Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  When I was growing up, ‘creature features’ were films about human-animal hybrids that, after awkward introductions, terrorised communities and were generally misunderstood. The Wolf Man , The Fly and, of course, Creature from the Black Lagoon are three such examples. In the documentary form, the term means something different. Viktor Kossakovsky’s ground-breaking film, Gunda , focussed on a mother pig that had just given birth; the supporting cast included a one-legged chicken. In British director Andrea Arnold’s documentary, Cow , the spotlight is on a Kent dairy cow branded with the number 1129, whom we later hear is called Luma. Arnold, who has an impressive track record in British dramas – Red Road , Fish Tank , Wuthering Heights – had a mixed experience in the United States in the 2010s. On the plus side, she wrote and directed American Honey , about a girl, Star (Sasha Lane) who runs away from her negligent mom and joins a group of travelling magazine subscription sell...

  Stop me if you have heard this one before. In rural contemporary England, a young woman returns to the family farm after the death of a close family member. The farm is in difficult straits. The woman tries her best to fix things but also come to terms with demons from her past. That for the most part is the plot of writer-director Hope Dickson Leach’s accomplished feature debut, The Levelling . It is also a description of Clio Barnard’s third film as writer-director, Dark River , adapted from Rose Tremain’s novel, Trespass . British films have a habit of recycling Hollywood movie titles: Dog Soldiers , directed by Neil Marshall, about a group of soldiers on a military exercise who take on werewolves, is also the name of a 1978 Vietnam War movie directed by Karel Reisz. I can understand why Barnard did not take the name of a 1992 Walter Hill movie starring Ice Cube (and not a good one at that) nor for that matter a 2011 damp squib of a home invasion thriller starring Nicolas Cage...