Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Lately, I’ve been sensitised to a new genre, ‘abortion porn’ - films that focus on women’s distress as they attempt to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies. Andrew Dominik’s recent Marilyn Monroe drama, Blonde , took this to sickening effect. Other films that attract this descriptor include Audrey Diwan’s L’ É v é nement and Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always . The phrase ‘unwanted pregnancies’ strikes me as too polite, likening the process of neutralizing the aftermath of rape to exchanging a pair of shoes. I propose the term, ‘invasive pregnancies’ – pregnancies resulting from enforced sex or that could seriously harm the life of the mother. An accepted change of terminology could, over time, change people’s minds over the issue, in the year that the ‘Roe vs Wade’ judgment has been overturned. The 1960s set drama, Call Jane , directed by Phyllis Nagy from a screenplay by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi (writers on the medical series, The Resident ), is only partly ‘...

  A long title isn’t a barrier to box-office success – but it doesn’t help. Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of one Harley Quinn is a bit of a mouthful, and it should come with a consumer advisory warning: the film isn’t fantabulous. For the most part it is very tedious, straight-jacketed by the cloying, fingers-on-a-chalkboard central performance of Margot Robbie as the ‘one’ Harley Quinn of the title, all fake New Yorker drawl (based on Mira Sorvino’s character in Mighty Aphrodite ) and no sympathy. Harley is a child rejected by her father, as the lively animated opening tells us, and she is rejected by her boyfriend, one ‘T Joker’, too. Being the girlfriend of Gotham City’s chief villain gives her a form of immunity, Harley squawks in voiceover. So long as no one knows they broke up, she’s fine. However, one drunken night, she decides to steal a gasoline tanker and drive it into the chemical plant where she and the Joker met. This is one of those plants where no gu...

Still courtesy of  Bleeker Street (US) / Focus Features / Universal Pictures (UK) Set in the maybe-not-so-distant future, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s feature, I.S.S. , is a confined space, zero gravity suspenser about three Americans and three Russians aboard the International Space Station who are given separate sets of orders when the world ignites below them into World War Three. The Americans are ordered to take control of the space station ‘by any means necessary’. The Russians are told not to expect any more Uber Eats. It is just as well that the crew on board did not rely on Dr Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) and colleague Christian Campbell (John Gallagher, Jr) for news from home. ‘How are relations between our two fine countries?’ Kira might reasonably have been asked. ‘I don’t know. I was too busy getting used to powdered food,’ she may have replied. Nick Shafir’s script doesn’t generate many laughs, but it does neatly play against our expectations. The film doesn’t re...