The Old Oak (2023) - Movie Review

It’s such a shame that I only started to get into Ken Loach’s work so close to the end of his career. Sure, retirement in the arts has a faster revolving door than Arkham Asylum, but this is one of those deals that might actually stick. And given how immensely depressing his last film was in Sorry We Missed You, along with the equally depressing impression left by The Boy And The Heron earlier this year, I was a bit apprehensive about this at first. But hey, as I pointed out when I highlighted SWMY as one of my faves of 2019, films that bum me the hell out tend to win my favour in the attempt.

Allelujah (2023) - Movie Review

It’s Shitty Plot Twist time again!

Yep, we’ve got another film where my usual attempts at weave around story specifics for the sake of spoilers (as I’ve said before, I don’t like the idea of ruining the experience of a film for anyone, even if I personally didn’t care for it) are rendered moot because the narrative not only hinges on a major twist, but so does the film’s efficacy as a whole. This is the kind of shift that had me going from generally liking the film, albeit not all that enthusiastically, to having a confused slack-jawed look plastered on my face for the entire ride home from the cinema. It has been quite a while since a single moment has so utterly demolished the rest of the film around it, but that’s what we’ve got here.

Dashcam (2022) - Movie Review

 

After how much I got into Host, my favourite film of 2020, my introduction to Shudder’s collection of streamed horror, and something I think will go down as one of the definitive films of the COVID era, I’ve been waiting for the chance to see what Rob Savage would come up with next. I spent quite a bit of 2021 hoping that this film would get a release over here in some capacity, to no avail, but it finally got a digital release in June of this year. It’s another computer-screen horror film, still working off of DIY production values, but it’s also a sharp change-up from what he offered up last time.

The Lost King (2022) - Movie Review

 

It’s been a while between drinks, but after a five-year gap since his last feature film, British director Stephen Frears is back in the cinema. Between 2015 and 2017, he came out with three films that I quite liked in The Program, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Victoria & Abdul, and as those were also my more formative years of trying to find my own voice as a critical writer, I’ve grown quite fond of the man’s style. And while I can certainly see what I liked back then still present today, there’s also a much more uneasy feeling attached to it this time around.

The House (2022) - Movie Review

 

Yep, still on an animation kick, and this is a real beauty here. Put onto Netflix back in January, this is a three-part anthology film all about the titular House. This is another situation where the use of stop-motion specifically does a lot for the storytelling all on its own, as putting emphasis on tangible textures and physical objects makes a tighter connection between the audience and the setting that these stories fixate on. It also makes each story’s more horrifying aspects sink in even deeper.

Crazed Gender Twisters From Planet X (2022) - Movie Review

 

It has been way too long since I last looked at some proper underground cinema. And this is about as underground as it gets, from what I can tell. Much like with The Exorcism Of God, you can thank a late-night scrolling session on YouTube for me stumbling onto this thing, and… yeah, I admit it, it also peaked my interest out of sheer morbid fascination. Except this was even harder to find out anything about its creation, leading to what is probably the most intensive research I’ve had to do on a film review all year (for this blog, at least).

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris (2022) - Movie Review

I don’t know if karma is actually a thing. It’s a nice idea as a general principle, and it would certainly help the world make a bit more sense, but... well, that’s just it: It relies on things in the world having a logical progression to them, and I’m not so sure of that. Bad people get rewarded for their dickery all the time, while those trying to do good often run at a deficit because altruism isn’t exactly a profitable endeavour. We should be good to each other and to ourselves, but that doesn’t mean getting recognised by some nebulous universal force is going to be part of the deal. Not that it isn’t a dream worth striving for, though, and dreams are bountiful when it comes to this particular film.

Flux Gourmet (2022) - Movie Review

Just in case it wasn’t weird enough that The Invitation and After Ever Happy, two films that fall under the same niche category of ‘hilariously awful fanfiction as cinema’, are both in cinemas at the same time as I’m writing this, we now have a film that fits into another niche that would’ve been weird enough to have one feature representing it in theatres. Much like Crimes Of The Future, the latest from Peter Strickland (who also did the excellent Duke Of Burgundy some years back) is heavily fixated on performance art culture and the politics surrounding it, refracted through the director’s unique sensibilities. However, where Cronenberg used it as a vehicle for his usual musings on the limits of the human body, what Strickland has in mind here is far less heady than that. It is downright silly, in fact.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande (2022) - Movie Review

It’s quite impressive how well this film turned out. I feel it’s important to open with that because there are quite a few things here that, if the production team weren’t as synchronised as they are, could’ve turned this into a complete shambles.

Men (2022) - Movie Review

I love fucked-up movies. To me, there are few feelings I love more than when I’ve just finished watching a movie, and my first instinct is to scream “What the fuck did I just watch?!” while sporting a massive grin on my face. I’ve looked at quite a few films on this blog that have genuinely gotten that reaction out of me, like The Greasy Strangler, Malignant, Where The Dead Go To Die, and Titane, and the experiences I had watching them for the first time are memories I hold onto quite closely. But when the latest film by Alex Garland, whose last two films were certified sci-fi king hits, popped up in a cinema close(ish) to me, I can’t say I was expecting it to join that illustrious collection. But sure enough, here we are.

Ammonite (2021) - Movie Review

For all the good things I’m about to put down on paper about this film, I have to admit that I can easily see this film rubbing some people the wrong way. This is an incredibly cold and detached film by design, depicting the budding relationship between palaeontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), a young woman who was basically thrust into Mary’s care without much say from either party. The sterile colour palette (if it can even be described as having one from the offset), the dreary seaside setting, the distance held between the characters and the cinematic perspective; it can be a bit much to get into right away.

His House (2020) - Movie Review

For the longest time, haunted house movies have been plagued by a single question: Why the fuck haven’t you left yet? Easily one of the most mockable cliches in horror (and it’s not as if there’s nothing else to make fun of within the trope-ier corners of the genre), it has likewise fallen into the realm of cliché to even point it out. The presence of something beyond this world makes itself known to the family living in a new house, and because the plot demands it, they never question that they haven't taken that as a sign that maybe it's time to move.

Not that all movies hand-wave this away, though. During the 2010s, James Wan and Mike Flanagan treated the question with a lot of postmodern clarity, and even further back, Beetlejuice remains one of my favourite examples of the sub-genre purely because it answers that question in a delightfully kooky fashion. Today’s film, however, is far less kitschy. In fact, it makes for one of the more sobering features I’ve ever seen from the haunted house clique.

Misbehaviour (2020) - Movie Review

What is feminism? With how easy it is to caricature basically any and all political movements (even the ones you personally support), it’s just as easy to lose sight of what a given movement stands for when it seems like everyone has their own idea of it. And not all of them are exactly accurate. Feminism especially has this problem in the popular consciousness, encompassing everything from equal rights to #killallmen. Of course, it’s also one of those catch-all terms like Satanism or post-modern Neo-Marxism or The Left™ that gets thrown around by people who basically want to lump everything they don’t approve of into a single category. So it comes as something of a surprise when a mainstream feature like Misbehaviour comes out, which manages to clear the air in rather bracing fashion.

Four Kids And It (2020) - Movie Review

The titular It of this film isn’t the legendary cosmic monster who dresses like a clown. No, this one might be even weirder than that. This It, voiced by Michael Caine, is a sand-dwelling creature that looks like Yoda fucked Chewbacca’s dad and somehow gave birth afterwards. He grants wishes by inflating himself with magical stomach gases, but can only grant one wish a day, except when he can do more because the plot needs him to.

Already, this sounds like the kind of crazy you can only find in media made for children, also known as one of the main reasons why I still give kids’ films an honest chance well into my 20s. Unfortunately, the lunacy isn’t confined to just the story specifics; this entire production is off its face.

The Secret Garden (2020) - Movie Review

Films like this are frustrating to write about, possibly even more so than films that are outright boring. Although weirdly enough, they’re both frustrating for the same reason: The challenge involved with writing about them in a way that’s worth reading. With boring films, it’s managing to get across how little of an impact it made on me as a viewer without resorting to just repeating the word ‘boring’ 500 times. With films like The Secret Garden, it’s figuring out how to explain that all the pieces for a satisfying movie are here, and it seems to have done what it set out to do… and yet somehow didn’t. Read on, and I’ll do my best to explain.

23 Walks (2020) - Movie Review

Gonna keep this one nice and short, since I don’t really have much to add to a film like this. It’s a romantic drama about a couple who meet and get to know each other over the course of the titular 23 walks in the park with their dogs. It’s rather minor-key and pleasant, almost tranquillisingly so, but in that lies its charm.

Love Sarah (2020) - Movie Review

Certain forms of media tend to bleed out into other forms of media. With how multidisciplinary art can become in the right hands, along with how everything ends up influencing everything else, every so often, I come across films that feel like cinematic reskins of other types of storytelling. In some cases, that can add layers to the production and the story, but in other cases (the latter being the unfortunate majority out there), it just makes me question why it just isn’t that other kind of media to begin with.

The Gentlemen (2020) - Movie Review

I’ve been ragging on Guy Ritchie as a filmmaker for a few years now, and I feel the need to clear some things up. For as much as I’ve taken issue with his more recent efforts, I don’t want to come across like my objections are coming from some knee-jerk “how dare he try and do something different” shit. Rather, I keep pointing this out because I’ve seen enough of Ritchie’s work to know where his strengths lie. He’s a Brit-crime storyteller, and a damn effective one when he plays to what he does best. But as soon as he reaches for something bigger, his limitations present themselves.

Whether it’s coating his usual style in philosophical wankery like with Revolver, adapting classic stories that clash with his sensibilities like with King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword, or just plain doing what he should know by now isn’t his strong suit like with Aladdin. I bring all this up because I want to see Ritchie deliver satisfying cinema again, and it’s why I’m very happy with his latest.

Sorry We Missed You (2019) - Movie Review

The latest release from British working-class hero Ken Loach is a bleak offering. It’s a portrait of a family in the midst of financial and personal crisis, primarily through Kris Hitchen’s humbling turn as a father who has just started a job as a white van man delivering packages. It carries next-to-no flash and about as humdrum as a release can get these days, and yet it carries an emotional intensity that makes for one of the most crushing films of the year.

Downton Abbey (2019) - Movie Review

In quite a few ways, I was not looking forward to this one. While part of that could be due to my inexperience with the series this film spawned from, it’s not as if that’s been an issue in the past. I haven’t seen any episodes of Dance Academy or Sword Art Online, and yet I left those films quite pleased with the results.

No, my apprehension here is more to do with the genre, as I have stated in previous reviews that costume dramas really aren’t my thing, and the writer and director bringing it together. Between Crooked House, which was less film as it was malformed audiobook, and The Chaperone, which as a possible road-test for Downton Abbey-style storytelling in a feature-length production ended up crashing into a ditch with all its wheels punctured, I wasn’t expecting much out of this. And yet, while still not entirely being on board with it, I walked away from this a lot more chipper than I would’ve guessed.