Popular Reviews
8 September 2014-09-08
Out in the UK This Week Blue Ruin (4DVD, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Most vigilante thrillers fall into one of two camps – either the seriously pissed off professional killer who decides enough is enough (Point Blank/Kill Bill), or the utterly unlikely avenger whose anger makes him/her as good or better than any professional (Death Wish/Law Abiding Citizen). Blue Ruin comes at it from a fresh angle, introducing the killer who is utterly unsuitable for the job, is forced into a corner and has to fight his way out, doesn’t learn anything along the way, and remains a bumbling milquetoast to the end. Macon Blair plays that man, a timid creature we first meet in the … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 25 – Who Was That Man I Saw You With?
There’s something a bit dead in the water about Who Was That Man I Saw You With?, a late-era Avengers episode with a lot going for it – but no spark. Jeremy Burnham wrote it, and atones for the messiness of Fog (the previous week’s episode) with a tightly constructed and well plotted story. There’s a bit of futurology in here too. Britain, it seems, has got itself a Star Wars defence system long before Ronald Reagan mooted the idea of a defensive umbrella that could blast incoming enemy missiles out of the sky. The system itself – codename Field Marshal – is magnificent, of course, but there are fears that a lone-wolf … Read more
25 November 2013-11-25
Out in the UK this Week The Heat (Fox, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) There aren’t many female buddy-cop comedies. This one, directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids), recalls the Lethal Weapon antics of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, and stars Sandra Bullock as the one trying to play it by the book, and Melissa McCarthy as the out and out slob prepared to take any risk because, hell, law and order is a dirty old business. Suit pants versus sweat pants, basically, with a plot that’s immaterial – it has something to do with guns and drugs, as per – but it’s just enough to bus the girls from one amusing set piece to the next, … Read more
The Mastermind
Loved by lovers of French film who can tell their Bresson from their Melville, The Mastermind is a touch inert if you come to it expecting what it’s billed as – an art-heist thriller. Instead Kelly Reichardt and her star, Josh O’Connor, cook up something altogether more speculative, meditative. Dull? We are largely denied the joys of the heist movie – watching a meticulously planned operation as it is put into play. Instead Reichardt does a “what if?”. What if the mastermind is at the last minute called on to mind the kids, for instance. Just one of many handfuls of grit thrown into the well-oiled machine – which isn’t that well-oiled in … Read more
Omni Loop
Sci-fi or is it? Omni Loop certainly doesn’t look or feel like a sci-fi movie. In fact it’s all about human foibles, regrets, the life lived rather than the life that could have been lived. But its ostensible story – a woman reliving the last week of her life over and over again thanks to a magic time-travelling pill – has sci-fi written all over it. Groundhog Week, you could call it. The action sets out from the point where Mary-Louise Parker’s Zoya Lowe is given a terminal diagnosis. Heading home from the hospital to die with the family, instead of breathing her last with them at the decisive moment she takes one of … Read more
Carry On Nurse
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 July UK National Health Service created, 1948 On this day in 1948, Britain’s National Health Service came into being. Based on the recommendations of 1942’s Beveridge Report, which proposed “comprehensive health and rehabilitation services for prevention and cure of disease” it was designed to be funded through taxation and free at the point of delivery. It is in essence a health insurance and provision system administered and run by the government. It ran as a unified system in the UK until 1998, when its various functions were devolved to the regional “national” governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Total … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 2 – The Undertakers
On Saturday 5 October 1963, a day after the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had updated their plan to invade Cuba the following July (President Kennedy’s assassination would intervene), and while JFK’s wife Jackie was enjoying the company of shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in Greece (she would later marry him), TV audiences in the UK got their own kicks by sitting down to watch the second episode of series three of The Avengers, altogether a camper, more knockabout affair than series two. And there was nothing camper in the 1960s than death, there being a positive Joe Orton-esque quality to the superb opener to The Undertakers – one member of a coffin-carrying team … Read more
Big Wednesday
Expectations were high for John Milius’s Big Wednesday when it debuted in 1978. Based on Milius and co-writer Dennis Aaberg’s own experiences growing up as California surfers, it tracks three dudes from callow youth to maturity, dropping in periodically as they also surf the waves of life. So high, in fact, that Milius kindly swapped profit points with his old friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Which is how he ended up owning a tiny piece of Close Encounters and Star Wars and they ended up with a little bit of Big Wednesday. Which worked out better for Milius than for Lucas and Spielberg. He became rich on his end of the deal … Read more
Elvis: That’s the Way It Is Special Edition
Here’s Elvis trying on the cape, the batwings and the wide belts in Las Vegas in 1970. There must have been a lot of material in that original white outfit because it was certainly let out a lot as the Seventies progressed. But not here, this is Elvis at his sleekest, only two years after his famous 1968 comeback special, when he proved he was one of the few people in the world who could wear top-to-toe black leather and not look like a gimp. This “special edition” is a recut of the original film, there’s a lot more goofing about, more pre-show rehearsal with the band (watch James Burton on guitar and … Read more
What Women Want
Nick Marshall, a sexy, charming and single Hollywood exec, hey it’s Mel Gibson everybody, suddenly develops the ability to hear what women are thinking. Of course he’s completely freaked, though obviously flattered at some of the “what a great butt” comments – this being the very last time that Gibson’s physique rather than his politics would be attracting attention. To start with Nick exploits his talents as many men would – getting laid, psyching out his female boss (Helen Hunt) and shortcutting his way back into his estranged daughter’s affections. But then something weird happens, which lifts this film right out of the common run. As a result of listening to the hopes … Read more
Still Alice
A super confident woman, top of her game, a linguistics professor, one day discovers herself grasping for a word while she’s giving a lecture. This being the movies, where a cough in one scene leads to coughing up blood in the next, we automatically suspect she’s got Alzheimer’s. The title providing another nudge (why Still?). And so it turns out, in a movie that seems determined to put a polish on the disease of the week movie, and largely succeeds. Polish number one is that it’s not just any old Alzheimer’s but familial Alzheimer’s, in which the gene – should you have been unlucky enough to have inherited it from an affected parent … Read more
Panique
How’s this for grim! The atmospheric and technically superb Panique, released in 1946, one year after the war ended, gave the French people an image of themselves at their worst. What the domestic market wanted at the time was sugar-coated triumphalism, stories about the nobility of the Resistance to the German occupation and the endurance of the indomitable French spirit etc. Unsurprisingly the film bombed. An adaptation of one of Georges Simenon’s “romans durs” (the tougher novels that didn’t feature Simenon’s decent detective Maigret), it opens with the death of a woman and closes with the death of a man. In between director/co-writer Julien Duvivier gives us one of the most relentlessly depressing … Read more
