Popular Reviews
Solaris
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 April Yuri’s Night Today marks the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight by a human –a “man” back then – into space and the first orbital flight of a manned (humanned?) vehicle, on 12 April 1961, on board the Soviet spaceship Vostok 1. It is celebrated across the world as Yuri’s Night, in the astronaut’s honour. It’s also used to applaud similarly momentous space exploration milestones. Yuri’s Night was first held in 2001, on the 40th anniversary of human spaceflight, though the Soviet Union had been honouring Cosmonautics Day since 1962, which since 2011 has been called the International Day … Read more
Staudamm
Unspectacular in an almost nonchalant way, Staudamm tells its story slowly and poetically, which is all the more remarkable when you consider its subject matter – a high school shooting. This one took place in a sleepy village in Bavaria and proceeded otherwise in classic US style – kid stalking the corridors letting off rounds in a slow and methodical fashion, killing many, before he too was brought down by a police bullet out by the dam (The Dam is the English language title) where he’d fled, in what looked like a pre-planned bit of suicidal “come and get me, suckers” bravado. Staudamm is about the aftermath rather than the event itself and … Read more
Herself
Phyllida Lloyd is most often described as the director of Mama Mia! but there’s a lot more to her than that. Take Herself, the latest in a line of strongly female-centred productions, including the Mrs Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady and the all-female Shakespeare productions of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest at the Donmar Theatre in London, which drew raves from the critics, wild applause from audiences and loud harrumphs from the gammons. The Shakespeares all gave top billing to Harriet Walter, and meaty roles to Clare Dunne. Here, Dunne is thrust into the lead (well, she did co-write) and Walter is a gracious supporting star in a story about one … Read more
Splice
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 June Lord Byron and house guests read Fantasmagoriana, 1816 While on holiday in Switzerland in 1816, Lord Byron and his house guests grew sick of the weather of the “year without a summer”, as 1816 came to be known. Volcanic activity on the other side of the world and the historically low solar activity were precipitating famine in Europe, flooding in Asia and other weather catastrophes. But for this party it meant excessive rain, gloom and little to do. To entertain each other, they started reading a collection of German and French gothic stories called Fantasmagoriana. Published only three years … Read more
A Trip to the Moon
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 01 September Generally speaking I’m going to choose historical events rather than movie events as a peg off which to hang the Film of the Day. But today is the first one so why not make an exception? Debut Screening by George Méliès of A Trip to the Moon, 1902 On this day in 1902, the great showman, illusionist and restless inventor George Méliès gave the first showing of Le Voyage dans la Lune. It was the Star Wars of its day and a huge international hit. If it wasn’t the first sci-fi film ever made, it was, along with the … Read more
To Write Love on Her Arms
Is there anything more life-sapping than listening to a druggie talking about drugs? Yes, a film about one, and it’s not less boring but more if it also offers a redemptive ta-daa. To Write Love on Her Arms is a film about one such, a young woman, played twixt K-Stewart sulk and ScarJo pout by Kat Dennings, an actor with a face straight from Babylonian antiquity and a career trajectory which surely guarantees she won’t be paddling in these waters again too soon. And, having had these thoughts, and affronted by what felt like an assault by the god squad for the long 118 minutes of this melodrama, I felt such a heel when … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 11 – Look – (Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One)…
Look – (Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One) but There Were These Two Fellers… that’s the full title to an episode determined that, since the day of The Avengers are numbered, things might as well go out with a bang. It’s written by the insanely prolific Dennis Spooner, whose name came to dominate British TV as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and was dead at the ridiculously young age of 53 in 1986. Perhaps it was overwork. Musings on mortality to one side, this is a great episode for all sorts of reasons. Top of those is the cast, which is full of British comedians from all sorts of different … Read more
Lamb
In Iceland, on a dark and stormy night near Christmas… if that sounds like the beginning of a fairytale or nativity play, prepare for Lamb, which mixes fairytale fantasticality with a bit of Christian iconography to dark Nordic effect… eventually. It’s all a bit weird and primeval, in other words, but things get off to a rather Martha Stewart-y opening as director Valdimar Jóhannsson sets his scene. A solitary house out in the Icelandic back of beyond, rustically chic, where jumper-wearing couple Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) and Maria (Noomi Rapace) farm by day and share evenings together in companionable silence. They’re happy. Maybe. Something about the way Jóhannsson keeps cutting away to the looks in … Read more
Class Action Park
Class Action Park is a punning title for a reasonably even-handed documentary about Action Park, Vernon, New Jersey, a trailblazing theme park when it opened in the 1970s, which later became infamous on account of the number of accidents and deaths that happened there. It was the brainchild of Gene Mulvihill, a disgraced Wall Street trader who realised there was money to be made from a park that varied its offer with the seasons – by winter a ski resort, a water park in summer. “Uncle Gene” is what the teenagers in his employ affectionately called him, and it’s their testimony that forms the bulk of Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott’s film. … Read more
16 June 2014-06-16
Out in the UK This Week The Invisible Woman (Lionsgate, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in a film ostensibly about the secret mistress of Charles Dickens. In fact it’s about Dickens himself. The Invisible Biopic, perhaps. Either way, Felicity Jones is Ellen Ternan, the actress who became Dickens’s lover while Ralph Fiennes plays Dickens, as perhaps one of the first true celebs of the media age, mobbed wherever he went, thanks to his appearance in daily newspapers, read avidly by the newly literate working classes. Both actors are as good as you’d hope (Jones, brilliant, Fiennes actually better than I expected), there’s a wealth of period detail, reminding us, for … Read more
Joanna
“The baroque signifies rebellion against the constraints of classicism,” is the key line in Michael Sarne’s Swinging London movie from 1968, Joanna. A more-is-more display of the excessive, it attempts to get several quarts into a pint pot, to import some Godard smarts and Fellini flash into staid British film-making and generally to baroque’n’roll things up as much as it can. In what verges on the incoherent but just about sticks to a story, the thin plot follows new-in-town 18-year-old Joanna (Geneviève Waïte) as she meets people on the London scene, sleeps with men, attends art school when she can be bothered (which is where the line about the baroque comes in) and … Read more
19 October 2015-10-19
Out This Week Slow West (Lionsgate, cert 15) One of the best westerns for some time, Slow West plays with the tropes of the pulp magazines that first connected the Old West with a reading public – the glamour, the danger, the hardship and the austere beauty are all here in Scotsman John Maclean’s really rather extraordinary feature debut. It’s framed like an odd-couple road movie, with Kodi Smit-McPhee as a naive, priggish kid following Rose, his one true love (Caren Pistorius, a star), from Scotland across the ocean to America, and then across the increasingly wild badlands. Joining him on the journey is Michael Fassbender as a bounty hunter – there’s a … Read more
