Popular Reviews
Nickel Boys
The bold experiment ultimately doesn’t quite pay off in Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel struggling to find a way of dealing with Whitehead’s fancy plot reveal towards its end – someone isn’t who we thought they were. Whitehead’s book tells the story of a poor black youth in 1960s America whose application and natural academic gifts suggest he’s going to have more life choices than the general run of his peers. And then, a complete chance puts him in the wrong place at the wrong time and instead of going off to college, Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp as a young boy, Ethan Herisse when older) winds up in the Nickel Academy, … Read more
X-Men: The Last Stand
The latest of the Marvel comics franchise is the most expensive film ever made but carries on just like the earlier two – lots of characters chasing too little plot. If you can call a po-faced allegory about society’s treatment of difference a plot. As ever Halle Berry looks nice, Hugh Jackman throws his chest out to good effect and Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen compete to see whose voice has the most actorly resonance. To flesh things out a bit more, the story hinges on a mutant called Leech, whose special power is the production of something – hormones, pheromones, slimy oozy stuff, call it what you will – which turns our … Read more
The Million Dollar Hotel
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 June Groundbreaking of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1993 On this day in 1993, the groundbreaking ceremony of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame took place, in Cleveland, Ohio. It was attended by Pete Townshend, Chuck Berry, Sam Moore (of Sam and Dave), Dave Gardner (the Coasters), Billy Joel, Sam Phillips, Ruth Brown and Dave Pirner (Soul Asylum). The hall had been proposed in 1983 by Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, with a view to capturing an ephemeral art form – or of confirming that rock and roll wasn’t ephemeral at all, take your pick – and … Read more
The Money Pit
Barely ever really funny, The Money Pit is something of a slapstick classic all the same, a triumph of a kind of Hollywood film-making and playing that’s so precise that you have to admire it… even though you’ll probably not laugh. The scenario is lifted wholesale from the 1948 comedy Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, which starred Cary Grant and Myrna Loy as the couple who buy a doer-upper and realise there’s more to do up than they can possibly manage. Here it’s Tom Hanks and Shelley Long as the pair who leapt before they looked. Hanks, two years after his breakthrough in Splash, is in his high comedy phase. Two years later … Read more
Thriller: A Cruel Picture
Thriller: A Cruel Picture goes by the name Thriller: En grym film in its original Swedish. And “grym” it is, an archetypal grindhouse thriller whose main character provided the inspiration for Daryl Hannah’s one-eyed Elle Driver in Tarantino’s Kill Bill, a light comedy by comparison. Director Bo Arne Vibenius has stated that he set out to make “the most commercial film ever made”. Clearly the statement of a man high on his own supply, Vibenius’s film is one of very few that managed to get itself banned in Sweden. In the USA, cut to bits, it went by the name They Call Her One Eye or Hooker’s Revenge or The Swedish Vice-Girl and … Read more
Grand Jeté
A former ballerina embarks on an intense sexual relationship with her own son. That bald plot outline of Grand Jeté doesn’t give any sense of the almost tactile intensity of Isabelle Stever’s film, a drama driven by emotion rather than events. Plot junkies might need to sit this one out. But for those who like mood and texture, Stever is the real deal, a director with a precise control of the warp and weft of film-making, with a camera that’s almost subjective in its shallow focus on its subject and its interest in the minutiae of everyday life. She follows, in an almost furtive documentary style, Nadja (Sarah Grether), from the practice room … Read more
Matthias & Maxime
Because it’s a Xavier Dolan film, Matthias & Maxime has to be approached as if it were a bomb liable to go off any minute – his films often do. We meet the two guys, friends since childhood, on a rowdy weekend away at a lake house where they’re about to take part in another friend’s movie. They’ve been roped in slightly against their will by the incredibly irritating Erika (Camille Felton), whose French keeps lapsing in a faux casual way into hipsterish English, “whatevs” and the like. And so here Matt (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) and Max (Xavier Dolan) are acting out a key scene. The movie is all about sexually fluid relationships … Read more
Riefenstahl
As you might expect, Riefenstahl is a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, “Hitler’s favourite film-maker”. The director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s career was first boosted and then destroyed by her association with the Führer. She insisted to the grim end – she died aged 101 in 2003 – that she was enthusiastic for Hitler at the time because all Germans were, nothing more or less. Director Andres Veiel had access to the Riefenstahl estate and so is able to include material that’s not been seen or heard before – interviews blowing up spectacularly when Riefenstahl loses her rag and telephone conversations with supporters, including Albert Speer. Veiel largely takes the combative … Read more
Marlowe
Warmed-over Raymond Chandler isn’t quite the same as hard-boiled Raymond Chandler, but that’s what’s on offer in Marlowe, a strange misfire that looks like it wanted to make a high-concept colourised simulacrum of a darkly noirish 1940s-style thriller and then settled instead for bloodless pastiche. It’s second order stuff all the way, from Xavi Gimenéz’s deliberately un-cinematic, almost Hallmark TV cinematography, to screenplay writer William Monahan’s flat adaptation of John Banville’s novel, itself a simulacrum of Raymond Chandler’s style. David Holmes’s non-committal (bewildered?) soundtrack kind of says it all. It’s all set in 1939, where ex-cop-now-gumshoe Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is visited by a rich, breathy, libidinous blonde (Diane Kruger) who wants him to … Read more
November 1st
Short and sweet isn’t the way write/director Charlie Manton plays it in this revenge-driven short starring Lindsay Duncan and Sophia Myles Uh oh, I thought, when actors Lindsay Duncan and Sophia Myles first opened their mouths, and out came Southern-fried accents. Duncan is from Edinburgh and Myles is a Londoner and if there’s anything that listening to too many BBC Radio 4 afternoon plays has taught me, it’s to be wary of Brits doing American. And maybe neither of them is entirely on target vocally 100 per cent of the time. But there’s no doubting the performances, Duncan’s in particular, in what feels like the very satisfying last act of an intensely fraught … Read more
The Serpent’s Kiss
A treatise on order and chaos, propriety and lust, hidden inside the convoluted, if a bit TV-ish, story of Meneer Chrome (Ewan McGregor), an 18th-century Dutch (or is he?) landscape gardener. Chrome has been employed to refashion and tame the herbaceous borders of bumptious self-made Thomas Smithers (Pete Postlethwaite) and in the process bankrupt him and seize his bride (Greta Scacchi), if the plans of dastardly fop James Fitzmaurice (Richard E. Grant) bear fruit. This lace-cuffed fol-de-rol of a Sunday afternoon movie is the directorial debut of Oscar-winning cameraman Philippe Rousselot and it doesn’t suffer from bad looks. It also has its odd sly, dry moment – though there are only so many times … Read more
Meanwhile on Earth aka Pendant ce temps sur Terre
Advancing on greatness by stealth, writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur Terre) isn’t all the way there, and he throws away a lot of goodwill towards the end, but the great stuff really is great, and his movie is bold and unusual too. It also features a star with one of those strikingly watchable face. There’s a savage beauty to the features of Megan Northam, who plays a young woman whose astronaut brother went missing in space three years before, an event that has torn her psychologically to shreds. Gone is the intention to forge a career in the arts, though Elsa still fervently sketches all the time. Instead … Read more
