Popular Reviews
Scare Me
There are two interesting things going on in Scare Me, which looks at first glance (and probably deliberately) like a Stephen King-style horror story about a writer having a tough time of it out in a cabin in the woods. Director/writer Josh Ruben also plays struggling writer Fred, here to crank out a horror tale that’s meant to save him from his humdrum job in advertising, though he spends more time doing impressions of Jack Nicholson in The Shining than actually writing. Out for a run the next day, he meets Fanny (Aya Cash) who turns out only to be the hottest writer of horror fiction right now, her book Venus a runaway … Read more
Parallel
A different take on the multiverse movie, Parallel does it all with acting. Just three people in a clinically modern house in a forest: a husband, a wife and the husband’s brother. Think of Everything Everywhere All at Once or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you’re summoning frantically busy films with a huge array of characters. Here, none of that. But Parallel isn’t just a calm corrective to an exhausting genre but also a smart drama that stands up on its own terms. Instead of busy, here we have a film that’s cool, almost static at times, wordy, contemplative. Set in a chichi modern lake … Read more
The Vanished
The Vanished stars three names who used to keep casting directors’ phones busy. Anne Heche, Thomas Jane and Jason Patric all bring a useful intensity to an incredibly wayward kidnap drama written by Peter Facinelli, whose face you’ll probably know (from the Twilight films, or Supergirl or Nurse Jackie on TV) even if you don’t quite recognise the name. It’s a simple whodunit, in many ways, loaded up with paranoia, and kicking off in a trailer park that’s largely deserted, on account of it being Thanksgiving weekend, where married couple Wendy (Heche) and Paul (Jane) rock up in their RV with their daughter for a family camping weekend. What with the film being … Read more
Salute
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 April Martin Luther King assassinated, 1968 On this day in 1968, the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. He’d gone there to intervene in a strike of black sanitary public works employees, who were employed on zero-hours contracts, while their white counterparts were paid by the day, irrespective of hours worked. There had been a bomb threat against King’s plane en route and he was clearly expecting trouble. On 3 April, at Mason Temple, he delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech – “Like anybody, I would like to live a … Read more
D.O.A.
The opening scene of D.O.A. is so punchy and dramatic that it has to be up there on any best-ever list. A man walks into a police station, finds the homicide department and announces that there’s been a murder. “Who was murdered,” asks the homicide captain. “I was,” Frank Bigelow replies. The film ends on a humdinger, too, which in the circumstances is almost unnecessarily generous. In between, in flashback, we get the back story to that odd opening remark, one that doesn’t seem to have surprised the cops at all. Fate often deals bad cards to the leading characters in film noir. It’s particularly undeserved here, a tale of a small guy … Read more
The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain
The title is a bit of a giveaway but The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain does not end well for Kenneth Chamberlain, a 70-year-old former Marine with heart problems and mental health issues who, shortly after 5am one November morning in 2011 accidentally set off his medical alert pendant while he slept. Within two hours he was dead at the hands of the New York cops who had been sent to run a routine “welfare check” on a man they knew to be “emotionally disturbed and medically fragile”. It’s a true story, and many of the details of what we see in this fictionalised reconstruction are confirmed just before the end credits. Writer/director David … Read more
Causeway
Welcome back, Jennifer Lawrence, who as recently as 2015/16 was the world’s highest paid actress and in Causeway reminds us why. And perhaps needed to – so many films she’s appeared in since her high-water mark have been just a touch underwhelming. And welcome to the big time for Brian Tyree Henry. Oscar-nominated for his role here, he’s been impressive in everything he’s been in for years, but it was 2020’s The Outside Story that proved he could carry an entire movie on his own. In what’s largely a two-hander – it could almost be a play in a studio theatre – Lawrence plays a soldier suffering post-traumatic physical and mental trauma after … Read more
Alias Nick Beal
Also known as The Contact Man, Alias Nick Beal is the much better title of this unusual political allegory meets supernatural drama. The Nick is Old Nick and the Beal is short for Beelzebub. Got it? A retelling of the Faust story is the idea, with Ray Milland as the Mephistopheles stand-in and Thomas Mitchell as Joseph Foster (Foster/Faust, see?), a principled and upstanding district attorney determined to nail a career criminal who has been outsmarting him for years. I’d give my soul to get that guy, says Foster in so many words at one point. And that’s it – unbeknown even to himself the deal is done. So when he meets the … Read more
Wicked: For Good
We’re off to see the wizard – again – in Wicked: For Good, part two of the origin story of the bad and good witch, Elphaba and Glinda, from The Wizard of Oz. It remains fascinating politically – Glinda the Good is actually Glinda the Horribly Compromised. And the Wicked Witch turns out to be a creature of some backbone. Together Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo remain magnificent, the massiveness of Grande’s voice (out of such a wee body) matched by Erivo’s ability to project at the highest level. But, all in all, it’s just good, OK, fine, all the way through. If you’ve seen part one then you probably have to see … Read more
The Turin Horse
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 October Friedrich Nietzsche born, 1844 On this day in 1844, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Röcken, near Leipzig, Germany. A philologist initially, Nietzsche was a university professor at the age of 24, in Basel, where he counted Richard Wagner as one of his friends. Within ten years, because of a variety of illnesses, both mental and physical (one of which was possibly syphilis) Nietzsche resigned from Basel and took up life as an independent philosopher, choosing to spend his winters in warm southern European towns, such as Genoa, Nice and Turin. It was during this time that he … Read more
Boomerang!
Boomerang! – what a great movie. Fully justifying that screamer, this movie from 1947 doesn’t get the love it deserves. For two reasons, of which more later. But first let’s clear away the baggage. It’s not a film noir, though it’s often described as one. Instead it’s one of those “ripped from the headlines” crime dramas that came along a bit later, relying on “you are there” levels of authenticity to bolster its dramatic credentials. In a written preamble we’re told that not only was the film shot on the same locations as the events it relates, but it uses some of the same people. The first is not true. The real-life incidents … Read more
Roadrunner: a Film about Anthony Bourdain
As a film about a person never at ease with himself, Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain sketches a compelling if depressing picture – of a man who at first didn’t have it all and was unhappy, and then did have it all and was still unhappy. Bourdain died in 2018 and had been famous since his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential turned him into a celebrity at a global level. “It was literally overnight,” he remembers in archive footage. Roadrunner begins his story about there, barely touching on his years as a heroin addict, a vital piece of the Bourdain jigsaw. Merely alluding to the bookish child with a rebellious streak who’d wound … Read more
