Popular Reviews
The Woman on the Beach
The Woman on the Beach is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Designed as a dreamy, psychological tear through the unconscious, where libido is locked in a fight with other bits of the psyche, it wound up looking like it had been in a fight with itself. After a negative preview screening, panicked director Jean Renoir took it away and cut out 30 minutes of it. After reshooting all the scenes between leads Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, he recast the only other significant woman in it. Out went Virginia Huston and in came Nan Leslie, who plays the significantly named Eve. The result? “I produced a film which was, I think, neither … Read more
Contraband
Powell and Pressburger’s second collaboration, 1940’s Contraband (aka Blackout) is a knockabout knock-off of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps – two people yoked together against their will, a Nazi cell and so on – which also goes large on Hitchcock’s light-hearted energy and his fondness for a set piece. Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson had both been in P&P’s first collaboration, the previous year’s The Spy in Black, and this time around play a couple charging around London under blackout conditions. She’s a spy who stole the shore passes issued to Veidt’s Captain Andersen, a Danish sea captain whose freighter has been impounded by the British authorities. He’s keen to get them back and … Read more
A Real Pain
Two Jewish cousins go on a Holocaust Holiday? No end of things could go wrong with that as an idea. The marvel of A Real Pain is that writer/director/producer/star Jesse Eisenberg doesn’t just sidestep potential disaster, but hands the film to another actor, Kieran Culkin, while doing so. It’s Before Sunrise in structure, but instead of pretty, young Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy hashing things out over a night of escalating romantic potential, it’s Americans Benji and David in Poland, off on a pilgrimage to see where their Polish grandma Doris once lived, talking the entire time, assessing themselves as people, as Jews in a country where their kind haven’t always fared so … Read more
Divorce Italian Style
Who remembers 1961’s Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’Italiana) today? An Oscar winner for its screenplay, with nominations for both its star (Marcello Mastroianni) and its director (Pietro Germi), it now for some reason languishes in the dusty zone where forgotten movies slumber. Perhaps it’s time to wake it up. It’s a brilliant example of the “sex comedy”, that strangely chaste beast most typified by all those Doris Day and Rock Hudson/James Garner films about bullish males trying to get their leg over and virginal ladies saying no. Sex was never really the issue, it was marriage, an institution that was beginning to chafe in a much more liberal post-War world. Germi wastes no … Read more
John Le Carré Movie Adaptations Ranked, 2021
There is a lot of John Le Carré out there. The author wrote prodigiously, starting while he was still working as a spy for MI5 and MI6 in the late 1950s and only really stopped when he died, in December 2020. There are nine novels featuring his most famous creation, the retired master spy George Smiley, and another 17 or so (depending on how you count) other novels, plus short stories, essays, memoirs, articles written for newspapers (denouncing the war in Iraq, for instance) and screenplays (always adaptations of his own novels). But there’s no getting round it, if you want a John Le Carré experience, the movies are probably the worst way … Read more
Nope
Nope is what you say when heroics are required but you’ve decided on an impulse that absolutely no way are you going to do what’s required. Maidens to be saved, beasts to be slain or dim passageways to be entered, whatever it is, the answer is no. Nope is also the return to form for Jordan Peele, the actor turned director whose conceptually brillant Get Out – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner done as a horror movie – was followed up by the less conceptually innovative but nonetheless very tidy Us. Nope is Jaws done as a sci-fi, a tale of a big something lurking somewhere out “there” in the sky somewhere and … Read more
Big Wednesday
Expectations were high for John Milius’s Big Wednesday when it debuted in 1978. Based on Milius and co-writer Dennis Aaberg’s own experiences growing up as California surfers, it tracks three dudes from callow youth to maturity, dropping in periodically as they also surf the waves of life. So high, in fact, that Milius kindly swapped profit points with his old friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Which is how he ended up owning a tiny piece of Close Encounters and Star Wars and they ended up with a little bit of Big Wednesday. Which worked out better for Milius than for Lucas and Spielberg. He became rich on his end of the deal … Read more
Platoon
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 May Ho Chi Minh born, 1890 On this day in 1890, Nguyen Sinh Con, later known as Ho Chi Minh, was born, in Hoang Tru, in Vietnam. One of four children, he got an education thanks to the colonial French, at a local lycée, and under the direction of his father, a Confucian scholar. Realising there was little future for him in Vietnam after his father lost his administrative position – influence was everything – he boarded a ship for France, working as a ship’s cook, where he failed to get work in Marseille. Over the next few years he … Read more
Bugonia
A remake of Save the Green Planet!, a South Korean movie from 2003, Bugonia fiddles with details and genders but tells essentially the same story – conspiratorially minded eco-warriors kidnap a chemical industry boss convinced that there’s an alien invasion imminent and use torture to extract the vital details that will save planet Earth. Jang Joon-hwan made the original and was all lined up to direct this English-language remake but in the end Yorgos Lanthimos stepped in, bringing in his favourite actress, Emma Stone, to play one of the leads. Now the chemicals boss man is a biopharma boss lady, and the kidnappers are a boggle-eyed dude (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin … Read more
Smashing Time
London in all its 1960s Swinging glory is what Smashing Time offers, in what’s meant to be a satire on the time and the place but is more a jaunt around the zeitgeist’s tourist landmarks strapped to some weak songs and very feeble comedy. I kid you not, there is a banana skin gag. Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave play Brenda and Yvonne, a pair of friends from “up north” who arrive in London determined to locate Carnaby Street and plug straight into the scene. Instead they find themselves penniless, having been robbed the minute they arrived in the capital. From here bullish, stupid Yvonne and timid, smart Brenda’s paths diverge slightly, allowing … Read more
19 November 2012-11-19
Out in the UK this week Arthur Christmas (Sony, cert U, Blu-ray/DVD) After some awful homegrown CGI animations – anyone remember Valiant? – the Brits have made a comic adventure about Santa Claus and family that’s witty, gutsy, insightful and entirely entertaining. A new Christmas classic, surely. Arthur Christmas – Watch it/buy it at Amazon Two Years at Sea (Soda, cert E, DVD) Hungarian miserabilist Béla Tarr is clearly a heavy influence on this artfully artless documentary following a hippie/hermit as he serenely goes about his hardscrabble life. For stressed-out, always-on screen-jockeys this could be the ideal therapy. Two Years at Sea – Watch it/buy it at Amazon Big Boys Gone Bananas (Dogwoof, cert E, … Read more
Spike Island
There is a great film to be made about the whole Madchester/Stone Roses/Acieed moment of the late 1980s but Spike Island isn’t it. Fun but messy might be a fair way to assess it. Fatally flawed might be another. This is a film clearly going for epic. It wants to be the Apocalypse Now of a particular youthquake, with a basic “journey” structure – four lads in a wannabe band are trying to get to Spike Island, scene of the Stone Roses’ most famous gig, a night that defined/ended an era. Onto this is grafted the story of the band itself, its attempts to record a demo, get it to the Stone Roses, … Read more
