Film
Fool's Paradise review - unfunny stab at making fun of HollywoodTuesday, 29 August 2023
It must have looked like a funny idea on paper: a mute innocent stumbles into a Hollywood career, is mindlessly fêted by the industry and throws all its idiocies into stark relief. It’s an idea as old as the romances of Chretien de Troyes and... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: GothicTuesday, 29 August 2023
Ken Russell’s horror comedy Gothic (1986) compresses into one nightmarish night the fabled three days in June 1816 when Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) entertained at his retreat Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva his fellow Romantic poet... Read more... |
Mob Land review - familiar pulp fictionSaturday, 26 August 2023
Optimistically billed as John Travolta’s comeback, writer-director Nicholas Maggio’s debut is an effective Southern noir, with Travolta an authoritative but peripheral presence.Mob Land is mostly about Shelby Connors (Shiloh Fernandez), a small-town... Read more... |
Scrapper review - home alone, but then Dad turns upFriday, 25 August 2023
It’s the summer holidays, and though Georgie (Lola Campbell) is only 12, she’s managing to keep her council house looking just the way her mum liked it. There may be a few spiders hanging around but they have names and personalities and there’s food... Read more... |
The Red Shoes: Next Step review - teen dancer's crisisFriday, 25 August 2023
Fans of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's timeless classic The Red Shoes shouldn’t rush to The Red Shoes: Next Step expecting a sequel. This sentimental Australian teen drama is more of a step-change than a follow-up.At least its American... Read more... |
The Innocent review - muddled French crime comedyThursday, 24 August 2023
Thespians and thieves have often pooled their resources in movies, notably in the work of Woody Allen. Since acting is basically a form of lying, goes the joke, actors dine at the same Runyon-esque table as people who nick stuff, and this French... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Thieves Like UsTuesday, 22 August 2023
Thieves Like Us, Robert Altman’s 1974 evocation of 1930s Mississippi, wasn’t a commercial hit on its original release, even though Pauline Kael called it a masterpiece.This Depression-era tale of a trio of hapless bank-robbers was shot on... Read more... |
Blue Beetle review - radical rehashSunday, 20 August 2023
Blue Beetle is DC’s first screen Latino superhero, a recent development in the history of a D-grade character summed up here in his own film as “like the Flash… or Superman… but not as good”. Scraping the character barrel and first meant for cable,... Read more... |
Lie With Me review - a bittersweet enchantmentFriday, 18 August 2023
The English title of Olivier Peyon’s new movie is a rather hackneyed pun that not only doesn’t work in the original language but also manages to convey exactly the wrong meaning. Arrête avec tes Mensonges is a faintly Almodóvarian love story about... Read more... |
Afire review - a moral reckoning by the BalticWednesday, 16 August 2023
Experts in irony tend to see life as faintly absurd, relatively meaningless and usually circular. They’re too self-aware to be neurotic and live life in short bursts, letting out little private snorts of dry, amused exasperation at frequent... Read more... |
Blu-ray: EarwigTuesday, 15 August 2023
Even more than David Lynch, to whom her work has been compared, director Lucile Hadžihalilović is a strange agent between this world and the dreamworld.From her debut feature, Innocence, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s symbolist novel about pre-... Read more... |
Haunted Mansion review - corporate craftSaturday, 12 August 2023
A Disney theme park ride adaptation remake is a challenging place to make your mark, and the dumping of Guillermo del Toro for promising real, supposedly child-freaking scares dampens hopes further. Replacement director Justin Simien (Dear White... Read more... |
