Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  The final film of Volume Seven of this series is a foul-mouthed feelgood comedy about female friendship entitled Joy Ride , co-written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao and directed by Adele Lim. The first film in this series (volume seven) was also called Joyride , but it is hard to imagine Olivia Colman doing half the stuff that the American Asian cast of Lim’s film act out – or maybe I just don’t want to. Joy Ride goes squarely for the crude belly laugh – nothing wrong with that, it is a form of exercise. At the US box office, it opened against Insidious – The Red Door , a franchise title with nothing new to offer but nonetheless scored an impressive $15 million in its first day of release (7 July 2023). I guess the guys taking dates to their movies are as controlling as an American comedian turned director who wouldn’t let his surfer teacher partner post pictures of herself on social media in a swimsuit. If you were shown The Red Door , maybe you should form an o...

  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...