Popular Reviews
In Her Hands
Two Brits starring in a French film. In Her Hands (Au bout des doigts in French) didn’t get a theatrical release in the UK or the US, so if the strategy was to guarantee anglosphere box-office action by casting Lambert Wilson and Kristin Scott Thomas (both of whom speak fluent French), it clearly hasn’t worked. The film did get some exposure in Canada (plenty of French speakers) and Australia, where it was called In Your Hands. Perhaps that’s all a bit of red herring, because, though Wilson and Scott Thomas’s names come up first in the screen credits, it’s actually Jules Benchetrit who’s the star here. In his first major role, Benchetrit plays … Read more
Anaïs in Love
Anaïs is hot. A pretty young French woman who wears a succession of dresses that show off her long legs, her bare arms, her lovely skin. With her hair cascading down her back, she’s a gorgeous, flighty, scatty, slip of a thing who, silly her, gets herself into the most terrible situations and then, skipping elegantly with an impish grin, escapes out of them back into her consequence-free existence. Anaïs has a boyfriend, Raoul, but she doesn’t seem particularly interested in him. She has commitments to a university thesis but seems to be treating that in the same take-it-or-leave-it way. Early on she discovers she’s pregnant and so, alors, pops off to the … Read more
The Duellists
The Duellists is Ridley Scott’s feature debut and premiered in 1977, four years after his famous advert for Hovis bread (voted the UK’s favourite TV advert in a 2006 poll). Both are picturesque evocations of a world long gone – pre-War England, in the 45-second advert’s case, the world of post-Revolutionary France in the case of the solid 100 minutes of The Duellists. The story is a true one – about two men in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of around 30 grudge duels over 19 years. Joseph Conrad had used the facts as the basis for a novella, and Scott’s screenwriter, Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, adapts them further with his screenplay, reducing the … Read more
Meet the Parents
The notion of “upstaging” comes from the theatre and refers to the moment when an actor walks upstage, away from the audience, thus forcing the actor they’re addressing to turn their back on the audience. The audience can’t see the actor’s face, it can’t hear them that well either. It drives actors crazy. It’s a harder thing to nail down on film, but it’s something Robert De Niro is great at, especially when a comedian is involved. In Meet the Parents the funnyman in question is Ben Stiller, playing the poor sap back to “meet the parents” of his intended (Teri Polo). De Niro plays Jack Byrnes, the mutha of a father, subjecting … Read more
Play Misty for Me
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 December Marconi receives the first transatlantic message, 1901 On this day in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi, one of the pioneers of long-distance radio transmission, finally proved that radio waves could travel really long distances. In 1894 he had started work on “wireless telegraphy” (sending telegrams without the need for wires, via Morse code) when only 20 years old, using his butler as a lab assistant – this was the butt end of the age of the gentleman scientist. He had soon worked out how to make a bell ring on one side of his room, wirelessly from the other. Impressed, his … Read more
Desire
1936’s Desire is the sort of film Hollywood has always excelled at. A bit of this, that and the other – some fun, some jeopardy, some romance – parcelled up beautifully and sold by attractive people who are looking their best. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in this case. The best bit actually comes at the outset, when Dietrich is playing two men off against each other by telling each man she’s married to the other. On one side a jeweller (Ernest Cossart), from whom she’s trying to steal a priceless string of pearls. On the other a shrink (Alan Mowbray), who is apparently supposed to be buying the pearls though he knows … Read more
Chemical Hearts
Love is a feeling generated by chemicals in the brain, suggests Suds, the practical, science-versed older sister of Henry, in Chemical Hearts. It’s also a feeling generated by this deliciously gooey romance. If there’s room each year for one gorgeous indie teenage love movie then this is the 500 Days of Summer of 2020. Henry is the nerdy high school kid whose long-term goal is to be a writer. Shorter term his ambition stretches to editing the school paper. Dropping into his world one day like an alien from outer space is Grace, a spiky, withdrawn, slightly sneery girl who’s smart, bookish and into the love poems of Pablo Neruda. Oh dear. He’s … Read more
Triangle of Sadness
Triangle of Sadness is Ruben Östlund’s third dance with essentially the same ideas that powered Force Majeure, his force majeure of a drama from 2014, and The Square, his Palme d’Or winner from 2017. Triangle of Sadness also won the Palme d’Or, so Cannes obviously likes Östlund’s take on role-playing and status. But first, Östlund has a little game to play. In a kind of prologue he restages the casting process for the film, with eventual-lead Harris Dickinson playing one of many male models being seen for a role in some never-specified campaign or show. To win the part ofTriangle of Sadness‘s Carl, Dickinson eventually beat out 230 contenders, so this fictional reworking … Read more
District 13
Free-running is the gimmick powering this actioner scripted and produced by French action powerhouse Luc Besson and also known as District B13 (B is for “Banlieue”). Set in a broken-down Paris in the near future, District 13 has an Escape from New York kind of vibe and follows a tough cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and a gangland desperado (David Belle) into a walled-off urban badland to sort out the guys who’ve nicked a nuclear weapon (it was the US president in Escape from New York). But back to the free-running, or le parkour as its French originators (one of whom is David Belle himself) call it – the adrenalised athletic stuntorama that could simply … 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
Pan’s Labyrinth
It’s not every fantasy film that comes complete with a scene of a brutal fascist captain sewing his own face up, but that’s what you get in Guillermo Del Toro’s best film since The Devil’s Backbone (better, certainly, than Blade II and Hellboy). It’s a dark fantasy reminding us that the Grimm brothers’ original tales were cautionary and soaked in violence and full of the sort of dirty psychological motivation that Disney flirted with in Snow White and Pinocchio. However this youthful experimentation wasn’t to last, and as with the pot reefer and student politicians, Disney, it seems, never actually inhaled. More’s the pity. No such cutes or evasiveness here, where things start … Read more
MaXXXine
A collection of great scenes in search of a movie, MaXXXine opens with a quote from Bette Davis – “In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star” – and ends with the song Bette Davis Eyes. Between those bookends, the story of a porn actress (Mia Goth) trying to go legit in the 1980s United States, where Ronald Reagan is promising “morning in America”, Christians are campaigning against satanism in rock music and filth on the screens, and a serial killer is on a spree butchering young women like Maxine. We first met Maxine in X, this trilogy’s opener, when she was a 1970s burlesque dancer with ambitions … Read more
