Popular Reviews
The Prosecutor
Genres collide! Actually, in The Prosecutor, they don’t. Two distinct species of movie live separate lives in this odd courtroom drama with martial arts action bolted on. Strangely, it works, because Donnie Yen, who stars and directs, has decided to keep them as separate entities – he gives us a bit of this and then a bit of that and doesn’t try too hard to make the two genres cohabit. Even so, those gear changes are awesomely noisy. The story is based on the real case of Ma Ka-kin, a Hong Kong kid who took delivery of a parcel of cocaine at his house, not knowing what it was, and wound up – … Read more
Black Widow
“Three’s a trend,” as the saying goes, and with the success of Black Widow, after Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman, it looks like the jinx on female superhero movies (Supergirl, Elektra, Catwoman) can finally be declared broken. It was about time that Black Widow got her own standalone movie in any case, the character having been a bit neglected by the Marvel Cinematic Universe in one Avengers film after another, to the point where it was looking like there was a sexism/patriarchy thing going on. Smartly heading that sort of criticism off at the pass, that’s the plot too, pretty much, with Black Widow swinging into action to neutralise a drug that turns … Read more
Love and Monsters
I’ve sat through more post-apocalyptic teen adventure flicks – Hunger Games, The Giver, three flavours of Divergent, Maze Runner etc – and not really enjoyed any of them. “They’re not for you,” a mate at work once remarked. And as I whinged some more about one or other of them, she nodded pityingly towards my greying hair. They’re not, it’s true, but even so I loved Love and Monsters, a post-apocalyptic teen adventure flick that gets by without any hat tips to Ayn Rand – rugged individual against the overweening state etc etc – and sets out its stall immediately with a voiceover by Joel (Maze Runner star Dylan O’Brien) explaining that the … Read more
The Matrix
Who has not seen The Matrix? It’s the Gone with the Wind and Star Wars of our era, a phantasmagoria in black leather open to multiple readings that was already being described as mind-bending and complex before it even debuted. From this distance it all seems as clear as water – Mr Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a disaffected slacker/hacker is invited to visit another plane of awareness, from which vantage point he can see that the plane he once inhabited, what he thought of as the “real” world, is in fact a construct, assembled by a computer program. Strip away the program and in the real “real world” humans are being grown in tanks … Read more
Border Incident
Evidence that borders aren’t just a 21st-century hot button, 1949’s Border Incident is about the contentious human back and forth between Mexico and the USA. Every year workers cross the border to harvest the crops in California, an authoritative and majestic introductory shot of the All-American Canal tells us, all part of the Bracero Program to import a workforce to do the jobs Americans don’t want to do. Braceros – from the Spanish for arms, because they’re manual workers – are a good thing, director Anthony Mann’s picture is at pains to point out. They only become a problem when they arrive in the USA illegally. Here, the picture is at even more … Read more
5 September 2016-09-05
Out in the UK this week Florence Foster Jenkins (Pathe, cert PG) Tackled recently in the French film Marguerite, the story of Florence Foster Jenkins – the tone-deaf 1930s New York socialite who insisted she could sing – gets another trot around the block courtesy of Stephen Frears. Frears makes it a less pathetic, more screwball story, as if Fred and Ginger had stepped out for a minute, to be replaced by a non-dancing Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant – actually, there is a dance moment, and it’s there, deliberately, to underline what Frears and this film are about. As with Marguerite the joke is on us rather than her, her inability to … Read more
The Avengers: Series 1, Episode 15 – The Frighteners
The 15th of 26 episodes in the first series is a story that Humphrey Bogart might recognise. A tale of a greasy heel sending his thugs around to put “the frighteners” on a society lothario who is wooing the impressionable daughter of a local business big noise, it looks and feels every inch like a film noir. It’s something director Peter Hammond clearly relishes and, on a TV budget, he does impressive things with pools of shadow, out of which loom both goodies and baddies. Two levels of baddies, what’s more – the Deacon (Willoughby Goddard) is the sweaty and corpulently effete manager of muscle, while Sir Thomas Weller (Stratford Johns) is the … Read more
Black Book
In some quarters the director Paul Verhoeven is now eternally infamous for Sharon Stone’s is she/isn’t she leg-crossing moment in Basic Instinct. But he came to prominence with a Second World War movie, Soldier Of Orange, in 1977. Black Book sees Verhoeven return to his native land, his native Dutch tongue and the 1939-45 war in an engrossing drama focusing on one young Jewish woman (played by the remarkable Carice van Houten), a member of the Dutch resistance who finds herself right at the heart of the Nazi war machine. It is a familiar genre but Verhoeven injects fresh elements into it – notably dark humour, lashings of nudity and a fuzzy delineation … Read more
The General
Buster Keaton’s favourite of his own films got off to a poor start in 1927. A flop at the box office and poorly received by critics (“the fun is not exactly plentiful” said the New York Times), it’s now considered to be one of the greatest films ever made. Is this high ranking down more to nostalgia for a simpler time or campaigns mounted by lovers of the hair shirt? Possibly a bit of both. But strip away the nonsense and you’re still left with something remarkable. The gags, for the most part revolve around The General, the steam locomotive of which Keaton is the engineer. The most famous of these is the … Read more
The Girl and the Spider
Not much happens in The Girl and the Spider (Das Mädchen und die Spinne) but that doesn’t mean nothing’s going on. Superficially the story of one young woman moving out of the apartment she’s been sharing with another, beneath the surface it’s a roiling stew of emotion, lust, jealousy, neediness and isolation. There’s are Bergmanesque developments, things said and unsaid, as we track Mara (Henriette Confurius) and Lisa (Liliane Amuat) through one day, a night and into the next day while around them wheel Lisa’s mother, a handyman and his helper, a neighbour or two, other young women from downstairs and next door, first in the apartment Lisa is moving into, and then … Read more
Every Little Thing
Every Little Thing is a documentary about a hummingbird sanctuary. A funny sort of documentary if you’re interested in the birds themselves and want to know how much they weigh, or how long they live, what they feed on or how big their eggs are – tiny, presumably, since the birds are only as big as your thumb. Based on the book Fastest Thing on Wings, by its subject, Terry Masear, it’s an emotional rather than informational portrait of the woman who runs this animal hospital, seemingly on her own. Masear is the woman to call in California – where hummingbirds flourish – if you’ve found an injured or orphaned bird and don’t … Read more
100 Years of… La fille de l’eau aka The Whirlpool of Fate
Nothing wrong with a nepo baby if they’re actually any good. La fille de l’eau (aka The Whirlpool of Fate, sometimes known as The Girl of the Water) is Jean Renoir’s first feature film, shot when he was 31, using Paul Cezanne’s property as a location and financial assistance from the estate of his own dad, the painter Pierre-Auguste (flogging one of dad’s paintings often came in handy in the early days). What he gives us is a lyrical and beautiful film harking back to the Impressionist/Post Impressionist style of Renoir Sr, Cezanne et al and forward to Renoir Jr’s own deliciously pretty films of the 1930s. What you don’t get is much … Read more
