Popular Reviews
19 May 2014-05-19
Out in the UK This Week The Wolf of Wall Street (Universal, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Scorsese’s best film since Casino also continues his trend towards flabby films. Twenty minutes can, and let’s hope eventually will, be trimmed from a film with a Goodfellas arc – we start with a voiceover of Leo Di Caprio saying, in effect, that for as long as he could rememeber he’d always wanted to be a richfella. And off we go into a roaring rush of the true story of Jordan Belfort, who became a licensed Wall Street broker on the day the market crashed in 1987, then started at the bottom all over again, selling penny stocks to … Read more
The Maltese Falcon
The Maltese Falcon, but not that one. Not the 1941 version starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston, but the other one, the original filmic take on Dashiell Hammett’s story, from 1931, with Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade and Roy Del Ruth directing. That one. Retaining much of Hammett’s terse, hard-boiled dialogue, it keeps his story intact too – woman called Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels) employs private eye Spade and his partner to help her find her missing sister. By the next morning two men are dead, one of them Spade’s partner, another the man who was supposed to have run off with Wonderly’s sister. The “sister”, it turns out, was all … Read more
They Live by Night
A gimcrack romance decked out in film noir finery, They Live by Night is a “kids on the run” story, the child of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and parent of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands. Three escaped prisoners on the run are holing up at the secluded cabin of the brother of their leader, where the youngest of the three first claps eyes on the brother’s daughter. In one of the great introductions in moviedom, Bowie (Farley Granger), a fresh-faced 23-year-old who’s been in jail since he was 16, meets Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), hat pulled down and light slanting across her face. He doesn’t know how to talk to girls. But one … Read more
The Canyons
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 July Paul Schrader born, 1946 Today in 1946, the writer, critic and director Paul Schrader was born, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. The son of religious parents, he was brought up by strict Calvinist standards and didn’t see a film until he was 17. He studied theology, then went on to do film studies at UCLA Film School, having met the famous critic Pauline Kael by accident en route and become one of her critic protégés. His first screenplay, co-written with his brother Leonard, was The Yakuza, and commanded the highest price for a script ever paid (according to the … Read more
The Charge of the Light Brigade
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 March Crimean War escalates, 1854 On this day in 1854, Britain and France declared war against Russia. Russia and the Ottoman Empire had been at war since October the previous year, when conflict had broken out ostensibly about the rights of Christians in the Holy Land – being restricted by Muslim Ottomans and being protected by Orthodox Russian if you accept the Russians’ diplomatic rhetoric. In fact the war was about territory, the Turks being on the decline after centuries of dominance in the region, the Russians keen to continue their expansion west into Europe and particularly south to the … Read more
Presence
There are big Steven Soderbergh movies and small Steven Soderbergh movies. Presence is the latest of the small ones, stacking up alongside Let Them All Talk and Unsane as another fascinating experiment in Soderbergian minimalism. Between starry, big-budget affairs like Oceans 11 or Contagion, in his smaller movies this master of technique sets himself film-making challenges, much as Hitchcock did with the likes of Rope or Lifeboat, perhaps also inspired by Lars Von Trier’s concept of “obstructions” (self-installed hurdles designed to jump-start the creative process). Soderbergh shot Let Them All Talk guerrilla-style, on board a cruise ship while it went about its regular business with paying customers. Quite a feat considering the cast … Read more
Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga
If it does nothing else then Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga reminds us what a bolt from the blue Mad Max: Fury Road was. How, after a string of Mad Maxes offering diminishing thrills (I mean Beyond the Thunderdome), writer director George Miller turned to gentler pursuits – Babe, Happy Feet – before blistering back in 2015 with a sensational action movie that was almost operatic in ambition. Mad Max to the max. Now he’s back again, nine years on from Fury Road, having another go at the same thing, telling the origin story of Furiosa, the one-armed badass then played by Charlize Theron and now played by Alyla Browne (as a wee … Read more
The Speech
The nightmare of public speaking. The nightmare of a breakup. The Speech (Le Discours, in the original French) is a film about a man dealing with two anxiety-inducing situations simultaneously. Or not dealing with them. Number one: the speech. Adrien is a nice, typically anxious French guy at a family dinner so unremarkable that underfloor heating appears to be the main topic of conversation. Until his sister Sophie’s husband-to-be, Ludo, asks Adrien if he’d do them the honour of making a speech at their upcoming wedding. Adrien is instantly thrown into a funk and one strand of director Laurent Tirard’s film starts enjoying itself spinning fantasy “what could possibly go wrong?” versions of … Read more
Roxie Hart
An A team of acting and technical talent bring their A game to Roxie Hart, the tale of an innocent woman who pleads guilty to a murder in the hope that it’ll further her stage career. The law as an extension of showbusiness, the corrupting effect of the media, never mind the 21st century, this was made in 1942, and retells the true story of murderous Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, who were renamed Roxie and Velma by journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins when she decided to turn some wildly successful newspaper reporting into a 1926 stage play called Chicago. And that’s the way Roxie and Velma remained, as the play became first a … Read more
Random Harvest
Random Harvest takes the amnesiac plot used and abused by mid-20th-century moviemakers and pushes it into and beyond the realm of the absurd. Audiences at the time loved it, the film was multi-Oscar nominated and even though it ascends into madness fairly early on, it’s a fabulous madness, confected by MGM with all the lush plushness the studio could engineer. Ronald Colman is too old by a stretch but let’s put that to one side as we watch him playing a soldier who is back from the First World War and languishing in an asylum with PTSD and amnesia. In short order he accidentally gets free, meets a showgirl and strikes up a … Read more
100 Years of… The Thief of Bagdad
Douglas Fairbanks was the Tom Cruise of a century ago and in 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad, Fairbanks’s favourite of his own films, you get to see him at his very best, in the peak of physical condition, in a film that’s one remarkable action set piece after another. As you’ve probably guessed, it’s silent, in black and white and set out in old Bagdad, where an Arabian Nights story unfolds concerning Ahmed (Fairbanks), a common street thief caught up in the machinations over who will wed the country’s fair princess (Julanne Johnston). Many would scale those walls, not least Ahmed, though he understands he has only a snowball’s chance in hell against … Read more
Undergods
A strange and evocative film, Undergods is a portmanteau fantasy horror with the seams sanded flat and then caulked in an attempt to hide the joins. Even so, it falls into clearly discernible distinct chunks, which seemingly bear little relation to each other. First up, K and Z, a pair of post-apocalyptic dealers in humans, dead for meat, live as slaves. Then on to the story of a man whose life is invaded by a stranger, who is soon sleeping with his wife in his own home. Then on to a bedtime story told by a father to his daughter. The story itself comes next, of a “merchant” stealing a mysterious thin man’s … Read more
