Film Reviews
Foe
Friday, November 10th, 2023 Film Reviews,For a director who cut his teeth making short, snappy TV commercials, Garth Davis’s features are remarkably ponderous. One wonders for how long he can subsist on the glamour of the six Academy Award nominations he received for Lion (2016). Despite the fanfare, I thought it was a very ordinary film and suspect a lot […]
The Origin of Evil
Friday, November 3rd, 2023 Film Reviews,Laure Calamy has amazing screen presence. She may not have the elegance of Catherine Deneuve or Fanny Ardant in their heydays, but she has charmed the French box office so effectively that, at the age of 48, she seems to be in every second movie. Naturally suited to comic roles, Calamy can turn on the […]
Dumb Money
Saturday, October 28th, 2023 Film Reviews,I’m no investor, but there have been times when I’ve walked into some booming retail outlet and thought: “This might be worth buying a few shares.” It’s hard to believe anybody could ever have felt that way about a GameStop store, which in the movie, Dumb Money, comes across as a lifeless, understocked franchise that […]
Killers of the Flower Moon
Saturday, October 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,In the language of Hollywood, “based on a true story” usually means: “a wildly distorted account of some real event that retains a mere spectre of the truth.” This usually prompts me to go home and look up the actual story, if only to satisfy my worst suspicions. After three-and-a-half hours of Martin Scorsese’s Killers […]
Lie with Me
Friday, October 13th, 2023 Film Reviews,As a title, Lie with Me is almost too tricky. The original French title of both Philippe Besson’s best-selling novel and Olivier Peyon’s screen adaptation was: Arrête avec tes mensonges – “Stop with your Lies”. There’s a significant difference: Stop with your lies is an order, while Lie with Me invites complicity. It seems as […]
The Exorcist: Believer
Friday, October 6th, 2023 Film Reviews,It took at least forty minutes for anything weird to happen in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), often said to be the scariest film ever made. David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer proceeds in an equally methodical fashion, letting us get to know the main characters before winding into the big confrontation with the demon. […]
The Creator
Friday, September 29th, 2023 Film Reviews,Made for a mere US$80 million, The Creator is a cut-price Hollywood blockbuster. The usual bill for one of these extravaganzas is north of US$ 300 million, but British director, Gareth Edwards, has managed to eliminate the waste that causes those pesky budgets to blow out. In the process, he may have made himself the […]
Scrapper
Friday, September 22nd, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s no surprise that Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper should be drawing comparisons with Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022): two debut features by young British directors, featuring dysfunctional fathers trying to bond with early teenage daughters. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, Aftersunhas generated an inordinate amount of gush from critics who seem to believe that vagueness, […]
Everybody Loves Jeanne
Friday, September 15th, 2023 Film Reviews,There should be a special ‘Quirky’ classification for films such as Everybody Loves Jeanne. The last movie I saw that combined comedy and strangeness in this fashion, was Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016), in whch a woman with a high-powered job is tormented by an embarassing father who wants to be part of everything. In […]
Past Lives
Friday, September 8th, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s no surprise to learn that Celia Song’s Past Lives is strongly autobiographical, as no purely fictional tale could resist so many opportunities for dramatic or romantic cliché. The temptation of fiction is to improve on life, to fulfil fantasies and repair omissions by turning back the clock and – this time – getting it […]