Popular Reviews
Long Day’s Journey into Night
First things first: Long Day’s Journey into Night has nothing at all to do with the Eugene O’Neill play of the same name, or with any of the movie spinoffs. Confusion piled on confusion, or possibly mischief-making, when Gan Bi’s film first debuted in China, where it was marketed as a big multiplex romance, when in fact it is a beast of a very different colour. Audiences, to say the least, were not amused. There isn’t much of a plot in this bizarre dreamy mystery, but what there is concerns a guy whose father has just died taking up the search for a woman he knew 20 years before. The one who got … Read more
Godzilla Minus One
A country basks in the reflected glow of a single man’s redemption in Godzilla Minus One, the 33rd outing for Toho Studios’ big bellowing beast/god and a contender for best of the bunch. Writer director Takashi Yamazaki wants to tell a story of shame and salvation rather than wang on about a big lumbering beast destroying things, though that happens as well, and narrows his focus onto a Japanese kamikaze pilot in the Second World War who chokes when it comes to his big day and then struggles to come to terms with his actions, or lack of them. Godzilla is effectively that pilot’s shame incarnate – the creature arrives on the scene … Read more
9 May 2016-05-09
Out This Week Room (StudioCanal, cert 15) Starting with 2004’s Adam & Paul, then continuing with Garage, What Richard Did and even in the comedic, less typical Frank, director Lenny Abrahmson has given us a series of intense psychological dramas examining human relationships under stress. Room continues the trend with a story about an abducted woman living in a shed with her son, he being the result of a rape by her abductor. The facts of the situation are dripped out in an un-explicatory way and keep things real, though it’s the current situation rather than the headline-grabbing aspects of the situation that fascinate Abrahmson: how the mother keeps her sanity; how she explains the … Read more
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi originally intended Evil Does Not Exist to be a 30-minute short but realised somewhere along the way that he had the makings of a bigger film on his hands, one that’s part thriller, part meditation on (and manipulation of) audience sympathies. In a variation on the WB Yeats line “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met” – beloved of expat Irish bars – Hamaguchi seems to be saying that in the movies there are no bad guys, just characters we haven’t been introduced to properly. Get close and evil does not exist, just complexity. See also Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy for more on this. First up, in what’s … Read more
Love Exposure
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 November Premiere of Ravel’s Bolero, 1928 On this day in 1928, Ravel’s Bolero made its debut at the Paris Opera. Ravel was originally going to call the work Fandango but changed his mind to Bolero, keeping his original intention – which he almost apologetically in later years would describe as “orchestral tissue without music… there are no contrasts and practically no invention except the plan and the manner of execution.” Bolero is a long rhythmic crescendo, starting out with a simple rat-tatta-ta-tat-tatta-ta-tattata-tattata-tat snare drum, a sinuous melody over the top, at first with just a few members of the orchestra … Read more
MK Ultra
If the title MK Ultra means something to you already, you’ll know what this movie is about – the CIA’s MKUltra program, mind-control experiments on unwilling, ignorant or forced volunteers (soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes) using LSD and other drugs, often psychotics or psychedelics. There were various aims but one of them was the creation of the perfect soldier, one who would obey orders without thinking. What’s odd and bold about writer/director Joseph Sorrentino’s fictionalised retelling of the story is how unsensational he makes it considering the historical facts – the experiments were entirely illegal and secret and only came to light in the 1970s. Sorrentino’s preamble tells us the program got up and running … 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
Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future
In science fact as well as science fiction the Soviet Union often got there first. First into space, first to the Moon, Mars and Venus, all mighty achievements by an empire whose successes have all subsequently been overshadowed by the regime’s ultimate failure. So how about Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future? Did it really boldly go in 1973 where Marty McFly and the Doc wouldn’t venture until 12 years later? No, is the short answer. The longer one is that this film had a different title originally – Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (or Ivan Vasilievich Menyaet Professiyu in the original Russian) – and it was its US distributors who renamed it, in an … Read more
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
Have you ever wanted to see Malcolm McDowell’s cock? Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is at least one place to find it, the movie released in 1979 marking the high water mark of the arthouse/porn crossover. The story behind the making of the film threatens to overshadow the plot of the film itself, which can be distilled as “man becomes emperor of Rome, goes mad, pays the price”, and as I’ve written about it at length once already, here’s the link if you don’t know how it goes. Briefly, the film, financed by soft-porn outfit Penthouse, was shot by Tinto Brass but was then drastically altered in post-production, with producer and Penthouse owner Bob … Read more
Beats Being Dead
The story behind Beats Being Dead (Etwas Besseres als den Tod) is an unusual one. Three hot German film directors belonging to what’s often loosely termed the Berlin School were corresponding together about the upcoming 40th anniversary of the DFFB (Berlin’s film and TV academy), and generally bemoaning the state of German cinema – what was there to celebrate etc? And so they decided to make a trio of loosely linked films to plug what they saw as a few gaps. Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler were the dynamic trio and, following Petzold’s lead, they set their stories in the bleak and romantic forests of Thuringia, in a place called Dreileben, … Read more
Beating Hearts
Beating Hearts is a French gangster-origin story, a noirish Goodfellas with more preamble. Let’s just cut through the flim-flam and say that it’s got some serious problems, yet the actors are so good. The concept isn’t bad either – Scorsese with some West Side Story ambitions, plus a bit of Tarantino stirred in, or that’s what director Gilles Lellouche says. It splits pretty neatly down the middle into two halves, with the first half meant to set us up for the second, which it doesn’t. In part one, 1980s bad boy Clotaire meets swotty, smart and attractive Jackie, and is instantly smitten. Doubly smitten when he tries to flirt with her with a lippy … Read more
Three Times
Shu Qi and Chang Chen are the actors playing three different sets of lovers, in 1911, 1966 and 2005, in this unusually beautiful film from director Hou Hsiao-hsien. All three stories take place in Taiwan and focus on love in different manifestations – love in its glorious first flush, love thwarted, and love carnal – to show how milieu and mores affect what is usually seen as an immutable, timeless emotion. In 1911 a republican activist gets caught up in the world of a concubine. In 1966 a military conscript falls for a hostess at a pool hall. In 2005 a photographer loses his heart to a singer. Hou places the 1911 story in … Read more
