Popular Reviews
Panic Button
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 May Maiden flight of the world’s first passenger jet, 1952 On this day in 1952, the de Havilland DH 106 Comet was introduced into service by BOAC airlines. It was the world’s first commercial jet and its clean lines, big square windows, relatively quiet cabin and comfortable interior meant it looked like it was going to be a success. However, things did not start auspiciously for the plane. Several Comets had to abort take-off as they were taxiing down the runway. Over the next year, three in-air catastrophes occurred, with planes falling apart in mid-air. It was discovered that the … Read more
Yolanda and the Thief
There’s not much wrong with Yolanda and the Thief that a lot more dancing wouldn’t fix. It’s a 1945 Fred Astaire musical, and the first in a run of Technicolor movies that would prove director Vincente Minnelli to be a master of colour and motion. Though it was a flop, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Minnelli’s direction or his eye, or with Astaire, when he’s given the chance. There’s not even that much askew with Lucille Bremer, at whose door most of the blame was laid for the film’s failure. She was producer Arthur Freed’s girlfriend, and he insisted on casting her as the female lead, in spite of the fact that she … Read more
Yes, God, Yes
Yes, God, Yes – a funny title pithily catching the twin obsessions of this slight but sharp movie. Sex and god. It stars Natalia Dyer, who somehow has managed to fit this in alongside the nine other movies and 30-odd episodes of the Netflix show Stranger Things she’s appeared in over the last six years or so. She was about 24 when she made this, but the big eyes and slender frame mean she can just about get away with playing Alice, a teenager from a sheltered background grappling with the first stirrings of sexuality at the Catholic school that seems almost unnaturally fixated on the carnal. Coming of agers with storylines that … Read more
Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events
Somewhere near the end of this highly anticipated children’s adventure movie there’s a cameo by Dustin Hoffman. He just blurs on, says a couple of indistinct phrases and is not seen again. The pointlessness of his appearance is indicative of what’s wrong with this film, a series of disconnected and poorly motivated events which no amount of star power – Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep, Billy Connolly, Timothy Spall – can give shape to. There’s even narration courtesy of Jude Law, though it could be Father Christmas for all the difference it makes. The plot follows three young orphans, bookish Klaus, resourceful Emily and gurgling infant Sunny, as they are farmed out to a … Read more
Jack Strong
Jack Strong – the name is only heard once in this movie of the same name. It’s the code name of Ryszard Kukliński, a real-life colonel in the Polish army who worked as a spy for the CIA in the period running up to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of communism. Much of the advertising for this film, which came out in 2014, centres on Patrick Wilson, who is barely in it, and also Dagmara Domińczyck (now a lot more famous on account of Succession). The two of them are married and so presumably came as a package, Polish-born Polish-speaking Domińczyck having suggested Wilson, I’m guessing. Fine though they … Read more
Submarine
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 May USS Scorpion submarine sinks, 1968 On this day in 1968, a nuclear submarine called the USS Scorpion was lost at sea in mysterious circumstances with 99 crewmen on board. Scorpion had been built in 1958 and had gone into service in 1960. Operating on the US’s eastern seaboard, she mostly took part in patrols of the Atlantic coast as part of the on-going development of Cold War submarine tactics, though she did occasionally operate in European waters. In 1966 she filmed a Soviet missile launch after stealthily having made the “Northern Run” to Novaya Zemlya, a Russian archipelago on … Read more
Gemini
Gemini director Shinya Tsukamoto was about 30 when he made his most infamous film, Tetsuo, which featured a man turning into a kind of scrapyard monster, complete with gigantic revolving hydraulic penis. Ten years later in 1999, nudging 40, here he is calmed down a touch, but not that much if the opening shots of Gemini – maggots crawling in meat, bedraggled rats feasting on what looks like an animal head – are anything to go by. Don’t expect restraint, in other words. Though there is a lot of taste and gorgeousness on display in Tsukamoto’s camerawork in early scenes as we meet a kindly noble doctor, his parents and beautiful amnesiac wife in … Read more
Medusa: Queen of the Serpents
An admission. Medusa: Queen of the Serpents isn’t the film I was after. I was aiming towards plain old Medusa, Anita Rocha da Silveira’s follow-up to Mate-Me Por Favor (Kill Me Please). Both films came out about the same time and when you type Medusa into Amazon, the covers of both films come up. Both feature a woman’s face and a greenish background. They’re pretty similar. Hence… Failure explained. Preamble over, let’s dive into a film that also dives pretty hard, and with great enthusiasm, into its low-budget ethos. It’s all set on a grim caravan site somewhere in low-rent UK, where a trio of working girls – Carly (Megan Purvis), Simone (Sarah … Read more
Frankie
Having made films with more than a hint of the French about them – character driven, focused on metropolitan angst, loose, semi-improvised acting style, unafraid to let nothing happen – Ira Sachs finally gets almost all of the way there with Frankie, a drama set in Portugal but with plenty of French speakers in his cast. Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux Qui M’aiment Prendront le Train) is a close analogue, though here the central figure around which everything spins is still alive. She’s played by Isabelle Huppert as Françoise (aka Frankie), a famous actress who has called all her family together in Sintra, Portugal, for … Read more
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
If the prolific Romanian director Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn does nothing else, it wins its lead actress an award for bravery. Its opening scenes feature Katia Pascariu in full-on sex with her screen husband, the pair of them putting it all on tape – her swinging tits, his erect cock, her back end, her entreaties for him to stick it in etc. Pascariu was last seen, high irony, playing a nun in Cristian Mungiu’s bleak 2012 drama Beyond the Hills. What neither the fully consensual Emilia (Pascariu) nor Eugen know is that the strictly-for-home-consumption “tape” is going to wind up on PornHub, and stay there, in spite of their … Read more
Late Night with the Devil
David Dastmalchian’s wonky presence slots right in to Late Night with the Devil, a horror movie with a difference, though if I say “found footage” and The Exorcist you might wonder where exactly the difference is. A preamble explains that what we’re about to see is a lost recording of a live, late-night TV chat show that went spectacularly bad on the night of Halloween 1977. It also explains that Jack Delroy (Dastmalchian) is a wannabe Johnny Carson whose successful TV chat show has been on the skids for some time now. After losing his wife to cancer, and having courted some mysterious conspiratorial organisation called The Grove, Jack is now casting around … Read more
The Adventures of Robin Hood
“Only the rainbow can duplicate its brilliance” ran the tagline to the swashbuckler from 1938 which took a young Tasmanian and gave him a movie role that would define him for ever. Errol Flynn may have become a fat roué in later life but here, as Robin Hood, he is every inch the handsome, athletic, cocky, light-hearted and brave hero. The film too is full of that brio, telling a story of good v bad, true love v convenience, rich v poor, idealism v cynicism. That “brilliance”, by the way, comes from the costly and technically demanding Technicolor three-strip process, which produces colours more saturated than any subsequent process has managed. Everything – … Read more
