Popular Reviews
The Duellists
The Duellists is Ridley Scott’s feature debut and premiered in 1977, four years after his famous advert for Hovis bread (voted the UK’s favourite TV advert in a 2006 poll). Both are picturesque evocations of a world long gone – pre-War England, in the 45-second advert’s case, the world of post-Revolutionary France in the case of the solid 100 minutes of The Duellists. The story is a true one – about two men in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of around 30 grudge duels over 19 years. Joseph Conrad had used the facts as the basis for a novella, and Scott’s screenwriter, Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, adapts them further with his screenplay, reducing the … Read more
Two Night Stand
Two Night Stand takes the boy wins girl/boy loses girl formula, gives it a millennial spin and then lets its stars, Miles Teller and Analeigh Tipton charm the pants off us as they rip the pants off each other. Genuinely fresh and cute, refreshingly forthright and even sexy – most sex comedies, let’s face it, aren’t – its simple two hander story sees Tipton’s sofa-surfing slacker having rebound sex with stoner Teller, then attempting to sneak away from his place in the early hours, only to find they’re snowed in together. Which is embarrassing considering the “fuck you, too” farewells they’ve just been bidding each other. And that’s it: a boy, a girl, … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 19 – The Secrets Broker
The Beatles were number one in America for the first time, with I Want to Hold Your Hand, when this latest episode of The Avengers, The Secrets Broker, aired in the UK on 1 February 1964. But though The Avengers went on to become one of the key harmonics of the Swinging London vibe, there’s scant evidence of it in this episode, the latest in the haphazard, piecemeal “one step forward, two steps back” way that the show almost blindly stumbled its way to glory. It’s a bit old school, this episode, in other words, even though it starts out with a scene at a clairvoyant’s – very 1960s (the doors of perception, and … Read more
My First Film
My First Film is not Zia Anger’s first film, and it isn’t a documentary either, which is what it sounds and looks like it’s going to be. Nor is it formidable, which its meta-sounding title suggests it might be. In fact it’s a surprisingly easy and enjoyable watch. Though it does start off in an esoteric direction – “assoteric”, Anger calls it – with a rough collage of staged recollection, old home movie footage and words typewritten on the screen designed to recall meetings Anger had with a production company to direct a film about, more or less, how tough it is being a woman. Something, she eventually realised, she just didn’t want to … Read more
Brother
Brother (Brat, in the original) is unusual because it’s not only a film made in the teeth of Russia’s economic collapse in the 1990s following the “shock treatment” prescribed by neoliberal economists from other countries, but it reflects the day-to-day reality of that treatment. Without anyone actually sharpening a political axe for the whole of its 96 minute running time, Aleksey Balabanov’s film nevertheless has a very clear point to make. There’s a clear generational aspect, too, with the focus firmly on the younger inheritors of a broken Soviet system that’s now been broken even further by western intervention. In particular it’s on Danila (Sergey Bodrov), a drifter who’s just finished his conscripted … Read more
Orders to Kill
A spy movie written by people who’d been actual on-the-ground spies, Orders to Kill is a gripping thriller with an unusual focus on psychology rather than action. It’s set during wartime, in occupied France, where a member of the Resistance is suspected of selling agents down the river to the Nazis. Back in Boston, a war hero’s mother, played by silent movie legend Lilian Gish in scenes that could all be removed, is waiting for her son to return for some R&R. But her son is still in England, where he has been seconded at the last minute to go to France and assassinate the double agent. Paul Massie plays young, naive Gene … Read more
29 February 2016-02-29
Out This Week James White (Soda, cert 15) Josh Mond was a producer on Martha Marcy May Marlene and now makes his feature debut with the sort of grown-up seriously accomplished filigree drama that more or less guaranteed no cinema release in the UK – wot, no guys in costumes? Instead here it is in what used to be the ignominious “straight to DVD” category. There’s a long ramble to be had here about the best films these days being more likely not to get theatrical releases, but let’s not go into that now. Instead let’s take a look at the film, which stars a seriously good “from the inside out” performance by … Read more
The Adventures of Robin Hood
“Only the rainbow can duplicate its brilliance” ran the tagline to the swashbuckler from 1938 which took a young Tasmanian and gave him a movie role that would define him for ever. Errol Flynn may have become a fat roué in later life but here, as Robin Hood, he is every inch the handsome, athletic, cocky, light-hearted and brave hero. The film too is full of that brio, telling a story of good v bad, true love v convenience, rich v poor, idealism v cynicism. That “brilliance”, by the way, comes from the costly and technically demanding Technicolor three-strip process, which produces colours more saturated than any subsequent process has managed. Everything – … Read more
Malmkrog (Manor House)
Some films you can watch while you’re checking your email or skimming Twitter. Malmkrog (aka Manor House) is emphatically not one of those films. It requires your full attention, but rewards the focus if you’re interested in what it has to say. At 3hrs 21mins it’s a long film too, so gird your loins, put on the blinkers, quit the mail app and submit. It’s divided into chapters, each one with the name of one of its five main protagonists, a gaggle of the Russian elite who we catch having a drink before lunch, eating lunch itself, taking afternoon tea, sitting down to dinner and then enjoying an after-dinner brandy. Tough life. Around … Read more
100 Years of… The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was the first of five films Rudolph Valentino made in 1921 and though it’s the film that made him a star he’s not the star of the film, which is an ensemble piece. The star is the film itself, an epic so complete and fine-tuned that it’s a reference point today whenever producers and directors are aiming to tell tender human stories against a background of raging conflict. It’s a big film too – two and a half hours long, which isn’t gargantuan compared to, say, Birth of a Nation (three and a quarter hours) or Greed (originally four and a half hours) – but surprises people who … Read more
I’m Your Man
Imagine that, a film called I’m Your Man and no sign of Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack. Or Wham! Partly that’s because this is a German film (originally called Ich bin dein Mensch) but mostly it’s because this funny and clever movie wants to do things its own way. How about a romcom plot involving C-3PO, for instance, to put it in elevator-pitch terms. Of course that’s not who Dan Stevens is playing but there’s more than a hint of the prissy Star Wars robot in Stevens’s portrayal of an AI-juiced man-machine designed expressly to be everything Alma, a university researcher, could want in a partner. As for Alma (Maren Eggert), she’s signed … Read more
When the Last Sword Is Drawn
Here’s a different type of samurai movie, the winner of the Japanese equivalent of the Oscars, following the strange, grudging friendship that develops between two warriors – one fierce, the other mild. It’s a massive sprawling affair that starts in 1899 in a doctor’s office where an old man and his grandson are seeking help. Then, a picture glimpsed on the wall prompts an alarmed look on the grandfather’s face and suddenly he’s diving back through a wibbly wobbly dissolve to a former time, when the Emperor and the Shoguns were facing off for one of their periodic powerplays, and the mercenary samurai were girding themselves for the last heave. The story of … Read more
