Latest Posts
6 June 2016-06-06
Out This Week Deadpool (Fox, cert 15) From the guys who wrote Zombieland, a similarly knowing and smart play in the genre pool, though this time it’s superheroes rather than the undead who get a prolonged playful kicking. The style is Honest Trailers – YouTube fanboys with brains ((“Trailers that tell you the TRUTH about your favorite movies and TV shows”) – and follows Ryan Reynolds as the eponymous hero as he searches … actually, there is no need to recount the plot at all, since that’s why you watch the film, though I should say that it is more than just a mere peg for jokes. And they come in all shapes and … Read more
30 May 2016-05-30
Out This Week The Club (Network, cert 18) Chilean film-maker Pablo Larraín’s seething drama is set in a remote safe house where a group of disgraced Catholic priests are living under the steely eye of capable nun Sister Monica (Antonia Zegers). Life is simple and ordered, with the only bit of excitement coming from the racing of the priests’ greyhound at a local track, though the priests themselves are symbolically watching the race from a distance, through binoculars. This cosy life of the exiled pariah changes when new priest Father Mathias (José Soza) arrives and, having been read the rules – no self-flagellating, no self-pleasuring, no contact with anyone outside – he resignedly settles in, complaining … Read more
23 May 2016-05-23
Out This Week The Revenant (Fox, cert 15) Last year Alejandro González Iñárritu won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscar for Birdman. The gongs have clearly gone slightly to his head and he now thinks he’s Terrence Malick. If there’s one thing this thrilling, frequently brutal and historically fascinating film doesn’t need is slo-mo glides through the awesomeness of its natural beauties – grandiose waterfalls, snowy wastes, virgin forests and the like. But we get them anyway, and if you’re feeling gracious, you might take them as a palate-cleanser between attacks by Indians, bears and the elements as 1820s fur trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) fights his way from a severe ursine mauling … Read more
16 May 2016-05-16
Out This Week The Big Short (Paramount, cert 15) What is a mortgage backed security, a sub-prime loan or a credit default swap? At an early stage in this hugely entertaining film about the financial crash of 2007, Ryan Gosling’s voiceover admits it’s confusing and exclaims, “so here’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain…” Cut to Margot Robbie up to her neck in suds, cradling a glass of champagne … “Whenever you hear the word ‘sub-prime’,” she tells us, “think ‘shit’…”. That’s The Big Short in a headline, a film unafraid to put on the brakes, wheel out a celebrity and roll out a colourful analogy – the chef Anthony Bourdain later … Read more
9 May 2016-05-09
Out This Week Room (StudioCanal, cert 15) Starting with 2004’s Adam & Paul, then continuing with Garage, What Richard Did and even in the comedic, less typical Frank, director Lenny Abrahmson has given us a series of intense psychological dramas examining human relationships under stress. Room continues the trend with a story about an abducted woman living in a shed with her son, he being the result of a rape by her abductor. The facts of the situation are dripped out in an un-explicatory way and keep things real, though it’s the current situation rather than the headline-grabbing aspects of the situation that fascinate Abrahmson: how the mother keeps her sanity; how she explains the … Read more
2 May 2016-05-02
Out This Week A War (StudioCanal, cert 15) The Danes do Afghanistan in a bloody, tense drama that takes a left turn about halfway through. That’s after we’ve been given a long immersive bath in war at its foggiest, leadership at its most difficult, focusing on Pilou Asbaek’s company commander Claus Pedersen as he takes his men out on patrol after a particularly bloody IED incident has left one of them with no legs below the knee, and his men having shown little enthusiasm for the “rebuilding the country” speech Pedersen has just given. After this, it’s a fairly familiar, though undeniably suspenseful journey through the dust, the evasive looks of the locals and the first-meets-third-world … Read more
25 April 2016-04-25
Out This Week Joy (Fox, cert 15) Joy tells the story of Joy Mangano, a real-life Mrs Mop who, as a young woman, invented the Miracle Mop and who went on to become the CEO of her own company. When we meet her, Joy is the bright kid whose early promise and dreams of further education and so on haven’t worked out, and is now the Mrs Fixit of a family of dysfunctional no-can-do’s. Director/screenwriter David O Russell breaks the film down into two halves. In part one, done in a screwball comedy style and speed, we meet Joy (Jennifer Lawrence), her flaky ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez), flakier father (Robert De Niro), flakier still … Read more
18 April 2016-04-18
Out This Week In the Heart of the Sea (Warner, cert 12) Why have one sea adventure when you can have them all? Though ostensibly about the incident that inspired the writing of Moby Dick, In the Heart of the Sea also takes shots at Jaws, Mutiny on the Bounty and Robinson Crusoe in a tale of a whaling ship’s adventures, only some of which are whale related. Chris Hemsworth stars – and possibly that’s a strangled Boston accent or a Clark Gable impersonation – as the first mate of a whaler out of Nantucket whose ship is pounced on by a great white whale. The story is all set out in “dark … Read more
11 April 2016-04-11
Out This Week Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney, cert 12) You don’t go to a Rolling Stones gig to hear new tunes. And you don’t turn out for Star Wars – reboot or not – for new stories. And yet. JJ Abrams, having done a remarkable job on the first Star Trek rejig, does bring lots that’s fresh to Star Wars in a film that seemed more remarkable the more I thought about it. At first it appeared to be a case of “same but different”, with every new thing and new character an echo of something from the first three films (numbers IV to VI) – Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren is … Read more
4 April 2016-04-04
Out This Week Tangerine (Metrodome, cert 15) A few weeks ago it was Tangerines, a blunt, austere Estonian/Georgian film about the conflict in Abkhazia. Now it’s in the singular, Tangerine, an over the top film about life in another conflict zone – on the crack-whorey streets of modern LA. The film is all shot on an iPhone 5S and shows that none of us has an excuse not to make a film any more, if that’s the way we’re claiming we’re pointing. Though director Sean Baker is so good at post-production and editing that you probably wouldn’t guess exactly how it was shot. The plot is simple yet ample – gender-transitioning street … Read more
21 March 2016-03-21
Out This Week Carol (StudioCanal, cert 15) Todd Haynes’s biggest success to date has been 2002’s Far from Heaven, the period-fanatical story of forbidden gay love giddy with the melodrama of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and starring Dennis Quaid, Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert. It’s tempting to see Carol as an attempt to repeat the trick, since it’s another period-fanatical story of forbidden gay love. But instead of man-on-man love, this time Haynes goes for woman-on-woman, and decks everything out in the colder, lonelier and butcher tones of an Edward Hopper painting – no Tupperware pastels here. It’s also a tale of love across a class divide, Cate Blanchett being the money, … Read more
14 March 2016-03-14
Out This Week The Dressmaker (EV, cert 12) Husband and wife team Jocelyn Moorhouse (director/writer) and PJ Hogan (co-writer) hit us with a curious mix of the comic, the tragic and the romantic, a flawed star vehicle for Kate Winslet, delivering a vaudevillian spin on her latterday Joan Crawford shtick as the troubled Aussie who returns to the Outback to make fabulous dresses for the town that exiled her years before. It’s the sort of town now familiar but once the antithesis of Aussie grunt – of Priscillas and Muriels, camp characters one and all who yearn, how they yearn, to cross-dress and lip-sync to a series of trash hits. Actually, The Dressmaker … Read more
