Popular Reviews
Shell
First The Substance, now Shell – is there room for more body horror about the perils of staving off the ageing process? Shell attacks the same subject from the same angle but uses different implements. The result is less Cronenberg-inspired, as Coralie Forgeat’s The Substance was, more Paul Verhoeven, a cautionary tale with a leer and yuks. Director Max Minghella signals he has Verhoeven in mind in his very first shot – of Elizabeth Berkley in a bath trying to hack black lumps off her leg. She was the star of Verhoeven’s infamous Showgirls, a film that all but ruined her career and didn’t do anything for his – two barrels of old-fashioned, … Read more
Roll Out the Barrel: Pubs Never Looked So Good
A collection of documentary shorts on the British pub paints a warm, comforting picture of one of the country’s most cherished institutions. But is it a true one? “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man,” intones a voice theatrically, “by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.” The quote is from Samuel Johnson and it kicks off The Story of English Inns, the first of 20 collected documentary shorts from the archive released in June 2012 by the British Film Institute. Alas, anyone who’s ever been to a British pub will tell you that this adage conveys only half the truth. For every charming hostelry … Read more
Broken Lullaby
Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 drama Broken Lullaby was originally called The Man I Killed, like the Maurice Rostand play it was based on (L’homme que j’ai tué). It turned out to be a title too hard-hitting for the box office and so it was decided to change it. To The Fifth Commandment. Until some bright spark pointed out that “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t always in the number five position in the Commandments. If you’re Jewish or Orthodox, it’s number six, for example. And so, bizarrely, Broken Lullaby is what the movie ended up being called. Both the play and the film are the story of a French soldier who kills a German soldier … Read more
1 December 2014-12-01
Home entertainment releases this week in the UK The Inbetweeners 2 (4DVD, cert 15) Four go mad Down Under in the “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” follow-up to the British box office hit of 2011. The initial idea behind writer/director Damon Beesley and Iain Morris’s TV series was that the four misfits were the kind of nerdy guys who aren’t cool enough to be cool, not dumb enough to be losers – they’re just inbetween. Normal. But Beesley and Morris’s great skill, as well as jokes involving sex and bodily functions, is in locating these lads socially. So when we first meet them this time around, striving Will (Simon Bird) is at Bristol University, … Read more
Becoming Led Zeppelin
When Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty were setting out to make Becoming Led Zeppelin they didn’t realise that surviving band members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones had all seen their TV series American Epic, about roots music in the US, and were big fans. So it came as more than a surprise to them when Page, Plant and Jones readily agreed to take part in a documentary about the crucial early days of one of the most famous rock bands of all time. They’d expected the sort of blank refusal this notoriously publicity shy band generally dished out to would-be suitors. The result is in many ways a traditional documentary, … Read more
Gentlemen of Fortune
You might not associate frivolous caper comedy with the dour Soviet Union of gulags and five-year plans, but that’s what Gentlemen of Fortune is. A larky affair that probably works best if you get all the cultural specifics, it’s perfectly entertaining even with very little knowledge of the USSR. It’s one of the most successful comedies ever produced under the communist system – doesn’t that tickle your curiosity? It’s a very familiar story, of one man posing as another, kicking off with the theft from an archaeological dig of a solid gold helmet reputed to have belonged to Alexander the Great. The thieves are soon caught and sentenced to prison, but where’s the … Read more
Miller’s Crossing
By the time the Coen brothers made Miller’s Crossing, their third movie, it had become obvious that their films weren’t really set in the real world. Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing is set in an adjacent reality constructed entirely from moviescapes and populated with characters we seem to have met before. That it works brilliantly, both as pastiche and as a drama in its own right, is the difference between the Coens and some others who try the same thing. That it also manages to be funny when it should be and tense as hell when necessary, marks them out as something really special. The film is built around askew … Read more
The Magnificent Ambersons
The film that never was, a magnificent mess, Orson Welles’s masterpiece, better even than Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons is all these things and more, or perhaps less, since no one apart from a handful of people in 1942 has ever seen the finished version. Instead there’s just the version we have, which is minus 50 minutes of material Welles had included in the rough cut he’d made with editor Robert Wise (later of The Sound of Music fame). After negative screenings, a general antipathy towards Welles at RKO and a change of public mood on account of Pearl Harbor having just propelled the USA into the Second World War, the studio ordered … Read more
Copshop
More tightly controlled chaos from Joe Carnahan with Copshop. Following hard on the heels of Boss Level, it’s another display of post-Tarantino buzzsaw brilliance, and again it has Frank Grillo – late to the action party but most welcome – as a badass lead. Most Carnahan films – The Grey and The A Team being notable exceptions – are like Copshop. The action starts out with a couple of characters doing something fairly preposterous, and then Carnahan widens his net with real skill to incorporate more and more characters, all also doing preposterous, or bad, or mad things, before he finally gets everyone together for a gonzo finale usually involving excessive gunplay and suicidal … Read more
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Patty Tolan and Kate McKinnon. It just wasn’t funny or scary. They never are, scary I mean, the Ghostbusters films. That’s not really the point. The idea is to deliver lots of likeable knockabout camaraderie and good vibes, which is what Afterlife does, liberally scattering easter eggs referring back to one of the original two movies, but not … Read more
31 August 2015-08-31
Out This Week Phoenix (Soda, cert 12) Nina Hoss and Christian Petzold have made six films together, of which I’ve seen only one – the outstanding left-field supernatural thriller Yella. Phoenix builds its drama in a similar way to that 2007 movie – withholding a piece of information and asking us to guess what exactly is going on. Here, we’re in a quasi-Vertigo story, with Hoss as Nelly, a Jewish woman who’s having facial reconstruction surgery in the immediate rubble-strewn aftermath of the Second World War in Germany. Why? We’re not sure. Though the fact she’s been in “the camps” is surely significant. And chilling. And what sort of a clinic is offering … Read more
Broker
On a filthy rainy South Korea night a young mother abandons her baby, leaving it in the “baby box” – designated for just this thing – attached to a church. The next day, having changed her mind, she heads back to the church, only to find that a pair of “baby brokers” got to the box before the church authorities. They have stolen her baby and intend to sell it on the adoption black market. Two cops saw all this. Clearly onto the brokers, they were watching from a stakeout vehicle as Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun) left her baby and as Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) filched it. As they watch and snack on instant noodles, gummi … Read more
