Popular Reviews
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
The Beast aka La Bête
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (La Bête) isn’t the first adaptation of Henry James’s novella 1903 The Beast in the Jungle. It’s not even the first one of 2023. That honour goes to Patric Chiha’s French-language movie The Beast in the Jungle, which made it to the screens about six months before Bonello’s. Whether Bonello trimmed his sails having seen Chiha’s fascinating and underloved film is doubtful. The Beast looks like the vision of a man who’d already decided to take Henry James and put him through an extreme wash followed by a rigorous spin. James’s story has lost its original shape in Bonello’s version, which flips the genders for a start, and casts … Read more
Amsterdam
That looks like Taylor Swift, I thought to myself, watching the opening moments of David O Russell’s promising looking Amsterdam, his first film since 2015’s Joy. It actually is Taylor Swift, just one of a galaxy of stars in a cast list so luminous that the likes of Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough and Zoe Saldana could almost be safely removed without harming the texture of the movie. No, maybe not Taylor-Joy, one of the important components, it turns out, when Amsterdam finally gets round to revealing its nature – an angry political drama, and a good thriller, hidden inside a meringue of deflection, pastiche, jokes, songs, historical factoids, good performances and all the … Read more
Hanussen
Magic and the Nazis. Hanussen, the bizarre and true story of Eric Jan Hanussen, is ideal big screen material, you’d have thought, since the Austrian stage hypnotist and soothsayer was a charismatic performer who held Germans in his thrall in the dying days of the Weimar Republic and into the Nazi era. The parallels with Hitler are obvious, and once you add in the rumour that Hanussen was the man who taught Hitler his techniques of mass manipulation and crowd control, it has all the ingredients of a story with a ready audience. However, there have been only two attempts at it. A 1955 version which seems to have vanished into the ether, … Read more
The Social Dilemma
Somewhere between the greenlighting of the 2013 Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn comedy The Internship – about two washed-up Generation Xers trying to make a go of it at Google – the attitude towards the tech giants changed. Intended as a genial comedy – and part financed by Google – it went into production skipping along on the trade winds of the zeitgeist but by the time it hit the screens the mood had shifted, the winds had veered. The end result looked propagandistic and borderline scary. That shift is what The Social Dilemma is about, a talking-heads documentary bringing into the mainstream misgivings by former industry lynchpins about the ways in which the tech giants … Read more
The Queen of Versailles
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 June John Maynard Keynes born, 1883 On this day in the 1883, the economist John Maynard Keynes was born, in Cambridge, to an economist father and a social reformer mother. A mathematics prodigy as a child, he won a scholarship to Eton College, then went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics on a scholarship, graduating in 1904. After a short career as a clerk in the India Office, Keynes resigned and returned to Cambridge, where he started studying economics. By 1909 he had published his first article on economics. By 1911 he was editor of The Economic Journal. … Read more
Mr Vampire
The first in a successful franchise and cornerstone of an entire genre – jiangshi – 1985’s Mr Vampire is a highly entertaining and madly inventive movie, particularly if you like high-level buffoonery and vampires who hop. It wasn’t the first jiangshi movie. That honour probably goes to Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind in 1980, the film that shifted Hong Kong vampires decisively away from the Nosferatu-like template and towards a more culturally Chinese vision of the undead. In jiangshi movies the vampires tend to come dressed in traditional changshan clothing. They are restless spirits or dead people whose burial has not been carried out according to the correct rituals. Drinking blood isn’t … Read more
Election
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 July Monica Lewinsky born, 1973 Today in 1973, Monica Samille Lewinsky was born, in San Francisco, USA. Best known for giving a US president a blow job, which the US president bizarrely later claimed did not equate to “sexual relations” (since he was receiving rather than giving the favour), Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern at the White House at the time her relationship with President Clinton took place. It came to light because Linda Tripp, a fellow worker at the Pentagon – where Lewinsky was moved by superiors concerned at the amount of time she was spending with Clinton – … Read more
Weapons
Zach Cregger found his niche with Barbarians and double-whammies with Weapons, a horror movie so intensely focused on character that the horror could easily be removed and it would still work. Here they are, all these small townsfolk, warts and all, peccadilloes to spare. Julia Garner as Justine, the teacher of young kids who drinks way too much and likes having boozy sex with Paul, a guy she shouldn’t have sex with. Josh Brolin as Archer, an angry parent convinced that Justine is behind the peculiar disappearance of an entire classful – bar one – of kids, determined to expose her for what he thinks she is. Alden Ehrenreich as Paul, the recovering alcoholic … Read more
The Commuter
Liam Neeson. A Very Particular Set of Skills. They’re back in The Commuter, in which everyone’s favourite geri-actioner gets physical… this time on a train. This is the fourth collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown (Skills in Berlin), Non-Stop (Skills on a plane), Run All Night (Skills in New York) and now Skills on the way home from work. If it seems like there have been a lot more of these films than that, you’re probably also adding Taken (three of them) and Walk Among the Tombstones to the tally. They were directed by different people but also featured a gravelly, unsmiling Neeson being forced into a corner and then coming … Read more
100 Years of… The Sheikh
Rudolph Valentino had two big films in 1921. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by far the biggest grossing film of the year, was the one that made him a star. But The Sheikh was even more important. It made Valentino so famous that we still talk of him today, long after the auras of fellow stars like Norma Talmadge and Wallace Reid have faded. The Four Horsemen gave Valentino the “Latin lover” tag but The Sheikh made it stick, something that Valentino – striving to have a varied career – struggled against before bowing to the inevitable in 1926 with Son of the Sheikh. In an intense but short time at the … Read more
The Boy behind the Door
Welcome to sex. The Boy behind the Door is the sort of film that a Freudian shrink could go to town on, being all about two boys cusping puberty who are abducted and taken to a remote property where they have to fight for their lives to get free. “Friends to the end,” Bobby (Lonnie Chavis) and Kevin (Ezra Dewey) have pledged out in the bright, sun-dappled world where they were hanging out before being knocked senseless and bundled into the boot of a car. Waking up, Bobby is dimly aware that Kevin has been dragged off somewhere, leaving him to suffocate out in a garage attached to a house a long way … Read more
