Larry Oliver Film Reviews

Pictured : Roki ( Isabel Deroy-Olson ) and aunt Jax ( Lily Gladstone ) in a scene from co-writer-director Erica Tremblay 's missing person drama, ' Fancy Dance '. Still courtesy of Apple TV Another debut feature. Another film about life on a Native American reservation. Except Fancy Dance , co-writer-director Erica Tremblay’s tale of a barely investigated disappearance, goes into the wider world. Her protagonist, Jax (Lily Gladstone) has a white American father, Frank (Shea Whigham), who wasn’t exactly around after Jax’s mom died but has since remarried. He seeks custody of Jax’s thirteen-year-old niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) after Roki’s stripper-prostitute mother disappears. Quite why Jax’s brother JJ (Ryan Begay) who works in law enforcement, more as an apologist than a deterrent to crime, doesn’t offer to take care of the girl is moot. Perhaps Frank isn’t his father; their scenes together don’t vibrate with familial tension. It is hard to attach a genre to Fancy Dan...

Pictured : 'Mirror, mirror.' Mina ( Dakota Fanning ) faces life being observed by nocturnal animals in a scene from ' The Watched ' (aka 'The Watchers'), adapted from A. M. Shine 's 2021 and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan . Still courtesy of Warner Bros . If Rebecca Miller and Sofia Coppola can be unfairly referred to as a ‘nepo babies’, what of Ishana Night Shyamalan, the latest daughter of a famous artist who has ostensibly jump-started a career behind the camera as writer-director thanks to family connections? Her film, known in the UK as The Watched but in other territories as The Watchers or perhaps, given the low box office to date, ‘The Great Unwatched’, is ostensibly a supernatural tale in the vein of the work of her father, M. Night Shyamalan. There is no doubt that M. Night helped – his company produced the film. While some dads buy their daughters a new car for their 21 st birthday, M. Night acquired the rights of A. M. Shine’s 2021 novel,...

Pictured : Ms Novak ( Mia Wasikowska ) sashays through the Talent Academy in a scene from the comedy-drama, ' Club Zero ', directed by Jessica Hausner from a screenplay by Hausner and  Géraldine Bajard . Still courtesy of Coproduction Office / BAC Films There is a case to be made that Austrian-born Jessica Hausner is one of the best writer-directors working in cinema today. Certainly she is the equal of her much-fêted compatriot Michael Haneke. Hausner’s films are about transgressors and ideas who are portrayed through a neutral lens. Her films aren’t about sex. Rather they are preoccupied with liberal guilt. We should do more for each other and ourselves or else we are doomed. Her message might be shortened to, ‘we are doomed’. Club Zero , which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and has been released worldwide incrementally with little fanfare and certainly no awards heat, concerns itself with the politics of over-consumption. Hausner doesn’t fat shame. Rather she...

  Pictured : Laura ( Melissa Barrera , left) receives an ultimatum from the Monster ( Tommy Dewey , right) in a scene from the horror comedy, ' Your Monster ', written and directed by Caroline Lindy , adapting her 2019 short of the same name. Still courtesy of Sundance Institute / Vertical Entertainment New York musical theatre is a cutthroat business. That’s the takeaway from writer-director Caroline Lindy’s feature debut, Your Monster , adapted from her 2019 short of the same name. The winner of the 2024 Sundance London Audience Award, it tells the story of a wannabe musical star, Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera) who loses both the part she had trained to play and her writer-director boyfriend Jacob Sullivan (Edmund Donovan) on the same day. She helped develop the role of Lori Francis, in a musical entitled ‘House of Good Women’, with Jacob, suggesting lyrics and ensuring that its nominal author was not starved of pasta. Then she had a cancer diagnosis, received treatment, the...

Pictured : Sri ( Kesav Binoy Kiron , left), Anila ( Kani Kusruti , centre) and Mira ( Preeti Panigrahi , right) enjoy a meal in a scene from the drama, ' Girls Will Be Girls ', written and directed by Shuchi Talati . Still courtesy of Sundance Institute / LuxBox / Modern Films Indian mainstream cinema is highly conservative. Bollywood (that is, Indian studio) films highlight stars and spectacle rather than a film director’s personal vision. Bollywood has not yet experienced its 1960s moment when audiences rejected ‘factory setting’ entertainment in favour of something edgier and more realistic. India has produced auteur cinema, but it exists in parallel to Bollywood output. Directors such as Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen succeeded internationally but didn’t reshape Bollywood output in the way that directors such as John Frankenheimer, Sam Peckinpah, Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn introduced a gritty, unpredictability to 1960s Hollywood films. India doesn’t lack cineaste film dire...

  Pictured : Elliott (Missy Stella, left) meets her older self (Aubrey Plaza) in the comedy-drama, 'My Old Ass', written and directed by Megan Park. Photo : Shane Mahood. Courtesy of Sundance Institute / Amazon MGM If you could go back in time and give your younger self some advice, what would you tell them? Don’t talk to strangers, obviously. Writer-director Megan Park explores this question in her second feature, the humorous and gently moving ‘coming of sage’ movie, My Old Ass , in which eighteen-year-old soon to be University of Toronto undergraduate, Elliott (Maisy Stella) encounters her thirty-nine-year-old wiser and more saggy self (Aubrey Plaza) after taking some shrooms of dubious provenance - could be South American, could be African, could be poisonous as fudge. Elliott is spending summer with her cranberry-farming parents (Maria Dizzia, Al Goulem) and two brothers in whose business she takes zero interest. As her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegle...