Popular Reviews
Yolanda and the Thief
There’s not much wrong with Yolanda and the Thief that a lot more dancing wouldn’t fix. It’s a 1945 Fred Astaire musical, and the first in a run of Technicolor movies that would prove director Vincente Minnelli to be a master of colour and motion. Though it was a flop, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Minnelli’s direction or his eye, or with Astaire, when he’s given the chance. There’s not even that much askew with Lucille Bremer, at whose door most of the blame was laid for the film’s failure. She was producer Arthur Freed’s girlfriend, and he insisted on casting her as the female lead, in spite of the fact that she … Read more
Stars at Noon
Once upon a time Claire Denis didn’t make genre movies. She made film you might designate broadly as dramas, or as French dramas, but most specifically as Claire Denis movies, films often with a strong emphasis on unspoken attraction (see Beau Travail, her masterpiece). But in recent years that has changed. In films like Bastards, a Get Carter-style crime drama, or High Life, a densely imagined piece of sci-fi, or Let the Sun Shine In, an ironic romance, Denis has shown she’s happy to make genre movies, as long as it’s on her terms. Which brings us to Stars at Noon, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in a shady Central American country run … Read more
The Street with No Name
Full of guys with nicknames like Mutt, Shivvy and Whitey, 1948’s The Street with No Name is your tough, streetwise crime drama making many claims to authentiticity. It was one of a run of “semi-documentary” movies made around this time, often by Twentieth Century-Fox, and shot out on the streets, in the bars and at the racetracks where ordinary Americans lived their lives in the boom that followed the Second World War. Don’t get too cosy is the message, delivered via stern voiceover and onscreen teleprinter in the film’s opening moments – gang activity is starting to re-assert itself now the peace has been won, it declares in so many words. If the … Read more
Sleep
A woman wakes up in the night to find her husband bolt upright in bed talking in his sleep. “Someone is inside,” he says, before sparking back out again. The next day she asks him about what he said the night before. It was a line from a script I’ve been reading, her actor-husband tells her dismissively. The next night something a bit different. The husband starts scratching at his face uncontrollably while apparently asleep. The wife wakes him up and quietens him down, then she goes back to sleep and so does her husband. But in the morning his face is a mass of bloody red scratches so bad that make-up will … Read more
Human Traffic
Human Traffic made a hell of a feature debut for its writer and director Justin Kerrigan at the back end of the 20th century. A pill-popping tale of a mad weekend among McJobbers in Cardiff, Wales, it’s a film unashamed, delighted in fact, to bring us drug-taking as it is experienced by those who do it most – from Friday night euphoria to Sunday comedown – as fun, an escape, a lark. We’re talking about ecstasy, this being 1999, and the film was so of the moment that the UK newspaper The Guardian called it “the last great film of the nineties”. The paper was rushing on its own euphoria but there is an … 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
Europa ’51
Often described as a neorealist film, Roberto Rossellini’s second collaboration with Ingrid Bergman, Europa ’51, is actually more a Hollywood melodrama with one breakaway neorealist moment. But more than that it’s a vehicle designed to rehabilitate Bergman by getting her to do what she was best at on screen – suffer. It’s the story of a high society woman who’s too busy drinking cocktails and exchanging chintzy chit-chat with her friends to notice that her son is in need of some love and affection. At a drinks party one night, son Michele attempts suicide by throwing himself down the stairs. He survives, only to die later of a complication. Irene (Bergman) is thrown … Read more
ChaO
Busy and strange, Japanese animation ChaO imagines a world where mermaids, mermen – merpeople? – commune regularly with humans, and where a lowly designer working for a shipping company becomes the romantic focus of attention of the daughter of the king of the sea. Make sure all your wits are primed when approaching this one, the plot details arrive at furious speed at the beginning – a fairytale princess, a fight with a monster, a mermaid, fantasy tales read in a book by an impressionable young man – before things settle down a touch as dogged reporter Juno finally tracks down his man and gets his scoop: the story behind the famous coupling … Read more
Parallel
A different take on the multiverse movie, Parallel does it all with acting. Just three people in a clinically modern house in a forest: a husband, a wife and the husband’s brother. Think of Everything Everywhere All at Once or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you’re summoning frantically busy films with a huge array of characters. Here, none of that. But Parallel isn’t just a calm corrective to an exhausting genre but also a smart drama that stands up on its own terms. Instead of busy, here we have a film that’s cool, almost static at times, wordy, contemplative. Set in a chichi modern lake … Read more
7 December 2015-12-07
Out This Week Trainwreck (Universal, cert 15) Amy Schumer takes that slightly fey, dizzy-smart, passive-aggressive female comedy type (Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Jenny Slate, Desiree Akhavan) and sticks a rocket up front and back passages in this very New York and very funny comedy. Schumer is the journalist on a self-important magazine sent off on a sports assignment even though she has no interest in … in fact it barely matters what the plot is, since all it’s there for is to give Schumer enough space to play keepie-uppie with the comedy ball. This she does, riffing hard on modern living as it affects a sexually active woman in the 21st century. When you … Read more
14 December 2015-12-14
Out This Week Aferim! (StudioCanal, cert 18) In spite of the fact that it won the Silver Bear at Berlin, Aferim! had no proper cinema release in the UK, and even its home entertainment release is a muted affair. What a terrible shame that is, because it’s a hell of a film, a powerful wonder following a cop and his son on a rambling journey through 1830s Romania. Shot in a slightly mucky black and white – easier to get period settings right when colour isn’t a problem – it’s a Don Quixote meets Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon affair, with the chase after an absconded Gypsy (Toma Cuzin) providing the loose frame of a … Read more
Joyless Street
There’s a lot going on in Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse), GW Pabst’s epic “Straßenfilm” about the Weimar era in Germany, made during the Weimer era in Germany. Greta Garbo is in it, which tends to draw a lot of attention, and because the film survives only in a print with a good half hour missing, it’s often described as her film. It certainly looks that way from the 150 or so minutes now available. But Asta Nielsen was top-billed when it came out and she thought she was the star. So spare a thought for poor old Asta as you watch a tale of two impoverished young women doing what they have … Read more
