Popular Reviews
The Omen
Thirty years on, a pointless remake of the film that put quite a few bums on seats in 1976. Back then Gregory Peck was playing the American diplomat slowly realising he’s bringing up the spawn of Satan, and Lee Remick (an expert in lip-tightening panic) was the wife. This time Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles have the dubious honour. In spite of the disaster movie craze and the example of the late career of Bette Davis, it was still quite unusual in the mid-1970s for a big star like Peck to appear in a horror movie – genre was for wimps. But the studios were realising that the likes of Jaws were changing … Read more
Foto Háber aka Haber’s Photo Shop
There’s a lot that’s good about Foto Háber (aka Haber’s Photo Shop), a pithy Hungarian spy thriller from 1963, but it does have one obstacle to surmount. Of which more later. One of the best things is Zoltán Latinovits as the cool, calm spy infiltrating an espionage ring that steals state secrets. Or secrets, let’s just say secrets, of which more, also, later. We meet Gábor Csiky (Latinovits) in a prison where he’s introduced as an ex-priest and theologian – the other inmates refer to him as “Reverend”. When they ask him what he’s in there for, Gábor replies “political stuff”, modestly. One inmate points out that, rationally, all crime, no matter how … Read more
Winnie the Pooh
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 January AA Milne born, 1882 On this day in 1882, Alan Alexander Milne was born in Hampstead, London, UK. The son of a Scottish teacher, he was educated at his father’s small public school in Kilburn, London, where one of his teachers was HG Wells. After that he attended Westminster, one of the country’s leading private schools, before going to Cambridge University on a mathematics scholarship. While there he was noticed by the humorous Punch magazine, to which he started contributing. After Cambridge he got a job at Punch and became a prolific writer, producing 18 plays and three novels. … Read more
The Aviator
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 January Howard Hughes sets transcontinental air record, 1937 On this day in 1937 Howard Hughes set a new world record for flying across the continent of America. Flying a H-Racer with extra long wings, he made the journey from Los Angeles to Newark in 7 hours 28 minutes and 25 seconds. The plane had been commissioned by Hughes himself and was innovative in many respects, not least its insistence on all rivets and joints being set flush, which greatly increased its slipperiness through the air. The record was one of many accolades that this man born into wealth would accrue. … Read more
Love and Basketball
The sports movie meets the romance in a boy-meets-girl drama featuring two affluent black kids. Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan play the basketball-playing next-door neighbours as grown-ups, the film having followed them from before puberty, through it and out into the world of professional sport and beyond. On the romance side it’s a “will-they-won’t-they” plot, in the sports arena it’s unusually focused on the daily decision-making and strategising of operating as a sports professional, where a career could be measured in months. On both sides it packs in most of the positive role models a body could need, carefully avoiding stereotyping (except that he’s hung), because that’s a bad thing. This film works … Read more
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush
A young man tries to get his oats in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, a British 1968 sex comedy starring Barry Evans, directed by Clive Donner and written by Hunter Davies. In many ways it’s the suburban Alfie, which was made two years earlier. Where Michael Caine had central London, Barry Evans has Stevenage New Town; where Caine’s Alfie was a confident lothario and lone wolf, Evans’s Jamie is a virginal 18-year-old schoolboy with laddish mates. Alfie charms his women into bed, Jamie just dreams about it, vividly, in youth clubs, bus shelters and while pedalling around town on the bike he cycles as part of his job as a delivery … Read more
Tony Manero
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 October Former Chilean president Pinochet arrested, 1998 On this day in 1998, Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile, was arrested in London, having been indicted by a Spanish judge of crimes against the human rights of his countrymen. It was the first time that European judges had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, which asserts that states or international organisations can lay claim to legal authority over somebody, regardless of where the crime took place. The most notable use of the principle to date was in the trial of Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War, many … Read more
Forty Guns
The French New Wave directors loved a bit of auteur machismo and they loved Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns, a tough, lean and smart western with lots to say and a pitiless logic that’s very un-Hollywood. Do not expect a happy ending. It’s filmed in CinemaScope and Fuller lets us know that immediately. Right after the 20th Century-Fox fanfare and before the opening credits there’s an opening shot of a massively wide panorama, followed by the entrance of a woman in black riding on a white stallion and in her thundering wake 40 (ish) men also on horseback. We have met Jessica Drummond, played by Barbara Stanwyck, the local rancher who is the alpha … Read more
Only the Animals
Dominik Moll’s latest film, Only the Animals (Seules les Bêtes), opens with a striking shot of an African man cycling along the road wearing a live kid goat on his back much as you would a rucksack, arms and legs for straps. But from there we leave the titular animals behind and enter the all-too-human realm. We’re up in the snowy heights of France in winter, where an optimistic insurance agent (Laure Calamy, of Call My Agent fame) is having an affair with Joseph (Damien Bonnard) one of her clients, a recently bereaved soul who leads a silent solitary life. The woman’s truculent oaf of a husband (Denis Ménochet) gets wind of the … 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
Far from the Madding Crowd
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 11 January Thomas Hardy dies, 1928 On this day in 1928, the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy died. He was 87 and this Victorian writer had survived into and almost through the age of the formal modernist, such as Joyce, with whom he had little in common, though he was an informing influence on writers with a more earthy, carnal and rural inclination, such as DH Lawrence. Hardy had trained as an architect in the 1860s but didn’t enjoy life in London and as soon as he became established enough he moved back to the West Country (Somerset, then Dorset) where … Read more
Turtles All the Way Down
Can you have a boyfriend if even the thought of kissing someone distresses you? Turtles All the Way Down is the film equivalent of a Billie Eilish song, a tale of teenage angst written by John Green, who also did The Fault in Our Stars. And, as the Amazon algorithm puts it, if you liked that you’ll probably like this. Aza (Isabella Merced) has OCD, which manifests as an extreme aversion to germs. Microbes, bacteria and c.diff in particular are what Aza thinks about all day long. Which means dating boys – all that saliva and oral glop – is right out. But that’s fine. Aza has her bestie by her. A chatty … Read more
