Bad god: "Thor: Love and Thunder"

Taika Waititi is out of good ideas. 2017's Thor: Ragnarok revivified both a moribund sub-franchise and a wider movie universe reeling from the fall of the Avengers, in large part by maintaining a sense of summer-special fun about material others had approached as if it were a matter of life and death. (It also generated two of the three truly memorable MCU images.) Thor: Love and Thunder, by contrast, is a sorry splurge of recycled ideas, semi-ideas, bad ideas, and non-starting ideas; Waititi has clearly been too busy lounging around on yachts with Rita Ora to exercise much in the way of originality or quality control. The new movie replays elements of Ragnarok (the throwaway tone, the stories-within-stories, the play-within-a-film) to far lesser effect; it reunites with the Guardians of the Galaxy, who - as led by the all-new, non-funny Chris Pratt - have never seemed more like a middling streaming-TV ensemble; it introduced this viewer to characters from actual streaming shows that I don't watch and now have even less of a desire to catch up with; and it circles back to touch base with characters from those earlier, duller Thor films, primarily the ever-blah Natalie Portman. Compounding all these throwbacks: way too much Guns 'n' Roses on the soundtrack, as if that band could represent anything in 2022 beyond the dullest excesses of corporate rock. Newer ideas include a menagerie of screaming goats, perhaps the worst idea a Marvel movie has ever had, presumably here because somebody's nephew showed their uncle a clip of same on the Internet before the pandemic. (Whether or not they were funny then remains debatable; shoved in your face by a multi-million-dollar movie, they only register as aggressively unfunny.)

Within thirty minutes, Love and Thunder has undone all the goodwill Ragnarok generated: it's not good for much, this opening stretch, but it may just stand as the most prominent example of effective self-sabotage modern American movies have offered us. The high bar Top Gun: Maverick set for this summer's releases suddenly vanishes, stratospherically out of sight. Instead, your eyes are left picking over the kind of wannabe blockbuster that results when a creative is primarily engaged with lounging around on yachts with Rita Ora: half-arsed, distractible, tossed-off. So you settle in, grateful at least for the multiplex aircon, if set to wondering whether anything else here is actually going to work. For five minutes, the film comes close to recapturing some of the joy of Ragnarok, with the introduction of Russell Crowe - whose mid-career transformation into a Ray Winstone-like character actor has been one of this century's biggest surprises, and most reliable pleasures - as no less a figure than Zeus. For two or three seconds, the new film surpasses the joy of Ragnarok, as you realise Crowe will be expressing all his dialogue in a thick Greek accent, including the immortal line "this is not a rudey-nudey festival" after accidentally removing Thor (Chris Hemsworth) of his clothes. Alas and alack, Crowe is but one more playing card the film tosses absent-mindedly towards the hat, vanishing offscreen shortly thereafter only to reappear amid the end credits to set up the next chapter in the Thor legend. This Zeus is but a colourful signpost, where there might have been a memorable antagonist, and perhaps even a conflict worthy of the heavens.

What remains recovers from early disaster to tout yet more of the same Marvel mediocrity: lumpy, infodump dialogue, interrupted by setpieces shot, cut and lit with less dynamism than Tessa Thompson's Thor-adjacent First Direct ad, and neither the dramatic stakes nor the spatial geography to involve us. It's this absence of apparent care (jokingly played up by Waititi and Thompson in a viral video designed to promote their quote-unquote efforts) which bugged me throughout Love and Thunder; where Ragnarok appeared genuinely carefree - and thus presented as a blast of fresh air after the wearyingly self-serious, self-involved Avengers mythos - Love and Thunder crosses the line into open carelessness. This narrative never matters. Individual scenes don't matter. The cameos don't matter. Christian Bale, for heaven's sake, doesn't matter. The stuff that's meant to matter - Thor's reunion with the Portman character at a terminally late stage in her cancer treatment - is approached with either brisk indifference (a neat tying-up of this universe's loose ends) or outright cynicism (a means of wringing a few tears at the end of a story that scarcely merits them). The jokes that once made light of how none of this really matters are no longer funny enough to justify the fact none of this really matters; and, with the exception of the odd, fleeting establishing shot, it all looks like crap Saturday-morning television. Either they've spent no money on this one, or - more likely - the budget went on the returning actors' paycheques, which makes Waititi and Thompson's viral joshing at the expense of their underpaid technicians seem even more like punching down.

In retrospect, Ragnarok now looks like the work of a creative who was keener than most to seize the big brass ring, even if it meant playing joker in the court of corporate mythmaking. For a while, the ring was seized, as were the yachts and the trophy girlfriends. But whether it's the exhausting number of projects Waititi has on the go (including the cable-TV hits What We Do in the Shadows and Our Flag Means Death) or simply the high price paid for having your irreverence co-opted by the studio system, Love and Thunder smacks of mischief misappropriated, misdirected and misapplied. The Waititi of Ragnarok might have been tempted into subversion around those scenes in which our brawny hero saves (and lectures) the children of this particular universe. Here, like those bloody goats, these scenes seem like an overt sop - a plea for help - aimed towards the one audience who might be just juvenile enough to guzzle down content this fundamentally indifferent. (In the field of corporate endeavour, it pays to get 'em hooked on this dross early: they won't know any better.) Thus, after giving off a few sparks of comic ambition, the MCU continues with its ongoing project of reducing expectations. We laughed at the start of the last decade when its creative prime movers compared New Marvel's early offerings to Shakespeare, and we mocked how far those films fell from their goal, but at least they had a target in mind. Barely aspiring to the status of cinema, let alone must-see summer event cinema, Love and Thunder returns comic-book material to something like its original formula: cobbled-together twaddle you'd have to be direly underdeveloped or desperately uncool to respond to with any degree of enthusiasm.

Thor: Love and Thunder is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Purge: "The Black Phone"

After walking away from the prosperous prospect of overseeing the Doctor Strange sequel, Scott Derrickson has sought to wean himself off high-budget, high-profit, integrity-threatening superhero fare with the movie equivalent of methadone: a cold, hard shot of something nasty but purging and, in this case, effective. The Black Phone is a Blumhouse-backed adaptation of a short story by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King) which allows Derrickson to continue functioning in the commercial mode, but without the attendant pressures of satisfying effects deadlines, the demands of the modern marketplace and the narrative strictures of a comic-book superstructure. It's teen-adjacent, and when it finally heads towards streaming, the algorithms can push it towards anyone who's watched Stand by Me, the It redos and/or Stranger Things, a potential audience that fortuitously numbers half the Western world. But it's also properly tough and thrilling, even horrifying, in the same way Derrickson's earlier horror-thrillers were able to be properly tough, thrilling and horrifying.

Under Blumhouse's roof (and the sanctuary of a hard-R rating), Derrickson has been freed up to push a little further than has been the multiplex norm, and indeed some considerable way beyond those childproofed Its. You notice it early on, in a kerbside beatdown where the camera lingers five (though it feels like fifteen) seconds longer on a teenager's bloodied face, and - conversely - in the unexpected but very funny mouthful of abuse our hero's meek-seeming, helium-voiced sister (Madeleine McGraw) spits out at an understandably surprised pair of cops. Most prominently, however, it's in the way the film gradually evokes the spectre of child abduction, and worse besides. What Hill has handed over to Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill is a bleak overview of a late-Seventies community in North Denver that scarcely knows how to look out for its young, a ratrun of deadbeat dads, bullies lurking in the streets outside, and an ever-growing threat in the form of an offender of some kind referred to locally by the alias "The Grabber". The Wonder Years this is not.

What this brutal scenesetting is showing us, of course, is a form of basic training; it's Hill, Derrickson and Cargill collectively asserting that the generation raised in the Seventies were, and had to be, made of sterner stuff. The viciousness of this quote-unquote normal suburban life leaves our sensitive, feather-haired hero Finn (Mason Thames) uniquely suited to scrabbling out of a hole after he's bundled into the back of a black van by a figure claiming to be a party magician (Ethan Hawke). At which point the film reduces itself further, becomes even more back-to-basics, leaving two performers attempting to outmanoeuvre one another on a single set: the Grabber's lair, a stripped-down escape room concealing clues and pitfalls and only connected to the outside world, or an adjacent astral plane, by the titular object. It's likely a matter of Covid logistics: this is the kind of largely self-contained production that's now easier and safer to shoot. Yet the set-up also offers considerable creative advantages. For starters, it forces Derrickson to focus - really focus - on this one small, standalone story, rather than, say, its place in the multiverse, or what time the Guardians of the Galaxy are going to show up for their contractually obliged cameos. No superheroes here; the film is as notable for what it shuts out as for what it leaves (and locks) in.

It's a pretty gripping story in its own right, though, Hill synthesising elements of his father's work (It, Carrie, even Shawshank) but with a subtly postmodern and self-reflexive slant that chimes with Derrickson's established interest in how stories get pieced together. (Consider anew the courtroom chicanery of 2005's The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and - if you can stand to - the snuff movies of 2012's Sinister.) None of the MCU's assorted doohickeys and Infinity Stones are as compelling in their own right as that black telephone, which lends Derrickson's film a dash of Lynchian surrealism (it's not connected; still, it rings) while also serving on a narrative level as a party line for the abused and traumatised, a (literally analogue) analogue for the message boards and What'sApp groups of the 21st century; a means of sharing experiences, providing mutual care and support, and finally figuring out some way of moving forward towards the light. (Like those forums, it eventually proves to be a lifeline.)

We may need a separate discussion about Derrickson and Cargill's reappropriation of the tools and methodology of the Time's Up movement, whether for the purposes of entertainment or to assert that, hey, we too had more than our fair share of predatory shit to deal with back in the day. But from a purely artistic perspective, they're unarguably committed to it, and the thrill of The Black Phone lies in watching an American multiplex proposition that is prepared to be authentically grim and unsettling when its narrative requires it. Every uningratiating choice serves this restatement of creative purpose, not least those made at the casting stage. Jeremy Davies makes Finn's alcoholic dad so fervently unsmiling you begin to wonder whether his offspring have any hope at all; James Ransone - a.k.a. The Wire's transcendentally exasperating Ziggy Sobotka - shows up, doing lines, as a midfilm curveball and possible red herring; Hawke, meanwhile, is monstrously jacked (one positive from The Northman?) and striking terrifying poses behind a mask that suggests what might have happened had the Devil ever made out with Tony Blair. (Like I said: terrifying.)

Their commitment obliges Derrickson to recalibrate himself and his camera. The control demonstrated (and tension generated) while tracking around the Grabber's lair - testing boundaries, hunting weakspots - far outstrips the setpieces in Doctor Strange, farmed out as those likely were to assistant directors or Marvel's own in-house action team. Now he's using his resources to land a punch or two again, rather than distract or kill time: some of his crosscutting during the finale seems to prey on cinephile memories of The Silence of the Lambs, while Hawke has been encouraged to come on roughly as strong as he did in the later stages of First Reformed, which is just insane when you stop to think about it. (Here, at last, is the 21st century performance that bears the closest comparison to Tim Curry's generation-haunting work in the original It.) You have to be pretty big and brave to walk away from the MCU, which may now be the movieworld's own Grabber, bundling countless wide-eyed talents into its van and imprisoning them for years to no especially edifying end. Yet after seeing the big nothing Sam Raimi made of Doctor Strange 2, The Black Phone indicates Derrickson was entirely correct to do so - and also that it would do Raimi no creative harm whatsoever to get back to stark, pulpy, punchy basics such as this.

The Black Phone is playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

Top 10 films at the UK box office (for the weekend of July 1-3, 2022):

1 (new) Minions: The Rise of Gru (U)

2 (1) Elvis (12A)

3 (3) Top Gun: Maverick (12A) ****

4 (2) Jurassic World: Dominion (12A)

5 (4) Lightyear (PG)

6 (5) The Black Phone (15) ****

7 (7) Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (15) ***

8 (6) Jugjugg Jeeyo (12A) ***

9 (8) Everything Everywhere All at Once (15) ****

10 (new) Nitram (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. This Much I Know To Be True

2. The Salt of the Earth

3. Alice in the Cities

4. The American Friend

5. Kings of the Road

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) The Lost City (12)

2 (5) Morbius (15)

3 (2) The Batman (15) ***

4 (1) Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (PG)

5 (3) Top Gun (12) ***

6 (4) The Bad Guys (U)

7 (16) Ambulance (15)

8 (new) Operation Mincemeat (12)

9 (7) Sing 2 (U)

10 (9) Spider-Man: No Way Home (12) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Worst Person in the World

2. Playground

3. The Duke

4. Licorice Pizza

5. The Card Counter

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Bringing Up Baby [above] (Friday, BBC2, 1.45pm)

2. Witness (Tuesday, BBC1, 11.25pm)

3. Westworld (Saturday, BBC2, 1am)

4. 2012 (Saturday, C4, 10.40pm)

5. Die Hard 2 (Friday, ITV, 10.45pm)

Circulations: "Kings of the Road"

After the overseas adventure of 1974's Alice in the Cities, the young Wim Wenders returned home and began poking around the German interior. Kings of the Road stakes out a hundred or so miles along the DDR border in the company of two drifters: this filmmaker's shaggy blond talisman Rüdiger Vogler, whose projector repairman is found deep in conversation with an aged former member of the NSDAP, establishing a clear route between Germany past and present; and sombre, just-divorced Hanns Zischler, who gets one of the 1970s art movie's most memorable introductions, driving his VW Beetle full pelt into a river. (He's out of gas; he's out of highway.) These two fall in together and hit the road again in the Vogler character's mobile repair truck, which allows Wenders and cinematographer Robby Müller to survey various small towns, play the records they like, and take the sleepy pulse of the German nation as it was in the summer of '75. The result is at once a young man's movie - made by emergent movers-and-shakers who appear to have all the time in the world - and one prone to a certain indulgence as it shambles on towards the three-hour mark. Yet it's also a road movie that develops its own critical, region-specific feel, something akin to what Chris Petit was doing in the UK around the same moment with Radio On.

Of course, Britain was on a long road to nowhere at the back end of the 1970s; the mood of Wenders' film, at least initially, is lighter and more playful. Throughout KOTR, there's a marked element of let's put the show on right here, with whatever comes to hand: it's a teachable example of a film that freewheels, making itself up as it goes along. Vogler drinks a cup of tea using a huge pair of tongs he finds on the counter of a railway station cafe, and curls out a huge shit in a quarry; while fixing one cinema's speaker system, our drifters improvise some shadowplay knockabout to entertain a class of schoolchildren. At every turn, where they are is more important than who they are, or what's brought them there. It's thirty minutes before we learn their names, and neither man seems the type to over-share. Still, they convince as travelling companions: folks whose relationship is contingent and temporary, will last only so long as it takes to get from here to there. They will bond, bicker, wind one another up and eventually go their separate ways with their own distinct memories of this shared experience (as the actors would have; as this entire crew would have), and Wenders deposits us right there in the back of the van with them.

Might we not, at some point, start kicking the back of the driver's seat and asking "Are we there yet?" Possibly. There are lengthy stretches of wheelspinning, extended diversions where the movie veers rather too close to replicating the experience of meandering through the flat German hinterlands with no particular place to go. (I think Wenders means to impress upon us that travel can numb as well as broaden the mind - that movement for the sake of movement is one way to becalm a hyperactive head.) And the current Wenders retrospective really has pointed up just how much heavy lifting Müller did on this director's early films: here, shooting ghostly, semi-deserted locations (a gas station overrun by capering children, an abandoned checkpoint, the office of a dying local newspaper) in an eternally handsome monochrome. Wenders' own choices at this point can seem a little functional, when not outright clunky (as in some of the early crosscutting between the two men). 

Yet the curiosity on display here absolutely explains Wenders' later work as a documentarian. More than anything, Kings of the Road is driven by a desire to go out into the world, set a camera or two rolling, and see what then comes to pass. (Exhibit A: the stretch devoted to the resurrection of a printing press, and thus the possibility of reconnection between a distanced father and son. Vorsprung durch Technik.) The film remains arguably as close as anyone's got to a successful movie adaptation of On the Road; like Kerouac, the young Wenders isn't a bunch of laughs, and has only a tangential interest in the opposite sex. More significant: having imported and rerouted several foundational tropes of the American cinema, it's just possible Wenders set down the itinerary for the next fleet of road movies. Given that one of the villages our heroes pass through is apparently called Dead Man, it wouldn't surprise me to learn Jim Jarmusch saw KOTR in the run-up to making Stranger than Paradise - thus pointing the American independent cinema (and eventually the American cinema itself) in an entirely new, unhurried direction. What drives around comes around.

Kings of the Road is playing in selected London cinemas as part of Curzon's touring Wim Wenders retrospective, and is available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.  

What you're proposing: "Jugjugg Jeeyo"

The current Top 10 hit Jugjugg Jeeyo has ambled into multiplexes at a fortuitous juncture with regard to the debate over whether or not the Hindi mainstream is out of ideas. It's not a new idea in itself, but it's an old idea done surprisingly well, and thus a demonstration of how that might still (just) be enough. It's also Dharma Productions - the mini-studio overseen by mega-producer Karan Johar - picking up where it left off before the pandemic: indeed, director Raj Mehta's immediate follow-up to Good Newwz, which opened at Christmas 2019 to genial notices and became one of Bollywood's last hits before lockdown. As with that goof-off, Jugjugg Jeeyo (Trekkie-friendly translation: Live Long and Prosper) represents an elevated example of the heteronormative, family-centred and family-oriented mass movie, with Dilip Kumar references for grandma, familiar faces, and 21st century attitudes and beats for the kids; the kind of movie, in other words, that this industry has been making since the year dot, and thus ought to know better than most how to make work.

It begins with scenes from a marriage. Erstwhile childhood sweethearts Kukoo (Varun Dhawan) and Nainaa (Kiara Advani) grew up together in the Punjab, married young (after the movies' first abs-based proposal; other stomachs are available), then moved to grey, wintry Toronto and began to drift apart. We catch up with them, glum and barely communicative, ahead of a fifth anniversary meal at which the conversation quickly turns to the matter of divorce. Before the paperwork is filed, however, they have one last duty to fulfil as a couple, namely an awkward homecoming for Kukoo's younger sister Ginny (Prajakta Koli)'s wedding celebrations, where they're torn between maintaining the pretence of a rocksolid item, and announcing they're about to break their vows at an event where everybody else around them is super-psyched at the thought of another couple taking theirs. What follows is something like a Hindi analogue to Top Gun: Maverick, another film about people strategising the best moment to drop a bombshell so as to jet off comparatively intact.

On paper, this set-up hints at something naggingly conservative, and you can easily imagine a version of Jugjugg Jeeyo that insists all our unhappy travellers need is to return to the warm embrace of homeland and family, the better to be reminded of what truly matters in this life. Certain scenes in this four-man screenplay shuffle in that direction, but the film JJ most closely reminded me of was 2015's slightly underrated Dil Dhakadne Do - Zoya Akhtar's attempt to build fresh bridges between resident and non-resident Indians - relocated to dry land. For starters, Mehta's film concedes that the homeland might play host to some varyingly conservative attitudes itself. It's the wedding guest who tells Nainaa she should tie Kukoo down with a child; it's the baleful swain watching on from the sidelines as his beloved Ginny is paired with someone for whom she doesn't particularly care. All of this, however, is but the preliminary to a (very funny, very well-played) after-hours drinking session in which Kukoo's father Bheem (Anil Kapoor) gradually lets slip that he, too, is fundamentally unhappy, and planning to divorce his boy's sainted mother Geeta (Neetu Kapoor). This is the thing about bombshells; you never know how many anybody else is carrying around with them at any one time, and whether theirs might outweigh your own.

As in Good Newwz, Mehta takes a sitcom-ready scenario, then begins to rotate its sides as one would a Rubik's Cube until he arrives at promising new configurations; there's a playfulness about this, but also an appreciable discipline in the screenwriting, an effort to find the drama (and, yes, melodrama) in what might initially present as fairly flimsy material. Case study: the second-half scene in which, standing before his oblivious, soon-to-be-ex wife, Bheem cavils at the prospect of holding his own miserable marriage up as an example for his son and daughter-in-law. Yet almost every scene here finds one character knowing slightly more than the person they're addressing; the script is a series of crises to be negotiated and mitigated against. The classic Indian wedding is thus converted into a form of group therapy, in which everybody is forced to admit, confront and work through their issues. You might well feel a pang of sympathy for poor Ginny, reduced to a third-party observer as these fireworks start to go off around her, but this openness staves off any hint of editorial fingerwagging, any suggestion the values of one generation should be imposed upon one another. Everybody on screen learns from everybody else, which strikes me as a pretty healthy societal model for an Indian movie to push forward in 2022.

That JJ proves fun to watch is down to Mehta's equally skilful shuffling of personalities; you're reminded that the reopening of cinemas has also been a reunion with old friends, faces you haven't seen on a big screen for some while. This filmmaker has an easy, obvious affinity with and sympathy for his young leads, which helps us over the choppier stretches. He's spotted just why engineering student Kukoo might have slipped into depression at having ended up a nightclub bouncer - but also how his resentment and status anxiety could mess up a marriage. (Credit to Dhawan, who - as in 2018's October - relishes the prospect of playing a character who isn't always readily likable.) Advani, who could have easily settled for being pretty in sweet nothings, makes a fair stab at inhabiting the LBDs and attendant insecurities of the modern career woman, tapping previously hidden depths of frustration and regret; whenever she goes toe-to-toe with her co-star, you really do feel a relationship is at stake. 

Mehta at first appears less interested in Geeta - Kapoor primarily has to exude maternal goodness and constancy - but he's clearly realised there are advantages to having at least one character on screen who has their shit together, not least to point up the fecklessness (the scattered shit) of the others. Mehta also grants her the most touching scene in the whole picture: Geetu passing on instructions to her husband's new woman (Tisca Chopra) as one would to a housesitter about an especially cherished pet. It's touching because we know just who and what she's resigned to giving up: Anil Kapoor, Indian cinema's new favourite father figure, more approachable than The Big B and a deft, self-mocking comic actor besides, here investing Bheem with a mix of dad jokes, midlife crankiness, and a misguided belief (common to many men in the autumn of their years) that he's somehow younger and hipper than he actually is.

When the screenwriting gods rush him to hospital in the second half, it's the only time Mehta's film thinks to teach one of its characters a lesson. Yet it's a funny one (trapped wind that has to be passed off as a heart attack: more deception) and one that further points towards the film's core theme. "It's not good to suppress natural things," Bheem tells Kukoo from his sick bed, having hopefully opened a window; Mehta's prescribing emotional honesty as a cure for (some of) India's present woes. There's nothing especially radical in what it's proposing, then: one of the thoughts the film prompts is that if Indian characters can still get in this big a tizz about a concept as yellowing as marital fidelity, heaven knows what's going to happen when Dharma get round to addressing the matter of pronouns. (A related thought: what a pity it was that the mass audience couldn't follow Kapoor into embracing 2017's Ek Ladki Ko Toh Aisa Laga, which likewise dealt gently and entertainingly with issues that shouldn't be a big deal this far into the 21st century.) Yet for its two-and-a-half hours, JJ circles what we might call the multiplex's sweet spot, being just substantial and just engaging enough to feel worthy of an evening out. In 2022, with everything we've been through and the world falling apart at the seams outside, there's an obvious appeal to watching nice, photogenic folk hurdling problems far worse than yours and mine, in a movie made by people who give at least the impression of knowing exactly what they're doing.

Jugjugg Jeeyo is now playing in selected cinemas.    

From the archive: "The American Friend"

"What's wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?" Nothing in theory, except that the hombre wearing the Stetson in The American Friend, Wim Wenders' quietly fascinating 1977 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, is Dennis Hopper in the midst of his wild(er)ness years, an embodiment of America's insidious influence on the European everyday. Worse: as Hopper's Ripley befriends Bruno Ganz's terminally ill art restorer Zimmermann, Wenders notes just how dangerously seductive this interloper is. He has money, and a gun, and charisma besides; we forever wonder which of these weapons he's going to turn on his quarry next. Mostly, Wenders uses Highsmith's still-compelling plot - Ripley recruiting Zimmermann to carry out a hit in Paris with the promise of a payday for his soon-to-be-bereaved wife and child - as an opportunity to tour his shabby, beat-up location with then-emergent Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller. One look at the framer's cramped digs, and we can see why he's so tempted by Ripley's filthy lucre; Paris makes for an obvious upgrade, but it requires a certain amount of dirty work to get there.

Wenders stages a nifty slo-mo pursuit around the Métro, where there aren't crowds enough for Ripley to discreetly take down his Stalin-lookalike target, but generally shirks the pulpy thrills provided by Liliana Caviani's equally leftfield, rather fun 2003 adaptation in favour of a cooler, more cerebral approach. This is the thinking person's Highsmith - it has subtitles in places, and everything - and it's a clever touch, commensurate with the author's thinking on the banality of evil, that this Ripley is less an outright sociopath than a subcontractor, a member of the globetrotting executive class setting others up for a fall. With the eponymous anti-hero ducking out of sight for so long - Hopper's left hanging with Nicholas Ray as a spellbound painter and giving slightly too big a performance for his surrounds - the Ganz narrative just about holds the attention, but Wenders' pacing proves idiosyncratic to a fault: the movie starts to drag a little, and can never entirely escape the spectre of what we now call the Europudding. Still, there's a handful of connoisseurial pleasures to be savoured - not least several witty visual jokes on the very idea of framing - and a nicely ambiguous ending, involving the movies' second most prominent VW Beetle after Herbie.

(February 2019)

The American Friend is reissued to cinemas today as part of Curzon's Wim Wenders retrospective, and is available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.

From the archive: "Alice in the Cities"

Upon its initial release in 1974, Wim Wenders' fourth feature Alice in the Cities - about a jaded reporter (Rüdiger Vogler) wandering the globe with a young child in tow - would have most likely seemed like evidence that the 'Sick Soul of Europe' party, as Pauline Kael described the angst-ridden cinema of Antonioni et al., had started up anew in Germany. Seen today, as the flagship of the NFT's January Wenders retrospective, it has retained considerable historical value. 

Even as its protagonist berates photographic reproductions for not living up to the real thing, the film manages to preserve on celluloid such relics as Pan Am flights (with smoking passengers!), Chuck Berry gigs, and the Twin Towers. The sparse score is by noodly art-rockers Can, which should inspire further nostalgic pangs in those of a certain age.

An essential component of nostalgia, of course, is the feeling things aren't what they used to be. Too many art films of this era now seem sunk by their own moroseness, but Alice never gets stuck in the same place: it's the work of a young man (Wenders was 29) with his eyes wide open and an obvious yen for travel. Vogler, with his shaggy locks and broad, goofy smile, is incapable of staying in a sulk for long, and Yella Rottländer, as the girl, is a delightful, matter-of-fact presence.

The film is confident that anyone can make a movie about the state of things simply by sticking a camera on a car bonnet and observing the changes playing out on the horizon. If this sounds somewhat monotonous or inflexible, well, Wenders never was as funny or as angry as Godard, but Alice demonstrates he was similarly ahead of the game on the postmodern condition. Whether the ad-interrupted print of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln that causes the journalist to trash a motel-room television or the Ford obituary upon which the film closes, everything is this particular universe is mediated.

(The Sunday Telegraph, January 2008)

Alice in the Cities is reissued to cinemas today as part of Curzon's Wim Wenders retrospective, and available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.