Popular Reviews
Manthan
The title of the Indian film Manthan is often rendered in English as The Churning – not some psychological state of distress but actual physical churning. As in rich, creamy milk into butter and whey. Because this is a film about the setting up of a milk co-operative, financed by the dairy farmers it’s all about. Before you doomscrool away, it’s a fascinating film, from its unique opening title card – “500,000 Farmers of Gujarat present… Manthan” – to its triumphant conclusion. Along the way there is triumph over adversity and collective action prevailing over greedy self-interest in what’s essentially an underdog story playing out under the umbrella of benign government intervention. How far away we … Read more
American Star
At last, in American Star, someone has given Ian McShane a lead role in a movie that he can get properly stuck into. Not a fine co-starring role (Sexy Beast) or fine supporting role (John Wick and its sequels) or as a fine co-lead in a spin-off from a TV show (Deadwood) but a bona-fide lead role in a movie that’s all his own. It’s a good movie too. It dips a bit in the last third but ends so powerfully you’ll forgive it. It opens powerfully too. In a stylised, wordless sequence, we follow McShane’s black-clad Wilson as he lands on the island of Fuerteventura, hires a car and drives out into … Read more
The Best Films of 2015
There’s a tendency among people who watch a lot of films to boost ones that stand out rather than ones that are good. This can lead to some perverse choices in the “best of” lists that proliferate at this time of year. So that probably explains the rogue nature of the list below – ha ha. If you’re expecting to find Spectre (not at all bad) or the latest Marvel movie or Jurassic World, look elsewhere. These are just the films, of the maybe 350 films or so that I’ve watched in the past 12 months, that jumped out and grabbed me. Some of them are 2014 releases. Ten Best Paddington (dir: Paul … Read more
Eiffel
“Librement inspiré de faits réels,” it says at the beginning of Eiffel. Not a mere “inspired by real events”, often used as an apology for serving up historical fact laced with made-up stuff, but “freely inspired”. Turn to Wikipedia if what you want is the actual factual, in other words. That’s what I did, and can tell you that the background to this story is pretty much all true, depending on what you call the background, which Eiffel isn’t entirely sure about either. In opening scenes Gustave Eiffel, engineer extraordinaire, stares out at Paris from the tower he gave his name to – handy if you’ve no idea who he was – before Eiffel cycles … Read more
Anything for Jackson
Horror films tend to be populated by sexy young things, but in Anything for Jackson the two protagonists are a pair of people in their 60s, played to the hilt by Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy. Actually, Anything for Jackson is more trad than it at first appears, because the couple in question aren’t actually the good guys, they’re a pair of Satanists – “Glory be to Satan” they chant at the coven where they meet their fellow devil-worshippers – who have kidnapped a heavily pregnant woman and plan to use her child as the receptacle for the spirit of their dead grandchild, Jackson. It’s a Rosemary’s Baby from the point of view … 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
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
By general consent a classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also won three Oscars – best director and screenplay for John Huston and best supporting actor for Walter Huston (his father) – and is one of those films that also get film-makers dewy eyed. Stanley Kubrick named it one of his faves (in 1963 anyway). Robert Redford ditto. Sam Peckinpah was a big fan. Lucas and Spielberg borrowed the look of its star, Humphrey Bogart, as the template for Indiana Jones. The hat, stubble, jacket, pants and boots all probably look better on Harrison Ford, but neither Bogart nor Huston Jr was aiming for matinee appeal with their movie, and that’s the … Read more
1 February 2016-02-01
Out This Week Sicario (Lionsgate, cert 15) With Incendies the disruption had its roots in the politics in the Middle East, with Prisoners in American paranoia and with Enemy it was something more internal still, a disrupted psyche. In Denis Villeneuve’s latest intelligent, genre-extending thriller his unsentimental gaze settles on the US government and how its agents actually go about their business (according to this film, at any rate). Working on the Mexico border, where drug cartels are mostly in charge, laconic badasses Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro are joined by seconded cop and audience avatar Emily Blunt, who looks on with jaw at various distances from the floor as the two … Read more
The Blood on Satan’s Claw
One of the “unholy trinity” of British folk-horror films of the era, 1971’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw sits between Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973) – there are a growing number of fans but it’s not as well known, cultish or highly regarded as the other two. I’m guessing the scrappy narrative is to blame. Both Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man tell a simple story – a witchfinder gets his comeuppance in one, a priggish policeman in the other – but The Blood on Satan’s Claw started life as an anthology of stories all set in the same village which then got reworked after director Piers Haggard came on board. … Read more
12 October 2015-10-12
Out This Week Mr Holmes (EOne, cert PG) A bit of a something and nothing here, with Ian McKellen playing a crusty 90-something Sherlock Holmes coming to terms with the loss of his faculties, wrapping up an old unsolved case (in flashback) and putting his remaining wits in the service of cracking an even greater enigma – himself. McKellen has been here before, in Gods and Monsters, when he played Frankenstein director James Whale at the ignominious end of his life. And so has director Bill Condon, who also directed the 1998 film, and again proves himself to be a deft stylist of wipe-clean period drama – Holmes’s ancient house, his beautiful garden … Read more
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 April Anita Loos born, 1889 On this day in 1889, or possibly 1888, Corinne Anita Loos was born. Always cagey about her true age, Anita became best known for her comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She grew up in a theatrical family – her father managed a theatrical stock company – and she was performing on stage as a young girl. Her father wrote one-act plays for the company and a precocious Anita started turning them out too. Having seen an early silent film in 1911 she decided to turn her hand to a screenplay for one-reelers. Over the next … Read more
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The superb McCabe and Mrs Miller (generally styled McCabe & Mrs. Miller) was sold as a revisionist western when it came out in 1971. Its director, Robert Altman, went so far as to call it an “anti-western”. Even though Anthony Mann in the 1950s and Sergio Leone in the 1960s had paved the way with “revisionist” westerns of their own, the first reviews of Altman’s version of the revisionist western were harsh. Rex Reed of the New York Daily News called it, “an incoherent, amateurish, simple-minded, boring and totally worthless piece of garbage”, which is nailing your colours to the mast if nothing else. Other critics liked, loved and raved over it. Pauline … Read more
