Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  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...

  I have come late to the Wonder Woman party. By the time I caught up with the big screen version of the popular DC Comics series, on Thursday 13 July 2017, the film had already grossed 373 million dollars at the US box office, making it at the very least the highest grossing live action movie directed by a woman. Well, it is a superhero movie, you say. They have built-in audiences. Perhaps - but you remember Catwoman starring Halle Berry in the title role, directed by Pitof. No, you don’t because it tanked – as did Tank Girl and Aeon Flux . This is because filmmakers don’t know how to make female centred superhero movies that audiences believe in. The defining gesture that Diana ( Gal Gadot ) makes in the new Wonder Woman movie is the crossing of her arms in front of her face – a big ‘x’, a whacking great ‘no’.   ‘No’ means ‘no’, people. This is a message that we can – and should – believe in. Wonder Woman has at least one scene that should become iconic. ...

  Pictured : A 'goodie bag' for the 2025 film, ' Superman '. Courtesy of Warner Bros. ‘Look up’ say the posters. I looked up, down, left and right but could not find where to pick up my wristband for entry anywhere. Tall, gym-buffed men dressed as Superman, the DC comic book hero subject of a new Warner Bros movie, were no help. They wore their underwear outside their leggings but had otherwise not been briefed. Cast as atmosphere people, they were located on the north side of the grassy enclosure of Leicester Square. On the south side, a large screen had been erected so that Londoners could watch that other breed of superhero, tennis players, competing in this year’s Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Tournament, hopeful Emma Raducanu having just progressed to the Third Round. Nine days before its UK release, ‘ Superman ’ written and directed by James Gunn, who successfully brought Marvel’s ‘ Guardians of the Galaxy ’ to the big screen, was being launched at a ‘fan event’ held at t...