Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece of voyeurism, imagination and obsession, desire and control, was released on this day 66 years ago. Only recently deposed from its position as the greatest film of all time in the ten-year Sight & Sound poll, it was a flop on its release. As David Thomson says, We have learned how to watch it, and we have discovered the mortified figure Hitchcock often masked with his comedian persona. Charles Barr describes its impact: This story of a man who develops a romantic obsession with the image of an enigmatic woman has commonly been seen, by his colleagues as well as by critics and biographers, as one that engaged Hitchcock in an especially profound way; and it has exerted a comparable fascination on many of its viewers.
Adapted by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor (with an initial uncredited draft from playwright Maxwell Anderson) from Boileau- Narcejac’s novel D’entre les morts (trans: The Living and the Dead) it can be summarised as a haunting.
Retired San Francisco police detective John ‘Scotty’ Ferguson (James Stewart) is hired by wealthy old friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to investigate his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) who is exhibiting strange behaviour.
He rescues her from the water at the Golden Gate Bridge near Fort Point.
He fails to save her when she plunges to her death from the bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista.
He meets Judy (Kim Novak), a dead ringer for Madeleine.
He makes her over so she looks identical to Madeleine …
There were mixed reviews although critics in the US liked it rather more than their British counterparts. Eric Rohmer’s review for Cahiers du Cinema commented, Ideas and forms follow the same road, and it is because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich, and free that we can say that Hitchcock’s films, with Vertigo at their head, are about ideas, in the noble, platonic sense of the word.
What if I could be the sort of person who goes camping by myself? Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Forty-year old Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is a gallery owner and divorcee who plans a solo camping trip while her ex-husband Daniel (Reid Scott) takes their daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) and her friends to Coachella. When he is called away on work assignment to Huston, she is left to accompany them. Daniel has arranged for a meet and greet with famous boy band August Moon, despite Izzy now dismissing them as so seventh grade. While waiting in the VIP area, Solène enters what she believes is a bathroom, only to discover that it is August Moon member Hayes Campbell’s (Nicholas Galitzine) trailer. The two are attracted to each other, although Solène, who is sixteen years older than Hayes, is uncomfortable. During August Moon’s performance, Hayes appears to change the show’s setlist, dedicating a song to her. Solène attends her birthday party where is fed up with prospective men her own age. Shortly after the festival, Hayes shows up unannounced at Solène’s gallery, interested in purchasing art. After he buys every piece at the gallery, Solène takes him to a friend’s warehouse studio, where they discuss life and art. After thinking that a restaurant would invite too much attention, the two go to Solène’s house to eat. They share a kiss, but Solène rebuffs him. Hayes leaves his watch behind, then, finding Solène’s phone number on the gallery invoice, texts her to join him in New York at the Essex Hotel. With Izzy away at summer camp, Solène meets him at his hotel where they have sex. Hayes persuades her to travel with him on August Moon’s European tour. Solène wishes to keep their relationship private and does not tell Izzy or anyone else. As the band takes a break at a villa in the south of France, Solène becomes uncomfortable about her age in relation to the other women travelling with them. Bandmate Olly (Raymond Cham Jr) tells her that Hayes’s dedicating a song to her is a tactic they use to impress women and that Hayes has previously pursued relationships with older women including a 35-year old Swedish film star he embarrassed. Solène feels misled and disillusioned and abruptly returns to Los Angeles … Is this your first time getting Mooned? Adapted by director Michael Showalter and co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt from actress Robinne Lee’s bestseller, this sees Hathaway getting into her groove in a seriously romantic drama. The ironic trigger for everything that now happens in her life is her ex’s need to prioritise himself and his business – just as his affair ended their marriage. When she meets a guy 16 years her junior and he reveals his own fear they find a kind of balance. He says: I think that’s my greatest fear in life – that I’m a joke. She counters with: What will people say? Galitzine at first seems like an overwhelmingly gallant white knight and Hathaway positively glows: being adored suits her. Watching her shrug off the mid-life nonsense purveyed by divorced men who insist on talking about themselves all the time is infectious – she is not in crisis. Naturally, once she goes on the road with the band Hayes’ alley cat past comes back to haunt him in a way that hers haunts her decision-making and the wheels come off when she can’t take the heat. The publicity leads her husband to gloat, I’m sure we can all agree that a relationship with a 24-year old pop star would be crazy on so many levels. Yet her daughter argues, Why would you break up with a talented kind feminist? And, for a while, it works, until the Moonfans get their way on social media. Tracy (Annie Mumolo) makes for a great BFF when she comforts Solène, People hate happy women. And that of course is the point. Women are supposed to suffer! Their cheating exes hate them except when they do what they’re told! Their kids don’t let them have a life if they’re not at the centre of everything! Other women hate them! Watching this lovely woman change her opinion of herself and her possibilities in the reflection of how a new guy sees her is wonderful. How the story beats are worked out might not be surprising but to say this is pleasurable and crowd-pleasing is an understatement: it’s a deeply sexy film. The leads are more than persuasive as the well met age-difference match, the scenario a delirium of groupiedom wish fulfilment (She’s with the boy band!!) and it’s all beautifully made with due diligence concerning the social media pile-on which is all too realistic as is the message that love at any age is a trial. A splendid soundtrack peppered with everyone from Fiona Apple to St Vincent as well as the songs from August Moon and Hayes as a singer-songwriter in his own right (with a score by Siddartha Khosla) makes this a total delight. Directed by Michael Showalter. We’re two people with trust issues who need to open up a little. What’s the worst that can happen?
They should have let me in. Sicily. At a remote winery Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) kills gangster Lorenzo Vitale (Bruno Bilotta) and his henchmen to obtain a key to the winery’s vault and recoup money stolen in a cyber-heist. While leaving the winery, Robert is shot in the back by Vitale’s young grandson (Adriano Sabrie). Robert attempts suicide due to his injury but finds his gun out of bullets and then takes the ferry back to the mainland. While driving on the Amalfi Coast, Robert pulls over and slips into unconsciousness from shock. He is found and rescued by local carabiniere Gio Bonucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea) who brings Robert to a small coastal Italian town called Altamonte where he is treated by a doctor, Enzo Arisio (Remo Girone). As he recovers and regains his mobility Robert becomes acquainted with the locals and becomes fond of the town and its people. He makes an anonymous phone call to CIA officer Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) to tip her off about the winery’s role in the drug trade, disguised as normal business transactions in Sicily. Collins and other CIA operatives arrive at the winery and find millions in cash along with bags of synthetic amphetamines used by ISIS terrorists hidden in a storeroom, confirming Robert’s suspicions. Meanwhile, members of the Camorra harass and kill villagers in an attempt to coerce them out of their housing and take over Altamonte for property development. Robert overhears Marco Quaranta (Andrea Dodero) a high-ranking Camorra member, pressuring local shop owner Angelo (Daniele Perrone) for protection payments. To make an example of him, the Camorra firebombs Angelo’s fish store as the entire town watches. Gio reviews video of the firebombing and calls the Italian central police for an inquiry. Along with his wife Chiara (Sonia Ben Ammar) and daughter Gabriella (Dea Lanzaro), Gio is attacked by the Camorra and beaten for interfering in their operations. Thereafter, Marco demands that Gio set up a boat for him. Overhearing the conversation, Robert asks Marco to move his operations to a different location. When Marco refuses, Robert kills him and his henchmen. The Naples head of police Chief Barella (Adolfo Margiotta) is threatened and tortured by Marco’s brother Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio) the head of the Camorra and is ordered to find the person responsible for Marco’s death … Those people don’t know where to go. Our favourite vigilante returns to equalize everything in sight, starting with the mysterious catalyst whose payoff takes the entire film to establish. Transported to Sicily and the Italian mainland, the violence returns with verve in Robert Wenk’s screenplay, the scribe of the others in the series, in the finale adapted from the TV show that starred Edward Woodward and was created by Michael Sloan and Richard Lindheim. What do you see when you look at me? McCall is ageing now and even he must be tired of all the killing. Lord knows I’m allergic to bad things. Availing of R&R in a pretty village with a pleasant woman restaurateur Aminah (Gaia Scodellaro) which introduces the hint if not the actuality of romance and a civilised doctor to oversee his recuperation he’s glad of it. Do I look like a guy who kills people? That’s an existential question that’s really kinda silly at this point in the trilogy: this film commences with a horrifying sequence of murders – yes, we know it’s McCall doing in some of the Camorra but it’s extremely shocking. Giving the CIA a tip-off is just the start of an elaborate denouement which unearths a terror cell and reveals the extent of the Mafia’s viciousness. The phone relationship with Emma is a preview of coming attractions: You don’t look like you sound/You do! That’s the opening gambit when they finally come face to face 48 minutes in. In these films Denzel is paired with younger women in a non-romantic way – they get the opportunity to do stuff and he returns to pleasantly predictable vengeful type. It’s his question to her that makes her think of the situation from a different angle: Why smuggle drugs into the most secure port in the entire region? That sets her off doing what he knows she will – directing the CIA action where it needs to go and hopefully keeping her out of the line of fire. While the women in this series are given an opportunity for some action it’s curtailed as here, where a well-timed call saves her but effectively puts her out of action – allowing him to rescue her and save the day because he’s the hero and that’s his job. That’s appropriate considering their previous pairing two decades ago in Man On Fire. Washington is an incredibly charismatic movie star and it’s a relief to have the first 45 minutes dedicated to rebuilding his constitution which allows him to cultivate relationships while the gangsters have their way with the locals, setting up an awesome revenge. His medical treatment and slow recovery gives the audience a chance to recover too before the inevitable kicks in. His visceral method leads him to explain his MO to a victim: It’s called pain compliance. It’s like he’s a doctor too! Shot in a palette verging on monochrome with chiaroscuro features by the brilliant Robert Richardson, the scheme complements the black and white morality, with the amorphous evil villainy of the Mafia rather less attractive than the mesmerising Marton Csokas in the first outing. It’s a stylish way for the series to take a bow – a kind of revenge Western with some spaghetti thrown in for good measure and a coda that explains why McCall fetched up there in the first place, a one-man reenacting of The Magnificent Seven against the mafia on their own turf. Directed as ever by Antoine Fuqua. I’m where I’m supposed to be
We are now closer than we have ever been to victory. The near future. A civil war has broken out between an authoritarian US Government and various regional factions. The dictatorial President (Nick Offerman) who is serving a third term, claims that victory is close at hand. Renowned war photojournalist, Colorado-born Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) saves aspiring photojournalist Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny) from a suicide bombing in Brooklyn. Lee and her colleague, Florida-born Reuters journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) intend travelling to Washington DC to interview and photograph the president before the city falls. Lee’s mentor New York Times veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson)asks to accompany them as far as Charlottesville where the Western Forces (‘WF’) of Texas and California are presently assembling. Despite Lee’s hesitance she and Joel agree. Unbeknownst to Lee, Jessie persuades Joel to take her with them as well. After leaving NYC, the group stops at a rural gas station protected by armed men where Lee negotiates the purchase of fuel in Canadian dollars. Jessie wanders off to a nearby car wash, which she saw from the road. There, she finds two men being tortured by the owners, who claim that the men are looters. One owner follows Jessie but Lee defuses the situation by taking a photo of the man posing with his victims. After leaving, Jessie berates herself for being too scared to take photos. Following an overnight stop close to ongoing fighting, the group documents the combat the next day as militiamen assault a building held by loyalists. Lee sees Jessie’s potential as a war photographer, while Jessie photographs the militia executing captured loyalist soldiers. Continuing on, the group spends the night at a refugee camp before passing through a small town where, under watchful guard, residents attempt to live in blissful ignorance. Look at the tops of the buildings. Be subtle. Lee and Jessie grow closer, trying on clothes at a local shop. Later, they are pinned down in a sniper battle amid the remains of a Winter Wonderland theme park. No one’s giving us orders, man. Someone’s trying to kill us and we’re trying to kill them. The snipers they are with mock Joel’s attempts to ascertain which party they are fighting for or against, telling Joel that they and the sniper in a nearby house are simply engaged in a struggle for survival. Jessie’s nerve builds and her photography skills improve as she witnesses several deaths and she develops a mentorship under Lee … They shoot journalists on sight in the capital. Writer/director Alex Garland’s latest film plugs into the inflammatory State of the Union as it currently pertains, figuring a fissure that is as much physical as ideological with the Western secessionist states of California and Texas pitched against the federal forces that protect a President hiding out in the White House. Garland’s work from The Beach onwards has focused on trouble in paradise and lately on dystopia. Lee and Joel are both camouflaging psychological disturbance from previous war zones – she has PTSD, he has modern-day shellshock and Lee especially exhibits something world weary cynicism to control symptoms that threaten to erupt into something worse. It’s gonna make a good image. How that dissonance within Lee translates into a kind of mentoring relationship with Jessie reflecting Sammy’s relationship with her provides much of the tension as the action and violence spiral the further into the US they travel. I remember you at her age. The juxtaposing of beautiful landscapes with jarring imagery of shock and awe combat provides much of the troubling visual texture. The sense of reality, the minutiae of a road trip under fire and the urgency of the storytelling has the quality of reportage from the front line. The fact that Lee wants to photograph the President to prove he is still alive speaks volumes. What happens ultimately is straight out of the Romanian playbook. The ones who get taken are always lesser men than you think. With no enemies identified, the viewer is asked to come to their own conclusions, a motley crew of varying protagonist-journalists providing a kind of collegiate and immersive focus group of the population, a prism for coming to terms with radical change and war as Americans fight Americans. Every instinct in me tells me this is death. Whether the presence and role of good old-fashioned photojournalists recording events makes a difference is not really questioned here – it’s presumed necessary for history: proof that things are happening because seeing is believing. Hence the acknowledged reference to Lee Miller in Dunst’s character’s name. What kind of American are you? A powerful state of the nation portrait that feels immediate and true. What happened back there is nothing in comparison with what we’re heading into
I’ll be chopped up into little pieces and end up all over the river. Montreal Airport: Lisa (Samantha Jones) takes a flight from to New York City, smuggling bags of heroin sewn inside an old-fashioned doll. When she disembarks, she becomes worried on seeing a man (Alan Arkin) watching her from the airport roof. She gives the doll to a fellow passenger, professional photographer Sam Hendrix (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.), for safekeeping. She is roughly escorted away by the other man. A few days later, con artists Mike Talman (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston) a crooked NYPD cop, arrive at the Greenwich Village apartment of Sam, recently married to Susy (Audrey Hepburn), who was newly blinded in an accident, believing it to be Lisa’s place. Harry Roat, the man who met Lisa at the airport, arrives to persuade Talman and Carlino to help him find the doll. After the con men discover Lisa’s body hanging in a wardrobe in Susy’s apartment, Roat blackmails them into helping him dispose of it and convinces them to help him find the doll. While Sam is on an assignment, the criminals begin an elaborate con using Susy’s blindness against her and posing as different people to win her trust. Implying that Lisa has been murdered and that Sam will be suspected, the men persuade Susy to help them find the doll. Mike, posing as Sam’s old army buddy using information gleaned from his previous recce, gives her the number for the phone booth across the street as his own after falsely warning her of a police car outside the basement apartment. Gloria (Julie Herrod) a girl who lives in an upstairs apartment and who had borrowed the doll without permission, sneaks in to return it. She reveals to Susy that there is no police car outside. After calling Mike and realising it’s the phone booth’s number, Susy figures out that the three men are criminals and hides the doll. She tells them it’s at Sam’s studio and the three leave after Roat cuts the telephone line. Carlino stays behind to stand guard outside the building. Susy sends Gloria to the bus station to wait for Sam. When she finds out that the telephone cord has been cut, she prepares to defend herself by breaking all the lightbulbs in the apartment except for the safelight. When did you figure it out about me? When Mike returns, he realises that she knows the truth and demands the doll but she refuses to cooperate. He tells her that he has sent Carlino to kill Roat. Having anticipated their plan, Roat has killed Carlino instead, and then kills Mike on the doorstep of Susy’s apartment, his body falling down the stairs. Intent on acquiring the doll, Roat threatens to set the apartment on fire … Do I have to be the world’s champion blind lady? Alfred Hitchcock said you acquire a play for its construction and he should know. He developed Dial M For Murder by Frederick Knott with great success (especially for his new muse Grace Kelly) and this similar chamber piece by Knott was a huge Broadway hit starring Lee Remick that became a vehicle for Audrey Hepburn with her husband Mel Ferrer in the producer’s seat (a situation that apparently contributed to the end of their already fraught union). Warner Bros. had bought the property prior to its Broadway success so convinced were they of its possibilities but according to her biographer Alexander Walker, Hepburn wanted her participation announced quickly to avoid the situation she’d endured with My Fair Lady when she was accused of stealing the lead from an untested Julie Andrews so discussions were going on prior to the production of How To Steal a Million in 1965. For tax reasons Hepburn wanted to shoot in Europe but that preference and her wish to be costumed by Givenchy was knocked on the head. Initially the aforementioned Hitchcock was mooted as possible director but he immediately rejected the studio’s offer because of Hepburn’s leaving No Bail for the Judge half a dozen years earlier when she wouldn’t agree to the inclusion of a violent rape scene and the project remained unmade. Thus charming British James Bond helmer Terence Young, who a teenage Hepburn had helped escape from Holland when he was shot down during the war, was in the director’s chair. Hepburn prepared meticulously for the role, visiting a clinic for the blind in Lausanne and continuing at the Lighthouse Clinic in New York where some of the film was made (as well as in Toronto) prior to shooting at Warners’ Burbank studio in Hollywood. For all of Hepburn’s detailed physical work, she ended up having to wear hard contact lenses to cover up her inimitably sparkling eyes, removing at least one of her trademarks which cinematographer Charles Lang did his best to illuminate. In a way this is a fraternal (or sororal) twin to the setup in Hepburn’s comic thriller Charade, with three men after something Hepburn doesn’t know she possesses. This thriller as adapted by husband and wife screenwriting team Robert Carrington & Jane-Howard Carrington has no comedy elements however and the premise starts by setting up a drug smuggling story in Canada with a deliriously beautiful woman (model Jones) who will eventually be found dead in one deeply awful moment of discovery: first when she’s seen by Mike and then when Susy puts on her scarf and unwittingly disturbs the dead woman’s hair. It’s a perverse sign of things to come. Arkin’s splashy star-making triple role of the various Roat characters might logically be questioned – how can our blind protagonist spot the difference? (She notes the commonality, in fact). Roat dispenses with his goons as expected and they are performed exceedingly well by the charming Crenna and compelling Weston, both of whom exhibit traces of guilt and fear. Damn it, you act as if you’re in kindergarten! This is the big bad world, full of mean people, where nasty things happen! In the end it’s a one on one fight and when the camera shoots wide for the final attack on Hepburn cinema audiences screamed louder than they’d done since Psycho: theatre owners were warned to turn down their lights to make it an immersive experience. It’s a brilliant shock, a literal jump scare, excellently staged. Everything in the suspenseful narrative leading up to that situation is about how Susy compensates for her devastating sight loss – that’s a classic dramatic writing tool, utilising the protagonist’s apparent weakness and turning it to their advantage. There’s a terrific performance by child actor Herrod as the ungainly little girl whose behaviour is entirely unpredictable but who ultimately proves her worth as an ally, providing Susy with the eyesight she no longer has. This is all about how appearances can be deceptive. Everything planted is paid off in spades. Hepburn may not be outfitted in her preferred designer but she is gifted another Henry Mancini score (using two pianos, a quarter tone apart with eerie echoing phrases) and theme song to accompany this wholly impressive heroine, stripped back to her essence, deprived of one of her senses, cornered behind a refrigerator door by a drug-ridden madman, fighting for her life. It’s a totally committed physical performance, among Hepburn’s very best. Despite receiving an Academy Award nomination, her fifth, she wouldn’t make another film for eight years, divorcing Ferrer, marrying a Roman psychiatrist and having another child, before the world of cinema finally lured her back to Robin and Marian. She would reunite a few years following that with director Young for Bloodline, a disappointing potboiler. How would you like to something difficult and incredibly dangerous?
See you yesterday. New Orleans. A ferry carrying US Navy sailors and their families across the Mississippi River for the Mardi Gras celebrations explodes, killing 543 people. ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) Special Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) evidence of a bomb planted by a domestic terrorist and goes to the mortuary where he examines the body of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) seemingly killed in the explosion but found in the river shortly before the time of the blast. Informing Claire’s father and searching her apartment, Doug learns that she called his ATF office the morning of the bombing and figures out that she was abducted and killed by the bomber hours before the explosion. Impressed with Doug’s deductive ability, FBI Special Agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) invites him to join a new governmental unit investigating the bombing. Led by Dr. Alexander Denny (Adam Goldberg) the team uses a surveillance programme called Snow White which they claim uses previous satellite footage to form a triangulated image of events four-and-a-half days in the past. Convinced that Claire is a vital link to the unfolding bomb plot, Doug watches her footage and can track the soon-to-be-bomber when he calls about a truck she has for sale. Figuring out that Snow White is actually a time window, Doug persuades the team to send a note to his past self with the time and place the suspect will be. However it’s his partner Larry Minuti (Matt Craven) finds the note instead, and is shot attempting to arrest the suspect. By using a mobile Snow White unit, Doug is able to follow the suspect’s past movements as he flees to his hideout with the wounded Minuti and then witnesses Minuti’s murder. In the present, the bomber is taken into custody after facial recognition systems identify him as Carroll Oerstadt (Jim Caviezel) an unstable self-proclaimed patriot rejected from enlisting in the military. He confesses to killing Minuti and Claire, taking her truck to transport the bomb and staging her death as one of the ferry victims. The government closes the investigation, but Doug, convinced that Snow White can be used to alter history persuades Denny to send him back to the morning of the bombing so he can save Claire and prevent the explosion … What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world but you knew they would never believe you? The premise of this dazzling sci-fi action thriller is perfectly preposterous but is set up so persuasively it never fails to engage. It helps that this has Washington at his most movie star-ish as you’d expect in his third of five collaborations with director Tony Scott, whose command of the medium is embellished by Paul Cameron’s elegant cinematography. For once in my life I’d like to catch somebody before they do something horrible. The actual time capsule that Doug enters literally enables a race against time. What if it’s more than physics? That’s what Doug suggests to elevate rationale for the potential experience because he’s fallen head over heels for the gorgeous Claire on the mortician’s slab so he calls it spirituality but it’s good old fashioned romance – and he means to have this woman come back from the dead. Seeing her eventually spring back to life is fabulous. One man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot. As the domestic murderer paying homage to Oklahoma, Caviezel has the blankness to match his unshakeable convictions that what he is doing is righteous. Satan reasons like a man but God thinks of eternity, Doug counters with unarguable post hoc knowledge which momentarily throws his captive. Then there’s nothing for it but to enter the world as it was days earlier – and to alter one more bit of history to try change the outcome for hundreds of people: alt-history as we watch. There’s a terrific supporting cast including Kilmer and also Bruce Greenwood and the director’s wife, Donna. Super-stylish, fast-moving and an avowed homage to the great city of N’Oleans, cher. Written by Bill Marsilli & Terri Rossio. I see what’s coming
That’s where we’re at, Future Angie! After her parents, Chinese father Fai (KaiChow Lau) and American mother Veronica (Liz Waters), suddenly get divorced, high school student and teen artist Angie Chen (Emma Galbraith) records her thoughts for a video diary and turns to secret hookups with her private school’s most popular jock Liam (William Magnuson). They keep the relationship secret from their friends and Liam is already dating the whitest person Angie could ever imagine, popular blonde influencer Sheryl White (Emily Garrett). Angie and Liam hook up after school in her bedroom and Angie thinks he feels about her how she does about him but at the same time gains empowerment from a gradual mastery of sex, which briefly engenders fantasies about other boys in school. Then she discovers her father has moved on from his family with a new woman in his life, another Chinese, Min (ShanShan Jin) whose daughter Fang (Thanh Phuong Bui) is Angie’s age. When Angie has to contend with being paired in class with Sheryl for a literature project she discovers appearances can be deceptive because Sheryl’s life is far from perfect. The girls have a lot in common. Angie realises that Liam is playing them both when he refuses to split with Sheryl and Angie confesses to Sheryl about their relationship. Then Min teases Angie about her inability to speak Mandarin and Angie causes a quarrel at her father’s house. Her life seems to be falling apart then her mother realises Angie has been having sex … I really like driving you home and sometimes it’s the best part of my day. A portrait of the artist as a girl, Mei Makino’s funny and affecting debut feature as writer and director debut is complex, smart and true. It’s like real life but you get to control everything. That’s what Angie tells Liam about playing Sims but it’s how she’d like her home existence after her father leaves and her hard-working lawyer mom leaves bagel bites for dinner. I know Liam is sort of an asshole but he’s MY asshole. The best looking guy in the school also appears to have it all but when he and Angie get together he tells her things she thinks are real revelations. When he’s with me in my room he’s not just the hot guy at school. When he seems to regret telling her about his life and bolts early one morning, she figures it’s just reluctance to be open but he still has Sheryl and keeps Angie his secret. But she too is complicit in this hidden relationship. Can we just have a Coke and a smile? he pleads when Angie wants to learn more about him. They are vulnerable to each other but it remains within the four walls of her bedroom. Is that love? Angie ponders. Don’t you want to soak up all life has to offer? he asks, offering her a spliff. This is a hedonist in the making. Maybe Min and Fong give him something that Mom and I never could. The issue of Angie’s biracial identity is horrifically exposed when Sheryl’s mom (Jane Schwartz) compliments her on her Asian-ness – Sheryl’s humiliation is beautifully expressed. The hit is twofold when Min shames Angie over her inability to speak her father’s language. The cultural gap is now a gaping chasm. The maturity that Angie experiences is achieved through empathy – with Sheryl and with her father. She recognises that other people have different outlooks and lives. Of Liam she concludes, It’s funny how he was this mythical presence in my life. When I look at him now he’s just a boy. That’s quite the take home lesson from teenage love: guys will be guys, no matter how they’re dressed up. Wonderfully performed, this is simultaneously obvious and subtle, just like teen life. Angie’s artwork is by Texan illustrator Larissa Akhmetova, as playful and delightful as the film’s protagonist. Okay Future Angie, I can feel your judgment!
I’m in this thing and after today everyone is going to know about us. Riko (Adam Deacon) and Kane (Jazzie Zonzolo) are two friends living in a flat in East London who dream of being taken seriously as roadmen. They are in debt of £15,000 to a local Indian crime family, the Patels. Kane failed to get the money after selling drugs to a Somali gang, but was instead beaten up. They devise a plan to get the money to pay them back. First, they attempt to sell a mobile phone to two other men, but they decline as it meant to be a gun after Kane mistook the word strap. The second attempt has them trying to rob megastar Lethal Bizzle but end up getting knocked out, stripped and embarrassed in front of everyone while a Link Up TV cameraman records their predicament. The video goes viral and makes the two a laughing stock. For a third attempt, they hold up the local bank but after an argument accidentally reveal their identities. Leo DeMarco (Danny Sapani) ignores their commands and dares Riko to shoot him. After arguing with Leo, he passes out suffering a heart attack. This gains Riko attention after apparently shooting Leo and earning him the nickname, Rambo Riko. It also sparks interest in gang leader Shotti (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) who sends him, Kane and Dwayne (Arnold Jorge) to retrieve a bag of drugs and money from a nightclub. Riko gets distracted by a girl named Tamara (Leomie Anderson) whom he fancies. A fight breaks out between Riko, Kane and members of another gang. The two win the fight and escape. Riko explains his bipoloar to Dwayne and the two form a bond when he reveals that he himself suffers from autism. They then realise that they forgot the bag from the club but before they can go back for it, they are chased by a rogue and Ian (Vas Blackwood) a xenophobic black police officer and his partner Bill (Barry McNicholl). After crashing the car Riko and Kane are caught but Dwayne escapes. At the police station, Riko calls Tamara who happens to be the stepsister of Leo who has woken up from his heart attack. Leo thanks Riko and tells him that he has decided to quit his gang life and has become a Christian. Unfortunately, Leo’s mental brother Tyreese (Richie Campbell) vows revenge against Riko and rages after he finds out the relationship between him and Tamara. Tyreese goes on the hunt for Riko, even running a policeman over after mistaking the latter for him. Riko and Kane are released and go back to Shotti where they reveal that they forgot the bag, infuriating him. After Shotti is informed that they beat up a member from a rival gang, they reconcile. Shotti lets them tag along for a deal at a warehouse with Polish gangsters … If I was your man I’d be here, innit. And on and on it goes. The culture wars begin here, really, with this ostensibly satirical swing at London gang culture winding up in a shoot-em-up that is as toxically stupid and trope-filled as its target and to anyone outside that milieu (guilty as charged) feels like a genre from another planet, mainly due to the lingo. Comedy it may well be but there’s a shot here of a body that is straight out of a violent gangster flick that’s not remotely amusing. Click Clack! Writer, director and star Deacon is known from Noel Clarke’s ‘hood movies, his own directorial debut urban comedy Anuvahood (2011) and is playing to a knowing sympathetic audience as he sends up the kinds of films he used to star in. It probably helps that Deacon could call on several celebrities such as Jennifer Saunders and Tamzin Outhwaite – and – wait for it – Jeremy Corbyn, former Labour leader – to make cameo appearances and there are some good moments of humour but they become fewer as the narrative progresses with a descent into a tale of rivalries that belongs in Gangs of London. At 25 minutes in there’s a subplot starring Ed Sheeran as Crack Ed which is so appalling we can’t even bring ourselves to articulate what he does. He might well regret his insatiable need to please. The double act leading the fray however clearly have chemistry and make for engaging goons. They came out in droves at least at a local level for this but as for us, we’re a bit mystified, mate. Quite impenetrable and ultimately wearying, this needs simultaneous translating for those of us without a clue about grime culture and all sorts of other things from housing estates in E15, innit. Can everyone stop getting shot?
There’s war and there’s war. 1990s: Renowned war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) is recalling her youthful relationship with novelist Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen). 1936, Key West, Florida. She meets him by chance in a bar and back at his house run by his wife Pauline Pfeiffer (Molly Parker) the two’s undeniable attraction is noted. My husband always says kill enough animals and you won’t kill yourself. The two writers encounter each other a year later in Spain where both are covering the Civil War, staying in the same hotel on the same floor. Initially, Gellhorn resists romantic advances made by Hemingway but during a bombing raid the two find themselves trapped alone in the same room and are overcome by lust as dust from the conflagration covers their bodies. They become lovers and stay in Spain until 1939. Hemingway collaborates with Joris Ivens (Lars Ulrich) to make the film The Spanish Earth. In 1940 Hemingway divorces Pauline so that he and Gellhorn can be married. He credits her with having inspired him to write the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and dedicates it to her. Over time however Gellhorn becomes more prominent in her own right, leading to some career jealousies between them. Gellhorn leaves Hemingway to go to Finland to cover the Winter War by herself. When she returns to the Lookout Farm in Havana the maid has quit and she tells him the place looks like a Tijuana whorehouse. Hemingway tells her that he has divorced Pauline. The two marry and travel together to China to cover the bombings by Japan. In China, they interview Chiang Kai Shek (Larry Tse) and his wife (Joan Chen) who Gelhorn can’t best when she expresses her horror after visiting an opium den where she has spotted a little girl. Chiang Kai shek is fighting the Chinese Communists and Japanese invaders. Hemingway and Gellhorn secretly visit Zhou Enlai (Anthony Brandon Wong) the revolutionary content to play both ends against the middle until his time comes. Gellhorn covers D-Day in Normandy. She reports on the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps and his so horrified she runs out of them … There’s nothing to writing. Sit at your typewriter and bleed. Bluster and confidence, the devastation of war, lust and fine writing, a universe of division and conflict and conscience, all are called upon as the affair and marriage of two of the twentieth century’s best writers bear witness to unfolding history. Beautifully shot by Rogier Stoffers using different camera effects and archive montages to insert the characters into both colorised and monochrome footage, there is an uneven tone to this biopic as well as shifts in performance particularly by Owen who doesn’t quite capture the self-aggrandising charisma of Hemingway but certainly asserts his sexist boorish aspect. There is a certain comedy to the introduction of the famous characters, who take time to establish themselves in the narrative and sometimes play minor roles, there to augment and embellish the self-mythologising author who is hard to pin down here (Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris does this with caustic aplomb). Surrounded by an entourage of sycophants and hangers on, only John Dos Passos (David Strathairn) appears to question Hemingway’s macho posturing. When Hemingway admits he’s taken her Collier’s contract, Martha repeats what the man he calls the second best American writer has said of Hemingway and he hits her across the face: we know the marriage must be over. But not quite. There’s still a final act of war and humiliation. They have persuasively created a sexual and co-habiting relationship that is sometimes hard to watch when they exchange harsh words – but then wind up laughing at the good of it all. Until they fight again and it becomes ever more vicious. They’ll still be reading me long after you’ve been eaten by worms. Hemingway’s demise following his marriage to Mary Welsh (Parker Posey), who’s written as a celeb-hunting nicompoop, which may not be quite fair, is dramatic and swift in storytelling time (those presumably causative head injuries in the later aeroplane crashes are not covered albeit the car crash here with Welsh probably contributed to it). It’s a rich tapestry and while not successful overall, with an occasional (if forgivable) lurch into domestic melodrama, there are moments of genuine humour, black comedy and horror. For instance when Kai Shek dumps his dentures into a teacup and his verbose spider spouse does the talking and makes an unwilling Gellhorn take a gift. That’s history. The only thing that really interests me is people. Their lives. Their daily lives. And there are instances in war zones when Gellhorn scoops up children as their parents bleed to death and Hemingway, the father of sons by his previous wives, scoffs yet paradoxically admires her humanity. When Gellhorn walks into Dachau but then says Auschwitz was unbelievably worse and just takes off running we sense her disbelief. Kidman is quite splendid for much of the film. This is an amazingly comprehensive and visually immersive portrait of a man and a woman who were at the heart of a decade of world-changing events whose impact we still live with today. However their characters are almost too big to contain (and the gargantuan 2021 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick docu-series Hemingway has far more biographical information), literally covering too much ground with the prism of a domestic battle perhaps too slight for such an enormous focus. Necessarily episodic, the protagonists’ differences are sketched out schematically so this goes just a little way toward explaining why both are legends and Gellhorn fought so hard for her individuation. As she says here, she’s more than just a footnote to Hemingway. Consider this film restitution. At 155 minutes, this was premiered at Cannes but broadcast as a mini-series by HBO. Written by Jerry Stahl & Barbara Turner and directed by Philip Kaufman. We were good in war. And where there was no war we made our own. The battlefield we couldn’t survive was domestic life
Find a lap. Purr when stroked. Pampered streetwise cat Beckett (Mo Gilligan) takes for granted the lucky hand he has been dealt when he is rescued and loved by Rose (Simone Ashley), a kind-hearted and passionate student researching bees at university. Beckett settles into a comfortable life in the country. literally becoming a fat cat, while Rose and her klutzy boyfriend Larry (Dylan Llewelly) continue her project. Rose has to deal with the mentor Professor Craven (Bill Nighy) who unbeknownst to her is a rival plotting to sabotage her work because of a childhood incident with a bee. When Beckett loses his ninth life and he is inadvertently locked out of the house he shares with Rose, fate steps in to set him on a transformative journey … You don’t know how one small insect can change the world. Deviating from your premise with a subplot that also involves non-human species is an unusual way to navigate narrative. First this is about a cat. Then it’s about bees. The plot lines in the screenplay by Ash Brannon, Ken Cinnamon, Karen Wengrod and Leland Cox intersect in the character of Rose and when Beckett gets lost, they diverge and he goes through the kind of kitty cat disasters that clock up to his requisite number of lives. He presents himself to Rose when he comes back in different forms with the different-coloured eyes that mark him out. Look at you, all charm with your big stupid face! Despite the excursion into thriller territory there’s a buoyancy to the drolly villainous performance of Nighy as the fake mentor/real rival who will be pretty familiar to anyone carrying out research in the world of academia. The message here is about complacency,, valuing friendship and what you’ve got, the pointlessness of holding grudges and seeking revenge (even if Nighy makes it sound very pleasurable). Beckett gets to have a real hero’s journey and Gilligan acquits himself well as a presumably Sarf Lahndon feline. The animation is pleasing, the characterisation is fun and it all comes together in the end in a kind of animal shelter afterlife with a real-life conclusion bound to tug at the heartstrings. Pop star Zayn Malik makes his movie debut voicing Cameron and Kirk. Directed by Christopher Jenkins. When you live and love with all your heart one life is all you need
mondomovies 