Popular Reviews
Drive-In Massacre
If you’re looking for a drive-in movie set at a drive-in… Drive-In Massacre is the short, sharp schlock you’re looking for, a cult item shot in four days, without permits and with all the actors using pseudonyms because they were on a non-union production. It’s a cult movie, which is a way of rationalising its low score on the IMDb – 3.7 out of 10 at the time of writing – but it’s better than its rating and has the sort of breezy, trashy quality you’d expect from a director with titles like Teenage Sex Therapy, Let’s Play Doctor and Teeny Buns on his CV. Stu Segall is the name. The premise is simple. … Read more
Too Late for Tears
Misleading title, Too Late for Tears, suggesting there was a time for tears at all. By the time this 1949 film noir is done, the story of a woman rotten to the core, it’s clear that the time for tears – from her, or for her – might well be never. It’s Lizabeth Scott’s chance to chew the scenery, the furniture and her co-stars, playing a woman with a crushing sense of social inferiority who is transformed instantly when a big bag of cash suddenly lands on the back seat of the convertible she and her husband are powering towards a dreaded dinner party in the Hollywood hills. The car it came from … 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
The Wrecking Crew
My first movie from 2026. And because it was released in January, I’m not expecting much of The Wrecking Crew. The prestige movies come at the back end of the year, so as to be fresh in the minds of voters when awards season gets underway (roughly, November to February/March). Not that The Wrecking Crew is the sort of film that is ever lined up for anything at all, except the appreciation of fans of movies like this. It’s Jason Momoa and Dave Baustista, before we go any further, playing a pair of estranged, muscley Hawaiian brothers thrown back together when their dad dies unexpectedly. It turns out that Dad possessed something the … Read more
Point Break
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 October World’s first parachute jump, 1797 On this day in 1797, André-Jacque Garnerin made the first descent by frameless parachute. Ascending from the Parc Monceau in a basket attached to what looked like a large furled umbrella, itself attached to a balloon, Garnerin got to around 900 metres (3,000 feet) before unpacking the chute and severing a cord attaching him to the balloon. His descent was ungainly and his basket fell rapidly and swung wildly. He arrived back on the ground with a thump but unhurt. Garnerin was not the first person to dabble with the parachute however. There are … Read more
Priscilla
So, Priscilla Presley the origin story, authorised version. Priscilla director and adapter Sofia Coppola isn’t out to bust any myths here, taking the onetime wife of Elvis, Priscilla Presley (an executive producer of this movie) at her word, or at the word of her 1985 biography Elvis and Me, at any rate. The result walks the line between high-end hack work and a prison-break drama, albeit one dressed to within an inch of its life. It’s the soup to nuts version of Priscilla’s life with the King – 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis Presley, the most famous man in the world, while he’s stationed in West Germany on military service in 1959. He … Read more
Prick Up Your Ears
A re-release of Stephen Frears’s 1987 drama about Joe Orton, the blackly satirical and dead funny writer of Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane who was battered to death by his lover Kenneth Halliwell in their rundown London flat in 1967, just as the big time arrived. It’s a study of a relationship skidding towards the brink, with Gary Oldman a chirpy, cocky Orton, Alfred Molina working hard at the much less sympathetic role of Halliwell, the older man whose tutorial services were no longer required once Orton’s star started to rise. Meanwhile Vanessa Redgrave puts in to-the-manner-born performance as Orton’s imperious, patrician, rather scary agent, Peggy Ramsay. The film seemed almost daring when … Read more
20 June 2016-06-20
Out This Week Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (Lionsgate, cert 15) And it is literally that… Pride & Prejudice… and zombies. Once the famous preamble – lightly scrambled – was out of the way, and I had been apprised of the fact that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains, it was straight into the tale of Elizabeth, if not the most beautiful then certainly the smartest of the Bennet daughters, and her growing relationship with dark, thunderous Mr Darcy. Lily James and Sam Riley play it straight as Elizabeth and Darcy, and Sally Phillips and Charles Dance also fit so neatly into the traditional roles of garrulous, mercenary Mrs … Read more
Dekalog
Ten shortish films loosely working their way through the Ten Commandments, director Krzysztof Kieslowśki and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s epic Dekalog made its TV debut in December 1989, as Poland was shaking off its Soviet overlords, and was instantly hailed as a masterpiece. Time has polished its legend and it’s still regularly cited as one of the greatest… TV shows or movie collections, take your pick. The whole ten-parter is set in and around one bleak Warsaw tower block, where people come and go, lives are lived and little moral dilemmas play out. In the first one, which lays out the stall, a prescient story about transcendental spirituality and the consciousness (or otherwise) of … Read more
The Pianist
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 March Roman Polanski charged with rape, 1977 On this day in 1977, the film director Roman Polanski was arrested on a charge of rape by use of drug. He was also charged with perversion, sodomy, a lewd and lascivious act on a child under 14 and with furnishing a controlled substance to a child under 14. Samantha Gailey was the victim, a 13-year-old he had been photographing as part of an assignment for French Vogue. The shoot took place at the actor Jack Nicholson’s house. Nicholson was away skiing. Polanski pleaded not guilty to all charges but later as part … Read more
100 Years of… Master of the House
More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, for plenty of that. Madly successful at the box office, Master of the House is, as near as you got from Dreyer, a Hollywood entertainment, telling a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, emotional arcs, good guys and bad guys, fairly realistic performances and a moral at the end that you can actually see coming from … Read more
Donkey Skin
A big thing in France but barely talked about anywhere else, Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (Peau d’âne), sometimes known as The Magic Donkey, possibly owes its failure to ring cultural bells globally to its plot, which is about a king trying to marry his own daughter – incest, in other words. It’s Catherine Deneuve as the daughter, trying to put the king off with one ruse after another. Jean Marais as the king, Delphine Seyrig as a fairy godmother reinforcing the young woman’s belief that sleeping with daddy is wrong, and Jacques Perrin as the prince of a neighbouring kingdom who falls for the disguised young woman after she goes on the run … Read more
