Popular Reviews
The Bunny Game
It’s unlikely you will ever have seen anything like The Bunny Game before, or will want to again. A film too strong and dark for many tastes, it’s undeniably brilliant at what it does. But couldn’t it do it elsewhere? Facetiousness to one side, The Bunny Game gets the thumbs up from the likes of horror sage Eli Roth, who loves it, and the thumbs down from the UK’s British Board of Film Classification, which refused to give it a certificate. The BBFC thought the film likely to “risk harm to individuals” (a line from its guidelines) due to its focus on “the unremitting sexual and physical abuse of a helpless woman” (a … Read more
Adaptation.
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 February The New Yorker launches, 1925 On this day in 1925, The New Yorker magazine was launched by Harold Ross and Jane Grant. Intended as a cosmopolitan magazine for the urban sophisticate – and those who aspired so to be – it started out as a broadly humorous publication, though quickly shifted its focus towards quality fiction and long-form journalism, though its cartoons have remained a key feature. Unafraid to be thought of as intelligent, educated and interested in a magazine world that largely pretends to the opposite, it could take its pick of a certain type of writer – … Read more
The Tunnel
In the opening moments of The Tunnel, an onscreen notice informs us that there are over 1,100 tunnels in Norway, and that, in the event of an emergency situation in any one of them, it’s really just a case of every person for themselves. There have been eight major fires in recent years, we’re further informed. Guess what’s about to happen? The Tunnel is a disaster movie happy to stick to the formula laid down in the ancient texts like The Poseidon Adventure. And so it is that in The Tunnel a group of people going about their every lives is suddenly subjected to an extreme ordeal testing their physical and moral endurance. … Read more
Where’s Poppa
Running on the same fuel as the UK comedy Steptoe and Son (or the US version of it Sanford and Son), Where’s Poppa is the story of a would-be suave, would-be lothario constantly being thwarted by his aged parent. George Segal plays the New York guy keen to spread his wild oats. Ruth Gordon is the insufferable mother he shares an apartment with, a woman who’s gone senile, or is maybe just making out she’s senile the better to thwart any chance of happiness for her son. It’s a loose-cannon story tracking the efforts of Gordon (Segal) to introduce a new nurse, Louise (Trish Van Devere) into the household, his mother having chased … Read more
Freud’s Last Session
Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis probably never sat down and had a conversation about the existence of God, a disclaimer at the end of Freud’s Last Session tells us, but that hasn’t stopped director Matt Brown and co-writer Mark St Germain (who wrote the play on which the film is based) from shaping a what-if drama about the event. We’re in London in 1939 as war is about to break out. Freud has recently arrived from his beloved Vienna, having been chased out by the Nazis because of his Jewishness. He has cancer of the mouth and only weeks to live – he’d opt for assisted suicide (a postscript also tells us) only … Read more
Mondo Hollywoodland
An alien from the fifth dimension lands in Hollywood (with a camera, handily) and takes a fact-finding tour with a skanky seller of psychedelic mushrooms. Mondo Hollywoodland is the result, a weird survey of the territory that makes half-hearted claims towards being a documentary. Bizarre points to note before the tour gets underway: it’s exec-produced by James Cromwell (yes, that one) and Francis Ford Coppola is namechecked in the “special thanks” credits at the end. Bizarre because Mondo Hollywoodland has that “assembled in the garage” feel, almost as if it’s taken a bunch of random footage and attempted to weld it together into a story, as some kind of bet. The old joke … Read more
Bad Girls Go to Hell
What great tits Gigi Darlene has. They cantilever out from her body in a way that makes the star of cult sexploitationer Bad Girls Go to Hell hard to miss and easy to appreciate, from an engineering perspective if nothing else. They are the star of this film, the agents of all the action. Gigi Darlene uses them like weapons, pointing them in the necessary direction and making sure she’s got her target located properly, then leaves her breasts to do the rest. Gigi Darlene wasn’t her real name, nor was the actor playing her screen husband called George La Rocque (they were Heli Weinreich and Charles Mazin) but they fit their screen … Read more
Lurker
A knuckle-chewing debut by Alex Russell, Lurker updates All About Eve for the Instagram era, looking on with a raised eyebrow as a nobody gets whisked up into the entourage of a big music star, finds he likes it and then hangs on for grim life when the beast tries to spit him out. It’s a brilliant portrait both of needy, paranoid fan worship and of needy, paranoid stardom – both parties require constant reinforcement, though only one of them can be open about it. Théodore Pellerin plays the nobody, a guy working in a clothes shop in LA when big star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) and crew bowl in one day to browse. … 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
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 March Motion Picture Code introduced, 1930 On this day in 1930, the Hollywood studios introduced a new code which laid out what was and was not acceptable in movies. It was a system of self-regulation which a scared Hollywood adopted after a series of widely reported scandals and after a number of risqué movies had prompted numerous states to introduce censorship bills. Rather than navigate through all this restrictive detail – what was fine in Iowa might not be in Texas – Hollywood bought off the objectors by introducing a code that satisfied nearly everybody. Working from a list of … Read more
The Equalizer 3
At the beginning of The Equalizer 3 we appear to be in familiar “action hero in retirement” territory. A sunny place. Beautiful scenery. The camera drinking it all in. Surely, any minute we’ll be meeting Denzel Washington in a Hawaiian shirt, a cocktail in one hand, a pretty young woman on his arm, in much the same way Matt Damon or Jason Statham were introduced in follow-ups The Bourne Supremacy and Mechanic: Resurrection. Instead director Antoine Fuqua gives us mayhem, horror, lakes of blood, a man with a machete buried in his face, and, sitting coolly in the middle of it all, one-man vigilante machine Robert McCall (Washington). He’s clearly laid waste to … Read more
The Naked Gun
Manslaughter mispronounced as “man’s laughter” – by a cop! I laughed, so shoot me with a service pistol. The Naked Gun, back after nearly 30 years and with Liam Neeson now playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the cop originally played by Leslie Nielsen, is funny. Not, perhaps, as funny as the original, but it made me chortle a few times, groan quite a few more, plus there was a reference to that beaver joke originally cranked out by Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in one of the earlier films. Can any more be necessary? A plot, for instance? No, it’s entirely unnecessary, and the writers – Akiva Schaffer (who directs), Doug Mand and … Read more
