Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Tomorrow , the London-set debut feature of script supervisor-turned-director Martha Pinson, took five years from the start of principal photography to being released in UK cinemas. In the meantime, one of its actor-stars, Stuart Brennan, who co-wrote the screenplay with fellow actor Sebastian Street, has directed his own movie, The Necromancer , shown it in movie theatres and grimaced at the reviews. I cannot hail Brennan and Street as Britain’s answer to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon – their writing isn’t particularly subtle. Yet the resulting film is an endorphin rush masquerading as a drama. It generates so much good will, it makes the Salvation Army seem grumpy. Street plays Tesla, a traumatised paraplegic ex-squaddie who doesn’t want to think about his time in Afghanistan, where he was injured in an explosion. He isn’t interested in spending time with his former army buddies. Nor does he want to think about the girlfriend who walked out on him. When we first see him, he is sp...

  Joanna Hogg (born March 1960) has been making feature films in England for the last twelve years. Three of them, Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013) have featured Tom Hiddleston (aka Loki from the Thor movies). Her latest, The Souvenir is her first film in six years, though at the end she teases a sequel. It has been a long journey – 21 years - from making her graduation film, Caprice in 1986 to her first authored feature. She is unmistakably an auteur. She will influence others, if she hasn’t already. With The Souvenir , arguably her most commercial film – Martin Scorsese is listed as an executive producer – she will influence more still. A Joanna Hogg film is undeniably upper middle class. Her struggles are not financial in nature. I learned from an article on frieze.com that she saw a psychiatrist in the 1980s and was prescribed Librium, used as Wikipedia tells me, to treat anxiety, insomnia and withdrawal symptoms from alcohol and/or drug abuse. T...

  For some, film directing isn’t a career, rather a diversion. It’s an opportunity to go beyond one’s usual field, to explore the potential of the medium. The risk is negligible: if it goes wrong, you can always return to the day job without shame or ignominy; indeed, you can blame the producer. Born in Tehran in 1956 and based in London, Mitra Tabrizian is an established photographer who has exhibited around the world – her CV lists shows in London, New York, Vancouver, Milan, Antwerp, Berlin, Queensland and Graz, amongst other cities. She has also directed three short films: The Predator (2004), The Journey of No Return (1993) and The Third Woman (1991). Gholam is her first feature. Set in London in 2011, as uprisings collectively dubbed the Arab Spring take place across the Middle East, it is inspired by a photograph Tabrizian made of an Iranian taxi driver in the capital. Working with co-writer Cyrus Massoudi, Tabrizian remakes or rather riffs on Martin Scorsese’s 1976 se...

  I’d like to make a prediction here on Sunday May 7, 2017, that on its eventual release in the UK, the film Brakes will be critically hammered. It is not that the film isn’t ambitious, funny and at times extremely well-acted. It is just that it exhibits writ-large the unconscious bias of its writer-director, Mercedes Grower. It is a film about break-ups, the moment when people look to their other half, their travelling companion on life’s travails and say ‘it’s not me, it’s you’. The more polite – can you be more polite in a break up – say ‘it isn’t working’ as if relationships are expected to be work. Compromise, yes. Tetchy - most certainly. Involve the throwing of crockery – only in the movies. Nothing says I hate you more than the smashing of a cereal bowl, except I still eat my Cheerios out of my son’s plastic ‘Noddy’ bowl, and it is very resilient. The couples don’t have children – or at least those under the age of eighteen – that we hear about. They are mostly young...

  Pictured : Beret, no Clyde. Kelly Brook in a scene from the London-set crime caper, ' Taking Stock ', written and directed by Maeve Murphy . Still courtesy of Swipe Films (UK).  For writer-director Maeve Murphy, Taking Stock, a crime caper set predominantly in London’s King’s Cross district, represents a change of pace. It is larky, low-fi and plays, if I’m truly honest, like a 75-minute episode of children’s television, albeit one where the heroine, Kate (Kelly Brook) sticks her head in the oven in the first five minutes. It is, incidentally, the softest ‘15’ rated film you will ever see. Murphy’s last film, Beyond the Fire , released in 2009 was a love story between two traumatised individuals, a rape victim and a priest who had been abused as a child. The only thing the films have in common is the lead actor, Scot Williams, here cast as an accountant with a troubled past (hint: it isn’t that he hates double-entry book-keeping). Filmed in 2014 and formerly entitled The R...

  Pictured : Just wanting to be together: Leo ( Luke Howitt ), Molly ( Posy Sterling ) and Ava ( Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoads ) in a scene from the London-set drama, 'Lollipop', written and directed by Daisy-May Hudson . Still courtesy of Met Film Distribution (UK) Daisy-May Hudson’s feature debut, Lollipop , is an example of the female gaze turned solely on women. Adult men exist only in the background, for example as security or coach drivers. The only characters who speak are women, either representing the system or running away from responsibility. In her predominantly-London-set drama, Hudson stages scenes naturalistically, often pointing her camera at her protagonist, Molly (Posy Sterling), a young mother fresh out of prison trying to get custody of her two children Ava (Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoads) and Leo (Luke Howitt), while opposition voices are heard out of shot; Hudson uses shot-reverse-shot sparingly. The stylised-naturalistic combo results in abrasive story telling. Set ...

  Pictured : A 'goodie bag' for the 2025 film, ' Superman '. Courtesy of Warner Bros. ‘Look up’ say the posters. I looked up, down, left and right but could not find where to pick up my wristband for entry anywhere. Tall, gym-buffed men dressed as Superman, the DC comic book hero subject of a new Warner Bros movie, were no help. They wore their underwear outside their leggings but had otherwise not been briefed. Cast as atmosphere people, they were located on the north side of the grassy enclosure of Leicester Square. On the south side, a large screen had been erected so that Londoners could watch that other breed of superhero, tennis players, competing in this year’s Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Tournament, hopeful Emma Raducanu having just progressed to the Third Round. Nine days before its UK release, ‘ Superman ’ written and directed by James Gunn, who successfully brought Marvel’s ‘ Guardians of the Galaxy ’ to the big screen, was being launched at a ‘fan event’ held at t...