Popular Reviews
Shoot the Piano Player
How do you follow a classic like The 400 Blows? With another one, if you’re François Truffaut. Shoot the Piano Player (aka Shoot the Pianist, or Tirez sur le pianiste in the original French) debuted in 1960, one year after 400 Blows had made Truffaut’s name as a director. Just in case there was any doubt about his talent, he’d also written Breathless (A bout de souffle), another classic, with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol in the interim. Let’s get the story out of the way, because in a way it’s not interesting, though the way Truffaut tells it is. Charles Aznavour plays a concert pianist called Edouard Saroyan who meets a young … Read more
Wolfwalkers
Kings of Irish animation Cartoon Saloon bring their Irish Folklore Trilogy to a close with Wolfwalkers, a rousing big finish after The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014). It’s closer in spirit to Song of the Sea, which was about a shapeshifting sea creature known as a selkie, than Kells, which was set in an Irish monastery where enthusiasm, bizarrely, was shown to trump actual craft and learning when it came to illuminating ancient manuscripts. This time, co-writer/director duo Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart have repurposed an old legend about “wolf men” from Kilkenny, where their studio is based, to tell the story of human beings who release their … Read more
4 August 2014-08-04
Out in the UK This Week Starred Up (Fox, cert 18, DVD/Blu-ray/digital) Starred Up is a British prison drama, a phrase that usually strikes fear into the soul. But this one is an exception. Jack O’Connell isn’t the only reason for it, though he’s convincing as a young lag toughing his way to the top. The script pulls its weight too, with lots of tiny details – like our guy peeling off his top before some argy-bargy and dousing himself in baby oil so the screws can’t get a hold of him – and an awareness that a prison drama only has a certain number of places it can go (the showers, the top dog’s … Read more
Asylum
There are two films called Asylum from 1972. One is typical of its era – a compendium horror produced by the Amicus studio, directed by Hammer regular Roy Ward Baker, written by Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame, and starring Peter Cushing. And so is the other, a fly-on-the-wall documentary taking seriously a countercultural moment at full flood. This is a review of the latter, just to disappoint the lovers of the lurid, a sober look inside a therapeutic community based in a small house in the East End of London, run by Dr RD Laing and his fellows in the Philadelphia Association, where clinicians and patients interacted together in a community in what … Read more
The Letter
Melodramas don’t start much better than 1940’s The Letter. A man fleeing from a bungalow on a balmy evening in Malaya. A woman fires at gun at him. He falls to the ground, obviously dead. She continues firing, not stopping until all the chambers are empty. “He tried to make love to me and I shot him,” the woman explains to her husband later. From the cold way we saw those chambers being emptied, we suspect this is not the entire truth. Nor do we entirely believe that the woman and the dead man barely knew each other. Because the woman’s explanation seems just a touch too blithe and high-handed. And because the … Read more
The Breed
Five horny college kids head off to an idyllic island for a weekend of booze and death in this tiredly formulaic horror film which subjects the isolated 20somethings to violent interaction with dogs – German shepherds, to be precise. To spend more time on the plot than is strictly necessary, it seems that someone has genetically fiddled with the dogs’ minds, making them super-intelligent and super-angry. Though not, it would seem, constantly so. Which gives our buff crew time to get drunk, have a laugh, and get into their bikinis (not the boys, obviously). After wondering when the black guy (Hill Harper) is going to die, you might also ask yourself what function exactly … Read more
Caught Stealing
Mock-serious bad times in New York City. Scorsese did it memorably in After Hours, and 40 years later Darren Aronofsky has a go with Caught Stealing, a gonzo nightmare missing a certain something. Comedy, I think, or the right comedic tone at any rate. Anyway, on the upside there’s Austin Butler as a dude in the late 1990s who agrees to babysit his neighbour’s cat, not realising that punk Russ (Matt Smith) is on the wrong side of some scary people, who aren’t all that discriminating when it comes to monstering. Russ being away in London at his dad’s funeral, so he says, street hoodlums Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) and Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) have … Read more
Cryptozoo
Independent, hand-drawn, adult animation is rare, as Sundance programmer Charlie Sextro said at the premiere of Cryptozoo, which puts Dash Shaw’s busy and quirky adventure in pretty much the same category as its subject matter. A cryptid, an early intertitle card informs us, is a creature whose existence is unsubstantiated, or who remains hidden. As in a cryptic crossword, you have to look beyond the surface to see what is really there. And a cryptozoo is where our hero, Lauren (voiced by Lake Bell) is employed as a kind of Indiana Jones swashbuckler, travelling the world to bring crypto-animals like the velue, the gorgon and the karzelek back to the zoo, where they’ll … Read more
Trouble in Paradise
Trouble in Paradise was Ernst Lubitsch’s favourite of his own films. It’s 83 quick minutes of screwball farce, made in 1932 just as Hollywood was putting its own house in order (before the government stepped in and did it), one of the highlights of the pre-Code era. It’s more sexually risqué than later films, for sure, though that isn’t what got it into trouble when Paramount tried and failed to re-issue it in 1935. Banned for decades, it wasn’t really seen again until the 1960s. It’s the story of a conman called Gaston and a thief called Lily who try to swindle and/or steal from each other but instead fall in love. Realising … Read more
Boys State
Fascinating, sometimes grimly so, Boys State is a documentary about a Texas program designed to educate high schoolers in the intricacies and mechanisms of democracy. It’s been run by the American Legion since 1935 and claims to be a “week-long experiment in self-governance” during which young men run for office, get a team around themselves, organise into parties, committees and cabals. En route, the cream (or scum) rises to the top, and the sharp elbowed and quick-tongued win out over the more thoughtful and considered. They’re not an entirely self-selecting group. In early interviews conducted by Legion members in full uniform, it’s obvious what sort of “boy” is being sought – one whose … Read more
Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future
In science fact as well as science fiction the Soviet Union often got there first. First into space, first to the Moon, Mars and Venus, all mighty achievements by an empire whose successes have all subsequently been overshadowed by the regime’s ultimate failure. So how about Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future? Did it really boldly go in 1973 where Marty McFly and the Doc wouldn’t venture until 12 years later? No, is the short answer. The longer one is that this film had a different title originally – Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (or Ivan Vasilievich Menyaet Professiyu in the original Russian) – and it was its US distributors who renamed it, in an … Read more
Her
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 August Storm botnet maximum, 2007 Today marks the day when, in 2007, activity by the Storm Worm Trojan horse reached its maximum. Having been identified in January 2007, the worm spread via emails with catchy subject lines such as “230 dead as storm batters Europe”. Once the recipient had clicked on it, the Trojan horse would go to work, replicating itself and emailing itself out to others as spam. No one is really sure where the Trojan horse came from – some suggest the US, others Russia – but it was designed to work on Microsoft Windows systems, turning each … Read more
