Popular Reviews
I Am Gen Z
At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 I Am Gen Z is a documentary about, er, Generation Z, and while it kicks off with a quick intro as to who Gen Z are NOT – they’re not millennials (born early 80s to mid 90s), instead they’re the next cohort (mid/late 90s to about 2012) – it settles down into an examination of the defining fact of their lives. They’re the digital natives whose lives have been shaped by, and who often live through, social media. It’s spooky to be reminded of how fast this has happened. There’s that old footage of Steve Jobs announcing three new devices – an … Read more
Uproar
There are a lot of reasons why Uproar works so well, but its star, Julian Dennison, is a major one. This is a warm and likeable underdog drama slash coming of ager, and Dennison is a warm and likeable lead. Another is that every time writer/directors Paul Middleditch and Hamish Bennett sail close to mawkishness, they are rescued by a strong New Zealand sense that, no matter what happens, it is absolutely essential that they stay this side of the ick. It’s 1981 and in New Zealand the country is about to welcome the South African rugby team, the Springboks, for a tour that is highly contested. Apartheid means that wherever they go … Read more
No Time to Die
A remembrance of Bonds past, No Time to Die is an evocative, elegiac farewell to Daniel Craig which also feels like a goodbye to the entire franchise – the familiar “James Bond will return” is there after the end credits, in case you need reassuring. It covers a lot of ground, flicks a lot of synapses not normally flicked by a Bond movie and is fascinating from first to last. All of the Craig Bond movies have played about with the Bond formula one way or another, but No Time to Die seems to have gone one step further, as if it wants to run two Bond movies in parallel – the one we … Read more
The Innocents
Askel Vogt’s The Innocents takes a romantic notion about children – that they know something adults don’t – and gives it a damn good spanking. The result is one of the moodiest, creepiest and most unsettling films about childhood ever made. There’s a touch of the brilliant 1961 film also called The Innocents, a bit of Let the Right One In and a smidgeon of The Exorcist in its intensely domestic setting. And it continues the trend towards supernatural stories told in a highly naturalistic way (see Petite Maman) which looks like it’s got a fair way to run. Vogt keeps his camera at child height as he gradually unfolds his story of … Read more
American Fiction
Can you be black in America and not live in the hood? What would the Great American Novel look like if it turned on the life and thoughts of a black man, rather than some old white dude like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow? American Fiction tackles those questions and a few more, in the process handing a great role to Jeffrey Wright, already one of the greats, but bolstered here by a fantastic cast who lift him to greater heights. Wright plays American college professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose career is put on hold after his latest burst of “inappropriate” behaviour with one of his snowflake students. This throws him back on … Read more
Bedtime Story
Bedtime Story is one of a string of movies produced by Marlon Brando’s Pennebaker Productions, a company run by Brando’s father, Marlon Sr, and named after his mother, Dorothy Pennebaker. They didn’t all feature Brando Jr. 1961’s Paris Blues was a vehicle for Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier and Louis Armstrong. 1959’s Shake Hands with the Devil starred James Cagney. 1964’s Man in the Middle was a courtroom drama set during the Second World War and handed a lead role to Robert Mitchum. You’ve probably not heard of any of them, and apart from One Eyed Jacks, Pennebaker Productions’ hit rate wasn’t astonishing, though the films they turned out did generally feature … Read more
World on a Wire
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) is German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only stab at sci-fi. An epic 3.5-hour behemoth, it was originally shown on TV in two parts, and starts as Fassbinder means it to go on, setting up questions about what we’re seeing in front of us. The opening shot is done on a lens so long it causes an atmospheric shimmer. The picture wobbles just a touch, as if we’re looking through a heat haze. When the people we’re seeing start speaking, their voices have the dead flat ambience of a dubbing studio. So much for atmosphere – we’re disconnected from these businessmen out on the street and entering … Read more
The Breaking Point
Released in 1950 two years before the death of its star, John Garfield, aged only 39, The Breaking Point played to all Garfield’s strengths – he’s the tough guy military veteran attempting to maintain masculine dignity in a world that doesn’t want him any more. It was his favourite role. Harry Morgan (Garfield) is scraping along in the business he set up after he returned from the Second World War, chartering boats out for fishing and whatever comes along. Times are hard and he owes everyone money, and so, in hock to his eyeballs, a disappointment to his loving wife (Phyllis Thaxter), bossed by an offstage father-in-law dangling a job with his successful company, … Read more
Benedetta
How funny is Benedetta meant to be? Is it a serious film examining the mindset of religious people of a different time, or a nunsploitation flick straining every sinew to get its stars out of their clothes and comically at it? It’s an adaptation of Judith C Brown’s book, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Reinaissance Italy. But tellingly, Gerard Soeteman, who worked on the original, never-realised adaptation with director Paul Verhoeven in the 1980s, had his name removed from the credits when he realised which way Verhoeven and new screenwriter David Birke were taking the material for the 2021 version. In bawdy, winkingly vulgar style, not unlike Pasolini’s Canterbury … Read more
That Most Important Thing: Love aka L’important c’est d’aimer
Mad, anguished romantic drama on an exaggerated scale from Andrzej Żuławski, warming up with That Most Important Thing: Love (a clumsy translation of L’important c’est d’aimer) for his maddest romance of them all, Possession, which would follow six years later, in 1981. In the meantime audiences were more than happy with a tortured tale of twisted troilism – the actress, her husband and the hot photographer who comes between the two of them. Unusually, for a film from the 1970s, it takes the side of fidelity, more or less, of higher ideals over a quick bunk-up. In a bohemian, but not particularly boho-chic Paris, actress Nadine Chevalier (Romy Schneider) is all too aware … Read more
31 August 2015-08-31
Out This Week Phoenix (Soda, cert 12) Nina Hoss and Christian Petzold have made six films together, of which I’ve seen only one – the outstanding left-field supernatural thriller Yella. Phoenix builds its drama in a similar way to that 2007 movie – withholding a piece of information and asking us to guess what exactly is going on. Here, we’re in a quasi-Vertigo story, with Hoss as Nelly, a Jewish woman who’s having facial reconstruction surgery in the immediate rubble-strewn aftermath of the Second World War in Germany. Why? We’re not sure. Though the fact she’s been in “the camps” is surely significant. And chilling. And what sort of a clinic is offering … Read more
Shorts
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 June Kat Dennings born, 1986 On this day in 1986, Katherine Litwack was born in Philadelphia to a scientist father and a speech therapist/poet mother. Home-schooled, she graduated high school aged 14, four years after her first acting role in a commercial. By age 13 she’d turned up in an episode of Sex and the City, then had supporting roles in films of increasing weight until she got her own starring role in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, alongside Michael Cera. Bright and feisty, since then she’s specialised in the sort of girl who can go from geek to goddess … Read more
