Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  You couldn’t run a women-only detective agency in the US in 2019 owing to gender equality laws. So why was rebooting the television series and movie franchise, Charlie’s Angels , for the big screen such a great idea? Admittedly there aren’t many franchises that present women as action heroes. If you were looking for a brand to relaunch, why not choose Police Woman or Cagney and Lacey ? The 2000 film Charlie’s Angels starring Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore alongside Bill Murray proved it has box-office potential– grossing US $264 million against a budget of $93 million. Its 2003 sequel, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle , without Murray’s participation, cost a lot more ($120 million) and grossed a little less ($259 million). Nevertheless, the idea of three women enthusiastically working for a man they never see, Charlie Townsend (voiced in the American Broadcasting Company TV series by John Forsythe) perpetuates the myth that unavailable men are somehow more alluring. The...

  Kelly Reichardt (born 1964) typifies what happens to most women filmmakers whose debut feature earns great notices but doesn’t quite get the audience it deserves. After her 1994 debut, River of Grass , she didn’t release a follow-up for 12 years. That film, Old Joy (2006), was only made possible by $30,000 which she inherited. Adapting a short story by the writer Jonathan Raymond, who subsequently collaborated on scripts for Reichardt’s subsequent films, Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Night Moves (2013), it told the story of two men (Will Oldham and Daniel London) who go on a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Not much happens, but something does. Born in Miami, the daughter of a crime scene detective and an undercover narcotics officer, Reichardt makes films with a forensic level of detail; detail that captures your attention in the absence of a complicated plot. If Certain Women is anything to go by, her films don’t use music to tell us how ...

  Pictured : Claudia ( Thora Birch , left) offers limited comfort to her traumatised sister Lidia ( Imogen Poots , right) in a scene from the film, ' The Chronology of Water ', adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch 's 2011 memoir by director Kristen Stewart . Still courtesy of Les Films Du Losange . For her feature debut as writer-director, actress Kristen Stewart has adapted Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water , an account published in 2011 of traumatic childhood and young womanhood from 1980 to the early 2000s. Both book and film are organised in five sections: ‘Holding Breath’, ‘Under Blue’, ‘The Wet’, ‘Resuscitations’ and ‘The Other Side of Drowning’. Stewart’s film is heavy on style: close-ups, match cuts, quick edits, flashes, fragmentation, voiceover. Such techniques can suggest inner torment – they do here – but also ward off empathy. Stewart is torn between showing Lidia (Imogen Poots) caught in the throes of trauma and illustrating her subjectivity through ...

Still courtesy of A24 Films (US) / Lionsgate (UK) Five years after her notable debut, Saint Maud , that took audiences into the delusional mind of a tortured, lonely, self-sacrificing nurse, director Rose Glass is in more cheerful mood with her long-awaited follow-up, Love Lies Bleeding , a film set in the late 1980s that pays homage to Thelma and Louise . She casts Twilight star Kristen Stewart, recently seen as Princess Diana, in a sharply contrasting role, as Lou, a gym manager first seen with her hand down a blocked toilet. Co-writing the script with director Weronika Tofilska, whose credits include the television series, Baby Reindeer , Glass explores the love at first sight romance between Lou and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a body builder with a dark past who is on her way to Las Vegas on her way to a contest. Lou introduces Jackie to steroids, which has genuinely unexpected consequences. Glass’ mood is relative. The catalyst of the drama is domestic abuse. Lou’s sister, Beth (Jen...