Reviews
Writer/director Alexandre Rockwell’s Sweet Thing is his 11th film in about 40 years and is a small-scale affair, as you might expect from an indie mainstay, crewed largely by students on the NYU film course he teaches and starring his own family and long-time collaborators. It’s the story of bright teenage girl Billie (Rockwell’s daughter … Read more
The TV show American Horror Story is probably partly responsible for Damian McCarthy’s Oddity, a horror movie that cuts through the subgenres with a cackle. AHS does it season by season, but McCarthy is doing it all in one compendious film, a bit of 1970s here, some 1930s there, a hint of silent-era horror even, … Read more
On absolutely no account to be confused with Sometimes Always Never, a dazzling tiny film starring Bill Nighy and written by the brilliant Frank Cottrell Boyce, Never Rarely Sometimes Always does actually share a couple of things with its near namesake – it’s a drama driven by relationships between people and has great performances by … Read more
Write what you know, they say. Les Pires (The Worst Ones in English) is the debut movie by two former casting directors, Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, telling the story of what happens when a film company comes to your disadvantaged part of town, picks your sorry ass out of a heap of fellow nobodies … Read more
Todd Haynes loves Douglas Sirk but with May December he takes on a love-across-the-divide tale even Sirk might struggle with. The story is loosely based on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, the case of a 34-year-old teacher and her inappropriate sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy. In this retelling, the teacher was the 36-year-old Gracie … Read more
Thanks to Normal People, the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s best-seller, for a while Paul Mescal was one of the most famous actors in the UK, and further afield. The world, as the Brits like to say, was his lobster. So it’s nice to see him lending his name to Aftersun, a debut movie by … Read more
A young woman whose soldier boyfriend has just dumped her goes out for a drink with a known “wolf”. Drunk and vulnerable, she then heads back to his place, where, he tells her, there’s a party going down, only to discover that the party consists of just her and him. The next morning the very … Read more
It’s only towards the end of The Executioner (El Verdugo) that it becomes really obvious what writer/director Luis García Berlanga is up to. Released in 1963 during the Franco era in Spain, when to criticise the regime was to court disaster, it looks to all intents and purposes like a light comedy, maybe like Italian … Read more
The Man in the Hat is a weird whimsical hybrid: a homage to Jacques Tati and a semi-musical travelogue in a fantasy version of France. In The Man in a Hat‘s France there is no fast food, no Japanese cars, no smartphones. The car The Man drives is a Fiat 500, the original, tiny, tin-boxy … Read more
It’s not every fantasy film that comes complete with a scene of a brutal fascist captain sewing his own face up, but that’s what you get in Guillermo Del Toro’s best film since The Devil’s Backbone (better, certainly, than Blade II and Hellboy). It’s a dark fantasy reminding us that the Grimm brothers’ original tales … Read more
Though Erich Kästner’s 1929 novel has never been out of print, this first of many adaptations of Emil and the Detectives is chiefly remembered these days as a vehicle for Billy (here billed as Billie) Wilder. He’s the only writer listed on screen, though the IMDb includes Kästner himself as well as Emerich Pressburger as … Read more
One of those pre-Code 1930s comedies that comes wrapped in an aura, Design for Living can’t live up to the sell. It’s not funny, though there is the odd smirk, nor perceptive, unless a comedy about the fickleness of women is what you’re after The aura comes virtue of the boys in the backroom. Noel … Read more