Kevin Macdonald directs Jodie Foster, Tahar Rahim and Shailene Woodley in this legal drama based on the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi who was held for 14 years without charge in the Guantanamo Bay.
Superb performance by Rahim plus Jodie doing what she does best. The true content is pretty compelling and rarely rings false. It even survives Benedict Cumberbatch doing a ropey Colonel Sanders impression.
John Schultz directs Melissa Joan Hart, Adrian Grenier and Stephen Collins star in this teen “comedy” where neighbouring kids, who no longer get along, orchestrate a scam so they can nab their preferred prom dates.
Sidney Lumet directs Richard Burton, Peter Firth and Jenny Agutter in this adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s acclaimed play where a child psychiatrist attempts to diagnose a young man with an unhealthy obsession with horses.
As close to Ken Russell or Nicolas Roeg as any American director has ever got. This is as much psychosexual nightmare as it is battle of wills. Burton gets a meaty role as the shrink whose own weaknesses, doubts and vulnerabilities are exposed by his investigation. There’s lots of seedy nudity, suggested perversion and the climax… well, I’d rather not have experienced the ending… it does piss the seat a little. Still, powerful stuff I’m never going to revisit.
6
Perfect Double Bill: Through A Glass Darkly (1961)
Jalmari Helander directs Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie and Jack Doolan in this Finnish WWII action flick where a lone gold prospector single-handedly takes on a Nazi tank battalion after they fuck with him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah! This is the real shit. Hardcore violence, stoic determination, crazed carnage. Modern action sensibility married with a spaghetti western’s sense of the legendary and the cartoonish. Everything you want from a 100 minutes of grimy ultra violence.
John McNaughton directs Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell and Denise Richards in this teen erotic thriller where a respected teacher is accused of raping a student in a series of double and triple and quadruple crosses all of which involves sex.
A lurid blast which crumples like a house of cards the moment you eject the disc. Remembered for the threesome, legendary for Kevin Bacon’s last minute twist dick shot and infallible thanks to Bill Murray absolutely smashing his choice “serious” support role. Blockbuster Video era premium trash.
Steven Spielberg directs Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in this historical biopic of Abraham Lincoln, following his attempts to end slavery before the Civil War is won.
Plays out very much like homework. Handsome homework for sure but still eating your greens, any which way you cut it. Day-Lewis’ Lincoln feels like a side character among the busy ensemble. James Spader probably gives a career best turn as lobbying sleaze on the right side of history and Tommy Lee Jones commands the admirable Thaddeus Stevens… who by the last act you realise has the agency and the arc we should be focussing on. It is Spielberg, so you could never accuse of it being an average film, yet I wouldn’t rush to rewatch Lincoln unless I find myself doing a History A-Level and need to skim past a few textbooks.
Luis Buñuel directs Simone Mareuil, Pierre Batcheff, himself, Lya Lys, Gaston Modot and Caridad de Laberdesque in this series of short surreal experiments full of iconic imagery and weird visual gags.
Buñuel told Dalí at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half “like a razor blade slicing through an eye”. Dalí responded that he had dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. Excitedly, Buñuel declared: “There’s the film, let’s go and make it.”
Got me a movie, I want you to know Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know
After World War II, Simone Mareuil returned to Périgueux, where she fell into a deep depression. She committed suicide by self-immolation — dousing herself in gasoline and burning herself to death in a public square.
Once you’ve seen Un Chien Andalou it becomes indelible in your film geography. A totemic key to any dream imagery or nightmare map you find yourself lost. I’ve watched it in A-Level Film Studies classes and standing up in art galleries but it works best at home. Somewhere between Laurel & Hardy and Tod Browning, this is the funniest terrifier ever made. Its easily digestible running time of 21 minutes means the shocks and the poetry never outstay their welcome or lose pace.
See The Golden Age for how important that last strength is. I know critics consider it just as “good” but for the casual viewer it is lengthy, indulgent, obscure and only very rarely attempts to illicit the high emotional reactions of its fore-bearer.
Andy Muschietti directs Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle and Michael Keaton in this superhero epic where The Flash travels back in time to save his mom and breaks reality as we know it.
An imperfect blockbuster almost crippled by bad timing. Ezra Miller’s dual performance is actually quite a lark if you can dial into it and ignore their real life woes. That tabloid scandal has delayed the release of this, as have a bottleneck of SFX houses able to work on the project (plus a corporate takeover at WB)… all meaning The Flash comes out a day late and dollar short. When it was announced that Keaton’s Batman and Batfleck would be crossing parallel universes in a Flash solo adventure 5 years ago it felt revolutionary. Since then, multiple Spider-outings have stolen that thunder and freshness by getting out of the multiverse / legacy reunion gate first. This has to be one of the most sophisticated and ambitious productions ever in terms of digitally rendered EVERYTHING so it is understandable some shots and set pieces take you out of the reality. The desert Royal Rumble stinks for incomplete shots but the Speed Force time bending and reality colliding moments have an impressionistic ugliness I wish they leaned even further into. As for fan service, there’s so much juicy stuff here. Some genuine surprises that make the whole endeavour feel valid. I think we now know there’s a back door for Wesley Snipes’ Blade to appear in a new Blade flick and Keanu’s Constantine to appear in Justice League Dark… or Henry Cavill to play Old Man Supes in a couple of decades time. The wrapper is off finality now. The Flash movie itself has spits and spurts of both boredom and excitement. It made me smile way too often for me to write it off due to the flaws everyone else is obsessed with focussing on. We still have an Aquaman 2 due before the franchise slate is reset, I doubt that will feel as much of a celebration of all things DCEU++ as this does. Bruv even tried to sell me a Nespresso at the end!
Ari Aster directs Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone and Amy Ryan in this pretentious shaggy dog story where a man basically crippled with neurosis goes on a near-pointless odyssey.
Doesn’t stretch Joaquin one little bit. And that is a waste. There’s a certain fecund blankness to his performance and the overall intent that chinstrokers and Letterboxd dweller might get lost in… for the rest of us though? Not much. The opening act is an anxiety nightmare, a near dystopian trip across the street. It had me. I’d watch this extended high wire sequence of urban horror again on its own and as daring filmmaking goes, the promise of what Ari Aster can achieve for me somehow always outweighs the flabby final product. The rest is two hours of patience testing rectum exploration followed by a gob in the mouth as an anti-comedy punchline. Oh dear. I went to a deserted late night showing of this with four big bullet cans of Innis & Gunn, a tube of Smokin’ Sweet Chilli Pringles and some cheap guacamole in my backpack. I made my own fun.
Tim Burton directs Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Martin Landau in this stop-motion animated tale of a suburban child scientist who resurrects his pet dog.
This starts out really beautifully but becomes repetitive and inessential very quickly. If you are Burton Head then it could be seen as a bit of a career celebration… Too much filler in this plasticine ‘wonder’. Maybe just stick to the original live action short?
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 