Michael Wood

What’s​ new? An old song begs our pardon for asking that. Guillermo del Toro’s new film, Frankenstein, is too busy to bother with such a query, but it’s aware of its own prehistory. It knows, for example, that if we ask AI how many films about Frankenstein there have been it will say it doesn’t know for sure, but there are more than four hundred. That’s just...

The​ title seems a little tame if you haven’t seen the movie. L’Histoire de Souleymane: Souleymane’s Story (or History). For once the problem or the fun has nothing to do with the double meaning of the French word histoire. It just feels as if the director of the film, Boris Lojkine, and his co-writer, Delphine Agut, could have worked a bit harder. Or worked less. There’s a reason Mrs Dalloway isn’t called ‘Mrs Dalloway’s Story’.

The film opens,​ as the credits roll down the screen, with shots of present-day downtown Manhattan. The chief angle of vision is on the balcony of an expensive penthouse in Dumbo, as a part of Brooklyn is now called. The name recalls Walt Disney, of course, but like many New York neighbourhoods (SoHo, Tribeca) has a more literal or lettered source in the words ‘down under the Manhattan...

One of the​ signatures of classic film comedy is a kind of crazy grace amid peril, a performance of control where there seems to be none. We think of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! hanging from the hands of a clock high above city streets, and dozens of moments involving Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. There is a reverse tradition, but it doesn’t produce classics, only extended...

The events​ of Danny Boyle’s new film, 28 Years Later, are not too far away. It’s set in the near future, but the prologue takes us back to 2002, which is when Boyle’s earlier film 28 Days Later was released. (There is also 28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, but this seems to borrow a piece of the storyline without becoming part of the...