Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  The Fight , written and directed by actress turned director Jessica Hynes, breaks so many genre stereotypes that they ought to create a new award. On a straightforward level, it is about bullying. Mixed race schoolgirl Emma Bell (Sennia Nanua), the eldest child of three, is rejected by a former friend, Jordan (Liv Hill) whose mother, Amanda (Rhona Mitra) has gone through a painful divorce. Emma retreats quietly to her room, reluctantly acknowledging the call for dinner. We see her looking at her phone while family toing-and-froing takes place. The youngest child Jason is fussy. There is an argument about whether he knows what a strudel is. Whatever it is, by the time the father (Shaun Parkes) heads for work, dinner plate broken, the dessert is burnt and in the bin. The mother Tina (Hynes) is struggling to find peace. She has taken up box fit to get rid of all her latent aggression and listens to the calming voice of a self-help guru (Russell Brand, in an atypical role) to find eq...

Still courtesy of Sony Pictures (UK) Until Barbie , the most financially successful film directed by a woman was Hi, Mom , the feature debut of writer-director-star Jia Ling, which, if Chinese box office figures are to be believed – and Box Office Mojo stopped endorsing them – grossed $841.7 million, dominating the 2021 Chinese Spring Festival holiday period. Three years later, Ling is back, with Yolo , loosely inspired by Masaharu Take’s 2014 film, 100 Yen Love , about a woman in her thirties who takes up boxing. Yolo requires Ling to physically transform herself into a competent-looking boxer. In the dazzling finale, Ling’s character Du Le Ying, goes three rounds with a professional, the second round of which is filmed in a continuous two-minute shot (in women’s boxing, rounds last two not three minutes). You don’t want her to win so much as survive. Yolo performed impressively at the Chinese box office, grossing $479.4 million, after opening in February 2024. It did less well in ...