Popular Reviews
Pacifiction
You’ll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump. It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet American (either version) or 1967’s The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But Greene’s complex-hero-abroad scenario turns up regularly in other people’s work – for example in The Tailor of Panama (writer John Le Carré obviously channelling Greene) and in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (Denis Johnson doing the same). And so to our man in Havana. Tahiti, in fact, where the compromised hero is a gent called De Roller. Dressed in a white suit … Read more
Cornered
“This is the new Dick Powell,” the trailer insists. “Rougher. Tougher than in Murder, My Sweet.” Cornered is indeed the “new Dick Powell”. Audiences in the late 1930s and early 1940s knew him best as a crooner. But 1944’s Murder, My Sweet changed all that, when Powell became the first screen iteration of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s dog-eared, quippy detective. In an adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, Powell delivered Chandler’s dialogue with great style – “She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who’d take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle.” … Read more
Smashing Time
London in all its 1960s Swinging glory is what Smashing Time offers, in what’s meant to be a satire on the time and the place but is more a jaunt around the zeitgeist’s tourist landmarks strapped to some weak songs and very feeble comedy. I kid you not, there is a banana skin gag. Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave play Brenda and Yvonne, a pair of friends from “up north” who arrive in London determined to locate Carnaby Street and plug straight into the scene. Instead they find themselves penniless, having been robbed the minute they arrived in the capital. From here bullish, stupid Yvonne and timid, smart Brenda’s paths diverge slightly, allowing … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 10 – The Grandeur That Was Rome
As prescient as a hot button shop, The Grandeur That Was Rome is also proper Avengers stuff – arcane, bonkers, camp, with implausible undercover work and mad hair. Even before the opening credits have flipped into view (and no pre-credits murder this time, thankfully) we’ve been treated to Roman senators, gladiators, toasts uttered in Latin and drunk in wine, plus a vague threat to destroy Western civilisation – just like the Romans, er, didn’t. After the credits we’re in a different milieu, another dreadful British company captained by a glib posh chap (Ian Shand) which is not doing quite as well as he says, and run by an ineffectual number two (Kenneth Kealing). … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 12 – Have Guns – Will Haggle
Intended as a 90-minute episode designed to introduce Tara King and originally called Invitation to a Killing, what became the 12th episode of the final series of The Avengers instead ran the usual 50-ish minutes, wound up being called Have Guns – Will Haggle and features not one but two iterations of King. The first is the ingenue blonde we are introduced to, producer John Bryce’s conception of King (Linda Thorson was his girlfriend at the time). The second, dropped in later by reshoot directors Robert Asher and Harry Booth, is slimmer, sleeker and has dark hair and a much more familiar Mrs Peel relationship with John Steed. Linda Thorson is fine as … Read more
Wer
In any fight for the top slot in the “humanoid monsters of the movies” competition, zombies and vampires fight it out to be number one, while werewolves lope along way behind. It could be worse – the mummies in their tatty bandages get barely any attention and even further down the field are invisible men who are hardly ever seen (geddit?). So maybe the werewolf doesn’t have it too bad, all things considered. At first glance 2013’s Wer appears to be in the business of pushing the fanged, hirsute lycanthrope even further down the pecking order. But first a pre-credits sequence in which a nice French family on a camping holiday are subjected … Read more
24 August 2015-08-24
Out The Week Far from the Madding Crowd (Fox, cert 12) A remake of the 1967 film, rather than another version of the novel. Well that’s what it looks like, and considering how closely so many of the scenes mirror – in length, composition, camera angles even – scenes from John Schlesinger’s original film, the temptation has to be to compare like with like. It’s a fairly fruitless endeavour – is Carey Mulligan more beautiful than Julie Christie? Is Tom Sturridge more dashing than Terence Stamp in his prime? Can Michael Sheen outshine the first film’s finest performance, Peter Finch as landowning nob Mr Boldwood? The answer is no on every count. However, … Read more
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 May Baron Münchhausen born, 1720 On this day in 1720, Hieronymous Carl Friedrich Baron von Münchhausen was born, in Bodenwerder, Hanover. An aristocrat by birth, Münchhausen was employed by Anthony Ulrich II of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, a member of the Habsburg dynasty, and followed him to Russia during the Russo-Turkish War (his employer being married to a Romanov). Münchhausen rose through the ranks, becoming a cornet, lieutenant and finally a captain, before retiring to his estate with his wife. There he would entertain guests with fabulously embroidered tales, particularly of his time fighting the Turks. Münchhausen knew his tales were fantastical, and … Read more
Gypo
Gypo is a Dogme film, the 37th made according to the strictures of the protocol dreamt up by a group of Scandinavian film-makers, including Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, in 1995. Naturalism is the stated idea, but Dogme could also be seen as an extension of Ikea flatpack design principles into film-making, or those of no-smells, no-bells Nordic Protestantism, or the “form follows function” of the Bauhaus, or fellow Scandinavian Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare aesthetic. Take your pick. What’s unusual about Gypo is that it is a British film, a kitchen-sinker set in the bleak coastal town of Margate. It tells the story from three different angles of a mother/daughter pair of … Read more
The American Friend
From the moment Alfred Hitchcock adapted Strangers on a Train in 1951, Patricia Highsmith was hotly pursued by film-makers. Her stories have a plot, thrills, seedy glamour, black humour and the suggestion of transgressive sex, any element of which can be dialled up and down. As I write there have been approaching 40 film and TV adaptations of Highsmith stories, quite a few of which are famous – Hitchcock’s, of course, Plein Soleil (starring Alain Delon), Carol (Cate Blanchett) and The Talented Mr Ripley (Matt Damon and Jude Law). The American Friend (aka Der amerikanishe Freund) not so much. In the mid 1970s director Wim Wenders wanted to do a Highsmith adaptation but … Read more
Mr & Mrs Smith
Here’s a strange thing – a screwball comedy by master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. Mr and Mrs Smith is the only one he made and, sad to report, it’s not very good. A “comedy of remarriage”, its plot isn’t a thousand miles away from the one that floated The Philadelphia Story to glory, about a husband and wife discovering that a legal technicality means their three-year marriage is void. If they want to be husband and wife for real, they’ll have to “remarry”. But, now that they have the chance to reconsider, will they (re)take the plunge? As a bit of a preamble to all this, some vital character furniture is put in place … Read more
Speak No Evil
Another film that’s hard to like but easy to admire, Speak No Evil comes hot on the heels of a recent example of the same – Soft & Quiet – which I watched last week. Both set up and stoke a tension that becomes so janglingly unpleasant that, for this home viewer, pausing, getting out of the chair and walking around a bit became a necessity. I suspect the way to really watch this film is in a cinema, where there is more pressure to stay in your seat and not out yourself as such an obvious wuss. Again like Soft & Quiet, Speak No Evil starts out in the sunlit uplands of … Read more
