The Iron Claw

Kevin flies through the air towards an opponent in the ring

The family is a cult and the cult a family in the films of Sean Durkin. After Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, The Iron Claw continues Durkin’s excavations with a biopic of the Von Erichs, a famous wrestling clan whittled away by a tragic curse. After a quick black-and-white preamble sketching paterfamilias Fritz’s own career as a fighter who failed to win the big prizes, Durkin goes curtain-up on the era of the retired fighter’s sons, the sun-kissed 1970s and beyond. Fritz, now a ballsy uncompromising martinet of the old school, is in charge of training his boys and of the wrestling franchise they fight in. By this point the family … Read more

The Rental

Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, Dan Stevens and Jeremy Allen White

Take your pick – The Rental is a deliberately confounding amalgam of genres or a film that can’t work out what it wants to be. It starts out looking like one of those cabin in the woods things, and we meet two couples – Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Michelle (Alison Brie), Josh (Jeremy Allen White) and Mina (Sheila Vand) – as they’re arriving at a secluded and fabulous place by the coast, complete with ocean view and hot tub. They also have a dog in tow, which the rules of the rental explicitly forbid. But they’re entitled ā€œwhite privilegeā€ kind of guys and so those rules don’t apply. Actually, one of them, Mina, isn’t white … Read more