Letterboxd — Your life in film

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

It’s hard not to enjoy The Last Death, manic a movie as it is. Following a doctor who finds a mysterious man unconscious on the floor when he arrives at his remote cabin, it’s equal parts sci-fi drama and psychological thriller as it hurtles its way through a twist-laden plot. Director David Ruiz does well enough to channel his effective lead performances and relatively low-budget effects into a coherent plot, particularly…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Whatever complaints one might raise with the original Silent Hill movie, which now and then managed an atmosphere befitting of the video game series’ legacy before squandering it on a silly execution, it seems a masterpiece beside this risible sequel, which conforms to every disheartening trend of mainstream horror, video game adaptations, and 3D filmmaking. It’s a triple-whammy of terrible dreck, its decent performances from Adelaide Clemens and Sean Bean powerless…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

An interesting counterpoint to First Blood in many ways, Rolling Thunder’s closest companion is of course Taxi Driver, penned as both were by Paul Schrader. William Devane is transfixing in the lead, playing a returned POW whose wife confesses adultery in his absence. Schrader, sharing scripting duties with Heywood Gould, manages a mighty amount of twists and turns, never letting us know just what kind of film we’re watching until the…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Here is a documentary that gives us an origin story quite different to those that fill multiplex auditoria the world over: this, ladies and gentlemen, is the tale of the birth of Snoop Lion. Rarely has a documentary been so relentlessly self-serving, Snoop Dogg traipsing through the streets of Jamaica in search of himself, claiming to sympathise with the plight of the poor all the while helping himself to their hospitality,…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Boasting a star-making turn from Bette Davis—who, despite not even being nominated, received the third-highest amount of Oscar votes that year—Of Human Bondage casts Leslie Howard as the failed artist turned medical student against Davis’ cold-hearted waitress. A paean to the complexities of human interaction, the film is a powerful lamentation of the uncontrollable urges we call love, looking on sadly as both characters are gradually whittled away by heartbreak and…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

There’s a certain finesse to the way Lost and Delirious, Léa Pool’s earnest Canadian drama, inverts a typically male-centric narrative structure to examine its central issue of female homosexuality. The boarding school movie, with its recurring tropes of bullying and burgeoning sexuality, is all too often home solely to boys; Judith Thompson’s script reclaims this setting for fascinating purposes here. Said finesse, alas, extends no further than the basic concept, and…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

An early supporting role for the young Bette Davis is overly emphasised in retrospective artwork for Hell’s House, which focuses far more on Junior Durkin’s role as the newly-orphaned teen who falls into a life of crime and winds up incarcerated in a boy’s reformatory. Offering an interesting counterpoint in perspective to contemporary gangster pictures like Scarface and The Public Enemy—in a sense fusing those with a narrative not dissimilar to…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

The inexperience of writers Enrique Chmelnik and Rafael Gaytán and director Pedro Pablo Ibarra is easy to spot in Heaven in Your Eyes, which has a fine premise and little more. It’s not a bad little movie, nodding its head to A Matter of Life and Death as it tells the story of star-cross’d lovers given a second chance when the man, having died before even getting together with his destiny-dictated…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

“You are pretty rapeable,” opines the security guard at one point in Flypaper, inconveniently caught up when two unrelated teams happen to decide to rob his bank at the same time. It’s a line that’s played for laughs, revealing it and its writers—Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, better known for The Hangover and 21 & Over—as every bit as foul and unattractive as this character is made out to be. It’s the…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

There’s a certain demented brilliance to Branded that seems to indicate an incredible dystopian vision on the part of writer/directors Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerayn. The problem, unfortunately, is that their film doesn’t even nearly manage to bring that vision to fruition. What a manic mess of a movie this is, its ambitious tale of a ruthless advertising executive in an increasingly westernised Russia never reaching the fantastical aspirations Bradshaw and…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Perhaps not quite so glorious a title as the previous year’s Blacula, 1973’s Blackenstein continued the emergent trend of blaxploitation horror with its reworking of Mary Shelley’s classic tale for a specifically African-American audience. To see the story told with an almost entirely black cast is more historically interesting than it is cinematically entertaining; there’s plenty to admire in the basic concept of writer/producer Frank R. Saletri—which touches briefly on the…

As I stumbled out of the cinema, wandering dizzily through the shopping centre, I couldn't quite fathom whether I'd liked Man of Steel. Isn't that a strange thing, to not be sure whether you've enjoyed something? I guess, really, it means I didn't. Maybe the confusion comes because it's such a big, loud, bombastic blockbuster, doing all the big, loud, bombastic blockbuster stuff without actually providing any of the entertainment you'd expect of a big, loud, bombastic blockbuster. I think…