Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

I really must stop criticising Tony Scott.  This is his second directorial outing and it’s pretty much perfect.  Of course it helps that the screenplay is top notch and that the film stars two actors at the top of their game, going toe to toe. The basic setup for this film is a doozie.  Against a backdrop of tensions between the US and the USSR running high, a US sub armed with nuclear missiles has lost communication with the outer world but the last order it received was such that unless it is countermanded its nuclear missiles will need to be launched within the hour. The sub’s commander Ramsey (Gene Hackman) is all for obeying the order and setting off a nuclear Armageddon.  His new second-in-command, Hunter (Denzil Washington), is more cautious (seems reasonable to me) and wants to confirm that the order should be carried out. Scarily, this setup is based on a real incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did my usual intense research (i.e. I skimmed Wikipedia...

There is a lot to admire in this 2004 film by M. Night Shyamalan: the cinematography by Roger Deakins, the score by James Howard, a terrific cast, and even (somewhat to my surprise) the director's screenplay. All of which makes the derision heaped upon it (44% on Rotten Tomatoes) a bit difficult to understand.  Some of that may simply have been that critics were keen to take the director down a peg or two , for whatever reason. But the elephant in the room here  is the ending.  Roger Ebert said of it "It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore."   Harsh! I guess the problem is that up to that point Shyamalan's main quality as a director had been seen as his ability to deliver a twist ending, as evidenced by 'The Sixth Sense' and 'Unbreakable'.  And judged by the endings of those two films 'The Village' does disappoint.  On the other hand, the film before ...

I had seen this back in the day but couldn’t remember much about it.  Given that it is reckoned to be one of Ridley Scott’s weaker efforts my expectations on a rewatch were low.  Maybe because of this I ended up quite enjoying it. Admittedly it got off to a poor start: a credits sequence over which a forgettable mid-tempo ballad is played.  Very 1989.   This is followed by a sequence the only point of which is to show us that Michael Douglas’s character (NYPD detective Conklin) is a bit of a biker on the side.  Inevitably Chekhov’s Motorcycle returns at the end.  We then get a poorly staged action sequence of sorts in a restaurant. Thankfully from this point on the film picks up as Conklin and his sidekick Vincent (Andy Garcia) are tasked with transporting a member of the Yakuza to Japan.   Scott’s visual flair is in evidence once we get to Tokyo, bringing to mind the Chinatown sequences in ‘Blade Runner’.  This was Douglas’s first role after...

This is the third film starring Kenneth Branagh as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, following 'Murder on the Orient Express' and 'Death on the Nile', all three being  directed by Branagh and written by Michael Green. I haven't seen the earlier two films which received a somewhat muted response from the critics, despite all-star casts. I don't imagine that they did anything very interesting with what is familiar material given that both source novels were given the big film treatment in the 1970s. Maybe as a response to the critics, this film does break new ground.  Firstly, although it is claimed to be a loose adaptation of a late Christie novel, 'Halloween Party', I think it is so removed as to constitute an original story.  Secondly, it is presented to us as more of a supernatural thriller than as a straightforward murder mystery.  I have to say that the screenplay is pretty damn good.  The underlying plot is of course somewhat unbelievable (as i...

I would never authorise the spending of $55million on a film with such an absurd plot as this one.  Which just goes to prove that (shock horror) I wouldn't make a very good film executive, given that this Jodie Foster thriller was a big commercial success. The basic setup is one that has been used before, in for example Hitchcock's 'The Lady Vanishes' and the later 'So Long At The Fair', in which somebody disappears but everyone other than the protagonist denies that the missing person was ever there. Here the missing person is Jodie Foster's daughter, which adds extra emotional tension, and the setting is a plane journey from Berlin to New York.  The reason for the flight is that Foster's husband has recently died, and his dead body (in a casket in the hold) is being transported home. Until the last act I was happily going along with all this.  Foster is excellent as always in conveying the intensity of a mother whose daughter has somehow disappeared an...

Rebecca Hall turns in a superlative performance as the main character in this impressive supernatural and psychological horror film. She is Beth, whose husband Owen has recently committed suicide.  Gradually Beth comes to believe that their isolated house on the edge of a lake is haunted by Owen's ghost.  Equally disturbingly, she starts to believe that Owen was cheating on her.   These two strands are expertly weaved together, building to a gripping and moving climax where Beth and we learn the real horror of what drove Owen to kill himself.   I'm not generally into ghosts and suchlike so afterwards I tried to persuade myself that another interpretation of the film might be that everything Beth experiences may simply be in her mind, consumed by grief as she is. However this really won't wash, since it doesn't explain various facts that Beth discovers which are undoubtedly real. But no matter, on this occasion I was happy to accept the supernatural elements...