Popular Reviews
Sucker Punch
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 June The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today Butcher cover, 1966 On this day in 1966, the Beatles released their eleventh US release, Yesterday and Today, a compilation of tracks from the three most recent British albums – Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver (not yet released). The record became infamous because of its cover, shot by Robert Whitaker earlier that year, which depicted the band dressed in butchers’ aprons draped with pieces of meat and various parts of plastic dolls. In terms of conceptual art, it was ahead of its time (it’s in Damian Hirst and the Chapman brothers territory) and the … Read more
Nothing But a Man
Made in 1964, in America’s Deep South – Alabama, to be precise – Nothing But a Man is, if nothing else, a remarkable document giving us an insight into the everyday lives of people on the wrong side of the racial divide at precisely the moment when the civil rights struggle was coming to some sort of a head. It would be a great film even without all that “historically important” aspect. Unusually neo-realist and quasi-documentary in style, it’s a powerful but simple boy meets girl story of a rangy guy who works on the railroad and the preacher’s daughter he falls for, much to the discombobulation of the preacher. Having ridden out the … Read more
Roxie Hart
An A team of acting and technical talent bring their A game to Roxie Hart, the tale of an innocent woman who pleads guilty to a murder in the hope that it’ll further her stage career. The law as an extension of showbusiness, the corrupting effect of the media, never mind the 21st century, this was made in 1942, and retells the true story of murderous Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, who were renamed Roxie and Velma by journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins when she decided to turn some wildly successful newspaper reporting into a 1926 stage play called Chicago. And that’s the way Roxie and Velma remained, as the play became first a … Read more
John Le Carré Movie Adaptations Ranked, 2021
There is a lot of John Le Carré out there. The author wrote prodigiously, starting while he was still working as a spy for MI5 and MI6 in the late 1950s and only really stopped when he died, in December 2020. There are nine novels featuring his most famous creation, the retired master spy George Smiley, and another 17 or so (depending on how you count) other novels, plus short stories, essays, memoirs, articles written for newspapers (denouncing the war in Iraq, for instance) and screenplays (always adaptations of his own novels). But there’s no getting round it, if you want a John Le Carré experience, the movies are probably the worst way … Read more
Not to Be Unpleasant, But We Need to Have a Serious Talk
The Greek Weird Wave was at its height in 2011 when Giorgos Georgopoulos released his last fictional movie, Tungsten (there’s been a documentary in the interim), one of the films included on almost all the “ten best” lists next to the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) or Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010). Now he’s back with another, admittedly very late, contender, a bone-dry, pitch-black, straight-faced comedy about a man with a fatal sexually transmitted disease seeking out the women he’s slept with over the past few years to tell them they are in all likelihood going to die. Not him, though, it’s only fatal for women. A comedy, you say? Well, the … Read more
Empire of Light
Margate on the south coast of England is one of many British seaside towns that’s seen better days. So has its cinema, Wonderland, here renamed by Sam Mendes and his team as the Empire, for a story set in 1980 about people who’ve seen better days, a country too, perhaps. Britain once had an empire of its own, of course. Metaphor and symbolism hang heavy in Empire of Light and affect every aspect of it. In the opening sequences cinematographer Roger Deakins’s camera mooches balefully about the interior of this palace of plush. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score weeps. This place isn’t in good shape. Bits are roped off, a whole floor … Read more
Star Wars
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 March President Reagan proposes the Strategic Defense Initiative, On this day in 1983, President Reagan announced a change in the country’s defence policy. Hitherto relying on a launch-on-warning (aka fail-deadly) response to attack – Mutual Assured Destruction – the US switched to a stated position of defending the country, not attacking an enemy: the Strategic Defense Initiative. Since the previous strategy had relied on a superabundance of ballistic nuclear weapons, the idea being that even if only a small percentage got through, the damage to the other side (the Soviet Union, generally) would be so great that nobody would even … Read more
Meshes of the Afternoon
Scan the most recent (2022) of Sight and Sound magazine’s polls of the greatest films of all time (critics are polled every ten years) and you’ll see films you know intimately (Singin’ in the Rain or Vertigo, maybe), films you might have seen once or twice (The Searchers, Playtime) and films by directors you’ve heard of but maybe aren’t over-familiar with (Ozu, Murnau, Varda, Renoir, Denis). And then, in the number 16 slot there’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Chances are you’ve not heard of it, or of its makers, Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied. But there it is. It stands out for other reasons too. It was made in 1943 and is silent … Read more
Pearl
While shooting 1970s-porn-pastiche-horror movie X in New Zealand, and caught up in a bit of a covid quarantine hiatus, writer/director Ti West realised he might have the makings of a franchise on his hands. So he pitched the idea to production company A24 of extending his single movie into something more. They said yes, and West, wasting no time, immediately set about writing Pearl with his star, Mia Goth. The franchise idea is loosely linked horror movies set in different eras and shot in different styles. X told the story of a gang of amateur porn film-makers in 1970s America getting their rich-hued sex/death/slasher/giallo-inspired comeuppance. In that film Goth played two roles – … Read more
Nightsiren
A young woman returns to the Slovakian village she fled as a child, little realising that she’s going to get the frostiest of receptions. She’s a witch, the townsfolk whisper, or the daughter of a witch, or at least lived in the house where the witch lived, they say. And, what’s more, while fleeing all those years before, she pushed her little sister off a cliff to her death. This is true, but the little girl’s death was an accident, a flashback makes clear, but no one in this village is buying that, or trading in hard facts where Šarlota (pronounced Charlotta and played by Natalia Germani) is concerned. She has been tagged, … Read more
Quo Vadis, Aida?
Jasmila Zbanic’s powerful drama Quo Vadis, Aida?, about the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, starts with a sad irony. As the production company idents come up, and various “with the support of” and “in collaboration with” credits list all the European and international organisations involved, remember that when the events in this flm were playing out in real life actual international collaboration seemed to consist of a collective looking the other way. Ask most people, most Europeans even, what the last war in Europe was and they’ll likely refer you to Adolf Hitler. That’s to forget the Bosnian war in the aftermath of the fragmentation of Yugoslavia – familiar as a holiday destination to so … Read more
100 Years of… 3 Bad Men
3 Bad Men was John Ford’s last silent western, though it was obviously never billed as such (who knew, when it opened, that the silent era would end within a couple of years?). The unannounced end of an era was released in 1926 and Ford wouldn’t return to the genre until Stagecoach in 1939. It’s a Ford classic, though you can see all the key elements in this earlier film – admirably straightforward storytelling through powerful characters against stunning backdrops. For those who consider silent movies to be a lesser art form, the unsophisticated predecessor to the real deal, this could be an eye opener. It’s ironic, for a start, and that starts with … Read more
