David Bruckner directs Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg and Stacy Martin in this horror where a grieving widow notices strange nightly disturbances in the lake house her dead husband built.
More chiller than shocker, the one well deployed jump scare makes zero sense in the ultimate explanation. Moves painfully slowly, you’ll be so far ahead of Rebecca Hall in unravelling the mystery that you’ll want to shake her and explain the plot to her by the close of the second act. She’s wasted here. Stacy Martin keeps her clothes on for once in a rare mainstream role. Sarah Goldberg, who has rose to fame playing a bad actress in TV’s Barry, suffers from you seeing her through that lens here. I reckon she can shake that stigma off but this ain’t the movie that will do it. Snore!
Prano Bailey-Bond directs Niamh Algar, Michael Smiley and Nicholas Burns star in this period meta horror where a tightly wound government censor for video nasties unravels when a movie reminds her of a past trauma.
Ooh… ‘elevated horror’, the critics love you as you are so easy to bash out a few thousands words about but genre fans do struggle to see what all the fuss is about. Censor is one of the better critical darlings in that it might not hit the giddy heights of Ben Wheatley or Rose Glass’ debuts but it certainly makes you want to see what Bailey-Bond does next. Censor can feel a little too much like a calling card at times yet it wears its influences on its sleeve nicely… Garth Marenghi meets Polanski giving way to surprising overtones of Lynch and Bava. That first hour feels pretty promising ratcheting up the tension and paranoia with deadpan unease. Yum! But the final act is a flub, going the most predictable ‘unpredictable’ route with a lack of ghoulish mania. It is a bit too measured, a bit too clumsily forewarned and neat. The twist is textbook. Either give us either carnage or a genuine shock. I really liked the milieu and the central performance by Algar is outstanding… possibly will become iconic. I’ll definitely give this another try with expectations diminished… sometimes those movie experts piling on and lauding a promising debut actually does it a slight disservice. We would have found this digital nasty without them, and the joy of discovery is half the battle with becoming a cult favourite.
Kevin Costner directs Robert Duvall, himself and Annette Bening in this western where a group of free grazers find themselves hounded into violence by a local land baron.
Gently paced and rich in character this is a fine piece of genre work. It is such a beautiful and entertaining movie that it is actually quite hard to fault, though some make take umbrage at the relaxed lengthy build up to the eventual, brutal day of violence. The final shoot out is a messy, nasty affair, fraught with threat to our heroes, Costner’s classical storytelling style keeping you in the mix but never lost within the satisfyingly clunky storm of bullets. Yet this is an experience whose true strength lies in its cautious but generous character work. Duvall often commands centre stage in these wonderfully written interactions and you begins to desire the moments of calm, often romantic, reflection over the stand-offs and blazes of glory. One of the finest example of its rare form this century. Demands repeat viewings.
Gus Van Sant directs Gabe Nevins, Taylor Momsen and Jake Miller in this indie teen movie where a skateboarder lives with the guilt over his involvement in the death of a security guard.
Crime And Punishment for the Tony Hawks generation. Nothing much happens… pointedly. The adults are generally out of frame or out of focus like a Peanuts cartoon. There are allusions to the invasion of Afghanistan. Some nice skateboarding footage. It is probably fair to say Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge or Larry Clarke’s Bully do a lot more with this set-up.
Mike Figgis directs Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone and Stephen Dorff in this yuppie in peril thriller where a rich family buy the wrong rural mansion.
A very late in the cycle entry, flat and unfocused. Dorff’s threat is just as likely to start crying as pull a knife. Stone is relegated to thankless role. Very boring, you get the feeling nobody really wanted to make this project… it is the result of some half forgotten contractual obligation from the Nineties.
Tony Scott directs Robert De Niro, Wesley Snipes and Ellen Barkin in this thriller where a star baseball player is stalked by an obsessed knife salesman.
A very brash and wobbly thriller but loaded with nice juicy bits. A twenty minute sequence set around Opening Day at the ballpark is absolutely gripping with minimal physical threat or violence. Ellen Barkin is always extremely watchable. Scott is developing his more unhinged, juddering approach to cinema that would define the second half of his somehow still underrated career. So Bobby and Wesley had already played these types a dozen times before by this point. It is nice to see the names do the hits again and De Niro especially imbues his psycho with a now long lost relish. Works best as a very extreme character study, kind of a poor man’s Falling Down.
Peter Weir directs Gérard Depardieu, Andie MacDowell and Bebe Neuwirth in this romantic comedy where a New Yorker marries a Frenchman in a sham marriage so he can gain citizenship… but then Immigration investigates and they are forced to live together.
The behind-the-camera craftsmanship is impeccable. So its a minor shame that MacDowell cannot act and Depardieu has no chemistry with her. That might sound like a major set-back to this type of genre movie but genuinely it is so finely made that you can almost just look past the cabbagy leads and get lost in the thrall of all the other pitch perfect bells and whistles.
Wong Kar-wai directs Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau in this Hong Kong period romance where a playboy breaks hearts.
Sultry and sumptuous but a bit too loose at the end. Not a movie that reaches a destination so much as just halts. The opening sequence showing a gradual seduction in a stadium cafe is wonderful. Throughout Wong Kar-wai lingers on clocks and the marking of time. You rarely have a shot where you aren’t visually aware of the moment passing, a schedule being met.
Larry Charles directs Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian and Pamela Anderson in this faux documentary comedy where fake Central Asian reporter Borat interviews unsuspecting real people across the USA and falls in love.
Strange to think that because of the streaming war landscape I have yet to see Borat Subsequent Moviefilm a whole year after its release. But this original bad taste gem is still just as scene after scene hilarious. So, some of the marks seem a little more in on the joke than you noticed the first time around but only very rarely do you feel you aren’t seeing a genuine reaction or over reaction to a bit of secretly staged madness. Fifteen years on we all now seem quicker to leap to offence but this is very much a movie about challenging the very concept of taking offence. What is acceptable in one culture is near criminal in another but who are we to judge that culture? No matter how ridiculously extreme and baiting the pantomime of that culture might be. Borat still works, as for every piece of risky business stunt prank, there’s a moment of sweetness or risqué daring that feels truly transgressive and universally welcoming. Sure, there’ll be viewers who are unwilling to see the joke in its context or are too blinkered to understand the blunt force satire… For those… maybe 15 certificate comedy is not for them? I’m surprised Borat didn’t receive an 18 in all honesty. As someone who has enjoyed Sacha Baron Cohen’s guts since the The 11 O’Clock Show days I’m not surprised Kazakhstan’s finest documentarian has endured over his Ali G and his Brüno. Borat always was a character with a certain degree of sympathetic Chaplin or ungainly Tati to him, if you can overlook the rape, racism and retardation. A creation with a little grace and personality among the risks and pratfalls. His restraint to only deliver the killer death blow of impolite affront is second to none. Sure, most left outside of the Venn Diagram crossover of people who truly get this will focus on the catchphrases and mankinis. But really this is very laugh packed, a tightly run road movie that checked America’s temperature in a way it never truly sat comfortably with afterwards. Naughty, naughty.
Lisa Joy directs Hugh Jackman, Thandiwe Newton and Rebecca Ferguson in this sci-fi noir thriller where in a waterlogged dystopian Miami a man relives memories through a machine.
Not really a film in it own right but a box ticking exercise in how many better classics are referenced or recycled. Strange Days without the confident aggression. Blade Runner without the lived in world. Inception without the quality control. Memento without any emotional heft. Chinatown without the shocks. Dark City without the cult potential. The list goes on and on. A shiny, soggy mash where action intrudes only occasionally and often unconvincingly. The kind of movie that blatantly tells you how it is going to end in the middle, so you set your watch hoping it won’t do that with such an obvious thud. Clearly the victim of some degree of studio meddling, we all want original, ambitious sci-fi content with grandiose budgets. This film wouldn’t know originality or ambition is it was plugged into a dream machine for the rest of its life. Okay… so there is one chillingly inventive scene involving a billionaire’s widow lost in time that feels like something Philip K Dick or Alan Moore might conjure up. Otherwise this is just not it! The polar opposite of what we are craving. Yet it plods along inoffensively with a great cast who are gamely unsure if they are making the new The Matrix or another Transcendence. Oh well!
