Reviews

After a gory opening with a two-minute cameo from Charles Dance, the movie slips into a low gear for half-an-hour or more before the Revelations start to kick in to make it an over-ripe prelude to the OMEN originals. Bill Nighy looks very uncomfortable in his role as a cardinal who may or may not be fully protective of our heroine; in one early scene I thought his lines were being dubbed, God knows why.

There's a garish glamour to the whole show that calls Dario Argento to mind. There are some welcome nods to the Gregory Peck OMEN, but the link to that movie at the end of this one is clumsy and seems to leave open the possibility that THE FIRST OMEN will not be the Last Omen. A prequel with a sequel - not sure that's a good idea. Sadly, Bill Nighy does not bring anything like the degree of class that Gregory Peck brought to the first Damien story in 1976. For diehard fans of Satanic-themed movies (count me in!) this is rather thin fare.

Pretending to be "found footage" from the 1970s, this is the night TV chat show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) hoped his show would get a boost from a Halloween special featuring a Latino medium and a teenage girl possessed by a demon. He got more than he bargained for. Obviously, things were going to go horribly wrong, and they did - horribly.

This is - almost - a gloriously original movie, or at least it's an original twist on familiar tropes, in the vein of, let's say, Scary Movie. Some projectile vomiting heralds the inevitable "hommage" to THE EXORCIST. Lilly, the possessed girl (Ingrid Torelli), is clearly referencing Linda Blair, but she reminded me a bit of Pamela Franklin (THE INNOCENTS, 1961).

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL is unusually short, less than 90 mins. A bit gross towards the finale, but not as sickeningly gross as the majority of current horror films. Recommended.

This is another of those small British movies that leaves a large impression, like 2022's Living. Based on a true story from the 1920s, director Thea Sharrock takes us back to the seaside town of Littlehampton in Sussex (more photogenic Arundel is used for the setting). Escalatingly vicious poison pen letters are being sent to local inhabitants, starting with Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), a middle-aged spinster still living with her elderly mum and dad (Gemma Jones and Timothy Spall). The prime suspect is their next-door neighbour Rose (Jessie Buckley), a potty-mouthed Irish immigrant with whom the Swans have had many altercations. A police investigation uncovers the truth, although most viewers will get there before they do.

The letters are not just Wicked, they are Filthy, and much of the film's humour derives from the inept smuttiness of their phrasing. Take out the dirty-postcard humour (please don't!) and this movie would fit seamlessly into the grand comedy tradition of the Ealing Studios output of the 1940s and 50s (The Lavender Hill Mob et al). Cinematography and set design beautifully recapture the period. The script and the performances are gloriously OTT, close to pantomime level. It's all in the worst possible taste - and all the better for it!

This movie is almost entirely set in the house and garden of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. A high wall separates the garden from the camp where tens of thousands of Jews are being exterminated. The storyline never takes us over that wall, although screams and cries and gunshots are often heard and dark smoke rises from the crematorium chimney. Meanwhile Höss's children play in the garden, as if unaware of the horror behind the wall.

They are not unaware of the horror. One of the kids is given gold teeth to add to his collection. Höss's wife parades in a magnificent fur coat brought from the camp; she even tries on the lipstick left in a coat pocket.

This is a subtler, darker movie than THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS, which it inevitably recalls. The banality of evil is at the core of THE ZONE OF INTEREST, and I think the audience is invited to see the indifference of the Höss family as symbolic of the indifference of the German nation to the genocide on their collective doorstep.

A grim movie on a grim theme. It will not be to every cinemagoer's taste. I'm not sure it was to mine.

This must be the most intense gay movie since BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, but ALL OF US STRANGERS is a lot more mystifying.

Given that a tube train can take him to see dead people, we have to decide how much of this story is real and how much a fantasy scripted by the unhappy Adam, who was orphaned at twelve and has limited interpersonal skills. The ending adds another layer to the mystery.

The love scenes are beautifully (and tastefully) shot, but the weirdness of the story will probably baffle and even alienate a lot of viewers. I'm not sure how I rate this: great performances from the charismatic lead actors, but I didn't feel as emotionally engaged as I was in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN or GOD'S OWN COUNTRY.

The Prague scenes - panic and looming chaos - are vividly captured despite the limitations imposed by a non-blockbuster budget. Johnny Flynn gives a believable portrait of an earnest young man fighting the bureaucratic obstacles to the transportation of hundreds of children. There are harrowing goodbyes at the train station to parents who we know will not live to see their children again.

In the 1980s scenes Anthony Hopkins plays the now knighted Winton, embarrassed by the hoopla that attends his exposure as a hero and emotionally scarred by the knowledge of what happened to the children (millions of them) who did not escape Hitler's hideous plan to exterminate European Jewry. A scene when Sir Nicholas is reduced to tears had the same effect on most of the audience at my local multiplex.

If ONE LIFE generates award nominations, Flynn is just as deserving as Sir Anthony.

Netflix has become a notable stable for LGBT-themed movies and TV series. A "will they/won't they" moment gives NUOVO OLIMPO a soap-opera climax.

The intensity of the early sex scenes is more than a little reminiscent of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (as in other Netflix productions full-frontal nudity takes the movie to the vertiginous edge of lite porn). The story also has faint echoes of THEOREM, Pasolini's pansexual odyssey which seemed extremely bold and weird in 1968 and might still seem pretty far out in 2023.

NUOVO OLIMPO isn't weird but it is a full-on exploration of gay and bisexual love, written and directed with a rare sensitivity by Ferzan Ozpetek and beautifully played by the two handsome leads. This is a must-see drama whose appeal, very much like BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, extends far beyond the gay audience.

This is mainly going to be remembered as Glenda Jackson's last movie, and what a glorious swansong it is. Her ancient, heavily lined face - far removed from the face of Elizabeth the First, the role that sealed her stardom in 1971 - conveys shades of emotion that not all actresses can hint at. She's playing Irene Jordan, the wife of Bernard (Michael Caine) who has gone AWOL from the care home in which they live, taking himself off to Normandy to attend the 70th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings.

This is another of those small movies with a big heart. Nothing very dramatic happens (apart from brief flashbacks to D-Day which Bernard's best pal did not survive). John Standing has a nice supporting role as another veteran who takes Bernard under his wing; there was a hint of camp in Standing's performance, which made me think an LGBT 'attitude' moment could and should have been shoe-horned in.

Michael Caine has weathered the years better than Jackson (or he's had some work done, which Glenda very clearly has not). His performance is not quite as subtle as hers, but this is a beguiling and totally believable reconstruction of an episode which made the papers back in 2014. A couple who have loved each other for seventy years are two people you have to take your heart.

RIP Glenda, one of the finest actresses Britain ever produced. And Happy Retirement to Sir Michael, who has given us a great deal of pleasure in a long and splendidly wide-ranging screen career.

Fifty years after the original EoXORCIST, the franchise gets a reboot in this schlocky tale of two 12-year-old girls who come back possessed by demons after disappearing for three days. Exactly how and why this happens is never fully explained; the script is full of holes, one of several areas in which it falls short of the earlier version.

Linda Blair gets a credit and a brief reappearance as middle-aged Regan. Her elderly mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) has a key role: she is now an exorcist herself and together with dropout-nun Ann Dowd takes a lead role in de-possessing the girls; in this movie the priest gets to play third fiddle.

BELIEVER is a bit better (not much) than I've made it sound. The build-up is good, but the actual exorcism is inevitably a rehash and the CGI is less terrifying than the original's use of stunts and make-up. The acting teeters on the edge of parody. Ann Dowd, rigid as a drumskin and "fruity" as ever, is the best thing in it.

Kenneth Branagh's third foray into Agatha Christie territory doesn't have the handicap of previous all-star movie adaptations to be compared with. This has enabled him to make savings with a slightly B-list cast (no disrespect intended). And, by taking one of the less well-known Poirot cases as its core, Branagh is able to put more of his own stamp on the project. This is not such a "sacred text" as DEATH ON THE NILE and ORIENT EXPRESS.

Sorry to say, these factors have not proved advantageous. A HAUNTING IN VENICE seems rather under-scripted and under-played. A séance in a decaying palace in Venice ends in a murder, with all those present anxious to prevent the medium (Michelle Yeoh, miscast but on fine form) revealing their secrets. There's not enough back-story to establish character and motives. Even Poirot (Branagh) is a bit flat this time. Jude Hill as a precocious schoolboy steals the acting honours with a performance possibly inspired by Paul Dano.

The cinematography lavishly evokes a dark mysterious Venice redolent of DON'T LOOK NOW. Unfortunately, murkiness overwhelms too many of the interior scenes, heightening confusion rather than tension for at least one viewer. Maybe Mr Branagh should invest his considerable talent in revisiting a different 20th-century author: is Anthony Powell due for a revamp?

MEG 2 confirms the truth universally acknowledged that sequels always disappoint. Jason Statham is back with a whole pod (or whatever the collective noun is) of giant prehistoric sharks. There's a subplot involving a rogue mining outfit who are mainly there as shark-bait.

The first MEG just about got by on novelty value, despite blatantly rehashing the PIRANHAS franchise, which in its day was a mash-up of the JAWS compendium. The island resort finale in MEG 2 is a rehash too far, seriously stale. Jason, bless, tries to put some meat on the bare-bones script, but this role enhances his pension fund rather than his reputation.

Stephen Spielberg's original 1975 JAWS had moments of high tension and shock-horror despite the plasticky-looking shark. There is no adrenaline rush in MEG 2 - and the CGI monsters sometimes look a bit plastic. Victims tend to be swallowed whole, often by the boatload, rather than bitten in half, so even the horror element is diluted.

A major disappointment. Correction - a minor disappointment.

This, for me, is a "companion piece" to last year's LIVING, since it again has an elderly gent in the central role. Like other "road movies", the film alternates between motivation and meetings. Harold crosses paths with a few fairly ordinary people who each have a tale to tell. At one stage he becomes a kind of Messiah figure, leading a flock of followers, but he arrives in Berwick on his own to resolve the issue of the dying woman's role in his life.

I got a slight sense of "wokeness" being applied to both the characters and the actors, and there are a few scenes that don't really ring true. The best element is the seesaw on which Harold's marriage is quietly riding.

Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton are two fine actors on top form here. This is another small movie with a big heart which it wears on its sleeve.

This is a lot more schlocky than I expected: another entry for the Worst Movie of the Year. Huge liberties are taken with the vampire mythology. Renfield not only eats insects but gets super-hero powers from small doses of Dracula's blood.

Nicolas Cage's Count has teeth like a barracuda and is played in camp overdrive. His main role - and Renfield's - is to tear limbs and heads off people in a succession of fight scenes that belong in a kung-fu movie.

There's a long history of vampire movies that messed with the legend or fell wide of the mark, but RENFIELD takes the biscuit. It's meant to be a spoof, which I think was most brilliantly brought off by Roman Polanski's sublimely comic DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES,(1967).

RENFIELD is woeful, dire.

This is a lot less schlocky than I expected. The demonic possession we see here, a small boy in Spain, brings unavoidable echoes of Linda Blair's Regan in the 1973 movie. The demon speaks in a guttural voice. The boy levitates and also hurls people across the room by pure mental power. Writing appears on his skin.

But despite the recycling there are many genuinely goose-bumpy moments. The boy (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) is believably desperate. Russell Crowe and his young sidekick (Daniel Zovatto) give measured performances, not too shouty. Franco Nero as the Pope is still a commanding screen presence at 81.

The last quarter of the film goes into CGI overdrive, bringing THE MUMMY remakes to mind, but even if the ground is a bit familiar, this is an exciting and entertaining way to revisit it.

This is a bleak drama, intermittently comic, set in the geriatric ward of an old hospital in Yorkshire which looks and feels like the one where I had my appendix removed in the 1950s.

Jennifer Saunders is the ward sister, efficiently and briskly coping with everything from assisted showers to incontinence and patient deaths. Judi Dench and Derek Jacobi are among the patients, but the focus is mostly on Joe (David Bradley), a frail old gent hoping to be sent home, and his nerdy son Colin (Russell Tovey, the go-to actor for gay roles), who is on the team planning a new hospital.

The Alan Bennett pedigree guarantees brilliant writing and all the cast do eminent justice to the script, but the tone of the movie is unremittingly glum, largely focused on death and dementia, and the dimly lit hospital adds more gloom. The ending is a bit rushed and not entirely in tune with what's gone before.

This is a dark comedy that is perhaps a bit too dark. Our Mr. Bennett has not lost his touch, but the humor in ALLELUJAH is over-laced with bile and bitterness.

Despite its threadbare storyline this third instalment of the Magic Mike story is fairly watchable, almost entirely due to the charisma of Channing Tatum. Salma Hayek is clearly slumming but she throws herself into it much as when she played the vampire dancer in Tarantino's FROM DUSK TO DAWN.

Steven Soderbergh, who directed this and the first of the trilogy but not the second, is also slumming but he gives the movie plenty of pace and pizzazz. None of the new troupe of dancers gets a decent back story, and the show-stopping finale amounts to no more than a series of raunchy Madonna-style music videos. Nobody actually goes 'the Full Monty', which feels like a rip-off. The opening scene, in which Sayek purchases a sensational private dance from Tatum, is the highlight not only of this episode but of the entire series - and probably worth the price of admission.

Another movie about Hollywood, but altogether softer and gentler in tone than last month's loud garish BABYLON.

The home-life and high-school scenes come with welcome echoes of a hundred other movies (notably, for me, AMERICAN GRAFFITI). Gabrielle LaBelle is totally convincing as the nerdy kid living a small life but dreaming big. Michelle Williams gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the neurotic Mitzi.

The film is a bit too long (two-and-a-half hours), but it's easy to take Sam and his family to your heart, especially when you remember that the real Sammy Fabelman is going to bring us ET and Close Encounters and the Indiana Jones movies a few years from where this story ends.

A stylish black comedy which riffs on THEATRE OF BLOOD, with Ralph Fiennes as the martinet chef of an offshore island restaurant whose specially invited customers are given a dinner they will never forget and may not survive. Anya Taylor-Joy is Nicholas Hoult's replacement date, who may or may not be the Plucky Survivor when the next course turns out to be THE HUNGER GAMES.

Fiennes's performance, marshalling his team of sous-chefs/waiters like a black-ops army unit and explaining to his guests why they have been selected, has strong echoes of Vincent Price's juiciest role as Edward Lionheart, though with rather less camp. The guest roles are perhaps a little under-powered and the climax is definitely OTT gothic, but THE MENU is a gourmet dining-out experience that teeters between humor and horror.

This little gem of a movie is scripted (adapting a Japanese story) by Kashuo Ishiguro who gave us THE REMAINS OF THE DAY thirty years ago. Living is set in the 1950s. Mr. Williams (in those days men called each other "Mister" on the commuter train and in the office) manages a section of the planning offices at London's County Hall where shuffling papers seems to be the order of the day. A widower living with his buttoned-up son and bitchy daughter-in-law, Mr. Williams is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and decides to try and "live a bit" in the time he has left. A strip-club in Brighton turns out not to be his cup of tea, and he goes back to London and finds a small project to invest his time and energy in. He also befriends a girl working in a Lyons Corner House (Aimee Lou Wood) - an awkward platonic relationship that has echoes of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.

Bill Nighy is perfectly cast as Williams, a man of his time painfully incapable of expressing his emotions. The script and the direction (Oliver Hermanus) beautifully capture the austerity and self-restraint of postwar Britain. This is a splendid evocation of a desperately ordinary man whose small life has an important impact on other people's lives, including ours, the viewers. Less is more - much more.

IMDb headlnes this as a comedy drama. Dramatic, yes, albeit at a slow pace. But comic? Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play Padraig and Colm, two men in a tiny village on a bleak island off the coast of Ireland. They've been friends all their lives until Colm announces that Padraig bores him to death and he doesn't want him to speak to him ever again; if he does, Colm, an accomplished fiddle player, will start to cut off his own fingers. Since I've questioned the humor of this movie, you can guess what happens next.

The acting is impeccable. Farrell, particularly, has never been better. Kerry Condon as Padraig's sister, who longs to escape the island, has the beauty and poignancy of a Thomas Hardy heroine. Delicately written and beautifully filmed, this is a small grim drama about friendship and isolation. But you will not come out of the cinema smiling. Not my definition of comedy.

A pair of feuding divorcees reunite to block their daughter marrying a guy they consider unsuitable. In TICKET TO PARADISE we have George Clooney and Julia Roberts recycling characters they've played before with a plotline that's been used many times: Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable - all the way back to the silent movie era.. The setting is Fiji, which makes for beautiful backdrops, and their daughter is marrying a cute Fijian seaweed-farmer, which gives the movie an eco-friendly vibe.

And it works - sort of. Despite the second-hand story (and performances) the movie has enough pace and the cast enough charm to keep you entertained for 104 minutes. It's not a spoiler to say you can see the ending from a mile off - in fact you can predict the ending before the movie starts! Familiarity doesn't have to breed contempt, although it will probably do so for more hard-bitten viewers.

Like THE CROWN, the script of this "fictional biopic" flies close to what we think we know as the facts. But was Marilyn all through her life obsessed with the absent father whose identity her mother never revealed?

One brutal session on the "casting couch" presumably represents the many such ordeals Marilyn endured. The single scene with JFK suggests that the President was not a nice guy. The conspiracy theories about her death are not played out here.

It's a long, slow movie - almost three hours. Ana de Armas is a sensationally good look-alike and does the breathy voice perfectly. She is nude for much of the movie, which may be intended ironically but it gives BLONDE a cruel hard edge.

The screenplay brings out Marilyn's serious side: she has read Chekhov and takes acting seriously despite all her neuroses and on-set tantrums. But except for the CGI recreation of her famous comedy films, this is a consistently bleak movie, concentrating on Norma Jeane/Marilyn's endless exploitation; she gets very few happy moments. For me, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN gave a more rounded portrait of both the actress and the woman, highlighting her great comic talent as well as her instability.

Sad to say, I suffered a sense-of-humor outage during this movie. The rest of the (sparse) audience laughed out loud; I almost never did. It's beautifully shot: interiors and exteriors have the lushness that we've come to expect from Poirot adaptations. Costumes were divine. Performances were spot-on for the period, although Saoirse Ronan's monotonous policewoman grated with me. The screenplay was not kind to Ronan, whereas Adrian Brody was gifted the (SUNSET BOULEVARD-inspired?) role of the murdered narrator and played it with juicy relish. Shirley Henderson's cameo as Agatha Christie was a joy, and I appreciated the (BRIDGERTON-influenced?) casting of her husband.

There's a lot to like about this movie, but the pace is leaden and so, for me, is most of the humor. I dozed off a couple of times. I'm as big a fan of Agatha Christie movies as anybody else, but not this one. Sorry.

Brownie points to Netflix for sponsoring this movie, which must have only limited appeal even to older gay viewers. Jack Lowden stars as World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden), whose emotional and sexual life director Terence Davies explores in this gloomy biopic. After publishing a letter condemning the military chiefs for the appalling death toll the conflict has brought, Sassoon is lucky not to be shot as a traitor; they send him to a mental institution where he meets and falls in love with fellow poet Wilfred Owen who's suffering from shell-shock (as PTSD was called in those dark days). Owen is sent back to die in Picardy in the last week of the war. The screenplay skates past Sassoon's brief return to active service.

After the war Siegfried has a brief affair with Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), shown here as the uber-bitch in London's far-from-discreet gay set. Siegfried has a longer but equally unhappy affair with upper-crust socialite Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch), the model for Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. Unhappy with homosexual life and converting to Catholicism, Sassoon marries. Flash-forward to his later life shows Sassoon (now played by Peter Capaldi) at odds with his wife and their son.

Throughout the movie Davies inserts horrific glimpses of battle casualties which never cease to haunt Sassoon. His poems are voice-overed from time to time, although two poems of Owen's make it clear that Sassoon was somewhat Second Division in comparison.

This is a beautifully shot movie, and all the cast perfectly evoke the look and feel of the 1920s and 30s, but the scriptwriter's prevailing tone is depressing. Male lovers and a wife all fail to bring happiness to Siegfried Sassoon. A life unfulfilled; a glum movie.