Larry Oliver Film Reviews

Contains spoilers In her third collaboration with director Claire Denis, Avec Amour et Acharnement (‘With Love and Fury’, re-titled in English as Both Sides of the Blade ), Juliette Binoche plays Sara, a radio talk show host who is torn between two men, her partner Jean (Vincent Lindon), an ex-con and former rugby player whose bi-racial son from his first marriage, Marcus (Issa Penca) is raised by his mother, Nelly (Bulle Ogier) and her ex, François (Grégoire Colin) who re-appears in her life first outside the offices of the radio station where she works and then as he goes into business running an agency for young rugby players. Unusually, Denis doesn’t make Sara her principal viewpoint character. Rather, she gives equal screen time to Jean, this also being Lindon’s third film with Denis. Outdoing both of them, Colin re-unites with Denis for their seventh film together, after Nenette et Boni , Beau Travail , Vendredi Soir , The Intruder , 35 Shots of Rum and Bastards . If nothing ...

  Officially in the United Kingdom, we are not supposed to talk about Brexit – the decision made in a referendum in 2016 to leave the ‘ever closer’ European Union. When discussing economic difficulties, even the absence of certain vegetables in our shops, it is not to be mentioned. Sold as an opportunity to ‘take back control’, Britons in their millions voted for it, swayed by the argument that an elected institution in Belgium should not be interfering in their lives to create a fairer society. Following this logic, but never acknowledging it, millions of Britons would much rather have a government closer to home cultivating an unfair society without the protections afforded by the EU. For the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom, there is nothing good about Brexit. The post of Minister of Brexit Opportunities – a non-job – has been quietly abolished under new Prime Minister Liz Truss. The UK government uses the English characteristic of never discussing shame against its...

  Few films have depicted the brittle love-hate relationship between a mother and a daughter as vividly as Korean writer-director Kim Se-in in her debut feature, The Apartment with Two Women . For Yoon Su-kyung (Yang Mal-bok), her twenty-something, emotionally insular daughter, Kim Yi-jung (Lym Ji-ho) is an encumbrance. They share a cluttered apartment with little privacy. When Yi-jung disappoints her mother, she is beaten, receiving a series of swiping blows from which she shields herself when not able to restrain her mother who, in spite of age, is stronger. Yi-jung doesn’t have a saviour on the horizon.   The film put me in mind of any number of Hollywood melodramas where a mother sinks her hopes, dreams and finally frustrations in her daughter, who yearns to escape emotional blackmail. But Kim Se-in takes the drama to physical extremes – Yoon Su-kyung drives the family car at her daughter during one such row, claims it as an accident and attempts to sue the car company, ...

  The test of a horror mystery is to reflect on the events within it and trace the outcomes back to the perpetrator.   Bodies Bodies Bodies passes with distinction. Directed by Halina Reijn ( Instinct ) from a smart screenplay credited to Sarah Delappe and a story by Kristen Roupenian, the film features a quintet of mostly wealthy twenty-something women, and their male companions, who turn on each other after a hurricane party game of ‘bodies bodies bodies’ goes very awry. When one of the group ends up dead with a sword wound to the neck, their blood-smeared dressing-gowned body pressed against a window, the group seeks the killer, concluding that their activity has gone too far. One of their number is in bed, having retired early and earlier squared off against the victim. ‘The best defence is a good offence,’ says one guest. ‘What does that even mean?’ asks the victim. The guest simply repeats the phrase, as if no further explanation is required. Any game that begins with sl...

Mention Hong Kong cinema to many cinemagoers and they might think of action films, particularly the work of John Woo, Johnny To and, in a lighter vein, Stephen Chow, or else the arthouse romances directed by Wong Kar-Wai. They won’t necessarily cite a melodrama featuring two members of the Cantopop boy band, ‘Mirror’. The latter is Mama’s Affair , written and directed by Kearan Pang ( 29 + 1 ) which tells the story of a woman, Mei-Fung (Teresa Mo) undergoing a shameful divorce who takes on as a protégé, Fong Ching (Keung To) a charming waiter from a local café, much to the annoyance of her seventeen year-old son, Hin (Jer Lau).   This is a generic but enjoyable and unexpectedly moving drama about following your talent and second chances. For Fong Ching, it is about having a mother for the first time in years, someone who he trusts and honours. Hin, by contrast, hides his true self from his mother, ostensibly planning to study at Cambridge University, England to be an architect. He ...

  Contains spoilers Incredibly, The Invitation , the email-order bride vampire film (not hard to work out the twist) is the first film directed by a woman to top the US Box Office charts in 2022. Admittedly, the weekend of 26-28 August was described as slow, with audiences insufficiently tempted by Idris Elba as a Djinn offering Tilda Swinton three wishes in Three Thousand Years of Longing (subtitle: ‘… gives me such a crick in the neck’). An estimated gross of $7 million doesn’t make it the highest opening film directed by a woman so far this year – that would be Where the Crawdads Sing – but it does show the enduring power of genre. Originally entitled ‘The Bride’ (let’s forget the Jennifer Beals-Sting movie of the same name) it stars Nathalie Emmanuel as Evie, a catering assistant and would-be potter hired for swanky launches who gets to keep a goodie bag. This, gentle reader, is a cautionary tale. You might think its great to swipe freebies at an awards ceremony or similar, b...