Popular Reviews
Dirty Dancing
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 September Patrick Swayze dies, 2009 On this day in 2009, Patrick Swayze shimmied off to the great dance studio in the sky. 1991’s “sexiest man alive” (according to People magazine) had been propelled to that position by 1987’s Dirty Dancing, a position he reinforced with the ridiculous 1989 bouncer movie Road House – in which he plays the sensitive PhD slumming it as the hired muscle in a one-horse town. Not forgetting 1990’s Ghost, in which his spirit threw beautiful clay pots with Demi Moore. Or Point Break, playing the Buddhist surfing bank robber. A dancer by training, with the … Read more
15 February 2016-02-15
Out This Week Nina Forever (StudioCanal, cert 18) If you ever saw the funny, dark and intelligent UK TV series Utopia – conspiracy nerds discover there really is a gigantic conspiracy going on – you’ll already know Fiona O’Shaughnessy, who played the mysterious and sexy lynchpin Jessica Hyde. She’s mysterious and sexy again in this comic horror about a dead woman (O’Shaughnessy) materialising zombie-like in the bed where her clearly-not-grieving-enough ex (Cian Barry) is making the two-backed beast with the new girl (Abigail Hardingham) he’s hooked up with. These two are loved up, but their new relationship has to weather repeated re-appearances by the crack-voiced dead girlfriend, who develops the habit of turning up unannounced … Read more
Crumb Catcher
In Crumb Catcher a doorstep salesman makes his big pitch in a revenge-of-the-nerd thriller with a comic edge, served straight-up with no messing about. Bloody and funny, it’s not bad for a debut at all, though director Chris Skotchdopole did co-write the story with Larry Fessenden (who’s also a producer), one of the stalwarts of low-budget horror. None of the relationships in it are quite right and Skotchdopole and Fessenden get us straight onto that trail with opening scenes set at the wedding of Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck). A street guy, possibly the son of a gangbanger, Shane is also a writer and is currently in the middle of … Read more
Gravity
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 April Sputnik 2 falls from orbit, 1958 On this day in 1958, the second satellite to be launched into Earth orbit, Sputnik 2, fell back to earth. It had been launched on 3 November 1957 and was carrying Laika, a samoyed terrier cross chosen for her good nature – the first animal launched into space. Sputnik 2 carried enough food, water and air to keep Laika alive for ten days, but because of a malfunction, the temperature inside Sputnik 2 got too high (104ºF/40ºC) and Laika died after a few hours into the mission, from heat and stress. If she … Read more
25 May 2015-05-25
Out This Week Tusk (Sony, cert 15) After the wobble of Red State, Kevin Smith seems to have got his midlife crisis out of the way and now roars back to form with a brilliant, and brilliantly discomfiting, grotesque comedy that sees shock podcaster Justin Long surgically turned into a human walrus by mad Michael Parks. The fact that Long has it coming is signified by his douchebag cheating on his superhot girlfriend, played by superhot Genesis Rodriguez, but nothing can really prepare us for the sense of pathos that Long conjures when he cries big walrus tears from out of his big brown eyes on realising his old human form has been … Read more
The Worst Person in the World
The Worst Person in the World is not about the worst person in the world, though it’s a good catchy title and so why not? Instead it’s about something that’s not so easy a sell – how to live the good life. The latest in a 20-year run of collaborations between director Joachim Trier and regular writing partner (and a director in his own right) Eskil Vogt, it follows dense, layered and intense films like Thelma, Louder Than Bombs and Blind with more of the same in a 12-chapter story about a smart, pretty young woman called Julie. At the end of each of Julie’s 12 steps she’s traded in what she had … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 13 – Death a la Carte
First broadcast on 21 December 1963 – a more obviously Christmas-y episode would go out the following week – Death a la Carte is pretty much The Avengers as usual. Which means: exotic foreigners, death served up in unusual ways and a bit of stealth undercover work for Steed and/or Gale. Both are incognito this time around, Mrs Gale as some sort of fixer/hostess trying to make life easy for a visiting emir, Steed as a chef in his kitchen. Yes, cheffing is just one of his talents. We learn pretty much straight away that the emir is in the UK for his annual health check, which looks less straightforward than usual … Read more
Strawberry Mansion
The Wikipedia entry for Strawberry Mansion describes it as “an American surrealist science fiction adventure romantic comedy film” – a genre pile-on by any standards. Whoever wrote that missed one – the fairy tale. For the strawberry mansion of the title read gingerbread house and you’ve about got the flavour of this strange surrealist (etc etc) film written and directed by two of its stars, Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney. After a strange preamble in which James Preble (Audley) finds himself trapped inside a strawberry coloured room, the action proper gets going with a segueway to Preble knocking on the door of a kindly old lady. He’s a tax inspector, he says, come … Read more
Spencer
A fairytale princess is trapped inside an ogre’s castle in Spencer, “A fable from a true tragedy” a note announces at the start of director Pablo Larraín’s film following Princess Diana over three Christmas-y days stuck with the Royal Family at Sandringham. But it’s also a story about a woman driven mad by the situation around her, gamely still fighting for independence, trying to assert that she’s also a somebody in her own right, a Spencer, not just a pretty bauble hanging off the tree of the British Royal Family. The story takes place at Sandringham over Christmas where the Firm all assemble annually. It’s the tenth time Diana has done the three-day … Read more
Hidden aka Caché
Everyone loves a form/content double whammy, when a film’s story and its method of telling correspond. It’s why Memento succeeds so well, for example, a tale about an amnesiac told in partial and unreliable flashback. How much craftier is Michael Haneke’s psychological thriller Hidden. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are media professionals, members of the Parisian chattering classes, liberal right down in their DNA. What could people of such good intent have to do with the rising tide of Islamism, anti-westernism, terrorism? Why are they being blackmailed by an increasingly incriminating series of videotapes? Are they guilty of something, or innocent, as the film seems to proclaim? Haneke’s double whammy is … Read more
Rogue Agent
As I write James Bond’s producers have a “we’re hiring” sign over Daniel Craig’s vacant seat. Is Rogue Agent James Norton’s audition? If it is, it’s a funny sort of one, though Norton is fairly remarkable as a man on a mission – to deceive almost everyone he comes into contact with. The thing to bear in mind through the length of this familiar and yet bizarre film is that it’s pretty much all true. As the film opens, it’s 1993, the IRA bombing campaign on Britain is at full spate and Norton’s Robert Freegard is working undercover as a barman, recruiting students at an agricultural college to infiltrate what he assures them … Read more
The German Lesson
Why did the Germans in the 1930s fall prey to the Nazi ideology? 2019’s The German Lesson (Deutschstunde) is a bracing story both about the Germans and for the Germans, who might not relish what writer Siegfried Lenz has served up, though director Christian Schwochow sugars the pill with images of austere beauty. Told in flashback from a jail cell where the barely adult Siggi is now a problem prisoner in post-War Germany, the story follows Siggi into his own past, growing up on the windswept Baltic coast with a father whose devotion to his policeman’s job came before else. It looks like an everyday German dedication to duty – “Pflicht”, to borrow … Read more
