Popular Reviews
Big Deal on Madonna Street
Working a gag a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, Big Deal on Madonna Street, aka Persons Unknown (a translation of its Italian title, I Soliti Ignoti) pours good-natured scorn all over the heist movie. The heist movie traditionally goes like this – a target is identified, a team is assembled and a plot is meticulously masterminded, there’s a dry run and then, finally, in the film’s big centrepiece, the heist itself, which goes like clockwork, apart from one tiny moment, when something freakish happens – a screwdriver slips, a guard varies his routine – and the entire operation is suddenly hanging by a thread. Writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli (known … Read more
United 93
A reconstruction of what happened on 11 September 2001 to the fourth hijacked plane, which went down in Pennsylvania before getting to its target in Washington DC, probably the White House. It’s shot in a documentary-like shaky-cam style, has not a single recognisable face to hook onto and there’s a complete absence of heroic Hollywood dialogue. Writer/director Paul Greengrass lets events unfold in real time which, coupled with the knowledge of how things pan out, has the effect of making every otherwise mundane detail – stewardesses sharing a joke, businessmen working on their laptops – unbearably poignant. As we have already seen in The Bourne Supremacy, Greengrass is a master of dramatic irony … Read more
Anaconda
Clever, this Anaconda, a vastly ironic comedy horror written and directed by the guys who did The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – which was also as clever as it was ironic. It follows a bunch of flaky dudes whose lives have been less than fulfilling in a last ditch attempt to do something meaningful by remaking 1997’s corny creature-feature Anaconda on a micro budget. Off they head, wedding videographer Doug (Jack Black) and useless actor Griff (Paul Rudd), with childhood friends Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) to the Amazon, where the snake wrangler they hire will be as good as useless, and the pilot of their boat will turn out to … Read more
The Pawnbroker
The Pawnbroker used to be a prestige movie, both when it came out in 1964 and for decades afterwards. It’s lost some of its sheen over the years, for a variety of reasons. Films referencing the Holocaust are no longer as scarce as they were when the Beatles were first conquering America. Rod Steiger’s star has also waned. Once seen as a rival to Brando, Steiger is now often regarded as a ham using Method techniques to disguise overacting. And the Method itself, of course, also no longer commands the respect it once did. There is still much to admire in the film though, and in Steiger’s performance, which he promised director Sidney … Read more
Mafia Mamma
Two thirds good, one third bad, as George Orwell almost said, Mafia Mamma is a comedy about a timid, emotionally giving American mother who becomes a mafia don, a donna in fact, after her grandfather in the old country dies in gang-related circumstances and she takes over the firm. Not that Kristin (Toni Collette) understands any of that. As far as she’s concerned the old guy was a winemaker and at the point where she is heading off to Italy to attend his funeral, it’s as much to get some “Eat. Pray. Fuck.” as to pay her respects. The fact that she’s just caught her husband banging her son’s counsellor in the kitchen … Read more
Wander Darkly
Matteo (Diego Luna) and Adrienne (Sienna Miller) are a broke couple with a new baby and a relationship on the skids. Arguing on the way home from a date night, mostly about Adrienne giving someone the glad-eye, they are involved in a massive car crash. This is no spoiler, we’re only a handful of minutes into Wander Darkly, and writer/director Tara Miele is just setting the scene – economically and with great visual flair – for the drama to come. Adrienne is dead. Or is she suffering from post-traumatic delirium and is just imagining she’s dead? Or is something else going on? It’s not certain, but what we can see is Adrienne in … Read more
18 July 2016-07-18
Out This Week Marguerite (Picturehouse, cert 15) The story of the socialite who sang like a scalded cat is also told by the film Florence Foster Jenkins. But this is France, the singer has been renamed Marguerite and instead of Meryl Streep there’s Catherine Frot in the lead role as the rich woman whose wealth buys her the appreciation – grins set to “fixed” – of her retinue of hangers-on in the select musical soirees she finances out of her own pocket. I’ve not seen FFJ, but have heard that it doesn’t go for the easy joke at Jenkins’s expense. If that’s true then director Xavier Giannoli and co have taken the same tack with Marguerite … Read more
You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 April Oldest recording of a voice, 1860 On this day in 1860, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made what is the oldest recording of a human voice still in existence. The recording was made on a machine called a phonautograph which Scott had invented and patented in 1857. It worked by emulating the human ear – sound travelled down a funnel, hit a membrane and was transferred to a stylus (pig bristle) which transmitted the vibrations onto smoke blackened paper or glass, the two-dimensional results being used to study amplitude and waveforms. No one at the time the recording was made … Read more
Hombre
If you’ve ever wanted to see a Western out of Bulgaria, Hombre is your chance. It’s a fascinating film, attempting to use the familiar narratives from the West as an allegory for pan-Balkan co-operation. If we don’t all get on, the idea runs, there’ll be a lot worse to deal with than a gunfight at the OK Corral. Whatever else it is or isn’t, it’s a very well cast film. Everyone here feels real, and also manages to exist as a character you might expect to encounter either around a camp fire in a Bulgarian forest in the 21st century or spooning up pork and beans in 19th-century Utah. There’s not too much … Read more
A Dandy in Aspic
The film that killed the great director Anthony Mann, A Dandy in Aspic didn’t get killer reviews when it debuted in 1968. “Completely devoid of suspense” and “bland,” said the New York Times. Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide declared it “wooden”. Mann died of a heart attack towards the end of shooting and the movie’s star, Laurence Harvey, took over directing, which isn’t the reason the film bombed. Harvey actually takes some pains to ape the claustrophobic, slick style of Mann. There just isn’t a whole lot going on in Derek Marlowe’s original story (which he adapted for the screen). But what looked like a failure back then looks more like a calculation all … Read more
The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady
The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady, for those who didn’t get enough musketeering with director Martin Bourboulon’s first trip out in a plumed hat, Part I: D’Artagnan. Shot back to back with the first movie, the sequel has all the strengths of the original, and all the flaws, but more so. It is static and lacking in drama but it does look fantastic, and the cast – who struggle to deliver because there is not a lot to work with – are exactly as you would want them to be. We pick up the story exactly where we left off, with D’Artagnan knocked unconscious while trying to prevent the abduction of his sweetheart, … Read more
The King of Staten Island
The thing to know going into The King of Staten Island, co-written by Judd Apatow, Dave Sirus and Pete Davidson, is that Davidson’s father was a fireman who lost his life in the call of duty (at the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, in fact). The father of Scott Carlin, the character Davidson plays in this movie, also lost his life in the line of duty, so it’s fair to say there’s probably an autobiographical element in this semi-comic look at a life held in arrested development by family trauma. If you don’t know Davidson, he’s the guy with the slappable face from Saturday Night Live, a slappability put to good … Read more
