Popular Reviews
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
It’s often said that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) has no narrative throughline, that it’s freeform, experimental, avant-garde and so on. This is both true and not true. There is a story, though Godard does his best to hide it, of a young Parisian woman, Juliette (Marina Vlady), who intersperses her roles as wife and mother with a bit of prostitution on the side. This she does, she explains in voiceover, at the request of her husband, who she met while working as a prostitute, and who suggested she go back on the game as a way of making a … Read more
The Narrow Margin
Dangers on a train? If it’s jeopardy on board a speeding locomotive you want, The Narrow Margin is the way to go. Made for buttons, shot in 13 days and with no big tentpole stars, it made the name of director Richard Fleischer, a B-movie guy bumped straight up to the big time once it eventually debuted. “Eventually” because RKO’s owner Howard Hughes sat on it for two years. There are many theories as to why – one prime candidate is that he was going to reshoot bits of it with bigger names to capitalise on its obvious qualities. Another that the film got caught up in Hughes’s machinations as he tried to … Read more
Last Night
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 February The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942 On this night in 1942, with the US at war with Japan for less than three months, air raid sirens started wailing throughout Los Angeles county. A blackout was ordered. Air raid wardens were summoned. At around 3am the Artillery Brigade began firing machine guns and anti-aircraft shells at reported aircraft. Over the next hour over 1,400 shells would be fired. At 7.21am the blackout was lifted. Several buildings had been damaged; five civilians were dead – three in car accidents, two from heart attacks. No planes were downed, or even hit, as … Read more
Infested
Infested is Attack the Block with added spiders… and that’s a good thing. A homage to John Carpenter, in other words. Confined space, conflicted characters, churning synths, an invisible foe… until it suddenly isn’t, it’s (mostly) all here. It’s the feature debut of French director Sébastien Vaniček and impressed Sam Raimi enough to get Vaniček a gig directing the next Evil Dead movie – a franchise back from the, er, dead. You can see why Raimi signed him up. Raimi-like, Vaniček wastes no time getting his story going, and then prioritises forward momentum. In disaster-movie style we meet a bunch of characters before following them into a situation full of jeopardy. Some will survive, … Read more
Green for Danger
A tightly plotted and nicely played whodunit of the old school, Green for Danger is also British to the core. Set during the Second World War, it was made in 1946, when it was possible to look back at the darkest hour – the Blitz, doodlebugs (the weaponised drones of yore) and all that with half a smile. The plot centres on the death in hospital of a man whose minor operation shouldn’t have killed him at all. Did someone want this local postman dead? If so, why? The medical team who operated on him all look guilty as hell, but all also seem to have plausible alibis. Enter Alastair Sim as Inspector … Read more
The Woman on the Beach
The Woman on the Beach is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Designed as a dreamy, psychological tear through the unconscious, where libido is locked in a fight with other bits of the psyche, it wound up looking like it had been in a fight with itself. After a negative preview screening, panicked director Jean Renoir took it away and cut out 30 minutes of it. After reshooting all the scenes between leads Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, he recast the only other significant woman in it. Out went Virginia Huston and in came Nan Leslie, who plays the significantly named Eve. The result? “I produced a film which was, I think, neither … Read more
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 May Ramesses II becomes pharaoh of Egypt, 1279BC On this day in 1279BC, the king often called Ramesses (or Rameses, or Ramses) the Great, became pharaoh of Egypt. Known as Ozymandias by the Greeks, the pharaoh most remembered by history was a great military campaigner and a great builder of cities, temples and monuments. He became pharaoh in his late teens and ruled for the following 66 years. The Egyptian army consisted of about 100,000 men, and he used it to wage war against the Hittites and Nubians, routed the Sherden sea pirates who were harrying ships on the Mediterranean … Read more
House of Gucci
House of Gucci, Ridley Scott, this looks like a good fit. A fashion house relying on its image to shift product and a director who started out in advertising and still has an eye for an arresting visual. And so it proves to be, mostly… though by the end you might be staring at the screen with head slightly aslant. The what, the huh? Pushing comparisons to beyond their limit, in some ways it’s a remake of Alien, though this time Lady Gaga plays the invading creature who’s going to wreak havoc, a brassy little minx called Patrizia who bumps into sober, low-key Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) – scion of the fashion house … Read more
Sisu
Sisu is the return to form that Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s fans were hoping for. If he’d died after his feature debut, 2010’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, he could have shuffled off to Tuonela knowing he’d made a funny, grisly Christmas movie like no other. But he followed up with Big Game, an attempt to weld Helander’s dark ethos to something more obviously Hollywood (it starred Samuel L Jackson), which not only didn’t quite satisfy either camp but also diluted the Rare Exports story a touch. TV work followed and now Sisu, a dark, bloodlusty, periodically howlingly funny film that reverses Helander out of that corner. First Blood is the inspiration, Helander … Read more
Censor
Censor twists the horror movie into something it usually isn’t – a political satire. It’s set in the 1980s, when a media-confected moral panic about “video nasties” forced the UK government into regulating what had been until then the entirley unregulated market in home videos, kept supplied by thousands of tiny one-man (they usually were men) operations run out of corner shops up and down the country. Until then the “board of film classification”, as it’s coyly known – an organisation funded by the industry and not by government – had dealt with theatrical releases only. There was barely anything else, after all. But as a result of the Video Recordings Act 1984, … Read more
Jimi: All Is by My Side
Here’s a problem for anyone about to make a film about Jimi Hendrix, genius guitarist, 1960s icon, member of the 27 Club of rock’s premature expirers – how do you get inside a character who was private, taciturn, shy and elliptically cool? With a voiceover? A confidant? Newsreel footage? It’s a question that writer/director John Ridley answers with a shrug in this inert biopic which fails to locate Hendrix in his time. There’s another problem too. Hendrix died a long time ago now. Hell, even Kurt Cobain died a long time ago now, so Ridley needs to make a film that tells an audience who might know next to nothing about Hendrix why and … Read more
Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream
Or how six films screened in graveyard slots between 1970 and 1977 changed the way movies are watched and made. The six are: El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mad freakish spaghetti western, the Man with No Name drops acid. Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s splattersome zombie motherlode which even now Romero is rubbing his hands about. Pink Flamingos – John Waters broke through with this excursion into camp sleaze, and how happy Waters is with the idea that almost single-handedly he dragged Hollywood along with him into the world of bad taste. The Harder They Come, the reggae film by Perry Henzell that filled a need created by Bob Marley for Jamaican … Read more
