Popular Reviews
Motherless Brooklyn
Motherless Brooklyn is the first film Ed Norton has directed since 2000’s Keeping the Faith. Oddly, considering Norton is a child of Episcopalians, that also had a connection to Catholicism – a rabbi and a priest fall for the same woman, boom boom. Here the link is the Catholic orphanage where Norton’s Lionel Essrog and his buds grew up, before being rescued by a kindly benefactor (Bruce Willis), who put them all to work in his detective agency. “Brooklyn” is what Frank (Willis) calls the motherless Lionel but let’s not worry too much about Frank since he dies in the first few minutes, providing the kicking-off point for a whodunit set on mean … 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
The Last Stop in Yuma County
The Last Stop in Yuma County is a reminder of the sort of film there used to be a lot of in the late 1990s. In that first post-Tarantino wave, low-budget film-makers would head to the desert, find a diner somewhere, load it up with gonzos and dimwits, add guns and fruity dialogue and then let the chips fall where they might. A lot were disappointing and eventually they became a chore to watch, but here’s a reminder of how good they could be when done properly. Just a few characters, not too much horsing around, tongue kept for the most part out of the cheek, a minimal situation with a sense of … Read more
Exit 8
A man on the Tokyo subway struggles to find the exit. That’s the entire plot of Exit 8, proof that it’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it. This is a tense and atmospheric chunk of quasi-scifi, owing something if not everything to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, with a bit of a stylistic assist from Vincenzo Natali’s cult classic Cube. Quite how Natali got sidetracked into gun-for-hire work on TV shows rather than making more superb high-concept movies like Cube is a question for another day. Here the incredibly capable director is Genki Kawamura, whose only previous feature, A Hundred Flowers, was a tremulous tale of encroaching dementia. Here, … Read more
The Brutalist
The Brutalist did well at the Oscars, winning three (Best Actor, Music, Cinematography) from a total of ten nominations. It is the sort of film the Academy likes – it’s got class written all over it, from the fancy opening credits and the high-end VistaVision process (not used for more than 60 years), to its built-in intermission and tackling of a pertinent issue. To wit: immigrants get the job done, as Lin-Manuel Miranda put it in Hamilton. One immigrant, in this case, an architect who survives the death camps of Europe, arrives in proud and confident America as it’s enjoying its finest flowering and then, through a series of adventures with a moneyed American … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 14 – Silent Dust
Silent Dust first aired on New Year’s Eve 1965 and from a 21st-century vantage point has all the makings of a very prescient episode of The Avengers. In what starts out as an obvious parody of a nature documentary, we first observe birds nesting in the trees, then watch as the birds start dropping off the branches. The second eco-themed outing for Steed and Peel (see A Surfeit of H2O) owes a debt to Rachel Carson’s massively consequential 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson was the first to bring to public attention the doubts that many scientists had been harbouring about the effects of widely available insecticides such as DDT, and detailed the effects on … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 24 – Mission… Highly Improbable
The US TV series Mission: Impossible was not quite a year old and hadn’t yet aired in the UK when the Avengers episode Mission… Highly Improbable debuted in the UK in November 1967, so Brits wouldn’t have got the joke/reference. It matters not – apart from the allusive title, there’s nothing else carrying over from the US show to the UK one. Apart, that is, from the high-budget looks. Everything looks like it’s been given two extra runs through the polisher – that’s the effect of American money. However, even though The Avengers was riding high on both sides of the Atlantic, the spy craze was on the wane. The Robert Culp/Bill Cosby … Read more
La Strada
The simple Italian led astray by an egotistical monster. Who could Federico Fellini have had in mind when he was making La Strada in 1954? This, according to all the books, is where Fellini the neorealist ends and Fellini the fantastical begins, in a movie about a strong man “buying” a halfwit daughter off a poor woman and then touring Italy with her as part of his act. It was Pope Francis’s favourite movie and directors as diverse as Peckinpah, Kurosawa, Konchalovsky and David Cronenberg have all sung its praises. Fascinatingly, both Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson have claimed it as an influence on key songs – on Hey, Mr Tambourine Man and … Read more
Earth Mama
A remarkable feature debut by Savanah Leaf, Earth Mama is the grim social drama that’s had a magic wand waved over it. Not the story, though. That remains grim. Young single mum Gia has lost her children to social services. She is a recovering drug user and is heavily pregnant. She loves her kids and realises she has made a mess of things. So she is trying to do whatever it takes to get her life back on track. But the system seems gamed against young black single women like her. How can she take on more work and earn enough money to satisfy the authorities’ stipulation that she be financially OK if … Read more
Les Tontons Flingueurs aka Crooks in Clover
There’s something about 1963’s Les Tontons Flingueurs as a title that sounds wackier, funnier, just better than the usual English translation – Crooks in Clover. The film also goes by the name Monsieur Gangster but the original French literally translates as Gunslinging Uncles. Tontons Flingueurs is better because it sounds a bit ridiculous, and that’s really what’s going on in this amusing French drama from 1963, often described as a comedy but only properly funny if you speak French. Michel Audiard’s screenplays deal heavily in slang and wordplay and neither of those quite survive the translation into English. The film has a real cachet in France; elsewhere barely any. If like me you’re … Read more
The Ice Tower
Lucile Hadžihalilović has been making films like The Ice Tower ever since her feature debut, 2004’s Innocence, an allegorical semi-fairytale in which a young Marion Cotillard played a pivotal role in a story that wasn’t about her character at all. Same here – Cotillard pivotal, playing Cristina, an actress in a very non-specific 1970s whose latest role, as Hans Christian Andersen’s Ice Queen, gets her caught up with a young runaway hiding out in the studio where the film is being shot. Mistaken for an extra, Jeanne (Clara Pacini) is gradually wound into the movie itself, into the life of Cristina and into the world of the Ice Queen. Hadžihalilović slides about between … Read more
The Prowler
“A masterpiece of sexual creepiness” – writer James Ellroy’s verdict on 1951’s The Prowler, a film that gave two good actors roles of a lifetime and which languished in the pit of obscurity until it was rescued by a restoration in 2011. The “sexual creepiness” arrives early on. Married woman Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) calls the cops after seeing what she thinks is a prowler outside her window, peeking at her as she got out of the bath. The cops turn up. No one there. Or is there? One of the policemen, Webb Garwood (Van Heflin), has taken an instant interest in Mrs Gilvray and he returns later that evening, ostensibly just to … Read more
