Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Relationships are tested by the perceived obstacles to happiness that couples face. In the Glasgow-set drama, Only You , the sensitively-acted, emotionally-affecting feature debut of co-writer-director Harry Wootliff, we spend two hours in the company of Jake (Josh O’Connor) and Elena (Laia Costa), who meet, fall in love, share a flat, decide that having a baby together is the next step and then hit the biological brick wall. Wootliff focuses on the subtle pressures that Elena and Jake feel under – all of Elena’s friends have young babies – as they begin to feel wanting. It is as if childlessness is a judgement - an un-birth sentence. Elena aged 35 at the start of the film, had an abortion aged 18. This isn’t discussed explicitly, but Wootliff’s film is fodder for the pro-life lobby. The film owes a monster-sized debt to the early naturalistic dramas of Michael Winterbottom, currently Britain’s most prolific, if hardly most successful director. His most relevant credits include...

Pictured : 'I prefer working on the inside to working on the outside.' Interpreter Nat ( Laia Costa ) is gripped by Andreas 'the German' ( Hovik Keuchkerian ) in the Spanish drama, ' Un Amor ', adapted from Sara Mesa 's 2020 novel by Laura Ferrero and director Isabel Coixet . Still courtesy of Imagine Film Distribution (Belgium) There is a trope in romantic dramas about mending the broken. Spanish director Isabel Coixet explores this in her adaptation of Sara Mesa’s novel, Un Amor . In it, Nat ( Laia Costa ), a young interpreter who works for an NGO, quits her job to retreat to a small village in a rural part of Spain, where everybody knows everyone else. The house Nat moves into needs a lot of work, but it is all Nat can afford. Her landlord Casero ( Luis Bermejo ) gives her the dog to match; it has a scarred face from ‘looking at something it shouldn’t’. There’s a pound nearby from which dogs bark at night. ‘I don’t hear them anymore,’ the grumpily mena...