Popular Reviews
István Szabó: Mephisto/Colonel Redl/Hanussen
A neat Blu-ray box set of some of Hungarian director István Szabó’s best – probably his best known – movies. Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985) and Hanussen (1988) all star Klaus Maria Brandauer, all three are co-written with Péter Dobai and they’re all shot by Lajos Koltai. Thematically they all deal with essentially the same issue too – personal integrity, though they come at it from different directions. To précis the plots, Mephisto is a Nazi-era tale of an actor who is “invited” to endorse the new regime in return for career success. Colonel Redl follows a traitor on his path towards sending thousands of countrymen to their deaths in the dog days … Read more
I Love You Again
I Love You Again is a knockabout Hollywood farce, a cock-eyed “comedy of remarriage” – The Philadelphia Story is the king of the genre – done in rat-a-rat style by the crack team of director WS Van Dyke and his stars, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Van Dyke was known as One Take Woody, for reasons that don’t need explaining, and at this point had worked together with Powell and Loy on three Thin Man films, which had done all three of them a lot of favours. If you’re not familiar with the Thin Man films (there would eventually be six; the first three are the best), they all feature Powell and Loy as … Read more
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
A hell of title and a hell of a film, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is the remarkable second feature by writer/director Lili Horvát, who’s otherwise oddjobbed about the film biz in Hungary for some time – a casting director here, an actor there (you might have seen her in Kornél Mundruczó’s 2014 movie White God, a bizarre amalgam of the Disney kids movie with the post-apocalyptic wasteland drama). With an influence of Claire Denis, Horvát conjures, also in “how is she doing that?” fashion, a complete dramatic universe set in a world of feeling and gesture, where facts as such are not as important as the emotions triggered … Read more
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Well it’s an African Festen, isn’t it? I’m going to say immediately what most reviewers seem to get around to saying eventually. But On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is much more than just a dark drama about family secrets coming to light at a family gathering, so memorably wrangled in Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film. The director/writer is Rungano Nyoni, who swept all before her with feature debut I Am Not a Witch in 2017. Also suggesting excellence is the fact that it’s an A24 production, and they are rarely putting a foot wrong at the moment when it comes to intelligent, entertaining and original drama (see The Brutalist, Midsommar, Aftersun and The Whale). … Read more
Pitch Black
A sci-fi shocker high on SFX, low on survivors and set on a planet where the self-serving and rather motley crew of an interplanetary cruiser are forced to pitch down after some unforeseen space ructions. It turns out that they are not alone on the planet. In fact this alien world is populated by some very unpleasant flying creatures who only come out in the dark. And – guess what – there’s a ginormous eclipse of the planet’s three suns on the way. Luckily, one of the spaceship’s number is gifted with uncanny nightsight. Unluckily, he is a vicious murderer locked in the ship’s brig. So there’s an awful lot of sucking of … Read more
Enemy at the Gates
Here’s a mixed bag of European war movie that is trying to be Saving Private Ryan in its impressive opening scenes, but looks as if it realises it doesn’t have the budget and so scales back the action to concentrate on two lone snipers. One German, one Russian. It’s set during the battle of Stalingrad, in which more than two million people died – yes, two million – and so the decision makes some logistical sense, even if it shortchanges the Russians and their epic level of sacrifice. The fact that it does that is what got the goat of a lot of historians masquerading as film critics, who suggested that the film … Read more
Rebellion
This ambitious and almost entirely successful drama sees Mathieu Kassovitz, the director of La Haine, back in France and back on form after a less than stellar time in Hollywood churning out studio cack such as Gothika and Babylon AD. It tells the true story of a small kerfuffle in 1988 in New Caledonia, a far-flung outpost of France, and follows a crack GIGN team – a SWAT team with brains – led by Captain Philippe Legorjus (Kassovitz) as they seek to restore order after a breakaway group of separatists seize a group of gendarmes and hold them hostage in a cave in a remote part of the island. Because of the way … Read more
A Touch of Zen
Sex, death and people flying about in the air fighting each other, A Touch of Zen is the Taiwanese martial-arts movie that reminded Hong Kong directors how to do it properly, with space used intelligently, fluid cameras, energetic edits, restrained performances, humour that isn’t just about falling flat on your face and stuntwork that’s extravagant but not ridiculous. It’s rightly acclaimed as one of the best examples of the genre and was released in 1971 when martial arts was generally a B or even C movie affair, by King Hu, the director who changed all that. Ang Lee borrowed heavily from it for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and there’s enough Star Wars-y feeling … Read more
The Dark Corner
The Dark Corner didn’t do too well when it debuted in 1946. There were too many other noirs around and it struggled to stand out from the pack. Now, though, it looks a lot better – its dark wit, snappy one liners and good cast help, plus the direction of Henry Hathaway, who knows how to be economical and inject pace. Hathaway blamed Mark Stevens for the film’s failure, and though Stevens is playing a private investigator as a second-order simulacrum – a version of a version – he gets the lines out well enough, and it is the lines that this film is about… when it’s not about plot. Stevens plays Bradford Galt, a … Read more
Mr Klein
Mr Klein is a film about a mindset as much as a man or an event. The event is the Holocaust, the mindset is of a man called Mr Klein, played by Alain Delon, a French art dealer who, one day in 1942 in Nazi-occupied Paris, is tagged as being a Jew. But he isn’t Jewish, Mr Klein insists. Why the idea is laughable, absurd. Somewhere in Paris there’s obviously another Monsieur Klein who is Jewish, but I’m not that guy. This is nothing more than a simple case of mistaken identity. And for the rest of the film Monsieur Klein keeps up his protestations, turning detective to try and flush out the … Read more
The Da Vinci Code
“What, [dodges bullet] you mean Jesus wasn’t really the Son of God [jumps into speeding car] and married Mary Magdalene [hijacks armoured vehicle] who bore a child who [takes plane to an England full of half-timbered cars] established a bloodline which [evades knife-thrust of albino monk] if it were ever to become public knowledge would [accidentally shoots cardinal] undermine the power of the Catholic Church [garrottes nun]?” There’s plenty more of this sort of carry-on in director Ron Howard’s almost satisfying attempt to turn Dan Brown’s 560 pages of lecture-chase-lecture into something cinematic. And it had to be made into a movie – the sales figures of the book said so. But did … Read more
100 Years of… The Sheikh
Rudolph Valentino had two big films in 1921. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by far the biggest grossing film of the year, was the one that made him a star. But The Sheikh was even more important. It made Valentino so famous that we still talk of him today, long after the auras of fellow stars like Norma Talmadge and Wallace Reid have faded. The Four Horsemen gave Valentino the “Latin lover” tag but The Sheikh made it stick, something that Valentino – striving to have a varied career – struggled against before bowing to the inevitable in 1926 with Son of the Sheikh. In an intense but short time at the … Read more
