John Magaro

Köln 75

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Keith Jarrett (John Magaro) at the piano

Corny in a good way, Köln 75 (aka Cologne 75) tells the strange but true story behind the story of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, to this day the biggest selling solo jazz album of all time. The album is just Jarrett improvising on a piano in a cavernous concert hall. Unlike the film, which is a winning mix of two familiar tropes as the triumph over adversity drama meets the can-do of the let’s-do-the-show-right-here musical. Mala Emde plays the young woman who made it all happen, German jazz enthusiast Vera Brandes. We meet Vera aged 16 forcing herself on British jazzer Ronnie Scott after a gig. Impressed by her chutzpah, and possibly also … Read more

The Bride!

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Jessie Buckley as the Bride

Frankenstein’s unfortunate monster was put together out of offcuts and so is director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a furiously eclectic assemblage of body parts. Motivating breath, alas, is there none and so the film remains on the table, lifeless, a glorious mess of gorgeous odds and sods, twitching but refusing to draw breath. To summarise the main thrust of the plot, after a century alone Frankenstein’s monster – Frank here – decides he needs a wife, and arrives at the office of Dr Euphronious, renowned for her re-animation research. After some niceties, Frank makes his pitch to Euphronious and she flat-out refuses to build him a bride, on ethical grounds. He responds with … Read more

Psycho Therapy

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Steve Buscemi as Kollmick

One of the great benefits of the whole 1990s revival thing has been a run of movies inspired by the early Coens. Psycho Therapy does a bit of a number on Barton Fink, not the Coens’ funniest or weirdest film, and is a re-assessment of their re-assessment of Hollywood output in its golden age. Screwball and crime, for the most part. It’s an “only in Hollywood” caper, about a stalled writer whose latest book set in Slovenia in the Neanderthal era is never going to be world shaking, if it ever gets finished at all. Keane’s friends laugh at him, wife Suzie pities him and his agent won’t answer his calls. Then one … Read more

September 5

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Close up of John Magaro

Cool rather than hot, and about events not as they happened but as they were reported, September 5 is the story behind the story, of how a sports team from ABC TV found themselves at the cutting edge of a major news event at the 1972 Olympics, when a group of Israeli athletes were taken hostage by a terrorist group, Black September, as 900 million viewers around the globe looked on. Mark Spitz winning seven swimming Gold medals, Olga Korbut performing her Dead Loop on the asymmetric bars, Munich is remembered for many things, but probably most of all for the moment when the German Olympic authorities’ attempt to perform a hard reset … Read more

Showing Up

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Lizzy at work in her studio

After the success of 2019’s First Cow, you might have expected Kelly Reichardt’s 2022 follow-up, Showing Up, to be a bigger hit than it was. Critics liked it; audiences not so much. It seems that Reichardt most hits the target with paying punters when she delivers westerns. See also Meek’s Cutoff. But all her films are engaging, and she’s always up to something, often in the background, as she is with Showing Up, which is the story of an artist who struggles through the distractions of everyday life to produce her work. But what Reichardt is she actually up to, that’s the question. Is this a slice of life? Or the story of … Read more

First Cow

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King-Lu and Cookie out in the woods

Kelly Reichardt’s films often operate at two levels. At the surface one story plays out, while somewhere to one side, and often as a comment on the first story, something different is going on. First Cow could really be called First Love, since it’s the story of two men who meet in difficult circumstances and then form a bond that lasts until death. What it looks like, though, especially at first, is a western, a story of a cook who’s travelling with hard-bitten fur trappers. They’re all out in the forest and there isn’t enough food. And even if there was, the trappers don’t seem to like what the cook’s been serving. There’s … Read more