Popular Reviews
Moontide
One of the little joys of Moontide is trying to work out which bits of it were directed by Fritz Lang. His name isn’t on the screen credits but he was the original director, until he was fired after falling out with its star, Jean Gabin. Ironically, it was Gabin who had campaigned to get Lang attached to the film in the first place, which shows he had quite a lot of pull in Hollywood for someone who might have been France’s biggest star but was unknown in America when he arrived there to escape the Nazis. Archie Mayo gets the director credit but it’s surely Lang behind the camera for the opening … Read more
Jerichow
Jerichow is the fourth collaboration between director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss – both names a guarantee of at least a degree of excellence. But before we get there – just quickly skimming through Petzold’s entries on the IMDB (research!) to see which films actually comprise the somewhat disputed “ghost trilogy” (Petzold and Hoss’s first three collaborations), I noticed that someone has added notes to a number of Petzold’s films, under the Trivia section. How closely one film resembles Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another Claude Chabrol’s Que la Bête Meure, yet another Sidney Lumet’s Running On Empty, and so on. And how in all of these cases there is no reference back to the … Read more
The Apple
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 November Navy Day, Iran Today is Navy Day in Iran. It’s the day every year when Iranians remember Operation Morvarid, a tactical strike against the Iraqi Navy in 1980, which resulted in much of the Iraqi Navy being destroyed. The Iranians, using American built F-4 Phantoms and F-5 Tiger aircraft, attacked Iraqi airfields, while a task force of the Iranian navy attacked Iraqi oil terminals, and two missile boats blocked the ports of Al Faw and Umm Qasr and started heavy shelling. Careful planning, lightning deployment, plenty of back-up and the strategic defence of all units involved in the attack … Read more
Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa kicks off with an urgent, arresting image laying out what’s at stake, archive footage of George Wallace making his infamous “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation for ever!” pitch on the campaign stump in 1963, before even more footage shows Wallace in the full glare of the TV cameras blocking the entrance to the University of Alabama to two black students. A flash even further back in time, to 1953, and a car containing a white woman and a black woman, caught in freeze frame, the two having run away together. They ended up, we learn, so badly disfigured in the burnt-out hull of the car that their bodies were unrecognisable. And … Read more
Lucky Grandma
There’s a silent movie quality to Lucky Grandma, the story of a Chinese grandmother in New York’s Chinatown who gets tangled up with the Triads and somehow (OK, improbably) comes out on top. But first let’s meet Grandma, played superbly by Tsai Chin (86 when this was made, though she could easily be 15 years younger) as a Buster Keaton-style stone-faced senior, smoking smoking smoking the entire time, partly just because she wants to, partly, we suspect, as a rebuke to a world that is increasingly infantilising her. One of the places where she isn’t infantilised is the casino, where we follow her just after she’s turned town her caring son’s offer of … Read more
The General
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 February Art thieves steal Munch’s The Scream, 1994 On this day in 1994, thieves broke into the National Gallery, Oslo, and stole the Edvard Munch painting The Scream. It is actually one of a number of so-named works of art, there being four different Screams in a variety of media, plus a number of lithographic prints struck by Munch himself. The one stolen on the night in question was in tempera on cardboard and was in a less secure part of the gallery – it had been moved as part of celebrations held to mark the opening of the winter … Read more
Wildcat
Wildcat is the sort of film where strangers wake up in a room together. Often, this sort of film – a handful of actors on one set – is all about learning who these people are and why they are in the room together in the first place. Often there’s also a kick in the tail where one person turns out not to be who they say they are, or the commonality connecting everyone is suddenly revealed. Not so here. We know almost from the outset who these people are – they’re journalist Khadija Young and a soldier called Luke, only survivors of an ambush on a convoy in Iraq, who are now … Read more
John Le Carré Movie Adaptations Ranked, 2021
There is a lot of John Le Carré out there. The author wrote prodigiously, starting while he was still working as a spy for MI5 and MI6 in the late 1950s and only really stopped when he died, in December 2020. There are nine novels featuring his most famous creation, the retired master spy George Smiley, and another 17 or so (depending on how you count) other novels, plus short stories, essays, memoirs, articles written for newspapers (denouncing the war in Iraq, for instance) and screenplays (always adaptations of his own novels). But there’s no getting round it, if you want a John Le Carré experience, the movies are probably the worst way … Read more
The Girl and the Spider
Not much happens in The Girl and the Spider (Das Mädchen und die Spinne) but that doesn’t mean nothing’s going on. Superficially the story of one young woman moving out of the apartment she’s been sharing with another, beneath the surface it’s a roiling stew of emotion, lust, jealousy, neediness and isolation. There’s are Bergmanesque developments, things said and unsaid, as we track Mara (Henriette Confurius) and Lisa (Liliane Amuat) through one day, a night and into the next day while around them wheel Lisa’s mother, a handyman and his helper, a neighbour or two, other young women from downstairs and next door, first in the apartment Lisa is moving into, and then … Read more
Love + Hate
My heart often sinks when “the movies” decide to do a story of love across the racial divide. Too often the result is melodrama overplaying relatively unimportant differences (like skin colour) while underplaying the ones that do matter (ie culture). See Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss, for example. Or, from the other end of the spectrum, the buffoonery of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Director Dominic Savage’s Love + Hate manages to avoid these pitfalls. It’s a “nice Asian girl meets racist white boy” story set in a town in Northern England and is Romeo and Juliet on a shoestring. At the Asian end of the relationship there’s the male/female double standards in an … Read more
Time to Kill
In one hour 1942’s Time to Kill achieves what a lot of much longer films fail to do. It delivers a story while painting a picture of a time, a place and the people in it, and is highly entertaining, amusing and dramatic. The fact that it’s based on a Raymond Chandler story helps – this is the first adaptation of High Window, which would re-emerge on screen as The Brasher Doubloon five years later. But Lloyd Nolan as Michael Shayne – Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe in all but name – really helps too. Shayne is introduced feet first, the camera lingering on the holes in his shoes as he takes a call that … Read more
Merrily We Go to Hell
Merrily We Go to Hell ran into trouble when it came out in 1932. The use of the word Hell in the title gave some distributors an attack of the vapours. To get round potential objections, in the UK the problem word was simply removed and the film went by Merrily We Go to __, which was also the case in certain states in the US. The film itself is often described as a comedy, but it isn’t really funny. But then that is often the way with the comedy of manners, which this is. This is a big one in the feminist canon, not least because it was directed by Dorothy Arzner, … Read more
