Popular Reviews
The Girl
There were two dramatised features about the working methods of director Alfred Hitchcock in 2012. Hitchcock starred a pretty decent Anthony Hopkins as the corpulent director. But today it’s The Girl, a more obviously made-for-TV affair. It’s an HBO/BBC collaboration, with actors who bump it up the pecking order – Toby Jones as a dead-eyed Hitchcock, Imelda Staunton as his enabling, collaborative wife Alma and Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren, the star of The Birds and Marnie. The story of The Girl is the story of a director who finds a new star, grooms her and, Vertigo-style, becomes hopelessly, almost pathologically obsessed with her. It’s Alma who first calls Hedren “the girl”, having noticed … Read more
The Enforcer
The Enforcer. Not Clint Eastwood, or Jet Li or even Humphrey Bogart (who starred in a mostly forgotten film of the same name in 1951). Instead it’s Antonio Banderas’s name over the title of this very familiar sounding movie, which has ambitions that go not much further than getting itself onto a screen near you. The “bad guy gets a conscience” plot falls into two halves. First we get to see what sort of a bad guy we’re dealing with – the strong arm of a Miami crime boss with a wretched personal life (wife hates him, daughter wishes he’d drop dead). Then the epiphany, as Cuda (short for Barracuda) gets involved with street … Read more
4 November 2013-11-04
Out in the UK This Week This Is the End (Sony, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Armageddon, aka The Rapture, arrives at a big Hollywood party thrown by James Franco in an in-jokey comedy whose USP is that everyone involved plays a version of themselves. The big names are Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen and James Franco (natch), with Jay Baruchel as our entry point, playing the sort of Jay Baruchel who is slightly intimidated by the bigger stars. Cameos are the big thing there – Rihanna pops in for a minute, Michael Cera has fun with his image as a total dude being fellated and rimmed simultaneously by a pair of babes while doing a … Read more
Twentieth Century
Named after the New York to Chicago train and designed to be just as sleek, fast and modern, Twentieth Century is a brilliant Howard Hawks screwball comedy that’s been slightly overshadowed by other brilliant Howard Hawks screwball comedies, like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. In art-imitates-life style, it tells the A Star Is Born story of one person in the ascendant and another on the decline, with Carole Lombard in the role that made her name, and John Barrymore pausing momentarily as he transited from movie godhood to a very mortal early death. Both are brilliant, but Barrymore is perhaps even better than Lombard, as Oscar Jaffe, a stage impresario with … 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
Cryptozoo
Independent, hand-drawn, adult animation is rare, as Sundance programmer Charlie Sextro said at the premiere of Cryptozoo, which puts Dash Shaw’s busy and quirky adventure in pretty much the same category as its subject matter. A cryptid, an early intertitle card informs us, is a creature whose existence is unsubstantiated, or who remains hidden. As in a cryptic crossword, you have to look beyond the surface to see what is really there. And a cryptozoo is where our hero, Lauren (voiced by Lake Bell) is employed as a kind of Indiana Jones swashbuckler, travelling the world to bring crypto-animals like the velue, the gorgon and the karzelek back to the zoo, where they’ll … Read more
Dead Mail
Horror-flecked crime thriller Dead Mail suffers from the death early on of one of its main characters and it never really quite recovers from it. But it’s good anyway, just not as good as it might have been if xxxxxx (no spoilers) hadn’t bitten the dust. It’s the second feature by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy and it’s all set in the 1980s, where, in a mail room in Nowheresville, USA, various members of the postal team try to reconnect lost letters with their intended recipients. The really discombobulating ones get sent up to Jasper (Tomas Boykin), a strange man who, when not at work, lives in a flophouse. A recovered down and … Read more
Bill & Ted Face the Music
Quick show of hands, did anyone actually ask for Bill & Ted Face the Music? Thought not, though here it is, around 30 years on from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and their Bogus Journey, back with its original stars, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, a good comedy director at the helm (Dean Parisot of Galaxy Quest fame), and with two talented draftees in there to provide new blood. In fact Reeves expressed an interest in a new instalment as long ago as 2005. Original writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon climbed back on board soon after, and the project was ready to go for about ten years – the studio wasn’t convinced a … Read more
Cuckoo
Allusional rather than visceral, Cuckoo is a stew of horror sub-genres served with a big side order of Grimm, and is pretty fabulous if you are used to drinking deeply at the well of the macabre. If you are not a horror nut, it’s probably a bit less necessary though fascinating all the same. It’s the story of a young woman who has been uprooted from her old life in the USA after the death of her mother and taken to Germany, where Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is now expected to fit in with her estranged dad’s family without making a fuss. Dad Luis (Marton Csokas) is now married to Beth (Jessica Henwick, so … Read more
I Wake Up Screaming
Twentieth Century-Fox didn’t do much in the way of noir. Betty Grable wasn’t much of a one for straight roles. So 1941’s I Wake Up Screaming is unusual for two reasons, not to mention a title making no sense at all. It’s a whodunit about people who are off their turf, so those deviations from the norm chime with what’s happening on screen, a murder mystery with a few wayward contenders for the killer of Vicky Lyn (Carole Landis), a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The man who obviously didn’t do it is Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature), who we meet being sweated by the cops for the young woman’s murder. … Read more
30 March 2009-03-30
Out in the UK this week Celia (Second Run, cert 15) Oz director Ann Turner’s classic 1989 rites-of-passage debut, about one girl’s amply furnished fantasy childhood. It’s the story of a child, from a child’s point of view, rather than adult looking back, and set in 1950s Australia overrun by rabbits and the Red menace. Celia – at Amazon Of Time and the City (BFI, cert 12) Back with a bang, grumpy, poetic old man Terence Davies’s elegy to his lost, native Liverpool, composed almost entirely of archive footage, brilliantly welded together by a master. Wait till you hear what he has to say about the Beatles. Of Time and the City – … Read more
1 April 2013-04-01
Out in the UK this week Silver Linings Playbook (EV, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Almost entirely brilliant from first breath to last gasp, David O Russell’s beautifully made, perfectly acted adaptation of Matthew Quick’s novel follows bipolar Bradley Cooper and his faltering relationship with fellow psychiatric case Jennifer Lawrence. If you’ve ever doubted Lawrence’s epic ability, watch this. In fact she’s so good – essentially mainlining Juliette Lewis – that she forces a good performance out of Robert De Niro, who is just one nugget of brilliance in a cast including Jacki Weaver (if you haven’t seen her in Animal Kingdom you have missed out) and Chris Tucker (entirely forgiven for those Rush Hour films … Read more
