Popular Reviews
The Dark and the Wicked
Some horror directors favour the balls-out approach of a high concept, others go down the skill route. Call it art v craft or wit v cunning. Then you get directors who manage both – Sam Raimi went down the the first path with Evil Dead and down the second with Drag Me to Hell. The Dark and the Wicked is writer/director Bryan Bertino’s fourth horror movie after The Strangers, Mockingbird and The Monsters. And if none of the others set people alight, they did at least give Bertino the space to make some mistakes and learn how to make a horror movie properly. That all comes good here, with a film that’s not … Read more
Lurker
A knuckle-chewing debut by Alex Russell, Lurker updates All About Eve for the Instagram era, looking on with a raised eyebrow as a nobody gets whisked up into the entourage of a big music star, finds he likes it and then hangs on for grim life when the beast tries to spit him out. It’s a brilliant portrait both of needy, paranoid fan worship and of needy, paranoid stardom – both parties require constant reinforcement, though only one of them can be open about it. Théodore Pellerin plays the nobody, a guy working in a clothes shop in LA when big star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) and crew bowl in one day to browse. … Read more
Magpie
All sorts of klaxons are sounding, red lights flashing and warning bells ringing at the beginning of Magpie, a neo-noir which, by the end, has triumphed in telling a story which Roald Dahl (wearing his adult hat) might be proud to call one of his own. It’s a screenplay written by an actor and it’s his first one – two amber signals right there. What’s more writer Tom Bateman is the husband of the film’s star, Daisy Ridley. And the story is “based on an original idea by Daisy Ridley”. There are are so many potential bear traps there that trepidation is understandable. And yet. A small, dark, exquisitely formed thriller-ish story is … Read more
Old Czech Legends
The guys at Second Run DVD sent me Jiří Trnka: Puppet Master, a two-disc Blu-ray set containing Old Czech Legends, The Czech Year and 90 minutes of extras, superb examples of this master of animation’s work and a great place to start for any beginner. Trnka worked in various forms but stop-motion puppetry is what he’s most famous for. Old Czech Legends delivers that in spades. It’s a retelling of the ancient history of the Czech people and how they came to occupy the land they now call home. Things get off to a portentous start with the death of Čech, tribal leader and the man who gave the Czechs their name – … Read more
The Forty-Year-Old Version
First, the title. It’s called The Forty-Year-Old Version because this autobiographical, documentary-style drama is about the 40-year-old, grown-up version of the kid who wanted to be a writer. Now a struggling actor/writer/director, Radha Blank had once upon a time also turned up on a 30 Under 30 list of hot young talents to watch, so the kid wasn’t deluded. Clearly, something has gone wrong in the intervening years. Instead of having a successful career in the theatre, Radha teaches. They’re nice, funny, feisty kids – the girls want to fight, the boys are obsessed with genitalia. But it’s not what she really wants to do. Radha’s mother, a painter, has recently died and … Read more
The Untamed
Genre collision is the dish of the day in The Untamed (La Région Salvaje) as the most down-to-earth drama, the soap, meets the most out there – sci-fi. The result probably shouldn’t work but it really does, thanks to writer director Amat Escalante’s decision to keep the sci-fi stuff in the background for most of the film. After an opening shot of a black meteorite in space, followed by one of a pretty young woman apparently pleasuring herself, or being pleasured by, a giant pink tentacle, we’re off into an entirely different realm until, in the film’s last section, the tentacle, and the creature it’s attached to, return for some very out-there cross … Read more
Beyond the Forest
“Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad!” screamed the posters for this 1949 melodrama starring, of course, Bette Davis. But bad how? The latest of a run of flops for Davis when it was released, Beyond the Forest allowed Jack Warner to offload the star who’d made him fistfuls of money for 18 years. Good riddance to you too, said Bette, who’d wanted out anyway. Or so she said. It’s a madly overcooked affair from the outset, with a rolling written introduction after the opening credits insisting that this is a grim but necessary portrait of evil and its rewards and ending with a metaphor about a “scorpion in a mad fury” … Read more
MaXXXine
A collection of great scenes in search of a movie, MaXXXine opens with a quote from Bette Davis – “In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star” – and ends with the song Bette Davis Eyes. Between those bookends, the story of a porn actress (Mia Goth) trying to go legit in the 1980s United States, where Ronald Reagan is promising “morning in America”, Christians are campaigning against satanism in rock music and filth on the screens, and a serial killer is on a spree butchering young women like Maxine. We first met Maxine in X, this trilogy’s opener, when she was a 1970s burlesque dancer with ambitions … Read more
Burden
Burden? As in “white man’s burden”? Ironically, no. There’s a white saviour theme running right the way through Andrew Heckler’s film but it actually takes its name from its key character, Mike Burden, a lifelong member of the Klan who saw the error of his ways. With the flying of Confederate flags in the US an ongoing point of contention when this movie was released in 2018, Burden has timeliness on its side, and a core cast so accomplished most first-time directors would auction their mothers to get hold of them – Garrett Hedlund as Mike, Andrea Riseborough as the woman whose love makes him see the light, Tom Wilkinson as the local … Read more
20 October 2014-10-20
Out in the UK This Week Two Days, One Night (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) A French factory hand (magnificent Marion Cotillard) has a weekend to persuade her colleagues to do without their cash bonuses and keep her on instead. As much a portrait of a woman battling depression and low self-esteem as a condemnation of modern employment norms – what kind of scumbag boss dodges a bullet by making his employees take those sort of decisions? – it has a high concept, a big name in the lead, clear heroes and villains and an “if you try hard enough you can win” throughline. In other words it’s the Dardenne brothers’ most Hollywood film … Read more
One-Eyed Jacks
There is a legendary aspect to One-Eyed Jacks. The only film Marlon Brando ever directed, it became notorious because of Brando’s extravagant shooting style – miles of expensive film run through VistaVision cameras to catch the right wave, days waited for the light to be just right and so on. The results were mixed. Brando has undeniably made a fantastic-looking film, and it features the man himself in a lead role when he was still beautiful and pumping pheromones. But it flopped badly on its 1961 debut and never really got another look-in, until the Film Foundation, with Spielberg and Scorsese backing, stumped up the money for a restoration. I watched the Criterion … Read more
Redux Redux
Redux Redux retools the high concept of Edge of Tomorrow, but instead of Tom Cruise being endlessly regenerated as an ever better fighting machine, it’s Michaela McManus as an endlessly vengeful mother repeatedly killing the man who killed her daughter, and visiting all the trillions of parallel universes to do so. Actually, Irene is hoping to find her daughter still alive and in the rude health in one of them. When she doesn’t, killing the man who stole her daughter’s life acts as consolation. It also means she gets to hone her slaughtering skills – tying the perp to a chair and setting fire to him in one universe, shooting him in another, … Read more
