Popular Reviews
The True Adventures of Wolfboy
The True Adventures of Wolfboy. Sounds like it might be a superhero movie – Wolfboy as a junior Wolverine. Or a supervillain movie – a Mini-Me Werewolf. In fact it’s neither. This is the everyday story of a teenage boy covered in hair, lots of it. And before we go any further, yes, he’s tried depilatory products, but the hair just comes back twice as thick. “I’m normal, I”m a normal kid,” says Paul (Jaeden Martell, who was going by the name Jaeden Lieberher last time I saw him, in 2016’s Midnight Special), a 13-year-old bullied by the horrible other kids, cowed into wearing a balaclava, a freak in his own eyes as much … Read more
Make Way for Tomorrow
Make Way for Tomorrow, what a purposeful title that is, a call to arms in the struggle for a brighter, more modern future. Get Out of the Way might be a balder, less glorious and less ironic way of expressing the sentiment behind that title, since this is a story about two old timers in their 60s and the adult children they lean on in their hour of need. The film is about the response of the children, who step swiftly away from the plate. Though they never quite put it quite this honestly, the kids are too busy leading their own lives to have time and space for the oldsters. It’s a … Read more
Biosphere
According to Charles Darwin and every credible evolutionary scientist since, individuals do not mutate, species do. But it suits the makers of Biosphere to imagine that that’s how evolution works – the survival of the fittest obviously being the fittest individual. Let’s just say it again – it does not work that way. OK, so, parking that objection and instead accepting “individual mutation” as a metaphor being used to challenge the “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” crowd, let’s dive into this strange two-hander set in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone apart from two men are dead. Billy and Ray. Two dudes. Bro’s. We meet them jogging around … Read more
Unclenching the Fists
Unclenching the Fists could so easily be poverty porn but manages not to be, thanks to an ending offering a sliver of salvation, and a look that’s deliberately trying to avoid the charge that this is just another in a very long series of films using poor people to tell the same story over and over again – it’s tough at the bottom. We’re in Ossetia, one of those regions that were all but subsumed by the old USSR but seem to be having a revival in the post-Communist era. Even so, it’s a poor place, and the town where Kira Kovalenko’s film is set sits in a ravine where it’s hemmed in … Read more
The Southerner
Fleeing France as the Nazis advanced, French director Jean Renoir went to Hollywood, where he tried to make more of the lyrical, socially engaged films that had made his name back home. 1945’s The Southerner was about as close as he got, but to make his third US feature he had to exit the studio system and do it as an independent. What do you know, it was his best received film, three-times Oscar-nominated, including one for Renoir himself as director. It was as near as he’d ever get to an Academy Award. Being a second-string production made outside the system meant not having access to big-name talent, but Zachary Scott and Betty … Read more
La poison
The misdirection starts early in the superb dark French farce from 1951 La poison (no prizes for guessing it translates as Poison). Right with the title, in fact, which suggests that poison, or a poisoning, is what the film is going to be about. It isn’t. Or it is, but not in the way the title might suggest. But first – more sleight of hand – writer/director Sacha Guitry, a boulevardier of the old school, introduces his cast, by their real names, starting with his star, Michel Simon, a big bear of a man Guitry praises effusively before moving on to Simon’s co-stars, all of whom get the buckets-of-praise treatment. Then on to … Read more
Made in England: the Films of Powell and Pressburger
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is another of those Michael Scorsese Does… affairs (see My Voyage to Italy), which is to say a hot letter from a fan to the object of his adoration, this time the British duo behind movies like A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus. So, no criticisms are to be found of the work, nor much in the way of examination of character or psyche, except where it touches the film-making. Instead, a wholesome, honest, thorough, well-researched, expertly assembled chronological run-through of what the two men did together, fronted and narrated throughout by an admiring and generous Scorsese, who regularly cross-references what P&P … Read more
Beasts Clawing at Straws
Beasts Clawing at Straws also goes by the English-language title of Beasts That Cling to the Straw but Rats in a Sack would also be a useful way of translating its original Korean title. It’s a story about different sets of people, all connected by a Louis Vuitton holdall full of cash, which we first see in the movie’s opening shot. Then, in 1960s heist-movie opening-credit style, the camera follows the holdall at its level while an unidentified someone carries it to a left luggage locker and leaves it there. As the movie ends, the bag is once again picked up and the camera follows it, again at bag height, off out onto … Read more
Hôtel du Nord
It’s soap, it’s melodrama, have a go if you like, but if it’s absolutely nothing else, Marcel Carné’s 1938 hit Hôtel du Nord is an object lesson in how to use a hair light. Watch it for its looks rather than its plot, in other words, which slaloms about a touch preposterously, though its actors are beyond criticism. Carné preceded it with Port of Shadows, and followed up with Le Jour Se Lève, though it can’t match either for punch, coherence or consistent characterisation. Apart from one ridiculous digression to the south of France en route to Egypt, it all takes place in and around the Hôtel du Nord, a Paris flophouse where … Read more
Into the Labyrinth
Dustin Hoffman and Toni Servillo in the same film? Into the Labyrinth (aka L’uomo del labirinto) is a properly intriguing prospect. Hoffman a madness-in-his-Method actor since his breakthrough in 1967’s The Graduate, Servillo the king of the hangdog deapan – or is that the deadpan hangdog? – and long-time collaborator with Paolo Sorrentino (in films like The Great Beauty and The Consequences of Love). Before you get too excited, they share only one scene together, and that’s right at the end, an afterthought possibly tacked on to give the publicity machine more to work with (and I’ve obliged by using the resulting picture). The two actors inhabit entirely different filmic universes, united only … Read more
The Way You Wanted Me aka Sellaisena kuin sinä minut halusit
Something of an outsider, an unknown quantity even by the standards of old cinema from far-flung corners of Europe, Teuvo Tulio is quite a maverick and The Way You Wanted Me (Sellaisena kuin sinä minut halusit, in the original Finnish) is a great example of what he does. A stark and direct melodrama, it’s a noir-meets-Douglas Sirk story of a sweet country lass corrupted by big-city morality and then tormented by fate, which repeatedly holds up a chance of redemption only to snatch it away again. Pushkin’s The Postmaster seems to provide the bare bones of the plot, and though Tulio has changed a lot of the particulars, certain key scenes map pretty … Read more
See How They Run
A kind of meta-The Mousetrap, See How They Run plonks itself down on the sofa alongside the other representatives of the whodunit revival – the likes of Knives Out and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Agatha Christie. In essence it’s Agatha Christie’s venerable long-running play subjected to mock trial by a thousand in-jokes, some knowing, others oblique. If a slightly more cerebral Sunday afternoon movie is what you’re looking for, this could be for you. The film comes at The Mousetrap sideways because the Agatha Christie estate will not sanction any film version of the play until its London West End run is over (it’s been running since 1952 and shows no sign of … Read more
