Popular Reviews
The Brooding Intensity of Michael Fassbender
Passion, power and emotional ferocity are all hallmarks of aMichael Fassbender performance. But is he just a kitten in real life? Here’s a funny thing. I’m in the audience at the New York Film Festival. On stage director Steve McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender are answering questions about the disturbing, brilliant film that’s just been shown. Shame, McQueen and Fassbender’s follow-up collaboration to the gruelling Hunger has Fassbender delivering a volcanic performance as a sex addict who’s either dialling rent-a-hooker, beating off at work or devouring porn at home. Intense, dark stuff. Someone from the floor asks Fassbender a question about the relationship between the two damaged lead characters, a brother and sister … Read more
Les Diaboliques
Les Diaboliques is the film that Alfred Hitchcock missed out on making after getting pipped to the post by another master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot. If the story is true, Clouzot stayed up all night reading the original novel, Celle qui n’était plus, and then called writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac the next morning, desperate to have the rights. By the time Hitchcock rang a few hours later those rights were no longer available. Hitchcock did not walk away entirely empty handed. Boileau and Narcejac went on to write D’Entre les Morts for him, which he turned into Vertigo, currently ranked at number one in the Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films … Read more
The Social Dilemma
Somewhere between the greenlighting of the 2013 Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn comedy The Internship – about two washed-up Generation Xers trying to make a go of it at Google – the attitude towards the tech giants changed. Intended as a genial comedy – and part financed by Google – it went into production skipping along on the trade winds of the zeitgeist but by the time it hit the screens the mood had shifted, the winds had veered. The end result looked propagandistic and borderline scary. That shift is what The Social Dilemma is about, a talking-heads documentary bringing into the mainstream misgivings by former industry lynchpins about the ways in which the tech giants … Read more
The Rule of Jenny Pen
Horror films are often about old age without being explicit about it. Think of all those shuffling zombies. The Rule of Jenny Pen cuts right to the chase to tell a story about nasty goings-on in a care home, where tangential horror occurs but the care home itself is the real concern of co-writer/director James Ashcroft. It’s a punchy and effective 100 minutes or so. Stephen King is a fan (“one of the best movies I’ve seen this year”). Maybe you should be too. Ashcroft starts with a joke. The actor Geoffrey Rush, five years absent from our screens thanks to legal wrangles, playing a judge. A New Zealand judge struck down by … Read more
The Second Woman
A spooky psychological drama, The Second Woman is often misdescribed as film noir but really it’s much closer to being overwrought melodrama of the sort Douglas Sirk used to make. That’s probably misdirection on my part – because there is no sotto voce examination of social mores going on here. Instead we’re asked to try and figure out who’s not being entirely on the level. There’s lots of misdirection in the film too. Robert Young eventually wound up playing the avuncular, reassuring medic Marcus Welby MD on TV but is in his element here, playing against his cosy image. The question the film asks of his character, successful architect Jeff Cohalan, is: how … Read more
M
The point of Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M – Eine Stadt Sucht einen Mörder is slightly lost when its truncated title, simply M, is used. This is a story not about a murderer (which is what the M stands for) but about the mob, when the rule of law is rejected in favour of a lynching. Which all comes as a bit of a surprise if you’re watching M for the first time and only know it from its reputation. There are two other things that most people coming fresh to this film already “know”. These are a) that M is an expressionist masterpiece and b) it’s got Peter Lorre in it. Dealing … Read more
Tuesday
Films about pretty young people dying miserably of some terrible but usually not disfiguring condition can be a bit of a drag. Tuesday writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusić has found a way of injecting a bit of zip – adding a bit of the weird supernatural. We’re told from all the publicity that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the star, but in fact Lola Petticrew more than capably holds the whole thing together as Tuesday, a teenager with not long to live, who is visited one day by a talking macaw that can change size at will. She intuits instantly that this is Death itself (we already knew that because an early montage sequence has shown us … Read more
Good Fortune
A strangely old-fashioned supernatural comedy from Aziz Ansari, still probably best known for Parks and Recreation, who wrote, directed and stars in Good Fortune, a so-nearly-great feature debut falling over itself in its desire to pack everything in. The opening shot of Keanu Reeves stood on top of a monumental building kitted out in angel’s wings suggests Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, but Ansari is really channelling Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch. It’s a Wonderful Life and Heaven Can Wait most obviously, though the social-democratic impulses of Mr Smith Goes to Washington are sloshing around in the drum too. Reeves plays a low-status angel, Gabriel (not the billing Gabriel gets in the Bible, … Read more
C’était un Rendezvous
The story goes that after wrapping on a film starring Catherine Deneuve, having come in under budget and with a day of shooting time left, as he often managed, director Claude Lelouch decided to do something mad and foolish, make a guerrilla short. All you need to make a movie is a gun and a girl, is how Lelouch’s New Wave colleague Jean-Luc Godard had put it. Lelouch set out to show you didn’t need even that, just a fast car and a camera strapped on the front. And that’s what C’était un Rendezvous is, a single shot from a slow-slung camera, as the car it’s attached to (a Ferrari?) hurtles through the … Read more
Lore
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 April Adolf Hitler kills himself, 1945 On this day in 1945, Adolf Hitler, the Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, also the Reichsstatthalter of Prussia, killed himself. On 22 April 1945, Hitler had railed against his generals, having discovered that his orders for SS Obergruppenführer Steiner and his detachment to attack the Red Army had been flatly ignored. On 23 April, Prime Minister Göring, in a telegram from Berchtesgaden, pointing out that Berlin was surrounded by the Russians and Hitler incapacitated, suggested that he, Göring, should assume leadership of Germany. Hitler responded by having Göring arrested and removing him from … Read more
Laurin
Robert Sigl was about 25 when he started making Laurin (aka Laurin: A Journey into Death), his remarkably atmospheric feature debut. It did well at the festivals when it came out in 1989, and Sigl picked up a rake of awards. More personal movies should have followed. But since the distinctive 1994 TV mini-series Stella Stellaris, Sigl seems to have been content to scratch the idiosyncratic itch with a series of occasional shorts; to keep the wolves at bay he’s done gun-for-hire work on German TV. Atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere is what Laurin is about, a Hammer horror meets Mario Bava/Dario Argento affair full of red-haired women, crimson lipstick, creepy churchyards, rolling mists, an … Read more
Marlowe
Warmed-over Raymond Chandler isn’t quite the same as hard-boiled Raymond Chandler, but that’s what’s on offer in Marlowe, a strange misfire that looks like it wanted to make a high-concept colourised simulacrum of a darkly noirish 1940s-style thriller and then settled instead for bloodless pastiche. It’s second order stuff all the way, from Xavi Gimenéz’s deliberately un-cinematic, almost Hallmark TV cinematography, to screenplay writer William Monahan’s flat adaptation of John Banville’s novel, itself a simulacrum of Raymond Chandler’s style. David Holmes’s non-committal (bewildered?) soundtrack kind of says it all. It’s all set in 1939, where ex-cop-now-gumshoe Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is visited by a rich, breathy, libidinous blonde (Diane Kruger) who wants him to … Read more
