Popular Reviews
Shorta aka Enforcement
Shorta (this film’s original Danish title) is the Arabic word for police. Enforcement is how it’s being sold in the rest of the world, as in “law enforcement”, but the truncation adds an extra shot of aggressiveness that’s entirely right for a boiled-in-piss drama all about the grrr. The opening shot sets the tone – a close-up of a black kid struggling to survive a chokehold administered by the cops. When the kid later dies, the no-go estates where kids like him live erupt and two cops find themselves in enemy territory as tension boils over into violent unrest. Jens Høyer (Simon Sears) and Mike Andersen (Jacob Lohmann) are the two cops, on … Read more
Count Yorga, Vampire
Going in to 1970’s Count Yorga, Vampire, the thing to remember – and the reason why it sometimes flies under an alternative title, The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire – is that it was originally destined to be a vampire movie of a softcore persuasion, at least as much about tits as teeth. It explains odd moments when the focus shifts from the matter at hand – an update on Bram Stoker’s Dracula story, in all the key essentials – and on to female flesh. There isn’t that much of it, to be fair to the film, which took its swerve away from the carnal early in the production process, at the point … Read more
The Court Jester
A flop, amazingly, when it was first released in 1955, The Court Jester is pretty much perfect in every way. It has the looks, the jokes, the action and the stars, in particular a perfectly cast Danny Kaye doing what he does best. There are stories of Kaye holding theatre audiences spellbound just sitting on the edge of the stage and reminiscing, and his ability (or perhaps his need) to command attention suits him perfectly to the role of a carnival entertainer using his talents to save the realm. The wicked King Roderick (Cecil Parker) has usurped the rightful ruler and killed the royal family. All except the infant prince, identifiable by a … Read more
Cyrano
If the tricky bit in musicals is the moment when people transition into song, what about the quasi-musical? Cyrano demonstrates that the problem isn’t doubled but squared – every time Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett or Kelvin Harrison Jr burst into song, it’s a genuine shock. The fact that the actual songs are a bit hit and miss is an added burden. In Edmond Rostand’s original story, Cyrano de Bergerac is the warrior poet with a massive nose and effortlessly spectacular language skills who falls badly for Roxanne, his ideal of femininity, but then helps a fellow soldier – handsome but dim Christian – woo her with his words, knowing that he has no … Read more
Lost Transmissions
Affable, blokeish, pint-in-a-pub, kickaround-in-the-park Simon Pegg. Even when he was playing Scotty in Star Trek he was still likeable Simon Pegg. From talking to someone who worked with him on one of the “Cornetto Trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), he is actually like that in real life. What you see is what you get – smart, geeky, funny, relatable. It comes as a shock to see him acting. In Lost Transmissions he’s a nervy record producer called Theo, life and soul of the party, a survivor of some 1990s band who now lives with his fellow Brit expats out in LA – they’ve made it. Theo is such … Read more
100 Years of… Foolish Wives
When Foolish Wives debuted in 1922, its writer/director/star Erich von Stroheim was at the peak of his popularity, having exploited anti-German sentiment during the First World War by playing a despicable Hun doing despicable things in a series of films. “The man you love to hate,” was his moniker, one gained in 1918 in the film The Heart of Humanity, where he plays a ruthless German officer who throws a baby out of the window so he can better get on with raping a Red Cross nurse. That’ll do it. Foolish Wives works the same seam, though, the war over and the Russian revolution grabbing more headlines, von Stroheim is now playing a … Read more
Clochemerle
Broadcast in 1972, the same year it was agreed that the UK would join the European Common Market, Clochemerle caused a stir when it was first shown. That’s because this charming show was all about a urinal. This pissoir (the word is never used) is erected in a small French village by the progressive mayor and town clerk, and causes ructions after the forces of conservatism decide it’s an affront to deceny and campaign to have it taken down. It was an unusual TV show in many respects. It was an international collaboration (with West German TV) in an era when such things were rare. It was an adaptation of a French comic … Read more
Fast X
The word “family” is uttered 56 times in Fast X, number ten (there’s a clue in the title somewhere) in the series whose focus on interpersonal relations threatens to scupper it. And yet it keeps on going. The latest outing is not so fast, not so furious, maybe, but in a jimjams-and-pizza-and-beer kind of way, it’s a decent enough piece of entertainment – 1950s-melodrama acting with obsessively planned Buster Keaton-style stunts. There is a plot, there really is, of a disavowed, Mission: Impossible flavour, with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and gang being accused of some dreadful atrocity and then being pursued by the Agency it used to work for. The atrocity – a bouncing … Read more
The Last of Sheila
As namechecked by Rian Johnson while out on the promotion trail, The Last of Sheila looks like a good chunk of the inspiration for his Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery. Adding to its attraction are the names of the bizarre writing team behind this whodunit from 1973: Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. It was the only screenplay either of them would ever write and sprang from the murder-mystery evenings they used to put on for a bit of fun in New York. The director Herbert Ross, then probably most famous for directing Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, was at one of them and suggested Hopkins and Sondheim work one of … Read more
Blue Story
Scrappy but powerful, Blue Story is also known as the film that got briefly banned by some UK cinema chains, because some people going to see it were arriving armed to the teeth. “Blue Story, a violent gangster movie, made by the BBC,” is how one British newspaper, never happier than when playing the race card and trashing the “woke” BBC, described the film in its reporting on the violent skirmishes at Star City, Birmingham, when the film opened. What was doubly unfortunate, from the film’s perspective, is that the other film showing that day was Frozen II, so the kids lining up to see that got a lot more than they bargained … Read more
Undine
So, an Undine. It’s a mythical water nymph, mentioned by Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician, but you won’t learn that directly from Christian Petzold’s latest drama, an increasingly bizarre and dislocated story of love suffused with magical realist moments that make no sense at all… unless you realise that the titular Undine (Paula Beer) is a version of the mythical creature who fell in love with a human. This Undine is a pencil-skirted guide to historical Berlin. She’s fresh out of a relationship with a guy she thought was the one, now propelled by fate into another one when a fish tank explodes and she and a man she’s just met (Franz Rogowski) are … Read more
Amsterdam
That looks like Taylor Swift, I thought to myself, watching the opening moments of David O Russell’s promising looking Amsterdam, his first film since 2015’s Joy. It actually is Taylor Swift, just one of a galaxy of stars in a cast list so luminous that the likes of Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough and Zoe Saldana could almost be safely removed without harming the texture of the movie. No, maybe not Taylor-Joy, one of the important components, it turns out, when Amsterdam finally gets round to revealing its nature – an angry political drama, and a good thriller, hidden inside a meringue of deflection, pastiche, jokes, songs, historical factoids, good performances and all the … Read more
