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7.5
Amazon Prime Video (Purchase)
Well isn't this film just charming as all hell? Jack Nicholson as a prickly, frequently hospitalised, Viagra-swlling womaniser who learns the error of his ways? Check. Diane Keaton giving a sensationally empathetic performance as a confidence-lacking middle-aged playwright learning to love again? Big check. Supporting roles for a sassy, feminist Frances Mcdormand AND a hunky, ridiculously charming, post-THE MATRIX Keanu Reeves? Check check check (Jon Favreau is also in this movie for some reason)! Plus,…
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6
Disney+
Cinematic junk food: comforting, pleasurable in the moment, but ultimately a bit unsatisfying. In this regard, DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE's closest cousin is SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME; similarly to NO WAY HOME, after the initial surge of affection wears off nobody will remember much about this film in two years' time. And, oddly, "affection" is very much the by-word here: looking past the route one plotting, the weird tonal pivoting between self-aware parody and deeply serious melodrama, the obscenely lazy--…
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7.5
BFI Player
As someone who is most definitely over Wes Anderson's bullshit by this point, it was an absolute treat to go right back to the start of his career to be reminded of just what a charming filmmaker he once was. Because BOTTLE ROCKET is Anderson without the baggage, a fleet-footed, beautifully crafted, incredibly warm ode to friendship and small-town directionlessness. It is also really funny-- not in the "ha-ha didn't Bill Murray just say something droll whilst…
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★★★★½ Watched 26 Sep 2024
8
Blu Ray (4K) (Eureka)
The humour is broad and goofy, the story is pretty nonsensical, and the film's attitude toward due process and police brutality is unreconstructed at best. Women are also not especially well represented (despite Maggie Cheung's best efforts). So why 4.5 stars? One word: stunts. Quite simply, POLICE STORY is the CITIZEN KANE of practical stunt-work. It is outrageous what they put their bodies through in this. No CGI. No stunt doubles. Just a fuck-ton of…
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8
MUBI
A bit of a hidden gem this. THE DAY OF THE BEAST is a Christmas-set Spanish dark comedy-horror directed by Alex de la Iglesia, whose work I must admit I was not previously familiar with. It follows the adventures of (the rather appropriately named) Angel (a brilliant Alex Angulo, who may be familIar to audiences from PAN'S LABYRINTH), a priest and philosophy professor who comes to the conclusion that the Antichrist is going to be born on Christmas…
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6.5
Amazon Prime Video (Rental)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions in this pseudo-Hitchcockian thriller. Leonie Benesch is absolutely fantastic as a young teacher at a progressive yet overburdened school, who after making an accusation of theft against a colleague sets off a cascading sequence of events which soon threatens to snowball out of control. Backed by an impressively nerve-jangling, staccato string score which adds greatly to the sense of tension and tone of jittery paranoia, THE…
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7.5
Curzon Home Cinema (Rental)
Kore-eda's best film since SHOPLIFTERS, his usual humanist, deeply empathetic style marrying up perfectly with a clever (and Cannes award-winning) screenplay which, by visiting the same events from different perspectives, forces the audience to constantly revise their understanding of those events and re-assess what we thought we knew about the characters. Accordingly, the film transforms before our eyes from Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare to WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN-type social commentary to, finally, an immensely…
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★★★★½ Watched 26 May 2024
9
Blu Ray (Criterion)
Absolutely extraordinary. Sayles hooks the audience in with a classic neo-noir opening-- a mysterious skeleton found in the desert just outside a small town on the Mexican border-- but then proceeds to unfurl moving, sprawling narrative accompanied by a dense, literary (and Oscar-nominated) screenplay about our complex relationship to and with the past, both on a macro (the history of nations/states) and a micro (the relationship between father and son, mother and daughter) level. In part…
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7.5
Shudder
A dark and stormy night. A man sits apparently alone in his run-down mobile home, nursing a whiskey as well as a mysterious liquid in a vial. A mysterious woman turns up unannounced on his doorstep, begging to be given shelter from the storm. Who is she? Where did she come from? Why is she clearly lying about everything? And who is he, for that matter? Why is he living alone in such a squalid, seedy place? What…
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★★★★ Rewatched 26 Apr 2024
8
MUBI (Rewatch)
A beguiling shapeshifter of a film with a lovely visual panache-- the blood red of the protagonist's hoodie framed against the pure white snow will never not be an arresting aesthetic. The film functions not only as a loving and very clever homage to FARGO; it is also a study in loneliness, isolation and delusion as well as a consideration of the porous line between fiction and reality. It is also a culture-clash, east-meets-west road trip (of…
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6
Amazon Prime Video
Hmm. Expectations were high: I thought PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN was one of the best films of 2020. But on Emerald Fennell's follow-up... mixed thoughts.
On the one hand, Fennell's direction and Lindus Sandgren's cinematography is out of this world: this thing needs to win some of the technical awards at the Oscars. The perfectly mid-2000s needle drops are excellent, the acting even more so. Keoghan is surely in contention in awards season, a chameleon who morphs…
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★★★★½ Watched 01 Dec 2023
8.5
Blu Ray (Radiance- Cosa Nostra boxset)
A great start to this beautiful Radiance boxset. THE DAY OF THE OWL is sometimes lumped into the "Years of Lead" subgenre, however I understand that both the source material and the film itself in fact prefigured those troubled years about which those films are typically based. This context- with the film made during a time when the influence of the Mafia was not widely known or commented upon- makes THE DAY OF…
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