Larry Oliver Film Reviews

Pictured : Students at the Talent Campus practice 'conscious eating' in a scene from Jessica Hausner 's 2023 film, ' Club Zero '. (Still: Coop 99 ) Over the period 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024, I watched and reflected upon a further fifty-two fiction films directed by women. 28 of these films had American finance. Six could be classed as British films. Three were French, a surprisingly low number given the number of French auteurs currently working. Two had Indian subjects, if not finance. Two were Belgian, another two Canadian (one in French, the other English). The remaining nine films were from Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Denmark, Germany, Morocco, Netherlands and Spain. Of the fifty-two, three movies officially grossed more than $100 million (either superhero sequels or spin-offs, namely Venom: The Last Dance , The Marvels and Madame Web ). One ( Yolo ) unofficially grossed this sum; Box Office Mojo does not offer reliable figures on Chinese movie...

Pictured : 'Let's just have a good time.' Chris ( James Le Gros , left) and teenage daughter Sam ( Lily Collias ) in a scene from writer-director India Donaldson 's 'the hiking trip where everything changed' drama, ' Good One '. Still courtesy of Metrograph Pictures (US) Good One , the feature debut of writer-director India Donaldson , is a deeply textured, seemingly low-stakes drama about being the child of divorced parents. Donaldson’s father, New Zealand-born film director Roger Donaldson , did divorce her mother, Mel Clark , but whether she behaved like her teenage protagonist, Sam ( Lily Collias ), who lives with her mother but chooses not to take sides, is none of this reviewer’s business. What I can categorically write is that her film repays three viewings – two at Cannes , one in a small arthouse cinema in Paris . It is not a film in which the characters emote, tell each other how they feel, and have a cathartic moment. Rather the film, set ove...