Popular Reviews
Holler
The precariat of America’s Rust Belt come under scrutiny in writer/director Nicole Riegel’s feature debut, Holler, a fleshing out of her short of the same name. It’s a kitchen-sinker, in most respects, which means a story set in a blue-collar/working class world where the odds are stacked against a central protagonist who may or may not get out of Dodge. Ruth is a smart girl in a town that’s falling apart. Her mother is a junkie awaiting either rehab or jail, whichever comes up first, it would seem. Her brother Blaze is clever enough to know that his sister has something he doesn’t and so it’s imperative that she go to college and … Read more
Black Sunday
1960’s Black Sunday (aka The Mask of Satan aka La Mascera del Demonio) is an amazingly productive film. It put a shot in the arm of the Italian horror biz – in terms of crowd-pleasing genre movies it had been mostly swords and sandals up till then. In Mario Bava it created Italy’s pre-eminent horror maestro – and this was his debut feature as director. And it also turned Barbara Steele, a Rank contract player, into an icon of the Italian horror scene. The inspiration is Nikolai Gogol’s story Viy, about a witch who can manifest either as a crone or a virgin attempting to come back to life and being prevented from … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 21 – You Have Just Been Murdered
You Have Just Been Murdered is what this episode of The Avengers is called and it’s what’s written on a card left behind at the house of a man who has just been menaced with a gun by an intruder. The gunman returns later with a fake knife, “kills” his victim again, and leaves behind another note – “You have just been murdered… again!” It turns out that Jarvis (Geoffrey Chater) is the third wealthy chap to have withdrawn a million pounds from the bank recently, and Steed and Peel are soon on a case which seems, at first, second and last glance, about keeping the very rich and their money happily together. … Read more
Stag
So, anyway, the guys are having a surprise blow-up dolly, drinks, strip-o-gram sort of stag night for their best buddy (John Stockwell), when something goes horribly wrong and things start to unravel badly. That’s the first 25 mins or so, the “interesting” bit, of this otherwise predictable drama whose most notable feature is its cast – Ben Gazzara and Mario Van Peebles in the same film? Strange. Kevin Dillon, William McNamara? Plus a couple of people you might not know (John Henson, Taylor Dane). They certainly don’t feel like a “brothers to the death” stag group of old buddies. But that’s because the cast has been hired for its ability to suggest a … Read more
The Blackening
The Blackening is an amiable throwback to who-dies-next? horror movies of yore, with a take on race trying to ignore the fact we live in the post-Get Out era. There is what you would expect from a cabin-in-the-woods horror, including a pre-credits death or two, followed by the traditional re-establishing shot of a new batch of people winding their way towards the same destination in one of those aerial shots of a car from way overhead, the isolated vehicle moving through the vastness of the encircling forest. Is someone watching? But these are not booze-chugging, drug-popping white people – long-legged girls, chunky jocks, a dweeb or two – instead a gaggle of black … Read more
Touki Bouki
Often described as Africa’s first avant-garde film, 1973’s Touki Bouki sits at number 66 on Sight & Sound magazine’s most recent Best of All Time list, had its restoration funded by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation and was even referenced by Jay Z and Beyoncé in the promo material for their 2018 tour (which led to an interesting discussion about cultural appropriation, especially as their tour took in not one African country). Is it any good though? Films end up on lists for all sorts of the wrong reasons – tokenism, lobbying and groupthink to name but three. The good news is that it’s as great as its reputation, a genuinely refreshing, technically … Read more
Wander Darkly
Matteo (Diego Luna) and Adrienne (Sienna Miller) are a broke couple with a new baby and a relationship on the skids. Arguing on the way home from a date night, mostly about Adrienne giving someone the glad-eye, they are involved in a massive car crash. This is no spoiler, we’re only a handful of minutes into Wander Darkly, and writer/director Tara Miele is just setting the scene – economically and with great visual flair – for the drama to come. Adrienne is dead. Or is she suffering from post-traumatic delirium and is just imagining she’s dead? Or is something else going on? It’s not certain, but what we can see is Adrienne in … Read more
Court
Chaitanya Tamhane’s feature debut, Court, tells the story of a 65-year-old “people’s poet” who is up in court on charges of having incited the suicide of a sewer worker. Narayan Kamble is a grey-haired firebrand who sings angry songs about the state of the world and his beloved India, and how the love of money is destroying spiritual values. Apparently, he has sung a song strongly advocating that sewer workers should kill themselves. It must have been a catchy tune and/or forceful lyrically because two days later a man did just that. Was the death suicide? Was the song ever even sung? – that’s what the court case is meant to ascertain. While Tamhane … Read more
House of Gucci
House of Gucci, Ridley Scott, this looks like a good fit. A fashion house relying on its image to shift product and a director who started out in advertising and still has an eye for an arresting visual. And so it proves to be, mostly… though by the end you might be staring at the screen with head slightly aslant. The what, the huh? Pushing comparisons to beyond their limit, in some ways it’s a remake of Alien, though this time Lady Gaga plays the invading creature who’s going to wreak havoc, a brassy little minx called Patrizia who bumps into sober, low-key Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) – scion of the fashion house … Read more
In the House
If you’ve seen 5X2, you’ll already know that François Ozon makes immensely clever and highly entertaining films, and that there’s a point to the cleverness; he’s not just showing off. In the House, aka Dans La Maison, is Ozon to the bone, another very clever piece of work. This time, however, the point he’s making is far less immediately obvious. 5X2 was a love story played out backwards, the point being that, “forearmed” as we were with the knowledge that the relationship would crumble, we saw the couple in question’s first stirrings of love, courtship, marriage, honeymoon and so on through entirely different eyes. Here Ozon plays a similar trick, taking a Cuckoo … Read more
Palm Springs
So great is the Groundhog Day idea that Palm Springs can squeeze a whole other film out of it… and there’s enough conceptual space for it to be great too. Writer Andy Siara knows he can’t get away with a straight retread and so tweaks the Groundhog Day idea a bit. When we first meet Palm Springs’s Bill Murray – Brooklyn Nine Nine and Saturday Night Live guy Andy Samberg – he’s already inside his own endless time loop. Siara takes things one stage further by imagining that Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliott (the GD camera guy) also somehow made it into the loop too, with all the possible extra complications that would have. … Read more
Cassandro
After two documentaries in 2010 and 2018 that did the same, Cassandro tells the story of Saúl Armendaríz, a lucha libre fighter in Mexico in the 1980s, and his transition from being one of masked luchadores to being an altogether rarer creature, an exótico. As a gay man on the macho lucha libre circuit, Saúl has always felt a little “exótico” among the grapplers and grunters. But he’s a masked fighter like they are, even though he’d probably be better off if he just went along with the locker-room banter and got his full flame on. So far he has resisted the switch from being a masked fighter to being one of the … Read more
