Chiwetel Ejiofor

Backrooms

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A horribly distorted Clark in pirate attire

It’s notable that both Kane Parsons, who directed Backrooms, and Curry Barker, of Obsession fame, started their film-making careers on YouTube making scary shorts. They’ve both come up with what are often described as the best horror movies of the year. In the case of Obsession that’s clearly true: there’s much screaming, ick and yuk. But what about Backrooms, and its psychologically chilly commentary on the bleakness of everyday existence in the urban environment? Parsons says he was majorly influenced by the video game Portal, and his intro – a first person “player” running around a puzzle-platform scenario – makes that obvious. We’re inside a vast empty succession of empty rooms with a … Read more

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

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Leo Woodall, Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Bridget Jones Calls It a Day might have been a better title, but Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy it is, a final trot around the paddock for Renée Zellweger and most of the familiar faces from the previous three films, plus a few new ones. Instant verdict: not bad. Definitely better than BJ2, but then that isn’t hard. Set in that Richard Curtis Cinematic Universe – a cosy well-to-do London beyond the imagination of most of its residents – it’s a genial, good-natured and ultimately rather rueful farewell which picks up the action with near-shut-in Bridget mourning the death of her husband (Colin Firth, who does a couple of ghostly cameos). The story then … Read more

Dirty Pretty Things

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French cinema poster for Dirty Pretty Things

Seventeen years after he made My Beautiful Laundrette,  Stephen Frears washes London’s dirty laundry again. Dirty Pretty Things is an ambitious, worthwhile drama digging into the spoil heap of the capital’s invisible underclass. And if that sounds about as glamourous and interesting as council housing, it is – until its hero, Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a human heart in a hotel toilet. Okwe is a Nigerian doctor exiled in a London that tolerates him just so long as he keeps his head down. By day he’s a minicab driver, doing the odd bit of illegal prescribing to keep his fellow drivers clear of the clap they’re transmitting to each other like a relay baton. … Read more