Popular Reviews
Lost Transmissions
Affable, blokeish, pint-in-a-pub, kickaround-in-the-park Simon Pegg. Even when he was playing Scotty in Star Trek he was still likeable Simon Pegg. From talking to someone who worked with him on one of the “Cornetto Trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), he is actually like that in real life. What you see is what you get – smart, geeky, funny, relatable. It comes as a shock to see him acting. In Lost Transmissions he’s a nervy record producer called Theo, life and soul of the party, a survivor of some 1990s band who now lives with his fellow Brit expats out in LA – they’ve made it. Theo is such … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 11 – Man-Eater of Surrey Green
Man-Eater of Surrey Green is the perfect Avengers episode title. Camp, corny, a bit sexy, a lot parochial, it sums up the series perfectly. And this episode, which is a mix of scientific blah blah and a lot of eccentric bombing about. Things kick off when two lab-coated scientists in love (Gillian Lewis and William Job) put their moist-eyed interchanges on hold when she suddenly hears a funny noise – it’s that 1960s mind-control noise created by someone furiously twiddling the knobs of an oscilloscope. Off she heads, in glassy-eyed “I hear and obey” fashion, to a Rolls Royce waiting to whisk her away. Steed and Peel are soon on the case of … Read more
John Le Carré Movie Adaptations Ranked, 2021
There is a lot of John Le Carré out there. The author wrote prodigiously, starting while he was still working as a spy for MI5 and MI6 in the late 1950s and only really stopped when he died, in December 2020. There are nine novels featuring his most famous creation, the retired master spy George Smiley, and another 17 or so (depending on how you count) other novels, plus short stories, essays, memoirs, articles written for newspapers (denouncing the war in Iraq, for instance) and screenplays (always adaptations of his own novels). But there’s no getting round it, if you want a John Le Carré experience, the movies are probably the worst way … Read more
Red Sun
Before we start, not the Red Sun from 1971, directed by Terence Young and starring Charles Bronson. Most emphatically not that one. Instead, the Red Sun from a year before, a film originally called Rote Sonne, from West Germany, directed by the largely overlooked Rudolf Thome and melding the politics of the post-1968, Women’s Lib era with a good old-fashioned horror movie. Though a warning to lovers of red plush and stakes through the heart, there is none of that going on here. But first let’s meet the hero/victim of this story, a sad sack of male entitlement, a total waste of petulant, lazy, sponging space called Thomas, who we first glimpse hitch-hiking … Read more
Ku! Kin-dza-dza
Let’s hear it for animated sci-fi comedy from the Russia. Anyone? Ku! Kin-dza-dza is a strange film whichever way you slice it, starting with its title, and the fact that it’s a remake of a live-action movie from 1986, also made by Georgiy Daneliya (here directing alongside Tatyana Ilina), who decided in 2013 that he needed to take a second tour of the territory, what with the Iron Curtain having fallen in the interim. Out went a good chunk of the satire and the darkness, though the kookiness remains in his story of a snobbish cellist and his streetwise nephew who are accidentally transported from wintry Russia to an alien world where status … Read more
5 October 2015-10-05
Out This Week Tomorrowland (Disney, cert 12) When did we give up on believing in the future? Can we believe again? Writer Damon Lindelof sets out to tackle the turn to postmodernism – the most significant philosophical cultural shift in the West for a century – in a big, multiplex popcorn film. George Clooney plays a character who is postmodernity incarnate. When Frank was an eager, inventive little boy he went to the 1964 New York World’s Fair (the high point of modernity and its showcase event) and met a young girl called Athena, was wowed both by her and by the scientific marvels he saw there. Then was wowed some more when … Read more
11 August 2014-08-11
Out in the UK This Week The Raid 2 (E One, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Gareth Evans’s sequel picks up exactly where the first film ended – after the relentless and entirely exciting display of pencak silat martial arts that was the alpha and omega of The Raid (aka Raid: Redemption) – as if to suggest we’re about to get more of the same. In fact we’re not. And at times over the next 150 minutes, following Iko Uwais as a cop deep undercover, Evans had me shaking my head in sorrow. Yes, there are some mighty fine displays of brilliantly choreographed fighting by Uwais. And the final 45 minutes is one long orgy of pugilistic brilliance. … Read more
Deerskin
Deerskin is a film about the film-making process, or a film about a man in the grip of a massive self-delusion, or one about the making of a serial killer, take your pick. It’s a comedy and it made me laugh several times, often simply because it is Jean Dujardin as the man at the centre of it all, an actor with funny bones – at his Oscar acceptance speech for The Artist, he name-checked both Laurence Olivier and Benny Hill. Here’s a bare-bones plot – man buys an elaborately fringed deerskin jacket and finds himself so taken with how he looks in it that it changes his character. He starts “acting” like … Read more
3 October 2016-10-03
Out This Week When Marnie Was There (StudioCanal, cert U) Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the guy at Studio Ghibli who isn’t Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, this is Japanese animation studio’s final, so Ghibli say, film. And it’s a typically sweet, anglophile story about a typically bereft child called Anna finding typical solace in the supernatural realm – a ghost, called Marnie, who lives in the big deserted house over the bay from Anna’s aunt and uncle. Adapted from Joan G Robinson’s Norfolk-set classic, it’s slow-moving and less loaded with drama than Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies or Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, but it’s undeniably sweet, and charms with its familiar Ghibli-style animation – 2D, … Read more
The Oath
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 February A bomb explodes in the World Trade Center, 1993 On this day in 1993, a bomb was detonated under the north tower of the World Trade Center. The bomb comprised urea nitrate, packed about with aluminium, magnesium and ferric oxide particles, boosted with nitroglycerine and dynamite, then surrounded by bottles of hydrogen to escalate the explosion into the thermobaric category. The intention was to knock the north tower over into the south tower, causing the World Trade Center to collapse. The operation was carried out by Ramzi Yousef and was financed by his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. When Ramzi … Read more
The Final Girls
Meta-slasher horror, the last refuge of the scoundrel – discuss. If you can’t make a decent straight-up slasher movie, why not put a frame around it and serve it up with an ironic wink, right? Prejudices laid out on the table, The Final Girls actually turns out to be a decent meta-slasher horror movie, with no scoundrels in sight, a good cast, sharp, smart direction and a high concept powerful enough to get it through a tight 90 minutes of jokes, shrieks, gruesomeness and a complete lack of bare breasts. You can’t have everything. Its premise: here in the early decades of the 21st century (the movie’s from 2015 so probably about there), … Read more
The President’s Analyst
With Elon Musk currently trailing his Neuralink “brain machine interface” idea as the future of inter-personal communications, how about The President’s Analyst, a 1967 movie that got there first? It’s called the Cerebrum Communicator – a brain implant that will render phone calls unnecessary – and comes at the familiar point in this spytastic spoof when the evil megalomaniac mastermind is laying out his plan for total world domination (or something) to Dr Schaefer, whose role as the US president’s analyst has got him caught up in a pantomime of escalating espionage mayhem. Before we all get too carried away with an idea that arrives from nowhere and is soon despatched there too, it’s … Read more
