Popular Reviews
11.6
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 August Warren Buffett born, 1930 On this day in 1930, the business magnate Warren Edward Buffett was born, in Omaha, Nebraska, the second of the three children of a father who was a US congressman and stockbroker. At age 11 Warren bought his first shares. He filed his first tax return aged 14, on income earned from delivering newspapers and selling door to door. The following year he bought a pin table and installed it in a barber’s shop. On leaving school in 1947, his report read – “likes math; a future stockbroker”. After graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln … Read more
Pink Wall
Tom Cullen is best known as an actor and his writing/directing debut, Pink Wall, owes something to the screen work he’s best known for – Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (Downton Abbey fans might disagree). So, yes, it’s the story of a couple on the cusp of something which also manages to sum up, to an extent, what it’s like to be their age – around 30, when youthful dalliances start solidifying into something more lasting, long-term plans are being made and thoughts turn to having kids. In relationship terms, Pink Wall is about that moment when it’s time to shit or get off the pot. The other film Pink Wall owes something to is … Read more
The Filmmaker’s House
The Filmmaker’s House is a remarkable documentary that might not be a documentary at all. It looks like one – there’s a handheld camera and it’s full of “ordinary people doing ordinary things” in the words of Marc Isaacs, the filmmaker who has up till now specialised in very intimate documentaries about subjects most directors wouldn’t go near. His film film, 2001’s Lift, was shot entirely in a lift/elevator, and his technique was very similar to what we see here – turn camera on a person, ask them if they mind being filmed, start asking questions. The results are often almost unbearable, though almost always gripping. In his last full-length documentary, 2012’s The … Read more
Master of Light
A film “by Rosa Ruth Boesten and George Anthony Morton” it says at the beginning of Master of Light. Given that Boesten is this documentary’s director and Morton its subject, that’s an unusual way of putting it. And yet. It’s the story of a former drug dealer, a man who spent his entire 20s in prison, and how he has been saved by painting. Painting, what’s more, like the Old Masters – Morton is a big fan of Rembrandt. For a black guy with a neck tattoo there’s a certain headline-catching novelty factor right there. If the neck tattoo and jail time seem to tell one story, Morton’s softly spoken manner and kind … Read more
Monte Carlo
Jolly and bright and unfashionable in so many ways – which just makes it better – Monte Carlo is also an Ernst Lubitsch film and so bubbles along like a thing demented. It has entirely uncool stars like Jack Buchanan and Jeanette MacDonald in the leads and a storyline taking repeated runs at the mistaken identity idea. MacDonald later became known for the films she made with Nelson Eddy, and is all the better without him here, as a flappy, silly, delightful countess who runs away on her wedding day from the oafish daddy’s-boy duke she’s meant to be marrying. In opening scenes that are textbook “Lubitsch touch” stuff and could come from a … Read more
Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands
I mean, a film called Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, how could you not? And then I learned this 1967 Japanese “pink” movie also goes by the name of Dutch Wife in the Desert, and was originally released as Horror Doll – and was even more intrigued. Having now watched it, as an exercise in curiosity as much as anything else, the surprise is that there’s actually a very good film lurking behind the lurid title(s). This curio turns out to be the second feature by cult director Atsushi Yamatoya, his first solo effort after working on 1966’s Season of Treason with Kôji Wakamatsu, the bruiser and former yakuza member who went … Read more
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
Based on the breakthrough novel by former spy John Le Carré, shot in black and white to suggest that espionage is unglamorous, dirty work and starring a hollowed out Richard Burton, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is as far from James Bond as it’s possible to get – further, even than Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer of the Ipcress File. Telling the story of a jaded spy who is busted to a desk job in London and then recruited by East German intelligence – or that’s what they think – it’s a bleak marvel, as redolent of the drab side of the 1960s as the smell of a wet duffel coat. Martin … Read more
Hannibal
This may not be the best film out this week, but it is the one that is shouting loudest. Who doesn’t want to see Anthony Hopkins return to the role of Hannibal the Cannibal after several years of haggling over his fee, which includes an agreement to make one more film featuring everyone’s favourite cultured cannibal? Hannibal’s plot sees Hopkins’s Dr Lecter returning to the USA, having been lured back from Italy by an elaborate hoax cooked up by Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), a former victim of Lecter’s, who has survived a fiendish munching and is now using Agent Clarice Starling as bait to get payback. The plot is familiar cat v mouse … Read more
Only the River Flows
Imagine a crime thriller where the guy who looks guilty from the outset is the killer… or is he? Or where the police achieve their aims not through diligent hard work but by sheer fluke. Where every cliché of the genre gets an outing and most of them left entirely unmauled… but some of them are given a left-handed spin. But which ones? That’s Only the River Flows, a strangely ironic neo-noir from Wei Shujun, whose films often offer meta-comment on film-making and the workings of genre. This time around Wei gets into all that straight away, installing his cop, Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) in the shell of an old cinema (klaxon), where he’s … Read more
Old Men in New Cars
Two things impelled me towards 2002’s Old Men in New Cars (Gamle Mænd i Nye Biler in the original Danish). The first was the quirky title, which has no real connection with anything that happens in the film. The second was the name Kim Bodnia at the top of the credits. You might know him as the Danish half of the Danish/Swedish investigative duo in the original The Bridge. Or, maybe, as the Russian control of assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve. In both he brought a dry, subtle wit to characters it would be easy to overplay and he does something similar here, though hold the “subtle”. There is nothing at all understated … Read more
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Well it’s an African Festen, isn’t it? I’m going to say immediately what most reviewers seem to get around to saying eventually. But On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is much more than just a dark drama about family secrets coming to light at a family gathering, so memorably wrangled in Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film. The director/writer is Rungano Nyoni, who swept all before her with feature debut I Am Not a Witch in 2017. Also suggesting excellence is the fact that it’s an A24 production, and they are rarely putting a foot wrong at the moment when it comes to intelligent, entertaining and original drama (see The Brutalist, Midsommar, Aftersun and The Whale). … Read more
The Twentieth Century
Where to begin with The Twentieth Century, a mad bit of nonsense that’s initially exasperating but eventually works so hard at what it’s doing that your resistance might start to crumble. We’re in the realm of the camp pastiche right from the opening colorized 1930s-style credits. Those dispensed with, the movies settles down to tell the story of WL Mackenzie King, Canada’s most celebrated prime minister – three terms of office from the early 1920s to late 1940s. Forget those details lifted from WLMK’s Wikipedia page. They’re only confusing. If there’s any basis of fact at all in writer/director Matthew Rankin’s film, it’s been so decorated with chintz, frills and flounces that it’s … Read more
