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Class Action Park is a punning title for a reasonably even-handed documentary about Action Park, Vernon, New Jersey, a trailblazing theme park when it opened in the 1970s, which later became infamous on account of the number of accidents and deaths that happened there. It was the brainchild of Gene Mulvihill, a disgraced Wall Street … Read more
Adam Morse’s feature debut, Lucid, is an ideas-driven supernatural drama that could almost double as an instructional video for shy boys who’d like to meet girls. In The Matrix style, it’s got a nerdy guy, Zel (Laurie Calvert) at its centre, an incel gamer whose mother (Sadie Frost) still hovers, concerned that her son isn’t … Read more
In probably the best condition it’s ever going to be seen, the Eureka Masters of Cinema 2019 restoration of Waxworks is a good 25 minutes shorter than the German original, all trace of which has disappeared. Instead, the Deutsche Kinemathek and Cineteca di Bologna took a surviving print from the British Film Institute and, using … Read more
The County is yet more proof that Icelandic film-makers punch above their weight. Grímur Hákonarson is one of a band of modern Icelandic writer/directors including Benedikt Erlingsson (Of Horses and Men, Woman at War) and Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík, The Deep) turning out films that manage to have something going on below the surface while … Read more
After the exotic holiday atmosphere of the second film, Turks & Caicos, the Worricker trilogy concludes with Salting the Battlefield. Writer/director David Hare takes us back, literally, to where he began gradually, starting the action out in Europe, where former agents and lovers Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) and Margot Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter) are on … Read more
More tales of emotional desperation from Anthony Chen, Wet Season follows 2013’s Ilo Ilo, using a couple of the same actors from his brilliant debut to squeeze a single drop of comfort from a scenario that would have been a full-bore histrionic melodrama in other hands. The returning actors are Koh Jia Ler, only 12 … Read more
Turks & Caicos is the second of the Johnny Worricker trilogy of TV movies made by Carnival Films (of Downton Abbey fame) for the BBC and boasting the sort of cast that was still rare at small screen level in 2014. Christopher Walken and Winona Ryder are the properly big names, though Dylan Baker, Helena … Read more
Two Brits starring in a French film. In Her Hands (Au bout des doigts in French) didn’t get a theatrical release in the UK or the US, so if the strategy was to guarantee anglosphere box-office action by casting Lambert Wilson and Kristin Scott Thomas (both of whom speak fluent French), it clearly hasn’t worked. … Read more
From the instant Page Eight starts we know where we are. The camera focuses on Bill Nighy’s face. He lights a cigarette and, as jazz music sulks away on the soundtrack, he strides out into the night. Johnny Worricker (Nighy) is another of Raymond Chandler’s white knights tilting at baddies out on the mean streets … Read more
Claire Denis’s remarkable film The Intruder (L’intrus) was first released in 2004, rolled out worldwide in 2005 and promptly disappeared. In some countries it was never shown at all; in the US, for instance, it’s only in 2021 that people are getting a chance to see it. It is a deliberately oblique drama, constructed almost … Read more
Wildcat is the sort of film where strangers wake up in a room together. Often, this sort of film – a handful of actors on one set – is all about learning who these people are and why they are in the room together in the first place. Often there’s also a kick in the … Read more
Rocks is the director Sarah Gavron’s best fiction feature to date, beating Brick Lane and Suffragette to top honours thanks to outstandingly fresh performances from a cast of actors who deserve all the praise that’s been heaped on them. It’s a simple and fairly familiar story. Rocks (Bukky Bakray) is a London inner-city kid, feisty … Read more
