Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Booksmart is a bit like its central characters, Californian High School students, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein). It tries too hard. From its opening gag, involving a motivational speech (voiced by Maya Rudolph) that lapses into profanity, it goes for a heightened comedy style that does not deliver big laughs. I wouldn’t change the premise – about two clever girls who are perceived as not fun who over-compensate during one hearty night on the evening before graduation. I would tweak the execution, which relies heavily on over-needy people. No one wants to go to university ill-prepared for a new social start. Yet most of us arrive at uni with our personas still under construction. The script is credited to four writers: Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern, writing partners who created the ABC television series, Trophy Wife ; Katherine Silberman, who wrote the Netflix rom-com, Set It Up ; and Susanna Fogel, who co-wrote and directed last year’s The Spy Who Dumped M...

  In the Church of Mumblecore - low-budget, low-fidelity, independently produced American films made between 2002 and 2009 - Greta Gerwig would be the High Priestess, obvs. Lynn Shelton, writer-director, who came late to the game, would be the organiser of community improvement activities. She would be herding her co-filmmakers to go out and clean the graffiti on President Obama posters (why does that one say ‘Yes, We Cancun’?). Shelton began her career with the documentary short, The Clouds That Touch Us Out of Clear Blue Skies , which sounds like a motto on the wall of a Waffle Dog outlet. (A Waffle Dog is actually a thing; I thought I made it up!) Taking its title from a W S Merwin poem, it describes what it is like to lose a baby through miscarriage. Shelton released her first feature in 2006, We Go Way Back , about a young actress, Kate who, at aged 23, looks back at her 13-year-old self. The hero is played by Amber Hubert and Maggie Brown, jarringly in the same reality. (OK, ...

  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...