Popular Reviews
2 May 2016-05-02
Out This Week A War (StudioCanal, cert 15) The Danes do Afghanistan in a bloody, tense drama that takes a left turn about halfway through. That’s after we’ve been given a long immersive bath in war at its foggiest, leadership at its most difficult, focusing on Pilou Asbaek’s company commander Claus Pedersen as he takes his men out on patrol after a particularly bloody IED incident has left one of them with no legs below the knee, and his men having shown little enthusiasm for the “rebuilding the country” speech Pedersen has just given. After this, it’s a fairly familiar, though undeniably suspenseful journey through the dust, the evasive looks of the locals and the first-meets-third-world … Read more
Gaslight
This Gaslight, the 1940 version, shouldn’t really exist. When MGM decided to remake the British original in 1944 as a star vehicle for Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, they tried to destroy the original prints, as if the 1940 film had never existed at all – a case of gaslighting Gaslight? Bergman and Boyer are good in the remake, and they have alliteration on their side. But so do (Anton) Walbrook and (Diana) Wynyard, in Thorold Dickinson’s excellently creepy original. The plot in a thumbnail. He’s gaslighting her into thinking she’s mentally unstable. Why? So she won’t ask too many questions about what’s going on under her roof. To the point where she … Read more
20 October 2014-10-20
Out in the UK This Week Two Days, One Night (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) A French factory hand (magnificent Marion Cotillard) has a weekend to persuade her colleagues to do without their cash bonuses and keep her on instead. As much a portrait of a woman battling depression and low self-esteem as a condemnation of modern employment norms – what kind of scumbag boss dodges a bullet by making his employees take those sort of decisions? – it has a high concept, a big name in the lead, clear heroes and villains and an “if you try hard enough you can win” throughline. In other words it’s the Dardenne brothers’ most Hollywood film … Read more
Black Bag
What does all that spying do to spies? That’s Black Bag in a neat explicatory parcel, a Steven Soderbergh movie that mixes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with the Michael Caine Harry Palmer films – or so say Soderbergh and writer David Koepp. But there’s John Le Carré in there as well. And as this densely packed, forensic examination of the spy psyche eases onto its queasy final straight, the comparisons with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy become unavoidable. Soderbergh opens with a long, glam tracking shot following Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse into a bar and then down and back up some stairs where, in wham-bam plotting, Koepp lays out the whole film in … Read more
Prayers for the Stolen
Writer/director Tatiana Huezo drops us straight in to Prayers for the Stolen (Noche de Fuego). As a dark screen accompanied by rapid breathing yields to a daytime scene of two females digging what looks like a shallow grave, the internal interrogation starts – Who are these people? Where are they? Is it a grave? Why do they both look so frantic? No voiceover tells us, no “useful idiot” arrives on the scene to act as a conduit from screen to viewer. Huezo forces us to work it out. She’s a director with a background in documentary-making and this adaptation of Jennifer Clement’s best-seller uses a classic technique of the observational style. What makes … Read more
The Killing Room
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 July CIA created, 1947 On this day in 1947, the National Security Act was enacted by the US Congress. Among other things, it created the Central Intelligence Agency, the successor agency to the Office of Strategic Services, which had been formed during the Second World War to coordinate spying against the Axis powers. The CIA is responsible for counterterrorism, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, intelligence, counter-intelligence and cyber-intelligence. In 1963 the CIA’s budget was $550million ($4.2 billion inflation-adjusted). By 2013 it was $14.7 billion. It is the only US government agency allowed to use “unvouchered” funds – those without … Read more
Charley Varrick
Charley Varrick, a neo-noir from 1973, is much better than its mixed reputation would suggest. Lean and fast, dark and enigmatic, it stars Walter Matthau as a crop sprayer who heists a smalltown bank in the hope of making a fair amount of easy money. Nothing too massive, just a cushion. But when he and his sidekick come to count their haul, it turns out that it’s mostly 50s and 100s, not dollar bills, fives and tens as expected. They have inadvertently heisted a lot more money than they anticipated. This, for Charley, is a problem. It means the police will be particularly keen to get the money back. So will the bank. … Read more
Black Book
In some quarters the director Paul Verhoeven is now eternally infamous for Sharon Stone’s is she/isn’t she leg-crossing moment in Basic Instinct. But he came to prominence with a Second World War movie, Soldier Of Orange, in 1977. Black Book sees Verhoeven return to his native land, his native Dutch tongue and the 1939-45 war in an engrossing drama focusing on one young Jewish woman (played by the remarkable Carice van Houten), a member of the Dutch resistance who finds herself right at the heart of the Nazi war machine. It is a familiar genre but Verhoeven injects fresh elements into it – notably dark humour, lashings of nudity and a fuzzy delineation … Read more
Fallen Angel
Watching a conman grift himself into a corner is always fun. In 1945’s Fallen Angel Otto Preminger gives us just that while Dana Andrews delivers another of the flat-faced, almost featureless performances he was so good at. He plays the shyster arriving in a small town with barely a cent in his pocket, who sets about trying to work his charms on a town full of hayseeds. Stop number one, another pair of grifters who run a clairvoyant act. But even before he gets stuck into Professor Madley (John Carradine, cadaverous features well deployed) and his assistant Joe (Olin Howard), Eric (Andrews) has had the misfortune of running into Stella (Linda Darnell), the … 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, 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 Dr Love picks up in a grindhouse cinema pleasuring a guy dressed as Napoleon. In a plot following Pygmalion’s major beats, aficionados of erotica Dr Love and Ms Rich … Read more
Identikit
Now this is a weird one. 1974’s Identikit, also known as The Driver’s Seat, and even occasionally as Psychotic, stars Elizabeth Taylor as what looks like a screen representation of her public persona – a batshit, flamboyant grande dame who we first meet in a German department store, where she is buying something garish and roundly insulting the sales assistant while doing so. Lise, it turns out, is a wanted woman. An identikit picture of her has been posted at all airports. The police are on her tail, for what we don’t know. And as she flies from Hamburg to Rome, they follow behind, questioning everyone Lise comes into contact with. Lise, for … 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
