Popular Reviews
Bitter Rice
Italian neorealism meets the crime drama in 1949’s Bitter Rice (Ris Amaro), Giuseppe De Santis’s gritty fable about a pair of petty thieves joining a horde of itinerant workers to plant and harvest rice. If drama is life minus the boring bits, De Santis is aware that neorealism at its worst can be a bit like life plus extra boring bits. So he brightens things up with crime thrills and a cast full of good-looking young things. In case we’re still not feeling it, more often than is absolutely necessary he’ll poke his camera into the cleavage of a few of his female stars as well. The thieves are played by Vittorio Gassman … Read more
Hacking Democracy
It’s amazing what a bit of solid investigative journalism can turn up. Hacking Democracy is essentially an interim report on the work of the Black Box Voting (BBV) organisation, a group of public spirited US individuals who were set up by activist Bev Harris after she discovered that a US senator had been the CEO of the company that counted his votes. BBV started asking awkward questions about the nation’s “impregnable” electronic voting system after cock-ups and/or fixes (delete according to political allegiance) at both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Couching questions so cautiously that you suspect that legal departments might have had a hand in writing the script, the documentary nevertheless … Read more
Rimini
Cheers aren’t what you get in an Ulrich Seidl movie but let’s give one anyway for his return to fiction after a ten-year absence, with Rimini, a glisteningly dark, drily amusing character study of a man who’d be funny if he wasn’t so pitiful. Actually, he’s quite funny too. Looking not a million miles away from Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, and sharing a few of his character traits, Michael Thomas plays Richie Bravo, a former pop singer in Austria who now lives in Rimini, where a shadowy vestige of his old life still plays out, albeit largely in Richie’s head. As Seidl’s film opens Richie is back home in Austria and re-connecting … Read more
Rush
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 February Enzo Ferrari born, 1898 On this day in 1898, Enzo Anselmo Ferrari was born. The man who would later be known as Il Commendatore, founder and leader of the Ferrari racing team (and car manufacturer) was taken to a racing track as a kid and realised immediately that he wanted to be a driver. By the early 1920s he was Alfa Romeo’s test driver, and when the company decided to outsource their racing unit, it was Ferrari that ran it. He went solo during the Second World War, during which time Alfa paid him not to compete, and by … Read more
Rudo y Cursi
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 March The Wanderers FC win first FA Cup, 1872 Today in 1872, the London football club Wanderers won the first football association cup, the oldest football competition in the world. It was the first of three wins of the cup for the club. The FA Cup is a knockout cup open to all football clubs who are established enough, and with facilities enough, to take part. In 1871-72, being the first season of the cup, there was a piecemeal and eccentric series of regulations – Wanderers managed to get to the final having won only one of their four games … Read more
It Happened Tomorrow
A journalist is given a fast-track to glory when he starts getting tomorrow’s headlines today in It Happened Tomorrow, a bright and breezy fantasy from 1944. It’s easy to imagine Cary Grant in this movie. He was first choice to be its lead, and Frank Capra was meant to direct. It’s also incredibly easy to imagine Capra being involved too. The corny fantasy It’s a Wonderful Life was only two years in the future. However, both are ably substituted. Grant by Dick Powell, then still en route from being a matinee crooner to his reinvention as a hard-bitten private detective later in the year in Murder, My Sweet (aka Farewell, My Lovely). And … Read more
City Streets
Gary Cooper was a long way from his craggy, motionless Mount Rushmore phase when he made City Streets in 1931. In fact he still looked boyish enough to play a character called Kid, a fairground worker who gets caught up with some gangsters, finds he has a taste for it and then lives to regret it. It’s a Dashiell Hammett story and it is typically Hammett – complex – with two interwoven fields of play, the romantic and the criminal, each providing the obstacle to the smooth progress of the other, before the two eventually switch about. So Cooper and co-star Sylvia Sidney are required to cover a lot of emotional ground. He’s the … Read more
10 June 2013-06-10
Out in the UK this week Zero Dark Thirty (Universal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) “A lot of my friends have died trying to do this; I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.” The key line of dialogue, as uttered by Jessica Chastain in the drama about the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden. “Spared” – there’s a faintly biblical colour to that word and it’s deliberate. Mark Boal’s script is not only mechanically extremely good – so many characters are introduced so well in such a short time – but it also deals, with varying degrees of depth, with matters arising from the aftermath of 9/11. The use of torture as … Read more
Wanda
Barbara Loden only made one feature film and Wanda is it. A remarkable piece of determinedly non-Hollywood vérité, it features no hero, comes with no moralistic teachable points and hasn’t got much of a plot, unless a relentless slide towards the abyss counts as one. Loden was inspired to make it after reading a newspaper article about a woman who had thanked a judge for sending her to jail, because that way her entirely formless life would be given some shape. Imagine a life like that, Loden mused. And here’s what the musing delivered, a portrait of a woman without any of what Loden called “the equipment” needed to live an independent life. … Read more
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan
As handsome as its star, François Civil, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan was shot back-to-back with its bookend companion, The Three Musketeers: Milady, a pair of old-school spirited adventures full of flashing eyes and flashing blades. I read somewhere that it’s quite tonally different from other Musketeer movies. It didn’t seem so to me. I only recently watched its century-old predecessor, 1921’s The Three Musketeers, starring Douglas Fairbanks, and that is pretty much identical to this in storyline and feel. But then all Musketeer movies tell the same story – Alexandre Dumas’s original tale must be one of the least messed about with in moviedom. D’Artagnan, the cocksure whelp from Gascony, arrives in Paris and … Read more
Ferrari
The first obvious thing about Ferrari, a film from 2023, is that it was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, writer of 1969’s The Italian Job. Martin died in 2009! It’s taken a long time to get this film made. Michael Mann has been talking about it since the early years of the new millennium. Back then he was going to produce and Sydney Pollack was going to direct. In the end, after much to and fro, and with Pollack also dead en route, Mann wound up directing it himself. The second thing to say is that for a film about sexy cars, beautiful women, danger, speed, the thrill of the race and so … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 1 – Mr Teddy Bear
Ian Hendry has left, Patrick Macnee has been bumped up to star and Honor Blackman has been drafted in as a sidekick who’s not just a pretty face. But there’s more than just those cosmetic differences – if they are just that – going on. In the opener for series two, it’s clear things have gone just a tiny bit self-referential too and that The Avengers is beginning to push against not just the envelope of its own founding principles, but also against those of television. The self-referentiality comes in the opening scene, set in a TV studio where a notable traveller and writer is about to be interviewed in some highbrow arts show … Read more
