Film

When family viewing was full of creeping menace

Strange, really, that the scheduled output of traditional broadcasters became known as ‘terrestrial’ television, given that TV is an etheric medium and nowadays exclusively a digital one. Or perhaps it’s not so strange at all. Television is ‘bonded to the earth’, writes Rob Young, whose roving survey of small and silver screen creativity between the 1950s and 1980s seeks to connect those airborne signals to the soil beneath our shoes. Young’s first book, the excellent Electric Eden, rummaged around the untrimmed hedgerows of the British psyche via the medium of folk-related music. The Magic Box has a similar aim. The intention is to ‘gorge on a huge cross-genre feast of

I laughed quite a lot when I shouldn’t have: Old reviewed

The biggest challenge in reviewing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old lies in describing its central idea without making the film sound considerably cleverer and more interesting than it is, but I’ll give it my best shot. Just remember: if I fail, and Old does sound clever or interesting at any point, it totally isn’t. This is directed and written by Shyamalan who is one of the most consistently inconsistent of film makers (Sixth Sense, good; The Village, so-so; Last Airbender, let’s never talk of it again). The central idea has it that a group of holidaymakers are trapped on a tropical, secluded beach where ageing is accelerated and, as they discover,

Quietly devastating: Nowhere Special reviewed

Off the Rails is one of those gentle ensemble comedies that we do so well (Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, etc.), except when we don’t, and it all falls rather flat, and feels like the B-side of a Richard Curtis film. This comes in, alas, at the flatter, B-side end of the spectrum, even if its heart is in the right place and all the other things you say when a film doesn’t deserve a kicking. But you can’t really say it’s any good. Plot-wise the deal is: to comply with the dying wish of their best friend, Liz (Sally Phillips), Kate (Jenny Seagrove) and Cassie (Kelly Preston) must

Wallace Shawn’s Designated Mourner feels like watching the news

Pity the aesthete, the flâneur and the opera-goer. Those who find the contents of their own heads so dull and mundane they must fill them instead with the fantastical inventions of our most extravagant lunatics. They have been locked out of the theatres and cinemas and public spaces that make them feel at their most alive and abandoned to the content programming of Netflix and whatever Tenet was supposed to be. They’ve been deprived, sheltered, cut off from the only thing that gives their lives meaning. I’m describing me. I’m asking you to feel sorry for me. If I don’t, at least twice a week, have a reason to wear

Lame and formulaic: Black Widow reviewed

Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer boredom, I was tempted back by the fact that this one stars a lady (Scarlett Johansson) and another lady (Florence Pugh) and even a third lady (Rachel Weisz) and is directed by a lady (Cate Shortland). Could be wonderful, I thought, except it isn’t. More women is its only decent idea. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. Otherwise, it’s all formulaic bish-bosh, smash-crash action scenes broken up by lame jokes and lame philosophising along the lines of: ‘Your pain only makes you stronger.’ Not if you’re dying in hospital and they’ve

If you didn’t love Jansson already, you will now: Tove reviewed

Tove is a biopic of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson who, most famously, created the Moomins, that gentle family of hippo-like trolls with the soft, velvety bellies which I remember reading about as a child when I was laid up with chicken pox. (The collector’s editions published by Sort of Books have restored the original artwork, are dazzling, and will take you right back, minus all that Calamine.) Biopics of artists are often more miss than hit. I’m still recovering from that Jackson Pollock one where he completes his first action painting and is told: ‘You’ve done it, Jackson! You’ve cracked it wide open!’ But this avoids the usual pitfalls,

An unrewarding slog: Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round reviewed

Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round has been heaped with awards: an Oscar, a Bafta, it swept the European Film Awards. And it has received rave reviews everywhere. I must now work out, I suppose, why I found it such a hard, boring, unrewarding, annoying slog. I did have a stern talk with myself, and even watched it again, but with the same result. I suppose your enjoyment may depend on how much time you might wish to spend with drunk middle-aged men who imagine they are being interesting. Or have you been trapped at parties by too many of them down the years? You may ask yourself: why should I be

Harry Potter meets Ikea: Backlot Cafe reviewed

Harry Potter is a fictional orphan locked in a cupboard by his aunt and uncle, after which he discovers a magical world and a better class of nemesis than his ugly suburban relatives. It seethes with class. The Dursleys are lower-middle-class, golf-club-haunting gammons. I suspect their MP is Dominic Raab, and I suspect they vote for him. The improved nemesis ‘Lord’ Voldemort is half landed gentry and heir to a Jacobean manor house on a hill. Harry Potter is world famous, and so people want to join him in suburban misery (we are near Watford), though in a slightly larger cupboard: the vast prop room in a former sound stage

Tucci and Firth are like Eric and Ernie but sexier: Supernova reviewed

At the time Supernova went into production one headline read: ‘What did we do to deserve a love story starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci?’ Something right, I suppose. This is an intense, intimate, spare film about love, grief and dementia, and the two leads, who play a gay couple, are superb. There is now the argument that gay roles should be played solely by gay actors but, my heavens, you can’t deny this pair look irresistibly adorable tucked up in bed together. Like Eric and Ernie, but with a sexier vibe. Tucci, Firth, a lovely dog and top-class jumpers? We must have done something stupendously right Tucci and Firth

10 films about space

As Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark prepare themselves to fulfil many a little boys dream and become real life astronauts on rocket-ship New Shepard, here’s a look at space flight in the movies. No doubt part of the fun for Jeff will be tweaking the noses of fellow space rival billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson. Unless one or both of the pesky duo steal a march on the Brothers Bezos before July 20th that is. I have tried to avoid the obvious choices: Gravity, Interstellar,  Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Passengers and Apollo 13 – all worthy of a watch – and introduce you to lesser known titles. Understandably, the rigours of space

Blissfully colourful, fun and basic: In The Heights reviewed

In The Heights is an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit stage musical — the one he wrote before Hamilton — and it is all-singing, all-dancing, and a ‘feelgood summer movie’, as they say. True, the storytelling is quite basic — anyone frowning over a calculator is sure to have money worries — and by the end of two and a half hours you may well be praying for less singing, and less dancing, I beg you. But what the hell. It’s colourful, it’s fun. It has an unstoppable energy. It has some tremendous set-pieces. And it’s blissfully straightforward. It’s not one of those films that comes at you like a

Remembering David Storey, giant of postwar English culture

There is a famous story about David Storey. It is set in 1976 at the Royal Court where, for ten years, his plays had first been seen before heading away to the West End and Broadway. That same week he had won the Booker Prize with his novel Saville. With unrivalled success across fiction, theatre and cinema, Storey was a giant of postwar English culture. He was also, compared with most writers, an actual giant. This Sporting Life, his novel made into a groundbreaking film, grew out of his experience of playing rugby league for Leeds. Unlike Saville, his new play Mother’s Day was greeted by a raspberry fanfare after

Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of dementia will undo you: The Father reviewed

The Father is an immensely powerful film about dementia starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was asleep in his bed in Wales when his Best Actor Oscar was announced, so we’ll never know if his outfit would have been a hit or a miss. Shall we give him the benefit of the doubt and say ‘hit’? Either way, he is absolutely remarkable here. I read the screenplay, available online, out of curiosity, and what he brings to the words on the page is beyond and beyond and beyond. Hopkins has played King Lear (twice) but this is his real King Lear. What Hopkins brings to the words on the page is

Lloyd Evans

Two hours of kitsch tomfoolery: Amélie at the Criterion reviewed

The latest movie to turn into a musical is Amélie, from 2001, about a Parisian do-gooder or ‘godmother of the unloved’. Some rate Amélie as the worst film ever made in France. Some consider it the worst film ever made. Our heroine is a 20-year-old waitress, a sort of proto-Greta, who plays truant from her restaurant job and wanders around Paris doing nice things to random strangers. Her inspiration is a box hidden by a child in her apartment 40 years earlier which she wants to restore to its original owner. Or, as the clunky narrator puts it, ‘Why is she holding that box like her future is inside it?’

Children will love it – alas: Peter Rabbit 2 reviewed

The cinemas finally reopened this week and what better way to celebrate than with Peter Rabbit 2? You’ll probably be thinking that there are plenty of better ways to celebrate than with Peter Rabbit 2, particularly if you saw the first Peter Rabbit, which was a travesty (I think. I slept through most of it). However, while this sequel has none of the smarts of, say, Toy Story or Paddington, the franchise is getting there. It’s certainly an improvement on the original (I stayed awake, mostly) and who knows, by Peter Rabbit 798, which seems inevitable, it may have actually nailed it. The film is directed by Will Gluck, who

10 films about the upper classes

Emily Mortimer’s BBC1 adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s classic The Pursuit of Love is proving a hit with viewers, demonstrating that the antics of our social betters continue to fascinate many of us. Downton Abbey may have helped pave the way for this interest, but there is far more to the upper classes than Julian Fellowes’ occasionally jejune televisual guidebook to snobbery, etiquette, and unforgivable social faux pas. Without further ado, ten movies where we ‘Non-U’s’ are given a privileged insight into the lives of the ‘U’s’. The Scandalous Lady W (2015) Amazon Buy Only Natalie Dormer (GoT/The Tudors) plays the real-life aristocrat Seymour Fleming (1758-1818), who became Lady Worsley on

A window on a fascinatingly weird place: Some Kind of Heaven reviewed

Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary set in The Villages, Florida, which is often described as a ‘Disneyland for retirees’ — it, too, has its own faux-historical town centre — and is the fastest-growing metropolitan area in America. (Current pop: 130,000.) The vibe is, I would say, cruise ship, but with golf. Hell, in other words, unless, that is, I’m going to be left to rot in a nursing home, in which case: I can learn golf! This is a film by Lance Oppenheim, who lived in The Villages for several months. It is a fascinatingly weird place and the film is worth seeing if only to get a

All’s well that ends well: TV’s most satisfying finales

As national irritation continues to simmer over what many viewers felt was the disappointing denouement to BBC1’s hit police drama Line of Duty, here’s a look at ten shows that bowed out on a more satisfying note. A good ending is comparatively rare, as the tendency in TV is to squeeze every last drop out of a hit series until audiences are in terminal decline; witness AMC’s The Walking Dead, which continues to limp on. In contrast to shows that drag on beyond their natural lives, many felt that Game of Thrones’ final 8th season was a rush job, prompted by the desire of showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss

Audiences don’t want woke: comic-book writer Mark Millar interviewed

Mark Millar has a raging hangover but he couldn’t be more chirpy or enthusiastic. ‘People say they get worse as you get older but I get reverse hangovers where I feel amazing. I wake up at four or five and I’m ready to go!’ I’ve caught him on a Sunday morning, on his way to Mass, after an exhausting three weeks in which he has been doing up to 45 interviews a day to promote Jupiter’s Legacy, his blockbuster superhero series for Netflix. He ought to be nervous: this is his first big project off the blocks since (in 2017) the studio bought up his publishing company Millarworld for a

This film deserves all the awards and praise: Nomadland reviewed

Nomadland won multiple Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and if there’d been an award for Best Film In Which The Woman In Her Sixties Isn’t The Least Developed Character In The Screenplay, Hallelujah, About Time, it would have scooped that too. Not much competition, regrettably, but you have to admire the film just for that, plus there is much to admire generally. It is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by the journalist Jessica Bruder, who spent months living with older Americans who, out of economic necessity, eke out a living while travelling from place to place for seasonal employment.