Popular Reviews
Herself
Phyllida Lloyd is most often described as the director of Mama Mia! but there’s a lot more to her than that. Take Herself, the latest in a line of strongly female-centred productions, including the Mrs Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady and the all-female Shakespeare productions of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest at the Donmar Theatre in London, which drew raves from the critics, wild applause from audiences and loud harrumphs from the gammons. The Shakespeares all gave top billing to Harriet Walter, and meaty roles to Clare Dunne. Here, Dunne is thrust into the lead (well, she did co-write) and Walter is a gracious supporting star in a story about one … Read more
Jimi: All Is by My Side
Here’s a problem for anyone about to make a film about Jimi Hendrix, genius guitarist, 1960s icon, member of the 27 Club of rock’s premature expirers – how do you get inside a character who was private, taciturn, shy and elliptically cool? With a voiceover? A confidant? Newsreel footage? It’s a question that writer/director John Ridley answers with a shrug in this inert biopic which fails to locate Hendrix in his time. There’s another problem too. Hendrix died a long time ago now. Hell, even Kurt Cobain died a long time ago now, so Ridley needs to make a film that tells an audience who might know next to nothing about Hendrix why and … Read more
Panic Button
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 May Maiden flight of the world’s first passenger jet, 1952 On this day in 1952, the de Havilland DH 106 Comet was introduced into service by BOAC airlines. It was the world’s first commercial jet and its clean lines, big square windows, relatively quiet cabin and comfortable interior meant it looked like it was going to be a success. However, things did not start auspiciously for the plane. Several Comets had to abort take-off as they were taxiing down the runway. Over the next year, three in-air catastrophes occurred, with planes falling apart in mid-air. It was discovered that the … Read more
Grand Jeté
A former ballerina embarks on an intense sexual relationship with her own son. That bald plot outline of Grand Jeté doesn’t give any sense of the almost tactile intensity of Isabelle Stever’s film, a drama driven by emotion rather than events. Plot junkies might need to sit this one out. But for those who like mood and texture, Stever is the real deal, a director with a precise control of the warp and weft of film-making, with a camera that’s almost subjective in its shallow focus on its subject and its interest in the minutiae of everyday life. She follows, in an almost furtive documentary style, Nadja (Sarah Grether), from the practice room … Read more
Last Train Home
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 8 November Chinese engineers divert the Yangtze river, 1997 On this day in 1997, Chinese engineers diverted the Yangtze River, China’s longest, in order to clear the way for construction of the world’s biggest dam. The Three Gorges Dam was designed to announce the return of China as a player on the world stage – 185 metres high, two kilometres wide, costing $23 billion, able to withstand an earthquake of 7 on the Richter scale, generating the power of 15 nuclear power stations, a tamer of the Yangtze’s catastrophic floods. The project was not just huge in engineering terms but had … Read more
Moonrise Kingdom
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 August First Scout camp, Brownsea Island, 1907 On this day in 1907, a camp organised by British national hero Lieutenant-General Baden-Powell to test the ideas he’d laid out in his book, Scouting for Boys, opened on Brownsea Island, just off the south coast of the United Kingdom. It lasted a week, and was made up of 20 or 21 boys of varying social backgrounds who spent their time camping, learning woodcraft, chivalry, lifesaving and patriotism. Each day started at 6am with Baden-Powell blowing a reveille on a kudu horn, after which the boys would have cocoa, do exercise, raise the … Read more
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
A hell of title and a hell of a film, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is the remarkable second feature by writer/director Lili Horvát, who’s otherwise oddjobbed about the film biz in Hungary for some time – a casting director here, an actor there (you might have seen her in Kornél Mundruczó’s 2014 movie White God, a bizarre amalgam of the Disney kids movie with the post-apocalyptic wasteland drama). With an influence of Claire Denis, Horvát conjures, also in “how is she doing that?” fashion, a complete dramatic universe set in a world of feeling and gesture, where facts as such are not as important as the emotions triggered … Read more
Lost Transmissions
Affable, blokeish, pint-in-a-pub, kickaround-in-the-park Simon Pegg. Even when he was playing Scotty in Star Trek he was still likeable Simon Pegg. From talking to someone who worked with him on one of the “Cornetto Trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), he is actually like that in real life. What you see is what you get – smart, geeky, funny, relatable. It comes as a shock to see him acting. In Lost Transmissions he’s a nervy record producer called Theo, life and soul of the party, a survivor of some 1990s band who now lives with his fellow Brit expats out in LA – they’ve made it. Theo is such … Read more
Paper Moon
Stunt casting gave Paper Moon an extra publicity push when it came out in 1973. Ryan O’Neal and his nine-year-old daughter Tatum were the headline-grabbing coupling, and the PR machine was glowing white hot by the time of the 1974 Academy Awards, when Tatum won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. This propelled the movie back into the big picture palaces and shot Tatum into the record books as the youngest winner of a competitive Oscar. Supporting actress schmupporting actress. As is entirely obvious from the first frame to the last, Tatum is obviously the lead in this movie. Madeline Kahn, who was in fact the supporting actress, said as much at the … Read more
Theodora Goes Wild
Almost a commentary on Hollywood’s transition from Pre-Code licence to Post-Code moralising, 1936’s Theodora Goes Wild is a breezy screwball comedy that straddles the decades with its opposition of conservative smalltown standards and liberal big-city values. Irene Dunne is the go-between, playing Theodora Lynn, a compliant daughter of the founding family of the small burgh of Lynnfield, but secretly also Caroline Adams, author of a work of racy fiction currently scandalising her staid puritanical aunts. Life for Theodora/Caroline continues on this twin track – dutiful mouse at home, sophisticated woman of the world on her visits to the city – until smoothie-chops New York book illustrator Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas) takes a shine … Read more
Hot Milk
In a hot European beach resort a woman in a wheelchair seeks a crank cure for her condition with her resentful daughter along in tow. Hot Milk is a hothouse drama, a sketch of a nasty little co-dependent relationship. Will the worm turn, and if so, when? Is mother really crippled, or is this part of her way of controlling her adult daughter? Does daughter realise her mother is possibly putting it all on? As mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), with sulking Sofia (Emma Mackey) perpetually on call, consults a dubious doctor on one of the Spanish Costas, something appears to be brewing but debut director Rebecca Lenkiewicz isn’t telling us what. “What do … Read more
Rimini
Cheers aren’t what you get in an Ulrich Seidl movie but let’s give one anyway for his return to fiction after a ten-year absence, with Rimini, a glisteningly dark, drily amusing character study of a man who’d be funny if he wasn’t so pitiful. Actually, he’s quite funny too. Looking not a million miles away from Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, and sharing a few of his character traits, Michael Thomas plays Richie Bravo, a former pop singer in Austria who now lives in Rimini, where a shadowy vestige of his old life still plays out, albeit largely in Richie’s head. As Seidl’s film opens Richie is back home in Austria and re-connecting … Read more
