Spinster (2019)

Do you really want to find your forever relationship? Caterer Gaby (Chelsea Peretti) lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. On her 39th birthday she finds her boyfriend of three months moving out admitting it was only supposed to be a fling and he was never really into her. Gaby is depressed but her married best friend Amanda (Susan Kent) reassures her that she still has time to marry and have children and encourages her back on the dating scene. Gaby awkwardly begins to search for a new man to enter a relationship with. After making a connection with one of her Tinder dates Gaby is crushed when he leaves right after they have sex. She begins living in the moment. After her father offers to give her the money he would have spent on her wedding in a lump sum Gaby decides to open a restaurant. After talking to her neighbour, a professor who never married or had children, Gaby begins to make peace with being alone and pursues her relationships with her family and friends including making time for Amanda that doesn’t mean hanging out with her kids. While out on a hike with her precious dog, Gaby finds a stranger Will (Jonathan Watton) who was lost in the woods ….. People are dicks to single women. Filled with shrewd apercus about the reality of life as a single woman, this is an amusing meditation on the traps of life in or out of relationships – they all contain hazards. When Amanda admits that being left home alone with two young children was horrible we see that the trap is womanhood itself. At a dinner party from hell Gaby triggers misogynistic statements from Amanda’s husband Jack (Bill Carr) that insult every woman present. That her own divorced brother Alex (David Rossetti) father of 9-year old Willow (Charlie Boyle) is an accountant who wants to be a standup comic also has issues is material – for his terrible routine – showing how terrible it is when marriages go wrong and people give up on their dreams and then flail when trying to retrieve them while juggling parenthood with a disagreeable ex. In the penultimate sequence when Gaby rescues a guy who’s lost in the woods while out hiking they basically enact a potential romance they might have had – and it sums up everything that goes wrong between two people, the expectations, presumptions and disappointments and thankfully it’s all talked over and rationalised out of existence by the end of the walk. A relationship in microcosm. This is smart and well performed and if it’s a tad low key and occasionally undisciplined it’s got its compensations in at least not faking a fairy tale ending. Perretti is terrific (and a front runner for a Streisand biopic). Written by Jennifer Deyell and directed by Andrea Dorfman. That’s the thing about breakups. They ruin your solitude

Lady Macbeth (2016)

Could you do without me? Northern England 1865.  Newly sold into marriage to an older man, rich industrialist Alexander Lester (Paul Hilton), Katherine (Florence Pugh) finds herself confined to the house and starved of companionship. Her husband can’t or won’t have sex with her but makes her strip and masturbates while she faces a wall. Forced to spend her days in endless tedium, dining with his bullying father Boris (Christopher Fairbank), when her husband is called away to one of his collieries she starts to spend more time with maid Anna (Naomi Ackie) and begins a passionate and fiery relationship with a young groom Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis) from the estate, beginning a conflict that will end in violence. Following her husband’s demise at her hands and after hiding his body, a surprise arrives on her doorstep in the form of her husband’s illegitimate son Teddy (Anton Palmer) accompanied by his grandmother Agnes (Golda Rosheuvel) throwing Katherine’s plans into disarray .… You’ve got fatter. Adapted by Alice Birch from Nikolai Leskov’s novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, this austere treatment of a rural tragedy is as contained as anti-heroine Pugh by corsetry and decency until sensuality spills forth and all hell breaks loose.  This is the distinctive Pugh’s breakout performance following The Falling and TV’s Marcella and her polarising character anchors a narrative which is ostensibly feminist but ultimately offers a critique of female power and how it is achieved and sustained. Perhaps the casting of black actors in the story complicates the issue of power by raising another issue, that of of race, in what is otherwise a melodrama of sex and class. Ultimately what happens when people are undone by desire can be murderous. It is a drama entirely without ornament. Directed by William Oldroyd. She is a disease

The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

The world is perfect. Appreciate the details. In the sleepy small town of Centerville, Pennsylvania something is not quite right. News reports are scary with the earth tilting on its axis and scientists are concerned, but no one foresees the dead rising from their graves and feasting on the living, and the citizens must battle to survive. Chief  Robertson (Bill Murray) and his officer sidekick (Adam Driver) get to work dealing with the undead while Mindy Morrison (Chloe Sevigny) reluctantly accompanies them, terrified and Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) observes hostilities … The only way to kill the dead is to kill the head. Well I didn’t see that coming. Jim Jarmusch making a zombie comedy? Things are getting exceedingly strange in the world of the cool Eighties auteur when he’s making a film that serves at least partly as an homage to George Romero with a side salad of Assault on Precinct 13 and a reference to Samuel Fuller. The title comes from a short story turned TVM written by Robert Psycho Bloch and it’s somewhat honoured here with a subplot about juvenile delinquents and the revenge they take. It’s something of a shaggy dog story with slow-running gags and the Murray/Driver double act offers deadpan self-conscious commentary on filmmaking indicating the lack of genre commitment, which may or may not irritate and take you out of the action the wrong way. In fact it makes it a bit of a zombie zombie film, if you think about it. There is a huge head count and most of the fun is in watching the different tools used to decapitate – guns, garden shears and, with her fierce Scottish accent and a samurai sword, funeral home proprietor Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton). Even sweet Selena Gomez is separated from her torso. Did I mention the UFO?! Thought not. A nicely made oddity shot with typical aplomb by Frederick Elmes. This is definitely going to end badly

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982)

I didn’t invent the cosmos I just explain it. In the early 1900s in upstate New York wacky inventor Andrew Hobbs (Woody Allen) and his wife Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) invite the priapic internist Maxwell Jordan (Tony Roberts) and his latest lover free-thinking nurse Dulcy Ford(Julie Hagerty) together with Adrian’s cousin, the dry philosophy professor Leopold Sturges (José Ferrer) and his fiancée Ariel Weymouth (Mia Farrow) for a weekend house party. However Andrew was in love with Ariel a long time ago and Maxwell falls for her while it transpires Maxwell and Adrian may know each other a little better than Andrew realises … If marriage is the death of hope then the night before marriage there’s still hope. A bucolic excursion involving three mismatched couples who find sexual joy in each other’s partners, all to the music of Mendelssohn and loosely adapted from Bergman’s 1955 Smiles of a Summer Night while Gordon Willis delights in the landscape and the endless possibilities of the play of sunlight. A frisky, frothy confection that without any big revelations or confrontations (beyond the use of a skilfully aimed arrow) risks being seen purely as a parody yet in its humorous dealing with matters sexual and intellectual manages to arrive at a few truisms about human behaviour and frailty as well as the idea that there might be some form of existence beyond rational explanation. Or it’s just a nutty sex comedy with a few references to Shakespeare and hints of enchantment via a whirring magic lantern. Steenburgen and Hagerty are both ideally cast while Farrow replaced Diane Keaton and would remain Allen’s muse for another dozen films. Nothing is real but experience

 

Au revoir, les enfants (1987)

I’m the only one in this school that thinks about death. It’s incredible! In 1943, Julien (Gaspard Manesse) is a student at a French boarding school run by Catholic priests. When three new students arrive, including clever Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto), Julien believes they are no different from the other boys. What he doesn’t realise is that they are actually Jews who are being sheltered from capture by the Nazis. Julien doesn’t care for Jean at first but the boys develop a tight bond with grudging admiration of each other – while the head of the school, Père Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud), works to protect the boys from the Holocaust.… I understand the anger of those who have nothing when the rich feast so arrogantly. Louis Malle’s autobiographical tale of his time at  school in Fontainebleau is an artful depiction of the country’s great shame – the level of collaboration with the occupying Nazis, some of whom are rather sympathetically portrayed. This is a beautifully composed, sensitively handled and measured portrait of childhood with its petty rivalries and quarrels, preceding an act of revenge, accidental betrayal and a chilling climax in an atmosphere of casual spitefulness, denunciations and anti-semitism. One of the very best films of its era, this is a perfect companion to Malle’s earlier masterpiece, Lacombe, Lucien. Those who should guide us betray us instead

Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018)

That hole is a gateway. And it leads, straight down, to hell. Now, who wants to buy some drugs? Yorkshire boy Don Wallace (Finn Cole) is sent to a strange public school by his concerned mother Kay (Isabella Laughland) where he has to share a room with the rather eccentric and bullied snuff-sniffing Willoughby (Asa Butterfield). He finds his predecessor hanged himself. He falls for ‘goddess’ Clemsie (Hermione Corfield) but is warned off and gets homesick in this weird institution run by The Bat (Michael Sheen) with a horrible house called Andromeda where students undergo strange rituals. Useless master Meredith (Simon Pegg) spends all of his downtime Skyping former love Audrey (Margot Robbie) who has clearly found a new romantic interest in South Sudan. When a company called Terrafrack run by Bat’s mate Lambert (Alex Macqueen) unearths a huge sinkhole emitting a terrible methane cloud it appears it has disturbed some strange subterranean creatures in the woods. And there’s an eco protest group nearby where Woody (Nick Frost) has a stash of drugs he wants to sell but there’s more to him than anyone suspects … We’re going to let them run our fucking country? From a screenplay by debut director Crispian Mills and Henry Fitzherbert, this is the latest Simon Pegg/Nick Frost collaboration, following their Cornetto Trilogy but they are minor characters, sidelined by attractive teens.  This is a story with the evils of fracking at its heart that traffics in charm rather than terror in episodic fashion. No more than Don’s mother, it has aspirations above its station in its references and a swipe at class difference, with a photo of Malcolm McDowell in the great If… on Willoughby’s wall. But it’s a schlock horror not a shock horror with lowbrow laughs, social commentary, some gore and a backstory that harks at myth. This may not be great but it is efficient genre cinema with oodles of good humour (and bad nature) and we might expect good things from the scion of Hayley Mills and Roy Boulting, never mind that he was also the frontman of Kula Shaker. The ecstasy of death

Kinsey (2004)

Are my answers typical? Professor Alfred ‘Prok’ Kinsey (Liam Neeson) is interviewed about his sexual history by one of his graduate students Clyde Martin (Sarsgaard) and reflects on how he became the author of famous studies of modern Americans’ sexual behaviour. He grew up in a repressed household headed by Alfred Seguine Kinsey (John Lithgow) and disobeyed him to study biology and became a lecturer, marrying his student Mac (Laura Linney). After completing his study of gall wasp behaviour and addressing the sexual issues within his own marriage his advice is sought by students and he begins teaching a sex ed course that raises questions he cannot answer.  He devises a questionnaire to find out what passes for normal activity among his students but soon realises that 100 completed documents are not remotely sufficient.  He commences a countrywide research project in which he taxonomises sexual behaviour inside and outside average marriages and subgroups like homosexuals at a time when all these things are illegal in several states … The forces of chastity are massing again. Writer/director Bill Condon’s biography of the famed sex researcher whose reports rocked midcentury America is careful, detailed and filled with good performances (appropriately). Both Linney and Neeson contribute complete characters and their respective realisation that Clyde wants to seduce Prok are extremely touching and when you consider it’s established in a phonecall it’s all the more affecting. Their marriage is a profile of the parameters of this study – until things become more extreme and the grad students carrying out the research offer their own services to be recorded. The issue of agreed infidelity and extra-marital sex is just one of the common behavioural tics dealt with here and deftly personalised. There are of course some limits to even these sexologists’ tolerance – and Pomeroy (Chris O’Donnell) storms out when a particularly noxious individual (William Sadler) decides to regale him and Kinsey about his incest, bestiality and more, including incidents with pre-adolescent children. There are some abusive perversions that are just too tough to take. Word about the nature of the team’s methodologies gets out and their funding is cut by the Rockefeller Foundation, an issue that is particularly effective as a narrative device because it reminds us of the real-world difficulties in securing funding and the consequences that not funding this particular study might have had – its far-reaching insights into human behaviour in a highly censorious era was groundbreaking.  Oliver Platt is particularly good as the genial Herman Wells, President of the University at Bloomington whose support of the controversial work is so important. The confrontational nature of the film doesn’t descend to pornography chiefly because the humanity of the protagonists – and that of the study’s participants – is carefully graphed against the social norms. The topper to Alfred Senior’s difficult relationship with his son is very sad and crystallises the reasons behind his bullying, a habit Prock has inherited and replays with his own son Bruce (Luke MacFarlane) over mealtimes. At this point we don’t need any lectures on nature versus nurture or gene theory. The coda is a wonderful exchange between Kinsey and his latest interview subject played by Lynn Redgrave. It’s a marvellous conclusion to a remarkable film that deals with biology, family and the life force. A very satisfying experience. Where love is concerned we’re all in the dark

Unsane (2018)

As soon as the insurance runs out you’ll be cured. Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) is a troubled woman who moves 450 miles away from home to escape a stalker. She is still triggered by interactions with men as a result of her experiences and makes an appointment to attend a counsellor at Highland Creek Behavioral Center. She unwittingly signs a release voluntarily committing herself to a 24-hour stay. She calls the police but they do nothing when they see the signed release. After physical altercations with a patient and a staff member whom she recognises as her stalker David Strine (Joshua Leonard), Dr. Hawthorne says she is being kept for seven more days  during which fellow patient Nate Hoffman (Jay Pharoah) reveals the insurance scam lying behind her incarceration and which even her mother Angela (Amy Irving) cannot do anything to change when she calls her on Nate’s smuggled cellphone …You unlocked something inside me that day, something I didn’t even realize was there. And right then, I knew that nothing in my life was ever going to be the same. In that moment, I was transformed permanently. You did that. Written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer.  Notable not just for being shot (and edited) pseudonymously by director Steven Soderbergh but because he did it on the iPhone Seven Plus and it sure ain’t purty. It’s a flawed but interesting genre piece, another thriller that’s actually an investigation of medical (non-)ethics (after Side Effects, and TV’s The Knick) providing further evidence that Soderbergh is happiest when making B movies, dramatising feisty female characters driven to the point of paranoia, generally hovering on the edges of commerciality and making films that verge on the experimental. The efforts to make TV star Foy a movie personality are interesting.  My job is to access and interpret data to produce analytical results. I did that job

An Actor Prepares (2018)

Maybe it would be a good idea to do some bonding. When he suffers a heart attack, hard-living movie actor Atticus Smith (Jeremy Irons) is forced to travel across the United States to his favourite child Annabel’s (Mamie Gummer) wedding with his estranged son Adam (Jack Huston) as he’s not fit to fly before cardiac surgery. Adam is a failing film lecturer and documentary maker whose painfully sincere work is sporadic and his health is problematic hence his frequent visits to a urologist. Girlfriend Clemmie (Megalyn Echikunwoke) is in London finishing up a project and bugging him on the phone. Atticus’ studio get a Hell’s Angel to take the pair across the country in an RV to ensure he’ll be in shape for their next movie but Atticus soon dispatches the guy. The father and son go to their holiday cabin, load up his vintage car and take off, meeting friends new and old along the way, including a former lover (Colby Minifie) of Atticus who’s now married to a preacher (Frankie Faison) … I’m a documentarian. I make documentaries about women in film. This starts out in rather clichéd fashion with a trajectory somehow familiar from Absolutely Fabulous but with balls (literally and metaphorically, since one cataclysm has to do with potential testicular cancer, another with baseball). No observation is too trite, nothing too on the nose for this narrative but some lines are pretty funny and hit home:  Live in the world not in your bloody head all the time. The father-son rivalry extends from penis envy (Atticus is a little too proud of his pecker) back to 15 years earlier to the divorce when Adam gave evidence against his father in court. Huston doesn’t have too many colours in his acting palette so for the most part Irons eats up every scene, with relish. When he watches contemporary porn on Adam’s iPad he comments, Too clean. This is like basketball.  It’s quite funny to see him working on his next part (God) while his son just keeps driving. Adam finally gets a turning point after some extraordinarily irritating phonecalls with his girlfriend Clemmie (pronounced Clammie, maybe pointedly) and even quotes one of his father’s roles but never shaves what Atticus calls his Osama bin Laden nutball beard, sadly. Occasionally however his character is permitted to surprise Atticus, who is named perhaps for Finch, to remind us that deep down he’s probably an okay guy despite his penchant for whisky and women and his tales of living it large with Richard Harris. Like all road movies, this is an emotional journey (yawn) but it gets better as it goes along and – ta da! – gets there in the end. There are nice small roles for Matthew Modine and Will Patton but this is all about Irons. Written by director Steve Clark and Thomas Moffett. The studio gives me stuntman work. Do you have any fucking idea how much that pays in residuals?

Christopher Robin (2017)

People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.  Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) now a family man living in London receives a surprise visit from his old childhood pal, Winnie-the-Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings). With Christopher’s help, Pooh embarks on a journey to find his friends – Tigger, Eeyore, Owl, Piglet, Rabbit, Kanga and Roo. Christopher Robin is irritated by Pooh’s fear of Heffalumps. Once reunited, the lovable bear and the gang travel to the big city to help Christopher rediscover the joy of life as he tries to save the jobs of his colleagues in the luggage company where he is an efficiency manager… I always get to where I’m going by walking away from where I’ve been. A film with baggage, quite frankly, as it struggles for at least the first hour to find its feet. The juxtaposition of bustling city with bucolic countryside is initially strained because until the adult Christopher Robin finally becomes at home with his inner child the Hundred Acre Wood is a dark, dank place. McGregor isn’t happy in the role until his character becomes happy. Nor are we, ironically, in a story about someone who has lost the power of imagination. The animatronic animals are wonderful however in a troublesome and sticky piece of work which bears the taint of cynicism and is a case of split cinematic personality. Inspired by A.A. Milne’s stories, although you’d never know from this film that Christopher Robin was his son, this is written by Alex Ross Perry, Tom McCarthy and Allison Schroeder from a story by Greg Brooker and Mark Steven Johnson while it was directed by Marc Forster. I’m not the person I used to be