Popular Reviews
RV: Runaway Vacation
And you thought that after being excellently sinister in Insomnia and One Hour Photo, Robin Williams had stopped making goofily sentimental comedies that stop every 20 minutes for toe-curlingly inappropriate improv from Mr W. Sadly not, as evidence there’s this woeful, slight affair in which Williams plays the family man driving his family cross country to a business convention (they think they’re going on holiday but he hasn’t told them the truth) in a recreational vee-hickle, even though they’re the sort of family who don’t do recreational vehicles, camping, communication, fun or togetherness. Cheryl Hines plays the exasperated wife and Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth are the heads of a family they meet … Read more
Past Lives
Past Lives is a woozy but cool romance where much is suggested but little given. The will they/won’t they is endlessly deferred and if not very much happens, what does happen is properly intense. Right to the last second writer/director Celine Song leaves us dangling. Bracket this one with In the Mood for Love, Casablanca and Brief Encounter. Boy meets girl, loses girl, remeets girl and… But the story starts in South Korea, where young schoolkids Hae Sung and Na have a relationship so intense that their parents arrange a mock “date” for them. More as a joke than anything else – Na’s family is about to emigrate to Canada and her mother … Read more
A Special Day
Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni appeared in many films together, but in 1977’s A Special Day they both play against type – she’s the dowdy housewife rather than the glamour bomb, he’s a gay man rather than the straight Italian lover, two characters thrown together after pretty much everyone else in their apartment block has rushed out into the streets hoping to catch sight of the Führer or Il Duce on the day that Hitler visited Mussolini in 1938. They may live in the same block but Antonietta and Gabriele have never met. She’s always too busy looking after her six kids and husband (John Vernon), and he’s always at work. Or always … Read more
The Kid Detective
The Kid Detective is Evan Morgan’s feature debut – he wrote and directed – and it’s a cracker, a mystery that manages to be funny and dramatic, brand new and yet intensely familiar. Adam Brody plays Abe Applebaum, the “kid detective” whose deductive powers once made him a big noise in his small town, where he’d solve mysteries ranging from missing lunch money at school to cases that stumped the police. Young Sherlock Holmes. Now, aged 32, he’s drinking and watching daytime TV, unshaven, a burn-out who can’t follow his successful first act and who’s still haunted by the case that finished his run of glory – a missing schoolgirl, abducted presumed dead. … Read more
Brian and Charles
Feelgood British low-budget whimsy, Brian and Charles‘s only real fault is that it’s taken the maddening decision to tell its story as a mock-doc. “Twee” – a regular criticism – could be lined up as another possible criticism, though I suspect that “fanciful” is what the naysayers really mean. In which case discard the bulk of Hollywood’s output. It started life as a short costing £500 in 2017, which British TV station Channel 4 liked and wanted to convert into a series. That never happened but C4 did put up some of the money for this film, the feature debut of director Jim Archer. Though really the film belongs to its two stars, David … Read more
Of Human Bondage
Of Human Bondage is the film to point to whenever some marketing guy is wanging on about “brand”. In it, Bette Davis demonstrates as clearly as can be done that it’s product – in the movies the role and performance – that’s critical. Get the product right and the brand takes care of itself. In doing it so brilliantly, Davis transformed her career. This was her breakthrough, in a part that most of her peers turned down – not on-brand enough for them. Davis lobbied for it and forced Warner Bros to lend her out to RKO to play it. It not only made her a star but whipped up talk out of … Read more
Waiting for the Barbarians
It’s a Sondheimian title, Waiting for the Barbarians – as in, “don’t worry, they’re here” – a story about the white man’s civilising mission on some distant frontier and how it gives licence to people whose instincts are far from civilised. The uniforms are deliberately non-specific but for the sake of argument we might as well say it’s the British who are in the spotlight, especially as Brit Mark Rylance is the star. He’s also almost the entire focus of a film about a kindly magistrate way out in the midst of a sandy nowhere whose humanist tendencies are crushed underfoot by the arrival of one badass after another. Enter Johnny Depp, in … Read more
Nightsiren
A young woman returns to the Slovakian village she fled as a child, little realising that she’s going to get the frostiest of receptions. She’s a witch, the townsfolk whisper, or the daughter of a witch, or at least lived in the house where the witch lived, they say. And, what’s more, while fleeing all those years before, she pushed her little sister off a cliff to her death. This is true, but the little girl’s death was an accident, a flashback makes clear, but no one in this village is buying that, or trading in hard facts where Šarlota (pronounced Charlotta and played by Natalia Germani) is concerned. She has been tagged, … Read more
8 August 2016-08-08
Out This Week These Final Hours (The Works, cert 18) A “last day of the world” film like we used to get around the turn of the millennium. It’s made on the cheap but with lots of skill and attitude, the attitude being largely borrowed from Mad Max. Actually, it’s about three genres in one and they successfully fold together as we follow James (Nathan Phillips of Wolf Creek) who is on a coming-of-age road trip on the very last day of the world’s existence. The question the film poses, and James asks of himself eventually when he’s got his priorities straight, is: am I going to be an asshole right to the … Read more
A Little Prayer
Writer/director Angus MacLachlan has built a career mapping the dynamics of functional and dysfunctional families. A Little Prayer slots neatly in alongside earlier films such as 2014’s Goodbye to All That and 2017’s Abundant Acreage Available. You could add his stage play The Dead Eye Boy to the list. I’ve not seen any of them but having now seen A Little Prayer I’d be interested in having a look, because MacLachlan has made an interesting drama in a genre I don’t generally have much time for. We’re in smalltown America where the tightly knit family of Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston) is having a moment. Their son, David (Will Pullen) and … Read more
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 September Publication of The Hobbit, 1937 On this day in 1937, George Allen & Unwin first published a children’s story by John Ronald Ruel Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford. It was called The Hobbit: or There and Back Again, and had grown out of pipesmoke gatherings of an informal literary group of Oxford academics called the Inklings, who met at a pub on Tuesday mornings. Perhaps as a reaction against the modernist experimentation of writers such as James Joyce, the Inklings favoured strong narratives and fantasy, both of which are present by the … Read more
Don’t Torture a Duckling
Which witch? That seems to be the question behind Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non Sevizia un Paperino in the original Italian), the film that made Lucio Fulci something of a name in his home country – the sex, the gore. It’s essentially a police procedural and sets off in a very familiar direction. A child is killed and a man has soon been arrested for the crime. But this arrest is too easy, too quick, and when another child is killed while the suspect is behind bars, it is suddenly clear that it cannot be Barra, the town simpleton and peeping tom. It must be someone else and Barra’s story about having buried … Read more
