The Book of Clarence

I was in a Passion Play once. Mr Williams our English teacher had some vague connection with the BBC and on Good Friday 1962 the school featured in a live broadcast on Radio 4 (it might have been the Home Service at the time). Anyway I was cast in the much coveted role of “Third…

Civil War

First a confession. Due to incompetence I managed to miss the first 10 minutes of Alex Garland’s ear splitting, nerve shredding film, which was a shame – but probably not catastrophic. Civil War depicts a near future version of the USA where various factions are in the process of tearing the country apart, using a…

The Teachers’ Lounge

A Best International Feature nomination at this year’s Oscars, Director Iker Catak‘s latest is unusual in that it conjures gradually escalating intensity from a scenario which begins with a relatively trivial incident. It produces a chain reaction which Oppenheimer would have been proud of. At a secondary school in provincial Germany a new teacher is…

Evil Does Not Exist

This could have been sub titled “A Day in the Life of a Junior Planning Officer”, because for much of its running time it dealt with the bureaucratic minutiae of a development proposal. It took me back to my early days as a hapless young development control officer trying to balance the competing demands of…

Monkey Man

Dev Patel’s directorial debut is a bone crunching, blood spattered, super violent revenge drama which fully merits its 18 certificate. He’s an actor with a broad spectrum of roles under his belt and I was interested to see where he would go when he took up the reins. The answer is that he opts for…

The Delinquents

I knew things were going to get tricky with this marathon Argentinian heist movie, when it became clear that all the main characters’ names were anagrams of each other. Maron is lonely, middle aged and locked in a bank job which is sucking the life out of him. He wants something better. Ramon is a…

Mothers Instinct

Douglas Sirk meets Patricia Highsmith in this entertaining but ultimately silly film. Mothers Instinct is based on the book Behind the Hatred by Barbara Abel and pits Alice (Jessica Chastain) against Celine (Anne Hathaway) in a paranoid parental feud which spirals, disastrously and all too quickly, out of control. Things start calmly enough and initially…