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Nitram and a burning car

Nitram

Nitram is a tough sell: a film about the Port Arthur shooting in 1996 – 35 dead, 23 wounded at the hand of a lone gunman called Martin Bryant – it was controversial in Australia, where the shooting occurred, and unsurprisingly several politicians were particularly vocal in campaigning against it. The fact that Australian’s gun laws were changed in the aftermath of the shooting might suggest culpable hostility on the part of politicians who had clearly been asleep on the job if a man with restricted intelligence, with a history of reckless behaviour and with no firearms licence could easily buy enough weapons to supply a small army. It’s a tough sell, though, … Read more
Laurence Olivier as Henry V

Henry V

Laurence Olivier didn’t want to direct Henry V. He was nervous about taking it on, what with having no actual directing experience and this being a film hoping to raise British morale during the Second World War (it was part financed by the government). Olivier asked William Wyler, his Wuthering Heights director, to take it on. Wyler declined, and so, later, did Carol Reed. Both told him the same thing – if it’s Shakespeare then it’s got to be you. Oliver screwed up his courage to the sticking place (to borrow a line from Macbeth) and got to work. The result is a magnificent hybrid of the theatrical and the cinematic, with the longest … Read more
Conor Leach as Sequin

Sequin in a Blue Room

“A Homosexual Film by Samuel Van Grinsven” is how the Sydney-based writer/director describes his feature debut, Sequin in a Blue Room, in the space where the usual “A film by” card comes up. Not “Gay”, not “Queer”. And “Homosexual” as if the film itself were homosexual, which is impossible. Perhaps Van Grinsven is staring down any would-be criticism with a “yeh, what of it?”. Or maybe he’s making it clear to the ninnies who don’t like this sort of thing that this sort of thing is exactly what they’re getting. It’s a love story, in essence, though one overlaid with all the modern-day paraphernalia of dating culture – the apps allowing hook-ups on … Read more
Cop Samad Majidi points a gun towards the camera

Law of Tehran

On the face of it Law of Tehran is a very simple movie. It’s the story of a cop trying to find a drugs kingpin and what happens when he does. But as well as being a crime thriller, Saeed Roustayi’s second movie also manages to be a nuanced psychological drama, a survey of the Iranian justice system and a critique of the “war on drugs”, with acting at a very high level and film-making of real vision and ability. A cop searches for Tehran’s current Mr Big of drugs, finds him and locks him in detention awaiting a trial. And then the games begin as the bad guy, Naser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) … Read more
Susan licks a spoon

Deep End

Jerzy Skolimowski, en route to America from his native Poland, stopped off in the UK in 1969 to make Deep End, a strange blend of farce with something much darker, a tale of stalking done almost as a sex comedy. It’s the story of an impressionable 15-year-old lad, Mike, who gets a job at a public baths – the sort that has both swimming and bathing, in “slipper baths” – and falls very hard for co-worker Susan, a young woman a few years older than him but way ahead of him in all the things that matter, most obviously sex. Mike is played by the pretty John Moulder-Brown, Susan by Jane Asher at her … Read more
The Grabber in a mask

The Black Phone

The Black Phone is the movie Scott Derrickson went off to direct after leaving Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness due to “creative differences”. He’d directed the first Dr Strange, a massive financial success, so you’d have thought the Marvel guys would cut him a bit more slack than they ultimately were prepared to. Anyway, on to the next project, a strange (pun intended) genre-crash horror movie that’s not that frightening, nor does it seem intended to be. Someone is kidnapping kids. Even big tough kids are disappearing into the van of some weird guy who leaves behind telltale black balloons. The kids are never seen again. Enter our milquetoast hero, Finney … Read more
Adam meets Anthony in Enemy

Enemy

If there is such a thing as “what the hellness” then Denis Villeneuve’s latest film absolutely has it. But then the French-Canadian does have form. With Incendies Villeneuve managed to turn the conflict in the Middle East into a thriller with a reveal that disconcerted and amazed. In Prisoners he made us feel bad for suspecting that a lank haired, stuttering, educationally subnormal Paul Dano was a paedophile, and then made us feel bad for cutting such an obvious wrong’un too much slack. The tricks are more playful in this latest exercise in duplicity. As with Prisoners, Enemy stars Jake Gyllenhaal, this time as Adam, a history professor who suddenly spots his spitting … Read more
Dougal and Zebedee

Dougal and the Blue Cat

If The Magic Roundabout is a psychedelic trip for kids, its spin-off, Dougal and the Blue Cat, is a wild ride on some pretty bad acid. Skip this paragraph if you know the backstory, but The Magic Roundabout, a mainstay of UK children’s TV in the 1960s and 1970s, was originally a French cartoon, Le Manège Enchanté, created by Serge Danot. Successful at home, it also got exported around the world, where it went under different names – in Italy La Giostra Incantata, in Germany Das Zauberkarussell and in the USA The Magic Carousel. However, in the UK, unlike most other territories, Le Manège Enchanté didn’t simply get translated into the local language, it … Read more
Lashana Lynch and Daniel Craig

No Time to Die

A remembrance of Bonds past, No Time to Die is an evocative, elegiac farewell to Daniel Craig which also feels like a goodbye to the entire franchise – the familiar “James Bond will return” is there after the end credits, in case you need reassuring. It covers a lot of ground, flicks a lot of synapses not normally flicked by a Bond movie and is fascinating from first to last. All of the Craig Bond movies have played about with the Bond formula one way or another, but No Time to Die seems to have gone one step further, as if it wants to run two Bond movies in parallel – the one we … Read more
Michael York as Tom Wabe

Smashing Time

London in all its 1960s Swinging glory is what Smashing Time offers, in what’s meant to be a satire on the time and the place but is more a jaunt around the zeitgeist’s tourist landmarks strapped to some weak songs and very feeble comedy. I kid you not, there is a banana skin gag. Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave play Brenda and Yvonne, a pair of friends from “up north” who arrive in London determined to locate Carnaby Street and plug straight into the scene. Instead they find themselves penniless, having been robbed the minute they arrived in the capital. From here bullish, stupid Yvonne and timid, smart Brenda’s paths diverge slightly, allowing … Read more
Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin

Point Blank

Midway between Philip Marlowe and John Wick, Walker, the hero of 1967’s Point Blank is a stylish hero in a film so stylish and influential that its original impact can now only be guessed at, so relentlessly has it been plundered in the ensuing decades. Soderbergh is a fan, as is Tarantino, and so, of course, is Chad Stahelski (of John Wick fame). Mel Gibson and director Brian Helgeland remade it in 1999 as Payback (go for 2006’s Payback: Straight Up, the dirtier director’s cut, if you’re heading that way) but it’s Boorman’s framing and his use of locations, space and sound that have made Point Blank such a moodboard/sourcebook, as well as … Read more
Disruptive David and fellow inmate

Asylum

There are two films called Asylum from 1972. One is typical of its era – a compendium horror produced by the Amicus studio, directed by Hammer regular Roy Ward Baker, written by Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame, and starring Peter Cushing. And so is the other, a fly-on-the-wall documentary taking seriously a countercultural moment at full flood. This is a review of the latter, just to disappoint the lovers of the lurid, a sober look inside a therapeutic community based in a small house in the East End of London, run by Dr RD Laing and his fellows in the Philadelphia Association, where clinicians and patients interacted together in a community in what … Read more

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