Popular Reviews
The Shout
There’s nothing wrong with The Shout that a different screenplay wouldn’t fix. In front of and behind the camera it’s brilliant. But further back than that, at the conceptual stage, there’s not much beyond a spectacularly tedious allegory about something or other. Into the marriage of John Hurt’s Anthony and Susannah York’s Rachel comes a stranger, a domineering man dressed in black whose shout, he says, can rip universes apart, pulp souls, burst brains, and so on. But is Charles Crossley (Alan Bates) just a lunatic, as he appears to be? We have after all first met him at an asylum watching a very English cricket match overseen by a chief medical officer … Read more
Nightmare Alley
2021’s Nightmare Alley isn’t based on the 1947 film noir of the same name, so we’re told by various venerable authorities. Tell that to the judge. Even if it genuinely is a bona fide and honest reworking of the same source material, William Lindsay Gresham’s smash 1946 novel, even a quick look at the 1947 movie is enough to convince anyone that this Nightmare Alley has seen the older one, taken notes and then studied them hard. This extends to the casting choices. These start with Bradley Cooper as the grifter who starts out as a nobody in a carnival, works his way to the top of showbiz with a mentalist routine, over-reaches … Read more
Cutter’s Way
When it’s remembered at all, 1981’s Cutter’s Way is often lumped in with All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and other 1970s conspiracy dramas, but it’s much more at home in the company of 1970s noirish murder thrillers, like Chinatown, or, most obviously, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Apart from mis-categorisation its other big problem is its title. It was originally Cutter and Bone, after the two men at its centre, drunk, angry firecracker Alex Cutter (John Heard), who lost an eye, an arm and a leg in a war we assume to be Vietnam. And slinky, college-educated golden boy Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges), whose given and family names both hint at … Read more
23 May 2016-05-23
Out This Week The Revenant (Fox, cert 15) Last year Alejandro González Iñárritu won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscar for Birdman. The gongs have clearly gone slightly to his head and he now thinks he’s Terrence Malick. If there’s one thing this thrilling, frequently brutal and historically fascinating film doesn’t need is slo-mo glides through the awesomeness of its natural beauties – grandiose waterfalls, snowy wastes, virgin forests and the like. But we get them anyway, and if you’re feeling gracious, you might take them as a palate-cleanser between attacks by Indians, bears and the elements as 1820s fur trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) fights his way from a severe ursine mauling … Read more
Devotion
Three stories fight for space in Devotion. Most obviously the Korean War, which turns up so infrequently it’s almost as if film-makers have taken a vow of silence on the subject (Robert Altman’s Mash, while set in the Korean War, was really about Vietnam – and it was 50 years ago). Second up, the trials and tribulations of a black naval flyer in a largely white American fighting force after the Second World War. And third, a story of platonic love between two men. It’s a true story, about white preppy academy guy Lieutenant Tom Hudner (Glen Powell, who’s also the producer) and black up-by-his-bootstraps Ensign Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors, so hissably good … Read more
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
Hot off Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director Michel Gondry takes an abrupt left turn with a documentary about US comedian Dave Chappelle hosting a block party in Brooklyn, where the likes of Kanye West, the Fugees, Jill Scott, Mos Def and Erykah Badu rock the house. Gondry has previous directing music videos so it’s not so much of a stretch but the idea is unusual – we watch as Chappelle organises things, calling in favours from friends, putting the celebrity lock on people too timid to turn him down while a camera is rolling, but most of all he’s handing out tickets to just about anyone he runs across in Dayton, … Read more
Boom!
“Beyond bad… the other side of camp… a perfect movie, really.” Schlock-loving John Waters’s verdict on Boom! is pretty much the mainstream take on this 1968 monstrosity, a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that is so monumentally kitsch that everyday adjectives aren’t up to describing it. Camp or kitsch? Why not both? If camp is unknowing whereas kitsch is deliberate, this has to be the latter, since it’s an out-and-out attempt to fix Tennessee Williams’s unsuccessful play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by making it even more grandiose and exaggerated than it was on the stage. You may hate it but you cannot deny its spectacle. The great Douglas Slocombe … Read more
Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan
A Vietnam war movie released in 2019, Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan has a couple of other potential strikes against it. It’s Australian, for one, and who even remembers that Australia lined up alongside the USA for that epic? For another, it’s not even vaguely interested in setting Vietnam in the wider political context. All good reasons to watch it, then. Long Tan was a real battle, in which 108 Australian and New Zealand troops somehow managed to hold off an enemy Vietcong force of 2,000 in a battle that took place in a rubber plantation, at a huge cost in lives on both sides. Not that this movie is really … Read more
Cars
Have the wheels come off at Pixar? Mawkishness now seems to have replaced energy and invention at the studio that… no hang on, this is the studio that once gave us Toy Story. Let’s not get carried away. But if Pixar have been known for anything it’s their ability to run sentiment and energy on a twin track, the result being a film with heart and drive. The plot of Cars suggests they’ve forgotten how to do this – we’re on the case of a self-centred hotshot racing car (voice: Owen Wilson) who loses his way and gets stuck in Radiator Springs, a small town where the good locals (all of whom are … Read more
16 December 2013-12-16
Out in the UK this week We’re the Millers (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Having turned up in small roles in good films (say, Friends with Money), in big roles in bad films (The Bounty Hunter), Jennifer Aniston finally makes a film in which she is a star and it is good and funny. She plays the poledancer pretending to be married to smalltime weed seller Jason Sudeikis, so they can smuggle a shitload of marijuana over from Mexico into the US, posing as an average family riding around in an RV. Along for the ride (and a cut of the cash) are street hustler Emma Roberts and dweeb Will Poulter. It’s basically your … Read more
Spike Island
There is a great film to be made about the whole Madchester/Stone Roses/Acieed moment of the late 1980s but Spike Island isn’t it. Fun but messy might be a fair way to assess it. Fatally flawed might be another. This is a film clearly going for epic. It wants to be the Apocalypse Now of a particular youthquake, with a basic “journey” structure – four lads in a wannabe band are trying to get to Spike Island, scene of the Stone Roses’ most famous gig, a night that defined/ended an era. Onto this is grafted the story of the band itself, its attempts to record a demo, get it to the Stone Roses, … Read more
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
If each era has its own horror film, then the lucky 1970s got both The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Tacked on to the end of a Walter Matthau film for its San Francisco debut, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre drove the cheesecloth-wearing crowd to storm the lobby, demanding money back with menaces. Many people have seen the underwhelming 2003 remake, starring a then fairly unknown Jessica Biel as the scream queen in a tight white t shirt. But for sheer economical film-making – and meanness of budget – you can’t beat the original. It’s based on the true story of Ed Gein, the handyman with a penchant for graverobbing, a … Read more
