Month: June 2021

Only the Animals

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Evelyne and the hopelessly smitten Marion

Dominik Moll’s latest film, Only the Animals (Seules les Bêtes), opens with a striking shot of an African man cycling along the road wearing a live kid goat on his back much as you would a rucksack, arms and legs for straps. But from there we leave the titular animals behind and enter the all-too-human realm. We’re up in the snowy heights of France in winter, where an optimistic insurance agent (Laure Calamy, of Call My Agent fame) is having an affair with Joseph (Damien Bonnard) one of her clients, a recently bereaved soul who leads a silent solitary life. The woman’s truculent oaf of a husband (Denis Ménochet) gets wind of the … Read more

The Dry

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Aaron and local cop Greg investigate

A very familiar whodunit with an unfamiliar setting, The Dry sees Eric Bana on home Australian turf as a cop investigating the case of a man who killed his wife and kid before turning the gun on himself. How familiar? How about: cop returns to old stomping ground, drawn back by a case which also re-awakens some slumbering trauma from years before. Yes, that one. Ringing the changes is the parched, dust-dry Outback where years-long drought is squeezing the life out of Kiawarra, a one-horse town dominated by farming, as well as the sweat-stain masculinity that’s an Aussie specialty. Drinking, brawling, swearing and scowling, plenty of all those too. Specifically, Eric Bana plays … Read more

The Night Eats the World

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Anders Danielsen Lie

The Night Eats the World is a detail-rich zombie procedural ingeniously set in one house, with one main guy as its focus, a couple of “names” doing the sort of walk-on you’d have thought they were above and a lot of extras stumbling about and moaning. Director Dominique Rocher’s feature debut spends a few minutes at the beginning just introducing us to its main character before it hits us. Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) is at a party he doesn’t want to be at – he’s just there to pick up some belongings after having obviously split acrimoniously with his girlfriend – falls asleep while waiting for her to show him exactly where his bloody … Read more

Riders of Justice

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Otto, Markus, Emmenthaler and Lennart

Anders Thomas Jensen is amazingly prolific. Riders of Justice (Retfærdighedens ryttere in the original Danish) may be only his fifth film as a director in 22 years but in that time he’s also written around 40 feature-length movies. You might have seen Brothers (starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman), or the underrated western Salvation (Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green, Jeffery Dean Morgan) or After the Wedding (Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Billy Crudup). All his directorial efforts to date have starred Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, four of the five have feature Nicolas Bro, fabulous actors all. They’re joined this time by another real talent, Lars Brygmann, for another exercise in the … Read more

The Killing of Two Lovers

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The lovers asleep

The Killing of a Two Lovers starts, unusually, with a climax, backs off quite a bit to let us work out what’s going on, before returning with another climax at the end, exactly where we’d expect one to be. It opens with two people in bed asleep. Hovering over them is a bearded man with a desperate look on his face and a gun in his hand. He hears a noise from somewhere else in the house, takes fright and climbs out the ground-floor window and makes good his escape. The two people sleep on unawares, while we head out with David, the desperate guy, and find out more about him. The film … Read more

The Man in the Hat

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The Man by his Fiat 500

The Man in the Hat is a weird whimsical hybrid: a homage to Jacques Tati and a semi-musical travelogue in a fantasy version of France. In The Man in a Hat‘s France there is no fast food, no Japanese cars, no smartphones. The car The Man drives is a Fiat 500, the original, tiny, tin-boxy version not the more chi-chi modern one. He jumps into it sharpish after the opening scene, when The Man (as the credits call him) spots a gang of unsavoury gentlemen heaving something human-shaped into the sea one balmy evening. They’d not realised he was there, enjoying a glass of wine and a plate of something tasty outside a … Read more

Undergods

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Z and K out on their rounds

A strange and evocative film, Undergods is a portmanteau fantasy horror with the seams sanded flat and then caulked in an attempt to hide the joins. Even so, it falls into clearly discernible distinct chunks, which seemingly bear little relation to each other. First up, K and Z, a pair of post-apocalyptic dealers in humans, dead for meat, live as slaves. Then on to the story of a man whose life is invaded by a stranger, who is soon sleeping with his wife in his own home. Then on to a bedtime story told by a father to his daughter. The story itself comes next, of a “merchant” stealing a mysterious thin man’s … Read more

Oxygen

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Liz in her hi-tech box

The amazingly up-down career of director Alexandre Aja hits a peak with Oxygen, a brilliantly conceived and executed piece of high-concept sci-fi calling on all Aja’s skills as a manipulator of tension, a master of genre, a technical whizz. Whether it’s his breakthrough, Switchblade Romance, or his deliberately schlocky Piranha 3D (featuring the memorable line “They took my penis”), Aja’s at his best working from a good screenplay. Oxygen’s is by first-timer Christie LeBlanc and is very strong – structurally taut, plausible and building gradually in pace. Paragraph three and I haven’t said what it’s about yet. It’s very simple. A woman wakes up in a dark box. When the lights come up … Read more

Pink Wall

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Leon and Jenna dancing close

Tom Cullen is best known as an actor and his writing/directing debut, Pink Wall, owes something to the screen work he’s best known for – Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (Downton Abbey fans might disagree). So, yes, it’s the story of a couple on the cusp of something which also manages to sum up, to an extent, what it’s like to be their age – around 30, when youthful dalliances start solidifying into something more lasting, long-term plans are being made and thoughts turn to having kids. In relationship terms, Pink Wall is about that moment when it’s time to shit or get off the pot. The other film Pink Wall owes something to is … Read more

Just Mercy

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Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx

Just Mercy continues writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton’s zig-zag up the movie food chain. His breakthrough came in 2013’s Short Term 12, which not only made his own name but also that of Brie Larson, who is now playing Captain Marvel at god knows what hourly rate of pay. Trouper that she is, she turns out for Cretton again here, as she did in his last film, 2017’s The Glass Castle, though here she’s in a minor, supporting role to star Michael B Jordan. Just Mercy tells a true story, of a smalltime lumber guy, Walter McMillian, known locally as Johnny D, who was picked up by the cops for the murder of a … Read more