Sobibor (Собибор) (2018)

When James Cameron injects high spectacle, grand romance, and completely made-up characters like Billy Zane's suave, tuxedoed, gun-toting villain Caledon Hockley into a painstakingly recreated Titanic, viewers can shrug off expectations of historical accuracy and give themselves up to blockbuster spectacle - never mind the roughly 1500 real people who died in 1912 - but the same can't be said of Sobibor, Russia's odd entry for Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Academy Awards, a high-gloss but button-pushing movie in which writer, director, and star Konstantin Khabensky presents the lead up to the uprising of the prisoners in the Jewish extermination camp, Sobibor - with a similar appetite for spectacle over accuracy, so atrocities play out in unflinching full where restraint might be more respectful, and Christopher Lambert's Karl Frenzel tips over into caricature - a mumbling, starey Dirk Dastardly whose abhorrent acts are here tied to a camp love triangle.

★★☆☆☆

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Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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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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Woman of the Hour (2024)

The fact that in 1978 an active serial killer once appeared in real life on a dating game television show seems at first a curious car crash moment to ogle in passing, hardly worth extrapolating into a feature-length movie – not without turning real murder and real victims into sideshow spectacle – but in her directorial debut, Anna Kendrick takes that moment and almost succeeds in finding the balance between respecting its grim reality and lampooning a world – then and now – that idly indulges sick male pathology with a sympathetic "there, there", fails to vet men before, say, letting them on camera, and asks women to laugh gaily at male idiocy.

★★★☆☆

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No Man of God (2021)

It's the American criminal justice system, one in the 1980s with a newly established criminal profiling department, that is the star of this oft-told, awful true crime story, approached from a peculiar angle - somehow Elijah Wood as real-life founding criminal profiler Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby's idiosyncratic and distracting Ted "Surely he sat up straight and spoke without a hand in front of his face, once?" Bundy disappear into the beige 1980s backgrounds, achieving little in their conversations about the infamous killer's crimes, and it is the access rules, prison protocols, and government bureaucracy that step forward and gently but insistently drive the interest here.  

★★★☆☆

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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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What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

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Shirley (2020)

Does it say more about me or this drama that the movie, a choppily edited, goal-diffuse and, regarding the characters and their behaviours, a largely psychologically incoherent one (who knows scene-to-scene, for example, if Shirley and her husband love each other or not, are co-conspirators in mischief or not, are each other's bitterest enemy or most devoted supporter or not) ended without me knowing Shirley, the title character, is Shirley Jackson, the famous US horror novellist I've since had to learn about on Wikipedia?

★★☆☆☆

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A United Kingdom (2016)

This biopic does a pretty good job of condensing into a serviceable two-hour history lesson the main details of not just one but two lives during an embarrassing period of British history: the life of Seretse Khama, the first democratically-elected President of Botswana who led the country to independence from British colonisation in 1965, and the life of his English wife who defied the sensibilities of her family and her country by marrying Khama and moving to and having a baby in Bechuanaland.

★★★☆☆

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Mary Shelley (2017)

Haifaa al-Mansour's story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is like two hours of Laugh In's Joke Wall - a highlight reel from the Shelleys' lives punctuated by door - with Clara, Mary's sister, most often the one to throw open the door to come in and Mary's husband, Percy, most often the one to grab his coat and hat and head out, slamming the door behind him, and when the door is next thrown open, there's no telling which of the extreme ends of the human emotional spectrum these characters will be on - will they have lurched forward in time to the next most dramatic episode of the Shelleys' lives or will they still be responding to the last? - making the movie feel like a 19th Century Clueless - petulant, door, immature, door, self-pitying, door, sassy, door, morose, door - but right at the end, in reply to a publisher's question about her age, Elle Fanning's Mary Shelley, at last an author, answers, "Eighteen," and suddenly the glib nature of it all, the sore lack of monstrous creation, makes some small sense.

★★☆☆☆

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Capote (2005)

This isn't In Cold Blood but Truman Capote writing 'In Cold Blood', and it is painterly and utterly captivating in its evocation of the 1960s and in the way it contrasts the cocktail parties, soirees of New York with the bleak landscapes of rural Kansas, its scene of the now infamous Clutter family murders and its penitentiary stretched out across the flat, but the biopic remains frustratingly superficial about its subject, more snapshot than character study, touching upon - for a Capote Devotee maybe - but not wholly taking up - for anyone else - myriad points of interest including Capote's addictions (we just see him with a glass in hand, a mere signal for those in the know), his self-centredness (he cries, but we wonder why; he says he's done all he can (after a holiday in Spain) but we wonder if he actually believes it); the veracity of his journalism (we hear him repeatedly proclaim his near-perfect recall but wonder if it might be because he feels his credibility is/would be challenged); his deteriorating relationship with Harper Lee (she cools but we wonder what affect this has on him), and the freedom he had in his relationship with Jack Dunphy (there are hints at dalliances, and possibly even one with one of the killers, Perry Smith (according to some sources but not this film), but we are left wondering if he feels duplicitous...or anything at all).

★★★☆☆

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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) (1974)

Werner Herzog doesn't entertain the possibility that Kaspar Hauser - the short-statured 17 year-old foundling discovered one day in a Nuremberg street - was a fraud exploiting a fantastic life story for the public attention, instead opening his film with Kaspar Hauser's captivity, his first venture outside, and his public discovery exactly as the cause célèbre himself described them, and with Herzog's mesmerising ways and a terrific disconcerting central performance from Boris S., a 41 year-old non-actor with mental health issues, the film allows viewers to discover for themselves, with the wonder of Nuremberg locals in 1828, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser suddenly in the world, clutching his letters on the street, the subject of a story Herzog presents as a matter of plain fact, leaving it to viewers to turn everything in on itself and let the possibilities of a fraud or a conspiracy or a personality disorder twist in their brains like a double- or even a triple- negative. 

★★★★★

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The Mercy (2017)

In 1968, Douglas Crowhurst entered a competition to solo-race around the world by boat and what happened aboard the Teignmouth Electron, a trimaran of his own design, while on land energy was high for his Boy's-Own Adventure, makes for gripping viewing with a terrific performance from Colin Firth as Crowhurst and a career-best performance from Rachel Weisz as his poor wife - but don't be fooled by that hopeful, heroic stare on the poster: it's grim.

★★★★☆

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Deepwater Horizon (2016)

It comes across as a rather simplistic account of what caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010, especially with John Malkovich playing a corporate Dastardly Whiplash whose amoral calculations - on - the - day - cause the blowout and Gulf of Mexico oilspill, but as a glimpse at life on an offshore oil platform, Deepwater Horizon is gripping and as a tribute to those that died, it succeeds wonderfully.

★★★☆☆

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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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Once Upon A Time In...Hollywood (2019)

In Tarantino's temporally slight ninth movie - it may be a homage to the 60s but a lot of what happens happens while Sharon Tate sits in a cinema watching herself in The Wrecking Crew - another actor, the fictional Rick Dalton and his stunt double Clint Booth saunter around an impressively recreated 60s Hollywood and with not much to do while they anxiously anticipate the demise of their Golden-Age-of-Hollywood careers due to the advent of colour television, they drop lines referencing 60s culture, have benign encounters with sinister hippies and occasionally strike poses and do things reminiscent of other Tarantino films. 

★★★☆☆

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The Walk (2015)

Phillipe Petit's wirewalk between the World Trade Towers is something I knew about but never thought much about and in fact I tended to dismiss whatever he did as the work of a serial pest like a streaker at a football game, but to watch him here progress his idea from fanciful notion in a dentist's waiting room to a death-defying feat high above an awe-struck America, is - even after so much maudlin, cringeworthy faux-Frenchness - extremely moving...and especially moving given the way the film juxtaposes Petit's contribution to history with the contributions of certain others.

★★★☆☆

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Dracula Untold (2014)

If they'd dispensed with the tired false promise of that title and marketed it as a live-action Castlevania, maybe more people would have enjoyed this origin story that melds together the mytholology of the world's most famous nocturnal neckbiter, Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, with the history of the 15th Century exacerbater of the Ottoman Empire, Vlad the Impaler even if the movie does rely a little too often on its swirling cgi bats and even if, like the film's antihero, the film refuses to die despite several ideal moments when it should impale itself on a stake and end but instead rises diabolically again and again and again (each time with a swirl of bats) because the gap between history and mythology that the film is bridging is actually a chasm with nothing in it, one that requires at some point just a stupid leap.

★★★★☆

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Sully (2016)

This workmanlike Clint Eastwood-directed movie tells the story of the 2009 emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after the plane hit a flock of geese and even though it is all still fresh in our minds and we all know very well the miraculous outcome and the celebrity status achieved by the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, it still proves as engrossing as any episode of Mayday/Air Crash Investigations, to see how the aviation investigation played out behind the media frenzy. 

★★★☆☆

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