Tag: comedy
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 That “heartwarming” tale of a young girl from an Indian migrant family who wants to be a soccer star, has been superceded by a story of a teen from a Pakistani family with ambitions to be a stuntwoman.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 […]
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once & All Quiet on the Western Front
Friday, February 24th, 2023 Film Reviews,With another Academy Awards looming, I’m taking the opportunity to look at the two remaining candidates for Best Picture. Both have form. The first, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, leads the pack in 2023 with 11 nominations. The second, All Quiet on the Western Front, has been nominated in nine categories, and won seven BAFTAs this week, […]
The Fabelmans
Friday, January 13th, 2023 Film Reviews,At a certain point in an illustrious career, many a writer has turned to autobiography. That moment usually arrives when an author has become so famous that he or she is more fascinating to the public than any work of fiction they may produce. It does, however, require a special kind of ego. Gore Vidal […]
White Noise
Friday, January 6th, 2023 Film Reviews,Some novels leave an indelible impression. I read Don DeLillo’s White Noise shortly after it appeared in the mid-1980s but can still remember whole passages and even certain sentences. It is a book of verbal gymnastics that Noah Baumbach has made into an equally wordy film, largely by quoting DeLillo verbatim. Baumbach shows an unusual respect […]