Popular Reviews
The Rabbi’s Cat
It’s a bit all over the place, The Rabbi’s Cat. That’s part of its charm and is potentially also a bit of a problem for people who like their stories topped and tailed, neat and tidy, starting off in with a destination in mind and then eventually arriving there. The piecemeal nature reflects its origins as a series of comics by Joann Sfar, who, with co-director Antoine Delesvaux and writer Sandrina Jardel, has opted to take a bit from here, a bit from there in an attempt at a greatest-hits compilation of the good stuff. But what if you don’t know the hits? Things you need to know are that it’s in French, … Read more
Napoleon
Ridley Scott does not meet his Waterloo in Napoleon, his headline-hopping spectacular about the man who conquered a huge chunk of Europe under the guise of a liberator. But nor is he covered in glory. This strange film has neither blockbuster smarts, nor arthouse depth, and is little use as a historical resource. If you don’t know Napoleon’s story already, you’ll struggle to keep up with what’s going on. In what are almost a series of sketchlike snapshots, it follows Napoleon Bonaparte the outsider upstart Corsican as the tactically brilliant army officer is swiftly promoted through the ranks. Napoleon saves the French Revolution from itself then mounts a coup d’état. He crowns himself … Read more
Baby Face
A key “pre-Code” movie, Baby Face is one of a handful of 1930s movies said to have accelerated Hollywood’s movie studios into the era of self-censorship – the government was threatening to step in if they didn’t act. It was a key movie for Barbara Stanwyck too, and helped her cement a reputation for playing tough, driven women. Here she’s a young unfortunate fighting her way up in the world by putting it about – that’s the sort of stuff the Code set out to stop – using and abusing men as she goes. Starting at the front door of a bank building in New York, she works her way literally and figuratively … Read more
Europa ’51
Often described as a neorealist film, Roberto Rossellini’s second collaboration with Ingrid Bergman, Europa ’51, is actually more a Hollywood melodrama with one breakaway neorealist moment. But more than that it’s a vehicle designed to rehabilitate Bergman by getting her to do what she was best at on screen – suffer. It’s the story of a high society woman who’s too busy drinking cocktails and exchanging chintzy chit-chat with her friends to notice that her son is in need of some love and affection. At a drinks party one night, son Michele attempts suicide by throwing himself down the stairs. He survives, only to die later of a complication. Irene (Bergman) is thrown … Read more
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
The world is at Peak Ben Gazzara and Peak John Cassavetes in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a neo-noir from 1976 full of techniques – handheld camera, sparse (if any) lighting, crash editing, semi-improv – that seemed weird at the time but have since been absorbed into mainstream film-making. Cassavetes had worked on the early stages of the film with Martin Scorsese (a protégé) and there are parallels with the style and content of Mean Streets – a “hey we’re just guys talking” aspect to the storytelling and a loose shooting style which Cassavetes pushes a lot further than Scorsese. Here, the camera often becomes more obviously subjective and emotional, the image swinging … Read more
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 wraps up the grungey offshoot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with grace and style, as well as big bangs and some good jokes. There’s a touch of cinematic pathos in there too, as if GOTG3 is also to some extent saying goodbye to the big superhero movie as a cultural meme. The MCU, after all, is running out of puff. It’s the film that nearly didn’t get made in its current form. Writer/director James Gunn, very much the presiding mind in all the GOTG movies, got fired early on in the production process – some old Tweets came back to bite him – but ended up being … Read more
Stage Door
Katharine Hepburn was at the height of the “box office poison” phase of her career when she made Stage Door in 1937. She’d won an Oscar only four years before but four flops in quick succession had turned RKO against her – she had to fight the studio to get star billing. Ironically, amusingly, cannily, the story of Stage Door plays to the public perception of Hepburn as a snooty, entitled daddy’s girl who expected the world to do her bidding by casting her as the snooty, entitled rich man’s daughter breezing into the Footlights Club, a boarding house for actresses, and being taken aback when she doesn’t get the reception she feels … Read more
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
These days, we’re used to a documentarian being an integral part of their own documentary. But Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 got there decades before the likes of Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore. Here, Kazuo Hara turns his camera on himself and his relationships and charts everything he sees. As an idea of what to expect, look at each of the words in the title – it is extreme, very private etc etc… and it all takes place in 1974. Very shaky, very handheld, very confrontational and quite possibly not all of it entirely unstaged, the film is essentially a chronicle of film-maker Hara’s relationship with a bar girl called Miyuki Takeda. … Read more
Tarot
Tarot is a horror film for people who don’t like horror films. Or a horror film for people who like to shout at the screen, possibly after a couple of drinks. Or that’s the initial impression at any rate. It starts out in territory so familiar it feels like a large language model wrote it. A small language model even. A group of guys and gals staying at a big old house. The girls are hot; the guys have personalities. There is a room the visitors have been warned not to enter. And so they do. There they find a deck of tarot cards, distinctively designed, and one of the hot girls, who’s … Read more
The Suicide Squad
The Suicide Squad, not to be confused with Suicide Squad from five years ago, fixes the mistake made by the 2016 movie, which got bogged down in plot. The Suicide Squad does that by not really having one. Or if it does it treats it as something to be vaguely referred to now and again, like a map by a driver who knows his way. The driver here is James Gunn, who does just about everything right in this super-sequel follow-up to the Dirty Dozen of comicbook movies. The first film was quite simply terrible, though bursting with great things, a kind of satire on Marvel movies, if you wanted to see it … Read more
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
I don’t remember there being an immigration angle to The Pied Piper of Hamelin, at least in the story I heard as a child, but it’s clearly there in this otherwise very traditional version of the fairy tale from 1957. The plot otherwise remains as I recall it. The town of Hamelin is plagued by rats so the townspeople offer a passing piper, who claims he can charm them all away with his music, a huge reward for doing so, then refuse to pay him after he’s done his job. Whereupon he performs the same trick on the town’s children, whisking them off to some some cliff face, which opens as he approaches. … Read more
District 13
Free-running is the gimmick powering this actioner scripted and produced by French action powerhouse Luc Besson and also known as District B13 (B is for “Banlieue”). Set in a broken-down Paris in the near future, District 13 has an Escape from New York kind of vibe and follows a tough cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and a gangland desperado (David Belle) into a walled-off urban badland to sort out the guys who’ve nicked a nuclear weapon (it was the US president in Escape from New York). But back to the free-running, or le parkour as its French originators (one of whom is David Belle himself) call it – the adrenalised athletic stuntorama that could simply … Read more
