Popular Reviews
Killer’s Kiss
“Her soft mouth was the road to sin-smeared violence,” runs the blurb on the poster for Killer’s Kiss. Well, yes and no. The title of Stanley Kubrick’s second feature’s isn’t really that accurate either – which killer? which kiss? – but we get the idea. Film noir. The lone individual dwarfed by circumstance and environment became an abiding concern of Kubrick’s in later films and you can see it here in his story of atomised individuals trying to make a go of it in the big city. On one side Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a fighter who’s seen better days. On the other Gloria Price (Irene Kane), a taxi dancer wondering how it came … Read more
Election
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 23 July Monica Lewinsky born, 1973 Today in 1973, Monica Samille Lewinsky was born, in San Francisco, USA. Best known for giving a US president a blow job, which the US president bizarrely later claimed did not equate to “sexual relations” (since he was receiving rather than giving the favour), Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern at the White House at the time her relationship with President Clinton took place. It came to light because Linda Tripp, a fellow worker at the Pentagon – where Lewinsky was moved by superiors concerned at the amount of time she was spending with Clinton – … Read more
Perfect Sense
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 May England and Scotland become the United Kingdom, 1707 On this day in 1707, the countries of England and Scotland officially became united in “one kingdom by the name of Great Britain” (according to the Acts of Union). By “England”, the acts included the country of Wales, which had become absorbed legally into England by the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542. Though in terms of monarchy, the English throne had been seized by a Welshman, when Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) defeated Richard III in battle in 1485. This Tudor line persisted in England until 1603, when … Read more
The Arrival of Wang
It’s L’arrivo di Wang in its original Italian, which still sounds bizarre, though perhaps slightly less fruity than it does in English, where the title suggests… the appearance of a Tarzanogram? The genre is sci-fi, so perhaps not, but if there’s one thing that this lo-fi offering has is plenty of intrigue. From the off we’re grabbed, as is our heroine Gaia (Francesca Cuttica), a jobbing Mandarin interpreter who is picked up out of the blue from her home one morning by a shady motorcade, blindfolded and taken to a government installation where the rest of the film plays out. What the government want from her, who they want her to act as interlocutor … Read more
The Apple
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 November Navy Day, Iran Today is Navy Day in Iran. It’s the day every year when Iranians remember Operation Morvarid, a tactical strike against the Iraqi Navy in 1980, which resulted in much of the Iraqi Navy being destroyed. The Iranians, using American built F-4 Phantoms and F-5 Tiger aircraft, attacked Iraqi airfields, while a task force of the Iranian navy attacked Iraqi oil terminals, and two missile boats blocked the ports of Al Faw and Umm Qasr and started heavy shelling. Careful planning, lightning deployment, plenty of back-up and the strategic defence of all units involved in the attack … Read more
27 January 2014-01-27
Out in the UK this week Rush (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/VOD) Recognising a good thing when he sees it, director Ron Howard sticks with Frost/Nixon writer Peter Morgan for this entirely satisfying, largely factual re-run of the rivalry between 1970s Formula 1 stars Niki Lauda and James Hunt. There’s tons to like in this film – Chris Hemsworth makes an excellent Hunt, and Daniel Brühl is actually an even better Lauda. But it’s Morgan’s screenplay which is the thing of wonder. Managing to tell the real story of the dramatic “couldn’t make it up” 1976 Formula 1 season and yet bouncing along simultaneously on the sort of good versus evil dynamic that Hollywood demands, … Read more
29 June 2015-06-29
Out This Week Appropriate Behaviour (Peccadillo, cert 15) The New York Neurotics Club – founder member Woody Allen, recent arrivals Lena Dunham (Girls) and Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha) – gets a new member in the shape of Desiree Akhavan, who gives us a smart, self-deprecating comedy about a slightly deadbeat woman struggling in a mumblecore world where everyone else seems to be doing OK. Playing, in Larry David style, a version of herself, Akhavan is Shirin, the bisexual daughter of immigrant parents who can’t or won’t come out to mum and dad, and whose private life is a shambolic mess like the rest of her life. The meat of the film is a chronologically … Read more
Paris Memories aka Revoir Paris
Tragedy destroys but maybe it can also heal. Paris Memories kicks off with a terrible terrorist attack in a Paris restaurant. A man, school-shooting style, wandering through the place and putting a bullet into everything that moves. It’s a grim and powerful opener directed with an eye for maximum shock by Alice Winocour, whose films usually focus on intangible emotion rather than concrete deed. You get both in these opening moments. But once she’s made her opening statement, Winocour reverts to type. The film is about the aftermath rather than the event, with Virginie Efira playing one survivor who, amnesiac since that night, only returns to the scene of the atrocity by accident … Read more
Before the Rain
One of the great feature debuts, Milcho Manchevski’s 1994 drama Before the Rain announced the arrival of new talent and went straight onto the New York Times Best 1,000 Movies list. Manchevski has been busy ever since, making rap videos, directing episodes of TV shows like The Wire and cranking out films set in the Old West and modern New York. But in between all that he’s regularly returned to Macedonia to make highly distinctive dramas, often with an episodic structure, as here, and often drawing parallels between one story and another. In Before the Rain’s first story a monk (Grégoire Colin) who has taken a vow of silence one day finds a … Read more
The Magnificent Ambersons
The film that never was, a magnificent mess, Orson Welles’s masterpiece, better even than Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons is all these things and more, or perhaps less, since no one apart from a handful of people in 1942 has ever seen the finished version. Instead there’s just the version we have, which is minus 50 minutes of material Welles had included in the rough cut he’d made with editor Robert Wise (later of The Sound of Music fame). After negative screenings, a general antipathy towards Welles at RKO and a change of public mood on account of Pearl Harbor having just propelled the USA into the Second World War, the studio ordered … Read more
22 September 2014-09-22
Out in the UK This Week Of Horses and Men (Axiom, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) The jacket photo of the DVD shows a man sitting on a mare that’s being mounted by a stallion. The look of passive acceptance on the mare’s face, randy enthusiasm on the stallion’s and stubborn resistance on the man’s says much of what you need to know about this instant classic, the debut by Benedikt Erlingsson. The mounting incident is the first of several discrete stories that eventually tie together, detailing life in rural Iceland, where a horse is still a valuable commodity and humans are seen, to a large extent, as at their best when they accept their … Read more
Amanda
Amanda uses the Islamist terror attacks in Paris in 2015 as a springboard for a quiet drama about loss. Since the focus is resolutely on the human rather than the political, it might be a bit too quiet for some, but co-writer/director Mikhaël Hers appears to be deliberately trying to make this a case of less heat more light. Hers takes time building up his characters. Amanda (Isaure Multrier) is the shy, sweet daughter of bright, kind teacher and lone mother Sandrine (Ophélia Kolb). Sandrine’s brother, David, is a young man working two jobs and always running a bit late. Busy busy. Too busy, in fact, to take his responsibilities as an uncle … Read more
