Reviews
The family that slays together stays together is the surprisingly sweet message of this undoubtedly controversial film about a family’s hunting trip in the Minnesota woods. A rites-of-passage tale seen through the eyes of Florence (the rather talented Bijou Abas), a 12-year-old on holiday with her mother and grandmother, aunt and uncle, it works hard … Read more
One of those feelgood made-for-TV films that’s somehow managed to net a great cast as they were commuting between better paying jobs. I suspect that that’s because William H Macy is involved, David Mamet’s favourite actor being the star and the adapter of Donald Westlake’s novel about a film critic who kills his girlfriend by … Read more
Zach Cregger found his niche with Barbarians and double-whammies with Weapons, a horror movie so intensely focused on character that the horror could easily be removed and it would still work. Here they are, all these small townsfolk, warts and all, peccadilloes to spare. Julia Garner as Justine, the teacher of young kids who drinks … Read more
Not to be confused with a 2010 film by feminist pornographer Erika Lust with a very similar title, 2021’s Lust Life Love (NOT, I repeat NOT, Life Love Lust) has its own hold on raunch, being a grungey tale of a polyamorous New York woman whose hitherto free-and-easy glide through various sexual relationships in the … Read more
She couldn’t act, couldn’t sing and danced like a wardrobe but for a while Maria Montez was quite the thing. Cobra Woman is probably the best example of a string of successful movies she made in the 1940s, often with the likeable, four-square Jon Hall as her romantic co-lead, all of them exotic, bright, colourful … Read more
Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for literature for a body of autobiographical body of work charting her own life. The Super 8 Years is pretty much more of the same, except in filmic form. At its most basic and off-putting level it’s a “what I did on my holidays” narration over clips from a … Read more
Two things impelled me towards 2002’s Old Men in New Cars (Gamle Mænd i Nye Biler in the original Danish). The first was the quirky title, which has no real connection with anything that happens in the film. The second was the name Kim Bodnia at the top of the credits. You might know him … Read more
Existential girl Monica Vitti meets material boy Alain Delon in L’Eclisse (The Eclipse), the last of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Incommunicability” trilogy and by a stretch the easiest to watch. Whether this, L’Avventura and La Notte actually are thematically a trilogy at all is an argument best left for another day, but Antonioni didn’t see them that … Read more
The ceaselessly inventive new Netflix show, Bo Burnham: Inside is a comedy special making the most of the reduced fields of operations available during the pandemic. Burnham’s on his own. No audience. No crew. Just him and all the tech he can muster. If he didn’t inform us repeatedly, we wouldn’t guess. This is a … Read more
Gay – in the old sense – is probably the best way to describe 1931’s The Smiling Lieutenant, a blithe, smart, quick and gossipy comedy from director Ernst Lubitsch starring Maurice Chevalier as the military man in question. Chevalier, as French as they come and not making the slightest effort to hide it, plays a … Read more
Talking of twice, there are two good reasons why reviews of the movie The Postman Always Rings Twice almost invariably mention the book’s author, James M Cain. Cain’s name has no real resonance today, but his book was Fifty Shades of Grey shade of famous in 1934 and made a celebrity of the author. As … Read more
1966’s The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) is another great opportunity to indulge the guilty pleasure of watching a once-glam Hollywood goddess at the tail end of her career being relentlessly monstered in a down-market movie. Think Joan Crawford in Trog or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings. Here it’s Joan Fontaine getting the treatment, the … Read more
