Popular Reviews
21 July 2014-07-21
Out in the UK This Week The Lego Movie (Warner, cert U, Blu-ray/DVD) Normally I watch a film and take notes as I go. With The Lego Movie I hardly managed any, because there was so little of the film that wasn’t packed to bursting with stuff – action, jokes, new characters, new twists on old characters, yet more awesome blocky Legotastic animation. The Lego Movie doesn’t make the Wreck-It Ralph mistake. Instead it sticks to a simple plot and pursues it to the end. Which is… The Matrix meets Star Wars – the nobody who becomes the somebody who can save the world. The voice work is fun, with Liam Neeson growling away as … Read more
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
Thanks to the postmodern turn of our retro-fixated culture, even teenagers today have heard of the great Tamla-Motown label. And playing on nearly every one of the 110 top ten hits coming out of Detroit between 1959 and 1972 were a loose collaboration of crack musicians called the Funk Brothers. They played on The Supremes “Baby Love”, Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, The Temptations’ “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” and Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears Of A Clown”. More hits, according to this film’s preamble, than the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys and Elvis combined. And having done all that for Motown and having turned its owner into a very wealthy man, … Read more
Sputnik
Sputnik is a movie from 2020 set in the Soviet era. As well as having a fantastic story thick with allegorical possibilities, it also feels like a movie from the Soviet era – as if half inch steel plate had been riveted together. There are touches of pure Hollywood too, not least in the character of its chief protagonist, the smart and businesslike Tatyana Klimova (played by the eye-catching Oksana Akinshina), a feisty shrink we first meet refusing to be made a scapegoat for some misdemeanour or other. Maverick credentials established, she’s soon been drafted in to take a look at a cosmonaut who’s recently arrived back on planet Earth after his mission went … Read more
Soul
We’re so used to the phrase Pixar Movie that it’s often easy to forget that they are in fact directed by actual human beings, not rendering algorithms. Soul is co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers, says the imdb, but the end credits of the film itself tell us that it’s “Directed by Pete Docter” and “Co-directed by Kemp Powers”, not “Co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers”. Kemp was heavily involved in the film, particularly at the conceptual and writing stages, but even so it still feels like a Docter film. His last one was Inside Out, the story of a little girl’s personality in crisis. And before that Up and Monsters, … Read more
25 July 2016-07-25
Out This Week Disorder (Soda, cert 15) Like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Disorder is a love story masquerading as something else – a home-invasion thriller, in this case – and so is the perfect date movie for traditionally minded peeps. The casting is bang on. Matthias Schoenaerts, an expert in beefy angst, is ideal as a security guard with PTSD falling for trophy wife Diane Kruger – Kruger’s “because I’m worth it” ex-model coolness actually being a real advantage here. The bit of posh going for a bit of rough is hardly a new idea, but director/writer Alice Winocour stokes the tension early on, setting many scenes in tight little corners, and even … Read more
The Novice
Lauren Hadaway’s directorial debut, The Novice, is a bit like two other films – Black Swan (she admits the influence) and Whiplash (which she worked on as sound editor). Both are stories where extreme physical dedication borders on madness and coaching is a form of abuse. The Novice has its feet in both of those camps too, but it also has something else to say. Let’s just talk about Isabelle Fuhrman’s face first though. Composed of cubist planes and flat angles, it’s a physiognomy that the camera loves and is capable of registers of emotion that are locked off to other actors. You might remember her as the ominously creepy kid in 2009’s … Read more
If Not Us, Who?
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 September Kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, 1977 On this day in 1977, the West German businessman Hanns-Martin Schleyer – a former SS officer who had risen to post-war prominence in the country’s employers organisation – was kidnapped in Cologne by the militant urban guerrilla group Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, as part of what became know as the German Autumn. His kidnappers were hoping to use him, at least partly, as collateral to force the government to release jailed members of their gang, including prominent faces Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. While the gang moved Schleyer around, from … Read more
The Battle of the Sexes
Telling the story of the hyperhyped tennis match between 55-year-old “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs and the then reigning queen of tennis, Billie Jean King, this deceptively light documentary catches the casual and systemic sexism of the time, paints a warm, human picture of King and even has the grace to give the publicity hungry Riggs, now long dead, a decent screw. And the match really was hyped. If you were alive back then there is no way you won’t remember the furore when Riggs, who’d won Wimbledon in 1939 but had long since slipped into obscurity, came out of retirement to make a loud public announcement – the women’s game was feeble, … Read more
Wasteland
In Wasteland (it also goes by the name Undercliffe) a young man wakes up with amnesia, having been badly beaten up on some old waste ground in Bradford, gets taken in a by a kind Muslim family and then, as bits of his memory start to reappear, starts to put together a picture of his old life. What he finds he doesn’t like. Though Stevie (Laurie Kynaston) is kind to Meeba (Mariam Haque) and her brood, and forms a bond of sorts with Khalid (Akhbar Kurtha), whose taxi ferries him all over town in the hope that Stevie will spot somewhere familiar, wherever it takes him Stevie keeps bumping into people who find … 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
Juliet & Romeo
Juliet & Romeo is the sort of film that schoolteachers wary about introducing Shakespeare to 16 year olds show to the kids. Sexy young things have key roles, the original language survives only as a vestige and there are songs that use autotune quite a bit. Purists will hate hate hate it, but it has a perky energy and its middle-finger approach means it actually fares a lot better than many a reworking. It sticks close enough to the original plot – star crossed lovers from rival families in Verona. The Montagues and Capulets, headed on one side by Jason Isaacs and Lidia Vitale as Lord and Lady M, on the other by … Read more
Barnyard
Otis, the barnyard bull, has udders. Because, kids, that’s what bulls have, isn’t it? Voiced by Kevin James, and with a first name that is generally appended to a male, it’s clear that either Otis is a transgender animal or cowardice has taken hold somewhere at the design stage in the latest animal CG comedy off the conveyor belt. This “me too” effort from Paramount also has a plot that seems determined to fit in, not stand out, it being a recycling of The Lion King. Growing a pair, ironically, is what it’s about too. Otis is the young motorbiking cowlet (I’d call him a bullock but he clearly isn’t) about town who has … Read more
