Breaking News in Yuba County is a low-rent comedy that failed to ignite for me. Married for 30 years and working in a menial job, the awkward Sue Buttons (Allison Janney) is treated shamefully by everybody in small town California. It’s her birthday and she’s keen to share the occasion with her husband, Karl (Matthew…
Christopher André Marks’ documentary King Otto tells the story of how rank underdogs became European champions thanks in significant part to an outsider. The outsider was Otto Rehhagel, a German coach who took the Greek National Football Team to glory at Euro 2004. Rehhagel was born in 1938 in Essen, where – as a five-year-old…
Wow! What a ripping good, most entertaining, magnificently realised origin story. Cruella is clever, funny and sassy – a family comedy turned sophisticated adult offering. English children’s novelist and playwright “Dodie” Smith is best known for the novel The Hundred and One Dalmations (1956), which became the big screen animation 101 Dalmations in 1961. Disney…
The wait has been worth it. The outbreak of COIVD-19 significantly delayed the release of A Quiet Place Part II and it is now difficult to watch this film without drawing parallels to the world on a precipice. How I’ve missed quality Hollywood fare of this ilk. Tension characterises the movie, which picks up where…
French cinema icon Isabelle Huppert displays her comedic side in Jean-Paul Salomé’s crime caper The Godmother (La Daronne). The film starts out as a conventional crime drama with the cops looking to intercept a shipment of drugs, but ends up in some pretty wild territory. Huppert plays Patience Portefeux*, a translator with the Paris police….
Death of a Ladies Man is a Irish/Canadian co-production starring Gabriel Byrne as Samuel O’Shea, a Montreal based lecturer and a hard-drinking womaniser. He arrives home to discover his second and much younger wife having passionate sex with a stranger in their marital bed and asks for a divorce. But this is just the start…
Pablo Larraín is a Chilean filmmaker of distinctive style. Much loved in art house circles, his films are often marked by slow narratives punctuated by arresting visuals – and occasionally violence. His latest film to reach these shores, Ema (actually made in 2019) follows a similar pattern. Larraín’s Jackie (2016) was one of my favourite…
The Man in the Hat sounds like something from the pen of Dr Seuss. Rather this is a quirky and offbeat Tati-esque comedy about an unnamed man (played by Irish actor Ciaran Hinds) driving through the French countryside in his little Fiat 500. He drives through backroads and byways and small villages, and interacts with…
In 2015, Robert Eggers played with the intersection of the real and the fantastic in the horrifyingly effective The Witch. Now writer-director Emily Harris treads similar territory in the creepy Carmilla. Like The Witch, Harris explores the line between reality on one hand, and fear and superstition on the other. But where Eggers left a…
Spiral: From the Book of Saw is the ninth film in the Saw universe, and an attempt to reboot a franchise long thought moribund. It’s been over a decade since the torture porn franchise came to a conclusion with Saw: The Final Chapter, although there was the disappointing attempt at a belated reboot with 2017’s…
