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Popular Reviews

Holly Kelly, Kelli Hollis and Michael Taylor in Mischief Night

Mischief Night

At a time when British film-makers generally are accepting the “multiculturalism rules, ok” status quo, former documentarian Penny Woolcock lights a match in a fume-filled room with an examination of life among the working classes in Leeds. Shane Meadows meets Shameless is the result, to a degree. Does that sound dull? Because the film isn’t at all. Instead Woolcock infuses her drama with a wild pantomime spirit, an unruly bawdiness that’s reflected in the set-ups, characters and dialogue. Set across a park, on one side of which live the whites, on the other the “Pakis”, the focus falls on Tina (Kelli Hollis), a local white goodtime girl with three kids by different dads, and … Read more
Mickey, Peter, Mike and Davy

Head

Head is many things. The Monkees’ declaration of independence, a psychedelic beanfeast, a wackadoo retread of Help by the Prefab Four, director Bob Rafelson’s big screen debut and one of Jack Nicholson’s rare writerly contributions to the movies to list just a few. What it isn’t is a good film. Tiresome in the extreme, it wears out its welcome very quickly. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Monkees are an extremely likeable foursome, it would be barely watchable at all. But there is something to be squeezed from it, and it’s not just the chance to see cameos by Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, Victore Mature, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson himself … Read more
Otto, Markus, Emmenthaler and Lennart

Riders of Justice

Anders Thomas Jensen is amazingly prolific. Riders of Justice (Retfærdighedens ryttere in the original Danish) may be only his fifth film as a director in 22 years but in that time he’s also written around 40 feature-length movies. You might have seen Brothers (starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman), or the underrated western Salvation (Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green, Jeffery Dean Morgan) or After the Wedding (Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Billy Crudup). All his directorial efforts to date have starred Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, four of the five have feature Nicolas Bro, fabulous actors all. They’re joined this time by another real talent, Lars Brygmann, for another exercise in the … Read more
Trine Dyrholm and Pierce Brosnan in Love Is All You Need. Photo: Doane Gregory

Love Is All You Need

Wedding films can be a bit like wedding cake – lots of layers, too sweet, just enough is already a bit too much, not everyone is a fan. Given those caveats, and with the realisation that for every joyous wedding-themed movie like Bridesmaids there’s a steaming pile such as 27 Dresses, let’s wander up the aisle with director Susanne Bier and her two stars, Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm. Brosnan plays Philip, the father of the groom, Dyrholm plays Ida, mother of the bride, people who have never met until, at the airport, she manages to reverse her car into his. Ida is a hairdresser recovering from cancer and from the fact that … Read more
Cathy Gale assesses John Steed

The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 3 – Man with Two Shadows

Shown the same day that RA (“Rab”) Butler made his big pitch to be the new leader of the Conservative party after Macmillan’s shock resignation (Butler’s big speech was a total fail), Man with Two Shadows also plays with the idea of the wrong man – the double being so fruitful a concept that The Avengers would return to it often, as did a lot of 1960s TV. Perhaps the widely prevalent notion of “false consciousness” – there is a right way of seeing things and a wrong way – has something to do with it. Another well worn path is that of someone being killed before the opening credits have rolled. In … Read more
Elpida in the stirrups

Pause

At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 When is she going to crack? It’s the question asked by Tonia Mishiali’s feature debut, Pause (aka Paúse), and then answered in a series of gotchas. Pause as in Menopause, the film’s working title, and in an opening scene that’s more amusing to watch than it would be to experience, middle-aged Greek woman Elpida (Stella Fyrogeni) is being examined in gynaecological stirrups after which she’s told that she’s going through the menopause. The male doctor runs through a list of what Elpida can expect – night sweats, body odour, weight gain, allergies, bleeding, osteoporosis – a list that goes on so comically … Read more
Alexei Navalny being interviewed

Navalny

Daniel Roher’s documentary Navalny starts with a bit of a joke. Roher, interviewing the Russian politician, would-be president, survivor of a gruesome poisoning, and (as I write) prisoner in a Russian jail, asks him how he’d like to be remembered by the Russian people if he is assassinated. Navalny laughs in an affable “guys, do me a favour” kind of way while pointing out to Roher that this film he’s in the process of making can go one of two ways. It can either be a thriller (he survives) or a “boring memoir” (he is killed). Roher then cuts to a very 007-style shot, of a wintry mountain, from high over the trees, … Read more
Chow Yun-fat lights a cigarette with counterfeit money

A Better Tomorrow

John Woo’s woo-hoo moment came in 1986 with the release of A Better Tomorrow, the crime drama that revived his career, created the “heroic bloodshed” sub-genre and, ultimately, influenced the way action movies the world over would look. It’s a simple story, of two brothers on either side of the legal divide. Leslie Cheung plays younger brother, Kit, a cop, while Ti Lung plays Ho, the older sibling who works, unbeknown to Kit, for a gangster. Woo and his co-writers, Chan Hing-Kai and Leung Suk-wah, are much more interested in the morally compromised Ho than the slightly peevish and almost dangerously vanilla Kit. What energy they have left they lavish on Ho’s sidekick, … Read more
Park Ji-min as Freddie

Return to Seoul

A woman born in South Korea but then raised in France returns to the land of her birth to look up her birth parents. And that’s the basic plot outline of Return to Seoul, a fictional reworking of the true story of Korean-born, France-raised Laure Badufle, who wrote this movie with director Davy Chou. This is a film that knows very well that there’s are a welter of genealogy-adjacent TV shows out there with titles like Long Lost Family. Who Do You Think You Are?, the globally most successful of them has been around for 20 years and exists in all sorts of iterations, under all sorts of titles, acquainting people with their … Read more
Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin

Respect

It would easy to go all hatey on Respect, a biopic of the life of Aretha Franklin, but instead let’s take it for what it is – the authorised version, the Stations of the Cross of a towering talent who even old, sick and with her voice in ruins could yank a tear, if not sobs, from the coldest of hearts. As we can see at the end of the film in actual footage from Aretha’s performance at the 2015 Kennedy Center tribute to Carole King which, perhaps unwisely, is shown over the end credits. Jennifer Hudson never quite manages anything similar, brilliant though she is. Choose your biblical metaphor – she’s Daniel … Read more
Texel and Jeremiasz

A Perfect Enemy

Keeping its cards close to its chest, almost until it’s too late, A Perfect Enemy is one of those low-budget Euro-thriller co-productions that also (eventually) makes some sense of its transborder elements, particularly its cast. There are only really two people, in a “starring” sense, in any case. The Polish actor Tomasz Kot you might know from Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War. He plays Jeremiasz Angust, a onetime high-flier architect who’s cashed in the status jobs and become even more of a somebody by taking on work that’s strictly humanitarian – hospitals in Rwanda, and the like, he tells the audience at the Ted-style talk he’s giving as the film opens. And Athena Strates, … Read more
Jean-Paul Belmondo

The Professional/Le Professionel

If you’ve ever wondered where to start with Jean-Paul Belmondo but have no taste for the French New Wave, The Professional might be the film for you. Released in 1981, it’s a pacy, light-hearted action movie not unlike a 1970s Bond movie, though Belmondo is more Sean Connery than Roger Moore. Belmondo plays the French government hitman sent to an African republic to kill its president. En route, the political wind changes direction and Joss Beaumont (Belmondo) ends up being sold out by the very people who sent him on the job. As the film opens he is in an African court off his face on zombifying truth drugs and testifying to his … Read more

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