Popular Reviews
The Bourne Identity
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 January The Pentagon dedicated, 1943 On this day in 1943 in Arlington Virginia the Pentagon was dedicated. At the time it was the largest building in the world. The home of the US Department of Defense, it was originally intended to be built on an irregularly pentagonal piece of land at Arlington Farms. When it was learnt that this location would obstruct the view of Washington DC from Arlington Cemetery, where soldiers fallen in conflicts since the Civil War have been buried, the location was switched to the site of the defunct Washington Hoover Airport. The design stayed pentagonal but … Read more
To Leslie
There’s a real market for films showing the lower orders wallowing in a misery of their own making. To Leslie looks like the familiar offer – feckless blue-collar gal wins big on the lottery, then pisses it all away in a hedonistic splurge. The message of films like this, usually covert, is: leave money to those who already have it. Michael Morris’s film avoids a lot of the pitfalls of the genre by concentrating not on the fall but on the bounce along the bottom. He introduces Leslie (Andrea Riseborough) in archive local TV news footage, ecstatically receiving a gigantic lottery cheque and squealing in redneck excitement before he cuts to the present … Read more
Wet Job
Wet Job is a 1981 TV movie and the last outing for Edward Woodward’s Callan, the touchiest secret operative British TV ever produced. Callan is a version of Harry Palmer of Ipcress File fame, a working class lad forced out of the army for insubordination and then picked up by the secret service because of his special set of skills. If Palmer was designed as the anti-007, Callan is another rung down on the ladder – there’s no glamour to the man, and he has absolutely no pride in his work, which is killing people. Callan is on TV rather than the big screen too. Palmer reported to a dowdy office front; Callan’s … Read more
All My Friends Hate Me
Psychological horror is delivered in an unusually pure form in All My Friends Hate Me, a British movie saving its best moves for its closing moments, when it shifts tone three, four, maybe five times. It repurposes the plot and some of the mood of The Wicker Man – a guy bumbling around in a situation he’s drastically misreading – but instead of murderous yokels as his nemesis, this guy is having a reunion weekend away with old university friends at the country pile of one of them, the incredibly wealthy George (Joshua McGuire). Things get off to a bad start when Pete gets lost en route, disturbs a mysterious/furious man sleeping in a filthy … Read more
Anything for Jackson
Horror films tend to be populated by sexy young things, but in Anything for Jackson the two protagonists are a pair of people in their 60s, played to the hilt by Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy. Actually, Anything for Jackson is more trad than it at first appears, because the couple in question aren’t actually the good guys, they’re a pair of Satanists – “Glory be to Satan” they chant at the coven where they meet their fellow devil-worshippers – who have kidnapped a heavily pregnant woman and plan to use her child as the receptacle for the spirit of their dead grandchild, Jackson. It’s a Rosemary’s Baby from the point of view … Read more
Gasoline Rainbow
Five kids head for the coast in an old van in Gasoline Rainbow, the Ross brothers’ first feature since Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, their intensely evocative film about the last day in the life of a Las Vegas dive bar. Bloody Nose looked like a documentary but there were suggestions at the edges that everything wasn’t quite as it was being portrayed. Those doubts become a bit more concrete in Gasoline Rainbow, which is what would be called “scripted reality” if it were TV, and if it were more scripted. It’s loose, incredibly so, looks like a documentary and feels like a documentary, with the sort of free, sometimes hesitant performances you get … Read more
The Silent Partner
The story goes that Elliott Gould screened The Silent Partner for Alfred Hitchcock after it was finished. Hitchcock apparently liked it, as well he might, since it’s about 75 per cent Hitchcock by look and theme. There’s a blonde, a bit of mistaken identity, a nobody who finds he’s a somebody when tested, and even a nod to Hitchcock’s set pieces, particularly in the finale. Gould plays a meek bank teller who discovers quite by chance that there’s going to be a raid on his bank, and that a guy disguised as Santa Claus is going to do it – I won’t explain but it’s either ingenious or ridiculous depending on which side … Read more
My People, My Country
Seven films by seven different Chinese directors comprise My People, My Country, a portmanteau film about key moments in the history of the People’s Republic, all overseen by Chen Kaige (who contributes one of the short films), director of My Beautiful Concubine. At 150 minutes running time that’s a 20-25 minute running time for each film. When people talk about waving the flag they’re usually using the term metaphorically. It’s literal in My People, My Country – rarely can so many flags have been waved, so fervently, up front, in the background or off to the side. They’re a disparate bunch of films, as portmanteaus tend to be, but patriotism is in no short … Read more
Don’t Look Now
It seems an odd thing to say, but most films aren’t really that cinematic. Most films, you could close your eyes and follow them. Not so with Nicolas Roeg’s “arthouse horror”. Close your eyes and you’re lost. In fact, even with your eyes open, all is not as it appears. Take the infamous love-making scene played out between grieving parents Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. It’s not the “were they doing it for real” question that marks it out as significant but the fact that Roeg keeps intercutting this ultimate example of living in the now with scenes from a few minutes later – when the duo are absent-mindedly getting dressed, ready to … Read more
Rent-a-Pal
Set in 1990 and influenced by the moment when direct-to-VHS schlock met cheap synthesisers, Rent-A-Pal actually takes its inspiration from a point further back in time, when The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone put high-concept sci-fi, often with a twist, on primetime TV. It’s a four-hander, with Brian Landis Folkins playing David, a 40-year-old sad sack whose life is dominated by the fact that he’s his demented mother’s carer. Since he barely leaves the house, he has no girlfriend, which is why he’s half-heartedly signed up to Video Rendezvous – you choose the woman you like from a tape full of pitches made by female lonely hearts – the sort of outfit … Read more
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 November Yukio Mishima commits seppuku, 1970 On this day in 1970, the Japanese writer/actor/director Yukio Mishima disembowelled himself ritualistically, after having tried and failed to persuade troops at the Ichigaya barracks to launch a coup d’état to reinstate the Emperor’s supreme power. Shortly afterwards, as pre-arranged, his assistant attempted to decapitate him. When this failed, another assistant succeeded in severing Mishima’s head, then performed the same service for the first assistant, who had by now also disembowelled himself. Mishima’s real name was Kimitake Hiraoka and his act brought to a conclusion a life that had been devoted to the idea … Read more
Beanpole
Beanpole (Dylda) is an obsessively observed, massively ambitious Russian film set in the aftermath of the siege of Leningrad which tells its story of lives brutalised by war from the point of view of two young women. It won Kantemir Balagov the best director gong at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category. That’s the one for young directors doing ambitious or unusual work, which puts Beanpole in the company of films such as Dogtooth, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, White God and Rams – classics all. Balagov, a onetime student of Alexander Sokurov, had already picked up the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes two years earlier, when he was only 26, with his … Read more
