Popular Reviews
Where’s Poppa
Running on the same fuel as the UK comedy Steptoe and Son (or the US version of it Sanford and Son), Where’s Poppa is the story of a would-be suave, would-be lothario constantly being thwarted by his aged parent. George Segal plays the New York guy keen to spread his wild oats. Ruth Gordon is the insufferable mother he shares an apartment with, a woman who’s gone senile, or is maybe just making out she’s senile the better to thwart any chance of happiness for her son. It’s a loose-cannon story tracking the efforts of Gordon (Segal) to introduce a new nurse, Louise (Trish Van Devere) into the household, his mother having chased … Read more
The Appointment
Fans of plotless movies will love The Appointment, an increasingly cultish British horror from 1982. The only feature by Lindsey C Vickers, it was regularly described as lost until the British Film Institute got themselves together and released it as part of their Flipside series of under-appreciated left-fielders. As to plot, it’s the title. There is an appointment a man (Edward Woodward) is suddenly being forced to keep for work purposes, ruining his plans to be at a key recital by his daughter, a promising violin player. The daughter (Samantha Weysom) is upset he won’t be there. His wife (Jane Merrow) looks on as he insists he’s got to go and as the … Read more
Liliom
“I almost like Liliom best of all,” Fritz Lang said in 1974 about the film he’d directed 40 years earlier. This from a director who invented whole genres (like the spy thriller), directed massive epics (Metropolis) and went on to dominate the crime drama with films like The Big Heat. Lang’s entirely atypical film about the poetic side of wife-beating is quite a surprise. It is a film full of surprises though. The story for one – sweet young Julie falls for rapscallion carnival barker Liliom, a man who loves her but is violent, lazy, feckless and eventually meets an ugly end after taking part in a heist. He then ascends to purgatory, … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 9 – The Medicine Men
The Medicine Men first went out on 23 November 1963, the day after the assassination of President Kennedy in the USA, and on the same night as the first episode of Doctor Who (also created by Avengers creator Sydney Newman). Of course none of this is reflected in the episode, which was made a couple of weeks earlier. Instead it’s a periodic obsession of The Avengers that gets an airing: the state of British industry. In a plot that’s been chopped up a bit because, I suspect, it was a bit on the boring side, Steed and Gale investigate the murder of a woman in a steam room, a murder which leads them … Read more
Radical
Radical is a good thing but there is a lot of it. An inspirational-teacher drama, it’s a dramatisation of events that took place in 2012. Those events became the basis of a 2013 Wired article written by Joshua Davis, this film’s producer. And from there ten years ago to this film in 2023. Meanwhile, the teacher at the centre of the whole thing, Sergio Juárez Correa, works in the José Urbina López Primary School to this day. Co-writer/director Christopher Zalla makes sure we know where we are and who we’re dealing with. A poor Mexican border town where guns, gangs and poverty grind out any aspiration parents might have for their children. A … Read more
The Pianist
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 March Roman Polanski charged with rape, 1977 On this day in 1977, the film director Roman Polanski was arrested on a charge of rape by use of drug. He was also charged with perversion, sodomy, a lewd and lascivious act on a child under 14 and with furnishing a controlled substance to a child under 14. Samantha Gailey was the victim, a 13-year-old he had been photographing as part of an assignment for French Vogue. The shoot took place at the actor Jack Nicholson’s house. Nicholson was away skiing. Polanski pleaded not guilty to all charges but later as part … Read more
Je t’aime, je t’aime
Part modernist experiment, part sci-fi, part exploration of memory, Alain Resnais’s weird 1968 drama Je t’aime, je t’aime (aka I Love You, I Love You) is the place to go if the prospect of watching his more celebrated first two movies, the formally and formidably “difficult” Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, give you the collywobbles. It’s clear even before the film gets going that something odd is going on. The massive titles in bright red and the haunting, ethereal choir singing over the opening credits eventually give way to opening scenes in which Resnais’s framing is also doing odd things – too close, not close enough, it’s all quite unsettling. … Read more
And Then We Danced
The very trad meets meets the very not in And Then We Danced, a pungently flavoured drama about a wild love affair between two men who dance with the Georgian national troupe. Black Swan and Flashdance are the two most obvious points of reference, as punishing regimes take thir physical toll and rivalries for the top slot combine with a push to innovate against the dead hand of tradition, the entire raison d’etre of a troupe like the one that Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) dances in. He’s perhaps not the best, the most naturally gifted dancer in the troupe, but he’s prepared to do whatever is necessary to make the grade and get into … Read more
Clara Sola
Capsule plot summaries can be misleading. The one for Clara Sola might say – a woman around 40 in a Costa Rica village has a sexual awakening. It’s more or less what the one on the IMDb says. And it’s not wrong, that is what happens. But the story, that’s a different thing altogether. And in fact the whole point of this debut by Nathalie Álvarez Mesén is in what isn’t being said rather than what is. The plot is straightforward but story lies scattered between the cracks, just slightly out of reach. It’s ambiguous, entirely, in almost every respect. Clara is a pretty woman and might, at her age, expect to be … Read more
The Last Duel
Talk about burying the lead. The Last Duel submerges its true story – the rape of a woman in 14th-century France – inside a story about the man who did it and her husband, his friend. We get the duel, the joust, up front, so we know from the outset where this adaptation of a true story is going, and then director Ridley Scott and writers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (their first collaboration since Good Will Hunting) and Nicole Holofcener (presumably brought in to de-problematise the very problematical screenplay) wheel us back in time to what brought us to this point. We’re introduced to all the parties involved – Sir Jean Carrouges (Matt … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 2 – The Gravediggers
Like a classic album that warms us up with an opening track before hitting us with a doozy, episode two of series four of The Avengers, The Gravediggers, is vintage entertainment that gets just about everything right. The plot is a mix of proper spy stuff and the eccentric, the macabre and the mad, and gets off onto its twin-track course with an opening shot of a newly filled grave out of which – after some ominous movement of the soil – an antenna pops. Over on the North York Moors at Fylingdales early warning system (it’s not named as such, but those white golfball domes look very like it), a techie is having trouble … Read more
The Curious Return of Douglas Sirk
What is it about a film-maker who died around 25 years ago in obscurity that fascinates a new generation of directors? The director Douglas Sirk died in 1987 aged 90. Born in Hamburg as Detlef Sierck, he became well known for his string of lush melodramas made in Hollywood in the 1950s. Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958) and Imitation of Life (1959) are considered his key works. The French “auteurists” were the first to start the re-assessment of Sirk in the late 1950s – the distinctive look of his films marking them out as … Read more
