Popular Reviews
We Live in Public
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 November Tim Berners-Lee publishes World Wide Web proposal, 1990 On this day in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, an employee of the European research organisation CERN, published the formal proposal to create a more efficient information management system which would connect up hypertext documents on different computers running different operating systems, to be viewed by client-server applications (ie browsers). Building on a prediction by Arthur C Clarke that satellites would allow global access via console to vast amounts of information, telephony, video conferencing and so on, Berners-Lee took practical inspiration from the Dynatext electronic book system – which used a rigorous and … Read more
A Quiet Place: Day One
Hang on, A Quiet Place: Day One is the origin story, about how Earth is invaded by creatures who track humans using sound alone? Wasn’t that already covered in A Quiet Place Part II? Indeed it was, but if you are generous of spirit and reject the idea that A Quiet Place: Day One is just a reheat of old hash, you’ll be pointing out right now that A Quiet Place Part II did the whole “how the apocalypse arrived” thing in its first ten minutes, then zipped forwards in time about a year and a half to catch up with the Abbott family (Emily Blunt, John Krasinski and co) as they came … Read more
M
The point of Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M – Eine Stadt Sucht einen Mörder is slightly lost when its truncated title, simply M, is used. This is a story not about a murderer (which is what the M stands for) but about the mob, when the rule of law is rejected in favour of a lynching. Which all comes as a bit of a surprise if you’re watching M for the first time and only know it from its reputation. There are two other things that most people coming fresh to this film already “know”. These are a) that M is an expressionist masterpiece and b) it’s got Peter Lorre in it. Dealing … Read more
The Furies
There’s not a likeable person in 1950’s The Furies, with the possible exception of a character who winds up at the end of a rope. It’s possibly why it’s so hard to get stuck into this complex and thematically rich film, though bad storytelling might be another reason. Since it’s called The Furies, you might expect a Greek tragic element, and you get it, in an Oedipal tale with a gender-flip, of an old patriarch and his two children: the son he can barely look at and the daughter he’s looking at a bit too much. She’s lavishing too much attention on him too, back rubs and whatnot, but for the most part … Read more
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz aka Ensayo de un crimen
In typical fashion, Luis Buñuel turns the crime drama on its head in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (originally Ensayo de un crimen), a story about a killer who isn’t a killer admitting to crimes he didn’t commit because he’s convinced he somehow perpetrated them. Being a Buñuel film there’s also a reckoning with the bourgeoisie, and how they tend to get things assbackwards. Here, the wellspring of Archibaldo’s misery is becoming hardwired to confuse sex and death at an early age when, as a spoilt little rich boy, he sees his governess killed by a stray bullet fired by revolutionaries running amok outside the palatial family home. It’s as … Read more
Man Hunt
A film expressly designed to lure the US into the war in Europe, 1941’s Man Hunt is also Fritz Lang’s attempt at a rollicking The 39 Steps-style yarn, with dashing about, derring-do, stiff upper lips, local colour and a man/woman yoking-together that’s got everything Hitchcock had except handcuffs and his exquisite sense of pace. It bogs down, in other words. But only towards the end. Up till then this is a fast-moving story about a tweedy secret agent of some sort, who is caught red-handed while lining up his rifle’s telescopic sight on Adolf Hitler. When interrogated by the Nazis Captain Alan Thorndike’s defence is that he had no intention of actually killing … Read more
15 December 2014-12-15
Out in the UK This Week Lucy (Universal, cert 15) Young innocent Lucy gains access to the full potential of her human brain in one of Luc Besson’s now infrequent bouts of directing. A kissing cousin of 1997’s The Fifth Element, it’s a fun and funky affair, helped enormously by the seven barrels of spunk that Scarlett Johansson injects into it. She plays the innocent abroad who is first forced into becoming a mule carrying a seriously mind-expanding drug for a seriously life-threatening gangster, and then an uberbeing when the drug gets into her bloodstream after she’s given a damn good kicking by a henchman for rejecting his sexytime overture. Well, that’s the last time anyone … Read more
This Must Be the Place
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 August The Mainz pogrom, 1349 In the 14th century, the bubonic plague – aka the Black Death – killed between 30 and 60 per cent of Europe’s population (20-30 million people) in the course of about six years. It arrived from Asia in 1346 and ran rampant. No one knew what the cause of it was, but one of the theories was that it was God’s way of showing his displeasure with humanity, either for waging war constantly (the 100 Years War was ten years in), failing to drive the Muslim out of the Holy Land, or, casting about for … Read more
A Fortunate Man
The title isn’t so much ironic as a question. Is Per (Esben Smed), the hero of A Fortunate Man, actually fortunate? Or a hero, for that matter? Danish director Bille August sweats bullets to condense this adaptation of Nobel-Prizewinner Henrik Pontoppidan’s eight-volume novel Lykke-Per down to movie size. At two hours 40 something minutes, it’s a big, sweeping, historical epic of a thing, a carriage-clock movie at bottom posing a simple question: what is the good life? Pontopiddan’s eight volumes were intended as a compare and contrast to Hans Christian Andersen’s last book, the near-namesake Lykke-Peer, which was a tale of heroic struggle crowned by the ironic death of its lead character at … Read more
23 March 2015-03-23
Out in the UK This Week Winter Sleep (New Wave, cert 15) The Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest thing of recalcitrant beauty is three hours long and breaks down neatly into three acts, each about an hour in length. In act one we meet Aydin, a progressive baby-boomer with a bit of money, a local luminary, a former actor, a newspaper columnist, a soft touch. Winter Sleep follows him, much in the way Michael Haneke did with Hidden, as that nice liberal carapace is pressure-tested, in Aydin’s case when the son of one of his tenants breaks his car window with a stone. Tenants? Yes, that’s how come Aydin is so comfortable, … Read more
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 February Elizabeth Taylor born, 1932 On this day in 1932 Elizabeth Taylor was born, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, UK. Her parents were American, originally from Arkansas, and her mother was a former actress. Often considered the last true star of Hollywood’s golden era – before TV made inroads in the 1950s – Taylor’s career started when she was nine, with There’s One Born Every Minute, followed up two years later with Lassie Come Home. Then came National Velvet, and at the age of 12 Elizabeth Taylor was a star. She remained, partly thanks to her violet eyes, double eyelashes, … Read more
Manhattan
Woody Allen’s 1979 magnum opus starts famously with a long montage which appears to suggest that New York is to the modern world what Paris was in the early half of the 20th century – the home of romance, intellectualism, art, sex and impossible glamour. To the sinuous jazz of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Allen treats us to a sequence of lush black and white images such as Robert Doisneau or Henri Cartier-Bresson might have taken. And then, in the filmic equivalent of dragging the needle off the record, he appears to say ‘Hang on – the French may be mature, worldly and philosophical. But New Yorkers?’ The next 90 minutes play out … Read more
