Popular Reviews
Prayers for the Stolen
Writer/director Tatiana Huezo drops us straight in to Prayers for the Stolen (Noche de Fuego). As a dark screen accompanied by rapid breathing yields to a daytime scene of two females digging what looks like a shallow grave, the internal interrogation starts – Who are these people? Where are they? Is it a grave? Why do they both look so frantic? No voiceover tells us, no “useful idiot” arrives on the scene to act as a conduit from screen to viewer. Huezo forces us to work it out. She’s a director with a background in documentary-making and this adaptation of Jennifer Clement’s best-seller uses a classic technique of the observational style. What makes … Read more
Leto aka Summer
Edited at home in Moscow by a director under house arrest, Leto is a 2018 movie about life in the Soviet era made by a director living in “democratic” Russia. Any read-across is obviously entirely accidental. Leto means Summer in Russian but this is a spring/autumn tale of a USSR rock star called Mike, his pretty partner Natasha and new kid on the block Viktor. It’s the early 1980s, the New Wave is making inroads into the tightly patrolled Soviet music scene and Mike is adapting to the new sounds/era with a nip here, a tuck there – really he’s an old school long-haired rock guy in the mould of Ian Hunter from … Read more
Au Pair Girls
Known in the US as The Young Playmates, Au Pair Girls is a ripe chunk of British cheese from 1972 and a prime example of the sort of film the UK was making at the time. A simple story of four girls arriving in the UK and then having various adventures, most of which involve them losing their clothes, Au Pair Girls really benefits from its feisty female leads, Astrid Frank, Gabrielle Drake, Me Me Lai and Nancie Wait. They’re an interesting bunch. Astrid Frank appeared in French, German and English language movies, switching from a French movie with Jean Gabin (1970’s Horse) to sexploitationers such as Swinging Wives or Swedish Love Games. … Read more
Borat
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 October Sacha Baron Cohen born, 1971 On this day in 1971, Sacha Noam Baron Cohen was born in London, England. While studying history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, Baron Cohen started to appear on stage in productions by the university’s Amateur Dramatic Club, whose past members include the actors Rachel Weisz and Ian McKellen and the director Richard Eyre. After leaving university, Baron Cohen worked as a model and as a presenter on local TV stations, before developing a character called Kristo, a gormless TV reporter (and forerunner of Borat). By 2002 he had developed the Super Greg character, a useless … Read more
The Beach Girls and the Monster
The beach party movie, surfer and monster movies all hang out together in The Beach Girls and the Monster, an oddity from 1965 that often makes it into the “so bad it’s good” category, largely, I suspect, because people just don’t really know what to make of it. It’s Scooby-Doo in plot – fun-loving kids, a string of strange murders carried out by an unconvincing monster, who looks like a human in a bad costume because… well why spoil it. It’s the only film directed by Jon Hall, who also has top billing. Hall had swung from one terrible movie to another in a long Hollywood career and is now most often remembered, if … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 10 – Death on the Rocks
The tone is light and bantery, a set of the features that would become permanent eventually, but in other respects this tenth episode of series two is one of the weaker entrants so far in the Avengers canon. Nothing wrong with any individual bit of it – a plot about Steed and Mrs Gales setting up home together (I say!), the better to pose as husband and wife, so they can infiltrate some diamond gang that’s trying to muscle in and control the trade by swamping the market with gems. And before you can say “takeover”, Steed has become a partner in a near-moribund diamond trading company, from where he will outwit the interlopers … Read more
Hotel Rwanda
In 1994, 800,000-plus Tutsis were butchered by their Hutu neighbours while the West debated whether this was genocide or merely isolated “genocidal acts”– i.e. not serious enough to warrant intervention. A decade on and the conflict is beginning to arrive on cinema screens, and most of the attempts to turn a dark day in human history into screen entertainment are taking the Schindler’s List approach – finding the rare good thing in a sea of bloody mayhem. As has director Terry George in this effectively realised true story about Rwanda’s own “Schindler”, Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who risked his Hutu hide to save upwards of 1,000 Tutsis. This is an incredibly tense … 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
18 August 2014-08-18
Out in the UK This Week Tracks (E One, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) This adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s book about her 2,000 mile solo trek across the Australian desert almost says more about the camels than it does about the woman who became known as the Camel Lady. Where she came from, what her motivation was (apart from a Garbo-esque wanting to be alone), how she sorted out water, provisions, medicines, almost all the sort of detail you might expect is lacking. It barely matters because director John Curran has settled for a non-aboriginal dreamtime approach – even as I write that phrase I realise it’s cack, since I have no idea what an aborigine … Read more
I Saw What You Did
Master of the kitsch gimmick William Castle’s 1965 shocker I Saw What You Did is a cautionary tale about the terrible things that happen to nice teenage girls who make prank phone calls. It’s also notable for being the last appearance in an American film by Joan Crawford. Though not her last film – 1967’s Berserk and 1970’s Trog were shot in the UK – it is like them a horror film, as befits a star who had been around since the 1920s and had become along the way a bit of a gargoyle. However, it’s not really about her. Instead attention focuses on Libby and Kit, two teenagers having a fun night … Read more
Wicked: For Good
We’re off to see the wizard – again – in Wicked: For Good, part two of the origin story of the bad and good witch, Elphaba and Glinda, from The Wizard of Oz. It remains fascinating politically – Glinda the Good is actually Glinda the Horribly Compromised. And the Wicked Witch turns out to be a creature of some backbone. Together Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo remain magnificent, the massiveness of Grande’s voice (out of such a wee body) matched by Erivo’s ability to project at the highest level. But, all in all, it’s just good, OK, fine, all the way through. If you’ve seen part one then you probably have to see … Read more
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
First Ant-Man, then Ant-Man and the Wasp and now Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, an element added to the title each time, the films also getting longer on each new iteration. Longer, busier, more sclerotic, this could be the worst Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to date, and that’s including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. This is also the first movie in phase five of the MCU, aka the Multiverse saga (if it’s the 2020s there must be multiverses), but never mind whether it calls into question the likelihood of there ever being a phase six (it doesn’t – Deadpool 3 is already in the works), it should raise all sorts … Read more
