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Now this one is a hard sell. It starts with its director, Gérald L’Ecuyer, addressing the confessional camera, telling of the 16 psychiatrists and the one doomed affair he went through to make this film. Then the film proper starts and it turns out it’s all about a young man and his tangles with psychiatrists … Read more
Nick Marshall, a sexy, charming and single Hollywood exec, hey it’s Mel Gibson everybody, suddenly develops the ability to hear what women are thinking. Of course he’s completely freaked, though obviously flattered at some of the “what a great butt” comments – this being the very last time that Gibson’s physique rather than his politics … Read more
Ten kids high on aspartame and orange food colouring were finally silenced at my house a few weeks ago when I put on the so-sharp-it-hurts remastered Wizard Of Oz. The 1939 classic’s SFX were still brilliant and Judy Garland’s performance is so thigh-slapping that it had a magical effect on adults too. Oddly, the film … Read more
In this small-scale, nasty and even snivelling film born in the Classmates.com/Friends Reunited era, young sleek winner Chuck (Chris Weitz) returns to his hometown and falls somehow back into the orbit of old childhood chum Buck, who in the intervening years has polished his dweebieness into something altogether needier and more pathological. Buck is a … Read more
Not to be confused with high-tone The Deep Blue Sea, from 2011, this action thriller whose USP is “smart sharks” got a mixed reception when it came out, everyone suddenly having forgotten how many people have tried to follow in the wake of Jaws – and totally failed. Renny Harlin’s film succeeds, mostly, thanks to … Read more
Here’s one of a number of interesting sci-fi films produced in Canada in the wake of Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. It’s a low-budget body-swap futureshocker with three different actors (Stephen Baldwin, Kyle MacLachlan and Kim Coates) all vaguely playing the same man, a “floater” refusenik named Alvin Toffler. There’s a joke in that name if you’re … Read more
DVD and Blu-ray out in the UK this week Sightseers (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Serial killing never looked so deliberately dowdy as it does in Ben Wheatley’s excellently funny and very British comedy about a couple (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who also wrote) whose tour of pencil museums and the like is interspersed with … Read more
This ambitious and almost entirely successful drama sees Mathieu Kassovitz, the director of La Haine, back in France and back on form after a less than stellar time in Hollywood churning out studio cack such as Gothika and Babylon AD. It tells the true story of a small kerfuffle in 1988 in New Caledonia, a … Read more
Between Bond movies The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day, busy Pierce Brosnan managed to fit in two other projects. One of them was this adaptation of a John Le Carre story about a downmarket spy (Brosnan) in Central America who uses a sweatily nervous tailor (the unimpeachable Geoffrey Rush) to gain access … Read more
It’s a good rule of thumb that road movies set out in any American desert and made on a low budget have a knack of turning out OK. There’s often something fairly oddball going on too. Made in 1997, the same year that its star would appear in Tarantino’s career-boosting Jackie Brown, American Perfekt sees … Read more
A night at the theatre in London’s West End is not always an evening of total entertainment: the ticket price, the discomfort of the seats, the warm G&T at the interval. But here’s an easy way to experience a play that was murder to get a ticket for when it was playing at the Old … Read more
If each era has its own horror film, then the lucky 1970s got both The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Tacked on to the end of a Walter Matthau film for its San Francisco debut, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre drove the cheesecloth-wearing crowd to storm the lobby, demanding money back with menaces. … Read more
