Popular Reviews
The Man Who Knew Too Much
James Stewart? Doris Day? Alfred Hitchcock? No. Instead meet Colin Wallace, a retired real-life spook who got heavily involved in the UK government’s undercover operations in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, blew the whistle when his paymasters started asking him to start smearing democratically elected politicians, then wound up in jail on a ten-year stretch on a confected charge of manslaughter. Strangely, or perhaps it’s not strange at all, it’s a tale from recent history with an urgent contemporary relevance. Michael Oswald’s documentaries to date have all sought to pull back the veil on the hidden workings of the world. Finance was the focus in 97% Owned, Princes of the Yen and The … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 9 – Legacy of Death
“A bit crap,” is what I wrote in my notes towards the end of watching The Avengers episode Legacy of Death. Perhaps I was being too harsh. My memory of it now is of being a pleasingly entertaining episode, and that’s largely down to the work of Stratford Johns and Ronald Lacey, who do a knock-up and knockabout job of pastiching Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, Casablanca/Maltese Falcon era. Pastiche is pretty much the watchword throughout, this being one of the banes of this farewell series (at what point did everyone realise that’s what it was?). But on to the plot – written by Dr Who’s Daleks creator Terry Nation and opening with … Read more
Sentimental Value
Imagine a standing ovation lasting for 19 minutes – enough time to have a bath. That’s what Sentimental Value got when it was shown at Cannes. Where, admittedly, they like this sort of thing – European, dense, non-genre, self-referential, serious, full of unsympathetic characters and recalling auteurs of the past. Bergman most obviously, and Persona in particular, a high point in his career of high points. There is a story, though it’s a jumping-off point for a series of meditations rather than a plot. After their mother dies, two sisters, Nora and Agnes, are slightly surprised and perturbed when estranged father, a cinema auteur whose best days are probably behind him, re-appears. Gustav, it … Read more
The Opening of Misty Beethoven
The openings are both figurative and literal in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, the pornified Pygmalion that’s a key movie from the so-called Golden Age of Porn. The real Pygmalion, you’ll recall, is about two la-di-dah gentlemen betting on whether they can get a Cockney flower girl to pass as a duchess. Here, Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Eliza Dolittle are replaced by Dr Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis), his occasional lover Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Bedaunt) and Misty Beethoven (Constance Money), a low-rent sex worker Dr Love picks up in a grindhouse cinema pleasuring a guy dressed as Napoleon. In a plot following Pygmalion’s major beats, aficionados of erotica Dr Love and Ms Rich … Read more
Snow White
A useful live-action remake of the 1937 animated Disney classic? Or a naked attempt at IP protection and extension? Snow White joins Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Dumbo and The Lion King in the “bit of both” category. It is in other words a decent-enough run-through of an existing story, in a visual style we all recognise, with some star power in lead roles to convince stragglers to shell out all over again. Disney learned how to do this from the record companies, who for a while couldn’t believe their luck when everyone updated vinyl to CD, and then did it all over again with digital. Snow Woke, though. Or … Read more
The Deep (aka Djúpið)
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 December Clarence Birdseye born, 1886 On this day in 1886, one of the greats of the modern food industry was born. The man who could be considered to be the real Captain Birdseye came into the world in Brooklyn, New York, the sixth of nine children. Clarence didn’t come from a privileged background and when he grew up he struggled to pay his college fees. He ended up dropping out and in his early 20s wound up being a taxidermist, where the standing problem is how to keep the animal fresh while it’s being worked on. By the age of … Read more
Juliet & Romeo
Juliet & Romeo is the sort of film that schoolteachers wary about introducing Shakespeare to 16 year olds show to the kids. Sexy young things have key roles, the original language survives only as a vestige and there are songs that use autotune quite a bit. Purists will hate hate hate it, but it has a perky energy and its middle-finger approach means it actually fares a lot better than many a reworking. It sticks close enough to the original plot – star crossed lovers from rival families in Verona. The Montagues and Capulets, headed on one side by Jason Isaacs and Lidia Vitale as Lord and Lady M, on the other by … Read more
A Haunting in Venice
A change of gear for Kenneth Branagh’s third Agatha Christie adaptation. A Haunting in Venice isn’t as starry as Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, doesn’t start out with a captive roster of possible murderers and murderees and, to an extent, abandons the strict rationality of previous Hercule Poirot adventures for something a bit more supernatural. All three turn out to be changes for the better. This is probably the best of the bunch so far, though, full disclosure, I’m not really a fan of these things. Whether it’s Peter Ustinov, John Malkovich, Albert Finney, Ian Holm, David Suchet, Tony Randall, Alfred Molina or even Austin Trevor (first of … Read more
The End
Here’s a pitch. A film about an oligarch family living in a bunker for 25 years… done as a musical! The End is Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his two documentaries about the genocidal regime in Indonesia, and should at least win awards for audacious change of direction. Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence both marked him out as a special talent, but those were both now ten-plus years ago and in the decade since he’s directed a couple of episodes of TV and nothing else. The End is both a return to film-making as well as a shift into fiction. According to the man himself, what he wanted to do … Read more
Alien
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 6 June Alexis St Martin shot in the stomach, 1822 On this day in the 1822, a 20-year-old Canadian called Alexis Bidagan St Martin was shot in the stomach at close range at a fur trading post on Mackinac Island, Canada. He survived the musket blast and the wound healed, leaving a hole, a fistula, in his side which led right into his stomach. The man treating him, US army sergeant William Beaumont, noticed that all the food that St Martin ate was re-appearing from the fistula. Matters improved, St Martin’s digestion returned to normal though the wound healed to form a … Read more
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
More of the same, that’s what Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse delivers. The follow-up to Into the Spider-Verse is another blistering, migraine- and epilepsy-inducing collision of animation styles, the sort of thing which, if it had been done in the 20th century, would have taken the entire 20th century to do. And if you like it, there’s still more to come. This is the second instalment of the tripartite series and it ends with an abrupt “to be continued”, comic-book style. Beyond the Spider-Verse will complete the cycle. Quick recap. There are many parallel universes out there. And in many of these there are parallel Spider-Men too. Some look a bit like this, others … Read more
Wake in Fright
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 April Captain James Cook espies Australia, 1770 On this day in 1770, the British captain James Cook’s ship Endeavour became the first recorded European vessel to catch sight of Australia. Cook had been commissioned to travel to the Pacific Ocean by the Royal Society, who were collecting data on the transit of Venus across the sun, during which the planet appears as a black dot against the solar disc. It is a rare occurrence and the Royal Society hoped the measurements Cook’s ship collected would add to the sum of scientific knowledge, as well as helping to calculate longitude, which … Read more
