Popular Reviews
My Sole Desire aka À Mon Seul Désir
A film about stripping worried about boundaries, My Sole Desire (À Mon Seul Désir) is a bit like that J-Lo movie Hustlers but with not as many clothes, a bit more honesty and a touch less Hollywood make-believe. Good though Hustlers was, it wasn’t always in touch with reality. But back to Lucie Borleteau’s movie, which like Hustlers sees the world of stripping from the point of view of a newbie. Shy, retiring student and part-time grocery-shop cashier Manon (Louise Chevillotte) pitches up at a strip club wondering how a fit young woman goes about getting a job like this. Within minutes she’s been renamed Aurore, has made a best friend in stripper/would-be-actor … Read more
Together aka Tillsammans
There’s something very funny and fairly tragic about Lukas Moodysson’s 2000 film set on a Swedish commune called Tillsammans (or Together, in English). It’s set in 1975, just as the Spanish dictator Franco has been declared dead and follows what happens when Elisabeth, an abused woman and her children arrive and are taken in, grudgingly, by a gang of virtuous, or so they think, communards on a big experiment in free living outside Stockholm. Liberal idealism is at its peak and nurture has the philosophical upper hand over nature. The lentil-eaters believe that lesbianism is a political choice, not a predisposition, that sexual love should come with no emotional baggage and that washing-up … Read more
Compartment Number 6
Compartment Number 6 has been described as a Finnish Before Sunrise but in fact it’s closer to It Happened One Night minus the jokes, since it’s a story about two people who really don’t get along suddenly finding they do get along, sort of. At the risk of banging on about a different subject for too long, Before Sunrise was Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy – two gorgeous, similarly minded and largely footloose people – on a train together and it was less a case of will they/won’t they and more a nailed-on certainty that something was going to happen between them, if only they’d get a move on. Here, we’re more in Clark … Read more
Superman
An all-you-can-eat buffet of Superman, or James Gunn’s Superman, as it’s invariably called, presumably to set it apart from the crowd. Not that Gunn seems interested in standing out from the crowd too much. His Superman’s tights are baggy, like the cheapo ones from the black and white era, though most of Gunn’s inspiration comes from the 1970s Christopher Reeve Superman, in the look of Superman/Clark Kent himself, the production design and most obviously in the use of the John Williams theme, which new composers David Fleming and John Murphy take off the peg now and then, usually when the big guns are needed. On the subject of guns, after playing him a … Read more
The Origin of Evil
Farce played as a thriller, The Origin of Evil (L’Origine du Mal) stars the brilliant Laure Calamy. If you enjoyed her style of paranoid ditziness in the worldwide TV hit Call My Agent (Dix Pour Cent), there’s plenty more of the same on offer here. She plays Nathalie, an ex-jailbird who decides that while her lover, Stéphane (Suzanne Clément), is in prison on a five-year stretch she’ll impersonate her and introduce herself to the father Stéphane never knew. For why? This is not exactly clear – she’s hoping to get some money out of him, maybe, or it’s just the latest of her scams, or she’s after a family she can call her own … Read more
The Tao of Steve
“Men and women both want to have sex, but women want to have sex 15 minutes after us, so if you hold out for 20, she’ll be chasing you for five.” Everyone knows a shlubby, none-too-handsome guy in a low-status job who seems to do OK with the ladies. The Tao of Steve analyses that phenomenon, and casts the incredibly likeable Donal Logue as Dex, its hero. His quest – to get laid as often as possible. This he does with ease since he follows “The Tao of Steve” a babe-magnet philosophy borrowed from all the chilled Steves of the world (McQueen, McGarrett, Austin – his list, not mine). Dex may be overweight, he may … Read more
Witchfinder General
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 January Oliver Cromwell executed two years after death, 1661 On this day in 1661, Oliver Cromwell was posthumously executed. A member of parliament who had entered the civil war against the king, Cromwell had risen quickly to become on of the best generals on the side of the “roundheads”. In 1649, Cromwell was one of the signatories of the death warrant of King Charles I. In 1653, having led campaigns against the Irish and Scots, he abolished a quarrelsome parliament and became de facto monarch of the country. When he died five years later, in 1658, the title of Lord … Read more
Strong Language
London wunderkind Simon Rumley wrote, produced, directed and probably did the catering on this fantastic debut feature. As an exercise in storytelling it appears to be simplicity itself. Initially it’s little more than testimonies to camera from a bunch of young Londoners as they bang on about money, clubs, drugs, sex, food, drink and Blur (well, it was made in 1998) among other things. Then the stories from the unconnected talking heads start to coalesce and something much more disturbing starts to rear its ugly head. I won’t say more than that about the plot because Strong Language’s ta-daa moment is dramatic in the extreme. Which is not to belittle the acting, which … Read more
18 April 2016-04-18
Out This Week In the Heart of the Sea (Warner, cert 12) Why have one sea adventure when you can have them all? Though ostensibly about the incident that inspired the writing of Moby Dick, In the Heart of the Sea also takes shots at Jaws, Mutiny on the Bounty and Robinson Crusoe in a tale of a whaling ship’s adventures, only some of which are whale related. Chris Hemsworth stars – and possibly that’s a strangled Boston accent or a Clark Gable impersonation – as the first mate of a whaler out of Nantucket whose ship is pounced on by a great white whale. The story is all set out in “dark … Read more
The Damned aka Götterdämmerung
Luchino Visconti’s The Damned aka Götterdämmerung is like several seasons of the TV show Dallas run together. It’s big, melodramatic and camp. There’s even a “Bobby Ewing back from the shower” moment. It’s the first of Visconti’s German trilogy – Death in Venice and Ludwig would follow in 1971 and 1973 – but is in many respects a return to the territory of 1963’s The Leopard, being the story of a great old family’s tussle with political forces beyond its control. In The Leopard it was the arrival of democracy in 19th-century Italy upending certainties. In The Damned, aka Götterdämmerung, it’s the Nazis. We’re in Germany, it’s the 1930s, Hitler is newly in … Read more
La Cérémonie aka The Ceremony
Ruth Rendell didn’t like many adaptations of her books but she did like 1995’s La Cérémonie (The Ceremony), a reworking of her thriller A Judgment in Stone. She wasn’t alone. Roger Ebert put it on his Great Movies list, the Cahiers du Cinéma people named it the best film of 1995, and Bong Joon Ho says it’s one of the main inspirations for Parasite, his Best Picture Oscar winner from 2019. It’s a chilly, anxious thriller about a mouselike maid working for a rich French family who strikes up a friendship with a woman who runs the local post office. Sophie is cool, efficient, doesn’t say much and does her job so brilliantly … Read more
The Outrun
The Outrun is the latest from director Nora Fingscheidt, whose edgy, urgent System Crasher opened doors in 2019 that she largely closed again with her follow-up, 2021’s The Unforgivable, which many critics indeed found unforgivable, even though it starred Sandra Bullock. She’s on the upswing again here, with the jumbled-up story of a young woman from the Orkneys who goes to London, becomes a terrible alcoholic and then returns to the wild islands off the coast of Scotland to seek balm for the soul and a new start in life. The arc is not unlike the one for Wild, the brilliant Jean-Marc Vallée film starring Reese Witherspoon as a wild child recapturing her … Read more
