Upgrade

Grey Trace

Leigh Whannell started as an actor, became a writer – of the horror franchise Saw and its sequels most notably – became a producer, then eventually a director. Upgrade is his second film behind the camera, having familiarised himself with the controls on Insidious: Chapter 3. Here he wears all the hats apart from the actor’s, in a film that’s attempting a genre blend – superhero origin meets detective thriller meets social commentary – in a techy story about a paraplegic guy who has his functions restored, upgraded even, after being implanted with a computer chip designed by a squillionaire tech mogul called Eron. Ahem. Upgrade was released in 2018, which was the … Read more

Human Capital

Quint and Drew face off

First-world and real-world problems collide in Human Capital, which started life as an American novel, became an Italian movie (Il capitale umano) in 2013 and then returned to the US in 2019 for this English-language version. How best to describe all three? Bonfire of the Vanities meets The Ice Storm will about do it. In other words a broad spectrum portrait of modern life, with a narrow focus critique of the elite at its core. It starts, as Bonfire of the Vanities did, with a car accident, and then plays and replays the story from the point of view of each of the characters involved. Not the same events, exactly, but a “how … Read more