Popular Reviews
Mank
Mank is the story, well known to film nerds, of the writing of Citizen Kane, for many the greatest film ever made. More exactly it’s two stories, one about writer Herman Mankiewicz dishing the dirt on press baron William Randolph Hearst (his model for press baron Charles Foster Kane) and his paramour Marion Davies, the other about director Orson Welles doing Mankiewicz out of a screen credit for his work. Inserted almost as an afterthought is yet another story – about the socialist Upton Sinclair and his campaign to become governor of California, and how his guns were spiked by the movie studios. Installed at a secluded cabin in the Mojave desert with … Read more
Rocks
Rocks is the director Sarah Gavron’s best fiction feature to date, beating Brick Lane and Suffragette to top honours thanks to outstandingly fresh performances from a cast of actors who deserve all the praise that’s been heaped on them. It’s a simple and fairly familiar story. Rocks (Bukky Bakray) is a London inner-city kid, feisty and formidable, fast of mouth, quick of wit, older in attitude than her 13 years. One day her mother simply disappears from the council block she shares with Rocks and much younger brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu), leaving behind a note saying she’s gone off somewhere to “clear my head” plus a bit of money intended to tide … Read more
Videoman
A tender story about the people left behind when the world went digital A miserabilist minor masterpiece, writer/director Kristian A Söderström’s feature debut is not only about a couple of people stuck spiritually and culturally in the 1980s, but looks, feels and has the mildewed ambience of those times, from the wobbly direction down to non-sequitur acting. Using a trash aesthetic is a refuge of the talentless, quite often, but Söderström’s story is so touching and heartfelt (as well as acutely observed and often darkly funny) that you don’t just give him the benefit of the doubt, you start checking to see what else he’s done (a string of shorts, which I’d like … Read more
Score
Score is another of those porn crossover movies from the “Golden Age of Pornography”, when the marginal moved into the mainstream and, for a while, it looked like attitudes to sex loosened by the cultural changes of the 1960s were about to be consolidated. Of course they did change – there’s more sex on the screen today, and more various sex, than there ever was before – and yet in mainstream movies (look at last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, or the big movies from any year) it’s like the Golden Age never really happened. Which makes the likes of Score doubly fascinating. Watching it now it’s obvious throughout that there’s a tension in … Read more
Clara Sola
Capsule plot summaries can be misleading. The one for Clara Sola might say – a woman around 40 in a Costa Rica village has a sexual awakening. It’s more or less what the one on the IMDb says. And it’s not wrong, that is what happens. But the story, that’s a different thing altogether. And in fact the whole point of this debut by Nathalie Álvarez Mesén is in what isn’t being said rather than what is. The plot is straightforward but story lies scattered between the cracks, just slightly out of reach. It’s ambiguous, entirely, in almost every respect. Clara is a pretty woman and might, at her age, expect to be … Read more
Larks on a String
Production on Larks on a String (Skrivánci na niti) started during the Prague Spring, an eight month period in Czechoslovakia when political liberalisation under the rule of new Communist First Secretary Alexander Dubček looked set to transform the country. It was not to be. By August 1968 the experiment was over, Soviet tanks were rolling in to the Czech capital and Dubček had been deposed. Also kicked into the long grass was any chance of distribution for Jiří Menzel’s now completed film, which wasn’t seen until 1990, after communism collapsed. Menzel is a master of straight-faced satire. In Closely Observed Trains he used a story about Nazis during wartime to comment on the … Read more
Eileen
Another tale of female self-actualisation from William Oldroyd, who follows Lady Macbeth with Eileen, a low-key melodramatic adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s best-seller. Lady Macbeth made a star of Florence Pugh, who had been a star-in-waiting since her debut in Carol Morley’s The Falling, in 2014. The transformation isn’t quite so marked here, since Thomasin McKenzie has been turning heads since she was 12 – you might have seen her in JoJo Rabbit, The Justice of Bunny King, The Power of the Dog and Last Night in Soho. Like Pugh, it seems to be written in stone that McKenzie will hold aloft an Oscar at some point in her career. We feel her pain … Read more
Topsy-Turvy
Lovers of costume drama and light operetta are in for a treat. And so are people who can’t stand either, thanks to Mike Leigh, more usually known as a purveyor of working-class drama to the realm. Taking as its starting point the creative roadblock reached by the librettist WS Gilbert and his writing partner, the composer Arthur Sullivan, after the relative failure of their Princess Ida in 1884, Leigh’s film follows the duo as they struggle towards the rejuvenating success of The Mikado. Leigh’s masterstroke is to weave the composer/librettist’s full antler stand-off – Gilbert wanted to write an opera called The Magic Lozenge; Sullivan most definitely didn’t – with an oblique commentary on … Read more
Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun: Maverick comes such a long time after the original film – 30something years – that a quick introductory “previously on Top Gun” wouldn’t go amiss. Instead, new director Joseph Kosinski (who worked with Tom Cruise on Oblivion) puts us at ease with an opening sequence that’s a homage to Tony Scott, director of the original Top Gun – machines and processes fetished, a high tech something in silhouette, steam escaping from somewhere. A racing motorbike on a long flat road. “Hell, yeh” masculinity. Long lenses. Heat shimmers. It’s a “previously on Top Gun” as a mood board. And then we’re in to a story that wastes no time in letting us … Read more
Daisies
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 July The first defenestration of Prague, 1419 Along with the Diet of Worms, the Defenestration of Prague is one of those events that make history students giggle. And as with exsanguination, which dresses up the base act of bleeding to death in a fancy Latinate term, defenestration is nothing more than throwing someone out of the window. It should be the defenestration at Prague, then, logically? Semantics to one side, the most famous defenestration of/at Prague took place in 1618, but the first time it happened was on this day in 1419, when an angry crowd led by a Hussite … Read more
Bathory: Countess of Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 August Hungary founded by St Stephen, 1000 On this day in 1000, Hungary was established as a country in the Carpathian basin by Stephen I. The area had been settled by semi-nomadic tribes out of the Urals, led by Arpad (c845-c907), and his descendants consolidated their power in the region. Stephen’s father, Géza (grandson of Arpad), had made peace with the Holy Roman Empire and started the process of turning the country Christian. Stephen, once he had dealt with a rival claim to the throne by Koppány, his uncle, continued the process, applying to Pope Sylvester II for the insignia … Read more
Trace of Stones
Socialism good, the socialist party bad is the idea driving Trace of Stones, originally Spur der Steine, a film made in the German Democratic Republic in 1966. It was shown a handful of times and then withdrawn, not to be seen again until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Audience unrest, said the authorities. Don’t criticise the Party! The SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deustschlands aka Socialist Unity Party of Germany) really does get it in the neck in what’s otherwise quite a familiar film, not a long way from the “kitchen sinkers” being made by the likes of Lindsay Anderson in the UK, though director Frank Beyer’s direction is looser, his approach to dialogue … Read more
