Popular Reviews
Rose Plays Julie
Rose Plays Julie arrives on screens an entire year late. I have an email from January 2020 telling me it would be out in “Spring 2020”, but here we are in Spring 2021, after a year of slippage. Presumably directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy were waiting for the cinemas to re-open and eventually gave up. I’m glad they did. This is a brilliant film, and while it probably would suit the claustrophobic murk of a big theatre, the confines of a living room don’t do it too much harm. “These are operatic film makers in search of a bigger better subject,” is what I wrote in my notes for Mister John, the … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 26 – Honey for the Prince
Mystical, mad and rather weird, Honey for the Prince was the last episode in series four of The Avengers, in terms of both production and transmission, and puts an exclamation mark on what has been an increasingly unreal and self-referential show. The script is by Brian Clemens, and in very Clemens style he layers eccentric characters over a plot that is ahead of its time. The story opens with a couple of unfortunates breaking in to a house decorated in an Arabian style. Finding a “magic lamp”, one of them gives it a jokey rub and – alakazam – a genie appears, a genie with a machine gun to be precise, and shoots … Read more
Caught by the Tides
Things change and things stay the same in Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-ke’s experimental movie inspired by the Covid pandemic. Locked down at home with nothing to do, Jia wondered if he could put something together using unused footage shot over the years – rehearsals for movies, location scouting, technical try-outs to see how equipment worked and so on. Also in there are excerpts from three of the nine films Jia has made with his wife, and star, Zhao Tao, over the years. Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006) and Ash Is Purest White (2018). So what we’re seeing here is a montage of stuff that was never really intended to go … Read more
Die My Love
I’m amazed at how many of “the best films of 2025” have left me pretty cold. Die My Love joins the list alongside the likes of Sinners, The Mastermind and Bugonia – everyone loves them, but I thought they were just OK. I did like Die My Love, though, particularly the florid performance by Jennifer Lawrence as a woman losing her mind in a severe case of post-partum depression. Possibly. It’s never entirely spelled out, but then that’s often the case with diagnosing the baby blues too. It’s a one-woman show offering co-star billing but not oodles to do to Robert Pattinson, who plays Jackson, the partner of Grace (Lawrence), who has brought … Read more
100 Years of… Robin Hood
Accept no substitute. This is the original Robin Hood, or Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (as the registered title insists), the one that Errol Flynn’s 1938 version modelled itself on, the one that gets all the Merry Men, Maid Marian, good King Richard and bad King John, Sir Guy of Gisbourne and the Sheriff of Nottingham into forms so recognisable that even at 100 years old, it’s instantly obvious who is who. This wasn’t the first screen outing for the mythical character, in fact there had already been five before (if we include 1919’s My Lady Robin Hood), so Robin Hood as a movie character was at least fairly well known, though of … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 25 – Six Hands across a Table
As I write, the UK is drunkenly stumbling towards its exit from the European Union. Rewind 55 years and Six Hands across the Table, the penultimate episode of the second series of The Avengers, is having a discussion similar to the one the country is having right now, a “whither us” debate about Britain – is it better going it alone or heading towards a more European version of the future? The drama opens at a meeting of a shipbuilding cartel, part of an industry in trouble. (For those too young, that “industry in trouble” idea is why the country signed up to the European project in the first place.) Digression aside, this … Read more
The Chronology of Water
So Kristen Stewart made a movie and, in spite of what the goons hoped, didn’t fall flat on her face. The Chronology of Water will infuriate people who harbour a grudge. Though, on the other hand, surely the twittersphere (Xsphere?) can’t still be hating on Stewart? After all this time? For the RPatz stuff? Or the sulky features and mumbling performances. Or suddenly becoming the highest paid actress in the world – briefly, till she walked away from all that. Who knows? There’s an irrational hellbeast out there for all of us if we look hard enough. Personally, I’m a fan, of Stewart’s “fuck you” attitude but particularly of the sort of films … Read more
Cordelia
The actor Antonia Campbell-Hughes is worth watching in anything she’s in. She’s particularly good at the externalisation of anxiety and there’s plenty of that in Cordelia, the story of a broken London woman trying to put her life back together after some terrible event. The event was the terrorist bombings of London in July 2005, though all we learn of what happened then is how it’s left Cordelia, an actor now afraid to leave the house, who hasn’t used the Underground ever since (this was made in 2019 and is set then too), and who leans heavily on her twin sister (also played by AC-H), a boozy, fun-lover who is presumably everything Cordelia … Read more
Ghosts of War
Ghosts of War is part of a recent wave of war movies with a supernatural flavour, slotting neatly alongside the likes of 2018’s Overlord (a funny macabre “Nazis do the weirdest things” near-miss produced by JJ Abrams), Frankenstein’s Army (a knowingly ridiculous 2013 film in which, at one point, one of the Baron’s descendant attempts to splice together a communist and Nazi brain). And Dead Snow, which featured Undead Nazis and had one of the best taglines of recent years – “Ein. Zwei. Die”. Before launching its assault, writer/director Eric Bress’s film takes time establishing its bona fides as a proper war movie. Normandy 1944, a group of five soldiers are on a take-no-prisoners … Read more
Dude, Where’s My Car
Sometimes an utterly mindless comedy really hits the spot. That’s Dude, Where’s My Car. It was written by South Park graduate Philip Stark and stars Seann William Scott, a stalwart of the American Pie genre, and Ashton Kutcher, then a new arrival on Planet Heartthrob. One day our two unlikely lads wake up after a large night out and can’t find the car. That’s the title dealt with, and the plot too, since what now happens is that the halfwitted stoner chums wander off trying to find the missing vehicle. As the situations shift from aimless to unlikely to improbable to impossible, with enough drink and drugs consumed en route to fuel a … Read more
Clemency
We’ve all seen prison dramas – the tough lives of inmates in a heartless system patrolled by brutes, policed by sadists and presided over by a martinet. Clemency isn’t that sort of film. Nor is it film-as-entertainment, be warned, but a grim and sobering look at US prison life from an unusual angle, the warden’s. Opening up with a pre-credits scene that follows an execution on death row, which ends up being a botched, messy and gruelling one, for the man who’s being killed, the people watching and the warden supervising the whole thing, the film proper then concerns itself with the preparations for the execution of another man, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) … Read more
Manhattan
Woody Allen’s 1979 magnum opus starts famously with a long montage which appears to suggest that New York is to the modern world what Paris was in the early half of the 20th century – the home of romance, intellectualism, art, sex and impossible glamour. To the sinuous jazz of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Allen treats us to a sequence of lush black and white images such as Robert Doisneau or Henri Cartier-Bresson might have taken. And then, in the filmic equivalent of dragging the needle off the record, he appears to say ‘Hang on – the French may be mature, worldly and philosophical. But New Yorkers?’ The next 90 minutes play out … Read more
