Elliot Silverstein directs Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin and Michael Callan in this musical comedy western about an accidental female outlaw.
Big, silly, not very sharp. Fonda is cartoonishly slinky, Marvin somehow picks up an Oscar for his laziest performance, Nat King Cole crops up as Greek Chorus style figure. There’s nothing wrong with it, its busy with shouty, shorty, flirty stuff. But there ain’t much to write home about either.
5
Julian Schnabel directs Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend and Oscar Isaac in this look at the last chaotic years of Vincent Van Gogh’s life.
This felt like being on the wrong side of eternity’s gate.
4
Ralph Fiennes directs Oleg Ivenko, himself and Adèle Exarchopoulos in this historical drama charting the ballet career of Rudolf Nureyev, building up to his defection from the USSR to the West in 1961.
Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, some muted dancing, dull then we get a thirty minute one act play set in a Paris airport where Nureyev has to decide to risk his life and abandon is career over a cafe au lait. That sequence is perfectly pitched and paced. All the childhood flashbacks and training, bed hopping and politics are ballast to make a feature length film from a great 30 minute short.
5
Peter Yates directs William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver and James Woods in this thriller where a janitor discovers a murder and uses his insider knowledge on the crime to leverage dates from a hot and hungry newshound.
A very strange Friday night throwaway thriller. Mossad people smugglers, Vietnam vets, affairs, disabled dads and dosed up pet dogs are piled on top of what should be quite a simple genre entertainment. The romance is icky (Hurt plays a manipulative weirdo… one who certainly wouldn’t be the hero in this current century’s cinema), the action sequences crop up randomly. It just never settles into anything consistent. Which is not to say barely connected scene to barely connected scene, this isn’t passable.
5
Tim Burton directs Danny DeVito, Michael Keaton and Colin Farrell in this remake of the flying elephant circus soap.
Whisper it but I think Tim Burton might be getting his mojo back. This is chaotic, maudlin and distracted yet it hits a visual authenticity that harks back to the bubblegum gothic that established him. A nostalgic cast, a trace of heart and soul. Like Miss Peregrine this isn’t a classic but it feels just a little more wholemeal than recent remakes and retreads by the former wunderkind. Circus freaks and and theme park satires, Burton’s touchstones and strengths find a home in a film that seems openly critical of Walt Disney-esque figures. Keaton’s otherworldly entertainment tycoon is a Satan in a luxury car. Strange for a remake of a Mousehouse property paid for, produced and put out by the corporation that bears his name to make their own figurehead the big bad?
6
My Top 10 Michael Keaton Movies
1. Out of Sight (1998)
2. Batman (1989)
3. Batman Returns (1992)
4. The Paper (1994)
5. Toy Story 3 (2010)
6. Birdman (2014)
7. Beetlejuice (1988)
8. Jackie Brown (1997)
9. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
10. Spotlight (2015)
Asghar Farhadi directs Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darín in this psychological thriller where a wedding reunion becomes a kidnapping mystery.
Watchable due to the talent involved, though only Javier Bardem’s star power is satisfyingly utilised throughout the lengthy running time. The set-up for an intense hostage negotiation gets sidelined by soapy revelations and crippling grief. By no means a bad film yet one that doesn’t stretch itself in any aspect.
6
Frank Capra directs Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt and Edward Everett Horton in this fantasy adventure where a plane full of Westerners discover Shangri-La hidden in the Tibetan mountains.
This has dated poorly. The utopia is creepy. The politics racist. We never recover from the all action opener. The first 15 minutes have an on-location chaos and scale that is impressive. You can see the influence on the entire Indiana Jones series in these sequences. Everything else that follows is overly talky and naive in comparison. Just when we threaten to get back to derring-do two hours later, the film is tied up by a new character, a stuffy official, recounting the excitement of a final act we never get to see for ourselves.
5
Sara Colangelo directs Maggie Gyllenhaal, Parker Sevak and Rosa Salazar in this drama where a frustrated teacher begins to exploit one of her 5 year old’s uncommon talent for poetry.
A complex and captivating central performance by the ever gorgeous Gyllenhaal motors this small scale affair. What starts as a twee and sunny character study lurches into darker places, the filmmakers intelligently pull the plug on the narrative as the bad choices become almost unbearably tragic.
7
Dennis Hauck directs John Hawkes, Crystal Reed and Dichen Lachman in this romantic neo-noir where a private detective looks for a missing girl he has history with around an L.A. filled with beautiful, sad women.
The trick, the hook, to Too Late is that it is just five scenes told out of sequence, each a long (seemingly unbroken) take where a little more of the mystery is clarified but more importantly the characters shift from being stock genre creations to something deeper. The opposite of Mystic River, then! In fact it would easy to be put off by the first and last five minutes. We meet a couple of rote drug dealers, straight out of the copycat Tarantino handbook. The kinda weak characters and rip-off dialogue that blighted the 1990s indie crime thriller in QT’s successful wake. Once they move out of focus though you forget them and even the formal trick of the movie. It is almost as the creative here is acknowledging on first glance that to be co-existing in the same hyper-aware, self-reflective City of Angels setting as Pulp Fiction at least needs referencing. “Here’s two mopes from Reindeer Games or The Last Days of Frankie the Fly… now let me do what I do that isn’t that or even what Quentin does!” What plays out is much richer. We essentially watch Hawke’s crumpled detective (he’s brilliant here as always) seduce a different beautiful woman in a little one act play. Times five. The dialogue has that hard boiled rat-a-tat poetry of a Chandler novel or a Bogart movie. The women seem embolden by having such richly written, deftly subtle parts. Hauck likes a certain type of actress… legs, rubbing up against middle aged, flinty, happy to have a camera follow their arse for endless periods. He gives these certain types the roles of their lives though. Their encounters with Hawkes dogged, sarcastic PI are crackling with attraction, tinged with loneliness and brutal in their witty power plays. It makes for a very stylish, gripping, gorgeous throwback of a mystery. Well worth tracking down. An underrated gem.
8
Clint Eastwood directs Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon in this American crime drama about three childhood friends reunited by the murder of one of their daughters and the dark history that tragedy dredges up.
I’m a big fan of Dennis Lehane’s writing – the authentic tours he gives of Boston’s neighbourhoods and organised crimes mundane workings, the unforced deconstruction of machismo, revenge and history repeating itself he achieves in nearly all his page turners. When adapted for the big screen, they feel like prestige projects rather than neo- noirs. Shutter Island, Gone Baby Gone and The Drop attract A-List casts and sophisticated directors. All cinematic translations focus on his rich ensemble of characters and deep, brooding emotion, the mystery elements often take the back seat as we watch criminals and victims, detectives and conspirators play out their lives. Mystic River is the finest film based on his writing. Clint directs it like an essay on America. He has a pitch perfect cast. Both Sean Penn and Tim Robbins turn in their very best work – large, broad, unrestrained performances that modulate between bellowing grief and seething threat. And the visuals are sublime, not least of which the iconic scene where Penn has to be swamped by uniform cops to restrain his rage. Then we have that ambiguous ending. Where America resets itself after all the doubt, violence and retribution… where the nuanced characters we met at the start have somehow reduced themselves back into stock roles. Gangster, cop, red herring. You can’t allow people to escape their past, not if you want the present to keep on marching.
10
