Popular Reviews
Thelma
Thelma, a collaboration between director Joachim Trier and writer (and sometime director) Eskil Vogt, is another reminder of what a dynamic duo these two are, separately and together. And that they make powerful and suggestive, moody and magnificent dramas that are also sly as hell. Slo-mo gotcha movies of a very high order. Thelma starts with a tender scene of a father out with his six-year-old daughter in the snowy wintry wastes of Norway. By the end of this sequence the father is taking aim at his daughter’s head with his rifle, unbeknown to her. Why? Trier and Vogt tell us almost two hours later, right at the end. In between they follow … Read more
Merry-Go-Round
“The pinnacle of Hungarian cinema,” is how István Szabó described Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta), and since he directed Mephisto and Colonel Redl, he’s worth listening to. But what of Zoltán Fábri, director of Merry-Go-Round, two of whose later films were Oscar nominated, which is quite a feat considering the deterrent effect of the Iron Curtain when he was at his creative peak. Not having seen any of his other films, I can only speak for this outing from 1956, which tells a familiar love story, adds just enough politics to keep the commissars happy (and allows for all manner of readings) and overlays everything with a heady wash of poetic realism, just like the French … Read more
Splitsville
Fans of the prosthetic penis will like Splitsville. For the rest of us there’s smart writing and a farcical plot aiming at… I have no idea… modern relationships? Is this really how people behave? I doubt it. Shorthand – it’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice meets The Break-Up (the one starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston as an estranged couple sharing an apartment). The basic set-up is that Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona) are a married couple who split up suddenly when she decides she can do better than this deadbeat. She’s also hotter than him by an order of magnitude – Arjona is hotter than almost everybody – so … Read more
Clara Sola
Capsule plot summaries can be misleading. The one for Clara Sola might say – a woman around 40 in a Costa Rica village has a sexual awakening. It’s more or less what the one on the IMDb says. And it’s not wrong, that is what happens. But the story, that’s a different thing altogether. And in fact the whole point of this debut by Nathalie Álvarez Mesén is in what isn’t being said rather than what is. The plot is straightforward but story lies scattered between the cracks, just slightly out of reach. It’s ambiguous, entirely, in almost every respect. Clara is a pretty woman and might, at her age, expect to be … Read more
The Wall
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 February Alexander Selkirk rescued, 1709 On this day in 1709, a Scottish sailor named either Alexander Selkirk or Selcraig was rescued from an island in the South Pacific. But the model for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe wasn’t the victim of a shipwreck. In fact he’d asked the captain of the privateer (ie pirate) ship he was sailing on, the Cinque Ports, to leave him on the uninhabited island known as Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández archipelago about 700km off the coast of Chile. Known since his youth as a quarrelsome sort, Selkirk had been loudly protesting … Read more
Zombi Child
There were zombie movies before George Romero came along and shook the genre up in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead and at first Zombi Child looks like it’s harking back to an older tradition of zombie movie, like 1932’s White Zombie or 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie. We’re in Haiti in 1962, where an opening shot shows us someone assembling something nasty-looking from various bits of pufferfish innards and other voodoo bits and bobs. The resulting powder is then put into a man’s shoes. The man “dies”, is buried, disinterred and in short order – this all taking about five minutes of screen time – is working on a sugar … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 25 – Esprit De Corp
Esprit De Corps is a mad and twisty Avengers episode, one of many dealing with the subject of indoctrination, the focus here being an army unit that’s going to launch a coup d’etat and put the “rightful” heir back on the throne. Mad enough, but there’s a fruitloop turn to come which I won’t spoil. Instead let me tell you that a 22-year-old John Thaw plays a key role, as an army captain (Thaw generally did play older than he was – at 33 he was seen-it-all cop Jack Regan in The Sweeney; he was only 45 when he played the retirement-dodging star of Inspector Morse). Thaw’s Captain Trench is being hoodwinked by … Read more
Undine
So, an Undine. It’s a mythical water nymph, mentioned by Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician, but you won’t learn that directly from Christian Petzold’s latest drama, an increasingly bizarre and dislocated story of love suffused with magical realist moments that make no sense at all… unless you realise that the titular Undine (Paula Beer) is a version of the mythical creature who fell in love with a human. This Undine is a pencil-skirted guide to historical Berlin. She’s fresh out of a relationship with a guy she thought was the one, now propelled by fate into another one when a fish tank explodes and she and a man she’s just met (Franz Rogowski) are … Read more
The Burial
A movie called The Burial that buries its main story – it sounds like some kind of meta-joke. But it isn’t. Whether the strategy works is the real question though. The story was first told in the New Yorker and relayed what happened to a real-life Mississippi guy called O’Keefe whose struggling funeral-home business was offered a buyout in the mid-1990s by the Loewen company, a megacorp specialising in burials and, more importantly (it turns out), burial insurance. O’Keefe and Loewen agreed a deal in principle but then the trail went cold. Eventually, convinced that Loewen were sitting on their hands until he went bust, so it could buy him out for cents … Read more
25 August 2014-08-25
Out in the UK This Week Locke (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) A film set entirely in a car driving along a motorway needs a lot going for it to work. Locke has it. A tight, believable script, Tom Hardy as a methodical yet inwardly erratic concrete specialist (metaphor alert) who has spent his entire life trying not to be like his loser dad, and is now trying to avert the collapse of his entire life by making call after bluetooth call while hurtling towards London. That’s it – a man and a phone and the voices at the other end. Some you might recognise – Olivia Colman as the pregnant one-night stand Locke is trying … Read more
Wish You Were Here
So you’re Julia Stiles and you decide to have a crack at directing a feature film. Wish You Were Here is the result, and, well well, if it isn’t a mash-up of precisely the sort of films Stiles used to star in when she was starting out, rom-com, girl-next-door, travails-of-the-teen-spirit-y kind of stuff – Ten Things I Hate about You most notably. She also wrote Wish You Were Here so this choice is clearly deliberate. Possibly Stiles is laying ghosts to rest or laughing at herself, it’s hard to say. What is clear is that her film is a mess until it properly works out which of the various early-Stiles-adjacent genres it really … Read more
Knights of the Teutonic Order
1960’s Knights of the Teutonic Order is one of the most watched movies in Poland’s history. According to some sources, almost everyone in the country saw it when it was released and it remains popular to this day. What is it about this tale of proud Poles taking arms against an order of corrupt German clerics dominating their country, made less than 15 years after a German invasion had propelled Europe into the Second World War, that caught the attention? The historical parallels are obvious, but there was the added bonus of the film’s anti-clerical theme chiming with the anti-religious agenda of Poland’s communist overlords. There will be no pushback from that direction. … Read more
