Wolfgang Becker directs Daniel Brühl, Katrin Sass and Chulpan Khamatova in this comedy where in 1990, to protect his fragile mother from a fatal shock after a long coma, a young man must pretend her beloved nation of East Germany is still going strong and the wall still exists.
Cute arthouse crowd pleaser remembered for the impressive shot where a broken statue of Lenin dangles from helicopters through a housing estate. And making Daniel Brühl a thing. The set-up is more interesting than watching the joke run out of steam. Yet it is very appealing and reaches some nice humane moments in between the colourful satire.
Becky Sharpe directs Charissa Shearer, Jamie Pigott and Antonia Gorence in this British indie thriller where a sad sack performance artist becomes obsessed with Isobel, her spooky surgeon lodger.
I don’t think I have ever seen something quite so awful and mesmerisingly humdrum as this. The acting is especially drearily one-note. Beyond parody, yet very dull. I genuinely think you’d have to work harder to make something this incompetent and unpalatable.
Ben Feldman directs Hillel Slovak, Anthony Kiedis and Flea in this talking heads documentary revisiting the formative years of the Los Angeles band, and the influence of original guitarist Hillel Slovak, who died in 1988.
Not the maddest fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers but their biggest hit will get me bobbing my head when they come on. This is quite a sweet way to capitalise on the chaos and self-destruction of the their first decade. I reckon going to see them live in the mid Eighties would have been epic, but they wouldn’t be a chill hang off stage. At their best when they are being dorky dafties.
Adam Carter Rehmeier directs Conor Sherry, Gabriel LaBelle and Mika Abdalla in this teen comedy where two hustlin’ best pals rent a poolside concession stand over the summer but find big business puts their friendship to the test.
1991 soft nostalgia. I would have loved this movie if I was 12. I don’t have room for another one like this in my life now I’m 46. It actually does everything right and Mika Abdalla has potent star power. Give it a chance…
Peter Del Monte directs Kathleen Turner, Gabriele Ferzetti, and Gabriel Byrne in this drama where a grieving woman slides between two realities after her husband Paolo’s death.
Sting is in this too. Being creepy. Roeg / Antonioni vibes. Turner was at the height of her fame when she decided to make an Italian art movie that mainly seems to exist to test out the advances in high end VHS cinematography. The only mystery is… why?
5
Perfect Double Bill: Identification of a Woman (1982)
John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish and Joe McGrath direct Peter Sellers, Ursula Andres and David Niven in this 007 spoof where multiple James Bonds are assigned the same mission.
Dead in the water chaos. Peter Sellers, at the height of his fame, signed on do this off-brand adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first novel. The shoot was chaotic. Rumour had it he and Orson Welles (cast as Le Chiffre and having a blast at the baccarat tables doing non-narrative magic tricks) fell out early doors. Plus Sellers wanted it to be “more serious”. Eventually he walked with only a third of the script in the can. So the producers tried to turn a weakness into a strength. Creating a framing device of David Niven as the “original” James Bond recruiting a whole bunch of newer James Bonds. It became a movie of vaguely tangentially related side plots featuring the most available stars of their day. It is an absolute dog’s dinner. Making little sense… slowly. Clutching at straws? Herb Alpert’s ear worm brass band theme tune is iconic. Welles seems to be having the time of his life disrupting a big studio mess he has no responsibility over. The Mata Hari sequence might be dated colonialism but at least is funny, sexy and spectacular. None of these things are any reason to sit through the first hour. Which is just grindingly awful. No movie could recover from such stale pop art boredom.
Woody Allen directs Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels and Danny Aiello in this magical realist fantasy where a cinema-goer and a movie character start a romance in the Depression era.
One of Woody’s more vivid, self contained ones. Seems to be in conversation with the magic of cinema and the crush of reality rather than his standard introspection. Sweet… until it isn’t… with one of the most quietly brutal endings ever in a “romcom”. Wonderful recreation of this era on a smaller budget.
Donald Cammell directs Anne Heche, Joan Chen and Christopher Walken in this erotic thriller where a money laundering banker moonlights as a call girl.
Infamous for having three versions. None of which make much narrative sense and the one the producers released may have contributed to Cammell’s suicide. Any version you watch is an incoherent soup of concepts and wildly off beam acting styles. I will say the lengthy centrepiece sex scene between Heche and Chen is very steamy. Everything flopping around it? Dreck.
Eva Victor directs themself, Naomi Ackie and Louis Cancelmi in this comedy drama about a young academic slowly recovering from a trauma.
Not entirely sure what the fuss is about here despite it giving a measured voice to themes of distress and healing that don’t get aired enough in cinema. Some of the tonal shifts are mired with smart alec-cky wish fulfilment. That’s OK for a movie like Fletch or Bottoms but here it doesn’t ring true. You can’t be deadpan twisting the emotions one second then snarking the next. Even if your target audience craves the small victory. Not the ‘new classic’ it is framed as being by the critics but quite affecting in spurts. Victor’s performance has depth and is quite pleasingly stoic, John Carroll Lynch has a brilliant one-scene only pop- up.
Brandon Trost directs Seth Rogen, Seth Rogen and Sarah Snook in this time travel comedy where an immigrant worker at a pickle factory is accidentally preserved for 100 years and wakes up in modern-day Brooklyn.
One of those “lost” Covid movies released when multiplexes needed content once they reopened but the studios refused to give ‘em anything big like Bond or Top Gun after Tenet struggled. I think we are finally back at a point where cinemas are busy and not just for the opening weekend of hyped blockbusters. I went to a screening of The Invite this weekend (Hello again, Seth) and it was full. Toy Story 5 was full. Obsession and Backrooms were probably still doing very healthy business. Felt like 1999 in terms of deep programming footfall. Anyway, this is a sweet comedy. Quite in tune with Mel Brooks and Albert Brooks at their most mainstream. Millennial concerns are reframed through the eyes of an Eastern European pre-Soviet union serf. Things go wild. Rogen has built up an impressive body of accessible, lowkey satires between all those dick and weed joke vehicles. We went to see Unhinged back when the Vue Ocean Terminal reopened. We probably should have went to see this too.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 