Popular Reviews
Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint
Three great abstract artists died in 1944, this revelatory German documentary from 2019 tells us. Two of them haunt the gift shops of the world’s museums of modern art: Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. The third deserves to be in there with them, according to Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint (Jenseits des Sichtbaren – Hilma af Klint) – which goes on to make an even bigger claim. That this obscure artist working in relative isolation in Sweden was not just one of the greats but the very first abstract artist, and so one of the major figures in 20th century painting. Piet and Wassily need to budge up. When MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction … Read more
Ride the Pink Horse
Ride the Pink Horse? Strange title. A gay slur, perhaps? Like “playing the pink oboe”, maybe? But as the title music comes up, all clippity cloppity, this unusual movie from 1947 sends us off in yet another direction. Because this isn’t a cowboy movie either, or even something more esoteric, it’s an unusual slice of dark noir set, atypically, on the Mexican border, where an ex-soldier recently back from the Second World War arrives in town to exact revenge on the guy who caused the death of his old comrade-in-arms. Robert Montgomery plays the ex-soldier, Gagin, and Fred Clark plays the slippery Mr Hugo, from whom revenge will be extracted, that’s if Gagin … Read more
Un Comisar Acuzã
The Romanian Spielberg is how director Sergiu Nicolaescu is often described. That’s a bit misleading but catches a flavour of the prolific writer/director/actor who from the 1960s until his death in 2013 made films designed to be seen by as many people as possible. 1974’s Un Comisar Acuzã is a prime example of what he was all about. A classic crime thriller with a distinctly political angle, it both plays to the Communist Ceaușescu regime’s notion of itself as the font of justice and, glimpsed side-on, critiques it, all the while delivering action, thrills, a fast-moving narrative and a hero who’s easy to like. Useful background to have before going in: in the … Read more
The Wolf of Snow Hollow
Young couple PJ and Brianne check in to a holiday cabin. They’re in love. He’s intending to propose later that evening. But before that, they go out to dinner, PJ gets on the wrong side of some local rednecks and things almost get physical. Back at the cabin, while PJ showers, Brianne is attacked and dismembered by a person or thing unknown. When the cops show up, there are body parts everywhere and Brianne’s vagina is missing. That gruesome detail is emblematic of a film otherwise made strictly to a formula, the twist added by writer/director/star Jim Cummings lifting everything onto another plane. This sort of thing used to happen from time to … Read more
Gran Torino
Old grizzled Clint Eastwood plays Shirty Harry in a film about redemption, ageing, learning to live with others, sacrifice but most of all about the myth of Clint himself. The skimpy plot concerns a grumpy Korean war veteran whose neighbourhood has gone to the dogs, evidence of which he sees in his immigrant neighbours, who are Hmong people. A view reinforced when the young son tries to steal his 1972 Gran Torino and underlined later on when he sets about “teaching the youngster a lesson”, which of course teaches him a few things he didn’t know. Like Unforgiven the tensions comes from the question “when is Clint going to strap the guns back … Read more
The Outside Story
Brian Tyree Henry goes from second string actor to star in The Outside Story. He’s probably best known from the TV series Atlanta, which has acted as a finishing school for talents including LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz. More recently you might have seen Henry’s face in Godzilla vs. Kong, as a nerdy conspiracy theorist. Writer/director Casimir Nozowski also gets an upgrade, having made a number of New York-centric shorts and directed a reality foodie show – and you can see the influence of both in The Outside Story. After a year of various levels of lockdowns, Henry is playing a character who’ll be familiar to many, as the video editor whose laptop-based … Read more
The Marriage of Maria Braun
The first of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy”, The Marriage of Maria Braun (aka Die Ehe der Maria Braun) is a canonical part of the New German Cinema era of the 1970s and in its key figure, Maria (Hanna Schygulla), gives us post-War Germany’s spectacular economic rebirth (die Wirtschaftswunder) distilled down into a single person. Fassbinder starts us off in the dog days of the Second World War. The first image on the screen is a portrait of Hitler, seconds later dislodged by the shock wave from a falling bomb to reveal a man and woman in the process of getting married while the world literally explodes around them. Maria and Hermann. Cut … Read more
Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa kicks off with an urgent, arresting image laying out what’s at stake, archive footage of George Wallace making his infamous “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation for ever!” pitch on the campaign stump in 1963, before even more footage shows Wallace in the full glare of the TV cameras blocking the entrance to the University of Alabama to two black students. A flash even further back in time, to 1953, and a car containing a white woman and a black woman, caught in freeze frame, the two having run away together. They ended up, we learn, so badly disfigured in the burnt-out hull of the car that their bodies were unrecognisable. And … Read more
BAC Nord
BAC Nord (released by Netflix as The Stronghold) tells the story of a case that’s notorious in the annals of French policing, when a unit of Marseille cops was hauled in and accused of drug trafficking and dealing. Their defence? They were part of an undercover and slightly off-limits operation ordered from higher up and now being officially denied. Whether that was or wasn’t the case is what the film is about, though it makes it clear from the beginning that it clearly was. And in the characters of the three main characters – granite-tough middle-aged leader Grégory Cerva (Gilles Lellouche), new family man Yass (Karim Leklou) and charming playa Antoine (François Civil) … Read more
The Act of Killing
“For killing people trousers should be thick,” says Anwar, the “star” and chief exhibit in this bizarre documentary. He’s the retired head executioner of an Indonesian death squad reliving his glory days garrotting hundreds if not thousands of “communists” (ie anyone in the way) with a piece of thick wire in the mid 1960s. And though now knocking on a bit he shows us how he did it, in the place he did it, a cement yard out the back of what looks like a restaurant. Bizarre though this is, there is more to come, because what the makers of this film have done – not sure if it was their idea or … Read more
Trouble in Paradise
Trouble in Paradise was Ernst Lubitsch’s favourite of his own films. It’s 83 quick minutes of screwball farce, made in 1932 just as Hollywood was putting its own house in order (before the government stepped in and did it), one of the highlights of the pre-Code era. It’s more sexually risqué than later films, for sure, though that isn’t what got it into trouble when Paramount tried and failed to re-issue it in 1935. Banned for decades, it wasn’t really seen again until the 1960s It’s the story of a conman called Gaston and a thief called Lily who try to swindle/steal each other but instead fall in love. Realising they’re a crack … Read more
Stations of the Cross aka Kreuzweg
A powerful and formally austere German drama that does exactly what it says on the label, Stations of the Cross charts the sad journey of one vivacious Catholic girl to an early grave in 14 grim instalments which echo those of Jesus Christ on the way to Calvary. The Catholics also knew the Stations as the Via Dolorosa, or the Way of Sorrows, the Latin name doubly appropriate here since devout, cusping-on-puberty Maria (a remarkable Lea Van Acken) is being prepared for her confirmation by the charismatic Father Weber (Florian Stetter), a priest in a breakaway part of the Catholic Church that still uses Latin. This branch of the Church is also positively … Read more
