Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : Tech billionaire Slater King ( Channing Tatum ) admires his guest Frida ( Naomi Ackie ) in a scene from the luxury island thriller, ' Blink Twice ', co-written and directed by  Zoë Kravitz . Still courtesy of MGM-Amazon Studios (US) / Warner Bros. (UK) What is the deal with a private island? Does someone even have the right to sell an entire landmass? How much of the surrounding ocean count as the owner’s waters, for fishing and such? Don’t they have an obligation to provide basic services, not just for guests but their staff as well? These were some of the questions that occurred to me after watching Blink Twice , an American takedown of toxic masculinity written (with E.T. Feigenbaum) and directed by actress-turned-director Zoë Kravitz. However, these are not the questions that interest her. Kravitz focusses on one: how can men get away with abusing women? She looks at what gives them licence, the enablers. Wealth is one. Bullied women living their worst life...

Pictured : Tessa ( Kit Zauhar ) inspects her temporary lodgings in a scene from the 2023 American independent drama, 'This Closeness', written, directed and starring Kit Zauhar . Still courtesy of Factory 25. Normally, I would advocate for every film to be screened in a cinema, to be enjoyed as a collective experience, discussed and dissected accordingly. However, This Closeness , written, directed and starring Kit Zauhar (her second feature), is almost designed to be watched on a laptop (as I saw it) with the sound broadcast through headphones. It is a film in which the action is confined to a two-bedroom apartment, which has one bathroom with a shower and a kitchen-diner. You get to know most of the spaces pretty well, so by the end you could draw a floorplan and probably put it on the market. Some films make you experience something real; this one turns you into a realtor. The scene that really comes alive at home occurs when the socially awkward, reluctant host Adam ( I...

  Pictured : Sisters reunited. Anne ( Awkwafina ) and Jenny Yum ( Sandra Oh ) in a scene from the 2023 comedy, ' Quiz Lady ', written by Jen D'Angelo and directed by Jessica Yu . Still courtesy of 20th Century Studios / Hulu. It can cost millions of dollars to promote a film. Sometimes studios prefer not to take the risk. 20 th Century Studios’ comedy Quiz Lady starring Awkwafina and Sandra Oh, written by Jen D’Angelo and directed by Jessica Yu skipped cinemas and debuted on Hulu last November. It is a film that twice asks, ‘do you know you difficult it is to be Asian in America?’ and doesn’t dwell on the answer. Ostensibly, it is a sports movie in which Awkwafina plays Anne, office worker by day, quiz show addict by early evening. A terry-cotton warrior, so to speak, Anne can fire out an answer on ‘Can’t Stop the Quiz’ as fast as the best competitor. She admires the host Terry McTeer (Will Ferrell) who has asked the questions on the weeknight show for 32 years throug...

Pictured : Agathe ( Renée Soutendijk ), the wronged wife in a scene from the Indonesia turn-of-the-century-set Dutch drama, ' Zoete Dromen ', written and directed by Ena  Sendijarević . Photo: Emo Weemhoff . Still courtesy of Gusto Film Distribution (Netherlands) In its most arresting image, Zoete Dromen (‘ Sweet Dreams ’) features death by sugar. Arguably many films suffocate the viewer with saccharine sentimentality, but in her second feature film, Bosnian-Dutch writer-director Ena Sendijarević takes the phrase literally. Responding to the title of her first film, Take Me Somewhere Nice , by showing the viewer somewhere not so pleasant – although the light does wonders for the skin – Sendijarević sets her follow-up at the end of empire (so to speak) in the early 1900s when a Dutch plantation family are driven out of Indonesia less by violence than an admission of defeat. ‘I don’t want to dominate,’ says Cornelis ( Florian Myjer ) as he arrives to take over affairs at his...

Pictured : 'I prefer working on the inside to working on the outside.' Interpreter Nat ( Laia Costa ) is gripped by Andreas 'the German' ( Hovik Keuchkerian ) in the Spanish drama, ' Un Amor ', adapted from Sara Mesa 's 2020 novel by Laura Ferrero and director Isabel Coixet . Still courtesy of Imagine Film Distribution (Belgium) There is a trope in romantic dramas about mending the broken. Spanish director Isabel Coixet explores this in her adaptation of Sara Mesa’s novel, Un Amor . In it, Nat ( Laia Costa ), a young interpreter who works for an NGO, quits her job to retreat to a small village in a rural part of Spain, where everybody knows everyone else. The house Nat moves into needs a lot of work, but it is all Nat can afford. Her landlord Casero ( Luis Bermejo ) gives her the dog to match; it has a scarred face from ‘looking at something it shouldn’t’. There’s a pound nearby from which dogs bark at night. ‘I don’t hear them anymore,’ the grumpily mena...

  Pictured : 'I took four trains to get here and we're seeing the movie.' Eden ( Ilana Glazer , right) prepares the heavily pregnant Dawn ( Michelle Buteau ) for entertainment in the laugh-out-loud comedy, ' Babes ', written by Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz and directed by Pamela Adlon . Still courtesy of Neon (US), Universal Pictures (UK) The misleadingly titled Babes is a comedy about female friendship in which two young women support each other during pregnancy, one in marriage, the other outside it. For a film as funny as it is, it did not attract a wide audience. I put it down to the advertising: the thinner of the two women, Eden ( Ilana Glazer , who co-wrote the screenplay with Josh Rabinowitz ) stares at a positive pregnancy test while her friend Dawn ( Michelle Buteau ) looks on. If I take it at face value, so what? Contrast it with the poster for Baby Boom – Diane Keaton in a business suit holding a baby - where you can see the potential for comedy. (‘I ca...

  Pictured : Janet ( Julianne Nicholson , left) and her daughter Lacy ( Zoe Ziegler , right) in a scene from the drama, ' Janet Planet ', written and directed by Annie Baker . Still courtesy of A24 Films (US), Sony / Stage 6 Films (UK) Extraordinary films sneak up unawares. They can transcend plot synopses, wow you with ideas and technique. As demonstrated by her debut feature, Janet Planet , writer-director Annie Baker isn’t merely cine literate, she’s cine articulate. She utilises the grammar of film to express difficult emotions. Her film has great scenes, strong moments, exchanges that cut to the quick. She uses framing, camera position, captions, editing, sound and performance – posture rather than emotional displays – to make the audience lean in and zoom out. Describing a film as staying with the viewer is something of a cliché – one of the finite modes of praise found in movie advertising. But Janet Planet , set in the summer of 1991, really does stick. I left the a...