Popular Reviews
Ludwig
As mad and excessive as the king it portrays, Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig – about the “mad” King Ludwig II (1845-1886) of Bavaria – is a vast, sprawling and endlessly sumptuous display of the excesses of a monarch who’s clearly off his chump. It got absolutely hammered by the US critics when it opened there in 1973 – Roger Ebert gave it one star and described it as “lethargic and persistently uninteresting”. The New York Times said it was “bereft of ideas”. And neither of them had seen the full-length four-hour version. At least 30 minutes had been lopped for its US distribution. Which is a pity, because the sheer unwieldy size of the … Read more
Flushed Away
Aardman, the animation house that gave us Wallace and Gromit, announced the ending of their collaboration with DreamWorks (Shrek) just as Flushed Away was released. And watching it, you can understand why. High on sentimentality and laden with backstory, it’s a DreamWorks movie with Aardman touches, rather than what Aardman probably hoped for – an Aardman movie with DreamWorks muscle behind it. A good movie that could have been a great one, in other words, though the good stuff makes it worthwhile. The over-complicated story tells the tale of Roddy St James, a privileged London pet rat (voiced by Hugh Jackman) who gets “flushed away” down the toilet and into the sewers, where … Read more
You Can Live Forever
A magnetic Anwen O’Driscoll re-purposes much of the Kristen Stewart style and look to play a grumpy teenage lesbian who becomes fixated on a devout Jehovah’s Witness in smalltown 1990s America. Who’s going to convert who? Or whom, if you’re feeling fancy, which You Can Live Forever never is, nor preachy or finger-waggy. It’s not even unfair to Jehovah’s Witnesses – well, not much – a sitting target for films like this, which are all about self-expression and freedom for young women where the Witnesses are all about the patriarchy and control. Specifics, though, specifics. Black-clad hoodie-wearing Jaime (O’Driscoll) has been sent by her mother to stay with her aunt and uncle in … Read more
The Northman
Aryans assemble! Hollywood’s most Nordic get together for The Northman, Robert Eggers’ latest exploration of arcane mindsets, and the sort of film that’s probably on a loop at White Supremacist HQ. The men are tall, blond, hairy and sculpted, the women are fierce, brave and yield only to their liege-lord husband. There is dirt, there are runic inscriptions, there is lore and there are any number of other tokens of authenticity. It’s the hipster version of The Vikings, the one that starred Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, made in the days when no one particularly minded a pair of New York Jews playing characters out of the Nordic sagas (though there were sniggerings … Read more
The Golden Glove
Should a serial killer movie sympathise with its killer? The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh) comes perilously close to going all-in with real-life killer Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler), who killed four women in Hamburg between 1970 and 1974 and then hid their body parts in his attic. Grim, seedy, sleazy, disgusting, vile, the negative adjectives have piled up in discussions about this undoubtedly brilliantly made movie. I’d go for “pitiless” or “cosmically ironic”. More verbosely, it’s a cool exercise in the manipulation of the human tendency to imprint (like a duckling for the first “mamma” object it sees on hatching) suggesting the omnivorous writer/director Fatih Akin has been watching Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy … Read more
Pacifiction
You’ll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump. It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet American (either version) or 1967’s The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But Greene’s complex-hero-abroad scenario turns up regularly in other people’s work – for example in The Tailor of Panama (writer John Le Carré obviously channelling Greene) and in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (Denis Johnson doing the same). And so to our man in Havana. Tahiti, in fact, where the compromised hero is a gent called De Roller. Dressed in a white suit … Read more
Les Diaboliques
Les Diaboliques is the film that Alfred Hitchcock missed out on making after getting pipped to the post by another master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot. If the story is true, Clouzot stayed up all night reading the original novel, Celle qui n’était plus, and then called writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac the next morning, desperate to have the rights. By the time Hitchcock rang a few hours later those rights were no longer available. Hitchcock did not walk away entirely empty handed. Boileau and Narcejac went on to write D’Entre les Morts for him, which he turned into Vertigo, currently ranked at number one in the Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films … Read more
Black Bear
Aubrey Plaza fans, here’s your film. In Black Bear she plays one, two, three or even four roles, depending on how you’re counting, as an actor/director trying to hash out a screenplay out in a cabin in the woods. From the first instant that Allison (Plaza) arrives at this B&B “for creatives”, as owners Blair (Sarah Gadon) and Gabe (Christopher Abbott) put it, it’s obvious there’s going to be trouble. She, a self-declared “difficult” actress who went into directing because no on would employ her any more, immediately starts that bantering, joshing to and fro with host Gabe which indicates that she fancies him. As they walk up from the main gate, he … Read more
Petrov’s Flu
Kirill Serebrennikov, the director of Petrov’s Flu (Petrov v grippe), wasn’t at Cannes in 2021 to see his film screened, as he hadn’t been at Cannes to see his previous film, LETO, screened in 2018. He was under house arrest back home in Russia, having been accused of embezzling funds from the Seventh Studio, one of several cultural institutions he was connected to. The charges were widely seen as trumped up, part of Vladimir Putin’s ongoing fight against liberal elements in Russia – Serebrennikov is a vocal supporter of LGBT causes. Given all that background, you might expect Petrov’s Flu, a fictional work but one set in the post-Soviet era, when society had … Read more
The Velvet Underground
A stark, bare-bones title for a documentary about a stark, bare-bones band, The Velvet Underground sees superfan director Todd Haynes using his own celebrity to gain access to talking heads who might not otherwise talk – the film’s coups are having a warm, chatty John Cale and a voluble and twinkly Moe Tucker on board to deliver the “I was there” bona fides from founder members. The Velvet Underground are the template for every art-rock or avant-garde rock band ever since. In their jangling, discordant, off-key, unschooled way they burned bright and short, and the cliché runs that though not many people ever saw them, everyone who did so formed their own band. … Read more
The Virginian
The Virginian’s ambitions aren’t that great. It wants to be a normal, everyday western like they used to make, in which man’s-gotta-do men negotiate morality in a lawless world, a baddie wore a black hat and a fair lady was open to a bit of courting as long as it was respectful. Can such a western be made? Is there an audience for it? The TV show The Virginian, which this isn’t, was one of several long-running series with high production values and fine actors. It ran for 249 shows over nine years, a way behind Bonanza (430 episodes between 1959 and 1973) and Gunsmoke (635 episodes between 1955 and 1975). Together, with … Read more
Casshern
A live action adaptation of the 1973 Japanese anime with a plot that is Godzilla in essence, except this time man’s interference with nature has produced a race of Neo-Sapiens – a deadly spawn out to kill the human race. Which can be saved by only one man – Casshern – a mortal reincarnated with an invincible iron body. It’s the debut feature by “acclaimed fashion photographer and music video director” Kazuaki Kiriya and, like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, it’s all CGI, apart from the humans. Unlike Sky Captain it’s decided to make things slightly less real, slightly more anime. Wise decision – we can now enjoy the backgrounds for what they … Read more
