Popular Reviews
Farewell Amor
Think of how many films there have been about the Irish immigrant experience in the USA. Or the Italian. Farewell Amor is a real rarity, because it’s looks at that fraught, hopeful new beginning through African eyes. Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is a refugee from Angola who went through the civil war there and is now living in New York, where he drives a cab. He’s been separated from his family for 17 years, but is now finally reunited with them. In fact that’s the first scene of Ekwa Msangi’s film: Walter, his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) meeting at JFK airport. The look on Sylvia’s face … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 13 – Death Dispatch
John Steed and Cathy Gale’s party trick, a duet working variations on the theme of the invincibility of the British upper class, really comes into its own in Death Dispatch, the 13th broadcast episode of series two. We’re off in the sort of colonial landscape described by Graham Greene – of swarthy thugs, Freudian dictators and minor functionaries of the Empire, a place where life is cheap and death is pitiless, as we see in the opening shots of this story where a low-level envoy newly in from Washington is quickly despatched in his hotel room in Jamaica. Cut to Steed, ogling women from his Caribbean sun lounger and meeting his control, One-Ten … Read more
Mission: Impossible II
Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is back, tasked with saving the world from a dastardly villain intent on unleashing a deadly virus – cackle, preen. The “this time it’s personal” angle comes from the fact that the villain is a former Impossible-ist himself, and also the former lover of the woman Mr Hunt is now in love with. You’d have thought it a mission impossible to make a duff sequel to Brian De Palma’s all-action 1996 movie with the fine ingredients assembled here. For starters there’s the $125m budget and Cruise, still one of the biggest stars in the world (he earned $60m+ for this). Then there’s the damsel in distress, Thandie Newton, a … Read more
100 Years of… 3 Bad Men
3 Bad Men was John Ford’s last silent western, though it was obviously never billed as such (who knew, when it opened, that the silent era would end within a couple of years?). The unannounced end of an era was released in 1926 and Ford wouldn’t return to the genre until Stagecoach in 1939. It’s a Ford classic, though you can see all the key elements in this earlier film – admirably straightforward storytelling through powerful characters against stunning backdrops. For those who consider silent movies to be a lesser art form, the unsophisticated predecessor to the real deal, this could be an eye opener. It’s ironic, for a start, and that starts with … Read more
John Wick: Chapter 4
Since the last appearance of John Wick, in 2019, Keanu Reeves has been in a Toy Story movie, a Spongebob movie, a Matrix movie and has voiced Batman in the animation Super Pets. Not bad for someone whose career at first glance alternates insane bursts of activity with lengthy snoozes. And so to the insanely grandiose John Wick: Chapter 4, another case of not much seeming to happen punctuated with frenzies of excitement. It’s the first film in the sequence not written by Derek Kolstad, who first pitched the idea of a supercool and unstoppable assassin re-entering the fray after his dog is killed in a screenplay originally titled Scorn. Keanu Reeves liked … Read more
On Dangerous Ground
One of the most cultish of Hollywood directors, Nicholas Ray, made his directorial debut in 1949. 1951’s On Dangerous Ground was his seventh film in two years (eighth, if you count Roseanna McCoy, where he replaced director Irving Reiss). If this maverick made films in a hurry, he also made films that moved at speed. On Dangerous Ground almost tells two stories before heading off to tell two more. The linking factor is Robert Ryan, in one of his trademark masculine-but-neurotic roles, playing Jim Wilson, a cop with a tendency to punch first and think later. First up, there’s a cop killer on the loose, and Wilson, along with buddies Pop (Charles Kemper) … Read more
Charley Varrick
Charley Varrick, a neo-noir from 1973, is much better than its mixed reputation would suggest. Lean and fast, dark and enigmatic, it stars Walter Matthau as a crop sprayer who heists a smalltown bank in the hope of making a fair amount of easy money. Nothing too massive, just a cushion. But when he and his sidekick come to count their haul, it turns out that it’s mostly 50s and 100s, not dollar bills, fives and tens as expected. They have inadvertently heisted a lot more money than they anticipated. This, for Charley, is a problem. It means the police will be particularly keen to get the money back. So will the bank. … Read more
Magic Mike’s Last Dance
And so the franchise built around Channing Tatum’s early career as a male stripper comes to an end, with one bang and, doubtless, several whimpers. Magic Mike’s Last Dance sees Steven Soderbergh return as director, director of photography and editor, writing credit goes again to Reid Carolin and Tatum makes it three in a row as he dry-humps a role that’s been good to him. The “bang” refers to Salma Hayek’s character, the immensely rich Maxandra Mendoza, who hooks up with down-on-his-luck Mike Lane (Tatum) early on, then whisks him away to the UK after he demonstrates his Magic in a raunchy private routine that leads to the “happy finish” Mendoza expressly said … Read more
Barbarian
A young woman in Detroit for a job interview turns up at the Airbnb she booked online only to find that there’s a man already in there. A double booking. It’s dark, it’s late and it’s raining and there’s a convention in town, so finding another place to stay is going to be a stretch. After several minutes of her wringing her hands and him shifting his weight nervously from one leg to another, he does the gallant thing – no, he doesn’t vacate and leave it to her, but he does offer her the bed. He’ll sleep on the sofa, he says. The bedroom door has a lock on it and he’s … Read more
Two of Us
I was intending to watch Two of Us (aka Deux) a few weeks ago and in fact did watch a film called Two of Us, just not this one. That one was a zombie movie set in Thailand. This one is a tense human drama set in Paris. Do not confuse. Although both feature a pair of women in the central roles, the females in the Thai movie were young women. The women in question here are both pensioners, a pair of secretive lesbians who have lived next door to each other for decades. To be more precise they have both lived in the apartment of Madeleine (Martine Chevallier), while Nina (Barbara Sukowa) … Read more
Stories from the Chestnut Woods
Stories from the Chestnut Woods could so easily have been a misery memoir or poverty porn but thankfully it’s not. Instead director/writer Gregor Bozic has crafted an elegiac film of real beauty and poignancy. It’s set on the border where old Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) meets Italy, a region that’s been in decline for a long time and, judging by most of the houses and the people in them, has seen better days. The people who are left are either old, or they’re young and have a plan to get out quick and take advantage of the prosperity that’s transforming much of the rest of Europe in the post Second World War era. Mario … Read more
Jerichow
Jerichow is the fourth collaboration between director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss – both names a guarantee of at least a degree of excellence. But before we get there – just quickly skimming through Petzold’s entries on the IMDB (research!) to see which films actually comprise the somewhat disputed “ghost trilogy” (Petzold and Hoss’s first three collaborations), I noticed that someone has added notes to a number of Petzold’s films, under the Trivia section. How closely one film resembles Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another Claude Chabrol’s Que la Bête Meure, yet another Sidney Lumet’s Running On Empty, and so on. And how in all of these cases there is no reference back to the … Read more
