Popular Reviews
Big Wednesday
Expectations were high for John Milius’s Big Wednesday when it debuted in 1978. Based on Milius and co-writer Dennis Aaberg’s own experiences growing up as California surfers, it tracks three dudes from callow youth to maturity, dropping in periodically as they also surf the waves of life. So high, in fact, that Milius kindly swapped profit points with his old friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Which is how he ended up owning a tiny piece of Close Encounters and Star Wars and they ended up with a little bit of Big Wednesday. Which worked out better for Milius than for Lucas and Spielberg. He became rich on his end of the deal … Read more
11 February 2013-02-11
Out in the UK This Week Beasts of the Southern Wild (StudioCanal, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) It’s generated a gazillion column inches, tweets and web-posts, and you are now pretty much obliged to see what is effectively a 21st century Huckleberry Finn story, set in the entirely atmospheric waterworld of the bayou below the levees where hardscrabble folk scratch out an existence, preferring near poverty in the Gulf of Mexico to destitution in the big city. Realism and magic realism aren’t natural stylistic partners – scenes of incoming storms ravaging the bayou sit alongside shots of the mythical beast the aurochs – but director Benh Zeitlin gets them to dance using six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis … Read more
The Dark End of the Street
This tantalising drama is the second film by writer/director Kevin Tran, and the second one to be called The Dark End of the Street – his first was a short and is the basis for this extended version, also, at 69 minutes, quite short. Robert Altman is at least partly the inspiration for a string of stories all set on the same suburban street and which increasingly start to coalesce. In rapid succession we meet Isaac (Michael Cyril Creighton) out walking his dog, Marney (Brooke Bloom) just home from work and shocked to discover that her cat has been killed, the Korean family over the road who are horrified at the news, Jim … Read more
L’Étrangleur aka The Strangler
Beautiful and weird, Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 serial-killer thriller The Strangler (originally L’Étrangleur) is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy mixed with Vecchiali’s humid take on queer sexuality. And on top of that it sends a string of women to their graves as if doing them a favour. A very very odd movie. Vecchiali only died in 2023, aged 92, and was making movies to the end having started in 1961. Along the way he also happened to produce Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, currently number-one film in Sight and Sound’s prestigious poll, but he also wrote, acted and edited and occasionally composed the music for his films too. … Read more
My People, My Country
Seven films by seven different Chinese directors comprise My People, My Country, a portmanteau film about key moments in the history of the People’s Republic, all overseen by Chen Kaige (who contributes one of the short films), director of My Beautiful Concubine. At 150 minutes running time that’s a 20-25 minute running time for each film. When people talk about waving the flag they’re usually using the term metaphorically. It’s literal in My People, My Country – rarely can so many flags have been waved, so fervently, up front, in the background or off to the side. They’re a disparate bunch of films, as portmanteaus tend to be, but patriotism is in no short … Read more
Ennio
Whether you call this long and detailed documentary Ennio: The Glance of Music or Ennio: The Maestro, or just plain old Ennio – all three titles seem to be out there – one thing remains constant. It’s a love letter to one of the most famous film composers who ever lived. It’s directed by Giussepe Tornatore, a master of the billet doux – see Cinema Paradiso – and he brings a picturesque film-maker’s eye to bear on his subject. There’s lovely lighting, a breezy narrative structure and rhythmic editing, and Tornatore carefully montages together the standard-issue clips and reminiscence elements to lift this documentary onto another level. It’s a labour of love. It’s … Read more
Dark of the Sun
One of those “dangerous train journey” movies, Dark of the Sun stars Rod Taylor as a mercenary pitching up in war-torn Africa and heading off on a rickety old steam locomotive to rescue some diamonds. Also known as The Mercenaries, it paints a particularly pitiless picture of war and the sort of men who fight it for money. But there is a soft heart beating in there somewhere. While he’s no hero, Taylor’s Curry is also on an internal journey to find his soul and by the movie’s finale has discovered or rediscovered what it means to be a decent human being. It sounds a touch soppy but isn’t, thanks in large part … Read more
About Endlessness
In one of the first scenes in About Endlessness, a waiter brings a diner a bottle of wine, opens it, sniffs the cork to check the wine is OK, then walks over to the right hand side of the diner to fill his glass. Holding the bottle near the bottom, the way a practised waiter does, he pours the wine precisely into the glass, then keeps pouring, pouring, pouring, until the wine overflows and starts pooling over the table. The diner, who’s been stuck behind his newspaper, suddenly notices. If you’re not familiar with the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson, this is a typical entry into his world. About Endlessness doesn’t mark … Read more
Besieged
Bernardo Bertolucci was once famous you know. As a director of the brilliant political drama The Conformist, the controversial Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci’s was one of the big names in cinema. Since that early 1970s heyday he’s stopped making headlines but continued making films. Often they have been marked out by the director’s keen eye both for a well composed shot and for women with strong, beautiful faces. Both figure centrally in this romantic drama from 1998, which in so many respects apart from its troubling message (is there one?) delivers few surprises. It’s the story of an exiled African woman (Thandie Newton) skivvying for a Rome-based classical pianist (David Thewlis). Is … Read more
3 August 2015-08-03
Out This Week Good Kill (Arrow, cert 15) What happens when you force a Top Gun kinda guy out of his plane and into a bunker, where he is now commanded to kill people in Whereveristan remotely, using drones? Writer/director Andrew Niccol and his Gattaca star Ethan Hawke reteam to answer the question in an anti-war film running through most of the arguments made by the liberal intelligentsia (ie the intelligentsia). Hawke physically channels Tom Cruise, donning Ray Bans and copying the faux big-bollocks walk, while little touches nudge us even further towards the conclusion that drones are a bad thing – the voice coming down the line from Langley with lethal orders … Read more
His House
Let’s do a refugee drama, which no one wants to watch, as a haunted house movie, which everyone does. That’s the thinking behind His House, a canny mix of genres from writer/director Remi Weekes in his feature debut, which adds a further layer of originality by adding all sorts of weird African supernatural juju to the mix. This clever and atmospheric amalgam kicks off with a pair of refugees from the war in South Sudan being shown a house on a housing estate in shithole Britain. It’s loads better than the detention centre and so Bol (Sope Dirisu) and his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) cannot believe their luck. They move straight in. Of … Read more
The White Tiger
Director Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker-winning novel The White Tiger looks at first like it’s going to be one of those “trickster” stories about a low-born person cutting a swathe through life using their natural-born smarts. When we meet him, Balram is clearly a man who has done well out of life. The White Tiger will play out in flashback, but for now Balram’s nice suit and fussy facial hair tell us all we need to know about his success in the world. How he got there is what the film is about. From poor beginnings in a dirt-poor village, where he appeared to be condemned to a life of … Read more
