Popular Reviews
A Little Prayer
Writer/director Angus MacLachlan has built a career mapping the dynamics of functional and dysfunctional families. A Little Prayer slots neatly in alongside earlier films such as 2014’s Goodbye to All That and 2017’s Abundant Acreage Available. You could add his stage play The Dead Eye Boy to the list. I’ve not seen any of them but having now seen A Little Prayer I’d be interested in having a look, because MacLachlan has made an interesting drama in a genre I don’t generally have much time for. We’re in smalltown America where the tightly knit family of Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston) is having a moment. Their son, David (Will Pullen) and … Read more
The Beasts
Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen reportedly said he wanted to make The Beasts (As Bestas, in Spanish) “as a western”. To a large extent that’s what he’s done. This is like a western where two opposing and implacable forces square off in a lawless milieu. John Ford might have made this, back in the day. If he had I wonder how much shorter he’d have made it. The story it tells is a true one, of a Dutch couple moving to a remote Spanish village to start a new life, then falling out badly with their neighbours until one day a moment of reckoning arrives. For the factual account, the true-crime documentary Santoalla (2015) … Read more
The Ghost Breakers
1940’s The Ghost Breakers is one of the most successful comedy-horror movies ever made. Critically and at the box office it did well and it’s still regularly on the all-time-best shortlists when they’re being drawn up. It’s a haunted house/ghost/zombie movie with some random bad humans in the mix and stars Paulette Goddard as Mary Carter, a woman who as the movie opens is learning that she has inherited the Castle Maldito on Black Island, somewhere off the coast of Cuba. Rejecting offers from various parties keen to take it off her hands, she heads off to take possession of it, becoming entangled en route with Bob Hope’s Larry Lawrence, a radio gossip … Read more
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
It’s often said that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) has no narrative throughline, that it’s freeform, experimental, avant-garde and so on. This is both true and not true. There is a story, though Godard does his best to hide it, of a young Parisian woman, Juliette (Marina Vlady), who intersperses her roles as wife and mother with a bit of prostitution on the side. This she does, she explains in voiceover, at the request of her husband, who she met while working as a prostitute, and who suggested she go back on the game as a way of making a … Read more
Host
Host is the perfect pandemic horror movie. Shot entirely on Zoom, it features a menacing presence that’s out there… somewhere… and a bunch of mates who are communicating with each other lockdown-style via laptop/phone/tablet. Expanding a short that went viral and gave director/co-writer Rob Savage an in with Shudder, who financed the film, it takes the glitches and irritations of the Zoom call and puts them to work dramatically. Realism is everything here and Savage and co-writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd have kept in the stuff that makes a Zoom call a Zoom call. So, the scratty getting-going moments, when one person is online but another isn’t, the terrible sound of a headset microphone … Read more
Encanto
If you liked Moana then you are the target for Encanto, a song-filled animated story of young female derring-do, set against the background of an ancient civilisation and with a sprinkling of magic to help things along. Polynesia did the decorative thing for Moana, it’s Mesoamerica in Encanto, but if actual knowledge brings you in out in hives, be not afraid, it’s largely just a few masks and other accessories borrowed from the Amerindian back catalogue to give Disney’s latest princess a USP that sets her apart from Pocahontas, Mulan, Merida et al. This one also wears glasses just to make her stand out from the increasingly homogenous big-eyed throng. The action takes … Read more
Yeelen
Like an Afro-futurist Arabian Nights or Homer’s Odyssey, 1987’s Yeelen tells in simple episodes the story of a young man on the run from his father. It’s often referred to as the greatest film ever to come out of Africa (no, Black Panther does not count) but even if you don’t buy that you’ll surely agree that it’s a beautiful film with an otherworldly atmosphere all its own. Director Soulemayne Cissé set out to make a film about Africa that rejected the usual colonial views of the continent – backward, savage etc – and largely succeeds, giving us a mysterious place steeped in tradition and running on old hierarchies and a rigid sense … Read more
La Grande Illusion
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 November First World War ends, 1914 On this day in 1914, hostilities officially ceased on the Western Front (which ran through Belgium, north-eastern France and Alsace-Lorraine – then German, now French), effective 11am. Though the First World War is often described as a victory of the allied powers, officially the result was a draw – the fighting between all concerned was simply called off. Though of course Germany had been beaten and in the Peace of Versailles, the Treaty arranged shortly afterwards, the looseness of this technical distinction became clear – Germany lost territory, its navy, most of its army … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 16 – Who’s Who???
The Nicolas Cage/John Travolta film Face/Off might perhaps have borrowed its central idea from Who’s Who???, a crackingly conceived episode of The Avengers built around the idea of a mind-swap between Steed and the dastardly Basil (Freddie Jones). There’s a bit plot business before we get to the big central idea – we are introduced to Basil and sidekick Lola (Patricia Haines) deliberately killing “one of our very best agents”, in the words of the original and as-yet-unaltered John Steed, expressly with the intention of flushing Steed and Peel out into the open to steal their identities. But nothing really held my interest until what looked like an old radar console from a … Read more
Oldboy
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 29 June iPhone launched, 2007 On this day in 2007, Apple launched the first version of the iPhone. Until then, mobile or cell phones had been phones first, with a range of other capabilities – camera, email, mp3 player, internet access – tagging along behind. Apple’s creative breakthrough was to design the iPhone as a very small computer which also had phone functionality. This might look like a “six and two threes” explanation but what the iPhone did, which no phone had done before, was deliver a more integrated service, so the phone became in effect a Swiss army knife of … Read more
Erotikon
What else did the director Mauritz Stiller do, apart from discover Greta Garbo and take her to America? Erotikon is one answer, a cult silent movie remarkably triumphing in a genre that usually needs dialogue to succeed. It’s a farce and Stiller gets it up and running in two opening scenes sketching his two main characters. In one corner Leo Charpentier, a professor of entomology who can wax lyrical about the sexual proclivities of the male beetle – how it likes to put it about a bit, in short – without ever realising that the same might apply to a) the female beetle, b) a human subject and c) most pertinently, his wife. We … Read more
EO
The Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s heyday was about 50 years, in the 1970s, a fact that make EO all the more remarkable. Here Skolimowski is, in his mid 80s, knocking it out of the park with a film that’s warm and tender, dramatically intense and also put together with a master’s touch. The even more remarkable thing is that at one point Skolimowski turned his back on film. For 17 years Skolimowski he was content to spend his time in his LA home painting. There were odd appearances in front of the camera – you might remember him interrogating Black Widow in The Avengers – but no cinema product bearing his name. But … Read more
