Popular Reviews
Fantômas
Though the character of Fantômas – ruthless arch-criminal and master of disguise – had been around in book form since the early 1900s, and there’d been regular film adaptations through the 20th century, the modern Fantômas, blue of face and black of glove, starts with this 1964 movie simply named after the man himself, which re-introduced the character to French audiences and exported him to the rest of the world. The original Fantômas of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre was something of a response to another successful French character of the time, Arsène Lupin. Both operated in similar fashion as lords of misrule disrupting the boring everyday with mad feats of fantastical excess, … Read more
Employees’ Entrance
Employees’ Entrance is a short, sharp and strange film, from the title on downward. A drama made in 1933 and set in a department store in the teeth of the Great Depression, it takes a look at rapacious capitalism in the form of its central character – Warren William as the time-and-motion guy Kurt Anderson, who somehow gains control of a business that’s been run almost on feudal lines till he came along. Kurt is a price-of-everything-value-of-nothing badass and though his technique isn’t all slash and burn, his management style is brusque, hectoring and unsympathetic and he demands total loyalty from his staff, who he expects to be on call 24/7. On the … Read more
House of Hummingbird
Why is House of Hummingbird called House of Hummingbird? I’ve got no idea, and watching this South Korean coming-of-ager hasn’t enlightened me. Can anyone help? Answers below if you can. Maybe I missed something. Odd in a way, because the film itself is as clear as day and is told in a bright, clear manner, by actors with open, honest faces, particularly Park Ji-Hu, who plays schoolgirl Eun-hee. This is her story. She’s an average kind of schoolgirl with an interest in comics and drawing. Life at home is a bit tense. Her brother bullies her a bit, her older sister is skipping out at night to see her boyfriend, mum and dad … Read more
Since Otar Left
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 August Cave city of Vardzia consecrated, 1185 On this day in 1185, the cave monastery of Vardzia, on the slopes of the Erusheti Mountain in Southern Georgia, was consecrated by Queen Tamar of Georgia. Building on the site, about 19 tiers high, had started a couple of years earlier, but excavation shows that people had been living there since the Bronze Age. Tamar was a warrior queen and dedicated the site to the Virgin Mary after successes against the Muslim invader. Because of its height and its construction in the rock, the site was held to be as impregnable “as … Read more
Night Moves
Arthur Penn’s 1975 movie Night Moves sits snugly alongside two other films made about the same time – Polanski’s Chinatown (which went into production in the same month in 1973) and Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which had opened earlier that year. All three are neo-noirs recalling the era of Raymond Chandler, Sam Spade and Humphrey Bogart. Of the bunch only Chinatown was a proper box office and critical hit, and even then some critics were a bit sniffy (the New York Times didn’t go a bundle). Since then, The Long Goodbye has been rerated upwards to join Chinatown in the pantheon, and now it looks like Night Moves is also in the process … Read more
Jesus’ Son
The son in question is played by Billy Crudup, a near schizo drug user on a no-brain road to nowhere. But never mind Crudup, wait till you see the performance by Samantha Morton. When she was cast in Sweet And Lowdown, Woody Allen’s uncharacteristically misogynist film, Allen had her playing a mute. Even so, she stole the film from under Sean Penn’s chiselled cheeks. Here it’s brave Crudup who’s standing too close to the flame. She plays the girlfriend, a hopeless smack-happy, grinning, winsome and overwhelmingly simpatico partner to FH (Crudup, who at the time seemed to be on the brink of something big). Together they bounce from balls-up to self-inflicted distress, shooting … Read more
The Fourth Man
Paul Verhoeven’s erotic drama The Fourth Man (De vierde Man) opens, to ominous Wagnerian rumbling, on a black screen and then as the credits roll Verhoeven dramatically reveals a spider in close-up, first stunning a fly caught in its web and then cocooning it in silk. The whole process, in agonising detail. What Verhoeven treats us to over the next 100 minutes is a garish, extended version of the same idea. In many respects it’s a warm-up for Basic Instinct, with Jeroen Krabbé in the Michael Douglas role and Renée Soutendijk as the blonde, deadly spider. The read-across isn’t total and for much of the film it isn’t really clear who is the … Read more
Promising Young Woman
A #MeToo-fuelled drama produced by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company, starring Carey Mulligan and directed and written by Killing Eve’s Emerald Fennell. Promising Young Woman is full of promising young women but recently gained extra notoriety because a Variety review of the film apparently suggested that Carey Mulligan wasn’t quite hot enough to pull off the role of vengeful temptress luring drunk men to their fate. That comment was actually about Mulligan’s performance rather than her looks. But the story now has grown its own legs. Either way, an attractive young woman who is not hot enough to tempt a heterosexual man wearing several pairs of beer goggles. Pause to think about that. And … Read more
Murder by Contract
Shot in seven days and decades ahead of its time, Murder by Contract is a lean, spare, ascetic, almost arthouse film noir from 1958 and was once described by Martin Scorsese as “The film that has influenced me most.” It stars Vince Edwards, an actor who is not particularly well known but who is particularly good as the almost existential hero who weasels his way into the hitman business and ends up – in the film’s protracted climax – confronted with the job too far, the one revealing an actual heart beating away beneath his refrigerated exterior. The setup is exquisitely done. Claude (Edwards) urgently insinuates himself into the good books of hitman … Read more
The Little Drummer Girl
Is the 1984 flop The Little Drummer Girl really a spy thriller, as it says on the tin, or an existential drama about a woman losing her mind because she believed in nothing to start with? Diane Keaton stars in this adaptation of a semi-successful John Le Carré novel (attempts have been made to re-appraise it since the author’s death), playing an actress recruited by the Israeli secret service to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist network. Le Carré (real name David Cornwell) based “Charlie” on his half sister, the actress Charlotte Cornwell, who around this time was suing a UK newspaper for suggesting her “bum is too big”. She won, on the grounds that … Read more
Omen
Belgian rapper Baloji’s feature debut Omen (Augure in French) starts with an image that might have come from a spaghetti western. To a whistled tune on the soundtrack a lone rider on horseback pitches up at a watering hole. Dismounting, the figure pulls one of her breasts from under her dark robes and squirts what looks like bloody milk into the water. It’s an arresting and unsettling start to a film that mixes stuff like this – African magical realism, you could call it – with a seemingly mundane story of a black African and his white European wife-to-be back in the Congo to sort out some family business. For Koffi (Marc Zinga) … Read more
Sense and Sensibility
Ragebait Sense and Sensibility from the Hallmark Channel, which seems perverse on the face of it. The home of white-sliced drama brings us a Jane Austen adaptation peopled with black faces. Bonnets and breeches are as per, stately piles visited, manners and refinement much in evidence. Before the purists take up their burning torches, this version does have something. Chiefly its two stars, Deborah Ayorinde and Bethany Antonia, as the sisters Austen teases mightily with suitors appropriate and inappropriate, blabbermouth cousins, silly-arse older men and busybody older women. Elinor the practical, Marianne the impetuous, which is how “sense and sensibility” translates in the 21st century, with a bit of poetic licence. Among the … Read more
