Popular Reviews
The Universal Theory
If Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka made a multiverse movie it might look like The Universal Theory, a fabulous and madly forensic undertaking by Timm Kröger, who gets just about all of it right and tells a really good story. You don’t need to be well versed in the works of any of the above to be well entertained but it really adds to the enjoyment. Kröger opens his story in a TV studio in the 1970s, where an author is bristling at his interviewer’s description of his book as fiction. It’s true, all true, the author says, causing the interviewer and fellow guests to smirk and titter. As Johannes Leinert … Read more
The Hit
A US remake has long been mooted but has never happened, but would it be any better than the original 1984 The Hit, Stephen Frears’s second non-TV movie? I doubt the casting could be any better – Terence Stamp as Willie Parker, a lag who squealed years before who’s now been tracked down to Spain by guys paid to bring him in for payback. John Hurt as Braddock, the taciturn leader of the abduction op. Tim Roth as Myron, Braddock’s hotheaded young assistant. And Laura del Sol as Maggie, a sexy young woman caught up in the midst of things. First the background – Willie ten years before singing like a bird in court. Then … Read more
Silver Haze
I saw Vicky Knight being interviewed around the time Silver Haze came out in 2023. She is its star, as she was in Sacha Polak’s previous film, Dirty God, and is once again hellishly good as a woman in search of a better life being tripped up by her circumstances. The jaw-to-the-floor moment of the interview came when the quietly spoken and very unactorly Knight revealed that she still had a day job, working in Britain’s National Health Service as a health support worker. Everyone in the room took a breath. The scarring she sustained after being trapped in a fire in her grandfather’s pub aged eight must be some of the reason … Read more
The Assessment
Harold Pinter never wrote out-and-out sci-fi, but if he had done it might have looked like The Assessment. A queasy and uneasy excavation of people’s motivations, its tension stems from confrontations deferred, which break suddenly in discomfiting and absurdist ways. Yet it’s simple, in set-up and execution. It’s easy to imagine this punchy three-hander being performed in an experimental theatre in the upstairs room of a pub. Another Pinteresque aspect – it’s an actors’ drama rather than a director’s, and it calls for subtlety and sudden switching of gears from its performers, which Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel all manage with real precision – Olsen and Vikander get the best of … Read more
The Traitor
The Corleones weren’t fictional. There really was a crime family called the Corleonesi, after the town in Sicily where they came from. In The Traitor (Il traditore in the original Italian) we learn what happened when the Corleonesi fell out with a fellow mob family, in a dramatisation of the true story of Tommaso Buscetta, the crime boss who went “pentito” and sang like a canary to the authorities. Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino) wasn’t a Corleonesi, he was from the other mob, and as Marco Bellocchio’s film opens Buscetta is in Brazil, where he’s living in happy early retirement, having divined that war between rival mobs was imminent, that it was going to be … Read more
The Nest
Suddenly Ingmar Bergman seems to be fashionable again. Just last week I watched Black Bear, a film with a hint of Bergman’s Persona. Now, in The Nest, there’s touches of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Which means that if you’re looking for fireworks, you’ve come to the wrong film. The Nest is a journey into dark psychological territory so muted that it would be easy to miss what’s going on. On the surface things look pretty peachy – Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is a successful trader who’s moved his family from New York back to the UK, where Rory has used his huge Wall Street bonanza to rent a massive Elizabethan mansion – … Read more
The Other Lamb
Omens and portents abound in The Other Lamb, action not so much. Following the story of Selah (Raffey Cassidy), it’s set in a cult headed by a man known as the Shepherd, otherwise populated exclusively by women, who are designated either as Wives or Daughters. For easy identification and to reduce individuality even more, the Wives dress in purple, the Daughters in Blue. They live in the modern world but away from it, out in the woods where they slaughter their own animals – sheep, appropriately – and butcher the meat themselves. They seem content, happy even, though little jealousies flare now and again when Shepherd chooses to lay with one wife rather … Read more
The Undertaker
The Undertaker has a novel suggestion for gangsters needing to dispose of dead bodies in a hurry. Instead of going to all the fuss of running a waste disposal business, why not just bury the bodies in a the ground, beneath the coffins of legitimate new arrivals at their final resting place? Who’s going to look in a cemetery? And if you can’t be bothered with the rigmarole of being an undertaker yourself, just get a real one to play along, and pay him handsomely to keep his mouth shut. That is the simple and effective premise of Michael Wright’s debut feature, which he wrote and directed. Wright started out in the world … Read more
The Pianist
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 March Roman Polanski charged with rape, 1977 On this day in 1977, the film director Roman Polanski was arrested on a charge of rape by use of drug. He was also charged with perversion, sodomy, a lewd and lascivious act on a child under 14 and with furnishing a controlled substance to a child under 14. Samantha Gailey was the victim, a 13-year-old he had been photographing as part of an assignment for French Vogue. The shoot took place at the actor Jack Nicholson’s house. Nicholson was away skiing. Polanski pleaded not guilty to all charges but later as part … Read more
The Alibi
Also known as Lies and Alibis, this is one of those “who’s zooming who” comic thrillers – a bit of Tarantino dialogue, some swish Soderbergh camerawork, a twisty LA Confidential-ish plot. And Steve Coogan’s in it too. Yes, that does seem like a slightly odd casting decision – a Brit actor best known in the UK for his portrayal of gauche local DJ Alan Partridge. As with the best Coogan performances there’s a touch of Partridge in his portrayal of Ray Elliot, the head of a company which provides alibis for players in the game of sexual infidelity. Ray’s only rule is that his company won’t provide an alibi if a crime has been … Read more
The Blue Gardenia
A young woman whose soldier boyfriend has just dumped her goes out for a drink with a known “wolf”. Drunk and vulnerable, she then heads back to his place, where, he tells her, there’s a party going down, only to discover that the party consists of just her and him. The next morning the very handsy Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) is dead, beaten to death with a poker. Did sweet Norah (Anne Baxter) do it? Of course she didn’t – we know how these things go. But for the rest of this underwhelming thriller’s 85-minute running time we watch and wait for energetic journalist Casey Mayo and lacklustre cop Sam Haynes to arrive … Read more
Bob Le Flambeur
If you’ve seen Frank Oz’s garbled heist movie The Score, starring Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando and Edward Norton, you might have asked how come three acting legends were inveigled into appearing in something so average. The answer is Bob Le Flambeur, the “one last heist” film they obviously thought they were channelling. Reeking of the late 40s but made in the 50s just as France was about to embark on the New Wave, it is the last word in Parisian chic, a mix of Gallic savoir faire, American hats and cars, dialogue drawled out the side of the mouth and jazz pouring out of radios, bars and nightclubs. Roger Duchesne plays white-haired … Read more
