Popular Reviews
Grand Theft Hamlet
Though the title almost does all the explaining you’ll ever need, to spell it out in a full sentence Grand Theft Hamlet is an attempt to stage the Shakespeare play Hamlet inside the online version of Grand Theft Auto. The background. It’s the third Covid lockdown in the UK and husband and wife Sam Crane, a theatre director, and Pinny Grylls, a documentary maker, are suddenly workless and at home cooling their heels. He’s a bit of a console jockey. She isn’t. Inspired by a comment from their kids about a YouTube gamer going by Dream (31.9 million subscribers as I type) who’s been staging performances inside Minecraft, they wonder if they can … Read more
Brian and Charles
Feelgood British low-budget whimsy, Brian and Charles‘s only real fault is that it’s taken the maddening decision to tell its story as a mock-doc. “Twee” – a regular criticism – could be lined up as another possible criticism, though I suspect that “fanciful” is what the naysayers really mean. In which case discard the bulk of Hollywood’s output. It started life as a short costing £500 in 2017, which British TV station Channel 4 liked and wanted to convert into a series. That never happened but C4 did put up some of the money for this film, the feature debut of director Jim Archer. Though really the film belongs to its two stars, David … 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
Benediction
Terence Davies struggled to raise the finance for Benediction, as he does so often with his films. There’s no multiplex demand for Emily Dickinson (subject of his last feature, 2016’s A Quiet Passion) or Edith Wharton (2000’s The House of Mirth), he’s told, and in any case the uncompromising Davies isn’t the sort of writer/director to meet audiences halfway with explication-heavy dialogue. Producers and money men take fright. And yet, every time a new Davies movie does finally make it to the screen, it turns out that there is an audience for it, the people who have some idea who this modernist poet was, or that infamous writer, or want to know more. … Read more
Carry On Cleo
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 January Julian calendar takes effect, 45BC On this day in 45BC, or 708AUC (Ab Urbis Conditae – since the founding of the city) as it was known at the time, the Julian calendar was first put into effect. It had been introduced the year before by Julius Caesar, and replaced the Calendar of Numa (which had earlier replaced the Calendar of Romulus). The Julian calendar consisted of 365 days divided into 12 months with a leap year every four years. This means that a single year averages out at 365.25 days. The solar year is in fact a few minutes … Read more
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands
The title of the movie Kiss the Blood Off My Hands makes a promise that can’t be fulfilled. An attention grabber, there was talk of changing it even before the film debuted. And so it became Blood on My Hands (which is how the IMDb has it). In some parts of the USA it went out as the even more timid The Unafraid. Dramatic though the original title is, it’s all wrong for a story about an accidental killer and his gal and is more suited to a lurid 1960s shocker or a 1980s video nasty than a 1948 melodrama. It’s the first in a long string of fascinating movies made by Burt … Read more
Spirits of the Dead
The film equivalent of the collateralised debt obligation, the portmanteau movie generally bundles together stuff of questionable quality then sells it on using a big name or a big star to help it achieve a decent credit rating. In Spirits of the Dead (aka Tales of Mystery and Imagination), three adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe tales, there are plenty of big names – Federico Fellini, Roger Vadim and Louis Malle as directors. Stars such as Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Jane Fonda and Terence Stamp. But no matter how glossy the name, or even how polished the product, the rule of the portmanteau movie applies here as everywhere else – the finished product is less … Read more
Romería
The intimate, highly personal family drama shot in an unobtrusive, semi-documentary way is Spanish auteur Carla Simón’s speciality, and in Romería, her latest film, she stays true to her vocation. Born in the mid-1980s, Simón was orphaned at an early age and raised by an uncle. In the early 2000’s she set off on a quest to find out more about her father’s family. The story here is pretty similar – Marina (Llúcia Garcia) arrives in Vigo in the early years of the 21st century, to chase down the paperwork she needs to get her into university to study film but also to dig out information about her parents. They fell in love … Read more
The Man in the White Van
The Man in the White Van slots into the mini-1970s horror revival that’s been going on for a while now. See the abduction horror of The Black Phone, or the folk horror of Midsommar, or the slightly Exorcist-y vibe of The Dark and the Wicked, or the Hammer-esque The Reckoning, just a few among many. That said, this movie is for people who don’t remember the 1970s and don’t particularly want to. Who find it all a bit long ago and perhaps a bit lank and unclean. Maybe that’s writer/director Warren Skeels’s take on the decade. It’s definitely how his movie comes across. Loosely based on the real life case of Florida serial … Read more
Night Train to Paris
Here’s Leslie Nielsen before Airplane! changed the course of his career, in Night Train to Paris, a curio from 1964. Nielsen plays a former spy dragged back into the game over a valuable computer program. Alan Hamilton’s task: to get the tape containing the program to Paris pdq. The impediment: so far, everyone who’s handled it has died at the hands of a fat assassin. Can Alan succeed where everyone else has failed? And will exotic beauty Catherine Carrel (Aliza Gur) be able to help him? I remember making the same journey, London Victoria to Gare du Nord in Paris, and if this film does one great service, it helps explain why that … Read more
The Hi-Lo Country
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 July Potsdam Conference, 1945 On this day in 1945, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman arrived in Potsdam, where they were over the next two weeks to decide the shape of the world in the wake of the Second World War. The three powers had met before, at Yalta, in 1945 while the war was still coming to an end, when Franklin Roosevelt was still alive, and before then in Tehran in 1943, when it had started to look like the Allies might be triumphant. Germany had surrendered nine weeks before Potsdam, and the conference largely was about Germany’s … Read more
The Price of Wisdom
Often billed as a drama but obviously a farce, The Price of Wisdom is a British “quota quickie”, one of many films churned out in the 1930s to shore up domestic production. “Quota quickie” is usually a useful synonym for “pile of crap” but this is an exception and if you’re on the lookout for a delightfully eccentric, highly tweedy, very British old-school light comedy, your train has just pulled in. There’s enough plot to power a two-hour movie and the only real argument you could mount against this 66-minute film is that it has to move too fast to get everything in. The actors are literally gabbling their lines to keep up … Read more
