Popular Reviews
Viva
The IMDb plot keywords for Viva include “large breasts” and “limp penis”, a rough indicator of what’s being served up in Anna Biller’s debut, a relentlessly accurate and grim pastiche of the pornified world of the 1970s sexploitation movie, or 1970s society itself. Biller wrote, directed, produced, edited, wrote some of the songs, designed the clothes and sets, painted the paintings, did the animated sequence and even played the organ. She also plays the main character. You could say it’s her film. What a world she’s conjured. Barbi (Biller), a suburban wife who we meet in her bath, tits prominent, smoking, drinking wine and looking pretty morose as she flicks through a magazine. … Read more
The Girl without Hands aka La Jeune Fille sans Mains
A miller down on his luck meets a man in the woods. The man is the Devil, though the miller doesn’t know it, and after a bit of smalltalk he’s soon offered the miller a deal. Give me what you have behind your mill and I’ll make you rich, offers the Devil. Behind the mill, thinks the man, that’s an apple tree. An apple tree for a crock of gold sounds fair enough to me, he reasons. Obviously never having read any fairy tales, he agrees to the bargain. It turns out that the miller’s daughter was also behind the mill and the miller has now signed her over to the Devil himself. … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 3 – Super Secret Cypher Snatch
As mentioned briefly in the previous post (and explained much more fully on the Avengers Forever website), there was a brief interregnum in the final series of The Avengers, when John Bryce took over as producer, only for Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell to return to save the day after Bryce got hopelessly bogged down. So in this series we’ve got a bunch of Bryce episodes and a whole lot more with Clemens as showrunner. Easiest way to distinguish is Tara King’s hair – if it’s blond, it’s Bryce. Super Secret Cypher Snatch is not one of those blond episodes. In fact Clemens and Fennell made quite sure that it was “their” Tara … Read more
Kokuho
The highest-grossing home-grown live-action movie in Japan’s history, Kokuho is a decade-straddling epic about the sacrifices required to make great art, served up as a Jacob and Esau tale of two boys – one who has all the gifts, the other not so many. The twist being that the talented kid is the son of a dead yakuza, and so cannot move easily, if at all, in the rarefied world of the kabuki theatre – his chosen field. As Lee Sang-il’s sumptuous film opens, young, orphaned Kikuo’s talent has just been spotted by one of kabuki’s masters, Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe). Soon, the disadvantaged child (Soya Kurokawa as a pretty boy, Ryô Yoshizawa as a … Read more
Desperate
Anthony Mann called Desperate his first proper movie, the one where he got to do what he wanted to do. Mann, now so famous for his westerns, had previously proved himself a master of film noir, as Desperate proves. This was the first of seven he’d crank out in 1947 and 1948. It’s a good work rate, but then these were made hot and fast. If it was me I’d have put director George Diskant’s name on the movie as its star. His cinematography is majestic. He was known for deep focus and his mastery of contrast – plenty of both here. But things being how they are it’s Steve Brodie’s name at … Read more
Good Night Oppy
Good Night Oppy tells the story of two robot explorers sent to Mars in 2003 by Nasa. The idea was for them to drive about collecting samples of rock and soil, with the ultimate aim of proving that what look like dried up rivers from Earth are in fact just what they look like, old water courses. Life on Mars, or the possibility of life on Mars, was what it was all about. The explorers were named Opportunity (nickname Oppy) and Spirit, and the engineers who designed them put a “warrantee” life on them of about 90 days. What with the low temperatures, the dust and the rigours of getting there and landing, … Read more
Redux Redux
Redux Redux retools the high concept of Edge of Tomorrow, but instead of Tom Cruise being endlessly regenerated as an ever better fighting machine, it’s Michaela McManus as an endlessly vengeful mother repeatedly killing the man who killed her daughter, and visiting all the trillions of parallel universes to do so. Actually, Irene is hoping to find her daughter still alive and in the rude health in one of them. When she doesn’t, killing the man who stole her daughter’s life acts as consolation. It also means she gets to hone her slaughtering skills – tying the perp to a chair and setting fire to him in one universe, shooting him in another, … Read more
Prayers for the Stolen
Writer/director Tatiana Huezo drops us straight in to Prayers for the Stolen (Noche de Fuego). As a dark screen accompanied by rapid breathing yields to a daytime scene of two females digging what looks like a shallow grave, the internal interrogation starts – Who are these people? Where are they? Is it a grave? Why do they both look so frantic? No voiceover tells us, no “useful idiot” arrives on the scene to act as a conduit from screen to viewer. Huezo forces us to work it out. She’s a director with a background in documentary-making and this adaptation of Jennifer Clement’s best-seller uses a classic technique of the observational style. What makes … Read more
Fantômas: L’échafaud magique
Fantômas: L’échafaud magique (aka Fantomas: The Magic Scaffold) is the first of four feature-length adaptations made in the 1980s for French TV. No less than Claude Chabrol directed this first one, with Juan Luis Buñuel (son of Luis) picking up numbers two and three, before Chabrol returned to round the series off. If you know Fantômas at all then it’s probably not through his TV outings. The infamous master-criminal appears in a vast number of novels and was famously turned into a rollicking silent feature by Jean Feuillade in 1913 (the first of five that appeared over the next year and a bit), returning even more famously on film in a series of … Read more
Princes of the Yen
Halfway through watching this simple but fascinating documentary, by the same team that made the equally eye-opening 97% Owned, a friend turned up. Instead of saying “How are you?” or “Wanna cup of tea?” (I’m writing this in the UK), I said, “God, I’m watching this amazing documentary about economics in Japan and how the authorities there deliberately sabotaged the country’s economy, and the whole 1980s boom and bust was a fix, and the…” and on I burbled. It’s not the reaction you’d expect to what is essentially a PowerPoint presentation, delivered in steady-as-she-goes voiceover. Yet the story the film (subtitle: Central Banks and the Transformation of the Economy) tells is remarkable, and is … Read more
One Minute of Darkness
At first glance One Minute of Darkness, last of the Dreileben trilogy, seems to be the most straightforward of the lot. A honest-to-goodness cat-and-mouser. On the one hand the escaped murderer Molesch, who has been little more than a bad smell in the first two films. On the other a cop on a mission to bring Molesch in, in spite of the fact that he’s ill and on leave. It’s deceptive, though, and the deception starts with the opening shots, of Molesch in custody being driven to a police station. This, it seems obvious, is a continuation of the previous instalment of the series, Don’t Follow Me Around (Komm Mir Nicht Nach), the … Read more
Magnolia
Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to Boogie Nights disappointed those who were hoping for more Dirk Diggler and his prosthetic schlong. At 182 minutes it also caught out those who were watching at the cinema with a beer or two inside them – knotted legs don’t make for maximum movie fun. At home with a pause button it’s pure luxury. Stylistically it’s heavily in debt to one of Anderson’s readily acknowledged influences, Robert Altman – the overlapping dialogue, the wandering camera and the faintly disengaged performances. By which I mean the actors are not all constantly presenting three-quarter profiles to camera (no, not even Tom Cruise). Yes, Tom Cruise. How often is it that … Read more
