KinoSis

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...

I really like films about artists – I don’t know what it is, but they’re consistently quality. Usually, you have to wait a decent number of decades before you can make a film about a real one, you can’t just rush in like a sheepdog, you have to be a bit patient and let the test of time tell you who’s worth the celluloid. When films do get around to doing famous painters, or the odd sculptor for some reason, the sensible interval means we get cute little period pieces, sometimes costume dramas if it’s one of the proper good artists and not a modern one. But it’s different with JMB because it felt like more of a now or never situation. The chances were pretty slim that anyone was going to know who Basquiat was in another fifty years, let alone act like he was up there with Van Gogh or Picasso, so they couldn’t hang about. Less than ten years after he overdosed, along came his biopic (before there was even a biography) and that almost-decade wasn’t enough to stop it feeling like a rush-jo...

Hello, strangers of the world, thank you for stopping by again. Today I thought we would reflect on the mighty river of a film that is Mummy & The Ho, an interesting work by short-lived genius Jean Eustache, who cast his eye over the great generation of the 1960s and realised that, in Twitter parlance, “it’s so over.” Reaction at the time was generally scandalised, though it won Special Jury prize at Cannes, Cahiers said it was the greatest film of the decade and, in this century, it got picked as the second-greatest French film of all time in a survey of French film-makers and critics, only missing the top spot to you-can-guess-what. It was elegantly characterised as “New Wave twilight” but that seems a bit gentle to me. It sounds romantic and wistful, and that’s not how this one rolls. At all. As I watched this weird mix of docu-neutrality and torrential stagey speechifying, it took a while for me to grasp what I was seeing. But eventually it occurred to me that this is the anti ...

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...