Popular Reviews
Don’t Follow Me Around
Don’t Follow Me Around (Komm mir nicht nach) is the second of the Dreileben trilogy set in a quaint old German town in the heavily forested state of Thuringia. Goethe, Schiller and Johann Sebastian Bach are all associated with the area, though nowadays it’s got more of a name for what doesn’t happen there rather than what does – it’s slightly left behind. That apartness, a sense of not much going on, pervades Dominik Graf’s story centred on Jo (Jeanette Hain), a criminal psychologist brought in to help the cops in Dreileben, who are struggling with the case of the escaped murderer Molesch (who links all three stories). Having found that her “booked” … Read more
The Vourdalak
Dracula before Dracula, the original of The Vourdalak, Aleksei Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak, was written in 1839, nearly 60 years before Bram Stoker sat down to write his tale of the Undead. It’s a refreshingly different take on the story we’re all used to, with a focus, unsurprisingly given the title, on how the average everyday vampire might get along with his relations, blood and otherwise. This retelling of the story makes for a very drole movie, in the very French sense of the word. Not exactly comedic but prancing about in that territory somewhere and incarnated in the central character – the Jonathan Harker, if you like – an innocent … Read more
Yeelen
Like an Afro-futurist Arabian Nights or Homer’s Odyssey, 1987’s Yeelen tells in simple episodes the story of a young man on the run from his father. It’s often referred to as the greatest film ever to come out of Africa (no, Black Panther does not count) but even if you don’t buy that you’ll surely agree that it’s a beautiful film with an otherworldly atmosphere all its own. Director Soulemayne Cissé set out to make a film about Africa that rejected the usual colonial views of the continent – backward, savage etc – and largely succeeds, giving us a mysterious place steeped in tradition and running on old hierarchies and a rigid sense … Read more
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 May Ramesses II becomes pharaoh of Egypt, 1279BC On this day in 1279BC, the king often called Ramesses (or Rameses, or Ramses) the Great, became pharaoh of Egypt. Known as Ozymandias by the Greeks, the pharaoh most remembered by history was a great military campaigner and a great builder of cities, temples and monuments. He became pharaoh in his late teens and ruled for the following 66 years. The Egyptian army consisted of about 100,000 men, and he used it to wage war against the Hittites and Nubians, routed the Sherden sea pirates who were harrying ships on the Mediterranean … Read more
The House of Laughing Windows
Pupi Avati isn’t one of the big names of giallo and yet The House of Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) easily stands alongside or even ahead of the best of Argento, Bava and Fulci. It’s a triumph not of concept or style, though it has both of those, but of a thousand careful craft decisions. It is simply a beautifully made film with a fabulous gothic eloquence, luxuriating in old places and odd faces as it tells a story about a picture restorer in 1950s Italy being menaced by characters from the church fresco he is working on. There’s a hint of Don’t Look Now in the idea, but really … Read more
Following
Can you honestly tell from Following, that its first-time director Christopher Nolan is only two years away from making Memento, the film that put him on Hollywood producers’ speed-dials? Shot on weekends and holidays guerrilla-style around London for about $6,000, it is a real “you saw it here first” effort and the acting is strongly redolent of the great days of British film – it’s rank. But when a story is this strong it barely matters. It’s simple too. We follow, in low-budget monochrome, a young, luckless and broke writer (Jeremy Theobald) who thinks it would be fun, “creative” in an artschool way, maybe, to “follow” people and see where it leads him. … Read more
Killer Joe
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 August Lolita published, 1958 If you’re looking for a start date for the 1960s, you could do a lot worse than this: 18 August 1958, when Vladimir Nabokov’s novel was first published in the USA. Detailing the love of a middle aged literature professor for a 12-year-old girl, whom he has nicknamed Lolita, it had first been finished in 1953, but was turned down for publication by a string of publishing houses, finally seeing light of day only after Olympia Press in France, a publisher of pornography, printed it in 1955. In spite of its low key debut, it sold … Read more
The Tao of Steve
“Men and women both want to have sex, but women want to have sex 15 minutes after us, so if you hold out for 20, she’ll be chasing you for five.” Everyone knows a shlubby, none-too-handsome guy in a low-status job who seems to do OK with the ladies. The Tao of Steve analyses that phenomenon, and casts the incredibly likeable Donal Logue as Dex, its hero. His quest – to get laid as often as possible. This he does with ease since he follows “The Tao of Steve” a babe-magnet philosophy borrowed from all the chilled Steves of the world (McQueen, McGarrett, Austin – his list, not mine). Dex may be overweight, he may … Read more
La Chimera
Halfway through making La Chimera, its star Josh O’Connor took a break and went off to make Challengers for Luca Guadagnino, then came back to Italy to finish off for Alice Rohrwacher. Since his breakthrough in 2017’s God’s Own Country, after five or so years of plugging away, these days everyone wants a piece of O’Connor. They’re not remotely similar roles – a tennis player in Challengers, a graverobber in La Chimera – but from the actor’s point of view they have something in common. Both are essentially unlikeable people the audience needs to feel something for, and does, because O’Connor, as he also demonstrated in God’s Own Country and then Only You … Read more
Confidential Report
The prevailing wisdom on Orson Welles has changed in recent years. It used to be: “Poor Orson, his masterpieces (such as The Magnificent Ambersons, It’s All True, The Lady from Shanghai ) butchered by the studios”. Now it’s: “Lazy Orson, got most of the way through a film and then lost interest”. Certainly Welles subscribed to the former view, and broadcast it widely wherever he went in Europe during his exile (or extended flake-out, take your pick). Confidential Report fuels the debate. A shadow of both his masterpiece, Citizen Kane, and Carol Reed’s The Third Man (in which Welles played the similarly gnomic Harry Lime), the film jumps around the world excavating the … Read more
La Cocina
If you’ve seen the TV show The Bear then you’ve seen a good chunk of La Cocina, a hothouse drama set in a fast-paced New York restaurant kitchen. New York makes a difference – more illegal workers. And La Cocina is more explicit than The Bear about its racialised pecking order, though it’s a very uneasy order and prone to break down when the orders pile up. Estela (Anna Díaz) is our introduction to this semi-familiar world, a wetback from Mexico wandering lost around New York until she finds what she’s looking for: The Grill in Times Square, the sort of high-volume eatery that knocks out fish and chips, pizza, pasta, burgers, plus … Read more
The Banshees of Inisherin
The films of Martin McDonagh are full of lonely, isolated people and The Banshees of Inisherin is no exception. Like In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri before it, this is the story of missed or missing connections. This time, though, it’s particularly bleak. Billed as a comedy, The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t full of laughs, and they tend to come early on. Things get darker as the film goes on. It reinstates the In Bruges coupling of Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, here as longtime friends who live on an island off the coast of Ireland in 1923. While the civil war has been raging away just over there … Read more
