2024 - January
Autumn Sonata (1978) 4/4
Hard Boiled (1992) 4/4
Bullet in the Head (1990) 4/4
The Holdovers (2023) 4/4
Searching (2018) 4/4
Laura (1944) 3.5/4
May December (2023) 3.5/4
Just Heroes (1989) 3.5/4
Mr Monk's Last Case (2023) 3.5/4
Murder by Death (1976) 3/4
Wind River (2017) 3/4
Paycheck (2003) 2.5/4
Missing (2023) 2.5/4
Manhunt (2017) 2.5/4
Switchback (1997) 2/4
Broken Arrow (1996) 2/4
Hard Target (1993) 1.5/4
Hard Boiled (1992) 4/4
Bullet in the Head (1990) 4/4
The Holdovers (2023) 4/4
Searching (2018) 4/4
Laura (1944) 3.5/4
May December (2023) 3.5/4
Just Heroes (1989) 3.5/4
Mr Monk's Last Case (2023) 3.5/4
Murder by Death (1976) 3/4
Wind River (2017) 3/4
Paycheck (2003) 2.5/4
Missing (2023) 2.5/4
Manhunt (2017) 2.5/4
Switchback (1997) 2/4
Broken Arrow (1996) 2/4
Hard Target (1993) 1.5/4
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- DirectorAlexander PayneStarsPaul GiamattiDa'Vine Joy RandolphDominic SessaA cranky history teacher at a prep school is forced to remain on campus over the holidays with a grieving cook and a troubled student who has no place to go.01-01-2024
24 years after his scathingly satirical "Election", director Alexander Payne returns to the high school setting in order to tell another story of an unusual relationship between a teacher and a troublesome student which will come to change both of their lives and redefine the principles they hold dear. But whereas "Election" was a film seething with sarcasm, "The Holdovers" is a surprisingly warm even delightfully cosy film, a modern Christmas classic which nevertheless delivers on all that we've come to expect from an Alexander Payne film.
Then again, the high school in "The Holdovers" is nothing like the societal petrie dish depicted in "Election". This film is set in an exclusive 1970s boarding school, the fancy Barton Academy whose wood-panelled hallways are stalked by the sons of the rich and influential. The story begins as classes end for winter and chauffer-driven limousines and helicopters come to pick the students up and return them to their mansions for Christmas Eve.
Left behind are the titular holdovers - foreign students and children whose parents are too busy to spend Christmas with them. The job of looking after this varied batch of misfits falls to classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). The sort of man who would describe himself as old-fashioned and whom everyone else would describe at best as rigid, Hunham has earned himself the assignment by failing a senator's son and costing him a spot at a prestigious university.
The only other adult at the school besides Hunham is cook Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) who decides to stay at the school in order to feel close to her son who attended the academy before being drafted into the army where he died mere months before the film begins.
At first, the situation between Hunham and the students is tense as they are resigned to suffering through the worst Christmas of their lives. Hunham is a real stick-in-the-mud kind of teacher. A stickler for the rules, his attempts at being friendly towards the kids include telling long-winded anecdotes about the Punic Wars and making them study even though they're on Christmas break.
However, a cockeyed kinship slowly begins to develop between Hunham and Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a bratty, wisecracking student who planned on spending Christmas on St. Kits before his mother decided to ditch him and spend the holidays with her new husband instead.
Snowed in at the echoey, grandiose academy, Paul, Angus, and Mary slowly grow to realize that they may have more in common than they initially assumed. As they get used to each other's idiosyncracies, these three societal rejects learn that they can rely on each other to finally open up to the bitter and complicated world out there and finally reach the potential they harbour inside themselves for love, friendship, and real human connections.
"The Holdovers" is based on Marcel Pagnol's 1935 film "Merlusse" but it could just as easily be compared to Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" or any other life-affirming tale about people who learn that the only way to break out of the emotional prisons they've build around their own souls is to open up to the people around them.
This is a quaint film, full of good humour and Christmas cheer. Warm, sentimental, and gently funny. The great thing about Alexander Payne's direction, however, is that he never allows all this quirkiness to become saccharine or mannered. Payne and writer David Hemingson clearly care deeply about these characters and build them as three-dimensional human beings rather than stereotypes from a Hallmark card.
It helps, of course, to have three superb performances spearheading your film. Paul Giamatti plays the prissy, pedantic Hunham with such superbly measured self-effacing humour and warmth that it might just be the best performance he's ever given in a career full of dazzling performances. He is not a pleasant man but we grow to like him so much because he obviously cares about his students and believes that giving them a hard time and forcing them to abide by the rules is the only way to turn them into good people.
Sessa and Randolph go toe-to-toe with Giamatti. It is hard to believe that this is Dominic Sessa's acting debut. His layered, convincing, complex performance as Angus slowly unfolds before the camera in a manner which is so precise that it would be an impressive feat even for a highly experienced thespian. However, it is Da'Vine Joy Randolph's subtle yet heartrending performance as a grieving mother which is my favourite in this film. She is the film's beating heart.
"The Holdovers" is also an impressive film to look at. As photographed by Eigil Bryld, the film has a highly convincing 1970s texture with its varied, colourful palette. Most significantly, this is the first movie shot digitally which genuinely managed to fool me into thinking it was shot on 16mm. Also deserving of praise is production designer Ryan Warren Smith who did an incredible job of making real locations look like gift-wrapped dollhouses.
But the real delights of this film are its characters, its superb central performances, its winning tone, and its heartwarming message of friendship and acceptance. While the more cynical of us maybe won't be entirely convinced, I found "The Holdovers" to be a perfectly packaged gift of warmth and good cheer at a time when these qualities are most needed.
4/4 - DirectorRobert MooreStarsPeter FalkAlec GuinnessPeter SellersFive famous literary detective characters and their sidekicks are invited to a bizarre mansion to solve an even stranger mystery.01-01-2024
Neil Simon took a brief break in writing his enormously successful character-driven, quip-laden Broadway comedies in order to pen the original screenplay for "Murder by Death", a breezily bizarre spoof of detective fiction and predecessor of "Clue" which is a definite oddball in Simon's filmography.
It begins with the old favourite of mystery fiction - the old dark house where a group of eclectic characters has been anonymously summoned for dinner and a murder. The fogbound Gothic mansion, surrounded by forbidding forests, connected to the outside world only by a crumbling bridge is indeed the ideal setting for such a weekend especially when you add the ever-reliable tropes of a cut telephone wire and a raging storm outside to the equation.
The guest list includes the five greatest detectives in the world and their plus ones. Simon populates his film with broad and only somewhat accurate spoofs of the genre's most famous protagonists. There's the gun-toting private eye Sam Diamond (Peter Falk) who walks around in a rented white tux with a bullet hole in the back. "You should see the other guy," he quips. He is followed in tow by his secretary and lover Tess Skeffington (Eileen Brennan) whom he treats as more of a nuisance than an assistant. "The last time I trusted a dame was in Paris in 1940," he explains," She said she was going to get a bottle of wine. Two hours later, the Germans marched into France."
Just as Sam never drops his gun, so Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith) never go anywhere without their cocktail glasses. Whether they're stumbling their way through the fog or examining a corpse, they are always immaculately dressed, superbly well-bred, and equipped with a cutting retort.
Accompanied by his long-suffering chauffeur Marcel (James Cromwell) is the prissy Belgian detective Milo Perrier (James Coco) who seems to be more interested in the dinner part of the weekend than the murder mystery. His boasts of being the greatest detective in the world are not taken kindly by the much more vivacious and pragmatic Miss Marbles (Elsa Lanchester) who is much sharper than the preening Belgian despite having to wheel her elderly nurse (Estelle Winwood) wherever she goes.
Finally, there's Chinese detective Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers) who shows up at the house with his Japanese son Willie (Richard Narita). Best known for his sharp deductive skills and broken English, he has a saying for every opportunity. Some of his finest zingers include "Conversation like television set on honeymoon - unnecessary" and "Big house like man married to fat woman - hard to get around".
Anyone with a passing knowledge of mystery fiction will recognise these characters as broad parodies of Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Charlie Chan respectively. On the other hand, I imagine that anyone not familiar with the characters being spoofed would be mightily confused and put off by this film.
The problem is that the fans of mystery fiction who should logically be this film's target audience will immediately notice that Simon doesn't have a particularly deep understanding of the characters he is parodying. His Miss Marbles, for example, is an in-name-only spoof of Miss Marple and actually resembles Jessica Fletcher more closely. Furthermore, his Milo Perrier character betrays a gross misunderstanding of the essence of Hercule Poirot. The gluttonous, rude, egotistical Perrier bears no resemblance whatsoever to the perfectly mannered, kind, and pedantic Monsieur Poirot and instead seems to be more of a parody of the popular image of Poirot held by people who've never read Agatha Christie than the character himself.
Also present in the mansion are the deaf-mute cook (Nancy Walker) and the blind butler wittily played with imperious stoicism by Alec Guinness. They work for the odious Mr Twain who offers a million dollars to the detective who solves the mystery first. Truman Capote plays Twain and even though he is clearly not a talented actor, his own finely tuned camp persona fits the character like a glove.
Neil Simon is a masterful writer and the dialogue in "Murder by Death" absolutely sparkles. The quips, back-and-forths, and the doubletalk are so sharp, so witty, so perfectly shaped and delivered that this film could work just as well on the radio. There are so many brilliantly quotable lines in this film that it's impossible for me to single out any one as an ideal example. From the running confusion about the butler named Jamessir Bensonmum to Sidney Wang's cod sayings and the faux noirish tough-gay parlance of Sam Diamond, there's just too much brilliance in the dialogue to single out any one line as the film's finest.
The gags come in thick and fast so much so that the film quickly achieves a breathless, chaotic pace it never lets up on. Indeed, Simon's script feels like a coherently structured narrative and more like a loosely put-together collection of all kinds of jokes thrown at the screen without any consideration for consistency or even tone. For example, Milo Perrier changes from a Belgian detective to a Frenchman when the joke requires it.
The lack of any narrative structure, however, becomes a severe hindrance as the film barrels along. There's no real mystery to be solved here. Instead of working out even the most rudimentary plot, Simon's script quickly descends into bizarrity and surrealism. Characters walk out of a room and come right back in wearing different clothes. A maid turns out to be a robot. A man is revealed to be a woman. A woman is revealed to be wearing a rubber mask.
Without a plot to follow or a clear structure, the film begins to feel like an out-of-control sketch show and while "Murder by Death" is most assuredly consistently funny it also becomes a tad tiring by the halfway point. Most bizarrely, this problem is referred to in the script by Dick Charleston who correctly assesses that the killer much like the writer "gives us meaningless clues to confuse us, dangles red herrings before our eyes, bedazzled us with bizarre banalities while all the time precious seconds are ticking away".
Simon tries to explain away the film's plotlessness by having the killer rage against unfair plots in mystery novels but if that was the target for Simon's satire then why did he choose to spoof characters from novels by Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Earl Derr Biggers who are most famous by playing fair with their readers, giving them all the clues before the final reveal, and crafting meticulous plots? Again, Simon's shallow understanding of the genre he is spoofing reveals itself.
What ultimately makes "Murder by Death" great fun despite its shortcomings is the starry, talented cast all of whom chew the scenery with glee and deliver wonderful comedic performances. Smartly director Robert Moore makes them play their parts completely straight. With the possible exception of the hammy-as-usual James Coco, each of these actors could play the character they are spoofing quite convincingly. I'd definitely watch a Nick and Nora film starring David Niven and Maggie Smith. The best performance, in my opinion, comes from Peter Falk who is so perfectly cast as the hardboiled gumshoe detective that the bizarre situations he finds himself in are all the funnier.
One thing that I have to note, however, before recommending "Murder by Death" is that it's definitely not a politically correct comedy and a vast majority of its jokes would absolutely not fly today. Besides having Peter Sellers in yellowface, it also makes a bevvy of fat jokes, gay jokes, racist jokes, blind jokes, deaf-mute jokes, trans jokes, and pretty much every other kind of joke you can think of. It throws around racist epithets and, unlike comedies of today, doesn't bother to tell the audience that it thinks they're bad.
If you're easily upset by dated humour, then definitely avoid "Murder by Death", however, if such matters don't trouble you then there's plenty in this scatterbrained but consistently hilarious film to amuse you. The dialogue is sparkling, the performances are excellent, and there is a killer score by Dave Grusin to tap your feet to. While the lack of a plot is frustrating and the climax feels deeply anticlimactic, I cannot deny the fact that I screamed with laughter from beginning to end.
3/4 - DirectorTodd HaynesStarsNatalie PortmanChris TenzisCharles MeltonTwenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.03-01-2024
Who knew that a film as unsettling as Todd Haynes' "May December" could begin on such a beautiful, warm morning in the cosy, picturesque beachside home of Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore)? The house is abuzz with activity as Gracie, her husband Joe (Charles Melton), and their twin children nervously prepare for the arrival of their weekend guest - the famous TV actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman).
But what is a celebrity like Elizabeth doing in this small Savannah town visiting a neighbourhood busybody like Gracie? Well, she is preparing to play her in a movie. You see, despite her cordial Southern Belle appearance, Gracie is an infamous local celebrity herself. A convicted sex offender who met her much younger husband Joe when he was only 13 years old. She was arrested, did her time in prison, got out, and the two have now been seemingly happily married for the better part of two decades.
If this story sounds familiar to you, "May December" was clearly influenced by the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, the notorious schoolteacher who raped her student in 1987 and then married him when she got out of prison.
Anyone who's been paying attention to the news must have noticed that there's at least one teacher every few months who is arrested for grooming a child. A cursory Google search tells me that just last week Adriana Rullan was arrested for having sex with her 13-year-old student. The questions pose themselves really. What makes these people tick? Are they merely manipulative predators, the paedophiles we were warned about in childhood, or is there some kind of a deeper pathology at play? What about their poor victims who, more often than not, were led to believe they were actually engaging in a loving relationship with their abuser? This alone makes "May December" an intriguing proposition.
However, I found that the character of Gracie Atherton-Yoo and her psyche are the least interesting elements of this very effective film. Very early on, almost from the very moment we meet her, Haynes unequivocally shows us that she is emotionally manipulative and sickeningly controlling. As she prepares for Elizabeth's arrival, we notice that she speaks to her 36-year-old husband as she would to an itinerant child.
Furthermore, it becomes blatantly obvious that she is stage-managing every aspect of her supposedly perfect life. She convinces Elizabeth that she is highly regarded in her neighbourhood and yet she finds a box of excrement lying on her front steps. She pretends to be a successful business owner but Elizabeth eventually finds out that all her clients are actually her few friends trying to help her out. In a particularly telling scene, she takes her daughter to choose a graduation dress. When her daughter chooses a dress Gracie doesn't like, she compliments her bravery saying "I wish I were so brave to show my arms like that". Of course, in the end, they buy the dress Gracie likes.
Her manipulation seems to extend to the film itself. The title is "May December" which is how Gracie would like you to think of her and Joe's relationship - not sexual abuse, just an unconventional romance. Even Christopher Blauvelt's warm, idyllic cinematography fits in with the illusion of a picture-perfect life she is trying to sell.
The few times things do go her way, Gracie throws tantrums, cries, and does her little girl lost act. With her lisp which comes and goes, her flowery dresses, and blushing cheeks, she puts a lot of stock in trying to appear like a child. "I'm naive," she repeatedly tells anyone within earshot. But she really isn't and Haynes and Moore don't seem to be trying to hide that.
Instead, writer Sammy Burch structures the film exactly like a police procedural with Elizabeth in the role of the detective methodically untangling Gracie's deceptions. The way "May December" uses her obsessive, intrusive, carelessly muckraking process as a narrative device reminded me of the similarly fascinating "Kate Plays Christine", Robert Greene's film about Christine Chubbuck which explores its subject by following actress Kate Lynn Sheil's preparations to play her in the film.
As a thriller, however, "May December" is the closest to a Brian de Palma film. Much like de Palma, Haynes gleefully indulges his love for melodrama, grand gestures, long zooms, and loud music cues. The film is exceptionally mannered creating a bizarre, deeply unsettling atmosphere of artifice and repressed terror. The whole film has an anxious tension running through every single scene and the whole time I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the butcher knives to come out.
Haynes uses music to great effect and as I watched the film I wondered who the composer was thinking it's the kind of score you don't hear in movies anymore - classical, loud, insistent. In fact, it was composed in 1971 for Joseph Losey's "The Go-Between" by the legendary Michel Legrand and reworked for this film by Marcelo Zarvos who makes Legrand sound like Bernard Herrmann.
Natalie Portman is absolutely superb in this film. Between "Star Wars" and the "Thor" films, it's easy to forget just what a resourceful, insightful, subtle actress she is. It's a compliment to her that Elizabeth does not remain a mere observer in this film but rather an active instigator of a brand-new melodrama. In a way, she is just as manipulative and as deceitful as Gracie and in a strange, creepily funny scene we watch her as she goes over some tapes of 13-year-old actors auditioning to play Joe in the film. "None of them are sexy enough," she complains to her producer.
The only sincere, heartfelt presence in the film is indeed Joe, the victim who is still entangled in his abuser's web. Unable to move on, he is still a 13-year-old in a grown man's body and kept that way by his sinister wife. Tellingly, he relates most easily to his three kids and in the scenes he shares with them he seems more like their brother than their father.
"May December" does not do a particularly great job of exploring the mindset of an abuser. Gracie is a fairly straightforward and obvious character and the few conclusions the film does reach about her seem awfully easy and predictable in the grand scheme of things.
What it does superbly, however, is exploit the bizarreness of the situation to create a very compelling, unsettling, and insightful portrait of abuse and the way her manipulation has infected her victim so successfully that he is unable to shake her influence even 20 years after the fact. In that sense, even though the film is being marketed on the strength of Portman and Moore's performances, this is really Charles Melton's film.
3.5/4 - DirectorAneesh ChagantyStarsJohn ChoDebra MessingJoseph LeeAfter his teenage daughter goes missing, a desperate father tries to find clues on her laptop.05-01-2024
It's a little startling to realize that there are adults in the world right now whose entire lives could be chronicled and tracked through their internet usage. After only about 20 years since the information superhighway became a common-place household appliance, an average American has left in their wake such a massive online footprint that a crafty internet detective could quite easily assemble the story of their life doing nothing more than "searching".
This realization came to my mind as I watched the beautifully assembled opening montage of Aneesh Chaganty's exquisite feature film debut "Searching" and it niggled away in the back of my mind for the duration of this gripping thriller. After the film was over, I had the overwhelming urge to look through my old YouTube comments and delete the really embarrassing ones which I choose to believe is proof of just how effective a film "Searching" is rather than an indication of what a cringy guy I am.
The opening montage is a kind of an online version of that tear-jerking opening montage from "Up" and it shows the childhood of Margot Kim (Michelle La), the beloved only daughter of David (John Cho) and Pamela (Sara Sohn). Beginning at the moment when the Kim family created their first online account, this montage edited by Nick Johnson and Will Merrick is a first-rate example of concise, unassuming, and elegant exposition. As we watch snippets of years' worth of memories, we slowly learn that Pamela was diagnosed with cancer when Margot was a teen. In the most heartbreaking use of a Windows calendar in a movie, we see Margot mark a date for her mom's return from the hospital. February 6th! She then moves the reminder to March 1st. Eventually, a cursor slowly moves across the calendar and deletes the reminder.
The film picks up a few years later when Margot mysteriously disappears. Now it is up to her worried dad David, who is not exactly a computer nerd, by the way, to trawl through terabytes of online data in order to find his daughter.
"Searching" is far from the first film which confines its action solely to computer screens. Levan Gabriadze's "Unfriended" came out four years before. However, director/writer Aneesh Chaganty manages to transcend this simple gimmick. Whereas, "Unfriended" felt like a conventional found footage film - assembled rather than crafted with care and thought - Chaganty gives "Searching" a confident and often humorous authorial voice through some excellent editing choices and smart use of Torin Borrowdale's energetic, urgent music.
I particularly like the way Chaganty uses the simple but effective method of drawing our attention to details by zooming. Look, for example, how he picks out faces in newscasts and videos. The way he zooms into David Kim's worried, anxious expression during a police statement regarding his missing daughter. Note also how he picks out a lonely, sinister figure in a key climactic scene which I won't spoil giving it an ominous quality even though what we're watching is nothing more but a static crowd shot.
Chaganty and his co-writer Sev Ohanian have also gone to the trouble of creating an interesting story and likeable, relatable characters with issues, anxieties, and flaws who react like actual human beings to the bizarre situation they find themselves in. John Cho gives a tremendous dramatic performance as a man frantically searching for his missing daughter. He is ill-equipped to find his way through the maze that is the online world and "Searching" does a great job of showing just how difficult it is to be an amateur sleuth. Cho's face is on-screen for most of the film and his excellent performance is one of the biggest reasons why it works as well as it does.
We also get a great sense of the man through the way he uses the computer. The way he types, the way he lingers before sending a text, the way he hesitates before typing certain words, and the words he deletes before sending all serve to build David's character. This is another example in which Chaganty's use of the gimmick is superior to anyone else's.
Also terrific is Michelle La as the missing daughter. Since Margot disappears in the first 10 minutes of the film, La's performance is mostly relegated to photographs and videos. This is a difficult, limiting task for any actor but La succeeds in creating a fully believable character whom we grow to genuinely care about even though she barely gets to interact with anyone else. She projects an eery kind of haunted quality, a deep-seethed sadness which makes us wonder if maybe Margot ran away or even committed suicide.
Like a found footage film, "Searching" consists of a great deal of videos, texts, articles, emails, and messages edited together into a kind of cinematic patchwork but Chaganty never allows his film to become static or feel uneven. He infuses it with a manic energy, a relentless pace driven by David's tireless search for his daughter. Chaganty's use of his virtual camera is virtuosic. It rarely rests, sweeping across screens and pages, zooming in on relevant details and reactions. When it does occasionally slow down or fully come to a stop, it is usually to highlight a significant discovery or a dramatic low in David's search.
The virtual camera thus feels completely connected with the film's protagonist and very quickly I did as well. I found "Searching" an unusually compelling and intense thriller, one which gripped me pretty much immediately with its interesting story and intelligent way in which it uses its central gimmick. I also have to commend the film for its high level of authenticity. Getting the internet culture right on film is not easy but Chaganty pulls it off in a way which doesn't make him feel like an old man screaming at the clouds. Bonus points for absolutely nailing the voices of random Reddit users who come up with all kinds of kooky theories about Margot's disappearance.
The big reveal of "Searching" is maybe not as groundbreaking as the film thinks it is and the way the story comes together is rather convenient but I must admit that by the time we got there, I was exhilarated and fully invested not just in the mystery but also in the relationship between David and Margot. There is a brief epilogue which involves a character changing their screensaver and to me that little gesture was more meaningful than the film's big, exciting climax. That, to me, speaks of a very effective film which goes well beyond genre trappings and manages to create compelling characters even within the confines of its gimmick.
4/4 - DirectorNicholas D. JohnsonWill MerrickStarsTim GriffinAva Zaria LeeNia LongAfter her mother goes missing, a young woman tries to find her from home, using tools available to her online.06-01-2024
There's only one thing to be said for high expectations - they can never be met. One film I had extremely high expectations for in 2023 was "Silent Night", John Woo's first American film in 20 years and even though it would be a perfectly fine direct-to-video actioner for any other director, it just didn't live up to the standards I hold Woo, one of my favourite living directors, up to. Here's another similar case of a film which might be a perfectly decent potboiler if it didn't come on the heels of one of the best thrillers that's come out in recent years
"Missing" is the spiritual successor to Aneesh Chaganty's exhilarating "Searching" which depicted a father's search for his missing daughter by confining the entirety of its action to his computer screen. Five years later comes "Missing", directed and written by the original film's editors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson. It repeats the same gimmick and quite a few of the same plot beats but without the breakneck pacing, clever plotting, or the emotional investment that helped the original transcend its gimmick.
This time around it's the daughter searching for her missing parent. Immediately, this change discards one of the most interesting aspects of the original film - the fact that our protagonist, a middle-aged dad in a PTA sweatshirt, was woefully unprepared to scour the complex world of the internet. On the other hand, our new protagonist, June (Storm Reid), is perfectly cyberliterate, making her investigation feel much less challenging.
The mystery of her mom's disappearance is extremely convoluted but not all that hard to untangle and ultimately the puzzles which Merrick and Johnson's screenplay throw her way, don't seem to test June's intelligence all that much. She comes upon clue after clue without much trouble, simply by following links, breaking into email addresses, and guessing passwords.
To keep us occupied, the film gives us twist after twist all of which are somehow both ludicrously preposterous and awfully predictable. Especially easy to spot is the film's big midpoint reveal which I figured out before the 20-minute mark. I wish I could claim that I'm some sort of a genius but the reveal was so obviously telegraphed that I'm shocked June didn't spot it herself. Then again, maybe I only spotted it because Merrick and Johnson lifted it straight out of "Prescription: Murder".
Once the mystery is untangled, the villain's entire plot feels unnecessarily complex for what turns out to be a fairly straightforward crime. The antagonist in "Searching" was a fleshed-out, interesting character with a human motive and a relatively sympathetic backstory. The big bad of "Missing", on the other hand, is a laughable boogeyman with a plot that a Batman supervillain would dismiss as doomed to fail.
Whereas the original film hinged as much on its likeable, relatable characters as it did on its clever mystery, "Missing" doesn't give us much of either. June and her mom Grace are both underwritten, their relationship feels stereotypical, and I never felt the same urge to see them reconnect as I did with the father and the daughter from the original film. This is not a criticism, by the way, of the actresses Storm Reid and Nia Long both of whom do a very good job indeed but of the writing which never goes above or beyond what the formula requires of it.
And that's my biggest issue with "Missing". While "Searching" felt urgent, real, inventive, intelligent, and powered with raw emotion, this sequel feels more like it is merely ticking the boxes and following in its predecessor's footsteps. It copies many of the same beats including the touching opening montage depicting the death of a parent from cancer. The few twists it tries to pull on the original's formula end up feeling self-conscious and a tad forced as if the only reason they've been inserted into the script is so that "Missing" could be different in at least some aspects.
Now, much like "Silent Night", "Missing" is not a total washout. In fact, I would say that for the most part, it's a perfectly decent little thriller but it simply never rises to the level of the far superior "Searching". It feels more like a lesser imitator, a Lifetime rip-off, rather than a true successor. I liked Storm Reid's charismatic presence and I still think the gimmick is clever and engaging, but I never got wrapped up in or as engaged by "Missing" as I expected to.
I must add, however, that I absolutely loved Joaquim de Almeida's brief but unexpectedly warm and funny performance as Javi, a Columbian delivery man who becomes June's unwitting sidekick. If they make a third film in the "-ing" franchise, as I hope they will, they should make it all about Javi.
2.5/4 - DirectorRandy ZiskStarsTony ShalhoubTraylor HowardJason Gray-StanfordIt follows Monk, a brilliant detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He returns to solve one last case involving his stepdaughter Molly, a journalist preparing for her wedding.06-01-2024
When I first became introduced to the magic of the mystery genre as a young child, the first three detectives I fell in love with were David Suchet's "Poirot", Jeremy Brett's "Sherlock Holmes", and Tony Shalhoub's "Monk". Since then, I've seen and read hundreds more mystery novels, TV shows, and movies, and I've fallen in love with authors like John Dickson Carr, Keigo Higashino, and Seishi Yokomizo, but those three detectives, all so different and yet all so alike, will forever hold a special place in my heart.
"Sherlock Holmes" ended well before I was born when Jeremy Brett sadly passed away, David Suchet hung up the moustache after starring in adaptations of every Poirot novel and short story in 2013, and "Monk" fizzled out in 2009. In the finale, he finally solved the murder of his beloved wife Trudy (Melora Hardin) and even met her long-lost daughter Molly (then played by Alona Tal). The finale was not the Earth-shattering climax everyone had hoped for. It always felt a little twee and forced to me but then the show had been running on fumes for at least its final two seasons. And yet, even with these definitive finales, there's always been a sneaking hope in the deepest reaches of my heart that David Suchet would don the Belgian accent once more or that Tony Shalhoub would live to touch another pole.
And so, here we are, fourteen years after "Mr Monk and the End" was broadcast watching "Mr Monk's Last Case: A Monk Movie". It's been a long wait but I'm pleased to say it's been worth it. From the very first scenes in which we find a despondent Adrian Monk trying to sell his thousand-page memoir to an uninterested publisher (Brooke Adams), I felt like I was transported back to the mid-2000s, eagerly awaiting the next Monk adventure in my little childhood room. If that's not nostalgia bait, I don't know what is.
One of the major reasons why the TV show "Monk" was so wonderful and always felt so comfortable was the luminous chemistry of its tremendous cast led by the always brilliant Tony Shalhoub. While he's certainly not been absent from our screens in the past decade, I've seen much less of his co-stars Traylor Howards, Jason Gray-Stanford, and Ted Levine. To my great relief, however, they all slip right back into the swing of things, bringing back that effortless, winning chemistry they shared all those years ago as if they never left the set.
It's especially wonderful to see Traylor Howard back. She hasn't acted since "Monk" ended in 2009 but seems to have become an even better performer in the intervening years. She has such a warm yet relentless, screwball-type energy that just bursts out of the screen.
Andy Breckman's writing, on the other hand, takes some time to find the old rhythm. The first act of "Mr Monk's Last Case" is a tad creaky, full of clumsy exposition and stilted dialogue but once the mystery gets going, Breckman's comedic instincts kick in and it truly does begin to feel like the show never ended. Monk's dialogue is especially funny and Shalhoub clearly delights in delivering some of the best zingers he's had since the first three seasons.
I have seen some people complain about the subplot focusing on Monk's suicidal thoughts. I feel like those people don't quite remember what the show was all about in the first place. "Monk" was not an uplifting, feel-good series because its characters never faced any adversity or suffered any pain. It was an uplifting, feel-good show because it was all about a man who was learning how to pick himself up and find his way through personal adversity and paralyzing emotional pain. Monk's OCD was the personification of all of our worst tendencies, the feelings of worthlessness, the feeling that the world would be a better place without us, that everyone has moved on but we can't.
For that reason, I completely sympathised with Monk in this film because when we meet him again after 14 years, his worst fears seem to have come true. Natalie has gotten remarried and left him to live in a different city; Captain Stottlemeyer has retired and the police force which was Monk's safe haven now has a new, unfamiliar face; and his last bastion of hope, his stepdaughter Molly (Caitlin McGee) is getting married and going off to live her own life.
The reason all of this may feel harsher than it did back in the 2000s is because the tone of the film has been rejigged for the modern age. The colourful, warm 16mm look of the show has been replaced by a cold, antiseptic, digital sheen. Randy Newman's quirky jazz score has given way to Fabrizio Paterlini's mournful solo piano. But this is a different, post-Covid world anyway and it feels right that Monk's life would be irrevocably changed as well. The new tone of the film mimics Monk's depression and fills completely fitting in the context of the story.
For that reason, "Mr Monk's Last Case" is not quite the warm, nostalgic hug I thought it would be but it's also certainly not a cold shoulder either. The cast is on top of their game, director Randy Zisk keeps the proceedings moving at an excellent pace, and there is enough humour here to keep the film from becoming mopey.
The mystery involving an Elon Musk-type millionaire (James Purefoy) who murders a nosey journalist looking into his shady past is fun if not exactly up to the show's highest standard. I did enjoy it, however, and I must confess that I didn't twig how exactly he pulled off his impossible crime until Monk told us "what happened".
I hope they make more of these "Monk" movies because the potential is certainly there. However, if they don't and if this truly is "Mr Monk's Last Case" then I am quite happy with how it ends. The big finale is undeniably cheesy but I had tears in my eyes nevertheless. It is a beautiful, warm, life-affirming note to end the journey on and it perfectly encapsulates what I talked about earlier - Monk's struggle to wake up every morning and fight another day despite overwhelming adversity and depression.
3.5/4 - DirectorTaylor SheridanStarsElizabeth OlsenJeremy RennerGraham GreeneA wildlife officer, who is haunted by a tragedy that happened because of him, teams up with an FBI agent in solving a murder of a young woman on a Wyoming Native American reservation and hopes to get redemption from his past regrets.07-01-2024
Taylor Sheridan's "Wind River" ends on a title card which informs us that no one knows how many Native American women go missing every year in North America because no one even bothers to compile the statistics. The truth is even worse seeing how due to jurisdictional squabblings and general lack of interest on behalf of the authorities many of these disappearances and murders don't even get properly investigated. The most famous example of this is the notorious Highway of Tears in Canada but I'm sure that every reservation in the US has its own patch of land drowned in tears.
This is not, however, the story that Sheridan tells. Despite proclaiming that it's based on a true story, "Wind River" is actually a fairly ordinary police procedural in which a big city FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) and a talented tracker from the US Fish and Wildlife Department (Jeremy Renner), both white, successfully solve the brutal rape and murder of a Native American woman and punish the bad guys with bullets and fists while the tribal police officers stand aside and gratefully accept their help.
I had much the same reaction to "Wind River" as I did to Sheridan's "Hell or High Water". I found both of the films to be enjoyable and skillfully made thrillers assembled exclusively out of cliches and tropes borrowed from much more original and impactful films. To that end, "Wind River" treads the same ground as much more thoughtful and complex movies like Michael Apted's "Thunderheart" or John Sayles' "Lone Star" as well as Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee novels.
Sheridan liberally peppers his script with the kind of portentous dialogue which might find a more appreciative audience among flag-saluting Western fans but which sounds like macho claptrap to this cynical European city boy. "You don't catch wolves looking where they might be," explains Renner, "you look where they've been". Later on, he looks meaningfully into the snowy mountains and proclaims: "My family's people were forced here. The snow and silence are the only thing that hasn't been taken from them". A real doozy comes when a drug addict asks him if he knows what it feels like when you wanna fight the whole world. "I do," he says in his signature raspy mumble, "but I decided to fight the feeling instead 'cause I figured the world would win". Maybe this guy should quit the Fish and Wildlife Department and sign up for beat poetry classes.
Like most Taylor Sheridan films, "Wind River" lives and breathes atmosphere and attitude. These are his strong suits and indeed the best thing about the film. He uses the striking, picturesque, forbidding snowy mountains of Wyoming the way other thriller directors use dingy basements and torture chambers. Ben Richardson's cinematography makes this white desert feel like the true villain of the movie.
He also creates a whole host of interesting, colourful supporting characters which makes it all the more disappointing that he felt the need to turn a pair of fairly conventional white saviours into the film's protagonists. A much more fascinating lead would have been the wise, quiet, yet surprisingly warm and witty tribal police chief Ben played by one of the finest American character actors Graham Greene. Not only does Greene outact Renner and Olsen in every scene they share but he gives Ben a bemused, fatherly attitude which I find much more engaging and original an attitude for a detective than Renner's movie star machismo.
It's not that Renner and Olsen give bad performances, by the way, it's just that the way Sheridan writes and directs their characters is not particularly interesting. They're stereotypes straight out of the thriller playbook. A haughty fish-out-of-water FBI agent and the stoic man from the wilderness. They are also supplied with standard-issue backstories involving dead daughters, broken marriages, and higher aspirations. It's predictable stuff lifted straight out of last-century potboilers.
Also fairly thin is the mystery of the young woman's death. There's not really much detection involved in finding her killer - just some luck and a lot of Jeremy Renner squinting at the snow. Sure, you could argue that "Wind River" is not truly meant to be a mystery movie but then what is the point of centring the whole story around a police inquiry? Furthermore, Sheridan's depiction of the aforementioned jurisdictional conundrums is rather misinformed and inaccurate as is his knowledge of medicine. The obligatory autopsy scene in this film is closer to science fiction than fact and it ends with Olsen's FBI agent picking a stupefyingly dumb fight with the local medical examiner.
"Wind River" is at its best when its characters shut up and when Sheridan allows the thick atmosphere and tension to take over. The film's third act is quite breathtaking mainly because it drops all the posturing and the backstory. Starting with an incredibly tense meeting between the cops and a group of rather suspicious individuals and ending with a first-rate shootout in the snow, it made me wonder if Sheridan might not be a better director than he is a writer.
Even though none of his work reaches the heady levels of Denis Villeneuve's artistry on "Sicario", Sheridan's direction is suspenseful, taut, and economical and the dialogue-free scenes, coupled with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' haunting score, are superbly effective. It's only when the actors begin delivering Sheridan's clanging dialogue that I'm taken out of the movie.
A great film about the missing and murdered Indigenous women whose cases remain unsolved and uninvestigated is waiting to be made. "Wind River" is, unfortunately, not it. What it is, however, is a decently well-made and uncommonly atmospheric police procedural which is weighed down by its white-saviour protagonists and portentous dialogue.
3/4 - DirectorJeb StuartStarsDanny GloverDennis QuaidClaudia StedelinAn FBI agent tries to catch a serial killer who kidnapped his son.07-01-2024
IMDb tells me that "Die Hard" scribe Jeb Stuart only ever directed two feature films but I know that to be untrue. His directorial debut "Switchback" alone is at least four different films loosely bundled together.
The film begins with an effective little slasher sequence in which a mysterious, unseen killer stalks a lonesome babysitter (Claudia Stedelin) in an affluent suburban home. Like in every good slasher prologue, the girl winds up dead, brutally stabbed in an unspeakable part of her body, and the killer vanishes into thin air with the boy she was taking care of.
Three months later, the killer re-emerges in rural Texas leaving corpses in his wake. FBI Agent Frank LaCrosse (Dennis Quaid) teams up with the local sheriff (R. Lee Ermey) as they track the killer across the state as he heads towards the Rocky Mountains.
At the same time, a quiet, anxious hitchhiker by the name of Dixon (Jared Leto) picks up a ride from Bob (Danny Glover), a gregarious former railroad worker driving through the state in a fancy Cadillac upholstered with pictures of naked ladies. The Law of Economy of Characters tells us that one of these men, both clearly hiding something, is the killer LaCrosse is chasing but which one? Is it the nervy Dixon who seems to be very handy with a knife or the folksy Bob whose jokey manner may hide a perverse glee?
The first half of "Switchback" keeps... well, switching between these two quite different movies. One's a non-alcoholic brand of "Manhunter" with LaCrosse trying his best to cut through small-town red tape and petty bickering in order to get his man and the other's a quirky road trip comedy which occasionally dips into some pretty creepy suspense scenes in which you're never quite sure if the two men are bonding or about to slice each other's throats.
The two finally converge in the film's flabby third act when it quite unexpectedly turns into an all-out action film. LaCrosse finally tracks the killer to an express train speeding through the snowy mountains and the two engage in the kind of a man-to-man fight which would be more appropriate in a Steven Segal picture.
There's very little consistency to Stuart's screenplay but I must confess that I quite enjoyed the first half of "Switchback". Sure, it's predictable, goofy, and wildly disjointed but it has a kind of a fun-loving B-movie quality to it. Especially entertaining are the road movie portions which see Bob and Dixon get into increasingly more melodramatic and preposterous situations. For example, first Dixon stumbles into a biker bar where he, of course, immediately gets beaten up and then Bob somehow winds up dangling off the side of a mountain. Their eventful trip even includes an emergency tracheotomy!
I also enjoyed the scenes revolving around the local sheriff played superbly by R. Lee Ermey. The role of Sheriff Buck Olmstead is a far cry from his intense, shouty performance in "Full Metal Jacket". Here, Ermey is surprisingly warm and laidback as the wily old sheriff who is running a losing bid for re-election against the smarmier-than-ever William Fichtner. Another great supporting performance comes from the ever-reliable Ted Levine as Ermey's right-hand man. The two have great chemistry and I'd happily watch a buddy cop movie with just the two of them.
Unfortunately, even in its entertaining first half, "Switchback" has two major problems. The first is the fact that the killer around which these disparate plots revolve simply does not have a strong enough presence in the movie. Before the big reveal, we only ever see him at work in the prologue. He doesn't have a distinguishing modus operandi, nor is he particularly sinister. I think this is the reason why the film feels so disjointed and has a terminal lack of suspense. There's just no sense of danger here, no dread, no one to fear. Imagine "Halloween" if we never actually saw Michael Myers, we just heard second-hand accounts of his presence.
The second problem is Dennis Quaid's frankly bizarre performance as the heroic FBI agent. For some inexplicable reason, Quaid delivers all of his lines in a robotic monotone, deliberately dulling his natural charisma. The result is a stilted, boring performance robbed of any screen presence.
These two problems are not so painfully evident in the busy, chaotic first half but once the two plots converge the film quickly falls apart. At this point, Quaid is meant to emerge as the film's sole protagonist but his awkward performance makes him a boring, unpleasant lead. It is around this point, as well, that the killer's identity is revealed but once the mystery is solved the film loses any sense of tension or suspense. The killer remains an oblique figure, without any motivation or pattern, and the actor playing him is never threatening or sinister enough.
It doesn't help that after a rather chaotic first half, the film seems to slow down to a crawl around the one-hour mark. The final 50 minutes are a dreadful bore as the killer and LaCrosse slowly make their way towards the train. We know where they're going, we know that they're going to meet and fight, so why not just get to it straight away? And yet Stuart delays the inevitable by leading us down one blind alley after another.
"Switchback" is the ultimate insecure directorial debut. It's the textbook case of a film written and directed by someone who didn't know if he'd get to make a second feature so he decided to pack all of his ideas into one movie. The result is a film which never finds a groove or an even rhythm. It flails between genres, styles, and paces in a way which made me feel like I was switching channels.
The biggest criticism I have, however, is that its second half is hopelessly boring. As long as the film kept up its breakneck pacing and goofy tone, I was enjoying its B-movie stylings but once it slowed down and began to take itself seriously, it lost my attention.
2/4 - DirectorJohn WooStarsTony Leung Chiu-waiJacky CheungWaise LeeWhen three close friends escape from Hong Kong to war-time Saigon to start a criminal's life, they all go through a harrowing experience which totally shatters their lives and their friendship forever.08-01-2024
Set in 1967, John Woo's sweeping, explosive epic "Bullet in the Head" tells the story of three childhood friends, Bee (Tony Leung), Fai (Jacky Cheung), and Sai Wing (Waise Lee). Having grown up in poverty, they are determined to become rich so they ask a local businessman for advice. "The more chaos a country is in," he tells them, "the easier it is to make money". So the trio decide to escape the Hong Kong riots and make their fortune in war-torn Saigon.
Once they arrive in Vietnam, however, they come to realize what the price of friendship truly is. Released four years after Woo's genre-defining classic "A Better Tomorrow", "Bullet in the Head" feels almost like its addendum. Whereas the previous film was all about the triumph of friendship and brotherhood over greed and pride, this film takes a far more cynical yet grimly realistic look at what happens when money comes in between friends.
Like "A Better Tomorrow", the reason why "Bullet in the Head" works as well as it does is because our three protagonists are such well-drawn and fleshed-out characters played to perfection by the film's talented cast. The extended prologue in Hong Kong firmly establishes the love and friendship between them so that there is a real emotional toll on the audience when war, the Triads, and US Army gold begin to tear them apart.
"Bullet in the Head" has most often been compared to "The Deer Hunter" and indeed the influence is fairly obvious, especially in the film's three-part structure. Woo opens his film with a gritty recreation of the 1967 Hong Kong riots placing our three heroes firmly in its center. A memorably tense scene shows Bee telling his bride Siu Jan (Fennie Yuen) that he has to leave the country to seek his fortune elsewhere as a soldier defuses a bomb mere meters away.
The film's exhilarating second act follows the trio in Vietnam. They roll up in Saigon as if they're going on holiday in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses only to immediately be met with the harsh realities of war. Woo does a spectacular job of portraying the confusion and lawlessness in a city under siege. We see peace protesters being mercilessly mowed down by soldiers who then go on to rob a jewellery store. We see a suicide bomber take out a Vietnamese general. Woo also clearly shows just how easy it is to lose one's life in this infernal chaos.
I found this portrayal of the Vietnam War in the first half of "Bullet in the Head" to be even more effective than its more famous depictions in films like "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now" because Woo doesn't focus on mysterious wargames between opposing forces or gunfights in the jungle but rather on the horror of everyday life in wartime. The life with the knowledge that you could be randomly rounded up one day by a brute in a uniform and summarily executed.
Of course, this being a John Woo film, "Bullet in the Head" is ripe with exhilarating, explosive sequences. Once the trio realize that in Saigon they have to go big or go home, an ill-fated raid on a nightclub owned by a local bigshot. The shootout in the nightclub is one of Woo's most dazzling sequences full of poetic violence, slow-motion gunfights, and explosions.
Equally impressive are the scenes in which our protagonists try to escape into the jungle and wind up in the middle of an ongoing battle. There is a shot in which Woo heralds the arrival of the Vietcong by showing a herd of bulls running away which is as evocative and as terrifying as anything in "The Deer Hunter".
I won't spoil where the third part of the film takes us but suffice it to say that a John Woo finale never disappoints. The climactic action scene, a gunfight duel with cars on a rain-soaked dock, is as memorable to me as the climactic duel in "Once Upon a Time in the West".
But I still maintain that what makes John Woo's action films into masterpieces is the heart and the emotion he packs into them. We genuinely care about these three guys trying to claw their way out of poverty the only way they know how - through violence. We also grow to care immensely about the people they meet along the way such as a heroin-addicted lounge singer Sally (Yolinda Yam) desperate to regain the beauty of her carefree youth and Luke (Simon Yam), the itinerant criminal who understands brotherhood better than our protagonists who won't shut up about it. "Bullet in the Head" is such a powerfully emotional journey that Woo managed to make me tear up with a simple shot of a passport floating in the river. That's cinema!
As is the case with a few other John Woo films, "Bullet in the Head" was cut by the studio by about an hour. Unlike "A Better Tomorrow II", however, the film has not been irreparably compromised even though it does feel choppy at times. This choppiness somewhat undermines Woo's diligent character development but the film loses none of its raw emotional power. Still, I suggest keeping your eye out for the longest-existing cut (135 min.) which restores one of the film's best and most suspenseful scenes missing from the more widely available theatrical cut (131 min.)
4/4 - DirectorJohn WooWu MaStarsDavid ChiangDanny LeeKuan Tai ChenA respected and well liked gang-boss is betrayed and killed. One of his three adopted sons are to take his place. One of them is the traitor.09-01-2024
An unfairly forgotten curio in John Woo's filmography, "Just Heroes" was made in 1989 as a sort of tribute to legendary Hong Kong director Chang Cheh who had fallen on hard times. The film was deliberately designed to cash in on the crime movie craze started by Woo's own "A Better Tomorrow" and all the proceeds from its theatrical run were donated to Cheh as a retirement gift. Instead, Cheh took the money and used it to fund his next picture. Once a director, always a director!
The reason "Just Heroes" is almost never mentioned as a part of the extraordinary run of action classics Woo made between 1986 and 1992 is because he co-directed the film with Wu Ma. Now, I must confess that I am not in the least bit familiar with Wu Man's own considerable directorial career but to my eyes "Just Heroes" looks and feels like a quintessential John Woo picture.
This operatic tale of brotherhood and betrayal begins with the mysterious (and brutal) murder of the beloved Triad boss Tsou (Paul Chun). Think of him as a Hong Kong Don Vito Corleone - reasonable, mild-mannered, and highly respected. He even shared Don Corleone's distaste for drug dealers!
Tsou's chosen successor Wai (David Chiang) refuses the position and retires to become a humble fisherman which leads to a power struggle between Chang's two possible heirs. One is the ambitious but hot-headed Sou (Danny Lee), and the other is the older and wilier Tai (Kuan Tai Chen).
Further complicating the oneupmanship between them is Tai's right-hand man Jacky (Stephen Chow) who goes rogue and decides to kill Sou. But the question lingering in everyone's mind is who killed Tsou and as former friends begin pointing fingers at each other, this political struggle threatens to turn into an all-out war.
Written by Nieh Kuang and Tommy Hau, "Just Heroes" is considerably more densely plotted than your average heroic bloodshed film. There's a whole lot of scheming, manoeuvring, and double-crossing going on as the filmmakers choose to portray the Triads more like a business empire than a brutish street gang.
According to legend, Woo directed 60% of this film and if I had to guess I would say that Wu Man directed all the lengthy dialogue scenes - the meetings, the conferences, and the peace negotiations. These scenes are uncharacteristically talky for a John Woo film and shot in a rather stilted, dullish manner.
On the other hand, the action scenes in "Just Heroes" are actually some of Woo's finest. I was particularly impressed by the complex, superbly edited shootout in a quarry which combines a car chase with an all-out massacre and feels like a dress rehearsal for the explosive climax of "Bullet in the Head". I also loved the more conventional but no less flamboyant warehouse shootout which contains a shot in which a man wielding two guns flies into the air, does a 360 spin, lands on some barrels and slides straight towards his enemy shooting him in the neck.
Despite its garrulousness, Nieh and Hau's script is a solid one featuring well-defined characters and some surprising twists. Even though the identity of Tsou's killer is easy to guess, I did not predict the way the story would ultimately unfold.
As is standard for a John Woo film, there are also some quite likeable and interesting supporting characters including Tsou's quirky consiglieri played by co-director Wu Ma himself. A tragic character comes in the form of Sing Fai (Cally Kwong), a former dashing beauty who ruined her life by choosing to marry the wrong man.
"Just Heroes" is certainly not a top-tier John Woo film but even second-rate Woo makes for a first-rate action thriller. With strong performances from its starry cast, a genuinely interesting plot, and some dazzling action scenes, this is a film which definitely deserves a whole lot more respect than it's been given. Maybe it doesn't have the raw emotional power of "A Better Tomorrow" or the sweeping tragedy of "Bullet in the Head", but it is deftly entertaining and far from forgettable.
3.5/4 - DirectorJohn WooStarsChow Yun-FatTony Leung Chiu-waiTeresa MoA tough-as-nails cop teams up with an undercover agent to shut down a sinister mobster and his crew.09-01-2024
If you're an action fan, seeing "Hard Boiled" may just be the stupidest thing you could possibly do because no other action movie in the world will ever be able to measure up to it. What John Woo delivers here is action on a level never seen before or since. Destruction of such magnitude and with such force that he makes a single door exploding off its hinges feel like a cataclysmic event. To call "Hard Boiled" exhilarating is to severely undermine its levels of intensity and sheer entertainment. Whenever I watch it, I have the urge to get up out of my chair and applaud even though I'm all alone in my room. I always feel like an idiot but this movie absolutely deserves it.
"Hard Boiled" is John Woo's last Hong Kong movie ending his dazzling six-year run of action masterpieces on a definite high note. Interestingly, it is also the most "Hollywood" film he'd made up to that point. What I mean by that is that he jettisons the operatic sentimentality and soulful character work of his previous films in favour of pure kinetic escapism.
That is not to say that the protagonists of "Hard Boiled" are forgettable but compared to the heroes of "A Better Tomorrow" or "Bullet in the Head", they are certainly more stereotypical and less nuanced.
Our hero-in-chief is Inspector Tequila (played by the inimitable Chow Yun-Fat). We meet this quintessential cowboy cop as he shoots up a storm in a teahouse eliminating half the population of Hong Kong in the process. The operation, however, is a bust. Not only does he not acquire any pertinent information but he also gets his partner killed. Dejected, grieving, and shunned by his fellow cops, Tequila swears revenge on the Triads.
Unbeknownst to him, the gang he is chasing has already been infiltrated by an undercover cop Ah-Long (Tony Leung). He has been undercover for five years posing as a soulless killer and like any undercover cop in a movie he's begun to feel his identity slipping away from him. In order to keep a hold of the last bits of humanity left in him, he makes a paper crane for every man he kills. Unfortunately for him, there's not enough paper in the world to account for the amount of mooks he'll shoot by the time the credits roll.
This set-up is relatively similar to "The Killer", but while that film dealt intelligently with the question of what would get an assassin and a cop to work together, "Hard Boiled" bypasses any such concerns. Tequila and Ah-Long quickly realize they're on the same side, team up, and declare war on the psychopathic Triad boss Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong) who is a far cry from the heroic gangsters from Woo's previous films.
"Hard Boiled" moves swiftly and stylishly from one set piece to the next. What I love about the film, by the way, is how those set pieces never seem to end. Every action scene simply grows more and more chaotic as dozens of mooks seem to spawn every minute until there's nothing left of the set to destroy.
The film actually consists of only three major set pieces which is almost unbelievable because the action seldom stops during its 128-minute runtime. The first set piece is the aforementioned teahouse shootout which makes up the film's ten-minute prologue. It ends in one of Woo's best gags as Tequila rolls through some flour, emerges covered in white powder, and then immediately shoots a criminal whose dark red blood sprays all over him.
The second set piece is a dazzling raid on a warehouse which begins with gangsters arriving at the place on black motorcycles and just goes on and on and on from there. This sequence goes on for about sixteen minutes ending on a pretty typical and breathtakingly awesome moment of John Woo melodrama.
The third and final set piece, however, is where the film shines. It is a stupefying, death-defying compilation of insane stunts, flamboyant explosions, and some of the most dynamic camerawork ever seen. Set in a hospital, it goes on for the entire second half of "Hard Boiled", comprising a good 50 minutes of screentime, and by the time it ends, there's nothing left where the building used to stand.
It is impossible to list even half of the most brilliant and memorable moments contained just in this climactic 50 minutes. The list would take up a whole book. You've probably heard of some of them such as the 2-minute unbroken shot of Tequila and Ah-Long shooting their way through two floors of mooks or the scene in which Tequila has to blow away bad guys while carrying a baby in his arms. And yet, believe me, you don't even know one per cent of the pandemonium which unfolds in this set piece. I have seen many wonderful, exciting, memorable action films in my life but I've never seen anything which measures up to the climax of "Hard Boiled". If John Woo hadn't shot a single second of film beyond these 50 minutes, his place in the pantheon of filmmakers would have still been guaranteed.
The great thing about John Woo's filmmaking, however, is that even in a film as busy as this, he doesn't forget to pepper in some colourful characters and humour. Chow Yun-Fat is, of course, the most charismatic star Hong Kong has ever produced and he's clearly having a blast playing Tequila but I think Tony Leung really steals the film as the haunted undercover cop. There's a moment in the film where we see him execute a man. Just for a second, he turns away from his fellow gangsters and we see a whole world of pain in his expression.
I must also not forget Philip Kwok as a spine-chilling, one-eyed hitman who is among the most terrifying goons I've ever seen in a movie. Also wonderful is Teresa Mo in a comic role as Tequila's colleague/girlfriend. She is easily the funniest female character in any of John Woo's films with the exception of Emily Chu in "A Better Tomorrow" and an absolute delight.
Scored wall-to-wall with Michael Gibbs' cool jazzy music, "Hard Boiled" is the epitome of cinematic awesomeness. It's also a masterclass in kinetic moviemaking, the benchmark for the action genre, and a whole lot of fun. If ever there was a movie which deserved to be described as an experience it's John Woo's "Hard Boiled".
4/4 - DirectorJohn WooStarsJean-Claude Van DammeLance HenriksenYancy ButlerA woman hires a drifter as her guide through New Orleans in search of her missing father. In the process, they discover a deadly game of cat and mouse behind his disappearance.10-01-2024
Despite being the greatest action director of all time, wherever he goes, John Woo always seems to find himself locked out of the editing room. In Hong Kong, producer Hark Tsui cut an hour out of his epic "Bullet in the Head". "A Better Tomorrow 2" was so severely cut that it ended up looking like a trailer for an unreleased movie. In the United States, Woo wound up knocking on the locked door of the editing suite on almost every film he directed. Some of his preferred cuts ended up being released on home video ("Windtalkers") but most linger in studio vaults.
One interesting case, however, is Woo's first Hollywood film, "Hard Target". His director's cut is actually available but as a very poor workprint and only on those certain internet sites that aren't particularly worried about copyright infringement. Watching it, I was immediately struck by the fact that the scenes Universal cut from the movie are the ones which make it feel like a John Woo production. Among them are some of the film's most striking and beautiful images such as the haunting shot of a homeless man frantically running away from a biker gang, his silhouette menacingly illuminated by their blinding headlights. Another pure Woo scene gone from the theatrical cut is a slow-motion montage of Jean-Claude Van Damme lovingly stroking a shotgun.
Unfortunately, whichever cut of "Hard Target" you choose to watch the one thing you won't get is a good movie. Based on Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game", this is yet another retread of that most tired premise in the world. Namely, a group of vicious hunters decide they're tired of hunting animals so they decide to go for the ultimate prey - man. Instead of going to some third-world country or a warzone, as any self-respecting villain would, they decide to hunt homeless veterans in the middle of New Orleans. And yet, despite the brazenness of their public executions, they're shocked beyond belief when someone begins looking into their murderous business.
That someone is Nat (Yancy Butler), the daughter of one of the murdered veterans, who hires an ass-kicking sailor named Chance (Jean-Claude Van Damme) to help her find the people responsible for her father's brutal death.
The film was written by Chuck Pfarrer and his screenplay is absolutely awful. The original Connell story has a concise elegance in that it follows one of the men chosen to be the hunters' prey. Pfarrer instead chooses to weave this needlessly convoluted detective story in which we follow Nat and Chance for close to an hour as they investigate the murder of her father.
The trouble is that we know from the very beginning who the killers are and what their plan is. This makes the entire first half of "Hard Target" interminably boring. There's nothing worse in a thriller than waiting for the protagonists to catch up with the audience but that is exactly what Pfarrer makes us sit through.
It doesn't help that Chance is played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, a total charisma vacuum whose stardom is still a total mystery to me. He is a terrible, stilted actor who gives wood a bad name. He may be a good fighter but the English language constantly kicks his ass.
As usual, Van Damme is completely unconvincing in any scene which doesn't involve him roundhouse kicking cigars out of people's mouths. This completely sabotages the movie as he has no chemistry with his co-star, the poor Yancy Butler who tries her best to infuse some emotion into her scenes.
Even the ubiquitous action one-liners Van Damme is given here are terrible. They range from unimaginative dreck like saying "Sorry about your shirt" after shooting a guy to really poor attempts at being clever such as the line he tells the hunters before massacring them - "Hunting season is over". Gee, how much did they pay Pfarrar to come up with that one? The stupidest exchange in the whole movie comes when Nat asks Van Damme what kind of a name is Chance. "Well, my momma took one," he answers and then pauses for the audience to laugh. Crickets ensue.
Far more charismatic and interesting are the film's two villains played by the always fantastic Lance Hendriksen and Arnold Vosloo. Clad in black trenchcoats and sunglasses they are quintessential John Woo bad guys. Hendriksen, in particular, brings such a colourful verve to his performance that the film almost actually works whenever he's on screen.
The workprint reveals that Woo really did pull out all the stops directing "Hard Target". The action scene, in particular, look amazing with all of his trademark slow-motion, balletic choreography, and white doves. But all of Woo's stylishness amounts to nothing because the story is so utterly uninteresting, the characters non-existent, and the pacing sluggish.
When I reviewed "A Better Tomorrow", one of John Woo's best films I said that his work is "the ideal illustration of the fact that the people shooting the guns are actually more important than the squibs in making an action scene work." The failure of "Hard Target" further illustrates my point. It has all the slow-motion flying through the air you'd expect from a John Woo film but lacks the passion, the emotion, the character development and because I never cared for Van Damme or Butler or the threadbare plot they find themselves entangled in, I was never entertained or exhilarated by all the huge shootouts, explosions, and fist-fights.
OK, maybe someone who is more of an action hound than I am would find enough to enjoy in this film but I personally found "Hard Target" a real chore to sit through. Sure, there is an occasional goofy and memorable moment such as Jean-Claude Van Damme punching out a snake but having to sit through the film's painfully drawn-out first half kinda killed my mood. By the time the shooting started, I was already checked out.
1.5/4 - DirectorJohn WooStarsJohn TravoltaChristian SlaterSamantha MathisTerrorists steal nuclear warheads from the U.S. military but don't count on a pilot and park ranger spoiling their plans.11-01-2024
In his second Hollywood film, John Woo is once again saddled with a dumb, threadbare script which features none of the passion, moral complexity, or character development which made his Hong Kong action films such masterpieces.
Written by Graham Yost, "Broken Arrow" is as simplistic as an action movie could possibly be. The plot revolves around two nuclear bombs stolen by a disgruntled US Major Vic Deakins (John Travolta). Hiding out in a Utah National Park, Deakins demands 250 million dollars or he will destroy half the United States. The only person who can stop him and recover the weapons is his old army buddy Captain Riley Hale (Christian Slater). Chases and explosions ensue.
Now, on paper, I must confess that the premise sounded quite promising. I expected "Broken Arrow" to be another one of those goofy 90s non-stop action pictures like "Air Con" or "Die Hard with a Vengeance". Instead, much like Woo's Hollywood debut "Hard Target", this is a surprisingly flabby, garrulous picture which takes a long time to truly take flight.
Yost's screenplay is weighed down by a ludicrous amount of unnecessary exposition. I would liberally estimate that about 90% of the film's dialogue consists of characters explaining things to other characters. We see countless meetings, mission briefings, and telephone calls. There are entire sequences which consist of nothing but army personnel staring at computer screens.
Not only that but Yost (and probably whichever studio executive had control over the picture) feels the need to explain in dialogue every scene action beat. For example, at one point in the film, a giant underground explosion causes an earthquake at the national park. We see the earth shaking and a helicopter explode. In the midst of this chaos, we cut to a close-up of one of Deakins' thugs who helpfully exclaims: "Son of a bitch! Shock wave took down the damn chopper". Gee, thanks, buddy. If you didn't tell me I'd think the helicopter exploded because Travolta gave it a smoldering look.
In another scene, Hale and a park ranger named Terry (Samantha Mathis) find themselves trapped with one of the nuclear bombs which is about to explode. Furthermore, Deakins and his gang of men are driving towards them in a jeep with enough guns to wipe out a small country. But Hale has a genius plan! Except, instead of just going ahead and executing his plan he takes the time to explain it to Terry (and the audience) in great detail. Because I suppose in that situation time is not a pressing issue.
Of course, as is customary in an action film, the villains also continually explain how every facet of their plan is going to play out. For no reason whatsoever, Deakins also tells Hale exactly how to disarm the nuclear bombs. You know, just in case he wanted to know.
"Broken Arrow" has a runtime of 108 minutes about 30% of which could have (and should have) been removed without anyone being any the wiser. Why? Because all this exposition, endless repetition, and dull explanations don't matter in the least. The film has no real plot beyond "good guy vs. bad guy". There are no plot twists, there's no mystery, no story to follow, and no character development. There's absolutely nothing we need to know beyond the fact that Deakins is the bad guy and Hale is the good guy. So, why not just cut to the chase and stop talking!!!
Yost's screenplay is so paper-thin that neither Deakins nor Hale has a scrap of character. They are mere figureheads meant to run around the national park aimlessly without any clear motivation or personality. Thankfully, this time around John Woo is not saddled with Jean-Claude Van Damme.
One of the saving graces of "Broken Arrow" is a gloriously hammy performance from John Travolta who takes his non-existent character and infuses him with the same madcap energy and lust for villainy he would exhibit in "Face/Off". I had more fun just watching him chew the scenery than I had with any other aspect of this film.
Slater and Mathis are less compelling, especially Mathis who exhibits little charisma in a role which feels shoehorned into the script. Since the film proceeds more or less in real-time, there's little room for a romantic subplot especially with two such underwritten and uninteresting characters.
"Broken Arrow" does eventually come to life whenever the characters shut up and start shooting. The action sequences are less stylish and flamboyant than one might expect from a John Woo picture but they are expertly shot and choreographed. I especially liked how Woo and his cinematographer Peter Levy use the film's National Park setting to make the film feel almost like a classic John Ford western.
I also must add that Hans Zimmer is the perfect composer for a John Woo film. Zimmer's grandiose, melodic and melodramatic scores are a great match for Woo's visuals and the score for "Broken Arrow" is every bit as good as the wonderful score Zimmer would produce for Woo's "Mission: Impossible II".
"Broken Arrow" has moments of great excitement and goofiness but I found it a rather flabby picture weighed down by tonnes of unnecessary exposition. It is also severely hampered by the fact that we are never made to care about any of the characters or the plot. The action scenes are very well made and entertaining unto themselves but I didn't once care whether any of the characters would get hit by any of the thousands of bullets fired.
I'd be interested to see a fan cut which would try and cut down "Broken Arrow" to, say, a lean 80 minutes but as it stands I found the film largely unengaging and dull with only the occasional moment of goofy entertainment.
2/4 - DirectorJohn WooStarsBen AffleckAaron EckhartUma ThurmanWhat seemed like a breezy idea that would net an engineer millions of dollars ends up leaving him on the run for his life and trying to piece together why he's being chased.11-01-2024
According to myth, in Ancient Egypt, builders and architects would be killed and buried in the pyramids so they wouldn't reveal their secrets. These days, they'd just make them say ironclad NDAs. In the future proposed in Philip K. Dick's short story "Paycheck", companies simply wipe the memories of their engineers. That way, their patents are safer than ever.
In the film adaptation of Dick's story, Ben Affleck plays one such engineer named Michael Jennings. Sleazy businessman Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) approaches him with a proposition. He offers him 100 million USD for three years of his life. Jennings of course accepts, you'd have to be stupid not to but when he wakes up he finds himself entangled in a bizarre conspiracy. His money is gone, he is being hunted by mysterious assassins, and he has no memory of how he got there.
What he has, however, is a manilla envelope with 20 trinkets inside. Things like a coin, an ugly pair of glasses, a pack of cigarettes, and a single bullet. What is the use of these items and why did Jennings mail them to himself shortly before his memory was wiped?
The mystery at the heart of "Paycheck" is not terribly hard to figure out. If you've seen a decent amount of thrillers, I bet you'll have no problem guessing what the meaning behind a paper with seven numbers written on it is or what use that pack of cigarettes will be.
Nevertheless, "Paycheck" does have a certain old-school charm. Directed by John Woo, the film offers an unusual Hitchcockian take on the standard themes of Philip K. Dick's literature - predetermination, loss of identity, humanity vs. technology etc.
Woo and writer Dean Georgaris deliberately structure "Paycheck" as a thriller rather than a high-concept sci-fi extravaganza. The result resembles films like "North by Northwest" and "Mirage" a whole lot more than "Minority Report" or "Total Recall" which alone makes "Paycheck" an intriguing proposition.
Ben Affleck is a terrific choice for the lead. He has some of that old-timey easygoing charm which made Cary Grant such a delictable screen presence. The supporting cast is similarly well chosen: Aaron Eckhart is a shoo-in for the greedy corporate man, Colm Feore is terrific as his creepy chief henchman, and Paul Giamatti is as quirky and loveable as ever as Jennings' best friend Shorty. I'm not so sure about Uma Thurman, however, as Affleck's love interest. There's not enough chemistry between them to make their love affair as melodramatic and as passionate as it should be.
The fun of "Paycheck" is watching Jennings figure out how these everyday trinkets can help him get out of action-movie jams. How will a coin help him break into a top-secret lab? How will a bus ticket save him from a shootout? What door does that strange tiny key open? There's something of "Mission: Impossible" to some of these scenes and as we know John Woo is an old hand in that particular genre.
The problem with "Paycheck" is that it hangs entirely on goodwill, old-timey charm, and occasional moments of excitement. The plot is not particularly interesting and the way it will unfold is pretty much instantly predictable. There are no major twists or revelations which renders the mystery aspects of the film mute. We know who the bad guys are from the start and John Woo doesn't even try to surprise us after that.
The film also moves at a sluggish pace and could stand to lose a good 15 minutes. A story as thin and straightforward as this really cannot sustain my interest for more than 90 minutes. There's a reason Philip K. Dick turned it into a short story rather than a novel.
And yet, I did have a pleasant time for most of "Paycheck". Sure, by the time the third act rolled around, I was itching to fast-forward through some of the climax but the first two-thirds were far from unpleasant. In fact, it's quite interesting to see John Woo try his hand at a different kind of thriller. Something more low-key and more plot-driven than his typical flamboyant heroic bloodshed.
One thing that did disappoint me quite a bit, however, is that "Paycheck" really doesn't look or feel like a John Woo movie. It's an atypically cold film for the usually melodramatic Woo and it has a distant, workmanlike style. I cannot help but feel that some of Woo's trademark excess might have injected more energy into the film and made it a bit more exciting.
2.5/4 - DirectorJohn WooStarsHanyu ZhangMasaharu FukuyamaStephy QiAccused of heinous crimes he didn't commit, a prosecutor sets out on a mission to clear his name.12-01-2024
Viewers expecting "Manhunt" to be John Woo's return to his old Hong Kong form will be sorely disappointed. It really couldn't be farther away from his brilliant heroic bloodshed movies which were so full of emotion, great characters, moral complexity, and disarming sincerity.
"Manhunt" is a lot closer to Woo's Hollywood films, more specifically his glossy, high-octane fare like "Paycheck" and "Mission: Impossible II". All style, no substance.
Based on a 1976 Japanese film of the same name directed by Jun'ya Sato, John Woo's screenplay is completely devoid of the humanity which made films like "A Better Tomorrow" so impactful. The characters populating "Manhunt" are nothing more than puppets made of cardboard which Woo strings and tugs through a plot as manic and incomprehensible as it is contrived and unbelievable.
As a result, all of Woo's attempts at high emotion come across as soppy and unconvincing and the film is never as compelling as it should be because we simply don't care about these characters.
The plot begins as a rip-off of "The Fugitive" with a Chinese lawyer named Du Qiu (Hanyu Zhang) waking up in Osaka next to the corpse of a beautiful woman. He doesn't know how he got there or who she is but he does know that he cannot stop running until he clears his name.
Before long, however, Woo begins throwing in plot elements from his Hollywood films almost at random. One such element is an evil corporation that hires a pair of sexy assassins to track down Du Qiu. With their futuristic headquarters, corporate demeanour, and almost gleeful villainy they irresistibly resemble the evil corporation from "Paycheck". Then, almost without warning, Woo also throws in a mysterious drug - like "Mission: Impossible II's" Chimera - which gives people superhuman strength but also turns them into homicidal zombies. I doubt any of these elements were present in the 1976 film.
Tasked with untangling this frankly insane plot is Inspector Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) who is introduced in a hilarious scene saving a child from a group of wannabe terrorists. As he emerges from their lair, child in hand, the boy weepingly asks him "How can I become a man like you".
"Manhunt" is a Chinese-Japanese production which means that for the most part, everyone speaks their own language. Trouble ensues, however, when the Chinese characters try to communicate with the Japanese characters in English. Unfortunately, none of the cast seem at ease with the language. Fukuyama, for example, sounds like he's learned his lines phonetically. He speaks in a bizarre staccato which makes every line he utters come out garbled. Zhang, meanwhile, is more fluent but chooses to deliver his lines in an utterly misguided, raspy voice which makes him sound like a bad impersonator of Christian Bale's Batman.
The dialogue Woo has written for them doesn't help in the least. The lines range from the kind of clunkers you'd expect to hear in a soap opera spoof to unbelievable cheesy goodness. "There's only one end for a fugitive," shouts Yamura, "A dead end". Later on, Du Qiu melancholically remarks "I was in the hospital for so long I almost forgot how blue the sky is". The biggest clunker, however, comes from one of the female assassins, a drug addict, who cries in between spasms "I want to get off these drugs! Such a miserable life!"
The performances are similarly stilted and corny. Fukuyama seems to be trying to emulate Hollywood action stars by constantly posing and pouting for the camera. Every one of his close-ups looks like a shampoo commercial. He also has a terminal lack of charisma and his dead eyes betray little to no emotion. Zhang fares slightly better but his performance is undone with his bizarre raspy delivery.
Much better performances come from the women in the film. Stephy Qi is suitably vulnerable and likeable as the film's damsel in distress. Angeles Woo, the director's daughter, is quite menacing as one of the assassins. The actress I liked the most in the film, however, is Nanami Sakuraba as Yamura's hapless, quirky partner. She brings some much-needed colour and humour to the proceedings.
The most curious aspect of the film, to me, is the editing which is so manic and choppy that I began to wonder if this film too was recut by Tsui Hark. The film is edited like a 108-minute long montage sequence with constant flashbacks, flashforwards, and bullet time effects in the most inopportune places. Some scenes are cut up like a YouTube video with all the silences removed so that characters jump around the set in between lines.
Nevertheless, Woo does display a certain flair. I enjoyed his Tony Scott-like use of camera which moves through spaces free from any physical constraints. In one scene, the camera moves through the walls of a train just like Scott's does in "The Taking of Pelham 123".
Woo's understanding of movement and fluidity in action scenes is still second to none and the numerous shootouts, fistfights, and sword fights are as kinetic and exciting as ever. They don't carry the same emotional weight as they did in his best films but they are every bit as well-executed and choreographed. Especially impressive is an extended action scene in which Du Qiu and Yamura are handcuffed together in a house and have to fight a gaggle of assassins relentlessly coming at them. This scene alone contains so much variety that it is worth the admission price.
"Manhunt" can be criticized at length for many failures but one thing it's most certainly not is boring. This is its major saving grace. Whether I was excited by the action scenes or confused by the plot or laughing at the awful dialogue, I was absolutely never bored or disengaged. Unlike some of Woo's Hollywood films, the pacing of this film never sags and just as you think you've seen the wildest scene it has to offer, Woo throws in something even more frenetic and awesome.
I cannot recommend "Manhunt" as a genuinely good movie or a serious action thriller. It is also not John Woo's publicized return to the heroic bloodshed genre. However, I would be amiss not to report that "Manhunt" is a great deal of goofy fun.
2.5/4 - DirectorOtto PremingerRouben MamoulianStarsGene TierneyDana AndrewsClifton WebbA police detective falls in love with the woman whose murder he is investigating.17-01-2024
There is a haunting, Gothic atmosphere permeating through Otto Preminger's off-beat noir "Laura", which makes it stand out from its contemporaries. In fact, it has less in common with "The Maltese Falcon" than it does with "Rebecca", another film about a woman so bewitching that her charms reach beyond the grave.
There is also something of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" in "Laura". Namely, a detective who becomes so obsessed with the woman he is investigating that his quest for the truth begins resembling a futile attempt at necromancy.
As the very first words heard in the film inform us, Laura (Gene Tierney) is dead. She has been shot in the face with a double-barreled shotgun. A nasty way to go, seemingly deliberately chosen so that no trace would remain of her downright mythical beauty. And yet, something does remain: a large, impressionistic portrait hanging above the fireplace in Laura's apartment, dominating it the same way Rebecca's portrait dominates Manderley. The way the camera snakes around it and lovingly regards it tells us it is haunted by Laura's presence.
Assigned to find Laura's murderer is the no-nonsense New York cop Lt. Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews). I love Dana Andrews' performance in this film. His tough guy persona, machine-gun delivery, and boxy physique make him a clear outsider in the world of jet-setting lounge lizards and socialities Laura surrounded herself with. When we first see him with his raincoat and hat, we expect him to be the film's one level-headed guy, the only person who can resist Laura's charm and cut through to the truth.
Quite the opposite happens, however. As he learns more about the alluring Laura from the people who knew her and, without an exception, loved her, he too is beguiled. He begins visiting her apartment at night, falling asleep under her portrait, yearning to know all there is to know about the mystery woman whom every woman wanted to be like and whom every man wanted to be with.
"Laura" is based on a novel by Vera Caspary which is, in essence, no more than a slightly above-average potboiler. Its overwrought plot is easy to figure out, the killer is obvious from the get-go, and the melodramatic twists elicit more disbelief than genuine surprise. And yet Otto Preminger's dreamlike direction and his superb cast put a different spin on Caspary's story and made it more alive on screen than it ever was on the page.
Roger Ebert criticised Gene Tierney's performance as emotionally uninvolved but I rather think that is the key to Laura's appeal. Unlike the other women we see in the film, especially Judith Anderson as an old rich lady pining after a younger man, Laura never acts like someone who wants to be loved. If anything, she seems more tired and dismissive of her suitors who respond to her ennui by growing all the more passionate. And yet, she's not playing hard to get either. There is a sincerity and sweetness to Tierney's performance which is almost unheard of in a femme fatale. Her Laura is disarmingly likeable and pleasant.
The first of her suitors we meet is the imperious columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) who first discovered her in a marketing agency and single-handedly bred her for high society like a latter-day Henry Higgins. Clifton Webb's performance has been much lauded over the years quite deservedly. He brings such a twinkle and a devious energy to the natty Waldo. "In my case, self-absorption is completely justified," he says, "I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention".
Waldo is also a possessive, jealous man who writes scathing newspaper reports about any man who so much as dares to talk to "his" Laura. He refers to these character assassinations as acts of love.
He is also very fond of playing power games which becomes obvious when he greets Lt McPherson in the nude having just emerged from the bath. "Pass me that washcloth," he says barely suppressing a vicious giggle.
Laura's other suitor is the complete opposite of Waldo. His name is Shelby Carpenter and he is played by Vincent Price. Most of us are used to seeing Price play smooth, sly, confident villains but here we see him in a completely different light. Dressed in oversized suits and always begging for money, his Shelby is a lumbering loser.
Why then is Laura taken with him? Well, perhaps precisely because he is so vastly different from Waldo. He is also immune to Waldo's character assassinations because he doesn't have much of a character left to assassinate. Everyone in high society knows he is a lecher and a cad and even the sharp-tongued Waldo can't come up with insults which haven't already been hurled at poor old Shelby.
"Laura" is a curious mystery with only two suspects. Was it Waldo or was it Shelby? In Caspary's novel the answer matters but not so in Preminger's film. The real mystery in "Laura" is its title character rather than her killer. Who is this kind, good-natured girl who drives men around the bend? Why was she murdered? How is it possible that even dead, she can drive her suitors insane with desire?
The screenplay by Jay Dratier, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Elizabeth Reinhardt is awfully talky and often stilted but Preminger's direction and Joseph LaShelle's striking photography infuse it with energy and atmosphere. I love their fluid camerawork which seems to snake through scenes moving in closer to hear a good bit of gossip and then pulling back to see who just entered the room.
The final ingredient is David Raskin's score which, just like Laura herself, is alluring and mysterious. Combined with LaShelle's dreamlike visuals, excellent performances, and Preminger's unusual direction, it turns a melodramatic potboiler into an atmospheric, mesmerising, offbeat film noir which manages somehow to be far more interesting and subversive than its screenplay could ever suggest it would be.
3.5/4 - DirectorIngmar BergmanStarsIngrid BergmanLiv UllmannLena NymanA devoted wife is visited by her mother, a successful concert pianist who had little time for her when she was young.27-01-2024
There is a willful disregard of cinematic etiquette in Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" that I find irresistibly appealing. Here is a film which could be described using a series of adjectives I usually use to criticise bad movies. It's stagy, talky, insular, and artificial. Its dialogue is heavy on exposition and its storytelling is light on action. And yet, not only does it work but it flitters with an ease and lightness characteristic of a chamber piece. Watching it, you never once doubt Bergman's style. Why would you? After all, it is nigh impossible to imagine a movie being made any other way. That, I suppose, is what people mean when they talk about being in the presence of genius.
The formal conceit of "Autumn Sonata" is theatrical from its inception. It's the kind of movie which I suspect was born when Bergman thought "Let's take two really brilliant actors, lock them into a small set, and see what happens". So he did. He cast the great Ingrid Bergman, one of the few true icons of cinema, and his own personal favourite Liv Ullmann. He then placed them into a cramped house built on a soundstage, designed by Anna Asp who doesn't seem to even be trying to disguise the set's artificiality. For one, there's nothing to be seen out of the house's large windows other than Sven Nykvist's bright lights. The effect creates great intimacy and concentration. The exterior of the house is utterly unimportant to the film as is the matter of whether we find the set convincing or not. What matters is the tension and the conflict inside the walls.
Bergman's screenplay consists mainly of long monologues in which characters describe their feelings and backstories at great length in the kind of floral, literal language usually reserved only for period dramas. For the most part, they talk to each other about things the other person ought already to know. However, when there's no one around to talk to, Bergman merely has them talk straight into the camera. After all, if a character has such interesting, insightful, original things to say, why should such a minor thing as screenwriting convention prevent them from doing so?
Another example can be seen in the scene in which Ingrid Bergman is meant to be playing the piano. Ingmar Bergman doesn't even try to convince us that his actress truly is playing the piano. Instead of utilizing editing tricks for the purpose of deception, he focuses his camera intently on close-ups of Bergman and Ullmann. After all, that is what truly matters in the scene, not whether we believe that Bergman really is playing the piano.
It is the kind of formal experiment that only works when it's undertaken by great artists and here we have at least three. Ingrid Bergman's astounding range as an actor is best illustrated by three roles. The first would certainly be "Casablanca" where she embodies the ideal of the lost Lenore. A kind of icon, alluring and unforgettable. The second would be "Murder on the Orient Express", where she was mousy, timid, seething with a kind of righteous neurosis, almost imperceptible. And then, there's her performance in "Autumn Sonata".
All you have to do is look at her very first scene to see what a whirlwind of energy Charlotte Andergast (Ingrid Bergman) is. She enters her daughter's house like a tornado blowing away everything in her path. She bristles with grandiosity, ego, and the kind of dismissive bonhomie which tramples over other people leaving them unable to do anything other than nod silently as she thunders past them. She is a great, successful pianist and one of those performers who have stage presence even in real life.
Her daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann), on the other hand, is a vastly different person. In her dowdy dresses and with her tightly wound braids she resembles a country teacher. She speaks with a high-pitched childish voice and seems like a walking embodiment of a woman who is still trying to find her way through puberty.
It is not hard to guess that Charlotte and Eva will clash but the extent and ferocity with which they will do so cannot be gauged from their friendly, seemingly warm reunion. And yet, Eva is still seething with anger at her mother who abandoned her for long periods of time when she was a child leaving her with traumas and a sense of abandonment with which she struggles even in adulthood.
This is a familiar premise but this wouldn't be a Bergman movie if things were so predictable and easy. The greatest thing about "Autumn Sonata" is that every memory, every incident, every long-held resentment is painted distinctly grey. The aforementioned screenwriting convention tells us that we should feel for the abandoned daughter and despise the monstrous mother but things don't quite play out that way.
Charlotte is oddly likeable and I found myself impressed by her ambition and her ability to achieve greatness in her chosen profession. While her failings as a mother are impossible to deny it is also hard not to sympathise with her lack of talent for the part. Some people just aren't cut out for the roles society has cast them in. On the other hand, there is a vicious, cruel streak running through Eva. A nasty vindictiveness which comes out as she brutally lays into her mother, verbally deconstructing her actions from decades ago. I couldn't help but wonder what the point is of bringing all of these things up now when they're both too old to change or fix each other.
The common characteristic they share is a lack of compassion. Neither of them is able or particularly willing to see the past from the other's perspective. Eva can only list the wrongs her mother did while Charlotte can only remember events from the past by the concerts she gave around the same time. In every dialogue scene, they seem to be talking at each other rather than with each other. Endlessly recounting past events from their own points of view, never agreeing on anything or seemingly listening to each other.
Bergman and Ullmann are brilliant together and it's no surprise that their names are synonymous with this film but "Autumn Sonata" is not a two-hander. Two other characters quietly inhabit the house. One is Helena (Lena Nyman), Eva's younger sister stricken by a mysterious wasting disease, a stark physical reminder of Charlotte's failings as a mother. The other is Viktor (Halvar Bjork), Eva's loving husband who unquestioningly lives and breathes for her attending quietly to her every need. And yet, instead of basking in the love he is giving her, she is damned to seek justice and approval from her distant mother for the rest of her life.
Bergman's direction is mannered and deliberately artificial and yet as the film moves along I found myself utterly spellbound by it. Even though the house is clearly a set, the monologues are clearly pieces of writing, and Ingrid Bergman is not playing the piano, I never once questioned the brutal reality at play in "Autumn Sonata".
4/4