Popular Reviews
Preparation for the Next Life
As a title Preparation for the Next Life sounds a bit sci-fi, spiritual maybe. But in fact it’s set in the very real world of the immigrant experience, as seen through the eyes of a young Uyghur woman who has arrived in New York on the back of a truck and is now trying to make a go of things without papers. As I type Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are rounding up people all over the USA, so this film, shot in late 2024 and early 2025, couldn’t be more timely. Director Bing Liu is best known for his documentaries, All These Sons and the Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap. He seems keen … Read more
What Women Want
Nick Marshall, a sexy, charming and single Hollywood exec, hey it’s Mel Gibson everybody, suddenly develops the ability to hear what women are thinking. Of course he’s completely freaked, though obviously flattered at some of the “what a great butt” comments – this being the very last time that Gibson’s physique rather than his politics would be attracting attention. To start with Nick exploits his talents as many men would – getting laid, psyching out his female boss (Helen Hunt) and shortcutting his way back into his estranged daughter’s affections. But then something weird happens, which lifts this film right out of the common run. As a result of listening to the hopes … Read more
Alias Nick Beal
Also known as The Contact Man, Alias Nick Beal is the much better title of this unusual political allegory meets supernatural drama. The Nick is Old Nick and the Beal is short for Beelzebub. Got it? A retelling of the Faust story is the idea, with Ray Milland as the Mephistopheles stand-in and Thomas Mitchell as Joseph Foster (Foster/Faust, see?), a principled and upstanding district attorney determined to nail a career criminal who has been outsmarting him for years. I’d give my soul to get that guy, says Foster in so many words at one point. And that’s it – unbeknown even to himself the deal is done. So when he meets the … Read more
Trench 11
Trench 11 (aka Death Trench) belongs to a genre that didn’t much exist before the 21st century – war horror. Alongside films like Overlord, Frankenstein’s Army, Ghosts of War and Dead Snow, war horror slickly insists that war isn’t horrific enough, and that what’s needed is a bit more supernatural nastiness on top. Or, seen more positively, that a light sprinkling of generic horror can shift even the bleakest offering more obviously into the box marked “entertainment”. In war horror, ghosties, ghastlies and ghoulies will generally turn up at some point, to help fight against but usually with the Nazis (it’s often the Nazis). But here we’re in the dog days of the … Read more
Darkest Miriam
An enigmatic title for an enigmatic film, Darkest Miriam is a puzzling almost 1990s-style drama. It’s a showcase for Britt Lower, star of Severance on TV, who carries the entire movie with a cryptic and compelling performance. And it grew out of a short, Miriam’s World, conceived as an art installation, so there’s a touch of arthouse aridity. That said, director Naomi Jaye isn’t rolling around in it. There is the sense that she’s keeping the weird in check. Lower plays a competent but withdrawn librarian whose daily life of almost eccentric normality is disrupted when she spots a guy, who turns out to be a Slovenian called Janko (Tom Mercier), on a … Read more
The Mermaid
So, Stephen Chow, the martial-arts practitioner/actor/writer/director/producer best known outside Asia for two brilliant films, 2001’s Shaolin Soccer and 2004’s Kung Fu Hustle, hasn’t troubled western waters too much ever since. Take The Mermaid, the all-time highest-grossing movie in Chinese history barely got seen when it was released in the UK (where I live) and it didn’t fare any better in the USA. What western distributors have against a proven moneyspinner I don’t know, but Chow’s previous film, Journey to the West, also the highest-grossing movie in Chinese history when it was released in 2013, suffered a similar fate. But back to The Mermaid, a fun, fast and familiar piece of Chow excess laced … Read more
Eran Trece
In Spanish it means “There were thirteen,” Eran Trece, and that’s the best title to use for a film originally called Charlie Chan Carries On. The original US version, in English, has been lost to eternity, it seems. But we still have this Spanish version, shot on the same sets with different actors and crew but working from the same story and using a lot of the same stock footage to set the scene. It’s a very trad whodunit about a gaggle of rich people travelling around the world on a grand tour. The action kicks off in London, where one of the party has wound up dead. There were 13… until old … Read more
Another Round
Another Round was a big hit in its native Denmark, managing to coax people into cinemas even as the coronavirus pandemic was shooing them away. Partly because it’s got a big Danish star, Mads Mikkelsen, in the lead, back with director Thomas Vinterberg after their big success The Hunt. And partly because it’s about booze and the Danes are big drinkers, particularly teenage Danes. Vinterberg made the film at the prompting of his daughter Ida, who suggested that a story fuelled by the exploits of hard-partying teens might be both interesting and successful. In the end Vinterberg tweaked that idea a bit, to make the film more about boozing middle-aged guys, and then … Read more
Hidden aka Caché
Everyone loves a form/content double whammy, when a film’s story and its method of telling correspond. It’s why Memento succeeds so well, for example, a tale about an amnesiac told in partial and unreliable flashback. How much craftier is Michael Haneke’s psychological thriller Hidden. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are media professionals, members of the Parisian chattering classes, liberal right down in their DNA. What could people of such good intent have to do with the rising tide of Islamism, anti-westernism, terrorism? Why are they being blackmailed by an increasingly incriminating series of videotapes? Are they guilty of something, or innocent, as the film seems to proclaim? Haneke’s double whammy is … Read more
Flow
Latvian animation phenomenon Gints Zilbalodis follows up his extraordinary debut, Away, with more beautifully rendered imagery in Flow, an Apocalypse Now-style quest, but with animals instead of people. They’re in a boat, in other words, sailing up a waterway and having adventures on the way, none of which ever look like they’re going to be fatally dangerous. If you were going to level an accusation at this gorgeous movie, its cuteness might be where you’d start. For those who don’t know Zilbalodis’s story, he’s the guy who couldn’t get a job after finishing college and so decided to write his own ticket, making Away all on his own, in his bedroom, taking on … Read more
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Is there an actor more forgettable than Paul Walker? Don’t write in, I know he’s not in this second follow-up. Instead Lucas Black has been drafted in to show Mr Walker that he’s not the sine qua non of the franchise. And though he’s marginally less handsome than Walker, Black has the edge when it comes to charisma and he’s got a swagger that goes all the way back to The Wild One. Black is, of course, playing a hot-rodding rebel born to burn rubber in the illegal street-racing face-offs around which F&F is built. Except this time the action includes learning how to drift a car round the bends. And this time … Read more
Sweet Dreams
If Knives Out weren’t a lark it would look something like Sweet Dreams (Zoete Dromen), a thriller from the Netherlands where the usual murder mystery is sharpened by a hit of oppression mixed with anti-colonial hatred. It’s a lovely-looking, lushly colourful movie set around 1900 in the Dutch East Indies where the white colonists are running a sugar-factory concern and living the high life indoors – dressing entirely in white for dinner, dining on sucking pig – while the brown folk do all the work outdoors. Unlike the usual Agatha Christie-style whodunit, all the sublimated stuff gets given its moment in the sun. There are servants who they simmer with resentment. There are natives … Read more
