The Killer

Nathalie Emmanuel with the Eiffel Tower in the background

John Woo never feels fully in control of The Killer, the remake of his own film from 1989, an accusation you could never have levelled at the original. Flipping the gender of the assassin, and switching from Hong Kong to Paris both seem like sound ideas, not least because in some quarters the increasingly close relationship between the assassin and his cop pursuer in the original seemed a bit too close to homosexual. No chance of that now. Omar Sy is in the cop role, and of all the many actors in this strangely off thriller, Sy probably comes out of it least shortchanged. There are two familiar tales here. First the “a … Read more

Untouchable

Driss shows Philippe the finer things in life in Untouchable

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 April Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, 1968 On this day in 1968, the senior Conservative British politician Enoch Powell made a speech in which he alluded to Virgil’s Aenid – “As I look forward, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” A Greek scholar who also spoke Urdu – Powell as an ambitious young man had set his sights on becoming the viceroy of India, only to find in later life that the Indians were coming to him – Powell was referring to the prospects for race … Read more