Popular Reviews
All the King’s Men
All the King’s Men is, give or take, a potted history of the rise and fall of Huey Long, the populist, Depression-era senator and governor of Louisiana. The names have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty (delete according to political preference), party particulars have been redacted and so have references to any specific state or region. But the ambitious public-works, education and health programmes launched by the stand-in for Long, Willie Stark, give us a flavour of Long that’s undeniable. Long thought the big state spending of Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t go anywhere near far enough and wasn’t shy about saying so. Audiences back in 1949 would have known exactly who the film … Read more
The Ghost Breakers
1940’s The Ghost Breakers is one of the most successful comedy-horror movies ever made. Critically and at the box office it did well and it’s still regularly on the all-time-best shortlists when they’re being drawn up. It’s a haunted house/ghost/zombie movie with some random bad humans in the mix and stars Paulette Goddard as Mary Carter, a woman who as the movie opens is learning that she has inherited the Castle Maldito on Black Island, somewhere off the coast of Cuba. Rejecting offers from various parties keen to take it off her hands, she heads off to take possession of it, becoming entangled en route with Bob Hope’s Larry Lawrence, a radio gossip … Read more
Import/Export
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 February Maastricht Treaty signed, 1992 On this day in 1992, the Treaty on European Union, aka the Maastricht Treaty, was signed by members of the European Community, in Maastricht, Netherlands. Its purpose, as its name suggests, was to create a union of Europe. It proposed and established three pillars of the Treaty –the European Community, a common foreign and security policy and a similar arrangement for justice and home affairs. In effect it formalised arrangements that had already existed, but it also extended them – the European Community was the continuation of the European Economic Community, with the “Economic” being … Read more
Zola
A nasty-ass neo-noir, Zola is based on the true story of Detroit dancer and waitress A’Ziah King, Zola to her friends. Over 148 tweets written in a clear and vivid prose style she laid out how her new stripper friend Stefani had tricked her into taking a job as a prostitute. Tweet one starts, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out?” The tweets went viral and the story got picked up by Rolling Stone, who turned it into a feature: Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted. Movie offers followed. At what point James Franco came on board is unclear … Read more
The Queen
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 8 February Elizabeth II proclaimed queen of UK, 1952 On this day in 1952, Elizabeth II was proclaimed queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. She had actually become queen two days earlier, on the death of her father, George VI, which she heard about while on a tour of Kenya. Proclamations were read out starting the next day. But according to time zone or geographical location, some parts of the new queen’s realm had not completed the formalities until the day after that. In keeping with protocol, the queen took different titles in different jurisdictions; in some she was … Read more
Network
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 02 September 50th Anniversary of CBS Evening News On this day in 1963 CBS’s flagship news show – broadcast since 1948 – assumed the title CBS Evening News. At which point it became US network TV’s first half-hour weeknight news broadcast. Walter Cronkite was its presenter (he’d taken over from Douglas Edwards the year before), a position he’d hold until 1981. A solid, progressive middle-American with natural gravitas, Cronkite became known as “the most trusted man in America” and the CBS Evening News became the country’s ratings-leading and most authoritative news broadcast. To this day when footage about the assassinations of JFK and Martin … Read more
One of Them Days
The inspiration for One of Them Days is the black cinema of the late 1990s, a period when actors like Taye Diggs and Gabrielle Union, Nia Long and Omar Epps were on early career highs. Though Dude Where’s My Car?, as white-sliced as it comes, might also be in the mix. That was a tale of two white teenage dudes having the day from hell, and One of Them Days does something similar with its story about a pair of young black women who suddenly need to raise a large sum of money or else be evicted from their fairly skanky apartment in a block called The Jungle. Unsurprisingly, given its name, The … Read more
Deadline at Dawn
A romance, a noir and a whodunit all in one, Deadline at Dawn is the only film Harold Clurman ever directed. A theatre director by background, Clurman wisely keeps it between the rails here with solid functionality. He shows us the stuff we need to see and nothing more. There’s no flash, no tricksiness. The same cannot be said for the timeline, which is jumbled about a fair bit. A smalltown soldier boy on leave in the big city wakes up with the mother of all hangovers and a pocketful of money. He has no idea where the loot came from, nor what he was doing the night before, beyond a hazy memory … Read more
Reno 911!: Miami
A feature length version of the Comedy Central TV show. And, obeying a law that stretches back at least to the dawn of TV comedy, the format goes on holiday. To Miami, as the title suggests, where Reno’s precinct of variously useless cops suddenly find themselves the only police in town with a drug lord to contain called Ethan the Drug Lord (played by Paul Rudd) and day-to-day policing duties to carry out. Obeying another law, there’s the odd guest cameo – Danny DeVito in this case (his Jersey Films outfit are bankrolling the movie so it makes sense). But who cares about guests or the plot – no one involved seems to – … Read more
Queer
An adaptation of a self-flagellating William Burroughs novel, Queer sets out to explore identity politics in a refreshing way, tacitly asking a question about the nature of people. Does doing homosexual things make you a homosexual? In the red corner Bill Lee (Daniel Craig), a dyed-in-the-wool ageing queer hiding out in Mexico City in 1950, where he lives the life of the dissolute bohemian expat on his American dollars, and flits from one seedy gay bar to another, to chitchat and drink, but mostly drink, and then weave home where a spoon and a syringe await. In the blue corner Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), recently out of US military service, female friend always … Read more
Fuze
Fuze adds another little gem of a film to under-regarded director David Mackenzie’s list, joining Starred Up, Perfect Sense, Relay, Spread and Hell and High Water as unusual takes on genre, often with a heavily procedural slant. Things click, click, click into place in Mackenzie films, though often the tumblers line up in unexpected ways. Here, what looks like one sort of film quickly becomes another and then another. But things starts off in familiar territory, in the Paddington area of London, where a huge unexploded bomb has been exposed during the preparatory work for a new development. In come the bomb disposal guys, an army team led by the bluff, sweary Major … Read more
Only the River Flows
Imagine a crime thriller where the guy who looks guilty from the outset is the killer… or is he? Or where the police achieve their aims not through diligent hard work but by sheer fluke. Where every cliché of the genre gets an outing and most of them left entirely unmauled… but some of them are given a left-handed spin. But which ones? That’s Only the River Flows, a strangely ironic neo-noir from Wei Shujun, whose films often offer meta-comment on film-making and the workings of genre. This time around Wei gets into all that straight away, installing his cop, Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) in the shell of an old cinema (klaxon), where he’s … Read more
