Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Watching Late Night I had a hard time accepting Dame Emma Thompson as a network talk show host using her English accent. It isn’t that Thompson is a bad actress – she’s won two Oscars. She was also the go-between for James Ivory and Anthony Hopkins on the set of Howard’s End , Schlegal very much. Talk show hosts are supposed to cajole their guests into a state of convivial bonhomie, as if they have just made their new best friend – what do you mean, I can’t use the green room? Thompson radiates intelligence and an air of ‘I will only tolerate your company for six minutes between commercials then it is back to the egg’. I can imagine Thompson running up and down a first class aircraft cabin and reproaching fellow passengers for snoring. Lately, she’s been making principled stands, turning down voice work on an animated feature and pledging solidarity with climate change protestors in central London – hang the round trip from Los Angeles. Above all, Thompson has been schooled like...

  Not all parents want to interfere with their children’s sex lives. That’s why they give them sweaters. But parents can voice their disapproval of a potential suitor. He or she might not be ‘good enough’. Alternatively, the parent might have an in-built prejudice that surfaces at dinner and manifests itself by placing the suitor under hypnosis in order to perform surgery. About that plot flaw in Get Out - did that film really deserve the Best Screenplay Oscar? If you are part of a nasty conspiracy and you place that nice young man that your daughter is dating into a trance, you aren’t going to give him time to figure out what you are up to – you are gonna get right to it. However, this isn’t a retrospective whinge about why Lady Bird was robbed at the 2018 Oscar ceremony by a so-called ‘smart’ horror film (reader, Gerwig was held up at gub point). This is about a modest box office success called Blockers directed but not written by Kay Cannon. Blockers has a script by a ...