A seriously solid, if not very imaginative, piece of historical pageantry, (Oscar winning costume design for starters), about the English Civil War and in particular, Oliver Cromwell's role in it. Ironically, in view of Cromwell's association with Ireland, he is played, and very well, by the Irish actor Richard Harris. The King is a very well cast Alec Guinness, (looking just like the many portraits of the time), and a host of acting royalty, (Dorothy Tutin, Robert Morley, Patrick Wymark, Patrick Magee, Frank Finlay, Nigel Stock), provide staunch support. Ultimately it works best as a beautifully photographed history lesson, (Geoffrey Unsworth is the DP). The director, Ken Hughes, who also wrote the verbose screenplay, does little to make it lively, though the battle scenes are spectacular and it's both handsome and intelligent. Worth seeing.
An entertaining, if overly complicated, thriller about murder and corruption involving City Hall. It aims for the same kind of labyrinth, noirish feel that distinguished "Chinatown" but falls far short. Mark Wahlberg is the ex-cop who is being set up, Russell Crowe, (very good), is the corrupt mayor and Catherine Zeta-Jones is the mayor's wife and others in a good supporting cast include Kyle Chandler, Jeffrey Wright, Barry Pepper and Griffin Dunne. The problem is there's just too much plot, most of it shrouded in mystery, with what I percieved to be a gay subplot getting lost in the mix. On the plus side, director Allen Hughes never pauses for breath and it looks great, (Ben Seresin was the DP), but it wasn't much of a success and has largely been forgotten.
You might not guess it from the title or from the content or the lact of content or indeed anything else but this little-seen movie is an adaptation of a Henry James novella that begins in a contemporary setting before moving back in time to a more typically Jamesian era and then forward again. Co-written and directed by Clara van Gool, "The Beast in the Jungle" is a strange, slow mix of dance, theatre and film unlikely to trouble the mulitplex crowd of a Saturday night. This Netherlands produced, English-language picture is Art House with a capital A and is hugely pretentious. It's little wonder it came and went without anyone noticing. Nobody acts in the film; they just say their lines and move around each other and while it's less than 90 minutes long it feels as if it's going on forever.
It would be sad if "Harriet" is remembered for being the only 2019 movie to feature an Oscar-nominated performance from a Black artist. Of course, my problem with the diversity issue isn't so much that Black artists aren't nominated but that Black artists aren't getting the roles that would get them nominated. "Harriet" is the story of Harriet Tubman, the American slave who practically waged a revolution against slavery from the inside. It's just the kind of meaty, real-life role Oscar loves and newcomer Cynthia Erivo is very good in the part but there is something sanitised and inspirational about the film itself, (lots of gospel singing in the face of adversity).
Tubman has become an American legend and while director and co-writer Kassi Lemmons, (she made "Eve's Bayou"), have tried to add a degree of complexity to her character, (using spells to bring about the death of her white master), the film's trajectory is still conventional, not to mention factually dubious. It's a story worth telling and it's a well-made movie but it lacks imagination; this is the Reader's Digest view of history and no-one other than Harriet herself stands out. It's just a pity the movie doesn't measure up to her.
Sometimes the great masterpieces of world cinema sneak in and then out of our field of vision and indeed our consciousness before we have time to recognise them. This was certainly true of Dariush Mehrjui's Iranian film "The Cow" which he made in 1969. A lot of people know it by reputation yet few have seen it. (It was initially banned by the Iranian government and had to be smuggled out of the country). It's a folk-tale, primitive not just in its setting but in its style of telling which will be familiar, nevertheless, to those who know Italian neo-realist cinema or perhaps the early films of Michael Cacoyannis.
The thin plot involves the death of a beloved cow belonging to Mash Hassan and of the villagers initial attempts to hide the death from him and, while an intensely visual work, was originally based on a play. The world it presents is, of course, alien to those of us in the West; a world that is simplistic, at times savage and even surreal. This is truly a world apart. In some respects this is a great tragic-comedy, the story of a man, magnificently played by the great Iranian actor Ezzatolah Entezami, so devoted to his beloved cow that he not only refuses to believe she's dead but that he himself has become the animal. In fact, this could easily have come from the pen of Kafka or Ionesco and its neglect these past 50 years is positively shameful.
The director was Charles Crichton, the starry cast included Stephen Boyd, Richard Attenborough, Jack Hawkins, (terrific and walking off with the movie), Diane Cilento, Paul Rogers, a fourteen year old Pamela Franklin and a certain Judi Dench in her film debut while Douglas Slocombe did the superb cinematography in black and white Cinemascope so why was "The Third Secret" such a load of old codswallop for most of its length. Easy; the script by Producer Robert L Joseph was a stinker.
It's a whodunit but given the material it's hard to care which of psychiatrist Peter Copley's patients bumped him off. The police have it down as suicide but his daughter, (a precocious Miss Franklin), believes it was murder and asks television journalist Boyd, (himself a patient), to play sleuth. Given the funereal pace of his investigation, (and the movie), it's difficult to see what audience the producers thought they might have. Perhaps they felt the cast alone would bring them in but the film has largely disappeared and is now of interest only for its use of London locations and for Judi Dench completists. Otherwise, something of a folly.
Joanna Hogg's most recent film "The Souvenir" has been hailed as a masterpiece although personally I think it's a little too precious for masterpiece status. For me, her real masterpiece is her debut film "Unrelated" in which a group of truly appalling people, (an extended family and their friend, Anna), spend a summer together in Tuscany. The film is scripted and the people on screen are, mostly, actors but it could be a documentary or even an autopsy as Hogg dissects their lives in close-up. Seldom have people I despised as much on film proved to be so fascinating and it's entirely down to Hogg's superlative direction and the extraordinary performances of the cast.
A horror movie but not in the way you might think. "Buy Me a Gun" could just as easily be called 'Field of Nightmares', set as it is around a deserted baseball camp used by Mexican drug cartels and looked after by Rogelio and his young daughter Huck who has to wear a mask to hide her identity. It's a terrifying film about simple, everyday violence from which no-one, particularly children, is safe. At the beginning we hear the voice of little Huck telling us that everything in the film is real and it certainly feels that way. Huck's dad is a drug addict and it's in drugs, not money, that the cartel pay him for looking after the field but as Huck observes, he's also lucky and that's why he's survived.
Kelly Reichardt's "River of Grass" may borrow more than liberally from early Terrence Malick but is none the worse for it. It's a shaggy dog story told with some humour and is certainly a lot less sonorous than the films that followed. It may be a fairly minor work, (we're not talking "Badlands" here, even with the Sissy Spacek like narration), but it has a goofy charm despite the ropey, amateurish performances and at 76 minutes is pleasantly short. It also makes good use of its depressingly bland Florida locations. If it doesn't mark Reichardt out as a major talent it shows that she was at least worth watching.
Narcissism run riot and for collectors of celebrity gossip and curios only. "That Summer" is something of a companion piece to "Grey Gardens" featuring some of the same characters, (the Beales, mostly), but it's really nothing more than the home-movies of Peter Beard, whose friends included Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, Truman Capote. Andy Warhol etc. and it's full of the indolent doodling of the super-rich. These people are so cut off from the real world they may as well be living on Mars. What's more, the cheap home-movie look of the picture is positively headache-inducing at times and like "Grey Gardens", there's something ghoulish about it but at least "Grey Gardens" felt like a real film, despite being highly intrusive. This is more like a vanity project gone wrong; a road-kill of a movie if there ever was one.
I like Tom Hanks; in fact, I like Tom Hanks a lot. I even think that, at his best, he can be a great actor but I wanted to kill Forrest Gump and now, all these years later, I want to kill Fred Rogers, the character, indeed the real-life character, Hanks plays in Marielle Heller's "A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood". Mr Rogers, as he is known on American television, is one of those 'inspirational' TV hosts who teaches life lessons to children and shows them how to be 'nice' and apparently he's very good at it. In fact, he's something of a legend on American television. However, Heller's film isn't a biopic of Fred Rogers anymore than her "Can You Ever Forgive Me" was a biopic of Lee Israel. Rather it's the story of the friendship that developed between Rogers and the journalist Tom Junod, here renamed Lloyd Vogel and played by Matthew Rhys and the film is as twee as I imagined it was going to be.