Popular Reviews
Spider Baby
Spider Baby was exploitation director Jack Hill’s first solo feature (Blood Bath was a collaboration) but didn’t get released until after what’s often listed as his first film, but isn’t, 1966’s Mondo Keyhole. Ah, Mondo – does that make Hill one of those directors who knock out trashy, sex-drenched, shock-filed schlock for the drive-in crowd? Yes and no, but much more specifically no in the case of Spider Baby, whose alternative titles – The Liver Eaters, Attack of the Liver Eaters and Cannibal Orgy – might suggest otherwise. This is a good-looking, sharply shot, well acted movie with good production values and a keen sense of craft – the continuity works! Rather than … Read more
The Beekeeper
Jason Statham enters the territory of John Wick, Taken and The Equalizer (feel free to add your own) with The Beekeeper, a midweight actioner marked out by spectacular fight sequences and violence that’s ingenious and gloriously brutal. He plays one of those retired guys who used to be something in the secret service. They’re never regular CIA or anything so crass, these ex-operatives, but onetime members of elite squads who can eat whole SWAT teams for breakfast, even though they’re now retired, out of shape and don’t really want to swing into action. But swing into action they must once they’ve been triggered by the death of a dog, in John Wick’s case, … Read more
Elstree 1976
The Kickstarter-funded Elstree 1976 looks like it’s going to be about Star Wars, not least because of the packaging and that being the year that the studio to the north of London was booked out by George Lucas to make his epic space adventure. It is, tangentially, but in fact it’s more a meditation on life and the way its rewards are portioned out. Director/interviewer Jon Spira was born in 1976, which means he’s fanboy generation rather than first-hand participant, but he’s an able interviewer of the ladies and gents who were there. Not the Harrison Fords or Mark Hammils, but the likes of Paul Blake, Laurie Goode, Anthony Forrest and Pam Rose, … Read more
Criminal Lovers
Criminal Lovers. Is that lovers who are criminals? Or people who love criminals? There’s no such ambiguity in the original French title of François Ozon’s 1999 shocker. Les amants criminels makes clear these are lovers who are criminals. No ambiguity at all, in a film shot through with it from start to finish. In what looks like a French reworking of Natural Born Killers, but is in fact a reworking of the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, Ozon’s film opens with a pair of loved-up teenagers – the passive Luc (Jérémie Renier) and femme very fatale Alice (Natacha Régnier) – indulging in a bit of mild S&M. Sex, sex, sex seems to be the … Read more
Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events
Somewhere near the end of this highly anticipated children’s adventure movie there’s a cameo by Dustin Hoffman. He just blurs on, says a couple of indistinct phrases and is not seen again. The pointlessness of his appearance is indicative of what’s wrong with this film, a series of disconnected and poorly motivated events which no amount of star power – Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep, Billy Connolly, Timothy Spall – can give shape to. There’s even narration courtesy of Jude Law, though it could be Father Christmas for all the difference it makes. The plot follows three young orphans, bookish Klaus, resourceful Emily and gurgling infant Sunny, as they are farmed out to a … Read more
The Glass Key
Watching The Glass Key you wouldn’t think it was the inspiration behind Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which itself inspired Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. But they’re in there if you peel back the 1942 fashions and noirish looks and swap out Alan Ladd for Toshirô Mifune or Clint Eastwood. Ladd plays the cool, smart, tough loner caught between various interacting groups of crooks, politicians, the police and the media, all in various ways in cahoots but falling out as an election swings into view and existing power dynamics are threatened. Ed Beaumont (Ladd) is a fixer for Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), a man who is himself a fixer, a shady operator trying to swing the … Read more
22 August 2016-08-22
Out This Week The Jungle Book (Disney, cert PG) A careful and clever live-action retread by Disney of their 1967 animated classic. Perhaps the cleverest thing Disney did this time round was to hire Jon Favreau, a director who seems, unlike the Zack Snyders of the world, to understand that wonder and awe are key components of films, especially those aimed at children and the child in us all – that first Iron Man movie, when Tony Stark is first getting to grips with his new suit, and is exhilarated almost beyond belief at the sheer simple sensation of flying, that’s the sort of thing Favreau does well. As for plot, it’s the … Read more
James Bond’s Testicles
Have you ever noticed how James Bond is always getting his balls interfered with? The world’s most virile spy is bursting with so much testosterone that women want to get their hands on them and can’t help but fall into bed with him. Men, on the other hand, feel so threatened they want to crush him/them. Either that, or his heterosexual payload intimidates them so much that they come over all gay – again and again 007 is beset by the world’s elite effete, men with an exaggerated interest in long-haired cats and their own clothes, and who treat beautiful women with a casual disregard. Most notably there was the dual shape of … Read more
10 Things I Hate About You
Apparently if you’re drunk enough when you say the title of this film, it sounds like, “The Taming Of The Shrew”. Whatever. When it came out in 1999 it tapped into two of the big trends in the cinema of the time: the high-school drama (Cruel Intentions, Election, Rushmore) and adaptations of the Bard (Elizabeth, Shakespeare In Love). It’s a teen tangle in Shakespeare country that manages to be both reasonably faithful (depending on how you define “reasonably” and “faithful”) to Shakespeare’s original, but not so heavy-handedly that the average audience member will nod off. It also managed to cast two hot properties of the time – Julia Stiles, who at one point seemed … Read more
Vesper
Ambitious sci-fi from Lithuania – but in English, before you switch off – Vesper is all about the world-building and the genre-tasting. One minute a coming-of-ager, another a love story, yet another a quest movie, its overriding vibe is the eco-apocalyptic thriller, set in a doomy world after the collapse of civilisation, where humans fight each other and an aggressive ecology for supremacy. Vesper Chronicles, the on-screen title actually proclaims, as if this were going to be the first of a series of movies. There is a Young Adult, almost Hunger Games aspect in its focus on a rugged young woman as its central figure. Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) lives out in a blasted … Read more
My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To
Talking of movies that got lost down the back of the Covid sofa, how about My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, the debut feature by Jonathan Cuartas and as good a modern take on the vampire genre as you’ll see. A homeless man is picked up by a guy with a beard. Where are we going, says the vagrant. To a hostel, says the bearded guy. This isn’t a hostel, says the homeless guy when they pull up outside a family home. Next second he’s been clubbed about the head by a baseball bat he (ironically) only minutes before had been pulling out of a dumpster bin. Another few seconds … Read more
The Woodsman
There are two big default ideas in Hollywood movies and in The Woodsman we have not just a fine film about a paedophile but also a film tackling these two notions head on. The first of Hollywood’s mantras is “be yourself”. The second: “you can have anything if you want it enough” – often expressed as “never give up on your dream”. In The Woodsman Kevin Bacon plays Walter, a fresh-from-prison paedophile who would give anything not to be himself, a man who would love to give up his dream – of having sex with young children. Unfortunately for Walter, his insane bail conditions force him to live over the road from – hollow … Read more
