Popular Reviews
One, Two, Three
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 August Berlin Wall goes up, 1961 On this day in 1961, Berliners woke up to a Berlin divided by a wall. The capital of Berlin had been partitioned in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like the rest of Germany, but in microcosm, Berlin was parcelled out between the victorious powers – US, UK, USSR and France. However, Berlin was entirely surrounded by Soviet territory, the allies’ parts of Germany being in the west of the country, and the fear amongst Berliners was that all of the city would be swallowed up by the Soviets. Stalin had already tried … Read more
The Ghost Breakers
1940’s The Ghost Breakers is one of the most successful comedy-horror movies ever made. Critically and at the box office it did well and it’s still regularly on the all-time-best shortlists when they’re being drawn up. It’s a haunted house/ghost/zombie movie with some random bad humans in the mix and stars Paulette Goddard as Mary Carter, a woman who as the movie opens is learning that she has inherited the Castle Maldito on Black Island, somewhere off the coast of Cuba. Rejecting offers from various parties keen to take it off her hands, she heads off to take possession of it, becoming entangled en route with Bob Hope’s Larry Lawrence, a radio gossip … Read more
To Live and Die in LA
To Live and Die in LA – the title is almost an invitation. Its director, William Friedkin, though born in Chicago, did live in Los Angeles, and that’s where he died aged 87 last week (I’m writing this on 18 August 2023), till the end a combative, charming, rough-edged, cultured man of many parts. The director who gave us the magisterial The French Connection and the blood-thinning The Exorcist stumbled at the box office with 1977’s Sorcerer (for all its merits nowhere near as good as the film it’s based on, The Wages of Fear) and then as good as fell off the edge of the world with Cruising, a film that looks … Read more
Sinners
Is Sinners a vampire movie? Even members of the cast couldn’t agree whether it was or not. Delroy Lindo said it wasn’t, Michael B Jordan said it was. Either way it’s bold and ambitious, full of stuff to discuss, book-club style, over a drink afterwards. A bit didactic, a bit tasteful, a bit too in love with Steven Spielberg – if that’s a crime, I don’t know. Your mileage etc etc. Riding along somewhere in the back of the narrative bus is the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, who went down to the crossroads and met the devil, who gave him all the best tunes. But that story is diluted to a … Read more
Red Right Hand
We’re in Appalachia for Red Right Hand, latest film by the Nelms brothers, Eshom and Ian. And immediately having said Appalachia, the shades start to assemble. Poor lives on the margin. Cackling inbreeds. Illicit drugs. Attack dogs. Tattoos. Guns and hunting. God. The family. Male relationships that seem overly familiar. Check, check, check, check and check (plus a few more). No one seems overly intent on overturning the stereotypes in Orlando Bloom’s latest foray into action-hero territory. This he has been exploring, presumably since he and his agent sat around scratching their heads over what to do with his career – Lord of the Rings must have been lucrative but that was a … Read more
Nosferatu
The films of Robert Eggers can get a bit overwrought and Nosferatu is no exception. Both The Northman and The Lighthouse (The Witch not so much) overdid it. All well and good if you subscribe to the view that too much gothic is still not enough. And you’ll be doubly re-assured by Eggers’s decision to go back to the sensational source as the inspiration for his turreted gothic assemblage. That’s not entirely true. Eggers does lean narratively and visually on FW Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, but that itself was a blatant steal from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Murnau and co hadn’t paid for the rights and hoped that changing character names would be enough … Read more
The Rule of Jenny Pen
Horror films are often about old age without being explicit about it. Think of all those shuffling zombies. The Rule of Jenny Pen cuts right to the chase to tell a story about nasty goings-on in a care home, where tangential horror occurs but the care home itself is the real concern of co-writer/director James Ashcroft. It’s a punchy and effective 100 minutes or so. Stephen King is a fan (“one of the best movies I’ve seen this year”). Maybe you should be too. Ashcroft starts with a joke. The actor Geoffrey Rush, five years absent from our screens thanks to legal wrangles, playing a judge. A New Zealand judge struck down by … Read more
11 April 2016-04-11
Out This Week Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney, cert 12) You don’t go to a Rolling Stones gig to hear new tunes. And you don’t turn out for Star Wars – reboot or not – for new stories. And yet. JJ Abrams, having done a remarkable job on the first Star Trek rejig, does bring lots that’s fresh to Star Wars in a film that seemed more remarkable the more I thought about it. At first it appeared to be a case of “same but different”, with every new thing and new character an echo of something from the first three films (numbers IV to VI) – Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren is … Read more
Becky Sharp
It’s remarkable that in film and TV adaptations of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, it’s always called just that. Thackeray lifted the title for his satire from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where a fair at a town called Vanity was an allegory for all the delights of the realm of the physical. It’s hardly a punchy title, or one with any modern currency and yet it carries on being used. At least six movies and eight TV shows, not to mention various magazines, have used or are using its name. Apart from this 1935 adaptation, no one seems to have though to use the name of its principal character, Becky Sharp, instead. Not … Read more
Blood In, Blood Out
Clearly intending to do for Chicanos what Scorsese and Coppola did for Italian Americans, 1993’s Blood In, Blood Out cannot be accused of a lack of ambition. A big, long, zeitgeist-tasting tale of life in and around the gangs inside and outside prison, it follows three East Los Angeles guys on a journey from callow youth to some sort of maturity, each winding up in a place he might not have expected. Miklo, Cruz and Paco are three streetwise Chicanos. Spanish peppers their streetspeak as they swagger around their rough neighbourhood in cartoon exaggerations of masculinity. Cruz is a street artist with ambitions to be something more. Half-brother Paco is a cock of … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 3 – Super Secret Cypher Snatch
As mentioned briefly in the previous post (and explained much more fully on the Avengers Forever website), there was a brief interregnum in the final series of The Avengers, when John Bryce took over as producer, only for Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell to return to save the day after Bryce got hopelessly bogged down. So in this series we’ve got a bunch of Bryce episodes and a whole lot more with Clemens as showrunner. Easiest way to distinguish is Tara King’s hair – if it’s blond, it’s Bryce. Super Secret Cypher Snatch is not one of those blond episodes. In fact Clemens and Fennell made quite sure that it was “their” Tara … Read more
They Made Me a Fugitive
Exactly why the 1947 crime drama They Made Me a Fugitive was renamed I Became a Criminal for its US release is something of a mystery. One is more passive, the other more active, yup, understood. But the original title is better, punchier and asks a question – who made who a criminal? Whereas the US title is kind of flappy – so you became a criminal, so what? The irony is that this British movie really wants to be an American one. It’s soaked in the stylings, characters and logic of film noir, with mean streets, a femme fatale and a slightly off-centre Mr Big at the centre of it. Though, this … Read more
