Popular Reviews
A Boy Called Christmas
A superhero origin story of sorts, A Boy Called Christmas is vague about the costumed crusader it has in mind. Is it Saint Nicholas, aka Santa Claus? Or his pagan predecessor, Father Christmas, the white-bearded giftbringer who “flew” through the winter night on his fleet-footed steed possibly with aerial assist from hallucinogenic mushrooms? Slight quibble to one side, this is a sweet, middle-of-the-road story about a boy’s Christmas-y fairytale quest to find Elfhelm, home of the elves, and it builds gently and unexceptionally towards an emotional climax that might catch you off guard. The Princess Bride is the quasi-template, with Maggie Smith in the Peter Falk role as the storytelling aunt babysitting her … Read more
The Naked Prey
If there’s an award for services to middle-aged buffness in a 1960s mainstream movie, The Naked Prey would probably win it for Cornel Wilde, the other strong contender being Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer. Wilde got there first, in 1965, three years before Lancaster stripped down to his swimming trunks to swim home through a series of suburban swimming pools. Wilde’s existential crisis is more physical. He plays a guy billed only as “Man”, the organiser of a big-game-shooting safari in colonial Africa whose boorish client – a blowhard boasting of wanting to go into slavery once he’s exhausted ivory – insults a tribe whose territory the hunters have strayed upon. The tribe, … Read more
The Damned aka Götterdämmerung
Luchino Visconti’s The Damned aka Götterdämmerung is like several seasons of the TV show Dallas run together. It’s big, melodramatic and camp. There’s even a “Bobby Ewing back from the shower” moment. It’s the first of Visconti’s German trilogy – Death in Venice and Ludwig would follow in 1971 and 1973 – but is in many respects a return to the territory of 1963’s The Leopard, being the story of a great old family’s tussle with political forces beyond its control. In The Leopard it was the arrival of democracy in 19th-century Italy upending certainties. In The Damned, aka Götterdämmerung, it’s the Nazis. We’re in Germany, it’s the 1930s, Hitler is newly in … Read more
The Intruder
The Intruder examines, in the sort of lurid, semi-deranged way you’d expect from a horror movie, something that’s actually rather subtle. How a house becomes a home. How any prospective buyer, looking around someone else’s home with a view to purchasing it, is an intruder. And how the seller, once the deal is complete, still has some residual emotional hold over the property. It might be the new buyer’s house – the legal documents say so – but in some sense it’s still the old owner’s home, especially if they lived there for decades. Nice young marrieds Scott (Michael Ealy) and Annie (Meagan Good) have done well in their careers and fancy moving … Read more
L’Année des Méduses aka Year of the Jellyfish
Sex as war. Breasts as breastplates. 1984’s L’Année des Méduses translates literally as Year of the Medusas but is usually rendered more tamely and less aptly in English as Year of the Jellyfish. Director Christopher Frank (who also wrote the book) sets out his stall straight away. A shot of two cocktails in tall glasses is quickly superceded by the bare breasts of the young woman who ordered them. We’re in the South of France, where a mother and daughter are holidaying on one of those beaches that give the more puritanical mind the heebie-jeebies. All the women are topless and everyone is carrying on as if it means nothing at all. But … Read more
20 May 2013-05-20
Out in the UK this week Django Unchained (Sony, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) If you could cross Gone with the Wind, Shaft, and A Fistful of Dollars, you might end up with something like Quentin Tarantino’s lavish entertainment starring Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx as unlikely amigos out to rescue a female slave (Kerry Washington) from plantation owner Leonardo DiCaprio. Starting verbose and staying there – is there a single person in this film who won’t stop talking? – this playful, bloody and tense drama is at its funniest when it leaves Foxx and Waltz to interact. And it’s full of surprises. A fact which extends all the way down to casting decisions – such … Read more
Dark Side of the Rainbow
Ten kids high on aspartame and orange food colouring were finally silenced at my house a few weeks ago when I put on the so-sharp-it-hurts remastered Wizard Of Oz. The 1939 classic’s SFX were still brilliant and Judy Garland’s performance is so thigh-slapping that it had a magical effect on adults too. Oddly, the film has always been a big one for gay men – Elton John, an arch Friend Of Dorothy, named his biggest album Goodbye Yellow Road in the days when he was still straight, or bi, or whatever he was. But if the mark of a great work of art is that it can be re-interpreted, re-purposed and mythologised then … Read more
All Quiet on the Western Front
If Netflix’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front has done anything it’s revived interest in this 1930 original, a film more people have heard about than seen but which has been influential on generations of film-makers. It’s obvious that Kubrick borrowed heavily from it for the trench sequences in Paths of Glory, and Steven Spielberg has acknowledged its influence on Saving Private Ryan. And what a beast it is, a marvel of technical brilliance, directed with almost insane virtuosity by Lewis Milestone, who’d already made a name for himself by 1930 and would go on to direct for decades to come – he directed the original Ocean’s Eleven in 1960, for … Read more
10 Things I Hate About You
Apparently if you’re drunk enough when you say the title of this film, it sounds like, “The Taming Of The Shrew”. Whatever. When it came out in 1999 it tapped into two of the big trends in the cinema of the time: the high-school drama (Cruel Intentions, Election, Rushmore) and adaptations of the Bard (Elizabeth, Shakespeare In Love). It’s a teen tangle in Shakespeare country that manages to be both reasonably faithful (depending on how you define “reasonably” and “faithful”) to Shakespeare’s original, but not so heavy-handedly that the average audience member will nod off. It also managed to cast two hot properties of the time – Julia Stiles, who at one point seemed … Read more
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Rose Byrne has been acting since she was 15, but it wasn’t until If I Had Legs I’d Kick You that some people started noticing how good she is – no matter how much money movies like Bridesmaids or Insidious make, it takes a “serious” movie to unlock some people’s critical reward system. But she is good in this. And she has to be, because this entire exercise in performative neurosis revolves around her. In fact the camera is on her so much that almost no one else features, and we only get to see her daughter – a bone of some contention throughout – right at the end. Which is how (once … Read more
Kids in America
How many America high school comedies have you seen? How many more do you want to see? Exactly my thoughts as I slid the DVD of Kids in America into the slot. But I was wrong and happy about it, because this is a smart and funny film, about smart and funny and intensely likeable teenagers who are shown giving nearly everything their best shot because it’s the first time they’ve done any of it. The action revolves around a gang of seven students, more ethnically mixed than your average movie high school clique, who decide that something in their “everything verboten” school has got to change. And it’s not going to be them. … Read more
Bad Times at the El Royale
The “who’s zooming who” thriller of the 1990s rides again in 2018’s Bad Times at the El Royale, one of those epics where, by the end, almost everyone is dead and a building is in flames yet barely a spark of emotion has been generated. That is probably the intention. Instead writer/director Drew Goddard wants us to admire the spectacle, and gasp as he piles dialogue on top of plot on top of wayward characters and vainglorious allegory, switching timelines, digressing, flashing back, hopping from one “lead” protagonist to another as he goes – oh no, he’s dead – and generally having a fun old time in a big, kitsch, faintly ridiculous but very enjoyable … Read more
