Popular Reviews
The Fury
The Fury (aka De Helleveeg in the original Dutch) gives Hannah Hoekstra something to do. Impressive in any number of films and TV shows, Hoekstra has at this point in her career (2016, she’s 29) played sexy young things with attitude and varying levels of coquettishness. And that’s just what she plays here, with a twist, and with a chance to show there’s more in her bag than we might have thought. She plays a young woman called Tiny, a working-class girl in a dead-end job in 1960s Netherlands whose life consists of her family trying to marry her off while in the interim she works for them as a skivvy. The local … Read more
Scarygirl
Smart eight year olds might go a bundle on Scarygirl, an Australian animation visually targeted more at their parents, though its bounce, straightforward storytelling and bold (ok, simplistic) messaging says young. There’s a touch of Finding Nemo in the plotting. Actually it’s more Finding Dory, the sequel, the one in which little Dory goes on a big long undersea quest to find her parents. Here it’s Arkie, a strange cross between an octopus and a human, with a patch over one eye and a mouth held together at the edges with stitches, setting off to find her dad, Blister, who’s been kidnapped by the despicable Dr Maybee. Blister is a big yellow/green octopus … Read more
100 Years of… The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Released in Germany in 1920 but not given an international debut until April 1921, in New York, German director Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has gone down in history as one of the most important films of the era, and the most important German expressionist film of all time. You can see its influence everywhere, in Citizen Kane, The Third Man and Shutter Island, to grab a trio of obvious borrowers, but though it’s much talked about, how many people have actually seen it? What might come as a surprise 100 years on is that it didn’t meet universal acclaim at the time. Cultural historians still argue about whether it was … Read more
Dancer in the Dark
Is it “Unique” (CNN), “Heartbreaking” (The Independent), “Riveting” (Radio Times)? Or, perhaps, “Ludicrous” (Daily Mail), “Numbing” (Salon.com) or “Grim” (TV Guide)? Lars Von Trier’s low-rent, grainy tale of the Czech immigrant in the USA who is losing her sight, made according to the minimalist Dogme manifesto, won the Palme D’Or at the 2000 Cannes film festival. And even there fighting almost broke out in the audience. What got everyone’s goat was Von Trier’s decision to couple his muddy shakeycam style to the most velour of Hollywood genres – the musical – and to cast the coolest of Euro sophisticats, Catherine Deneuve, as a factory worker. Adding to this deliberate provocation is the singing … Read more
Le Samouraï
Jean-Pierre Melville’s stylish 1967 hitman flick Le Samouraï has danced down the decades, leaving its mark on everything from William Friedkin’s The French Connection, to Walter Hill’s The Driver (and, by extension, Nicolas Winding Refn’s homage, Drive), Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, Anton Corbijn’s The American and the Coens’ No Country for Old Men. Even John Wick can trace its ancestry back to Le Samouraï, Keanu Reeves being a 21st century update on the lone wolf operator going into battle against forces known and unknown. The opening shot alone makes Le Samouraï noteworthy. A darkened room, a man lying on a bed. The camera does one of those perspective-altering Vertigo zooms, gets about halfway into … Read more
Caught
Revenge would be a better title but Caught it is, director Max Ophüls’s broadside against Howard Hughes, who’d fired him from Vendetta only days into shooting a film that was meant to launch the career of Faith Domergue, a Hughes “discovery” (booty division). Vendetta ended up with five directors’ names attached to it so clearly the launch needed more grease on the slipway than anticipated. Hughes’s treatment of women, it turns out, is what Caught is all about, a reworking of the Libbie Block novel Wild Calendar also incorporating the stories Ophüls and screenwriter Arthur Laurents had heard about the infamously philandering studio boss. Naive and nice young thing Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes) … Read more
Shock Treatment aka Traitement de Choc
The weird thing about Traitement de Choc, usually shown in English-speaking areas as Shock Treatment, is that it went by the title Doctor in the Nude in the UK when it was released in the early 1970s. Nothing to do with the comic novel Doctor in the Nude by Richard Gordon, the latest in his larky series about young doctors, and more to do with the fact that for one very brief moment you got to see star Alain Delon’s penis. So that’s how it got sold to British audiences, with the vaguely saucy title as some sort of come-on, because selling it any other way would have been, in the distributors’ eyes … Read more
The Locket
A locket opens once, to reveal what’s within. The 1946 movie The Locket, on the other hand, keeps on opening. Flashback follows flashback, with more information delivered each time the hinge creaks ajar. What’s inside is sort of special, sort of irritating. This is a film whose most difficult bits are quite easy to follow. It’s the rest of it that gets a touch troublesome. That flashback-within-flashback structure is the film’s USP. Otherwise it’s a mid-1940s aberrant-psychology drama focusing on one Nancy Patton (Laraine Day). As the curtain rises Nancy is about to get married to big swell John Willis (Gene Raymond) at a society wedding. But then Dr Blair (Brian Aherne) sits … Read more
1 Chance Sur 2 aka Half a Chance
1 Chance Sur 2 (renamed Half a Chance for English speakers) is almost a thought experiment. When France’s biggest stars of the 1960s, Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo, were being courted by Hollywood, imagine that instead of deciding “non”, they’d accepted the offers and moved Stateside. What sort of films would they have made? Decades later, director Patrice Leconte answers the hypothetical with a big, fun, explosion-filled action movie full of flamboyant bad guys, helicopters, car chases, sexy women and “we’re getting too old for this shit” repartee. And to catch another quadrant there’s a fluffy plot driving it all, about tearaway car thief Alice (Vanessa Paradis) being pursued by the Russian mafia … Read more
The Usual Suspects
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 January Pete Postlethwaite dies, 2011 On this day in 2011, aged 64, the actor Pete Postlethwaite died of pancreatic cancer. It had been diagnosed in March 2009. Postlethwaite had already survived cancer once, having been diagnosed of testicular cancer in 1990, which went into remission after he had a testicle removed. An actor simultaneously of great force and nuance, Postlethwaite’s relatively uncommon name marks his family down as having originated in Postlethwaite in Cumbria, England (the name means Postle’s Farm). His relatively uncommon looks – huge bony cheekbones, honest putty nose, angry skin – were matched by his trajectory into … Read more
Enemy
If there is such a thing as “what the hellness” then Denis Villeneuve’s latest film absolutely has it. But then the French-Canadian does have form. With Incendies Villeneuve managed to turn the conflict in the Middle East into a thriller with a reveal that disconcerted and amazed. In Prisoners he made us feel bad for suspecting that a lank haired, stuttering, educationally subnormal Paul Dano was a paedophile, and then made us feel bad for cutting such an obvious wrong’un too much slack. The tricks are more playful in this latest exercise in duplicity. As with Prisoners, Enemy stars Jake Gyllenhaal, this time as Adam, a history professor who suddenly spots his spitting … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 10 – Noon-Doomsday
High Noon, the 1952 movie starring Gary Cooper, is the inspiration behind this Terry Nation-scripted episode of The Avengers. Nation had done something similarly pastiche-y the previous week with Legacy of Death, an episode that leaned on 1940s noir. Quick thumbnail of High Noon – Gary Cooper is the good guy finding everyone in the town has a pressing previous engagement, leaving him to fend alone when a bad guy comes calling. An injured Steed takes his place here, his broken leg forcing him to convalesce in a very exclusive sanatorium (Brian Clemens’s farm, in fact) and finding himself increasingly isolated and vulnerable as a sworn enemy comes ever closer. The episode has … Read more
