Popular Reviews
The Untamed
Genre collision is the dish of the day in The Untamed (La Région Salvaje) as the most down-to-earth drama, the soap, meets the most out there – sci-fi. The result probably shouldn’t work but it really does, thanks to writer director Amat Escalante’s decision to keep the sci-fi stuff in the background for most of the film. After an opening shot of a black meteorite in space, followed by one of a pretty young woman apparently pleasuring herself, or being pleasured by, a giant pink tentacle, we’re off into an entirely different realm until, in the film’s last section, the tentacle, and the creature it’s attached to, return for some very out-there cross … Read more
World on a Wire
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) is German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only stab at sci-fi. An epic 3.5-hour behemoth, it was originally shown on TV in two parts, and starts as Fassbinder means it to go on, setting up questions about what we’re seeing in front of us. The opening shot is done on a lens so long it causes an atmospheric shimmer. The picture wobbles just a touch, as if we’re looking through a heat haze. When the people we’re seeing start speaking, their voices have the dead flat ambience of a dubbing studio. So much for atmosphere – we’re disconnected from these businessmen out on the street and entering … Read more
Love + Hate
My heart often sinks when “the movies” decide to do a story of love across the racial divide. Too often the result is melodrama overplaying relatively unimportant differences (like skin colour) while underplaying the ones that do matter (ie culture). See Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss, for example. Or, from the other end of the spectrum, the buffoonery of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Director Dominic Savage’s Love + Hate manages to avoid these pitfalls. It’s a “nice Asian girl meets racist white boy” story set in a town in Northern England and is Romeo and Juliet on a shoestring. At the Asian end of the relationship there’s the male/female double standards in an … Read more
After Yang
Philosophical (ie moody) sci-fi movie After Yang picks up on Philip K Dick’s sci-fi reflections on the possibility of consciousness in bots. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and all that. Dick’s stories tends to arrive on screen dark – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report – but director Kogonada decides to go one better than any of those with a film that is almost stygian in its gloom. No matter which way you come at this movie – soundtrack, acting, delivery of speech, clothing, cinematography, framing, screenplay – that doomy, gloomy mood is there. It makes for a meditative experience, if you’re up for something that could also be … Read more
Swan Song
Swan Song is a gay movie set in a post-gay world, a lament for the loss of the sense of community that the transition from “in” to “out” has brought with it, but also a celebration of “how far we’ve come”. Somehow, successfully, magically, it keeps these two elements in play. How gay? There’s Judy Garland on the soundtrack, and Dusty Springfield, and Shirley Bassey. There’s Jennifer Coolidge in the cast and… get this… Linda Evans (of Dynasty fame). And what a role for Udo Kier, on screen for all of it, as an aged gay (gay, not queer) man of the old school – flamboyant, arch, bitchy, a former hair-and-beauty salon owner now … Read more
Yes, Madam!
Yes, Madam! isn’t in any way like a fine wine. It has not aged well and looks far worse now than it did when it came out in 1985. A Hong Kong comedy actioner that knows its audience and its times, it was made quickly for a market that wanted it. Posterity could sort itself out. This is the bit where I outline the plot and it’s actually quite hard to do that, since so much of Yes, Madam! makes no sense and it feels at times like it’s been cobbled together from offcuts of other action movies. After a whipcrack opener involving a flasher, a heist, some gunplay and a car stunt, … Read more
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 November Yukio Mishima commits seppuku, 1970 On this day in 1970, the Japanese writer/actor/director Yukio Mishima disembowelled himself ritualistically, after having tried and failed to persuade troops at the Ichigaya barracks to launch a coup d’état to reinstate the Emperor’s supreme power. Shortly afterwards, as pre-arranged, his assistant attempted to decapitate him. When this failed, another assistant succeeded in severing Mishima’s head, then performed the same service for the first assistant, who had by now also disembowelled himself. Mishima’s real name was Kimitake Hiraoka and his act brought to a conclusion a life that had been devoted to the idea … Read more
The Crime Is Mine aka Mon Crime
Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and Everything Went Fine (a drama about assisted dying) looking a little like aberrations. Farce and old-school screwball is the idea. The style borrowed from Lubitsch and Capra, the story looking like it’s borrowed from the 1926 play Chicago. Actually, it’s based on the 1934 play Mon Crime, which, it’s possible, might have leant on the same real-life source … Read more
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 February Elizabeth Taylor born, 1932 On this day in 1932 Elizabeth Taylor was born, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, UK. Her parents were American, originally from Arkansas, and her mother was a former actress. Often considered the last true star of Hollywood’s golden era – before TV made inroads in the 1950s – Taylor’s career started when she was nine, with There’s One Born Every Minute, followed up two years later with Lassie Come Home. Then came National Velvet, and at the age of 12 Elizabeth Taylor was a star. She remained, partly thanks to her violet eyes, double eyelashes, … Read more
Far from the Madding Crowd
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 January Thomas Hardy dies, 1928 On this day in 1928, the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy died. He was 87 and this Victorian writer had survived into and almost through the age of the formal modernist, such as Joyce, with whom he had little in common, though he was an informing influence on writers with a more earthy, carnal and rural inclination, such as DH Lawrence. Hardy had trained as an architect in the 1860s but didn’t enjoy life in London and as soon as he became established enough he moved back to the West Country (Somerset, then Dorset) where … Read more
Looking for Venera
Men are mostly lurking presences rather than characters in Looking for Venera, Norika Sefa’s film which she says is about showing the world that life in Kosovo isn’t all about poverty and exotica. Sitting in London, it looks pretty poor and exotic to me. Sefa opens with a shot of a teenage female having pounding sex with a man in the woods, observed sight unseen by another teenage female. Later we learn that the young woman having sex is Dorina (Rozafa Celaj) and the one watching is Venera (Kosovare Krasniqi). They are not friends, but after Venera pulls Dorina aside to quiz her about what she was up to on her back among … Read more
Hope Gap
About as unfashionable as they come, Hope Gap has two and a half great actors in it and tells a tender story with great compassion. It’s an adaptation of writer/director William Nicholson’s play The Retreat from Moscow and though Nicholson throws in scenes set on the cliffs and by the sea as often as possible, in an attempt to cinematify things, this is obviously a chamber piece that doesn’t in any case need them. Instead it gets its power from the gulf between what is said and what is unsaid, and the interaction of the two. The two great actors are Annette Bening and Bill Nighy, playing a long married couple called Grace … Read more
