Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : Vladimir, Vlado to his friends ( Slavko Sobin ) and daughter Maria ( Olive Gray ) in a scene from the Bristol-set British drama, ' Surviving Earth ', written and directed by  Thea Gajić . Still courtesy of Metis Films  (UK)   The Bristol-set drama, Surviving Earth , written and directed by South London-born Thea Gajić, is dedicated to her late father, Serbian émigré Vladmir Gajić, who died of a drug overdose after settling in England. The film is a fictionalised account of the months leading to his death, vividly speaking to the pressures placed on immigrants and the limitations of a positive outlook. It is elevated by a charismatic central performance of Croatia-born Slavko Sobin, who gives Vlado (the name he is frequently called, as opposed to Vlad) depth, humour and credibility. Sobin, who has been cast in tough guy roles in films like the thriller 97 Minutes , relishes the opportunity to play a three-dimensional character. You forget you are wat...

  The penultimate film of this series is low-budget indie, Scrapper , a British, nay, London film written and directed by Charlotte Regan. Regan has directed a bunch of short films, some of which have been screened internationally, helmed pop and corporate videos and has absolutely earned the right to succeed. I have mixed feelings about the end result. I enjoyed it very much, but it veers close to the aesthetic of British – specifically BBC – children’s television. If Regan sought a career directing episodes of Byker Grove or The Story of Tracy Beaker this would not be a bad thing, but my suspicion is that she has ambitions above tea-time in front of the kiddies. Regan deals with a difficult topic – loss. Specifically the loss of one’s mother as experienced by a pre-teenage girl, Georgie (newcomer Lola Campbell). The effect is disorientating, numbing and world collapsing. Regan approaches the subject with good - I would qualify, excellent - humour. Georgie decides to manage ...

  In South London, some people collide with you on purpose, shoulder against shoulder, and hiss, ‘what’s your problem?’ If you are sensible, you will pick up the pace and not prolong the encounter. If you are insensible, that’s because you answered back and ended up with a fist in the face. Long hot summers bring out a desire for distraction, a need to win. You can’t beat the sun; you can clobber a stranger. Writer-director Dionne Edwards makes her feature debut with the British drama, Pretty Red Dress . It is a tale of a dysfunctional South London family, the very sort who might ask, ‘what’s your problem?’ It is a film about being uncomfortable in your skin but not knowing why. Instead the characters reach out for alternatives, finding some comfort – or release – in the titular garment. The dress means different things to Candice (Alexandra Burke), Travis (Natey Jones) and their teenage daughter Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun). For part-time singer, full-time shop worker Candic...

  Jukebox musicals can be extremely lucrative. The hits of a popular artist are employed in the service of a flimsy plot. Audiences don’t ask, ‘what happens next’, rather ‘how will it feature my favourite song?’ One of the most financially successful jukebox musicals of the latest twenty years is Mamma Mia! , directed on stage and screen by Phyllida Lloyd and utilising the songbook of the Swedish pop quartet, Abba. The film brought together Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters - the triple act we never knew we wanted. Not quite as successful – and not yet turned into a film - is We Will Rock You , featuring the songs of Queen. Greatest Days , written by Tim Firth and directed by Coky Giedroy ć , utilises songs made famous by the band Take That – Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, Jason Orange and Howard Donald. It is based on Firth’s play, ‘The Band’, first staged in 2017 about a group of female pop fans who are spuriously reunited twenty-five years later. In the film, Radio Cli...

  Eccentricity and self-mortification are two elements at play in director Hettie Macdonald’s film adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s very English novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry . Jim Broadbent, an actor who has worked with Mike Leigh, Baz Luhrmann and Martin Scorsese, is typically unassuming as the titular Harold, a retired brewery worker living with his wife, Maureen (Penelope Wilton) in South Devon who decides to walk five hundred miles to Berwick-upon-Tweed to be reunited with a former colleague, Queenie Hennessy (Linda Bassett) who is dying from cancer. Unable to find the right words to respond to her letter, written on pink writing paper, he arrives at the conclusion that by walking to see her, he can keep her alive. We don’t know how long it will take Harold to get there, especially in the wrong sort of shoes, and whether Queenie will live to see him, but as with all road movies, it is the journey, not the destination, that is important. Joyce, who also wrote the scre...

  Though homosexuality was decriminalised in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, suspicion and a lack of empathy has governed attitudes towards it in the subsequent decades. Gay culture is perceived as threatening and corrupting, in spite of evidence to the contrary. There is a spurious argument that if you don’t mention something – same sex attraction, gender dysphoria – then it ceases to exist. Women need men to procreate – isn’t that the point? The fact that heterosexuality has a violent strain – domination fantasies, rape – is ignored. Sexuality exists alongside consent and if consent between participants of a sexual act is given by those capable of granting it (and that is in itself a contentious issue) then it becomes a personal matter outside of legislation. Blue Jean , the confident if not entirely satisfactory first feature of writer-director Georgia Oakley, is a drama set in Northern England in the late 1980s about a lesbian Physical Education teacher, Jean Newman (Ro...

  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...

  Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is about the pursuit of female pleasure. Pleasure without guilt, in which the transaction isn’t just financial. It is also about the danger of being a surrogate mother in the bedroom experienced by the protagonist, fifty-something widow, Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson). Reconciled to never having an orgasm, Nancy wants to experience sex with a much younger man and hires a male prostitute, twenty-something Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) to please here. Structured around a series of meetings in a luxury hotel in Norwich, the film ‘written and created’ by comedian Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, explores the tension between buttoned-down former Religious Education teacher Nancy and easy-on-the-eye fantasy plaything, Leo. The performances by Thompson and McCormack are terrific, but what catches the eye are the open curtains in the hotel room, allowing them to be seen from the outside. The curtains are only closed when – well, that would be telling. ...