Carrie Coon

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

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Phoobe fires the Ecto-1 gun

There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Patty Tolan and Kate McKinnon. It just wasn’t funny or scary. They never are, scary I mean, the Ghostbusters films. That’s not really the point. The idea is to deliver lots of likeable knockabout camaraderie and good vibes, which is what Afterlife does, liberally scattering easter eggs referring back to one of the original two movies, but not … Read more

Lake George

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Phyllis and Don

Neo noir of a particularly minimal sort, Lake George gets better the longer it’s up there on the screen, and by the time it’s hitting its closing scenes it’s almost in a zen state. It’s largely a two-hander centred on two actors who are generally more support players than leads. Shea Whigham, brilliant in any number of other films (Eileen, Fast & Furious 9, Joker) and Carrie Coon (The Nest, Widows and a couple of Avengers movies, as Proxima Midnight). He’s the jailbird just out after a ten-year stretch. An accidental jailbird, it transpires, who made a complete mess of a job for a Mr Big called Armen and yet still wants to … Read more

The Nest

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Allison and Rory in the Elizabethan manor

Suddenly Ingmar Bergman seems to be fashionable again. Just last week I watched Black Bear, a film with a hint of Bergman’s Persona. Now, in The Nest, there’s touches of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Which means that if you’re looking for fireworks, you’ve come to the wrong film. The Nest is a journey into dark psychological territory so muted that it would be easy to miss what’s going on. On the surface things look pretty peachy – Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is a successful trader who’s moved his family from New York back to the UK, where Rory has used his huge Wall Street bonanza to rent a massive Elizabethan mansion – … Read more