Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli redefines the female mental health film in her appealing, though not to all tastes, feature debut, Amanda . Featuring an intense central performance by Benedetta Porcaroli in the title role, it is a comedy about the need to connect, specifically a young woman who yearns to be noticed quivering in the face of attention. The film begins with young Amanda clutching a box of cereal whilst lying on a sun lounger in the middle of her family’s pool. On the side of the pool, her older sister, Marina is sunbathing. Sensing that she is almost invisible, or perhaps testing the response to her narcissism, Amanda tips her sun lounger over. Just as she does this, the family’s Latin American maid, appears with a tray bearing lemonade and glasses, which she promptly drops. Now an adult, Amanda reflects on an encounter in a cinema in which she and a male cinemagoer lock eyes. She waits for him. He looks at her. Nothing happens. ‘That was five years ago,’...

  Pictured: Agnes Shakespeare ( Jessie Buckley , centre) is expectant at a production of her husband's play, 'Hamlet' in a scene from the film, ' Hamnet ', directed by Asian-American auteur,  Chloë  Zhao . Still courtesy of Focus Features . Between Friday 21 February 2025 and Sunday 8 February 2026, I have watched and reflected on a further fifty-two feature films directed by women. The challenge just to watch the films – not to review them – was set by Melissa Silverstein, founder and publisher of ‘Women in Hollywood’, in 2015. I consciously select feature films and not documentaries and only those intended for cinema, that is, commercial release. My rationale is these films are made to compete in a global marketplace. By demonstrating their artistic worth and commercial appeal, these films advocate for more films from women directors to be greenlit, addressing prejudice. Many of these films I watch at festivals. In the case of this volume, at Berlin, Brussels, ...

Pictured : Holly ( Benedetta Porcaroli , left) and Arabella ( Lucrezia Guglielmino , right) at a chapel where the young girl makes money as a flower girl in the quirky Italian comedy, ' Il Rapimento di Arabella'  (' The Kidnapping of Arabella '), writer-director Caroline Cavalli 's entertaining sophomore feature. Still courtesy of Piper Film  (Italy) Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli makes films about headstrong young women who act as if dealt a special hand. Amanda , her debut, featured one such woman. The Kidnapping of Arabella ( Il Rapimento di Arabella ), her follow-up, has two. Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli) believes that eight-year-old Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino) whom she meets in the parking lot of Taco King, is herself having fallen through time and space to provide the opportunity for a do-over. Holly can follow-up on the opportunity of being a ballerina, something she avoided aged eight, pretending to affect a limp. When Holly sees the child simil...