Popular Reviews
Stormbreaker
We’ve had young James Bond, courtesy of Charlie Higson, and the Spy Kids films, so there’s nothing that groundbreaking about Alex Rider, the mini-me spy and key character in Anthony Horowitz’s string of highly successful novels. 16-year-old Alex Pettyfer steps into the Rider role, his private school accent and rent boy looks making him ideal as the juvenile spy. Horowitz himself adapts his own novel. Which is a feat considering that he also writes the Power of Five series (known as The Gatekeepers in the US), has knocked out a Sherlock Holmes novel, a number of scripts for the long-running Sunday afternoon footwarmer Poirot, a whole raft of Midsomer Murders and he’s the creator … Read more
When Strangers Marry
A peculiar, interesting and not entirely coherent crime thriller about a woman who marries a man she barely knows and then starts wondering if he’s a killer. When Strangers Marry makes more sense as a title than Betrayed, which is the flag it flew under when it was re-released in 1949, five years after its debut. The re-release also allowed a bit of rejigging of the pecking order. Third-billed Robert Mitchum – who’d become a star in the interim – is top-billed second time round. To be fair to everyone, Mitchum is in it more than Dean Jagger, who plays the mysterious salesman Kim Hunter’s wide-eyed Millie Baxter has married more or less … Read more
Natural Born Killers
Oliver Stone’s notorious film about two dim kids who kill a few people and become media celebrities takes two actors who weren’t exactly the go-to choices for crazy nutjob killer roles. Woody Harrelson was fresh from playing affable dunce Woody in Cheers and Juliette Lewis was uppermost in the mind as the daughter in Cape Fear. As it turned out the roles fit them like a second skin. As in similar gangster/road movies such as Badlands or Bonnie & Clyde, writer Quentin Tarantino and director Stone send their two fuck-ups off on a series of murders. But, unusually, they also send them off on a stylistic journey through a storm of different generic … Read more
I’m Your Man
Imagine that, a film called I’m Your Man and no sign of Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack. Or Wham! Partly that’s because this is a German film (originally called Ich bin dein Mensch) but mostly it’s because this funny and clever movie wants to do things its own way. How about a romcom plot involving C-3PO, for instance, to put it in elevator-pitch terms. Of course that’s not who Dan Stevens is playing but there’s more than a hint of the prissy Star Wars robot in Stevens’s portrayal of an AI-juiced man-machine designed expressly to be everything Alma, a university researcher, could want in a partner. As for Alma (Maren Eggert), she’s signed … Read more
Viy
1967’s Viy is often described as the only horror film made in the Soviet Union. In truth it’s more like a fairy tale than a horror story, more Grimm than grim – bum, tish – though in the final haunting sequence things definitely start going bump in the night. Odder than its solitary genre status is the fact that it’s a film with religion at its core. The USSR did not do god. Yet Viy is suffused with religious symbols and practices, beliefs and lore. There’s a good deal of paganism too, which the scientifically minded USSR wasn’t very keen on either. The original story was by Nikolay Gogol, who claimed it was … Read more
Triangle
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 March The USS Cyclops disappears, 1918 On this day in 1918, the USS Cyclops disappeared at sea, with a loss of 306 crew and passengers. It remains the single largest naval disaster not involving enemy attack in US history. The ship was carrying manganese, an ingredient in munitions production, and so the suspicion was at the time that the ship had been sunk by the Germans, with whom the US was at war, though this has never been confirmed. The other theory is that the ship encountered a heavy storm after leaving Bahia, Brazil, bound for Baltimore, Maryland. The ship … Read more
Causeway
Welcome back, Jennifer Lawrence, who as recently as 2015/16 was the world’s highest paid actress and in Causeway reminds us why. And perhaps needed to – so many films she’s appeared in since her high-water mark have been just a touch underwhelming. And welcome to the big time for Brian Tyree Henry. Oscar-nominated for his role here, he’s been impressive in everything he’s been in for years, but it was 2020’s The Outside Story that proved he could carry an entire movie on his own. In what’s largely a two-hander – it could almost be a play in a studio theatre – Lawrence plays a soldier suffering post-traumatic physical and mental trauma after … Read more
The Walking Target
The Walking Target packs a lot of people and a lot of plot into its brief 74 minutes running time. That is a feature not a bug. It’s a story about a man freshly out of prison who is, as the prison governor tells Nick Harbin (Ron Foster) while reluctantly releasing him, a “walking target”. Because he’s never divulged where the heist money was stashed that got him the jail sentence in the first place. As he heads out through the front gates of the prison there they all are waiting for him. The girlfriend, Susie (Merry Anders), who visited him only once while he did his five-year stretch but now wants to … Read more
Catch the Fair One
Catch the Fair One is a game of two halves kind of movie, absolutely the wrong metaphor for a story incidentally set in the world of boxing, and starring a boxer in her acting debut. Kali Reis not only plays the similarly named Kaylee, but also co-created the story, with director Josef Kubota Wladyka. Who came up with the fractured chronology is less clear and it doesn’t help a film that could most easily be described as a young woman’s search for her lost sister. Wrinkles come courtesy of the fact that Kaylee is also a female boxer and that her sister is the real daughter of a Native American mother, whereas Kaylee … Read more
Crossing Delancey
Very New York, very Jewish, very of its time, 1988’s Crossing Delancey seems to divide opinion sharply. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus is largely in favour, though back in the day Roger Ebert wasn’t so keen (“not good enough,” said the usually fair-minded Ebert). It’s often billed as a rom-com, which is like calling Hamlet a comedy because it has the gravedigger in it. No, it’s a romance, a romantic drama, plain and simple, a genre that often has to fly under a flag of convenience. Plot: pretty but no longer quite so young Izzi works at New York’s most bookstore bookstore, where she’s in charge of looking after the writers who turn up … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 7 – The Living Dead
The zombie movie was sleeping fitfully in its crypt – George Romero would wake it in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead – when The Avengers episode The Living Dead first aired in February 1967. Steed and Peel, it seems, are now ghosthunters as well as murder investigators, industrial-decline consultants and everyday spies, and are called in after stage drunk Kermit (Jack Woolgar), stumbling home one night espies the lid of a tomb opening and a man in white ascending from it. “The Duke!” Kermit exclaims. Was it the first duke, of 17th century vintage? Or one only recently deceased – “a real man”, according to one local – who died in … Read more
The Chronology of Water
So Kristen Stewart made a movie and, in spite of what the goons hoped, didn’t fall flat on her face. The Chronology of Water will infuriate people who harbour a grudge. Though, on the other hand, surely the twittersphere (Xsphere?) can’t still be hating on Stewart? After all this time? For the RPatz stuff? Or the sulky features and mumbling performances. Or suddenly becoming the highest paid actress in the world – briefly, till she walked away from all that. Who knows? There’s an irrational hellbeast out there for all of us if we look hard enough. Personally, I’m a fan, of Stewart’s “fuck you” attitude but particularly of the sort of films … Read more
