Well, it looks ravishing. And everybody is excellent in it. And the Rezner & Ross score perfectly combines jazzy urgency with the menace of Hermann. So, why is it a little dull?
Ben Wheatley (not a director anyone could usually accuse of being dull) should have made a fever dream box of delights but it all feels like a Hallmark movie of the week rather than the revisionist Hitchcock melodrama anyone was hoping for.
Read More
ose Glass’ directorial debut, SAINT MAUD, which she also wrote, is superb. The weight of God, faith, doubt and the Devil are brought to bear on a vulnerable and disturbed, pious twenty-something nurse.
Read More
Darren Starr’s new series, EMILY IN PARIS, is lightweight and breezy, chock-full of clichés and with zero believability, yet entertaining and good to look at. Lily Collins is a young out-of-her-depth assistant, who has to go to Paris in lieu of her boss, played by Kate Walsh, to help an esteemed French marketing company with its social media campaigns.
Read More
I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS is Charlie Kaufman’s new film, on Netflix. It’s based on an elliptical, awkward novel by Iain Reid. Kaufman has turned in an elliptical, awkward film that is beautiful and extraordinary.
Read More
ENOLA HOLMES on Netflix is a treat! Delightful, whip smart, and carrying a lightness of touch that belies the hard work behind it.
Millie Bobby Brown and Helena Bonham Carter excel as the daughter and mother pulled apart by the politics of the times.
Read More
I’m feeling mixed about Ryan Murphy’s new series, RATCHED, based on the story of Nurse Ratched, as featured in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST.
Sarah Paulson lifts anything, we know this. But, Ryan and his team have created a series that is so shockingly heightened, any drama that ought to be rendered by this fascinating character’s backstory ends up being shorn of nuance because it tips too frequently into melodrama.
Read More
THE NEW MUTANTS. I rather enjoyed it. It got such poor reviews from critics and comics fans, my expectations were low, but if you can separate it from the comics and treat it as its own thing: a film that tries to give a contemporary X-Men story a Mike Flanagan horror treatment, then you can enjoy a half-decent low-key provisionally spooky movie that feels like a pilot episode for a Netflix series (which I’d happily watch).
Two excellent documentaries on Netflix, both trending at the moment. Both are the right length, one at sixteen minutes, one at thirty-nine; both are about friendship, obsession and drive, and finding what it is in the world that defines you.
Read More
THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON is a 2019 film about an illegal fisherman-thief, Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), and a young man with Down's syndrome, Zak (Zack Gottsagen), who go on the run together.
Read More
Does TENET need to make sense? I suspect that critics are not wanting to spoil the “Let’s Get People Back Into The Cinemas” drive of the film and so are choosing to celebrate its big-screen-ness instead. In other words, cutting the film-maker some slack.
Read More
Watching it, and succumbing to its beat and energy, you get a sense of American history being explored in a vital, compelling and contemporary way.
Read More
Will Ferrell’s EUROVISION SONG CONTEST: THE STORY OF FIRE SAGA for Netflix is lightweight breezy fun, a sketch masquerading as a movie, with Will being Will, often very funny but with an incredibly thin line separating the inspired and the abysmal
Read More
Neasa Hardiman’s SEA FEVER (2019) has just surfaced on Sky Cinema. It is most definitely worth watching.
Although the events of this Irish/Swedish Co-production - a crew in a fishing vessel get caught up in the tendrils of a giant sea creature which proceeds to infect them one-by-one - are inherently derivative, it is shot and designed by Hardiman in such a way as to pull you in and admire it.
It’s a bad title for a good film. In the UK, the title evokes the weak tea comedy of the Jack Whitehall sitcom and its spin-off movie; in the US, it aligns it with such films as BAD TEACHER or the BAD MOMS franchise. It is neither of those things, but it is a reminder that cinema marketeers no longer know how to sell or even describe a movie if it doesn’t slot into a genre, in other words if it falls simply into the category of “drama”.
Read More
MRS AMERICA is an extraordinary new FX/Hulu drama series starring Cate Blanchett about the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution (essentially equal rights for women) in the 1970s in the US. The series follows conservative activist Phyliss Schlafly, and this is what makes it interesting.
Read More
The bile and low scores (1/10s) directed at Armando Iannucci’s winningly fresh take on DAVID COPPERFIELD is mostly thinly disguised racism from idiots taking exception to the “colourblind” casting. Ianucci goes all in on this, casting actors for roles in his film without any regard to race or color.
Read More
If, like me, you love the idea of Aubrey Plaza playing CLEOPATRA and Will Ferrell finally getting to essay his FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER, then look no further than the U.S. series of DRUNK HISTORY. Six seasons to date. Each ep is twenty-one minutes long, with one or sometimes two drunken historian stories.
Read More
Oof... I lasted 1 hour and 23 minutes into Spike Lee’s DA FIVE BLOODS before baling out with over an hour to go. It just wasn’t good enough. The storytelling was derivative and ramshackle. The sub-titles annoying. The use of music appalling.
Read More
MIDDLEDITCH & SCHWARTZ is essentially three fifty-minute improv shows starring Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch and Parks & Rec's Ben Schwartz.
Read More