Popular Reviews
The Night Eats the World
The Night Eats the World is a detail-rich zombie procedural ingeniously set in one house, with one main guy as its focus, a couple of “names” doing the sort of walk-on you’d have thought they were above and a lot of extras stumbling about and moaning. Director Dominique Rocher’s feature debut spends a few minutes at the beginning just introducing us to its main character before it hits us. Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) is at a party he doesn’t want to be at – he’s just there to pick up some belongings after having obviously split acrimoniously with his girlfriend – falls asleep while waiting for her to show him exactly where his bloody … Read more
Maniac
In deep, deep, deep homage to 1980s horror, here’s a pungent, standout film that’s entirely enjoyable as long as you love seeing women’s scalps being removed – a quick razor to the forehead and they peel straight off, it seems. A remake of William Lustig’s 1980 film of the same name, 2013’s Maniac makes one crucial and utterly transformative change – the point of view is through the eyes of a seriously disturbed serial killer (is there any other type?). Directors and stars are what reviews usually concentrate on but the key players here are writers Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, whose Switchblade Romance in 2003 proved to the world that the French … Read more
Prayers for the Stolen
Writer/director Tatiana Huezo drops us straight in to Prayers for the Stolen (Noche de Fuego). As a dark screen accompanied by rapid breathing yields to a daytime scene of two females digging what looks like a shallow grave, the internal interrogation starts – Who are these people? Where are they? Is it a grave? Why do they both look so frantic? No voiceover tells us, no “useful idiot” arrives on the scene to act as a conduit from screen to viewer. Huezo forces us to work it out. She’s a director with a background in documentary-making and this adaptation of Jennifer Clement’s best-seller uses a classic technique of the observational style. What makes … Read more
I’m Not There
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 March Bob Dylan releases first album, 1962 Having dropped out of the University of Minnesota and relocated to New York City to visit the dying Woody Guthrie and break into performing, today in 1962 Bob Dylan released his first album. Eponymously titled Bob Dylan it came about after Dylan played harmonica on Carolyn Hester’s album in September 1961 and caught the eye of producer John Hammond. Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia Records in October 1961 and within five months the album was done. It was a collection of folk standards, coffeehouse favourites plus two Dylan originals – Song to Woody … Read more
Lux Aeterna
Gaspar Noé’s Lux Aeterna (or Lvx Æterna in its original Latin-script form) is a short film about the shit women have to put up. Like the old ironic joke about the light at the end of a tunnel probably being an oncoming train, Noé’s “eternal light” (the translation of lux aeterna) is probably being emitted from the fire built to burn problematical women as witches. The first image is from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (made in 1943, but with looks from 1443) and is a remarkable shot of a woman being placed on top of a ladder, from where she’s dropped down at speed into a massive fire. The actress, Noé’s … Read more
Corsage
Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), the focus of writer/director Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, isn’t that big a deal outside the Germanosphere. Inside it, though, it’s a different matter. A huge number of documentaries have been made about her in Germany and Austria, going all the way back to 1921. The interest remains fervent in the 21st century. So far this decade she’s made an appearance in no less than five Austrian/German dramatisations of her life – as well as Corsage, there’s the TV series Sisi; feature Elisabeth; another TV series, The Empress; and another feature, Sisi and I (whose release date got bumped when Corsage came along). What’s the fascination? Maybe it’s that she, … Read more
Wonder Woman 1984
And so Wonder Woman 1984. Last time we saw Gal Gadot’s lasso-swinging Amazon she was helping to win the First World War, and now, nearly 70 years on, here she is again in the era of Armani suits and “greed is good” and in a year most closely associated with George Orwell. This is a big, heavy, beast of a film that’s too long, too slow, too dull, and if that is a political message about democracy that writer/director Patty Jenkins is trying to sneak in there, someone should really have told her not to. Gal Gadot remains a wondrous Wonder Woman, though, a flawless paragon of superherodom, and the story gets off … Read more
Last Night in Soho
Edgar Wright, born 1974, hymns the 1960s, a decade he never saw, in Last Night in Soho, a genre mash-up and nerd’s custard with looks, style and verve to spare. Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) is a shy 1960s-obsessed girl from the sticks who comes to London to study fashion. Having got off to a bad start with a gang of other students who’d be called “plastics” if this were a high school movie, Ellie takes a room with seen-it-all-dearie landlady Ms Collins (Diana Rigg). By day Ellie continues her studies, crafting bits of pink chiffon into babydoll outfits for imaginary peroxided 1960s women. But by night, in a magical meld of bodyswappiness and time … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 25 – Who Was That Man I Saw You With?
There’s something a bit dead in the water about Who Was That Man I Saw You With?, a late-era Avengers episode with a lot going for it – but no spark. Jeremy Burnham wrote it, and atones for the messiness of Fog (the previous week’s episode) with a tightly constructed and well plotted story. There’s a bit of futurology in here too. Britain, it seems, has got itself a Star Wars defence system long before Ronald Reagan mooted the idea of a defensive umbrella that could blast incoming enemy missiles out of the sky. The system itself – codename Field Marshal – is magnificent, of course, but there are fears that a lone-wolf … Read more
Score
Score is another of those porn crossover movies from the “Golden Age of Pornography”, when the marginal moved into the mainstream and, for a while, it looked like attitudes to sex loosened by the cultural changes of the 1960s were about to be consolidated. Of course they did change – there’s more sex on the screen today, and more various sex, than there ever was before – and yet in mainstream movies (look at last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, or the big movies from any year) it’s like the Golden Age never really happened. Which makes the likes of Score doubly fascinating. Watching it now it’s obvious throughout that there’s a tension in … Read more
Straightheads aka Closure
Yet another Danny Dyer movie in which he plays a flaky spliffer. And another, like Outlaw, in which he’s involved in vigilantism of a particularly unpleasant sort. This one, though, co-stars Gillian Anderson as the posh totty Dyer ends up bedding after installing CCTV equipment at her pad. And then, after she’s invited him out to a party at a swish country house, the pair are set upon on the drive back to town. He is horribly beaten up, she is brutally raped. But hang on – Danny Dyer? Gillian Anderson? No, it doesn’t seem right somehow but Anderson has a habit of turning up in some odd corners. And in Straightheads actually work … Read more
Don’t Worry Darling
Talking about films that crashed on the rocks of high expectations, here’s Don’t Worry Darling, a Stepford Wives/Total Recall hybrid hotly anticipated because it was a) the directorial follow-up to Booksmart for Olivia Wilde, b) because it starred Florence Pugh, whose career since debuting in Carol Morley’s Falling in 2014 has been a series of triumphs and c) because it gave a meaty role to Harry Styles, he of swoonsome pop-starriness. It’s the film that crashed twice, in fact, the second calamity coming as stories started to circulate about bad blood on set – over Shia Labeouf (fired), between Wilde and Pugh (over Styles), and most notoriously over Chris Pine and Styles and … Read more
