Review

Stories from the Chestnut Woods

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Massimo De Francovich as Mario

Stories from the Chestnut Woods could so easily have been a misery memoir or poverty porn but thankfully it’s not. Instead director/writer Gregor Bozic has crafted an elegiac film of real beauty and poignancy. It’s set on the border where old Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) meets Italy, a region that’s been in decline for a long time and, judging by most of the houses and the people in them, has seen better days. The people who are left are either old, or they’re young and have a plan to get out quick and take advantage of the prosperity that’s transforming much of the rest of Europe in the post Second World War era. Mario … Read more

The Commuter

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Liam Neeson between two train carriages

Liam Neeson. A Very Particular Set of Skills. They’re back in The Commuter, in which everyone’s favourite geri-actioner gets physical… this time on a train. This is the fourth collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown (skills in Berlin), Non-Stop (Skills on a plane), Run All Night (Skills in New York) and now Skills on the way home from work. If it seems like there have been a lot more of these films than that, you’re probably also adding Taken (three of them) and Walk Among the Tombstones to the tally. They were directed by different people but also featured a gravelly and largely unsmiling Neeson being forced into a corner and … Read more

Song Without a Name

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Pamela Mendoza as Georgina

Song Without a Name is the first feature from Peruvian director Melina Léon, who has made a beautiful but grim drama which can’t quite live up to its early promise. The beauty comes from the look of it all – shot in black and white, fantastically lit, framed in the Academy format with the image dropping off as it bleeds towards the edges. It’s a thing to behold. The grimness comes from the story at its heart – of a pregnant 20-year-old peasant girl who is lured by radio adverts to a “philanthropic” clinic and then has her newborn baby stolen from her by the doctors and nurses. She never sees the baby and nor … Read more

The Dark and the Wicked

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Marin Ireland

Some horror directors favour the balls-out approach of a high concept, others go down the skill route. Call it art v craft or wit v cunning. Then you get directors who manage both – Sam Raimi went down the the first path with Evil Dead and down the second with Drag Me to Hell. The Dark and the Wicked is writer/director Bryan Bertino’s fourth horror movie after The Strangers, Mockingbird and The Monsters. And if none of the others set people alight, they did at least give Bertino the space to make some mistakes and learn how to make a horror movie properly. That all comes good here, with a film that’s not … Read more

Lucky Grandma

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Tsai Chin as lucky grandma

There’s a silent movie quality to Lucky Grandma, the story of a Chinese grandmother in New York’s Chinatown who gets tangled up with the Triads and somehow (OK, improbably) comes out on top. But first let’s meet Grandma, played superbly by Tsai Chin (86 when this was made, though she could easily be 15 years younger) as a Buster Keaton-style stone-faced senior, smoking smoking smoking the entire time, partly just because she wants to, partly, we suspect, as a rebuke to a world that is increasingly infantilising her. One of the places where she isn’t infantilised is the casino, where we follow her just after she’s turned town her caring son’s offer of … Read more

Kajillionaire

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Old Dolio, Theresa and Robert crouching to avoid being seen

There’s a lot to like in Kajillionaire, apart from the film itself, since what it boils down to is a story of child abuse told in a tone so wilfully whimsical that it’s hoping to sell itself as a comedy. The abused party is Old Dolio, a bizarre name for a child, daughter of a pair of grifters whose bar is set so low that their regular gig is to steal mail from the post office and just chance to luck that there’s something in there. The parents don’t see themselves as bottom feeders, more as revolutionaries who have rejected the blandishments of modern capitalism – where everyone wants to be a “kajillionaire” … Read more

Gemini

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Kindly Yukio stuck in the well

Gemini director Shinya Tsukamoto was about 30 when he made his most infamous film, Tetsuo, which featured a man turning into a kind of scrapyard monster, complete with gigantic revolving hydraulic penis. Ten years later in 1999, nudging 40, here he is calmed down a touch, but not that much if the opening shots of Gemini – maggots crawling in meat, bedraggled rats feasting on what looks like an animal head – are anything to go by. Don’t expect restraint, in other words. Though there is a lot of taste and gorgeousness on display in Tsukamoto’s camerawork in early scenes as we meet a kindly noble doctor, his parents and beautiful amnesiac wife in … Read more

Friendship’s Death

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Bill Paterson and Tilda Swinton

There’s been a slight revival of interest in Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death since the London Film Festival chose it as one of the items they wanted to pluck from obscurity by showcasing it in their 2020 Treasures section, alongside films such as The Cheaters, an Australian silent thriller from 1929, and Chess of the Wind (aka Shatranj-e Baad), a 1976 film shining a light on pre-revolutionary Iran. Beside that lot Friendship’s Death – British, from 1987 and starring quantities Bill Paterson and Tilda Swinton – seems a bit of a damp squib, even if it was one of film theorist Wollen’s few directorial credits. A loose description isn’t likely to cause priapic excitement … Read more

The True Adventures of Wolfboy

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Wolfboy in pensive mood

The True Adventures of Wolfboy. Sounds like it might be a superhero movie – Wolfboy as a junior Wolverine. Or a supervillain movie – a Mini-Me Werewolf. In fact it’s neither. This is the everyday story of a teenage boy covered in hair, lots of it. And before we go any further, yes, he’s tried depilatory products, but the hair just comes back twice as thick. “I’m normal, I”m a normal kid,” says Paul (Jaeden Martell, who was going by the name Jaeden Lieberher last time I saw him, in 2016’s Midnight Special), a 13-year-old bullied by the horrible other kids, cowed into wearing a balaclava, a freak in his own eyes as much … Read more

Love and Monsters

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Dylan O'Brien and cute dog

I’ve sat through more post-apocalyptic teen adventure flicks – Hunger Games, The Giver, three flavours of Divergent, Maze Runner etc – and not really enjoyed any of them. “They’re not for you,” a mate at work once remarked. And as I whinged some more about one or other of them, she nodded pityingly towards my greying hair. They’re not, it’s true, but even so I loved Love and Monsters, a post-apocalyptic teen adventure flick that gets by without any hat tips to Ayn Rand – rugged individual against the overweening state etc etc – and sets out its stall immediately with a voiceover by Joel (Maze Runner star Dylan O’Brien) explaining that the … Read more