KinoSis

Richard Burton’s contribution to the London-gangland genre might look as if it’s mainly of historical interest now, with its dated dialogue, rather fake looking violence, and a bad-lad cockney accent from Burton that just doesn’t work. Superseded in scary nastiness many times over since it was made, it stands denuded of any power to still shock us; happily, its being denuded lets us get a better look at it, and what it really has to offer a brave punter. Released in a whole year of dark violent fantasies on the screen (among others: Dirty Harry, The French Connection, Shaft, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Wake In Fright, The Devils, Duel - all 1971), Villain feels like it’s not quite part of that psycho-drama moment, but something more grounded and socially astute. Burton plays Vic, an East End gangster who can’t resist branching out to try something new and risky for his gang, namely, their first armed robbery. For the most part, the plot alternates between the crooks (a gormless pac

Does the will to live not dim a little whenever “The Nature of Daylight” starts playing? If I can just offer one helpful note to the producers of Hollywood and television: we hate this piece of music, it’s always been shit, stop using it. Apparently, Denis Villeneuve had wanted to make a science-fiction film since he began his career as a director - a career of, let's say, unpredictable choices - and settled on this: aliens land on Earth and the US Army press-gangs the world’s top linguistics experts into figuring out how to talk to them, so "we" don’t have to start a war. The experts, led by Louise (played by Amy Adams) don’t really have to be asked twice, what with it being the biggest event in history, although from the dour mood of the Army you would think it was latrine duty. SF fans might remember elements of this from Ian Watson’s novel The Embedding. So they put on their astronaut suits for protection and pop round to meet the new neighbours. The film then follows

Sometimes I write rather loosely, do I not, so on this occasion I am toying with a more essayistic approach which I suspect will be a passing fad to the mutual relief (or common relief, as Fowler would say) of the author and his readers. The object of this fine writing will be Valmont , an adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons from an interesting and - to begin the flourishes - heady collaboration between the director of One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest and the screenwriter for Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,  subversively doing Dangerous Liaisons against itself.   They clearly don’t like the book and redo the whole thing in the polar opposite genre – get ready for Dangerous Liaisons as a dry comedy with some occasional slapstick. You may wonder what that’s like. Well, here’s how I’d put it: Milos Forman’s film of Dangerous Liaisons can be slightly jolting if you know any other version of the story – it’s quite an imperious display of the auteur’s prerogative to tu

In light of my recent revisitation of The Mother & The Whore, here's something I wrote in 2020 (hence the WAP reference) and never got round to posting on another film which expresses scepticism about the Sixies and similarly concludes in favour of traditional marriage. But it is not a similar film.  Elegaic, quiet, gentle, Acts Of Love is a film about life’s disappointments which, it might be said, embodies its theme too well. It’s beautifully written, constructed and acted and I’ve seen it many times but every time I do, even if it’s convincing in its parts, I’m yet to be convinced either by its anti-60s bias or its reliance on that bias to tell us how true love works. This flaw doesn’t lie in the initial premise. We lay our scene, by implication, in the late 60s or early 70s in what looks like Minnesota, specifically a farming town, where Joseph, a school teacher with emotional baggage and a bad leg (played by Dennis Hopper), has a hot fling with Catherine, a 17-year old blo

The above title is a little reference. Long ago, there was a parody of F R Leavis titled “A Few More Books To Cross Off Your List”. This post possibly inaugurates a series in which I devote some short(er) reviews to films which may be passed over without dishonour to the cinephile. One has to doubt that there is no lesson to be drawn from the fact that every film in the following selection is English. A Good Year (2006) : ah, bless Ridley Scott – he really flunks the Turing test with this one. I don’t know who told him he should go anywhere near comedy, never mind rom-com. This is an excruciatingly, violently schmaltzy, Richard Curtis-y exercise in perky winsome performances and painfully naff humour (sped-up footage of a car going round a roundabout??), a kind of contrived plastic forgery of a rom-com where a super-rich Square Mile prick (Russell Crowe doing an English accent) happily finds the best in life on a French vineyard by learning a little lesson about his feelings, with a

You may have often wanted to see Sylvester Stallone as a heroic terrorist bomber and Sharon Stone, aged 36, as Hot Blonde In Her Early 20s With An Air Of Mystery And Trouble. In the same film. Well, Warner Bros agreed wholeheartedly and that's what 1994 was like. This very mid-90s thriller makes the very mid-90s decision to be a hybrid of action movie and neo-noir, both of which were still runaway popular then (and, looking back, they saved the whole decade). The Getaway did the same thing, same year. Guns were briefly out of fashion in Hollywood so Stallone’s character just blows people up with explosives instead of mowing them down, a really unimprovable example of Hollywood being socially responsible. It was based on a series of 80s pulp novels I used to read and has nothing much in common with them except that he’s an ex-military guy for hire who, in every book, gets hired by a sultry babe to do a revenge hit on a Mafia boss (usually in New York, but the film goes for Miami), a