Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Honey Boy is a ninety-minute ‘cry from the heart’ written by and starring Shia LaBeouf, who made the transition from child actor to juvenile lead with more than a little help from Steven Spielberg, who produced the Transformers films and cast him as Indiana Jones’ son in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull . While not exactly a bankable star, LaBeouf suddenly (from the outside at least) succumbed to substance abuse. Now in his thirties, he is an unsettling presence. You feel complicit in his unhappiness, sorry that you ever enjoyed the first three Transformers films (though the first one is pretty good) and films such as Disturbia and Eagle Eye . Like fellow child star turned anti-Hollywood lead, Joaquin Phoenix, LaBeouf is plunging into the dark side, only it isn’t exactly clear that he will find some sort of equilibrium. You like to think actors are in control of their performance, because anything else would be unhealthy. I’m not sure if LaBeouf knows where he ...

  The route from acting to direction is a familiar one. Recognising the limits of a star persona, actors retreat behind the camera to tell different stories, ones that reveal a broader range of interests, with more emotional depth and subtlety. In 1978, Sylvester Stallone used the kudos afforded to him by the success of Rocky to write and direct Paradise Alley , a drama about three brothers in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, who enter the world of professional wrestling in the 1940s. So determined to one-eighty away from reprising Rocky Balboa in a different guise, Stallone cast Lee Canalito as a strong simpleton in the mould of Lenny from Of Mice and Men who is persuaded by his two brothers to enter the ring. The film was not a success. Stallone’s next film as director was Rocky II , a year later, and he rarely deviated from giving the audience what they wanted – even his Saturday Night Fever sequel, Staying Alive (1983) was directed like a sports movie. Stars use their celebrity to ...

  Pictured : 'You like the form. You don't like the content.' Agnes ( Eva Victor ) teaching Vladimir Nabokov's taboo-busting novel 'Lolita' in a scene from the film, ' Sorry, Baby ', written and directed by Eva Victor . Still courtesy of A24 (US) / Picturehouse Entertainment (UK)  Lately, people wishing to display virtue have been pictured holding cats. You have to feel sorry for the cats. They have no idea of the purpose into which they have been co-opted. Why am I being held so high? Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, has been pictured with a cat, with the intention of mocking the tyrant President Trump - currently Newsom’s full-time job. On the poster of her acclaimed film, Sorry, Baby , the writer-director-actor Eva Victor holds a cat she has liberated from houselessness in an apologetic way. ‘I’m sorry, cat,’ her character, Agnes, seems to say, ‘but I need you.’ People say things to cats that they wouldn’t say to a human being but having place...