Popular Reviews
The Wrong Box
Lovely wallpaper. It’s not the highest praise you could give to a film, but The Wrong Box is one of those British films of the 1960s that’s so fundamentally terrible that you are left scrabbling to find something good to say about it. It’s a bad picture but isn’t the frame lovely? It’s one of those sub-Agatha Christie comic capers set in the Victorian era, where two ancient brothers are the last survivors of an elaborate tontine pact set up decades before – everyone pays in but only the last surviving member benefits from the payout – with John Mills and Ralph Richardson as Masterman and Joseph Finsbury, the two old duffers trying … Read more
10 November 2014-11-10
Out in the UK This Week X-Men: Days of Future Past (Fox, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Films that frontload their action, especially films that are big-screen event movies as all the X-Men series are, often do so because, secretly, they know they’re small-screen channel-hoppers. So when the seventh X-Men movie in 14 years kicked off with a big action sequence, I started scribbling “lack of confidence” in my notes. I was totally wrong. Director Bryan Singer might be lacking for friends in Hollywood right now – what with “twink party” allegations and all – but he’s absolutely on his game here. Maybe, in fact, he feels like he’s got something to prove. For starters, … 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
Enzo
If it’s gay versus queer then gay wins out in Enzo, a coming-of-age/coming-out drama of the old school, where the homosexuality is the subject under discussion, the problem to be solved, rather than window-dressing to something else. Enzo is a 16-year-old French lad who has rejected the life that was in his stars. Currently working as a labourer, he was meant to be following a similar trajectory to his brother – university, some sort of career – but has instead dropped out and is hefting sacks about on a building site where his soft hands are picking up blisters. As we meet him, Enzo is being given a hard time by his boss, the … Read more
7 September 2015-09-07
Out This Week John Wick (Warner, cert 15) Like some kind of undead film star, Keanu Reeves manages magnificent returns every few years – Speed, The Matrix and now John Wick, a super-sleek bit of badass comic-book adaptation relying heavily on Reeves’s blank persona (no one does it better) for much of its appeal. He plays a retired hitman so frightening that, we’re shown, even incredibly hard hardmen blench when they hear he’s on the warpath – after some damn fool goes and kills the pet dog that was the only reminder of his dead wife. And that’s all you need to know about the plot. The screenplay is incredibly smart, a collection of … Read more
Omen
Belgian rapper Baloji’s feature debut Omen (Augure in French) starts with an image that might have come from a spaghetti western. To a whistled tune on the soundtrack a lone rider on horseback pitches up at a watering hole. Dismounting, the figure pulls one of her breasts from under her dark robes and squirts what looks like bloody milk into the water. It’s an arresting and unsettling start to a film that mixes stuff like this – African magical realism, you could call it – with a seemingly mundane story of a black African and his white European wife-to-be back in the Congo to sort out some family business. For Koffi (Marc Zinga) … Read more
Good Bye Lenin!
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 June Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech, 1987 On this day in 1987, US president Ronald Reagan made a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, where the Berlin Wall erected in 1961 by the Soviets bisected the city, making the Wall and Berlin the symbol of the Cold War. The speech was made in honour of Berlin’s 750th anniversary and in a climate of increasing openness and freedom in the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc. The speech has a famous peroration “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if … Read more
18 May 2015-05-18
Out This Week Ex Machina (Universal, cert 15) Joining Gravity and Interstellar, as well as a host of lower budget films, Ex Machina shows we’re in a golden age of sci-fi, this film’s theme being consciousness and whether the Turing Test has been passed: that a robot has become intellectually indistinguishable from a human. Or is it the Test itself that’s being tested? Domhnall Gleeson is the geek brought in by his messianic megatech wizard boss (Oscar Isaac) to give the yay or nay, Alicia Vikander is the robot he clearly falls for the very first second he claps eyes on her – and with face, breasts and buttocks Vikander’s own, while the rest … Read more
We Have a Pope
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 October Second Vatican Council convenes, 1962 On this day in 1962, Pope John XXIII formally opened the Second Vatican Council. The first Vatican Council had been held nearly 100 years before, the most remembered of its declarations being that the Pope was infallible, when speaking ex cathedra. But back, or forward, to the Second, its aim being, broadly, to work out what the hell to do with the 20th century. The solution was to modernise. Out went the insistence that the Catholic church was the only way to sanctification and truth. Out went the Latin mass. In came a renewed … Read more
Volver
Pedro Almodóvar is bang back on form in a film celebrating a way of life he’s spent the best part of his artistic life revolting against – family centred, non-cosmopolitan, conservative, Catholic. Well, Generalissimo Franco has been dead a while now.The word Volver means “return” in Spanish, and if Almodóvar is returning to something he long ago rejected – with a fair degree of tenderness (ah, maturity) – Penelope Cruz is also back in a Spanish speaking role, in her home country, in the sort of film she started out in, a drama with its feet in familiar soil but its head who knows where (see Abre los Ojos). It’s set in one … Read more
22 July 2013-07-22
Out in the UK This Week In The House (Momentum, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) François Ozon’s thriller/farce is as clever as you’d expect from a man who gave us the relationship-in-reverse drama 5X2. Here he’s again examining the nature of storytelling with a film about a teacher who becomes infatuated with his star pupil’s stories, each of which ends with a “to be continued”. And in the continuation the story – and the teenager writing them – becomes more and more involved in the older man’s life. There’s post-structuralism in there, if you’re feeling smart. But the whole thing works just as well as a dark farce played to the hilt by a brilliant … Read more
Secret Honor
Secret Honor is one of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s favourite films, was loved by late lamented critic Roger Ebert and is one of the select fraction of movies given a home in Criterion’s choice “Collection”. Most people have never heard of it, though they do know its maker, Robert Altman, director of Mash, The Long Goodbye and Nashville, and later The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park. Secret Honor came between those two blocks of three, in the period after the relative flop of 1980’s Popeye and the comeback of 1992’s The Player, when no matter what Altman did (film, TV or theatre) nothing really seemed to hit bullseye. Nor, to be frank, … Read more
