22 Jump Street is the kind of sequel you get from people who hate sequels. That’s not an entirely bad thing. This is the first sequel Hollywood wunderkinds Chris Lord and Phil Miller have helmed, though not the first they’ve inspired: they fobbed off Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 to Cody Cameron and…
Improvisational comedy is fast becoming the norm. Whether it’s This is the End, Bad Neighbours or Anchorman 2, the construction is the same: narrative skeleton to keep the audience interested interspersed with some carefully-honed gags and a lot of loose improvisation, edited into something tighter. I’m not complaining, mind; I love the shooting-shit-with-your-mates vibe of…
The Trip to Italy is a hard film to dislike. Sure, your jealousy of Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan might curdle into distaste. They’re both charming fellows, talented (and affable, if you believe Brydon), but when they get to make a television series-cum-feature film that sees them traipse around the most picturesque locales in Italy,…
This isn’t going to be a review of Prince Avalanche. Stop by Rotten Tomatoes and you can find a raft of those, talking about the charming atmosphere of David Gordon Green’s buddy comedy, the laidback performances of leads Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch and the way the fire-ravaged California forest and Explosions in the Sky…
Bad Milo has everything it needs to be a modern cult horror-comedy classic, from an eclectic, impressive cast (Ken Marino, Gillian Jacobs, Kumail Nanjiani, Peter Stormare) to a perfectly silly conceit: a monster living in the rectum of sadsack Duncan (Marino) that emerges in a homicidal rage whenever he’s overcome with stress. Why, then, does…
Bad Neighbours (titled just Neighbors in the States) is a mash-up of two “classic” – or, if you’re feeling less generous, clichéd – comedy conceits. The film modifies the ‘slobs vs snobs’ frathouse formula by repurposing the ‘snobs’ as 30-something stoners struggling with the demands of adulthood. There’s little originality in the Bad Neighbours screenplay, but thankfully…
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…
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…
G.B.F. – “gay best friend” – is essentially a queer Mean Girls. Like that film, it exists in an exaggerated candy-coloured high school reality, our world emphatically underlined with a pink highlighter. It’s defined by rigid cliques spouting made-up slang, ruled over by picture-perfect teenage girls. The story centres on how a gay teenager’s inadvertent…
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