Popular Reviews
The Looking Glass War
The third of John Le Carré’s spy thrillers to be adapted for the big screen, 1970’s The Looking Glass War is an odd and pretty much entirely unsuccessful spy thriller that’s taken a big conceptual decision only for it not to pay off at all. The first two adaptations were the big success The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (Richard Burton starred) and the underrated The Deadly Game (a reworking of Le Carré’s novel Call for the Dead, with James Mason as a version of George Smiley). There’s no sign of Smiley here, though he was in this film’s original novel. That said, there is some justification for removing him since … Read more
The Munsters
Rob Zombie’s The Munsters is a reboot of the 1960s TV show borrowing heavily from the original and dredging it all in a tooth-rotting production design. Rarely if ever has a black-and-white TV show been re-imagined so gaudily. The end product, like Herman Munster himself, is a bag of bits. That’s maybe intentional. Herman Munster was an ersatz Frankenstein’s monster, the original version having been assembled in the good Baron’s laboratory. In much the same way, in the 1960s The Munsters was assembled from offcuts of Universal’s 1930s and 1940s horror movies – Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man etc. This made financial sense. No character rights to pay for since Universal … Read more
Let the Wrong One In
Comedy horror – no surprise there, surely – Let the Wrong One In takes the vampire movie and does a Shaun of the Dead number on it. Which is to say: arcane lore is exposed to the withering light of everyday life. Result: funny, and another contender for the Ireland’s Comic Horror Hall of Fame, alongside the likes of Shrooms and Grabbers. Conor McMahon gets his film going with lurid gothic titles and a bit of a Hammer horror parody. We’re in Transylvania where Sheila (Mary Murray) and her gal pals are on a hen weekend, getting drunk, carrying around giant inflatable penises and the like, when Mary is suddenly approached by a … Read more
Things Will Be Different
Michael Felker’s debut movie, Things Will Be Different, is billed as “A Felker Film”, which is ominously grandiose. But things are indeed different here and Felker emerges as a writer/director you might term an auteur, which is what the whole Felker Film thing is suggesting, right? Most movies don’t operate like Felker’s film. They set out a proposition and then work their way through it for us. Here, Felker drops us into something and makes us do the mental lifting for ourselves. After introducing us to two people at a remote diner, both with rifles, both looking hunted, he essentially asks us to ask a whole bunch of questions. Who are these people … Read more
Le Procès aka The Trial
An arch bullshitter of the first water, Orson Welles fell on Franz Kafka’s The Trial like he fell on everything – mountainously. Kafka’s is a simple story – about Joseph K, a man arrested for an unspecified crime, who is taken through a legal process, all the way protesting he’s innocent. Is he? We can never tell, since the narrator is K himself and it’s impossible to work out if he’s lying or not, though he does increasingly come across as a shifty piece of work. Not unlike the artful Mr Welles, who protested to the end of his days that Hollywood had found him guilty of an unspecified crime and had banished … Read more
Christmas Holiday
Imagine calling a film Christmas Holiday and then filling it with desperation, prositution, twisted mother love and murder. They knew how to have fun in 1944. Ignore all the opening flimflam about a lieutenant being dumped by his girl on Christmas Eve, the day before his wedding. The film only really takes wing once we get to the backstory of Jackie (Deanna Durbin), the prostitute that heartsore Lieutenant Charles Mason (Dean Harens) hooks up with after accidentally landing in New Orleans en route back to San Francisco for the furlough he now no longer wants or needs. He winds up taking not to bed but to… midnight mass. Charlie is a nothing in … Read more
Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose
The who? The what? Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose is a title asking two questions and, without further ado, here come the answers. Nandor Fodor was a real man, a Hungarian-born parapsychologist (1895-1964) and former associate of Sigmund Freud who became a leading paranormal investigator. His preferred MO was to explain poltergeists and other spiritual apparitions as having a rational (psychological) explanation. People, he generally thought, believe this stuff into existence, they’re not being deceptive. As to the Talking Mongoose, that was a famous case lofted into the public consciousness by the British tabloid newspapers, of an animal on the Isle of Man (which sits in the Irish Sea between the UK … Read more
Marie Antoinette
It’s tempting to look at writer/director Sofia Coppola’s biopic about Marie Antoinette as a coded self-portrait – young woman born into immense privilege, continuing in the family business, expected to have an understanding of the hoi polloi though with no experience thereof, allowed to indulge her whims, and so on. Perhaps it’s a better film seen that way, because as a straightforward biopic it’s full of problems, chief of those being the inertia at the centre, where Kirsten Dunst’s Marie – the Austrian princess bought in by the French to produce an heir – and her spouse the Dauphin (Jason Schwartzman) sit like a pair of bland puddings while around them wheel a menagerie of exotic … Read more
Caught
Revenge would be a better title but Caught it is, director Max Ophüls’s broadside against Howard Hughes, who’d fired him from Vendetta only days into shooting a film that was meant to launch the career of Faith Domergue, a Hughes “discovery” (booty division). Vendetta ended up with five directors’ names attached to it so clearly the launch needed more grease on the slipway than anticipated. Hughes’s treatment of women, it turns out, is what Caught is all about, a reworking of the Libbie Block novel Wild Calendar also incorporating the stories Ophüls and screenwriter Arthur Laurents had heard about the infamously philandering studio boss. Naive and nice young thing Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes) … Read more
The Man Who Sold His Skin
“Sometimes I think I”m Mephistopheles,” guyliner-wearing conceputal artist Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw) tells Sam (Yahya Mahayni) near the beginning of The Man Who Sold His Skin. Sam is the Syrian refugee Godefroi is about to sign up to be a living art work, and Godefroi’s declaration is as clear a reference as you need that this is an update on the Faust legend, albeit with a clever retooling for a more secular age – men no longer sell their souls, it’s their ass or, more decorously, their skin that’s in this game. The Arabic original title – translated as The Man Who Sold His Back – gets things a touch closer to … Read more
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
One of the big surprises of late 2023 was Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves making it onto so many “Best of…” lists for the year. Even more surprising, it actually deserves to be there (usual caveats apply). It’s a big sword-and-sorcery quest movie, with all the stuff you’d expect – spells, elves, shapeshifters, a medieval setting, capes, subterranean realms, undead creatures and, yes, dungeons and dragons. “Wizards and shit”, as one critic once termed it (I suspect it might have been Nathan Rabin, who also gave us the Manic Pixie Dream Girl as a concept). What you might not expect is the tone. It’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the medieval … Read more
Tár
Tár, not Tar – even in the title of this drama about a world-famous conductor’s epic fall from grace there are hints as to what exactly caused it. Writer/director Todd Field, in his first film since 2006’s Little Children, structures this grand return like a symphony, with a big opening statement à la Mahler’s Fifth, introducing conductor extraordinaire Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) on stage in conversation with Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker. This is the full data-dump of personality – a glamorous, garrulous, driven, intellectual, unapologetic, combative internationally feted conductor at the top of her game. Tár’s self-satisfaction is almost unbearable to watch. After that a series of sketches dip slightly behind the … Read more
