Popular Reviews
Broadway Melody of 1940
If it’s not quite the big deal it maybe ought to be, Broadway Melody of 1940 does do one great service to posterity: it brings together for the only time on screen Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, whose ferocious tap skills Astaire admired and even feared. The story is the corny Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers one of mistaken identities, with Powell as a successful Broadway star and Astaire as one half of a struggling song and dance act. Seeking to freshen up her act with some new blood, Clare Bennett (Powell) gets her agent to contact talented, committed Johnny Brett (Astaire), but instead winds up with his deadweight song-and-dance partner, King Shaw (George Murphy). … Read more
Nuremberg
Would you have guessed, when Russell Crowe was appearing in Australian TV soaps like Young Doctors and Neighbours that one day he’d be playing the lead in Nuremberg? And that he’d have gone from being a slim, handsome chap with tousled hair to someone who could effortlessly play Hermann Göring, sour-faced, fat and oozing self-regard. The self-regard maybe – actors, huh – and transformations are what actors are all about, after all. Wibbling to one side, Crowe’s performance as Göring, Hitler’s Supreme Commander of the Air Force and an unrepentant Nazi right to the last moment, is the making of James Vanderbilt’s film. Set at the Nuremberg War trials in the aftermath of the … Read more
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
When Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was first proposed, no one imagined that the sequel to the huge hit of 2018 was going to be made without its star. Chadwick Boseman died in 2020, having kept his battles with colon cancer super-heroically to himself. What to do? Cast someone else in his place? It was an option, and one Boseman’s own brother Derrick suggested, as a memorial to the character Chadwick had played. Or marshal the forces of CG to bring the lead actor back to digital life? For various reasons neither was considered a goer – social media kickback always being an issue. In the end, writer/director Ryan Coogler et al decided to … Read more
The Worst Ones
Write what you know, they say. Les Pires (The Worst Ones in English) is the debut movie by two former casting directors, Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, telling the story of what happens when a film company comes to your disadvantaged part of town, picks your sorry ass out of a heap of fellow nobodies and puts you in a movie. Being former casting directors and now director-directors who have done just that – gone to the rundown Picasso City in Boulogne-sur-Mer and plucked several feisty kids to star in their film about kids from a rundown estate being cast in a movie – Akoka and Geuret are clearly in the life imitates … Read more
22 February 2016-02-22
Out This Week Spectre (Fox, cert 12) Trope is what they should have called this film, rather than Spectre, though god knows the spectre of so many old Bond movies hangs over a film which, in reviewing terms is worth about two out of five stars if seen as a standalone film, but four as a mash-up. The usual recent writing team of John Logan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Bond writers since The World Is Not Enough) is augmented this time by playwright Jez Butterworth, whose knack for snappy dialogue made Edge of Tomorrow into something worth listening to as well as watching. Here, this quartet send Bond off to Mexico for … Read more
Femme
Femme has a really powerful premise – a black drag artist in full cross-dressed glory is beaten up one night by a white tattooed thug for being a “faggot”, then months later happens upon the same guy in, of all places, a gay sauna. The angry closeted homophobe clearly doesn’t recognise the meek black guy out of costume and the two of them get into a strange sort of relationship – no-strings, ask-no-questions sex. What’s going on here? Is the black guy a masochist who’s taking his liking for a bit of rough to the next level? Is he seeking revenge and keeping his powder dry? Or is it physical attraction pure and … Read more
Supergirl
Green kryptonite at the box office, Supergirl is standard superhero fare juiced with Deadpool-style wit and smarts. Well, that’s the intention. In fact, the wit is a bit strained and the smarts are a touch familiar. Everyone is trying just a bit too hard. Put it down to nerves. DC realised their DC Extended Universe (2013’s Man of Steel to 2023’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom) had lost whatever mojo it had ever had and so decided to reboot it as the more streamlined DC Universe – “Extended” was possibly a hostage to fortune. As part of all that, out went Sasha Calle, a perfectly fine Supergirl in The Flash, and in came … Read more
Dirty Pretty Things
Seventeen years after he made My Beautiful Laundrette, Stephen Frears washes London’s dirty laundry again. Dirty Pretty Things is an ambitious, worthwhile drama digging into the spoil heap of the capital’s invisible underclass. And if that sounds about as glamourous and interesting as council housing, it is – until its hero, Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a human heart in a hotel toilet. Okwe is a Nigerian doctor exiled in a London that tolerates him just so long as he keeps his head down. By day he’s a minicab driver, doing the odd bit of illegal prescribing to keep his fellow drivers clear of the clap they’re transmitting to each other like a relay baton. … Read more
The Super 8 Years
Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for literature for a body of autobiographical body of work charting her own life. The Super 8 Years is pretty much more of the same, except in filmic form. At its most basic and off-putting level it’s a “what I did on my holidays” narration over clips from a family’s home movies. At another a snapshot of a lost era and the history of a development of a writer. In 1972 Annie and husband Philippe Ernaux (always addressed by his full name) bought a Super 8 camera. It was, she says in voiceover, “the ultimate desired object… much more than a dishwasher or TV”, and set about … Read more
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Patty Tolan and Kate McKinnon. It just wasn’t funny or scary. They never are, scary I mean, the Ghostbusters films. That’s not really the point. The idea is to deliver lots of likeable knockabout camaraderie and good vibes, which is what Afterlife does, liberally scattering easter eggs referring back to one of the original two movies, but not … Read more
Elstree 1976
The Kickstarter-funded Elstree 1976 looks like it’s going to be about Star Wars, not least because of the packaging and that being the year that the studio to the north of London was booked out by George Lucas to make his epic space adventure. It is, tangentially, but in fact it’s more a meditation on life and the way its rewards are portioned out. Director/interviewer Jon Spira was born in 1976, which means he’s fanboy generation rather than first-hand participant, but he’s an able interviewer of the ladies and gents who were there. Not the Harrison Fords or Mark Hammils, but the likes of Paul Blake, Laurie Goode, Anthony Forrest and Pam Rose, … Read more
Duck Soup
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 October Groucho Mark born, 1890 On this day in 1890, Julius Henry Marx, one of the 20th century’s most distinctive comedians was born, in New York City. He started off in a vaudeville singing troupe with various members of the family, including his mother at one point. When pure singing didn’t work for them, the Marx brothers started to include comedy in their act, losing non family members on the way and eventually settling down to be the four brothers, Julius, Adolph, Leonard and Milton (aka Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Gummo). Gummo decided to leave and Zeppo, considered the funniest … Read more
