• Burning

    February 6, 2019 - By 

    True complexity and originality in film is something that is hard to come by these days. Managing to make a film that is entertaining at the same time is something that few achieve but South Korean writer-director Chang-Dong Lee (Secret Sunshine) has made a career out of it, though this is his first film since 2011’s fantastic Poetry. His latest, Burning, based on a short story called Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami — though I suspect William Faulkner’s novella of the same name is something to do with it as well — follows Jong-su, a part-time delivery man, and kicks…

  • Can You Ever Forgive Me?

    February 1, 2019 - By 

    Chin chin! A half-cut treat to see off a dry January, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is an immensely enjoyable and assured tragi-comic memoir, Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant in a spirited double act as a pair of grifting boozehounds in early 90’s New York. McCarthy has made her name playing loud, sweary and angry, but beneath her characters’ luridly detailed, improv-style threats of violence there is usually a blinking pilot light of sadness, marking women who feel beaten down, ignored and overlooked. The puppy-nabbing outsider in Bridesmaids; the minimum-wage worker in Tammy; the aggrieved middle-aged woman ditched by her husband in…

  • Polar

    January 29, 2019 - By 

    The world’s greatest assassin is about to retire when his former boss decides he’s a liability. Hoping for a silly shoot ‘em up like The Mechanic or John Wick? Sorry to disappoint but Polar, released this week by Netflix, isn’t it. Instead, this is a film so terrible that it’s an early contender for the year-end worst of lists. Duncan Vizla (Mads Mikkelsen) is the great assassin preparing for his 50th birthday and mandatory retirement. He’s already started to wind down by moving to a snow covered one-street town in Montana. There, Duncan wanders around his log cabin, buys a…

  • Destroyer

    January 29, 2019 - By 

    In Destroyer, Nicole Kidman is cast against type as Erin Bell, a Los Angeles homicide detective haunted by her past. It’s a startling performance from Kidman and one that could have put her in the running to feature in the best actress category at this year’s Academy Awards. We can wonder about the reasons for the omission another time. Destroyer is a middling thriller that benefits enormously from the work of its outstanding lead. When a body is discovered on the streets of LA, Erin Bell comes to believe that the murder is connected to a botched undercover operation she…

  • The Mule

    January 25, 2019 - By 

    In Clint Eastwood’s The Mule, The Man with No Name is faced with his biggest adversaries yet: Cartels, the DEA, and smartphones. A quite strange and mostly not very good version of what David Lowery and Robert Redford were doing in The Old Man And The Gun, Eastwood directs and stars as a 90 year-old horticulturist who has fallen on hard times and becomes a drugs mule for the local Cartel. Like Redford’s career criminal in Old Man, Mule is a possible swansong in which a screen icon plays a compulsive workaholic who has neglected his family. But Mule has a sourer…

  • Vice

    January 22, 2019 - By 

    “What, uh, do we believe, sir?” a young Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld’s aide during the Nixon years, asks his boss. Rumsfeld, played by Steve Carell, laughs hysterically, blindsided by the naivety of the question. Matters of personal principles and ideology simply do not factor into Washington power games. It’s a central concern in Vice, the latest in Anchorman director Adam McKay’s swerve from knockabout man-boy comedy to polemical film-making, but it’s also a question the film desperately needed to ask itself. What does McKay believe? What moral vision is he trying to put on screen? What on earth is Vice…

  • Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened

    January 21, 2019 - By 

    The word “hustle” used to denote a ruse or con game, a trick to fleece someone out of their cash. In the current parlance of hyper-go morning-routine capitalists, it’s taken on a new aspirational aura, now the religion of twenty three year-old dudes with Tim Ferris quotes in their bio. Following close on the heels of Hulu’s doppelganger doc Fyre Fraud, unavailable outside the U.S., Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened makes clear that, in many ways, the meaning of the word hasn’t shifted at all. Directed by Chris Smith (Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, another doc about…

  • The Upside

    January 16, 2019 - By 

    Phillip Lacasse doesn’t want to be patronised. Played by Bryan Cranston, the disabled billionaire, rendered paralysed from the neck down by a paragliding accident, doesn’t want people making a fuss over him, speaking over him or adopting that pitying tone you would take with a shy child. He hires unemployed ex-con Dell (Kevin Hart, making the radical leap from bad comedy to bad comic drama) as his live-in life auxiliary precisely because he doesn’t tiptoe around his condition. How unfortunate, then, that he finds himself in a film that is so consistently patronising: to him, to his new buddy, and,…

  • The Camino Voyage

    January 14, 2019 - By 

    Four Irishmen in a boat. It sounds like the start of a joke. The Camino Voyage, directed by Irish documentarian Donal O’Ceilleachair, chronicles the attempt of four Kerry men — and later, adding a dash of name-recognition, The Frames frontman Glen Hansard — to travel the traditional route of the Camino de Santiago, also known as the Way of Saint James, an ancient pilgrimage from Ireland to a Galician cathedral in northern Spain. With an appreciation for symmetry, the group — two writers, an artist and a stonemason — set off from St. James’ Gate in Dublin, on a passageway across the Irish Sea, the Atlantic’s edge, and…

  • The Favourite

    January 4, 2019 - By 

    Court is in session in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, a spectacular re-dressing of the period costume drama and savage comedy of manners about people who barely have any. It’s early 18th century England in Queen Anne’s palace. Off-screen, over on the mainland there’s a war with France to fund (there was always a war with France), but home is where the real hostilities are flaring up. Upstart crow Abigail Hill (Emma Stone at her most compelling) is the ruthless social climber cousin of the reigning royal favourite Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), the Cheney-like whisperer who basically runs the country for the…