Popular Reviews
Il Posto
Clear-eyed but compassionate, Il Posto is the other film by Ermanno Olmi, the one that isn’t The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Both are neo-realist to an extent and are concerned, obsessed, with the stuff of everyday life. Here, though, the focus is on the city, whereas Clogs was resolutely a tale of rural peasant life. It translates as The Job, Il Posto, and follows a young lad from the fringes of Milan, away from his traditional family and into the realm of the modern company. First he takes an aptitude test, where he’s inculcated into the world of time and motion, aptitude, the peg being created to fit the slot, rather than vice … Read more
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte tries to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And fails. It’s not even a valiant fail, instead director Robert Aldrich and co cynically re-run the same basic idea – two vintage dames doing battle most foul – but this time around one essential ingredient is lakcing. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis is here, though, the other half of the duelling duo who’d made Baby Jane‘s so memorable. Crawford walked off the production of this follow-up claiming to be ill. Eventually the insurers demanded she be let go. Or that’s how the story goes. It’s just as likely that Bette Davis orchestrated her exit. If you remember … Read more
Flag Day
Parenting tips with Sean Penn? Flag Day continues the actor/director’s interest in movies circling around the idea of family. In 2001’s The Pledge, childless, edge-of-retirement cop Jack Nicholson sought redemption by bringing in a child murderer, out of a personal sense of duty to the parents. In 2007’s Into the Wild, graduating student Emile Hirsch rejected the fast track to the top enabled by his wealthy parents and headed into the wilderness to… also seek redemption. Even if you didn’t like them, both were full of interesting moments and performances. More tightly focused than either of those on the actual parent/child bond, Flag Day tracks the on/off, up/down journey down the decades of charming … Read more
About Endlessness
In one of the first scenes in About Endlessness, a waiter brings a diner a bottle of wine, opens it, sniffs the cork to check the wine is OK, then walks over to the right hand side of the diner to fill his glass. Holding the bottle near the bottom, the way a practised waiter does, he pours the wine precisely into the glass, then keeps pouring, pouring, pouring, until the wine overflows and starts pooling over the table. The diner, who’s been stuck behind his newspaper, suddenly notices. If you’re not familiar with the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson, this is a typical entry into his world. About Endlessness doesn’t mark … Read more
Stay the Night
Boy meets girl in Stay the Night, a story of an antsy girl and an angry boy who meet by accident in downtown Toronto and dance around each other hesitantly while writer/director Renuka Jeyapalan teases the audience with the old will they/won’t they. Grace (Andrea Bang) works in HR but has just got passed over for promotion. Too standoffish for a people-facing position, her boss says. Too picky generally, her sexually adventurous room-mate tells her. Carter (Joe Scarpellino), meanwhile, is an ice hockey player who’s just been canned from his team. Having taken his position for granted, he’s been coasting – till now. Overnight, if he’s very lucky, his agent might find something for … Read more
The History Boys
Mr Chips meets Dead Poets Society in Nicholas Hytner’s adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play, and depending on how you approach it, it’s either a fairly satisfying or a slightly disappointing event. Personally, I was disappointed, but then maybe I’d expected more from a film which as a play had garnered such critical plaudits. Or maybe it was the play-iness of the whole thing that stuck slightly in the craw. The story concerns a bubbly class of boisterous Sheffield boys in the 1980s being crammed for Oxford and Cambridge by a gaggle of teachers – Hector the advocate of the thirst for knowledge (Richard Griffiths), Mr Irwin the teacher to the test (Stephen Campbell … Read more
Vortex
Grimly powerful and powerfully grim, Vortex is the story of a longtime married French couple on the final lap of the track. Elle and Lui, Gaspar Noé’s film calls them, Her and Him, universalising the particularity of what happens to the people played by Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento, a first lead role in front of the camera for the 80-ish-year-old director. It’s appropriate that Argento is known for horror because in its own domestic, downbeat beat way this is a horror film, the kind of one we’ll all one day have a leading role in, if we’re “lucky” enough to get that far. As in the recent Lux Aeterna, Noë does it … Read more
The Ghost Ship
The Ghost Ship isn’t a Jacques Tourneur film but it feels like one. Perhaps that’s because Tourneur’s editor, Mark Robson, is directing. And as well as misty gothic looks and a sense of foreboding, Robson has also borrowed from Tourneur his sense of psychological overload. The Ghost Ship isn’t a horror movie, or a supernatural tale, though it looks like one and even the title nudges us that way, much like Tourneur’s Cat People did. Instead it’s the story of a bright and capable third officer on board a ship who becomes increasingly alarmed at the behaviour of his captain, Will Stone, eventually blowing the whistle after becoming convinced that the captain’s cavalier … Read more
Holler
The precariat of America’s Rust Belt come under scrutiny in writer/director Nicole Riegel’s feature debut, Holler, a fleshing out of her short of the same name. It’s a kitchen-sinker, in most respects, which means a story set in a blue-collar/working class world where the odds are stacked against a central protagonist who may or may not get out of Dodge. Ruth is a smart girl in a town that’s falling apart. Her mother is a junkie awaiting either rehab or jail, whichever comes up first, it would seem. Her brother Blaze is clever enough to know that his sister has something he doesn’t and so it’s imperative that she go to college and … Read more
Camp X Ray
One of three 2014 Kristen Stewart films that seemed designed to shift her image out of Twilight territory and into something with a bit more actorly grunt, Camp X Ray works better as brand realignment than as drama. The other two were Clouds of Sils Maria and Still Alice, the first a Juliette Binoche arthouse flick, the other starring Julianne Moore as an English professor with early onset dementia. In both Stewart was second billing to a major league dramatic actor and metaphorically sat at the feet of the star and took notes. She didn’t have to do it. At the time she was one of the highest paid actress in the world … Read more
The People’s Joker
The People’s Joker started life as a re-edit of the original Joker movie, then that idea was junked in favour of shooting something that was all new, though leaning heavily on the intellectual property of Batman and his DC adversaries. So much did it lean, in fact, that it got as far as one screening at the Toronto International Film Festival before a shot across its bows from Warner Bros. got it yanked it from the festival. There were no further screenings, and nor were there any clear explanations from either director/star Vera Drew or from Warners whether a full-blown cease-and-desist letter had been sent, or whether something else had gone on in … Read more
The Memory of a Killer
A hitman’s final job. A cop on the case. A paedophile network run by very well connected men. Corruption at the top end of the police. What could easily have been an identikit crime thriller comes out as something a bit more in The Memory of a Killer, thanks to intelligent direction by Erik Van Looy, fine playing, in particular by Jan Decleir as the conflicted gun-for-hire on the home straight, music by Stephen Warbeck that dives into the rhythmic when the going gets tense, and editing that lifts the whole production a notch and helps make it look like it’s got more than a TV budget behind it. You might know it … Read more
