Reviews
A treatise on order and chaos, propriety and lust, hidden inside the convoluted, if a bit TV-ish, story of Meneer Chrome (Ewan McGregor), an 18th-century Dutch (or is he?) landscape gardener. Chrome has been employed to refashion and tame the herbaceous borders of bumptious self-made Thomas Smithers (Pete Postlethwaite) and in the process bankrupt him and … Read more
’Ohana is the Hawaiian concept of family or home and in Finding ’Ohana a couple of ethnically Hawaiian New York brats discover its true meaning back “home” in Oahu. They’re looking for something else: lost pirate treasure which, according to an old journal belonging to their grandpa Kimo (Branscombe Richmond), can be found by following … Read more
Talking about films that crashed on the rocks of high expectations, here’s Don’t Worry Darling, a Stepford Wives/Total Recall hybrid hotly anticipated because it was a) the directorial follow-up to Booksmart for Olivia Wilde, b) because it starred Florence Pugh, whose career since debuting in Carol Morley’s Falling in 2014 has been a series of … Read more
Yi Yi was the last feature film Edward Yang made. He died in 2007, of cancer of the colon, seven years after this, his most popular, most successful, most widely praised film, which is itself, appropriately, all about transitions from one life phase to another. Yang was one of the key players in the Taiwanese … Read more
A nasty-ass neo-noir, Zola is based on the true story of Detroit dancer and waitress A’Ziah King, Zola to her friends. Over 148 tweets written in a clear and vivid prose style she laid out how her new stripper friend Stefani had tricked her into taking a job as a prostitute. Tweet one starts, “Y’all … Read more
Modern film-makers could learn a lot from Bride of Frankenstein and its illustrious predecessor, 1931’s original Frankenstein, not least how to tell a story at speed. And the amazing thing is that director James Whale took the finished cut of his sequel, a tight 90 minutes, and took a further 15 minutes out of it … Read more
A woman wakes up in the night to find her husband bolt upright in bed talking in his sleep. “Someone is inside,” he says, before sparking back out again. The next day she asks him about what he said the night before. It was a line from a script I’ve been reading, her actor-husband tells … Read more
Thirty years on, a pointless remake of the film that put quite a few bums on seats in 1976. Back then Gregory Peck was playing the American diplomat slowly realising he’s bringing up the spawn of Satan, and Lee Remick (an expert in lip-tightening panic) was the wife. This time Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles … Read more
Advancing on greatness by stealth, writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur Terre) isn’t all the way there, and he throws away a lot of goodwill towards the end, but the great stuff really is great, and his movie is bold and unusual too. It also features a star with one of … Read more
John Frankenheimer’s Seconds could almost serve as an emotional template for Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, made two years later in 1968, though Frankenheimer is working in black and white and brings much more of the live TV aesthetic to bear on his cool, highly influential horror movie – Face/Off, Total Recall and The Wicker Man also … Read more
Like a lot of Lena Dunham’s work, Sharp Stick is a quirky dramedy set among the delusional and self-obsessed. With its strong autobiographical element it sits neatly alongside her early web series Delusional Downtown Divas (which kind of says it all), her breakthrough movie Tiny Furniture, and her TV show Girls. Dunham appears in it, … Read more
The revisionist western par excellence, Devil’s Doorway is the story of the despicable white man stealing the land off the noble American Indian and then getting nasty when the Indian objects. It stars Robert Taylor as Broken Lance, a Shoshone Indian known as Lance Powell while serving in the US Army, where he won a … Read more