Niki Caro directs Kevin Costner, Maria Bello and Carlos Chalabi in this sports drama where a white coach moves to predominantly poor, Mexican neighbourhood and starts a cross-country running team.
The White Saviour narrative you all hate but based on a true(ish) story… so suck it! Costner couldn’t be more honky in this… his character is called Mr White, he only drinks Coca-Cola and he is baffled by the concept of tacos. Was 1987 really that culturally segregated? Anyway… the joke is often on him as he integrates slowly but eventually willingly into his new community. All the sports team cliches are trotted out but here they are delivered with such a pure heart and unashamed confidence that you can’t help but be entertained. A throwback to the Eighties era of family films… one where Costner’s now quaint brand of star power shines through. I know tales where people get along, work together and acknowledge and respect each other’s differences are seen as relics these days but this effortlessly hits a now overlooked sweet spot.
Céline Sciamma directs Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla and Lindsay Karamoh in this French teen drama about an estate girl who joins a gang when her options and prospects narrow.
I know I’m going to have to rescind my Letterboxd membership for saying this but I found this facile and meh. White middle class tourism through issues and emotions that don’t just need unsolicited justification and unwarranted celebration from the voices latching on. Marieme is a sweet faced but dull kid who becomes a bully and rejects a job. Sure, cleaning ain’t anyone’s chosen career, it certainly ain’t a middle class dream job in the arts or finance. But then she should’ve worked harder on her grades if she wanted to chase that distant carrot. Loads of kids from these backgrounds do, some even beat the odds of rigged game privilege and succeed. And that abandoning of the limited path offered to her is treated like an act of defiance that should be celebrated… and her only option as a failed citizen?! Yet unlike, say, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Fish Tank, there’s no sophistication or intelligence or emotional texture to this angry voice. There’s barely a voice. Marieme stays silent and stoic throughout and I suspect that’s due to a lack of confidence on Sciamma’s part. If her avatar was to make a definitive statement it might betray the lack of integrity inherent in the project. Words and declarations would reveal the inauthenticity and discomfort way too blatantly. And unlike say The Warriors or This Is England we don’t even share any illicit, exploitative thrill of the tribalism of gang life. We can’t have our cake, we can’t eat it. A black working class voice should have been given this budget and opportunity. Because it doesn’t ring true beyond a tabloid understanding of the issue and broadsheet handwringing about the problem. I grew up with kids like this of all colours, intelligence and ambitions. I can promise you you wouldn’t want to be on a metro carriage with them when they brandish their knives and act obnoxious. La Haine took a gamble and managed to paint its angry young faces as real, complex, relatable humans. This is only interested in lip service tragedy. Fairy tale gangsterism. Instagram politics, surface level proselytising. The Rihanna sequence and the scrubland fights are high points. Sciamma is good at making you feel the feels and her visual handwriting is always impeccable. Otherwise this is too basic to really be anything more than a feature length awayday for soft people who will never be in this trap but want to act oppressed and put-upon anyway.
Alfred Hitchcock directs Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and John Gavin in this horror thriller where a lonely lad who runs a deserted hotel has to contend with the corpses his mother keeps gifting him with.
I love Psycho. Love the urgent, bullying score by Bernard Herrmann. I love the illicit introduction where we sneak, like frustrated peeping toms into the lovers hotel room after a cheeky nooner. I love Perkins amazingly seductive protagonist – slightly camp, slightly unhinged yet loveable. I love his and Marion’s back room chat that flirts and skirts and teases with revealing the deadly truth of the trap they have found themselves in. Like blood circling a plug hole, it only has one destination. I love the shower sequence which feels like a time traveller has wandered into a old staid, black and white movie and shown you a fast paced, unrestrained vision of the future. I love the breathtaking pause when a car stops sinking in a swamp. The future is horrendous and lurid and disturbing! And I love that big reveal.
Everything about Psycho is wonderful, flawless… except Doctor Exposition from the school of yakety-yak at the close down. He can do one! I always start planning the rest of my day as he burbles through what we already know or suspected or feared. That one teeny tiny misstep aside and Psycho is amazing.
What caught my eye this time is how Hitch makes us feel complicit in both of his leads’ mania. For the first half of the film we are Marion Crane… we live her internal monologue, her paranoid POV. We ride her rollercoaster of sleazy workplace temptation, lapse of judgment, guilt, police harassment and eventual clarity. Hitch sympathetically makes us experience the weekend of an amateur embezzler, life on the run for a ordinary citizen… in the first person. Would we fare any better than Marion Crane? But then the shower turns on, we have a psychotic break… a schizophrenic shift. Suddenly we are Norman… a far less regular character… we have to dutifully dispose of bodies, evade snoops who are smarter than us and keep mother’s rotten secret… a secret that doesn’t bear acknowledging.
The iconic murder of Marion Crane isn’t just shocking for it implied violence. It is a pivotal moment where we swap criminal minds from the opportunistic and forgivable to the deviant and unpredictable. Hitch stabs us and slashes us and wraps us in a shower curtain, when we awake we have tagged out of being a normal person who has made one impulsive, foolish decision and we are now looking through the eyes of a mind we shouldn’t be able to fathom… but chillingly can. Psycho is a cruel work of empathy and identification. A masterpiece of terror as it makes us first victim, then accomplice to brutal, bloody murder.
Alfred Hitchcock directs Tippi Hedren, Sean Connery and Diana Baker in the psychosexual mystery where a frigid cat burglar gets cornered by a publishing tycoon who wants to get the bottom of all of her hang-ups.
Expertly crafted but incredibly iffy in its sexual politics. The “hero” is a rapist who traps his beloved like an exotic pet in a cage of blackmail. Hitch is so obsessed with finally being allowed to do whatever he wants to one of his gorgeous blonde dolls that he forgets to include any motor in the plot. The film’s sole purpose is to get into and control the immaculate ice queen’s knickers… whether by force, coercion or cod amateur Freudian therapy. It makes for an awkward, bleak and naively dated film. Yet it unlocks and emphasises Hitch’s concerns and peccadillos far more than his Vertigos and Frenzys… Marnie feels like an ornate and impressive skeleton key. Hedren should be praised as she somehow humanises her fetishistic titular part.
David Gelb directs Jiro Ono, Yoshikazu Ono and Masuhiro Yamamoto in this foodie documentary about the multi-Michelin starred sushi chef who operates from a tiny concession in a Tokyo subway station.
Fascinating subject (especially the relationship between the details obsessed father and his dedicated sons) but a very trope heavy directorial voice.
Victor Fleming directs Ingrid Bergman, José Ferrer and Francis L. Sullivan in this period drama following the virgin saint’s journey from warrior prophet to burned heretic.
A confession. I watched this over a series of nights in chunks before I fell asleep. And it is so stodgy and turgid that my eyes started to droop after only 10 minutes most evenings. It is not a complete write-off; there’s a pretty hack happy battle in the middle, the cinematography become very beautiful in the final moments. But this is now an inessential relic.
Jaume Collet-Serra directs Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore and Michelle Dockery in this action mystery where a drunk Federal Air Marshall must solve who is killing his passengers on a transatlantic flight.
I have an absolute blast every time I watch Non-Stop. Like all his slick and glossy B-Movies, this has Neeson kicking ass, taking names and threatening to be the fine actor he once was rather than pleasingly ridiculous movie star he has become. What elevates this particular mid budget slab of hokum above the other vehicles is it is utterly, utterly barmy yet also plotted as water tight as a duck’s bum. There are 720 degree twists that would make Agatha Christie piss her knickers and disaster movie escalations that would make the Airplane! team chuckle at their ludicrous catastrophic unlikeliness. Yet both forms of gamble are executed with over confident finesse continually. Non-Stop is far too compulsive and hectoring (just like its hulking star) to pick at or give up on. I loved it at the cinema on release and have watched it in bits in hotel rooms with sound down late night a few occasions since. This is my first full rewatch and I’m quite happy to say it is the best thing Neeson, Moore, doomed aeroplanes and international terrorists have done this century. The below score is generous but what else can you give as unashamed and thrusting an entertainment as Non-Stop?! Popcorn heaven.
Ken Annakin directs John Mills, Dorothy McGuire and Janet Munro in this blockbuster family adventure where a shipwrecked clan colonise their island paradise.
One of the most popular films of its day, this is pretty much non-stop peril or larks. Invariably though every scene involves shrill, bland child actors or animal cruelty. I didn’t feel guilty napping during the middle act. Movies like this exist to fill rainy afternoons in the summer holidays.
Ridley Scott directs Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis and Harvey Keitel in this road movie where two put-upon women find themselves on the run from the law and the men who take advantage of them.
While I appreciate its cultural importance and how beloved it is by many, T&L has never done much for me personally. Once it sets its actresses on a road to oblivion the script spins its wheels and goes in circles until the iconic finale. Sarandon is superb as always (tough and tender) but the usually reliable Davis’ doesn’t hit the right blend of naivety and hedonism so becomes grating. The men are pretty useless to the point of caricature… it says something when Mr Blonde plays the most sympathetic support… but Brad Pitt makes an impact in his star making turn as a baby faced hustler. Scott has a good outsider’s eye for Americana and in the final act leans towards the spectacular over the believable. Considering this is a popcorn fantasy, that is an acceptable alternative to realism.
Luc Besson directs Jean Reno, Natalie Portman and Gary Oldman in this action thriller where a loner assassin takes in the neighbour’s twelve year old daughter when her family is killed by dirty D.E.A. agents.
Like Miller’s Crossing, this is a film I fell in love with when I was hardwiring my movie tastes and obsessions to the point where it felt undeniably like my own, sole possession. I know this movie back to front, left to right, beanie hat to bullet casing. The perfect movie for a quiet teenage boy – the action is crisp and impactful, the plotting clean and purposeful, the emotional content relatable and spellbinding, the visuals iconic and believable, the backstreet Manhattan location work exotic yet recognisable, the relationship between Léon and Mathilda is both Tarantino fairy tale wish fulfilment and bubbling with nascent sexual tension.
I think it is fine to give the riskier moments of attraction between the man child and streetwise Lolita a pass if you are a teenager watching this. You know Léon is a hulking innocent, more paternal than predatory… so the precocious child who is playing with sexual fire is completely safe to crush on and flirt with her saviour. And yes, I know Besson was impregnating an underage girl at the time of the movie’s inception (she even appears as a hooker… ugh!) but that creepiness and queasiness can be separated by the sheer class of the pure hearted hyper violent adventure as it unfolds. Besson the man may be a questionable character but Besson the storyteller here wisely defines separate sleeping areas for his unlikely leads and an unspoken but strictly imposed line that his adult killer will not cross. If only he did that in real life, hey? Too many words on a footnote about this masterpiece…
What makes Léon: The Professional god tier is four superb performances. Danny Aiello’s complex mob organiser… exploiting our Léon but clearly with a fatherly affection that goes beyond manipulation. Jean Reno’s wonderful innocent hitman… believable both as an artist for destructive death and an illiterate naïf in all other matters. Natalie Portman’s orphaned protégé… take out the lurches into kink and what bullied kid would want to train with the greatest contract killer in Little Italy? Like I say, wish fulfilment. She matches the adults scene for scene, line for line. A star is born. But maniac of the match is Gary Oldman’s pill popping, Beethoven loving Stansfield… a beautifully attired, utterly quotable bastard man. He dominates every frame, often those poor frames cannot contain him, in an performance that is delightfully hammy as it is unpredictably lethal. The stuff of genre movie dreams. “Death is… whimsical… today…”
