Likely unavoidable after Whore (1991). Here Ken Russell has Kathleen Turner play a woman divided between her day job of designing women's sportswear and her evenings as a working girl who'll do whatever's required by the denizens of L.A. She's strives to be the best in both roles. The script by Barry Sandler is disjointed, lurid, clunky and generally poor, especially in how it draws Anthony Perkins's god botherer who somehow identifies with her. The scenes from a marriage (between John Laughlin and Annie Potts (Bo Peep in the Toy Storys from 1995 onwards)) are boring, tepid reworkings of Rabbit, Run (1970), until Perkins gets his cue. The camerawork lacks the necessary realism, and the sets etc. are too cheap and nasty, for it to work as a time capsule. In a couple of sittings due to mystification.
Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars. Silly. Severely cut to fit into an R rating. Janet Maslin. Extremely tawdry. The bulk indeed has a "flat, joyless tone" which is annoying as the first time we encounter Turner (with a john) is quite funny.
Carol Lombard (Twentieth Century (1934), To Be or Not to Be (1942)) completism. Directed by Gregory La Cava from a script that Morrie Ryskind helped Eric Hatch adapt from the latter's novel of the same name (1935). In two sittings.
The screwy Bullock family attend an NYC society event that features a scavenger hunt. The last item they need to win the show is an "unwanted man". They discover a whole trove of them at the dump on the East River but of course the only really suitable one is William Powell. He and Lombard have a few good dialogues and she invites him to buttle. All the ladies of the house fall for him and things go as they must in Depression-era black-and-white. The final half an hour is overly heavy and serious in a similar way to It Happened One Night (1934).
I enjoyed Eugene Pallette's flat, droll and very amusing performance. Alice Brady was a bit too strident for me as the mother but she got most of the really effective screwy stuff; Lombard was too giggly little-girl space-cadet ditzy self absorption. Gail Patrick is perhaps the straightest shooter as an improbably-resistible conniving femme fatale. The vibe is pure Americana: there are no problems a man can have that cannot be fixed with a job and a woman, though some may require someone with more financial engineering nous than he has. Women do not have problems that do not involve a man, and some of these can be solved with a direct approach. Everyone has a right to do what it takes to remain in their class.
Roger Ebert: four stars in 2008 as a "great movie". Frank S. Nugent at the time. IMDB trivia suggests that things make more sense if you hear "protegé" as "gigolo".
Another from director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water (2016), Relay (2024), Fuze (2025)). Also for Ben Mendelsohn who I've never thought of as particularly physically imposing. Written by Jonathan Asser.
Ultra-violent Jack O'Connell (Sinners (2025)) is fresh outta juvie and the other adult prisoners soon learn that they're in there with him. Father Mendelsohn and group-shrink Rupert Friend try to help him fit in (in incompatible ways) and while we are teased by some signs of character in the calmer scenes everyone is unregulated and underdeveloped throughout. Within this envelope there is some decent work from the actors in supporting roles (David Ajala and Anthony Welsh amongst others). The rapid-fire mumbling made it difficult to follow the nuance (if there was any). Some scenes simply do not work. Mackenzie lent too heavily on the revolving door motif. It is nowhere as absorbing a study of violence or hard time as Adolescence (2025) or A Prophet (2009).
Peter Bradshaw: three stars. Wikipedia. Shot in defunct prisons in Northern Ireland.
Probably inevitable after the recent run of Theresa Russell movies. Here she intersects with co-writer/director Ken Russell (The Devils (1971)) in the aftermath of Pretty Woman (1990). Deborah Dalton collaborated on a screenplay based on a play by Brit David Hines.
Russell leads as a working girl in L.A. She mostly serves her lines up direct to camera and a very few of those are tepidly amusing, probably because of her delivery. Benjamin Mouton is her ice-cold pimp. Both characters are stereotypes. There's nothing particularly graphic, novel or bent to it. It is unclear why they bothered with a plot. It sort-of works as a time capsule of the time and place, specifically some parts of the city closed to vehicles.
The cast is a little interesting. Brief bestie Elizabeth Morehead played Christine Kochanski in the (news to me, apparently dire) US remake of Red Dwarf (1992). (Incredibly they got Robert Llewellyn involved in that.) Antonio Fargas as a rasta, Danny Trejo a tattooist, Jack Nance a straight good Samaritan. It's difficult to know what to blame (the weak script, the witless backstories of the characters) or if the whole thing was misconceived.
Roger Ebert: three stars. At least "she isn't completely strung out on drugs." Vincent Canby: "surprisingly plain", "not pornographic", "not much of anything." "It's difficult to tell whether this was an artistic decision or one dictated by a limited budget." Caryn James on the genre at the time.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's (good) interview with auteur/star Shahrbanoo Sadat. Afghanistan's first rom-com! Di Rosso said it was made in the style of Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally... (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993)). Sadat was glad he noticed and said it was mostly shot in Germany; the footage of actual events in Kabul was archival. In a couple of sittings.
The setup has Sadat working the camera for some soft women's-interest TV shows but dying to get out and do some real journalism. Anwar Hashimi is the veteran interviewer who is saddled with her when he sets up a meeting with a Taliban commander. Their initial interactions are sweetly comedic but at some point things get disjointed and the flow of time becomes difficult to track; why, for instance, do they go for a meal together? The romantic aspect is complicated by her being married but separated (her husband is a grotesque) and if I followed correctly, him being married (with children) throughout. This is perhaps a subtle reinforcement of the title of the movie, a theme that is made overt in a series of effective voxpops. The ending seems to flail around, looking for a place to land.
By far the best scenes were between Sadat and her girlfriends: she really lit up.
Peter Bradshaw at the Berlin Film Festival: four stars. Casablanca (1942).
A return to the Rutger Hauer completism. This is a very 1980s kids movie. Matthew Broderick (in between Wargames (1983) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)) led as a thief who escapes the dungeon of a medieval town that appears to be run by Bishop John Wood (Wargames (1983), Chocolat (2000)). Hauer assists him in evading the guards and Michelle Pfeiffer's raw beauty convinces him to help them in turn. (Pfeiffer's beauty is the cause of and solution to every problem in this movie.) Leo McKern is tasked with explaining it all to us. Alfred Molina also as something-or-other.
Directed by Richard Donner (Superman (1978), The Goonies (1985), Lethal Weapon (1989)) from a screenplay by Edward Khmara, Michael Thomas (The Hunger (1983), Burke & Wills (1985), Welcome to Woop Woop (1997)) and Tom Mankiewicz (several James Bonds). Andrew Powell and Alan Parsons served up a clunky, insistent and overtly synth-y soundtrack; he failed to do for medieval Italy what Vangelis did for twenty-first century L.A. in Bladerunner (1982). The editing is very sliced up, clearly showing that the animals were insufficiently cooperative. Broderick is often in a one-sided dialogue with God which is sometimes amusing. Over two sittings as it mostly failed to grip.
Vincent Canby. Shot by Vittorio Storaro. All the ingredients, ruined by the script. Wikipedia. IMDB trivia: "Three of the castles used for this movie were owned by Italian movie director Luchino Visconti and his family."
And still more Nicolas Roeg/Theresa Russell completism. Things open abruptly with Gary Oldman playing statues, thumb out, at the end of a bridge over the overtly marked Cape Fear River, John Lennon's Mother (1970) blaring in our space but not his. Russell soon appears in very 1980s active leisurewear fashion (hair, workout gear, bright colours, padded shoulders, braces on her teeth, a bit too much shape, dodgy Southern accent, facial expressions that do not reach the eyes) with friend Arlanda (the same but more so). She's somehow married to gerontologist Christopher Lloyd who is more interested in Sandra Bernhard and trains. This is her A Woman Under the Influence (1974). Seymour Cassel as Lloyd's boss bridges this and the Cassavettes universes.
Notionally a psychothriller but without flow; the tone is uneven and things are sufficiently cracked and disjointed (as usual with Roeg) that you have to wonder if he's actually trying for that effect (of not expecting us to suspend disbelief). The one time they cast Russell an age-appropriate bloke, well, they make him her son! — inevitably and obviously with oedipal and arrested-development implications. Oldman's performance reminded me of his unregulated punk efforts in Sid and Nancy (1986) but even more so of Udo Kier in The Kingdom (1994, 1997), and Lloyd's model trains of Europa (1991). So at least Lars von Trier paid attention. And perhaps Aronofsky. Unfathomably I have yet to see the original Cape Fear (1962) with Robert Mitchum so I missed all those references.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Not disappointing! I beg to differ. Janet Maslin. "[T]he direction is so laden with contempt for the characters." Silly. Produced by Beatle George Harrison. Written by Dennis Potter.
Dustin Hoffman gets paroled from Folsom State Prison, Los Angeles after six years and you've got to wonder if things could possibly go anywhere interesting. He lacks the menace of, for instance, Tahar Rahim, and so his interactions with his parole officer M. Emmet Walsh (and so on) taxed my credulity. Theresa Russell, so young here, too young to be so jaded, works in the job centre and is apparently at a sufficiently loose end that he looks like a good bet; she knows what she wants even if we can't see it. (How did she finance that fabulous abode? — and the Mustang. That may've been the better story.) There's some joyful recidivism. It works as a time capsule.
Directed by Ulu Grosbard from a script that IMDB trivia says was initially developed by Michael Mann, author of the source novel/experience Edward Bunker, and Nancy Dowd (Slap Shot (1977), Coming Home (1978), Ordinary People (1980)). Alvin Sargent (Paper Moon (1973), Ordinary People (1980)) and Jeffrey Boam were credited with the doctoring. Mann's involvement explains why Hoffman is more like James Caan in Thief (1981) than Hoffman in any other thing I've seen him in. Russell is not Tuesday Weld but there is a prefiguring of the diner scene here. Harry Dean Stanton mumbled like Dennis Hopper. Kathy Bates did not look convinced.
A bum steer from Nell Minow at Roger Ebert's venue (three-and-a-half stars). This is a well-known story, about the meteorological forecast for D-Day in 1944, that could possibly have been great but is very poorly told. The cast is adequate and perhaps the direction is too but the script by David Haig and director Anthony Maras, adapting the former's stage play, is not. Andrew Scott (Locke (2013), Fleabag, 1917 (2019), Wake Up Dead Man (2025)) led as the foremost British forecaster. I thought he did OK but was always thinking that Robert Carlyle was the man for the job. Brendan Fraser took on Ike. Chris Messina drew the short straw as the overconfident American weatherman and had to deliver the same misfire time and again. Kerry Condon broke up the sausagefests with endless walk-ons and some mothering. The various attempts at getting the alpha energy flowing completely occluded the decision-making process. I guess they did succeed in making a movie about World War II with almost no Nazis in it.
Brandon Yu at the New York Times, more accurately. Fraser was miscast: he can't do gravitas. Jesse Hassenger, more brutally.
Kindle. A reductive, generic take on wartime tedium with Sài Gòn as a backdrop. The American-GI bloke is a vehicle mechanic from Wisconsin in the rear with the gear who never does any maintenance. The Vietnamese girl has little backstory and no specificity; purely essentialised. She provides the obvious services and he the fretting. Rabe appropriated the less interesting aspects of Kim Vân Kieu. The characters are bland and the writing is banal.
Goodreads was generally unimpressed. Philip Caputo at the New York Times: Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992).
