Popular Reviews
Mank
Mank is the story, well known to film nerds, of the writing of Citizen Kane, for many the greatest film ever made. More exactly it’s two stories, one about writer Herman Mankiewicz dishing the dirt on press baron William Randolph Hearst (his model for press baron Charles Foster Kane) and his paramour Marion Davies, the other about director Orson Welles doing Mankiewicz out of a screen credit for his work. Inserted almost as an afterthought is yet another story – about the socialist Upton Sinclair and his campaign to become governor of California, and how his guns were spiked by the movie studios. Installed at a secluded cabin in the Mojave desert with … Read more
Blind Alley
A film about the all-conquering power of Freudian psychoanalysis, Blind Alley lasts just a bit longer than a session with a shrink and in its 69 minutes attempts to convince us that the root of all evil lies in our relationship with our parents. It’s a bit mad but highly entertainingly done, and in the background there’s something lurking for any would-be psychoanalyst, in the relationship between an incidental couple, Mr and Mrs Curtis, and the “constant companion” Mrs C calls Dick. Parse that one. But neither Dick nor the Curtises is who the film is about. It’s about a professor of psychoanalysis whose weekend cottage is invaded mid-soiree by a dangerous criminal … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 29 – Requiem
Requiem sounds like it should be the title for the last-ever episode of The Avengers, now only weeks away. That it’s not is a typical piece of perversity by showrunner Brian Clemens. Another is Clemens’s ongoing attempt to sideline Linda Thorson, which he’s still engaged in even this late in the day. Perhaps a further series was still a possibility. If it had come off, doubtless Tara King would have been noticeable by her absence. Anyhow, the setup – a woman is killed in an underground car park by a pair of heavies. But it turns out it’s not a woman at all, but a man in drag – who has been acting … Read more
Mister Lonely
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 July Papal infallibility proclaimed, 1870 On this day in 1870, the Catholic church declared that certain utterances by its pope were to be considered infallible – they could not be wrong. The Church had long held that pronouncements made by the pope in his official capacity, and speaking ex cathedra, had a universal truth to them, basing this notion on Jesus Christ’s words to Peter, the first Pope – “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed … Read more
Mystery of the Wax Museum
Screwball but not comedy, 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum is less well known than its remake, 1953’s House of Wax, but more fascinating in many respects, particularly in its portrayal of liberated young women making their way in the world. There’s sex and drugs too, though you wouldn’t bother with it for those. The Hays Code, which cleaned up American movies starting around 1934, wasn’t expressly designed to put women back in their box (discuss) but it did it anyway. The ostensible star of this pre-Code film is eminent stage actor Lionel Atwill, as the driven creator of wax effigies of great historical figures whose London museum burns down in the film’s … Read more
Tulpan
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 August Princess Diana dies, 1997 On this day in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car crash in the Pont D’Alma road tunnel in Paris. Also in the car were Henri Paul, the driver, and Dodi Fayed, her boyfriend. The accident happened after Fayed and Diana had spent the evening at the Ritz in Paris, owned by Fayed’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed. At the end of the evening they had got into a Mercedes S280 and driven off from the rear entrance of the hotel, a decoy car having already drawn off a sizeable number of journalists by leaving … Read more
Clemency
We’ve all seen prison dramas – the tough lives of inmates in a heartless system patrolled by brutes, policed by sadists and presided over by a martinet. Clemency isn’t that sort of film. Nor is it film-as-entertainment, be warned, but a grim and sobering look at US prison life from an unusual angle, the warden’s. Opening up with a pre-credits scene that follows an execution on death row, which ends up being a botched, messy and gruelling one, for the man who’s being killed, the people watching and the warden supervising the whole thing, the film proper then concerns itself with the preparations for the execution of another man, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) … Read more
Mulan
Anyone for a live-action remake of a much-loved animation? The latest of Disney’s live-action makeovers of its own back catalogues continues a “so-what?” run of remakes – Jungle Book, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo to name a few. They’re not bad films exactly – no, hang on, Dumbo is – but how many of them have been necessary, what are Disney playing at exactly, and how long before Snow White? Junking the songs and comedy sidekicks of the 1998 animation, this Mulan sticks fairly close to the original Chinese folk tale, first written down about 1,600 years ago, of a feisty young woman skilled in combat who, fearing for her sick father’s … Read more
Saloum
There are a lot of interesting films coming out of Africa right now. Here’s Saloum, not perfect but pretty damn exhilarating for its first half at the very least. It’s an open homage to Tarantino putting colourful characters with unexpected skillsets into tense situations and then watching as the pinball-machine consequences play out. Congolese director Jean Luc Herbulot gives us a fascinating opening shot of a shadowy figure entering what might be a lake with a gun. What are we about to see? A western? A sci-fi movie? A war movie? A revenge drama? There are flavours of most of those in what Herbulot eventually delivers. But first let’s meet the team: a … Read more
Priscilla
So, Priscilla Presley the origin story, authorised version. Priscilla director and adapter Sofia Coppola isn’t out to bust any myths here, taking the onetime wife of Elvis, Priscilla Presley (an executive producer of this movie) at her word, or at the word of her 1985 biography Elvis and Me, at any rate. The result walks the line between high-end hack work and a prison-break drama, albeit one dressed to within an inch of its life. It’s the soup to nuts version of Priscilla’s life with the King – 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis Presley, the most famous man in the world, while he’s stationed in West Germany on military service in 1959. He … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 19 – The £50,000 Breakfast
The £50,000 Breakfast is a Cathy Gale-era episode (Death of a Great Dane) originally written by Roger Marshall and then reworked here by Brian Clemens into an Emma Peel-era one. And though it’s tempting to do a compare and contrast – as if to definitively nail the differences between the two eras – that can’t quite be done because Death of a Great Dane really marked the beginning of classic-era Avengers with its mad plots, people with odd names, extras thin (ish) on the ground and a general air of unreality all-pervading. The same opener launches both – a man dies (here it’s a ventriloquist) and his stomach is found to contain a … Read more
The Maltese Falcon
Not a bad way to start. The Maltese Falcon, one of the most highly acclaimed films ever made, was John Huston’s directorial debut. He also wrote the screenplay, adapting Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled thriller into a lean piece of cinema that stands the test of time. In the 21st century if you want to watch something that’s a piece of surefire entertainment from front to back, The Maltese Falcon will not let you down. It’s a simple story, not really a story at all, more a contrivance just sturdy enough to hold together a series of interactions between people, about three desperados all in search of a fabulously ornate bejewelled bird – the so-called … Read more
