Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Some bold creative decisions really pay off, others not so much. Mouthpiece , the latest film from Canadian director Patricia Rozema ( I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Into the Forest ) falls into the latter category. It preserves the spirit of the one hour two-women-in-a-bath-playing-one-character play from which it is derived. In it, writer-performers Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, who originated the material, appear in every scene as one character, Cassandra, a writer who is preparing to delivering a eulogy following the death of her mother, Elaine (Maev Beaty), a promising writer-editor who, according to Cassandra – well that would be a spoiler. The film builds to the Christmas party in which Cassandra – well, tall Cassandra (Nostbakken) - delivers some home truths. Short Cassandra (Sadava) isn’t exactly the peace maker; in fact I am not what she contributes to Cassandra’s split personality. She’s the one who doesn’t have sex but instead comments on tall Cassandra’s breasts...

  It opened on 29 March 2019 on 235 screens, but if the website box office mojo is to be believed, director Inés de León’s feature debut , ¿Que te juegas? ( Get her ... if you can ) was pulled from Spanish cinemas after two weeks of release. The big Spanish language hit that replaced it, I Can Quit Whenever I Want , is a remake of an Italian comedy about three unemployed professors who develop a drug that helps them party all night. There is no accounting for popular taste. De León’s film focuses on a wager between two brothers, Roberto and Fernando Allende-Salazar (Javier Rey and Daniel Pérez Prada) whose company is facing ruin. As CEO, their sister, Daniela (Amaia Salamanca) proposes lay-offs and downsizing. Roberto, who is something of a playboy, makes a counter proposal - a turbine that he has sketched that will transform the company’s prospects. Fernando, who hides in an office in army uniform, has given his sister his vote. Roberto bets his brother that he can find someone ...

  When it comes to turning a book into a film, an author is not the best adaptor of their own work. A story that has reached its perfect form in one version is then converted into a different form, a screenplay, and then directed with actors. For Holy Lands , Amanda Sthers has taken her 2010 epistolary novel written in French, written a screenplay in English and directed the film, casting veteran movie star James Caan in the leading role as Harry Rosenmerck, a Jewish American who has retired to Israel to raise pigs much to the distaste and distrust of the local community – except for a neighbour who sews a bandanna for a piglet rejected by its mother. The film focuses on the unlikely friendship between Harry and the local rabbi, Moshe Cattan (Tom Hollander) as Harry attracts the unwanted attention of a zealous (Catholic?) priest who condemns him for being a squatter on Jesus’ property. In telling the story through a series of letters, Sthers (pronounced ‘Esthers’) created a tapes...

  Some of us feel like little kids in old people’s bodies. That’s called immaturity – now, eat your greens. There are a few people who feel like adults in children’s bodies - minus hormones. Good to know - now eat your greens. Writing checks your body can’t cash (to quote Top Gun ) – it’s hard. I mean, who writes checks anymore? Being the smartest person in the room doesn’t mean that you get respect - look at the White House. There’s definitely scope for comedy. Writer Tracy Oliver ( Girls Trip ) and director Tina Gordon have collaborated on the Universal Pictures release, Little , a throwback to those body-swap do-over movies like Freaky Friday and 13 Going On 30 . In a zeitgeist type thing, the current superhero movie, Shazam is also about a little kid in a muscular adult body. It’s a lot of fun. Putting an adult in a young girl’s body with a child expressing adult desires isn’t so much. However, young TV star Marsai Martin ( Black-ish ) as little Jordan Sanders puts in a terri...

  The American actress Patricia Clarkson is in almost every scene of Out of Blue , British writer-director Carol Morley’s quasi adaptation of British author Martin Amis’ 1997 quasi noir detective thriller, Night Train. Morley has some fun at the expense of Amis: a new character, Ian Strammi, played by Toby Jones is an anagram of the author, and boasts an abscess. Amis reputedly demanded a huge advance for a novel to pay for dental work. Later, we see Strammi in a club filled with exotic dancers; Amis is famously obsessed with low culture – the boozer, the bother, the broken glass. Amis and cinema represent an unhappy marriage. The last Amis adaptation, London Fields , ended in litigation, the director’s vision interfered with by the producers. Morley had no such aggro. Then again, there’s no such spice. Clarkson plays New Orleans Police Detective Mike Hoolihan, a former alcoholic investigating the death of renowned astrophysicist, Dr Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer), felled by a ...

  At the heart of the fact-based drama Yuli – The Carlos Acosta Story , adapted from Acosta’s 2007 autobiography, ‘No Way Home’ by screenwriter Paul Laverty and director Icíar Bollaín, there is an abusive father-son relationship. Pedro Acosta (Santiago Alfonso), a black truck driver living in a slum in Havana, Cuba, literally forces his young son Carlos, nicknamed Yuli (Edilson Manuel Olbera Núñez) into ballet school. Ten year-old Yuli is a talented street dancer who apes the moves of Michael Jackson with a few extra side flips and who, at the start of the film (in 1983) is winning a street dance battle. His father, seen calling his name in a frantic but to all intents and purposes unmotivated search, grabs him and drags him home. Although in the film permanently old, Pedro is powerfully built. Separated from his wife, María (Yerlín Pérez) with whom he still shares a house, he teaches Yuli, with whom he shares a room, that he is descended from Ogun the warrior. (‘I told him that,’ ...