Popular Reviews
The Beast in the Jungle
Henry James on the dancefloor! La Bête dans la Jungle (aka The Beast in the Jungle) sees the old Edwardian master throwing some pretty fly shapes in this fabulous and slightly mad adaptation of a James novella from 1903. The action may have shifted from London to France but the characters and plot are largely intact. It’s 1979 when May first meets John in a Paris discotheque. In what looks like May making a clumsy move on him, she claims she and John have met before. He isn’t sure they have. She insists. He reluctantly goes along with her insistence, though quite why this nice-looking but not exceptionally attractive guy isn’t reacting more … Read more
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
28 Years and a Bit Years Later, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was never going to be called. It’s the 2026 sequel to 2025’s 28 Years Later, which came 18 years after 28 Weeks Later, and it started shooting as soon as Danny Boyle had handed over to his replacement and handed the keys to the director’s mobile cabin to new arrival Nia DaCosta. It’s the second of three, so there’s one more to come, with Boyle back in charge. Be warned, this second one won’t work as a standalone, or barely. Do yourself a favour and watch 28 Years Later first – you can skip Days and Weeks, if all … Read more
Just My Luck
Released as its star Lindsay Lohan enters a spiral of celebrity freefall, Just My Luck is directed by Donald Petrie, who is a dab hand at turning unbelievable Hollywood nonsense into something resembling a decent movie. So he almost managed to make you forget that the undercover cop and supposed frump in Miss Congeniality was the never-less-than-hot Sandra Bullock. Or that in the romcom How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days Kate Hudson … to be honest, it’s so whimsical and borderline nasty that I’m not going to go there. Here Petrie takes the still perky screen presence of Lohan and inserts her into a similarly whimsical and borderline nasty scenario – she’s … Read more
The Burial
A movie called The Burial that buries its main story – it sounds like some kind of meta-joke. But it isn’t. Whether the strategy works is the real question though. The story was first told in the New Yorker and relayed what happened to a real-life Mississippi guy called O’Keefe whose struggling funeral-home business was offered a buyout in the mid-1990s by the Loewen company, a megacorp specialising in burials and, more importantly (it turns out), burial insurance. O’Keefe and Loewen agreed a deal in principle but then the trail went cold. Eventually, convinced that Loewen were sitting on their hands until he went bust, so it could buy him out for cents … 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
I Love My Dad
When James Morosini was about 19 he and his dad got into a huge fight. James ended up blocking all connections to him – phone, email, social media, the works. A few weeks later James got a friend request from a pretty girl on Facebook. “I was thrilled,” James later said in an interview. “She was perfect. We shared the same interests, she was gorgeous… Things were looking up. Unfortunately, she was also my dad.” Fast forward about a decade after that fight and here’s I Love My Dad, a comedy about what happened when a teenager gets catfished by his own dad, with Morosini in the lightly fictionalised role of Franklin, Patton … Read more
Rudo y Cursi
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 March The Wanderers FC win first FA Cup, 1872 Today in 1872, the London football club Wanderers won the first football association cup, the oldest football competition in the world. It was the first of three wins of the cup for the club. The FA Cup is a knockout cup open to all football clubs who are established enough, and with facilities enough, to take part. In 1871-72, being the first season of the cup, there was a piecemeal and eccentric series of regulations – Wanderers managed to get to the final having won only one of their four games … Read more
There Will Be Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 May Standard Oil declared a monopoly, 1911 On this day in 1911, the American oil company Standard Oil was ruled to be a monopoly by the US Supreme Court. Set up only in 1870 by the industrialist John D Rockefeller and his associates, the company was efficient and focused and had grown rapidly, first becoming dominant in refining, where it used its early lead to price competitors out of the market or buy them up, before moving on to production and distribution, where it used similar tactics to squeeze out or buy out competitors. By 1882 the company was already … Read more
St Benny the Dip
I didn’t know, going into St Benny the Dip, that a “dip” is a pickpocket. In these circles the dip is the one who goes in for the goods, the “stall” having provided a distraction, while the “mule” is the one to whom the hot item is swiftly transferred, in case the dip is caught in the act. That established, into the film, which doesn’t seem to be about pickpockets at all, though it is about street criminals. When we meet Benny (Dick Haymes) the smooth, Matthew (Roland Young) the plausible and Monk (Lionel Stander) the operator, they are midway through a gambling sting, trying to bilk a high roller, when the police … Read more
Fort Ti
Fort Ti is a 3D western and it really wants you to know it. Everything that can come the audience’s way does – a tomahawk, an Indian, a cannonball, more Indians, more cannonballs, bats, bullets, yet more Indians. In the action sequences at least it keeps coming. It’s the first 3D western and shot in Technicolor just to make the whole thing stick out in more ways than one and stars good old dependable George Montgomery as a captain in the Rogers Rangers getting caught up in a conflict with Indians and then the French. There are not just two enemies but two potential love interests too – Joan Vohs as Fortune Mallory, … Read more
6 January 2014-01-06
Out in the UK This Week Upstream Colour (Metrodome, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Shane Carruth’s belated follow-up to his brilliant 2004 film Primer is a weird mix of body-horror and love story, the story of a woman (a rather good Amy Seimetz) infected by some parasitic worm who is hypnotised and then robbed while under the influence. Well, that’s the first bit anyway. After that she seems to be falling for some guy she’s met (played in a bit of Ben Affleck casting by Carruth himself), the whole thing told in the language not of film but of advertising – overlaps, quick cuts, montages, while a Sigur Ros-style soundtrack (a band advertisers love) bleeps … Read more
Superboys of Malegaon
It’s pronounced “maa.lay.gao”, a screen note informs us, before Superboys of Malegaon gets properly underway. And that’s the tone of the entire film – nothing left to chance, a narrative that is laid out with one logical piece following another, nothing fancy, nothing tricksy, just the age-old “let’s do the show right here” tale, of an Indian guy in the small town of Malegaon in Maharashtra State, India, who decides to make movies – no money, no clue, just make them. It’s brilliant. Feelgood, funny, dramatic, tear-jerking, a feast of emotional manipulation by director Reema Kagti and co, who retell the true story first told in the 2008 documentary Supermen of Malegaon, which … Read more
