Matt Smith

Caught Stealing

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Hank sitting on the ground alone

Mock-serious bad times in New York City. Scorsese did it memorably in After Hours, and 40 years later Darren Aronofsky has a go with Caught Stealing, a gonzo nightmare missing a certain something. Comedy, I think, or the right comedic tone at any rate. Anyway, on the upside there’s Austin Butler as a dude in the late 1990s who agrees to babysit his neighbour’s cat, not realising that punk Russ (Matt Smith) is on the wrong side of some scary people, who aren’t all that discriminating when it comes to monstering. Russ being away in London at his dad’s funeral, so he says, street hoodlums Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) and Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) have … Read more

Starve Acre

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Juliette stares at a wicker crib

Starve Acre starts out looking like it’s going to be a folk-horror reworking of The Amityville Horror, spooky house and all that. Then changes tack and appears to be attempting a folk-horror reworking of The Exorcist, possessed child and all that. Before finally settling down to tell a story about different ways of coping with grief. It’s a mood piece in many ways. So if you’ve pitched up looking for entertainment – boo scares, ghoulies, things going bump – park those expectations. Subterranean sounds and bleak visuals abound in this story set on the Yorkshire moors in the 1970s, where the modern, rational mindset meets the old ways and comes off second best. … Read more

Morbius

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Close up of Morbius's face

Is Morbius, Marvel’s tragic brooding vampire, a bad guy or good guy? The eponymous movie strings a line between two opposing conceptions of the same individual and hangs Jared Leto out to dry on it – here’s a character and a movie that’s indecisive in a deadly way. So, no, Twitter, it’s not the bad special effects or Leto’s Method acting, or anything else that’s really wrong with the film. The effects are good enough, Leto is good enough – in an “I wish I were Loki” kind of way – but everything in this film just kind of hangs, caught up on the writers’ fatal decision to be faithful to all of Morbius’s history. … Read more

His House

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Rial screaming

Let’s do a refugee drama, which no one wants to watch, as a haunted house movie, which everyone does. That’s the thinking behind His House, a canny mix of genres from writer/director Remi Weekes in his feature debut, which adds a further layer of originality by adding all sorts of weird African supernatural juju to the mix. This clever and atmospheric amalgam kicks off with a pair of refugees from the war in South Sudan being shown a house on a housing estate in shithole Britain. It’s loads better than the detention centre and so Bol (Sope Dirisu) and his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) cannot believe their luck. They move straight in. Of … Read more