Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Till is a two-hour victim statement marketed as a drama. Centred on the real-life brutal lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) in Money, Mississippi in August 1955, it focuses on the grief of his mother, Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler), putting her emotions front and centre. The primacy of Mamie’s sorrow and anger displaces every other aspect of the story – the killers, J W Milam (Eric Whitten) and Roy Bryant (Sean Michael Weber) being acquitted in the subsequent trial, though later admitting their guilt, the shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), whose exaggerated sense of offence led to Emmett being ‘taught a lesson’ and her subsequent perjury, escaping prosecution. A caption tells us that in March 2022, lynching was finally classified as a crime in the United States, 67 years after Emmett’s death, but the film, directed by Chinonye Chukwu ( Clemency ), who also contributed to the screenplay by Keith Beauchamp & Michael Reilly, anchors the viewer to Mamie....

  Not many people want to see a film about African Americans being beaten up and killed without reply. That’s my take-away from the poor box-office performance of Detroit , an exceptionally well-made, suitably angry film that has extremely limited appeal. It is taut. It is gripping. But where is the uplift? Where is the justice? Violence without justice is just pornography. Only shufflers in trench coats do pornography. Detroit is a work of outrage from 65 year old director Kathryn Bigalow, the only woman to date to collect the Best Director Oscar – and that was a long time coming. Whilst other women her age might think about retirement, Bigalow has immersed herself in the events of July 1967, when a police operation, the raid of a ‘blind pig’ (illegal drinking) party led to five days of rioting. Bigalow and her estimable screenwriter Mark Boal – he’s Paul Laverty to her Ken Loach – reproduce an atmosphere of uncertain violence agitated by the local police. The nub of the film is...

  Never confuse an important subject with an important film. The Zookeeper’s Wife has an important subject, focussing on the selfless work done under threat of death by Antonina Žabińska and her husband Jan Žabiński in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War Two. Together, they provided refuge for some 300 Jewish men, women and children, smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto, in the grounds of Warsaw’s bombed-out zoo that they formerly managed. Madame Žabińska’s houseguests were lodged in disused cages and underground tunnels whilst the zoo was re-purposed as a pig farm, producing meat (eventually) for the Polish Resistance. Of the many guests, there were only two fatalities – a mother and daughter discovered by the Nazis and killed. Madame Žabińska had a German admirer, Lutz Heck, who, whilst not exactly looking the other way, ensured at least that she was above reproach. The killing of the zoo’s stock by trigger happy Nazis left Madame Žabińska devastated. She was also a music lover...