The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (Wes Anderson, 2021)
Anderson is a Marmite director and I confess to blowing a little hot and cold – I can’t help but admire the inventiveness and – like Jim Jarmusch and, formerly, Woody Allen, he gets a high octane cast. I just wonder if he doesn’t go too whimsical and self-indulgent.
Continue reading →No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021)
I confess I’ve lost track of which Bond films I’ve seen — they were Christmas and Easter and Bank Holiday films and ITV had a phase of showing them on a Sunday afternoon. They followed a familiar pattern, a precredit sequence full of stunts, Bond being sent on a mission by M and being geared up by Q, a car chase that graduated to a lot of cars chasing, to helicoptors chasing, the entire Russian army chasing on skis, seemingly unable to shoot one man. And thence to a volcano base, and a final confrontation and a big bang. And along the way, one liners and a several Martinis and a bit of the old in-out with a girl thirty or forty years his junior. Continue reading →
Dune: Part One (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)
Yes, but what about John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941)?
Continue reading →Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2021)
Those of you who have submitted yourselves to my shouting at clouds Marvel Universe movies know that they are not my cup of Earl Grey, nor even a guilty pleasure. Well, perhaps the first of the Spider-Men. I suspect Black Panther was the most interesting, but Martin Freeman saving the day rather undercut the thrust of the film. But, like Black Widow, I’m pleased that it exists, even if I am unlikely to rewatch more than once. And there must be several I still haven’t seen — excluding Iron Man III which I am pretty sure I have but wiped from my memory and unfortunately that presumably answers the question of Ben Kingsley.
Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021 film)
I confess I’ve only seen about a third of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I’ve long wondered with something like three hundred films in the franchise now, why the recurring characters were so male and pale. Black Panther challenged this — although for obvious reasons a sequel is problematic. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) seemed to be a character defined by her gynaecology, and I don’t think they ever explained who her husband was. Now she gets her own film and a female director, so as the world ended.
Continue reading →Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020)
This has the feel of a fable — the Yi family move from 1980s California to Arkansas to live in a static caravan where Jacob (Steven Yeun) starts a farm to grow vegetables for Korean restaurants and Monica (Han Ye-ri) works in a chicken sexing unit to try and bring more money in. After a short period, they bring her mother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) across for childcare and Korean War vet Paul (Will Patton) helps out.
Continue reading →Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019)
I’d noticed Riz Ahmed in a couple of films and been impressed, and of course he’s in Chris Morris’s Four Lions, so here he is in pretty well every scene, if not shot, of this film. Heavy metal drummer Ruben Stone (Ahmed) is in the middle of a low budget tour with his thinly-drawn girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) when he begins to lose his hearing. Whilst he is determined to get cochlear implants, first he has to check into a school for the hearing impaired and learn to sign. Here he reluctantly learns from Vietnam vet Joe (Paul Raci, stealing every scene) and befriends Jenn (Chelsea Lee).
Continue reading →The Killing of Two Lovers (Robert Machoian, 2021)
Imprisoned within the almost square of the film ratio, David (Clayne Crawford) is poised at the start to shoot a sleeping woman or the person next to her. He is interrupted by the sound of a flushing toilet.
Continue reading →Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)
This film is easy to love — Faye (Frances McDormand), recently widowed in a small Nevadan town ruined by the gypsum company which had owned it, buys a van and heads out into deep, marginal America, it what could be a feminist western (and clearly references The Searchers). Faye finds work in an Amazon warehouse, a burger bar, a trailer park and a sugar beet plant, along the way meeting other boomers who have lost homes and families and livid the nomad lifestyle. Many of these are based on real people, who play version of themselves — the exception being David (David Strathairn), who she meets en route and he forms a transient, tenuous, almost relationship. McDormand is in every scene — almost every shot — with only Patricia Clarkson coming close to her for this kind of unglamorous role in Hollywood. The scenes with Strathairn are especially strong.
Continue reading →Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020)
It may be, of course, that I read Rebecca years and years ago — I know I started it and I studied the opening paragraph, the dream of the Manderley mansion from years later, but I’m not sure I got much further. And when I bought two Du Maurier boxsets, I don’t think Rebecca was part of them. It took me a while to track down a copy — although naturally I found several since, as a battered paperback 1992 reprint got more battered as it got carried around.
The conceit should be familiar: lady’s companion Rebecca meets aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter in Monte Carlo and the two have a whirlwind romance, before returning to the ancestral pad in … where we take to be Cornwall but it isn’t named in the book. The new bride finds life at Manderley difficult and the ghost of the dead Rebecca hangs over her, especially through the behaviour of housekeeper Mrs Danvers. A ball would be useful, perhaps, but Mrs Danvers persuades her to wear the same costume as Rebecca had and then it seems as if a wedge has been driven between the loving couple. Then a body is discovered in a sunken boat… Continue reading →
Subject to Change 