| MovieSteve

To Live and Die in LA

2023-09-012023-08-27 by Steve

To Live and Die in LA – the title is almost an invitation. Its director, William Friedkin, though born in Chicago, did live in Los Angeles, and that’s where he died aged 87 last week (I’m writing this on 18 August 2023), till the end a combative, charming, rough-edged, cultured man of many parts. The director who gave us the magisterial The French Connection and the blood-thinning The Exorcist stumbled at the box office with 1977’s Sorcerer (for all its merits nowhere near as good as the film it’s based on, The Wages of Fear) and then as good as fell off the edge of the world with Cruising, a film that looks … Read more

Illuminata

2023-04-26 by Steve

Bold and unusual and entirely itself it may be, but Illuminata isn’t entirely successful as a film. Strange as it may seem, maybe writer/director/producer/actor John Turturro wants it that way. This was only his second movie behind the camera and, being an actor of some renown, he was able to call in some of the finest talent of the day (1998) to help him get this love letter to thespianism, and in particular the live theatre, off the ground. All the world’s a stage and the stage is a world in this busy adaptation of Brandan Cole’s play Imperfect Love, a Shakespeare in Love meets Noises Off backstage farce following the comings and … Read more

The Batman

2022-11-012022-06-10 by Steve

The Batman. Let’s get the plot out of the way first, since it’s the most straightforward aspect of the latest bulletin from Gotham City. A caped crusader, a trio of villains in the shape of Paul Dano’s Riddler, Colin Farrell’s Penguin and John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone, a campaign of murder being waged against city officials. The mayor dies first, in the opening moments of the film, forcing Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) to call in Batman – he rates the mysterious vigilante but no one else does. Along the way Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) becomes involved, a good girl in this version, and a crimefighting sidekick, should Batman want one, which he doesn’t seem to. … Read more

The True Adventures of Wolfboy

2022-11-052020-11-26 by Steve

The True Adventures of Wolfboy. Sounds like it might be a superhero movie – Wolfboy as a junior Wolverine. Or a supervillain movie – a Mini-Me Werewolf. In fact it’s neither. This is the everyday story of a teenage boy covered in hair, lots of it. And before we go any further, yes, he’s tried depilatory products, but the hair just comes back twice as thick. “I’m normal, I”m a normal kid,” says Paul (Jaeden Martell, who was going by the name Jaeden Lieberher last time I saw him, in 2016’s Midnight Special), a 13-year-old bullied by the horrible other kids, cowed into wearing a balaclava, a freak in his own eyes as much … Read more

Quiz Show

2023-10-302013-09-09 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 10 September The “Coughing” Major, 2001 On this day in 2001, Charles Ingram, a former major in the British army, won £1,000,000 in the UK TV gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. But before the payout could be made, accusations were already flying that he’d been tipped off as to the real answer to various questions by two plants in the audience – his wife, Diana, and a friend, Tecwen Whittock – who would cough when the right answer was read out. Ingram did not cough himself, nor was he any longer a major, but tabloid newspapers, preferring a story … Read more