Popular Reviews
Play Dirty
“Life is goddam black and I photograph life.” Andre De Toth’s thumbnail manifesto is perfectly illustrated by Play Dirty, his last film and one of his ugliest. Critics hated it, though you sense it was the nihilism of the movie they really had an issue with rather than the various issues they cited. War is hell and it turns men into beasts, that’s the message here. It is in essence The Dirty Dozen but dirtier, a not-so-playful Second World War adventure in the sands of North Africa, where a prissy cravat-wearing Brit, played by Michael Caine, is seconded by a cynical top brass (who expect everyone to die) to lead a crack unit … Read more
Tension
If you’re buying Tension as a “physical”, it often comes packaged together on DVD or Blu-ray with Where Danger Lives, as if it were a makeweight. Strange, since it’s a cracking film in terms of plot and character. Ostensibly designed as a vehicle for Audrey Totter, it ended up with Richard Basehart’s name first in the billing – studio reasons – though in all honesty it’s Barry Sullivan who’s the standout here, excellent though Totter and Basehart are. She plays the femme fatale who’s somehow wound up married to sappy and dutiful drugstore manager Warren Quimby but who’s carrying on a not-so-secret affair with local tough guy Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough), a believer in … Read more
Double Indemnity
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 April Miklós Rózsa born, 1907 On this day in 1907, the celebrated and prolific film composer Miklós Rózsa was born, in Budapest, Hungary. His mother was a pianist and his father was a wealthy industrialist. Young Miklós was performing in public and composing at the age of eight. After studying in Leipzig, Germany, he moved to London, where fellow Hungarian, the producer Alexander Korda gave him his first film to score, 1937’s Knight without Armour. Rózsa went to Hollywood with Korda to work on The Thief of Bagdad, then went on to work on several Billy Wilder films, including Five … Read more
100 Years of… The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Released in Germany in 1920 but not given an international debut until April 1921, in New York, German director Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has gone down in history as one of the most important films of the era, and the most important German expressionist film of all time. You can see its influence everywhere, in Citizen Kane, The Third Man and Shutter Island, to grab a trio of obvious borrowers, but though it’s much talked about, how many people have actually seen it? What might come as a surprise 100 years on is that it didn’t meet universal acclaim at the time. Cultural historians still argue about whether it was … Read more
Paracelsus
Paracelsus, the great Swiss renaissance physician. Who could want a film about him? Adolf Hitler, it turns out. Maybe in the story of the proud loner standing against received wisdom, the tribune of the Volk and all that, Hitler saw a kindred spirit – the Führerprinzip in action before the Führer. The director was the GW Pabst, who’d been caught in France en route to the USA at the beginning of the war and was then forced to turn out films for the Reich. With a lot of foot-dragging and a determination to keep Nazi ideology as much as possible out of the finished product, the great Austrian made only two in five … Read more
Chemical Hearts
Love is a feeling generated by chemicals in the brain, suggests Suds, the practical, science-versed older sister of Henry, in Chemical Hearts. It’s also a feeling generated by this deliciously gooey romance. If there’s room each year for one gorgeous indie teenage love movie then this is the 500 Days of Summer of 2020. Henry is the nerdy high school kid whose long-term goal is to be a writer. Shorter term his ambition stretches to editing the school paper. Dropping into his world one day like an alien from outer space is Grace, a spiky, withdrawn, slightly sneery girl who’s smart, bookish and into the love poems of Pablo Neruda. Oh dear. He’s … Read more
Ghosts
Ghosts (Gespenster in the German original) is the film Christian Petzold made between Wolfsburg and the one that bounced him more into the international spotlight, Yella. It’s the second of his Ghosts trilogy – Die innere Sicherheit (aka The State I’m In) and Yella are the other two – and like Die innere Sicherheit stars Julia Hummer as a bit of a waif trying to shore up her personality against a hostile world. Here she’s a teenage girl who lives in a home, a shy kid who one day meets her exact opposite, a tough street rat who lives on her wits, largely by shoplifting, and who knows what else. Nina (Hummer) is … Read more
23 November 2015-11-23
Out This Week Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Paramount, cert 12) Tom Cruise’s desire to be James Bond really gets the better of him in M:I5, a flabby action spectacular which has visited Vienna, London, Langley, Paris and Havana within its first 20 minutes or so, right after the pre-credits sequence which sees Jason Bourne, hang on, Ethan Hunt clambering onto the outside of a cargo plane as it’s taking off. A stunt done for real, we’re told, and impressive whether it was or wasn’t. Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed, so there’s plenty of that “who is the real bad guy?” attitude that was the making of The Usual Suspects, but here is … Read more
Ludwig
As mad and excessive as the king it portrays, Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig – about the “mad” King Ludwig II (1845-1886) of Bavaria – is a vast, sprawling and sumptuous catalogue of the excesses of a monarch who’s clearly off his chump. It got absolutely hammered by the US critics when it opened there in 1973 – Roger Ebert gave it one star and described it as “lethargic and persistently uninteresting”. The New York Times said it was “bereft of ideas”. And neither of them had seen the full-length four-hour version. At least 30 minutes had been lopped for its US distribution. Which is a pity, because the sheer unwieldy size of the thing … Read more
Europa
Europe is finished! Lars Von Trier’s finale to his Europa trilogy – Europa – makes summaries and predictions about life on a continent dragging a long, dark history behind it. All three films – The Element of Crime, Epidemic and now Europa – work in the same way, as grim anti-pantomimes of studied awfulness, presented in arthouse genuflection before Tarkovsky, Kafka, Fassbinder and Brecht. Into a shattered post-War Germany in ruins Von Trier inserts his hero, a new arrival from America, full of idealism and signing up to work on the railways as a sleeping car guard. It’s not long before Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr) has been compromised, restrained, tied down and discredited after … Read more
The Sixth Sense
How the mighty M Night Shyamalan has fallen since this, possibly the most barnstorming debut in the past 25 years. I’d have said “except Reservoir Dogs” except that Tarantino’s film wasn’t his debut (the barely seen My Best Friend’s Birthday, the final reel of which got burnt up in a lab fire, has that honour). But then a lot of people don’t know that The Sixth Sense wasn’t Shyamalan’s debut film either; it was his third. Those hugely digressive factoids to one side, Shyamalan’s certainly most famous film to date gave us Haley Joel Osment as a young boy being pestered by unquiet spirits. The boy doesn’t like it and so ends up … Read more
The Killer
There’s a remake of 1989’s The Killer in the works, with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy in lead roles. But can it match up to the original, even with original director John Woo calling the shots. I believe it’s Emmanuel as the assassin in the update/reimagining, but it was Chow Yun-Fat way back when, as the supercool killer motivated to do “one last job” to raise enough cash to restore the eyesight of an innocent singer who got caught in the crossfire of a previous hit. Compare and contrast the relative importance of female roles. Blind singer Jennie, played by Sally Yeh, does not do much more than scream and whimper in the … Read more
