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Reviews
American Fiction (2023)
The right to be black and boring
American Fiction has a very droll premise and many sharp lines, as you'd expect from an adaptation of a Percival Everett novel.
If the overarching drama here is meant to be an example of the more universal human stories that black writers and film-makers want to tell, it doesn't make a fully satisfying whole. The film is about 30 minutes of scabrous satire interrupting 90 minutes of rather tedious and uninvolving famililial stife.
Perhaps that's the even slyer point that Everett and Jefferson are making - that they have the right to be black and boring. If so, it came across to me very effectively, as I was checking my watch constantly in the second hour.
Asteroid City (2023)
Putting the 'alien' in alienation
I came out of Asteroid City with a profound sense of alienation. Given the money and creative talent involved in making it, and the respectable box office it has enjoyed, there is clearly a parallel world in which this is a worthwhile artistic endeavour and a rewarding way to spend an hour and three quarters (rather than a profoundly irritating and self-indulgent endurance test). This is a world where I do not exist, and in which I cannot conceive of being.
It is something of a relief to find similar dissenting voices here. Could someone give Anderson something else to do, e.g. Direct the next Bond film? Now that might be entertaining.
Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993)
Now looking like a pastiche
The Three Colours trilogy was a colossus of European cinema in the 90s, but its lustre seems to have faded somewhat - none of the films made the recent Sight & Sound top 100.
Here we are though with a 4K restoration of Blue, still getting a raft of 5 star reviews from primarily male critics, but leaving me cold. Blue now looks like a pastiche arthouse movie, populated by luminously beautiful women mooning around Parisian cafes and strip joints with cigarettes in their mouths, and nothing of any consequence happening.
Juliette Binoche is undeniably fine in the lead, but this felt to me like a heterosexual 'male gaze' idealisation of a beautiful grieving woman who needed saving from her affectlessness, and without any amatory investment in her it was difficult for me to engage. The film has none of the intellectual provocation and interest of her work with Michael Haneke, which is much more my thing.
The cinematography is gorgeous, and the few interesting moments are where the camera homes in on beautiful quotidian detail (a cube of sugar absorbing coffee, a leaking brake line, etc).
The Fabelmans (2022)
A movie to put you off movies
It's an irony that a 'love letter to cinema' could be so aggressively tedious that it makes you curse yourself for going. After the flat whimsy of the first ten minutes I knew the film would not have a single interesting scene - I was wrong, but it only comes at the very end. I won't spoil who turns up to play a famous director, but his work is the polar opposite of this gruelling stretch of nothing.
I'm actually angry writing this, having wasted 2 and a half hours of my life sitting through such a self-indulgent meta-bore. It's the very worst kind of award-chasing 'prestige picture'. For a director whose career has been made by entertaining an audience, how could he think this story worth telling? By far the worst film of his that I have seen.
Black Hands (2020)
Making the case for the orignal verdict
This has recently been aired in the UK as 'The Bain Family Murders'. For someone without any prior knowledge of the case and the long legal story that followed, the series seems determined to convince us that the original jury got it right all along.
It's an evocative and well-played piece of work, with a very strong sense of time and place, but it would have done well to present a more nuanced picture. It's also at least an episode too long.
The Novice (2021)
Never mind the rowlocks
There's no doubting Isabelle Fuhrman's commitment in the lead, but the material is thin and the film soon becomes a tiresome grind. Her character is so rebarbative that I had as much desire to spend time with her as most of her crewmates. Yes, there's some dramatic potential in the 'effortless achiever' vs 'obsessive striver' tropes, but The Novice finds little nuance to chew over, and the film seems about half an hour longer than its running time.
The Humans (2021)
A stagy and self-important endurance test
Like many others here, I am baffled by the critical adulation. The script has all the elements of the most tedious of contemporary US plays - an interminable series of faux-naturalistic conversations which in fact resemble no dialogue ever heard outside a theatre, played out with smug self-assurance of its own profundity. There is the obligatory bit in the middle where the title is mentioned, and we are meant to have a great revelation about what it all means. There are a couple of redeeming moments surrounding the grandmother with dementia, where genuine emotional resonance finally breaks through, but the rest rings completely hollow.
The actors do their best with such thin gruel, and full marks to the production designers for their creation of the most dingy and miserable Manhattan apartment.
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
Something wicked this way comes
Any new film adaptation of Shakespeare has to contend with the curse of the 'classroom treat': the dutiful retread of a canonical text which the English teacher will stick in the DVD player for the final lesson of term, when most of their pupils' minds are already on holiday. The Tragedy of Macbeth largely succeeds, and it is certainly a finer effort than the more 'realistic' Fassbender/Cotillard version of 2015.
First among its virtues is Kathryn Hunter, playing all three Witches: she is phenomenal, and the depiction of the hags in uncanny triplicate, morphing from crow to crone, is bracingly original. This is the only facet of the production that embraces all the FX advantages of film, but otherwise Joel Coen and his production designer Stefan Dechant wisely embrace a parallel (sound)stage world, where a script in iambic pentameter and the plot's compressed artifice can still make its own internal sense. Some of the set design seems inspired by the beautiful Escher-like aesthetic of the video game Monument Valley.
Denzel Washington is a very fine verse speaker, and his key soliloquies are beautifully done. Frances McDormand makes a creditable and gory stab at Lady Macbeth, but ultimately both of them are too old for the roles (their motivations make no sense unless there's a prospect of them bearing issue to supplant Banquo's or Duncan's heirs). The supporting cast are generally very strong, with special mention to Alex Hassell in what should be a break-out performance as a cowled and mercurial Ross. (British viewers might do a double-take on his first appearance: he's a doppelganger of Will Young). The only weak link for me was Corey Hawkins in the key role of Macduff. His response to what should have been devastating news barely registers above mild dismay, as if there had been a mix-up with his UberEats order.
Gerry (2002)
Slow cinema with little reward
The best 'slow cinema' is truly hypnotic and immersive, and there's a good chance van Sant would have achieved a worthy homage to Bela Tarr if he'd given us the gorgeous desert photography and Arvo Part's music alone. What kills the film is the actors: Affleck and Damon give probably the most irritating 'performances' of their careers: throughout I had no investment in either 'Gerry', I was only aware of watching two rather immature actor friends doing some inane improv and goofing around with each other.
After an hour I was watching on 1.5x speed just to waste less of my life.
A History of Violence (2005)
Lean and sinewy
I took a dislike to this film when I saw it at the cinema, but 16 years on I can't remember why. It works very well on its own pulpy terms, and as an allegory for the patina of civilization masking middle America's brutal frontier past, and it gets everything done in 90 minutes without any fat.
The only real negative is Howard Shore's banal and misjudged score, which sounds like it was commissioned for a Lifetime biopic.
Censor (2021)
Stagy and uninvolving
I had high hopes for Censor from some of the press reviews, particularly the adulatory coverage in Sight & Sound (although they both share BFI funding). However, this is a very minor piece of work, and I lost interest from about 15 minutes in. It's all too 'meta' to work in any way as a horror film, and its ideas about the breakdown between fantasy and reality just aren't very original or interesting. As others have said, the script is weak and the actors deliver the lines with stagy archness, as if to compensate for the fact that little of it resembles real dialogue.
The opening VHS-processed idents for Film Four etc were superbly done, but it was all downhill from there. A moderately interesting final sequence, but nothing to compare to the far superior Saint Maud.
The Courier (2020)
Middlebrow sludge
As my first trip to the cinema in ages, The Courier was not a great start. It's pure middlebrow mediocrity, and had this been on Amazon or Netflix I would have given up after about 45 minutes. Somehow a promising true story becomes a plod through one formulaic scene after another.
Director Dominic Cooke (formerly of the Royal Court theatre in London) lacks cinematic flair, and he's hampered by a derivative score which as usual is lathered over scenes that would have been much more effective without it.
I admired Cumberbatch's physical commitment to the role, as the later scenes required, but his effort is out of all proportion to the value of the material.
Black Summer (2019)
The definition of 'content'
Season 1 was passably diverting, but this new slew of episodes lacks any distinction whatsoever. It's an utterly enervating watch, redeemed only by the relative brevity of each segment, and exists only to pad out Netflix's very thin slate of new shows in 2021.
I am sure it took ingenuity and application to get this made at all during the pandemic. Credit to the producers, then, but in artistic terms this is as enjoyable as long Covid.
Bait (2019)
Fascinating form, shame about the content
As others have suggested, Bait is a lot more interesting as a film artefact than for its narrative themes. It's a shame that the bracing originality of Mark Jenkin's approach is in the service of such a banal, nuanceless story about the impact of second-homers on a Cornish fishing village. At times it's hard to distinguish between studied anti-realism and amateurism, particularly in some of the performances.
The Road (2009)
Ruined by an intrusive score
I was expecting this to be a highlight of the London Film Festival, but I found it a little disappointing.
The production design can't be faulted - just about every scene looks as I imagined when reading the book, blasted CGI cityscapes used sparingly to situate real, local desolation redolent of '28 Days Later'. The performances were fine, the use of flashback effective, and the storytelling faithful. Why then did I find it strangely unmoving? Perhaps if I'd come without knowledge of the novel, I wouldn't have found the film too often an exercise in 'box-ticking' of major scenes, lacking real directorial vision. But I think I would still have found Joe Penhall's script rather reductive in its focus on the 'good guys'/'bad guys' dichotomy, as articulated by the boy - throughout, I always wanted to hear more of Viggo's voice-over instead. And I was irritated by the persistently intrusive music, so keen to tell me what to feel about each scene that my emotions rebelled into numbness. When a musical instrument is one of the key motifs dividing idyllic past from bleak present, it's all the more inappropriate to have an orchestra swelling with indiscriminate plangency over everything.
A visual triumph, then, and a passable précis for those who haven't read the book - but if you were hoping for a bold re-imagining of McCarthy's novel, you may find the film wanting.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)
A counter-productive allegory
Has the film downplayed the book's Christian allegory? Lewis's intent is still strikingly clear on screen. You get a hint of his dubious 'Lord, liar, or lunatic' trilemma from the Professor before the children even get through the wardrobe; and Edmund's temptation by Turkish Delight could be construed as a dangerous flirtation with Islam. But it's in the parallels of Aslan with Christ in the second part of the film that things get really obvious. The lion has his own Garden of Gethsemane moment before going off to be sacrificed instead of the sinful 'son of Adam', he is humiliated before being killed, his body is tended by two weeping women, and then he rises from the dead.
Lewis's intention was to prepare children's minds for reception of the Gospel by casting it in an adventure story, but surely there's a danger here. If you present Christ's sacrifice and resurrection in terms of magical fantasy, don't you make it more difficult for children to make the leap to understanding the New Testament as fact rather than just another parallel myth? The other key problem is that there is no logic to Aslan's passion: there's some mumbling about the 'deep magic' requiring that the Witch have a sacrifice, but I would struggle to explain to a child WHY it was required, or how this deep magic could be a force of absolute good. Rather than making the Christian message easier to assimilate, Lewis's tale just makes it seem confusing.
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Karate Kid with an 'issue'
Following the template set by Mystic River, Clint Eastwood turns in another overlong, murky, shallow film concocted more for the dulled palates of Academy voters than with any intention of entertaining or stimulating its audience. For the first two thirds, it's just Karate Kid all over again - hopeless young wannabe persuades elderly pro to train them, wax on/wax off, becomes champion fighter. Then we get the euthanasia bit tacked on to the end, without any genuine attempt to tackle the complexity of the issue. Not least of which is the legal position - at the end, would Eastwood's character really have been allowed to just slink away without any repercussions? Morgan Freeman is the same character he has been in every film since Shawshank, there is a desperately flat, 'humorous' subplot involving a Cletus-like cretin in the gym ... the movie needed putting out of its misery long before it got the greenlight.
War of the Worlds (2005)
The end of the Worlds
Three things particularly puzzled me about *War of the Worlds*.
One is the strange chronology of events. As the film opens, the first inkling of anything amiss are a few reports on the news of power outages in Ukraine. When the tripod emerges in New Jersey, there is no reason for us to think that any have yet struck elsewhere. And yet within just a few hours, we hear people talking about battles around the world as if they have been going on for weeks: and this when all sources of communication are supposedly down.
The second puzzle is what the purpose of Tim Robbins is. This is a larger philosophical issue, not a casting query.
The third is how Spielberg and the scriptwriters ever thought they could get away with the ending. Why does the boy need to survive when all plot logic dictates that he should be dead or missing? It shows such total contempt for the audience that I'm staggered Spielberg ever let it cross his mind, let alone film it and put it in the final cut.
My Brother Tom (2001)
Hollyoaks meets Blue Velvet
Broadcast on UK terrestrial TV for the first time last weekend, in the early hours of the morning, *My Brother Tom* sums up where the ailing FilmFour went wrong: while admirably uncompromising, the film manages to be both histrionic and flat at the same time, its depiction of doomed teens in perverted suburbia ratcheted to pure absurdity and never managing to convey any greater purpose other than to be grim for the same of it. It's no surprise that the film was virtually ignored on its cinema release - who were its intended audience? The saving graces are the fabulously committed lead performances, particularly Ben Whishaw as 'Tom'. Unsurprisingly, the film has led to better things for him: it's easy to see why Trevor Nunn picked him to play a young Hamlet on the London stage recently.
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
No match for the Superman sequel
So, this is the best superhero movie of all time', is it? That's the absurd line being peddled by a number of UK critics. So where are the truly memorable set-pieces: the Eiffel Tower elevator, Niagara Falls, the arctic ice palace? Where are the villains who are actually bad, rather than temporarily misguided, and who you actually have any interest in seeing killed? I'm talking about Superman 2, of course. This second Spider-Man movie is a slight improvement on the woeful trash of the first, but it's still banal, joyless, forgettable tripe; it's the kind of perniciously inane summer fodder that seems to lower the IQ of anyone who sees it. And the idea that we need a third one of these, with the guy in the goblin costume again, just beggars belief.
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
Dud, sucks, poxy
There's one good joke in this film, about musicals. Otherwise it's as arch, smug, and soulless a comedy as could be expected from the Coen brothers, the charm of whose oeuvre entirely escapes me (yes, even *Fargo*). Just because these nerds can claim to be 'auteurs' doesn't mean that what they create is any good. Tim Robbins mugs his way through the central role, but is infinitely more watchable than Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose excruciatingly mannered performance could give anyone a migraine. All the satire about capitalism is overegged, Steve Buscemi puts in a predictable cameo, and the whole experience left me sympathising only with those characters who lost the will to live.
The Rocking Horse Winner (1949)
A boy learns how to ride
This is a very intriguing British film, quite unlike most others from the period; it's a pretty dark Freudian tale, from a D H Lawrence short story, whose overt depiction of a schoolboy and his magic toy gets away with a strictly taboo subtext. The focus is on a well-to-do household of the period, in which the hierarchy of adults and children is strictly defined; the parents try to keep their son Paul, wearing short trousers even in the depths of winter, innocent of their adult concerns in particular, their problems with money. After discovering that his rocking horse gives him secret powers when he rides it hard enough, with giddy camera-work showing how it feels when he 'gets there', the boy tries to usurp his father's role to provide his mother with what she needs. John Mills produced the film, and his interest was no doubt linked to his typecast image: he normally plays rather piously unimpeachable characters, so it's quite a shock to see him here directing the lad's first experience of 'riding'. The only slight difficulty is that the boy actor needed to be nearer his early teens to carry the weight of the story's darker implications.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Rum, celibacy, and the lash?
Master and Commander is a reasonably diverting film, and undeniably beautiful to look at, but it strings out a minor naval episode into a pretty inconsequential two hours. Battle scenes are not Peter Weir's overriding concern they only take up 15 minutes at beginning and end so you would expect rather more subtlety of dialogue and character development than there is in between. These seamen are just too noble to be realistic; OK, so there's a dash of rum and a flick of the lash, but nothing of the third major sailing ingredient. Are we expected to believe that, on a ship half-full with rosy-faced teenage boys, none of them were (like the French ship they are chasing) vulnerable at the stern'?
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
The first of the great sequels
It's common knowledge that the Friday 13th series lost its way when it moved out of Camp Crystal Lake at part 8; Jason is at his best in the great middle sequels, from parts 2 to 7. There's no point in watching these films on DVD the full experience can only be gained from a warped, fuzzy, pan-and-scan VHS that has been borrowed from the video library too many times. This is how they were meant to be seen.
There are so many layers in these movies. On the one hand, they are part of the banal detritus of teen Americana, existing purely to give their air-headed audience some predictable shocks and a few glimpses of gratuitious nudity after the frat party. And yet... and yet. At the same time, Jason embodies pure hatred for exactly this type of audience. It was because the camp counselors were preoccupied with their inane conversations and having sex, after all, that the poor kid drowned in the first place. Jason's silent, hulking nihilism is completely at odds with the context in which the movies supposedly exist, as a naughty diversion for straightforward, optimistic, middle-American kids. One of the best moments in part 2 shows how aware the film-makers are of this dichotomy: a girl strips to go skinny-dipping, for no obvious reason other than to titillate the audience, but when she returns to the shore she flings her towel over the camera, showing her contempt for the people watching. Brilliant.
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Battlefield Earth, anyone?
Is this the most absurd spiritual vanity project from a Hollywood star since Travolta's 'Battlefield Earth'?
The whole concept of this film is bogus. Gibson purports to show the unsanitized 'truth' of Jesus's last days, but to paraphrase Pilate we have no way of knowing what that truth is: only conflicting accounts written long after the events, in very complex political and religious contexts. The film can't even claim to be a faithful depiction of the Gospel stories themselves - where in the Bible does it say that, half way through the scourging, the Romans turned Jesus onto his back to whip his front, or that they used flails with fish-hooks? The film's extreme violence, piously punishing the audience, is literally gratuitous. There's no anti-Semitism here: Gibson's clearly loathes all of humanity equally and is intent upon visually flagellating us into penitence. His righteous fury is the most ugly and frightening thing on display here, its shrill hysteria in inverse proportion to any convincing historical evidence that events ever happened in this way.