Tag: drama
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 […]
Killers of the Flower Moon
Saturday, October 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,In the language of Hollywood, “based on a true story” usually means: “a wildly distorted account of some real event that retains a mere spectre of the truth.” This usually prompts me to go home and look up the actual story, if only to satisfy my worst suspicions. After three-and-a-half hours of Martin Scorsese’s Killers […]
Lie with Me
Friday, October 13th, 2023 Film Reviews,As a title, Lie with Me is almost too tricky. The original French title of both Philippe Besson’s best-selling novel and Olivier Peyon’s screen adaptation was: Arrête avec tes mensonges – “Stop with your Lies”. There’s a significant difference: Stop with your lies is an order, while Lie with Me invites complicity. It seems as […]
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, […]
Past Lives
Friday, September 8th, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s no surprise to learn that Celia Song’s Past Lives is strongly autobiographical, as no purely fictional tale could resist so many opportunities for dramatic or romantic cliché. The temptation of fiction is to improve on life, to fulfil fantasies and repair omissions by turning back the clock and – this time – getting it […]
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’ […]
Gran Turismo
Friday, August 18th, 2023 Film Reviews,Not long ago, when people were asked to declare their hobbies and interests, they might list swimming or stamp collecting, visiting art galleries, or going to the opera. Nowadays, it’s increasingly likely the average person’s Number One pastime will be Shopping – with a capital ‘S’. The trend is reflected in our near-religious veneration for […]
Chevalier
Friday, August 4th, 2023 Film Reviews,Chevalier stretches the bounds of credibility from the very first scene. We are at a concert in Paris, in the late 18th century, where a cocksure Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is conducting his own music and playing the violin. When he invites requests from the audience, a black man in a periwig comes striding down the […]
Oppenheimer
Friday, July 28th, 2023 Film Reviews,No figure stands more squarely at the crossroads of 20th century science and politics than J. Robert Oppenheimer, forever known as “father of the atomic bomb”. An epic story requires an epic film, and Christopher Nolan has given Oppenheimer the treatment he demands, in a three-hour bio pic that manages to balance a portrait of […]
Reality & Driving Madeleine
Friday, July 7th, 2023 Film Reviews,Reality is a film that lives up to its title, with a script taken word-for-word from one woman’s experience of an actual FBI search. The protagonist is a young civil servant with the rather surreal name of Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) who arrives home from the supermarket to find two men waiting for her outside […]