Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  The penultimate film of this series is low-budget indie, Scrapper , a British, nay, London film written and directed by Charlotte Regan. Regan has directed a bunch of short films, some of which have been screened internationally, helmed pop and corporate videos and has absolutely earned the right to succeed. I have mixed feelings about the end result. I enjoyed it very much, but it veers close to the aesthetic of British – specifically BBC – children’s television. If Regan sought a career directing episodes of Byker Grove or The Story of Tracy Beaker this would not be a bad thing, but my suspicion is that she has ambitions above tea-time in front of the kiddies. Regan deals with a difficult topic – loss. Specifically the loss of one’s mother as experienced by a pre-teenage girl, Georgie (newcomer Lola Campbell). The effect is disorientating, numbing and world collapsing. Regan approaches the subject with good - I would qualify, excellent - humour. Georgie decides to manage ...

  There is a pitifully small group of people – filmmakers or people who can identify with the struggles of putting one’s vision onto celluloid – who will enjoy Joanna Hogg’s arthouse sequel, The Souvenir Part II . The rest of the world will find cinematic pleasure elsewhere. I had a great time – and for a film that is also about grief, that is saying something. Hogg’s 1980s-set follow-up is ‘partly’ autobiographical. Her protagonist, Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne in what maybe her final screen role – her only one, in fact) shares Hogg’s initials. In the 2019 ‘part one’, Julie’s boyfriend, Anthony (Tom Burke), a heroin addict who may have been a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (the film is set in the 1970s) had died. Anthony was unreliable, had borrowed money from Julie and had even broken into her flat to ensure he had cash for a fix. In the sequel, Julie returns to Raynham Film School – everyone’s favourite film school, in my humble opinion - to make a film insp...

  One of my favourite film titles of all time is ‘What Rats Won’t Do’. You have a rodent who noses around looking for food, biting indiscriminately and spreading disease. Then there is something that it would treat disdainfully, an invitation it would turn down. Incredible! At any rate the film didn’t live up to its title; in fact it didn’t get a cinema release. So ‘What Rats Won’t Do’ is still a mystery. This brings me inelegantly to Beach Rats , a film written and directed by Eliza Hittman (born 1979), whose previous credits include It Felt Like Love (2013) and the short, F orever’s Gonna Start Tonight (2011). It is about a young man, Frankie (Harris Dickinson), living with his mother (Kate Hodge) and sister in Brooklyn, who repeatedly visits a gay chat room and looks at who’s on offer. To those who ask, he explains that he doesn’t know what he likes. In a shot quite late in the film we see him framed against a sign that reads ‘electric closet’. Frankie is in the electric clo...