Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This is the second of the rebooted series, featuring Andy Serkis as Caesar the leader of the evolved apes, being the sequel to ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’. (I hate to be a nit-picker but surely dawn comes before the sunrise, not after?) We quickly learn that the pandemic that ends the first film has wiped out most humans. Meanwhile Caesar has established a peaceful home for the apes in the woods outside San Francisco. But once the surviving humans from the city make accidental contact with the apes the only question is whether war between the two species can be averted. Despite the best efforts of Caesar and one of the humans, Malcolm, the answer inevitably is ‘no’, which could make for a downbeat viewing experience were it not for the skilful way the story unfolds, always keeping the viewer interested.   The credit for this lies in part with the quality of the writing and the outstanding visual effects. But essentially it is Serkis who carries the film. In contrast, none...

This is one of those films where immediately it finishes I need to go to Wikipedia, because although the plot seems simple enough it is presented in such a skeletal fashion that I felt a need to get it fleshed out. Not that the plot is really that important, even in the second half of the film when a state Senator and the state Governor enter the picture, because essentially this is a character study. And because the character in question, Joe (played by Joaquin Phoenix) is severely damaged, through childhood abuse by a violent father, and possibly through some PTSD from military service, this is not  an easy viewing experience.  To add further to the pain on display, Joe's line of work is to rescue under-age girls, specifically in this film Nina, the state Senator's daughter. We get to understand that Joe is damaged through the use of fleeting images from his past, and from various acts of self-harm in the present both actual and imagined.  At times the combination of im...

Apparently this is the best of the many Halloween sequels, in which case I shall give all the others a wide berth.  Because although it was kind of fun to catch up with the gang some four decades after the original, this film never reaches any great heights. It is rather typical of the whole film that the two journalists we are introduced to at the start don't contribute anything to the subsequent plot, nor are their deaths particularly memorable. The most shocking aspect of the film might be that Laurie Strode is now a grandmother, and her relationships with her daughter and granddaughter give the film some much needed emotional heft. Inevitably their menfolk prove expendable, and the three women end up facing Michael Myers alone; the police, it hardly needs saying, don’t do much to help throughout. The climax is not that exciting though decent enough but prior to this there's even less to set the pulses racing, it all feeling a bit formulaic. There is one surprising plot deve...

This is the second film in A lan J Pakula's excellent 'paranoia trilogy', coming three years after 'Klute' and two years before 'All The President's Men'.   An air of  dread and quiet menace is established at the outset in the pre-credit sequence in which a US Senator is assassinated, in the spectacular setting of Seattle's Space Needle. Trying to uncover the truth behind that assassination, some three years later, is Warren Beatty, playing a somewhat chaotic reporter.  Despite narrowly escaping death on three separate occasions, all very well staged in their different ways, and uncovering a plot to kill another US Senator, Beatty's character for no very good reason chooses not to involve any law enforcement agencies.  He may have something in his past to explain this aversion but we never get to learn what this might be or indeed anything much about him. For sure he is not the world's most competent journalist, since he fails to take the bas...

Having just watched Ridley Scott's take on the Robin Hood legend I thought I would revisit this 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle, a huge commercial success, of which I had vaguely fond memories. Well this time around I literally found it unwatchable - I gave up in disgust about 100 minutes in (one of its many faults is its length - 143 minutes). Everything, and I mean everything, is poor or barely tolerable at best.  The music, editing, cinematography and direction are all sub-par.  The screenplay is execrable.  This is a film devoid of charm, wit, excitement, adventure, or romance.  Kevin Costner and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are the dullest Robin Hood and Maid Marian imaginable, with zero chemistry between them.  The tone of the film is both cartoonish a lot of the time yet also unpleasantly gory or grisly at others.  The climactic scene where the Sheriff of Nottingham tries to rape Marian somehow succeeds in being both.   Morgan Freeman, as an impr...

This is the follow-up to ‘The Ipcress File’, in which secret agent Harry Palmer is again played by Michael Caine. The critics regard this as somewhat inferior to its predecessor which is fair enough - it does lack some  of the visual style of the original (Guy Hamilton is the director this time) but at least we do get a more down-to-earth story (no brainwashing this time).  What initially appears to be the main plot about a Colonel Stok (well played by Oskar Homolka) defecting turns out to be a bit of misdirection; the real story centres on an ex-Nazi who is trying to get his hands on some documents which would  give him access a fortune in a Swiss bank account. Admittedly the plot does get quite convoluted by the end, and keeping track of the two sets of documents (one genuine, one fake) kept me on my toes, but overall I enjoyed it. I was pleased to see Colonel Ross return to try to keep Harry on the straight and narrow, but the  German actress who is Harry’s love i...

If you find the James Bond films too unbelievable and ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’ too grim, then meet Harry Palmer, an intelligence officer with a nice line in insolent behaviour who is a whizz in the kitchen (surprisingly) and in the bedroom (less surprisingly).   Michael Caine is perfectly cast as Harry, and he is ample reason to watch this, the first of several Harry Palmer films. The film also benefits from good casting in the secondary roles. I enjoyed the humorous cut-and-thrust of all the scenes between Harry and his superior, Colonel Ross, especially a very funny one in a supermarket.  It was also refreshing for a film of this type and era that Harry's love interest is her own woman and more than a match for him. John Barry provides a pleasant score and the film is ticking over nicely until some rather grim stuff towards the end when Harry is imprisoned and subjected to brainwashing  à  la   ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. I’m not sure this part of t...

This is an odd but strangely enchanting film. At its centre is six-year-old Amy, a dreamy child with no friends of her own age, which leads her to  make two new friends. One, in a rather unconvincing sub-plot, is an old lady who lives in a large house (what else?) and whose mental health is rather questionable (ditto).  She sees Amy as a kind of replacement for her own daughter Barbara who she believes died at Amy’s age, except that this is not true - grown-up Barbara is very much alive and well in the house.   Because Barbara is treated as an impostor by her mother she deserves our sympathy but it suits the film at times to make her into a sinister character who seems to wish Amy harm. Meanwhile at home Amy has an imaginary friend, Irena, the first wife of her father who died in tragic circumstances.   Amy’s father is understandably unnerved by all this nonsense (as he sees it) and wants Amy to snap out of it, which of course is not helping Amy. Fortunatel...

This low-key Western from 1950 was a personal favourite of the director John Ford, and it’s easy to see why, because (perhaps more than any other of his films) it showcases a community front and centre,  without the distraction of star names or plot complications. The community in question is a group of Mormons travelling across inhospitable terrain, who also have to deal with an outlaw gang who attach themselves to their wagon train.   Although the story is simple enough the main  characters are established with economy and prove to be engaging company for the journey. Several members of the ‘John Ford stock company’ get a chance to shine: Ward Bond as the Mormon leader with a short fuse; Ben Johnson as the pragmatic and good-natured ’wagon master’; Joanne Dru as the object of his affections, as well as Harry Carey Jr., Jane Darwell and Hank Worden. Together they give a fine display of ensemble acting, appropriate for a film which extols the virtues of community, vi...

This 1957 film set in wartime Crete, made by the eminent partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is very much a lightweight affair. The plot is simple: some British officers, led by Dirk Bogarde, kidnap the top German general on the island, and then they have to get him onto a ship to take him to Cairo.  This mission comes across more as an escapade since it has no military value, and seems to have been dreamt up by Bogarde simply to embarrass the Germans. The Brits in this film come across as ex-public schoolboys on a jolly jape. Maybe because I have a very low tolerance for this sort of thing, the film totally failed to charm me. Bogarde’s air of nonchalance throughout irritated me like hell. I would imagine that life under German rule wasn’t much fun for the Cretans but you wouldn’t get that impression from this film. All the locals we see seem to be having a great time of it. At one point the Germans circulate leaflets threatening reprisals on the locals unless th...

This film about a German plot to kidnap Churchill bears some resemblance to an earlier and superior wartime film 'Went The Day Well' in that in both films German soldiers take over a stereotypical English village. This film however suffers from two fundamental problems. The first is that (spoiler alert) we know the plot is not going to succeed.  This problem is further compounded by the fact that the German mission starts to unravel surprisingly early in proceedings. The second problem is that we see things from the point of view of the Germans, and are therefore meant to sympathise with them. To get around this the film does everything possible to stress that these Germans are ‘good Nazis’.  They behave very politely to the villagers, and the only people they kill are US soldiers rather than British, and then only in self-defence. Because the Germans are so nice, and are doomed to fail, there is very little tension.  The action sequences therefore don't carry much weight...

I approached this film with some nervousness given that it received mixed reviews and given that I thought Zack Snyder’s ‘Man of Steel’ was dire. The fact that many critics thought the best part of this very long film (160-plus minutes) was the montage during the opening credits wasn’t very encouraging either. Still, I had enjoyed the graphic novel and so I looked forward to reacquainting myself with it given that I had pretty much forgotten how the story unfolds. Some reviewers thought that the story was too complex to be filmed but I found it straightforward enough once I had got clear in my mind who was who.  The film is visually impressive, and very much feels like a graphic novel brought to life. Sometimes CGI can take me out of a film but here it didn’t, perhaps because even the scenes depicting normal reality are quite stylised so that any CGI didn’t especially stand out. Some reviewers complained that Snyder followed the source material too slavishly and didn’t bring anythi...

The main drama on view is whether the women in a strange religious colony are going to leave, or alternatively to "stay and fight".  This decision is being made by a kind of committee, so indeed the film does comprise 'women talking' and not much else.  On paper this might not sound very exciting, but the outstanding cast (headed by Rooney Mara and Claire Foy), together with the skilful direction and screenplay (both by Sarah Polley), succeed in creating characters that we care about, from young girls to their grandmothers.   We quickly learn that women and girls in the colony are routinely drugged and raped, and are generally subservient to the men.  So t here is plenty of anger on display, not all of which is directed at the men, as well as moments of humour and compassion.  So for me the film was a moving and engaging human drama. The only man that the women trust is August (Ben Whishaw) .  I think it is significant that he is the colony ’s  sc...

Not a bad title is it, although I guess if this horror film from 1943 was  made today it would be beefed up - 'I Slept With A Zombie' maybe? And it would have a lot more scares, because frankly there aren't many here.  What it does have is oodles of voodoo atmosphere and a prime collection of messed-up white people. The protagonist is nurse Betsy who comes to the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian to care for Jessica, the wife of Paul, the owner of a sugar plantation.  Jessica is in a zombie-like state, the result supposedly of a tropical fever (really?). Also hanging around is Paul's younger half-brother Wesley, who has a burgeoning drink problem, and their mother Mrs Rand. We soon learn that in the past Wesley and Jessica were in love and wanted to go away together.  Paul stopped them, just before Jessica became sick.   Paul's feelings towards his wife are obscure.  In fact Paul's feelings about anything are far from clear since he is very much one of th...

This 1947 beauty was the first 'B' movie to garner a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It’s a tightly directed drama by Edward Dmytryk with film noir aspects, centring on a murder which we see right at the start, and leading to the murderer being apprehended some 24 hours later. The cast is headed up by three Roberts, each of whom is perfectly cast: Robert Young as the world-weary investigating police captain, Robert Ryan as the army soldier who committed the murder, and best of all Robert Mitchum as a laconic (what else?) army sergeant. Besides being an absorbing crime drama the film has a Message, about the dangers of prejudice in general, and anti-Semitism in particular, which turns out to be the motive for the crime. This Message gets spelt out maybe a bit too explicitly towards the end but that’s to nit-pick. And to further nit-pick I might also say that this film is an example of where the perpetrator doesn’t need to confess, given the weakness of the hard evidence against h...

This is a little gem of a horror film from Jacques Tourneur, who was a master of this sort of thing. It’s a taut 70-minutes which has the confidence to take its time building up a sense of unease and then dread. The film starts with a chance encounter at the zoo between Irena and Ollie, a kindly if naïve soul, who rapidly falls in love with and marries her. Unfortunately Irena  is convinced that her Serbian ancestry means that if she is aroused into passion she will change into an evil black panther (!). In 1942 film-makers couldn’t be too explicit, but nevertheless it is clear that the passion Irena fears is not just anger or jealousy but also sexual passion, so she cannot consummate her marriage or even kiss Ollie.  His patience begins to run out when  she resists the help of a psychologist, the smug and patronising Dr Judd, who is himself drawn to Irena.   A further complication is that Ollie is loved by Alice, a work colleague. Irene’s jealousy puts Alice at risk...

Based on a Stephen King short story this film could be described as a cutdown version of  ‘The Shining’, where the horrors are confined to a single hotel room rather than the entire hotel. The protagonist is Mike Enslin, a  jaded and cynical writer of books about supposedly haunted buildings. He doesn’t believe in ghosts and so cannot resist the challenge of spending an hour in room 1408 which, according to hotel manager Samuel L Jackson, sends anyone in it crazy or to their death. Given this build-up the horrors need to be impressive and inventive. But although  the goings- on are well staged, and there are some effective moments, overall I felt that we were covering familiar horror tropes.  Enslin himself is emotionally scarred even before he enters the room, by his relationship with his father, and more recently by the death of his young daughter.  The former is only hinted at and is not developed, so I didn’t get why it was included at all. The most effectiv...

By rights this star-studded epic should make for painful viewing - 146 minutes of white people congratulating themselves for overcoming adversity in order to create the paradise on earth that is modern day America. Slavery doesn't get a mention despite the Civil War featuring slam bang in the middle of the period covered, roughly the 1830s to the 1870s. And although it is acknowledged that the Native Americans might have just the teensy weeniest grounds for complaint, the view of the film, as voiced by one of the more unpleasant characters, seems to be that they were at fault for not learning to adapt. Three different directors contribute different sections of the film, but none of them manage to stamp any individual style on the material, so you don't notice the joins. But if you can put these issues, along with the rather bland voice-over commentary, to the back of your mind there are some pleasures to be had, and the commercial success of the film is not completely unwarrant...

Anyone coming to this expecting the usual merry japes will be very disappointed. This is a sort of origin story for Robin Hood (played by Russell Crowe), and a rather dour one at that, which starts with him as an archer in King Richard’s army, and it is only at the very end of the film that he has become an outlaw. I don’t think Sherwood Forest is ever mentioned, and the climax of the film is a battle between English and French soldiers on the south coast. During the film Robin gets to pretend to be  Robert of Loxley,  the husband of Lady Marion (Cate Blanchett, great as always), and as such he plays a key role in helping King John defeat a French invasion.  Robin in this version of the legend is even more of a proto-socialist than usual.  He fails in his attempt to get King John to sign a forerunner of the Magna Carta, but by way of compensation the film ends with Robin and Marion setting up some sort of commune in the forest. So a lot of liberties are taken with bo...

This film musical features songs by Cole Porter and has a plot that revolves around a stage musical called 'Kiss Me, Kate' (based on 'The Taming of the Shrew') that features songs by Cole Porter, who briefly appears as a character - it's all a bit meta for 1953.   The main characters are performers Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessa, who used to be married and who have a tempestuous relationship that creates  off-stage fireworks to mirror those on-stage. Further comic mayhem is provided by some gangsters who are owed money. The original stage musical won the first ever Tony, and was Cole Porter’s first integrated musical i.e. one in which the songs relate directly to the surrounding story. The story itself is entertaining tosh and the sparkling songs are done full justice by Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson as Fred and Lilli. Most of the dancing in the film features Ann Miller. She turns up in many musicals of this era (such as ‘On The Town’) and unfortunately I find her ...

Obviously this film can’t be as good as its two predecessors. But is it worth watching and does it add anything to the franchise? A qualified ‘yes’ to both questions. It’s a competent film which is lifted by the central performances by Nick Stahl and Claire Danes.  The character played by the latter in ‘Homeland’ began to grate on me after the first couple of series, even though I could recognise that it was good to have a lead female character whose gender was almost irrelevant.  So it has been refreshing to see her in some of her earlier roles such as this and in ‘The Rainmaker’. Here she does a lot with a character who as written doesn’t have much depth. I found Stahl convincing as someone made half-crazy by the thought that the future of all of humankind might depend on him. As for how this film fits into the franchise we do learn a bit more about the Resistance, and I found the ending to be a neat and affecting way to take the story further. Making the Bad Terminator a fe...

I remember being a bit disappointed by this sequel but given that that was a long time ago I thought I would give it a second chance. Sadly, I still think it’s a bit of a let-down. The main problem is the climax. Although it is undeniably kind of cool and fun that it takes place simultaneously with that of the first film, this has the drawback of drawing attention to the fact that this film is struggling to come up with an exciting ending in its own right. In the first film there is a genuine urgency. Marty and Doc are really up against it, having to get back to the present and get Marty’s parents-to-be to fall in love, both before the lightning strikes. Whereas here all Marty and Doc have to do is recover the almanac from Biff - how challenging can that be?  And there is zero urgency because they only need to do this before Biff starts placing bets. And should they fail they can try again BECAUSE THEY HAVE A TIME MACHINE. Also this film just isn’t as much fun as the original. That...