Popular Reviews
So Close
Men are largely an irrelevance in So Close, Corey Yuen’s “girls with guns” actioner made in 2002 just as Hong Kong was exiting its glory period. I prompted Google in AI mode to list the key characteristics of the “girls with guns” genre were. It said – Hong Kong, female protagonists, gunplay and stunts, challenging norms and exploitation v agency. We get all of those in the opening sequence, in which assassin Shu Qi’s Lynn, dressed all in white, enters the HQ of a shady Hong Kong megacorporation posing as a techy “angel” specialising in malware attacks. Only to exit shortly afterwards at speed, pursued by scores of security men, many of them … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 7 – The Murder Market
The Murder Market is one of the episodes first shot with Elizabeth Shepherd playing Mrs Peel, then reshot with Diana Rigg in the role after it was decided that Shepherd didn’t fit the bill. Hence the two directors on the imdb credits – Wolf Rilla shot the original, Peter Graham Scott this version, which eventually was broadcast on 12 November 1965, a Friday night, rather than the usual Saturday (in the London region at least). Order was restored the following Saturday. The title is a weak pun on “meat market” since the plot revolves around a dating agency with a natty sideline in murdering people – as established in the opening scene in … 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
The Intruder
The Intruder examines, in the sort of lurid, semi-deranged way you’d expect from a horror movie, something that’s actually rather subtle. How a house becomes a home. How any prospective buyer, looking around someone else’s home with a view to purchasing it, is an intruder. And how the seller, once the deal is complete, still has some residual emotional hold over the property. It might be the new buyer’s house – the legal documents say so – but in some sense it’s still the old owner’s home, especially if they lived there for decades. Nice young marrieds Scott (Michael Ealy) and Annie (Meagan Good) have done well in their careers and fancy moving … Read more
100 Years of… Lady Windermere’s Fan
Mary Pickford once described the director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors”. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, you can see what she means. She meant it dismissively, though the door, and what’s behind it – or not – is key to Lubitsch’s work generally, and specifically here. This is a story all about secrets – as Wilde’s so often were – a tale of mistaken identity with ironic distance between what the people on the screen imagine themselves to be and how the audience sees them. To thumbnail-sketch a delicately intertwined plot, it centres on Lady Windermere, who is in love with her husband but being pressed … Read more
10 August 2015-08-10
Out This Week The Salvation (Warner, cert 15) Having made his name with austere Dogma films, Kristian Levring makes clear he’s more than a one trick pony with a film that pulls every “big movie” trick available – lighting, cameras, costumes, location and sound are all used to the max in a lavish western that sees Mads Mikkelsen striking Clint Eastwood poses as he tries to gain revenge for the death of his wife and child. One of the best modern westerns thematically, technically, artistically and in terms of pure entertainment, it references the medical violence of Peckinpah, the masculine codes of Aldrich, the operatics of Leone and the spartan ruggedness of John Ford, … Read more
My First Film
My First Film is not Zia Anger’s first film, and it isn’t a documentary either, which is what it sounds and looks like it’s going to be. Nor is it formidable, which its meta-sounding title suggests it might be. In fact it’s a surprisingly easy and enjoyable watch. Though it does start off in an esoteric direction – “assoteric”, Anger calls it – with a rough collage of staged recollection, old home movie footage and words typewritten on the screen designed to recall meetings Anger had with a production company to direct a film about, more or less, how tough it is being a woman. Something, she eventually realised, she just didn’t want to … Read more
Gaslight
This Gaslight, the 1940 version, shouldn’t really exist. When MGM decided to remake the British original in 1944 as a star vehicle for Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, they tried to destroy the original prints, as if the 1940 film had never existed at all – a case of gaslighting Gaslight? Bergman and Boyer are good in the remake, and they have alliteration on their side. But so do (Anton) Walbrook and (Diana) Wynyard, in Thorold Dickinson’s excellently creepy original. The plot in a thumbnail. He’s gaslighting her into thinking she’s mentally unstable. Why? So she won’t ask too many questions about what’s going on under her roof. To the point where she … Read more
The Voyeurs
Sydney Sweeney’s big eyes and impressive breasts both work hard in The Voyeurs, a trashy thriller designed to titillate even as it vaguely warns of the perils of being too interested in what other people get up to. As is often the way with these things, a hearty interest in what other people get up to is actually The Voyeurs‘ raison d’etre. It starts with one of those grand cinematic establishing shots of a cityscape, the camera gradually zooming in, in, in, onto a street, a shop, then dissolving the window separating outside from inside, before advancing still further into this boutique selling lingerie, and towards a changing cubicle where Sweeney can just … Read more
The Breed
Five horny college kids head off to an idyllic island for a weekend of booze and death in this tiredly formulaic horror film which subjects the isolated 20somethings to violent interaction with dogs – German shepherds, to be precise. To spend more time on the plot than is strictly necessary, it seems that someone has genetically fiddled with the dogs’ minds, making them super-intelligent and super-angry. Though not, it would seem, constantly so. Which gives our buff crew time to get drunk, have a laugh, and get into their bikinis (not the boys, obviously). After wondering when the black guy (Hill Harper) is going to die, you might also ask yourself what function exactly … Read more
The Asphalt Jungle
“Trash,” was MGM boss Louis B Mayer’s verdict on The Asphalt Jungle when he saw it in 1950. “Ugly people doing nasty things,” he added, possibly unhappy that John Huston had borrowed from the glamour-dodging European neorealists to make what’s now considered to be one of the pre-eminent films of the 1950s. Does Mayer have a point? Not from this end of the telescope. If nothing else, Huston has been proven right by the passage of time and the respect of countless other directors. You can see plenty of The Asphalt Jungle in the work of Quentin Tarantino, for instance. It’s a heist movie, a heist-gone-wrong movie in fact, and so there’s nothing … Read more
Burden
Burden? As in “white man’s burden”? Ironically, no. There’s a white saviour theme running right the way through Andrew Heckler’s film but it actually takes its name from its key character, Mike Burden, a lifelong member of the Klan who saw the error of his ways. With the flying of Confederate flags in the US an ongoing point of contention when this movie was released in 2018, Burden has timeliness on its side, and a core cast so accomplished most first-time directors would auction their mothers to get hold of them – Garrett Hedlund as Mike, Andrea Riseborough as the woman whose love makes him see the light, Tom Wilkinson as the local … Read more
