Popular Reviews
Dick Van Dyke on DVD
What a great thing Dick Van Dyke has been. First there’s that improbable name. Even more improbable, it’s his real name. Then there’s his legs, long and lean and made for comedy dancing and comedy pratfalls. And his smile – as wide as the screen and surely the biggest on TV, if we’re not counting that of Mary Tyler Moore, who played his screen wife. We tend to think of him as a TV performer – no less than three TV series have been named after him, including the seminal Dick Van Dyke Show of the 1960s, the direct descendants of which (via Mary Tyler Moore and James Burrows) are Friends and The Big … Read more
Jesus’ Son
The son in question is played by Billy Crudup, a near schizo drug user on a no-brain road to nowhere. But never mind Crudup, wait till you see the performance by Samantha Morton. When she was cast in Sweet And Lowdown, Woody Allen’s uncharacteristically misogynist film, Allen had her playing a mute. Even so, she stole the film from under Sean Penn’s chiselled cheeks. Here it’s brave Crudup who’s standing too close to the flame. She plays the girlfriend, a hopeless smack-happy, grinning, winsome and overwhelmingly simpatico partner to FH (Crudup, who at the time seemed to be on the brink of something big). Together they bounce from balls-up to self-inflicted distress, shooting … Read more
Drive My Car
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi delivered two chunky movies in 2021. The three hour Drive My Car followed hot on the heels of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Both movies are interested in identity and the way humans sometimes make use of lies in order to access truth. It’s a case of the theatre director, his driver, his wife and her lover, with the slightly hangdog Hidetoshi Nishijima playing Yûsuke, the grieving actor-turned-director trying to put on a production of Uncle Vanya with a cast using his celebrated avant-garde methods – different people talking in different languages (including one actor using Korean sign language). It’s a metaphor for the gulf between speech and meaning – language … Read more
Battles without Honor and Humanity
Never mind Battles without Honor and Humanity, how about battles that make some sense? There’s lots to love in Kinji Fukasaku’s 1973 gangster movie – the first of a five-part series of “Battles” movies he’d make in two years (amazingly) – but coherence isn’t high on the list. It’s often called the Japanese Godfather, and there’s plenty of that in there. But there’s also Goodfellas, since it’s the story of a guy, Hirono, an ex-soldier who (actually) never always wanted to be a gangster. But once this smalltime criminal has landed in trouble with the law he finds himself sharing a prison cell with a yakuza guy. Once invited to join, he is … Read more
Barbie
And so Barbie is born, as a live-action presence, I mean. She’s been in utero one way or another for nearly 40 years, going all the way back to the 1980s and the Cannon Group’s plans to put her on the big screen (shudder). Between there and here there have been many possible outcomes – a possible Amy Schumer Barbie, a possible screenplay by Diablo Cody, Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins in charge. All of them sound interesting, but in the event it turns out to be Margot Robbie as Barbie and Greta Gerwig directing, with Noah Baumbach in the backroom as co-writer with Gerwig. The stories about a movie’s gestation are often ones … Read more
Tarot
Tarot is a horror film for people who don’t like horror films. Or a horror film for people who like to shout at the screen, possibly after a couple of drinks. Or that’s the initial impression at any rate. It starts out in territory so familiar it feels like a large language model wrote it. A small language model even. A group of guys and gals staying at a big old house. The girls are hot; the guys have personalities. There is a room the visitors have been warned not to enter. And so they do. There they find a deck of tarot cards, distinctively designed, and one of the hot girls, who’s … Read more
The Count of Monte-Cristo
So here’s The Count of Monte-Cristo 2024 style, not to be confused with the TV show of the same name from the same year covering the same story. Or the more than 20 film adaptations down the years, the numerous TV and radio versions (including one by Orson Welles). Plays. Musicals. Games. You get the idea. The story has legs. Injustice, the upper orders out of control, a triumph against adversity, Alexandre Dumas’s original story has timeless drivers, plus a dramatic knot at its centre – whether to let revenge boil on or yield to something more gracious. As one tragic character on her death bed says to this story’s hero: “Between vengeance … Read more
My Name Is Julia Ross
There is some spectacularly bad acting in 1945’s My Name Is Julia Ross but it’s worth a look in spite of that. And at only 65 minutes, it’s not exactly an investment. To sell it a bit harder, it hums with weirdness, is very nicely directed by Joseph H Lewis, who was renowned for spinning straw into gold (or at least gold plate), and it also has some very good acting in it, too, mostly by Dame May Whitty (most famous for being the titular lady in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes). George Macready, who plays her son, is pretty good too. The set-up is this: Whitty and Macready play a pair of fruitloops … Read more
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
So, in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, the Portokalos Family finally make it to Greece! In other news, Nia Vardalos takes over directing duties as well as being writer, star and producer. But in most other respects this is a case of more of the same – nothing wrong with that. To recap. The original movie about a Greek American woman scandalously marrying a non-Greek man was the word-of-mouth monster from 2002 that went on to become – choose your sources – the biggest grossing romantic comedy of all time (I don’t believe this either). Regardless, a big movie. And the 2016 sequel, though no one asked for it, was warmly funny … Read more
The Lodger
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 September Jack the Ripper Kills Twice, 1888 On this day in 1888, the London serial killer known as Jack the Ripper killed two women, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. Stride had had her throat cut; Eddowes had also had her throat cut, part of her nose was missing, her right earlobe was hanging off and she had had her abdomen cut open and one kidney had been removed. They were victims number three and four of a five-kill run that had started on 31 August and run its course by 9 November of the same year. The Ripper’s identity was … Read more
City Lights
Charlie Chaplin started making his film City Lights in one era and released it in another. In the three years the picture was in production, an epochal shift occurred as Hollywood abandoned the silent movie and went wholesale over to talkies. When Chaplin started shooting what was intended to be his biggest picture to date in 1928 he was the king of the hill – and of the world, its biggest ever star before or since – in a world of silent movies. By the time he finished, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy and Harold Lloyd were all talking and the world was going crazy for the likes of Fredric March snarling his way … Read more
Seriously Red
“Find out who you are and then do it on purpose.” Seriously Red starts out with this pithy aphorism from Dolly Parton then dives into the story of Raylene “Red” Delaney, an Australian property valuer who really really wants to be the Tennessee country star herself. Red is a lovely woman but a terrible valuer, and director Gracie Otto and writer Krew Boylan’s film wastes no time in getting her fired from her job for being too empathetic, not quite pencil-skirted enough, and then putting Red on the road to glamour and glory as she goes all in on being a Dolly impersonator. But can you be true to yourself by being someone … Read more
