Tag: comedy
Samba
Saturday, April 4th, 2015 Film Reviews,Four years ago, French filmmakers, Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano had such a huge hit with The Intouchables, it left one wondering what they could possibly do for an encore. The answer is Samba, another humanistic comedy-drama starring Omar Sy, the giant-sized wheelchair-pusher from the previous movie. The paradigm may be slightly different but the […]
A Little Chaos
Saturday, March 28th, 2015 Film Reviews,After watching Leviathan, a present-day tale with overtones of the Old Testament, it is almost a light relief to turn to A Little Chaos, Alan Rickman’s period drama of the Ancient Regime. Set in the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, it is the story of a fictional landscape gardener, Sabine De Barra, and […]
Inherent Vice
Saturday, March 14th, 2015 Film Reviews,Anyone who complains that the plot of Inherent Vice is confusing has obviously never read a novel by Thomas Pynchon. Confusion, or rather paranoia, is the standard condition of most of Pynchon’s characters, and perhaps readers, – which may explain why Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is the first attempt to bring this elusive author’s work […]
French Film Festival 2015
Saturday, March 7th, 2015 Film Reviews,Three years ago the ever-popular Alliance Francaise French Film Festival opened with Valérie Donzelli’s A Declaration of War. The film had been a hit in France but it provoked a good deal of muttering and eyebrow-raising among the first-night crowd at the Palace Verona who didn’t know what to make of a movie about a […]
The Interview
Friday, February 20th, 2015 Film Reviews,I’d never felt much sympathy for the despotic regime in Pyongyang – until I saw The Interview. We know the late Kim Jong-il was a movie buff who went so far as to kidnap South Korean director, Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife, Choi Eun-hee, to help improve the quality of his propaganda films. One […]
What We Did on Our Holiday
Saturday, February 14th, 2015 Film Reviews,Viewers who have come staggering, glaze-eyed, out of Selma or American Sniper, and are looking for a change of pace, might appreciate the whimsical charms of What We Did On Our Holiday. This comedy-drama by British writer-directors, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, is a spin-off from the popular BBC comedy series, Outnumbered. The actors may […]
Mortdecai
Saturday, February 7th, 2015 Film Reviews,Mortdecai is one of those films that would have had me surging towards the exit after about 10 minutes if I didn’t have a professional obligation to hang around. I could only watch with envy while members of the audience filed out at regular intervals. As an attempt at a brand of screwball or ‘caper’ […]
Birdman
Saturday, January 17th, 2015 Film Reviews,Mexican director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, has a reputation for dark and difficult films but Birdman is a philosophical black comedy that holds us from first to last. It’s a story about the theatre that examines the changing nature of fame, the difficulty of human relationships, the splendours and miseries of the actor’s life. It’s also […]
St. Vincent
Saturday, January 10th, 2015 Film Reviews,Sentimentality looms dangerously over Theodore Melfi’s comedy-drama, St. Vincent, which tells the tale of an aging misanthrope who becomes baby-sitter for a precocious little boy. I can hear the alarm bells ringing already. “It’s not that snotty little creep from Love Actually, is it?” Fortunately, no. The boy, Oliver, is played by 11-year-old Jaeden Lieberher, […]
Annie
Saturday, December 20th, 2014 Film Reviews,This time of year the main choices for a critic are between movies for children and movies for childish adults. I’ve yet to see the film about Paddington Bear the Asylum Seeker but I’d recommend going soon before Scott Morrison slaps a ban on it. That leaves Annie – a film of wasted opportunities. The […]