Popular Reviews
Gravity
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 April Sputnik 2 falls from orbit, 1958 On this day in 1958, the second satellite to be launched into Earth orbit, Sputnik 2, fell back to earth. It had been launched on 3 November 1957 and was carrying Laika, a samoyed terrier cross chosen for her good nature – the first animal launched into space. Sputnik 2 carried enough food, water and air to keep Laika alive for ten days, but because of a malfunction, the temperature inside Sputnik 2 got too high (104ºF/40ºC) and Laika died after a few hours into the mission, from heat and stress. If she … Read more
Two of Us aka Dead Earth
Well I was expecting a French film called Two of Us (aka Deux), about two ageing lesbians who have spent decades in the closet. Instead I got this Two of Us (aka Dead Earth aka Paradise Z) about two young lesbians fighting off a zombie holocaust. Not quite the same thing, the lesbian aspect to one side, if Sylvia and Rose even are lesbians. What this Two of Us reminded me of very early on was a great and barely known zombie film called The Battery. The Battery’s USP is the portrait it paints of two guys – former baseball team-mates – who have spent so long in each other’s company, and fighting … Read more
Pink Wall
Tom Cullen is best known as an actor and his writing/directing debut, Pink Wall, owes something to the screen work he’s best known for – Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (Downton Abbey fans might disagree). So, yes, it’s the story of a couple on the cusp of something which also manages to sum up, to an extent, what it’s like to be their age – around 30, when youthful dalliances start solidifying into something more lasting, long-term plans are being made and thoughts turn to having kids. In relationship terms, Pink Wall is about that moment when it’s time to shit or get off the pot. The other film Pink Wall owes something to is … Read more
The Wall
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 February Alexander Selkirk rescued, 1709 On this day in 1709, a Scottish sailor named either Alexander Selkirk or Selcraig was rescued from an island in the South Pacific. But the model for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe wasn’t the victim of a shipwreck. In fact he’d asked the captain of the privateer (ie pirate) ship he was sailing on, the Cinque Ports, to leave him on the uninhabited island known as Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández archipelago about 700km off the coast of Chile. Known since his youth as a quarrelsome sort, Selkirk had been loudly protesting … Read more
The Cat and the Canary
The director Paul Leni died just as the talkies were coming in, but even so his name still has clout 100+ years on. 1927’s The Cat and the Canary reminds us why. It’s not only a cracking whodunit, and a demonstration of technical wizardry but is also a masterpiece of gothic expressionism… done only semi-seriously. Leni later directed The Man Who Laughs and he’s also having a lot of fun here. The plot is so familiar Agatha Christie might have written it – a group of people gather in a spooky old house to hear the reading of the will of a relative who died 20 years before. This will make one of the … Read more
Gun Crazy
A crazy mixed-up kid is dragged to hell by a sexy dame in Gun Crazy (not for nothing also known as Deadly Is the Female), a film that has us by the scruff of the neck right from its fabulous opening scene. In super-sharp close-up a kid smashes the plate glass window of a hardware shop, steals a gun and then falls flat on his face in the rain as he tries to run away. Bad luck of this sort is to dog Bart Tare for the whole of his life. Flashback scenes flesh out this pretty decent kid with a strange obsession with guns – “Shooting’s what I’m good at. It’s what … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 24 – Concerto
Shot in April 1963 but not actually broadcast until April 1964, Concerto is a spytastic episode with a Cold War setting, espionage chicanery and so on, with a plot about a concert pianist being accused of rape and murder. Or more to the point, a plot about Steed and his Russian opposite number Zalenko (Nigel Stock) trying to prevent pianist Stefan Veliko (Sandor Elès) being fingered as a criminal in order to keep trade talks between the two countries on the road. It’s a Steed-heavy episode, with Mrs Gale relegated to babysitting the accused man within minutes of the episode kicking off, right after a journalist has cried blue murder after a … 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
Galaxy Quest
Turn on TV most nights and there’s some Star Trek spin-off boldly heading off somewhere. In it are actors you’ve never seen before and will possibly never see in anything else again. As coloured latex hangs off various bits of various faces they strike heroic poses and over-earnestly deliver lines from rehashes of scenarios that were tired in the Sixties. Galaxy Quest knows those shows and those actors. It follows a past-it sci-fi cast as they do the convention circuit, signing books for the geeks they despise, bickering among themselves, boring anyone who’ll listen with stories of antique Shakespearean glory. Then, gasp, a bunch of real aliens turn up, expecting not crummy autographs, … Read more
16 May 2016-05-16
Out This Week The Big Short (Paramount, cert 15) What is a mortgage backed security, a sub-prime loan or a credit default swap? At an early stage in this hugely entertaining film about the financial crash of 2007, Ryan Gosling’s voiceover admits it’s confusing and exclaims, “so here’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain…” Cut to Margot Robbie up to her neck in suds, cradling a glass of champagne … “Whenever you hear the word ‘sub-prime’,” she tells us, “think ‘shit’…”. That’s The Big Short in a headline, a film unafraid to put on the brakes, wheel out a celebrity and roll out a colourful analogy – the chef Anthony Bourdain later … Read more
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
The Ruby in the jolly and entertaining Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is, true to billing, a Kraken. Which is to say, Wikipedia definition, a giant sea monster that’s found off the coast of Norway, according to old sailor lore. Krakens don’t turn up in movies as often as vampires, zombies or even werewolves, but there are more of these folkloric creatures about than you might think – Victor Hugo and Jules Verne wrote about them, so did Alfred Lord Tennyson and Herman Melville (in Moby-Dick). John Wyndham perhaps most famously, in his novel The Kraken Wakes. But they also make an appearance in Game of Thrones and Pirates of the Caribbean. So Krakens … Read more
Tabloid
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 June Brigham Young born, 1801 On this day in 1801, Brigham Young was born, in Vermont, USA. This son of farming folk with four brothers worked as a travelling carpenter and tinker before marrying in 1824. He had become a Methodist in 1823, though was drawn to the Mormon faith when he first read the Book of Mormon on its publication in 1830. Two years later he joined the church, becoming a missionary and spreading the word in Canada and the United Kingdom. In 1844 Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saints movement (of which the Mormon church … Read more
