Tag: comedy
Academy Awards 2024
Saturday, March 9th, 2024 Film Reviews,Over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself wildly out of step when it comes to picking winners at the annual Academy Awards. Naturally I’m convinced it’s the world, not me, that keeps getting it wrong. My mistake has been to try and nominate the best film, when it would have been smarter to […]
Fallen Leaves
Friday, February 16th, 2024 Film Reviews,You’ll have to wait until the credits roll to hear Fallen Leaves sung in Finnish, but like all Aki Kaurismäki films, there’s no shortage of music along the way. This bittersweet story about two ordinary people who find each other, in the most hesitant fashion, is one of Kaurismäki’s typical working-class fables. If you’re already […]
The Boys in the Boat & The Holdovers
Friday, January 12th, 2024 Film Reviews,In those heady days when John Wayne was dispatching hostile injuns by the dozen, no-one could have envisaged Hollywood making clean-cut white Americans into the bad guys. It would have taken a clairvoyant to predict the tide of identity politics that has swept over the United States in recent times, engendering a new generation of […]
Poor Things
Wednesday, December 27th, 2023 Film Reviews,Imagine Frankenstein remade as a Scottish sex comedy and you’ll be slightly better prepared for Poor Things. I say “slightly” because Yorgos Lanthimos and his favourite scriptwriter, Tony McNamara, have created another bizarre, indefinable production that juggles extremes of vulgarity and profundity. Pay too much attention to the foul language and bare flesh, and you […]
Saltburn
Saturday, November 18th, 2023 Film Reviews,Downton Abbey it ain’t. The grand estate of Saltburn may be even larger than the Crawleys’ ancestral home, but the tone is distinctly lower. In her second outing as a director, Emerald Fennell takes aim at a subject that has been shot full of holes on many occasions: the English upper classes. If Fennell’s previous […]
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 […]
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’ […]