Popular Reviews
The Rabbi’s Cat
It’s a bit all over the place, The Rabbi’s Cat. That’s part of its charm and is potentially also a bit of a problem for people who like their stories topped and tailed, neat and tidy, starting off in with a destination in mind and then eventually arriving there. The piecemeal nature reflects its origins as a series of comics by Joann Sfar, who, with co-director Antoine Delesvaux and writer Sandrina Jardel, has opted to take a bit from here, a bit from there in an attempt at a greatest-hits compilation of the good stuff. But what if you don’t know the hits? Things you need to know are that it’s in French, … Read more
Tenebrae
The last time I watched Tenebrae was in 1999, when it had just been released in as near to a complete, uncensored version as anyone up to that point had managed for the home entertainment market. I didn’t like it much. A “weird blood-bucket whodunit” was one line in my notes, which also mentioned its strange non-sequiturs, its jagged dramatic throughline and its disengaged acting. So I thought I’d give it another go, to see whether Arrow’s recent 4K remaster – every nanosecond of it now back as Dario Argento intended – improved on the Nouveaux version from the last century, which was on VHS. For those who’ve not seen it, the film … Read more
18 May 2015-05-18
Out This Week Ex Machina (Universal, cert 15) Joining Gravity and Interstellar, as well as a host of lower budget films, Ex Machina shows we’re in a golden age of sci-fi, this film’s theme being consciousness and whether the Turing Test has been passed: that a robot has become intellectually indistinguishable from a human. Or is it the Test itself that’s being tested? Domhnall Gleeson is the geek brought in by his messianic megatech wizard boss (Oscar Isaac) to give the yay or nay, Alicia Vikander is the robot he clearly falls for the very first second he claps eyes on her – and with face, breasts and buttocks Vikander’s own, while the rest … Read more
New Life
If you’ve only seen the poster for New Life you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a sci-fi movie. It isn’t, but what it actually is remains fairly opaque until (checks timings) pretty much right on the halfway mark, when debut writer/director John Rosman finally shows his hand. It’s a good reveal and I’m not going to ruin it. Until this ta-daa, New Life looks like it might be a Bourne movie on a budget, or possibly a very earthbound sci-fi movie, or maybe exactly what it appears to be, a chase thriller. It is brilliantly economical and turns its low budget to its advantage as it spins out a story of two … Read more
Earth Mama
A remarkable feature debut by Savanah Leaf, Earth Mama is the grim social drama that’s had a magic wand waved over it. Not the story, though. That remains grim. Young single mum Gia has lost her children to social services. She is a recovering drug user and is heavily pregnant. She loves her kids and realises she has made a mess of things. So she is trying to do whatever it takes to get her life back on track. But the system seems gamed against young black single women like her. How can she take on more work and earn enough money to satisfy the authorities’ stipulation that she be financially OK if … Read more
I Want to Live!
I Want to Live! won Susan Hayward a Best Actress Oscar and yet the film, like Hayward herself, is barely remembered today. The story of a woman who is convicted of murder and is then executed in a gas chamber, it is an emotional and fairly gruelling drama which leaves one question entirely open – did she deserve it? – to focus on the unsavoury mechanics of the execution itself. But first a couple of prologues, one by the writer Albert Camus, billed as the Nobel Prize winner, enjoining us not to look away, the other from the Pulitzer-winning journalist Ed Montgomery, who covered the case, and vouches that what you are about … Read more
Beanpole
Beanpole (Dylda) is an obsessively observed, massively ambitious Russian film set in the aftermath of the siege of Leningrad which tells its story of lives brutalised by war from the point of view of two young women. It won Kantemir Balagov the best director gong at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category. That’s the one for young directors doing ambitious or unusual work, which puts Beanpole in the company of films such as Dogtooth, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, White God and Rams – classics all. Balagov, a onetime student of Alexander Sokurov, had already picked up the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes two years earlier, when he was only 26, with his … Read more
Adieu les cons aka Bye Bye Morons
The French comedy Adieu Les Cons (Bye Bye Morons in English) is dedicated to Monty Python’s Terry Jones, who died while it was being made, and also features a blink-and-miss-it cameo by Terry Gilliam, another Python. Given that the film’s director, co-writer and star, Albert Dupontel, is a big fan of the British comedy troupe, you might expect this film, which did incredibly well at the César Awards (the French Oscars) to be full of Pythonesque silliness, absurdity and gentle mocking of the staid middle class. Yes… but mostly no. It stars the ever-brilliant Virginie Efira, a still centre of calm as the mayhem escalates, as Suze, a hairdresser who’s just been told that … Read more
Yannick
Just when it looked like Quentin Dupieux had hit a creative wall, out comes Yannick, a swerve from his more surreal outings towards something a touch more political. If it’s not entirely plausible, it mostly is, and for Dupieux – the man who gave us a sentient truck tyre in Rubber and a chase comedy involving a gigantic insect in Mandibles – it’s probably as normal as it’s ever going to get. It’s also short, which Dupieux films tend to be, this one clocking in at only 67 minutes. It was short enough that Dupieux was able to film it on the hoof while preparing for his next official movie, Daaaaaali! (about surrealist … Read more
20 October 2014-10-20
Out in the UK This Week Two Days, One Night (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) A French factory hand (magnificent Marion Cotillard) has a weekend to persuade her colleagues to do without their cash bonuses and keep her on instead. As much a portrait of a woman battling depression and low self-esteem as a condemnation of modern employment norms – what kind of scumbag boss dodges a bullet by making his employees take those sort of decisions? – it has a high concept, a big name in the lead, clear heroes and villains and an “if you try hard enough you can win” throughline. In other words it’s the Dardenne brothers’ most Hollywood film … Read more
The Opening of Misty Beethoven
The openings are both figurative and literal in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, the pornified Pygmalion that’s a key movie from the so-called Golden Age of Porn. The real Pygmalion, you’ll recall, is about two la-di-dah gentlemen betting on whether they can get a Cockney flower girl to pass as a duchess. Here, Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Eliza Dolittle are replaced by Dr Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis), his occasional lover Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Bedaunt) and Misty Beethoven (Constance Money), a low-rent sex worker Dr Love picks up in a grindhouse cinema pleasuring a guy dressed as Napoleon. In a plot following Pygmalion’s major beats, aficionados of erotica Dr Love and Ms Rich … Read more
Family Plot
If you were idly flicking through the TV channels on a wet afternoon and hit upon Family Plot, chances are you wouldn’t immediately think it was a Hitchcock movie – it looks more like an episode of Columbo. That bright TV lighting, those mid-range actors who look like they’re trying not to be fingered as this week’s criminal, one who’s once again not as smart as the man in the mac. I’ve looked up Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Barbara Harris and William Devane and not one of them ever did make an appearance on Columbo but they don’t quite fit the standard Hitchcock bill either, or not the bill containing Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, … Read more
