Sam Mendes directs Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Daniel Craig in this prohibition gangster movie where an Irish mob hitman goes on the run with his son when it turns out “loyalty” doesn’t cut both ways.
Confuses slowness for sophistication. Ambitiously aiming for the import of The Godfather and the look of Miller’s Crossing, this proves quite stilted and lifeless. A stellar cast feels slightly lost in the oversized mannerisms… there’s not enough larks with tommyguns nor moments of humanity that don’t feel forced. By no means a bad film, it is astonishingly well crafted, but an underwhelming swan song to Newman’s career.
Iain Softley directs Stephen Dorff, Ian Hart and Sheryl Lee in this romance following the love triangle between John Lennon, early band member Stuart Sutcliffe and a German photographer set around The Beatles pre-fame days in Hamburg.
A favourite from my teens, I never remembered just how much sex and nudity there was in this. A lovely surprise in that respect. Softley’s debut is visually rich, the Hamburg strips bars seem like a direct homage to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sleazier arthouse stylings. The Beatles Begins stuff can be a little too cute at times (meeting Ringo feels particularly crowbarred in) but the music is pretty toetapping. Getting modern grunge artists to punk up and speed up the energy of the rock ‘n’ roll hits the almost fab five would have played is a wonderful conceit. Ian Hart’s John Lennon is pleasingly abrasive and witty. Dorff and Lee are cast for their prettiness rather acting talent and he shows them up in quite a few scenes. One thing I noticed on this rewatch was just how much plot is raced through in the first 25 minutes. Everything is set up and primed in a breathless rush. It make the last hour seem a bit lackadaisical in comparison. Still very good but almost as if the movie runs out of uppers long before tragedy strikes.
Lawrence Michael Levine directs Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon in this dark comedy where a difficult actress arrives at lake house retreat owned by a fractious couple.
This indie starts like a three hander play where we are stuck between a warring husband and wife and their sarcastic guest. It works and I would have quite happily experienced the continued tensions, flirtations and jealousies play out at feature length. At the midway point though something shifts, the story either resets or reboots from a reality altering viewpoint… the movie becomes a heavily populated meta farce. Not a bad one, and the themes remain the same, yet you feel like the toy you were enjoying playing with has been snatched away and replaced with something… a bit cheaper? Quibbles and frustrations aside, Plaza remains one of the most pleasing, exciting movie stars out there. She dominates the screen here.
Wes Craven directs Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy and Brian Cox in this thriller where a hotel employee is trapped on a flight with a hitman who needs her to make an important call.
The Hitchcockian war of words and wits in economy class never really takes off. Luckily when we are off the plane Wes Craven finds his groove. Once McAdams is playing cat-and-mouse with a knife wielding psycho around a mansion sized house the entertainment comes. The Scream-esque finale is near orgasmic after a slow and underwhelming build up. Good cast.
David Prior directs James Badge Dale, Marin Ireland and Sasha Frolova in this horror where an ex-cop investigate a missing girl, a curse and a cult.
Even though very little happens over quite an excessive running time, The Empty Man keeps you permanently on edge. The production has a consummate professionalism, executes a few genuine shocks and chills. The script is like four episodes of a prestige show binged together, though each from a different season of the run. It is all powered by the anticipation of some terrible thing about to happen, of some destructive cosmic truth about to be revealed. It is certainly unique enough, almost abrasively so, that you can see it building a significant fan following.
Sean Durkin directs Carrie Coon, Jude Law and Oona Roche in this Thatcher-era drama where a mother moves her family from the States to Surrey, begrudgingly chasing her spendthrift husband’s dream of making a billion dollar deal.
The urgency of a thriller, the haunting paranoia of a ghost story – this is a slice of prestige soap that constantly upends expectations. Martha Marcy May Marlene director Sean Durkin returns to the big screen after a decade and it was well worth the wait. He is a boldly intimate director, able to convey emotions and fears and frustrations in his characters without explicitly setting them to words. He favours backlit shots where characters features are draped in shadow, he isn’t scared of an unfocused detail or an unorthodox piece of framing. We are aware when watching this fractured dysfunctional family through his true auteur’s eye that we are getting right into their faces rather than the big picture. When we do see an establishing or wide shot, Eighties England is presented as a deserted and desolate place. The inhabitants of the drama might very well be the last people on Earth… or so caught up in their own disintegration that nobody else intrudes or matters. The acting is uniformly pitch perfect. Law leans into the seedier, untrustworthy side of his star persona. The treacle voiced scumbag in him has always been there but here the tarnish is truly glaring. It is a great piece of casting. Coon, however, is the standout. It proves fascinating that her drowning wife never is portrayed as perfect or the victim. That would be too easy. She has flaws, is lazy, late, almost embraces obsoletion by the end. Watching her rankle at Law’s repetitive bullshit or dance the night away in a room of strangers is the movie’s fireworks. Matthew Price’s costume design for her in particular is noteworthy, subtle and timeless but never fully rejecting the strangeness of Eighties design. The spot on New Wave soundtrack too is banger after banger, filtered through crackly radio stations and sound systems in other rooms. A family slowly rotting, an indictment of neoliberalism economics as a way to live your life, a dead horse being flogged in the most beautiful way possible. Abrasive movies for adults this well made don’t come along very often anymore. If you are a fan of Closer, Phantom Thread or American Beauty you’ll cherish this.
Nia DaCosta directs Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris and Colman Domingo in this legacy sequel to the original Clive Barker adaptation.
Bernard Rose’s Candyman is a favourite in our house; an urban fairytale where body horror meets social commentary meets gothic romance. So this attempt reimagine the concept from black voices and leapfrog over those duff cash-in sequels that directly followed is welcome. There are times where it can feel like a dissertation movie – something with just a little too much to say to do so persuasively and set to inspire far too many college thesis over the next few year. Candyman is explicitly repositioned as a personification of black American suffering, a golem or wraith solidifying a history of racial violence. This aspect works well and the first hour has plenty of shocks and food for thought – classily made, well cast and gripping. It is a project that is in constant dialogue with the original, sometimes on the attack, often celebratory, but never alienating to newcomers or old fans. There is trouble in paradise however. The closer does go off the rails a fair whack. You could say DaCosta is matching the unpredictable lurches of the original’s third act. But those narrative leaps felt discombobulating but organic to the set-up. Here the big finale seems rushed to the border of incoherence. The final shot will sate the existing fanbase and you’ll never see better executed shadow puppetry as a narrative device on the big screen. With a really penetratingly icky score from Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe too boot, he gives Philip Glass a run for his money.
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.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 