Popular Reviews
Theatre of Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 May Sam Jaffe born, 1901 On this day in 1901, one of the great characters of Hollywood was born, in Harlem, New York. Sam Jaffe, not to be confused with the actor of the same name, dropped out of high school and, thanks to his brother-in-law being a producer, got a job as an office boy at Paramount. He rose quickly and by 22 was production manager on films directed by such luminaries as Lubitsch, Von Sternberg and Mamoulian. Having dated Clara Bow and saved Paramount studios financially by inventing the “night for day” system of shooting – which used … Read more
Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare
“All children, except one, grow up.” The opening line to JM Barrie’s Peter Pan is already plenty creepy (especially those commas). Ripe for exploitation even. Now that the copyright has expired on the book, in the USA at any rate, someone has gone ahead and mined the children’s classic it for its horror potential. Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is the result, a gory and unsettling tale of kidnap, drug abuse, dismemberment, screaming and lots of blood. We get a flavour of what’s to come in the pre-credits sequence. A young boy is charmed at the circus by a clown twisting balloons into animal shapes. Later the same boy is accosted at home by … Read more
Sleuth
Doubles and doubling feature a lot in Sleuth, the cockeyed comedy thriller from 1972 written by Anthony Shaffer, the identical twin of brother and fellow writer Peter Shaffer. Anthony also wrote Frenzy, for Alfred Hitchcock, and The Wicker Man. Peter wrote Amadeus, Equus and Royal Hunt of the Sun, so no slouch either. They also for a while wrote detective novels together – as Peter Antony. Journalists would often ask the Shaffers whether there was rivalry between them. There was. It featured in Peter’s work (Amadeus is powered by it) and even more obviously in Anthony’s Sleuth, the story of an older man inviting his wife’s younger lover to his home to humiliate … Read more
Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 April Serge Gainsbourg born, 1928 On this day in 1928 Lucien Ginsburg was born, to refugees from the Russian revolution who had fled in 1917. Later, he would change his name from Ginsburg to Gainsbourg to reflect his admiration for the British landscape painter Gainsborough, and from Lucien to Serge to honour his Russian heritage. Originally intending to be a painter, Gainsbourg wound up supporting himself by playing piano in bars and so entered the world of music more by accident than design. However, once he realised he had something of a knack for chansons in the Jacques Brel style, … Read more
This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Against the assertion of the title, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection does look like more like a death than a reanimation, of an individual, a way of life and a group of villagers in Lesotho who are being relocated before their village is flooded to make way for a dam project. It’s an impressive film in pretty much every respect, and it’s entirely understandable why the country decided to submit it for Oscars consideration, something they’ve never done before. This Burial/Resurrection idea is handled almost as a kind of dry joke, since the film’s focus is an old woman who spends the entire film trying to die, after learning of … Read more
The Seventh Victim
A prequel of sorts to Cat People, 1943’s The Seventh Victim is also something of a warm up for Rosemary’s Baby – Satanists in New York! – as well as the debut of Kim Hunter, who plays the little girl lost in the big city. It’s a bit of a mad film and doesn’t quite add up but it’s stoked with atmosphere, all kicking off with young Mary (Hunter) being called into the principal’s office at her school because her older sister, Jacqueline, has not been keeping up with the payments on the fees. She’s gone missing, it seems. So Mary heads to New York to find her, and there tangles with one … Read more
Wonder Woman 1984
And so Wonder Woman 1984. Last time we saw Gal Gadot’s lasso-swinging Amazon she was helping to win the First World War, and now, nearly 70 years on, here she is again in the era of Armani suits and “greed is good” and in a year most closely associated with George Orwell. This is a big, heavy, beast of a film that’s too long, too slow, too dull, and if that is a political message about democracy that writer/director Patty Jenkins is trying to sneak in there, someone should really have told her not to. Gal Gadot remains a wondrous Wonder Woman, though, a flawless paragon of superherodom, and the story gets off … Read more
Lesbian Space Princess
So what are you expecting from a film called Lesbian Space Princess? A countercultural screed with a blast of porn maybe? Once upon a time, maybe. But these days things are slightly less urgent. “Real-life girlfriends” (their scare quotes) Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese want to tell us an animated story that’s light and bright and very cute, with swear words and some cultural critique slid in on the downlow. Take “downlow” on advisement because it’s all set on the planet of Clitopolis – “famously hard to find” – where, as things get going, our heroine, Princess Saira (voiced by Shabana Azeez) is being dumped by her girlfriend Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel), … Read more
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
You know The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a Guy Ritchie film even without knowing it’s a Guy Ritchie film. That Gentleman bit of the title is the giveaway – whether it’s Holmes and Watson or the Lock, Stock lads, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or The Gentlemen (film and TV versions), Ritchie has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s a guy Guy. Even his most feminine sounding movie, Snatch, is all about the boys. So the real-life story of the dude who became the template for Ian Fleming’s James Bond sounds like a good fit. And with Henry Cavill – regularly proposed as the next 007 – as Gus March-Phillips, what could possibly wrong? Before answering … Read more
Without Limits
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 November Adolf Dassler born, 1900 On this day in 1900, Adolf Dassler, known to his friends as Adi, was born, in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, Germany. A cobbler by training he started making his own sports shoes after returning from the First World War. He got his big break at the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928, where his running shoes were popular with athletes. At the 1936 Olympics Dassler offered Jesse Owens a pair of his running shoes, the first time an African American had had a sponsor. Dassler joined the Nazi party, along with his brother Rudolf, but later left the party … Read more
The Whistlers
A stonefaced middle-aged Romanian cop arrives on the brutally beautiful island of La Gomera (the original title of The Whistlers) in the Canaries. A stunning woman is there to meet him. Forget what happened in Bucharest, she whispers into his ear as they embrace, it was just for the security cameras. We can guess what “Bucharest” was all about but writer/director Corneliu Poromboiu gives it to us anyway, in a vivid, cool, drily funny and sexy flashback to Cristi’s (Vlad Ivanov) first encounter with Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) – her film noir name absolutely no mistake. Hang on to those moments because that’s it as far as sex and jokes are concerned. Style, yes, plenty … Read more
Beating Hearts
Beating Hearts is a French gangster-origin story, a noirish Goodfellas with more preamble. Let’s just cut through the flim-flam and say that it’s got some serious problems, yet the actors are so good. The concept isn’t bad either – Scorsese with some West Side Story ambitions, plus a bit of Tarantino stirred in, or that’s what director Gilles Lellouche says. It splits pretty neatly down the middle into two halves, with the first half meant to set us up for the second, which it doesn’t. In part one, 1980s bad boy Clotaire meets swotty, smart and attractive Jackie, and is instantly smitten. Doubly smitten when he tries to flirt with her with a lippy … Read more
