Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : Best friends but unsuitable for marriage, cousins  William Rodney ( Jack Whitehall , left) and Katharine Hilbery ( Haley Bennett , right) in the film adaptation, ' Virginia Woolf's Night and Day ', scripted and produced by Justine Waddell and directed by Tina Gharavi . Still courtesy of Vue Lumiere (UK) Of all the films I have so far covered in this volume, Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day adapted by writer-producer Justine Waddell and directed by Tina Gharavi is by far the least satisfactory. I am loathe to describe it as a film, more a set of well-intentioned impulses that chew the cud in various corners of an enormously large field. Look over there, we have some suffragettes. Directly opposite, a suppressed same sex romance only acknowledged after one of the party has died. There’s a woman fascinated by the stars who wants to be admitted to the Royal Astrological Society and, when that doesn’t work out, applies to study at Oxford. There is a comedy subplot ...

  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....