Popular Reviews
The Puffy Chair
Here’s a simple story about Josh (Mark Duplass), his needy girlfriend (Kathryn Aselton), Josh’s hippie-dip brother (Rhett Wilkins) and their cross-country journey to take collection of an overstuffed couch-potato chair they just bought on ebay, and take it to the guys’ dad (played by Duplass’s dad, Larry Duplass). Shot for $10,000 by first-timers, this is one of the handful of films first to be called “mumblecore” – Wikipedia tells me that the term was first applied at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2005 to a trio of films – this one, Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth, and Mutual Appreciation by Andrew Bujalski (often called “the father of mumblecore”) But how … Read more
America as Seen by a Frenchman
In the late 1950s the French documentarian François Reichenbach took his camera to the USA for 18 months. America as Seen by a Frenchman (aka L’Amerique Insolite) is the result, a snapshot of a country caught at a moment in time, where the tension between homogenising mass consumption and the individual pursuit of happiness runs through almost every frame. Reichenbach starts out in California and then winds his way across the country, finally ending up in New York. The opening shot is eye-catching – two American sailors staring out from a ship as it pulls into San Francisco Bay and under the Golden Gate Bridge – and Reichenbach continues to deliver seductive imagery at … Read more
The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The death of David McCallum a few days ago prompted a return to the show that made his name in the 1960s. Well, not the show itself, but a 1983 TV movie “return”, which looks as if it was intended to relight the fire under the series itself. It was not to be and so this remains the final hurrah for McCallum and co-star Robert Vaughn as Ilya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo, the spy-fi buddies working for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. The show had been part-devised by Ian Fleming as a response to the surge of interest in all things spy after the success of James Bond and ran … Read more
I.S.S.
I.S.S. is a thriller set on the International Space Station where Russians and Americans are co-operating happily until a nuclear war breaks out down below. First up, why haven’t more films been set on the ISS? What a golden opportunity. Second up, did you realise (as I didn’t) that missions continue to be flown to the ISS, even though tensions between the USA and Russia are hardly at an all-time low (writing this in March 2024)? Pushing that tension into the fictional realm, I.S.S. becomes operational as a space thriller when one of the crew notices that massive eruptions are taking place down on planet Earth. Volcanoes, suggests one? It turns out the … Read more
The Drummer
A typically copper-bottomed performance by Danny Glover isn’t just the making of The Drummer, it sets the tone for the entire film. He’s been doing this sort of thing for ever – long before Lethal Weapon more or less institutionalised his shtick – and here plays the Vietnam veteran who runs a drop-in centre called The Drummer, which caters for serving military personnel who want out. It’s 2007 and George W Bush has just ordered “the surge” in Iraq, and in an all-hands-on-deck move the army is sending back into the field of conflict people who really shouldn’t be there, either because they’re exhausted and have done too many tours already, or because they’re … Read more
Renaissance
Daniel Craig, Romola Garai, Ian Holm, Catherine McCormack and Jonathan Pryce? That’s quite a cast and it’s just for starters. And for a French anime-style sci-fi too, the “French” bit being the clue that the names are actually here to revoice Gallic product for Anglophone consumption. What they’re lending their voices to looks interesting though, a futuristic story about a kidnapped geneticist (Garai) who turns out to have the key to immortality. The USP of Renaissance is its look – the actors have all been motion-captured, then converted to the harshest black and white renditions of themselves. This is unusual though hardly revolutionary: as a technique it can be traced back to Walt … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 10 – Never, Never Say Die
Christopher Lee! Christopher Lee of Dracula fame, intelligence operations during the Second World War, later a Bond villain, Saruman of Lord of the Rings and a heavy metal artist in his 90s, yes, that’s the man, lumbering about like Frankenstein’s monster (another role) the first time we see him, and shot from below, again Frankenstein-style, by director Robert Day as this episode of The Avengers kicks off with a car accident which renders the guest star dead. Surely not? Surely so. But this episode isn’t called Never, Never Say Die for no reason, and no sooner has he been pronounced dead by a doctor at the hospital than he rises again, to the … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 8 – A Surfeit of H2O
Undoubtedly a fancy episode when it first aired in late November 1965, A Surfeit of H2O manages to be whimsical, sinister, ridiculous and ingenious all in one go, with a good belt of fine character actors to help things along. Water is what it’s about, as the title suggests, and before the title has even come up a poacher has died while out setting traps, drowned in an open field by a massive thunderstorm which appeared out of nowhere. Decent special effects being a bit more than the show can afford, when Steed (dressed in absurd Edwardian hunting gear) and Peel arrive in a Mini Moke, there’s not a drop of water to … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 7 – False Witness
An episode of The Avengers with the name of director Charles Crichton on it is usually a good sign. A claim borne out by False Witness, a permutation on a favourite of showrunner Brian Clemens – mind control – scripted by Jeremy Burnham in such a way as to keep us guessing what’s going on for a quite a while. But back to Crichton, whose Ealing films like The Lavender Hill Mob show a fondness for getting out of the studio when possible. He satisfies his urge here, adding a layer of fascination for anyone keen to have a look at London’s streets in the 1960s. So much of The Avengers was shot … Read more
My Thoughts Are Silent
My Thoughts Are Silent (Moyi dumky tykhi, in the original Ukrainian) is one of a small clutch of films about or featuring a sound recordist, sitting alongside the likes of Silence (from Ireland), Upstream Color (USA) and Berberian Sound Studio (UK). All are odd and left-field in different ways, with My Thoughts Are Silent the most deliberately comedic. Which is not quite the same thing as “funny” though it does have its moments. There’s a black and white prologue before the film proper gets going, set in Hungary in 1526, where some priest is trying to flog a “holy relic” to two priests. “A foreskin?” asks one of the clerics hopefully. It turns … Read more
In the Heights
“Immigrants – we get the job done,” ran a line in Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash musical. In the Heights deals more overtly with the immigrant experience in America but no matter which way you look at it, this film doesn’t get the job done quite as well as Hamilton did, not in terms of plot or songs or raps. Why would it? This was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first go at creating a musical and though it won him a Tony – not bad for a debut – he’s still held back by the Broadway conventions that Hamilton rejected, and was all the better because it did. Big opening number, and we’re introduced to all the … Read more
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
If the prolific Romanian director Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn does nothing else, it wins its lead actress an award for bravery. Its opening scenes feature Katia Pascariu in full-on sex with her screen husband, the pair of them putting it all on tape – her swinging tits, his erect cock, her back end, her entreaties for him to stick it in etc. Pascariu was last seen, high irony, playing a nun in Cristian Mungiu’s bleak 2012 drama Beyond the Hills. What neither the fully consensual Emilia (Pascariu) nor Eugen know is that the strictly-for-home-consumption “tape” is going to wind up on PornHub, and stay there, in spite of their … Read more
