Popular Reviews
The Last Son
Look at the long list of executive producers attached to The Last Son and you’ve got to wonder if they aren’t at least partly responsible for the film’s uncertainty about what it is. Even the title is in dispute – The Last Son of Isaac LeMay is an alternative. It’s got good bones, though, a lean story about Isaac LeMay, an old western hand who, believing himself afflicted by a Cheyenne curse that that one of his own children will kill him, sets off to kill them all before they can kill him. Since Isaac has distributed his seed liberally among the working girls of the Old West, this is some task. (How … Read more
Godmothered
Godmothered is Disney product. Written to a Disney template, cast, directed, lit and edited in an efficient business-like Disney way, it’s a comedy fairytale that popped off the production line and onto screens wrapped up all nicely and ready to go. Its story even resembles an existing Disney film, Enchanted, the one about a fairytale character having a fish out of water experience in New York – comedy, romance, the full nine yards. We’re in Boston this time, snow-encrusted, twinkly, Christmasy Boston, where magic is about to happen when klutzy trainee godmother Eleanor (Jillian Bell) arrives on an “assignment” to help out the little girl who wrote to her asking for help. Should … Read more
Denmark
Denmark (aka One Way to Denmark) doesn’t look immediately like a remake of the 1949 movie The History of Mr Polly, because it isn’t. But it has roughly the same plot shape and is dealing in the same sort of feelgood, which after the picture of woe it’s painted in its setup, feels entirely welcome. Mr Polly saw the miserable and passive Polly (John Mills) – locked in a loveless marriage and living a life he hated running a draper’s shop – given a second chance of happiness in the figure of a warm, lovely woman who runs an idyllic inn beside a picturesque river. It worked so well in 1949 (and still … Read more
Shoot to Kill
1947’s Shoot to Kill (aka Police Reporter) opens with a car crash. Two people dead. One is Lawrence Dale, the district attorney, the other a known gangster, Dixie Logan. The DA’s wife has somehow survived. But what were she and her husband doing in a car with Logan in the first place? From her hospital bed, and with a shimmer of flashback, injured Marian explains all to pushy reporter George “Mitch” Mitchell. Back, back we go, to when the DA was just an ambitious assistant district attorney, and Marian was starting out in his office. Soon, having proven herself to be more than a capable secretary, she is practically running Larry’s office. She … Read more
Dahomey
Doing very little but saying quite a lot, Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey tracks the return of a number of artefacts from France to Benin in West Africa, which was known as Dahomey when they were first appropriated – looted, if you prefer. The fairly short film divides up into three distinct chunks. In the first, Diop’s cool, fly-on-the-wall camera follows the action as the items – wooden carvings of deities, thrones and so on – are crated up, watched over by Calixte Biah. An elegant man with a grave expression who assesses the artefacts for damage, Biah notes the condition (cracks, flaking paint etc) of the treasures and supervises as they are carefully … Read more
65
“Adam Driver fights dinosaurs” seems to be the social media consensus on 65, in which Adam Driver does indeed fight dinosaurs, but also fear itself, in a surprisingly good and tense thriller directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the guys who wrote A Quiet Place. The buzz was not good before it opened, so the studio kept this film away from the press, allowing only one screening right before it premiered, to minimise negative publicity. Clearly, they felt, something had gone wrong. Which is odd because Driver is a proven quantity. Sci-fi – also a winner. Dinosaurs – who doesn’t love a dinosaur? And yet… The studio was right to be nervous but … Read more
Before Sunset
This 2004 follow-up to Richard Linlater’s 1995 Before Sunrise is a first-date movie for people who fancy themselves as having more going on upstairs. But grey matter to one side, do you need to have seen the first film to enjoy the second? Probably not, though it helps to know that in Before Sunrise Ethan Hawke had fulfilled every heterosexual male InterRailer’s wildest fantasy – by meeting the stomach-churningly beautiful, witty and, very important, French Julie Delpy on a train and having a night of flirtatious intellectual chat and wild adventure with her. By the end of Before Sunrise both parties are agreed – it’s love and they are absolutely definitely going to … Read more
American Gigolo
In American Gigolo a man falls in love with the wrong woman and is framed for a murder he didn’t commit. It’s a classic film noir plot given a neo-noirish treatment in what looks like writer/director Paul Schrader’s homage to Howard Hawks and The Big Sleep. The twist being that this is the 1980s. And how. Though released in the opening year of the decade, American Gigolo is fully immersed in it. Its hero is a male prostitute obsessed with consumerist stuff. He drives the right car, wears the right clothes (Armani), is coiffed to perfection, works out to keep his body gym-toned and his skin has that well hydrated look of a … Read more
Because That Road Is Trodden
Because That Road Is Trodden is included as a bonus item on the BFI’s release of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. It’s a strange extra, not thematically linked, no personnel in common. Both were shot in the UK towards the end of the 1960s, this at Bryanston School, a fee-paying private school in Dorset, Mulberry Bush in working class Stevenage New Town. By British standards these places are not even geographically close. It’s a strange and short film, moody and woozy, about a day in the life of someone called only The Boy (Sebastian Tombs) from waking up in the morning onwards (though minute to minute this is not). It was … Read more
Danger Man aka Secret Agent
Is Danger Man one TV series or two? It has two entries on the IMDb. There’s this one, for the original series, which ran 1960-1962, and this one for its second coming, 1964-1967, when the show in some places (the USA for example) went by the name Secret Agent and had a snappier theme tune (High Wire, played on a muscular harpsichord). In its native UK it was always Danger Man. There is an argument for treating them as different entitities but in essence they are the same thing, united by the presence of Patrick McGoohan as John Drake, dry spy extraordinaire – no guns, no girls, no gadgets, initially at least. Along … Read more
The Poseidon Adventure
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 April Ronald Neame born, 1911 On this day in 1911, a remarkable figure in cinema was born. Ronald Elwin Neame lived until 2010 and in his time was a cinematographer, a producer, writer and director. There are probably plenty of people who could line up a similar list of credits. But Neame was a cinematographer on Powell and Pressburger’s One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, a producer of Oliver Lean’s Oliver Twist, the writer of Lean’s Great Expectations and the director of The Poseidon Adventure, each one of them an important film, for different reasons. He also directed Judy Garland … Read more
Les bas-fonds aka The Lower Depths
Beautiful but basic, Jean Renoir’s 1936 movie Les bas-fonds (aka The Lower Depths) isn’t the only adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s stage play. Among many, many other people, Kurosawa did a version in 1957, sticking closer to Gorky’s 1902 original, something Renoir himself later acknowledged he himself should have done. Kurosawa’s is the better version, he reckoned. Renoir’s reason for fiddling with the story was, he said, to get around the casting of the actresss Jany Holt – who he thought was “terrible” but was forced to accept – rewriting around her to diminish her role. There is room for the experiment. Gorky’s original plot is full of people, very Russian, but it constellates … Read more
