Popular Reviews
Only the River Flows
Imagine a crime thriller where the guy who looks guilty from the outset is the killer… or is he? Or where the police achieve their aims not through diligent hard work but by sheer fluke. Where every cliché of the genre gets an outing and most of them left entirely unmauled… but some of them are given a left-handed spin. But which ones? That’s Only the River Flows, a strangely ironic neo-noir from Wei Shujun, whose films often offer meta-comment on film-making and the workings of genre. This time around Wei gets into all that straight away, installing his cop, Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) in the shell of an old cinema (klaxon), where he’s … Read more
Mash
An on-screen statement, put there at the behest of a nervous film studio, claims this film is about the goings-on at a field hospital during the Korean War. That statement apart, this is obviously a film about Vietnam, a war the Americans had already lost at home, if not yet out on the field of battle. Now, decades later, from the other end of the countercultural telescope, Mash’s relentless portrayal of the military hierarchy as being overrun by charlatans and buffoons seems a bit old hat. But the director making it had earned the right to his opinion. Robert Altman was a veteran of the Second World War who’d gone on to become … Read more
The Fallen Sparrow
“In a world at war many sparrows must fall.” A poignant line slightly out of keeping with the hard-boiled characters populating this atypical noir. Unusually on the money politically and psychologically, The Fallen Sparrow is a story about a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War who returns to New York only to find it full of Nazi sympathisers. John Garfield’s decent American John “Kit” McKittrick has been fighting the good fight abroad and is now ready to fight it at home too, even though he’s weighed down with a hefty amount of PTSD after being tortured in Spain. Kit never saw the Nazi who directed Franco’s torturers, he explains early on, but … Read more
Cross of Iron
Two types of nobility do battle in Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, a 1977 movie out of time in the Star Wars era and too subtle and ambiguous to count back then as mass entertainment. Starting with the opening credits – German schoolchildren sing nursery rhymes one second, German soldiers bellow military anthems the next, while images of war and destruction flash up on the screen. Hitler takes a salute, there are pictures of men starving and dying on the front, and now we hear the children again. Is Peckinpah being ironic? And then a shock. The Germans are the good guys. They are played by recognisable faces – James Coburn, James Mason and … Read more
Bobby
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 November Robert Kennedy born, 1925 On this day in 1925, Robert Kennedy was born. The seventh child and third son of Joseph Kennedy Sr – who had made a fortune out of brokering deals with Hollywood studios and then importing whisky into post-Prohibition America – Robert was, like his father, not particularly academic but, having been gifted a good education by his socially and politically ambitious father, made it to Harvard, then went on to law school. Thanks to the manoeuvring of his father, Robert rose quickly, working first at the US Department of Justice, then for scourge-of-the-communists Joe McCarthy, … Read more
American Utopia
David Byrne’s American Utopia show, essentially a greatest hits package plus plus, was getting towards the end of its run in 2019 when Spike Lee arrived to film it. Part of Byrne’s wider Reasons to Be Cheerful project aimed at spreading good vibes, it had become, like Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway shows in 2017, a must-see event by that point. Both Byrne and Lee are New Yorkers and there’s a definite Big Apple sensibility to this show – smart, dry, liberal, culturally catholic. Another way to see it is as Stop Making Sense Part II. That, if you remember, was Jonathan Demme’s great 1984 concert movie of Talking Heads in their pomp, and kicked … Read more
Love Possibly
Love Possibly is a riff on Love Actually, obviously, a romantic comedy about the hopelessly mismatched being manoeuvred together by fate and circumstance. If only it weren’t done in the mock documentary style. If only. It was made in 2018 when the mock-doc genre was even more overcooked than it is now (writing this in 2023) and like its sibling, the found-footage horror, was finally beginning to hit exhaustion point. But. The acting is good. In fact the acting is its saving grace. Steve Hodgetts deserves awards for dicing with typecasting death for playing Alex, a nerdy, spoddy, on-the-spectrum virgin whose favourite film is Sleepless in Seattle and who dreams of having the … Read more
I Love My Dad
When James Morosini was about 19 he and his dad got into a huge fight. James ended up blocking all connections to him – phone, email, social media, the works. A few weeks later James got a friend request from a pretty girl on Facebook. “I was thrilled,” James later said in an interview. “She was perfect. We shared the same interests, she was gorgeous… Things were looking up. Unfortunately, she was also my dad.” Fast forward about a decade after that fight and here’s I Love My Dad, a comedy about what happened when a teenager gets catfished by his own dad, with Morosini in the lightly fictionalised role of Franklin, Patton … Read more
Daaaaaalí!
Surrealist film-maker makes film about surrealist artist shock. Daaaaaalí! is the result, and you wonder why Quentin Dupieux, who’s only a semi-serious surrealist really, didn’t do it before. Dupieux starts off with a bit of comedy. Judith, a nervous young reporter played by Anaïs Demoustier, stands in a corridor with the great painter’s assistant, awaiting his arrival. Here he comes, says the right-hand woman, and indeed it is the legend himself, barrelling towards them down the corridor, his signature moustache pointing skyward, his mouth working at a mile a minute as this ball of self-regard and practised eccentricity approaches them. Except he never seems quite to arrive. In a scene familiar from an … Read more
The Outfit
Why didn’t someone think of it sooner? The Outfit – could be a criminal organisation, could be something you’d wear. How about writing a drama that conflates and confuses the two, and make it about… er… a tailor who somehow gets caught up in the work of a criminal establishment. The conceit is worn transparent in Graham Moore’s debut as a feature director. Like a bespoke suit this is a handsomely assembled item, made from fine materials and put together with care and a conservative eye. It’s also more than slightly theatrical, and it would be easy to imagine events playing out in a darkened small theatre. Events? A bit of plot. We meet … Read more
A Story of Floating Weeds
Beautiful, exquisite, poetic – choose your adjective, but there’s no denying the extraordinary visual effect of A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujirō Ozu’s silent glory from 1934. A box-office smash in his native Japan, it was also a critical hit worldwide, and is a good place to start if you’re interested in tracking the development of Ozu’s classic style. Low, slow and nothing fancy, if you’re after a soundbite. It’s the story of a troupe of kabuki players who blow into a small town where, years before, the troupe’s leader, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) fathered a child with a young woman, Otsune (Chōko Iida). Now, older and perhaps tiring of the life of the … Read more
Casino Royale
You only live twice, or so they say. Casino Royale is the old Bond song incarnate. Because we have been here before. Not titularly – though we have, in the 1967 spoof made by a gaggle of writers and directors (John Huston, Billy Wilder, Woody Allen and Joseph Heller among them) who must have been high. Tonally, I mean. After A View to a Kill, Roger Moore’s last Bond and a bad performer at the box office, moves were made to zhuzh up the increasingly tired formula. In came Timothy Dalton, out went the eyebrow, and for a couple of films, which in retrospect, look better and better, there was a return to … Read more
