Popular Reviews
The Emperor’s New Clothes
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 May Napoleon dies, 1821 On this day in 1821, Napoléon Bonaparte died, on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. He had been taken there by the British after defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, which had been made necessary by Napoléon’s escape from his previous exile on the isle of Elba. Elba was in the Mediterranean, but with Helena no one was taking any chances. The man who had conquered most of western Europe and invaded Russia was sequestered on one of the remotest places in the world – 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) from the nearest major … Read more
Parallel
A different take on the multiverse movie, Parallel does it all with acting. Just three people in a clinically modern house in a forest: a husband, a wife and the husband’s brother. Think of Everything Everywhere All at Once or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you’re summoning frantically busy films with a huge array of characters. Here, none of that. But Parallel isn’t just a calm corrective to an exhausting genre but also a smart drama that stands up on its own terms. Instead of busy, here we have a film that’s cool, almost static at times, wordy, contemplative. Set in a chichi modern lake … Read more
Souleymane’s Story
Souleymane’s Story got lots of love on the festival circuit and made it onto quite a number of the Best Of 2025 lists. And yet it’s about the immigrant experience. I say “And yet” because, face it, your heart sinks a bit at the prospect of watching some poor sap having a relentlessly terrible time at the hands of the authorities. Director Boris Lojkine clearly understands that too, and has decided that the way to persuade audiences to watch his film is to give them energy and thriller vibes. An Uncut Gems of the French sans papiers is the result. It’s a familiar story, following Souleymane (Abou Sangaré), who works as a food-delivery … Read more
Sentimental Value
Imagine a standing ovation lasting for 19 minutes – enough time to have a bath. That’s what Sentimental Value got when it was shown at Cannes. Where, admittedly, they like this sort of thing – European, dense, non-genre, self-referential, serious, full of unsympathetic characters and recalling auteurs of the past. Bergman most obviously, and Persona in particular, a high point in his career of high points. There is a story, though it’s a jumping-off point for a series of meditations rather than a plot. After their mother dies, two sisters, Nora and Agnes, are slightly surprised and perturbed when estranged father, a cinema auteur whose best days are probably behind him, re-appears. Gustav, it … Read more
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Having paused for 38 years to catch its breath, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reminds us what we loved about the original 1988 movie… and what we found slightly less than satisfying. 1988 was when some of today’s biggest actors were born – Emma Stone and Glenn Powell for instance. It was the year of Seoul Olympics. And it was around then that Tim Berners-Lee started messing about with a concept that would become the World Wide Web. So, yes, a while ago. Clicking right through back to the present, there’s no sign of Alec Baldwin or Geena Davis in this sequel but a lot of the cast and crew are back – most crucially Michael Keaton … Read more
19 May 2014-05-19
Out in the UK This Week The Wolf of Wall Street (Universal, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Scorsese’s best film since Casino also continues his trend towards flabby films. Twenty minutes can, and let’s hope eventually will, be trimmed from a film with a Goodfellas arc – we start with a voiceover of Leo Di Caprio saying, in effect, that for as long as he could rememeber he’d always wanted to be a richfella. And off we go into a roaring rush of the true story of Jordan Belfort, who became a licensed Wall Street broker on the day the market crashed in 1987, then started at the bottom all over again, selling penny stocks to … Read more
Dogs in the Movies
Dogs. Yes, that’s right, dogs. I’ve probably already doubled the amount of traffic to this site just by writing the word “dogs” three times. Four times if you count that mention. Because people just love dogs (five). They can’t help themselves. It’s down to their dependability. A human being might let you down, but a four legged friend probably won’t eat you until you’ve been dead at least four days. A cat would probably tuck in while you were still warm. Trenchant insight aside, a dog’s loyalty and trainability make it a natural for the movies. A dog can be encouraged to do stuff that’s cute. Or, with a sign from off-camera, it … Read more
Sweet Thing
Writer/director Alexandre Rockwell’s Sweet Thing is his 11th film in about 40 years and is a small-scale affair, as you might expect from an indie mainstay, crewed largely by students on the NYU film course he teaches and starring his own family and long-time collaborators. It’s the story of bright teenage girl Billie (Rockwell’s daughter Lana) and her brother Nico (his son Nico) living a ramshackle life with their drunken dad (regular Rockwell presence Will Patton). Somewhere in the wings is their neglectful mother Eve (Karyn Parsons, the kids’ real mother) and her current boyfriend, the bragadocious Beaux (ML Josepher), onto whose mercies Billie and Nico are thrown when dad ends up in … Read more
S-a Furat o Bombă aka A Bomb Was Stolen
The Romanian animator Ion Popescu-Gopo’s live-action film S-a Furat o Bombă (translated as A Bomb Was Stolen or They Stole the Bomb) was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1962. It had very little chance of winning, since it was up against Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and Satyajit Ray’s Devi. But it was there, an achievement in itself for someone who’d never made a live-action film before. Popescu-Gopo’s animated short, Scurtă Historie (A Brief History) had won the Short Film Palme d’Or in 1957. It’s also a film without dialogue, another potential handicap, though … Read more
Divine Love aka Divino Amor
There’s an opaque quality to Divine Love (Divino Amor), as there was with Gabriel Mascaro’s last film, Neon Bull. But, subject matter to one side, the big difference between them is that Neon Bull didn’t explain itself, whereas Divino Amor does, only in the film’s last third revealing that it hasn’t really been explaining itself at all. It’s all been a bit of a feint. The genre, for instance. Sci-fi, or so it claims, with the action set in Brazil in 2027 (barely into the future at all then) where Joana and Danilo, a loving couple are members of a charismatic evangelical church. When not dancing like dervishes at church raves – the … Read more
Five Films about Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher, Mrs T, The Iron Lady, is dead. 31 years ago she was the most unpopular UK Prime Minister in history. Then, after winning the Falklands War she was re-elected in 1983. She was elected again in 1987 before being defenestrated by her party in 1990, a defeat she never quite came to terms with. Politically she was deeply divisive but on one point everyone is agreed – she recast British politics, and to a certain extent global politics, with her doctrine of open markets, privatisation, financial deregulation and tax cuts. Thatcher made the world we live in now. To some she was the greatest prime minister who ever lived, to others … Read more
Murder at the Gallop
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 September Birth of Agatha Christie, 1890 On this day in 1890, one of the greatest writers of detective fiction was born. Agatha Christie’s two most famous creations are fastidious Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the prim but indomitable Miss Marple. Christie is the best selling novelist of all time and has the longest running play of all time – The Mousetrap – still playing to full houses in London’s West End after more than 60 years. Her stories were being adapted into films already by the end of the 1920s, and continue to this day – Crooked House is just … Read more
