Popular Reviews
The Death of Dick Long
Subversive in a quiet way, The Death of Dick Long starts out conventionally enough, with three rock dudes practising in a garage and making a racket. Eventually the session comes to an end, various females peel off and go to bed and the guys decide to “get weird,” as Dick puts it. Director Daniel Scheinert (who also plays Dick) cuts to three old beer cans hastily being hacked into makeshift pipes. And cuts again to later that night when Dick’s friends, Zeke (Michael Abbott Jr) and Earl (Andre Hyland), are dumping a severely injured Dick outside the local hospital. They run away. A mystery – what the hell happened to Dick? This question is … Read more
The Forgotten Battle
War dramas are often held to a higher standard than other movies, and it’s a rare one that doesn’t bring generals – active, retired and armchair status – out into the open to condemn some appalling misrepresentation of the facts or other. A fate The Forgotten Battle largely dodged when it debuted in 2020. That’s mayb ebecause for the most part it kept its background (the facts) and its foreground (the fiction) separate. The facts: after the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, the Allies started pushing the Germans back out of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, eastward, ever eastward. But progress eventually started to be held back by overstretched supply lines. Cherbourg, … Read more
La Llorona
La Llorona is a figure in Mexican folklore, a tragic ghostly beauty dressed in white clothes who haunts the world she once lived in, having drowned first her own children and then herself. You can find a faint echo of La Llorona in the Wilkie Collins novel The Woman in White, but though The Woman in White has been turned into several movies, TV series and an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, it’s never really taken hold in the anglosphere quite the same way as La Llorona has with Spanish speakers – in fact there were two other movies based on the myth in production when this La Llorona debuted. I mention all that because … Read more
Hope aka Håp
“Oh no, no, no, no, not another fucking cancer film,” was Stellan Skarsgård’s response when he was asked to be in Hope (aka Håp in the original Norwegian) by his old friend, its writer/director Maria Sødahl. Skarsgård has a point. The terminal illness weepie can itself be pretty deadly. But Hope is more about love and family life than about sickness. It doesn’t get too hung up on redemption. And it can boast fabulous performances all round, including from Skarsgård, who took the gig. The true-to-lifeness undoubtedly has a lot to do with the fact that it really happened. In 2011 Maria Sødahl learned that the lung cancer she thought she’d recovered from … Read more
Magic Mountains
So you broke up with someone and now they’ve got in touch to ask you if you’d like to go climbing with them, just like the two of you used to. One last hurrah, kind of thing, a farewell to all that. You decide to go, though it doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Before anything else happens, Urszula Antoniak’s Magic Mountains, a brooding yet brief (only 81 minutes) exercise in mood management, has to explain why Hannah (Hannah Hoekstra) would accept this invitation from former boyfriend Lex (Thomas Ryckewaert) to go to the Tata mountains in Slovakia. Antoniak does it adroitly, in a scene which establishes the entire mood of the … Read more
Confess, Fletch
A confession about Confess, Fletch. I was quite a chunk in before I realised that the character of Fletch, played here by Jon Hamm, was the same Fletch that Chevy Chase played in 1985’s Fletch and 1989’s Fletch Lives. Prejudices readjusted, I continued, noting that Hamm’s Fletch is now a retired investigative journalist (Chase’s was still on the job), and that Hamm is trying to dignify the character up a bit. A touch of Cary Grant in his portrayal, or maybe even Gregory Peck – especially when Fletch is riding around Rome on an old-school scooter, Roman Holiday style. From the opening credits – that big blue Miramax ident of yore – and the … Read more
The Assistant
“It’s about Harvey Weinstein,” is how The Assistant is often shorthanded. Yes, but no. At a basic level Kitty Green’s bracingly edgy film really is about an assistant at a movie production house ruled over by a predatory tycoon. At another it’s about the way low-status individuals – women in this case – are treated in general. It’s not all sexual misconduct either. The Assistant makes it clear, even from the weak position of those two words on the screen in the opening credits (bottom right, the last stop on the eyes’ journey) that status bleeds into every aspect of human relations. Take the early scene where the rookie assistant, Jane, is silently waiting … Read more
You and Me
What’s the best Fritz Lang film? The argument could go on all night, and there are so many to choose from – contenders include M, Fury, You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, or While the City Sleeps. Or how about Rancho Notorious, Metropolis, The Big Heat or Man Hunt? So how about the worst one? 1938’s You and Me is a prime candidate. It’s still an interesting if largely unsuccessful film. Lang himself considered it to be his worst, a “lousy picture”, he said in his autobiography, in which styles argue with each other while a miscast lead does his best to make sense of a character. George Raft is … Read more
Romanzo Criminale
Translated as “Crime Novel”, this Italian drama follows three childhood friends, Il Freddo (Kim Rossi Stuart), Libano (a brilliantly psychotic Pierfrancesco Favino) and Il Dandi (Claudio Santamaria) as they make their way from smalltime thuggery to bigtime gangsterism. Finally, a film about gangsters made by real Italians, I hear you say. And they’re real gangsters too, the Magliani outfit, who not only hoovered up the drugs business in 1970s Italy but also got involved with the terrorist Red Brigades and the execution of the president, Aldo Moro, in 1978. Moustaches, lapels, chest hair, male jewellery. Being a film kicking off in the 1970s, Romanzo Criminale staggers under their weight in its pursuit of … Read more
Nuclear
After His House and A Dim Valley, Nuclear is the third film with an uneasy supernatural element that I’ve seen in the last three days. All three use the otherworldly element to put a spin on a familiar genre – two/three genres in the case of Nuclear. The first is a family drama. Mother (as the imdb calls her, and played by Sienna Guillory) gets a formidable kicking as the film opens, from her son (Brother, as per the imdb, played by Oliver Coopersmith), is rescued by her daughter Emma (Emilia Jones) and driven off into the middle of nowhere, mum to recuperate, Emma to marshal her forces before moving on to who … Read more
Brick
Careful use of Spanish-flavoured old LA locations, low-slung camera angles and a devotion to hard-boiled dialogue, often maddeningly mumbled, make director Rian Johnson’s debut one of the most authentic nu-school noirs for some time. All the genre types are there – the honourable loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the femme fatale (Nora Zehetner), the urbane crime lord (Lukas Haas), the thick-as-pigshit muscle (Noah Fleiss). The plot too is the real deal – brain-strainingly complicated and/or pointless, you’re never sure which. The twist is – there isn’t a person in the movie over high school age. Which serves to put a shiny new coat on the old genre. And shows that, if nothing else, Johnson knows how … Read more
Rize
Fashion photographer and music-video director David LaChapelle’s documentary about Krumping, the brutally physical, adrenalised street dance movement in South Central LA which rose, in the aftermath of the 1992’s Rodney King riots, from the Clowning movement. Yes, clowning as in painting the face and putting on big baggy clothes. Think rap face-to-face showdowns, but instead of spinning rhymes they do the most ridiculously amazing dances with their body, the court of audience opinion more often than not deciding the winner. Both clowning and now krumping are a leftfield response to deprivation and the added blight of the gang culture and originally allowed those who do it to pass unmolested from one gang district … Read more
