I have been reviewing films all my life, semi-professionally in the past and for the past 10 or 12 years on imdb and more recently in letterboxd and facebook. The idea of this blog is to get as many of those reviews gathered together in one place. I have had a great deal of support and encouragement from a lot of people throughout the world and I hope that continues. Now for the ratings. **** = not to be missed. *** = highly recommended. ** = recommended. * = of interest and no stars = avoid..
Thursday, 6 February 2025
THE BRUTALIST ****
The cinematic equivalent of those great door-stopper novels certain authors feel obliged to write from time to time, Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist" has a great deal to recommend it even if it does fall short of greatness, (a dip into melodrama slightly takes the edge off things near the end), and for a movie that runs for 3 hours and 35 minutes, (with a self-imposed 15 minute intermission), it fairly gallops along. Of course, it also leaves itself open to accusations of pretentiousness; this is a big movie with big ambitions, shot in 70 mm and in VistaVision.
It is the story of Laszlo Toth, (Adrien Brody in a career best performance), a Jewish Hungarian architect and a Holocaust survivor who, when the film opens, finds himself in America where he encounters the excessively rich Harrison Lee Van Buren, (Guy Pearce in another career best performance), who commissions him to design a building in memory of Van Buren's mother and basically that's it but if you think this might be just a long, boring film about buildings, think again. There is a depth and a depth of feeling to Corbet's film, (which he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold). rare in what we might describe as commercial cinema.
Toth has his demons and he carries them with him wherever he goes. He's an alcoholic and a drug-addict with a fierce temper and as it turns out those demons also make themselves manifest in the people around him and in particular in the man who might have been his savior. Pearce's Van Burren is a monster and it is his treatment of Toth that ultimately draws the film into the realms of melodrama. His wife, (Felicity Jones, very good), whom he left behind in Europe, when she does finally arrive, (after the intermission), turns out to be a lot tougher than she looks and maybe not quite as simpatico to Toth as he would have hoped. In other words, life seems to have dealt him a bad deal.
For the most part Corbet treats all of this with the straightest of faces and a considerable amount of technical skill. This is an epic of the old-fashioned kind; long, sprawling and perhaps biting off more than it can chew. Toth is a 20th Century Job and his ills do tend to become wearying after awhile and somewhat circuitous. There were times when I thought, haven't we been here before; just give the guy a break. And yet it's never miserabilist; there's a streak of black humor running through the film and it does provide a sense of closure. In fact, this is just the kind of film the Oscar-givers love.
Sunday, 26 January 2025
LONGLEGS no stars
This hugely overpraised horror film sacrifices suspense and shocks for a nonsensical plot about a serial killer though it would appear it's the Devil who takes centre stage. It says he gets the best tunes but it's unlikely any of his tunes here will chart. "Longlegs" is nothing more than a pretentious and self-consciously arty horror movie with a woefully one-dimensional performance from Maika Monroe as the FBI agent on Longleg's trail.
If the film has a plus side you could say it's very attractively photographed and the casting of an almost unrecognizable Nicholas Cage as the serial killer gives the film a certain OTT liveliness but the psuedo-supernatural element and all that business with the dolls scuppers the film. Whatever happened to the good old bad old days of the likes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" when serial killers were serial killers and devil dolls were devil dolls and never the twain met. Mostly a load of codswallop.
THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE **
Horror movies come in all shapes and sizes and there's no denying that black and white Nordic art-house movies, by their very 'look', can often be classed as horror movies particularly when set in the past and dealing with what we might call 'grim' subject matter. Magnus von Horn's "The Girl with the Needle" qualifies on all accounts from the superimposed faces and silent screams of its pre-credit sequence to its attempted abortion with a needle in a Turkish bath and that's before we even get close to the film's real horrors; the ghost of Bergman is never far away.
Karoline, (Vic Carmen Sonne, excellent), is a young seamstress whose husband comes back from the Great War with most of his face missing while she's pregnant by her employer who drops her like a hot potato. She is saved from a botched abortion by Dagmar, (a terrific Trine Dyrholm), who seems to be running some kind of black market adoption agency and who takes Karoline under her wing but this so-called act of kindness isn't what it seems.
The horrors inherent here are the horrors of trying to survive in a cruel world in which survival doesn't seem like an option. This is the grimmest of morality plays in which every image feels like a slap in the face. It might look amazing but as we come to realize just how terrible the actions of these people are the further we withdraw from them and from the movie itself. As I said, horror movies come in all shapes and sizes.
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