I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of Candyman, which is released theatrically in Europe and the United States this weekend.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: candyman, Chicago, escapist, jordan peele, nia dacosta, review, the candyman, the escapist | Leave a comment »
I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of Reminiscence, which is released theatrically in Europe and the United States this weekend and is now streaming on HBO Max.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: 3mr, escapist magazine, hugh jackman, lisa joy, movie review, noir, reminiscence, review, sci-fi, the escapist, three minute review | Leave a comment »
I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, which is releasing on Netflix tomorrow.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: 3mr, anime, netflix, review, the escapist, the witcher, the witcher: nightmare of the wolf, three minute review | Leave a comment »
Reminiscence is an intriguing concept in desperate need of a stronger execution.
Reminiscence marks the feature film directorial debut of Lisa Joy, the co-creator of Westworld. In some ways, this is revealing. It often seems like the best version of Reminiscence might be a television pilot, a two-hour feature-length exploration of a futuristic dystopia that lays a lot of groundwork to be explored by later episodes and seasons. It’s very clear that Joy has put a lot of thought into the world of Reminiscence, about how it works and how it developed, and why it turned out the way it did. All of that work is either on-screen or blasted over the audio system via helpful voiceover exposition.
On the record.
Unfortunately, Reminiscence struggles to devote any real energy to its actual narrative or characters. Reminiscence is clearly constructed as an affectionate homage to classic film noir, in everything from its production design to its plot structure to its thematic concerns. However, it lacks the richness and the complexity that distinguishes the best of the genre. Instead, because so much time is spent explaining and re-explaining the mechanics of the world, everything else feels like a thinly-drawn sketch.
Reminiscence often feels like the faded memory of a much more engaging film.
Shining a light on it.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: dreams, film, Film noir, hugh jackman, Inception, lisa joy, memory, Movie, noir, non-review review, reminiscence, review, science fiction | Leave a comment »
People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan has had an interesting journey to the big screen.
People Just Do Nothing began as an online video series, before transitioning to BBC Three and then to BBC Two. The mockumentary comedy accrued a cult following, and so it’s refreshing to see much of the cast and crew given the chance to take the concept to a cinematic adaptation. There’s something inherently charming in this comedy concept built around a bunch of unqualified (and perhaps even untalented) local pirate DJs getting to make their own feature film that takes the characters and the cast to Japan. (It is also, for example, fascinating to see the characters fronting an anti-piracy public service announcement.)
The band at a crossroads.
Big in Japan has a lot of work to do, both in appealing to fans of the series and in winning over potential new converts. The movie is designed to function both as a culmination of the characters’ journey and paradoxically as an introduction to the characters. It’s a lot to ask from a feature film, particularly a comedy, and Big in Japan occasionally stumbles under the weight of those competing demands. Big in Japan is at its weakest when it’s trying to craft a story that is at once a satisfying development for long-term followers these characters while also being universal enough to work for audiences new to this world.
Big in Japan works best in its smaller moments, when it commits to individual jokes rooted in particular character. It falters when it sacrifices those strengths in the hopes of advancing the big picture. Big in Japan is arguably at its best when it goes small, a lesson that the film tries to impart to its own characters.
Toasts of Tokyo.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: bbc, big in japan, comedy, film, mockumentary, Movie, non-review review, people just do nothing, review | Leave a comment »
I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of Free Guy, which is releasing theatrically in Europe and the United States this weekend.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: escapist, free guy, jodie comer, npc, review, ryan reynolds, shaun levy, taika waititi, the escapist, video games, youtube | Leave a comment »
Censor is a love letter to the era of so-called “video nasties” and an exploration of the moral panic that tends to encompass discussions of the genre.
Niamh Algar plays Enid, the eponymous moral guardian with a traumatic back story who has committed herself to protecting the nation’s sanity by watching and rating the low-rent horrors flooding the market. Over dinner conversation, Enid takes offense when her mother asks if she has seen any good movies recently. “It’s not entertainment, Mam,” Enid snaps. “I’m protecting people.” It’s very clear that Enid believes this, taking meticulous notes and engaging in rigorous debates about exactly how much eye-gouging the public can tolerate.
The Green Night.
On the surface, Censor is a movie with a plot that loosely suggests something akin to Hardcore or 8mm. Throughout the film, hints are dropped about Enid’s traumatic past, including the mysterious disappearance of her younger sister while the two girls were playing together. When the latest film from a provocative auteur named Frederick North crosses her desk, Enid seems to recognise one of the on-screen victims. Is her sister still alive? Has she been swallowed by this world of exploitation horror cinema? More to the point, can Enid finally rescue her and bring her home?
The beauty of Censor lies in how co-writer and director Prano Bailey-Bond plays with this familiar set-up, building a movie around the idea that horror movies are a form of escapism for moral guardians as much as the intended audience, a space into which these people can project their own nightmares and anxieties without ever having to confront the reality of the world around them.
Signalling concern.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: censor, film, horror, horror cinema, margaret thatcher, Movie, niamh algar, non-review review, prano bailey-bond, review, video nasties | Leave a comment »
The Last Letter from Your Lover is an adaptation of Jojo Moynes’ breakout romantic novel of the same name, and it very much feels like a cinematic adaptation of a beloved novel.
The basic premise of The Last Letter from Your Lover is a nested love story. While working on a feature about another subject, an intrepid journalist named Ellie Haworth finds a mysterious love letter. This love letter suggests a secret affair in sixties high society. The letters are clearly addressed to Jennifer Stirling, a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a wealthy industrialist, who finds herself navigating her own past following an accident that leaves her with amnesia.
How I Met Your Lover.
It’s a solid set-up for a romantic drama, with The Last Letter from Your Lover paralleling both Ellie and Jennifer in their investigations into Jennifer’s mysterious past in an effort to explore and investigate the sordid affair that potentially could derail Jennifer’s entire life. The Last Letter from Your Lover benefits from two charming lead performances from Felicity Jones as Ellie and Shailene Woodley as Jennifer, along with strong direction from Augustine Frizzell.
Unfortunately, The Last Letter from Your Lover never feels like a convincing screen romance, but instead a shadow of a much more engaging love story on the page.
Letter be.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: affair, felicity jones, film, jojo moynes, Movie, non-review review, review, romance, Shailene Woodley, the last letter from your lover | Leave a comment »
Profile is the latest entry in the so-called “Screen Life” series, produced by Timur Bekmambetov. It is also notable as the first entry in the series to be directed by Bekmambetov himself.
The “Screen Life” series is effectively a set of heightened genre movies that unfold through the screen of a laptop, narratives that unfold through chat boxes, Skype chats, playlists and file transfers. It’s an innovative and experimental approach to storytelling. While the results – Unfriended, Searching… and Unfriended: Dark Web – have varied in quality, the hook has always been fascinating. So much of modern life is navigated through screens that it is fascinating to see movies try to reflect that. Indeed, there’s an argument that movies like Unfriended play better on computer screens than they do in theatres or on televisions.
Translating the story to screen.
Profile adheres to the cinematic conventions of these sorts of stories, but it feels unnecessarily constrained in other ways. Each of the three previous films has been a genre exercise told through a computer screen. Unfriended and Dark Web are teenage horror movies, while Searching… is a delightfully schlocky nineties thriller reimagined through a web camera. In contrast, the subject matter of Profile is decidedly weighter. The film is based on the non-fiction book In the Skin of a Jihadist by Anna Ereklle, looking at online recruitment of young British girls by Islamic extremists.
This is an appreciably more grounded and more serious piece of subject matter than something like Unfriended or Searching…, and it’s interesting to see this cinematic language applied to this subject matter. After all, this is a digitally native story and a tale about the process of mediating the world through computer screens. However, Profiles suffers slightly from the need to frame this subject matter not through the lens of a web camera, but through the prism of genre, to transform something very real and very threatening into a heightened cartoonish thriller.
A new Skype of thriller…
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: daesh, extremism, facebook, film, grooming, internet, isis, Movie, non-review review, Online, profile, recruitment, review, screen life, skype, thriller | Leave a comment »
I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of The Suicide Squad, which is releasing theatrically in Europe this week and in cinemas and on HBO Max in the United States next weekend.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: 3 minute review, 3mr, escapist, escapist magazine, review, the escapist, the suicide squad, three minute review | Leave a comment »
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