Allison Janney

Minions & Monsters

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One-eyed James behind a movie camera

You know a film’s struggled a bit when the end credits are the best bit of it. Minions & Monsters is a case in point, a collection of individually brilliant scenes in search of a plot, exemplified by those end credits, which are the one-damn-thing situation distilled. Does anyone not know who the Minions are? This is the third outing for the little yellow animated servants away from their master, despicable supervillain Gru, whose own Despicable Me franchise has racked up four iterations, all of them also featuring the Minions. So that’s seven movies in all. Remarkably, all of the Minion movies have been written by Brian Lynch, and Pierre Coffin has directed … Read more

Miss You, Love You

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Diane seen outdoors

How angry would you be if your life partner suddenly died and your son sent an employee along to help with the funeral, rather than turning up himself? That is the opening position of Miss You, Love You, an unusual two-hander running largely on bile. One of life’s great joys is watching Allison Janney playing righteously angry women and there’s plenty of that going on here. Furious Diane Patterson (Janney) on one side and meekly apologetic Jamie Simms (Andrew Rannells) on the other. The grieving wife and the office assistant, she needing help at this time… just not him. And Jamie there because he’s being paid to be, he’d probably rather be anywhere … Read more

To Leslie

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Leslie goes wild

There’s a real market for films showing the lower orders wallowing in a misery of their own making. To Leslie looks like the familiar offer – feckless blue-collar gal wins big on the lottery, then pisses it all away in a hedonistic splurge. The message of films like this, usually covert, is: leave money to those who already have it. Michael Morris’s film avoids a lot of the pitfalls of the genre by concentrating not on the fall but on the bounce along the bottom. He introduces Leslie (Andrea Riseborough) in archive local TV news footage, ecstatically receiving a gigantic lottery cheque and squealing in redneck excitement before he cuts to the present … Read more