Review

Host

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The Zoom call begins to go wrong

Host is the perfect pandemic horror movie. Shot entirely on Zoom, it features a menacing presence that’s out there… somewhere… and a bunch of mates who are communicating with each other lockdown-style via laptop/phone/tablet. Expanding a short that went viral and gave director/co-writer Rob Savage an in with Shudder, who financed the film, it takes the glitches and irritations of the Zoom call and puts them to work dramatically. Realism is everything here and Savage and co-writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd have kept in the stuff that makes a Zoom call a Zoom call. So, the scratty getting-going moments, when one person is online but another isn’t, the terrible sound of a headset microphone … Read more

Away

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The creature lurks while the boy hangs from a parachute cord

Fresh out of college and with no tempting job offers, Latvian arts graduate Gints Zilbalodis decided to start work on an animation. Away is the result, a remarkable film – and all from one man’s bedroom (and imagination). Zilbalodis was 24 when he started on his three-and-a-half-year marathon and didn’t just do all the animation we see in the finished result – he pretty much did everything else too, production, editing, sound, music the lot. Think of the scrolling hundreds of names you see in the credits in a typical animation and marvel. It’s obvious from the opening shot that something good is going on. A young man hangs from a blasted tree … Read more

Twist

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Raff Law, Michael Caine and Rita Ora

Updating Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, as Twist does, is a bold move. Usually the lure of the dressing-up box and the chance to lay on the foggy London atmospherics prove irresistible. Film-makers tend to stick with its original Victorian setting. Looking through the many, many adaptations, Twisted stands out. It’s a 1996 update set in in New York’s gay subculture. But for the most part Oliver Twist tends to be set in world of street urchins, top hats, horse-drawn carriages and much dropping of aitches. Watching the opening moments of Twist, a question arises: when in the early production process did someone suggest bringing Oliver Twist into the Britpop era? And was this … Read more

About Endlessness

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The hovering couple inspired by Chagall's Over the Town

In one of the first scenes in About Endlessness, a waiter brings a diner a bottle of wine, opens it, sniffs the cork to check the wine is OK, then walks over to the right hand side of the diner to fill his glass. Holding the bottle near the bottom, the way a practised waiter does, he pours the wine precisely into the glass, then keeps pouring, pouring, pouring, until the wine overflows and starts pooling over the table. The diner, who’s been stuck behind his newspaper, suddenly notices. If you’re not familiar with the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson, this is a typical entry into his world. About Endlessness doesn’t mark … Read more

Bacurau

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Procession at the funeral of Teresa's grandmother

Two opinions of Bacurau from Amazon’s Top Reviews of this film. “One of the worst movies we have ever seen,” said Scout in a one star thumbs-down. “We were both regretful that we paid to give away time that we cannot get back watching a movie that was this painfully stupid.” On the other hand Cameron Brady, giving Bacurau five stars, said, “This movie is simply fantastic. It touches on subjects of socioeconomic disparity, racism, colorism, etc. but keeps a certain humor and charming weirdness as well.” I can sympathise with both points of view. If what you want is a good strong story told in an efficient way, Bacurau is a load … Read more

The Forty-Year-Old Version

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Radha Blank on a bus

First, the title. It’s called The Forty-Year-Old Version because this autobiographical, documentary-style drama is about the 40-year-old, grown-up version of the kid who wanted to be a writer. Now a struggling actor/writer/director, Radha Blank had once upon a time also turned up on a 30 Under 30 list of hot young talents to watch, so the kid wasn’t deluded. Clearly, something has gone wrong in the intervening years. Instead of having a successful career in the theatre, Radha teaches. They’re nice, funny, feisty kids – the girls want to fight, the boys are obsessed with genitalia. But it’s not what she really wants to do. Radha’s mother, a painter, has recently died and … Read more

Clemency

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Alfre Woodard

We’ve all seen prison dramas – the tough lives of inmates in a heartless system patrolled by brutes, policed by sadists and presided over by a martinet. Clemency isn’t that sort of film. Nor is it film-as-entertainment, be warned, but a grim and sobering look at US prison life from an unusual angle, the warden’s. Opening up with a pre-credits scene that follows an execution on death row, which ends up being a botched, messy and gruelling one, for the man who’s being killed, the people watching and the warden supervising the whole thing, the film proper then concerns itself with the preparations for the execution of another man, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) … Read more

Another Round

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Martin chugs down a beer

Another Round was a big hit in its native Denmark, managing to coax people into cinemas even as the coronavirus pandemic was shooing them away. Partly because it’s got a big Danish star, Mads Mikkelsen, in the lead, back with director Thomas Vinterberg after their big success The Hunt. And partly because it’s about booze and the Danes are big drinkers, particularly teenage Danes. Vinterberg made the film at the prompting of his daughter Ida, who suggested that a story fuelled by the exploits of hard-partying teens might be both interesting and successful. In the end Vinterberg tweaked that idea a bit, to make the film more about boozing middle-aged guys, and then … Read more

Zombi Child

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The girls have a midnight feast

There were zombie movies before George Romero came along and shook the genre up in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead and at first Zombi Child looks like it’s harking back to an older tradition of zombie movie, like 1932’s White Zombie or 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie. We’re in Haiti in 1962, where an opening shot shows us someone assembling something nasty-looking from various bits of pufferfish innards and other voodoo bits and bobs. The resulting powder is then put into a man’s shoes. The man “dies”, is buried, disinterred and in short order – this all taking about five minutes of screen time – is working on a sugar … Read more

Sylvie’s Love

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Robert and Sylvie outside her dad's record store

The remarkable thing about Sylvie’s Love is actually how unremarkable it is in many ways. It’s a white-sliced, white-picket-fence melodrama of a sort that once might have starred a Joan Crawford. Except it’s black rather than white people playing all the parts. That shouldn’t be remarkable, nor should stories about the black middle classes, but it is and Eugene Ashe’s drama knows it’s doing something different in its deliberately old-fashioned, “they don’t make them like this any more” way. Tessa Thompson plays Sylvie, the young woman who works in her daddy’s record store but really wants to get a job in TV. Nnamdi Asomugha is Robert, the tall, dark and handsome saxophonist who … Read more