Month: February 2021

Wander Darkly

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Adrienne and Matteo happy on a boat

Matteo (Diego Luna) and Adrienne (Sienna Miller) are a broke couple with a new baby and a relationship on the skids. Arguing on the way home from a date night, mostly about Adrienne giving someone the glad-eye, they are involved in a massive car crash. This is no spoiler, we’re only a handful of minutes into Wander Darkly, and writer/director Tara Miele is just setting the scene – economically and with great visual flair – for the drama to come. Adrienne is dead. Or is she suffering from post-traumatic delirium and is just imagining she’s dead? Or is something else going on? It’s not certain, but what we can see is Adrienne in … Read more

Farewell Amor

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Opening shot: the family meets

Think of how many films there have been about the Irish immigrant experience in the USA. Or the Italian. Farewell Amor is a real rarity, because it’s looks at that fraught, hopeful new beginning through African eyes. Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is a refugee from Angola who went through the civil war there and is now living in New York, where he drives a cab. He’s been separated from his family for 17 years, but is now finally reunited with them. In fact that’s the first scene of Ekwa Msangi’s film: Walter, his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) meeting at JFK airport. The look on Sylvia’s face … Read more

Viy

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The witch rides Khoma

1967’s Viy is often described as the only horror film made in the Soviet Union. In truth it’s more like a fairy tale than a horror story, more Grimm than grim – bum, tish – though in the final haunting sequence things definitely start going bump in the night. Odder than its solitary genre status is the fact that it’s a film with religion at its core. The USSR did not do god. Yet Viy is suffused with religious symbols and practices, beliefs and lore. There’s a good deal of paganism too, which the scientifically minded USSR wasn’t very keen on either. The original story was by Nikolay Gogol, who claimed it was … Read more

The Kid Detective

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Sophie Nélisse and Adam Brody in a car

The Kid Detective is Evan Morgan’s feature debut – he wrote and directed – and it’s a cracker, a mystery that manages to be funny and dramatic, brand new and yet intensely familiar. Adam Brody plays Abe Applebaum, the “kid detective” whose deductive powers once made him a big noise in his small town, where he’d solve mysteries ranging from missing lunch money at school to cases that stumped the police. Young Sherlock Holmes. Now, aged 32, he’s drinking and watching daytime TV, unshaven, a burn-out who can’t follow his successful first act and who’s still haunted by the case that finished his run of glory – a missing schoolgirl, abducted presumed dead. … Read more

Synchronic

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Paramedics Mackie and Dornan

Synchronic is Christopher Nolan knock-off fronted by a pair of decent actors – Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan – and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who gave us the intelligent indie psycho-thriller The Endless. Mackie and Dornan play a pair of paramedics who start noticing that weird cases are coming their way. One badly injured man appears to be suffering from a drug overdose but also has a massive sword wound from front to back through his chest. The sword appears to be the sort of thing a conquistador might carry. Another man is lying at the bottom of a lift shaft, dismembered but with a big smile on his face. … Read more

I’m Your Woman

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Jean with new baby

I’m Your Woman starts with a series of wham-bam events that prompt the question: “what is that all about?” A man arrives home and gives his wife a baby she’s clearly never seen before in a “there you are, get on with it” kind of way. In the next scene, a gang of men all arrive at the house that Eddie (Bill Heck) shares with Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) + new unexplained baby. Who are they? Eddie suddenly goes missing. Why? A guy called Cal (Arinzé Kene) turns up, gives Jean a big bag of money and spirits her (+ new unexplained baby) off to a hideout. We have no idea what’s going on … Read more

Herself

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Celebrating the build

Phyllida Lloyd is most often described as the director of Mama Mia! but there’s a lot more to her than that. Take Herself, the latest in a line of strongly female-centred productions, including the Mrs Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady and the all-female Shakespeare productions of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest at the Donmar Theatre in London, which drew raves from the critics, wild applause from audiences and loud harrumphs from the gammons. The Shakespeares all gave top billing to Harriet Walter, and meaty roles to Clare Dunne. Here, Dunne is thrust into the lead (well, she did co-write) and Walter is a gracious supporting star in a story about one … Read more

Blithe Spirit (1945)

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Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford and Constance Cummings

“How the hell did you fuck up the best thing I ever did?” Noel Coward famously asked director David Lean when he first saw the film version of Blithe Spirit, a play that had wowed London in 1941 and went on to do the same on Broadway. We’re now often told the film – a relative flop on its first release – is a classic. It isn’t, but certain elements of it remain quite special, most obviously Margaret Rutherford, who steals the film with a performance of batshit comic gurning so dazzling that the film flags whenever she’s not on stage… set, whatever. “Just photograph it, dear boy” was Coward’s instruction to Lean, … Read more