Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  About as far from the box-office success of Barbie as one can reasonably imagine is Alice, Darling . Written by Alanna Francis and directed by Mary Nighy, this is another American film about female empowerment, albeit one that comes from a very dark place. Released by Lionsgate Films, the company behind John Wick Chapter IV – worldwide gross $432 million and counting - it only was screened in the UK once or twice a day in a handful of independent cinemas in January 2023, having no prospect of commercial success. Happily, it has found its way onto Amazon Prime, which also hosts another Lionsgate release, Living , starring Nighy’s award nominated father, Bill. Nighy might unkindly be described as a nepo-baby. However, there have been numerous offspring of famous actors and directors who have carved out successful careers through virtue of their talent – Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, the children of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner to name but two. Nepotism...

  Lately, I’ve been sensitised to a new genre, ‘abortion porn’ - films that focus on women’s distress as they attempt to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies. Andrew Dominik’s recent Marilyn Monroe drama, Blonde , took this to sickening effect. Other films that attract this descriptor include Audrey Diwan’s L’ É v é nement and Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always . The phrase ‘unwanted pregnancies’ strikes me as too polite, likening the process of neutralizing the aftermath of rape to exchanging a pair of shoes. I propose the term, ‘invasive pregnancies’ – pregnancies resulting from enforced sex or that could seriously harm the life of the mother. An accepted change of terminology could, over time, change people’s minds over the issue, in the year that the ‘Roe vs Wade’ judgment has been overturned. The 1960s set drama, Call Jane , directed by Phyllis Nagy from a screenplay by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi (writers on the medical series, The Resident ), is only partly ‘...