Popular Reviews
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
A cult Spanish zombie film shot mostly in England’s Peak District in 1974 – those filters must surely narrow things down to Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, which also goes by the name of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, the slightly more anaemic Don’t Open the Window and the original Spanish title, No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos. The Living Dead bit nods us towards George Romero. But Jorge Grau’s film is full of his own little touches, and has fantastic mood and chilling music to offset some of the madder moments of bad acting (though a lot of those can be laid at the door of bad dubbing). Plotwise, a man … Read more
Servants
Servants is a story about the collusion between the Catholic Church and the Czechoslovakian StB (its secret service) in the days of the Cold War. It’s also a beautifully made film, full of arresting cinematography and a soundtrack so haunting that it alone makes the film worth catching. The opening shot, of a car seen from behind gliding down a night-time road through an industrial landscape, immediately places us in noirish thriller territory. This is a world where bad things happen at night, unsmiling men stalk the landscape, bodies are dumped by roadsides, cigarettes are smoked, drink is drunk and belted overcoats are worn. Women don’t have an awful lot to do. It … Read more
22 July 2013-07-22
Out in the UK This Week In The House (Momentum, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) François Ozon’s thriller/farce is as clever as you’d expect from a man who gave us the relationship-in-reverse drama 5X2. Here he’s again examining the nature of storytelling with a film about a teacher who becomes infatuated with his star pupil’s stories, each of which ends with a “to be continued”. And in the continuation the story – and the teenager writing them – becomes more and more involved in the older man’s life. There’s post-structuralism in there, if you’re feeling smart. But the whole thing works just as well as a dark farce played to the hilt by a brilliant … Read more
Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy)
Czech master film-maker Juraj Herz’s 1971 follow-up to The Cremator is a complete change of gears, pace, look, intent, the whole kit and caboodle, as if Herz wanted to say to the Communist authorities – look, I can do it straight too. Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy) is in colour, for a start, whereas The Cremator was a more serious black and white, and there’s nothing fancy in the lens choices, no unsettling edits, no barbed message hiding in the undergrowth. The story it tells is pretty straightforward too, about a woman desperate to be married who plumps for entirely the wrong man and then repents at leisure. It’s clearly informed by John Schlesinger’s … Read more
Nino
The weepy illness movie is a potentially irksome beast. It’s just too easy to stick a sick person on screen and ask us to pity them. Nino doesn’t play it that way. The film follows a diffident young man from the moment he receives a diagnosis of throat cancer over the long weekend leading up to his first dose of (emergency) chemo. And then leaves him. Should we pity Nino (Théodore Pellerin)? Does he somehow deserve what’s happened to him? Director and co-writer Pauline Loquès sets us a challenge as she challenges her subject – a closed-off dude who receives the bad news on his 29th birthday (tellingly, he doesn’t correct the doctor … Read more
The Letter
Melodramas don’t start much better than 1940’s The Letter. A man fleeing from a bungalow on a balmy evening in Malaya. A woman fires at gun at him. He falls to the ground, obviously dead. She continues firing, not stopping until all the chambers are empty. “He tried to make love to me and I shot him,” the woman explains to her husband later. From the cold way we saw those chambers being emptied, we suspect this is not the entire truth. Nor do we entirely believe that the woman and the dead man barely knew each other. Because the woman’s explanation seems just a touch too blithe and high-handed. And because the … Read more
12 October 2015-10-12
Out This Week Mr Holmes (EOne, cert PG) A bit of a something and nothing here, with Ian McKellen playing a crusty 90-something Sherlock Holmes coming to terms with the loss of his faculties, wrapping up an old unsolved case (in flashback) and putting his remaining wits in the service of cracking an even greater enigma – himself. McKellen has been here before, in Gods and Monsters, when he played Frankenstein director James Whale at the ignominious end of his life. And so has director Bill Condon, who also directed the 1998 film, and again proves himself to be a deft stylist of wipe-clean period drama – Holmes’s ancient house, his beautiful garden … Read more
Viva Zapatero!
After a slew of documentaries from the US, not least Michael Moore’s prodigous output, here’s a reminder that Europeans can make political documentaries too. Viva Zapatero! is a pop at Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi by Sabina Guzzanti, whose politically satirical TV programme was axed by Italian state broadcaster RAI for being “political” – after legal pressure was applied by rival media outfit Mediaset (proprietor: Silvio Berlusconi). Guzzanti then goes further and accuses RAI of being stacked with Berlusconi stooges, effectively his employees. Should a public service broadcaster be headed by political (ie Berlusconi’s) appointees? Of course not. Though precious few in Italy have had the balls to say so, such … Read more
Magellan
Magellan is quite a conventional movie by the standards Lav Diaz sets himself. An ocean-going biopic about the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, it’s in English rather than Diaz’s usual Tagalog, features a well known actor in the shape of Gael García Bernal, is in colour (this is Diaz’s first colour film for 12 years) and it’s short. Short by Diaz’s standards at any rate, clocking in at two hours 40 minutes, which is breezy compared to other Diaz movies – 2013’s Norte, the End of History was four hours 10 minutes (and worth every minute), as was 2024’s Phantosmia. 2004’s Evolution of a Filipino Family comes in at ten hours 25 minutes. Diaz … Read more
The Man in the White Van
The Man in the White Van slots into the mini-1970s horror revival that’s been going on for a while now. See the abduction horror of The Black Phone, or the folk horror of Midsommar, or the slightly Exorcist-y vibe of The Dark and the Wicked, or the Hammer-esque The Reckoning, just a few among many. That said, this movie is for people who don’t remember the 1970s and don’t particularly want to. Who find it all a bit long ago and perhaps a bit lank and unclean. Maybe that’s writer/director Warren Skeels’s take on the decade. It’s definitely how his movie comes across. Loosely based on the real life case of Florida serial … Read more
Renaissance
Daniel Craig, Romola Garai, Ian Holm, Catherine McCormack and Jonathan Pryce? That’s quite a cast and it’s just for starters. And for a French anime-style sci-fi too, the “French” bit being the clue that the names are actually here to revoice Gallic product for Anglophone consumption. What they’re lending their voices to looks interesting though, a futuristic story about a kidnapped geneticist (Garai) who turns out to have the key to immortality. The USP of Renaissance is its look – the actors have all been motion-captured, then converted to the harshest black and white renditions of themselves. This is unusual though hardly revolutionary: as a technique it can be traced back to Walt … Read more
Requiem for a Heavyweight
There are two versions of Requiem for a Heavyweight. The original was a 1956 TV movie starring Jack Palance as the ageing, punch-drunk boxer finally hitting the existential canvas. This movie version from six years later swaps out Palance for Anthony Quinn. Ralph Nelson directed both and preferred Palance – “truer to the role” was his verdict in a letter he wrote to the press. That’s remarkable in itself, writing to the press to diss an actor. I have not seen Palance’s version but it must be pretty good to come in ahead of Quinn, who overdoes it a bit, for sure – Marlon Brando in “contender” mode crossed with Quasimodo – but … Read more
