Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : Frankenstein at the Movies. Or rather his creature ( Christian Bale ), as seen in writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal 's Marmite 'monster' 1930s road movie, ' The Bride! '. Still courtesy of Warner Bros  Few sophomore films from acclaimed directors are as bat sh-t crazy as writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride . Her follow-up to The Lost Daughter portrays Frankenstein’s creation (Christian Bale), broadly as imagined in the 1931 Boris Karloff picture and its 1935 sequel, as a lonely film addict seeking a female companion. This reanimated figure, the subject of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, appears to have been brought to life in the 1930s rather than a century earlier. Gyllenhaal presents the creature (let’s not use the word ‘monster’) as a child of cinema doomed to impersonate past – and future – portrayals of itself, imagining itself as a song and dance man rather than forever pursued by an angry mob - though the latter is inevitable. The creature i...

  Though it is both written and directed by women, I’m not sure Mary Shelley qualifies as a film ‘by women’. It feels designed by a committee, who took Australian writer Emma Jensen’s script, ‘ A Storm in the Stars ’ and turned it into an industrial product starring Elle Fanning and a bunch of Brits. The title character, Mary Shelley, the lover of unconventional 19 th Century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, is the author of ‘ Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus ’. Even if, like me, you haven’t read the book you have a clear idea of what Frankenstein is from Boris Karloff’s memorable performance, Mel Brooks’ affectionate parody and Robert de Niro telling Kenneth Branagh, ‘meet me on the sea of ice.’ The director is Saudi-born, San Fernando Valley resident Haifaa al-Mansour, who since her breakout 2012 feature, Wadjda about a young Saudi schoolgirl who wants her own bicycle - the first film to be shot in Saudi Arabia, by the way, not just by a woman, but by anyone – has relocated t...