Popular Reviews
4 January 2013-01-04
Out in the UK This Week Berberian Sound Studio (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) “A dangerously aroused goblin prowls the dormitory” – a line that says it all from the never-seen film that soundman Toby Jones is working on in Peter Strickland’s follow-up to the brilliant, Romanian-set Katalin Varga, a brilliantly overheated, Italian-set homage to 1970s “giallo” horror. Really worth watching with headphones on, this one. Berberian Sound Studio – at Amazon The Imposter (Revolver, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) One of the most gripping films of 2012, a semi-documentary about how a 20something French juvie managed to pass himself off as a missing 16-year-old from Texas. And why the family bought it. A remarkable … Read more
American Splendor
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 8 October Harvey Pekar born, 1939 On this day in 1939, Harvey Lawrence Pekar was born, in Cleveland, Ohio. And that’s where he died too, in Cleveland, Ohio. An underground comicbook artist, if not THE underground comicbook artist (fight that one out with Robert Crumb), he is credited with changing the way graphic novels were perceived. Largely responsible, in fact, for them being called graphic novels in the first place. That’s down to his subject matter. Staying away from fantasy and sci-fi, comedy and stoner musing, Pekar depicted the life he saw happening all around him. His works are autobiographical, downbeat, … Read more
The House on 92nd Street
The House on 92nd Street is the sort of earnest propaganda movie Hollywood liked to pump out once in a while in the 1940s. It was made during wartime, so the justification is there, and it deals with a real case – the fifth column of Nazi-sympathising Americans working to overthrow their own government and install Hitler. And it’s based on a real case, the Duquesne spy ring. Director Henry Hathaway and his writers give us about ten minutes of sonorous scene-setting in a “ripped from the headlines” newsreel-voiceover style before introducing the hero – William Eythe’s Bill Dietrich, a second-generation German American who is recruited as a double agent by the FBI … Read more
Court
Chaitanya Tamhane’s feature debut, Court, tells the story of a 65-year-old “people’s poet” who is up in court on charges of having incited the suicide of a sewer worker. Narayan Kamble is a grey-haired firebrand who sings angry songs about the state of the world and his beloved India, and how the love of money is destroying spiritual values. Apparently, he has sung a song strongly advocating that sewer workers should kill themselves. It must have been a catchy tune and/or forceful lyrically because two days later a man did just that. Was the death suicide? Was the song ever even sung? – that’s what the court case is meant to ascertain. While Tamhane … Read more
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
“Fear me, if you dare!” It’s a strange catchphrase but it is Puss in Boots’s and goes some way towards explaining his appeal – dangerous and ridiculous at the same time, as befits a vainglorious furball swashbuckler who’s Zorro in miniature, a legend in his own eyes more than anyone else’s, but a legend all the same. In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish two-time Zorro and four-time Puss Antonio Banderas returns to the role and remains a good part of the appeal of this character spun off from the Shrek franchise. Puss debuted in Shrek 2, returned in Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After, then got his own show in 2011’s … Read more
All the Colors of the Dark
The plot’s terrible but the mood is tasty in All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti I colori del buio), an Italian/Spanish giallo from 1972 that does its best – and breast – work early on. The opening sequence is formidably unsettling. A lurid montage of nudity, distortion, doubled imagery, a hideous pregnant woman in a fright wig on a gurney, a man dressed as Bo Peep, the camera pulsing in and out as if on psychedelics while children sing tunelessly on the unnerving soundtrack. After that, waking from the horrendous nightmare reliving the night her child died, Jane Harrison (Edwige Fenech) hops out of bed and into the shower in her skimpy nightdress, for … Read more
Moontide
One of the little joys of Moontide is trying to work out which bits of it were directed by Fritz Lang. His name isn’t on the screen credits but he was the original director, until he was fired after falling out with its star, Jean Gabin. Ironically, it was Gabin who had campaigned to get Lang attached to the film in the first place, which shows he had quite a lot of pull in Hollywood for someone who might have been France’s biggest star but was unknown in America when he arrived there to escape the Nazis. Archie Mayo gets the director credit but it’s surely Lang behind the camera for the opening … Read more
I.S.S.
I.S.S. is a thriller set on the International Space Station where Russians and Americans are co-operating happily until a nuclear war breaks out down below. First up, why haven’t more films been set on the ISS? What a golden opportunity. Second up, did you realise (as I didn’t) that missions continue to be flown to the ISS, even though tensions between the USA and Russia are hardly at an all-time low (writing this in March 2024)? Pushing that tension into the fictional realm, I.S.S. becomes operational as a space thriller when one of the crew notices that massive eruptions are taking place down on planet Earth. Volcanoes, suggests one? It turns out the … 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 Usual Suspects
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 January Pete Postlethwaite dies, 2011 On this day in 2011, aged 64, the actor Pete Postlethwaite died of pancreatic cancer. It had been diagnosed in March 2009. Postlethwaite had already survived cancer once, having been diagnosed of testicular cancer in 1990, which went into remission after he had a testicle removed. An actor simultaneously of great force and nuance, Postlethwaite’s relatively uncommon name marks his family down as having originated in Postlethwaite in Cumbria, England (the name means Postle’s Farm). His relatively uncommon looks – huge bony cheekbones, honest putty nose, angry skin – were matched by his trajectory into … Read more
Hinterland
Horizons aslant, perspectives askew, Hinterland borrows freely from German Expressionist cinema to put a new (old) spin on familiar material. “The war is lost,” intones a sombre voice in German as the lights come up. We’re in Austria after the First World War where a soldier just back from an extended stretch in a Soviet prisoner of war camp is acclimatising himself to life back in Vienna. He was a cop before the war and now he’s back on home turf he’d like to be again. Which is handy because there’s a killer on the loose, offing people in floridly extravagant ways – one man pinioned to a post by a large number … Read more
A Man Escaped
A Man Escaped is probably the best jailbreak movie ever made. Who said Shawshank? What’s more it was made almost as an “anti-movie” movie by a director so disdainful of cinema trickery and excess that he turned out one film after another to demonstrate that you don’t need it all, and that when it comes to drama on the big screen, sound is at least as important as image, possibly more so. Set in 1943 in Nazi-occupied France, it simply follows a Resistance fighter called Lafontaine (François Leterrier) into and then out of prison again. Taken in by the Nazis, escaping under his own steam, using nothing but ingenuity and everyday objects. A … Read more
