Everybody Wants Some!!

Mike on the ticket counter (aged 22 or thereabouts) greeted me warmly and told me that I was in for a treat. It was such a shame he said, that the rest of the world was ignoring Richard Linklater’s lastest masterpiece, even tho it boasted 2 exclamation marks. This jarred with the appaisal from Mark…

Mustang

A stirring tale of female oppression, rebellion and eventual empowerment. Nominated for best foreign language film at this year’s Golden Globe and Oscars, Deniz Erguven’s examination of what it is to be young and female in Turkey provides a timely if somewhat oestragen laced insight into a culture which, from this evidence, looks a thousand…

Demolition

Your correspondent’s normally razor sharp critical faculties were somewhat blunted at the screening of Jean Marc Vallee’s Demolition this afternoon. You see my good friend Frazer had tasked me with trying to identify him in a crowd scene shot at Grand Central Station New York, which he had been involutarily caught up in whilst on…

The Brand New Testament

Imagine that God is a spiteful, slovenly middle aged Belgian living with his mute wife and uppity daughter in a seemingly unremarkable Brussels apartment. No its not quite the stretch you might have thought is it? It is however the premise of Jaco Van Dormael’s scurrilously entertaining satire on religious patriarchy. God (Benoir Poelvoode) is…

Love and Friendship

Based on a very early Jane Austen short story called Lady Susan this Anglo Dutch co production has a refreshing lightness of touch which sometimes borders on irreverence. Kate Beckinsale plays the titular heroine; a beautiful, smart-mouthed proto feminist. Recently widowed she is reputed to be the biggest flirt in all of England and over…

The Club

Just when you thought the stock of Roman Catholic clergy could sink no lower, along comes Chilean director Pablo Larrain to prove that this just isn’t so. A group of disgraced priests are living in a retreat on the outskirts of a remote coastal village. They are supposedly here to reflect on their paedophilia and…

Son of Saul

Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes is much too young to have any first hand experience of the holocaust. But that doesn’t stop him from delivering a serious and sober account of daily life in Auschwitz 1944, which manages to find a new way to explore those barely imaginable horrors. Here the USP is an up close…

The Grump

A sporadically funny look at the generation gap, Nordik style. In this Finnish/Icelandic co production Director Dome Karukoski comes across as a slightly more mainstream version of compatriot Juri Kurosmaki, whose droll and slightly wistful form of humour he retains, albeit leavened by a few moments of physical comedy which fall just short of slapstick.…

Eye in the Sky

Hats off to Gavin Hood who has given us a taut and tantalising thriller which has the confidence and patience to explore the spectrum of moral issues involved in modern warfare. He places much of the action in darkish interiors where characters debate the legality, morality, politics and the practicality of a drone strike on…

Florence Foster Jenkins

These days Stephen Frears seems to be carving out a bit of a niche in the making of competent but fundamentally unchallenging, middle of the road biographies. After The Queen and Philomena he has now turned his attention to the trueish story of FFJ, a socialite and music lover who achieved a sort of celebrity…