Popular Reviews
You Won’t Be Alone
You Won’t Be Alone is a fairytale from Macedonia alive to the idea that darkness is a power in the world, one kept at bay by praying and, sometimes, by making unholy contracts with other forces. Its aim is to connect us with the mindset of the middle-European peasants who first told these stories, people who really believed in witches and changelings. Its lack of revisionism is unusual, refreshing and exotic. There’s no Angela Carter feminist re-imagining, à la Dances with Wolves. No Disney self-fulfilment. Marx and Freud are not to be found lurking in the subtext. The Grimm brothers would nod approvingly. When is it set? Focus Features, who distributed it, suggest … Read more
1 April 2013-04-01
Out in the UK this week Silver Linings Playbook (EV, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Almost entirely brilliant from first breath to last gasp, David O Russell’s beautifully made, perfectly acted adaptation of Matthew Quick’s novel follows bipolar Bradley Cooper and his faltering relationship with fellow psychiatric case Jennifer Lawrence. If you’ve ever doubted Lawrence’s epic ability, watch this. In fact she’s so good – essentially mainlining Juliette Lewis – that she forces a good performance out of Robert De Niro, who is just one nugget of brilliance in a cast including Jacki Weaver (if you haven’t seen her in Animal Kingdom you have missed out) and Chris Tucker (entirely forgiven for those Rush Hour films … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 29 – Requiem
Requiem sounds like it should be the title for the last-ever episode of The Avengers, now only weeks away. That it’s not is a typical piece of perversity by showrunner Brian Clemens. Another is Clemens’s ongoing attempt to sideline Linda Thorson, which he’s still engaged in even this late in the day. Perhaps a further series was still a possibility. If it had come off, doubtless Tara King would have been noticeable by her absence. Anyhow, the setup – a woman is killed in an underground car park by a pair of heavies. But it turns out it’s not a woman at all, but a man in drag – who has been acting … Read more
The Lady Eve
The Lady Eve is a brilliant piece of writing by Preston Sturges, and playing by Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. Screwball comedy you could call it, or a comedy of remarriage, maybe, except nobody remarries. But that is the guiding idea – two people who have been together and possibly will be again, if fate can be encouraged to remove the many obstacles in their path. Fonda plays a wealthy brewing heir who meets a young woman and her father on board a ship sailing back from the Amazon, where he’s just spent a year indulging his passion for snakes. Jean (Stanwyck) and the “Colonel” (Charles Coburn) are a pair of con artists … Read more
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 June Statue of Liberty arrives in New York, 1885 On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty, designed and made in France, arrived in New York. Depicting the Roman goddess of freedom Libertas, the statue was made in pieces, the first completed bits being the head and torch arm, and then shipped in crates to the USA, where the Americans had already built a pedestal in anticipation of its arrival. Its sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had originally started work in the late 1860s on a gigantic torch-bearing statue designed to stand at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal. … Read more
The Taste of Things aka La Passion de Dodin Bouffant
Tran Anh Hung has only made five films in the years between his breakthrough and The Taste of Things (La Passion de Dodin Bouffant). Not much has changed since 1993’s The Scent of Green Papaya. This is also a languid and beautiful film full of longing for a bygone time when people did things properly and (say this very quietly) they also knew their place. It doesn’t need a plot. You could watch this exquisite movie for the images alone, which are spectacular and gorgeous, like paintings by Renoir or Manet come to life. But there is one, several in fact, providing just enough thread to lead us from one elegant instance of … Read more
Sunshine
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 February Galileo Galilei born, 1564 On this day in 1564, the astronomer, mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei was born. He was most famous for advocating the Copernican view of the solar system, which put the sun at the centre and had the planets orbiting about. This was in stark contradiction of the Church view, which had the earth at the centre, and also the Tychonic system (earth at centre, sun orbiting earth, other planets orbiting the sun). Galileo was an accomplished lutenist, like his father, and also considered the priesthood before choosing the life scientific. He had studied medicine before … Read more
It Be an Evil Moon
It Be an Evil Moon does not declare itself immediately, but debut feature director Ben Etchells offers snacks to keep us going with a pre-credits sequence – a guy driving on a forest road at night finds something blocking the way. Gets out. Moves it. Gets back in the car. The audience at this point is thinking: “Something got into that car while that guy wasn’t in it.” But just at the moment when whatever is going to pounce does pounce, Etchells does something odd. With a tiny camera move he pulls off the equivalent of the football one two, a flicker of misdirection that bodes well for the rest of the film. … Read more
They Nest
We’ve had them all – alligators, piranhas, anacondas, killer bees and most famously birds and sharks. So what’s left? Insects, of course. In 2000’s They Nest (aka Creepy Crawlers), the time is the present, the scene is the island of Maine off America’s east coast, and the action kicks off when a swarm of cliched, unbelievable and laughable B-list actors assemble and draw lots to see who’s going to suffer the first low-budget extermination at the hands, mandibles, whatever, of crazed crawling creatures. Meanwhile a brave, resourceful, wise and intelligent doctor (Thomas Calabro) is battling to get it through the skulls of the locals that they’re in more peril than they can possibly … Read more
Cloud
What would online life be like if actions had consequences like they do in the real world? That seems to be the motivating energy behind Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud (Kuraudo), an overlong but fascinating thriller yanking a thread that’s visible from the start, though it takes a while to realise that it’s there. Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) has a traditional job in a factory making stuff. His boss likes him and wants to promote him, setting him off on a safe, decent and traditional career. But there is more to Yoshii’s life than the day job. He also has a side hustle buying distressed goods at knockdown prices and selling them online for a … Read more
Capricorn One
According to conspiracy theorists, Kubrick shot the Moon landings. Peter Hyams is in some respects a better candidate. His Capricorn One is all about a faked journey into space, and is undoubtedly the inspiration behind many of the whisperings about Nasa making the whole thing up. Why does Kubrick get name-checked so much more often than Hyams then? Probably because Kubrick is a better film-maker, even though the space sections of his 2001: A Space Odyssey look far more obviously bogus than Hyams’s later mission-to-Mars movie. 1977’s Capricorn One is also a bit of a mess, whereas 2001, for all the messing around, is not. Hyams does his best work early on and … Read more
12 October 2015-10-12
Out This Week Mr Holmes (EOne, cert PG) A bit of a something and nothing here, with Ian McKellen playing a crusty 90-something Sherlock Holmes coming to terms with the loss of his faculties, wrapping up an old unsolved case (in flashback) and putting his remaining wits in the service of cracking an even greater enigma – himself. McKellen has been here before, in Gods and Monsters, when he played Frankenstein director James Whale at the ignominious end of his life. And so has director Bill Condon, who also directed the 1998 film, and again proves himself to be a deft stylist of wipe-clean period drama – Holmes’s ancient house, his beautiful garden … Read more
