Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

A few years ago I had read the source novel for this film ('Munich' by Robert Harris) but having forgotten much of the detail I was able to enjoy the story all over again. Given that most people have some idea as to what happened at the 1938 peace conference ("peace in our time" and all that), Harris has to create dramatic tension by inventing an espionage plot involving two fictional protagonists, both young men who were friends at Oxford University - Hugh, now private secretary to Chamberlain, and Paul, a German who is now a junior diplomat. Paul is part of an anti-Nazi group who is trying to get to Chamberlain a document proving that Hitler won't stop at annexing part of Czechoslovakia.  The German actor who plays Paul, Jannis Niewöhner, gives a compelling performance as someone desperate to avert the catastrophe he knows is coming if Hitler isn't stopped now. Among a strong cast Sandra Hüller appears in a minor role, two years before making a huge  impact ...

In 1976 Brian De Palma made 'Obsession', a film inspired by the Hitchcock classic, 'Vertigo', yet eight years later he directed and co-wrote this thriller, which has a similar plot device.   It's a bit odd and smacks of De Palma churning something out while he was waiting for the green light on a more personal project. Whatever the truth, this is a bizarre variation on 'Vertigo', with echoes of 'Rear Window' and  (in one short scene) 'Dial M For Murder'. The main protagonist is Jake, a struggling actor who suffers not from a fear of heights but instead claustrophobia.  He becomes obsessed with a rich woman Gloria, who he spies on at night when she cavorts half-naked in her apartment.  In ‘ Vertigo' the protagonist is played by the great James Stewart, who can engage our sympathies no matter how creepy or odd his behaviour.   Here even Stewart would struggle in the icky scene where Jake spies on Gloria trying on new underwear in a shop, an...

This 1944 Powell and Pressburger film is an oddity even by their standards. It starts off promisingly with a narrator taking us back to the time of The Canterbury Tales, before a kestrel in mid flight is replaced by a Spitfire as we are suddenly transported to the present day, reminiscent of a similar transition in '2001: A Space Odyssey' two decades later. Then we move to Chillingbourne, a small village just outside Canterbury, where we first meet the three modern day 'pilgrims' we are going to get to know: Alison (a 'land girl' assigned to a local farm), Bob (a US Sergeant) and Peter (a British Sergeant).  They arrive late at night and almost immediately Alison is attacked by a mysterious troublemaker (the 'glueman' as the villagers call him) who puts glue on her hair. We also soon meet the other main character, Mr Colpeper, the JP, who has an almost mystical obsession with the local countryside and with the continuity between past and present.   At 12...

This instalment of the franchise (a directorial debut by J.J.Abrams) has some problems.   I get that the plots in these films are never the main reason to watch them but in this case the plot is so weak it barely suffices as the skeleton on which to hang a rapid series of action set-pieces.  It revolves around a weapon codenamed 'Rabbit's Foot' which is such a MacGuffin that we never even find out what it is (or care).  In between the action there's very little time spent on characterisation or building suspense.   I didn't much care for Abrams' visual style here which often reminded me of pop videos.   And I found all the scenes involving Ethan's wife to be a bit of a drag, even those at the end when rather implausibly she takes out a couple of bad guys. And it's a shame that Keri Russell is killed off so soon since she would make a great kickass IMF agent. But there are some positives.   Firstly Philip Seymour Hoffman makes a much bigg...

Having just watched the original 1957 version I rewatched the 2007 remake, for comparison. Unsurprisingly the later film is 30 minutes longer, and more violent - which are not necessarily advantages.  In particular the transportation of Ben to Contention is now full of all manner of shenanigans - involving Ben first escaping, killing some Apache Indians, and then having to be rescued from being hung.  Although all this does detract a little from the basic story, it does allow the relationship between Ben and Dan to develop. One of the main differences between the two films is that Dan's older son William is now a major character.  He starts off openly contemptuous of his father, for being (as he sees it) such a loser.  He disobeys his father by tagging along, and this creates the opportunity for a very effective payoff at the end. Acting-wise Christian Bale is fine as Dan, although I think Van Heflin in the original is more believable as a downtrodden rancher. ...

Somehow this 2019 film went under my radar despite it being right in my wheelhouse: a political thriller based on a real-life case of a whistle blower in the runup to the Iraq War. The whistle blower in question was Katherine Gun, a translator at GCHQ, and she leaked a memo which revealed that the US and UK governments were looking to dig up dirt on some UN delegates who were likely to vote against a vital UN resolution. She is played by Keira Knightley who gives the best performance I can remember by her.  She is ably supported by a fine cast, including Matt Smith, Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans as Observer journalists, and especially Ralph Fiennes as Gun's defence lawyer when she is charged under the Official Secrets Act. I guess you could criticise it for being a little predictable but it has the merit of being an accurate depiction of a brave action which might have saved a lot of lives.  And I was certainly on tenterhooks as to how it would all end. RATING :  ✓   ...

OK, be warned  - this is a heavy film.  That's partly down to the subject matter (marital abuse) but mainly it's because of its style.   For no good reason I was expecting an up-market and progressive version of 'Death Wish' except in this film it would be a female vigilante who takes down a series of bad guys, but in an entertaining way, although now that I think about it that would make for a fairly gross film. So quite rightly writer and director  Sarah Daggar-Nickson  treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves, but possibly overdoes it. The protagonist Sadie is helping women and children escape from abusive husbands or fathers, which sometimes means she has to use her martial arts training to inflict violence on the abusers.  At the same time she is trying to locate her abusive husband who killed their son and then went off-grid.  Somehow she knows he is in a particular forest, which she is scouring methodically. We also get some flas...

I guess we can forgive this 2021 film it's rather laughable title, since it is indeed about a World War 2 intelligence operation with this name.  And a very important operation it was since it successfully fooled the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece rather than Sicily, thereby saving many lives. The basic deception was to place false papers on a corpse of a made-up British soldier, revealing the planned invasion of Greece, and then arranging for the corpse to be washed up in Spain where German agents would get involved. This story had already been told once before in a 1956 film, 'The Man Who Never Was'. You would think the story of the operation would be sufficiently gripping in itself, but the makers of both films didn't think so because in both cases they are guilty of making embellishments. The 1956 film adds various incidents. probably fictional, to the goings on in Spain. This 2019 film is more focussed on the two men in London whose ba...

This is one of those films that illustrates how difficult it must be to be black in the Deep South. The black man here, Terry, is wanting to post bail in a small town in Louisana in order to stop his cousin being sent to a state prison where his life is likely to be at risk.  This simple task turns out to be surprisingly difficult (a bit of an understatement).   Admittedly the initial problem is not so much racism as it is police corruption, but thereafter the police chief takes delight in being unreasonable because he is a racist.  As a consequence racism permeates most of the police force. The only person in the town willing to help Terry is a young courthouse clerk Summer, and as the film progresses Terry is reluctantly drawn into helping her uncover the nature of the corruption.   All three lead roles are very well acted, by  Aaron Pierre as Terry, Don Johnson as the police chief, and by AnnaSophia Robb as Summer.  All three characters are wel...

The main protagonist Alice in this effective techno-thriller is  a camgirl, who (so I learned) is  a woman who makes a living  streaming sexually explicit material live on the internet via webcam.   The early scenes of the film show us Alice (or Lola as she calls herself on the internet) at work so to speak, and how she is consumed with the desire to boost h er ranking on the site where she performs.  We also get to see her away from her studio, and learn that she has told her mother she works in web development.   Things take a surreal turn when Alice's account on the site is taken over by an identical Lola, and the rest of the film shows us Alice's increasingly desperate efforts to take back control of her account (and identity).  She eventually manages to close the account, but only after taking some extreme steps, and this possibly provides an opportunity for her to make a fresh start, given that her life as a camgirl does not seem to be ...

This 2023 film directed by Richard Linklater went completely under my radar at the time, so discovering it now was like Christmas coming early. It's described in Wikipedia as a 'romantic crime comedy', which is another way of saying that it's hard to categorise.  A comedy to begin with, it then becomes darker, so much so that at one stage I thought we were entering film noir territory, but I think overall it is best described as a black comedy.  I didn't detect a lot of romance but there is (spoiler alert) a fair bit of sexual heat. It stars Glen Powell who also co-wrote.  I hadn't come across him before but based on this outing I shall certainly look out for him in future.  He has undeniable charm and star quality. He plays Gary, a dull professor of psychology and philosophy who on the side helps the local police force with their sting operations, because Gary is a dab hand at electronics.  Then one day he gets thrust centre stage at short notice by having to ...

I don’t think I’ve ever come away from a film as bemused as I did with this horror comedy mashup. That’s in part due to the director and writer, Anna Biller, going to great lengths to create a retro 1960s look even though the film is set in the modern day, albeit one where witches are accepted as a real thing. The main character Elaine (nicely played by Samantha Robinson) is one such witch who is trying to find a man to love. Unfortunately the ones she meet all tend to end up loving her excessively and then dying, although since this is down to the potions she gives them isn’t she to blame?  All in all I found the way the film is inverting gender roles or commenting on them quite confusing, but maybe that the point? Also adding to my disorientation is the  strange acting style which I’ve seen referred to on the internet as ‘presentational’ which seems to mean it is stylised.   Well it’s certainly unlike how real people speak for sure. I was certainly entertained in the se...

I am really torn on this 1926 Buster Keaton film.   As a great Keaton admirer I want to love it, especially since it has a reputation as a classic  (it was ranked in the top ten greatest films of all time in a couple of the prestigious Sight & Sound polls).  Yet I can well understand why audiences and critics of the time were disappointed with it.  The key point is that it is not a comedy as such so if you watch it with that expectation you are bound to come away somewhat bemused. Wikipedia describes it as an action comedy which calls to mind something like 'Lethal Weapon' rather than this loving recreation of a real event from the Civil War.  Which is not to say there isn’t a lot of comic energy on display in the various set pieces involving trains as well as some amusing moments interspersed. But there isn’t the level of comedic invention one would expect from a Keaton film, and Keaton himself plays a different persona than the one we are used to.  In...

This film scores a measly 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, yet Clay Keller (the creator of the wonderful Screen Drafts podcast) rates it one of the best action films of the 1990s.  Who's right? Well, it's a little from column A and a little from column B. The critics were a bit harsh, maybe because inevitably they were comparing it with its predecessor 'The Fugitive'.  On the other hand it barely passes muster as a way of whiling away a couple of hours. To describe it as a sequel to the aforementioned Harrison Ford blockbuster is misleading since its only connection is the presence again of Tommy Lee Jones as US Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard. We should be thankful for that since he is the best thing in this film.  It's a pleasure again to see him barking orders at his team. The main difference between the two films is that the former had a fugitive hero we could easily identify with and root for, a civilian wrongly accused of a terrible crime, whereas here Wesley Snipes is a gov...

For anyone worried that this film might be too tense for them to enjoy I can reassure them that they'll be fine. Admittedly the setup does sound promising.  Violet is on a first date in a swanky restaurant when she starts getting orders on her phone from someone who is threatening to kill her child (and baby-sitter sister) if she doesn't follow those orders to the letter. It's done stylishly to begin with and I was certainly intrigued as to where it was heading, and how Violet would manage to follow some of the more demanding orders.  And of course I was wondering whether her date Henry was in fact not all he seemed. Eventually we learn who is behind it all, and where Henry fits in.  As often happens with an outlandish premise the resolution can be either anti-climactic or not very plausible or (as here) both. And then suddenly we are thrown into a ridiculous set of action sequences which aren't done very well, and are very much at odds with what has gone before. Ultima...

I started watching 'Challengers' but after half an hour or so I gave up trying to be interested in young people talking about, or having, sex.  Instead I retreated to my comfort zone and watched this 1950s Western.  Some 90-odd minutes later I very much felt I had made the right choice. The backdrop to this 1954 film, directed by Robert Aldrich, is the Franco-Mexican War of 1861-7, which (as we all know) was a conflict between conservative Mexican forces, headed by Emperor Maximilian and supported by France, and Mexican rebels, known as Juaristas.  Thankfully the film does a good job of conveying the bare minimum you need to know about all this. The US Civil War has just ended, and defeated Southerner Ben Trane (played by Gary Cooper) is in Mexico to lick his wounds and earn himself some money.  There he teams up with a younger and less civilised gunslinger, Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster).   They are employed by the Emperor, for a handsome fee, to transport a co...