The metaphor at the heart of Cat’s Cradle is the titular cat’s cradle, a mess of string criss-crossing into a web of X’s. But why the name? Where’s the cat? Where’s the cradle? This confusion and disarray represents the post-war politics of the time, the mess of religion and morals and science strung up by…
Young and Beautiful’s opening shot is through a pair of binoculars, watching seventeen year-old Isabelle (Marine Vacth) as she strolls along the beach. Isabelle moves from beach to Parisian hotel rooms as a part-time prostitute by the name of Lea, while director François Ozon continues to survey her from a distance. Isabelle’s reasons for going…
The Way, Way Back is a lightweight coming-of-age summer holiday comedy/drama, often funny but rarely convincingly dramatic. Much like After May, it places at its centre an actor not quite up to the task – here, Liam James as the introverted, awkward teenager Duncan. He’s not supposed to be particularly charismatic, but James finds little…
Cheap Thrills is an ungainly mashup of grisly horror, blokey comedy and muted morality; it’s like the intersection on the Venn diagram of Jackass and Would You Rather? The conceit is bone-simple: dude (Pat Healy) is down on his luck; fired, broke, family at home. Meets up with an old friend (Ethan Embry) at a…
Late in After May (Après Mai or Something in the Air elsewhere) one of its teenage protagonists is informed that the assault charges that had loomed over these young wannabe-revolutionaries have been dropped. You see, in an ill-advised protest, these leftist French students (in tumultuous 1971) seriously injured a security guard, causing them to spend…
Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) is a liar and a thief. He steals skiing equipment from the wealthy guests populating the ski resort looming over his squalid apartment. The funds he earns from their sale is shared with his sister Louise (Léa Seydoux) – when she isn’t disappearing into a never-ending procession of young men’s cars.…
For a supposed “chick flick,” The Other Woman doesn’t demonstrate an especially high opinion of women. The hook – a wronged wife (Leslie Mann) and a pair of mistresses (Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton) team up to get revenge on their smarmy lover (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) – seems to be an empowerment-of-women-type-deal on the surface. And…
“The Lion and the Rose” is a timely reminder of why Game of Thrones is excellent television. Not because it dispatches one of the most detestable fictional characters in recent history, but because it continues its trend of subversion. George R.R. Martin is infamous for his predilection for dispatching his characters en masse, often unexpectedly.…
In Bob We Trust unapologetically positions Father Bob Maguire as an icon of goodness, an old man with an infectious good humour, idiosyncratic charm and, above all, a deep respect and love for humanity. Defined by his generosity in the community and his outspokenness in the media, this documentary chronicles Bob’s battle to try and…
I should love Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It’s about a game show impresario who is, according to his own supremely questionable accounts, a CIA assassin. Said alleged assassin is played with trademark jerky charm by the inimitable Sam Rockwell and the screenplay is from the legendary Charlie Kaufman. In short: exactly my kind of…
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