I loved his Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, with Connery of course.
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I absolutely love Branagh‘s adaptation of SLEUTH - and Caine and Law were rarely better. Again, Branagh brings visual audacity to highlight stellar performances. Pinter, of course, offers the most delicious dialogue:
„I‘ve always LONGED for an intimate chat with a hairdresser.“
„I‘M NOT A HAIRDRESSER!“
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I do own a copy (oddly, for me, Branagh would fit in on that thread of accidental collections) so I will give it a rewatch.
Since I´m always right you will agree afterwards. 
Well…I just reached the discovery of the body, and that continuous shot from above the corridor is incredible, selling the idea of the audience as a voyeur, nosing into a situation they have no business being involved with, only breaking from it when Poirot agrees to look into it. It becomes the audience’ business when it becomes Poirot’s
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It´s almost too showy - but in line with Branagh treating the story with respect and still knowing it is a potboiler, old-fashioned and somehow silly, but he wrangles all the emotions out of it that really kept me spellbound.
“You emphasised the wrong syllable” Really pulled me out of the film.
Oh, hello Branagh the actor who has has been doing a huge amount of accent work recently…Casino Royale has a similar moment with Eva Green missing an emphasis where it isn’t actually wrong, but not something someone with that cultural background would do, but as I’m talking shop in both instances for it to bother me, I’ll easily let it slide.
- I should say this was director/producer Branagh doing accent work for the lead role talking to noted character actor Willem Dafoe playing a detective who is doing accent work who then feels the need to apologise for the more unsavoury aspects of his character’s fictional identity. Lads, save it for pub conversations, not literally onscreen!
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I´m so easily won over AND don’t notice those details…
I definitely enjoyed it more on second viewing, getting to appreciate Branagh’s visual sensibility as whilst he does rely on his stellar cast, it’s more trusting that his cast know what they’re doing, so he can focus on the visuals in a way other Agatha Christie adaptations have not.
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Directing actors well is just casting them well. Great actors know what to do and how to do it.
Don’t Blink ( 2014 ) on Amazon
An intriguing mystery, a group of friends head off to an isolated holiday resort but on arriving find it like the Mary Celeste. Half finished meals, cars left running so they run out of petrol, no animal life etc. Then members of the group start to disappear which leads to arguments and tension spreading across the group.
A good start and mystery but it does fall a little flat, with a disappointing ending,
One great quote from it is …
“I don’t know where they go when they disappear, but I’ve read enough Stephen King to know that nothing safe comes back from that dark place.”
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Went back to the cinema for the first time this year and saw A QUIET PLACE part 2 last night,at my beloved flea pit cinema, I must admit I jumped out of my seat a few times!
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Kudos for being persistent!
I saw A Quiet Place Part 2 yesterday, and while okay I didn’t think it was anything special.
Would give it 6.5, or 7 at most.
SPIRAL: FROM THE BOOK OF SAW (2021)
Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson
Dir. Darren Lynn Bousman
In one of the more left-field collaborations we’ve seen in a while, Spiral (or Saw IX for those keeping track) finds legendary funnyman Chris Rock joining forces Lionsgate to bring the Saw franchise back to life and move it forward into a new era. It’s an odd mixture, to be sure, but one that certainly has its moments.
After a rather forgettable attempt to revive the franchise in 2017’s Jigsaw, the franchise seemed to be as dead as its main antagonist, who kicked the bucket back in the third film in the franchise a decade and a half ago. Enter Chris Rock, who not only stars in the film but produces it and devised the story for the film as well. Working with a whose who of Saw filmmakers (all of the franchise’s former directors, with the exception of Jigsaw’s Spierig Brothers, have a hand in this film), Rock brings to the screen a story that both manages to feel at times original to the franchise while also feeling very much like it’s heading down the same path we’ve seen time and time again with these films.
Chris Rock plays Detective Zeke Banks, who we learn early on is ostracized by his fellow officers for having turned in a fellow officer for a heinous crime some time ago. He finds himself so ostracized by his fellow officers that he simply goes about his business in his own way, until he has a rookie partner (played by Max Minghella) forced upon him by the precinct’s captain. Shortly after, a police officer is found dead in a crime that has all of the hallmarks of a Jigsaw copycat.
To take care of the elephant in the room before we go on much further, much has been made about Chris Rock’s acting ability in this film. Which is to say, there’s been a lot of hyperbole out there, most of it that would lead you to believe that he’s the worst actor to have ever stepped foot in front of a camera. All of that nonsense is overblown. He does fine here. Now, is he up to the standard of, to keep it in the franchise, someone like Danny Glover in the original film? No. But the performance is okay, and that’s good enough for this kind of film. What Rock really brings to this film is his fame, which is something that these films have been sorely lacking since Danny Glover, Cary Elwes, and Monica Potter appeared in the original. The presence of Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson lends a sense of weight, dare I even say gravitas, to the proceedings, as though the film may be better or more important than it actually is because it can land talent that people have heard of before, rather than trafficking in the kind of casting that you would associate more with direct-to-DVD films, which is what the franchise had been doing from the third film onward.
Traditionally, the star of these films has been the traps. They return in Spiral, but they take a backseat to the police procedural that is the main focus of the film’s story. In a welcome change, the traps are scaled back considerably from where we last saw them. Gone are the “death house” traps where multiple people wander around a booby trap-laden complex trying to stay alive through a series of traps. This film takes things back to the style of the traps in the original film, with smaller setups that focus on the morality of the person that has been placed into the trap. They are gruesome, but they don’t last as long as those that we’ve seen in the other films, and there are far fewer of them than in your typical Saw film.
The biggest problem with Spiral is that it lacks a certain focus, especially early on in the film. The film clearly wants to make a statement about the issues that we are currently debating when it comes to policing, but it lacks the focus and the discipline to really pull this off. It doesn’t help that, aside from Rock, Minghella, and Jackson, that the film is populated by actors who simply can’t rise to the level that is necessary to tell this kind of story. They are also not helped by being given characters who are paper-thin and are completely unmemorable. A fix for this would have been to spend more time developing the characters found in the police department in the early going of the film, expanding the film beyond its meager 90-minute run time and giving this completely new cast of characters some room to breathe.
What Spiral definitely does get right is its ending. Now, the “twist” reveal of who is behind everything is not really a twist at all. If you have any combination of a functioning pair of eyes, a brain, and/or ears, you’ll be able to figure it out. The motivation behind the twist, however, feels more poignant than what you’d expect from a Saw film, and the film’s ending packs a punch, the likes of which we really haven’t seen since the early days of the franchise, probably going back all the way to the original.
In the end, Spiral isn’t quite the homerun that serves to bring the franchise back into the power-position that it once enjoyed, but at the same time it is successful enough to help move the franchise forward, which is not something that could have been said about it’s immediate predecessor. Whether we’ll see Rock and this cast of characters return for the already announced Saw X remains to be seen, as who knows how the studios will interpret “success” at the box office in this new era of Covid moviegoing (especially as this film was one of the first to open to a wide audience, at least in the US), but ultimately Spiral moves the needle for the Saw franchise in a way that we haven’t seen since the early days of the franchise.
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Thank you for once again writing a thorough, balanced and intelligent review.
I haven’t seen any of the SAW films, mainly because I can’t stomach gore or torture. I do enjoy horror films - but only those which suggest rather than show.
What is your opinion on Mark Kermode‘s argument that too many modern horror films offer funhouse scares in between long stretches of nothing?
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The Naked Gun (1988)
Not as funny as I used to find it
First time back in a theater: “Cruella”. Loved it.
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Doctor X (1932)
Classic early horror in ethereal two-color Technicolor, glowing in shades of eerie green and florid red. The restoration on the new Warner Archive Blu-Ray is probably the best the film has ever looked. Michael Curtiz’s fluent direction and Ray Rennahan’s masterly cinematography show that two-color Technicolor, with its limited range and otherworldly tones, was better suited to horror than any later color process.
Not that Doctor X is all-out horror. The hero is a wisecracking reporter, played by Lee Tracy, who’s investigating a “full moon killer” with ties to a medical institute run by Lionel Atwill (whose daughter is Fay Wray). The plot complications involve cannibalism, a host of creepy professors, a spooky mansion, some jaw-dropping but very cinematic pseudo-science, and the climax: the uncanny and unforgettable revelation of the killer’s face. Those used to modern horror might find the proceedings slow or familiar, but you whippersnappers need to understand where so many of those old tropes were originated or perfected.
Curtiz, Rennahan, Atwill, and Wray reunited a year later for a follow-up, Mystery of the Wax Museum, also in two-color. I slightly prefer that film to Doctor X but if you see one you should see the other.
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