Popular Reviews
Surge
Surge is one of those films that make a nonsense of star ratings. It’s undeniably brilliantly conceived, played and made but whether you actually want to watch it is another matter. Compelling and entertaining are not the same thing. The IMDb charmingly calls it a “thriller about a man who goes on a bold and reckless journey of self-liberation”. I’d call it an almost clinical overview of a man going into, and eventually being swamped by, psychosis. Joseph, played by Ben Whishaw, starts out OK enough, if a bit twitchy. He’s one of the security guys at London Stansted Airport who frisk you as you go through from landside to airside. It’s a … Read more
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush
A young man tries to get his oats in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, a British 1968 sex comedy starring Barry Evans, directed by Clive Donner and written by Hunter Davies. In many ways it’s the suburban Alfie, which was made two years earlier. Where Michael Caine had central London, Barry Evans has Stevenage New Town; where Caine’s Alfie was a confident lothario and lone wolf, Evans’s Jamie is a virginal 18-year-old schoolboy with laddish mates. Alfie charms his women into bed, Jamie just dreams about it, vividly, in youth clubs, bus shelters and while pedalling around town on the bike he cycles as part of his job as a delivery … Read more
The Forgotten Battle
War dramas are often held to a higher standard than other movies, and it’s a rare one that doesn’t bring generals – active, retired and armchair status – out into the open to condemn some appalling misrepresentation of the facts or other. A fate The Forgotten Battle largely dodged when it debuted in 2020. That’s mayb ebecause for the most part it kept its background (the facts) and its foreground (the fiction) separate. The facts: after the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, the Allies started pushing the Germans back out of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, eastward, ever eastward. But progress eventually started to be held back by overstretched supply lines. Cherbourg, … Read more
Phenomena
The lesbian boarding school classic Mädchen in Uniform generally seems to be somewhere in the mix in Dario Argento films, and so it is with 1985’s Phenomena, another instance of a naive teenager, Jennifer (Jennifer Connelly) in this case, arriving at a girls school, this time in Switzerland, where she will be monstered by staff, pupils and other forces. Jennifer gets a frosty reception from the stiff-faced headmistress (Dalila Di Lazzaro), a woman with a gravedigger’s haircut, and by the other girls in the school, apart from her nice roomie, Sofia (Federica Mastroianni, niece of Marcello). Out in the big wide world there’s a killer on the loose, one who dispatches young women … Read more
Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun: Maverick comes such a long time after the original film – 30something years – that a quick introductory “previously on Top Gun” wouldn’t go amiss. Instead, new director Joseph Kosinski (who worked with Tom Cruise on Oblivion) puts us at ease with an opening sequence that’s a homage to Tony Scott, director of the original Top Gun – machines and processes fetished, a high tech something in silhouette, steam escaping from somewhere. A racing motorbike on a long flat road. “Hell, yeh” masculinity. Long lenses. Heat shimmers. It’s a “previously on Top Gun” as a mood board. And then we’re in to a story that wastes no time in letting us … Read more
In the Earth
In the Earth is Ben Wheatley’s most overtly horror of horror films since he did the U is for Unearthed section of the portmanteau The ABCs of Death, though in films like Sightseers, High Rise and last year’s Rebecca horror has always lurked at the edges of his work. Made during the covid pandemic, and incorporating its disinfecting/distancing precautions into theme and treatment (there’s a covid supervisor in the crew credits), it’s a film all about infection, though the contagion in question isn’t so much microbial or viral as an infection of the rational mind by the spores of unreason. In In the Earth, cool, clear, scientifically trained minds are taken over by … Read more
After Midnight
A few years ago Jeremy Gardner wrote, directed and co-starred in The Battery, a criminally underrated zombie movie that just had two guys in it… and a horde of zombies. It examined a relationship that had gone on too long – two guys who’d played together in a baseball team and who were then thrown into too-close proximity by an apocalypse – and watched as its final stages played out… with a horde of zombies. Gardner, now co-directing with The Battery’s producer and cinematographer Christian Stella, pulls off something similar with After Midnight. No zombies this time, just a mystery monster lurking outside and a relationship going wrong inside. Gardner is again in a lead … Read more
The Duellists
The Duellists is Ridley Scott’s feature debut and premiered in 1977, four years after his famous advert for Hovis bread (voted the UK’s favourite TV advert in a 2006 poll). Both are picturesque evocations of a world long gone – pre-War England, in the 45-second advert’s case, the world of post-Revolutionary France in the case of the solid 100 minutes of The Duellists. The story is a true one – about two men in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of around 30 grudge duels over 19 years. Joseph Conrad had used the facts as the basis for a novella, and Scott’s screenwriter, Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, adapts them further with his screenplay, reducing the … Read more
Viva
The IMDb plot keywords for Viva include “large breasts” and “limp penis”, a rough indicator of what’s being served up in Anna Biller’s debut, a relentlessly accurate and grim pastiche of the pornified world of the 1970s sexploitation movie, or 1970s society itself. Biller wrote, directed, produced, edited, wrote some of the songs, designed the clothes and sets, painted the paintings, did the animated sequence and even played the organ. She also plays the main character. You could say it’s her film. What a world she’s conjured. Barbi (Biller), a suburban wife who we meet in her bath, tits prominent, smoking, drinking wine and looking pretty morose as she flicks through a magazine. … Read more
The Counterfeiters
When The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2008, there was disquiet in some quarters. How come Cristian Mungiu’s brilliant 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days hadn’t even been nominated? Didn’t that glaring omission obviously invalidate all the other entries? As with most cases of whataboutery, the answer is yes, but mostly no. The Oscars are always a bit of a scrum and for all their claims to objectivity are best seen as industry awards first (ie the “Buggins’ Turn” rule is in play) and guarantors of quality second. In the end The Counterfeiters won and, while not quite a classic on the Mungiu level, it’s a fine … Read more
Lunacy
The last man standing at the surrealists’ party, Czech animator Jan Svanmajer is as good as his tag in 2005’s Lunacy (aka Sílení), a blend of live action and trademark stop-motion, using two Edgar Allan Poe stories and the life of the Marquis de Sade as inspiration. Svankmajer himself pops up just before the story gets going, in front of a white screen, to inform us that art is almost dead and has been replaced with advertising, that the deep has been replaced by the superficial, the implication being that what we’re about to see is a) art and b) deep. Bold claim. He’s also told us that his film is about two … Read more
All Quiet on the Western Front
Not a remake, say the team behind 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, referring to the legendary 1930 movie anyone would be a fool to try and remake. More another adaptation of the book it was based on, they say, Erich Maria Remarque’s serialised novel from 1928 about the grim reality of the First World War from the average soldier’s point of view. This is true. I’ve seen both, and the 1930 version less than six months ago, so can easily see what’s different in this adaptation. Absent, for example, is the class element – they were posh boys in the 1930 film and one of their great bugbears once they’d joined … Read more
