Popular Reviews
Zorro: Who Is That Masked Man?
The Mexicans like their heroes the way they like their tacos – with cheese. Enter Zorro. Cue mask, cape and ludicrous pencil moustache Next time you’re in London, try the Robin Hood Zorro restaurant in Hammersmith. This oddly conceived English/Mexican hybrid serves an equally odd drink called the Robin Hood Meets Zorro cocktail. A mouthful to order and a hell of a thing to drink, it contains tequila, gin and beer. The menu doesn’t say it’s served with a bucket, but it probably should be. What is it about Zorro that seems to bring out the naffness in … well, everything? It was not always thus. Dial back to the mists of the … Read more
Tony Manero
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 October Former Chilean president Pinochet arrested, 1998 On this day in 1998, Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile, was arrested in London, having been indicted by a Spanish judge of crimes against the human rights of his countrymen. It was the first time that European judges had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, which asserts that states or international organisations can lay claim to legal authority over somebody, regardless of where the crime took place. The most notable use of the principle to date was in the trial of Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War, many … Read more
Woolf Women
Five young women head to Turkey with their skateboards in this documentary taking a tour of the Generation Z zeitgeist. Before we go any further, they refer to each other as “girls”, which I know is not everyone’s favourite term for young women, ladies, females – none of them sound quite right. Lass, chick, dame? Something else that doesn’t sound right is the sound coming out of the mouth of German professional downhill skater (and co-director) Jennifer “Jungle” Schauerte, who we see in opening footage hurtling down a road at a hell of a speed, the helmetcam catching the dizzying, exhilarating descent before she slams into a crash barrier and starts screaming. She’s … Read more
29 September 2014-09-29
Out in the UK This Week Edge of Tomorrow (Warner, cert 12, digital) As hyper-aware of his position in the culture as he is of a camera in relation to his three-quarter profile, Tom Cruise knows that a lot of people want to see him taking a kicking. Edge of Tomorrow (or Live. Die. Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow as it seems to have become) answers that demand, with Cruise playing a cocky jumped-up PR guy pressganged into the army (which answers the “how come a guy over 50 is still in any army?” question) who then relives the same day over and over again, after he gets contaminated with alien blood. What plays out is … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 4 – Bullseye
Like one of those arcane “tontine plots”, the fourth episode of series two offers us a scenario where a string of people die so somebody in the same eco-system can ultimately benefit. Julie Stevens womanfully did sidekick duty in the last episode, but Honor Blackman’s Cathy Gale returns this time round to help Steed unravel another mystery that yet again seems to be more a matter for the police than any covert organisation – an arms company resisting a takeover bid by pushy johnny-come-lately Henry Cade (Ronald Radd) finds its board members dying one after the other. Is Cade – already painted as the unacceptable face of capitalism (as if being in the … Read more
The Night
A Farsi-language horror film from the Iranian diaspora, writer/director Kourosh Ahari’s The Night is the latest entry on a very short list of crossover hits, most notably headed by A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
The Scoundrel
The Scoundrel is a gift from two great writers to Noël Coward, a chance for the playwright, screenwriter, director, actor and impresario to do his thing in a Hollywood setting for a change, rather than on the stages of Broadway or London’s West End. A highly epigrammatic, almost drawing-room dramedy, it’s high in tone from the opening credits onwards, with the spirit of Oscar Wilde (still a living memory to many in 1935 when this was made) hovering waspishly over the entire production, the tale of an utter scoundrel (Coward) being served. It’s Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur writing, producing and directing. Two of the very greatest screenplay writers, Hecht and MacArthur wrote … Read more
100 Years of… When Knighthood Was in Flower
When Knighthood Was in Flower answers the question posed by Citizen Kane – just how much of a chump was media magnate William Randolph Hearst over actress Marion Davies? Here is how much – a massive movie conceived on the grandest scale, produced by a company Hearst set up expressly to make Davies a star, with her name above the title, opening credits making great claims to the film’s historical accuracy, an opening scene with a grand entrance by Davies’s character in a royal barge, exteriors shot in Windsor, UK, even though much of the rest of the film was shot in New York and Connecticut, followed by an advertising campaign on the … Read more
100 Years of… The Strong Man
Two people do special things in 1926’s The Strong Man. The first is director Frank Capra, inventing film language on the hoof in his feature debut and showing us why he was such a force on the 20th-century film scene. The other is Harry Langdon, demonstrating an ability to animate dead space with his fluid features and expressive body. The story is really a case of the tail wagging the dog and it takes a long time to get to the film’s point – elaborately conceived and expertly executed stunts. First there’s a preamble in the Great War, where Harry’s hapless soldier Paul Bergot is taking potshots at Germans with his catapult in … Read more
19 May 2014-05-19
Out in the UK This Week The Wolf of Wall Street (Universal, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Scorsese’s best film since Casino also continues his trend towards flabby films. Twenty minutes can, and let’s hope eventually will, be trimmed from a film with a Goodfellas arc – we start with a voiceover of Leo Di Caprio saying, in effect, that for as long as he could rememeber he’d always wanted to be a richfella. And off we go into a roaring rush of the true story of Jordan Belfort, who became a licensed Wall Street broker on the day the market crashed in 1987, then started at the bottom all over again, selling penny stocks to … Read more
The Love of Jeanne Ney
The Love of Jeanne Ney is one of those torrid love stories told against a backdrop of roiling conflict. Or that’s what it looks like at the outset. But by the end it’s become more like a showcase for everything the great Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst could do – all the genres in all the styles. By this point in his career, Pabst had given Greta Garbo her first starring role two years before in 1925’s Joyless Street (aka Die freudlose Gasse). Two years later he would turn Louise Brooks into a global icon with Pandora’s Box. If Jeanne Ney was a bit of bait designed to lure Hollywood into hiring him, … Read more
The Poseidon Adventure
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 April Ronald Neame born, 1911 On this day in 1911, a remarkable figure in cinema was born. Ronald Elwin Neame lived until 2010 and in his time was a cinematographer, a producer, writer and director. There are probably plenty of people who could line up a similar list of credits. But Neame was a cinematographer on Powell and Pressburger’s One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, a producer of Oliver Lean’s Oliver Twist, the writer of Lean’s Great Expectations and the director of The Poseidon Adventure, each one of them an important film, for different reasons. He also directed Judy Garland … Read more
