KinoSis

Military coups aren’t nearly as in demand as they once were, why is that? The heyday was the 1960s, they really got into couping back then, and it remained hugely popular throughout the 70s. Like much else from those decades, there’s a retro trend that carries on the once-beloved genre to this day, but they feel a bit played out now, I think there’s only been about fifty coups in the last decade (shout out to Myanmar). Still, don’t be disheartened - fifty or so is enough to give a perennial quality to this serviceable, if sometimes draggingly slow, and notably low-budget conspiracy thriller. It’s a Canadian film, nobody has ever heard of it, and those two things are related, but had it been American, who knows if notoriety or obscurity would have followed? Any film that takes a pro-military-coup stance at least has political novelty, but perhaps the kind of novelty that compounds its not wholly unfair oblivion. So there’s this country, no name, sort of implied to be Latin America but...

Hello! Welcome back and sorry not sorry about the Quintet review, a post that received hundreds of comments far and wide, the verdict of which may be summarised as “you have produced a disastrously clotted gabble of half-formed ideas.” But I still like it. Here now are some reviews of films I don’t feel strongly enough about to write full posts on. Norma Rae (1979) : This is really the epitome of the well-told take-it-seriously life-in-America film. People, me, talk about “70s films” but really there’s early 70s and there’s late 70s – this is a late 70s classic, so it has sentimental scenes, clunky bits, a couple of moments of over-acting but it is mostly persuasively acted, strongly directed, and builds to some real intensity. Exquisitely Tasteful-Hollywood work gives us the vitality and the flinching tameness of Tasteful-Hollywood at its best – lots of over-crafted dialogue and calibrated emotional arcs so we can suck our middle class thumbs happily. But it is also a very satis...

In my blissful youth, I watched lots of obscure and unorthodox films on late-night TV that ended my dogma of what good cinema was like and, it might be said, changed me a bit. Among those, the 1970s sci-fi films in particular were hypnotic. Phase IV, Zardoz, A Boy & His Dog, Silent Running – jarring music, lackadaisical pace, sere mood, subdued acting, muted action. These odd little wild-cards, scrutinised on a square-foot screen in silent darkness, frequently with a reception that looked like a swarm of angry bees in a snowstorm, were mesmerizingly different to movies from before their historical moment and after it; they felt as alien as you might in fact think films about aliens should do. They tantalised me and felt like they had slipped through a net of homogeneity. But I did not see Quintet at that time. If I had, I might well have announced “possibly a bit too heterogenous” (or words to that effect) and this, I submit, would have been admirably fair of me. As American films ...

Journeys, turning points, the crucial epiphanies of personal growth when someone learns something improving about themselves - these warmly charming moments are, of course, irritating to watch at the best of times, but particularly in comedy films, so the very few comedies so heartless as to skip all that are accordingly the ones that stand out in our affections. This one is kind enough to be precisely that cruel. It comes out at the pre-kaboom period of transition between the naughty 90s and the, I suppose, actual 00ies, where the fad of dark comedy crime film finally gets too self-conscious about its own assumptions to carry on with itself any more. At first glance, it’s just a film noir spoof with some neat tricks but it’s actually one of those interesting little movies that surreptitiously says a lot of unflattering things about American society, and who, I ask, is to say wrongly? It turns out that spoofing the femme-fatale pulls a Jenga brick which collapses the fragile tower of...

Everyone talks about two bits in Birth   – one, Nicole Kidman goes to the opera, and the camera holds in a close-up on her face for two long minutes, in an obvious Dreyer homage. Two, Kidman takes a bath with a ten-year-old boy and the mood is tenser and less innocent than ideally one would like it to be given the bounds of propriety. Will bath-time become paedo sexy-time? A kid-man for a Kidman.  Now I know what you’re going to say – “I’m giving this one a wide berth!” Well, you know what, just grow up a bit please, this is a serious film and we’re not going to dwell on those scenes anyway. Everything to say about them has been said, not that there's loads to say. In fact, hundreds of thousands of words of deep musings about this film are already available , but I think mine will show - pregnant pause - more natal care.  The design of Birth is perfectly clean and uncluttered. A precocious child declares that he’s the reincarnation of an upper-class Manhattan woman’...

Great pains are taken throughout this mid-70s Clint Eastwood hit (and it was a massive hit, think about that) to assure the audience that the hero of the title is anti-racist and anti-war. And looking back on it now, it’s easy to see why Eastwood, who directed the film, was so careful on that point. Based on a novel by violent KKK member Asa Carter, the movie recasts the Confederates as the good guys and is generally taken to be the type of right-wing propaganda movie that paved the way for Reagan’s victory. Eastwood plays a vigilante who wants revenge on the US government for a war-crime - by Union soldiers - who kill his family in the first scene, and at first glance it adds to a string of 70s Westerns known as thinly disguised condemnations of the Vietnam War: Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, Ulzana’s Raid. It also fits neatly into the post-Watergate suspicion of government, like that decade’s spate of paranoid conspiracy thrillers. But its heart is with the far right of American ra...

Auteur directors can’t seem to resist melodrama. Todd Haynes did it with Far From Heaven, Schrader with Forever Mine, Lumet with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. There’s loads of examples. They love it. Probably it’s because whackadoo crazy plots give them more legroom than boring dopey realism, without them having to make art-films that nobody watches. De Mille, Minnelli, Sirk and Ray were doing this at the exact point that Europeans said Hollywood was dumb (loveable, but dumb) and it was time to do something entirely different – and the Europeans thereupon made the greatest films of all time. The 70s saw the American backlash, recrowning realism as the one true monarch of cinema, and so auteurism since then has been all about working within those confines. Melodrama is one acceptable mode of testing the walls of the cell. Iñárritu (look at the trouble I’ve gone to there! Not really - cut and paste) sort of joins the melodrama club but takes the clichés of daytime TV movies a...