Film
Thomas H. Green
Nostalgia drew me to this rerelease. In a household where the television was mostly off, A High Wind in Jamaica was sanctioned viewing when it cropped up on BBC Sunday afternoon schedules and we watched it as a family. I must have seen it a couple of times before the age of 10 but, decades later, it was to disappoint.Many of director Alexander Mackendrick’s films – Sweet Smell of Success and Ealing classics such as Whisky Galore! and The Ladykillers – have stood the test of time. The Ealing films clearly represent a bygone era but they maintain charm and brio. Unfortunately, A Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Odessa must be one of Central Europe’s more distinctive cities, characterised by a profoundly cosmopolitan ethnic mix over more than two centuries. It was one of the most international cities in the Tsarist empire, while in Soviet times it honed that identity, based not least on the size of its Jewish population, and the brand of humour – accompanied by an almost distinct language – that resulted. So what am I doing here, I asked myself, watching a Monty Python film retrospective, in a packed late-night showing, where a fair part of the audience seems to know the lines off by heart?The answer Read more ...
ronald.bergan
When Jean Renoir returned to France at the end of 1953 after 13 years of exile, he felt as if he were beginning his career from scratch. His Hollywood films were not highly regarded, and neither The River (1951) nor The Golden Coach (1953), shot in India and Italy respectively, were successful enough to redeem his international standing among reviewers or at the box office. The critical consensus declared that he was an artist in decline. There were exceptions, of course, one of the most important being Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine founded in 1951.Cahiers contradicted the received opinion Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Looking back over his life, Szindbád admits, “I’ve never loved anybody but my vanity.” After drifting through liaison after liaison, ritualised meal after ritualised meal, he’s come to the end of the road. Zoltán Huszárik's extraordinary Szindbád is an elegiac evocation of a life spent pursuing gratification at the expense of forming any real bonds. It’s also a magical film that was barely heard of outside Hungary until the last decade.Huszárik completed just one other feature, 1980’s Csonataváry. Szindbád premiered in 1971. Huszárik died, consumed by depression and alcohol, in 1981. He had Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You don’t tend to get many films from the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union. And certainly not from Kyrgyzstan. The Light Thief is the kind of work which schleps respectably around the festival circuit harvesting nods of approval from film aficionados but not, more importantly, the support of distributors. So the fact that, as of this week, the film has made it past Go is worth cracking open the orange juice (its titular main character does not drink). And it more than repays a look. The Light Thief is light on its feet at only 75 minutes, and it melds gentle lyricism with a very Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s perhaps best to start this review by stating that I miss Horrid Henry's target demographic by about, ooh, a decade or three. But it’s also right and proper to say that while I wouldn’t recommend it for grown-ups, those youngsters whose opinions I canvassed after the screening I attended gave it a huge thumbs-up.It’s not difficult to see why, as there are plenty of fart and bogey gags (the latter really quite disgusting when viewed in 3D) and adults are the butt of all the jokes. Theo Stevenson as the titular character is lovely, too (and not at all horrid, but that’s the story’s weakness Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Already shouldering the new Harry Potter off the top of the US box-office charts, this latest arrival from Marvel Studios harks back to a simpler America where the hero wraps himself in the stars and stripes and the bad guys speak with ridiculous German accents. It’s 1941, the Nazis are trampling Western civilisation underfoot, and gung-ho American kids are flocking to join up.But it’s bad news for 98lb weakling Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a rickety, asthmatic youth from Brooklyn who’s desperate to pull on an army uniform and head for war-torn Europe, but hasn’t a hope of passing a medical Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Better Life is Bicycle Thieves remodelled for modern LA. Vittorio De Sica’s iconic 1948 film about an Italian father and son living over a precipice of poverty sadly requires adjustment only in its details, the theft of a bicycle the father needs to seek work here updated to a stolen truck. Director Chris Weitz has parlayed the success of his vampire franchise hit Twilight: New Moon into this virtual remake set in Latino LA, the often illegally present half of the city’s population its wealth depends on. Their status in Hollywood is shown by the endless movies dismissing them as Manuel- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
John Huston’s 1970 spy movie is the sort of baggy, eccentric work that is routinely dismissed by critics at the time, but whose untidy pleasures become apparent with age. Max von Sydow and Orson Welles are among the cheap but arresting all-star cast in what begins as a colourful and camp 1960s caper, only to darken shockingly. It’s the DVD debut of as bleak a film as Huston made.The Kremlin letter itself is, like the Maltese Falcon in the film which made the director’s name almost 30 years before, a device to set base and interesting human desires in motion: a rash US diplomatic note Read more ...
Graham Fuller
1985 was an annus mirabilis for harsh Liverpool comedies, both of them. Letter to Brezhnev, about two Liver birds wooed by Soviet sailors, was the quintessential grassroots production of the British Film Renaissance. No Surrender, Alan Bleasdale’s sole foray into cinema, was a £2 million epic farce about sectarian fury erupting when two coachloads of OAPs are double booked into a Stanley Road nightclub one New Year’s Eve. (A group of infirm geriatrics, wailing and flailing, also materialises.) Arriving on DVD this month, it has lost none of its edge as a bracing blend of reality, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
What would loving Gilda Farrell be like? I do mean Gilda, and not Rita Hayworth, who was 27 when she portrayed her. The flamboyantly seductive persona Gilda has adopted to drive men crazy obscures the true nature of a woman who learns it brings out the worst in them and that it's a heavy burden to carry. As the actress ruefully remarked of her husbands, “They all married Gilda, but they woke up with me” - a telling putdown of the erotic artifice in which she herself was draped. The “clothed” striptease Gilda electrifyingly performs in Charles Vidor’s perverse and sophisticated film Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One should never pass up an opportunity to revisit an Ealing comedy. Invariably arch, ingenious and wonderfully played, these dozen or so films made between 1947 and 1957 offer a lovely snapshot of a Britain long gone, while the films themselves still feel remarkably fresh. The Lavender Hill Mob isn’t quite there with the very best of them, but a digital restoration on its 60th anniversary is still irresistible.An Oscar-winning script by TEB Clarke offers a variation on a regular Ealing theme, of a common man (though not an Everyman) pitted against the Establishment. Alec Guinness is Henry Read more ...