Popular Reviews
American Perfekt
It’s a good rule of thumb that road movies set out in any American desert and made on a low budget have a knack of turning out OK. There’s often something fairly oddball going on too. Made in 1997, the same year that its star would appear in Tarantino’s career-boosting Jackie Brown, American Perfekt sees Robert Forster playing a psychiatrist driving through the empty desert who stops to pick up a female hitchhiker (Amanda Plummer). She is clearly deranged but no matter how mad she apparently seems, he’s even madder – it’s only thanks to a coin toss that he’s giving her a ride, rather than killing her. Half an hour or so … Read more
The Phoenician Scheme
Symmetrics. Opulence. Screwball comedy pacing. Whimsy. Deadpan. A nostalgic evocation of old Hollywood. The Phoenician Scheme must be a Wes Anderson movie and if nothing else it finally does with Bill Murray what should have been done long ago. It casts him as God. Wes Anderson. By now about 50 per cent of his potential audience have had enough of the tableaux vivants and the mid-century-modern sets and candy colours, the endless digressing, and films that seem longer than they actually are (The French Dispatch and Asteroid City were both only about 1 hour 45 minutes, but felt longer). But fear not, The Phoenician Scheme has pace, it has jokes and it has … Read more
Cosmopolis
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 September Occupy Wall Street starts, 2011 On this day in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement, unable to set up its protest against US financial institutions in its original two preferred locations, took over Zuccotti Park, New York. With its rallying cry “We are the 99 per cent,” it made reference to the growing disparity in income distribution in the US (back more or less to its levels around the time of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, in spite of more than 80 years of relative prosperity) and set off a wave of similar protests all over the world. … Read more
Wer
In any fight for the top slot in the “humanoid monsters of the movies” competition, zombies and vampires fight it out to be number one, while werewolves lope along way behind. It could be worse – the mummies in their tatty bandages get barely any attention and even further down the field are invisible men who are hardly ever seen (geddit?). So maybe the werewolf doesn’t have it too bad, all things considered. At first glance 2013’s Wer appears to be in the business of pushing the fanged, hirsute lycanthrope even further down the pecking order. But first a pre-credits sequence in which a nice French family on a camping holiday are subjected … Read more
Salvo
What do solitary hitmen want? To get out. Or a normal family life. Or for the senseless killing to stop. Salvo gives us versions of all these possibilities, with masses of style and a cool, thrilling central performance by Saleh Bakri as the titular Salvo – it means “safe” in Italian, a name that can be read ironically, depending on which end of the gun you are at. Cannes liked it, and awarded it the grand prize in Critics Week in 2013, which is the one they hand out to new talent. Which situates Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza alongside Bernardo Bertolucci, Leos Carax, Wong Kar-wai, Julia Ducournau and Andrea Arnold. For its money … Read more
Clochemerle
Broadcast in 1972, the same year it was agreed that the UK would join the European Common Market, Clochemerle caused a stir when it was first shown. That’s because this charming show was all about a urinal. This pissoir (the word is never used) is erected in a small French village by the progressive mayor and town clerk, and causes ructions after the forces of conservatism decide it’s an affront to deceny and campaign to have it taken down. It was an unusual TV show in many respects. It was an international collaboration (with West German TV) in an era when such things were rare. It was an adaptation of a French comic … Read more
Eliminators
It’s easy to get sniffy about films like Eliminators, spam-fisted actioners featuring one lunk or another kicking the life out of some meathead, delivering the coup de grace with a quip that’s meant to be James Bond but is more often than not Steven Seagal. Even Seagal has been known to make good films, so let’s park the prejudices and get down to action. Scott Adkins, a British actor, plays a federal agent hiding out in London on some witness protection program, whose life is upended when three local desparadoes looking for a stash of cocaine break in to his house waving guns about. They threaten his daughter, bad mistake, and are soon … Read more
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 June Tiananmen Square Massacre, 1989 On this day in the 1989, one of the most recognisable images of recent decades flashed around the world as Type 59 tanks marched in single file through Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, while facing them stood a lone figure – “Tank Man”. Protest had been gathering pace since April, when students had first gathered to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer. The mourning developed into a call for political and economic reform, more accountability, freedom of expression and democratic rights, and at first the government tolerated the protests. By May the … Read more
Manthan
The title of the Indian film Manthan is often rendered in English as The Churning – not some psychological state of distress but actual physical churning. As in rich, creamy milk into butter and whey. Because this is a film about the setting up of a milk co-operative, financed by the dairy farmers it’s all about. Before you doomscrool away, it’s a fascinating film, from its unique opening title card – “500,000 Farmers of Gujarat present… Manthan” – to its triumphant conclusion. Along the way there is triumph over adversity and collective action prevailing over greedy self-interest in what’s essentially an underdog story playing out under the umbrella of benign government intervention. How far away we … Read more
Pacifiction
You’ll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump. It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet American (either version) or 1967’s The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But Greene’s complex-hero-abroad scenario turns up regularly in other people’s work – for example in The Tailor of Panama (writer John Le Carré obviously channelling Greene) and in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (Denis Johnson doing the same). And so to our man in Havana. Tahiti, in fact, where the compromised hero is a gent called De Roller. Dressed in a white suit … Read more
Le Samouraï
Jean-Pierre Melville’s stylish 1967 hitman flick Le Samouraï has danced down the decades, leaving its mark on everything from William Friedkin’s The French Connection, to Walter Hill’s The Driver (and, by extension, Nicolas Winding Refn’s homage, Drive), Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, Anton Corbijn’s The American and the Coens’ No Country for Old Men. Even John Wick can trace its ancestry back to Le Samouraï, Keanu Reeves being a 21st century update on the lone wolf operator going into battle against forces known and unknown. The opening shot alone makes Le Samouraï noteworthy. A darkened room, a man lying on a bed. The camera does one of those perspective-altering Vertigo zooms, gets about halfway into … Read more
Heroic Purgatory
The question mark that hangs over Kiju Yoshida’s 1970 movie Heroic Purgatory is: is he joking? Is this a grand avant-garde modernist movie told in a deliberately non-narrative way, or is it Yoshida parodying the same, as if to pour scorn on an idea prevalent at the time – that you can’t break the bourgeois system using bourgeois tools? Either way, whether he’s joking or being deadly serious, the one thing that will haul you from opening to closing credits nearly two hours later is Yoshida’s astonishing visual sense. This is a fabulously photographed movie full of stark, awkward, angular compositions shot in a high-contrast and often high-key monochrome, and it all takes place … Read more
