Popular Reviews
CODA
CODA is the acronym for Children of Deaf Adults and the name of a movie whose subject matter might make many people pause before watching. Too worthy maybe. Sign language all over the place. Triumph over adversity mawkishness. Though it won an Oscar for Best Picture, this can be not so much a gong, more a warning bell – see Crash, Driving Miss Daisy and Around the World in 80 Days. So it’s a surprise to find what a sweet, straightforward film it is. An underdog movie that piles it on with an earth mover, it stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, the teenage fully-hearing daughter of two deaf parents, sister to a … Read more
26 January 2015-01-26
Out in the UK This Week Jimi: All Is by My Side (Curzon, cert 15) Imagine a Jimi Hendrix record without any of his guitar pyrotechnics. That’s the feeling you get from this efficient, workaday biopic about the godlike genius who came and went so quickly, leaving behind enough music for us to know how good he was. The film follows Hendrix’s transformative year in London 1966-67, makes glancing references to his influences and to his ethnicity (as you might expect from a film directed by 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley). The ethnicity, it claims, Hendrix chose to ignore, which almost brings into focus a man who might have been remarkably … Read more
The Worst Person in the World
The Worst Person in the World is not about the worst person in the world, though it’s a good catchy title and so why not? Instead it’s about something that’s not so easy a sell – how to live the good life. The latest in a 20-year run of collaborations between director Joachim Trier and regular writing partner (and a director in his own right) Eskil Vogt, it follows dense, layered and intense films like Thelma, Louder Than Bombs and Blind with more of the same in a 12-chapter story about a smart, pretty young woman called Julie. At the end of each of Julie’s 12 steps she’s traded in what she had … Read more
Mean Streets
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 May Exile on Main Street released, 1972 On this day in 1972, one of the cornerstone rock albums of all time was released. Exile on Main St was the Rolling Stones’ follow-up to Sticky Fingers and the first album they had produced since extricating themselves from their contract with manager Allen Klein. The Stones had recently become tax exiles from the UK – and recorded much of the album in the south of France, at a villa Keith Richards was renting. Richards was a heavy user of heroin at the time, and his villa became a hub for visiting fellow … Read more
Liliom
“I almost like Liliom best of all,” Fritz Lang said in 1974 about the film he’d directed 40 years earlier. This from a director who invented whole genres (like the spy thriller), directed massive epics (Metropolis) and went on to dominate the crime drama with films like The Big Heat. Lang’s entirely atypical film about the poetic side of wife-beating is quite a surprise. It is a film full of surprises though. The story for one – sweet young Julie falls for rapscallion carnival barker Liliom, a man who loves her but is violent, lazy, feckless and eventually meets an ugly end after taking part in a heist. He then ascends to purgatory, … Read more
Freddy Got Fingered
The ancient Hebrews used to send out a goat into the wilderness, hoping it would take all their sins off with it. Modern Hollywood continues the practice every year with the Razzies, awards handed out to films which supposedly stink but which are in fact often not significantly more terrible than many others. In fact Razzies are often awarded to films which tried hard and failed, rather than to films which cynically set out to be terrible, in the hope of turning a buck, so maybe there’s some honour in getting one. In 2012, was Kristen Stewart really deserving of hers, for Snow White and the Huntsman and the last of the Twilight … Read more
Anything for Jackson
Horror films tend to be populated by sexy young things, but in Anything for Jackson the two protagonists are a pair of people in their 60s, played to the hilt by Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy. Actually, Anything for Jackson is more trad than it at first appears, because the couple in question aren’t actually the good guys, they’re a pair of Satanists – “Glory be to Satan” they chant at the coven where they meet their fellow devil-worshippers – who have kidnapped a heavily pregnant woman and plan to use her child as the receptacle for the spirit of their dead grandchild, Jackson. It’s a Rosemary’s Baby from the point of view … Read more
The Full Monty
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 October World’s first football club formed, 1857 On this day in 1857, Sheffield Football Club was founded, in Yorkshire, UK, as an offshoot of a local cricket club. It is now considered to be the oldest still existing football club in the world. Over the years there have been competing claims from different clubs and from different forms of football – though we’re talking here about a football club not the game itself (American football goes back to the 1860s though rugby, on which it is based, goes back centuries before that; Australian rules football goes back to the 1860s). … Read more
9 November 2015-11-09
Out This Week Song of the Sea (StudioCanal, cert PG) The Irish tricolour is firmly nailed to the mast in the follow-up to Tomm Moore’s animation The Secret of Kells – opening and end credits are in Gaelic – a whimsical tale of a young lad unaware that his dumb younger sister is in fact a kelpie, a mythical sea creature. Moore has set out to do the things with animation that Pixar rarely does, using its possibilities in a more expressive, impressionistic way, recalling Studio Ghibli and Sylvain Chomet, though the resolutely 2D approach also contains echoes of Noggin the Nog and other Smallfilms productions. The story is pure Ghibli though – … Read more
Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands
I mean, a film called Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, how could you not? And then I learned this 1967 Japanese “pink” movie also goes by the name of Dutch Wife in the Desert, and was originally released as Horror Doll – and was even more intrigued. Having now watched it, as an exercise in curiosity as much as anything else, the surprise is that there’s actually a very good film lurking behind the lurid title(s). This curio turns out to be the second feature by cult director Atsushi Yamatoya, his first solo effort after working on 1966’s Season of Treason with Kôji Wakamatsu, the bruiser and former yakuza member who went … Read more
Lamb
In Iceland, on a dark and stormy night near Christmas… if that sounds like the beginning of a fairytale or nativity play, prepare for Lamb, which mixes fairytale fantasticality with a bit of Christian iconography to dark Nordic effect… eventually. It’s all a bit weird and primeval, in other words, but things get off to a rather Martha Stewart-y opening as director Valdimar Jóhannsson sets his scene. A solitary house out in the Icelandic back of beyond, rustically chic, where jumper-wearing couple Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) and Maria (Noomi Rapace) farm by day and share evenings together in companionable silence. They’re happy. Maybe. Something about the way Jóhannsson keeps cutting away to the looks in … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 17 – Killer
Were showrunner Brian Clemens, fellow producer Albert Fennell and the rest of the production team trying to get rid of Linda Thorson? She had been introduced during his brief interregnum by producer John Bryce and when Clemens and Fennell returned, they were stuck with her. Killer is an episode bursting with agents – who die one after the other and wind up gift-wrapped in plastic – but Thorson’s character Tara King is notably absent, having told Steed in dialogue that protests a bit too much that she is off on holiday and there is nothing he can do about it… so there. Instead Steed is paired with Lady Diana Forbes-Blakeney – referred to … Read more
