Nino

Nino, isolated in a crowd

The weepy illness movie is a potentially irksome beast. It’s just too easy to stick a sick person on screen and ask us to pity them. Nino doesn’t play it that way. The film follows a diffident young man from the moment he receives a diagnosis of throat cancer over the long weekend leading up to his first dose of (emergency) chemo. And then leaves him. Should we pity Nino (Théodore Pellerin)? Does he somehow deserve what’s happened to him? Director and co-writer Pauline Loquès sets us a challenge as she challenges her subject – a closed-off dude who receives the bad news on his 29th birthday (tellingly, he doesn’t correct the doctor … Read more

Lurker

Matthew close up

A knuckle-chewing debut by Alex Russell, Lurker updates All About Eve for the Instagram era, looking on with a raised eyebrow as a nobody gets whisked up into the entourage of a big music star, finds he likes it and then hangs on for grim life when the beast tries to spit him out. It’s a brilliant portrait both of needy, paranoid fan worship and of needy, paranoid stardom – both parties require constant reinforcement, though only one of them can be open about it. Théodore Pellerin plays the nobody, a guy working in a clothes shop in LA when big star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) and crew bowl in one day to browse. … Read more