Steve

Camp X Ray

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The new recruits are briefed

One of three 2014 Kristen Stewart films that seemed designed to shift her image out of Twilight territory and into something with a bit more actorly grunt, Camp X Ray works better as brand realignment than as drama. The other two were Clouds of Sils Maria and Still Alice, the first a Juliette Binoche arthouse flick, the other starring Julianne Moore as an English professor with early onset dementia. In both Stewart was second billing to a major league dramatic actor and metaphorically sat at the feet of the star and took notes. She didn’t have to do it. At the time she was one of the highest paid actress in the world … Read more

God’s Own Country

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Josh O'Connor and Alec Secareanu

It was reading about his highly anticipated 2020 film Ammonite that jolted me into the realisation that I’d never got around to seeing God’s Own Country, former actor Francis Lee’s 2017 debut as writer/director. It was on the must-watch list and then another load of must-watches came along and it got lost. Thanks to the imminence of Ammonite, amends have now been made. “God’s own county” (not “country”) is what proud Yorshirefolk call England’s biggest (and once richest) administrative region, a sentiment not shared by the protagonist of this tale of big emotions played out on small canvases. Johnny (Josh O’Connor) hates Yorkshire, he hates the family farm he works on with his … Read more

Noelle

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Anna Kendrick in bobble hat and warm coat

Christmas movies. They’re churned out by TV channels, who plop a cute jumper on a couple of their botoxed, permatanned stars, add a bit of grog to a romantic plot involving the healing of a family rift – or something – and there you are, 90 minutes (perhaps 120 with adverts) of overlit fixed-grin cheer. But when a Christmas movie works – A Christmas Carol (almost any one of them) or Elf – what a glorious thing it is, catharsis without the pain. Noelle fits that bill. Borrowing heavily from Elf, it’s a feminist-lite tale of the girl who would be Christmas, Anna Kendrick playing the daughter of Santa Claus who, when the old … Read more

Possessor

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Andrea Riseborough

Stab a human being in a vital area of the body and what happens? In most movies, after one clean thrust a modicum of blood seeps decorously into an item of clothing and the victim promptly drops dead. But this is a Brandon Cronenberg movie and Brandon is the heir to David Cronenberg, king of the body horrror. So when someone is stabbed in the neck in the pre-credits sequence to Possessor, the blood-letting is spumungous, nasty, frenzied and inconclusive – this victim isn’t going down without a fight. Even as he dies he’s summoning all his forces to keep the only show he has on the road. That’s what happens. Remarkably, this … Read more

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm

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Borat leaving his village pursued by a mob

Sacha Baron Cohen retired his anti-semitic fake Kazakh TV journalist after the first Borat movie, 14 years ago, reasoning that when someone is that well known the joke – unsuspecting members of the public gulled into compromising situations – won’t work any more. So he either felt the time was right or he needed the money his most famous creation can raise – make benefit the Baron Cohen bank account – and out Borat is wheeled for what is essentially a re-run of the first film. That had a quest structure – Borat searching for Pamela Anderson – and so has this, except this time Borat is crossing the USA to meet Vice … Read more

Rent-a-Pal

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Wil Wheaton and Brian Landis Folkins

Set in 1990 and influenced by the moment when direct-to-VHS schlock met cheap synthesisers, Rent-A-Pal actually takes its inspiration from a point further back in time, when The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone put high-concept sci-fi, often with a twist, on primetime TV. It’s a four-hander, with Brian Landis Folkins playing David, a 40-year-old sad sack whose life is dominated by the fact that he’s his demented mother’s carer. Since he barely leaves the house, he has no girlfriend, which is why he’s half-heartedly signed up to Video Rendezvous – you choose the woman you like from a tape full of pitches made by female lonely hearts – the sort of outfit … Read more

The Other Lamb

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Shepherd with his flock of women

Omens and portents abound in The Other Lamb, action not so much. Following the story of Selah (Raffey Cassidy), it’s set in a cult headed by a man known as the Shepherd, otherwise populated exclusively by women, who are designated either as Wives or Daughters. For easy identification and to reduce individuality even more, the Wives dress in purple, the Daughters in Blue. They live in the modern world but away from it, out in the woods where they slaughter their own animals – sheep, appropriately – and butcher the meat themselves. They seem content, happy even, though little jealousies flare now and again when Shepherd chooses to lay with one wife rather … Read more

Two of Us aka Dead Earth

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Alice Tantayanon and Milena Gorum by the pool

Well I was expecting a French film called Two of Us (aka Deux), about two ageing lesbians who have spent decades in the closet. Instead I got this Two of Us (aka Dead Earth aka Paradise Z) about two young lesbians fighting off a zombie holocaust. Not quite the same thing, the lesbian aspect to one side, if Sylvia and Rose even are lesbians. What this Two of Us reminded me of very early on was a great and barely known zombie film called The Battery. The Battery’s USP is the portrait it paints of two guys – former baseball team-mates – who have spent so long in each other’s company, and fighting … Read more

An American Pickle

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Seth Rogen as Ben and Herschel

American Pickle is unsure whether it’s fighting the culture war or fighting it off – a proper pickle It’s amusing, likeable, good-natured and I really wanted to like it, but American Pickle really is all over the place. Basics first: Seth Rogen is the East European from some Yiddish-speaking stetl who, after the Cossacks kill everyone in his village in a pogrom, heads to the US with his wife and love of his life (Sarah Snook, soon dead, before you get too excited). There, Herschel gets a job, falls into a vat in a pickle factory, wakes up a century later, the brine having somehow magically preserved him, and heads out into modern New … Read more

Mulan

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Liu Yifei as Mulan

Anyone for a live-action remake of a much-loved animation? The latest of Disney’s live-action makeovers of its own back catalogues continues a “so-what?” run of remakes – Jungle Book, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo to name a few. They’re not bad films exactly – no, hang on, Dumbo is – but how many of them have been necessary, what are Disney playing at exactly, and how long before Snow White? Junking the songs and comedy sidekicks of the 1998 animation, this Mulan sticks fairly close to the original Chinese folk tale, first written down about 1,600 years ago, of a feisty young woman skilled in combat who, fearing for her sick father’s … Read more