Popular Reviews

Till Death

Till Death isn’t much of a film for irony but the title, recalling the “till death us do part” line from the wedding vows, is rich in it. Megan Fox plays the straying wife whose husband decides to take an exquisite form of revenge, one which winds up with her shackled to a dead corpse in a remote holiday home that’s been cleaned of every utensil, tool or scrap of anything that might serve as a key. There’s no parting here. And that’s the setup – Emma (Fox) in her ivory silk underwear and covered in blood and bits of the dead man’s brain, with no working phone line, her mobile phone dunked … Read more

Clemency

We’ve all seen prison dramas – the tough lives of inmates in a heartless system patrolled by brutes, policed by sadists and presided over by a martinet. Clemency isn’t that sort of film. Nor is it film-as-entertainment, be warned, but a grim and sobering look at US prison life from an unusual angle, the warden’s. Opening up with a pre-credits scene that follows an execution on death row, which ends up being a botched, messy and gruelling one, for the man who’s being killed, the people watching and the warden supervising the whole thing, the film proper then concerns itself with the preparations for the execution of another man, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) … Read more

I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians

In I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (originally Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari), Romanian auteur Radu Jude takes on the his country’s treatment of the Jews in the Second World War, as part of Hitler’s Final Solution. The title comes from a speech made by Romanian leader Ion Antonescu in 1941, which effectively initiated the campaign of mass murder on the Eastern Front. Romania was allied with the Nazis at the time. Ioana Iacob stars as a stand-in for Jude, playing Mariana, a Romanian director attempting to put on a show about Romanian wartime atrocities and getting pushback at every turn. Researching … Read more

Angst

Angst is director Gerald Kargl’s only film. But what a film! Grim, depressing, formidably unsettling, it is the psychopath-killer movie the others want to be. Gaspar Noë watched it repeatedly before borrowing bits for his Irreversible, Kargl’s fellow Austrian Michael Haneke surely studied it before he embarked on Funny Games. There’s clear evidence of it in Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove. More recently, Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature – another disturbing shocker – openly acknowledged the debt. Angst is the full-strength hit, though, so full-strength in fact that the film got banned outright in some places when it came out in 1983, and where it wasn’t banned it was barely shown. Perhaps most … Read more

The Lure

So how about a horror movie featuring sexy mermaids who become disco singers in 1980s Poland? The Lure (Córki dancingu) is the film you’re after, so grabby as a concept that it went straight into the Criterion Collection after its release in 2015, which isn’t bad considering that’s where Kurosawa, Truffaut, Bergman and Claire Denis all hang out together. In the words of Criterion, this is where “important classic and contemporary films” are to be found. It’s also not bad for a debut feature, by Agnieszka Smoczyńska, who’s recently grabbed more attention with her The Silent Twins, another story of two isolated sisters leaning on each other for support. But not like this. … Read more

Trainspotting

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 September Irvine Welsh born, 1958 On this day in 1958, in Leith, Edinburgh, Irvine Welsh was born. Or was he? After a police arrest in 1996, just after fame had hit him like a heroin rush, the police revealed that he was in fact seven years older, so born in 1951. Or 1961, if the BBC’s Writing Scotland website is to be believed. But 1958 is what the author maintains (I say “maintains” though his own website is silent on the subject), so let’s stick with that. After growing up in nearby Muirhouse, Welsh moved to London in the late … Read more

Carolina Caroline

If you’re not familiar with the work of Adam Rehmeier, he made the harrowing The Bunny Game as a feature debut, later following up with Dinner in America, another distinctive, idiosyncratic film. Carolina Caroline is neither of those, in mood or intention. Instead it is a down-the-line crime drama seemingly designed to show Hollywood that Rehmeier can play quirk-free. It’s a Bonnie and Clyde kind of thing, with the emphasis firmly on the female party, a smart, hot young woman in a small nowhere town who one day realises a grift is taking place under her nose – a passing motorist is pulling it on the owner of the gas station where she works. … Read more

Pleasure

If you want porn, there’s Pornhub, if you want a frank, unapologetic drama about the porn industry, try Pleasure, a Star Is Born (or not) story of a 19-year-old Swedish blow-in trying to make it in LA. Cocks and pussies are not prominent, in other words, though there are enough of them to convince us that director Ninja Thyberg has done her homework (she spent months gaining the trust of people in the biz), and in any case this is the story of wide-eyed, fresh-faced Bella trying to become a “star” rather than just a regular porn actor. Coercion and consent are what this is really about, though, and Pleasure hints at the … Read more

Cold November

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 to avoid the charge that it’s a screed on behalf of some gun lobby. So hard, in fact that it could be accused of protesting a touch too much. This is a nice family – a sassy, funny matriarch (Mary Kay Fortier-Spalding), her open, warm daughters and a helpful manly husband (played by writer/director Karl Jacob), with Florence … Read more

Saltburn

The music in Saltburn tells you a lot of what you need to know about the movie. Starting with Zadok the Priest and ending with Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Murder on the Dancefloor, this is a big, gaudy, fun switchback that surely would have been made in Technicolor if the process was still about. A superheated noirish romp is what you get either way. The plot is simple but it plays with expectations about who exactly is zooming who. Poor little rich boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) befriends poor little poor boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) at Oxford University, where Felix is a student as if by right and scholarship boy Oliver is there on … Read more

The Spectacular Now

Feeling, looking, sounding like a very dark John Hughes film (Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller period), The Spectacular Now also has in Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley exactly the sort of actors Hughes might have cast – not the prettiest, but the most personable, the most “relatable” as we now say. It’s Teller’s first starring role, after standing out in a series of supporting roles, notably adding a gloss to the comedy 21 & Over that the sub-standard joke writing certainly wasn’t delivering. And at first sight he’s playing a similar kind of character, the bright funny jock. Except this isn’t the successful jock the movies encourage us to pity – because of their muscular … Read more

The Naked Gun

Manslaughter mispronounced as “man’s laughter” – by a cop! I laughed, so shoot me with a service pistol. The Naked Gun, back after nearly 30 years and with Liam Neeson now playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the cop originally played by Leslie Nielsen, is funny. Not, perhaps, as funny as the original, but it made me chortle a few times, groan quite a few more, plus there was a reference to that beaver joke originally cranked out by Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in one of the earlier films. Can any more be necessary? A plot, for instance? No, it’s entirely unnecessary, and the writers – Akiva Schaffer (who directs), Doug Mand and … Read more