Bill Camp

How to Make a Killing

by
Becket with a bow and arrow

Not to be confused with a 2024 French black comedy also with the title How to Make a Killing (in English at least), this is the one from 2026 starring Glen Powell that’s a remake of 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets. It is, you know, OK, demonstrating (yet again) how good those Ealing chaps were at cranking out superficially slight comedies containing a concealed stiletto. Director/adapter John Patton Ford updates things to the 21st century, where little Becket Redfellow (Powell as an adult, Grady Wilson as a kid) is born into a wealthy family but is kicked out of it when his mother marries beneath her. Having grown up broke, and having promised … Read more

The Burial

by
Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx sitting on some stairs

A movie called The Burial that buries its main story – it sounds like some kind of meta-joke. But it isn’t. Whether the strategy works is the real question though. The story was first told in the New Yorker and relayed what happened to a real-life Mississippi guy called O’Keefe whose struggling funeral-home business was offered a buyout in the mid-1990s by the Loewen company, a megacorp specialising in burials and, more importantly (it turns out), burial insurance. O’Keefe and Loewen agreed a deal in principle but then the trail went cold. Eventually, convinced that Loewen were sitting on their hands until he went bust, so it could buy him out for cents … Read more