Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

As a standalone film, rather than an episode in the seemingly never-ending MCU storyline, this is pretty dire.   The AI villain Ultron, accidentally created by Iron Man, is unmemorable; the CGI action set-pieces feel endless; the story jumps around in a way that fails to build any dramatic tension.  It all feels muddled and unfocussed, but I guess that is always a problem with having so many characters. Worst of all, no one, including Iron Man, seems especially bothered at the mayhem he has unleashed so carelessly. I also found the cutesy dialogue rather uninspired and less amusing than usual. Notwithstanding these failings the film does offer a few things to enjoy.  The climactic sequences do have some power.   There's a fight between Iron Man and Hulk which I found mildly diverting.  I liked the new characters, Wanda, her brother Pietro and (best of all) Vision, who gets the funniest line in the film. Disappointingly for me Pietro dies saving Hawkeye...

I avoid films about The Holocaust - I find them too upsetting and anyway what more is there to say? But this film is directed by Jonathan Glazer whose previous film 'Under The Skin' was one of the most unsettling and disturbing films I have ever seen, so I was intrigued to see how he would follow it up. Normally I don't read reviews in advance, so as to be able to see a film free of preconceptions. Unfortunately in this case I knew enough going into the film so that the moment early on when we discover the truth about the affluent, seemingly nice family we are observing, and what is going on next door to their villa, didn't have the shock value it might have had.  Even so, it's a jaw dropping moment as we come to understand what the head of the household's role in Nazi Germany is, and what those ceaseless and sinister sounds in the background might signify.  Given that there is no story arc or even plot to speak of, the film relies on our horror at the banality ...

Unquestionably this film deserves its Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  It's not so much that the story told is especially clever; in essence it's fairly simple and can be summarised quite easily - a woman is put on trial for the murder of her husband, and (spoiler alert) is cleared.  We the audience are left unclear whether she is in fact guilty, or whether the death (from a fall) might be an accident or even suicide. The merit of the screenplay (by Arthur Harari and the film's director Justine Triet) lies more in the ways it draws us into the relationship between successful novelist Sandra (played superbly by  Sandra  Hüller ) and her frustrated husband Samuel, and how it manages to maintain ambiguity without annoying us.  The flashback scene where eventually we get to see the tensions between Sandra and Samuel  exploding to the surface is one of the most riveting I can remember.  The dialogue as each of them tries to seize the moral high ground i...

I was a bit shocked when this film ended up only third in the 'Screen Drafts John Grisham Super Draft', behind 'The Pelican Brief' and 'The Client'.  I was further taken aback to find out this film only gets 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. I have always thought of this as an excellent adaptation of what is surely Grisham's best novel. Rewatching it though I can see that those critics who complained about its length (two and a half hours!) and its slow pace might well have had a point.  And it's fair to say that the director Sydney Pollack might not be the best at handling the thriller elements, especially towards the end. The basic setup is great: a bright law student Mitch (Tom Cruise, at 31 just about young enough to play the part) is tempted to join a small law firm in Memphis only to discover that they are connected to a Mafia mob in Chicago.   Any lawyer trying to leave the firm is murdered, and just to make things worse the FBI are investigating and want M...

This is a sequel to 'Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse'.  I loved the first film, for its freewheeling humour, for the concept of infinite worlds, each with its own Spider-Man, and for its animation style, which brought to life the look of 1960s comic books which I read avidly for a while as a child (although I was more into DC than Marvel). Inevitably this sequel didn't make quite the same impact, because the novelty value had worn off a tad. That being said it's still highly enjoyable.   The animation throughout is stunning, and this time it brings to life the look of more modern comic books.  And we get some terrific new characters, notably Gwen Stacy, who is Spider-Woman on Earth-65, and Miguel O'Hara who is - well I'm not entirely sure, other than that he is in charge of the Spider-Society (whatever that is). Miguel's main concern (understandably, to be sure) is to stop the entire Spider-Verse collapsing.  This could happen if in an individual universe ...

The structure of this film is simple enough - it's about 11-year old Sophie's holiday in a Turkish resort with her father Calum, who has separated from her mother. We experience the holiday interspersed with bits of footage taken by Sophie on a miniDV camera, and also with some odd dreamlike sequences where adult Sophie is in a crowded rave, trying to get close to Calum (who hasn't aged). At first I thought this film was going to be about child abuse, but quickly it became apparent that this wasn't where the film was heading.  Instead it gradually emerges that Calum is not just unhappy, but depressed.  There are poignant moments  scattered throughout where Sophie senses her father's deep unhappiness and attempts to comfort him in some way. Although nothing terribly dramatic happens in the film, I found it riveting thanks to the excellent performances by Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, who have a lovely chemistry, and to the way the writer and director Charlotte Wells...

My main reason for watching this film was to see Jodie Foster's performance.  Her recent film appearances have been few and far between, so I welcomed the opportunity to see her in a performance that garnered her an Oscar nomination (her first since 1994). However her character doesn't have a lot to do, and I came away more impressed with the lead performance of Annette Bening, and a supporting performance by Rhys Ifans. It's the kind of film that wouldn't normally appeal to me much, a sports drama of sorts about a real person, Diana Nyad, and her remarkable feat of endurance: in her early '60s she became the first person to swim the 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. Despite Bening's compelling performance, I always feel uneasy about celebrating someone's monomaniacal commitment to doing something which is, when you come down to it, essentially pointless.  But the film could be said to be a celebration of the human spirit and I  did find the conclusion of the ...

I guess younger people might find this film a bit icky - a Hollywood comedy featuring a Hollywood star actor (Dustin Hoffman) in drag, as a struggling actor (Michael) who has to pretend to be a woman (Dorothy) to get a part in a TV soap. But I can enjoy it, especially the comedy aimed at the acting profession or at daytime TV.  It also takes aim at casual misogyny, which for 1982 makes it somewhat ahead of its time. The film doesn't explore gender roles as deeply as it could have.  It would have been interesting for example to have made Hoffman's character more of a womaniser, who then comes to discover what it is like to be on the receiving end.  I also feel that the film doesn't know how to resolve the relationships it sets up between Dorothy and fellow actor Julie (Jessica Lange), and between Dorothy and Julie's father Les.  Both Julie and Les seem to cope with Michael's deceit far too easily, and in particular I didn't find the ending of the film, when it is...

John Carpenter wrote, directed and edited this entertaining low-budget cult film, his second after the equally entertaining low-budget cult film, 'Dark Star'.    It has a pretty simple plot, owing a lot to 'Rio Bravo' and 'Night of the Living Dead': hordes of nameless gang members are intent on overwhelming a LA police station that is in the process of being decommissioned, and killing the skeleton staff inside. The three main characters within the police station are barely given enough characterisation to make them interesting, and the action sequences are likewise just about good enough. So why the cult status? I guess it comes down to those intangible qualities of attitude and atmosphere, for which the electronic score (written by Carpenter) is an important element.  Plus the fact that two of the three main characters, the secretary Leigh and the convicted prisoner, Napoleon Wilson, are undeniably cool. There is also a shocking moment early on when a young gi...

This 1972 film is something of a curiosity - a stripped-down Western starring Robert Redford and directed by Sydney Pollack.  It is partly based on what little we know of the real-life Jeremiah Johnson, a "mountain man'', or in other words an explorer of sorts who survives by hunting and trapping.  A lot of legends have grown up about Johnson, but it's not obvious that his life story makes for a compelling drama, yet this film made money, which must say something about Redford's superstar status back in the day. Not that Redford was first choice for the part; at one stage it was going to star Clint Eastwood, which is more obvious casting.  The director was going to be Sam Peckinpah, who no doubt would have made the most out of the more violent aspects of the Johnson legend. Johnson got into a vendetta with Crow Indians, and legend has it that he would eat the livers of those he killed.  Needless to say we don't see Redford doing that; his Johnson is a gentle an...

This is the least well-known of three terrific films Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn made together in the 1930s, the other two being (of course) the incomparable 'The Philadelpia Story' and a film I don't enjoy quite as much as some do, 'Bringing Up Baby'. Like the 'The Philadelphia Story' this film is directed by George Cukor and based on a play by Philip Barry.  Barry pursued a writing career despite efforts to make him work in the family business.  This suggests that 'Holiday' is somewhat autobiographical in that the main question posed here is whether it is better to pursue a conventional life seeking material reward, rather than to follow one's dreams.  This rather dry-sounding question is brought to dramatic life by making Cary Grant's character Johnny have to choose  between marrying the somewhat dull Julia (and thereby condemning himself to a life of luxury working at her father's bank) or Julia's unconventional sister Linda ...