Popular Reviews
Tótem
Lila Avilés has only made one film before, The Chambermaid, in which a lot happened without very much seeming to happen at all. The same thing is going on with Tótem, superficially an almost-fly-on-the-wall naturalistic drama tracking a family through the day leading up to the birthday party of Tono, a very sick husband, father and son, who will probably not see another birthday, it becomes apparent fairly early on. Tono used to be the hottest guy in town, we later learn, but in glimpses of his body as he tries to hold himself upright to take a shower, he’s now a skeletal remnant of what used to be. Without the horrorshow of … Read more
27 July 2015-07-27
Out in the UK This Week Clouds of Sils Maria (Artificial Eye, cert 15) Olivier Assayas follows Something in the Air, his largely autobiographical personal meditation on the aftermath of the events of May 1968, with a different type of dramatic reflexivity. Clouds of Sils Maria is a meditation on acting, performed by a trio of actors at the top of their game. Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz are the three, all channeling vague versions of themselves. Stewart plays the personal assistant to Binoche, an actress now about to play the older role in a remake of the punishing two-hander that made her name years before. But who to play … Read more
The Piano Teacher
Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher came out in 2001, just about halfway through his remarkable 20-year run of films starting with 1992’s Benny’s Video, ending with 2012’s Amour and taking in Funny Games, Time of the Wolf, Hidden and The White Ribbon. All of them have a pitiless, lidless-eyed quality to them, and The Piano Teacher won all the major awards at Cannes when it was shown there. That will never happen again – the rules were changed so as to spread the love a bit wider in subsequent years. It’s an unusual film for Haneke because he didn’t write it and didn’t intend to direct it. He took on Elfriede Jelinek’s novel … Read more
Au Pair Girls
Known in the US as The Young Playmates, Au Pair Girls is a ripe chunk of British cheese from 1972 and a prime example of the sort of film the UK was making at the time. A simple story of four girls arriving in the UK and then having various adventures, most of which involve them losing their clothes, Au Pair Girls really benefits from its feisty female leads, Astrid Frank, Gabrielle Drake, Me Me Lai and Nancie Wait. They’re an interesting bunch. Astrid Frank appeared in French, German and English language movies, switching from a French movie with Jean Gabin (1970’s Horse) to sexploitationers such as Swinging Wives or Swedish Love Games. … Read more
Of Human Bondage
Of Human Bondage is the film to point to whenever some marketing guy is wanging on about “brand”. In it, Bette Davis demonstrates as clearly as can be done that it’s product – in the movies the role and performance – that’s critical. Get the product right and the brand takes care of itself. In doing it so brilliantly, Davis transformed her career. This was her breakthrough, in a part that most of her peers turned down – not on-brand enough for them. Davis lobbied for it and forced Warner Bros to lend her out to RKO to play it. It not only made her a star but whipped up talk out of … Read more
High Wall
One for lovers of noirish movies with twisty plots, High Wall doesn’t in the end quite add up emotionally, but its serpentine bends make it an enjoyable crime thriller asking us to reconsider an open-and-shut case once any number of impediments have been thrown in the way. The opening scene – a man is driving his car with his wife in the passenger seat. She’s dead, it seems, and in a few seconds he’ll be dead too, if his plan to crash his car off a bridge succeeds. That seems to be the story anyway. His plan doesn’t quite succeed. He survives the crash and has soon been arrested. He admits to killing … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 3 – Escape in Time
Escape in Time is a good chance to see what the great documentary maker John Krish can do when handed an episode of The Avengers to direct. The results are a mixed bag: visually interesting but dramatically a little flat, though the premise – a time-travelling bolthole into another era to aid escaping master criminals – is a fascinating one if you’re on board with the whole time-travel idea. And it gives the production team at The Avengers a chance to get the fancy-dress box out – a sure sign of a series that’s jumping the shark. On the upside, Peter Bowles is in it, and we meet him very early on after … Read more
Bad Seed
Billy Wilder directed 1934’s Bad Seed (Mauvaise Graine) more out of necessity than desire. He’d never directed a film before, in spite of having been quite a big wheel as a writer in the German film industry (the Nazis put paid to that). But he was in a tight spot and so had to add a string to his bow. He wouldn’t direct another film for eight years, in Hollywood, where 1942’s The Major and the Minor became the first of a remarkable run lasting nearly 40 years. Alexander Esway also gets a director’s credit, but he was little more than a gracious front man whose name helped Wilder’s movie get financed. What’s … Read more
Hard Candy
Thonggrrrl14 , aka Hayley, agrees to meet Lensman319, aka Jeff, at a local coffee shop. They head back to his pad, the 14-year-old and the mature photographer, where Hayley drugs Jeff, ties him up and prepares to wreak some overdue revenge on behalf of all the other poor girls who have ever been hoodwinked and then abused by someone who should know better. First threatening to castrate him following procedures she learnt online – see how the internet gives but also takes? – she then spends a good amount of time messing with his head, in scenes which should be punctuated with reminders to breathe. Which way is this thriller going to play … Read more
The Big Sleep
The older it gets, the better 1946’s The Big Sleep looks. When it was new, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s famously unfathomable story was rooted in reality – the clothes, the cars, the language, the streets of LA. Since then, as it’s become detached from the everyday, it has risen unimpeded into the mythic. The opening scene sets the tone. A detective, Philip Marlowe, arriving at the mansion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), where the sick old man lives in an orchid house, staying alive on the heat, while his daughters run wild with his money. One of them, the general informs Marlowe, has got into some trouble. Can Marlowe fix it? That’s … Read more
Drive-In Massacre
If you’re looking for a drive-in movie set at a drive-in… Drive-In Massacre is the short, sharp schlock you’re looking for, a cult item shot in four days, without permits and with all the actors using pseudonyms because they were on a non-union production. It’s a cult movie, which is a way of rationalising its low score on the IMDb – 3.7 out of 10 at the time of writing – but it’s better than its rating and has the sort of breezy, trashy quality you’d expect from a director with titles like Teenage Sex Therapy, Let’s Play Doctor and Teeny Buns on his CV. Stu Segall is the name. The premise is simple. … Read more
La poison
The misdirection starts early in the superb dark French farce from 1951 La poison (no prizes for guessing it translates as Poison). Right with the title, in fact, which suggests that poison, or a poisoning, is what the film is going to be about. It isn’t. Or it is, but not in the way the title might suggest. But first – more sleight of hand – writer/director Sacha Guitry, a boulevardier of the old school, introduces his cast, by their real names, starting with his star, Michel Simon, a big bear of a man Guitry praises effusively before moving on to Simon’s co-stars, all of whom get the buckets-of-praise treatment. Then on to … Read more
