Popular Reviews
The Beta Test
There is no test in The Beta Test but there is a Beta – lead character Jordan (Jim Cummings), a would-be Hollywood big wheel who’s not quite got the clout of a producer or agent, because he’s more a “packager” of deals, one of those legends in his own lunchtime who secretly wants to be Harvey Weinstein, though he’s too attuned to the zeitgeist to ever let on. Like Griffin Mill in Robert Altman’s The Player, Jordan looks impressive to people who aren’t in the know, but is less impressive to those who are. And he feels this so keenly it’s destroying him. When a potential client, an actual hotshot with money to … Read more
Heretic
What happens if you turn wayward, dithery rom-com Hugh Grant all the way up to 11? Heretic is the answer, a through-the-looking-glass turn by Grant whose good guy/bad guy turn as a householder giving two young Mormon women a night they won’t forget is this movie’s main event. First we meet the young women – Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) – in a scene designed to demonstrate to us their everydayness. With their coy chat about Magnum condoms, penises and online porn, Bates and Paxton also demonstrate to each other that they are everyday normal young women, just ones who happen to members of the Church of Jesus Christ … Read more
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Not the best Otto Preminger film but a very good example of what he was about, Where the Sidewalk Ends is a film noir directed with maximum economy that re-teams Laura‘s golden pairing of Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, he again impassive as you like, she almost unbearably long-suffering. It’s not much of a role for her, as Laura wasn’t in fact (her character was literally dead for most of it and for the rest of it represented ideal womanhood). But for Andrews it’s a great example of his abilities inside the noir genre, where minimalism is generally the best option. No one was more minimal than Andrews. He’s Dirty Harry before Dirty … Read more
You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 April Oldest recording of a voice, 1860 On this day in 1860, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made what is the oldest recording of a human voice still in existence. The recording was made on a machine called a phonautograph which Scott had invented and patented in 1857. It worked by emulating the human ear – sound travelled down a funnel, hit a membrane and was transferred to a stylus (pig bristle) which transmitted the vibrations onto smoke blackened paper or glass, the two-dimensional results being used to study amplitude and waveforms. No one at the time the recording was made … Read more
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe must surprise even Marvel. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the 28th film in the series, the fifth of Phase Four, and with talk of folding both Deadpool and Blade into the franchise, the MCU isn’t going anywhere just yet. Have a squint at the Trivia section for this film’s entry on the IMDb – it expands to fill several multiverses. Fanboy fervour unbound. Sam Raimi is part of that success. Though his Spider-Man trilogy of 20 years ago isn’t part of the official MCU – and Blade had to an extent already shown the way – the success of three films in five … Read more
1 September 2014-09-01
Out in the UK This Week The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Sony, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Marc Webb’s reboot of Spider-Man in 2012 was artistically unnecessary but Webb did at least inject a welcome note of young love into it – he directed indie weepie 500 Days of Summer, let’s not forget. This even more unnecessary sequel sees Andrew Garfield’s Catcher in the Rye webslinger taking on an unnecessary plurality of villains – Electro and Green Goblin. Electro is a nice bit of racist stereotyping for Jamie Foxx, who starts off as a mild mannered janitor and winds up as “angry nigger” Electro, all exaggerated features and steroidal rage, capable of bringing a city to its knees … Read more
The Magic Mountain
There are two versions of the 1982 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s weighty novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg). One is the theatrical cut, which came in at about 153 minutes. The other is the TV cut, which weighs in at an epic 312 minutes over three instalments. That’s the one I watched yesterday, all five hours and a chunk of it, having taken heed of reviews complaining about the theatrical cut’s lack of coherence. The theatrical cut is a lousy edit is the gist of the complaints. As to the full-fat version, it was easier to digest than I’d expected. I suspect the complaints about the theatrical cut are right. In the long … Read more
Zombies of the Third Reich
Zombies of the Third Reich lives in a critic-proof zone along with all the other Nazi Zombie movies. How do you approach something that’s designed to be ridiculous? A collision of genres, a mixed chow mein of excess, these movies come from the land that taste forgot. And that’s exactly as it should be. Good taste is the enemy of great art, as Marcel Duchamp once said. In a funny preamble we meet a twittish British officer (Ellis J Wells) briefing Craftman (Zach Devereux), a plucky Brit, about a Nazi experiment into the creation of a supersoldier somewhere in Second World War France. On what’s clearly something of a suicide mission, Craftman is … Read more
The Secret Garden
The world may not need yet another version of The Secret Garden, but here’s one anyway. The latest adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s story is in a crowded field and to cut through has to compete with two very respectable adaptations, the much lauded one from 1993 directed by Agnieszka Holland and the one from 1949 starring cute child star Margaret O’Brien. There are plenty of others, going as far back as 1919, and what all have in common is the same roster of character names – one sign of something achieving classic status is that no one dicks about with the names as written on the page. See Harry Potter, Elizabeth … Read more
The Sicilian Clan
The golden age of hijacking (1968-1972) was just peaking in 1969 when The Sicilian Clan (Le Clan des Siciliens) debuted, a French heist movie itself hijacked – twice! – by a plot involving the illegal commandeering of a plane and by a superannuated screen star who really shouldn’t be in it. It’s really, at bottom, one of those heist movies in which security cameras, pressure sensors, alarms, iron bars, motion sensors and all the modern security paraphernalia have to be overcome by a gang smart and greedy enough to have a go. And that looks to be exactly what we’re getting as first our main guy, Roger Sartet (Alain Delon), is introduced, a … Read more
Nobody
“Who the fuck are you?” two cops ask the bloody guy they’ve got sitting over the table from them, in some sort of interview situation. “I’m, er…” he says. And boom, up on the screen comes the single word in giant letters, NOBODY, and this head-clearing mix of extreme violence and dry comedy gets underway. The nobody is feeding a kitten from a tin of tuna, by the way. A movie-length flashback answers the cops’ question. The guy is called Hutch Mansell. Director Ilya Naishuller and writer Derek Kolstad quick-cut-montage a picture of his humdrum existence. A suburban husband and father who does the routine things that dads with two school-age kids do, … Read more
Evil Dead Rise
Who’s been watching The Exorcist? Writer/director Lee Cronin has, and Evil Dead Rise, the fifth instalment in the Evil Dead franchise, is thick with references to William Friedkin’s seminal 1973 horror movie. No bad thing in itself and just for fun Cronin chucks in an amusing reference to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining at one point, just to keep things lively. Comedy has been part of the mix in the Evil Dead series, going back to halfway through the second instalment when director Sam Raimi suddenly pushed the ick factor so far beyond overload that it became funny. It seemed unintentional, a misjudgement, at first. But going repeatedly too far proved Raimi meant it … Read more
