Popular Reviews
Platoon
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 May Ho Chi Minh born, 1890 On this day in 1890, Nguyen Sinh Con, later known as Ho Chi Minh, was born, in Hoang Tru, in Vietnam. One of four children, he got an education thanks to the colonial French, at a local lycée, and under the direction of his father, a Confucian scholar. Realising there was little future for him in Vietnam after his father lost his administrative position – influence was everything – he boarded a ship for France, working as a ship’s cook, where he failed to get work in Marseille. Over the next few years he … Read more
Shadow Force
Lacking the crackle and wit of the usually fairly mad Joe Carnahan movie, Shadow Force is full of charismatic performers angling for a moment in the sun. Which, for most of them never comes. Gunplay and banter are there, but they’re swamped by slack verbiage and scenes full of characters never properly introduced. So when the trademark Carnahan Big Finale arrives – guns blaze, wisecracks spark – ignition does not happen. It should be good, with its mix of Kill Bill, John Wick and Mr and Mrs Smith plotting. Omar Sy and Kerry Washington play Issac Sarr (codename Sombra) and Kyrah Owens (codename Ombra), two members of a crack black-ops squad who, years before … Read more
Mill of the Stone Women
1960’s Mill of the Stone Women was the first Italian horror film to be shot in colour – Technicolor, no less – and is a landmark film which opened the door to the lurid looks and titillating scenarios of the giallo genre. Also known as Drops of Blood (or Il mulino delle donne di pietra, in the original Italian), but not in the slightest bit frightening no matter what you call it, it’s soaked in atmosphere only enhanced by the dislocating effect of the foreign language dubbing. It’s dubbed no matter which language you watch it in – originally it came in German, French, Italian and two different English dubs (one more US, the … Read more
Cut Bank
Look at the talent in Cut Bank – John Malkovich, Bruce Dern, Michael Stuhlbarg, Oliver Platt, Liam Hemsworth, Teresa Palmer. And Billy Bob Thornton. Clearly great things were intended. But maybe 2014 was just too early for a revival of the gonzo Tarantino movie of yore. Ten years later movies like Cut Bank were all over the place. Worth checking out, it’s likeable, well done and showcases Malkovich acting for a change, rather than turning in an “and featuring John Malkovich” performance, as a backwoods sheriff trying to get to the bottom of the murder of universally loved mailman Georgie Wits (Dern). The incident was captured on camera, just by chance, by two … Read more
Make Way for Tomorrow
Make Way for Tomorrow, what a purposeful title that is, a call to arms in the struggle for a brighter, more modern future. Get Out of the Way might be a balder, less glorious and less ironic way of expressing the sentiment behind that title, since this is a story about two old timers in their 60s and the adult children they lean on in their hour of need. The film is about the response of the children, who step swiftly away from the plate. Though they never quite put it quite this honestly, the kids are too busy leading their own lives to have time and space for the oldsters. It’s a … Read more
Road House
Road House is a bad movie full of good things – yes, that is the sort of line often trotted out by the terminally indecisive or foolishly fixated when they don’t want to just come right out and condemn something. But in this case it’s true. Why it’s bad first: it’s a film suggesting it’s about one certain person when it’s about another. The several good things: the acting by Ida Lupino and Richard Widmark plus the crackling dialogue. And the cinematography is pretty tasty too. And, before going any further, there is no connection to the Patrick Swayze movie of four decades later, though both stories take place at a road house, … Read more
The Fall of the House of Usher
Overshadowed by both the Jean Epstein silent 1928 version and Roger Corman’s one from 1960, 1948’s The Fall of the House of Usher isn’t exactly a good film but it is a hellishly interesting one. Directed by Ivan Barnett, it was shot mostly at GIB Studios in Hastings on the south coast of England, a town not exactly bristling with movie production facilities and people. GIB stands for George Ivan Bennett, the director’s full name. The studio was an offshoot of a film society Barnett had formed in 1944 when he was about 19. When Sight and Sound magazine did a report on the Hastings film scene in the mid-1940s they declared the … Read more
Zéro de Conduite
Short but massively influential, Zéro de Conduite is 44 minutes (or so) of prime Jean Vigo. A film deemed “anti-French” when it was released in 1933, it went on to influence that most French of genres, the New Wave. François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows owes it a lot, as does British New Waver Lindsay Anderson’s If…., which borrowed its finale for its famous climax. “Zero for conduct; detention on Sunday” is its refrain, the punishment handed out by the schoolmasters at a French boarding school where unruly lads are kept in check, barely, by a strict system of punishment and reward. Naughty boys is its theme and Vigo wastes no time establishing it … Read more
Miller’s Crossing
By the time the Coen brothers made Miller’s Crossing, their third movie, it had become obvious that their films weren’t really set in the real world. Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing is set in an adjacent reality constructed entirely from moviescapes and populated with characters we seem to have met before. That it works brilliantly, both as pastiche and as a drama in its own right, is the difference between the Coens and some others who try the same thing. That it also manages to be funny when it should be and tense as hell when necessary, marks them out as something really special. The film is built around askew … Read more
Scarface
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 September Brian De Palma born, 1940 On this day in 1940, Brian De Palma was born. De Palma is one of the key figures in the New Hollywood group that stormed the citadel in the 1970s. If 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde marked the beginning, 1977’s Star Wars saw the beginning of the end for the golden ten-year run of the New Hollywood gang, after which 1940s Hollywood certainties seemed to re-establish themselves and the selling of spin-off action figures became too lucrative to ignore. In that short sweet flowering, the careers of Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, Spielberg, Lucas, Rafelson and Schrader … Read more
Private Schulz
The six-part TV series Private Schulz was a hit when it first aired and has become something of a cult since it was first broadcast in 1981. Made by the BBC in collaboration with the Australian ABC, it was the last outing for the great TV writer Jack Pulman, whose I, Claudius adaptation had been one of the great successes of the 1970s and who was the BBC’s go-to man for adaptations of big novels (Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks). It was also the first, and only collaboration between its stars, Michael Elphick and Ian Richardson, both scene-stealers extraordinaire, but who came at upstaging from … Read more
The River
Is 1951’s The River a look in search of a story? It’s regularly described – often by people who haven’t seen it – as one of the greatest films ever made. Dig one layer deeper and the praise heaped on Jean Renoir’s “masterpiece” starts to look a touch more one-note. Martin Scorsese reckons this and The Red Shoes are “the two most beautiful colour films ever made.” Eric Rohmer, also no slouch as a director, called it “the most beautiful colour we have ever seen on the screen.” The New York Times in 1951 said “beautiful”. Time Out – “beautiful”. Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Best Films of all time poll rang the changes a … Read more
