Popular Reviews
The White Tiger
Director Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker-winning novel The White Tiger looks at first like it’s going to be one of those “trickster” stories about a low-born person cutting a swathe through life using their natural-born smarts. When we meet him, Balram is clearly a man who has done well out of life. The White Tiger will play out in flashback, but for now Balram’s nice suit and fussy facial hair tell us all we need to know about his success in the world. How he got there is what the film is about. From poor beginnings in a dirt-poor village, where he appeared to be condemned to a life of … Read more
Noelle
Christmas movies. They’re churned out by TV channels, who plop a cute jumper on a couple of their botoxed, permatanned stars, add a bit of grog to a romantic plot involving the healing of a family rift – or something – and there you are, 90 minutes (perhaps 120 with adverts) of overlit fixed-grin cheer. But when a Christmas movie works – A Christmas Carol (almost any one of them) or Elf – what a glorious thing it is, catharsis without the pain. Noelle fits that bill. Borrowing heavily from Elf, it’s a feminist-lite tale of the girl who would be Christmas, Anna Kendrick playing the daughter of Santa Claus who, when the old … Read more
1 July 2013-07-01
Out in the UK This Week Maniac (Metrodome, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, the writers of Switchblade Romance, one of the most heart-pounding horror films of recent years, swing bloodily back to form with a remake of a 1980 slasher which takes lovely gentle Frodo (Elijah Wood), casts him as a Norman Bates-style homicidal mother’s boy and then sets director Franck Khalfoun to work filming his exploits as if from the killer’s point of view. Result: another brilliant horror film, touches of Silence of the Lambs, House of Wax, with an electropop sound that just makes it all the grimmer. Maniac – at Amazon Cloud Atlas (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) … Read more
The King of Staten Island
The thing to know going into The King of Staten Island, co-written by Judd Apatow, Dave Sirus and Pete Davidson, is that Davidson’s father was a fireman who lost his life in the call of duty (at the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, in fact). The father of Scott Carlin, the character Davidson plays in this movie, also lost his life in the line of duty, so it’s fair to say there’s probably an autobiographical element in this semi-comic look at a life held in arrested development by family trauma. If you don’t know Davidson, he’s the guy with the slappable face from Saturday Night Live, a slappability put to good … Read more
29 August 2016-08-29
Out This Week Bad Neighbours 2 (Universal, cert 15) You thought a sequel wouldn’t yield much? Well, I did. I was wrong. There are lots of jokes in this follow-up, which has decided that being ballsy is the best way to go – jokes about people throwing up over each other, a physical gag about a girl going through a car window, one about putting Jews in ovens (OK, it’s in speech marks, but it is there). And the twist this time is that Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne are now next door not to a frat house, but a sorority (headed by Chloe Grace Moretz) where the girls want to have what … Read more
Cruising
When William Friedkin died in 2023, aged 87, the obituaries talked of the director of The Exorcist and the man who gave us The French Connection. The Boys in the Band, his groundbreaking film from 1970, which took dramas about gay men into the mainstream, got some bandwidth, as did Sorceror, his remake of Clouzot’s 1953 classic The Wages of Fear, which has gained in reputation ever since it was released in 1977. Cruising not so much. Or if it was mentioned it was usually in passing, as the controversial film that ended Friedkin’s time at the top. In fact Sorceror had already done that. The title had confused people thinking they were … Read more
Throw Down
Johnnie To’s baffling Throw Down, from 2004, is a hell of a good-looking film. It’s a homage to Akira Kurosawa a dedication at the end tells us – “the greatest film-maker”. And though you might find influences from the great Japanese director, who had died only six years before, you’ll search in vain for coherent storytelling, one of Kurosawa’s strengths. What the hell is going on, in other words. Three characters who have little obvious connection band together: Sze-To (Louis Ko), the drunken manager of a Hong Kong nightclub; Tony (Aaron Kwok), a figure of wild impetuosity who wants to fight everybody; and Mona (Cherrie Ying), a skank living on her wits, doing and … Read more
Without Limits
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 November Adolf Dassler born, 1900 On this day in 1900, Adolf Dassler, known to his friends as Adi, was born, in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, Germany. A cobbler by training he started making his own sports shoes after returning from the First World War. He got his big break at the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928, where his running shoes were popular with athletes. At the 1936 Olympics Dassler offered Jesse Owens a pair of his running shoes, the first time an African American had had a sponsor. Dassler joined the Nazi party, along with his brother Rudolf, but later left the party … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 5 – Mission to Montreal
Mixing it up yet again, episode five of series two – Mission to Montreal – introduces yet another sidekick in a story set on board a cruise liner heading for Canada. Jon Rollason plays Dr Martin King and brings the number of Steed’s accomplices in this series to three (Honor Blackman and Julie Stevens being the other two). King is an echo of Ian Hendry’s Dr David Keel in that he’s a doctor, and also one only too happy to indulge in a bit of espionage and rough stuff if necessary – not exactly what you’d expect from a well paid follower of Hippocrates, but there you go. In fact he’s more than … Read more
Possessor
Stab a human being in a vital area of the body and what happens? In most movies, after one clean thrust a modicum of blood seeps decorously into an item of clothing and the victim promptly drops dead. But this is a Brandon Cronenberg movie and Brandon is the heir to David Cronenberg, king of the body horrror. So when someone is stabbed in the neck in the pre-credits sequence to Possessor, the blood-letting is spumungous, nasty, frenzied and inconclusive – this victim isn’t going down without a fight. Even as he dies he’s summoning all his forces to keep the only show he has on the road. That’s what happens. Remarkably, this … Read more
All the Colors of the Dark
The plot’s terrible but the mood is tasty in All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti I colori del buio), an Italian/Spanish giallo from 1972 that does its best – and breast – work early on. The opening sequence is formidably unsettling. A lurid montage of nudity, distortion, doubled imagery, a hideous pregnant woman in a fright wig on a gurney, a man dressed as Bo Peep, the camera pulsing in and out as if on psychedelics while children sing tunelessly on the unnerving soundtrack. After that, waking from the horrendous nightmare reliving the night her child died, Jane Harrison (Edwige Fenech) hops out of bed and into the shower in her skimpy nightdress, for … Read more
The Beanie Bubble
The story behind the success of a stuffed-toy phenomenon, The Beanie Bubble is in many ways a template World 2.0 tale of one man, a vision, plus a lot of help from other people, most of whom get left in the dust when it is time to bask in the glory. It could be Jobs, or Musk, or Thiel, or Bezos, but here it’s Ty Warner – in many ways he got there first, building up a company selling understuffed, very soft toys to children. The toys became a thing, a can’t-lose investment. Starting in the 1980s but accelerating to warp speed in the 1990s, Ty Inc. rose and rose on the back … Read more
