Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  I have mixed feelings about including the Hollywood biopic, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody in this series. Kasi Lemmons ( Eve’s Bayou, Harriet ) directed it, but the film comes across as a further effort to milk the legacy of the titular singer, who in her prime achieved seven consecutive Billboard Number Ones, from ‘Saving All My Love for You’ in 1985 to ‘Where Do Broken Hearts Go?’ in 1988, as well as an attempt to let some of those who contributed to her decline off the hook. The film charts Whitney’s rise and fall and is advertised as ‘from the writer of Bohemian Rhapsody ’, Anthony McCarten, as if that was somehow a selling point. McCarten is also listed as a producer. Modestly budgeted at $45 million, with British actress Naomi Ackie convincingly lip-synching and emoting as Whitney, the film’s box office has been tempered by adverse weather conditions in the United States, not to mention poor-to-indifferent reviews. The film climaxes with a flashback to an ic...

  In Come Away , writer Marissa Kate Goodhill and director Brenda Chapman take the combined plots of James Barrie’s Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and turn them into a hybrid cross between Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist . It isn’t, as they say, pretty. Set at an unspecified time, either Victorian or Edwardian era England, it showers the narrative with motifs from Barrie’s and Carroll’s fiction without any of the charm. The idea might have worked if each iconic character had suddenly entered the other’s enchanted world (Peter in Wonderland, Alice in Neverland) and the two worlds were under threat owing to the displacement of the young protagonists but that is not the film that Goodhill and Chapman have made. This is a film in which an entire family, the Littletons, embraces fantasy to a lesser or greater degree. Mama Rose (Angelina Jolie) makes hats so her children can dress up. Papa Jack (David Oyelowo) builds model repl...