Popular Reviews
I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
In I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (originally Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari), Romanian auteur Radu Jude takes on the his country’s treatment of the Jews in the Second World War, as part of Hitler’s Final Solution. The title comes from a speech made by Romanian leader Ion Antonescu in 1941, which effectively initiated the campaign of mass murder on the Eastern Front. Romania was allied with the Nazis at the time. Ioana Iacob stars as a stand-in for Jude, playing Mariana, a Romanian director attempting to put on a show about Romanian wartime atrocities and getting pushback at every turn. Researching … Read more
Eden
Ron Howard loves a fact-based story and in Eden he delivers a punchy one about romantic and naive people getting a rude awakening – the natural state of humanity isn’t bliss but blood. After recent films about Pavarotti, JD Vance and Jim Henson, Howard turns to the far less famous Margret Wittmer, who along with her husband Heinz and son Harry decamped to a remote island idyll in the Galapagos in the 1930s. There, inspired by the example of atheist intellectual vegans Friedrich Ritter and partner Dore Strauch, the Wittmers hoped to build a new life alongside them, and possibly chart a new course for humanity while doing so. It all went badly … Read more
On the Rocks
A Sofia Coppola movie with Bill Murray as an agent of misrule? Lost in Translation II is the guiding principle of On the Rocks, though “stars” Rashida Jones and Marlon Wayans might disagree. First up, we’re served Jones and Wayans hot and then cold – an opening scene shows Laura (Jones) and Dean (Wayans) in love and hot for each other sneaking away from their own wedding party to take a swim in the pool in the hotel basement. Cut to some years later and Dean arrives home late from a work thing, kisses Laura sleepily and then reacts with surprise when she says something. Was he expecting someone else? She was in … Read more
Dirt Music
A popular and critically acclaimed novel somehow just doesn’t make it to the screen in Dirt Music, an Outback tale about people with broken lives trying to find romance. It’s the slushy sort of story often associated with women’s fiction – chick lit, if you like. Georgia (Kelly Macdonald) is out swimming naked in the sea one hot, hot night when she spies a boat stealing crayfish from her husband’s fishing grounds. She says nothing but the poacher sees her and they exchange a couple of meaningless words and some more meaningful looks. Sparks would fly if she weren’t so damp. Some days later they do, when Georgia’s car breaks down and Luther … Read more
Dune: Part Two
Let’s get straight to the verdict. Dune: Part Two is visually spectacular but dramatically inert, the good stuff attributable to its remarkable director Denis Villeneuve, the bad stuff down to the writer of the original novel/doorstop, Frank Herbert. This is not going to be how everyone sees it, of course, what sort of a world would that be? But if you’re one of the people who picked up Herbert’s original Dune at some point only eventually to put/fling it down again after tiring of the relentless one-thing-after-anotherness of it (see also Tolkien) the movie won’t offer much that the book didn’t, its retina-cleansing visuals to one side. It picks up right where Part … Read more
The Love of Jeanne Ney
The Love of Jeanne Ney is one of those torrid love stories told against a backdrop of roiling conflict. Or that’s what it looks like at the outset. But by the end it’s become more like a showcase for everything the great Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst could do – all the genres in all the styles. By this point in his career, Pabst had given Greta Garbo her first starring role two years before in 1925’s Joyless Street (aka Die freudlose Gasse). Two years later he would turn Louise Brooks into a global icon with Pandora’s Box. If Jeanne Ney was a bit of bait designed to lure Hollywood into hiring him, … Read more
Why Don’t You Just Die!
The trailer does not lie. Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa, sdokhni in the original Russian) is a camp melodrama awash with blood, gruesomeness, novel ways of hurting people and comic-book cruelty. It’s as if all the horrible things that ever happened to Wile E Coyote were bundled together and then brought to the screen by a Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez in one of their Grindhouse jaunts. The opening shot: a young man with a fantastically broken nose (Aleksandr Kuznetsov, and that’s his real nose) is waiting outside an apartment with a hammer behind his back. The door after much knocking opens. It is a bullet-headed man (Vitaliy Khaev). Andrey, the young … Read more
Way of the Morris
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 8 May First commemorative period of silence proposed, 1919 On this day in 1919, Edward George Honey, an Australian former soldier and journalist, first proposed the idea of a silence to honour the dead of the Great War. He was living in London at the time, and suggested it in a letter written to the London Evening News. Honey mooted a five minute silence, to commune with “the Glorious Dead who won us peace”, having been upset by the sight of people dancing in the streets on Armistice Day in 1918. Honey’s idea was either taken up by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, or … Read more
The Queen of Versailles
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 June John Maynard Keynes born, 1883 On this day in the 1883, the economist John Maynard Keynes was born, in Cambridge, to an economist father and a social reformer mother. A mathematics prodigy as a child, he won a scholarship to Eton College, then went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics on a scholarship, graduating in 1904. After a short career as a clerk in the India Office, Keynes resigned and returned to Cambridge, where he started studying economics. By 1909 he had published his first article on economics. By 1911 he was editor of The Economic Journal. … Read more
100 Years of… The Strong Man
Two people do special things in 1926’s The Strong Man. The first is director Frank Capra, inventing film language on the hoof in his feature debut and showing us why he was such a force on the 20th-century film scene. The other is Harry Langdon, demonstrating an ability to animate dead space with his fluid features and expressive body. The story is really a case of the tail wagging the dog and it takes a long time to get to the film’s point – elaborately conceived and expertly executed stunts. First there’s a preamble in the Great War, where Harry’s hapless soldier Paul Bergot is taking potshots at Germans with his catapult in … Read more
Private Schulz
The six-part TV series Private Schulz was a hit when it first aired and has become something of a cult since it was first broadcast in 1981. Made by the BBC in collaboration with the Australian ABC, it was the last outing for the great TV writer Jack Pulman, whose I, Claudius adaptation had been one of the great successes of the 1970s and who was the BBC’s go-to man for adaptations of big novels (Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks). It was also the first, and only collaboration between its stars, Michael Elphick and Ian Richardson, both scene-stealers extraordinaire, but who came at upstaging from … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 22 – What the Butler Saw
What the Butler Saw is an episode about what the butler did rather than saw, though it does kick off with John Le Mesurier – tongue doing at least half of his acting as usual – handing his employer a gun and looking on as a minion asking for too large a cut of an ill-gotten gain is murdered. What the butler actually saw, in the soft-porn flickerbook images of the Victorian Mutoscope machines, was his mistress disrobing. Appropriately, the reference points in this episode are Victorian – the 1949 Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (set in Victorian times) in particular. Which is why Steed, aiming to find out which of a … Read more
