Steve

I Am Toxic

2022-11-042021-02-13 by Steve

If you’d never seen a modern zombie film (ie something made since George Romero relaunched the genre in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead), the Argentinian film I Am Toxic would be a good place to start. It’s a distillation, a jus, of all the elements you might expect to see, with none of the flim-flam. A man (Esteban Prol) wakes up among a loose pile of bones and bodies. He’s surprised he’s alive. He hauls himself upright and blunders off in a daze, striking out across the scorched earth in the harsh sun. It’s a post-apocalyptic world and he’s a survivor in it, this we know because we’ve seen a lot … Read more

Our Friend

2022-11-042021-02-12 by Steve

I’m not sure who the audience for terminal disease weepies is. Not me, for sure. But Our Friend is a remarkably good one. When we die, or as we die, the highs and lows of the life just lived end up being tallied. That’s what this film does, taking particular account of one high that would have passed unnoticed if something really bad hadn’t come along. The high is Jason Segel as the titular Friend, the something really bad is the cancer diagnosis that Nicole (Dakota Johnson) receives. The action actually snakes back and forth through 14 years of the relationship between Nicole and her husband Matt (Casey Affleck) but it’s the diagnosis … Read more

News of the World

2022-11-042021-02-11 by Steve

British readers wondering why Tom Hanks is starring in a film about a defunct Rupert Murdoch newspaper – fondly known as The News of the Screws, because of its interest in kiss-and-tell stories – wonder no more. This western is called News of the World because that is the name of the novel it’s based on, by American writer Paulette Jiles. Simple as. The film version is immediately reassuring on three counts. First, the look of it as it opens, honeyed light spilling from kerosene lamps in what is obviously a Western setting – props to DP Dariusz Wolski, who for a long time has been doing great work on what often turn … Read more

Promising Young Woman

2022-11-042021-02-10 by Steve

A #MeToo-fuelled drama produced by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company, starring Carey Mulligan and directed and written by Killing Eve’s Emerald Fennell. Promising Young Woman is full of promising young women but recently gained extra notoriety because a Variety review of the film apparently suggested that Carey Mulligan wasn’t quite hot enough to pull off the role of vengeful temptress luring drunk men to their fate. That comment was actually about Mulligan’s performance rather than her looks. But the story now has grown its own legs. Either way, an attractive young woman who is not hot enough to tempt a heterosexual man wearing several pairs of beer goggles. Pause to think about that. And … Read more

One Night in Miami

2022-11-042021-02-09 by Steve

What did Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Malcolm X all talk about when they met to celebrate on the night of Ali’s victory over Sonny Liston in January 1964? It’s a fascinating question that One Night in Miami asks. The answer, in reality, is nothing, since the meeting never took place. But Kemp Powers’s play imagined that it did, and it didn’t do the box office any harm. Now Regina King’s silky and understated direction brings it to a wider audience. Ali wasn’t called Ali back then. He was still using his birth name, Cassius Clay, a fact that boomers will already know since Ali is part of their programming. For … Read more

Wander Darkly

2022-11-042021-02-08 by Steve

Matteo (Diego Luna) and Adrienne (Sienna Miller) are a broke couple with a new baby and a relationship on the skids. Arguing on the way home from a date night, mostly about Adrienne giving someone the glad-eye, they are involved in a massive car crash. This is no spoiler, we’re only a handful of minutes into Wander Darkly, and writer/director Tara Miele is just setting the scene – economically and with great visual flair – for the drama to come. Adrienne is dead. Or is she suffering from post-traumatic delirium and is just imagining she’s dead? Or is something else going on? It’s not certain, but what we can see is Adrienne in … Read more

Farewell Amor

2022-11-042021-02-07 by Steve

Think of how many films there have been about the Irish immigrant experience in the USA. Or the Italian. Farewell Amor is a real rarity, because it’s looks at that fraught, hopeful new beginning through African eyes. Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is a refugee from Angola who went through the civil war there and is now living in New York, where he drives a cab. He’s been separated from his family for 17 years, but is now finally reunited with them. In fact that’s the first scene of Ekwa Msangi’s film: Walter, his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) meeting at JFK airport. The look on Sylvia’s face … Read more

Viy

2022-11-042021-02-06 by Steve

1967’s Viy is often described as the only horror film made in the Soviet Union. In truth it’s more like a fairy tale than a horror story, more Grimm than grim – bum, tish – though in the final haunting sequence things definitely start going bump in the night. Odder than its solitary genre status is the fact that it’s a film with religion at its core. The USSR did not do god. Yet Viy is suffused with religious symbols and practices, beliefs and lore. There’s a good deal of paganism too, which the scientifically minded USSR wasn’t very keen on either. The original story was by Nikolay Gogol, who claimed it was … Read more

The Kid Detective

2022-11-042021-02-05 by Steve

The Kid Detective is Evan Morgan’s feature debut – he wrote and directed – and it’s a cracker, a mystery that manages to be funny and dramatic, brand new and yet intensely familiar. Adam Brody plays Abe Applebaum, the “kid detective” whose deductive powers once made him a big noise in his small town, where he’d solve mysteries ranging from missing lunch money at school to cases that stumped the police. Young Sherlock Holmes. Now, aged 32, he’s drinking and watching daytime TV, unshaven, a burn-out who can’t follow his successful first act and who’s still haunted by the case that finished his run of glory – a missing schoolgirl, abducted presumed dead. … Read more

Synchronic

2022-11-042021-02-04 by Steve

Synchronic is Christopher Nolan knock-off fronted by a pair of decent actors – Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan – and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who gave us the intelligent indie psycho-thriller The Endless. Mackie and Dornan play a pair of paramedics who start noticing that weird cases are coming their way. One badly injured man appears to be suffering from a drug overdose but also has a massive sword wound from front to back through his chest. The sword appears to be the sort of thing a conquistador might carry. Another man is lying at the bottom of a lift shaft, dismembered but with a big smile on his face. … Read more