Popular Reviews
The Exterminating Angel
One of a string of films by Luis Buñuel sticking it to the bourgeoisie, the church, the authorities, the man, The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador) looked wildly radical and political when it debuted in 1962. Now it looks like a metaphor in search of a story. Times change. Even before things have descended into the purely allegorical, Buñuel is telling us that something is afoot. All is not well at the grand house preparing for an after-party for the swells who have just attended the opera. Everyone is uneasy. The servants are making excuses to get out of the building before their social superiors arrive. When this gaggle of top-hatted, fur-wearing toffs … Read more
September 5
Cool rather than hot, and about events not as they happened but as they were reported, September 5 is the story behind the story, of how a sports team from ABC TV found themselves at the cutting edge of a major news event at the 1972 Olympics, when a group of Israeli athletes were taken hostage by a terrorist group, Black September, as 900 million viewers around the globe looked on. Mark Spitz winning seven swimming Gold medals, Olga Korbut performing her Dead Loop on the asymmetric bars, Munich is remembered for many things, but probably most of all for the moment when the German Olympic authorities’ attempt to perform a hard reset … Read more
Nightmare Alley
1947’s Nightmare Alley is lavish, melodramatic, contains a hint of the supernatural and is a touch too long – you can see why Guillermo Del Toro wanted to remake it. It’s also a great role for a matinee idol trying to shrug off a pretty-boy tag (Tyrone Power even more so than Bradley Cooper in the remake). In a tale about a carnival worker tasting the heights and then plunging into the depths, Jules Furthman’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s best-seller plays the hubris card early on, in a little speech in which carnie Stanton Carlisle (Power) explains himself. “You see those yokels out there,” he says to mindreader Zeena (Joan Blondell), laying … Read more
Saltburn
The music in Saltburn tells you a lot of what you need to know about the movie. Starting with Zadok the Priest and ending with Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Murder on the Dancefloor, this is a big, gaudy, fun switchback that surely would have been made in Technicolor if the process was still about. A superheated noirish romp is what you get either way. The plot is simple but it plays with expectations about who exactly is zooming who. Poor little rich boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) befriends poor little poor boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) at Oxford University, where Felix is a student as if by right and scholarship boy Oliver is there on … Read more
The Kingmaker
Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary is called The Kingmaker but it looks at first glance like nothing more than a film about a woman whose days in the sun are long behind her. Greenfield you may remember as the director of The Queen of Versailles, a film about a trophy wife of a very rarefied sort. Imelda Marcos, subject of The Kingmaker, you might remember as another trophy wife, of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. She of 3,000 pairs of shoes. Watching it I was reminded of Errol Morris’s 2013 documentary about Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, in which Morris managed to lay not a single glove on the old fox, who had absolutely no … Read more
The Other Lamb
Omens and portents abound in The Other Lamb, action not so much. Following the story of Selah (Raffey Cassidy), it’s set in a cult headed by a man known as the Shepherd, otherwise populated exclusively by women, who are designated either as Wives or Daughters. For easy identification and to reduce individuality even more, the Wives dress in purple, the Daughters in Blue. They live in the modern world but away from it, out in the woods where they slaughter their own animals – sheep, appropriately – and butcher the meat themselves. They seem content, happy even, though little jealousies flare now and again when Shepherd chooses to lay with one wife rather … Read more
The Professional/Le Professionel
If you’ve ever wondered where to start with Jean-Paul Belmondo but have no taste for the French New Wave, The Professional might be the film for you. Released in 1981, it’s a pacy, light-hearted action movie not unlike a 1970s Bond movie, though Belmondo is more Sean Connery than Roger Moore. Belmondo plays the French government hitman sent to an African republic to kill its president. En route, the political wind changes direction and Joss Beaumont (Belmondo) ends up being sold out by the very people who sent him on the job. As the film opens he is in an African court off his face on zombifying truth drugs and testifying to his … Read more
The General
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 February Art thieves steal Munch’s The Scream, 1994 On this day in 1994, thieves broke into the National Gallery, Oslo, and stole the Edvard Munch painting The Scream. It is actually one of a number of so-named works of art, there being four different Screams in a variety of media, plus a number of lithographic prints struck by Munch himself. The one stolen on the night in question was in tempera on cardboard and was in a less secure part of the gallery – it had been moved as part of celebrations held to mark the opening of the winter … Read more
100 Years of… A Page of Madness
Madness indeed. A Page of Madness was made in 1926 on next to no budget, by a talented director aided by a group of demented avant-garde writers called the Shinkankakuha, who were determined to break free from the shackles of naturalism. For many years it was considered lost, until its director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, found a copy of the film in a storeroom in 1971. Still with a third of its footage missing, that’s the version you will see today. The other thing that needs saying before locking in is that it’s made with barely any gear. Kinugasa and co had no equipment to speak of, just a 16mm camera and eight lights. Remember … Read more
Blithe Spirit
“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert,” run the lines in Shelley’s poem To a Skylark. And though there’s plenty of spirit in 2020’s remake of a 1945 film often considered a classic, this bird resolutely fails to take wing. The basic plot remains the same as the original film (and original play): Charles and Ruth Condomine are a rich couple living in elegant boredom out in the English countryside. He’s a writer struggling with his latest novel. So he gets in a bogus spiritualist, Madame Arcati, to conduct a seance, which waggish Charles will use as background material in his book. The seance goes oddly right, or wrong. When Madame … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 16 – Who’s Who???
The Nicolas Cage/John Travolta film Face/Off might perhaps have borrowed its central idea from Who’s Who???, a crackingly conceived episode of The Avengers built around the idea of a mind-swap between Steed and the dastardly Basil (Freddie Jones). There’s a bit plot business before we get to the big central idea – we are introduced to Basil and sidekick Lola (Patricia Haines) deliberately killing “one of our very best agents”, in the words of the original and as-yet-unaltered John Steed, expressly with the intention of flushing Steed and Peel out into the open to steal their identities. But nothing really held my interest until what looked like an old radar console from a … Read more
Wet Season
More tales of emotional desperation from Anthony Chen, Wet Season follows 2013’s Ilo Ilo, using a couple of the same actors from his brilliant debut to squeeze a single drop of comfort from a scenario that would have been a full-bore histrionic melodrama in other hands. The returning actors are Koh Jia Ler, only 12 years old when he played the vile, utterly spoiled child in 2013, so about 18/19 in this film, as an attentive diligent student. Also back is Yeo Yann Yann, who was the vile child’s bitch of a mother in Ilo Ilo, and is now playing a thoughtful, dedicated teacher. Both are chalk and cheese transformations. Dysfunctional family life … Read more
