Popular Reviews
14 April 2013-04-14
Out in the UK This Week Nymphomaniac Vol I (Artificial Eye, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD/Digital) A middle aged man finds a woman beaten up in the street. Taking her back to his house – she doesn’t want the police involved – he coaxes her story out of her with nothing more than a bit of tea and sympathy. And so starts Lars Von Trier’s most “normal” film to date, effectively a Victorian bildungsroman in which one party (Charlotte Gainsbourg) relates the ping-ponging progress of her life, while the other party (Stellan Skarsgård) prompts more revelations with a “do tell me more”. Von Trier barely bothers to hide the structure and sets about acclimatising us … Read more
Skeletons
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 July Last Tsar of Bulgaria becomes prime minister, 2001 On this day in 2001, having been elected in a free and fair vote, the last Tsar of Bulgaria, Tsar Simeon II, aka Simeon Borisov Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, became prime minister of Bulgaria. The monarchy had been abolished by the Communists in 1946 and the nine-year-old Tsar – the word derives from Caesar (more obviously if spelt Csar) as does the German Kaiser – had gone into exile, first in Egypt, then in Madrid. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he applied for and was issued with a new Bulgarian passport. In … Read more
Westward the Women
No “bundling” – that’s the law as laid down by Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor). Female-centric western Westward the Women is not only a clear influence on Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff but a great demonstration of the talents of director William Wellman, who’d been doing westerns for 30 years by the time he got round to shooting this 1951 movie, so knew exactly what it was all about. The story is about a convoy of women making the arduous journey out West, where there’s a chronic shortage of men. Sign up and choose your husband is the big idea – it’s the women who do the choosing, picking out the man they fancy from … Read more
Lad: A Yorkshire Story
When Dan Hartley was a lad, growing up in Yorkshire, he struck up a relationship, a friendship, with Al Boughen, a park ranger working for the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Lad: A Yorkshire Story, dedicated to Boughen, who died in 2010, is a tribute from the older Hartley, now a writer and director, to the man who mentored him at a crucial stage of his life. In Hartley’s film Dan is now called Tom and is played with real charm by Bretten Lord (bringing to mind another Yorkshire lad, David Bradley, in Ken Loach’s 1969 film Kes). Tom is a 13-year-old with a life on a familiar course – hanging with his older brother … Read more
Earwig
A girl is having her saliva harvested in the opening scene of Earwig. There’s a contraption fitted to her head which consists of a metal frame, some ducting and a pair of little glass vials. An attentive man is is on hand to help collect the secretion, which is then transferred to a mould and frozen. Hey presto, a set of dentures made of frozen spit, which are then carefully fitted into the mouth of the girl, who has no teeth of her own. Not a word has been spoken and in fact nothing will be said until, at 25 minutes in, after several repeats of the procedure (teeth made of ice…er… melt) in … Read more
Dune
Dune. Not Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 behemoth, that pleasure still awaits. But David Lynch’s 1984 version, the only film in his career that he wished he hadn’t made and will not talk about in interviews, except to say he shouldn’t have made it. And not the theatrical version either, but the “extended” one worked up for TV so it could be shown in two 90 minute chunks. Lynch hated this one so much he had his name taken off the credits. So welcome to another “Alan Smithee film”. Acutally Lynch originally had a four-hour cut in mind but had managed to get the running time down to three hours. Not short enough for his … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 8 – All Done with Mirrors
A strange episode in many respects, All Done with Mirrors leaves John Steed almost entirely out of the picture, instead focusing on Tara King’s attempts to find out who is leaking secrets from a communications facility when Steed is arrested as a suspect mole. It’s all a ruse, of course, Steed will in fact be spending his time with Mother, Rhonda and some bikini-clad lovelies at HQ of the week, a swimming pool equipped with an excellent bar. King, instead, is given a right hand man, Watney (the excellent Dinsdale Landen) to help her investigate the security breaches. Invisible forces are at work in this one, literally, with an opening sequence which sees … Read more
4
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 July Czar Nicholas II and family executed, 1918 On this day in 1918, the former ruler of Russia, Nicholas Romanov, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, having had a disastrous reign during which he had presided over the collapse of his once-great country, was shot and killed, along with his family. He had abdicated the year before, after a series of military defeats and revolutions, culminating in the February Revolution of 1917. For a while his family had lived under house arrest but in comparative luxury, though rations had increasingly been tightened and servants had been dispensed with as the … Read more
A Touch of Zen
Sex, death and people flying about in the air fighting each other, A Touch of Zen is the Taiwanese martial-arts movie that reminded Hong Kong directors how to do it properly, with space used intelligently, fluid cameras, energetic edits, restrained performances, humour that isn’t just about falling flat on your face and stuntwork that’s extravagant but not ridiculous. It’s rightly acclaimed as one of the best examples of the genre and was released in 1971 when martial arts was generally a B or even C movie affair, by King Hu, the director who changed all that. Ang Lee borrowed heavily from it for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and there’s enough Star Wars-y feeling … Read more
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 November Lady Chatterley Trial verdict, 1960 On this day in 1960, a jury in the trial of Regina versus Penguin Books found the UK publisher not guilt of obscenity. The trial against DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was brought under the provision of the Obscene Publications Act, which had only come into force the previous year and was intended to more clearly mark off pornography from works of artistic and scientific merit. And so the trial hinged on whether Lawrence’s 1928 novel did indeed possess artistic merit, or whether its litany of rude words and rude acts would tend … Read more
King of New York
I used to work at a magazine and would get a lot of DVDs in for review purposes. King of New York was the one that really got all my co-workers misty eyed. They started quoting lines from the script, remembering the best bit of the film, asking me if I could have the disc after I’d finished with it. No wonder. It’s a hugely influential piece of work and you can see its impact on almost every mob drama since. It was made when Christopher Walken was in his pomp, here he plays the self-styled King, a classically ruthless gang boss with a strangely benevolent streak, a man who tries, in his … Read more
Armored Car Robbery
Let’s hear it for Plod. With a bit of bad luck, a dangerous dame and a drop of hubris thrown in for good measure, that’s the idea behind Armored Car Robbery. Detail, detail, detail is the USP. The villains may be smart but the cops have something the bad guys don’t have – persistence. They do not give up and in the end it’s shoe leather and blunt-force cop procedure that does for a gang who – no surprise, surely – have carried out a robbery on an armoured car. First we meet the criminal mastermind, David Purvis (William Talman), outside Chigago’s Wrigley Field baseball stadium, where he’s just put in a call to … Read more
