Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

Films don't come much better than this 2014 masterpiece, written and directed by Olivier Assayas.  Its many virtues have often been extolled on the Screen Drafts podcast, and I am so glad I got around to watching it at last. The central relationship is between a very successful actress Maria (Juliette Binoche) and her personal assistant Val (Kristen Stewart). Maria's breakthrough performance some 20-odd years earlier was in a play where she played a young woman Sigrid whose relationship with an older woman Helena ends in the latter's suicide, when Sigrid dumps her. Maria h as agreed (somewhat reluctantly) to play the part of Helena in a revival of the play.  As part of her preparation, she and Val run through some of the scenes together. These scenes suggest to us that the relationship between Helena and Sigrid mirrors in some ways that of Maria and Val.  But only in some respects.  For example there is no suggestion that Val is deliberately taking advantage of Maria...

Like a lot of people (other than maybe the critics) I didn't much care for this Scorsese-De Niro collaboration when it was first released.  But its reputation in the 40-odd years since has been on an upward trajectory, so I thought it deserved a rewatch. But I still don't like it much.  It's main merit is its prescience back in 1982 about where our celebrity-obsessed culture was heading. And the performances are all fine. I especially enjoyed that of Jerry Lewis as comedian Jerry Langford although I wouldn't have minded his character being a bit meaner. De Niro is very good at making his character Rupert Pupkin (an aspiring comedian) quite creepy but not totally unsympathetic. But as a black satire it’s not that funny and not that black either, it's all a bit restrained.  Bob Fosse considered directing it for a while, and it's fascinating to speculate what his version would have looked like.  Rather livelier I would guess. Roger Ebert as usual summed it up perfe...

My, what a load of sourpusses film critics in 2000 were, collectively delivering this likeable Sandra Bullock vehicle a lowly 41% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Admittedly, as action-comedies goes the action is thin, and the comedy a little over-reliant on Bullock's pratfalls in high heels. But she is as watchable as ever, and makes the most of this fish-out-of-water setup as a nerdy FBI agent who has to go undercover in a beauty pageant scholarship program. She is ably assisted by Michael Caine as a Professor Higgins to her Eliza Dolittle.  Their first scene, in a restaurant, is very funny, and I was a little disappointed that their relationship thereafter never again reaches the same heights. William Shatner enjoys himself as the pageant MC, and the whole confection goes down easily enough if you are not being overly critical. RATING :  ✓ Cheers

The source novel for this film is one of Agatha Christie's best: it makes sinister use of a children's rhyme to create a baffling mystery which culminates in a stunningly bleak ending. Mrs Christie then adapted the novel for the stage, but she completely changed the ending in order to make it more palatable for theatre audiences in the early 1940s.  Even with the more upbeat ending, any film adaptation worth its salt should be able to generate some chills, given the setup: ten strangers alone on an island being murdered one by one by their mysterious and invisible host who is determined to make each of them pay for their unpunished crimes. T here should be a mounting tension and sense of dread with each death.   Here however any such tension is constantly being undercut by the little touches of humour here and there, presumably introduced by the screenwriter, Dudley Nichols, and by the fact that the characters are absurdly relaxed, given the gravity of their situation....

One might expect a film about a US civil war set in the near future to be saying something about the state of America now. But since the civil war involves a Democrat state (California) and a Republican state (Texas) combining, it's clear that this film is not doing that - at least not directly. Maybe the intention (in part at least) is to serve as a warning about where the polarisation of American society.   But the main focus of the film is journalism, since the four main characters are members of that profession.  Well, really two main characters: Lee, a veteran photojournalist (Kirsten Dunst) and Jessie  (Cailee Spaeny) , a young woman who wants to follow in her footsteps.   I found the character of Jessie unconvincing given  that the screenplay doesn't do a great job of fleshing out her character.   To me she comes across as a rather annoying teenager although this may say more about me than it does about the performance.  There's a mome...

I'd never got round to seeing this late Sam Peckinpah film because it was a bit of a flop, it's not a Western, which is the genre he is most associated with, and I thought it might be overly violent and nihilistic. Not for the first time I was way wrong.  This film is so good, it's ridiculous it doesn't get the love it deserves.  I can accept that it was a commercial flop (what do the public know?), but any critic who panned it should be in a different line of work, mentioning no names Vincent Canby . We're in 1943 on the Eastern Front, when the Russians now have the upper hand and the Germans are struggling, and failing, to hold their position. The film focuses on one group of German soldiers in particular, headed up by a Colonel Brandt.   One of the incidental joys of this film is the relationship between Brandt and his adjutant, Captain Kiesel, both enlightened and humane men, both somewhat cynical at this stage of the war, under no illusions about Germany's ...

Not to speak ill of the dead but the director of this espionage thriller is Tony Scott, and his aesthetic has never appealed to me much. The opening set-piece is a case in point.  Brad Pitt is trying to extract someone from a Chinese prison, and it ought to be exciting and suspenseful, but thanks to the editing and visual style it did nothing except irritate me. Pitt is playing Bishop, an ex-CIA operative who used to be handled by Muir, played by Robert Redford.  Bishop is captured by the Chinese and (rather absurdly) is going to be executed in exactly 24 hours time.   So we have a very contrived race against the clock  - can Muir save Bishop? What ensues is a battle of wits between Muir and his bosses who don't seem that bothered by Bishop's fate, interrupted by flashbacks tracing the history of Muir's relationship with Bishop. The first flashback, in Vietnam, is dull in the extreme. The second flashback, in Berlin, is a bit better, in terms of the story and th...

Somehow this 1998 crime thriller had gone under my radar. It has an intriguing premise - a police hostage negotiator, Danny, is framed for a murder, and out of desperation he himself takes some hostages, as a way of trying to clear himself.   The murder is of Danny's partner Nate who was investigating corruption around the local police Disability Fund. The implication is that both the murder and the framing of Danny are the work of the corrupt cops about to be exposed, so Danny demands that a hostage negotiator, Chris, from another part of the city, be brought in to run things.  Although Danny barely knows Chris he at least can rely on him not being corrupt.   Danny is played by Samuel L Jackson and Chris by Kevin Spacey.  Both are in peak form;  Spacey in particular is well cast and extremely compelling. Their relationship reminded me of that between Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in 'The Fugitive'.  At first Chris has no interest in whether D...

Like most people I really enjoyed this film when it came out.  It was a smart idea, combining the world of mobsters with that of Hollywood.  And, as you would expect from a film based on an Elmore Leonard novel, the dialogue was sharp, and the plot intricately constructed. But for some reason, on a rewatch I couldn't get into it.  I could still admire its qualities but I felt disengaged. Maybe the problem is that what seemed fresh then feels far less so now.   Or that John Travolta is the main character, and I'm not a member of the John Travolta Fan Club. Or that one of my favourite actors Gene Hackman is miscast here as a dim two-bit Hollywood producer. Or that Danny DeVito is also miscast. Or that all the business about the money at the airport bored me. I would have liked a little less mobster action and a bit more satire of the film business. On the plus side any film with Rene Russo is worth watching.  And we get to see the great James Gandolfini in an...

Rather to my surprise it turns out I hadn't seen this film before. At least I'm pretty sure if I had I would have remembered, seeing how bonkers it is. Or to be more precise the film itself isn't bonkers (in fact it treats the material quite seriously on the whole) - what is crazy is the central plot idea, combining the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele with cloning. The film is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ira Levin, and no doubt he would say that the idea of cloning human beings is not too far out. But I would maintain that (spoiler alert) creating 94 clones of Adolf Hitler in the hope (if that is the right word) that one of them might grow up to create the Fourth Reich is loony tunes material, especially since Mengele wants the 94 adoptive fathers around the globe each to be assassinated at the same age as the real Hitler's father died (!). The director is Franklin J. Schaffner who is most famous for directing 'Planet of the Apes' and...

Yet again we're in curate's egg territory. On the plus side it's a film with two lead female protagonists, very unusual for 1995.  They are portrayed by Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter (another big plus).  Refreshingly there are virtually no romantic subplots: instead we get to focus on Dr Helen Hudson (Weaver) as an expert in serial killers who doesn't suffer fools gladly and MJ Monahan (Hunter) as a no-nonsense police inspector. And it's a serial killer thriller set in San Francisco. So what are the negatives? Well, the direction and soundtrack are both bland (although the director Jon Amiel does at least deserve credit for coming up with the idea of the two leads being women.) The premise, a copycat serial killer, is fine as far as it goes but the story doesn't do that much with it.  There is also an odd subplot involving a former lover of MJ and a shooting at the police station which is unsatisfactory in itself but we are also asked to believe that it stop...