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The first film I saw of Pablo Larraín’s was 2008’s Tony Manero, which was about a man whose passion in life was posing as John Travolta’s character, Tony Manero, out of Saturday Night Fever. Larraín’s interest in people pretending to be something they’re not continues in Ema, which also happens to be a film pretending … Read more
Grief rather than lust is what drives Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, the well-told story of a Finnish man who starts visiting a dominatrix after his wife dies. Director and co-writer J-P Valkeapää’s drama (with the odd comedic touch) is delivered in three big chunks. Chunk one is brief and details the life of Juha (Pekka … Read more
Cockneys vs Zombies given a wipe-down and relocated to the US, maybe? But Vampires vs. the Bronx isn’t a reworking of the 2012 British film even though it’s also about the denizens of a run-down part of a world city taking on a mythical horror foe. Are the vampires even the foe, or is it … Read more
After His House and A Dim Valley, Nuclear is the third film with an uneasy supernatural element that I’ve seen in the last three days. All three use the otherworldly element to put a spin on a familiar genre – two/three genres in the case of Nuclear. The first is a family drama. Mother (as … Read more
Stardust, echoing the title of his most consequential album, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, charts the journey of David Bowie from washout – the big 1969 hit Space Oddity not having led on to greatness – to the moment he became the David Bowie of legend. Gabriel Range’s film pegs that moment as … Read more
A Dim Valley is a quiet but bizarre drama that sets off in one direction only to blindside. All seems familiar at the outset. Three guys out on a botany field trip in Kentucky – two students and the prof. The students are the jockish one Albert (Whitmer Thomas) and Ian (Zach Weintraub) who may … Read more
Three Irish gobshites have a last summer of fun before maturity claims them in Eoin Macken’s Here Are the Young Men, a tantalising mix of the familiar and the fantastical. It’s nearly 50 years since Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. Made in 1971 but nostalgic for 20 years earlier, it wrote the blueprint for … Read more
The Greek Weird Wave was at its height in 2011 when Giorgos Georgopoulos released his last fictional movie, Tungsten (there’s been a documentary in the interim), one of the films included on almost all the “ten best” lists next to the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) or Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010). Now he’s … Read more
Five young women head to Turkey with their skateboards in this documentary taking a tour of the Generation Z zeitgeist. Before we go any further, they refer to each other as “girls”, which I know is not everyone’s favourite term for young women, ladies, females – none of them sound quite right. Lass, chick, dame? … Read more
Of all the films I’ve seen at the Raindance festival this year, The Woman with Leopard Shoes is the best so far. It was put together under Covid-19 strictures and yet here it is, an excellently conceived, constructed and executed high-concept thriller delivered by a debut director, with a star who’s also in his first … Read more
James Stewart? Doris Day? Alfred Hitchcock? No. Instead meet Colin Wallace, a retired real-life spook who got heavily involved in the UK government’s undercover operations in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, blew the whistle when his paymasters started asking him to start smearing democratically elected politicians, then wound up in jail on a ten-year stretch … Read more
Antarctica is a Booksmart-style comedy about a couple of high school girls, friends who don’t fit in, cocky and standoffish as a defence against the scorn they get from fellow schoolmates. They are not cool. They have fairly OK home lives which they think are horrible, a perfectly decent school life which they also think … Read more
