May 2013
4 posts
35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum)
Director Claire Denis Stars Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue 2008 France/Germany Language French and German (with English subtitles) 1hr 40 mins Colour
Slow-moving but engrossing suburban drama
There’s nothing very romantic about suburban trains. Unlike long-distance ones, they aren’t promising to whisk you away to anywhere, just to and from work. And...
My Favorite Wife
Director Garson Kanin Stars Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Gail Patrick, Randolph Scott USA 1940 Language English 1hr 28mins Black & white
Classic screwball with an emotional tug
Because their films were sold on the fact of their easily identifiable presence, it is easy to assume golden-era Hollywood stars just did the same thing in every movie. That idea, as I tried to...
The Human Factor
Director Otto Preminger Stars Nicol Williamson, Iman, Robert Morley, Derek Jacobi, Richard Attenborough UK 1979 Language English 1 hr 55 mins Colour
Uneven but intriguing late Greene adaption
Obscure films come in two broad categories: those whose low profile is easily put down to unknown actors, film-makers, source material and/or a small budget, and those whose lack of fame is...
La Vida Util
Director Federico Veiroj Stars Jorge Jellinek, Manuel Martinez Carril, Paola Venditto Uruguay/Spain 2010 1hr 10mins Language Spanish Black & White
Lovely look at the life of a professional film obsessive
Jorge (Jorge Jellinek, a real Uruguayan film critic) works at Cinemateca, a serious-minded (overly serious minded, one might argue) art-house film theatre in Montevideo....
April 2013
3 posts
The Ryan Gosling Sort-of-Paradox, or why it’s surely possible to gather your girls together, eat Ben & Jerry’s and watch one guy stomp another to death on screen
[There are spoilers ahead. Also sexism, probably.]
There are women I know who have only seen one film starring Ryan Gosling. For them, he will always be the cute guy in the 2004 weepie The Notebook. As they have warm...
The Gay Divorce
Director Mark Sandrich Stars Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton USA 1934 1hr 47mins Language English Black & White
Fred & Ginger turn up in a wonderfully improbable 1934 Brighton
Everything I know about Brighton in the 1930s comes from two novels, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941) and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938). Between,...
Spring Breakers
Director Harmony Korine Stars Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, James Franco USA 2013 Language English 1hr 34mins Colour
Faux-exploitation movie set during bourgeois America’s tiny window of misbehaviour
The line above this was going to be ‘Disney chicks go Russ Meyer’. But although that is a useful starting point in some ways to this story of...
March 2013
4 posts
Silver Linings Playbook
Director David O Russell Stars Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jackie Weaver USA 2012 Language English 2hr 2mins Colour
Rom (non com) with dubious mental health angle
Crazy guy meets crazy girl, bonds over the horrors of meds, eventually – it’s not easy! These are wounded people! – they creep towards love. Aw. Or something like that.
Except… here are...
Was it the beard wot won it?
So the 2013 movie awards season is over and within weeks I will have completely forgotten who won what. But shortly before I do, I would like to pay tribute to a major player in Argo’s eventual triumph, Ben Affleck’s (now departed) facial hair.
As beards go, Affleck’s was unremarkable. In Argo, it was period appropriate (even if the real Tony Mendez...
The Ghost of Jimmy Stewart weighs in on the digital v film debate
This week’s episode of Talking Pictures – the BBC’s dig into their vault of interviews with the great Hollywood stars – featured James Stewart. There were the inevitable appearances on Parky and Wogan, but also an interview in front of an NFT audience conducted by Joan Bakewell (wearing a strange tepee-like dress –...
Duel In The Sun
Director King Vidor (officially – unofficially, half a dozen others had a go, including Josef von Sternberg) Stars Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore USA 1946 Language English 2hrs 24mins Colour
Quite delirious attempt at star-making
Don’t be fooled: Duel In The Sun may look like a Western – it has lots of cowboys, the coming of the...
February 2013
2 posts
Lore
Director Cate Shortland Stars Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina, Nele Trebs, André Frid Germany/Australia 2011 Language German (with English subtitles) 1hr 48 mins Colour
Growing up is tough when the Thousand Year Reich turns out to have been a big con
What kind of kind of film is Lore? It’s a teenage girl-struggles-to-come-to-grips-with-her-world indie movie, told in saturated colours, lots of...
So far in the awards season there has been a clear winner in the battle the two based-on-real events movies involving the CIA versus Islamic extremism. It’s Argo all the way.
Now, that neither proves that Argo is a better film than Zero Dark Thirty nor guarantees it a win at the Oscars. Its edge over Kathryn Bigelow’s hunt for Bin Laden movie is almost certainly due in part to factors unrelated...
January 2013
2 posts
Did we get it right? Neon magazine’s films of 1998 (Part 1)
Reading (and writing) end-of-year lists has got me thinking once again about the creation of these top 10s, 20s, 50s… It’s such an arbitrary, often panicky process, full of instant regret and shaded (when you taking part in a collective vote) with lots of calculation. Did you get it right at the time, and more contentiously, from the...
Punch-Drunk Love
Director Paul Thomas Anderson Stars Adam Sandler, Emily Watson USA 2002 Language English 1 hr 35 mins Colour
Eccentric love story with astonishing sound design
Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect that most people who have an opinion on the matter consider Punch-Drunk Love to be the runt in Paul Thomas Anderson’s litter. Unlike The Master or Magnolia, it’s not obviously about big...
December 2012
1 post
My favourite films of 2012
Simple rules: these are the movies I enjoyed most (or otherwise got something out of) out of those that had a British cinema release for the first time in 2012 – so no re-releases, no festival films, no award-season bait that won’t be in our cinemas until some time in 2013. I make no claims that this list is any way comprehensive. There were a lot of films I didn’t make...
November 2012
2 posts
Submarine
Director Richard Ayoade Stars Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor UK 2010 Language English 1hr 37mins Colour
A coming of age in South Wales through a nouvelle vague filter
Youth In Revolt
Director Miguel Arteta Stars Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Ray Liotta USA 2009 Language English/French 1hr 30mins Colour
A would-be adolescent cult falls...
[NB: this is a rewritten and much-expanded version of a review that appeared during the London Film Festival]
End Of Watch
Director David Ayer
Stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick, Natalie Martinez
USA 2012
1hr 49 mins
Language English
Colour
Perceptive study of male friendship hidden inside a cop-movie wrapper
Of all the genres of film, it’s hard to think of one that...
October 2012
14 posts
Watching reasonably disturbing movies in the South London suburbs
1. Early in the year, I wrote about seeing Shame in an ordinary suburban cinema. It turned out to be a much stranger, more interesting experience than if we had watched the same film in central London, in a room full of people who knew exactly what they were getting and had already discounted some of the shock in their mind.
It...
LFF#9: The Dead Man And Being Happy
Most years at the LFF I end up seeing something that is broadly like the work of Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki, including some of favourite festival entries like Lake Tahoe and J’ai Toujours Rêvé d’Etre Un Gangster*. This, I think, fits squarely in that tradition. Every scene of the film is narrated by a measured female voice, sometimes...
LFF#8: Compliance
Compliance wants to be a talking point, have audiences emerging debating ‘what would you have done?’ or ‘They say it is based on real story, but seriously?’ During one busy day at a typical mid-American fast food joint, something strange happens. The exact what and just how I’ll leave out, but I think the title gives a chunky clue. The moral of...
LFF#7: Something Wild
SPOlLER ALERT There is a dramatic development in the first few minutes of this film that has to mentioned to discuss it in any sensible way.
Each year I try to see at least one archive film at the LFF. This time it was this little-seen film from 1961. It stars, and was partially financed by Carroll Baker and directed by her then husband, Jack Garfein. Baker is most...
LFF#6: The Body
Alex thinks he has committed the perfect murder, until his wife’s body goes missing and he ends spending the night in the morgue, where things are going bump in the night. Meanwhile, we get flashbacks to piece together the build-up to the killing of the wealthy wife with a peculiar sense of humour… but does someone know more than they are letting on, or has the...
LFF#5: Peddlers
At the start, this feels like a critical look at the new India, kicking off with some rich kids who take their socially clueless dealer to the beach with them as a bit of a plaything, and a hip young cop who fits too easily into his cover of lounge lizard. It’s all Facebook and iPhones and characters renting Dexter on DVD, and it’s shot like a moody American indie. It’s...
LFF#4: Nameless Gangster: Rules Of The Time
Meet Mr Choi. He’s flabby, schlubby, corrupt, easily bullied, a bit of a joke. He’s a minor customs official entering middle age, enjoying the odd bribe but going nowhere. Until chance gives him an opening in the world of organised crime, and Mr Choi starts his unlikely rise. His secret: in positions of power on both sides of the law are other Chois,...
LFF#3: The We And The I
Michel Gondry is the director of some hugely entertaining and inventive movies, including Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind. But although his new film has an intriguing set-up – taking place on a single bus ride home through the Bronx on the last day of school – it should it in no way be mistaken for a piece of entertainment. It is, in fact, the...
LFF#2 Eat Sleep Die
So apparently even Sweden has its rust belt, dying towns being emptied out of people doing dying jobs. The irony in this case being that many of the residents seem to have only just arrived in the country. Eat Sleep Die is the story of Raša, who - Montenegran-born but raised in Sweden - is neither quite a foreigner nor a native. She’s a 21-year-old who is an endearing...
LFF#1: End Of Watch
Cop movies have suffered from the current golden age of TV. There’s something about police work, its daily grind, its different-but-similar incidents, and the chat when nothing is happening, that fits 13 or 24 hours better than two. End Of Watch goes down the kind of LA streets and alleys between one-story clapboard houses and chain-link yards as (the impossibly great)...
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?
1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, USA)
In short: Pensioned-off San Francisco cop becomes obsessed with glamorous but damaged young woman. Then something happens that pushes him into behaviour that is frankly screwy…
The S&S voters love it because: It suggests that at the heart...
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?
2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941, USA)
In short: Why did Charles Foster Kane, wildly rich, charismatic, idealistic, never short of a dazzling idea, died a defeated man? The answer is compellingly pieced together through flashbacks.
The S&S voters love it because: The endless behind the...
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?
3. Tokyo Story (Ozu Yashiro, 1953, Japan)
In short: An elderly couple decide to visit their (ungrateful) grown-up children in the Japanese capital. A lot of what might now be termed passive-aggressive behaviour ensues.
The S&S voters love it because: The restraint, and the humanity, plus...
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?
4. La Regle du Jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939, France)
In short: Beautifully made French country house farce. With, it turns out, an edge.
The S&S voters love it because: It gives them the chance to chuck around the term ‘Popular Front’ as if assuming that everyone is au fait with the...
September 2012
8 posts
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?
5. Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (FW Murnau, 1927, US)
In short: Big-hearted melodrama about the encounters between a rural couple and the influence (good and bad) of the big city. To say any more would be to risk spoiling the plot.
The S&S voters love it because: Of director FW Murnau’s...
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968, UK)
In short: The dawn of man – weird shit happening in space – computer goes mad – wow, man…
The S&S voters love it because: It’s pure image making. This is the big-budget Hollywood director as uncompromising artist, taking the...
Killing Them Softly
Director Andrew Dominik
Stars Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn
USA 2012
Language English
1hr 37mins
Colour
Louisiana-set modern noir
There’s a lot of talk here. The characters talk themselves into doing something stupid, talk about their never-to-be realised dreams, talk about the job, talk about terms and conditions, talk through a narcotic haze,...
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Of All Time are likely to tempt you to skip an episode of Revenge in order to see them?
What am I up to? A sort-of explanation
7. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956, US)
In short: Much like E4’s Revenge, The Searchers deals with the corrosive effects of trying to get back at the people who have harmed the ones you love. Big John Wayne spends years and...
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Of All Time are likely to tempt you to skip an episode of Revenge in order to see them?
An explanation for this exercise can be found here
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929, USSR)
In short: Self-proclaimed experimental film covering life in a Soviet city (actually Moscow, Kiev and Odessa) over a day, told with a full bag of camera...
Take This Waltz
Director Sarah Polley
Stars Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
Canada/Spain/Japan 2011
1hr 56mins
Language English
Colour
Ambiguous love story
Notionally, this is a film about a woman, a man and another man. But as much as anything, it’s about a place, a bohemian wonderland of affordable Victorian houses with lovely original features and porches for...
[The intro to this little project is here]
9. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928, France)
In short: Mediaeval girl rebel leader stands trial in this unapologetically sombre silent classic.
The S&S voters love it because: It’s all in the faces – the film is composed of extreme close-ups, especially of Joan (Renée Jeanne Falconetti) crying single tears at a time – and the...
Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Of All Time are likely to tempt you to skip an episode of Revenge in order to see them?
Every 10 years, Sight & Sound magazine and the British Film Institute release their list of the Greatest Films Of All Time. They have been doing this once a decade since 1952 and the electorate is a wide and weighty group of writers and academics from around...
July 2012
3 posts
The Dark Knight Rises
Director Christopher Nolan
Stars Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Gary Oldman
USA 2012
Language English
2hr 48mins
Colour
Conclusion of Nolan’s Bat trilogy
[NB: This was largely written before the terrible murders in a Colorado cinema. I’ve left them largely as they were. For a bit of perspective on events (not always welcome in the immediate...
Panic In The Streets
Director Elia Kazan
Stars Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Barbara Bel Geddes
USA 1950
Language English
1hr 33mins
Black and white
Plodding plague thriller
Oh, this film has so much going for it. Made in 1950, it was shot on tangibly real locations in New Orleans, taking us right into the docks, the bars with unpainted walls, a sprawling banana warehouse, lonely streets....
(Poster ©Marvel/Columbia Pictures)
The Amazing Spider-Man
Director Marc Webb
Stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Dennis Leary
USA 2012
Language English
2hr 16mins
Colour
Rip it up and start again…
So here’s what you need to know: yes, they have begun the whole Spider-Man saga again for the second time in a decade. No, the story isn’t exactly the same, although core...
May 2012
4 posts
Picnic
Director Joshua Logan
Stars William Holden, Kim Novak, Rosalind Russell
USA 1955
Language English
1hr 55mins
Colour
Surprising satisfying mid-West, mid-century drama
It’s 1955, and small-town America is rich with simmering generational and sexual tension, or at least that is how Hollywood saw it. And unlike the pushy newcomer television, the movies could take everyday...
Old Joy
Director Kelly Reichert
Stars Daniel London, Will Oldham, Tanya Smith
USA 2006
Language English
1hr 13mins
Colour
Gently compelling walk in the forest with shades of Kerouac/Cassady
The movies don’t trust nature. When we see characters heading into the woods, something bad seems likely to happen. Even in old-fashioned Disney animal pics, the hills are full of peril. All...
[NB: Discussion of Little Dieter Needs To Fly probably gives away a few things that you might not want to know if you were to watch Rescue Dawn first, or on its own with no prior knowledge of the story)
Little Dieter Needs To Fly
Director Werner Herzog
Stars Dieter Dengler
Germany/UK/France 1998
Language English (with some German and what I guess is Laotian)
1hr 20mins
Colour
Classic Herzog...
Damsels In Distress
Director Whit Stillman
Stars Greta Gerwig, Analeigh Tipton, Megalyn Echikunwoke
USA 2011
Language English
1hr 39mins
Colour
Utterly charming return from upper-class chronicler Whit Stillman
Deciding who to talk to your first day of college can be a life-changing call. Lily (Analeigh Tipton) doesn’t have much choice in the matter, being descended upon at her first day at...
April 2012
4 posts
Moneyball
Director Bennett Miller
Stars Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman
USA 2011
Language English
2hrs 13mins
Colour
Sturdy attempt to turn baseball’s stats revolution into a watchable drama
Bull Durham
Director Ron Shelton
Stars Susan Sarandon, Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins
USA 1988
Language English
1hr 48mins
Colour
Entertainingly overheated and overwritten romance set in the...
Ride The High Country
Director Sam Peckinpah
Stars Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Mariette Hartley
USA 1961
Language English
1hr 33mins
Colour
Elegiac Western with both traditionalist and revisionist leanings
There’s a Randolph Scott Western on TV at least one afternoon a week, or at least that’s how it’s always seemed to me. And yet I never watched one, having developed the feeling – I don’t know...
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Director David Fincher
Stars Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer
USA/Germany/Sweden/UK 2011
Language English (and a little bit of Swedish)
2hrs 38mins
Colour
Part one of the Hollywood version of Stieg Larsson’s moody trilogy
At heart, this is a film about a middle-aged man having sex with a severely damaged Nine Inch Nails fan in her early twenties. So...
