Film Reviews
Belfast
Friday, February 18th, 2022 Film Reviews,Among the great mysteries of contemporary cinema: how, in the space of one year, can a director make something as good as Belfast, and follow up with the ridiculous Death on the Nile? I don’t think one can lay the blame on an overbearing studio, or suggest that the best of Kenneth Branagh’s movies may […]
Drive My Car
Friday, February 11th, 2022 Film Reviews,Drive My Car is a long film, but possessed of such quiet intensity one barely notices the time slipping by. Another distraction is that the credits don’t appear until more than half an hour into the movie. By then we’ve stopped expecting them and they come as a surprise. Suddenly it seems that everything we’ve […]
Parallel Mothers
Friday, February 4th, 2022 Film Reviews,Anyone watching Pedro Almódovar’s films in the early 1980s would find it hard to believe him capable of the skilful, touching dramas he’s making today. The Spanish director’s first efforts, such Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom(1980) or Labyrinth of Passion (1982), put him in the same territory as provocative campmeisters such as […]
Spencer
Friday, January 28th, 2022 Film Reviews,When a movie begins with the words “based on a true story”, it’s usually a coded warning that what you are about to see is fantasy. The disclaimer bestows an appealing suggestion of reality while allowing the filmmakers to let their imaginations run wild. So when Pablo Larraín begins his bio-pic about Princess Diana with […]
Nightmare Alley
Friday, January 21st, 2022 Film Reviews,Nightmare Alley reads like it was written for Guillermo del Toro. A pulp novel with literary pretentions, William Lindsay Gresham’s masterpiece was acclaimed and denounced when it appeared in 1946. The language was obscene, the sexual content too brazen, the picture of human nature it painted, too bleak and brutal. The book was intermittently banned, […]
The House of Gucci
Friday, January 14th, 2022 Film Reviews,Shakespeare allegedly set tragedies and comedies in Italy because the stereotype of the excitable Italian was engraven on the Elizabethan mind. One finds the same view at the end of the 18th century in the memoirs of playwright, Vittorio Alfieri, who, caught in an adulterous affair with an English woman, was astonished by the calm, […]
Licorice Pizza
Thursday, January 6th, 2022 Film Reviews,There are eagerly anticipated movies that turn out to be duds, and movies such as Licorice Pizza, which are better than might ever have been suspected. The duds are far more common, so when a film of real quality turns up one feels like cheering. Many believe Paul Thomas Anderson (b.1970) to be America’s greatest […]
The Films of 2022
Wednesday, January 5th, 2022 Film Reviews,Presuming we don’t emulate success stories such as Denmark and go leaping back into the bunker, 2022 should see a greater range of movies returning to local cinemas. It remains to be seen whether the film industry has been permanently altered by the pandemic, with a large number of people now content to stick with […]
The Movies: A Boxing Day Round-Up
Saturday, December 25th, 2021 Film Reviews,For those not turned feral by the Boxing Day sales, the day after Christmas is the traditional detox after all that festive activity. Yes, it’s supposed to be joyous, but it’s also stressful when one has to work harder at a holiday than at a regular job. Hence the popularity of the Boxing Day test […]
The Beatles: Get Back
Friday, December 17th, 2021 Film Reviews,After an hour of this lengthy three-part documentary about the Beatles, I was wondering if it was going to be nothing more than an extended jam session – gripping stuff for diehard fans, but a long haul for the rest of us. When Peter Jackson got his hands on this never-before-seen footage, he must have […]