Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  What does it mean when you say to your partner, ‘we’re meant to be together’? This sentiment is expressed sometimes in repose, sometimes in the waning of a lost argument, a pitiful despatch of the final life raft. I have my own thoughts on the subject. The more romantic will incline towards the film, Past Lives , written and directed by Celine Song, which explores to some extent whether relationships are destined to persist. Song’s film features Greta Lee as Nora Moon (born Na Young), a playwright who reconnects with the Korean boy, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) who she last saw in person twenty-four years ago. Nora didn’t ‘leave’ Hae Sung. She was separated from him by her parents who relocated to Toronto; her father is a film director. But you know kids – especially precocious ones. They’ll claim the decisions made by others as their own. Koreans, in line with many nationalities, are known for formality and repressed emotions, the latter released with the lethality of steam from a broke...

  Nobody knows anything. This applies to judges at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival who awarded writer-director A V (Aline Victoria) Rockwell’s feature debut, A Thousand and One , the Grand Jury Prize only to see the film flounder at the US box office upon its release on 31 March (gross: $3.386 million to 27 April 2023). Rockwell’s film has, like its single mother protagonist, Inez (Teyona Taylor) a defiant dignity built on unsteady foundations.   The structure is bold, divided like Moonlight into three distinct time periods (1995, 2001, 2005) – four if you count the opening scene on Riker’s Island (1994). At its heart is a ticking time bomb: what will happen to Inez when the crime she has committed eventually comes to light? The New York City-set drama, which takes its title from a door number, but also offers itself a riposte to 2001: A Space Odyssey – the characters in A Thousand and One fight for space – is ambitious in scope, tying Inez’s story to changes ushered by su...

  Contains spoilers The opening of Farewell Amor is deceptive: a single static shot of people waiting in the Arrivals hall of John F. Kennedy International Airport. Our eyes are drawn to a figure holding a sign in the centre of the frame. However, it isn’t this figure who is important, rather Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), a tall and as we discover soft-spoken Angolan who steps forward from the left of the frame to greet his wife, Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), whom he has not seen for seventeen years. While Walter headed to America at the end of the Angola Civil War, Esther and Sylvia migrated to Tanzania (specifically Dar Es Salaam) where Esther found and enthusiastically embraced God. As she hugs her husband, calling him ‘Amor’, she allows her handbag to fall to the ground. Sylvia quickly picks it up and puts it on top of suitcases stacked on a luggage trolley that she is pulling. As Walter, a taxi driver, takes the pair into New York City,...

  In Sofia Coppola’s seventh film, the New York-based comedy-drama, On the Rocks , the writer-director is reteamed with her male muse, Bill Murray. Murray is the father Coppola never had, great with kids in small doses if this film is anything to go by but incapable of marital fidelity. Coppola’s actual father, Francis Coppola, the director of three Godfather movies as well as of Apocalypse Now and The Conversation , has been married to Eleanor for 57 years, so clearly this film is not autobiographical. Coppola apparently put some of her father’s somewhat outrageous opinions into the mouth of art dealer Felix Keane, played with relaxed é lan by Murray. You find yourself asking: ‘did he really know a tribe of women in Canada who kidnapped men and placated them by having sex?’ ‘That sounds like your fantasy,’ blocked novelist daughter, Laura (Rashida Jones) tells him. On the Rocks is what some people call a ‘low stakes’ drama, by which is meant that there’s barely any drama at all...

  Set in New York City over the course of one day, The Sun is Also a Star , adapted by Tracy Oliver ( Little ) from Nicola Yoon’s 2016 novel and directed by Ry Russo-Young suffers from a huge credibility problem. Twenty four hours before her family is due to be deported to Jamaica, why would a student, Natasha (Yara Shahidi) entertain Daniel (Charles Melton), a Korean American poet on the verge of being pushed into a medical career he doesn’t want, who insists that they are destined to be together? After Daniel saves Natasha from being hit by a car and she sits down with him for a little bit, you would expect her to tell him about her dire circumstances that she was inadvertently responsible for. You see, Natasha stole candy from a store, was reprimanded by the authorities who then looked into her family’s immigration status. Ouch! Appeal rights exhausted, they are out and Natasha’s father (Gbenga Akinnagbe) is pissed. Natasha had big plans to be a data scientist. She also loves t...

  Why would a young black choreographer-performer rehearsing with a tight group (her ‘family’) and living in an apartment where she faces eviction fall for a mysterious, wounded white boy, who pretends to be living with his half-sister but is actually homeless? It is a question never satisfactorily resolved in writer-director Danielle Lessovitz’s debut feature, Port Authority , which like its hero, Wye McQueen (Leyna Bloom) has a ‘lot going on’ but never quite accounts for all of it in its plotting. It has a ticking clock. Paul (British actor Fionn Whitehead) arrives at New York City’s Port Authority bus station hoping that his half-sister, Sara (Louisa Krause) would be there to greet him. He is left un-met. Through a window, looking out onto some steps, he briefly sees a group of dancers in their own world. They are like the sub-culture skateboarders in last year’s Skate Kitchen . Paul is mesmerised by the confidence they have in their own self-expression. Inadequate words that ...

  ‘ Remember the Hitler diaries?’ The literary forger Lee Israel is asked midway through Can You Ever Forgive Me , the film adaptation of Israel’s entertaining, some might say scandalous autobiography, brought to the screen by writers Jeff Whitty and Nicole Holofcener and director Marielle Heller. Israel forged 400 letters from celebrities from the 1920s onwards. Using her skill to disappear inside her subject, she is, by her own humble opinion, a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker. Other luminaries to get the Israel treatment include Noël Coward and Fanny Brice; she was working on a biography of the latter when she drifted into literary embellishment. The reason that the film got made is the participation in the lead role of Melissa McCarthy, the popular American comedy star of such hits as Bridesmaids and The Heat . Also seen on the TV series, Saturday Night Live , McCarthy is, in this author’s humble opinion, a better Sean Spicer than Sean Spicer. The film was develope...

  As I begin my third year at looking at feature films directed by women, I really want the first film in the new series to utterly justify my focus, to be the benchmark against which other films can be measured. The Boy Downstairs is not that movie. The purpose of this study is to prove that women directors are just as interesting auteurs as men, that their work connects with an audience on an emotional level, that the only reason women directors aren’t more widely known as that their films rarely get shown in multiplexes, or that women aren’t regularly given franchise movies to direct or, if they happen to arrive on a franchise, they are replaced by a man for the sequel (Penelope Spheeris, Wayne’s World, Catherine Hardwicke , Twilight ) and that they are equally talented and offer safe pairs of hands. At some point, if industrialised filmmaking continues (as opposed to folks just picking up cameras and making films with their friends) I would like directors to be cast in a g...