Popular Reviews
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
A hell of title and a hell of a film, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is the remarkable second feature by writer/director Lili Horvát, who’s otherwise oddjobbed about the film biz in Hungary for some time – a casting director here, an actor there (you might have seen her in Kornél Mundruczó’s 2014 movie White God, a bizarre amalgam of the Disney kids movie with the post-apocalyptic wasteland drama). With an influence of Claire Denis, Horvát conjures, also in “how is she doing that?” fashion, a complete dramatic universe set in a world of feeling and gesture, where facts as such are not as important as the emotions triggered … Read more
I Saw What You Did
Master of the kitsch gimmick William Castle’s 1965 shocker I Saw What You Did is a cautionary tale about the terrible things that happen to nice teenage girls who make prank phone calls. It’s also notable for being the last appearance in an American film by Joan Crawford. Though not her last film – 1967’s Berserk and 1970’s Trog were shot in the UK – it is like them a horror film, as befits a star who had been around since the 1920s and had become along the way a bit of a gargoyle. However, it’s not really about her. Instead attention focuses on Libby and Kit, two teenagers having a fun night … Read more
Nude Area
Films about falling in love have been done so often that the way the characters in them declare their love has become incredibly important. How does “I love you. You complete me” compare to “Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches…” or “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her”? Top marks for spotting Jerry Maguire, The Princess Bride and Notting Hill. Love stories depend for success on a lot of things – but emotional plausibility and the romantic stars aligning need good writing and chemistry to take things over the line. … Read more
A Man Escaped
A Man Escaped is probably the best jailbreak movie ever made. Who said Shawshank? What’s more it was made almost as an “anti-movie” movie by a director so disdainful of cinema trickery and excess that he turned out one film after another to demonstrate that you don’t need it all, and that when it comes to drama on the big screen, sound is at least as important as image, possibly more so. Set in 1943 in Nazi-occupied France, it simply follows a Resistance fighter called Lafontaine (François Leterrier) into and then out of prison again. Taken in by the Nazis, escaping under his own steam, using nothing but ingenuity and everyday objects. A … Read more
Gaia
Gaia is a South African horror film. Unusual enough. An eco-horror, a survivalist horror, a myco-horror and a Freudian horror too. And somehow, in among all that, it even manages a bit of old-fashioned girl-in-a-T-shirt horror titillation, a demonstration of its limber ability to play to and against horror expectations. The supreme example of this comes early on, right after we’ve met Gabi (Monique Rothman) and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi), a pair of forestry workers far from base, punting up river in a canoe, on a mission to collect data. Having lost the drone they’re using as a tech wayfinder, they separate. Expectation one – this is a bad idea. This turns out to be … Read more
Golem
Golem is the first of Polish director Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy – as it’s sometimes called – and is also often credited as being one of the inspirations for Blade Runner. Before Ridley Scott fans start rubbing their hands together with glee, Szulkin is far less interested in entertainment than Scott. His film is bleaker, more paranoid and more obviously Kafkaesque than Blade Runner. Think Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz meets Terry Gilliam’s Brazil rubbed all over with an oily rag heavy with swarf. It’s political too, in a coded sort of way and though set ostensibly in a destroyed society decades after an apocalyptic nuclear event, it’s clear that Szulkin has Communist Poland in … Read more
Manhattan
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 September George Gershwin born, 1898 On this day in 1898, the writer of Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Someone to Watch over Me, Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess was born in Brooklyn, New York. A school dropout, Gershwin, born Jacob Gershowitz, was playing piano in clubs at the age of 15, published his first song when he was 16 and was writing shows by his early 20s. His breadth was amazing – Tin Pan Alley songs, entire Broadway and Hollywood musicals and his “folk opera” Porgy & Bess all poured from him, with Gershwin all the time … Read more
Pan’s Labyrinth
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 December Francisco Franco born, 1892 On this day in 1892, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was born. He’d later style himself Generalísimo, or Caudillo, of Spain while he ruled the country, from 1939 to 1975. From a military family, Franco was the youngest general in Europe in the 1920s, and rose rapidly through the ranks. With the fall of the monarchy and the establishment of a Republic in 1931, the monarchist conservative Franco became increasingly marginalised and in 1936 he led a coup against the elected government. With help from Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany Franco prevailed in the … Read more
Dark aka Dying of the Light Director’s Cut
Dark is writer/director Paul Schrader’s cut of Dying of the Light, the 2014 spy thriller that was taken from him, re-edited, de-kinked and reworked into something more akin to what the studio wanted – a Bourne movie. Schrader was not happy about it at the time and you might remember him, his stars Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin and executive producer Nicolas Winding Refn all posing for pictures in matching T shirts bearing the “non-disparagement” clause in their contracts, which prevented them from saying anything bad about the movie. Point made, point taken. Originally Refn had been meant to direct the film, with Harrison Ford starring and Channing Tatum in the Yelchin role. But … Read more
The Echo (El Eco)
Hardscrabble lives are what film-maker Tatiana Huezo specialises in and that’s what she gives us in The Echo (El Eco), a documentary following three families in a Mexican village, particularly the girls just coming of age and contemplating a future of mixed possibilities. A couple of years ago Huezo gave us the excellent Prayers for the Stolen, also set in Mexico, also interested in young women, a documentary-influenced fiction feature with a double shot of drug-cartel thriller to drag us along. Now back with her first love for the last in her so-called “trilogy of pain”, Huezo gives us The Echo‘s key scene early on. Montserrat Hernandez is helping her mother bathe her … Read more
Somebody I Used to Know
Like some sort of cosmic ordering service, romances and romantic comedies work to put together people who deserve to be together. But what happens if the people concerned don’t deserve to be together? That’s what Alison Brie and Dave Franco’s Somebody I Used to Know sets out to discover. Married couple Brie and Franco co-wrote it, Franco directs and Brie stars, as the Hollywood burnout who heads back to the small town where she grew up after her TV show, Dessert Island (a baking meets dating reality thing), gets canned. There she bumps into the ex she bailed out on suddenly ten years before to go and make it big in Hollywood. The … Read more
Rage
George C Scott, as well as acting, also directed three films. Rage, the second, was the first to get a theatrical release and is an interesting failure, unlike Scott’s first film, The Andersonville Trial, which was a critical hit. Scott’s last, The Savage Is Loose, tickled neither audiences nor critics – it was probably the theme of incest. The fascinating thing about Rage is that it’s a conspiracy thriller with a plot that’s all about the US government conspiring against its own people. This was 1972, pre-Watergate, when mainstream US-set conspiracy thrillers generally still hinged either on malevolent foreigners hatching dastardly plots (The Manchurian Candidate) or rogue generals planning a coup (Seven Days … Read more
