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As a film about a person never at ease with himself, Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain sketches a compelling if depressing picture – of a man who at first didn’t have it all and was unhappy, and then did have it all and was still unhappy. Bourdain died in 2018 and had been famous … Read more
Censor twists the horror movie into something it usually isn’t – a political satire. It’s set in the 1980s, when a media-confected moral panic about “video nasties” forced the UK government into regulating what had been until then the entirley unregulated market in home videos, kept supplied by thousands of tiny one-man (they usually were … Read more
The Man Who Came to Dinner claims to star Bette Davis, but this is not true. The real star – the person around whom the story revolves, who drives the plot and takes up most of the screen time – is Monty Woolley, as the eponymous “man”. He’s the hoity-toity metropolitan-elite writer who arrives in … Read more
Structured like a dream, or a nightmare, Staying Vertical (Rester Vertical in the original French) is populated with character types – the writer, the young man, the grandfather, the doctor, the farmer, the farmer’s daughter. And it has wolves in it too, which feature almost as a threat or an element from a fairytale until … Read more
There’s a Marvel character called Ares, and a DC one, strangely enough. A Greek god also goes by the same name, as does the hero of Ares (Arès, originally), a dystopian French actioner mainly remarkable for how unremarkable it is. Reda Arèsilla (Ola Rapace), to give him his full name, lives in Paris in 2035, … Read more
People at a decisive moment of their lives is what Lorelei is about. Or, more specifically people who should be at a decisive moment of their lives but whose circumstances are so proscribed that they’re incapable of seeing an opportunity offered, even when one does come along. Wayland is fresh out of jail after 15 … Read more
Great title, She Dies Tomorrow, full of “duh duh duuuh” foreboding. It’s directed and written by Amy Seimetz and stars Katy Lyn Sheil as a woman dealing with the aftermath of an emotional break-up. She does this initially by playing Mozart’s Requiem a lot and crushing dry leaves between her fingers, as if to feel … Read more
This tantalising drama is the second film by writer/director Kevin Tran, and the second one to be called The Dark End of the Street – his first was a short and is the basis for this extended version, also, at 69 minutes, quite short. Robert Altman is at least partly the inspiration for a string … Read more
Valley of the Gods. What the hell was that? At around an hour in, Lech Majewski’s film starts to look like it’s developing a plot. But until then it’s been a series of scenes/scenarios/situations that don’t seem to be very connected at all. In one we meet John (Josh Hartnett), a would-be writer trying to … Read more
Heartfelt rather than gut-wrenching, Resistance is an origin story. Not of a superhero, which is what origin stories usually concern themselves with. But of the world’s most famous mime, Marcel Marceau, who died in 2007 aged 84. This seems, at first glance, amazing in itself. After all, who’s interested in that? But it turns out … Read more
Sputnik is a movie from 2020 set in the Soviet era. As well as having a fantastic story thick with allegorical possibilities, it also feels like a movie from the Soviet era – as if half inch steel plate had been riveted together. There are touches of pure Hollywood too, not least in the character of … Read more
The ceaselessly inventive new Netflix show, Bo Burnham: Inside is a comedy special making the most of the reduced fields of operations available during the pandemic. Burnham’s on his own. No audience. No crew. Just him and all the tech he can muster. If he didn’t inform us repeatedly, we wouldn’t guess. This is a … Read more
