Popular Reviews
Pilots
Pilots (Pilotinnen) was Christian Petzold’s graduation film, a short feature-length drama which he completed in 1995. At 35, Petzold was quite ancient as students go but he’d studied German and theatre already before switching into film at Berlin’s DFFB. Either way, his film got a showing on the German TV channel ZDF, which isn’t bad at all for a graduation movie. It’s clearly the work of someone who technically is still learning how the vehicle works but thematically knows exactly where he’s heading. It’s not so much Petzold in utero as Petzold in miniature. It’s a two-hander, in essence, and once Petzold has thrown us with an opening shot suggesting that his troubled … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 25 – How to Succeed… at Murder
Feminist or not feminist? That’s the question that hovers over the whole of How to Succeed… at Murder, a Brian Clemens script for The Avengers that first aired in March 1966. Secretaries are what it’s all about, trusted right-hand women of busy gammon-faced male business titans, who are all dying in quick succession. Leaving the running of their companies in the hands of women formerly trusted with little more than jotting down and transcribing shorthand… because these Girl Fridays are the only people who understand the fiendishly complicated systems these men have devised. Is this a good thing (see how capable a woman can be!)? Or the opposite (things are so desperate that a … Read more
27 July 2015-07-27
Out in the UK This Week Clouds of Sils Maria (Artificial Eye, cert 15) Olivier Assayas follows Something in the Air, his largely autobiographical personal meditation on the aftermath of the events of May 1968, with a different type of dramatic reflexivity. Clouds of Sils Maria is a meditation on acting, performed by a trio of actors at the top of their game. Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz are the three, all channeling vague versions of themselves. Stewart plays the personal assistant to Binoche, an actress now about to play the older role in a remake of the punishing two-hander that made her name years before. But who to play … Read more
The Opening of Misty Beethoven
The openings are both figurative and literal in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, the pornified Pygmalion that’s a key movie from the so-called Golden Age of Porn. The real Pygmalion, you’ll recall (and My Fair Lady, the musical version) is about two la-di-dah gentlemen betting on whether they can get a Cockney flower girl to pass as a duchess. Here Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Eliza Dolittle are replaced by Dr Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis), his occasional lover Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Bedaunt) and Misty Beethoven (Constance Money), a low-rent sex worker whom Dr Love picks up in a grindhouse cinema masturbating a guy dressed as Napoleon. In a plot following Pygmalion’s major beats, … Read more
Wife of a Spy
There’s a real lack of urgency in many of the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Sometimes it works in his favour, sometimes against. Against, I’m feeling, with Wife of a Spy. Though there are plot bombs dropped towards the end, and fascinating ideas bubbling away in there to, this high-tone mix of lush period drama and fine acting is undercut by Kurosawa’s tendency to soft-pedal. Spies, a time of national emergency, marital infidelity, Wife of a Spy doesn’t lack for hot subject matter and, for the non-native viewer, it also offers a window on a world we don’t often see – Japan during the Second World War, when patriotism took on an almost mystical … Read more
A Woman under the Influence
Peter Falk had been appearing in the Columbo series on TV already for about three years when A Woman under the Influence came out in 1974. It’s a film no one wanted to make, and as well as co-starring, Falk helped finance it, with $500,000 he gave (lent?) to his friend, the maverick indie film-maker John Cassavetes. Once it was made no one wanted to show it either, and Cassavetes was literally walking from distributor to distributor with cans of film under his arm trying to get his new movie screened. And then Martin Scorsese, hot from Mean Streets, stepped in and… the rest is history. Woman ended up with a couple of … Read more
Law of Tehran
On the face of it Law of Tehran is a very simple movie. It’s the story of a cop trying to find a drugs kingpin and what happens when he does. But as well as being a crime thriller, Saeed Roustayi’s second movie also manages to be a nuanced psychological drama, a survey of the Iranian justice system and a critique of the “war on drugs”, with acting at a very high level and film-making of real vision and ability. A cop searches for Tehran’s current Mr Big of drugs, finds him and locks him in detention awaiting a trial. And then the games begin as the bad guy, Naser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) … Read more
Nothing Personal
Working my way in no logical order through the films of the under-rated Urszula Antoniak, I come to her first feature, 2009’s Nothing Personal. And it’s nearly all here – the female focus, the quiet way of working, the absence of unnecessary detail, mood rather than plot being her primary concern, and great performances just to top it all off. What isn’t quite here is Antoniak’s sudden ta-daa moment, the moment in Code Blue (2011) or Magic Mountains (2020) when she suddenly racks all the knobs to the max, to shocking effect. It could be, of course, that those films are atypical. There are another three films, at the time of writing, to … Read more
Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future
In science fact as well as science fiction the Soviet Union often got there first. First into space, first to the Moon, Mars and Venus, all mighty achievements by an empire whose successes have all subsequently been overshadowed by the regime’s ultimate failure. So how about Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future? Did it really boldly go in 1973 where Marty McFly and the Doc wouldn’t venture until 12 years later? No, is the short answer. The longer one is that this film had a different title originally – Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (or Ivan Vasilievich Menyaet Professiyu in the original Russian) – and it was its US distributors who renamed it, in an … Read more
29 February 2016-02-29
Out This Week James White (Soda, cert 15) Josh Mond was a producer on Martha Marcy May Marlene and now makes his feature debut with the sort of grown-up seriously accomplished filigree drama that more or less guaranteed no cinema release in the UK – wot, no guys in costumes? Instead here it is in what used to be the ignominious “straight to DVD” category. There’s a long ramble to be had here about the best films these days being more likely not to get theatrical releases, but let’s not go into that now. Instead let’s take a look at the film, which stars a seriously good “from the inside out” performance by … Read more
The Fourth Man
Paul Verhoeven’s erotic drama The Fourth Man (De vierde Man) opens, to ominous Wagnerian rumbling, on a black screen and then as the credits roll Verhoeven dramatically reveals a spider in close-up, first stunning a fly caught in its web and then cocooning it in silk. The whole process, in agonising detail. What Verhoeven treats us to over the next 100 minutes is a garish, extended version of the same idea. In many respects it’s a warm-up for Basic Instinct, with Jeroen Krabbé in the Michael Douglas role and Renée Soutendijk as the blonde, deadly spider. The read-across isn’t total and for much of the film it isn’t really clear who is the … Read more
Daddy Nostalgie
Dirk Bogarde’s final film, Daddy Nostalgie (released as Daddy Nostalgia in the UK and These Foolish Things in the US), is also, arguably, Jane Birkin’s best one and a reminder (writing this just days after she died) how good she could be away from the shadow cast by Serge Gainsbourg. It’s a small-scale, almost subterranean drama, played out on the sunny Cote d’Azur, where retiree Tony (Bogarde) is recovering from a serious operation. The op might not have worked and Tony might not have long for this world. Time to get his affairs in order, settle things with wife Miche (Odette Laure) and daughter Caroline (Birkin) before the grim reaper turns up. And … Read more
