Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured :  Michal ( Milan Ondrík ) is prevented from rushing to the scene of a crime in a scene from Slovak co-writer-director  Tereza Nvotová 's third feature, Otec ( Father ). Still courtesy of Intra Films (Slovakia)   Some directors make incredible leaps between one movie and the next. Did we really expect Steven Spielberg to move from the cinema of suspense ( Jaws ) to that of wonder ( Close Encounters of The Third Kind )? Or George Lucas to move from redefining 1960s nostalgia in an apolitical way ( American Graffiti ) to creating a science fantasy franchise ( Star Wars )? Slovak writer-director Tereza Nvotová makes a similar progression from her second feature Nightsiren (released in 2022) to her third, Otec ( Father ), which she boldly stages the action in a series of single takes (the generic term is ‘oners’). Not only does Nvotová create a sense of unease from the opening moments, as she introduces the protagonist, publishing company boss Michal (...

  We see an open field. A young girl and a young woman run towards each other and collide intentionally. What is going on? For a long time in Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke’s film, Love Me Tender , that is the last we see of the outside world. The main character, Seconda (Barbara Giordano) is an agoraphobic. She lounges around in the family apartment in her underwear practising dance routines. She appears to be expecting a phone call or at least is excited when the telephone rings, but then her father (Maurizio Tabani) unplugs it. (There are no mobile phones in Seconda’s household.) Seconda hisses at the white-haired cat, Milou, whom she perceives as a competitor for attention – they are both home bodies. It appears to us that Seconda has been traumatised by her sister’s death but, as we discover, this is a girl she did not know. Her sister, she explains later, was crushed by a car. Seconda is the second child and this time her parents are going to protect her. But tha...

  Pictured : Troubled lady poet Sybil ( Rebecca Calder ) goes for a walk in the park in a scene from director Joanne Mitchell 's horror film, ' Broken Bird ', written by Dominic Brunt . Still: Catalyst Studios  (UK) Broken Bird is a modest budget British horror film shot in Serbia that relies less on jump scares and fetishiz ed violence than on unsettling performances and fragmented narrative strands. Not to mention fantasy sequences, exposed intestines and stitched together body parts. Expanded from her short film, Sybil , by director Joanne Mitchell, working from a script by her husband Dominic Brunt, it tells the story of a troubled young woman who has an unfortunate habit of causing every funeral home she works at to close down. Rebecca Calder excels as Sybil who we first meet at an evening of ‘pies, pints and poetry’ in an unspecified Northern town. She fits the stereotype of troubled lady poet, reciting verse slowly and deliberately, as if every word might be the last...