Popular Reviews
The County
The County is yet more proof that Icelandic film-makers punch above their weight. Grímur Hákonarson is one of a band of modern Icelandic writer/directors including Benedikt Erlingsson (Of Horses and Men, Woman at War) and Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík, The Deep) turning out films that manage to have something going on below the surface while also being entertaining. If Kormákur has recently gone a bit Hollywood (2 Guns, with Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, and currently finishing The Good Spy with Hugh Jackman), Hákonarson has stayed closer to home and more stereotypically “Icelandic”, like countryman Erlingsson. You might have seen Hákonarson’s excellent last film, Rams, which told the story of two ageing sheep-farmer … Read more
A Place in the Sun
Based on the appropriately named novel An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun is a noirish and properly tragic melodrama hailed as a nigh-on perfect movie when it came out in 1951. Since then its stock has fallen somewhat, though the first two thirds still work beautifully, thanks in no small part to the performance of Shelley Winters, though Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor’s scenes together also exert a mesmeric pull. Its tragic hero is George (Clift), the poor relation of the wealthy manufacturing family the Eastmans, who, having tapped his uncle for a job, catches the eye of Alice (Winters), a demure sweetie who works alongside him on his uncle’s production … Read more
Suspiria
Suspiria, the original 1977 one not the 2018 remake (a treat for another day), pulls a version of the same trick on its audience that Orson Welles pulled on his crew while making Citizen Kane. “It’s a dream sequence,” Welles would sometimes shout, when he ran into resistance against whatever novelty he was trying out on any given day. Park your timeserved-craftsman’s logical objections, in other words, and give it a try. Armed with his “dream sequence” rationale Welles was able to experiment away to his heart’s content. If Welles had a dream, Dario Argento has a nightmare to deliver and everything in his film is shaped by it. Park expectations about “good” … Read more
Zola
A nasty-ass neo-noir, Zola is based on the true story of Detroit dancer and waitress A’Ziah King, Zola to her friends. Over 148 tweets written in a clear and vivid prose style she laid out how her new stripper friend Stefani had tricked her into taking a job as a prostitute. Tweet one starts, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out?” The tweets went viral and the story got picked up by Rolling Stone, who turned it into a feature: Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted. Movie offers followed. At what point James Franco came on board is unclear … Read more
This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Against the assertion of the title, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection does look like more like a death than a reanimation, of an individual, a way of life and a group of villagers in Lesotho who are being relocated before their village is flooded to make way for a dam project. It’s an impressive film in pretty much every respect, and it’s entirely understandable why the country decided to submit it for Oscars consideration, something they’ve never done before. This Burial/Resurrection idea is handled almost as a kind of dry joke, since the film’s focus is an old woman who spends the entire film trying to die, after learning of … Read more
Night of the Kings
When is a prison drama not a prison drama? When it’s Night of the Kings (La nuit des rois), a French-language drama from the Ivory Coast that starts and ends in a brutal jail and soars off in every direction in between. Philippe Lacôte’s film opens with a shot of the jungle. The camera pans up to reveal a vast building, the Maca prison, one run by its inmates, the governor will later remark to an underling. It’s a jungle out here and it’s going to be a jungle in there too, right? Right. But also very wrong. Into this pulullating mass of hyper-masculinity – so many shirtless male bodies, so many scowls – … Read more
The Boy Who Turned Yellow
The Boy Who Turned Yellow is interesting for all sorts of reasons. Released in 1972, it was the final film of both director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, the powerhouse duo who’d been responsible for some of the UK’s most innovative, technically brilliant, thematically complex and entertaining films. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes are probably the biggest successes in a partnership that lasted from 1939’s The Spy in Black (“the most exciting spy melodrama since the advent of the Second World War,” opined the New York Times) to 1957’s Ill Met by Moonlight aka Night Ambush (Powell himself … Read more
The Justice of Bunny King
One woman’s triumph against adversity – now there’s a phrase to chill the blood. Here’s what it says right under the title on the IMDb page for The Justice of Bunny King. “A triumph over adversity tale of women fighting their way back from the bottom of the barrel.” I don’t know who wrote that but what director Gaysorn Thavat’s debut feature serves up is a horse of a very different colour. The films of Ken Loach provide the most obvious reference point, particularly Cathy Come Home, one of a string of TV “plays” Loach made for the BBC in the mid 1960s. It told the story of one woman trying to triumph … Read more
The Innocents
Askel Vogt’s The Innocents takes a romantic notion about children – that they know something adults don’t – and gives it a damn good spanking. The result is one of the moodiest, creepiest and most unsettling films about childhood ever made. There’s a touch of the brilliant 1961 film also called The Innocents, a bit of Let the Right One In and a smidgeon of The Exorcist in its intensely domestic setting. And it continues the trend towards supernatural stories told in a highly naturalistic way (see Petite Maman) which looks like it’s got a fair way to run. Vogt keeps his camera at child height as he gradually unfolds his story of … Read more
All Quiet on the Western Front
If Netflix’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front has done anything it’s revived interest in this 1930 original, a film more people have heard about than seen but which has been influential on generations of film-makers. It’s obvious that Kubrick borrowed heavily from it for the trench sequences in Paths of Glory, and Steven Spielberg has acknowledged its influence on Saving Private Ryan. And what a beast it is, a marvel of technical brilliance, directed with almost insane virtuosity by Lewis Milestone, who’d already made a name for himself by 1930 and would go on to direct for decades to come – he directed the original Ocean’s Eleven in 1960, for … Read more
I Love My Dad
When James Morosini was about 19 he and his dad got into a huge fight. James ended up blocking all connections to him – phone, email, social media, the works. A few weeks later James got a friend request from a pretty girl on Facebook. “I was thrilled,” James later said in an interview. “She was perfect. We shared the same interests, she was gorgeous… Things were looking up. Unfortunately, she was also my dad.” Fast forward about a decade after that fight and here’s I Love My Dad, a comedy about what happened when a teenager gets catfished by his own dad, with Morosini in the lightly fictionalised role of Franklin, Patton … Read more
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
A hell of title and a hell of a film, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is the remarkable second feature by writer/director Lili Horvát, who’s otherwise oddjobbed about the film biz in Hungary for some time – a casting director here, an actor there (you might have seen her in Kornél Mundruczó’s 2014 movie White God, a bizarre amalgam of the Disney kids movie with the post-apocalyptic wasteland drama). With an influence of Claire Denis, Horvát conjures, also in “how is she doing that?” fashion, a complete dramatic universe set in a world of feeling and gesture, where facts as such are not as important as the emotions triggered … Read more
