Popular Reviews
Super Size Me
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 April Ray Kroc opens the first McDonald’s, 1955 On this day in 1955, sanctioned by the McDonald brothers Richard and Maurice, Ray Kroc opened the first franchise of one of their McDonald’s hamburger restaurants, in Des Plaines, Illinois, USA. The ninth of a chain started by Richard and Maurice in 1948 in San Bernadino, California, the place was an immediate hit, taking hundreds of dollars in its first day. Kroc, a businessman by nature, itched to open more but the McDonalds weren’t particularly expansionist. So, in 1961, Kroc bought the entire company off them for $2.7 million and set about … Read more
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 November James Pratt and John Smith executed for sodomy, 1835 On this day in 1835, the last two men to be publicly executed for buggery in England were hanged outside Newgate Prison in London, where a fairly large crowd had gathered. James Pratt, aged 30, and John Smith, aged 40, had been discovered in flagrante in the room of another man, William Bonill, by Bonill’s landlord, who had become suspicious about the string of men who would visit him. By climbing into the loft of the next door building, the landlord had been able to catch sight of what Pratt … Read more
The Narrow Margin
Dangers on a train? If it’s jeopardy on board a speeding locomotive you want, The Narrow Margin is the way to go. Made for buttons, shot in 13 days and with no big tentpole stars, it made the name of director Richard Fleischer, a B-movie guy bumped straight up to the big time once it eventually debuted. “Eventually” because RKO’s owner Howard Hughes sat on it for two years. There are many theories as to why – one prime candidate is that he was going to reshoot bits of it with bigger names to capitalise on its obvious qualities. Another that the film got caught up in Hughes’s machinations as he tried to … Read more
Ebony & Ivory
If you enjoyed The Greasy Strangler and wondered whether writer/director Jim Hosking had anything else in his locker, Ebony & Ivory has your name on it. Imagining Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder meeting on the remote Mull of Kintyre in Scotland sometime in 1981, it’s not aiming for documentary realism – the two musicians met in Montserrat in the Caribbean, for one – and is the sort of whimsy that seems aimed at stoners. And yet there is a kernel of something weird but true going on here. The British Wool Marketing Board feature in the closing credits, that’s how all over the place this film is, leading to theorising (if only on my … Read more
The Last Photograph
For a good third of The Last Photograph, Danny Huston’s first directorial effort for nearly 20 years, there’s a distinct impression that something’s not right. The acting is wonky, some of the artistic choices are confusing (why has he put a soft filter on the camera at just this moment?), the narrative is playing out to a staccato rhythm which seems designed to confuse rather than enlighten. It’s all a bit chaotic. Huston also plays the lead character, a grouchy guy who owns a bookshop concession inside Chelsea Farmers Market, London, whose dealings with his fellow humans all seem to end the same way: the middle finger, either at him or from him. … Read more
The Marriage of Maria Braun
The first of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy”, The Marriage of Maria Braun (aka Die Ehe der Maria Braun) is a canonical part of the New German Cinema era of the 1970s and in its key figure, Maria (Hanna Schygulla), gives us post-War Germany’s spectacular economic rebirth (die Wirtschaftswunder) distilled down into a single person. Fassbinder starts us off in the dog days of the Second World War. The first image on the screen is a portrait of Hitler, seconds later dislodged by the shock wave from a falling bomb to reveal a man and woman in the process of getting married while the world literally explodes around them. Maria and Hermann. Cut … Read more
1 June 2015-06-01
Out This Week Selma (Pathe, cert 12) Martin Luther King’s life done as a triumph, not the usual tragedy, the focus being the series of marches King led from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. These effectively rode a coach and horses through the prevailing practice of disenfranchising Negros by making registering to vote all but impossible. Up in Washington DC are two tricky customers – the conniving though not entirely venal President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson, not over-reaching himself) and his homunculus, FBI boss J Edgar Hoover (another eel-like turn by Dylan Baker), while down in Alabama operates the strategically astute, tactically sharp King. Like last year’s Dallas Buyers Club, the success of the … Read more
Misericordia
So here’s France’s best film of 2024, in the esteemed Cahiers du Cinéma’s estimation at any rate. Which may come as a surprise to many in the anglosphere, where Misericordia came and went without making much of a stir, as Alain Guiraudie’s films so often do. It’s a slight return to Guiraudie’s most well received film (a finger in the air poll only), 2013’s Stranger by the Lake, which set a “cosy” murder mystery at a secluded countryside spot where gay men convene to have sex with each other. Guiraudie opened that film with shots of penises in mid frame and continued in much the same vein, the Poirot-esque murder investigation regularly taking … Read more
The Mitchells vs the Machines
A cross-pollination of Deadpool and The Lego Movie might result in The Mitchells vs the Machines, a mad, meta-referential animation full of smart ideas and packed with enough jokes for repeat viewings. It’s refreshing, also, for a big Hollywood movie to be such a hymn (if hymns can be this busy) to weirdness. That’s largely down to co-writer/director Michael Rianda, who makes clear in the exit credits – with a big picture of his own family tagged “the real life Mitchells” – that this is a personal project. Perhaps idiosyncrasy is a better word than weirdness, let’s not get carried away, because in the telling of a story about a teenage movie-mad girl … Read more
Skinamarink
My parents used to say “Skinnymalink” rather than “Skinamarink”. As affectionate insults go I suppose it was better than one alternative description, which was “long streak of piss”. The dictionary tells us the word has something to do with an old Scottish children’s song, Skinamalinky Long Legs, which (to vary the spelling yet again) went: “Skinny Malinky long legs / Big banana feet / Went to the pictures but couldnae find a seat / When the picture started / Skinny Malinky farted / Skinny Malinky long legs / Big banana feet.” The name probably came from the dialect word “Manikie” a little man (like mannequin) – so a skinamarink is skinny little man. All of … Read more
Mutual Appreciation
A micro-budget black-and-white indie drama, written and directed by one of its co-stars, Andrew Bujalski, who plays the college lecturer graciously helping out old school friend and budding rock musician Alan (Justin Rice) after he relocates to New York. Failing to commit, being vaguely rubbish, avoiding maturity, just sort of drifting about, that’s the over-riding atmosphere delivered by Bujalski’s bittersweet second film, after the highly influential Funny Ha Ha. His inspiration would appear to be the naturalism of early Jim Jarmusch, the awkwardness of Woody Allen, and Bujalski is keen on situations where what is not said is twice as powerful as what is. Embarrassment looms large too, inevitably, so anyone who’s ever … Read more
The Beasts
Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen reportedly said he wanted to make The Beasts (As Bestas, in Spanish) “as a western”. To a large extent that’s what he’s done. This is like a western where two opposing and implacable forces square off in a lawless milieu. John Ford might have made this, back in the day. If he had I wonder how much shorter he’d have made it. The story it tells is a true one, of a Dutch couple moving to a remote Spanish village to start a new life, then falling out badly with their neighbours until one day a moment of reckoning arrives. For the factual account, the true-crime documentary Santoalla (2015) … Read more
