Popular Reviews
Rush
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 February Enzo Ferrari born, 1898 On this day in 1898, Enzo Anselmo Ferrari was born. The man who would later be known as Il Commendatore, founder and leader of the Ferrari racing team (and car manufacturer) was taken to a racing track as a kid and realised immediately that he wanted to be a driver. By the early 1920s he was Alfa Romeo’s test driver, and when the company decided to outsource their racing unit, it was Ferrari that ran it. He went solo during the Second World War, during which time Alfa paid him not to compete, and by … Read more
Luz
So was Tilman Singer’s first feature, 2018’s Luz, as inventive as Cuckoo, his most recent one (starring Hunter Schafer)? Yes, is the answer, though Luz is inventive in an entirely different way. It plays about with time in ways that are unusual – Singer doesn’t do flashbacks and flashforwards so much as infect the here and now with snatches of what’s happened and what’s about to come. It sounds like it’s hard to follow and at first it is, but by the end Singer has given us enough plot for us to have a grasp of what’s been going on. This seems to be, in as much as we can tell, the story … Read more
The Last Stop in Yuma County
The Last Stop in Yuma County is a reminder of the sort of film there used to be a lot of in the late 1990s. In that first post-Tarantino wave, low-budget film-makers would head to the desert, find a diner somewhere, load it up with gonzos and dimwits, add guns and fruity dialogue and then let the chips fall where they might. A lot were disappointing and eventually they became a chore to watch, but here’s a reminder of how good they could be when done properly. Just a few characters, not too much horsing around, tongue kept for the most part out of the cheek, a minimal situation with a sense of … Read more
The Landlord
The Landlord is a remarkable film dealing in an unusually nuanced way with entitlement, white-saviour complex, gentrification, poverty tourism and cultural appropriation decades before the rest of the pack got there. It was made in 1970 by Hal Ashby in his first film as a director, but it’s Bill Gunn’s flexing, unflinching screenplay that makes it what it is. It also happens to be one of the best films ever to star Beau Bridges, who is really remarkably good as the very rich white boy who decides to buy a brownstone block in “the ghetto”, with the idea of turning it into one of those new-fangled loft spaces that all the “beautiful people” … Read more
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
By general consent a classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also won three Oscars – best director and screenplay for John Huston and best supporting actor for Walter Huston (his father) – and is one of those films that also get film-makers dewy eyed. Stanley Kubrick named it one of his faves (in 1963 anyway). Robert Redford ditto. Sam Peckinpah was a big fan. Lucas and Spielberg borrowed the look of its star, Humphrey Bogart, as the template for Indiana Jones. The hat, stubble, jacket, pants and boots all probably look better on Harrison Ford, but neither Bogart nor Huston Jr was aiming for matinee appeal with their movie, and that’s the … Read more
Merrily We Go to Hell
Merrily We Go to Hell ran into trouble when it came out in 1932. The use of the word Hell in the title gave some distributors an attack of the vapours. To get round potential objections, in the UK the problem word was simply removed and the film went by Merrily We Go to __, which was also the case in certain states in the US. The film itself is often described as a comedy, but it isn’t really funny. But then that is often the way with the comedy of manners, which this is. This is a big one in the feminist canon, not least because it was directed by Dorothy Arzner, … Read more
Chuck & Buck
In this small-scale, nasty and even snivelling film born in the Classmates.com/Friends Reunited era, young sleek winner Chuck (Chris Weitz) returns to his hometown and falls somehow back into the orbit of old childhood chum Buck, who in the intervening years has polished his dweebieness into something altogether needier and more pathological. Buck is a stalker in other words and, having met Chuck again, he locks on hard. Mike White plays Buck and also wrote the film. He cut his teeth on slightly squeaky TV shows about high school, such as Dawson’s Creek and Freaks and Geeks, before turning to the dark side with this twisted debut. It was a welcome breath of … Read more
One, Two, Three
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 August Berlin Wall goes up, 1961 On this day in 1961, Berliners woke up to a Berlin divided by a wall. The capital of Berlin had been partitioned in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like the rest of Germany, but in microcosm, Berlin was parcelled out between the victorious powers – US, UK, USSR and France. However, Berlin was entirely surrounded by Soviet territory, the allies’ parts of Germany being in the west of the country, and the fear amongst Berliners was that all of the city would be swallowed up by the Soviets. Stalin had already tried … Read more
Wander Darkly
Matteo (Diego Luna) and Adrienne (Sienna Miller) are a broke couple with a new baby and a relationship on the skids. Arguing on the way home from a date night, mostly about Adrienne giving someone the glad-eye, they are involved in a massive car crash. This is no spoiler, we’re only a handful of minutes into Wander Darkly, and writer/director Tara Miele is just setting the scene – economically and with great visual flair – for the drama to come. Adrienne is dead. Or is she suffering from post-traumatic delirium and is just imagining she’s dead? Or is something else going on? It’s not certain, but what we can see is Adrienne in … Read more
The Assessment
Harold Pinter never wrote out-and-out sci-fi, but if he had done it might have looked like The Assessment. A queasy and uneasy excavation of people’s motivations, its tension stems from confrontations deferred, which break suddenly in discomfiting and absurdist ways. Yet it’s simple, in set-up and execution. It’s easy to imagine this punchy three-hander being performed in an experimental theatre in the upstairs room of a pub. Another Pinteresque aspect – it’s an actors’ drama rather than a director’s, and it calls for subtlety and sudden switching of gears from its performers, which Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel all manage with real precision – Olsen and Vikander get the best of … Read more
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter
There’s a bat stuck “splat!” on to someone’s face at a certain point in Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, which just about sums up this film made in 1972 (released in 1974), an attempt by writer/director Brian Clemens and his crew to breathe new life into the vampire genre and the Hammer Studio’s output. Clemens was the moving spirit behind the British TV spy-fi series The Avengers, which had ceased production in 1969 after an eight-year run. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, in the interim he’d created the comedy series My Wife Next Door, and written for TV shows The Champions and The Protectors, and also penned the screenplay … Read more
Twinless
The reinvention of Dylan O’Brien continues with Twinless, a tale of fruitless love and stalkerish obsession aimed at the mopey Gen Z contingent but with enough meat and thrillerish darkness to satisfy most tastes. It’s billed as a black comedy on Wikipedia (all the research I did before watching it) which seems like a bit of a stretch. Mournful, creepy and tense, I thought, especially once it gets into its stride and starts working up a sense of doomed tragic love that cannot go anywhere except to the bad. O’Brien plays two roles – the gay, popular and dead Rocky and his twin brother, the straight, withdrawn and alive Roman – who meets … Read more
