Grandma

Well here’s a film which passes the Bechtel test in spades. Lily Tomlin is Elle a 76 year old lesbian poet who is in the midst of a literary drought. It’s a peach of a role for her. In the opening scene she dumps her toy girl Olivia (Judy Greer) with a curious mix of…

Joy

If David O Russell was intending to make a comedy about a domestic cleaner he would have been better off casting Julie Walters as Mrs Overall. Come to think of it if he was intending to make a biopic of the magic mop inventor Joy Mongano she would probably be nearer the right age too.…

The Revenant

It’s a long time since I’ve seen a film which you could truely call epic. But Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu doesn’t do things by half and here he has put his cast and crew through the mill to produce a sweeping, snarling, shivering adaptation of Michael Punke’s source novel. It tells the story of Hugh Glass…

The Monk

Part Phantom of the Opera, part Count of Monte Cristo and all served up with a dash of The Devils, this was really meaty old fashioned film making. The casting in particular was spot on. Vincent Cassel as Ambrosio is just about perfect as the brooding, sexually repressed devout around whom the action revolves. We’re…

The Forbidden Room

Now you know I like weird. Bunuel is a piece of cake. Fellini, just routine. In my view David Lynch could easily be put in charge of Coronation Street and anything Terry Gilliam touches is bound to veer towards the prosaic. But nothing had prepared me for Canadian director Guy Maddin. Quite simply, I’ve never…

Room

Here’s a story inspired by the barely believable Frizl case from 2008. Emma Donohue adapts her own novel, which in the capable hands of Lenny Abrahamson plays out partly as a modern fairytale, (Rapuznel?) partly as an escape thriller and partly as a study of family dynamics which are fractured by events beyond the scope…

The Danish Girl

Rather better than I had been led to expect, but still frustratingly selective. The film is almost too beautiful to look at. Za characters are beautiful. Za buildings are beautiful. Za clothes are beautiful. Even Za orchestra is beautiful. Einar and Gerda Elbe (Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander) live in an airy boho studio in…

Brooklyn

There’s no doubt that this is well acted, sensitively directed and, as adaptations go, a commendable example of screen writing which, for the most part, felt authentic and carried its wispy emotional depth very deftly. So why didn’t I warm to it more? It wasn’t that the thing was just too unremittingly Oirish, as I…

Love 3D

Gawd bless him, Gasper Noe’s sexually explicit love story is a complete one off. It showcases a talented director with a terrific eye and an endearing determination to be provocative, whose mind seems to have been taken over by a 15 year old boy. The story is simple. Boy, Murphy played by Karl Glusman meets…