Film Reviews by RJ

I suffered from a bit of Chaplin fatigue after watching his first four films in quick succession. Refreshed after a bit of a break, I watched City Lights and was quite pleasantly surprised. I am still not (and probably never will be) completely sold on Chaplin but I did find this to be the funniest of his features so far and quite touching as well, notwithstanding the hokey blind-girl-miraculously-cured storyline.

The formula is familiar - the plot is just a line on which to hang various bits of slapstick, pantomime and, of course, romance but for the most part the sketches are funny. I actually laughed out loud a couple of times watching this, whereas the previous films elicited mostly smiles and the odd small chuckle. The repeated motif of the millionaire who loves The Tramp when intoxicated but fails to even recognise him when sober was a funny and nicely executed concept. Bits of slapstick by a canal, in a dance hall and at a boxing match were all well choreographed and amusing.

All in all an enjoyable watch, even for a Chaplin agnostic.

It is dispiriting to see a film with so little ambition. A cliched, predictable Western-cum-slasher movie, it's perfectly competent but desperately lacking in creativity. There isn't a single moment that is original, startling or memorable - it just trudges doggedly along, hitting all of the expected narrative beats before reaching its inevitable conclusion. It's no surprise that the director has subsequently gone on to direct sub-par Hollywood dross like The Expendables 3 and The Hitman's Bodyguard.

This film seems to have received high praise from critics, judging by a quick glance at the 'Critical Response' section on Wikipedia, but I have to say I'm struggling to see why. It's not a bad film, but it didn't strike me as particularly good either. The plot is full of familiar western tropes and doesn't really take any surprising turns. I found a lot of the acting a bit suspect - John Hurt's cameo was particularly grating and I didn't think Ray Winstone, Emily Watson and Danny Huston were especially convincing either. I like Nick Cave's music and I think I expected that this film would be somehow more singular and unusual than it is. I found it all a bit run of the mill - OK, but nothing more.

As so often in life, I feel like the miserable one at the party, refusing to join in. I just didn't like this film, despite it being recommended by friends and also despite the fact I haven't really been able to find a bad review of it online (although some of the reviews have at least acknowledged the weakness of the melodramatic finale).

It just didn't work for me right from the start. I didn't find the central characters convincing and the whole thing had the feel of an improvisation workshop in drama school. Many people/reviews have commented on the 'truthfulness' of the film and the performances, but I found it all extremely contrived and not resembling any version of reality that I am familiar with. Just for good measure, I also disliked the look of the film, which is black-and-white-for-the-sake-of-it in the way that quirky indie films often are.

But, hey, everyone else seemed to like it, so it's probably safe to ignore my review.

I quite enjoyed the first 25-30 minutes of this low budget comedy horror, but thereafter it became rather repetitious and my interest waned pretty quickly (shortly after Terry-Thomas' fun cameo appearance). It's a cheaply made film mostly lacking in creativity and imagination in which the actors give weary, can't-really-be-bothered performances. It lurches between comedy and horror; although the 'comedy' largely amounts to the unfortunate Inspector Trout constantly being erroneously referred to as Bream/Perch/[insert name of another kind of fish here] etc. It's a shame, because the central plot of Dr Phibes wreaking a biblically-inspired revenge on the doctors he holds responsible for his wife's death is actually quite compelling. If this had been made as a straight horror film with less of the daft, knockabout humour it could have been genuinely creepy. As it is, the whole thing just has a disposable, throwaway feel to it, despite Vincent Price bringing a bit of gravitas and pathos to it. Passable entertainment for a dreary Wednesday night in October and I admit that I did add the sequel to my rental list afterwards - albeit at the bottom, and it's a long list......

The reason I keep watching films and, in particular, seeking out as diverse a range of films as possible, is because of the hope of finding something like this - something that I connect with almost immediately and which resonates so deeply that the experience is absolutely thrilling.

Now - it is clear that 99.9% of people would not choose the adjective 'thrilling' to describe this film. It is slow-moving, mostly consists of very long takes with minimal editing, features only two characters exchanging gnomic dialogue and its theme is the painful transition from life to death. But to me, 'thrilling' is exactly the right word. I love films of this kind (see also Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr etc) that leave gaps for me as a viewer to fill with my own thoughts, ideas and interpretations. As a general rule I am far more interested in the atmosphere of a film than the plot. I understand that most film viewers do not feel this way, hence the previous reviewer describing this as 'like watching paint dry'. For me, all those moments where, superficially, 'nothing is happening', those are the moments in which I am most actively engaged, where my relationship with the film becomes most intense and most rewarding.

It's all a matter of preference, and my mention of the previous reviewer is not in any way meant as a criticism. It was a perfectly fair and honest review, mercifully free of the kind of anger and accusations of pretentiousness that are normally prevalent when people review 'arty' films which they haven't enjoyed. For me, this was about as close to transcendent as film can get - and given the volume of average-to-quite-good films that I sit through, stumbling across something like this is a real joy.

Regarding Chaplin in general: I bought the Curzon Artifical Eye blu-ray collection of Chaplin films a few months ago on a whim after watching a documentary about him and have been trying to work through them. The trouble is, I'm just not sure if Chaplin is really for me. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but there is something about him that I find a little bit off-putting. I don't find him inherently funny, I find that I have to make an effort to engage with his style of humour. I haven't seen enough of Buster Keaton to make a fair comparison, but what I have seen (Sherlock Jr, for example) I just found immediately and effortlessly funny - properly, laugh-out-loud funny. Ditto Laurel and Hardy. With Chaplin's films I smile occasionally but very rarely actually laugh.

Regarding The Kid specifically: I would say it is almost-but-not-quite a feature film. I think it runs to about 53 minutes (this is the 1971 re-release), but if you take away the superfluous dream sequence which makes up the last part of the film it would be somewhere around 45 minutes. There's nothing particularly wrong with the dream sequence in itself, and a lot of people love it apparently, I just don't think it belongs in this film. The tone of it is very different to the rest of the film and I have not been able to come up with anything other than very tenuous arguments for it having a thematic resonance with the film as a whole either. It's also slightly troubling that the sequence features a 12 year old Lita Grey made up to look older and play a 'vamp', given that Chaplin started sleeping with her when she was 15. But - I don't want to get tangled up in the separating-art-from-artists debate. After the dream sequence the film ends abruptly with a tagged on happy ending.

Like most of what I have seen of Chaplin's work, The Kid is mildly amusing in places and quite sentimental. I feel compelled in almost every review I write to restate that I am not a film expert - I know a little bit about a lot of things when it comes to cinema. People with far greater knowledge than I could explain the importance of this film in the context of cinema... all I do know is that F.W. Murnau made Nosferatu about a year after Chaplin made The Kid and that (Nosferatu) is one of my favourite films (silent or otherwise) of all time. My point being that there are other films from this era to which I respond intuitively. With Chaplin, my honest feeling is that I find them interesting in terms of film history and mildly entertaining, but ultimately not really to my taste.

An attempt by Chaplin to broaden his horizons by making a serious drama in which he did not feature (apart from in a brief cameo) as an actor. I would regard this as Chaplin's first proper feature film (I think The Kid is a transitional film between shorts and features) and it's actually pretty good. It is rather melodramatic - particularly the ending which overreaches itself in pursuit of pathos - but it's engaging and full of good performances.

If I'm honest, I found this a nice change from the antics of The Little Tramp, which I sometimes find hard to warm to. It's a shame that the film was not well received at the time, as this resulted in Chaplin giving the public what they wanted and going back to the tramp for his next film, The Gold Rush. For better or for worse, his career could have been very different if the public had embraced this film.

The 'Chaplin Today' featurette on the blu-ray release is worth watching. There are some interesting comments by Liv Ullmann, Michael Powell and others which helped to contextualise the film and which made me think about it in ways I hadn't considered on my initial viewing.

I have never quite managed to fully embrace Charlie Chaplin. His humour sometimes makes me smile, sometimes make me groan but rarely makes me laugh out loud.

Having said that, this is by no means a bad film and I preferred it to The Kid and A Woman of Paris (I'm working my way through the box set). There are parts of this which are genuinely funny and some moments which are quite sweet and touching, alongside some rather more cloying sentimentality.

I'm sure the internet is awash with reviews, essays etc about this film so I won't go into any great detail about the film itself. The main purpose of my review is to warn that, unfortunately, the Curzon Artificial Eye blu-ray release only contains the 1942 re-release of the film to which Chaplin, presumably in an attempt to attract modern audiences to the film, added a thunderous and distracting narration which completely ruins the film. The whole beauty of silent cinema is how everything is expressed through the physicality of the performers. The narration added by Chaplin just tramples all over it, I couldn't concentrate on the action at all and all the delicacy and beauty of the film was lost.

The original version from 1925 is available on YouTube - not the best quality but perfectly watchable. It is far superior and you should seek that out rather than this butchered experiment.

I've been working my way through the blu-ray box set of Chaplin's features and have made it as far as The Circus.

As I've said in my reviews of his previous features, I have not yet completely warmed to Chaplin. I should also say that this is the fourth review I've written of Chaplin's films in the last hour so I am flagging slightly and running out of things to say.

Very much like his previous film, The Gold Rush, this is often quite funny, occasionally quite touching, a bit sentimental.... it's a Chaplin film, what else can I say?

I definitely have Chaplin fatigue now. I think the rest of the box set will have to wait a little while.

It has been noted that this film has some similarities to Robert Egger's 2015 film The Witch - obviously in terms of its theme of witchcraft, but also because they are both films where there was a sharp divide between critical opinion and audience opinion. Both films have been acclaimed by critics but largely unloved by audiences. In the case of The Witch, I was on the side of the critics - I really enjoyed it when I saw it at the cinema three years ago (although I would be interested to have a second look at it now to see if I still felt the same). In the case of Hereditary, I have to side with the general audience reaction, which is illustrated by the (mostly) negative reviews previously written on this site.

One difference between the two films which seems almost too prosaic to mention, but which I do think is significant, is the running times. The Witch was a fairly lean 93 minutes, whilst Hereditary clocks in at a patience-testing 127 minutes. I'm actually a fan of slow cinema, but in the horror genre there is only so much I can take of shadowy apparitions, eerie music and unsettling noises before suspense turns into boredom. Another difference (allowing for errors of memory as it's a while since I saw The Witch) is that although both films have surprisingly literal 'reveals' at the end, Hereditary lingers much longer on its revelation than The Witch did, which arguably stretches credulity past breaking point.

I read lots of audience reviews of films (on here, on Amazon etc - it's a minor obsession of mine) and one of the most common types of review I come across is the kind where the writer gets really angry because they have not enjoyed a film which was critically acclaimed. I don't want this to be one of those reviews, and yet the cynic in me can't help feeling that Hereditary is essentially a bog-standard witchcraft/possession horror film of the kind found perennially inhabiting the multiplexes, which has just been slowed down to a glacial pace and had most of the more obvious jump scares removed in order to be rebadged as an 'art-horror'.

Often when horror films are critically acclaimed the reviews tend to focus on the horror being a metaphor for something else (see Raw, Under the Shadow, The Babadook etc etc). Horror above all genres lends itself very easily to metaphorical interpretations but it seems to me like this critical approach is mainly used to try and add an intellectual dimension to films, as though being 'just' a horror is somehow not enough. This approach can easily be applied to Hereditary (e.g. mental illness, familial and intergenerational tension) but I am not convinced identifying these aspects makes the film any better or any worse.

In summary, this felt like a journey I have been on too many times before in the horror genre - two hours of smoke and mirrors before a disappointing reveal and the sense of a largely wasted evening.

The set up of this film is simple and classic. Just over an hour before he is set to retire and leave town with his new bride, Marshal Will Kane receives news that Frank Miller, a violent criminal who he put behind bars, has been pardoned and is arriving on the noon train to meet his three accomplices and seek revenge on Kane. He is implored by his wife and many of the townsfolk (some with Kane's interests at heart, some with their own) to leave town, but with a new marshal not due to arrive until the next day, Kane is unable to turn his back on the town, fearing not only that Miller would pursue him if he fled but also that Miller would set about dragging the town back into the state it was in before he rid it of Miller and cleaned the place up.

For the next hour, Kane tries unsuccessfully to enlist a posse of deputies to help him face Miller. Some have a personal grievance against Kane; others were able to benefit financially from the criminal activities of Miller; others are simply too scared or jaded to fight. Abandoned by everyone (even, seemingly, his wife), Kane heads alone towards a fateful showdown with the four criminals.

I really wanted to like this film more than I did. I think my main gripe is that is somehow fails to exploit the potential of the classic set up. It's engaging and there are lots of good performances, but it's also rather episodic as it goes through the process of showing the moral failings of all of the people who abandon Kane in his (literal) hour of need. Kane's determination to stand for what is right, and the ease with which he is deserted by people who he has helped in the past, is quite compelling (and, inevitably, widely interpreted as a comment on McCarthysism, HUAC etc). Tension builds to an extent, but is never really ratcheted up to the nerve-jangling level that it could have been. And when Frank Miller finally arrives, he is an underwhelming, forgettable villain. The confrontation between Kane and Miller's gang is anticlimactic - Miller, supposedly a terrifying, hardened criminal is ultimately defeated after being lightly shoved in the face by Grace Kelly, allowing Kane to shoot him. I am a fan of Sergio Leone's westerns, in which climactic showdowns are stylised, operatic and protracted - so I'm being a bit unfair judging this film by those standards. I'm sure if you find Leone's westerns absurd and overblown then the brevity of this film's climax would be refreshing.

Yet again I find myself sitting down to try and review a film whilst lacking the contextual framework to do so properly. At the age of 38, this is the first John Wayne film I have ever seen. Even though for the last twenty years I would easily have been able to rattle off the names of films like The Searchers, Stagecoach, True Grit, Rio Bravo etc, I've somehow never actually got around to seeing any of them. Maybe because there were always other films I was more interested in seeing, maybe because a vague awareness of Wayne's political views put me off, maybe because my exposure to the Western genre was through revisionist/spaghetti westerns and I thought that Hollywood Westerns would be too safe and conservative - for whatever reason I just never seemed to get around to them.

My overall impression of El Dorado was that it was a film made by old hands with nothing to prove - and I mean that as a compliment. I think Hawks was about 70 at the time of directing this, his penultimate film, whilst Wayne was about 60 and had been starring in films for more than three decades. The film kind of ambles along at a pace befitting men of their ages - it's slow, but not at all in the sense of being boring, just in the sense of being unhurried, knowing exactly where it is going and seeing no need to rush in getting there. It's a film that is not interested in being original (I understand that it is more or less a remake/thematic variation of Rio Bravo, and was basically remade again a few years later as Rio Lobo), instead preferring to indulge in the pleasures of a simple story told in an engaging manner.

It's actually much harder to review a simple film than a complex one. What else can I really say about this? It's an engaging story, directed and acted with such confidence and assurance as to seem effortless. To quote Roger Ebert's 1967 review: "For people who like well-made, entertaining movies with suspense, violence, horses, colorful characters, lots of shooting and a few pretty girls, "El Dorado" is about the most entertaining Western to turn up this year." I must be one of those people because I enjoyed this.

There is one cringeworthy bit of racism towards the end when Mississippi (brilliantly played by James Caan) pretends to be Chinese in order to distract a guard by putting a bowl on his head, turning up the corners of his eyes and spouting some 'Chinese sounding' gibberish. This was 1966 and American New Wave cinema was just around the corner, not that you would know it from this defiantly old-fashioned film - and it's ironic that this little bit of regressive racism is performed by Caan who is the only clue in this film to the imminent changing of the landscape (and changing of the guard) in American cinema.

Disclaimer: This review is based on the first 25 minutes of the film, which is how much I watched before turning it off.

This is not something I would normally rent. I'd recently watched The Defiant Ones and on the special features this film was mentioned as being a variation on the theme of that film and I frivolously chucked it on my rental list thinking it might be a bit of easy, undemanding fun. I was obviously aware that is it an 'exploitation' film, but having recently enjoyed Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream (the latter of which also starred Pam Grier), I thought this might be OK. I was wrong.

As I recall, despite being categorised in the 'blaxploitation' genre, the Blacula films weren't overly exploitative and they seemed to be made by filmmakers who were genuinely trying to make good films even whilst working within the confines of limited budgets and genre restrictions. But this is a pretty torrid and sordid affair. Set in a women's prison, it's only a few minutes before the prisoners are all naked, hosing each other down in the shower, whilst one of the guards (all of whom are apparently lesbians, naturally) peeps at them through a hole in the wall and masturbates. If my 15 year old self had stumbled across this on late night TV 20+ years ago I probably wouldn't have believed my luck - but my critical faculties have changed somewhat since then.

In between flimsy excuses for further female nudity you will find terrible acting, a silly plot and cheap, shabby filmmaking. I am not qualified to discuss the merits of the exploitation genre in great detail - I am sure that as in any genre there are good and bad examples. Arguments in defence of films like this usually run along the lines of saying that they provided an opportunity to portray strong women and/or people of colour which was not yet available in mainstream cinema. There might be something in this and, as I said, I don't know enough about the genre as a whole to comment with any authority - maybe films like these were a kind of stepping stone on the way to progress. Either way, I couldn't endure the exploitation aspect or the amateurish filmmaking for more than 25 minutes.

The interview with Kim Newman on the Blu-ray (which I watched after watching the film) helped to put The Defiant Ones into context for me, because - despite flattering myself that I'm reasonably well informed about films - it exposed yet more gaps in my knowledge. I didn't know a thing about Stanley Kramer, apart from gathering via Wikipedia that he was known as a director of 'message' films. Newman's way of putting it is that Kramer was 'more important than good'. Thankfully, The Defiant Ones seems to be regarded by many as one of Kramer's best. I enjoyed it and whilst it certainly isn't a subtle film I didn't find it too heavy-handed or overly preachy.

It's a simple story with good performances from Curtis and Poitier. Newman's interview also made some useful points about where Curtis and Poitier were in their respective careers at this point in time - Curtis looking to be taken seriously and Poitier not yet typecast as the 'dignified negro'. I thought they were both good in a film in which the script tries with variable success to portray them both as believable characters and as ciphers for the film's message about mutual understanding and cooperation (specifically between races but also more generally). There's great support from the likes of Theodore Bikel and Lon Chaney Jr. which helps to add a bit of colour and interest into the otherwise less-than-thrilling and episodic pursuit of the convicts. It also had a satisfyingly bleak ending, which Newman posits was due to the demands of censorship at that time - if that was the case, then I'm grateful to censorship on this occasion.

The film looks stunning (it was no surprise to discover it won an Oscar for best black and white cinematography) and, cleverly, there is no non-diegetic music used. This heightens the realism of the film by allowing us to hear the rain pouring down, the sounds of the birds and bugs, and the squelching of footsteps as both convicts and pursuers make their way through the swamps and bogs. Often with films of this period and earlier, the overwrought musical scores are my least favourite aspect, so this was a welcome relief.

I think I am happy to accept the consensus that, overall, Kramer was 'more important than good' - but I think in this film the balance between important and good was fairly even, and I found it a solid, enjoyable watch.