Popular Reviews
The Searchers
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 May John Wayne born, 1907 On this day in 1907, Marion Robert Morrison was born, in Winterset, Iowa, USA. He was named after the Civil War veteran Marion Mitchell Morrison, and the young Marion’s middle name would be switched in favour of Mitchell when his parents decided to name their next son Robert. In any event Marion preferred the nickname Duke, which he picked up from his Airedale terrier pet, Duke – young Marion was initially Little Duke. Morrison went to the University of Southern California to study pre-law on a football scholarship, but a broken collarbone picked up while … Read more
Secret Agent
Anyone for the fifth best British film of 1936, as voted for by the readers of the defunct Film Weekly? Secret Agent is one of a run of spy thrillers Alfred Hitchcock made in the 1930s. Sandwiched between The 39 Steps and Sabotage it’s the least compelling of the three, a misfire in many ways. There are two reasons for that, both Hitchcock’s fault. But let’s get to that later. First, you need to know that it stars John Gielgud as Edgar Brodie, a successful novelist recruited by the British secret service, given the spy moniker Ashenden (the title of the Somerset Maugham book on which the film’s based) and sent to Switzerland. … Read more
The Secret Garden
The world may not need yet another version of The Secret Garden, but here’s one anyway. The latest adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s story is in a crowded field and to cut through has to compete with two very respectable adaptations, the much lauded one from 1993 directed by Agnieszka Holland and the one from 1949 starring cute child star Margaret O’Brien. There are plenty of others, going as far back as 1919, and what all have in common is the same roster of character names – one sign of something achieving classic status is that no one dicks about with the names as written on the page. See Harry Potter, Elizabeth … Read more
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants
Grief rather than lust is what drives Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, the well-told story of a Finnish man who starts visiting a dominatrix after his wife dies. Director and co-writer J-P Valkeapää’s drama (with the odd comedic touch) is delivered in three big chunks. Chunk one is brief and details the life of Juha (Pekka Strang), a doctor with a beautiful wife and young daughter whose world changes entirely when the wife drowns while they’re holidaying by a tranquil lake. Chunk two: a frozen-by-grief Juha accidentally strays into the chamber of a working dominatrix while taking his daughter to have her tongue pierced, and then starts visiting the dominatrix regularly. Chunk three, also … Read more
Bitter Rice
Italian neorealism meets the crime drama in 1949’s Bitter Rice (Ris Amaro), Giuseppe De Santis’s gritty fable about a pair of petty thieves joining a horde of itinerant workers to plant and harvest rice. If drama is life minus the boring bits, De Santis is aware that neorealism at its worst can be a bit like life plus extra boring bits. So he brightens things up with crime thrills and a cast full of good-looking young things. In case we’re still not feeling it, more often than is absolutely necessary he’ll poke his camera into the cleavage of a few of his female stars as well. The thieves are played by Vittorio Gassman … Read more
Lifeforce
The cheap and cheerful Cannon Group were ready for the big time in the mid 1980s. Having made a decent amount of money out of various barrelscrapers – Death Wish sequels, Chuck Norris actioners and assorted Ninja movies – they decided to move upmarket. Lifeforce was the result, a big-budget (for them) sci-fi movie and the first of a three-picture deal between director Tobe Hooper (still hot from Poltergeist) and the “Go-Go boys”, as Cannon owners, cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, were known. The film was a total flop on its release and got hacked about a bit in an attempt to make it more sellable. That didn’t work either. However, over … Read more
The Reception
The Reception is a film that seems to be heading gloriously in one direction, only to actually be heading disastrously in another. It tells the surely thorny enough story of Jeannette, a rich French-American woman (Pamela Holden Stewart) and her African-American lover Martin (Wayne Lamont Sims), who live in bucolic splendour in upstate New York, where he gains her financial patronage for his career as a (blocked) painter, in return for his companionship and quiescence about her drinking – the few glasses of red per night generally turning into a torrent. Then her daughter Sierra (Maggie Burkwit) turns up with her husband Andrew (Darien Sills-Evans) and the delicate balance is undone. It turns … Read more
Chicken for Linda!
Linda wants chicken, that’s the plot and the literal translation of the original French title of Chicken for Linda! (Linda veut du poulet!), a farce of sorts about a young girl and her hassled mum, a dead dad and a search to get together the ingredients to make the dish that reminds Linda of her missing papa. Except. Maman does not cook. She’s a microwave queen whose cooking know-how extends about as far as the difference between shepherd’s pie and lasagne. But cook she must, because having accused Linda of stealing her ring she discovered that the cat had in fact swallowed it. And now that mum Paulette has found it again in … Read more
Dune: Part Two
Let’s get straight to the verdict. Dune: Part Two is visually spectacular but dramatically inert, the good stuff attributable to its remarkable director Denis Villeneuve, the bad stuff down to the writer of the original novel/doorstop, Frank Herbert. This is not going to be how everyone sees it, of course, what sort of a world would that be? But if you’re one of the people who picked up Herbert’s original Dune at some point only eventually to put/fling it down again after tiring of the relentless one-thing-after-anotherness of it (see also Tolkien) the movie won’t offer much that the book didn’t, its retina-cleansing visuals to one side. It picks up right where Part … Read more
20 April 2015-04-20
Out in the UK This Week Annie (Sony, cert PG) The “Black Annie” this has been called. With the button-cute Beast of the Southern Wild’s Quvenzhané Wallis in the lead as Annie and Jamie Foxx in the Daddy Warbucks role and with Jada Pinkett and Will Smith producing, you could call it that, if these things matter to you. If they don’t, what you get is perhaps the epitome of the “turn that frown upside down” musical, carefully updated – Annie is no longer an orphan but a foster kid, Foxx is a cell phone billionaire, a couple of new songs have been added to the familiar ones (Hard Knock Life, Tomorrow, I … Read more
Only the River Flows
Imagine a crime thriller where the guy who looks guilty from the outset is the killer… or is he? Or where the police achieve their aims not through diligent hard work but by sheer fluke. Where every cliché of the genre gets an outing and most of them left entirely unmauled… but some of them are given a left-handed spin. But which ones? That’s Only the River Flows, a strangely ironic neo-noir from Wei Shujun, whose films often offer meta-comment on film-making and the workings of genre. This time around Wei gets into all that straight away, installing his cop, Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) in the shell of an old cinema (klaxon), where he’s … Read more
Monsters
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 December Military Abolition Day, Costa Rica On this day every year, the people of Costa Rica celebrate Día de la Abolición del Ejército (Military abolition day), as a reminder of the day in 1948 when President José Figueres Ferrer got rid of the country’s armed forces, in particular the standing army. Unusual in itself, this act was all the more remarkable when it is considered that Ferrer was a general who had just led an army to victory in the 44 day civil war in Costa Rica, which had been precipitated by the parliament refusing to accept that the opposition … Read more
