Popular Reviews
The Retirement Plan
It’s Nicolas Cage’s turn to have a go with the very particular set of skills, in The Retirement Plan, a gonzo action comedy that’ll be familiar if you’ve seen any of the Liam Neeson outings as an all-action seeker of payback, or any of the Keanu Reeves’s incarnations as John Wick. That, apparently, was writer/director Tim Brown’s original idea – imagine John Wick finally, eventually, retired, 20 years older and living on a sunny island and being called back into action by some untoward event. The event that does it here isn’t the killing of a pet dog but the arrival on the Cayman Islands, where Matt Robbins (Cage) has been retired for … Read more
The Devil Is a Woman
Marlene Dietrich’s favourite of all the films she appeared in was The Devil Is a Woman. Maybe because she’s playing an independent woman beholden to no man. Maybe because she laughs quite a lot in it. The two might not be unrelated. It’s set in Spain, and Dietrich plays Concha Perez, a beauty spotted first on a float at the carnival by dashing gay blade Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero), who falls for her instantly and badly. Woe betide any man who messes with Concha, Galvan is told by older, wiser Captain Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill), a soldier and stuffed shirt who has already thrown himself on those rocks. And in a protracted flashback … Read more
The Tunnel
In the opening moments of The Tunnel, an onscreen notice informs us that there are over 1,100 tunnels in Norway, and that, in the event of an emergency situation in any one of them, it’s really just a case of every person for themselves. There have been eight major fires in recent years, we’re further informed. Guess what’s about to happen? The Tunnel is a disaster movie happy to stick to the formula laid down in the ancient texts like The Poseidon Adventure. And so it is that in The Tunnel a group of people going about their every lives is suddenly subjected to an extreme ordeal testing their physical and moral endurance. … Read more
Battles without Honor and Humanity
Never mind Battles without Honor and Humanity, how about battles that make some sense? There’s lots to love in Kinji Fukasaku’s 1973 gangster movie – the first of a five-part series of “Battles” movies he’d make in two years (amazingly) – but coherence isn’t high on the list. It’s often called the Japanese Godfather, and there’s plenty of that in there. But there’s also Goodfellas, since it’s the story of a guy, Hirono, an ex-soldier who (actually) never always wanted to be a gangster. But once this smalltime criminal has landed in trouble with the law he finds himself sharing a prison cell with a yakuza guy. Once invited to join, he is … Read more
Power Ballad
By the end of Power Ballad I felt like I had been emotionally manipulated all the way up a very familiar garden path. In case I’m giving the wrong impression, I also cried. On balance I’d summarise it as “John Carney does it again”, the writer/director who does other things but regularly returns to the street-musical genre that made his name with 2006’s Once (wow, 20 years ago), and then proved he wasn’t a one-trick pony with Begin Again, Sing Street and Flora and Son. Do we all like Paul Rudd? Is Rudd the everyman du jour, more handsome, funnier and nicer than we are but adjacent enough that we buy in to … Read more
100 Years of… The Plastic Age
There was barely any plastic around in 1925 when The Plastic Age debuted. “Plastic” in this context has its original sense of something easily moulded – “rendering the material more plastic”, my dictionary offers as an example. That “material” in this case is a young man and his “Age” is the reason he’s so biddable, labile, impressionable, easily influenced – see your thesaurus for more synonyms. Donald Keith plays the dude, Hugh, a young man off to college where, his parents hope, he’ll keep the family end up and fulfil himself as a sportsman of track and field (no one at this college seems to do any studying). But instead of knuckling down … Read more
The Last Vermeer
The Last Vermeer is the true story of Han Van Meegeren, art forger extraordinaire, who knocked out old masters by the likes of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, among others, during the Second World War and even managed to sell a “Vermeer” to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring for a fortune. Van Meegeren was initially brought to trial in the Netherlands after the War for having sold Göring what was supposed to be a real Vermeer, as a collaborator who had facilitated the expropriation of the cultural property of the Netherlands. But when he eventually admitted that the picture was fake, those charges were dropped. However, because of the skewed logic of … Read more
100 Yards
100 Yards is directed by the Xu brothers, Haofeng and Junfeng, and it’s a great martial arts movie – though any more than that is a stretch. The martial arts sequences are spectacular, the fighting epic, the moves expertly choreographed and it’s shot the proper way – so you can see how good the combatants are not how nimble the editor is. But between the spectacular set pieces things tend to go a bit limp. Gentle, if we’re being kind, or elegant maybe. It’s all set in 1920s Tianjin, which is another part of its appeal, and opens with an old kung fu master about to breathe his last. Shen An (Jacky Heung), the … Read more
Nightsiren
A young woman returns to the Slovakian village she fled as a child, little realising that she’s going to get the frostiest of receptions. She’s a witch, the townsfolk whisper, or the daughter of a witch, or at least lived in the house where the witch lived, they say. And, what’s more, while fleeing all those years before, she pushed her little sister off a cliff to her death. This is true, but the little girl’s death was an accident, a flashback makes clear, but no one in this village is buying that, or trading in hard facts where Šarlota (pronounced Charlotta and played by Natalia Germani) is concerned. She has been tagged, … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 3 – Escape in Time
Escape in Time is a good chance to see what the great documentary maker John Krish can do when handed an episode of The Avengers to direct. The results are a mixed bag: visually interesting but dramatically a little flat, though the premise – a time-travelling bolthole into another era to aid escaping master criminals – is a fascinating one if you’re on board with the whole time-travel idea. And it gives the production team at The Avengers a chance to get the fancy-dress box out – a sure sign of a series that’s jumping the shark. On the upside, Peter Bowles is in it, and we meet him very early on after … Read more
La Bête Humaine
In Emile Zola’s story La Bête Humaine, the “human beast” is train driver Jacques Lantier, a man whose family line is full of fuck-ups, alcoholics and brutes. He keeps his passions in check, just about, by focusing rigidly on his job, and in particular on his locomotive, which he calls by the female name Lison. There’s an intertitle card telling us all this at the start of Jean Renoir’s brilliant 1938 adaptation of the story. However, the “beast” of Renoir’s version might actually not be Lantier at all. Instead it could be Séverine, the lusty wife of a plodding stationmaster in Le Havre, where Lantier is forced to spend some time when his … Read more
Causeway
Welcome back, Jennifer Lawrence, who as recently as 2015/16 was the world’s highest paid actress and in Causeway reminds us why. And perhaps needed to – so many films she’s appeared in since her high-water mark have been just a touch underwhelming. And welcome to the big time for Brian Tyree Henry. Oscar-nominated for his role here, he’s been impressive in everything he’s been in for years, but it was 2020’s The Outside Story that proved he could carry an entire movie on his own. In what’s largely a two-hander – it could almost be a play in a studio theatre – Lawrence plays a soldier suffering post-traumatic physical and mental trauma after … Read more
