Popular Reviews
The Act of Killing
“For killing people trousers should be thick,” says Anwar, the “star” and chief exhibit in this bizarre documentary. He’s the retired head executioner of an Indonesian death squad reliving his glory days garrotting hundreds if not thousands of “communists” (ie anyone in the way) with a piece of thick wire in the mid 1960s. And though now knocking on a bit he shows us how he did it, in the place he did it, a cement yard out the back of what looks like a restaurant. Bizarre though this is, there is more to come, because what the makers of this film have done – not sure if it was their idea or … Read more
Rome, Open City
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 June The sack of Rome, AD455 On this day in the 455th year of the Christian or Common Era, Rome was sacked. Actually, this is a touch ambiguous, because Rome had already been pillaged twice before, in 390BC by the Gauls fighting the Roman in the Battle of the Allia; and in AD410, in the attack of the Visigoths led by Alaric. In AD455 it was the Vandal king Genseric who marched on Rome, claiming a peace treaty between himself and Emperor Valentinian III had been violated when Emperor Petronius Maximus had usurped Valentinian and seized the throne. Out of … Read more
Westward the Women
No “bundling” – that’s the law as laid down by Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor). Female-centric western Westward the Women is not only a clear influence on Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff but a great demonstration of the talents of director William Wellman, who’d been doing westerns for 30 years by the time he got round to shooting this 1951 movie, so knew exactly what it was all about. The story is about a convoy of women making the arduous journey out West, where there’s a chronic shortage of men. Sign up and choose your husband is the big idea – it’s the women who do the choosing, picking out the man they fancy from … Read more
The Tango Lesson
Sally Potter took quite a chance with her 1997 movie The Tango Lesson, by casting herself as herself in a lightly fictionalised version of her relationship with tango dancer Pablo Verón. Potter does like taking risks, though. Her previous film, Orlando, was an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s story about a character (Tilda Swinton) who travels through history changing gender as he/she goes, and cast a man, Quentin Crisp (the self-confessed “stately homo of England”), as Queen Elizabeth I. After The Tango Lesson came Yes, in which all the dialogue was in iambic pentameter. In comparison The Tango Lesson is a restrained affair, about a film director between projects who is entranced by a … Read more
Beats
There are two films from 2019 called Beats, both heavily into music. This is the other one – British (Scottish, more specifically) and set in the 1990s world of rave culture. I haven’t seen the American Beats, hip-hop to the core, so can’t say which one comes out on top but Brian Welsh’s Beats sets a high bar. A bit of background. In the 1980 and 90s, ideologically committed to staying out of the economic sphere, the UK government turned its attention instead to policing the population’s behaviour, with new controls on what people could watch (the Video Nasties panic), who they could have sex with (the notorious Section 28 of the innocuous … Read more
House on Haunted Hill
When you buy a Bentley – as you do – you’re not looking for a holographic dashboard, an in-car virtual chauffeur, or an ejector seat. You want walnut and leather everywhere. The same is true of some horror movies. House on Haunted Hill was originally directed in 1958 by William Castle, the man who fitted cinemas seats with buzzers, had skeletons drop from the ceiling. Castle was – in the best sense of the word, a horrible man. In 1958 wonderful Vincent Price was the star. In 1999 for this remake it’s the magnificent Geoffrey Rush – as a crazy millionaire called Price – complete with pencil moustache, cravat and lop-sided leer. The … Read more
Tuesday
Films about pretty young people dying miserably of some terrible but usually not disfiguring condition can be a bit of a drag. Tuesday writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusić has found a way of injecting a bit of zip – adding a bit of the weird supernatural. We’re told from all the publicity that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the star, but in fact Lola Petticrew more than capably holds the whole thing together as Tuesday, a teenager with not long to live, who is visited one day by a talking macaw that can change size at will. She intuits instantly that this is Death itself (we already knew that because an early montage sequence has shown us … Read more
Downfall
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 October Nazi leaders sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials, 1946 On the afternoon of this day in 1946, the individual sentences were read out at the conclusion of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The defendants were all political and military leaders of the Third Reich, and were charged with a) crimes against peace, b) planning and waging wars of aggression, c) war crimes and d) crimes against humanity. Several notable Nazis were not present – Adolf Hitler, Martin Boorman, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. Three were already known to be dead; it was assumed Boorman was still alive. He was … Read more
In Harm’s Way
Did the world need Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way in 1965? Does it need it now? After all if you’re in the market for a big, formless war movie shot in expensive-looking black and white and starring John Wayne, there is and was 1962’s The Longest Day. But Day was Europe and Way is the Pacific, the thinking obviously went. And so here we are. The action kicks off in Pearl Harbor on the evening before it’s bombed by the Japanese. By the end of the attack the film’s two main characters, heroic Captain Rock Torrey (John Wayne) and his no-less-courageous first officer Commander Paul Eddington (Kirk Douglas), have both been busted down … Read more
Savage State
Savage State is a western in French. Just that fact makes this film, also known as L’état sauvage, unusual and worth a watch. Is that enough though? Not quite, but as with Frenchness so with the rest of its many idiosyncrasies. This is a strangely bland film packed with unusual and often pungent elements. The setting for one. We’re in the teeth of the American Civil War, but rather than being on one side or another we’re with the neutrals, the French settlers ordered from afar by Napoleon III to take no part in the conflict. Early scenes establish a frontier setting of double-cross and gunfights, contraband and big characters, in particular the … Read more
The Five Devils
A close relative of Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman, The Five Devils (Les Cinq Diables in the original French) starts off with a one two three of scenarios which, if you’re coming to this movie cold (as I did) are designed to make you wonder just what you’ve signed on for – a horror movie, something at the luxe James Bond end of film-making, or even something much more ordinary, workaday, as those two opening impressions give way to a third. An aquarobics class, run by Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) who, when not exhorting her “girls” (senior citizens) to give it some heft, spends her spare time wild-water swimming in a wintry alpine lake that’s … Read more
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
When Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was first proposed, no one imagined that the sequel to the huge hit of 2018 was going to be made without its star. Chadwick Boseman died in 2020, having kept his battles with colon cancer super-heroically to himself. What to do? Cast someone else in his place? It was an option, and one Boseman’s own brother Derrick suggested, as a memorial to the character Chadwick had played. Or marshal the forces of CG to bring the lead actor back to digital life? For various reasons neither was considered a goer – social media kickback always being an issue. In the end, writer/director Ryan Coogler et al decided to … Read more
