Review collection 2024-25

21 November 2024

Double De Niro makes for a laborious true-story mafioso movie. The actor plays Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two warring mob bosses in 1950s New York, in a caper that lacks the richness of its writer’s earlier Goodfellas.

Just before the war, Frank and Vito make a good living in black market alcohol and drugs and illegal lotteries as part of the Lucky Luciano crime family. Vito then flees to Italy and when he comes back to New York in 1945, he finds that his old pal is only giving him a small slice of the cake. And, moreover, stolid, cautious Frank is unwilling to expand further into drugs, having bribed his way into a cosy, pseudo-respectable position in society. Frank infuriates Vito with a professed ambition to retire and his willingness to cooperate as an un-subpoenaed witness in front of grand juries. Vito suspects (understandably) that this stance will only be carried off by selling out his former criminal pals and so orders a hit on Frank, resulting in a brutal and incompetent assassination attempt that leads to disaster. The film’s title refers to the postwar New York drinking club where Vito and Frank hung out; the movie had previously been called Wise Guys, which was perhaps too close to Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, on which the film Goodfellas was based. All the time-honoured mannerisms are here, including the old-fashioned barber-shop hit – but the movie also adds little memory moments in black and white, as well as snatches of documentary archive footage. It also has a habit of giving the old guys in the club stretches of expository dialogue to tell each other and us what is going on. When the entire nationwide mob family is busted by police at a powwow in upstate New York, Pileggi speculates that Costello deliberately contrived the meeting and reported them to the cops to save himself – a snitch move, from which the film carefully rescues Costello by sentimentally putting him in the same prison cell as Vito.

I approached the movie with a certain scepticism because I am always very disappointed by biopics in general and, in this particular case, by having seen James Mangold’s previous one, Walk The Line, dedicated to Johnny Cash. Besides, 1961 – 65 is Dylan’s Golden Age: his output in that period changed my life forever and a possible profanation would have been unbearable. Instead, the film works, it gives a glimpse and the aroma of the period, even if quite a superficial one. There is no attempt to understand Dylan’s genius, his poetry, his songwriting and so on. It is also full of untrue facts, but that is not the point, fictional works can make the subject more real, and interesting, when events are realistic but not real. The suggestion from a complete unknown, that is myself, is to go see the movie.

Folk Revival early 60s Download

I don’t know how it happened, we were just kids, late teenagers attending high school, running wild in the early seventies still roaring with the rebelliousness and the political fights of the previous decade. As for the Folk Revival in the US, we were a ’singing movement’ in love with the counterculture of the sixties, looking for a singing prophet. Dylan came to us a decade later, but it nonetheless struck hard: his anti-Tin Pan Alley voice, his rough folky guitar playing and his finger-pointing songs were arrows to our hearts. He became our idol, and we followed him down the line of his discography, in his turning electric and visionary, his lyrics more and more poetic and modernist, till the motorcycle crash of ’67 that abruptly put an end to his golden period, unchallenged until today. Other great glimpses of his genious would surface in the following decades, especially in the seventies, but to me 60s’ Dylan remains the real one, the true voice of another America in which we mirrored our dreams and ways. May your song always be sung and may you stay forever young.

Reuniting the director, writer and stars of Forrest Gump, Here is an original film about multiple families and a special place they inhabit. The story travels through generations, capturing the most relatable of human experiences. Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Castaway, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Contact, Back to the Future) directs from a screenplay by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Killers of the Flower Moon, Dune, A Star is Born) and him. Told much in the style of the acclaimed graphic novel by Richard McGuire on which it is based, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in a tale of love, loss, laughter and life, all of which happen right Here.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/15/here-review-hanks-and-wright-add-folksy-charm-to-robert-zemeckis-single-place-drama

CONCLAVE follows one of the world’s most secretive and ancient events — selecting the new Pope. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is tasked with running this covert process after the unexpected death of the beloved Pope. Once the Catholic Church’s most powerful leaders have gathered from around the world and are locked together in the Vatican halls, Lawrence uncovers a trail of deep secrets left in the dead Pope’s wake, secrets which could shake the foundations of the Church.

Here is a determinedly old-fashioned drama, verbose and elaborate but also forthright and watchable in its way. It is a Stoppardian what-if meeting, imagining a bruising encounter between two celebrated historical figures who could, theoretically, have run into each other; it is adapted by director Matt Brown from a stage-play by American dramatist Mark St Germain, in turn inspired by a 2002 book by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi who had seized upon a report that Sigmund Freud met with an unnamed Oxford don just before his death. What if that don was CS Lewis, the Christian apologist who in his 1933 book The Pilgrim’s Regress had mocked atheist Freudianism and every other sort of godless trendiness? the guardian

Gabriele Salvatores has crafted a delightful film based on a treatment written in their youth by Fellini and Pinelli. They are responsible for the story of Celestina, who, a few years after the end of the war, decides to escape a life of hardship in Naples to reach New York, the promised land brimming with opportunities. The protagonist’s coming-of-age story is mirrored in the narrative style, which transitions from the neorealism of the first part to the fairy-tale quality of the second. Salvatores and the cast deliver an extraordinary performance, maintaining the film’s delicate balance between drama, comedy, and fantasy. The result is a refined elegance that avoids the saccharine or overly sentimental tones the story could have easily inspired. A significant contribution comes from the impeccable production design and the soundtrack, combining period and contemporary music, which imbues the film with a poetic lightness throughout.

“Juror #2” follows family man Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) who, while serving as a juror in a high profile murder trial, finds himself struggling with a serious moral dilemma… one he could use to sway the jury verdict and potentially convict–or free–the accused killer (Rotten Tomatoes)

How we liked Clint as a tough guy, first in Leone’s spaghetti westerns and then as Inspector Callahan in the Dirty Harry series! Since Eastwood has moved to the other side of the camera, he has produced a series of genre films which show a sensibility, a human touch, an understanding of the human soul and its dilemmas which was at first strange, then it became a trademark of his (it seems almost impossible that he endorsed D. Trump in 2016 or that he has always been a Republican, home of the worst vulgar instincts). Juror #2 is no exception, much more than a legal thriller, a comedy of errors where truth and justice hardly meet. His final testament? hopefully not, we do need sensitive directors like Clint in these times of desolately high-tech movies.

It’s not quite an ultra-villain origin story. But nor is Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice in any way a flattering depiction of its subject, the young(ish) Donald Trump (a horribly convincing Sebastian Stan). The film follows Trump’s early journey, starting as “Little Donnie”, the browbeaten second son of an overbearing father who scoffs that his boy “needs all the help he can get”. But, as the film tells it, the young Donald finds a second father figure in the well-connected and widely feared rightwing lawyer Roy Cohn (Succession star Jeremy Strong, bringing his trademark unblinking gimlet intensity to the performance, with chilling effect). The lessons learned from his mentor – chicanery, bluster, vanity and the need to win at all costs – shaped the Trump we know today.

It would have been easy to make Trump into a monster or a ridiculous figure of fun … But it does show a side of the former US president that, you suspect, he would prefer not to be seen. This Trump is an unexpectedly weak and malleable figure; an impressionable man who mistakes bullying for strength and views power as something to be weaponised… the fact the Donald has worked himself into a frothing, impotent rage about the film suggests that it must be doing something right… Cohn sets about moulding young Donald into a winner. He rattles off his three rules for success. No 1: attack, attack, attack. No 2: admit nothing, deny everything. No 3: always claim victory, never admit defeat… https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/oct/20/the-apprentice-review-ali-abbasi-donald-trump-roy-cohn-biopic-jeremy-strong-sebastian-stan

With his 13th film, Gabriele Muccino signs his first action thriller, following a young American woman on holiday in Italy who turns her life upside down over the course of one night.

Here Now begins like a love story under the sun of Sicily, but soon turns into an action thriller, until its very last moments. The director … for the first time measures himself against a genre high in adrenaline, in which his proverbial style of direction of actors (“Gabriele is a director who gets agitated, sweats, shouts at you”, says one of them) adds frenzy to frenzy, reaching almost extreme levels.

… the film explores the dangerous drifts of the desire for adventure and for a challenge with oneself. The protagonist is a Californian girl in her 20s, Sophie (New York actress Elena Kampouris), recovering from a great pain and who, on her last day of holiday in Italy, decides to go to the sea for a swim (we are in Palermo, in Sicily) rather than accompany her sister Rachel (Ruby Kammer), passionate about art, to visit yet another cathedral. This is the first of a long series of choices that the young woman will make over the following 24 hours, against one and all, and which will turn her life upside down. On a high rock for dizzying dives, she meets the beautiful and seductive Giulio (Saul Nanni) and his friends Komandante (Lorenzo Richelmy), Samba (Enrico Inserra) and Sprizz (Francesco Garilli), a group of boys from the area who aren’t really recommendable, but who win Sophie over with their friendliness and audacity. The girl, who has meanwhile fallen for Giulio, decides to spend her last hours in Italy with them and to live, at whatever the cost, the most adrenaline-filled night of her life – a night during which all kinds of things truly happen.

Inspired by After Hours by Martin Scorsese (“a film that has chased me for years”, declares the director), Here Now definitely keeps you glued to your seat. The at once hyper-vibrant and painful parable of this young woman is intriguing, as she continually pushes the limit of risk in order to get out of her emotional cage. It is also interesting to see how the border between good and evil, licit and illicit, can be blurred, and how it might be easier than we think to find oneself on the wrong side. With a little more sense of proportion … the film would still be good for its genre, that of the action film with a sentimental background. Muccino knows how to direct and also experiments – for this film, he used, among others, a camera prototype that immerses itself in the cockpit of a moving car and shoots the actors in 360 degrees. “It’s a film we shot with shivers on our backs”, highlights the director, “a film that doesn’t simulate adrenaline, but lives it”. And this undoubtedly can be seen on screen. https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/468975/

Daniel Auteuil directs, produces, co-writes and stars in this solid, slightly plodding courtroom drama about a jaded barrister who finds himself unexpectedly emotionally connected to what should be just another ordinary case. Auteuil plays Jean Monier, the lawyer appointed to defend Nicolas Milik (Grégory Gadebois), a gentle teddy bear of a man and a loving father who has been accused of murdering his wife. The more Jean explores the case, the more he becomes convinced of his client’s innocence. https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/an-ordinary-case-cannes-review/5193908.article

Best line of the year 2023 (from the classic noir 'The Big Steal')