caper

Here is a saucy, silly, queer road-movie caper from director Ethan Coen and his partner, co-writer and co-producer Tricia Cooke; it’s Coen’s second film without his brother, Joel, following his Jerry Lee Lewis documentary in 2022. Drive-Away Dolls is a flimsy lark wrapped up smartly and economically in 84 minutes with a perfunctory (and cheerfully nonsensical) MacGuffiny premise that makes it look like a Xerox of Coen brothers classics such as No Country For Old Men or Fargo. Lead player Margaret Qualley’s twangy…

Late 90s and early 00s cinema wasn’t all bad, but it was responsible for a crop of particularly dismal crime flicks. Including pictures such as the now notorious Rancid Aluminium, these were painfully contrived and agonisingly ironic winks to camera, made by film-makers who watched the movies of Tarantino and the Coen brothers and figured, how hard can it be? So it’s disappointing that Ethan Coen’s solo directorial outing (his brother Joel having already ventured out alone with the sombre, stylised The Tragedy of Macbeth)…

“Drive-Away Dolls” is, technically speaking, made up of old parts. HT Image Its script was written two decades ago, when references to Ralph Nader and Chelsea Clinton’s security detail were current. Its homages are even more vintage, with trippy transitions harkening back to the acid-soaked B-movies of the 1960s. There’s a mysterious, sought-after briefcase, odd couple thugs on the hunt for it and some innocents who find themselves unwittingly entangled in the drama. It is all very familiar, and yet, in the…

Carol Reed’s 1955 film is a rich slice of gentle, sentimental comedy, adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from his own novel. It’s a little bit broad and not in the class of The Third Man or The Fallen Idol, but forthright and heartfelt, and boasting a veritable aristocracy of British character acting talent.In the bustling world of Petticoat Lane in London’s East End, then the traditional home of the Jewish community, a shy little boy called Joe mopes and daydreams around the place; he’s played by Jonathan Ashmore, with the rather…

There’s a sweet charm to Leong Po Chih’s 1986 mystery-comedy Ping Pong, set in and around the restaurant businesses of London’s Chinatown, now rereleased. It was produced by Film Four, who two years later brought out Mike Newell’s comparably set Soursweet, based on the Timothy Mo novel, although that is more serious. Ping Pong is eminently likable, though for me there is something perhaps a little soft-edged and carefully paced which dampens the energy a bit. It is a cheerfully far-fetched caper that could have taken some…

The release of a new Pixar film, once a major, all-attention-securing event, has received a notable downgrade in recent years, not just because of a considerable dip in quality (arguably just Inside Out and Coco are the only indispensable offerings in the last decade) but because of an inevitable change in release strategy. Just a month before the pandemic truly took hold, the fantasy caper Onward (yet another underwhelming effort) became one of the only 2020 films to get a wide theatrical release and as everything…

The rectangle of the screen itself seems to bend and twist into a giant self-satisfied smirk for an unbearably smug caper from director Matthew Vaughn. It has all the interest of a men’s magazine cover-shoot: thin, flimsy, lumbered with a dull meta-narrative and dodgy acting, and boasting a blank parade of phoned-in cameos from the supporting cast. Argylle is a high-concept elevator pitch stuck between floors, a piece of colourful would-be franchise content that Vaughn is tiresomely trying to fold into the extended…

On the back of his short-story collections, Young Skins and Homesickness, Colin Barrett was lauded by the Oprah Daily website as “a doyen of the sentence”. As accolades go, this has the dubious merit of being simultaneously embarrassing and accurate: a ludicrous phrase sullying a fair designation. Fair, because when reading Barrett, one is immediately struck by a sensation best described as relief: the realisation that one is in safe hands here; this is a writer of glaringly obvious talent, operating at a seriously high…

Stories about the power of stories are an easy sell; in part, I think, because they subtly ennoble the producer and the consumer of those stories, shedding a glow of valour on the profession of the former and chosen leisure pursuit of the latter. Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is very much a story about the power of stories – and the spiritual and emotional succour they give – though, fortunately, too much of a clever one to fall entirely into the mode of blithe self-congratulation.It is 412BC, the…

Uma Thurman and Samuel L Jackson didn’t share any screen time in Pulp Fiction (though their paths crossed briefly in Kill Bill Vol 2) so this comic thriller can take credit for turning the Tarantino twosome into a double-act for the first time. Thurman plays Patrice, a highly strung, Adderall-snorting Manhattan gallery owner whose acquisitions haven’t exactly set the art world alight. Enter Gordon (Jackson), a Brooklyn bialy baker and underworld stooge who proposes funnelling mob money through her books as supposed…