Popular Reviews
Ida
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 December Beethoven debuts 5th Symphony, 1808 On this day in 1808, the composer Ludwig van Beethoven debuted his most famous work, the 5th Symphony, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. It was a big evening, lasting more than four hours, at which Beethoven also debuted his 6th Symphony, his 4th Piano Concerto, plus a few other items, with the whole evening rounded off by another debut, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, which he had written specifically as a big show-off finale piece. Possibly because there was so much new material to familiarise the orchestra with, partly because rehearsals were rushed, … Read more
Ben Dover: The Sultan of Schwing
Britain’s pornographer-in-chief on the toughest thing about his job, changing attitudes to sex and why all politicians are bastards “M’lud, one of the pornographic tapes in question involved a young lady and a German sausage, a Brat… (leans back) – or was it a Bock…? It was, I believe, a Bockwurst. The lady was in the process, your honour, of committing an unnatural act with a meat appendage.” Ben Dover, real name Simon (though he tells me it’s Lyndsay) Honey, hits the Soho bar we’re meeting in with his motormouth at full throttle and full volume. Now sitting opposite, he’s telling me about his court appearance for supplying porn to some Belgian bloke … Read more
The Sadness
Rob Jabbaz’s feature debut, the Taiwan-set movie The Sadness, revives two genres. Welcome back the zombie movie, which has been having an afternoon nap since Train to Busan persuaded more or less everyone that there was no point trying to top it. And the torture porn/gorno movie, which has been absent without leave for a little longer. Both combine spectacularly and splattertacularly in a story that’s ostensiby about a nice young couple who wake up one day to find that the world outside their window is now populated by virus-infected flesh-eating humans. In fact The Sadness is more about Kat (Regina Lei) than it is about Jim (Berant Zhu), a handsome young man … Read more
They Live by Night
A gimcrack romance decked out in film noir finery, They Live by Night is a “kids on the run” story, the child of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and parent of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands. Three escaped prisoners on the run are holing up at the secluded cabin of the brother of their leader, where the youngest of the three first claps eyes on the brother’s daughter. In one of the great introductions in moviedom, Bowie (Farley Granger), a fresh-faced 23-year-old who’s been in jail since he was 16, meets Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), hat pulled down and light slanting across her face. He doesn’t know how to talk to girls. But one … Read more
A Quiet Place Part II
For a while it looks like A Quiet Place Part II is perversely going to be a prequel story. We’re not in the post-apocalyptic world of the first film, where much of humanity is dead and ghastly monsters are picking off the survivors one by one. Instead we’re at a baseball game, where the pre-disaster Abbott family – Lee (John Krasinski), Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Marcus (Noah Jupe) – are having one of those all-American family days with their friends and neighbours. All is lovely. Until, from the sky, a flaming asteroid, or spacecraft, or something, arrives and within minutes the carnage has started. It’s all by way of a … Read more
Casablanca
Exhortations to go and see this timeless film are usually based on its treasure chest of quotable lines. “Round up the usual suspects”, “We’ll always have Paris”, “Play it, Sam”, “Here’s looking at you, kid” and so on. But there’s more to it than that. It’s the one where the guy doesn’t get the gal, discovers his soul and wanders off into the gloom with a Nazi-sympathising police chief who may have just had a similar epiphany. Modern Hollywood films often generate a similar tension – can Spider-Man nobly save a cable-car of terrified schoolkids about to hurtle to their death or will he selfishly save his girlfriend instead? And modern Hollywood films … 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
The Second Woman
A spooky psychological drama, The Second Woman is often misdescribed as film noir but really it’s much closer to being overwrought melodrama of the sort Douglas Sirk used to make. That’s probably misdirection on my part – because there is no sotto voce examination of social mores going on here. Instead we’re asked to try and figure out who’s not being entirely on the level. There’s lots of misdirection in the film too. Robert Young eventually wound up playing the avuncular, reassuring medic Marcus Welby MD on TV but is in his element here, playing against his cosy image. The question the film asks of his character, successful architect Jeff Cohalan, is: how … Read more
Benedetta
How funny is Benedetta meant to be? Is it a serious film examining the mindset of religious people of a different time, or a nunsploitation flick straining every sinew to get its stars out of their clothes and comically at it? It’s an adaptation of Judith C Brown’s book, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Reinaissance Italy. But tellingly, Gerard Soeteman, who worked on the original, never-realised adaptation with director Paul Verhoeven in the 1980s, had his name removed from the credits when he realised which way Verhoeven and new screenwriter David Birke were taking the material for the 2021 version. In bawdy, winkingly vulgar style, not unlike Pasolini’s Canterbury … Read more
The Duke
The Duke is a great example of the sort of film that Brits make for domestic consumption and which often do pretty well internationally as well. Playing up to harmless stereotypes, they’re full of silly sausages with funny voices and odd, eccentric behaviours. Here for the most part it’s Northerners being earthy and honest and principled, while down South a different sort of daffy stereotype – posh, restrained, clean – are hauling on barristers’ outfits and judges’ horsehair wigs to use Latinate turns of phrase in the most rarefied of settings, the courtroom. Both export beautifully. Both reassure the natives even more. The stereotypes are diamond tooled in The Duke, a true story … Read more
The Gift
Director Sam Raimi is an expert in genre-twisting. Back when he was making The Evil Dead he so overloaded his gore epic that it eventually became funny. With The Gift he takes on a genre even more arcane: the British whodunit. Then he does weird shit with it. First he transports the whole shebang to the Deep South to remove all traces of afternoon tea or warm beer. Then he gives us Cate Blanchett as a clairvoyant detective who can’t quite make out the identity of the murderer – well, it wouldn’t be much of film if she could, would it? And then, as a masterstroke, he takes a raft of famous faces … Read more
Alphaville
The French New Wave, film noir and sci-fi all collide in Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard’s mad mash-up of all three genres. If it does nothing else it demonstrates that as long as you have imagination you don’t need any budget at all to make an impressive movie. Godard shot it all in Paris, with no sets, no gadgety props, no special effects. He didn’t even bother with a newly minted character. Instead he repurposed Lemmy Caution, a gumshoe created by British crime novelist Peter Cheyney who had already appeared in a string of French B movies by the time Alphaville came out in 1965. Then, as here, Caution is played by the American singer … Read more
