Popular Reviews
1984
Diana Ringo has made the first feature film of 1984 in Russian, and she’s done it her way, with little in the way of exterior financial backing. It’s cheap and it’s cheerless, but that just adds to the dystopian gloom. George Orwell would probably approve. He might not be quite so happy about Yevgeni Zamyatin’s name being on the credits as a co-writer. Zamyatin wrote We, a Russian dystopian classic from 1924, which Orwell clearly borrowed from, though he stridently rejected the suggestion. In fact he’d already chucked that rock at Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World was definitely lifted from Zamyatin, according to Orwell at least. Both men, at various points, would … 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 Devil’s Bath
Powerful to the point of punishment, The Devil’s Bath (Des Teufels Bad) is Austria’s contender for the Best International Feature Oscar in 2025. It won’t win. It probably won’t even make the shortlist. Too bleak. Too uncompromising. Seen one way, it’s a group portrait of the extremely grim existence hacked out by peasants in a remote part of 18th-century Austria. Seen another, it’s the progress of one female from fragile, dreamy single girl to married woman in psychological extremis. Anja Plaschg plays Agnes, a sweet, unworldly creature who in early scenes is married off to Wolf (David Scheid), a bear of a man who seems delighted to be married to her. Or maybe … Read more
The Machine Girl
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 July Gavrilo Princip born, 1894 On this day in 1894, the man who started the First World War was born, in Obljaj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to a family of serf farmers, Serbian Orthodox Christians. Gavrilo Princip didn’t go to school till he was nine, but was bright and a quick learner. His brother, sensing a family member who could lift the entire clan out of poverty, encouraged Gavrilo to move to Sarajevo when he was 13, using money earned as a manual labourer to put his younger brother through merchant school. Gavrilo became a passionate campaigner for Yugoslavian unification and … Read more
28 October 2013-10-28
Out in the UK This Week Before Midnight (Sony, cert 15, DVD) After Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), this is round three for cinema’s most romantic couple, as played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They’re now married with two kids and living in France, but we catch up with them holidaying in Greece where they have the time and space to do what they do best – talk – while we get to watch and wonder. In round one he met her on a train journey through Europe and they fell for each other. The film’s USP was the way Delpy and Hawke’s characters interacted – they talked the … Read more
Pitfall
A good example of a flat, stoic, buttoned-up film noir, Pitfall is as minimal and undemonstrative as they come, depending on how you view sex and death. The stars are Dick Powell, deadpan Dick as usual, while Lizabeth Scott is the femme fatale, a model (and so an independent woman) who’s not so much bad as elementally disruptive. There are three key men – Powell as the everyday happily married insurance man John Forbes, Raymond Burr as “Mac” MacDonald, the shifty private investigator Forbes sometimes uses in murky cases, and Byron Barr as Smiley, a crook now doing time for a bent insurance claim. All have lost or will lose their heads to … Read more
The Noise of Engines
At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 French-Canadian film-maker Philippe Grégoire’s debut feature The Noise of Engines (Le bruit des moteurs) starts off with various shots of cars donutting away in rubber-burning circles, going nowhere, but fast. It’s a metaphor, of sorts, for a story about a young man who seems to be going nowhere, but slowly. Perhaps the contrast is a deadpan joke. There is a lot of deadpan joking going on here. The story is a lift from Grégoire’s own life. He worked part-time for the Canadian customs force to finance his way through college and he comes from a small town near the border with the … Read more
Bergman Island
French writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve genuflects before the master, Ingmar Bergman, in her playful and reverential drama set on Fårö (pronounced foe-rer, more or less), the island where Bergman wrote and shot some of his films, and which is now dedicated to promoting his legacy. In meta fashion, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony are a pair of film-makers arriving on Fårö to seek inspiration for the next projects they are working on. Renting the house where Bergman once shot parts of Scenes from a Marriage, or so they (and we) are told by the woman showing them around, they get down to work, him beavering away in the bedroom, her in the mill next … Read more
Flee
Towards the end of 2021 Flee found itself in the curious position of being eligible for Oscar nomination in three different categories. Which way to jump? It eventually submitted itself as a contender in the Best International Feature category. Best Animated Feature was also an option. As was Best Documentary – though spotting that Summer of Soul was in that category would make anyone think twice. Flee ticks all three boxes because it is a documentary telling the true story of a young man called Amin and his long and perilous flight from wartorn Afghanistan up to the moment, where he is about to marry his partner, Kaspar. It’s from Denmark (box two) … Read more
Firebrand
Unusually for a film concerning King Henry VIII of England, Firebrand is not interested in wife one (Catherine of Aragon) or wife two (Anne Boleyn). Instead focus is on the last of Henry’s six wives, Katherine Parr. And, no bones about it, she is the focus of this film, not the king. A history lesson. At the time this film is set Henry has broken politically but not entirely religiously with Rome. The Church of England has been established and Henry is its head. But because he’s relied so heavily on Protestants to support his break, Henry’s brand of Catholicism is on the defensive and the Protestants are on the prowl. It’s against … Read more
The Blackening
The Blackening is an amiable throwback to who-dies-next? horror movies of yore, with a take on race trying to ignore the fact we live in the post-Get Out era. There is what you would expect from a cabin-in-the-woods horror, including a pre-credits death or two, followed by the traditional re-establishing shot of a new batch of people winding their way towards the same destination in one of those aerial shots of a car from way overhead, the isolated vehicle moving through the vastness of the encircling forest. Is someone watching? But these are not booze-chugging, drug-popping white people – long-legged girls, chunky jocks, a dweeb or two – instead a gaggle of black … Read more
Man Finds Tape
Like one of those Victorian novels that spends a chunk of time laying out its bona fides, Man Finds Tape does a lot of scene-setting early on, establishing the who and the what and the where. This all really happened, it insists. But this being the 21st century rather than the 19th, its claims to authenticity rest on different foundations. Victorians were happy to be fed a yarn about the narrator being told a tale by a stranger in a coaching inn on a dark stormy night, a tale that purportedly came straight from eye-witness accounts. Fast-forward to now and Man Finds Tape does it with a camera, a voiceover and a welter … Read more
