Letterboxd — Your life in film

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Since debuting as a director with 1991’s The Indian Runner, Sean Penn has gone on to prove himself perhaps as talented behind the camera as he is before it, emerging every few years to deliver a measured and ultimately magnificent tale of isolated individuals on the fringes of society. Into the Wild, his latest such effort, concerns the true-life tale of Christopher McCandless, a privileged college graduate whose disillusionment with modern…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Another prime exemplar of that particular brand of dark comedy to which Uruguayan cinema of late seems so inclined, Gigante addresses issues of voyeurism in its story of a late-shift supermarket security guard who grows to obsess over a member of the cleaning staff. At times unsettling, it’s more with a veneer of cute comedy that first-time feature director Adrián Biniez tells this tale, teasing a frankly adorable portrayal from the…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Having made his name with the brooding Dutch drama The Vanishing, director George Sluizer went on to all-but-destroy that reputation with his own critically-reviled Hollywood remake. He followed that misstep with another in the form of 1996’s Crimetime, an intelligently conceived but appallingly executed crime thriller starring Steven Baldwin as an actor on a television reconstruction programme for whom the lines between reality and fiction begin to blur. There’s much to…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

The digital revolution, and its subsequent evolution, is so fast-moving a phenomenon that any efforts to encapsulate the expansion of the internet must surely be damned to soon be dated. That’s the unfortunate case for Hideo Nakata’s Chatroom, an interesting but almost immediately outdated examination of teenage angst against the backdrop of the eponymous social networking scene, which seemed obsolete already by the film’s 2010 release. It’s largely for this that…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

Following on from The Impostors’ Netflix arrival, Stanley Tucci’s directorial debut, taken with that later effort, does much to attest the chameleonic actor’s equal versatility as a director. Where that film offered a variety of comic stylings ranging from the slapstick to the absurd, Big Night instead maintains a particular façade of caricature that gradually erodes to reveal a depth of character, surprisingly less for its strength than for the realisation…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

A penchant for dark comedy seems to characterise contemporary Uruguayan cinema, most particularly seen in the films of Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll—25 Watts and Whisky—and also aptly evidenced in Bad Day to Go Fishing, the directorial debut of short filmmaker Álvaro Brechner. A charming tale of a touring strongman and his scheming manager, it’s not unworthy of comparison to The Wrestler, nor indeed to certain aspects of Rocky III,…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

With their eleventh collaboration—The Angels’ Share—released this year, writer Paul Laverty and director Ken Loach have evidently forged a strong relationship across their years together. 2004’s Ae Fond Kiss, their fifth pairing, sees the duo perfecting the riotous comedy and socially-conscious drama that has come to define their films. Something of a variation on All That Heaven Allows, it depicts the religiously-oriented tensions that fray the burgeoning romance between an Irish…

Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand"

The road movie, by definition, is traditionally a genre associated with mobility, a trait French comedians Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine subvert to comic effect in their shared directorial debut Aaltra. Starring as rival Belgian farmers who together travel to Finland to demand compensation from the eponymous company whose faulty equipment costs them the use of their legs early in the film, de Kervern and Delépine knowingly invert genre conventions…

Rewatched with a big bunch of friends as a fine party was coming to a quiet close. I mustn't lie, I watched others' reactions more than I watched the film, and therein lay most of my enjoyment. What a wonderfully fun movie this is, flippant in its attitude to formula and absolutely determined to pull the rug out from under your feet, even if it first has to come along, lift you up, and put one under you. Goddard and…

If you read my review of Mark of the Vampire, you'll know I watched it in prep for an essay on Tod Browning. Ditto The Devil-Doll which, despite providing less material of worth for me to talk about, I enjoyed quite a lot more. A large part of that, I confess, was the sheer strangeness of seeing Lionel Barrymore in drag for the whole movie. That was a treat. There's also the brilliant special effects that allowed for the creation…

"Well this is rather a lot like Dracula, isn't it? There's Lugosi, playing a mysterious and threatening foreigner. Tod Browning is behind the camera. A virginal woman is under threat, and her fiancé has called upon the aid of a wise old man to help. I mean really, this is just absurdly similar, they're not even trying to hide the plagia... ah, alright then."

This was me watching Mark of the Vampire, which is a very strange film that's not…

Of course I watched a film called Torture Ship. Of course I regretted it. That's how exploitation cinema works, right? The film's first ten minutes are now lost to the ravages of time, which leaves the modern viewer struggling to gather the details of a quite complex plot that involves multiple deceptions and a seriously unfortunate assortment of passengers with secret pasts. I suspect, however, that were we to find those first moments we wouldn't have a much better chance…