Popular Reviews
I Eat Your Skin
What is it Tarantino says, about all movies being interesting even if they’re not all good? I Eat Your Skin is a case in point. Not great but absolutely fascinating, it started life in 1964, when it went by the title Zombies, gaining the name it’s now stuck with when a distributor was looking for a companion movie to make up a double bill in 1971. Director/writer/producer Del Tenney had just the film to go with I Drink Your Blood, he said. And so, taking Zombies (aka Zombie Bloodbath aka Voodoo Blood Bath) off the shelf where it had sat for seven years, he gave it yet another new name and some refreshed … Read more
Odd Man Out
The tragedy is Greek but the accents are Irish in 1947’s Odd Man Out, a day in the death of a wounded Republican man on the run in Belfast. The film turned James Mason from a British star into an international one and is often rated as director Carol Reed’s best film. Peckinpah loved it. Polanski also. Mason thought it was the best thing he ever did. An opening statement declares that this isn’t really about partisan struggle in Northern Ireland, where Republican Catholics were engaged in a long struggle against Protestant Unionists. And, true to their word, director Carol Reed and writers FL Green (he also wrote the book the film is … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 19 – Quick-Quick Slow Death
Lean, arch and fast, Quick-Quick Slow Death is high-church Avengers, with barely a normal person in it. Instead a busload of eccentrics power a plot that starts odd – a full-grown man in evening dress and bearing a “Lucille” tattoo on his arm being disgorged from a baby’s runaway pram after it’s crashed at speed – and keeps getting odder. Steed and Peel are soon on the case of the dead “agent” – the series has also finally decided how to describe the line of work that Steed and his various partners are in – with Peel off to a tattoo parlour to pursue the “Lucille” line of enquiry, while Steed heads to … Read more
Infinity Pool
What happens when the constraints of civilisation are loosened? It’s the sort of question Michael Haneke asks in a series of films, Funny Games and Time of the Wolf most obviously. In Infinity Pool Brandon Cronenberg attacks the same subject, except from a typically Cronenbergian direction, but comes to more or less the same grim and bloody conclusion as Haneke. Prepare, in other words, for a lack of laughs. Prepare also for another spectacular Mia Goth performance, current queen of letting it all hang out when it comes to horror. But first let’s meet James (Alexander Skarsgård) and wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), a couple staying in a dangerous developing country where the wealthy … Read more
All the King’s Men
All the King’s Men is, give or take, a potted history of the rise and fall of Huey Long, the populist, Depression-era senator and governor of Louisiana. The names have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty (delete according to political preference), party particulars have been redacted and so have references to any specific state or region. But the ambitious public-works, education and health programmes launched by the stand-in for Long, Willie Stark, give us a flavour of Long that’s undeniable. Long thought the big state spending of Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t go anywhere near far enough and wasn’t shy about saying so. Audiences back in 1949 would have known exactly who the film … Read more
Downloaded
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 December Record Industry Association of America files lawsuit against Napster, 1999 This is the day in 1999 that the self-styled “music industry” started its fightback. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit against Napster intended to prevent it from distributing music over its peer-to-peer file-sharing service. At the time the vast bulk of people didn’t know what peer-to-peer file-sharing was but the publicity that the case caused meant that many more of them soon did – thanks to helpful explanatory articles in newspapers etc. The suit came on top of previous attempts by individuals – notably members … Read more
Life during Wartime
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 July Earl Tupper born, 1907 Who is Earl Tupper? He invented Tupperware, and was born on this day in 1907, in Berlin, New Hampshire, USA. After studying at Bryant and Stratton University, he went into business for himself, in landscaping and nursery, before the depression of the 1930s made him bankrupt. So he took a job with DuPont, where he found a use for polyethylene slag – a waste product from oil refining – reprocessing it and fashioning it into unbreakable containers. Later, he worked on the airtight lids and in 1938 he formed the Tupperware Plastics Company. The breakthrough … Read more
Pause
At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 When is she going to crack? It’s the question asked by Tonia Mishiali’s feature debut, Pause (aka Paúse), and then answered in a series of gotchas. Pause as in Menopause, the film’s working title, and in an opening scene that’s more amusing to watch than it would be to experience, middle-aged Greek woman Elpida (Stella Fyrogeni) is being examined in gynaecological stirrups after which she’s told that she’s going through the menopause. The male doctor runs through a list of what Elpida can expect – night sweats, body odour, weight gain, allergies, bleeding, osteoporosis – a list that goes on so comically … Read more
The Signal
Well, I loved this. A confident exercise in genre and genre misdirection that has the balls to invoke The Matrix, Close Encounters, and Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. So, yes, it’s about aliens and a gigantic conspiracy and there’s a lot of white light bathing its clinical setups, and it cost not very much at all. And the first bit of misdirection comes at the very first shot – a boy, a girl, his buddy, dappled sunlight, a piano on the soundtrack. It looks like we’re in torridly romantic Nicholas Sparks territory and we can only be minutes away from someone coming down with a terminal disease, especially as Nic, our lead, is on crutches, as … Read more
Spirits of the Dead
The film equivalent of the collateralised debt obligation, the portmanteau movie generally bundles together stuff of questionable quality then sells it on using a big name or a big star to help it achieve a decent credit rating. In Spirits of the Dead (aka Tales of Mystery and Imagination), three adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe tales, there are plenty of big names – Federico Fellini, Roger Vadim and Louis Malle as directors. Stars such as Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Jane Fonda and Terence Stamp. But no matter how glossy the name, or even how polished the product, the rule of the portmanteau movie applies here as everywhere else – the finished product is less … Read more
Plan B
The comedy Plan B hits the road with a pair of young women as they scour the South Dakota badlands for a morning-after pill. If Plan A is not getting pregnant, Plan B is… you follow. Lupe (Victoria Moroles) and Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) are two smart, funny, best buds from strict families – Lupe’s is Hispanic and her father’s a minister, Sunny’s is Asian, with all the educational expectation that typically comes with. Of the two Lupe is the more sexually knowing – she wears vampish dark lipstick – though it’s Sunny who we first encounter thrusting her hand down her pants as she settles down with a school biology textbook and the chapter … Read more
Frankie
Having made films with more than a hint of the French about them – character driven, focused on metropolitan angst, loose, semi-improvised acting style, unafraid to let nothing happen – Ira Sachs finally gets almost all of the way there with Frankie, a drama set in Portugal but with plenty of French speakers in his cast. Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux Qui M’aiment Prendront le Train) is a close analogue, though here the central figure around which everything spins is still alive. She’s played by Isabelle Huppert as Françoise (aka Frankie), a famous actress who has called all her family together in Sintra, Portugal, for … Read more
