Popular Reviews
Putin’s Olympic Dream
“There was only a mountain, no road. A forest, a river, nothing else. Nothing there at all.” Oligarch Vladimir Potanin, a (former) investor in the Sochi Winter Olympics says with just a touch of residual pride about Sochi, a spa town on the Black Sea that is now home to the Winter Olympics. He got involved back in 2002, when it was a smallish private project, before President Putin, as he was then and is again now (having made himself prime minister for a spell, so as to sidestep an annoying constitutional restriction on being president too often) involved himself and directed the full force of the state onto the event, making it … Read more
Let It Be Morning
Sam and Mira are a Palestinian couple back in the village where he grew up. They’re at the wedding of his brother, a big, rowdy affair, with the extended family out in force, music, dancing, kids running around, it’s a lot of fun. It’s being held in his father’s half-built house and as Sami wanders off around it to grab some air and a moment to himself, he discovers exactly who is doing the building, one of the “daffawis”, as Palestinian refugees are disparagingly known by Sami’s far less woke brother in law. This refugee is a ragged looking guy and he’s camping out in a shell of a room with his young … Read more
BAC Nord
BAC Nord (released by Netflix as The Stronghold) tells the story of a case that’s notorious in the annals of French policing, when a unit of Marseille cops was hauled in and accused of drug trafficking and dealing. Their defence? They were part of an undercover and slightly off-limits operation ordered from higher up and now being officially denied. Whether that was or wasn’t the case is what the film is about, though it makes it clear from the beginning that it clearly was. And in the characters of the three main characters – granite-tough middle-aged leader Grégory Cerva (Gilles Lellouche), new family man Yass (Karim Leklou) and charming playa Antoine (François Civil) … Read more
25 May 2015-05-25
Out This Week Tusk (Sony, cert 15) After the wobble of Red State, Kevin Smith seems to have got his midlife crisis out of the way and now roars back to form with a brilliant, and brilliantly discomfiting, grotesque comedy that sees shock podcaster Justin Long surgically turned into a human walrus by mad Michael Parks. The fact that Long has it coming is signified by his douchebag cheating on his superhot girlfriend, played by superhot Genesis Rodriguez, but nothing can really prepare us for the sense of pathos that Long conjures when he cries big walrus tears from out of his big brown eyes on realising his old human form has been … Read more
Tótem
Lila Avilés has only made one film before, The Chambermaid, in which a lot happened without very much seeming to happen at all. The same thing is going on with Tótem, superficially an almost-fly-on-the-wall naturalistic drama tracking a family through the day leading up to the birthday party of Tono, a very sick husband, father and son, who will probably not see another birthday, it becomes apparent fairly early on. Tono used to be the hottest guy in town, we later learn, but in glimpses of his body as he tries to hold himself upright to take a shower, he’s now a skeletal remnant of what used to be. Without the horrorshow of … Read more
The Gangster
There aren’t that many films called The Gangster, which is odd considering how many gangster movies there are. But here he is, this singular malefactor, in a film noir from 1947, a strange one with a weird, distorting-mirror quality. Too arty for its own good seems to have been the general consensus at the time. I have no idea what any of those complaints are about. The odd art deco clock and building frontage to one side, there’s not much artiness going on here at all – director Gordon Wiles isn’t messing about overly with the narrative. DP Paul Ivano gives it to us fairly straight in terms of lenses and lighting. Dalton … Read more
The Killing Room
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 July CIA created, 1947 On this day in 1947, the National Security Act was enacted by the US Congress. Among other things, it created the Central Intelligence Agency, the successor agency to the Office of Strategic Services, which had been formed during the Second World War to coordinate spying against the Axis powers. The CIA is responsible for counterterrorism, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, intelligence, counter-intelligence and cyber-intelligence. In 1963 the CIA’s budget was $550million ($4.2 billion inflation-adjusted). By 2013 it was $14.7 billion. It is the only US government agency allowed to use “unvouchered” funds – those without … Read more
Penda’s Fen
As far as the work of director Alan Clarke goes, Penda’s Fen is an outlier. A strange take on folk horror, it’s become something of a cult in the decades since it was first broadcast in 1974 in the BBC’s long-running Play for Today strand. Pre HBO and streaming, TV was predominantly a writer’s medium rather than a director’s. Even so, Clarke made a name for himself as a director in TV for two reasons: his focus on often punishingly gritty social-realist subject matter and his eye for talent. Prime (though relatively late) examples of this include TV features like 1979’s Scum, set inside a young offenders prison, where he gave Ray Winstone … Read more
World of Tomorrow
World of Tomorrow is a brilliant short by American animator Don Hertzfeldt, the latest in a career that stretches back at this point by nearly 30 years and has consisted almost entirely of shorts. Even his one long movie, It’s Such a Beautiful Day, turns out on closer inspection to be a compilation of three shorter ones. World of Tomorrow is also part of a grander work, along with Parts Two (The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts) and Three (The Absent Destinations of David Prime). But it’s this first one that got the Oscar nomination, largely, I suspect, on account of its cuteness, though there’s an iron hand beneath the velvet glove. Cutes … Read more
Erotikon
What else did the director Mauritz Stiller do, apart from discover Greta Garbo and take her to America? Erotikon is one answer, a cult silent movie remarkably triumphing in a genre that usually needs dialogue to succeed. It’s a farce and Stiller gets it up and running in two opening scenes sketching his two main characters. In one corner Leo Charpentier, a professor of entomology who can wax lyrical about the sexual proclivities of the male beetle – how it likes to put it about a bit, in short – without ever realising that the same might apply to a) the female beetle, b) a human subject and c) most pertinently, his wife. We … Read more
Close Your Eyes
Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los Ojos in the original Spanish) makes it four full films in 50 years for writer/director Victor Erice. Hardly a punishing workrate. But then when your debut was The Spirit of the Beehive – often touted as the best Spanish film ever made – you can pretty much go at your own pace. Close Your Eyes does too, moving at a speed that would be considered glacial if it were almost any other director, but is a delicious, tantalising linger in the hands of Erice. A thriller, believe it or not, though a fairly existential one, about a famous actor who disappears off the face of the earth just … Read more
27 May 2013-05-27
Out in the UK This Week The Last Stand (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Welcome back Arnold Schwarzenegger, just a touch arthritic after all those years running California and now, with seven projects announced on the imdb, clearly cranking them out quick before the ibuprofen wears off. So what do we have here? It’s Arnie as a sheriff in a nowhere town down near the Mexican border being inveigled into an Unforgiven style strapping back on of the guns by a seriously bad escaped gangster (Eduardo Noriega) who’s heading down Arnie’s way in a hilariously fast car. The big idea is a lone-hero High Noon showdown but in essence this an 80s action movie … Read more
