Popular Reviews

D.O.A.

The opening scene of D.O.A. is so punchy and dramatic that it has to be up there on any best-ever list. A man walks into a police station, finds the homicide department and announces that there’s been a murder. “Who was murdered,” asks the homicide captain. “I was,” Frank Bigelow replies. The film ends on a humdinger, too, which in the circumstances is almost unnecessarily generous. In between, in flashback, we get the back story to that odd opening remark, one that doesn’t seem to have surprised the cops at all. Fate often deals bad cards to the leading characters in film noir. It’s particularly undeserved here, a tale of a small guy … Read more

Possessor

Stab a human being in a vital area of the body and what happens? In most movies, after one clean thrust a modicum of blood seeps decorously into an item of clothing and the victim promptly drops dead. But this is a Brandon Cronenberg movie and Brandon is the heir to David Cronenberg, king of the body horrror. So when someone is stabbed in the neck in the pre-credits sequence to Possessor, the blood-letting is spumungous, nasty, frenzied and inconclusive – this victim isn’t going down without a fight. Even as he dies he’s summoning all his forces to keep the only show he has on the road. That’s what happens. Remarkably, this … Read more

Staying Vertical

Structured like a dream, or a nightmare, Staying Vertical (Rester Vertical in the original French) is populated with character types – the writer, the young man, the grandfather, the doctor, the farmer, the farmer’s daughter. And it has wolves in it too, which feature almost as a threat or an element from a fairytale until they make an actual appearance right at the end. Imagine Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon brought up to date. Damien Bonnard is the Lyndon-esque Léo, a young man on the make, a rake, a bullshitter, a fantasist, who we first encounter hitting on a handsome young man. “Do you want to be in the movies?” asks Léo, using the … Read more

Italian Studies

The (mis)adventures of a writer who suddenly loses her memory in New York City, Italian Studies boldly tries something original with the old “movie amnesiac” formula and swerves the usual mechanics: loss and recovery. Instead, writer/director Adam Leon sets out to explore what it actually feels like to suddenly have no idea of who or what you are. Vanessa Kirby plays the amnesiac author in search of character, a Brit in New York who wanders into a hardware store to buy something, having first tied her dog up outside. Nothing obvious happens while she’s in there, but on leaving, this pretty blonde walks away from the store, leaving the dog behind. She has … Read more

Clash by Night

Marilyn Monroe as a fishwife?! 1952’s Clash by Night has some fun incidentals like Monroe, making much of a small role. But the real action is with Barbara Stanwyck, as a goodtime girl who’s worn out her welcome after ten years in the big city and is now back in the coastal town where she grew up to wreak havoc among the menfolk. It’s another tough-nut role for Stanwyck, who plays a woman who decisively knows what she doesn’t want but isn’t quite sure what she does want. Should Mae, for instance, go with her head and marry dull and dependable Jerry (Paul Douglas)? Or have a fling with bad boy Earl (Robert … Read more

Stranger on the Third Floor

Peter Lorre is top-billed but he’s really just the seasoning in Stranger on the Third Floor, often described as the first film noir. Lorre owed RKO a couple of days on his contract and so got shoe-horned into Boris Ingster’s directorial debut, bumping John McGuire from poll position. The film doesn’t need Lorre to work, but he adds off-whack flavour to the portrayal of an escaped lunatic – a scant handful of scenes, not that much to get excited about. In 64 tight minutes, Ingster, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and writer Frank Partos do two remarkable things. First, they make a thematic break with the crime movies that came before to deliver an indictment … Read more

Barbara

By the time Christian Petzold made Barbara in 2012, enough time had passed for his film not to be seen as just the latest in a line of Ostalgia movies (2003’s Good Bye Lenin! is a prime example). In any case the German writer and director tends to be more concerned with the problems created by freedom rather than a lack of it. Films misty-eyed for the communist era aren’t really his thing. However, Barbara does have some generous things to say about life in the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) wrapped up in a thriller about a woman trying to escape to the West. Barbara (Nina Hoss) is a doctor in … Read more

The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 4 – You’ll Catch Your Death

Boring but prescient is how you’d describe You’ll Catch Your Death, fourth episode of the final series of The Avengers. Prescient because it’s all about biological warfare, people dying due to exposure to some deadly toxin, Steed and King investigating the demises of the dead men (naturally) who all happened to be ear, nose and throat specialists. We see one of them (Hamilton Dyce) keeling over as this episode opens, having just opened a letter with nothing inside. A clue! Yes, the envelope is the clue, the only one, in fact. And once the envelope has been traced back to the shop it was brought from – handily (and an Avengers standby/weakness) a … Read more

Ambush

Starring Aaron Eckhart, the blurbs for Ambush proclaim. Also starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, they trumpet. Not true, either of them. Connor Paolo is in fact the star of this potentially rather good Vietnam war movie hobbled by a plot lacking sparkle. A Vietnam war movie? In the 2020s? A boldly unfashionable move by Mark Burman, who directs, co-writes and produces, so presumably made the phone call that brought Eckhart and Meyers on board. Eckhart, in what is probably a “one and done” deal in terms of days worked, plays a general ordering a team of rookie engineers into Vietcong tunnels to retrieve a vital document containing the names of agents working for the … Read more

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), what a treasure trove of spine-tingling musical goodies this film is. “Directed” by Questlove, whose role is really more curatorial and editorial, it’s a compendium of highlights from a series of six free concerts held on Sundays in Harlem from June to August 1969. Billed at the time as The Black Woodstock, after legendary festival which was being held upstate at around the same time. There were around 40 hours of performances recorded, and most of it has lain abandoned in a basement ever since it was shot by producer Hal Tulchin. Tulchin’s plans to get it a wider distribution came to … Read more

16 November 2015-11-16

Out This Week Minions (Universal, cert U) By the end of the first Despicable Me film, Gru, the archetypal bad guy, had been exposed as a bit of softie, which left Despicable Me 2 with nowhere to go, in terms of jokes about bad guys wheezing despicably and mwah-ha-ha-ing their way to world domination. But Gru’s Minions were still funny, and in this surprisingly lively, amusing, inventive spin-off, they get to show they can be funny at feature length, in spite of not being able to speak. Well, they do speak, but it’s a kind of Esperanto done with expressive voices and telegraphed emotions – Pingu, the Clangers and Shaun the Sheep territory. … Read more