Director Peter S. Traynor has obviously seen Daisies, and like that film, Death Game does a terrific job of portraying a very specific brand of gleeful female fuckery that I find both extremely relatable and highly entertaining.
I'm a huge fan of Eli Roth's hilarious and underrated Death Game remake Knock Knock, so I've long been curious to compare it with its source material. I'm delighted to find that they are quite different in ways that make each one more…
Dramatically inert, structurally flat, ugly AND boring, with really cheap-looking costumes and a career-worst performance from Hanks. Felt a billion hours long – I couldn't believe it when I looked at my watch and realised we were only an hour in. Austin Butler is great and looks the part, but all the OTT Luhrmann touches I love in Romeo + Juliet felt trite and stagnant here, like ol' Baz just runs the movie through his patented Lurhmannator then sits back…
Offensively stupid on multiple levels, a movie by people who think real rape-revenge films are beneath them while condescendingly co-opting those films' transgressive impact – but they can't even get that right, because any feints towards real violence are effectively neutered by some goody two-shoes bullshit where Carey Mulligan surprises would-be date rapists by giving them a stern talking-to instead of cutting their dicks off. (And let me tell you, as someone who has had their fair share of interactions…
Barely a movie, more like a jumble of tenuously connected scenes moving incomprehensibly backwards and forwards in time, with a tone that aims for exuberance but feels like hours of incessant high-pitched screaming. Borderline unwatchable if you're not intimately familiar with the source material – I'm not, and I think this assumes its audience is. I can't think of any other explanation for why Gerwig would go for this baffling structure. Nothing is allowed to develop naturally, every scene operates…
