Popular Reviews
The Looking Glass War
The third of John Le Carré’s spy thrillers to be adapted for the big screen, 1970’s The Looking Glass War is an odd and pretty much entirely unsuccessful spy thriller that’s taken a big conceptual decision only for it not to pay off at all. The first two adaptations were the big success The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (Richard Burton starred) and the underrated The Deadly Game (a reworking of Le Carré’s novel Call for the Dead, with James Mason as a version of George Smiley). There’s no sign of Smiley here, though he was in this film’s original novel. That said, there is some justification for removing him since … Read more
Let the Corpses Tan
Pastiche nudged into madness, Let the Corpses Tan is a Sergio Leone film on psychoactive substances and the third feature-length outing for Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, who specialise in this sort of weird pastiche/homage. Their 2009 feature debut, Amer, baked Lynch, Kubrick, Svankmajer and Argento into a kaleidoscopic revisit to the Euro soft porn/arthouse crossover of the 1970s. Their The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears was an onslaught of stylishness in a dream-infused slasher movie ripe as a liquid Camembert. In between they also did the O Is for Orgasm segment of The ABCs of Death compendium movie, a sado-masochism-inflected view of sexual congress that was all leather, taut stomach and … Read more
R.M.N.
The state of the Romanian nation is what Cristian Mungiu’s films tend to be about – Occident, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Tales from the Golden Age, Beyond the Hills and Graduation have all dealt in various ways with the country’s escape (or not) from the Communist-era Ceaușescu regime and its progress towards becoming an more or less integrated part of modern Europe. R.M.N. could be a truncated textspeak-y way of writing “Romania” but in fact it’s an acronym standing for Rezonanță Magnetică Nucleară, Magnetic Resonance Imaging in English, and that, in a sense is what the film is – a 360º scan of the nation, where the same grand game is … Read more
El Cochecito
There aren’t many films called El Cochecito. That’s the Spanish title. In English it goes by the title The Wheelchair. There aren’t many films with that title either. A wheelchair is not aspirational, it’s not something people covet. (As for The Little Coach, which the film sometimes flies by, no one even knows what that is.) But the main character in El Cochecito really does aspire to own one, which makes him an unusual character. But then this is a very unusual film. Rather than confinement, the wheelchair seems to Anselmo Proharán to offer freedom, escape. He’s a retired man, a somebody back in the day, a widower who now lives with his … Read more
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Is there an actor more forgettable than Paul Walker? Don’t write in, I know he’s not in this second follow-up. Instead Lucas Black has been drafted in to show Mr Walker that he’s not the sine qua non of the franchise. And though he’s marginally less handsome than Walker, Black has the edge when it comes to charisma and he’s got a swagger that goes all the way back to The Wild One. Black is, of course, playing a hot-rodding rebel born to burn rubber in the illegal street-racing face-offs around which F&F is built. Except this time the action includes learning how to drift a car round the bends. And this time … Read more
Sylvie’s Love
The remarkable thing about Sylvie’s Love is actually how unremarkable it is in many ways. It’s a white-sliced, white-picket-fence melodrama of a sort that once might have starred a Joan Crawford. Except it’s black rather than white people playing all the parts. That shouldn’t be remarkable, nor should stories about the black middle classes, but it is and Eugene Ashe’s drama knows it’s doing something different in its deliberately old-fashioned, “they don’t make them like this any more” way. Tessa Thompson plays Sylvie, the young woman who works in her daddy’s record store but really wants to get a job in TV. Nnamdi Asomugha is Robert, the tall, dark and handsome saxophonist who … Read more
La poison
The misdirection starts early in the superb dark French farce from 1951 La poison (no prizes for guessing it translates as Poison). Right with the title, in fact, which suggests that poison, or a poisoning, is what the film is going to be about. It isn’t. Or it is, but not in the way the title might suggest. But first – more sleight of hand – writer/director Sacha Guitry, a boulevardier of the old school, introduces his cast, by their real names, starting with his star, Michel Simon, a big bear of a man Guitry praises effusively before moving on to Simon’s co-stars, all of whom get the buckets-of-praise treatment. Then on to … Read more
One False Move
One False Move is the result of Carl Franklin’s realisation, aged 37, that acting wasn’t enough for him and that what he really wanted to be was a director. In 1986 he went back to college to study directing, then worked for two years knocking out pile-em-high product for Roger Corman. He got given his head with this 1991 movie. In terms of plot it’s something like a road movie. Three drugs desperadoes steal a load of money and cocaine in LA, then head to Arkansas, where at least two of them grew up. En route they kill more people, dodge cops and swap one hot car for another. On they press towards … Read more
The Girl
There were two dramatised features about the working methods of director Alfred Hitchcock in 2012. Hitchcock starred a pretty decent Anthony Hopkins as the corpulent director. But today it’s The Girl, a more obviously made-for-TV affair. It’s an HBO/BBC collaboration, with actors who bump it up the pecking order – Toby Jones as a dead-eyed Hitchcock, Imelda Staunton as his enabling, collaborative wife Alma and Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren, the star of The Birds and Marnie. The story of The Girl is the story of a director who finds a new star, grooms her and, Vertigo-style, becomes hopelessly, almost pathologically obsessed with her. It’s Alma who first calls Hedren “the girl”, having noticed … Read more
The Innocents
Askel Vogt’s The Innocents takes a romantic notion about children – that they know something adults don’t – and gives it a damn good spanking. The result is one of the moodiest, creepiest and most unsettling films about childhood ever made. There’s a touch of the brilliant 1961 film also called The Innocents, a bit of Let the Right One In and a smidgeon of The Exorcist in its intensely domestic setting. And it continues the trend towards supernatural stories told in a highly naturalistic way (see Petite Maman) which looks like it’s got a fair way to run. Vogt keeps his camera at child height as he gradually unfolds his story of … Read more
Light Sleeper
Of the three “loner” films that Paul Schrader wrote, Light Sleeper gets the least love. Taxi Driver is always number one, of course, and American Gigolo is often mentioned in despatches. But ask people if they’ve seen Schrader’s 1992 drama and the answer is often an open mouth and a tilted head. It’s a pity because it’s a superb film in which Schrader gets it right both as a writer and as a director (something he doesn’t always manage). These “loners” are all night workers too – Taxi Driver’s Travis (Robert De Niro), American Gigolo’s Julian (Richard Gere) and now, in Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe’s John, a drug dealer who works the high … Read more
Speak No Evil
Another film that’s hard to like but easy to admire, Speak No Evil comes hot on the heels of a recent example of the same – Soft & Quiet – which I watched last week. Both set up and stoke a tension that becomes so janglingly unpleasant that, for this home viewer, pausing, getting out of the chair and walking around a bit became a necessity. I suspect the way to really watch this film is in a cinema, where there is more pressure to stay in your seat and not out yourself as such an obvious wuss. Again like Soft & Quiet, Speak No Evil starts out in the sunlit uplands of … Read more
