Popular Reviews
Highest 2 Lowest
The least satisfying Spike Lee film I’ve ever seen, Highest 2 Lowest at least has the excuse that it’s Spike Lee in gun for hire mode. Walter Salles, Mike Nicholls and Martin Scorsese were all lined up to direct at various points. It’s mystifying, though, because Lee’s journeyman work is usually better than this. It’s a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, or so the blurbs say. In fact Lee and adapter Alan Fox seem in a hurry to work through Kurosawa’s scenarios, as if they had a more urgent appointment elsewhere. If they did, they’re not telling us what it is. In other words, if you want to see a really … Read more
Enemy
If there is such a thing as “what the hellness” then Denis Villeneuve’s latest film absolutely has it. But then the French-Canadian does have form. With Incendies Villeneuve managed to turn the conflict in the Middle East into a thriller with a reveal that disconcerted and amazed. In Prisoners he made us feel bad for suspecting that a lank haired, stuttering, educationally subnormal Paul Dano was a paedophile, and then made us feel bad for cutting such an obvious wrong’un too much slack. The tricks are more playful in this latest exercise in duplicity. As with Prisoners, Enemy stars Jake Gyllenhaal, this time as Adam, a history professor who suddenly spots his spitting … Read more
Didi
Messy, but good-messy like real life, Didi is the coming-of-ager working most of the angles in an attempt not to do the “arcs” of this sort of thing, and mostly succeeding. The other thing it’s doing is successful too, maybe even more so – depicting that dewy moment in the early 2000s when social media was still fresh and new and offered a vista of exciting possibilities, exactly like this film’s subject, a kid on the cusp of the rest of his life. “Didi” is Mandarin for younger brother, and refers to Chris Wang, Wang Wang to his friends, an American Asian growing up in suburban Everywheresville with an absent dad, a typically … Read more
OK Connery
A moving target is harder to hit. That must be why OK Connery goes by so many different titles. The perfectly reasonable Operation Kid Brother is one alternative, the frankly bizarre Divided Evil another. Probably the most informative of all the variants, apart from the original, is Operation Double 007. If I tell you that it stars Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil, you’ll twig what’s going on here. A mockbuster Bond movie, complete with actors from the franchise. Like Bernard Lee, who played M; Lois Maxwell, of Miss Moneypenny fame; a Bond Girl in the shape of Daniela Bianchi (she was in From Russia with Love); Adolfo Celi (a villain in Thunderball); and … Read more
The Canyons
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 July Paul Schrader born, 1946 Today in 1946, the writer, critic and director Paul Schrader was born, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. The son of religious parents, he was brought up by strict Calvinist standards and didn’t see a film until he was 17. He studied theology, then went on to do film studies at UCLA Film School, having met the famous critic Pauline Kael by accident en route and become one of her critic protégés. His first screenplay, co-written with his brother Leonard, was The Yakuza, and commanded the highest price for a script ever paid (according to the … Read more
Brokeback Mountain
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 May First same-sex marriage in US, 2004 On this day in 2004, Bostonians Tom Weikle, 53, and Joe Rogers, 55, became the first same sex couple to marry in the United States. They had been together for 25 years and were taking advantage of the change in legislation, Massachusetts being the first state in the US to allow marriage between people of the same sex. Though the US constitution was clear in its position on the “unalienable right… to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, many states had started countering the change of opinion in favour of same-sex marriage … Read more
Baby Face
A key “pre-Code” movie, Baby Face is one of a handful of 1930s movies said to have accelerated Hollywood’s movie studios into the era of self-censorship – the government was threatening to step in if they didn’t act. It was a key movie for Barbara Stanwyck too, and helped her cement a reputation for playing tough, driven women. Here she’s a young unfortunate fighting her way up in the world by putting it about – that’s the sort of stuff the Code set out to stop – using and abusing men as she goes. Starting at the front door of a bank building in New York, she works her way literally and figuratively … Read more
3 October 2016-10-03
Out This Week When Marnie Was There (StudioCanal, cert U) Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the guy at Studio Ghibli who isn’t Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, this is Japanese animation studio’s final, so Ghibli say, film. And it’s a typically sweet, anglophile story about a typically bereft child called Anna finding typical solace in the supernatural realm – a ghost, called Marnie, who lives in the big deserted house over the bay from Anna’s aunt and uncle. Adapted from Joan G Robinson’s Norfolk-set classic, it’s slow-moving and less loaded with drama than Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies or Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, but it’s undeniably sweet, and charms with its familiar Ghibli-style animation – 2D, … Read more
Hotel Rwanda
In 1994, 800,000-plus Tutsis were butchered by their Hutu neighbours while the West debated whether this was genocide or merely isolated “genocidal acts”– i.e. not serious enough to warrant intervention. A decade on and the conflict is beginning to arrive on cinema screens, and most of the attempts to turn a dark day in human history into screen entertainment are taking the Schindler’s List approach – finding the rare good thing in a sea of bloody mayhem. As has director Terry George in this effectively realised true story about Rwanda’s own “Schindler”, Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who risked his Hutu hide to save upwards of 1,000 Tutsis. This is an incredibly tense … Read more
Ju-On: The Grudge 2
How odd. For the fourth entry in the Ju-On cycle, Takashi Shimizu, the director of the original Ju-On: The Grudge, has almost entirely ditched the muted ethos of the original in favour of a British Hammer Horror approach. “In America,” he says in the production notes, “people tend to be scared by a lot of blood and direct attacks.… In England people tend to fear evil and the source of darkness… Hollywood just doesn’t have the history of this type of expression of horror.” However you look at it, the original Ju-On The Grudge was scary as hell, and even the American remake (with Sarah Michelle Gellar) was pretty terrifying. But if you’re … Read more
Woolf Women
Five young women head to Turkey with their skateboards in this documentary taking a tour of the Generation Z zeitgeist. Before we go any further, they refer to each other as “girls”, which I know is not everyone’s favourite term for young women, ladies, females – none of them sound quite right. Lass, chick, dame? Something else that doesn’t sound right is the sound coming out of the mouth of German professional downhill skater (and co-director) Jennifer “Jungle” Schauerte, who we see in opening footage hurtling down a road at a hell of a speed, the helmetcam catching the dizzying, exhilarating descent before she slams into a crash barrier and starts screaming. She’s … Read more
4 April 2016-04-04
Out This Week Tangerine (Metrodome, cert 15) A few weeks ago it was Tangerines, a blunt, austere Estonian/Georgian film about the conflict in Abkhazia. Now it’s in the singular, Tangerine, an over the top film about life in another conflict zone – on the crack-whorey streets of modern LA. The film is all shot on an iPhone 5S and shows that none of us has an excuse not to make a film any more, if that’s the way we’re claiming we’re pointing. Though director Sean Baker is so good at post-production and editing that you probably wouldn’t guess exactly how it was shot. The plot is simple yet ample – gender-transitioning street … Read more
