Aftersun [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19770238/] Just as Kazuo Ishiguro is able to impart mood, and delivers novels that are more than just the words, the sub-plots and the sub-vocalised, so does Charlotte Web make films. I hope that this is the first important film of a long career.
All Quiet on the Western Front [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016150/] I watched this in three passes. It is very long, and the opening section of the film contains a long, harrowing, scene. It’s obviously necessary, and frames the rest of the film very well, but I was pleading for it to end long before it did. The break turned out to be a blessing, because I didn’t realise until I started watching again, that I could watch it in English too. Brave job taking on a subject about which the audience is so knowledgeable. But, like the makers of Elvis, if you’re supremely gifted at your art and know your project inside out, it’s worth the effort, because you’ll find things in the subject that others didn’t know that they knew, until you show it to them.
Amsterdam [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10304142/] IMHO Christian Bale never puts a foot wrong. Lots to like in this film, but overall, mmmyeh. It feels overwritten in a way that implies that it was once underwritten – as if they added layers to it after the first draft, in an attempt to make it more intriguing. It just felt unnecessarily convoluted.
Babylon [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10640346/] Do you remember how Midnight’s Children was an intoxicating burst of colour and life, that Rushdie sustained for an entire novel? Well this film starts like it’s going to do that, then stops after five minutes. It’s an overblown indulgence purporting to tell the story of, err, overblown indulgence. It even had the temerity to suggest that its story was somehow a sort of nascent Singing in the Rain, as if to bring it all back round to a point in the end. It has no point, and this film will stand as no more than a monument to that which it sought to parody. Don’t fall for the trailer.
Banshees of Inisherin [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11813216/] I really quite liked this, though I suspect it’s one of those films that is looked at less critically in the cinema than it would be on TV screens. I think, as in In Bruges, the writer flirts too closely with the absurd at times. Which is all well and good, so long as it doesn’t undermine what he’s trying to do in the remaining 90% of the film. In Emily, similar moments provided telling glimpses into the humour and recusant nature of the protagonists, in this, it feels like the writer has provided cameo roles for his favourite jokes.
Blonde [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655389/] Like Elvis, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Emily, the subject seems too well known and too done to death to offer any chance of a fresh, original and engaging film. But like all of those, it does it with aplomb, as if its creators know their subject so well, they can bring out a better angle on that which was thought to be well known previously. Dare I say it, like Steven Knight did with Great Expectations.
Brian and Charles [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13270424/] Brilliantly mad. I think, if you went for a drink with David Earl, he’d probably be one of those people with whom you just started laughing before either of you said anything. It was really only a one-joke comedy, but they resisted the temptation to put Charles Petrescu front and centre of every scene, so each new time you saw him, it was a treat. I laughed my head off from start to finish. Though they did have to resort to a really lame three-act story (to get it financed, I imagine); and towards the end, he felt a little like that black bin-liner sheep dog out of Viz.
Elvis [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3704428/] Ignore the (few) negative reviews. This is great. How it got all the important facts in without it feeling like a made-for-TV bio, was an act of artistic brilliance in its own right. It sounds trite to say that films are about pictures more than they are words, but it takes watching a film like this to get what that means. Kazuo Ishiguro (Living) would do well to watch it before he embarks on his next project. It feels redundant to say that it felt like a labour of love for the writers. But they have, obviously, and without making a virtue out of it, deep-bored to the root of every episode of their subject’s life, and fretted over it until they came up with the perfect way to present it on the screen. It’s a high-energy, rollercoaster, whirlwind of an adventure – all that stuff that everyone says. But it’s something else. It’s the most perfect version of what it is, that it could possibly be.
Emily [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12374656/] I will be on my own here, but my favourite film of the last year. It helps (a lot) if you already know Wuthering Heights, but it so expertly and deftly crafts its story of that novel’s creation, it feels less like a film about how that was done, as it does a movie about inspiration, made by a genius with special insight into the eye of a genius. Funny, odd, true, and desperately painful – just like real life. A brilliant collaboration between two coming giants of film, Frances O’Connor and Emma Mackey.
Empire of Light [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14402146/] Yes. Lots of good things going on. Lots of things to recognise about that faraway land called near history. Very good on depression I thought. And Olivia Colman, who has roles like this in her pocket, is just great. But the lasting impression was that it was, overall, a bit too tick-boxy
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6710474/] Feels like heresy, but I didn’t like it. Well, I managed to get a half an hour in, twice, before deciding to give all of it up, forever, anywhere it might be shown, now and always. I’m not interested in all those fighty-fantasy films that it is said to constantly reference, in fact, I would go so far as to say, I hate them, so if there were any of those in the first thirty minutes or so, I missed the joke. Which might help explain why I entirely missed the joy of this film, which so many others seem to share. It sounded like a good idea; and I wanted to like it. I just didn’t.
Glass Onion [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11564570/] What are these films? I thought that Knives Out was just a really bad version of a murder mystery. And this is even worse. Are they supposed to be ironic? Or highly-stylised? I just have a massive sensation of Emperor’s New Clothes about this whole trilogy, sub-genre, thing, or whatever it is that it claims to be. It’s like they’ve gone sois-disant quirky, then pushed the envelope on their ‘cool new idea’ so far, that they bent it completely out of shape and lost what little was good about it in the first place.
I Wanna Dance with Somebody [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12193804/] If the Gold Standard of appallingly bad biopics is The Krays, for ticking-off the clichés and showing none of the action that justified them, then this film skirts dangerously to that territory in parts. Despite being over two hours long, the consequences of drama and conflict are often shown without bothering to play out what got us there. It doesn’t quite dip to the standards of The Krays, or Bobby Moore, and the many others that help define this lamentable genre, but neither does it quite leave it behind either – in the way that Elvis did. It feels a bit as if it has been saved by great performances, especially those of Stanley Tucci and Naomi Ackie.
Licorice Pizza [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11271038/] I love it when they get nostalgia right. This film reminded me of those semi-factual American and Canadian films for children and teenagers from the 60s and 70s that were imported and played to us on Saturday mornings. All it needed was a whispering narrator and a flute soundtrack. I may even have consented to be happy again. For a while.
Living [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9051908/] Screenplay by genius novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and that is the problem.
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5151570/] Not just because it’s a vehicle for the impeccable Lesley Manville, this is a delight for all ages and tastes (I went with my mum). This unpretentious film achieves far more than similar films with loftier ambitions.
Sharper [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12573454/] I LOVE conman/hustle films. This one has double/triple crosses, and maybe some 4x crosses that fooled me. They’re mostly played on the audience. Just left with a lingering feeling that the writers have done too many of these now. At the end, when they were playing out the final-final reveal, I audibly exclaimed, ‘Oh no, not that, for fuck’s sake.’
She Said [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14807308/] Said to be a Me-Too film, but it felt like more of a newspaper movie, akin to The Post, to me. Enjoyed it. If it is a genre movie, it made a better job of it than Women Talking.
Tetris [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12758060/] There is a certain anxiety attached to watching films like this (and there are so many ‘films like this’ that it’s almost becoming a genre). I always begin the watch thinking, how are they going to tell the story of the development, marketing, and scrap over ownership and still make a compelling film out of it? Well, like The Social Network, they manage the trick quite well. In parts it is stretched to breaking point to do what needs to be done whilst still keeping it watchable – the KGB, prelapsarian Soviet commerce, and the Maxwell family lapse into caricature to keep the whole thing on the road – but they sort of manage it. Plus, you get the Big Screen’s version of Michael Sheen – Taron Egerton, who seems always to be able to find a way; and we’re in the era of watching the 80s as history now, which is fun in it’s own right. But I still think I’d have preferred it as a documentary.
The Fabelmans [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14208870/] Quite liked it. Quite like lots of Steven Spielberg’s output. But the John Ford scene and the final frame would have been enough.
The Menu [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9764362/] I don’t like horror. And I make no exception for this. It felt massively contrived to me, in the way that Glass Onion and Triangle of Sadness were contrived. It reminded me of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds – two awful and distinct parts, roughly welded together to maker a bigger, even more awful, thing.
The Quiet Girl [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15109082/] Quietly terrifying and affirming at the same time. It sucks you in brilliantly.
Triangle of Sadness [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7322224/] Unadulterated shite flows through one of the pivotal scenes of this film. Actual unadulterated sewage. Which is about as significant as this film gets – it flows through the rest of the scenes as if a script editor had never been allowed to take a look at it. That this meretricious nonsense won an award says more about how favours and finance work in the film industry than it does anything else. That is no shock. What is truly confounding, is how anyone was persuaded to part with money to make it.
Unstuck in Time [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1461238/] I should recuse myself. I am too much of a fan-boy to be objective. For me, it was like finding a gold bar in the attic.
Women Talking [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13669038/] They forgot to put in a first scene to explain what was going on and set it up properly. Without it, it was like watching an interminable am-dram production. Fucking awful.
Dickie White's Diary 