Tag: comedy
Joy
Monday, January 4th, 2016 Film Reviews,David O. Russell is one of the few active Hollywood directors that thinks in terms of stories, scripts and actors rather than big budgets and special effects. Paolo Sorrentino is the most talented director to emerge from Italy over the past two decades. Both men have new movies released this week, movies that are flawed […]
Now Add Honey
Thursday, November 12th, 2015 Film Reviews,It’s been a slow week for new releases, and for one reason or another I haven’t been able to catch He Named Me Malala, the only serious candidate as a second review. The other movie released this week, Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, is being shown at such a small number of cinemas that Roadshow […]
Man Up
Friday, November 6th, 2015 Film Reviews,Ben Palmer is another director who has spent much of his career in television, but Man Up has more verve than most romantic comedies. There are moments when this movie becomes genuinely funny and anarchic, but the claims of the genre keep reasserting themselves, allowing the return of the godawful sentimentality that makes such films […]
Mistress America
Thursday, October 29th, 2015 Film Reviews,When one character says her campus has just got a frozen yoghurt machine, and the other replies: “I watched my mother die”, you realise you’re watching a film in which everyone talks at cross-purposes. And talks, and talks. Mistress America continues Noah Baumbach’s gradual metamorphosis into Woody Allen. This includes a high degree of productivity, […]
The Lobster
Friday, October 23rd, 2015 Film Reviews,Yorgos Lanthimos could never be accused of a lack of originality. All over the world, one imagines viewers wandering out of The Lobster, asking: “So what was that about?” If I say it’s an allegory, that will do little to ease the confusion. Think of the late, deadpan surrealist comedies of Luis Bunuel and you’ll […]
unINDIAN
Friday, October 16th, 2015 Film Reviews,If there were an Academy Award for product placement, Anupam Sharma’s unINDIAN would be this year’s hot favourite. This self-confessed “frothy” flick is not going to win any awards for acting, directing or scriptwriting, but when it comes to acknowledging sponsors it is in a class of its own. unINDIAN is an attempt to make […]
Learning to Drive
Friday, October 9th, 2015 Film Reviews, Uncategorized,Learning to Drive is one of those films that spin an entire story around one simple metaphor. For a middle-aged woman, learning to drive is an act of self-determination, a way of taking control of one’s life. Having entered one’s fifties as a passenger there is a profound sense of affirmation in finally getting behind […]
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Saturday, September 19th, 2015 Film Reviews,Many viewers will be touched, charmed, moved and seduced by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Hey, it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, so it must be doing something right. There is a lot to like about this film, but also a […]
A Walk in the Woods
Saturday, September 5th, 2015 Film Reviews,If they made a movie of your life, which actor should play you? In this old game it’s almost obligatory to say: “Brad Pitt” while friends offer less flattering suggestions. Not so long ago a chap might have suggested: “Robert Redford”, and received an equally derisive response. Travel writer, Bill Bryson, is in the flattering […]
Ricki and the Flash
Saturday, August 29th, 2015 Film Reviews,It often seems Woody Allen can’t make up his mind whether he wants to make a feel-good film or a feel-bad one. No such indecision characterises Jonathan Demme who, in Ricki and the Flash, has created a movie to make middle-aged audiences believe all hope is not yet lost. It is a film that owes […]