Popular Reviews
The Thirteenth Chair
A classic country-house whodunit from 1937, The Thirteenth Chair gets the whole thing done and dusted in just over an hour, which is more than you can say for a lot of these things. And it can boast May Whitty – billed as “the Distinguished English Actress Dame May Whitty” – in the lead role as a clairvoyant. Set in India during the Raj, it opens with Scotland Yard inspector Marney (Lewis Stone) and local man Commissioner Grimshaw (Matthew Boulton) discussing the recent murder of a man not universally loved by the expat community who lord it about in Calcutta. The dead man’s best friend, John Wales – “fanatical”, says Grimshaw, so obviously not … Read more
Fancy Dance
Lily Gladstone shot Fancy Dance in breaks in the filming of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. His film might be the reason why she got the gig on the fiction debut of documentarian Erica Tremblay. Or maybe not. Either way, Gladstone repays Tremblay’s compliment with a performance every bit as eye-catching as the one she gave for Mr S. They’re not dissimilar in many ways – stoic is probably the word to describe them. What also connects the two films up is that they’re both set in the world of the Native American, and neither is going for the sentimental easy goal. There the similarities don’t exactly cease so much as … Read more
2 November 2015-11-02
Out This Week Amy (Universal, cert 15) Amy is a misery-memoir documentary about the singer Amy Winehouse, whose life ended at the age of 27 after she drank herself to death – years of bulimia had rendered her body too weak to cope with booze as well as the crack, smack and partying she’d put it through. Director Asif Kapadia proceeds in much the same way as he did with his film Senna – hide the fact that it’s a talking-head doc by laying archive footage, newspaper headlines, TV appearances, radio interviews with Amy, whatever you’ve got, over the recollections of journalists who interviewed her, musicians who worked with her, friends, parents, and … Read more
Never Gonna Snow Again
Remember the days when you’d never get a popular film star to work on a TV series? The reverse happened when co-directors Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert were casting Never Gonna Snow Again. They wanted Alec Utgoff, of American TV series Stranger Things fame, to take pole position in their film but would they be able to persuade him to take a step down? They did and, beyond the profile he brings, you can see why they wanted him. The story is about a masseur from Ukraine who has a number of clients in a rich gated community in Poland. He massages, they open up to him. That’s it. Except for the fact … Read more
A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe
Supposedly the last western Sergio Leone worked on, 1975’s A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (aka Un genio, due compari, un pollo) has a ramshackle spaghetti western charm and an opening section which strongly recalls the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West – it’s operatic, dramatic, largely silent and at the end of it there’s a plot reversal designed to shock and delight. It’s this section that was supposedly directed by Leone himself. With spanking wide vistas of Monument Valley and close-ups so vivid you can see sweat droplets forming, that must almost certainly be true. Damiano Damiani did the rest of it, poor guy, and the story here … Read more
Only the River Flows
Imagine a crime thriller where the guy who looks guilty from the outset is the killer… or is he? Or where the police achieve their aims not through diligent hard work but by sheer fluke. Where every cliché of the genre gets an outing and most of them left entirely unmauled… but some of them are given a left-handed spin. But which ones? That’s Only the River Flows, a strangely ironic neo-noir from Wei Shujun, whose films often offer meta-comment on film-making and the workings of genre. This time around Wei gets into all that straight away, installing his cop, Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) in the shell of an old cinema (klaxon), where he’s … Read more
Fast Charlie
There’s nothing really fast about Fast Charlie, a relaxed, medium-weight saunter through thriller territory in the company of some fine people. Pierce Brosnan, now in his 70s but still with the 007 swagger and nonchalance, plays Charlie, a fixer for an aged gang boss who winds up on the wrong side of a rival gang boss in a turf war in New Orleans. The film is an adaptation of Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler, a writer who puts a comedic spin on familiar crime-fiction material. And more information than what I’ve already written isn’t strictly necessary. You’ve seen this movie before. But the casting is good and includes James Caan in his very … Read more
To Sleep with Anger
Between Lethal Weapon 2 and Predator 2 Danny Glover starred in To Sleep with Anger, a genre film of an entirely different stripe, masquerading as a domestic drama about an extended family of black folk. Glover plays Harry, an old-school charmer with Southern manners, who after many years of absence arrives back in the lives of old friend Gideon and his wife Suzie. Gideon invites his old childhood friend to stay and Harry soon has his feet well under the table. Writer/director Charles Burnett spends time detailing the extended family Harry finds himself among. It’s a slightly soapy portrait of a large group of people who get along just fine though not entirely … Read more
Loving Highsmith
Delicately ambiguous as a title, Loving Highsmith also turns out to be a clever way of signalling the approach of its director, Eva Vitija, to its subject matter. It is both fan letter to the writer of classics such as Strangers on a Train (she really loves her Highsmith), and an attempt to delve into the love life of the author herself – what Highsmith was like to love. Highsmith’s dates are 1921 to 1995 but you’ll struggle to get that information out of this documentary. It isn’t full of details of that sort, and there isn’t particularly a timeline that can clearly be followed. Watch it with the Wikipedia page to one … Read more
Light Sleeper
Of the three “loner” films that Paul Schrader wrote, Light Sleeper gets the least love. Taxi Driver is always number one, of course, and American Gigolo is often mentioned in despatches. But ask people if they’ve seen Schrader’s 1992 drama and the answer is often an open mouth and a tilted head. It’s a pity because it’s a superb film in which Schrader gets it right both as a writer and as a director (something he doesn’t always manage). These “loners” are all night workers too – Taxi Driver’s Travis (Robert De Niro), American Gigolo’s Julian (Richard Gere) and now, in Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe’s John, a drug dealer who works the high … Read more
Air
Hollywood fixes capitalism, just like it used to do in the 1980s, with Air, the story of Nike getting together with basketball ace Michael Jordan to create the Air Jordan, the most popular sneaker of all time. Like Jordan, it’s got the skills, is light on its feet and moves at pace, introducing first the era in its opening moments with the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing behind a montage of Ronald Reagan, Princess Diana, Rubik’s Cubes, The A Team, dial-up modems and Jane Fonda (workout era). Then, barely pausing for breath, it’s on to its dramatis personae – persona, really, since this story focuses hard on central character Sonny Vaccaro (Matt … Read more
Wendy
With its documentary feel and taste for the fantastical, Wendy walks in the shoes of Beasts of the Southern Wild, the Ben Zeitlin film that was one of the must-sees of 2012. Wendy isn’t going to fare so well, not least because that tune’s already been played. As the title hints, it’s a variation on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan story, which writer/director Zeitlin has refreshingly shifted out to Louisiana (location of Beasts), taking his version of Barrie’s kids down a social rung or two in the process. They’re the rambunctious, happy brood who live right by the railroad tracks where their hard-pressed and careworn mother runs a diner. But life changes for imaginative, … Read more
