Popular Reviews
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 21 – Build a Better Mousetrap
Build a Better Mousetrap is a great episode of The Avengers – it’s Brian Clemens at his best, from its very Clemens-y joshing title, to his use of British eccentrics, and his mix of the venerable with the modern, the tech with the antique and the old with the young, not forgetting Clemens’s usual dabble in the sociology of class. And it gets off to a flying start, making sensible use of Mrs Gale’s penchant for leather by inserting her into a motorcycle gang, somewhat improbably. As the episode gets going, one of this gang’s number is frightening two harmless old ladies (Athene Seyler, Nora Nicholson), who retaliate by threatening to put a … Read more
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz aka Ensayo de un crimen
In typical fashion, Luis Buñuel turns the crime drama on its head in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (originally Ensayo de un crimen), a story about a killer who isn’t a killer admitting to crimes he didn’t commit because he’s convinced he somehow perpetrated them. Being a Buñuel film there’s also a reckoning with the bourgeoisie, and how they tend to get things assbackwards. Here, the wellspring of Archibaldo’s misery is becoming hardwired to confuse sex and death at an early age when, as a spoilt little rich boy, he sees his governess killed by a stray bullet fired by revolutionaries running amok outside the palatial family home. It’s as … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 13 – Death Dispatch
John Steed and Cathy Gale’s party trick, a duet working variations on the theme of the invincibility of the British upper class, really comes into its own in Death Dispatch, the 13th broadcast episode of series two. We’re off in the sort of colonial landscape described by Graham Greene – of swarthy thugs, Freudian dictators and minor functionaries of the Empire, a place where life is cheap and death is pitiless, as we see in the opening shots of this story where a low-level envoy newly in from Washington is quickly despatched in his hotel room in Jamaica. Cut to Steed, ogling women from his Caribbean sun lounger and meeting his control, One-Ten … Read more
Heart Eyes
It’s a good moment for whacked-out horror. Heart Eyes joins Crumb Catcher, The Rule of Jenny Pen, Bring Her Back, Together, Gazer and The Monkey, to name just the ones I’ve seen in the last few weeks. Heart Eyes is less icky than some, more larky than others – it’s Whedon-esque, Buffy-like, horror done with a smirk. So, very referential? Yes, indeedy. The pre-credits sequence sets us up nicely for what’s going to play out. A sweet young-lovers proposal scene. He’s going to pop the question. She’s trembling with anticipation. But instead of the two of them walking off into the sunset together, he winds up with an arrow in the head and … Read more
Triangle
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 March The USS Cyclops disappears, 1918 On this day in 1918, the USS Cyclops disappeared at sea, with a loss of 306 crew and passengers. It remains the single largest naval disaster not involving enemy attack in US history. The ship was carrying manganese, an ingredient in munitions production, and so the suspicion was at the time that the ship had been sunk by the Germans, with whom the US was at war, though this has never been confirmed. The other theory is that the ship encountered a heavy storm after leaving Bahia, Brazil, bound for Baltimore, Maryland. The ship … Read more
Nothing Personal
Working my way in no logical order through the films of the under-rated Urszula Antoniak, I come to her first feature, 2009’s Nothing Personal. And it’s nearly all here – the female focus, the quiet way of working, the absence of unnecessary detail, mood rather than plot being her primary concern, and great performances just to top it all off. What isn’t quite here is Antoniak’s sudden ta-daa moment, the moment in Code Blue (2011) or Magic Mountains (2020) when she suddenly racks all the knobs to the max, to shocking effect. It could be, of course, that those films are atypical. There are another three films, at the time of writing, to … Read more
Highest 2 Lowest
The least satisfying Spike Lee film I’ve ever seen, Highest 2 Lowest at least has the excuse that it’s Spike Lee in gun for hire mode. Walter Salles, Mike Nicholls and Martin Scorsese were all lined up to direct at various points. It’s mystifying, though, because Lee’s journeyman work is usually better than this. It’s a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, or so the blurbs say. In fact Lee and adapter Alan Fox seem in a hurry to work through Kurosawa’s scenarios, as if they had a more urgent appointment elsewhere. If they did, they’re not telling us what it is. In other words, if you want to see a really … Read more
The Adventures of Robin Hood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 June King John “signs” Magna Carta, 1215 On this day in 1215, the king of England put his seal to Magna Carta (the Great Charter) at Runnymede, near Windsor, England. It is in effect a bill of rights, one forced on the king by feudal barons unhappy with the levels of taxation, John’s abysmal record when it came to fighting wars and his supine relationship to the Pope. Designed as part of a powerplay to unseat the king, it proposes limits to the power of the king, making that power more contractual in nature, and denies the king the power … Read more
Panique
How’s this for grim! The atmospheric and technically superb Panique, released in 1946, one year after the war ended, gave the French people an image of themselves at their worst. What the domestic market wanted at the time was sugar-coated triumphalism, stories about the nobility of the Resistance to the German occupation and the endurance of the indomitable French spirit etc. Unsurprisingly the film bombed. An adaptation of one of Georges Simenon’s “romans durs” (the tougher novels that didn’t feature Simenon’s decent detective Maigret), it opens with the death of a woman and closes with the death of a man. In between director/co-writer Julien Duvivier gives us one of the most relentlessly depressing … Read more
Adieu les cons aka Bye Bye Morons
The French comedy Adieu Les Cons (Bye Bye Morons in English) is dedicated to Monty Python’s Terry Jones, who died while it was being made, and also features a blink-and-miss-it cameo by Terry Gilliam, another Python. Given that the film’s director, co-writer and star, Albert Dupontel, is a big fan of the British comedy troupe, you might expect this film, which did incredibly well at the César Awards (the French Oscars) to be full of Pythonesque silliness, absurdity and gentle mocking of the staid middle class. Yes… but mostly no. It stars the ever-brilliant Virginie Efira, a still centre of calm as the mayhem escalates, as Suze, a hairdresser who’s just been told that … Read more
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End
“The star was an alcoholic, the writer was an alcoholic, the producer was an alcoholic and the director was an alcoholic.” I cribbed that line from David Cairns’s loving write-up about this film. It’s a quote from Neil Innes, the musician who worked with Vivian Stanshall in the cult 1960s comedy outfit The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Innes was talking about this film, Stanshall’s elegy to an England whose class-defined distinguishing features were being sandpapered away by social-democratic change. The concept first saw light of day on the Bonzos’ album Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly, then made its way on to BBC DJ John Peel’s radio shows in the 1970s. Essentially a … Read more
The Last Son
Look at the long list of executive producers attached to The Last Son and you’ve got to wonder if they aren’t at least partly responsible for the film’s uncertainty about what it is. Even the title is in dispute – The Last Son of Isaac LeMay is an alternative. It’s got good bones, though, a lean story about Isaac LeMay, an old western hand who, believing himself afflicted by a Cheyenne curse that that one of his own children will kill him, sets off to kill them all before they can kill him. Since Isaac has distributed his seed liberally among the working girls of the Old West, this is some task. (How … Read more
