Popular Reviews
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 22 – The Positive Negative Man
A mad spy-fi story, the sort that made The Avengers the legendary show it is, The Positive Negative Man gets off to a Cybernauts-style start with a big lumbering creature – a man in silver greasepainted face and a metal sleeve on one finger – zapping a scientist (Bill Wallis) as he labours over some boffin-y task. The man has been thrown clean across the room. This being “the Ministry”, Steed and Peel are soon called in, only to become mired in protocol – do they or do they not have enough security clearance to conduct any sort of investigation, sort of thing. Tony Williamson’s script tugs in two directions. One is techy – … Read more
The Twentieth Century
Where to begin with The Twentieth Century, a mad bit of nonsense that’s initially exasperating but eventually works so hard at what it’s doing that your resistance might start to crumble. We’re in the realm of the camp pastiche right from the opening colorized 1930s-style credits. Those dispensed with, the movies settles down to tell the story of WL Mackenzie King, Canada’s most celebrated prime minister – three terms of office from the early 1920s to late 1940s. Forget those details lifted from WLMK’s Wikipedia page. They’re only confusing. If there’s any basis of fact at all in writer/director Matthew Rankin’s film, it’s been so decorated with chintz, frills and flounces that it’s … Read more
Eternals
Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, Eternals is a Marvel superhero movie that’s sketchy, thin, never fully fleshed out. Not bad, exactly, just hard to get a bead on. Is stuff missing or was it never meant to be there? Perhaps its problems lie in the origins of the source material, an iteration of an iteration etc etc. The first of the superhero gangs was 1960’s Justice League (itself a revival of the 1940s Justice Society of America), a greatest-hits compilation of DC Comics’ big hitters – Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash and more. In 1963 Marvel responded to the success of the Justice League with its own version, … Read more
The Big Sleep
The older it gets, the better 1946’s The Big Sleep looks. When it was new, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s famously unfathomable story was rooted in reality – the clothes, the cars, the language, the streets of LA. Since then, as it’s become detached from the everyday, it has risen unimpeded into the mythic. The opening scene sets the tone. A detective, Philip Marlowe, arriving at the mansion of General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), where the sick old man lives in an orchid house, staying alive on the heat, while his daughters run wild with his money. One of them, the general informs Marlowe, has got into some trouble. Can Marlowe fix it? That’s … Read more
Close
Close by name and nature, this intense, tightly packed, intimate study of a friendship between two 13-year-old Belgian boys took the Grand Prix prize at Cannes, where they do like a bit of a wallow. Beautifully made and sensitively played, it starts out in one territory but ends in another. The focus is on Leo and Remi, two lads in their last summer before puberty, or possibly the first one since the hormones announced themselves – either way we’re right on a cusp of big changes. Their boyish closeness – families who know each other, sleepovers possibly since childhood, everything shared – is sketched out in opening scenes of bucolic intimacy by writer/director … Read more
Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s epic ode to Robert J Oppenheimer, the “father of the bomb” who masterminded the development of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s and later went sour on the US government’s use of nuclear power just before the US government went sour on him. Oppenheimer’s is a fascinating story to tell. Emblematic of the change in the perception of nuclear power from scientific miracle to bringer of armageddon, he fell foul of the McCarthyite anti-Communist atmosphere after the Second World War. The film delivers the proof that Nolan is now as at home making movies about historical events (alongside Dunkirk) as he is in the realm of the high … Read more
100 Years of… The Phantom Carriage
The Phantom Carriage is something of a phantom movie. Loved by Ingmar Bergman, who rewatched it every year and claimed it inspired him to get into film-making, it was also adored by Charlie Chaplin, who called it the best film ever made. Stanley Kubrick was also a fan, and lifted one of his most iconic sequences – Jack Nicholson axing through a door in The Shining – directly from it. But how many people have actually seen this classic? Bergman, Chaplin, Kubrick, this is clearly a film with “bottom” but it also has plenty going on up top. In short, it’s a Dickensian tale of a man who has lived a life as an … Read more
American Utopia
David Byrne’s American Utopia show, essentially a greatest hits package plus plus, was getting towards the end of its run in 2019 when Spike Lee arrived to film it. Part of Byrne’s wider Reasons to Be Cheerful project aimed at spreading good vibes, it had become, like Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway shows in 2017, a must-see event by that point. Both Byrne and Lee are New Yorkers and there’s a definite Big Apple sensibility to this show – smart, dry, liberal, culturally catholic. Another way to see it is as Stop Making Sense Part II. That, if you remember, was Jonathan Demme’s great 1984 concert movie of Talking Heads in their pomp, and kicked … Read more
The Suicide Squad
The Suicide Squad, not to be confused with Suicide Squad from five years ago, fixes the mistake made by the 2016 movie, which got bogged down in plot. The Suicide Squad does that by not really having one. Or if it does it treats it as something to be vaguely referred to now and again, like a map by a driver who knows his way. The driver here is James Gunn, who does just about everything right in this super-sequel follow-up to the Dirty Dozen of comicbook movies. The first film was quite simply terrible, though bursting with great things, a kind of satire on Marvel movies, if you wanted to see it … Read more
Old Men in New Cars
Two things impelled me towards 2002’s Old Men in New Cars (Gamle Mænd i Nye Biler in the original Danish). The first was the quirky title, which has no real connection with anything that happens in the film. The second was the name Kim Bodnia at the top of the credits. You might know him as the Danish half of the Danish/Swedish investigative duo in the original The Bridge. Or, maybe, as the Russian control of assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve. In both he brought a dry, subtle wit to characters it would be easy to overplay and he does something similar here, though hold the “subtle”. There is nothing at all understated … Read more
The Phantom of the Opera
It’s something of a minor industry to make fun of Andrew Lloyd Webber. But with this film version of his stage phenomenon (billions of dollars at box offices worldwide, and counting) it looks like the musical lord is once more going to be having the last laugh. It’s a story we all know – a hideously disfugured creature, endowed with a gift for music, yearns for the love of a pretty, young singer. He tutors her and turns her into a star. But could she ever love him? It’s often said that the story is a coded version of the relationship between Lloyd Webber and his ex-wife, Sarah Brightman. Brightman was the original … Read more
Night of the Kings
When is a prison drama not a prison drama? When it’s Night of the Kings (La nuit des rois), a French-language drama from the Ivory Coast that starts and ends in a brutal jail and soars off in every direction in between. Philippe Lacôte’s film opens with a shot of the jungle. The camera pans up to reveal a vast building, the Maca prison, one run by its inmates, the governor will later remark to an underling. It’s a jungle out here and it’s going to be a jungle in there too, right? Right. But also very wrong. Into this pulullating mass of hyper-masculinity – so many shirtless male bodies, so many scowls – … Read more
