Larry Oliver Film Reviews

Pictured : Amin ( Tahar Rahim ) and Alpha ( Mélissa Boros ) in a scene from ' Alpha ', the third feature film from writer-director Julia Ducournau . Still courtesy of Neon (US), Curzon (UK), Diaphana Distribution (France) French writer-director Julia Ducournau has made two bold, kinetic horror films, Raw and Titane in which women behave very badly. She fuses ‘out there’ elements, like a car impregnating a woman or bloodsucking at a medical school, with family dynamics. In those first two movies, not only are no f-ks given, none are offered. Alpha , her third feature, which returned empty handed from the Cannes Film Festival, the site of her 2021 unexpected triumph with Titane , is different. The genre elements – specifically a disease that turns people into crumbling statues – don’t emanate from the protagonist, thirteen-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros). Rather, they are observed from without. Ducournau employs flashbacks in which Alpha’s father, Amin (Tahar Rahim) struggles...

  Pictured : 'You like the form. You don't like the content.' Agnes ( Eva Victor ) teaching Vladimir Nabokov's taboo-busting novel 'Lolita' in a scene from the film, ' Sorry, Baby ', written and directed by Eva Victor . Still courtesy of A24 (US) / Picturehouse Entertainment (UK)  Lately, people wishing to display virtue have been pictured holding cats. You have to feel sorry for the cats. They have no idea of the purpose into which they have been co-opted. Why am I being held so high? Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, has been pictured with a cat, with the intention of mocking the tyrant President Trump - currently Newsom’s full-time job. On the poster of her acclaimed film, Sorry, Baby , the writer-director-actor Eva Victor holds a cat she has liberated from houselessness in an apologetic way. ‘I’m sorry, cat,’ her character, Agnes, seems to say, ‘but I need you.’ People say things to cats that they wouldn’t say to a human being but having place...