Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Published in 2014, Josh Malerman’s novel Bird Box tells the story of Malorie, a woman who takes two four year-old children blindfolded on a twenty-mile journey down river. There is something outside the house that cannot be looked at. Some years previously, a spate of ‘open air’ suicides took place in Russia. The affliction spread to Alaska and finally to the United States. Existing as social beings, people are driven to self harm. They can only be safe away from wider society, where they don’t take part in looking. The anti-social media metaphor is mangled in the film version, adapted by Eric Heisserer ( Arrival ) and directed by Susanne Bier ( In a Better World , TV’s The Night Manager ). The villains are individuals who, having not been driven to suicide owing to their own atypical mental condition, force others to look into the light and therefore succumb to madness. What drives their compulsion to kill? Neither Heisserer nor Bier makes this clear. My guess is these maniac...

  All Good ( Alles ist Gut ) is the debut feature of thirty-five-year-old, East Berlin-born writer-director Eva Trobisch. It deals unsentimentally with the aftermath of a rape. Set in Munich, it tells the story of Janne (Aenne Schwarz) whose publishing business with her partner, Piet (Andreas Döhler) has just gone kaput. Their prize-winning author has left them and they have no money to continue. At the start of the film we see them consult a lawyer to wind up their firm. They also decorate a house, an inheritance. Janne attends a class reunion where she chats to Martin (Hans Löw). She takes him back to the house where she is staying with the intention of letting him sleep in a spare bed. He attempts to rape her in the kitchen. At a certain point, Janne bangs her head. You might think this would stop Martin – but it doesn’t. He finishes inside of her and leaves. Punkt. At the same time, Janne is offered a job in a more established publishing company by an older friend. She accept...

  ‘You never asked why I am making this film.’ Director Adina Pintilie makes this statement in voiceover shortly after the start of her study of intimacy aversion, Touch Me Not . The first time I saw the film on the night it won the Golden Bear at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival, I thought it was addressed to her subject, Laura Benson, a fifty-something Englishwoman who cannot bear to be touched. In fact, as we discover later, it is directed to Adina’s mother. Adina relates to Laura a dream that in which her mother turned up in her bedroom. Adina banishes her from the apartment but then she appears on the balcony - or rather the ‘curse-word’ balcony. When I first saw the film, I thought it was a documentary, or at least it had documentary elements – Laura resisting a male hand wandering downwards from her solar plexus. ‘How does that make you feel?’ the male therapist, Seani Love, asks as he tests Laura’s physical limits. ‘It makes me feel ... uncomfortable.’ This might win an awar...

  ‘Losing face’ is an English expression for losing respect. In the Polish film, Mug ( Twarz ), Metallica-loving construction worker, Jacek Kalisztan (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) loses half his face, requiring a transplant, and almost all the respect from his family and girlfriend. He ends up boarding the very bus on which he used to see his beloved Dagmara (Malgorzata Gorol) leave the village, having no way to meaningfully contribute to anyone’s lives. He is worth just twenty zloty, the small amount collected for him at Sunday service. As we see a wide Kaftan-like basket being passed around, no one is moved to offer money to pay for the expensive immune-suppressants that the Polish health service won’t fund. Co-written and directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, who is married to her lead actor – Kościukiewicz previously had the lead role in her 2013 film, In the Name of ( W imie... ) – Mug is pitched somewhere between black comedy, broad satire and allegory. It never quite comes togeth...

  Maybe we knew, maybe we thought it, but passing traffic makes a sound like gently lapping waves. Listen to it a while and you could be on a beach. In a comfortable bed, snuggled up under sheets - but you are on a beach. No big old tsunami gonna land on your head. Not yet. Actress turned director Jordana Spiro, known for recurring roles in the American TV series My Boys, Harry’s Law and The Mob Doctor, makes a creditable feature debut in Night Comes On , about a black teenager, Angel Lamere (Dominique Fishback) who ended up in juvenile hall after been found in possession of a gun. Newly released, she sets out on a mission. Her mamma told her about those waves but now she’s dead, killed by the old man. Angel wants vengeance – she’s an angel of vengeance, pardon my Abel Ferrara film reference. She wants another gun, then to find her pa and stick it to him. He can’t apologise for something like that. But how do you find him when you gotta report to the parole officer (James McD...

  In the past, I have complained that female directors have never got to make sequels to their commercial successes. Catherine Hardwicke was removed from the Twilight series while Sam Taylor-Johnson was replaced by James Foley for the follow-ups to 50 Shades of Grey . One writer-director who has proved the exception is Britain’s Debbie Isitt, who has helmed four films in the Nativity series. Now, I know what you’re thinking: just how many times can I watch the baby Jesus being born? It’s not that nativity, exactly. All four films, Nativity (2009), Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger (2012), Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey (2014) and now Nativity Rocks! (2018) – subtitle ‘This Ain’t No Silent Night’ (I hate double negatives) – are set in St Bernadette’s Primary School in Coventry, where the new teacher is tasked with putting on the nativity play, which is important for spurious and frankly irrelevant reasons. Isitt casts well-known television actors in the leading roles - a...

  I f I have learned one thing about writing about films by women directors for the last three years, it is that change is slow. There were no films that equalled the impact of Wonder Woman in year three, though in my humble opinion, Lady Bird should have been rewarded at the 2018 Academy Awards – apologies for playing a broken record, but Get Out did not deserve ‘Best Original Screenplay’. Nevertheless, I look forward to whatever surprises ‘year four’ might throw up. The first, Fiore Gemello (Twin Flower), written and directed by Laura Luchetti, isn’t exactly a surprise. It is nevertheless an engaging and sensitively told film about two young people from very different worlds who help one another. Set in Sardinia it focuses on Basim (Kalill Kone), an illegal migrant from Côte D’Ivoire who befriends Anna (Anastasyia Bogach), a sixteen year old (or thereabouts) young woman traumatised into being mute and on the run from a threatening older man, Manfredi (Aniello Arena). It depi...

  In her 2013 debut feature, The Reunion , Swedish performer-director Anna Odell showed herself being ejected from a class reunion after describing the humiliation she suffered whilst at school, then deconstructed the spectacle by having actors play the bullies who nourished her waking unhappiness. Rooted in the director’s emotional pain, the film earned Odell five star reviews and the right to make a second feature. X & Y , which opened the 2018 Stockholm International Film Festival, is that movie. It is similarly provocative, this time pairing the troubled director with the well-known Swedish actor, Mikael Persbrandt, who has had his own experience of substance abuse. I’m not sure why cocaine addiction is called ‘substance abuse’, unless you waste the stuff. Personally, I don’t advocate drug taking – why walk with a crutch if your leg isn’t broken? I won’t even take beta blockers even though my cardiologist recommends it. With two troubled people playing off one another, yo...

  A film can be let down by its make-up. At the beginning of the Irish traveller drama, Float Like A Butterfly , the second feature from writer-director Carmel Winters (following her 2010 debut, Snap ) feisty teenager Frances (Hazel Doupe) is shown with her cheek caked in blood, having just been in a fight. Only it isn’t a convincing injury. Even if she had been grazed by the stones in her opponent’s make-shift boxing gloves or, more likely, by the hard ground beneath her, the wound would barely have time to congeal, with blood mixing with sweat. You don’t believe in it, nor in the early scene of Frances’ childhood, in which her younger self (Amelie Metcalfe) is carried on the shoulders of her proud father, Michael (Dara Devaney) before their outdoor bonding session amongst drying linen is interrupted by the local constabulary, who want to know why Frances isn’t at school. The main action takes place in 1972. Muhammed Ali is shouting about himself on the telly. Young Frances fanc...

After her 2013 critically successful debut, In A World… writer-director-star Lake Bell has found a more conventional use for three full stops in the relationship comedy, I Do … Until I Don’t . Essentially, it is several sit-com episodes strung together for a 106 minute feature film. Some of the characters could use a little more rounding and there is (spoiler alert) screenwriter 101 structure for an upbeat movie – begin with a funeral and end with a birth. Personally, I have a lot of time for screenwriting 101; usually, I see screenwriting 911. (‘Hello, my inter-racial buddy comedy isn’t working. What do you recommend? What do you mean, give up?’) I admire Bell for putting her character, Alice, in uncomfortable situations. Like having sex in a toilet cubicle where she noticed that the previous user – Alice’s husband, Noah (Ed Helms in a rare foray into a film that grossed under $1 million, if you discount The Clapper ) - hasn’t flushed. Then there’s the movie-stopping ‘ball cupping’ s...