Luis Buñuel directs Paul Frankeur, Laurent Terzieff and Edith Scob in this art house film where two tramping French pilgrims travel through time and reality visiting various discussions and incidents of religious dogma on their way to Spain.
“That would be an ecumenical matter.” A clip show of shit you don’t care about. Most of the skits or quandaries presented go on for an achingly long time after they have made their point. And the point rarely is to be anything more than pretentiously self-satisfied.
John Lee Hancock directs Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson and Kathy Bates in this Great Depression era true story about the retired Texas Rangers employed to hunt down Bonnie and Clyde.
You pair one of my favourite movie stars with one of my favourite character actors and my expectations are set very high. And for the first hour of character introductions and creakily getting back on the road The Highwaymen satisfies in a low key way. It looks right for its setting and Costner and Harrelson form a natural acting partnership, whether silently mourning their lost youth or snarking with each other over sandwiches on a stakeout. There’s a lovely extended scene where Costner meets Clyde Barrow’s father (played by William Sadler) that just sits in the mix like a ghost from a superior film. Maudlin bonhomie will only take us so far though. Plot-wise we get stuck in a rut. While the demise of the infamous criminals in known to us from classic films past, who knew their downfall was so drawn out and unfocused? There’s no grip to the chase, no pulse quickening once the net closes, no sense of approaching finality until the shoot out… just happens. And then just regret again. Regret does not an entertainment make.
Daniel Espinosa directs Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman and Noomi Rapace in this period thriller about child murders, jealous secret police leaders and a subversive marriage in Stalin’s Russia.
Great Lenin’s Ghost! Just stick to one plot and let it breathe. There’s at least three here fighting for oxygen, all of them stillborn by the end credits. Great cast, solid production values, hokey accents, average film.
Richard Donner directs Sean Astin, Josh Brolin and Corey Feldman in this classic kids search for pirate treasure comedy actioner.
No chickenshit distributor bothered to release a wide movie in the build up to Avengers: Endgame so The Goonies got a nationwide big screen airing the weekend before. And it was a glorious revival . Hard to believe but I was too young to see this at the cinema back in the days (And yet parents will take their toddlers to the apocalyptic monster massacres that will happen in the superhero tentpoles…) This is just goofy kids larking… making jokes, screaming in the face of danger, being overawed by the latest piece of still impressive production design. Donner does something really clever with his foul mouthed, fresh faced heroes. He lets them have moments where they can just riff, be kids and be excited. You can tell in four or five scenes he just showed the ensemble something (the Fratellis disposing of bodies, a booby trapped skeleton, a full scale pirate ship in a secret cave) and let them just react naturally as a group. Their unbridled juvenile wonder powers the film as much as any scripted banter or special effects. And the best at this is Sean Astin… he is adorably earnest throughout. It is a magical, inviting child performance. There’s great stuff barely focussed on in The Goonies; the Spielbergian use of light, a monster truck race hijacked in the opening credits and then forgotten about, the pleasing pairing of Feldman and Martha Plimpton. It is packed with silly, fun doings. Some bits have dated… Sloth now seems in far worst taste than he did then… his relationship with Chunk doesn’t feel quite so loveable through adult eyes. Then we have Andi’s impractically short mini skirt and that missing octopus. What Octopus, Data? WHAT FUCKING OCTOPUS?! It is almost a shame YouTube has ruined the mystery. All in all this is endlessly rewatchable entertainment. We were all Goonies watching this. From a lost time when a family film had relatable kid protagonists rather than robo-suited billionaires and indestructible meta-mutants. Though Shazam! And Spider-Verse might just nudge the scales back into balance.
Neil Jordan directs Isabelle Huppert, Chloë Grace Moretz and Maika Monroe in this stalker thriller where a nice girl befriends the wrong lonely lady.
This is exactly what I want from a Friday night thriller. Stock female roles given quirk by gifted actresses. All three leads are stellar. Moretz has a sweetness – her appealing normal body and doll like face selling the paranoia and peril. Monroe nails the bad girl best friend role… you count the minutes until her fodderish death… then something else, something not quite so cliched happens with her. And Huppert can do these unhinged witch parts in her sleep. Watching her skip out a little ballet after a murder or calmly injecting a spurting wound is nowhere near as creepy as her turning up at your restaurant and dissing the wine list. Jordan’s visuals are lush, he even gets to evoke his fairy tale back catalogue… this NYC set rattler owes as much to Little Red Riding Hood as his breakthrough In the Company of Wolves did 35 years ago. A tight little throwback.
Wolfgang Petersen directs Brad Pitt, Brian Cox and Eric Bana in this epic yet truncated retelling of Homer’s The Iliad.
Golden yet lifeless. Big yet distracted. First time I watched this at the cinema I couldn’t get my head around Brad Pitt’s torso. I was definite it had been CGI’d on. This time I got the Classics degree commentary track treatment from my wife. I know all the changes to the text now… which Gods are missing… which battles lasted ten years rather than four minutes. I feel so educated, I also feel like I wanna watch Clash of the Titans instead. Orlando Bloom is a pussyhole in this… all this massacring, thousand ships trouble because he was a pussyhole. You have problems when the only sympathetic character in your entire production of hundreds is played by Rose Byrne. A hit in its day I guess this is only really of interest now as the forerunner to Game of Thrones. The same writing team reworked George R R Martin’s series of books the way they adapted Homer here. A soapy concoction of stoic duty, rapes, face-offs, plotting tyrants and pretty boy swooning.
Jonah Hill directs Sunny Suljic, Olan Prenatt and Na-kel Smith in this teen drama about an awkward kid becoming accepted by a group of skaters.
Yeah, this got me. Not the funniest, nor most intellectual teen movie made yet it hits a seam of truth beautifully and works that seam gloriously for its easy to digest running time. Hill captures all the doubt, hurt and conflict of trying to fit in with kids who don’t know who they are when you definitely don’t know who you are. These kids are united by skating… the drinking and the hanging out are what convince though. Hill gives us the tribal joy of rolling down a street lane together, the pain of realising how difficult it is for kids to articulate jealousy and loneliness. We get glimpses of alcoholism, self harm and poverty… not in an afterschool special finger wagging way… just to add to the reality. There’s a melancholy that overrides the nostalgia, a foul mouthed inarticulacy that smothers any scripted wit. It is film that will make you laugh out loud, wish you were there, wish you weren’t. It might well be the Dazed and Confused for this generation. It might well be almost as fine a piece of filmmaking as that genre pinnacle.
Vincenzo Natali directs Nicole de Boer, Maurice Dean Wint and David Hewlett in this sci-fi puzzler where a group of strangers wake up in a geometric cell maze full of booby traps.
Proof that great sci-fi cinema can make its limitations its core strength. Natali recycles the same set over and over, making it seem like an endless existential curse. Our leads have to decide which of six hatches to climb through next… is the next room safe? Does it lead anywhere? Do any of them lead anywhere? The cube design is rich… industrial yet functional. The screech and clanks of the hatches plus the iconic glowing wall panels all add to the oppression yet also embellish a rich fantasy setting. Sure the cast are basic, but they get across the escalating tensions and theories of exposition adequately enough. It makes for a tense, jerkingly gory thriller, one that is enjoyably rewatchable despite its singular set. Neat.
Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer direct Jason Clarke, John Lithgow and Sonia Maria Chirila in this remake of the Stephen King tale about a family who moves onto land with the unholy powers of resurrection.
A vast improvement on the first godawful stab at adapting this King bestseller. It is creepier, superior in its acting talent and playful in it twisty tweaks especially in the final third. That’s still not to say this update is entirely worthwhile. It is a story whose horrors lie in the imagination of the reader and visualising the revulsion and moral turmoil of its players will never have the same effect as what is left unshown in the book. Many King novels lend themselves to cinema, it is probably time to accept Pet Sematary is just not one of them.
Drake Doremus directs Felicity Jones, Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence in this romance about a couple, clearly in love, separated by immigration laws.
Directed so as to be a collage of “real” understated moments, this oscillates between powerfully affecting and bitty. The cast is winning, though it is hard to have too much sympathy for Yelchin’s Jacob when he pines for Felicity Jones while having Jennifer Lawrence as his emergency back-up. This feels more recognisable on the whole than most Hollywood romances.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 