Popular Reviews
The Drummer
A typically copper-bottomed performance by Danny Glover isn’t just the making of The Drummer, it sets the tone for the entire film. He’s been doing this sort of thing for ever – long before Lethal Weapon more or less institutionalised his shtick – and here plays the Vietnam veteran who runs a drop-in centre called The Drummer, which caters for serving military personnel who want out. It’s 2007 and George W Bush has just ordered “the surge” in Iraq, and in an all-hands-on-deck move the army is sending back into the field of conflict people who really shouldn’t be there, either because they’re exhausted and have done too many tours already, or because they’re … Read more
Daddio
The conceit of Daddio is that it’s just two people in a car driving from JFK Airport into New York City. It’s a yellow cab and the driver is played by Sean Penn, the passenger by Dakota Johnson. As the car rolls towards the city they talk. At first Clark makes cab driver smalltalk, kneejerk remarks about the modern world and how everything has gone to the bad. Then he shifts on to giving her the wealth of his wisdom, and eventually, after a cool appraisal, she obviously comes to the conclusion that he’s mostly mouth and starts to respond. This is what the film is about, their wide-ranging conversation, but returning regularly … Read more
Bathory: Countess of Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 August Hungary founded by St Stephen, 1000 On this day in 1000, Hungary was established as a country in the Carpathian basin by Stephen I. The area had been settled by semi-nomadic tribes out of the Urals, led by Arpad (c845-c907), and his descendants consolidated their power in the region. Stephen’s father, Géza (grandson of Arpad), had made peace with the Holy Roman Empire and started the process of turning the country Christian. Stephen, once he had dealt with a rival claim to the throne by Koppány, his uncle, continued the process, applying to Pope Sylvester II for the insignia … Read more
The Room
Weirdo sci-fi The Room has plot to spare and every time it feels like it’s about to hit a dead end of genre familiarity the cul de sac reveals itself to be a road to somewhere else. The first “dead end” comes early on. After a boastful credit sequence during which much has been made of the fact that this is an “original idea by Christian Volckman”, with “written by” input by blah, and “collaboration and dialogs” by blah and blah, a strangely familiar story appears to get going. A couple who have moved out of the city and bought a doer-upper in upstate New York. They unload boxes, they throw old furniture … Read more
Rose Plays Julie
Rose Plays Julie arrives on screens an entire year late. I have an email from January 2020 telling me it would be out in “Spring 2020”, but here we are in Spring 2021, after a year of slippage. Presumably directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy were waiting for the cinemas to re-open and eventually gave up. I’m glad they did. This is a brilliant film, and while it probably would suit the claustrophobic murk of a big theatre, the confines of a living room don’t do it too much harm. “These are operatic film makers in search of a bigger better subject,” is what I wrote in my notes for Mister John, the … Read more
19 September 2016-09-19
Out This Week Everybody Wants Some!! (E One, cert 15) About perfect, Richard Linklater’s ode to university life when he was a lad is a portrait of 1980s guys just hanging out and having fun, getting laid, listening to music, crashing parties and playing sports. Not much work gets done. It’s done in an Altman-esque overlapping style, pumps music of the era onto the soundtrack and is thick with cultural references to make us feel like we’re there – Space Invaders games as recreation, My Sharona on a car radio, the Burt Reynolds moustache still a non-ironic look. There are no big names and you’d be tempted to think Linklater is aiming for … Read more
Clemency
We’ve all seen prison dramas – the tough lives of inmates in a heartless system patrolled by brutes, policed by sadists and presided over by a martinet. Clemency isn’t that sort of film. Nor is it film-as-entertainment, be warned, but a grim and sobering look at US prison life from an unusual angle, the warden’s. Opening up with a pre-credits scene that follows an execution on death row, which ends up being a botched, messy and gruelling one, for the man who’s being killed, the people watching and the warden supervising the whole thing, the film proper then concerns itself with the preparations for the execution of another man, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) … Read more
All Quiet on the Western Front
Not a remake, say the team behind 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, referring to the legendary 1930 movie anyone would be a fool to try and remake. More another adaptation of the book it was based on, they say, Erich Maria Remarque’s serialised novel from 1928 about the grim reality of the First World War from the average soldier’s point of view. This is true. I’ve seen both, and the 1930 version less than six months ago, so can easily see what’s different in this adaptation. Absent, for example, is the class element – they were posh boys in the 1930 film and one of their great bugbears once they’d joined … Read more
The Major and the Minor
The Major and the Minor is an elevator pitch movie selling itself on its title. As to what’s in it for the viewer, quite a lot if you like comedy that rides right into inappropriateness. It’s written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and one of the joys of watching this under-regarded 1942 comedy is looking on as two masters of their craft get into one tight spot after another – sometimes deliberately – and then Houdini-like spring themselves free. Maybe when they first came up with the idea Brackett and Wilder didn’t realise that half-price train travel out of New York in the 1940s applied only to the under-12s. Maybe they thought … Read more
Beats Being Dead
The story behind Beats Being Dead (Etwas Besseres als den Tod) is an unusual one. Three hot German film directors belonging to what’s often loosely termed the Berlin School were corresponding together about the upcoming 40th anniversary of the DFFB (Berlin’s film and TV academy), and generally bemoaning the state of German cinema – what was there to celebrate etc? And so they decided to make a trio of loosely linked films to plug what they saw as a few gaps. Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler were the dynamic trio and, following Petzold’s lead, they set their stories in the bleak and romantic forests of Thuringia, in a place called Dreileben, … Read more
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
The Ruby in the jolly and entertaining Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is, true to billing, a Kraken. Which is to say, Wikipedia definition, a giant sea monster that’s found off the coast of Norway, according to old sailor lore. Krakens don’t turn up in movies as often as vampires, zombies or even werewolves, but there are more of these folkloric creatures about than you might think – Victor Hugo and Jules Verne wrote about them, so did Alfred Lord Tennyson and Herman Melville (in Moby-Dick). John Wyndham perhaps most famously, in his novel The Kraken Wakes. But they also make an appearance in Game of Thrones and Pirates of the Caribbean. So Krakens … Read more
Black Rock
Three young women are chased around an island by three crazed ex-soldier guys in Katie Aselton’s boo-goes-there horror story which would slot nicely into the big book of feminist films if it weren’t for the gratuitous (oh come on) nudity. Not that there’s anything wrong with god-given nakedness. But back to the film. Directed by Aselton and co-written with her partner, Mark Duplass, Black Rock takes three old schoolfriends, Aselton, Lake Bell and Katie Bosworth, sends them off to a remote island they used to visit as kids, but not before pointing out that one of the three did something bad with another of the trio’s boyfriend some years back, and that the … Read more
