Popular Reviews
Sentimental Value
Imagine a standing ovation lasting for 19 minutes – enough time to have a bath. That’s what Sentimental Value got when it was shown at Cannes. Where, admittedly, they like this sort of thing – European, dense, non-genre, self-referential, serious, full of unsympathetic characters and recalling auteurs of the past. Bergman most obviously, and Persona in particular, a high point in his career of high points. There is a story, though it’s a jumping-off point for a series of meditations rather than a plot. After their mother dies, two sisters, Nora and Agnes, are slightly surprised and perturbed when estranged father, a cinema auteur whose best days are probably behind him, re-appears. Gustav, it … Read more
Rush
Is Rush – about the rivalry between 1970s Formula 1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt – Ron Howard’s best film yet? After those terrible Da Vinci Code films recently, made for who knows what favour to the studio, this might not seem like much of a claim. But let’s not forget that Howard made Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon. If there’s one thing uniting those three films and Rush it’s that they’re all based firmly on real events. And yes, to bolster the argument, it’s necessary to forget about boxing drama Cinderella Man, Russell Crowe’s Rocky, also based on the life of a real man, but only of value to archaeologists … 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 Avengers: Series 6, Episode 23 – Take Me to Your Leader
Coined as a film-making term by Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Angus McPhail, the Macguffin (spell it anyway you like) is a simple plot device which doesn’t do much on its own, but acts as a string on which a number of scenes can be strung, lending an illusion of wholeness to something which, without it, would just be a jumble. Take Me to Your Leader is the Macguffin idea at its purest, the driver of an effectively brisk and noticeably slick episode of The Avengers, written by Terry Nation and directed by Robert Fuest – pretty much the A team by this stage in the proceedings. The device? A red briefcase, one that talks, … Read more
Adaptation.
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 February The New Yorker launches, 1925 On this day in 1925, The New Yorker magazine was launched by Harold Ross and Jane Grant. Intended as a cosmopolitan magazine for the urban sophisticate – and those who aspired so to be – it started out as a broadly humorous publication, though quickly shifted its focus towards quality fiction and long-form journalism, though its cartoons have remained a key feature. Unafraid to be thought of as intelligent, educated and interested in a magazine world that largely pretends to the opposite, it could take its pick of a certain type of writer – … Read more
Deep Blue Sea
Not to be confused with high-tone The Deep Blue Sea, from 2011, this action thriller whose USP is “smart sharks” got a mixed reception when it came out, everyone suddenly having forgotten how many people have tried to follow in the wake of Jaws – and totally failed. Renny Harlin’s film succeeds, mostly, thanks to his understanding of action, his writer’s reliance on the old “someone’s been messing with nature” plot, of Godzilla vintage, and a better cast than these things often have (Michael Caine in Jaws: The Revenge being a rare exception). So we have Saffron Burrows as a scientist who’s been genetically modifying sharks in an attempt to find the cure … Read more
S-a Furat o Bombă aka A Bomb Was Stolen
The Romanian animator Ion Popescu-Gopo’s live-action film S-a Furat o Bombă (translated as A Bomb Was Stolen or They Stole the Bomb) was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1962. It had very little chance of winning, since it was up against Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and Satyajit Ray’s Devi. But it was there, an achievement in itself for someone who’d never made a live-action film before. Popescu-Gopo’s animated short, Scurtă Historie (A Brief History) had won the Short Film Palme d’Or in 1957. It’s also a film without dialogue, another potential handicap, though … Read more
Chopper
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 November Chopper Read born, 1954 On this day in 1954, Mark Brandon Read was born, in Melbourne, Australia. The son of an army father and a Seventh-day Adventist mother, he spent the first five years of his life in children’s homes before returning home, where he was often beaten by his father. A street fighter already as a teenager, he began his criminal career by robbing drug dealers, then went on to kidnap and torture members of the criminal underworld, in order to extort money out of them. He gained a reputation for brutality – bolt-cutting (hence the “Chopper” nickname) … Read more
Holy Days
Holy Days is a twinkly and comforting National Treasure Road Movie about three New Zealand nuns who go on a road trip to try and stop their convent being pulled down by a nasty developer. Miriam Margolyes, Jacki Weaver and Judi Davis play the valiant sisters trying to locate the property deeds that will avert the disaster. Along for the ride is Brian, a motherless lad angry at dad’s new partner. A bit of a softie, maybe Brian will be annealed by time spent with Sisters Mary Clare (Weaver), Agnes (Davis) and Luke (Margolyes) as they pootle towards the South Island, where a former nun, now a lawyer, may be able to get … Read more
Bellissima aka Beautiful
If it’s a performance you want – and I mean a performance – look no further than Luchino Visconti’s 1951 comedy Bellissima (Beautiful to English speakers), in which Anna Magnani turns on the acting flamethrower in the film’s opening moments and runs it at full intensity until fadeout. She plays the mother with aspirations that her little girl shouldn’t live the same impoverished, largely hopeless, male-dominated life that she’s had – Maddalena (Magnani) strains every sinew in her body to get her girl into the movies. A casting call goes out on the radio in the film’s opening moments and from here we follow Maddalena and seven-year-old Maria (Tina Apicella) as they prepare for … Read more
Ishanou
Manipuri cinema, from the state of Manipur in northwest India, only got going in 1972 and it’s pretty fair to say that Ishanou (The Chosen One) is either the most famous film ever to come from there or a contender for the title. Made in 1990 by Aribam Syam Sharma it’s a beautiful and deceptively simple drama shot on 16mm stock, which makes the whole thing gauzy and impressionistic and offsets an ethnographic element as fascinating as the story it tells. A preamble gives us a structure for what’s to follow and fills us in on the background on the Maibis of Manipur, a religious order of sorts, whose female members are said … Read more
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
On absolutely no account to be confused with Sometimes Always Never, a dazzling tiny film starring Bill Nighy and written by the brilliant Frank Cottrell Boyce, Never Rarely Sometimes Always does actually share a couple of things with its near namesake – it’s a drama driven by relationships between people and has great performances by its leads. It could so easily, in hands other than those of writer/director Eliza Bittman, not have been, since it’s a film “about” abortion. Abortion dramas tend to be issue-y. Here, instead, Bittman stays as far back as she can while still engaging. This is primarly a film about the friendship between two young women. Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) … Read more
