Popular Reviews
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 26 – Lobster Quadrille
Episodes of The Avengers were often not shown in production order. But Lobster Quadrille was both the last one broadcast and the last one made in series three, going out on 21 March 1964, a day after it had been finished. It’s also Honor Blackman’s farewell episode, before she headed off to be Pussy Galore to Sean Connery’s 007 in Goldfinger. And so you’d be tempted to think the production team might give her a good send-off. But in fact it’s a very John Steed-focused adventure, all about lobster fisherman, a dastardly plot to flood the country with heroin and a mystery Chinaman who connects the first with the second. No, Chinaman is … Read more
Cold November
The family that slays together stays together is the surprisingly sweet message of this undoubtedly controversial film about a family’s hunting trip in the Minnesota woods. A rites-of-passage tale seen through the eyes of Florence (the rather talented Bijou Abas), a 12-year-old on holiday with her mother and grandmother, aunt and uncle, it works hard to avoid the charge that it’s a screed on behalf of some gun lobby. So hard, in fact that it could be accused of protesting a touch too much. This is a nice family – a sassy, funny matriarch (Mary Kay Fortier-Spalding), her open, warm daughters and a helpful manly husband (played by writer/director Karl Jacob), with Florence … Read more
Design for Living
One of those pre-Code 1930s comedies that comes wrapped in an aura, Design for Living can’t live up to the sell. It’s not funny, though there is the odd smirk, nor perceptive, unless a comedy about the fickleness of women is what you’re after The aura comes virtue of the boys in the backroom. Noel Coward wrote the original play, then Ben Hecht came in and threw most of that away while working on his screen adaptation, in the process turning Coward’s urbane posh gents into a couple of impetuous workaday types – the Time Out London review called it a “tea cups to beer glasses” transformation, and that’s a neatly pithy way … Read more
The Long Summer of Theory
The “theory” in the title The Long Summer of Theory (Der lange Sommer der Theorie) refers to critical theory, a grab-bag term that lumped together the likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, an achingly fashionable cohort of philosophers and theorists whose thoughts and theories were referenced in universities and in the wider field of (especially) the arts until one day, someone concluded, their “summer” had ended. That someone was Philip von Felsch, whose book, The Summer of Theory, is the starting point for film-maker Irene von Alberti’s relentlessly fascinating examination of the political scene among young people – women mostly – who reckon themselves to be progressive, politically engaged and … Read more
The Blue Angel
This is the film that made Marlene Dietrich a household scandal back in 1930. It’s the story of how a pompous but respectable schoolteacher is lured on to the rocks by Lola-Lola, the nightclub singer in a Weimar-era club who can’t help “Falling in Love Again” (which Dietrich sings here). Poor Emil Jannings, who played the professor, thought he was the star of the film – as well he might since he’d won the Best Actor Oscar the year before, at the very first Academy Awards. He resisted director Von Sternberg’s choice of Dietrich, then a nobody, as the temptress. Von Sternberg had discovered her acting in a stage play quite by accident. … Read more
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
Volver
Pedro Almodóvar is bang back on form in a film celebrating a way of life he’s spent the best part of his artistic life revolting against – family centred, non-cosmopolitan, conservative, Catholic. Well, Generalissimo Franco has been dead a while now.The word Volver means “return” in Spanish, and if Almodóvar is returning to something he long ago rejected – with a fair degree of tenderness (ah, maturity) – Penelope Cruz is also back in a Spanish speaking role, in her home country, in the sort of film she started out in, a drama with its feet in familiar soil but its head who knows where (see Abre los Ojos). It’s set in one … Read more
Nowhere Boy
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 8 December John Lennon murdered, 1980 On this day in 1980, John Lennon was murdered by Mark Chapman outside the south entrance of the Dakota building, where Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had had an apartment since 1973. Chapman shot Lennon four times in the back and Lennon probably died immediately. He was certainly dead by the time medics at the Roosevelt Hospital saw him. Lennon and Yoko Ono had been out for the evening, mixing a track from their forthcoming album. Lennon had the final mix of the track, Walking on Thin Ice, appropriately, in his hand when he … Read more
Conclave
Conclave is not so much a case of who done it as who won it, a thriller set in the Vatican as the cardinals gather to elect a new pope. Being an adaptation of a Robert Harris novel, like Enigma (which became a film of the same name) and The Ghost (which became The Ghost Writer), it’s a closely researched thing, its potentially deadening attention to detail kept spiky by the addition of some suspense, intrigue, cloak and dagger and some lively thumbnail performances by a lot of mostly old white guys as the cardinals. Following custom, when an old pope dies, the men in scarlet come together from the four corners of … Read more
House of Gucci
House of Gucci, Ridley Scott, this looks like a good fit. A fashion house relying on its image to shift product and a director who started out in advertising and still has an eye for an arresting visual. And so it proves to be, mostly… though by the end you might be staring at the screen with head slightly aslant. The what, the huh? Pushing comparisons to beyond their limit, in some ways it’s a remake of Alien, though this time Lady Gaga plays the invading creature who’s going to wreak havoc, a brassy little minx called Patrizia who bumps into sober, low-key Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) – scion of the fashion house … Read more
The American Friend
From the moment Alfred Hitchcock adapted Strangers on a Train in 1951, Patricia Highsmith was hotly pursued by film-makers. Her stories have a plot, thrills, seedy glamour, black humour and the suggestion of transgressive sex, any element of which can be dialled up and down. As I write there have been approaching 40 film and TV adaptations of Highsmith stories, quite a few of which are famous – Hitchcock’s, of course, Plein Soleil (starring Alain Delon), Carol (Cate Blanchett) and The Talented Mr Ripley (Matt Damon and Jude Law). The American Friend (aka Der amerikanishe Freund) not so much. In the mid 1970s director Wim Wenders wanted to do a Highsmith adaptation but … Read more
5 May 2014-05-05
Out in the UK This Week Like Father, Like Son (Arrow, cert PG, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) A couple of years ago Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda made an enchanting film called I Wish, about two separated brothers, the importance of family ties being its theme. With Like Father, Like Son he’s similarly sure-footed and on the same turf but is coming at it from a slightly different direction. The story of the Nonomiyas, a well-to-do couple who discover that their five-year-old son isn’t actually their son at all – a mix-up in the maternity ward – this drama is all about the competing values of rearing over blood. The white-collar family discover that the owner … Read more
