Tag: comedy
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 […]
BlackBerry
Friday, August 25th, 2023 Film Reviews,We’ve recently entered a new world of cinema in which product placement is the entire rationale for a movie. No longer is it sufficient for a character to swig a wellknown softdrink or flash an expensive watch – now the softdrink or the watch are the heroes of the film. We learn about their inventors’ […]
Asteroid City
Saturday, August 12th, 2023 Film Reviews,Whatever Wes Anderson is doing it might be better classified as ‘art’ rather than cinema. This was confirmed when he received invitations from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Fondazione Prada in Milan, to create exhibitions in 2018-2020. The Prada had already shown its affection for the director by getting him to design a […]
Barbie
Friday, July 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,Barbie is the most unusual feminist statement ever to hit the cinema. It’s also a bizarre advertorial for the Mattel corporation, and one of the most original movies you’ll see in this or any other year. A word of warning: there is an awful lot of pink. From the moment she appeared in March 1959, […]
Red, White & Brass
Friday, June 23rd, 2023 Film Reviews,Jennifer Lawrence, still considered one of Hollywood’s top drawcards, has appeared in only five films over the past six years. None were especially memorable, but her new effort, No Hard Feelings is a certified career killer. I never thought I’d see a big-name star degrade themselves so comprehensively as Robert De Niro did in Dirty […]
Renfield
Friday, June 2nd, 2023 Film Reviews,After watching Renfield I walked back to the car, switched on the ignition and was greeted by strains of Bela Lugosi’s Dead, by the original Goth band, Bauhaus. “No,” I thought. “Bela Lugosi is not dead! He’s very much alive and goes by the name of Nicolas Cage.” In the context of Cage’s roller-coaster career, […]
I by Day and You by Night
Saturday, April 29th, 2023 Blog,When we think of the Weimar Republic we inevitably think of crazy, decadent cabarets and social chaos, inflation so rampant that workers would carry their wages home in a wheelbarrow and rush to spend them before they lost more value. It sounds ridiculous, unbelievable, but at its worst – in November 1923 – one US […]
Polite Society
Saturday, April 29th, 2023 Film Reviews,Anglo-subcontinental filmmaking has come a long way since Bend it Like Beckham (2002). That “heartwarming” tale of a young girl from an Indian migrant family who wants to be a soccer star, has been superceded by a story of a teen from a Pakistani family with ambitions to be a stuntwoman. Once again, the cultural […]
The Innocent
Friday, April 14th, 2023 Film Reviews,Although I didn’t get to write about this year’s French Film Festival, our national love affair with French cinema shows no signs of abating. As usual, a good percentage of the movies shown during the festival will get a local release. This comes as something of a relief, as we have gone into the annual […]