Dario Argento directs Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasance and Dario Nicolodi in this supernatural horror where a sleepwalking girl with a psychic connection to insects stalks a slasher.
As mad as a box of frog. There is so much camp weirdness here that to list any of the more ridiculous developments would be to spoil the fun. The first hour is floaty atmosphere and icky strangeness. The last 30 minutes are nightmare fuel of the most depraved kind. You can look for logic or have a blast. You can’t do both. Probably would be awful without the star value Connelly and Pleasance imbue it all with by their reputations and sincere performances.
Tim Story directs Samuel L. Jackson, Jessie T. Usher and Regina Hall in this father and son buddy cop comedy where a straight-edge millennial FBI analyst teams-up with his blaxploitation legend father to solve a mystery.
Has the colour, the shape, the dynamic, the form, the plotting, the humour and the action of a TV movie for kids. But for adults? Crass, lowest common denominator stuff, minimal effort has been put into nearly every aspect. Jackson is as ever watchable, game even, but the only ambition of everyone else involved is to be inoffensively adequate.
Karyn Kusama directs Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbell and Sebastian Stan in this neo-noir where a self-destructive L.A. cop pursues demons from her corrupt past.
This is a flawed film – often dull, cliched and hard to warm to. But I’m going to give it a pass. Kidman plays against type and convinces. There are two really intense heist sequences that echo the quality and immersion of Point Break. There’s even quite a good rug pull at the end… I’m rarely caught off guard by a twist. It has the structure of a classic L.A. detective novel… Kidman’s grizzled cop chases down leads from the sleazy dying, the relaxed corrupt, the mansion-bound powerful in a way that echoes the plotting of hard boiled masters like Chandler or Hammett. This is the shit I like. Now there’s a lot of reaching and affectation of importance that slows things down and dilutes the good stuff. Let pulp be pulp… even if you have a classy thesp slumming it in the lead. Yet I’d watch this again a decade down the road. Hence the score of…
Gary Felder directs Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd and Cary Elwes in this serial killer thriller where genius detective Alex Cross gets personal and chases the murderous kidnapper who just added his niece to a menagerie of beautiful captive women.
OK… so it’s not Se7en. It still satisfies as a throwaway Friday night thriller. I would buy a ticket to one of these if they still made three of them a year for the last two decades. Expensively shot, well cast, moving at a pace so fast you can’t really pause to question just how rickety it all is. Just like one of Patterson’s airport page-turners then. They weren’t original or particularly well written but the chapters last three pages max and neatly always ended on cliffhangers and tantalising question marks. I used to read them on my bus journey home from my first pub job and it would be a race to cram in as many twists and turns as possible. This is Morgan in his comfort zone – a star who oozes wisdom, class and educated masculinity – solving a mystery by being the smartest guy in the room. He’s a joy to watch even in formulaic pap. It is fair to say the film doesn’t fully squeeze all the juice from a gleefully exploitative premise. Felder plays it maybe a setting too tasteful. Yet you have to give the director points for making the identity of the killer so so obvious that you spend the final half constantly second guessing yourself that he must be a bright crimson red herring and someone… anyone… else will be revealed to be the big bad! That is brinkmanship of the highest order. Judd is as good as she gets too.
Joseph Losey directs Dirk Bogarde, James Fox and Sarah Miles in this Harold Pinter scripted thriller where a man-servant takes over his new employer’s life and home.
If you loved Parasite then this will blow your mind. Bogarde is utterly brilliant as the ambiguous, elusive and insidious butler. His motivations never fully revealed, he seduces and ingratiates his way into dominating his employer completely. He starts quiet yet slowly becomes rampant – a sexually attractive and threatening presence living in the other half’s home. And he likes how they live. You never have a doubt he isn’t fully in control of events even if his devious plan seems riskily counterproductive at junctures. The great thing about Losey’s direction is you can approach The Servant as a spot-on class allegory that essays and predicts the era’s societal shifts, an unpredictable noir mystery or a very daring, dark romance. Losey and Pinter approach desire as oblivion and attraction as a weapon. This is the finest variation on the director’s house themes and style I’ve yet watched.
Roger Donaldson directs Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins and Phil Davis in this historical adventure retelling the sea-faring expedition to Tahiti in 1787 that ended in rebellion.
This was scripted and planned to be David Lean’s last project before he died. Donaldson manages to get the sweep and scope correct but the psychology and engagement is just a little too off. The suggestion here is Bligh went a little mad when his men went fuck happy with the natives on the island. Partly out of shaken strict Christian morality, partly out of unspoken homosexual desire for Mel’s tops-off Fletcher Christian. Hopkins does a good job keeping the jealousy and mania just bubbling and rattling the lid, it never over spills. He does risk ham a fair few times though. It isn’t his best work. Then the last act loses its grip on the audience. There should be a good hook in a finale where the mutineers need to find a safe haven before the castaways find civilisation. A race against the clock and the tides. It just never gels. Shame, as if Donaldson engineered this final element to thrill he’d have had a great film on his hands.
Marcel Carné directs Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault and Pierre Brasseur in this romantic epic where a mime and an actor rise to fame but the criminal beauty they both love pulls far less quixotic men into their world.
Once Upon a Time in Pantomime Paris. This is a big film with aspirations to Victor Hugo and Dickens. It flows wonderfully and both the melodrama and the backstage triumphs captivate. The production of the film was used as a cover for Resistance fighters against the Nazis. The fact that something so timeless and lyrical has such an intriguing backstory only adds to the mystique.
Sergio Leone directs Robert DeNiro, James Woods and Tuesday Weld in this gangster saga where a teen gang turn prohibition bootleggers turn old survivors with regrets.
A long movie of moments. Many of them brilliant, iconic but as many unfinished and puzzling. The gangster epic by way of dream. The framing opium den sequences ruin any chance of us trusting this fractured, jumbled narrative that flows like a half-true confession. Decades forgotten memories re-emerge from a jump cut of a frisbee catch yet we never find out what happens in the now when the past can overwhelm a scene. We peek in at a child in her lace dancing, we peek in at a more desirable past. The glow and invitation of it illuminates our spy hole. Is Noodles looking back into time for a better version of himself? All his actions from the midway point reveal a callous, violent and merciless man. A psychopath who only knows how to take what he wants. Have we been investing all our faith in the wrong protagonist? Have we been following the villain of the piece? What stock can we put into his memories of the “good” he did, the successful scores he masterminded and the friends he loved? We are reliving the fantasies of a man with too much betrayal to forget. He remembers nothing of his teenage years in prison or his new life in Buffalo. Maybe these purposefully ignored, brutalising parts of his life are the undeniable soul of a nasty, untrustworthy criminal? Maybe the sepia soaked good old days of scams and yearning and camaraderie in the Lower East Side are all that is worth reminiscing over?
Martin Scorsese directs Steven Prince, himself and George Memmoli in this documentary where raconteur, music manager and heroin addict Steven Prince turns up to a party, sits on a couch and tells his best anecdotes.
Marty doesn’t want a gun pointed at him at one point. Fair enough. I’m not sure turning the camera on Steven Prince is that healthy for the subject either. Steven Prince played Easy Andy, the gun dealer in Taxi Driver. It is a very impactful and charismatic one scene role. His life is full of stories. And smack. Some of his parroted mumbling gets lost in the weeds… he has told these coke party crowdpleasers of deals gone wrong, bad behaviour and violence erupting so many times he has forgotten some essential lines that connect one incident to the next. He is struggling to stay on the ball. Not quite as good as reputation. Quite sad. There’s one story Pulp Fiction fans will recognise. Tarantino lifted it. But then turned that anecdote into a great scene. That’s what a great filmmaker does.
Richard Kelly directs Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Sean William Scott in this loooong existential near-future thriller spoof where neo-Marxists manipulate a confused action hero, a cop with a twin and a mainstream porn star to topple a fascist clean energy conglomerate.
Donnie Darko was a tenuous attempt to make an emo Back to the Future that infused Lynchian dread with Kurt Vonnegut plotting. The fact that Kelly somehow walked that near impossible tightrope with his debut marked him out as a filmmaker to watch. His indulgent, unruly and self-sabotaging follow-up kinda proved he was lucky to make it across the wire that initial attempt. This time he fell, there was no net and his career hasn’t snapped back into shape since. Though I do kinda like The Box, his third and final film. Southland Tales though is a train wreck. A pile-up. I’ve glared into the near- three hour wreckage of it twice now… both times optimistic. And once you’ve endured the first hour and squeezed some poorly sold intention out of it, there are flashes of genius. That first hour though! 10 minutes of exposition overload… a narrated prologue that seemingly never ends. Then we float around a series of vacant and lifeless characters played by upcoming stars who are playing against type. Types we were only just investing into in 2006. Scott is an underrated actor and sells his puppet cop with minimal fuss, admirably never falling back on his broad comedy persona. The Rock is a bizarre presence – channeling Stan Laurel’s childish nervousness in some scenes and just blankly enduring through reams of conspiracy (there are lots of overlapping factions to keep track of if you can in anyway follow the plot) in most scenes. Sarah Michelle Gellar actually is good camp fun as the gormless porn star turned influencer. This is the one prediction Kelly makes of “the now” that was right… just a shame her adult superstar remains strictly PG for the plot. The fact she is fully clothed and sexless throughout just doesn’t work. Whenever there’s a lip-synced musical number… there are musical numbers… the film jump starts and has our attention. There are nexus points when the random plot strands crossover and it almost feels worthwhile. The finale, though very drawn out, has some trippy imagery and finality to it. It is like panning for gold in a stream no-one has found a nugget in yet! If this is your favourite film you are trying too hard. But if you can’t find anything to love among all the flat, TV movie looking, daffy hubris then you probably don’t love cult cinema. Hard to recommend but difficult to completely write-off.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 