Popular Reviews
The Grandmaster
There are misgivings even during the opening scene of this decade-straddling epic about Ip Man, generally described as “the man who trained Bruce Lee”. There’s legendary martial artist Ip Man (the impassive Tony Leung) in a stylish straw hat taking on a phalanx of uglies in a torrential nighttime downpour. Slo-mo rain. It’s the sort of visual cliché you might expect from Uwe Boll rather than one of the most gifted film-makers in the world. But, a bit of plot. The film kicks off in the 1930s when, Leung’s voiceover tells us, Ip Man is about 40, a content, wealthy resident of Foshen with a lovely wife and a rich cultural life. This … Read more
The Monkey’s Paw
When William Jacobs wrote the short story The Monkey’s Paw in 1902, could he have realised what sort of afterlife it would have? It’s been adapted dozens of times, even more if you count productions that don’t use its original title. This 1948 version is a short and atmospheric rendition of Jacobs’s story, changing the names and some of the details but keeping the central idea intact – a monkey’s paw that will grant three wishes to anyone who is holding it, but which brings a belt of bad luck along with the granting of the wish. For a film that’s only just over an hour long, you might marvel at how much … Read more
Elvis
It was Elvis’s misfortune to die in 1977, just as punk rock was coursing through mainstream culture. Old and worn out at 42, sick and fat, the King became an instant shorthand for everything that this new wave of music wanted to drive to extinction. He died on the toilet, the story went, with an impacted colon. What a metaphor – the man was literally full of shit. None of that features in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, a gaudy and joyous celebration of the man from cradle to grave, stopping off mostly at the best bits and leaving the dark stuff way off to the sides. This would be terribly problematic, if Elvis were the … Read more
The Descendants
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 August Hawaii becomes 50th US state, 1959 Today marks the day when, in 1959, Hawaii became a part of the United States. It came about as a result of revolution which unseated the local Republican party, which had been in power in an almost unbroken run since the country had become a constitutional monarchy in 1887 (though that didn’t last long – it was shortly after annexed by the US in 1898 and became a Territory). The Republicans had close ties to a number of companies known as the Big Five, originally sugar plantation owners and processors, whose oligarchic power … Read more
The Ugly Stepsister
The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) started life as a film about a woman with a talking vulva. Then writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt decided to come at the same idea – the onerous demands put on young women – by taking a second run at the Cinderella fairy tale. The resulting debut feature introduces a really gifted director to a wider audience, though the film itself could learn a lesson from Cinderella herself – it’s the dainty foot that gets into the glass slipper, not the galumphing one. It’s the same story, just slanted so we see it from the point of view of the loser – in this case Elvira (Lea Myren), the … Read more
Finding ’Ohana
’Ohana is the Hawaiian concept of family or home and in Finding ’Ohana a couple of ethnically Hawaiian New York brats discover its true meaning back “home” in Oahu. They’re looking for something else: lost pirate treasure which, according to an old journal belonging to their grandpa Kimo (Branscombe Richmond), can be found by following a number of clues, in much the same way as you might follow clues if you were geocaching. Handily, one of the two siblings is all about the geocaching. But let’s meet the family, as they say in game shows – Grandpa is living under a mountain of debt which his widowed daughter and frazzled single mom Leilani … Read more
The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980, as well as the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979. Not everyone was enamoured, though. While the Los Angeles Times thought it “a masterwork of cinema” and the New York Times slightly less effusively reported that it “compels attention,” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times took against it, doling out only two (out of four stars) in a review that expressed bafflement at other critics’ admiration of the film. The years have tended to vindicate Ebert. The movie, like the original Günter Grass book on which it was based, has been steadily rerated downwards over the decades, not least since … Read more
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The title is a joke, a reference to Marvel history and also an announcement – this, fanfare please, is the opening film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s glorious Phase Six. The joke. The Fantastic Four has taken many first steps before. It’s the failed-to-launch superhero franchise par excellence, with three damp squibs – two with Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba and one with Miles Teller and Kate Mara plus assorted unremarkable FF walk-ons in other MCU movies. “Damp” may be overdoing it, but those three movies did not sweep all before them, let’s say. And then there was Roger Corman’s run at the material, with a movie in … Read more
On Swift Horses
On Swift Horses is giddy 1950s melodrama for the 21st century, with Will Poulter and Jacob Elordi as brothers charting separate courses through the great American post-War boom. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays the prize for one of them, or she would be if she weren’t also on a journey of her own, towards a sense of self-actualisation. The dynamic is good boy/bad boy, Poulter drawing the short straw as Lee, the hard-working, conformist brother married to wife Muriel (Edgar-Jones), while Elordi has the fun as Julius, the sexy gambler on the road less travelled. In the film’s opening moments Julius arrives back from the Korean War at the homestead of Lee and Muriel and … Read more
Raya and the Last Dragon
Remember when Disney princesses just lay about in glass cases waiting to be kissed? Raya and the Last Dragon gives us the latest iteration of the new style of Disney female, joining Mulan, Merida (from Brave) and Moana in a kick-butty world of smarts where any obvious interest in looking glasses or clothes is deeply suspect. Disney love the ™ symbol but as I write Raya has not yet been made a part of the Princess Line™. She’s up there with the best of them so it can only be a matter of time. Her film has a driving story with emotional depth, a good voice cast, doesn’t overdo the cutes and there … Read more
El Topo
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 movie is considered to be one of a handful that changed the way films were watched… and made. Signalling the shift into, and legitimisation of the hitherto critically rarely considered genre movie, El Topo simultaneously satirises and adds to its chosen area of operations. Which is the western, the spaghetti western to be more specific. Though Sergio Leone, or even Sergio Corbucci, never cranked out anything this sensationalist. El Topo is the spaghetti western as travelling circus. It’s populated with cruel, cackling banditos, pinheads, armless and legless freaks, bare-breasted women, fly-covered corpses and even, at one point, spontaneously combusting rabbits. And all of the above are sewn into a plot … Read more
The Shrouds
The Shrouds looks like the filmic equivalent of David Bowie’s final album, Dark Star, a requiem revisiting old ideas in an up-to-the-minute way. David Cronenberg has not announced that he is dying. But aren’t we all? All the time? It’s the sort of thing Cronenberg has been saying, with a macabre chuckle, since he first announced himself with Shivers 50 years ago. Cronenberg’s own wife died in 2017 and it would be crass to suggest that The Shrouds is really all about that. But let’s be crass for a minute and point out that Vincent Cassel, who plays this film’s dubious hero, has hair like Cronenberg’s. His character dresses like him and works … Read more
