Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  The test of a horror mystery is to reflect on the events within it and trace the outcomes back to the perpetrator.   Bodies Bodies Bodies passes with distinction. Directed by Halina Reijn ( Instinct ) from a smart screenplay credited to Sarah Delappe and a story by Kristen Roupenian, the film features a quintet of mostly wealthy twenty-something women, and their male companions, who turn on each other after a hurricane party game of ‘bodies bodies bodies’ goes very awry. When one of the group ends up dead with a sword wound to the neck, their blood-smeared dressing-gowned body pressed against a window, the group seeks the killer, concluding that their activity has gone too far. One of their number is in bed, having retired early and earlier squared off against the victim. ‘The best defence is a good offence,’ says one guest. ‘What does that even mean?’ asks the victim. The guest simply repeats the phrase, as if no further explanation is required. Any game that begins with sl...

Where Hands Touch , the fourth film from ‘Afro-European’ writer-director Amma Asante (she does not identify as British) comes from a good place. She attempts to bring to life – in fictional terms – the story of a so-called ‘Rhineland Bastard’, a child born of a black father and a white mother, who lived in Germany in World War Two. Asante’s way in to the story was borne of a curiosity about black (African) children living in Europe in the first half of the 20 th Century. What happened to the descendants of freed slaves or the off-spring of men from Africa who were conscripted to fight in World War One? In particular, who was the child shown in a photograph of the internees in a concentration, one black face in a cluster of white? Asante didn’t try to tell that story, rather imagined a teenage girl in a similar position, Leyna Schlegel (Amandla Stenberg) who is brought to Berlin by her mother Kerstin (Abbie Cornish) in 1944 with her white younger brother Koen (Tom Sweet) to, as it were...

  Everything, Everything , directed by Stella Meghie ( Jean of the Joneses) is adapted by screenwriter J. Mills Goodloe ( Age of Adaline ) from the debut ‘young adult’ (YA) novel by Nicola Yoon, first published in 2015. It deals with an eighteen year old girl, Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) who has a genetic disorder known as SCID – Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disorder. The disease is rare but real – it is also known as bubble baby disease. The most famous ‘bubble baby’ was David Vetter, born in 1971 but died twelve years later. His condition inspired the John Travolta TV movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble , which aired in 1976. In real life, children born with David’s condition can live normal lives, thanks to a breakthrough in treating SCID which was achieved in 2002. This involved a two year old Palestinian girl, Salsabil, being treated with non-myeloblative conditioning. The process involves isolating haematopoietic blood cells and reprogramming them to contain the adenosine...