A well-acted courtroom drama, with a little formal showboating and pretensions towards philosophical character study, but nothing more than that.
-
-
The Zone of Interest 2023
The most interesting thing I have seen anyone do with the medium in quite a while, creating a shadow film in which every image has a dark twin, and challenging us not to zone in on what’s before us and tune out of formless noise.
-
Monkey Business 1931
The Marxes go nuts on a liner. Harpo is quite unbelievably funny in this: he was the one soundless comic for whom chaos was the point; he would rather be anarchic than conventionally victorious. For him, anarchy was victory. The sequence in the puppet show is a minor classic, memorably spotlighting his ‘Gookie’ face, which he made up as a child to troll a bloke who lived in his New York neighbourhood. Several times he has the chance to sit…
-
Remember the Titans 2000
A Disney film about an integrated high school football team in 1971, and that’s all you need to know, as it follows every single dramatic and stylistic beat to the letter. I realise that when the film serves up those big syrupy moments – a crowd swelling with applause, and the strings on the soundtrack rising to meet them – you are supposed to cry, but it was just a little too calculating for me this time.
Denzel is fine…
-
Red Rock West 1993
There’s an inescapable, dreamlike circularity to the early parts of this neo-noir that give us a lovely way in, and there’s heaps to enjoy after that, in the story, the dialogue, and Dennis Hopper’s quietly unhinged performance as hitman Lyle from Dallas (he was so good during this period). Having said that, the film never quite transcends the feeling of a pastiche: the mechanics of its story are too visible, it’s prosaically shot, and it needed a more dynamic fatale…
-
Crimson Tide 1995
Mutiny on the Alabama, with three tussles going on at once: the age old ‘vocation vs education’ set-up, a Cold War-era ‘hawks vs wets’ tussle, and of course Denzel vs Hackman. It’s a little daft and a little repetitive, with some hilariously incongruous punched-up dialogue from Tarantino, but slickly made, with gorgeous use of one of my favourite hymns, ‘Those in Peril on the Sea’.
-
Poor Things 2023
A Frankenstein story in so much as Lanthimos has chopped up lots of bits of better films and stitched them together.
It’s a fish-eyed, quasi-feminist, steampunk Fellini-Elephant Man-Universal Horror thing, too vague in its points about misogny, and too broad, low and lazy with its jokes. I get how Lanthimos is endlessly impressed by his own supposed cleverness and unpleasantness, but not why anyone else has joined in. When von Trier did edgelord cinema, the point was that he was…
-
The Siege 1998
*MINOR SPOILERS*
A prescient, fascinating, staggeringly stupid, eye-wateringly racist, and jaw-droppingly misogynistic piece of garbage that despite its pervasive sense of paranoia somehow manages to both over and underestimate the terrorist threat.
It’s basically Homeland 1998, though Homeland after it fell off a cliff. After a series of attacks by Islamic fundamentalists in New York, a general (Bruce Willis) makes his grab for power, ghettoising and interning the Muslim population, as an FBI agent (Denzel Washington) and a CIA operative…
-
Déjà Vu 2006
An absolutely stunning high-concept time-travel thriller, with Denzel as an ATF agent trying to save a murdered woman – and a ferry-full of terror victims – some four days after the fact. An inspired premise is given dizzying execution by Tony Scott: the results are tense, compulsively entertaining and deeply moving. There's also this one little moment where Denzel says nothing more than, "Yeah... OK... alright... OK" to a group of FBI agents, controlling the scene as his character controls…
-
The Cat Creeps 1946
Somehow made in 1946, despite being – in everything but its clothes and haircuts – an incredibly 1932 film, though sadly not a good one. It has hopelessly overwritten wisecracks, a weird hero who comes off as a cross between Alan Ladd and Liberace, and people just endlessly walking into rooms, fainting or accusing one another of murder. Absolutely desperate stuff.
-
The Bedroom Window 1987
Guttenberg and Huppert: together at last! They’re having an affair; she witnesses an assault, he tells the police he saw it. Meanwhile, the Tintin-looking motherfucker responsible stalks the city. Curtis Hanson’s ‘Hitchcockian’ thriller feels more like a DePalma rip-off, though it’s doggedly mediocre in a way that Pervy Bri’s films never are. Worth it only for Elizabeth McGovern's neat performance as the avenging victim, or if you have 112 minutes to kill but don't want to have either a particularly good or bad time.
-
American Gangster 2007
It tries to be several things: a black Godfather, an 11th-hour buddy movie, a suddenly heroic depiction of a smack-dealing murderer. It doesn’t quite succeed in any of them, though it’s well-acted and solidly entertaining, if rather too murky in its visuals, with a superbly-conceived final shot.