Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : 'It's the end of my world and I know it.' Nino ( Théodore Pellerin ) attends his surprise birthday party twenty-four hours after being told that he has throat cancer in a scene from writer-director  Pauline Loquès ' Paris-set film, ' Nino '. Still courtesy of Curzon (UK) Nino Clavel (Théodore Pellerin) the soon-to-be 29-year-old protagonist of French writer-director Pauline Loquès’ feature debut, Nino , faces his worst-ever birthday weekend. Visiting a Paris clinic on Friday to collect a sick note, he is told that he has throat cancer. Nino had complained of fatigue and a pain in his throat but did not expect the diagnosis of papillon carcinoma, the result of a sexually transmitted disease he contracted when he was younger.   However, he is being fast-tracked for treatment. He needs to have someone to accompany him on Monday morning for the first appointment. He is told that the treatment will not result in hair loss but will reduce his sperm count...

  If you were to ask: ‘alcoholism and cancer – what do they mean to me?’ I would say ’2002’. That was the year I knew I was addicted to alcohol after my wife retreated into herself following the death of her mother from cancer and we were coping with the diagnosis of our young son (then aged five) of being on the autistic spectrum. There are things I cannot write because social media has a habit of biting one in the bum, as Australians say. Suffice to say, 2002 was my horror year. I carried on writing film reviews but I cannot remember anything I wrote. My cure, in 2007, was to take up running again, replacing one addiction with another. I spent a year preparing for the Edinburgh Marathon, which I ran in 2008 and 2009, though the product of that was plantar fasciitis, or a pain in one’s foot, a condition that I have to this day. Canadian writer-director Molly McGlynn’s feature debut, Mary Goes Round , deals with both alcoholism and cancer but not plantar fasciitis, because that wou...