Reviews
Brenda Blethyn and Julie Walters seem too often to be in women’s weepy territory and are in it again in this slice of gritty Northern life – The Full Monty by way of Shirley Valentine. It’s written by Kay Mellor, who’s almost cornered the market in female northern empowerment on British TV with scripts for Band … Read more
The House on 92nd Street is the sort of earnest propaganda movie Hollywood liked to pump out once in a while in the 1940s. It was made during wartime, so the justification is there, and it deals with a real case – the fifth column of Nazi-sympathising Americans working to overthrow their own government and … Read more
There’s a definite influence of The Wicker Man in Fréwaka, Aislinn Clarke’s second feature. You might call it The Fréwaka Man if you were being facetious. But it deserves better than that. And in any case the main character is a woman, so that’s enough of that foolishness. It’s also the first horror movie in … Read more
A horror movie coming at the genre from three different directions, Reborn starts off in distinct tits’n’gore territory, jumps quickly into the supernatural and then eventually morphs into something altogether more psychological. Key asset is Kayleigh Gilbert, who has a big-eyed face and long physique built for the gothic. She plays the teenager who was … Read more
The (mis)adventures of a writer who suddenly loses her memory in New York City, Italian Studies boldly tries something original with the old “movie amnesiac” formula and swerves the usual mechanics: loss and recovery. Instead, writer/director Adam Leon sets out to explore what it actually feels like to suddenly have no idea of who or … Read more
For anyone who gets confused between Ben Affleck and Ryan Reynolds, Joe (Narc) Carnahan’s latest feast of bang-bang macho will be very bewildering indeed, since they’re both in it. But then bewilderment seems to be what Smokin’ Aces is about. The hip-feast is built around Jeremy Piven, playing Buddy “Aces” Israel, a Las Vegas showman … Read more
It’s been nearly 40 years since Pixar got going in the, yes, garage of one of its founders, and in that time it’s gone from being cult item to monster indie to part of the Disney mega-stable. Inside Out 2 comes at an interesting point in its history. Pixar is now part of the cultural … Read more
Pastiche nudged into madness, Let the Corpses Tan is a Sergio Leone film on psychoactive substances and the third feature-length outing for Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, who specialise in this sort of weird pastiche/homage. Their 2009 feature debut, Amer, baked Lynch, Kubrick, Svankmajer and Argento into a kaleidoscopic revisit to the Euro soft porn/arthouse … Read more
And so, drum roll, The Town of No Return and the beginning of series 4. And with it the arrival of Diana Rigg as Mrs Emma Peel, the story going that the new partner for Steed would have to have “man appeal” or M-appeal for short. Hence the name. She’s not the only new arrival … Read more
The United States launched the Echo 2 satellite on 25 January 1964, the day that the Mandrake episode of The Avengers aired. And though the week before’s outing, The Wringer, had been a very up-to-date affair, set in the world of international espionage and modern brainwashing techniques, Mandrake harks back to earlier episodes of the … Read more
There’s an opaque quality to Divine Love (Divino Amor), as there was with Gabriel Mascaro’s last film, Neon Bull. But, subject matter to one side, the big difference between them is that Neon Bull didn’t explain itself, whereas Divino Amor does, only in the film’s last third revealing that it hasn’t really been explaining itself … Read more
Radical is a good thing but there is a lot of it. An inspirational-teacher drama, it’s a dramatisation of events that took place in 2012. Those events became the basis of a 2013 Wired article written by Joshua Davis, this film’s producer. And from there ten years ago to this film in 2023. Meanwhile, the … Read more