Popular Reviews
The Salvation
Anyone for a Danish western, a great one? Made by one of the Dogme boys? If you look up Dogme in the Wikipedia, it will tell you that this particularly austere style (no music, no lights, no effects) was founded by two Danes, Von Trier and Vinterberg, who were soon joined by two others, Kragh-Jacobsen and Levring. And it’s possible to read this film as an announcement, shout, by the least known of those directors, Kristian Levring, that he doesn’t do that Dogme thing any more. Because The Salvation contains every big movie trick in the book – a lush score, arresting sets, cinematography snatched at the golden hour, melodramatic camera movements, sudden close-ups, … 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
House of Bamboo
In many ways an atypical Sam Fuller film, House of Bamboo does conform to Fuller type in one specific way – strong performances by his two leads. They are Robert Ryan and Robert Stack, as two guys involved in different ways in crime in post-War Japan. Doing almost nothing at all, Ryan acts Stack right off the screen as crime boss Sandy Dawson, an American who has found rich pickings in the debris of post-War Japan. And yet Stack is also pretty effective as a smalltime hoodlum who arrives in the country and immediately starts throwing his weight around and extorting money in the smallest of smalltime ways. What Eddie Spanier (Stack) doesn’t … Read more
The Fourth Man
Paul Verhoeven’s erotic drama The Fourth Man (De vierde Man) opens, to ominous Wagnerian rumbling, on a black screen and then as the credits roll Verhoeven dramatically reveals a spider in close-up, first stunning a fly caught in its web and then cocooning it in silk. The whole process, in agonising detail. What Verhoeven treats us to over the next 100 minutes is a garish, extended version of the same idea. In many respects it’s a warm-up for Basic Instinct, with Jeroen Krabbé in the Michael Douglas role and Renée Soutendijk as the blonde, deadly spider. The read-across isn’t total and for much of the film it isn’t really clear who is the … Read more
Rudo y Cursi
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 March The Wanderers FC win first FA Cup, 1872 Today in 1872, the London football club Wanderers won the first football association cup, the oldest football competition in the world. It was the first of three wins of the cup for the club. The FA Cup is a knockout cup open to all football clubs who are established enough, and with facilities enough, to take part. In 1871-72, being the first season of the cup, there was a piecemeal and eccentric series of regulations – Wanderers managed to get to the final having won only one of their four games … Read more
Hitman
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 June First barcode scanned, 1974 On this day in 1974, a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum became the first product to be scanned by a barcode reader for commercial purposes. The so-called Universal Product Code had been in development since the late 1940s, when Bernard Silver, a Pennsylvania graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology had overheard a local supermarket owner bemoaning the fact that there wasn’t a system for automatically scanning items through a checkout. Drexel went to work, first using ultra-violet inks (they faded), then Morse code in which the dots were stretched to become lines, fatter ones … Read more
Song Without a Name
Song Without a Name is the first feature from Peruvian director Melina Léon, who has made a beautiful but grim drama which can’t quite live up to its early promise. The beauty comes from the look of it all – shot in black and white, fantastically lit, framed in the Academy format with the image dropping off as it bleeds towards the edges. It’s a thing to behold. The grimness comes from the story at its heart – of a pregnant 20-year-old peasant girl who is lured by radio adverts to a “philanthropic” clinic and then has her newborn baby stolen from her by the doctors and nurses. She never sees the baby and nor … Read more
A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe
Supposedly the last western Sergio Leone worked on, 1975’s A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (aka Un genio, due compari, un pollo) has a ramshackle spaghetti western charm and an opening section which strongly recalls the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West – it’s operatic, dramatic, largely silent and at the end of it there’s a plot reversal designed to shock and delight. It’s this section that was supposedly directed by Leone himself. With spanking wide vistas of Monument Valley and close-ups so vivid you can see sweat droplets forming, that must almost certainly be true. Damiano Damiani did the rest of it, poor guy, and the story here … Read more
The Avengers: Series 1, Episode 6 – Girl on the Trapeze
The sixth episode of the series (numbers two to five having vanished) and we’re edging into what would later be familiar Avengers territory. There are devious foreigners, a complex plot and a surprising amount of agency for the female sidekick. Dennis Spooner’s screenplay concerns a woman throwing herself off a London bridge into the Thames, an act which Dr Keel (Ian Hendry) just happens to witness as he’s on the way to a party. Being a public spirited chap he rushes down the steps to the river, where a passing copper and a swarthy type with a thick accent are already on the scene. The woman is dead, but there’s not much water … Read more
One of Them Days
The inspiration for One of Them Days is the black cinema of the late 1990s, a period when actors like Taye Diggs and Gabrielle Union, Nia Long and Omar Epps were on early career highs. Though Dude Where’s My Car?, as white-sliced as it comes, might also be in the mix. That was a tale of two white teenage dudes having the day from hell, and One of Them Days does something similar with its story about a pair of young black women who suddenly need to raise a large sum of money or else be evicted from their fairly skanky apartment in a block called The Jungle. Unsurprisingly, given its name, The … Read more
King, Queen, Knave
Here’s the sort of film King, Queen, Knave is – one where a pratfall comes with a sound effect, in case the pratfall wasn’t obvious enough. One where a woman’s breasts seem ready to be fondled, as if fitted with a homing device for wayward hands. One where an attractive woman at a certain point in the evening slips into “something more comfortable”. One where bed springs are noisy. It’s from 1972, it might be no surprise to hear, and stars David Niven, Gina Lollobrigida and John Moulder-Brown – Niven plays German department store magnate Charles Dreyer, Lollobrigida is his lusty younger wife, Moulder-Brown is Dreyer’s nephew, a gauche and timid young thing thrown … Read more
Grand Theft Hamlet
Though the title almost does all the explaining you’ll ever need, to spell it out in a full sentence Grand Theft Hamlet is an attempt to stage the Shakespeare play Hamlet inside the online version of Grand Theft Auto. The background. It’s the third Covid lockdown in the UK and husband and wife Sam Crane, a theatre director, and Pinny Grylls, a documentary maker, are suddenly workless and at home cooling their heels. He’s a bit of a console jockey. She isn’t. Inspired by a comment from their kids about a YouTube gamer going by Dream (31.9 million subscribers as I type) who’s been staging performances inside Minecraft, they wonder if they can … Read more
