Popular Reviews
Run
She can’t. Run, that is, one of the little jokes that director/co-writer Aneesh Chaganty has with the audience in this two-hander about a mother, her wheelchair-using daughter and the young woman’s impending flight from the family home to university. Another joke is what a great mother Diane (Sarah Paulson) is. She’s home-schooled her daughter Chloe (Kiera Allen), feeds her with vegetables grown (organically, surely) in their very own garden, the better to ensure that Chloe grows up big and strong. Except that isn’t Chloe’s fate. She’s been born with a range of problems – asthma, diabetes, a blood condition and paralysis from the waist down – but she’s a smart and resourceful kid … Read more
The Big Bluff
Did you know that Billy Wilder had a brother and that his name was Billy too? In fact W Lee Wilder had more of a claim on “Billy” than Billy did, being two years older than his more famous sibling and having actually been baptised William. Billy’s birth name was Samuel. W Lee Wilder also worked in the film biz, though down the chain quite a bit. He specialised in making shorts about church music in the Southern USA. There were 16 of those, produced to little acclaim. When W Lee was not ploughing this furrow he was busy in another, churning out unremarkable if not downright terrible low-budget sci-fi like 1954’s Killers … Read more
For All Mankind
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 July Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon, 1969 Today in 1969, while schoolchildren the world over hugged their knees while watching, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the Moon. Armstrong and Aldrin had landed just after 8.00pm UTC (aka GMT) and, having completed the hardest part of the mission without major mishap, then decided to bring forward the planned moonwalk. Just over six hours later they were ready to go. The Eagle, the lunar module, was depressurised, the door was opened and Armstrong climbed down the ladder to become the first … Read more
16 March 2015-03-16
Out in the UK This Week The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (Lionsgate, cert 12) Jennifer Lawrence works the adenoids in the third dump of Hunger Games literalism, in a series that has consistently mistaken event for drama. Being the first of two parts, Mockingjay was never even aiming to line up all its battalions, send them into battle and bring them safely home again. But even so, this is a very thin outing for Katniss and co – now she is being groomed as the mascot of the rebels and as such is off out with a camera team making propaganda TV infomercials. How very quaint – TV, camera crews, a world … Read more
26 November 2012-11-26
Out in the UK this week Ted (Universal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Descending occasionally into Family Guy droning, Seth MacFarlane’s comedy about a guy (Mark Wahlberg) and his walking, talking, living teddy bear otherwise riffs rude and hilarious on popular culture – hookers and hookahs to Diff’rent Strokes and Ming the Merciless. Ted – at Amazon Magic Mike (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Channing Tatum takes his clothes off. Recommendation enough, maybe, but Steven Soderbergh’s Boogie Nights-lite drama about male strippers also faintly deals with the objectification of the male body. And Matthew McConaughey takes his clothes off too. Magic Mike – at Amazon The Amazing Spider-Man (Sony, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) The special effects aren’t … Read more
Human Traffic
Human Traffic made a hell of a feature debut for its writer and director Justin Kerrigan at the back end of the 20th century. A pill-popping tale of a mad weekend among McJobbers in Cardiff, Wales, it’s a film unashamed, delighted in fact, to bring us drug-taking as it is experienced by those who do it most – from Friday night euphoria to Sunday comedown – as fun, an escape, a lark. We’re talking about ecstasy, this being 1999, and the film was so of the moment that the UK newspaper The Guardian called it “the last great film of the nineties”. The paper was rushing on its own euphoria but there is an … Read more
Wonder Woman 1984
And so Wonder Woman 1984. Last time we saw Gal Gadot’s lasso-swinging Amazon she was helping to win the First World War, and now, nearly 70 years on, here she is again in the era of Armani suits and “greed is good” and in a year most closely associated with George Orwell. This is a big, heavy, beast of a film that’s too long, too slow, too dull, and if that is a political message about democracy that writer/director Patty Jenkins is trying to sneak in there, someone should really have told her not to. Gal Gadot remains a wondrous Wonder Woman, though, a flawless paragon of superherodom, and the story gets off … Read more
Totally Killer
As a capsule description Totally Killer sounds totally familiar. A nice white-picket American town in 1987. Three 16-year-old females murdered, stabbed 16 times by the same masked mystery assailant. The murderer never caught. Now, 35 years later, on Halloween, it’s happening again. A Nightmare on Elm Street? Friday the 13th? Most obviously Halloween – the date, the mask, the teenagers, the burbs and all that. Yes. But no. Because to that heady bestiary of 1980s horror, writers David Matalon and Sasha Perl-Raver add another mid-1980s staple – the time-travel movie, à la Back to the Future (1985) or Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Kiernan Shipka plays Jamie Hughes, the Peggy Sue/Marty McFly avatar … Read more
Marty Supreme
Timothée Chalamet spent five years in training for Marty Supreme, dragging a table-tennis table from one film to the next, so he could hone his skills by banging out a few games between takes. There’s lots of spare time on film sets, especially on the sort of big productions Chalamet has got used to appearing in – Dune, Wonka, A Complete Unknown. It has paid off. Whatever else Marty Supreme is, it’s exhibition-class proof that Chalamet put in the hours and became a plausible table tennis dynamo. As for the rest of it, it’s director/co-writer Josh Safdie’s first film made without the support structure of brother Benny. The Safdies did Uncut Gems together, … Read more
Broken Flowers
If you’re looking for peak Bill Murray, 2005’s Broken Flowers is a strong contender. Murray himself recently said, “that was a perfect movie… it really did happen”, (while eating spicy chicken wings on a YouTube show called First We Feast, in case you want to check that out too). It’s peak Murray because it’s a Jim Jarmusch movie, and Murray and Jarmusch are both masters of cool deadpan. But also because this is a Murray vehicle in a way even Groundhog Day cannot match. He is in every scene, the story is all about his character and though there’s obviously a gulf between the Murray we see on screen and the real one, what … Read more
100 Years of… Master of the House
More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, for plenty of that. Madly successful at the box office, Master of the House is, as near as you got from Dreyer, a Hollywood entertainment, telling a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, emotional arcs, good guys and bad guys, fairly realistic performances and a moral at the end that you can actually see coming from … Read more
The Social Network
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 October The Mickey Mouse Club debuts, 1955 On this day in 1955, Walt Disney launched The Mickey Mouse Club on the ABC television network. Essentially a variety show that made stars of its mini-vaudevillians (named Mouseketeers), it was hosted by a number of adult comperes. Initially this was Jimmy Dodd, who would intersperse performances by the kids and old episodes of shows such as The Hardy Boys with a song and a homily of his own composing, thus setting the tone for the MMC – sunny, positive, virtuous. The show continued until its cancellation in 1959, but then continued to … Read more
