Popular Reviews
The Parenting
Brian Cox apparently gets a bit sick of being asked in interviews about Succession and playing Logan Roy, which might explain his presence in The Parenting, a film unafraid to do jokes about projectile vomiting alongside a whole slew (spew?) of gags revived from the era of gross-out comedy. Look, this says, I’m an actor, now doing something completely different, alright, because that’s what acting is. Craig Johnson is the director and Kent Sublette the writer, but it’s the Farrelly or Wayans brothers who really preside over this movie – comedy done with a wink and a how-low-can-you-go chuckle. It’s a Meet the Parents set-up. Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn) are … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 13 – Death a la Carte
First broadcast on 21 December 1963 – a more obviously Christmas-y episode would go out the following week – Death a la Carte is pretty much The Avengers as usual. Which means: exotic foreigners, death served up in unusual ways and a bit of stealth undercover work for Steed and/or Gale. Both are incognito this time around, Mrs Gale as some sort of fixer/hostess trying to make life easy for a visiting emir, Steed as a chef in his kitchen. Yes, cheffing is just one of his talents. We learn pretty much straight away that the emir is in the UK for his annual health check, which looks less straightforward than usual … Read more
The Avengers: Series 1, Episode 20 – Tunnel of Fear
For a long time it was thought that only a couple of episodes from series one of The Avengers had survived. And then Tunnel of Fear turned up in a “private film collection”, as the press release guardedly puts it, swelling the number of complete episodes from two to a mighty three out of a possible 26. There’s about a third of the very first episode, Hot Snow, too – reviewed here. We might not have the full run of the season but with Tunnel of Fear we now have enough to get a sketchy impression of the direction of the show. Hot Snow in first position establishing David Keel (Ian Hendry) as a … Read more
Dead Man’s Letters
If there’s a prize for the dourest sci-fi movie ever made, surely Dead Man’s Letters would win it. Sometimes the original Russian title, Pisma Myortvogo Cheloveka is translated as Letters from a Dead Man, which is hardly any jollier. While Blade Runner or Solaris or Dark City or Threads will all have their advocates, this strange, dark, almost entirely subterranean movie set in the bowels of a museum in the aftermath of a nuclear attack has to be a contender. The movie’s opening scene more or less says it all: a dark, stygian basement, lit in garish yellow/orange, where an old man is tending to a woman who appears to be dying, while … Read more
The Lives of Others
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 October Foundation of the German Democratic Republic, 1949 On this day in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (DDR in German) formally came into being. After losing the war, Germany had first had its eastern border shifted considerably to the west, to the Oder-Neisse line (reducing its landmass by about 25%). Germany had then been divided up between the four “victorious” powers, USA, USSR, GB and France (on the winning side if not technically victorious), with the easternmost portion of what was left handed over to the USSR (former German territory further east became part of Poland). Known sarcastically in the … Read more
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 December Birth of Leonid Brezhnev, 1906 On this day in 1906, the very last old-school leader of the USSR was born. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born into Tsarist Russia, the son of workers. Thanks to an education at a technical school he became a metallurgist, joined Komsomol (the Communist youth movement) and started to make his way in the party, becoming a political commissar in a tank factory by the age of 30, and eventually party secretary in Dnipropetrovsk, a Ukrainian city intimately connected to the arms industry. As a result of Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s, Brezhnev advanced … Read more
Carry On Nurse
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 July UK National Health Service created, 1948 On this day in 1948, Britain’s National Health Service came into being. Based on the recommendations of 1942’s Beveridge Report, which proposed “comprehensive health and rehabilitation services for prevention and cure of disease” it was designed to be funded through taxation and free at the point of delivery. It is in essence a health insurance and provision system administered and run by the government. It ran as a unified system in the UK until 1998, when its various functions were devolved to the regional “national” governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Total … Read more
4 April 2016-04-04
Out This Week Tangerine (Metrodome, cert 15) A few weeks ago it was Tangerines, a blunt, austere Estonian/Georgian film about the conflict in Abkhazia. Now it’s in the singular, Tangerine, an over the top film about life in another conflict zone – on the crack-whorey streets of modern LA. The film is all shot on an iPhone 5S and shows that none of us has an excuse not to make a film any more, if that’s the way we’re claiming we’re pointing. Though director Sean Baker is so good at post-production and editing that you probably wouldn’t guess exactly how it was shot. The plot is simple yet ample – gender-transitioning street … Read more
25 July 2016-07-25
Out This Week Disorder (Soda, cert 15) Like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Disorder is a love story masquerading as something else – a home-invasion thriller, in this case – and so is the perfect date movie for traditionally minded peeps. The casting is bang on. Matthias Schoenaerts, an expert in beefy angst, is ideal as a security guard with PTSD falling for trophy wife Diane Kruger – Kruger’s “because I’m worth it” ex-model coolness actually being a real advantage here. The bit of posh going for a bit of rough is hardly a new idea, but director/writer Alice Winocour stokes the tension early on, setting many scenes in tight little corners, and even … Read more
Angels Hard as They Come
Hippies! Bikers! Bikers! Hippies! They’re not really the same thing but 1971’s Angels Hard as They Come (aka Angel Warriors) doesn’t care. Get the women to take their clothes off now and again, add in some yowling rock boogie. Long hair! Marijuana! Yay – we got ourselves an exploitationer. Of course it’s a Roger Corman movie, since he specialised in vibe-adjacent movies designed to squeeze a dollar from the latest fad. Here he’s working off the back of Easy Rider and, as was Corman’s trick, he’s got some good people in to assist. This was the first movie Jonathan Demme wrote, along with his mate from advertising Joe Viola, who took on directing … Read more
The Deep (aka Djúpið)
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 December Clarence Birdseye born, 1886 On this day in 1886, one of the greats of the modern food industry was born. The man who could be considered to be the real Captain Birdseye came into the world in Brooklyn, New York, the sixth of nine children. Clarence didn’t come from a privileged background and when he grew up he struggled to pay his college fees. He ended up dropping out and in his early 20s wound up being a taxidermist, where the standing problem is how to keep the animal fresh while it’s being worked on. By the age of … Read more
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
