Scott Hicks directs Anthony Hopkins, Anton Yelchin and Hope Davis in this Sixties set coming-of-age drama where a fatherless boy bonds with a fugitive psychic who moves into the apartment above him.
Featuring an outstanding early child performance from Yelchin and one of Hopkins less hammy turns, this is a pleasing re-run of Stephen King’s preferred themes, imagery and emotions. Sure, you could watch the superior Stand By Me or IT or The Shawshank Redemption again but this gently spools out everything those classics did perfectly in a neat, heartwarming compilation package. The non-horror King project this seemingly shares the most DNA with though is 11.22.63… ominous men in hats, time displacement, unavoidable fate and Kennedy era nostalgia. It might not reinvent the wheel but it is a nice little film to get lost in and the characters have a rounded complexity that often gets left out in most page to screen adaptations.
D.J. Caruso directs Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke and Gena Rowlands in this serial killer thriller where a FBI profiler heads up to Canada to catch a psycho who takes over his victim’s identities for a year.
Now That’s What I Call A Serial Killer Movie Vol 43. All the tropes you are bored of and a few too many wild swings which fail to connect. Sifting for gold, here are the rare flakes. There’s a pretty brief but undeniably hot sex scene at the start of the third act. There’s a big name actor included as a red herring in an almost mercenarily wasteful way. There’s a good jump shock involving a bed. There’s an endgame finale that is… bonkers, just not very inspired. Yet it is all too slick and tension free to really enjoy. Like someone has xeroxed all the nuance out of a middling peer like Copycat or someone is trying to make a two hour pop promo based on a rental blurb they read about The Silence of the Lambs. But never bothered to watch the actual classic. Frequently laughable, it might work better as a parody.
Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai directs Rocco Siffredi, Gabriele Galetta and Kelly Stafford in this documentary following the final year in an Italian male pornstar’s stellar career.
I’m not going to be bashful and pretend I don’t watch porn or have never heard of Rocco Siffredi but I’m pretty sure I’ve never knowingly enjoyed one of his movies. For rather vanilla heterosexual reasons, male porn performers never really register with me and his particular brand of sex work seems to be a very European form of rough sex… choking, slapping, spitting and endurance gangbangs. If that’s your cup of tea, then ding dong diddly… but it is a bit too consistently pain and humiliation focussed for me. Yet watching his final year be captured by a pair of respected arthouse documentary makers is a fascinating experience. Some intuitive and talented people are using all their skill to spotlight and catalogue the career and neuroses of one of the biggest brands in the ‘lowest’ form of entertainment. It makes for a strange experience that ticks all the current documentary boxes with mixed success.
The best moments are the fly on the wall, behind the scenes working days of a higher end porno shoot. These feel relatively unguarded and certainly show all the movement and fluids you’d expect… if not anything that would be considered gynaecologically hardcore. If you aren’t sure if this is a viewing experience for you then let me set the scene. The movie opens on a high resolution, artistically lit close-up of Siffredi massive schlong in the shower and then holds on it. Then minutes later we are chatting to a just off-shift female performer while she is still on her knees and before she’s had a chance to wash her face. It is fair to say the documentary pushes itself right up to the limit of what can be shown in a mainstream arena. So buyer beware… it is pretty unflinching and not family viewing. The details Demaizière and Teurlai capture though by not being shy are often insightful; the egos of the men, the false romantic intimacy the female performers generate to make the filming day palatable, the masks slipping when there are technical hiccups that prove this is the regular bullshit they have to deal with on what very much is just another paying job for them, Siffredi’s tragically parasitic relationship with his cousin Gabriele – a failed stud who now works behind the camera. Gabriele’s regularly foiled ambitions to add a Fellini-esque set up to the fucking scenes, or his tantrums, or his dedicated mopping of the floor at the close of a day’s work adds much of the humour and humanity to the project. He’s a sad little counterpart to the named star, one who completely forgets he is on camera for the most. Their interactions have the same farcical joys and symbiotic bad blood of the central relationship in the brilliant rock documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil. Two men almost cursed with each other for eternity.
Where Rocco slips up is allowing its star just a little too much rope to hang himself with. There are cringe worthy scenes where he tries to provoke positive acclamations from his sons who clearly do not want to talk about their father’s prolific reputation. Then there are the artier moments when Rocco is filmed alone dealing with his sex addiction demons or praying to his saintly dead mother. Often filmed in a self-consciously chiaroscuro style, they stand in direct contrast to the pleasing awkwardness of the behind the scenes procedural footage. They almost feel like a spoof of the more visually pretentious form of doc that has emerged in the last twenty years. I’m pretty sure they are meant to be taken at face value… or at least show the directors know what a preening, ridiculous figure their subject really is… but they begin to grate very quickly.
Agnès Jaoui directs Jean-Pierre Bacri, Anne Alvaro and herself in this French comedy of manners where a boorish factory owner is immersed in his town’s little art world after becoming smitten with an actress giving him English lessons.
This takes a little while to bed in as there are a lot of characters to introduce but once it coalesces Le Goût Des Autres becomes a very pleasurable satire. One that wittily sidesteps farce when it can. Jaoui has a rare heightened degree of sensitivity for her stereotypes so that by the final turn of events the broader characters have grown and developed while the smarter types have had the sneering mirror they so carelessly wield turned around on themselves. A nice little comedy that never takes the most obvious route.
Steve Zaillian directs Max Pomeranc, Joe Mantegna and Ben Kingsley in this child chess prodigy true story.
Also with Joan Allen and Laurence Fishburne. The sorta release that screams quality now but got lost in the shuffle back then. It possibly needed to be a little bolder in its storytelling choices to make an impact. This feels very much like an exercise in formula screenwriting – with characters existing in shifting opposition to each other until all the luvvies have shared a confrontation with every other piece on the board. That’s no bad thing – I’m pretty sure Ben & Matt stole a lot of the form and stakes from this when crafting their Good Will Hunting screenplay. There are definite strands of shared DNA between the two films. This remains a satisfying curio but it is a building block to the later classic of emotionally intelligent cinema about unlikely geniuses and those who shepherd them to greatness. And yet it isn’t even the best chess film of its decade. That title goes to Fresh… a forgotten 90s movie well worth seeking out.
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck direct Ryan Reynolds, Ben Mendelsohn and Sienna Miller in this buddy road comedy where a gambler who can’t win and a charmer who can’t lose try to build up the buy-in money for a big poker game.
My kinda movie! Often hitting the grainy, scuffed energy and visual look of a Seventies New Hollywood classic. I like gambling movies. I like road movies. I like buddy movies. This has edge but still keeps you grinning and hooked despite the lurches into darkness and predictability. Mississippi Grind is probably the best use anyone has ever put Ryan Reynolds to, I’d happily see his gorgeous, cherry cheeked overconfidence be deployed more often in films about super losers rather than superheroes.
Ronald Neame directs Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson and Ned Beatty in this chase comedy espionage movie where a disgruntled CIA veteran leaves the agency and writes his memoir; a book full of secrets that no nation wants to see him finish.
I find it hard to believe I didn’t half watch this one afternoon as a kid. It is so familiar and TV friendly, very much a beast of its pre-VHS era. There’s no sex or violence or swearing… just flirting and location stunts and wit. A passable low key vehicle for Matthau’s crumpled, baggy-one upmanship. It globe-trots like a Bond adventure but really only dazzles when Matthau and Jackson are trading cosy innuendos in their living rooms. Inoffensive, forgettable fun.
Scott Derrickson directs Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance and James Ransone in this horror where a true crime author moves his family into the site of a massacre and discovers 8mm footage that suggests those grisly murders were not an isolated incident.
One of the rare instances where watching a film on your Ipad, resting on your chest in bed, with your wife asleep next to you in the dark, and your headphones on, is the optimum experience for squeezing full value out of a movie. Genuinely better on second watch. In the cinema I didn’t share Hawke’s growing mania and paranoia, his unwavering scopophilia for not looking away from the foreboding vintage snuff. This time, with the terror a mere unavoidable half foot from my face, and my setting very similar to the lead’s match conditions, I was compelled. Constantly on edge and fearful. Even though I know this is just conjuring all the trendy tricks in a slightly different order. The use of negative space and lurking wraith children is excellent. Whisky quaffing, chunky cardie clad and ruffled beard, this is peak Ethan Hawke. An actor who always delivers in genre cheapies, blockbusters, indie darlings or experimental one-offs. He is just brilliant.
Sam Raimi directs Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves and Giovanni Ribisi in this wet Southern Gothic thriller were a single mother with psychic powers becomes embroiled in a scandal involving sex, murder and abuse.
Wildly overrated in its day this was boring and predictable and overacted then and it is boring and predictable and overacted now. Raimi fights his instincts to amp up the ghoulish aspects of the script. Billy Bob Thornton based the screen story on his mother’s fortune telling abilities. Katie Holmes does a late in the runtime nude scene that is still glorious – the Dawson Peaks of her acting career. Everyone else is plainly better than the unruly, blunt, lackadaisical screenplay and it is hard to fathom why the far superior A Simple Plan exists in The Gift’s shadow.
Alex Thompson directs Kelly O’Sullivan, Ramona Edith Williams and Max Lipchitz in this comedy about a dropout nanny who is ill prepared for caring for her ward yet begins to connect with the various women around her.
Saint Frances begins like most slob bro comedies – a feckless loser in arrested development hitting rock bottom in terms of finances, employment and relationships. The lead could be Bill Murray or Seth Rogen if it wasn’t for this is a project written by its female lead Kelly O’Sullivan as a breakthrough vehicle. As a showcase for her talent and star power it works a treat. Bridget is a messy, unpredictable and often emotionally frustrating character – torn between her feminist leanings and her erratic often selfish desires – who you very much bond with and relate to. The plotlines that takes in hook ups, abortions, vaginal bleeding, postpartum depression and raising a child may seem low stakes and a little too pointedly seminal but the dealing of them is never gentle or whimsical. It confronts various issues head on, auditing these various trends in modern womanhood sympathetically, without losing O’Sullivan’s naturally humorous voice. To enjoy a mainstream accessible film that consistently gives airtime to matters that Hollywood has traditionally shied away from is pleasing in the extreme. Warm, and only very occasionally didactic, Saint Frances is a minor triumph.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 