Сообщения

American Fiction review – wry literary satire is a mixed bag

Изображение
A s the old saying goes, there are really no great movies whose title consists of two words, the first of which is “American”. There are some decent ones. There are, in fact, some very decent ones. But there’s something about this oft-employed title structure which is destined to prevent any film upon which it is adorned from attaining true, untrammelled greatness. There’s no science behind it, but one might hazard that it denotes an attempt by the makers of the film to offer a grand gesture aimed not just at a small pocket of American society, but one that applies to everyone. Maybe the formulation doesn’t work because it suggests scuppered hubris – a lofty ambition that’s not met. When you’re stating that the lessons in the film you’ve made apply to everyone, you’re setting yourself up for a fall. American Fiction is Cord Jefferson’s plucky entry into this cursed canon, and it is based on the 2001 satirical novel Erasure by the great author and academic, Percival Everett. One of ...
Отправить комментарий
Далее...

Thelma – first-look review

A t 93 years old, Thelma Post (June Squibb) remains fiercely independent, living in the California home she shared with her late husband despite her family’s concerns that she’s too frail to be on her own. Her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) has more faith in her – maybe because she’s the only one who seems to have any faith in him – and visits regularly, helping Thelma learn how to use her computer and filling her in on how things are going with his ex-girlfriend. But one morning, Thelma gets a frantic phone call from someone claiming to be Danny, explaining he’s been in a car accident and needs her to bail him out of jail. Sweet Thelma springs into action to help her grandson and promptly posts $10,000 to a PO box…only for it to transpire that Danny was fast asleep in bed, and Thelma has been the victim of a particularly insidious phone scam. When the police are indifferent to Thelma’s plight, she refuses to take no for an answer, and sets out on a mission to reclaim what was tak...
Отправить комментарий
Далее...

The Zone of Interest review – a towering, awful masterwork

Изображение
O f all the creature comforts in her family’s home, Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) is most proud of the manicured gardens – she shows them off to her mother on a bright summer’s day, highlighting the vegetable patch, and the cheerful flowerbeds. There is even a modest swimming pool for their five children to play in. “This was a field three years ago,” she explains proudly. Beyond the boundary wall loom the chimneys of Auschwitz. Every so often, the sound of gunfire or screaming pierces the air. Hedwig does not seem to notice as she chatters pleasantly about her rural idyll. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, loosely inspired by Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, depicts a period of roughly one year in the lives of the Höss family, who lived next door to Auschwitz from May 1940 until September 1944. Their patriarch, Rudolf (played here by Christian Friedel) was the commander of the camp, responsible for the death of at least 1.1 million inmates, primarily Jewish people deported ...
Отправить комментарий
Далее...

Migration review – A sorely underpowered duck tale

Изображение
E veryone knows that Salt Bae is one of the most awful humans currently roaming the planet, and you’ll be happy to discover that the folks over at Illumination Animation Studios concur with that fact. A nameless, voiceless parody of Salt Bae turns up as the knife-wielding, indoor micro sunglasses-wearing antagonist in Migration, a light comic caper about a family of mallards (always referred to here as mallards, never ducks?) who accidentally migrate north for the winter and end up in New York City. The evil chef is introduced as someone who keeps a tropical macaw locked up in a very small cage, and he’s shown violently humiliating one of his sous chefs for what he construes to be an inferior plate of food. Yet rather than steak wrapped in gold leaf, duck à l’orange , that 70s classic, is the chef’s speciality, and he’s depicted fetishising a sharp carving blade in every shot he appears, either spinning it around his finger like a six-shooter, or scraping it along the crispy skin o...
Отправить комментарий
Далее...

Handling the Undead – first-look review

A grieving mother and grandfather attempt to go about their daily routine after the death of her young son. An elderly woman says goodbye to her recently deceased partner. A husband is devastated after his wife dies in car accident. These three narratives never quite converge, but all find their trajectories altered when a mysterious event reanimates the dead in Thea Hvistendahl’s debut feature. Adapted from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel of the same name (the author behind Let the Right One In and Border ), Hvistendahl’s take on the zombie genre deviates from the familiar with its glacial pace. The sparse script and sparing use of the typical violence associated with zombie movies are a refreshing change; we learn precious little about the characters on screen, which adds a growing uneasiness to the storytelling. Although it’s hinted that the phenomenon has awoken the dead across the city (and potentially the world) the story remains steadfastly focused on the three separate stor...
Отправить комментарий
Далее...

This Blessed Plot review – a rough-hewn Brit ghost story

Изображение
S ometimes the slovenly industrial mechanisms of traditional film production are just not the right fit for certain projects. British filmmaker Marc Issacs, known for his eccentric riffs on classical documentary form, heads out to the metaphysical wilds of Thaxted in Essex for his strange and intriguing new film, This Blessed Plot, which seeks to demolish certain truisms about that fragile line between objective reality and subjective performance. This is the story of softly-spoken Chinese filmmaker Lori (Yingge Lori Yang) who has travelled to Thaxted in search of a subject for her new work. When she encounters and converses with the ghost of Conrad le Despenser Noel, a socialist priest who died in 1942, she decides that it’s probably best she stick around and see what other spectral shenanigans that this sleepy burg has to offer. Soon after she meets Keith (Keith Martin), a rabid Arsenal football fan and long-time collector of signed trinkets. He invites her to his house to survey...
Отправить комментарий
Далее...

The Color Purple review – rides on its stellar performances

Изображение
T he cinema to broadway musical and then back to cinema pipeline is big news in Hollywood, CA, right now, with a glossy, toe-tapping new version of The Color Purple coming to our screens mere weeks after a movie musical update of highschool hit, Mean Girls, made its bow. It’s an understandable commercial gambit: instead of repackaging a beloved story or a robust franchise property, why not at least bring a fresh twist to the table? Yet in this instance, there’s something vital that’s been lost in translation, where the primal political power of Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has been subverted, diluted and, sadly, softened around the edges. There’s a lot to like in the film, and one would have to be exceptionally untalented to ruin the story outright, but an constantly oscillating tonal barometer doesn’t make this an easy one to love. The story consists of a wrenching, continent-straddling drama set at the turn of the 20th century in postbellum Georgia and focuses...
Отправить комментарий
Далее...