Popular Reviews
New Life
If you’ve only seen the poster for New Life you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a sci-fi movie. It isn’t, but what it actually is remains fairly opaque until (checks timings) pretty much right on the halfway mark, when debut writer/director John Rosman finally shows his hand. It’s a good reveal and I’m not going to ruin it. Until this ta-daa, New Life looks like it might be a Bourne movie on a budget, or possibly a very earthbound sci-fi movie, or maybe exactly what it appears to be, a chase thriller. It is brilliantly economical and turns its low budget to its advantage as it spins out a story of two … Read more
Haunters of the Silence
I got sent a link to Haunters of the Silence by its director, Tatu Heikkinen, with a nice note attached. Would I like to review it? Yes, of course, though my heart sank slightly. Not because I have anything against indie Finnish directors who have made a film for nothing ($2,000!) with friends and family taking on most of the duties (his wife, Veleda, is co-director, co-writer, co-star and cinematographer). The worry was that I wouldn’t like it and would feel obliged, out of a misplaced sense of personal integrity, to say so. Who wants to kick a struggling artist who’s just getting going? Well so much for that. I liked it! And … Read more
Cutter’s Way
When it’s remembered at all, 1981’s Cutter’s Way is often lumped in with All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and conspiracy dramas from the 1970s. But it’s much more at home in the company of 1970s noirish murder thrillers like Chinatown, or, most obviously, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Apart from mis-categorisation its other big problem is its title. It was originally Cutter and Bone, after the two men at its centre – drunk, angry firecracker Alex Cutter (John Heard), who lost an eye, an arm and a leg in a war we assume to be Vietnam. And slinky, college-educated golden boy Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges), whose given and family names hint … Read more
Ikiru
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is now old enough – it was released in 1952 – for people to be able to consider it rationally. Almost from the moment it hit the screens it was treated as Kurosawa’s “triumph”, one of the best films ever made, regularly turning up on Sight and Sound magazine’s influential once-a-decade poll of the best movies ever made. Recently, though, it’s slipped a bit. In 1962 it was number 20 on S&S‘s list. By 2012 it’s “only” at number 136, well behind Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (17) and Rashomon (24). A 2016 article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph listing its top 10 most overrated films of all time placed Ikiru at … Read more
A Private Life
A Private Life is the “Jodie Foster speaks French shock!” movie, and it’s a funny old beast, as if the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma – the fixer who cannot fix her own life – had been re-written by Agatha Christie and then weirded-up with a plot involving past lives. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a 1940s noir, as refracted through Robert Altman’s 1970s update of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. But let’s go to cold hard facts and leave the analysis to work itself out. Foster is Lilian Steiner, a Jewish American psychotherapist based in France who seems to be having trouble keeping hold of patients. Her son … Read more
Magnolia
Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to Boogie Nights disappointed those who were hoping for more Dirk Diggler and his prosthetic schlong. At 182 minutes it also caught out those who were watching at the cinema with a beer or two inside them – knotted legs don’t make for maximum movie fun. At home with a pause button it’s pure luxury. Stylistically it’s heavily in debt to one of Anderson’s readily acknowledged influences, Robert Altman – the overlapping dialogue, the wandering camera and the faintly disengaged performances. By which I mean the actors are not all constantly presenting three-quarter profiles to camera (no, not even Tom Cruise). Yes, Tom Cruise. How often is it that … Read more
16 February 2015-02-16
Out in the UK This Week The Babadook (Icon, cert 15) The Babadook is a horror story about a nervous lone mum with a hyperactive and emotionally fractious six/seven-year-old child who was born the day his father died… in the car which crashed rushing his labouring wife to the hospital. If that isn’t the backstory to something psychologically intense, then what is? The Babadook has a lot going for it – the sombre production design and the creepy drawings in the book about the ghoulish Babadook that the mother ill-advisedly reads to her child as a bedtime story are just for starters. But it succeeds mostly, like all the best horror films, because it … Read more
Shoot the Piano Player
How do you follow a classic like The 400 Blows? With another one, if you’re François Truffaut. Shoot the Piano Player (aka Shoot the Pianist, or Tirez sur le pianiste in the original French) debuted in 1960, one year after 400 Blows had made Truffaut’s name as a director. Just in case there was any doubt about his talent, he’d also written Breathless (A bout de souffle), another classic, with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol in the interim. Let’s get the story out of the way, because in a way it’s not interesting, though the way Truffaut tells it is. Charles Aznavour plays a concert pianist called Edouard Saroyan who meets a young … Read more
13 Going On 30
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 November Thriller released, 1982 On this day in 1982, Michael Jackson’s album Thriller was released. As I write, it is the biggest selling album of all time. And with unified collections of music now a “take it or leave it” item displaced by technology it is likely to remain so. Thriller has sold around 60 million copies worldwide (estimate) and continues to sell. It was Jackson’s sixth solo album, his second as a mature artist in charge of his career, and because Jackson had renegotiated his royalty rate with his record company only the year before (after the success of … Read more
Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s epic ode to Robert J Oppenheimer, the “father of the bomb” who masterminded the development of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s and later went sour on the US government’s use of nuclear power just before the US government went sour on him. Oppenheimer’s is a fascinating story to tell. Emblematic of the change in the perception of nuclear power from scientific miracle to bringer of armageddon, he fell foul of the McCarthyite anti-Communist atmosphere after the Second World War. The film delivers the proof that Nolan is now as at home making movies about historical events (alongside Dunkirk) as he is in the realm of the high … Read more
Offside
Iranian Jafar Panahi’s comedy is about a group of girls who are arrested for dressing up as boys and trying to get in to see the 2006 World Cup Iran/Bahrain qualifier, women not being allowed to watch football in Iran. Accessing another country’s culture through football is a neat way of curving a ball past those who “don’t do arthouse”. The anti-subtitle crowd might also be interested to learn that the film was shot on the hoof, guerrilla style at the actual game in Tehran, using non-professional actors. Painting a picture of a country that seems at first almost barbaric in its medieval world view, Panahi isn’t so western focused that he can’t … Read more
Caught Stealing
Mock-serious bad times in New York City. Scorsese did it memorably in After Hours, and 40 years later Darren Aronofsky has a go with Caught Stealing, a gonzo nightmare missing a certain something. Comedy, I think, or the right comedic tone at any rate. Anyway, on the upside there’s Austin Butler as a dude in the late 1990s who agrees to babysit his neighbour’s cat, not realising that punk Russ (Matt Smith) is on the wrong side of some scary people, who aren’t all that discriminating when it comes to monstering. Russ being away in London at his dad’s funeral, so he says, street hoodlums Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) and Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) have … Read more
