Popular Reviews
Avatar: The Way of Water
Discounting the documentaries about voyages to the bottom of the sea, James Cameron’s last two movies were 1997’s Titanic and 2009’s Avatar. Titanic was the biggest grossing movie of all time, until Avatar replaced it at the top. Success breeds sequels but with the best will in the world it’s hard to imagine what a Titanic follow-up would be about (Titanic II – “it’s still at the bottom of the Atlantic”). The same cannot be said about Avatar, and so it came as no surprise when Cameron announced in 2010 that a sequel was in the works. It took 12 years to get it onto the screens, in large part because Cameron decided … Read more
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 May Baron Münchhausen born, 1720 On this day in 1720, Hieronymous Carl Friedrich Baron von Münchhausen was born, in Bodenwerder, Hanover. An aristocrat by birth, Münchhausen was employed by Anthony Ulrich II of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, a member of the Habsburg dynasty, and followed him to Russia during the Russo-Turkish War (his employer being married to a Romanov). Münchhausen rose through the ranks, becoming a cornet, lieutenant and finally a captain, before retiring to his estate with his wife. There he would entertain guests with fabulously embroidered tales, particularly of his time fighting the Turks. Münchhausen knew his tales were fantastical, and … Read more
The Vourdalak
Dracula before Dracula, the original of The Vourdalak, Aleksei Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak, was written in 1839, nearly 60 years before Bram Stoker sat down to write his tale of the Undead. It’s a refreshingly different take on the story we’re all used to, with a focus, unsurprisingly given the title, on how the average everyday vampire might get along with his relations, blood and otherwise. This retelling of the story makes for a very drole movie, in the very French sense of the word. Not exactly comedic but prancing about in that territory somewhere and incarnated in the central character – the Jonathan Harker, if you like – an innocent … Read more
We Can Be Heroes
Robert Rodriguez takes the Spy Kids idea for another spin around the block, and crashes on the way. Spy Kids, if you don’t remember, was about kids stepping up when their James Bond-like parents got waylaid. Here the parents are not spies but superheroes, and after they’ve been captured by evil aliens their progeny band together to free them. The kids all have superpowers too. Noodles is stretchy, Slo-Mo can move super quickly, A Capella can sing at pitches so high and low that the laws of physics are bent out of shape. Rewind can turn back time. His sister, Fast Forward… you’re ahead of me. There are more of them, some of … Read more
The Legend of Rita
When Germany reunified after the fall of the Berlin Wall it wasn’t so much a merger as a hostile takeover – the Federal Republic swallowed the German Democratic Republic whole and set about digesting it. One way of doing things had lost and the other had won. You might have expected a certain amount of crowing from the winning side. And there probably was some, but overall the notable thing about post-unification Germany has been the lack of it. Again and again, if it’s made in Germany for German consumption, there’s an eagerness to demonstrate – to insist, almost – that the GDR wasn’t all bad. In fact, the new consensus seems to … Read more
Barbarian
A young woman in Detroit for a job interview turns up at the Airbnb she booked online only to find that there’s a man already in there. A double booking. It’s dark, it’s late and it’s raining and there’s a convention in town, so finding another place to stay is going to be a stretch. After several minutes of her wringing her hands and him shifting his weight nervously from one leg to another, he does the gallant thing – no, he doesn’t vacate and leave it to her, but he does offer her the bed. He’ll sleep on the sofa, he says. The bedroom door has a lock on it and he’s … Read more
The Breed
Five horny college kids head off to an idyllic island for a weekend of booze and death in this tiredly formulaic horror film which subjects the isolated 20somethings to violent interaction with dogs – German shepherds, to be precise. To spend more time on the plot than is strictly necessary, it seems that someone has genetically fiddled with the dogs’ minds, making them super-intelligent and super-angry. Though not, it would seem, constantly so. Which gives our buff crew time to get drunk, have a laugh, and get into their bikinis (not the boys, obviously). After wondering when the black guy (Hill Harper) is going to die, you might also ask yourself what function exactly … Read more
Back Roads
Having played the junior James Bond figure Alex Rider in Stormrider, and then a few teenage heartthrobs before bulking up to become a kind of Channing Tatum in waiting, Alex Pettyfer takes control of his own destiny by starring in his own film. It’s his directorial debut and a pretty good one, a knotty piece of American trash gothic about a family in trouble. As we open, Pettyfer’s blood-stained Harley is being grilled by cop Robert Patrick. Why did you kill her, the cop wants to know. But the question this film actually asks is not why but who? We know it’s a woman who’s dead, but which woman exactly? Harley’s life is … Read more
Lola
Back to the Future meets It Happened Here in Andrew Legge’s bold and original debut feature, Lola. What did you do during lockdown? Legge got out some pre-war wind-up cameras, threaded them with black and white film and shot a Nazi-inflected found-footage time-travel epic. Mad scientists are usually male and old but Legge’s heroes (if that’s what they are) are young and female, long-limbed aristo types fashioned after the Mitford sisters and played by Stefanie Martini, as Martha, and Emma Appleton as Thomasina. In a little preamble we’re given the found-footage set-up – reels of film found in the cellar of a country house in Sussex in 2021 – before we’re supposedly presented … Read more
Something to Remind Me
It’s called Toter Mann in German, the literal translation of which is Dead Man, but instead of calliing it that the distributors went with the possibly even more ironic Something to Remind Me for the English-language release of this mystery thriller, the first collaboration between writer/director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss. A TV movie is how it was described in 2001 when it aired in Germany, but these days that fairly nonsensical distinction has dropped away – it’s a movie, and a highly cinematic one at that. It hasn’t got the budget of the big screen movie but the thriller genre fits the bill, as does the atmosphere, sleek and chilly. Petzold, … Read more
Babes
Comedies about people who refuse to grow up tend to be about men (howls of “oh no they don’t”), but Pamela Adlon’s feature debut, Babes, reminds us that women get stuck too. If that doesn’t grab you as a concept, what if I just say Babes is Booksmart for grown-ups? Ish ish ish. Clever, funny, earthy, it’s co-written by Ilana Glazer (with Josh Rabinowitz), who also co-stars, and follows two lifelong friends through the birth of children into a choppy patch and out into calmer waters on the other side, wisecracking all the way, in that smart New York way. We meet Dawn (Michelle Buteau), heavily pregnant with her second child, and perma-singleton … Read more
The Last of Sheila
As namechecked by Rian Johnson while out on the promotion trail, The Last of Sheila looks like a good chunk of the inspiration for his Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery. Adding to its attraction are the names of the bizarre writing team behind this whodunit from 1973: Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. It was the only screenplay either of them would ever write and sprang from the murder-mystery evenings they used to put on for a bit of fun in New York. The director Herbert Ross, then probably most famous for directing Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, was at one of them and suggested Hopkins and Sondheim work one of … Read more
