Saturday Night (2024)

It was an ugly time in comedy when SNL first aired, really, when comedians were smirking smug white men being loud, woofing at women, humping legs, and plastering schoolboy notes on everything (all seen here), but SNL fans will love this behind-the-scenes look at the hours leading up to the very first episode of what is now a 50-year-old comedy institution and anyone into, say, The Muppets or 30 Rock will be interested in the madcapped goings-on behind the scenes of another live production.

★★★☆☆

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The Cursed (2021)

Like The VVitch, the attempt here is to elevate horror with history, so the first stretch of the movie involves gypsy encampments being razed by colonists in grey miserable scenes that depict real historical horrors, but then we are expected to care about a monster horror that in comparison is turgid and plodding, not half as interesting as the history.

 

★★☆☆☆

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Mississippi Burning (1988)

I think I read that potential lawsuits meant the factual story of the FBI's investigation into the murders of three young civil-rights workers in Mississippi in the 1960s couldn't simply be told as it happened, and so the identity of the case's mysterious Mr X informant is altered, names are changed, and liberties are taken with the historical facts of who did what, reducing the impact of the movie-final series of stills telling viewers what happened after the story, but as a gripping, dismaying, maddening period crime drama, this Oscar-winner is star-studded, well acted and completely engrossing.

★★★★☆

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Orlando (1992)

With her title character untethered by time and experiencing life in different male and female forms, Virginia Wolff in 1928 in her book Orlando: A Biography may have debuted the concept of the multiverse, not DC Comics in 1961; Sally Potter's adaptation of Wolff's book is full of painterly detail across the various times and locations, amuses with its sly humour, and lead Tilda Swinton transfixes as Orlando, staring out from the movie like a figure from a series of Romantic paintings come alive.

★★★★★

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My Brilliant Career (1979)

Fierce and intelligent and packaged off to live with relatives like an Australian Anne of Green Gables, Sybylla (Judy Davis, in her first lead role) waves off anatopic turn-of-the-century British sensibilities and as much as possible determines her own irreverent way through her Australian bush life, juggling family responsibilities and personal endeavours with a blossoming romance with dashing landowner Harry Beecham (Sam Neill in his first lead role).

★★★★☆

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Vanity Fair (2004)

To give you an idea of the pace, war breaks out in one scene and Reese Witherspoon's all-too-American Becky Sharp, the social-climbing female-Barry Lyndon central to William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 novel, helps her fellow pregnant friend into a shelter where they talk momentarily about their impending motherhood and in the next scene when they emerge onto the street, the Napoleonic Wars are over and they are mothers of 15-year-olds, and so it goes - a breezy line about a funeral is dropped to inform us of the death of a major character we saw cough just a moment earlier; a first kiss immediately precedes a scene of extended family bliss - and while it may be an impressive feat of screenwriting to capture most things that happen in Thackeray's 650-odd pages of sweeping, multigenerational period drama, as a movie this feels too often like a mere highlight reel.

★★☆☆☆

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The Ice Storm (1997)

Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, based on a book by Rick Moody, does for the 70s what The Big Chill and Grand Canyon did for the 80s and 90s - present middleclass America in a moment, here an era of nuclear families contending with post-Vietnam War sexual liberation - and while the movie might have benefitted from a few more laughs as 70s upheaval is paraded in the form of packaging peanuts, Jesus Christ Superstar, est training and key parties, the sombre drama is redeemed by affecting endscenes suggesting the inexorable thaw and moving forwards of Time...and along the way compelling evidence is provided that Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood are not, in fact, the same person.

★★★☆☆

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Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

The actual historical figure also had grand aspirations to be something greater but failed because there were others that had already succeeded in her place.

★★☆☆☆

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The Favourite (2018)

Director Yorgis Lanthimos's latest and most accessible movie to date tells of Queen Anne's friendships with the privileged Lady Sarah and 'downstairs' Abigail, two women in competition to be the Queen's favourite; sumptuous period detail, a cracker performance by Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne, and titled chapters that recall Barry Lyndon help disguise the fact that this is essentially an episode of Melrose Place transported to the 1700s - one of the ones where Jane Mancini and her sister Sydney Andrews fight and end up in the pool.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Phantom Thread (2017)

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

As with many of Paul Thomas Anderson's movies, we are introduced to a world so immaculately and painstakingly presented and with such exquisite attention to detail that we start to wonder if the movie isn't based on historical fact - perhaps the fashion house of dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock really existed in 1950s London and really was rocked by the arrival of a lover and muse, Alma, who not only really was but was able to tolerate, unlike those before her, Woodcock's ego and control - and then, at the point Anderson's world-building gives way to narrative development, the wheels of his elegant sportscar fall off and we are left wondering why an isolated case of Munchausen's Syndrome requires such elegant, elaborate treatment, truly a beauty to behold.

★★★★☆

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The Beguiled (2017)

In her movie based on Thomas Cullinan's novel, is Sofia Coppola commenting on the fortitude and independence of women as men all around them tear each other apart in the American Civil War, or suggesting women make really bad rash decisions in the absence of men, or is Coppola's equally celebrated and lamented light touch as a director in fact a fear of saying anything at all, and had Annie Wilkes hobbled Paul Sheldon to save his life, would 'Misery' have been a thriller of greater psychological depth, are the sorts of questions that come up while watching this beautifully acted, stunningly photographed (the scene in which Kirsten Dunst picks flowers in the overgrown garden of a great southern plantation house is alone worth the price of admission), occasionally amusing, but mystifying and very slight, slice of feminist, no, anti-feminist, no, fem...gothic period drama.

★★★★☆

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A Quiet Passion (2016)

IBS sufferers, heavy breathers, and fans of the Fast and Furious franchise be warned: Quiet is the operative word in the title of this biopic which unfolds with the urgency of a poetry recital, with not a word wasted as Emily Dickinson, the posthumously celebrated American poet, grows up in the 19th century, distinguishes herself as unique in early adulthood, and then grows steadily more insular and cantankerous as she gets older and loses, one by one, those she loves to death or, equally devastating, marriage.

★★★★☆

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Lady Macbeth (2016)

I knew nothing of this beyond what the poster promised ("Imagine Alfred Hitchcock directing Wuthering Heights!'") so it wasn't until the end when a titlecard states the film is based on a Russian novella that everything - the abject bleakness and the sense of confused time and place that pervades a thankless plot (a heartless Englishwoman with a household of black servants in rural England throws 19th century sensibilities into unedifying, murderous chaos) - suddenly made sense: imagine Michael Haneke directing Crime and Punishment.

★★★☆☆

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My Cousin Rachel (2017)

The trouble with Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, whether this very beautifully photographed and finely acted new version, the 1952 Olivia de Havilland version, or any version at all is that viewers are supposed to question the motivations of a foreign woman and ask themselves whether she is a loose opportunist, while extending sympathy towards an immature, impestuous privacy invader, domestic abuser and effective murderer.

★★★☆☆

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