Popular Reviews
Mara
“Over 40% of the world’s population suffer from sleep paralysis,” the written preamble to Mara informs us, before going on with: “Two thirds of them describe being attacked by a demonic entity.” These fanciful statistics delivered, director Clive Tonge (who presumably wrote this nonsense with co-writer Jonathan Frank) gets his movie underway. It is, you won’t be surprised to discover, a horror movie about demonic entities – just the one, in fact – who visit people in the night and pin them to the mattress while they lie in bed asleep, or are frozen in fear half awake while all this is going on. The star is Olga Kurylenko, who plays a forensic … Read more
Les Diaboliques
If you’re working yourself towards film-buffery, you really need to have seen something by master of suspense Henri-Georges Clouzot – “the French Hitchcock” he is often called, when Jacques Deray or Claude Chabrol aren’t using the sobriquet. You may already have seen the masterful The Wages of Fear, Clouzot’s 1953 tale of gelignite being driven across the South American jungle. It’s well worth adding Les Diaboliques, 1954’s tale of the murder most horrid – drugged, drowned – of a brutish husband by a fragile wife (Vera Clouzot) and his scheming mistress (Simone Signoret, none better). Job done, except the body keeps disappearing. Less a whodunit, more a wheresitgone, Les Diaboliques also strongly prefigures … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 17 – Box of Tricks
A thin, confusingly plotted and frankly rather dull episode is only emphasised by the terrible picture and sound quality (on the old box set I’m watching this series on, anyway). And it’s a Venus Smith episode, which means a song from the chanteuse, but not until after the opening credits. Before they roll, we watch as a magician in the night club does the disappearing lady trick. Glamorous assistant enters magic box covered in spangles. Magician utters the magic words. Glamorous assistant exits magic box covered in spangles and blood – dead. We cut to a seemingly unrelated story, set in the house of a senior military gent (Maurice Hedley) in a wheelchair, overseen … Read more
All Is Forgiven
All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonné) was the first feature Mia Hansen-Løve made, in 2007, when she was about 25/26. It’s an interesting debut and sets the tone for a career built on small, carefully crafted human-relationship dramas going for the slow burn rather than the big melodramatic bang. The Nordic name is a bit of a bum steer. Hansen-Löve is French, was born in Paris, and works in the distinctly French cinematic tradition, itself a continuation of the French literary tradition – Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola etc. Which is another way of saying that her films are about recognisable people having a bad time. Here it’s never really certain whether it’s the … Read more
The Commuter
Liam Neeson. A Very Particular Set of Skills. They’re back in The Commuter, in which everyone’s favourite geri-actioner gets physical… this time on a train. This is the fourth collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown (skills in Berlin), Non-Stop (Skills on a plane), Run All Night (Skills in New York) and now Skills on the way home from work. If it seems like there have been a lot more of these films than that, you’re probably also adding Taken (three of them) and Walk Among the Tombstones to the tally. They were directed by different people but also featured a gravelly and largely unsmiling Neeson being forced into a corner and … Read more
Licorice Pizza
Paul Thomas Anderson’s quest to make the perfect 1970s movie continues with Licorice Pizza, a living, breathing simulacrum of the sort of film that stalked the landscape before George Lucas came along with changed/ruined (according to taste) everything with Star Wars. Ironically, another Lucas film, American Graffiti, might have served as a moodboard for his attempt to outdo 2014’s Inherent Vice – itself an attempt to outdo 1999’s Magnolia – along with Robert Altman’s rambling, discursive Nashville, though the storyline deep down is actually A Star Is Born – guy on the way down meets gal on the way up – with a scrappy side order of What’s Up, Doc. The guy is … Read more
Andrei Rublev
A film about an icon maker called Andrei made by a film maker called Andrei. Any read across from 15th century painter Andrei Rublev to 20th century auteur Andrei Tarkovsky is entirely deliberate, though the surprise of watching what’s often described as Tarkovsky’s master work is how little Andrei Rublev actually features in it. He’s the bystander, the observer, in his own story, which is actually more the story of the times Rublev lived in, as recreated by Tarkovksy in, remarkably, only his second film. How at this stage in his career Tarkovsky got the funding from an avowedly anti-God communist regime to make a film about a man of God is one … Read more
Barnyard
Otis, the barnyard bull, has udders. Because, kids, that’s what bulls have, isn’t it? Voiced by Kevin James, and with a first name that is generally appended to a male, it’s clear that either Otis is a transgender animal or cowardice has taken hold somewhere at the design stage in the latest animal CG comedy off the conveyor belt. This “me too” effort from Paramount also has a plot that seems determined to fit in, not stand out, it being a recycling of The Lion King. Growing a pair, ironically, is what it’s about too. Otis is the young motorbiking cowlet (I’d call him a bullock but he clearly isn’t) about town who has … Read more
Jurassic World Dominion
Going into production, the makers of Jurassic World Dominion knew they had to deal with a raft of problems that most franchises don’t have to deal with. They couldn’t change the villain – one of the key ways that long-running franchises refresh their offering. In Jurassic Park movies the bad guy remains the dinosaur no matter how many crazed megalomaniac humans are injected into the mix. They also couldn’t really change the location. This isn’t a story of a world taken over by dinosaurs but of a theme park (essentially) going wrong. James Bond gets sent to Bermuda, or Brazil, or Baluchistan, or into space orbit or beneath the waves to ring the … Read more
Summer Window
When not co-creating, -writing and -directing the glorious Babylon Berlin TV series, Henk Handloegten likes to make films like Summer Window (Fenster zum Sommer), dramas that come front-loaded with a chunk of fantasy. The fantasy isn’t what his films are about, it’s more of a come-on, luring in the sceptical, who might find that they’ve lingered longer with his style of humane drama than they expected. In Good Bye Lenin!, which Handloegten co-wrote, the fantasy was more oblique, existing only in the mind of its East German characters, who were playing a gigantic game of make-believe with their frail mother, recently awake after a coma, in which the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen and … Read more
29 September 2014-09-29
Out in the UK This Week Edge of Tomorrow (Warner, cert 12, digital) As hyper-aware of his position in the culture as he is of a camera in relation to his three-quarter profile, Tom Cruise knows that a lot of people want to see him taking a kicking. Edge of Tomorrow (or Live. Die. Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow as it seems to have become) answers that demand, with Cruise playing a cocky jumped-up PR guy pressganged into the army (which answers the “how come a guy over 50 is still in any army?” question) who then relives the same day over and over again, after he gets contaminated with alien blood. What plays out is … Read more
Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea
OK, deep breath for the title alone. Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (or Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem in the original Czech) is also conceptually the sort of film that requires a super-oxygenation session before diving in. It’s made in the 1970s but set in the 1990s, where time travel is a leisure activity that’s part of everyday life. Here, a bunch of aged Nazis who have been kept relatively youthful by the regular swallowing of anti-ageing pills plan to return to 1944, taking with them a hydrogen bomb that will allow Hitler to win the war. Got that? To that concept another one. Of two twin brothers … Read more
