Tag: romance
Touch & Kneecap
Friday, August 30th, 2024 Film Reviews,Although Icelandic creativity is appropriately volcanic, most of the films from this tiny country fall into the arthouse category. It may be that Baltasar Kormákur’s Touch is the movie that cracks the mainstream. Devoid of rugged landscapes, lurking demons and sheep, Touch is the kind of wellmade, sentimental drama that audiences tend to adore. The […]
Fly Me to the Moon
Friday, July 19th, 2024 Film Reviews,It’s said that Marguerite Duras’s brief for Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) was to script a love story that would not appear inconsiderable alongside the dropping of the Atomic bomb. She succeeded so well with this unthinkable task that Alain Renais’s film is recognised as a cinema classic. Scriptwriter, Rose Gilroy, seems to have been given […]
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 […]
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 […]
Saint Omer & One Fine Morning
Friday, June 9th, 2023 Film Reviews,Hollywood scriptwriters are on strike, protesting about poor rates of pay and the threat of being replaced by AI. There may be quality writing on cable TV, but the stuff we get in American action films and superhero flicks could already have been written by AI, or by a fridge, or a lawnmower. My most […]
Empire of Light
Saturday, March 4th, 2023 Film Reviews,Looking at the Rotten Tomatoes listings this week, I was amazed to see that Charlotte Wells’s debut film, Aftersun, scores a 95% approval rating from the critics, while Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light clocks in at 45%. This suggests that Wells has given us a masterpiece and Mendes has made a dud. Despite this apparent […]
Emily
Saturday, January 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,Emily Brontë remains one of the most mysterious figures in world literature. When she died at the age of 30 in 1848, she had written one novel and a sheaf of poems. The poems were immediately acclaimed for their “genius” but are little read today. The novel, Wuthering Heights, is a classic for the ages, […]
Stars at Noon
Friday, December 9th, 2022 Film Reviews,When the teenaged Margaret Qualley appeared as one of the Manson gang in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), it was easy to predict we’d be seeing a lot of this young actor. That prediction has come true – literally – in Stars at Noon, a film in which she spends much […]
Decision to Leave
Friday, October 21st, 2022 Film Reviews,Among Korean directors, Bong Joon-ho achieved worldwide fame when Parasitewon the Oscar for best Picture in 2019, but one should not ignore the claims of his contemporary, Park Chan-wook. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Park won the award for Best Director, while his new film, Decision to Leave, has been selected as South Korea’s […]
Licorice Pizza
Thursday, January 6th, 2022 Film Reviews,There are eagerly anticipated movies that turn out to be duds, and movies such as Licorice Pizza, which are better than might ever have been suspected. The duds are far more common, so when a film of real quality turns up one feels like cheering. Many believe Paul Thomas Anderson (b.1970) to be America’s greatest […]