Popular Reviews
1 December 2014-12-01
Home entertainment releases this week in the UK The Inbetweeners 2 (4DVD, cert 15) Four go mad Down Under in the “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” follow-up to the British box office hit of 2011. The initial idea behind writer/director Damon Beesley and Iain Morris’s TV series was that the four misfits were the kind of nerdy guys who aren’t cool enough to be cool, not dumb enough to be losers – they’re just inbetween. Normal. But Beesley and Morris’s great skill, as well as jokes involving sex and bodily functions, is in locating these lads socially. So when we first meet them this time around, striving Will (Simon Bird) is at Bristol University, … Read more
Went the Day Well?
“Do not underestimate the British” is the message of Went the Day Well?, a tea-and-crumpets piece of wartime propaganda from Ealing Studios. It begins with a unit of Germans – disguised as British Tommies – arriving in the village of Bramley End and ends with the villagers uniting to give Fritz a bloody nose. Actually, much more than a bloody nose. The violence, when it eventually comes, is all the more shocking for being out of the blue. If I tell you that the village where it was shot, Turville in Buckinghamshire, was later used as the location for cosy comedy The Vicar of Dibley and cosy crime series Midsomer Murders that’ll give you … Read more
Margin Call
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 6 March Alan Greenspan born, 1926 On this day in 1926, the economist Alan Greenspan was born in New York City. His father was a stockbroker and analyst but Alan initially seemed to be heading towards a career in music, studying clarinet at Juilliard, playing with Woody Herman’s band, before switching to economics. He gained a bachelor’s and a master’s in economics before becoming an analyst, then a consultant. In 1974 he was appointed by President Gerald Ford as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Greenspan was a member of the Group of Thirty (wise men of economics, essentially) in … Read more
The 13th Warrior
A real proper old-fashioned Sunday afternoon film – epic in intention, ludicrous in execution. Considered to be unwatchable when it was test-screened, it was partially recast, rescored and reshot – by Michael Crichton, writer of the original book, who took over from John McTiernan, his Die Hard and Predator experience counting, apparently, for nothing. Crichton’s intervention doesn’t save it. Perhaps nothing could. Perhaps it was jinxed by the presence of Omar Sharif, an adornment of so many terrible films of a similar sort in days of yore. Or by his Nineties successor, Antonio Banderas. It’s an adaptation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf and Banderas plays Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, a Muslim banished to the … Read more
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense, is one of the best concert documentaries ever made. Now he’s done the same favour for Neil Young, who was just recovering from a brain aneurysm when he delivered this two-part country set in Nashville. The title itself is something of a misnomer, or a hard sell (take your pick) since the first part of the concert is Young’s Prairie Wind album in its totality. It’s only in part two that Young gets the back catalogue out, mostly songs from Harvest, After the Gold Rush and Harvest Moon, his slight return to the acoustic-y banjo-y style of Harvest. As with Stop Making Sense Demme starts … Read more
Stars at Noon
Once upon a time Claire Denis didn’t make genre movies. She made film you might designate broadly as dramas, or as French dramas, but most specifically as Claire Denis movies, films often with a strong emphasis on unspoken attraction (see Beau Travail, her masterpiece). But in recent years that has changed. In films like Bastards, a Get Carter-style crime drama, or High Life, a densely imagined piece of sci-fi, or Let the Sun Shine In, an ironic romance, Denis has shown she’s happy to make genre movies, as long as it’s on her terms. Which brings us to Stars at Noon, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in a shady Central American country run … Read more
King, Queen, Knave
Here’s the sort of film King, Queen, Knave is – one where a pratfall comes with a sound effect, in case the pratfall wasn’t obvious enough. One where a woman’s breasts seem ready to be fondled, as if fitted with a homing device for wayward hands. One where an attractive woman at a certain point in the evening slips into “something more comfortable”. One where bed springs are noisy. It’s from 1972, it might be no surprise to hear, and stars David Niven, Gina Lollobrigida and John Moulder-Brown – Niven plays German department store magnate Charles Dreyer, Lollobrigida is his lusty younger wife, Moulder-Brown is Dreyer’s nephew, a gauche and timid young thing thrown … Read more
The Killing
Stanley Kubrick really gets going with 1956’s The Killing, the first of his grand march through the genres. Paths of Glory, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut would follow but here Kubrick’s attempt to do genre movies in a distinctively different way focuses on film noir, and in particular the noirish heist. Yes, there had been earlier movies, Killer’s Kiss and Fear and Desire, but Kubrick considered those the training warm-ups of the ambitious amateur rather than considered finished products. Here, thanks to a partnership with producer James Harris, he had enough money and enough technical talent behind and in … Read more
The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux’s famous story of the Phantom – who lives in the bowels of the Paris opera house, falls for a pretty singer and wreaks terrible revenge when she won’t play footsie – seems to have a strange effect on artists. Leroux went super-gothic – very pretty girl, monstrous beast, subterranean caverns, stygian doom, death by fire and water and so on. And everyone since has more or less kept up the melodramatic pace, right down to Andrew Lloyd Webber – ‘the phantom of the opera is there/Inside your mind’ cackle, twirl. This 1925 silent film is actually the best of the lot – it’s got Lon ‘Man Of A Thousand Faces’ Chaney … Read more
Post Mortem
For a while there was an odd debate going on out there as to whether Post Mortem was or was not Hungary’s first horror movie. On the trivia pages of the IMDb someone claimed that it most definitely was. Since the claim was tucked in among positive reviews from various film festivals, it looked like a case of zealous PR. On the same page, somewhat on its own, was one line stating baldly that Post Mortem isn’t Hungary’s first horror film “even if the creators think it is”. Elsewhere on the same page there’s a claim that that honour should in fact go to a 1996 movie, Legyen világosság (aka Let There Be … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 25 – Six Hands across a Table
As I write, the UK is drunkenly stumbling towards its exit from the European Union. Rewind 55 years and Six Hands across the Table, the penultimate episode of the second series of The Avengers, is having a discussion similar to the one the country is having right now, a “whither us” debate about Britain – is it better going it alone or heading towards a more European version of the future? The drama opens at a meeting of a shipbuilding cartel, part of an industry in trouble. (For those too young, that “industry in trouble” idea is why the country signed up to the European project in the first place.) Digression aside, this … Read more
Run
Short, bleak and tense, Run is writer/director Scott Graham’s third feature, his third to have a single syllable title and the third to be about a person bridling against a life of limited opportunity. His previous two, Shell and Iona, were about semi-attached women, Run is about a very-married man. Finnie (Mark Stanley) is a big, permanently angry husband and father stuck in a crap job in a fish preparation plant in Fraserburgh (Graham’s home town), north west Scotland. Hating his job, he’s also resentful of his son, Kid (Anders Hayward), who’s just walked off the same job, and painfully resistant to the charms of Katie, his doting wife (Amy Manson). Both Katie … Read more
