Popular Reviews
Radical
Radical is a good thing but there is a lot of it. An inspirational-teacher drama, it’s a dramatisation of events that took place in 2012. Those events became the basis of a 2013 Wired article written by Joshua Davis, this film’s producer. And from there ten years ago to this film in 2023. Meanwhile, the teacher at the centre of the whole thing, Sergio Juárez Correa, works in the José Urbina López Primary School to this day. Co-writer/director Christopher Zalla makes sure we know where we are and who we’re dealing with. A poor Mexican border town where guns, gangs and poverty grind out any aspiration parents might have for their children. A … Read more
9 December 2013-12-09
Out in the UK This Week The Conjuring (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) A family living out in the boonies is terrorised by a demon spirit in this moody horror film directed by James Wan and written by twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes. The Hayes brothers are in their 50s but Wan wasn’t even born when The Exorcist was released in 1973. But he’s definitely seen the film; The Conjuring is an exercise in Exorcist atmospherics – all rosaries, Latin and vomit. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson play the weird earnest, hucksterish exorcists, Farmiga deliberately going for Ellen Burstyn in her performance, Wilson wisely staying away from any suggestion of channelling Max Von Sydow. … Read more
Of Time and the City
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 6 July John Lennon meets Paul McCartney, 1957 On this day in 1957, a 15-year-old Paul McCartney went to a gig held after a church fete at St Peter’s Parish Church, Woolton, Liverpool. The fete had been a traditional affair, with tombola, a cake stall, games of hoop-la and a rose queen. There had also been entertainment, in the shape of a young local skiffle band called the Quarry Men – so called because most of the members were schoolboys at Quarry Bank Grammar School. The band was led by a 16-year-old John Lennon and as they set up again for … Read more
Alice
Jan Svankmajer is hardly a household name, yet he is one of the most influential animators ever. He’s not Walt Disney, maybe, but you can see his stamp in the work of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and even, through squinted eyes, Nick (Wallace and Gromit) Park. His live-action/stop-frame adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is a prime example of what he does – a darkly surreal, loud, clanking, gothic distillation of Poe, De Sade, Kafka (a fellow Czech). It’s also about the best film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s much abused work. Uncle Walt chose to play cute with the story, but Svankmajer goes the other way – a white rabbit that bleeds sawdust, for … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 26 – Lobster Quadrille
Episodes of The Avengers were often not shown in production order. But Lobster Quadrille was both the last one broadcast and the last one made in series three, going out on 21 March 1964, a day after it had been finished. It’s also Honor Blackman’s farewell episode, before she headed off to be Pussy Galore to Sean Connery’s 007 in Goldfinger. And so you’d be tempted to think the production team might give her a good send-off. But in fact it’s a very John Steed-focused adventure, all about lobster fisherman, a dastardly plot to flood the country with heroin and a mystery Chinaman who connects the first with the second. No, Chinaman is … Read more
Dellamorte Dellamore aka Cemetery Man
First, Dellamorte Dellamore is a much better title for a movie than Cemetery Man, which is how it went out in English speaking countries in 1994. Cemetery Man suggests something slasher-inspired, maybe. Dellamorte Dellamore, and its literal translation, Of Death, Of Love, something much more gothic and weird. And that’s exactly what this mad piece of super-cultish garage grindcore is. It’s Italian, who are good at weird, and is based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore by Tiziano Sciavi. Sciavi had based his main character in an earlier work, the comicbook Dylan Dog, on the actor Rupert Everett (specifically the listlessly upper-class Rupert Everett character in Another Country) and so when it came time … Read more
Beats
There are two films from 2019 called Beats, both heavily into music. This is the other one – British (Scottish, more specifically) and set in the 1990s world of rave culture. I haven’t seen the American Beats, hip-hop to the core, so can’t say which one comes out on top but Brian Welsh’s Beats sets a high bar. A bit of background. In the 1980 and 90s, ideologically committed to staying out of the economic sphere, the UK government turned its attention instead to policing the population’s behaviour, with new controls on what people could watch (the Video Nasties panic), who they could have sex with (the notorious Section 28 of the innocuous … Read more
Across 110th Street
The Arriflex 35BL camera is the most important ingredient in Across 110th Street. It drives the look, the location, the acting style, the intimate mood, in fact almost every aspect of this strange hybrid of blaxploitation and noirish crime thriller. Silent, lightweight and released in time for the Munich Olympics, the new 35BL (the BL stands for blimped) was much easier to use than standard movie cameras. It could get into tight spaces and meant almost all of this film, also from 1972, could be shot out on the streets and inside the clubs and bars of New York – if you’ve seen the TV series The Deuce, Across 110th Street looks very much … Read more
1 July 2013-07-01
Out in the UK This Week Maniac (Metrodome, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, the writers of Switchblade Romance, one of the most heart-pounding horror films of recent years, swing bloodily back to form with a remake of a 1980 slasher which takes lovely gentle Frodo (Elijah Wood), casts him as a Norman Bates-style homicidal mother’s boy and then sets director Franck Khalfoun to work filming his exploits as if from the killer’s point of view. Result: another brilliant horror film, touches of Silence of the Lambs, House of Wax, with an electropop sound that just makes it all the grimmer. Maniac – at Amazon Cloud Atlas (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) … Read more
You and Me
What’s the best Fritz Lang film? The argument could go on all night, and there are so many to choose from – contenders include M, Fury, You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, or While the City Sleeps. Or how about Rancho Notorious, Metropolis, The Big Heat or Man Hunt? So how about the worst one? 1938’s You and Me is a prime candidate. It’s still an interesting if largely unsuccessful film. Lang himself considered it to be his worst, a “lousy picture”, he said in his autobiography, in which styles argue with each other while a miscast lead does his best to make sense of a character. George Raft is … Read more
Midnight Sky
Midnight Sky continues George Clooney’s fascination for sci-fi, a rocky relationship that’s only really yielded one proper old fashioned hit – Gravity. Both Solaris and Tomorrowland seemed to fall into the dark hole between reviewer favourite and audience hit. Unbowed, Clooney plugs on, directing here, and trying something rather bold as he attempts to weld the thoughtful meditative mood of Solaris to the gut-churning action dynamics of Gravity, a bold and some might say doomed endeavour. The postmodern futurism of Tomorrowland is nowhere to be seen. The action takes place out in space and here on Earth – out there is a ship returning from scoping out a new planet to colonise, down here … Read more
Back Roads
Having played the junior James Bond figure Alex Rider in Stormrider, and then a few teenage heartthrobs before bulking up to become a kind of Channing Tatum in waiting, Alex Pettyfer takes control of his own destiny by starring in his own film. It’s his directorial debut and a pretty good one, a knotty piece of American trash gothic about a family in trouble. As we open, Pettyfer’s blood-stained Harley is being grilled by cop Robert Patrick. Why did you kill her, the cop wants to know. But the question this film actually asks is not why but who? We know it’s a woman who’s dead, but which woman exactly? Harley’s life is … Read more
