sergi lopez

Sirât

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Esteban and Luis in the middle of a rave

If ringing the changes is the big challenge of genre cinema, Sirât pulls it off brilliantly. Occasionally the workings of writer/director Óliver Laxe’s mind are visible – how can I catch the audience off guard? Mostly they’re not. And that’s probably down to the people and the places – both unusual. It’s two genres in one, really. In one, a father and son are trying to track down a missing daughter/sister in Morocco – a road movie. In the other the father/son brush up against a contingent of old ravers, the ones who didn’t go home when the party finished, and end up hooking up with them, certain that they will lead them to the … Read more

Pacifiction

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De Roller

You’ll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump. It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet American (either version) or 1967’s The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But Greene’s complex-hero-abroad scenario turns up regularly in other people’s work – for example in The Tailor of Panama (writer John Le Carré obviously channelling Greene) and in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (Denis Johnson doing the same). And so to our man in Havana. Tahiti, in fact, where the compromised hero is a gent called De Roller. Dressed in a white suit … Read more

Pan’s Labyrinth

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Doug Jones as the pale man in Pan's Labyrinth

It’s not every fantasy film that comes complete with a scene of a brutal fascist captain sewing his own face up, but that’s what you get in Guillermo Del Toro’s best film since The Devil’s Backbone (better, certainly, than Blade II and Hellboy). It’s a dark fantasy reminding us that the Grimm brothers’ original tales were cautionary and soaked in violence and full of the sort of dirty psychological motivation that Disney flirted with in Snow White and Pinocchio. However this youthful experimentation wasn’t to last, and as with the pot reefer and student politicians, Disney, it seems, never actually inhaled. More’s the pity. No such cutes or evasiveness here, where things start … Read more

Pan’s Labyrinth

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Doug Jones as the pale man in Pan's Labyrinth

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 December Francisco Franco born, 1892 On this day in 1892, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was born. He’d later style himself Generalísimo, or Caudillo, of Spain while he ruled the country, from 1939 to 1975. From a military family, Franco was the youngest general in Europe in the 1920s, and rose rapidly through the ranks. With the fall of the monarchy and the establishment of a Republic in 1931, the monarchist conservative Franco became increasingly marginalised and in 1936 he led a coup against the elected government. With help from Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany Franco prevailed in the … Read more