Popular Reviews
Now Is Good
In Love Story, the 1970 weepie in which boy meets girl and girl dies – sorry, that’s it – it is, let me reiterate, the girl who dies. It always is, sickness being part of the female condition, in mainstream Hollywood of the era anyway. Different decade same idea in Now Is Good, a boy-meets-girl-and-girl-dies weepie with Dakota Fanning as the pale, interesting girl, Jeremy Irvine as the boy she falls for and leaves behind. To go into further plot detail is pointless – the publicity material points out that Tessa (Fanning) has a bucket list and that losing her virginity is at the top of it. But that’s little more than a … Read more
Lorelei
People at a decisive moment of their lives is what Lorelei is about. Or, more specifically people who should be at a decisive moment of their lives but whose circumstances are so proscribed that they’re incapable of seeing an opportunity offered, even when one does come along. Wayland is fresh out of jail after 15 years. A former biker with an iron-cross neck tattoo, he alone who took the fall for an armed robbery gone wrong. Now, his old gang are there at the gates to welcome him back to the outside world but can offer him little in the way of support beyond the initial booze and babes party. Instead, a helping … Read more
Lumumba
Lumumba tells in grimly appropriate bullet points the story of the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo-Léopoldville from its moment of independence in 1960 to Lumumba’s ousting and killing in a coup less than three months later. If you don’t know anything about Lumumba, Raoul Peck’s film will tell you just enough of what you need to know. How a charismatic and politically engaged young man went from being a successful beer salesman to the country’s first prime minister by espousing national and pan-African ideals. How this stirred resentment from rivals more wedded to a tribal and regional politics. And how they caballed with the ousted rulers of … Read more
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
Sorry, Wrong Number
Sorry, Wrong Number, made in 1948, is a superbly melodramatic drama taking the brittle, “dangerous dame” image of its star, Barbara Stanwyck, for a protracted ride. Four years earlier Stanwyck had starred in Double Indemnity as the manipulative minx persuading poor schmuck Ed McMurray to kill her husband, and here she is in Sorry, Wrong Number as a victim, a bed-ridden rich woman who, on a crossed line while telephoning, overhears two men discussing a murder they’re going to commit later that night. The servants have been given the night off, her husband is away, but Leona Stevenson (Stanwyck) isn’t initially that worried. But as the night progresses and as she makes and … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 17 – Killer
Were showrunner Brian Clemens, fellow producer Albert Fennell and the rest of the production team trying to get rid of Linda Thorson? She had been introduced during his brief interregnum by producer John Bryce and when Clemens and Fennell returned, they were stuck with her. Killer is an episode bursting with agents – who die one after the other and wind up gift-wrapped in plastic – but Thorson’s character Tara King is notably absent, having told Steed in dialogue that protests a bit too much that she is off on holiday and there is nothing he can do about it… so there. Instead Steed is paired with Lady Diana Forbes-Blakeney – referred to … Read more
Old Czech Legends
The guys at Second Run DVD sent me Jiří Trnka: Puppet Master, a two-disc Blu-ray set containing Old Czech Legends, The Czech Year and 90 minutes of extras, superb examples of this master of animation’s work and a great place to start for any beginner. Trnka worked in various forms but stop-motion puppetry is what he’s most famous for. Old Czech Legends delivers that in spades. It’s a retelling of the ancient history of the Czech people and how they came to occupy the land they now call home. Things get off to a portentous start with the death of Čech, tribal leader and the man who gave the Czechs their name – … Read more
Father Mother Sister Brother
Acting when there’s something to do is relatively straightforward. But what about when there’s nothing to get hold of? Father Mother Sister Brother is full of empty space, and for whole stretches of time the characters in it don’t really know how to fill the silence. They babble. They fall silent. They pick up on a tiny detail and won’t let it go. Because where a relationship should be there is none. Jim Jarmusch’s latest film is episodic, three bijou, beautifully crafted Carver-esque mini-dramas. In story one a brother and sister visit their ageing father, who lives all alone and on the breadline miles from anywhere in rural New Jersey. As they approach … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 23 – The House That Jack Built
John Lennon’s declaration that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” had gone public just the day before The House That Jack Built aired in the UK on 5 March 1966. Not that this episode of The Avengers has anything to do with religion or popular music, or anything like that, but it swims in the same backward-looking yet progressive waters as the Beatles, and with a plot heavy on the paranoia, with suggestions of psychoactive substance use on the part of the writer, Brian Clemens, it couldn’t be more 1960s. Patrick Macnee more or less gets a day off this time out, and once he’s set the plot in motion – with … Read more
The History of Sound
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a film together? Sold to that salivating wreck at the back of the room. The History of Sound has pulled off a casting coup, that’s for sure. Two of the hotmost of actors right now in the same movie. If you were to take a guess as to what sort of movie that might be – given their CVs of sexy and queer-adjacent stuff – you might go for something like a Brokeback Mountain remake. And that’s just what this is, dressed up in a different era’s clothes and with the two men committing themselves to the roles as a pair of students who meet at Boston … Read more
The Tenth Victim
The Tenth Victim is a textbook case of a cult film that’s actually no good. Released in 1965 and billed as sci-fi (it barely is), it’s a camp Italian spectacle combining the unique talents of Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni, and just that cocktail – 1965, Italy, sci-fi (ish), Andress and Mastroianni – is plenty of reason for seeing the film. It’s set in the 21st century, where violence has been outlawed and is now limited to carefully controlled contests between designated Hunters and Victims. These contests, adjudicated by the Ministry of the Big Hunt, are broadcast on TV, where advertisers line up with sponsorship deals – Ming Tea being the product successful Hunters (or … Read more
Western Union
A nice 95-minute advertisement for a company still with us, 1941’s Western Union is appropriately both a western and about the Union, being an adaptation of a Zane Grey story about how the west was won, or at least connected up to the rest of the United States, by telegraph wire. In linking coast to coast, telegraph company Western Union helped forge the country into a more solid political entity. Three men dominate the action – Randolph Scott as Vance Shaw, a loner former outlaw and fixer persuaded to join the drive to lay cable across terrain good and bad. Robert Young plays rich man’s son Richard Blake, an engineer who is also … Read more
