Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Some call it ‘colour blind’ casting. The late Peter Brook preferred the term ‘colour rich’. This is the selection of actors of different ethnicities to play roles that according to the setting would have gone to white Europeans. British-born, Los Angeles-based director Emma Holly Jones has opted for the ‘colour rich’ approach in her feature debut, Mr. Malcolm’s List , screenwriter Suzanne Allain’s adaptation of her 2010 Regency-era novel. Jones filmed a short, Mr. Malcolm’s List: Overture with many of the same cast, but also Gemma Chan, in 2019 to prove the concept. The resultant feature benefits to some extent from its multi-ethnic cast but suffers from a fatal absence of chemistry between its leads. Did I wish for vicar’s daughter Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto) to win the heart of wealthy bachelor Jeremy Malcolm ( Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù)? No, reader, I did not. Set principally in 1818, after the defeat of Napoleon, it stars Zawe Ashton as eligible London bachelorette, Julia Thistlethwai...

  Contains significant plot detail Atonement without atonement. That’s how Mothering Sunday , director Eva Husson and screenwriter Alice Birch’s film adaptation of Graham Swift’s slender (132 page) 2016 novel plays. Notable for very un-English full-frontal nudity from both leads – Husson isn’t embarrassed about sex – it deals with a young orphan maid, Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) who has a part in delaying her lover’s attendance at a luncheon with disastrous, unforeseen consequences. Husson and Birch employ a tricky flashback structure that gives actress turned Parliamentarian Glenda Jackson (as the older Jane Fairchild) her first big-screen role since 1990 – she took a hiatus from acting in 1992 to become an MP, retiring from Parliament in 2015. Jackson, in the film’s closing minutes, takes the film somewhere else. ‘I’ve won all the awards,’ she says to a throng of reporters at her front door. You look at Jackson and think, ‘yes, you have’. Jackson is a fiery presence capabl...