Popular Reviews
Friendship
It’s hard to discuss a film you viscerally hate, as I did Friendship. Call me a sensitive snowflake but I’m just not into protracted depictions of inadequacy leading to humiliation. This has been Tim Robinson’s shtick in the various TV shows he’s been involved with. Now he’s brought the same cringe persona to a film, all 100 minutes of it. Or writer/director Andrew DeYoung has, in his feature debut, which he wrote expressly for Robinson. And yet I’m giving it three stars. To explain: it’s the difference between liking and admiring, when it comes down to it. I didn’t like Friendship for one minute but it undoubtedly does do what it set out … Read more
25 August 2014-08-25
Out in the UK This Week Locke (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) A film set entirely in a car driving along a motorway needs a lot going for it to work. Locke has it. A tight, believable script, Tom Hardy as a methodical yet inwardly erratic concrete specialist (metaphor alert) who has spent his entire life trying not to be like his loser dad, and is now trying to avert the collapse of his entire life by making call after bluetooth call while hurtling towards London. That’s it – a man and a phone and the voices at the other end. Some you might recognise – Olivia Colman as the pregnant one-night stand Locke is trying … Read more
Heading South
Charlotte Rampling often gets a free pass in films. Sometimes that’s for all the right reasons, such as her association with great directors such as Visconti, Lelouch or Ozon. Sometimes for the wrong ones – the more generalised cultural cringe before the French, with whom she’s also had a long association. The films she’s in often get the free pass too. Let’s take this drama, ostensibly something very daring about matronly white women heading to Haiti to be boned by the local black youth. There are many ways of describing this film but in all honesty it is an interminable drag and actually at its most boring while Rampling and fellow harpies (including … Read more
Green for Danger
A tightly plotted and nicely played whodunit of the old school, Green for Danger is also British to the core. Set during the Second World War, it was made in 1946, when it was possible to look back at the darkest hour – the Blitz, doodlebugs (the weaponised drones of yore) and all that with half a smile. The plot centres on the death in hospital of a man whose minor operation shouldn’t have killed him at all. Did someone want this local postman dead? If so, why? The medical team who operated on him all look guilty as hell, but all also seem to have plausible alibis. Enter Alastair Sim as Inspector … Read more
The Night Listener
When he switches off the mouth, Robin Williams can be an incredibly effective actor. This is one of those turns, yet it’s ironically about a man who is a professional mouth, a DJ with a late-night show who uses his graveyard phone-in to tell and listen to stories. It’s another of Williams’s characteristics as an actor that he’s happy, let’s say willing, to play characters who either aren’t likeable or are downright nasty, One Hour Photo being the ultimate proof of that. Again ironically, he’s neither here, though he is playing a character despised in much of society – a gay man. There’s a dark almost Hitchcockian feel to the path that leads off … Read more
Deep Sea
Deep Sea came as a genuine surprise, not that I know much about the state of Chinese animation in 2024, or any other year. But what a magical, remarkable, imaginative, technically inventive film this is. The story is pretty much Studio Ghibli – Shenxiu, a young girl whose mother has walked out and whose father has remarried and lost interest in her, falls over the rail of the ship her family are on and is instantly transported to a phantasmagorical undersea world. Here she ends up in a busy restaurant kitchen on board a cranky submarine powered by pedalling walruses and is taken under the wing of Nan He, an avant-garde chef (his estimation … Read more
OK Connery
A moving target is harder to hit. That must be why OK Connery goes by so many different titles. The perfectly reasonable Operation Kid Brother is one alternative, the frankly bizarre Divided Evil another. Probably the most informative of all the variants, apart from the original, is Operation Double 007. If I tell you that it stars Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil, you’ll twig what’s going on here. A mockbuster Bond movie, complete with actors from the franchise. Like Bernard Lee, who played M; Lois Maxwell, of Miss Moneypenny fame; a Bond Girl in the shape of Daniela Bianchi (she was in From Russia with Love); Adolfo Celi (a villain in Thunderball); and … Read more
Boogie Nights
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 December Jeff Lynne born, 1947 On this day in 1947, Jeffrey Lynne was born in Birmingham, UK. Jeff was an early starter and by the age of 16 had formed a band in Birmingham, called first The Hellcats, then The Handicaps, and finally The Andicaps. By 18 he had learnt the rudiments of the studio recording process after buying a Bang & Olufsen BeoCord 2000 reel to reel tape machine, and joined a band called The Nightriders, who changed their name to The Idle Race. In 1970 he joined The Move, at the invitation of former Nightriders/Idle Race member Roy … Read more
Summer in Berlin
One of the big films of 2006 in Germany, Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon) caused barely a ripple anywhere else. Which is a pity, because it’s a great example of a precisely acted, brilliantly crafted film telling a good story without histrionics. In a world dominated by superhereos, subtlety sometimes struggles to get a hearing. It’s shot warm, and that’s the idea – the fuzzy, warm friendship between two women, Katrin and Nike, who spend most evenings after thankless days drinking wine together on a balcony and setting the world to rights while summertime Berlin burbles away below. While their relationship is good, the rest of their lives are a little shaky. … 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
Groundhog Day
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 February Groundhog Day Today is Groundhog day. In areas of Pennsylvania where a High German dialect known as Pennsylvania German or Pennsylvania Dutch (from Deutsch) is still preserved the event is marked with a fersommlinge (Versammlung in modern German, meaning meeting) at which much interest is shown in a groundhog, a type of marmot, and whether it throws a shadow when leaving its burrow. If it does, so the folklore says, there will be another six weeks of winter. But if it is cloudy, then spring is on the way. The largest of these celebrations is held in Punxsutawney, where … Read more
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person does in six longish words what Snakes on a Plane does in four short ones – telegraphs a plot and a tone in a title. In the original French (or French Canadian, if you’re being picky), Vampire Humaniste Cherche Suicidiaire Consentant, it comes in one word shorter. So there’s not a lot more to say about the feature debut by Ariane Louis-Seize, except that you should watch it if vampire movies like What We Do in the Shadows (for laddish Ocker humour), or Let the Right One In (Nordic minimalism), or My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (dark US family relations), or A Girl … Read more
