Popular Reviews
Somebody I Used to Know
Like some sort of cosmic ordering service, romances and romantic comedies work to put together people who deserve to be together. But what happens if the people concerned don’t deserve to be together? That’s what Alison Brie and Dave Franco’s Somebody I Used to Know sets out to discover. Married couple Brie and Franco co-wrote it, Franco directs and Brie stars, as the Hollywood burnout who heads back to the small town where she grew up after her TV show, Dessert Island (a baking meets dating reality thing), gets canned. There she bumps into the ex she bailed out on suddenly ten years before to go and make it big in Hollywood. The … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 20 – School for Traitors
Mrs Gale takes a rest and Venus Smith gets another outing in an episode set at an elite Oxbridge-style university and kicking off with a death (again) before the credits (again). Steed is sent in to find out what happened to the man he was meant to have been keeping an eye on, after a briefing from a different control, One-Seven (Frederick Farley), a ridiculous throwback complete with cigarette holder and winged collar. A much chattier, gamine Venus Smith is introduced early on. Smith just happens to be gigging at the university’s rag week, which is handy for Steed, who has soon also inveigled his way into the grove of academe and is … Read more
The Best Films of 2014
Of the 350+ films I saw this year, these are the best ones. Some of them were released last year and I’ve been a bit slow getting round to them. Some of them were released even longer ago. The criteria are – I watched them in 2014 and I liked them. That’s it. The Best Computer Chess (2013, dir: Andrew Bujalski) Andrew Bujalski, inventor of mumblecore, proved there’s life in the old beast yet with this retro-verité drama about geeks meeting in the 1980s to pit their programs against a chess-playing computer. Shooting on original video cameras in fuzzy-edged boxellated black and white, Bujalski catches the moment when the let-it-all-hang-out era died and our … Read more
Dragged across Concrete
Dragged across Concrete is a bit of a masterpiece, an urgent, drily funny, brutal, dirty and often ugly film full of horrible people, whom we nevertheless root for because writer/director S Craig Zahler focuses on the relationships rather than the genre aspects of this admittedly big genre beast of a movie. Zahler – he’s called that by everyone, apparently (his mum too?) – has done this before. In 2015’s Bone Tomahawk he re-worked the western, switching out of what you might call Revisionist Indian mode (they’re all noble, sinned against etc) into something far less PC and much more gruesome. If you’ve seen it, I’ll just say “that scene where…” and leave it … Read more
Human Traffic
Human Traffic made a hell of a feature debut for its writer and director Justin Kerrigan at the back end of the 20th century. A pill-popping tale of a mad weekend among McJobbers in Cardiff, Wales, it’s a film unashamed, delighted in fact, to bring us drug-taking as it is experienced by those who do it most – from Friday night euphoria to Sunday comedown – as fun, an escape, a lark. We’re talking about ecstasy, this being 1999, and the film was so of the moment that the UK newspaper The Guardian called it “the last great film of the nineties”. The paper was rushing on its own euphoria but there is an … Read more
Gladiator II
As if made by the “if you like that you’ll like this” algorithm, Gladiator II takes all the bits you liked in the first film and does them all over again, with a bit more blood, a touch less swagger and far better CGI than Ridley Scott could muster in 2000. Scott is again at the helm, with quite a few members of the same technical team from the first film – DP John Mathieson most notably – a couple of the same actors in the shape of Derek Jacobi and Connie Nielsen, and pretty much the same storyline. The original Gladiator opened with a spectacular battle sequence, and so does this film – flaming fireballs … Read more
You and Me
What’s the best Fritz Lang film? The argument could go on all night, and there are so many to choose from – contenders include M, Fury, You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, or While the City Sleeps. Or how about Rancho Notorious, Metropolis, The Big Heat or Man Hunt? So how about the worst one? 1938’s You and Me is a prime candidate. It’s still an interesting if largely unsuccessful film. Lang himself considered it to be his worst, a “lousy picture”, he said in his autobiography, in which styles argue with each other while a miscast lead does his best to make sense of a character. George Raft is … Read more
Blood for Dust
Sometimes you like something but you’re not sure why. Case in point: Blood for Dust, a 1990s style “who’s zooming who?” thriller full of bullets, bad guys and cases of money being swapped for white powder in remote locations. It is very familiar. And yet. The two central performances help a lot. First up, Scoot McNairy, so good in Gareth Edwards’s feature debut, 2010’s Monsters, a smart reworking of 1930s screwball comedy It Happened One Night as sci-fi. Underused almost ever since, he proves himself again here, his dustbowl features lending a haunted aspect to his portrayal of Cliff, a travelling salesman lured into taking a courier-level gig with a gang who run … Read more
Clara Sola
Capsule plot summaries can be misleading. The one for Clara Sola might say – a woman around 40 in a Costa Rica village has a sexual awakening. It’s more or less what the one on the IMDb says. And it’s not wrong, that is what happens. But the story, that’s a different thing altogether. And in fact the whole point of this debut by Nathalie Álvarez Mesén is in what isn’t being said rather than what is. The plot is straightforward but story lies scattered between the cracks, just slightly out of reach. It’s ambiguous, entirely, in almost every respect. Clara is a pretty woman and might, at her age, expect to be … Read more
The Film that Broke the King of Cool
In 1969, when Steve McQueen suggested a film about the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans race, everyone thought it couldn’t fail. Everyone was wrong At the end of the 1960s Steve McQueen had it all. Though it was an era of longhaired peaceniks, this shorthaired toughie had become acknowledged as the King of Cool. He was one of the highest paid actors in the world and his string of box office smashes already included three total classics – The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and Bullitt. On top of that he’d been Oscar-nominated for The Sand Pebbles and, in 1970, had just made The Reivers, a gentle period drama that proved McQueen … Read more
Viva Zapatero!
After a slew of documentaries from the US, not least Michael Moore’s prodigous output, here’s a reminder that Europeans can make political documentaries too. Viva Zapatero! is a pop at Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi by Sabina Guzzanti, whose politically satirical TV programme was axed by Italian state broadcaster RAI for being “political” – after legal pressure was applied by rival media outfit Mediaset (proprietor: Silvio Berlusconi). Guzzanti then goes further and accuses RAI of being stacked with Berlusconi stooges, effectively his employees. Should a public service broadcaster be headed by political (ie Berlusconi’s) appointees? Of course not. Though precious few in Italy have had the balls to say so, such … Read more
Captain America: Brave New World
A bit Sixties, a bit Eighties and a bit all over the place, Captain America: Brave New World is a strange mishmash of a movie. According to Variety, it wiped the floor with Kraven the Hunter at the box office. Which says more about that movie than this one, having seen both of them. First up, it’s a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie (Kraven was Marvel but not canonical MCU, if these theological niceties mean anything to you). Second up, Chris Evans has been replaced by Anthony Mackie as Captain America, least interesting of the Marvel superheroes. Third up, the story harks back to The Incredible Hulk of 2008, which heavily featured General “Thunderbolt” … Read more
