How I Live Now is a good movie whose potential greatness is squandered by a staggeringly wrong-headed romantic plotline. The set-up of the film is engaging – sixteen year-old American teenager Daisy (Saoirse Roman) moves to England to stay with her cousins just as the country is embroiled in a devastating nuclear war, the details…
In my interview with 52 Tuesdays director Sophie Hyde, she described her first feature length drama as “a very flawed film.” I don’t disagree. But this is a film whose flaws aren’t failings; rather evidence of an exciting, refreshingly different movie. Flaws are to be expected with such an unconventional approach to filming: per the…
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…
About a week ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Sophie Hyde, the award-winning director of 52 Tuesdays. The film and the director are both remarkable – having had only a very busy work day to prepare for the interview, I went in with a list of half-written, largely-incoherent questions that she answered with aplomb,…
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 Amazing Spider-Man 2 seems like it could be the first feature film to take inspiration from AAA videogame development. That isn’t a good thing. You see, many weaker big-budget videogames suffer from creative inconsistency born of farming out their writing to dozens of writers; this guy wrote the lore, that guy writes the journal…
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…
The Goldfinch is the third novel in just over twenty years from Donna Tartt, an author whose first novel The Secret History remains one of my favourite books of all time. The Goldfinch is an inspired, excellent work with much in common with her debut, even if it’s not quite on the same level. Like…
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…
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