Popular Reviews
Touki Bouki
Often described as Africa’s first avant-garde film, 1973’s Touki Bouki sits at number 66 on Sight & Sound magazine’s most recent Best of All Time list, had its restoration funded by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation and was even referenced by Jay Z and Beyoncé in the promo material for their 2018 tour (which led to an interesting discussion about cultural appropriation, especially as their tour took in not one African country). Is it any good though? Films end up on lists for all sorts of the wrong reasons – tokenism, lobbying and groupthink to name but three. The good news is that it’s as great as its reputation, a genuinely refreshing, technically … Read more
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 May Ramesses II becomes pharaoh of Egypt, 1279BC On this day in 1279BC, the king often called Ramesses (or Rameses, or Ramses) the Great, became pharaoh of Egypt. Known as Ozymandias by the Greeks, the pharaoh most remembered by history was a great military campaigner and a great builder of cities, temples and monuments. He became pharaoh in his late teens and ruled for the following 66 years. The Egyptian army consisted of about 100,000 men, and he used it to wage war against the Hittites and Nubians, routed the Sherden sea pirates who were harrying ships on the Mediterranean … Read more
Stray Dog
Subtle, understated Japanese film noir, 1949’s Stray Dog appears to be Akira Kurosawa’s embrace of the post-War reconstruction of Japan in the image of the American conqueror. It may be something else as well. But before all that, is the “stray dog” we see panting in the opening titles meant to be Japan itself? That dog does not otherwise feature in the film. No dog does. Instead of canines, Kurosawa beetles away at a Maguffin leading us from one end of his movie to the other. The story of a diligent young cop, Detective Murakami (Toshirō Mifune), who one sweltering day on a crowded bus has his police revolver lifted from his jacket … Read more
Dinner in America
Dinner in America starts raucously, in shock joke territory, and ends up as a tender love story. In scene one a zonked-out woman taking part in a drugs trial is gesturing lasciviously towards a fellow trial member, fingering the sliced meat on her plate of food in a clear “fuck me” invitation. He’s spraying puke across the formica by the way. By the finale, the territory has shifted into the domestic and the lovey-dovey though writer/director Adam Rehmeier has cleverly managed to keep the overall tone more or less the same. This is your 1990s grunge superdweeb comedy revisited, with everyone a relation at various removes from the dramatis personae of Superbad or … Read more
La Dolce Vita
More than 50 years old yet curiously contemporary, Federico Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece isn’t just a cynical critique by a conflicted Catholic of “the sweet life”, it’s the film that announces the arrival of the world we now inhabit. It starts with one of cinema’s most famous shots, a lingering view of a huge statue of Christ being airlifted, possibly rescued, from a Rome gone to the bad. God, Fellini appears to be saying, has left us, and in his place we have placed the pursuit of carnal pleasure, the joys of the night, drink and the worship of our new deity – the celebrity. This, after all, is the film that introduced the … Read more
Romería
The intimate, highly personal family drama shot in an unobtrusive, semi-documentary way is Spanish auteur Carla Simón’s speciality, and in Romería, her latest film, she stays true to her vocation. Born in the mid-1980s, Simón was orphaned at an early age and raised by an uncle. In the early 2000’s she set off on a quest to find out more about her father’s family. The story here is pretty similar – Marina (Llúcia Garcia) arrives in Vigo in the early years of the 21st century, to chase down the paperwork she needs to get her into university to study film but also to dig out information about her parents. They fell in love … Read more
Christmas Holiday
Imagine calling a film Christmas Holiday and then filling it with desperation, prositution, twisted mother love and murder. They knew how to have fun in 1944. Ignore all the opening flimflam about a lieutenant being dumped by his girl on Christmas Eve, the day before his wedding. The film only really takes wing once we get to the backstory of Jackie (Deanna Durbin), the prostitute that heartsore Lieutenant Charles Mason (Dean Harens) hooks up with after accidentally landing in New Orleans en route back to San Francisco for the furlough he now no longer wants or needs. He winds up taking not to bed but to… midnight mass. Charlie is a nothing in … Read more
Women Talking
Women Talking could have got a lot of dramatic mileage simply by telling the story of what happened rather than what happened next. But it opts for the latter, a daring ploy that eventually yields results, though there are moments on the journey when it looks like it’s not going to make it. Here’s what happened. In a devout, modernity-shunning Mennonite community in Bolivia between 2005 and 2008 a number of women and girls started waking up mornings to discover they’d been raped in their sleep. The youngest of the 151 victims was three, the oldest was 65. The community elders suggested that Satan was responsible, or one of his demons or possibly … Read more
My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To
Talking of movies that got lost down the back of the Covid sofa, how about My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, the debut feature by Jonathan Cuartas and as good a modern take on the vampire genre as you’ll see. A homeless man is picked up by a guy with a beard. Where are we going, says the vagrant. To a hostel, says the bearded guy. This isn’t a hostel, says the homeless guy when they pull up outside a family home. Next second he’s been clubbed about the head by a baseball bat he (ironically) only minutes before had been pulling out of a dumpster bin. Another few seconds … Read more
Petite Maman
Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman takes such a massive turn at a certain point in its brief 1hr 12 minutes running time that it could only be spoilerish to mention it. Let’s just say she might have been watching Netflix’s German TV series Dark and leave it at that. As to the rest of it, it’s absolutely classic Sciamma territory – sentimental education, always female – following on from Sciamma’s 2007 debut and taking in Tomboy, Girlhood and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the last of which is definitely on a very short shortlist of the best movies of 2019. Petite Maman may be brief but it’s so densely packed that if you’d … Read more
Monster Hunters
Monster Hunters, not to be confused with Monster Hunter starring Milla Jovovich. Scratch that thought. Because half the thing about any of these Asylum “mockbusters” is that confusion is at least half of the deal. So many Asylum movies ride on the coattails of the advertising spends of much bigger movies, maybe peeling off a few of the less wary hoping for more Milla Jovovich or whoever. Another tranche of viewers come to see what new depths have been plumbed by, say, The Twisters or Road Wars: Max Fury. Yet others see The Asylum as being on a bit of a mission – the bigger and more complicated Hollywood movies get, the more … Read more
Fitzcarraldo
The “conquistador of the useless” is how Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald – known by the Peruvian locals as Fitcarraldo – is described at one point in Werner Herzog’s fourth collaboration with actor Klaus Kinski. It helps, watching this mad epic conceived on the grandest of scales, to remember that Herzog often described himself that way too. The story is as big as the character of Fitzcarraldo, an obsessive opera-lover with a string of failures behind him, like the Trans-Andean railway that never went anywhere, or the ice-making business with not enough demand for ice locally to make success a possibility. As Herzog raises the curtain, Fitzcarraldo’s latest plan is to build an opera house … Read more
