Film Reviews by PD

Wow. This wonderful piece by first-time feature director Shannon Murphy will speak volumes to anyone who has suffered the effects of someone taken before their time. I was very impressed by her handling of such a delicate subject and very moved.

Eliza Scanlen is pitch-perfect as the terminally ill teenager Milla, whilst Ben Mendelsohn as her father Henry and Essie Davis as mother Anna offer thoroughly convincing support as they attempt to stave off the tidal wave of grief looming over them. Murphy is really good at depicting the crushing feeling of the family home being filled with sickness, and the way any small joys managed within it are quickly stifled.

At the heart of the film is Milla’s relationship with wayward, drug-addled 23-year old Moses (admirably played by Toby Wallace), a decidedly tricky dynamic - for we are as wary of him as her parents, but ultimately we, like them, are, if not exactly won over, are forced to end up seeing him through Milla's eyes, and this is some achievement on the part of the director. Milla’s romantic and sexual awakenings are a faltering journey that Scanlen illustrates with disarming wisdom. She’s got serious chemistry with Wallace, who keenly communicates the ways that Moses’s decency is so often at war with the necessities of his addiction and the wounds of his own tumultuous family life. The age gap between the two characters, and the way it’s lovingly forgiven in the film, may rankle some, but for me it ultimately convinces. “It’s her first love,” Anna says resignedly to Henry in one quiet scene. The unspoken sentiment is that it could also very well be her last. Is that enough to excuse the gap in age and experience? Babyteeth is content live with that ambiguity, as Anna and Henry realise that giving permission to 'transgression' is in a way allowing Milla to live a whole young adulthood in a compressed, terribly fleeting time frame. Murphy is not interested in didactic lesson-learning. Instead, the film insists on the inadequacy of what is 'proper' in the face of oblivion, the confounding uselessness of saying “no” to someone who is staring down life’s ultimate negation.

Murphy avoids the clunky exposition of films of this ilk —there are few dutiful explanations of what exactly is wrong with each character. Rather, we discover their pain as the film floats along. Some omens can’t be avoided—hair loss, vomiting, dinner embarrassment after too many pills—but the film mostly knows that Milla, her family, and Moses would all understand their circumstances without needing to spell them out. And Murphy also avoids any prescriptive moralising: Henry and Anna are neither good or bad parents; they are just trying (and often failing) to find a way through an impossible situation.

My favourite (short) scene is one in which a video of fireworks exploding in slow-motion is projected on Milla’s face, all while an androgynous figure in futuristic silver circles her, and brings home Milla’s fragile being far better than any words could. Compelling viewing.

This one begins as it means to go on - by talking, not of Billie Holiday, but of Linda Lipnack Kuehl, a journalist who in 1971 embarked on a biography of the Billie and died in 1978 - suicide, according to the police, murder, according to others. So we have two films in one based on two different people, and whilst it's an intriguing premise, to my mind the execution is at best clumsy and at worst significantly detracts from the lives of both people.

Kuehl amassed a formidable research archive, including tape recordings of interviews with Holiday’s collaborators, friends, lovers etc. Some of her work was used in subsequent published biographies, but the film's director, James Erskine, acquired the rights to her entire collection, and “Billie” is the result. It's a fairly sympathetic review of Billie's life, packed with incident, much of it pretty disturbing, but the film plausibly insists that she also lived her 'high life' with a level of proud ostentation, and the suggestion of a masochistic self-destructive instinct is particularly convincing. And while the parallel lives are rather awkwardly done, Eskine's handling of Keuhl’s interviews are pretty good - what’s said on the tapes often kicks us in the gut. Some of her white collaborators speak of Holiday condescendingly, whilst the legendary drummer Jo Jones seethes with an anger at Holiday’s exploiters you can still feel decades after the fact. But she isn't, crucially, portrayed as 'victim', which I'm sure she would have approved of.

Another weakness is that the film gives short shrift to subject’s artistry; there's just nowhere near enough of the music. There's some great moments - particularly the soul-piercing 'Strange Fruit' - but unfortunately the (admittedly terribly difficult) need to match the persona along with the art simply doesn't happen here. That all said, it's a great watch on the whole, and both fans and onlookers alike will find much to think about. Well worth a look.

This brave, meticulously crafted piece is for the most part very successful at giving us an empathetic portrayal of schizophrenia. Most films about mental illness tend to use “normal” characters to provide an outside perspective on the subject’s illness, but instead Roberts lets Jane herself (superbly played by Sally Hawkins) be our guide, which has the result we are unable to differentiate between reality and delusion since she herself cannot do the same.

There's some dark humour en route, notably a Christmas present-giving scene involving thoroughly bemused relations, but on the whole it's a heartbreaking film, for Roberts doesn't attempt to shy away from the fact that Jane is a lost soul, trapped inside a mind walled off into sections between her present and past self / selves.

Sometimes the script isn't quite strong enough to cope with the sheer complexity of what's being shown, and the sections involving Jane's relationship with fellow psychiatric patient Mike are a bit awkward, but generally speaking this is strong stuff, and is all the better for not giving us a neat and tiny narrative arc or any sort of cathartic conclusion.

Ignoring the largely indifferent reviews, I took a punt on this one, but unfortunately pretty much everything, be it the acting, the screenplay, the direction, all falls rather flat. It's a promising premise - most divorce dramas start at the beginning and lead you to the break-up, whereas this one starts at the end and concentrates on the fall-out, but sadly, since it seems deliberately keen to avoid any kind of emotional depth, what we end up with is a very trivial piece about an important subject and you end up not really caring much about these people.

Nighy as Edward appears right for his role; his early scenes of biding-his-time tolerance before the great revelation are pretty good, but he remains rather one-dimensional throughout, and whilst O’Connor does ok with a dreadfully thin script, they remain more archetypes of a feuding couple than flesh-and-blood people who were once in love with one another; Nicholson’s failure to probe Grace and Edward’s interior landscapes, or even get at the root problems of their marriage, only makes the film’s attempts at big emotional gestures feel all the more hollow. Added to the mix is Josh O'Connor as son Jamie, but rather than explore the dysfunctional context of this father-son relationship and whatever led up to such a callous, manipulative decision, Nicholson settles for propping him as the helpless middleman with the result that he spends much of the film giving us various pained expressions of one sort or another. And when he finally does have something to 'do' it all ends badly - a truly terrible sequence involving Jamie talking to his mother about a desire to commit suicide on the cliff edge is terribly trite - I've seen better work from sixth-formers, frankly. The overall result of all this is a film that, as with a dull play (and this does feel very 'stagey'), tries your patience at times. Meanwhile, Cinematographer Anna Valdez-Hanks provides breathtaking views of the coastline, but those vistas feel more like some tv nature documentary rather than anything complementary to what is going on, whilst the portentous score is simply an irritating distraction.

There's one or two good lines that get us underneath Grace's complex skin, as it were, but, aside from an ill-judged attempt to shoehorn some famous poetry into the action, the basic problem is that Grace is defined entirely by her relation to Edward and Jamie. We’re told that Grace is a creative soul nourished by her faith and driven by her passion, but except for one brief scene of her at early Mass, we see precious little of either - it’s as if she disappears as soon as the men in her life leave the room. Perhaps only a man could make a film about a 'left woman' that cares more about the leaver.

Mercifully short.

This film, generally faithful to Highsmith’s novel, has distinct echoes of her “Strangers on a Train,” in that it details the intersection of two men with murder on their minds, even if it lacks the tension of Hitchcock's film. Rare bookstore owner Kimmel (Eddie Marsan) is a reserved loner whose wife has recently been murdered. Detective Lawrence (Vincent Kartheiser) eyes him as the prime suspect, though his potential guilt is also of interest to architect Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson), who when not dealing with his depressed real-estate agent wife Clara (Jessica Biel) clips newspaper articles of murders as possible inspiration for the short stories he writes in his spare time.

Relocated from the book’s 1950s setting to the early ’60s, the film revels in the era’s clothing (dapper suits, wide-brimmed hats, even wider-bottomed dresses) and decor, which is drenched in heavily suggestive lurid reds. Walter soon begins an affair with young Greenwich Village bohemian Ellie (Haley Bennett), and their tryst sends the jealous, desperate Clara to attempt suicide. Susan Boyd’s script rather lacks the necessary psychological depth to get into to the head of Walter, with the result that it's difficult to comprehend just exactly why he visits Kimmel before Clara’s death and continually behaves in a manner so obviously destined to make himself look guilty, so it’s a testament to Goddard’s direction that the film, also embellished with cross-cutting between the past and present, keeps us engaged throughout, with his wintry metro-NYC visuals having a snow-globe unreality to them, and his framing ably conveying the constricting circumstances in which Walter finds himself.

Biel and Bennett fulfill their light/dark archetypes adequately enough, but it's Wilson who delivers the standout performance, locating a balance between arrogance, entitlement, paranoia and defiance — his mantra becoming, “I didn’t do anything wrong”. He embodies Walter as a mess of contradictions, all of them exacerbated by his fear that his situation, nominally created by one stupid decision after another, is the byproduct of a subconscious desire to be rid of his wife. He's neatly complemented by that of Marsan as a quiet, mousy man with the eyes of a viper, and their few scenes together are charged with a mixture of distrust and kindred-spirit admiration. Unfortunately however, Kartheiser’s smug detective is rather clumsy, coming across as mostly a sketchy caricature designed to fulfil basic narrative requirements.

Aka 'The Third Man', the film climaxes in dark, dank corridors where a killer’s pursuit of a potential victim is projected in shadow along cold, starkly illuminated walls. Goddard’s finale is pretty predictable, but in its swirling deathbed dream of ruminations, feelings and written words, it expands upon noir’s trademark fatalism, implying that doom befalls not only those foolish enough to try to change their lot in life, but also those thoughtless enough to think about doing so in the first place.

This extraordinary piece, the second offering from Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Palmason, revolves around Ingimundur, a former police chief, who unravels after his wife dies in a strange accident and then comes to suspect that she was having an affair with a younger colleague. At times, ' White, White Day' brings to mind a cinematic version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream - there's an awful lot of barely suppressed angst you just know will explode at some point. But Palmason is in no rush at all (for those wanting 'action' look away now) and pushes his disturbing story in unexpected directions both dramatically and stylistically.

The grimly hypnotic opening at once suggests that Palmason is up to something out of the ordinary as we are advised that, “The dead can still talk to those who are still living on certain days when the white of the sky matches the white on the ground.” Even more arresting is the imaginative way the director then suggests the passage of time by repeatedly flashing a collection of the same landscape compositions in different seasons; with this and some forthright exposition, the film announces its intention to do things a bit differently.

The heart of the film is a stand-out performance from Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson, who is absolutely terrific as Ingimundur, giving, aka Ben Affleck in 'Manchester by the Sea', a thoroughly convincing display of the demon that is grief, whether expressed inwardly by fixing up a house, or outwardly by smashing up a computer after a counsellor has driven him to distraction, whilst his relationship with his 9-year old granddaughter Salka, superbly played by Ida Mekkin Hlinsdotti, steals whole scenes.

There's some awkward moments, particularly towards the rather incongrously melodramatic final section, and the cathartic resolution is all a bit convenient, but it’s generally strong stuff and, especially early on, Palmason engages in storytelling that's worthy of some the great modern directors. Impressive.

A not-too subtle anger runs through the feature debut of Algerian director Mounia Meddour, which centers around Nedjma, a student in an Algiers girls’ university hall of residence in the 1990s, who is determined to put on a fashion show as an act of defiance against the rising Islamist tide: female self-expression being denied both by enemies and so-called friends.

Lyna Khoudriv delivers a fine, fiery performance as Nedjma, and a clever strand is the inventive, pointed way in which clothes and textiles are used as metaphors both for female constraints and female defiance - the sight of Nedjma with pins sticking out of her mouth, transforming a ’haik’ (the traditional Maghrebi women’s robe) into a seductive ball dress, is a particularly telling image. There’s plenty of warmth and good humour alongside the darker notes, but what the film power lies mostly in revealing Nedjma's fury at the way a country she loves is being hijacked by bigots.

There's some rather awkward plot twists, and the last section is all a bit forced and melodramatic, but overall an intriguing, powerful piece of filmaking.

This film from Haifaa al-Mansour centres around plucky young Saudi Arabian doctor Maryam (Mila Al Zahrani), who makes an impulsive decision to run for her local municipal council seat. In a nation where women are not even welcome to openly address a congregation of men, it’s a bold move, even if the last decade has seen a relaxing of strict laws concerning travel, driving and employment. As a doctor in an overcrowded local walk-in clinic, Maryam carries herself with admirable confidence, but she meets obstacles frequently, inevitably resenting that she can’t aspire to higher aims in the medical field or find a chance to prove her worth to her society at large.

The film's matter-of-fact, unsentimental tone is successful, and there are some really good scenes, notably one in an airport where Maryam is faced with the humiliation of not being able to travel to an outdated permit which needs renewing by her father, and a niqab fashion show, which offers a pointed and positive representation of a garment that has been fraught with negative political meaning. Much of the film focuses on the connective tissue between Maryam and her sisters, who have not long ago lost their mother and also have a close relationship with their musician father, although this theme is a tad too rose-tinted to be entirely convincing.

The film may be rather gentle to leave a lasting impression, and it's all a bit convenient the way Maryam is reconciled to the world around her so quickly, given how judgemental we keep being told it is by the characters; indeed, we are shown very little regarding the fallout of her decision: perhaps al-Mansour is working too hard to gain approval for her character’s strident feminism. Nevertheless, all in all it's a likable exploration of female optimism and democratic willpower in a deeply conservative society, and the final shot is absolutely terrific.

In this low-key piece, hard-working Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) courageously sacrifices her livelihood to speak out against the corruption and injustice at work in her community. As with writer-director Grímur Hákonarson’s previous film “Rams,” it probes a deeply rooted rural culture that is closely connected to the Icelandic national spirit, while championing traditional Icelandic values over the exploitative underside of capitalism. The film is also pleasingly full of feisty female energy and imagery as Inga, in David v Goliath fashion, takes on scheming co-op boss Eyjólfur and his heavy-set enforcer Leifur.

Once again showing a keen eye for detail, Hákonarson naturalistically presents the rigours of farm work, the plainness of his solitary protagonists’ lives and their affection for their cows. Spot-on production design by Bjarni Massi Sigurbjornsson supplies comfortable, lived-in interiors for the dairy farmers that look as if they haven’t changed since the 1940s, but which present a marked contrast to the classy open rooms and art of Eyjólfur’s water-view home and his stable of expensive horses. In her first leading film role, Egilsdóttir makes Inga a sympathetic and convincing earth mother - one early shot of the film is her helping a cow to calf; but she also knows how to use a gun and operate the big rigs. Meanwhile, her antagonists are not reduced to pantomime villains, although perhaps more could have done been to present the 'case against' as it were. Highly watchable.

Mmm .......... writer-director Jennifer Kent wants to rage against historical injustice here, but unfortunately it all falls a bit flat, perhaps as a result of wanting to do too much.

Set in colonial Australia / Tasmania, it's laid on on with a trowel that the English use Irish prisoners as slaves and “civilise” the native population by exterminating them ... mmm .... and Aisling Franciosi as revenge-seeking Clare, is, I'm afraid, not very convincing (we're obviously on her side, but I wouldn't bet on her to ride a horse for 20 paces, let alone shoot anyone). And then just when you think it might build up to something important it builds up to a ridiculous (and bafflingly male-centred given the appealing 'feminist' premise) ending.

The important theme of the sordid history of English colonialism is unfortunately packed into one cartoonish character, and this has the effect of leaving us with little to think about. So, in the meandering last half hour (we're kept for over 2 hours, and it felt like it) any power that some scenes have had (and there are many) is dissipated in a truly awful melodramatic, cliched finale. So all in all a bit of a disappointment from a fine director.

Starts off vaguely promisingly, but gradually reveals itself for what it is - a terribly lame, laughably bad piece that's trying very hard to take itself seriously but seems to have been created by a bunch of university film students during a weekend consisting of too much to drink and overdosing dubious substances. It's not historically interesting in the slightest, gets progressively more moronic as it goes along, and builds up to a crudely executed ending which reminded me of those Monty Python sketches involving blood spurting everywhere. Add to all of this a truly horrible and intrusive score, embarrassingly bad and truly cringe worthy sex scenes, and some of the most cliched hammy acting I've seen for years, you do wonder what on earth Peake and Dance thought they were doing. Nice costumes, but that's about it. Absolute drivel.

This piece stars Glenda Jackson who gives a strong performance in depicting the inner life of the protagonist Maud, whose mind is being slowly devastated by dementia.

Adapted from the novel by Emma Healey in which Maud is the unreliable narrator, the heart of the plot is Maud's concern about her elderly friend, Elizabeth, who has failed to turn up at their regular meeting place, and worries she might have come to harm. But no one else seems bothered, least of all Maud’s daughter, Helen, who has enough on her plate just keeping tabs on her mother, and Elizabeth’s son, who unsurprisingly doesn’t welcome being harangued on the phone at three in the morning. In a bid to organise the chaos of her mind, Maud is forever writing messages to herself. Thus, post-it notes line her walls and pockets, through which she can make sense of the world and, it is hoped, unravel the mystery of her missing friend. “I haven’t lost my marbles though everybody seems to think I have. Nobody listens to me,” Maud grumbles to her granddaughter. Rarely off the screen, Jackson is remarkable, playing Maud not as a benign and crinkly grandma but a proud woman unmoored and rendered increasingly impatient and volatile. Sitting in a restaurant with her family, she smashes a plate and emits a silent scream, her face and body contorting with frustration, whilst later, we watch her claw at the front door, as Helen, fearing she might go wandering, locks her in her house overnight - the film is good at showing us how dementia eats away not just at memory but identity and empathy. The pain of these losses are sharply drawn here, both in Maud and her family who mourn the mother and grandmother they once knew, and the film is all the better for being totally unsentimental and (generally) free of melodrama.

Unfortunately, all this is rather undermined by a much weaker parallel narrative set in the late 1940s, in which we meet young Maud along with her glamorous older sister, Sukey. I realise the background story is there so we can build and feel a connection with Maud as a real person and that Maud's sisters disappearance played a part in Maud's later life, but for me there's way too much about Sukey, who I couldn't care less about, and the tv soap-style suburban murder mystery element (which includes a truly ridiculous 'big reveal' near the end) for me is a big, and unnecessary, distraction from the generally powerful central theme. This got me thinking why the author/director felt it necessary to include such a 'heavy' sub-plot - is the present-day material not 'entertaining' enough? Or is it that they think the audience can't bear to watch it for a sustained period? Either way, it rather defeats what I presume the main the object is - namely, to show the variety of sorrows dementia causes, and to empathise with someone suffering from it.

This first feature from director Claire Oakley is a highly watchable, original piece, being a tense, psychological drama with coming-of-age elements and a sprinkling of sinister surrealism. It's very successful in creating a tangible sense of atmosphere and discomfort through clever filmmaking and a subtle but highly absorbing lead performance by Molly Windsor as 18-year-old Ruth. The off-season Cornish caravan site setting is truly inspired, with Oakley, along with cinematographer Nick Cooke, turning a campsite into a nightmare (fumigated caravans covered in polythene feel like crime scenes) as Ruth tries to come to terms with new desires and who she really is. Though the film is quite short you don't get the feeling of anything particularly rushed or contrived for effect, the director taking her time to explore Ruth's repressions and desires via her relationships with boyfriend Tom and, especially, her new friend, the vivacious Jade, who, on the surface, is everything that Ruth isn’t, i.e. confident and liberated. By turns, Jade brings out something of herself in Ruth, much the chagrin of Tom and his gross workmate, Kai.

Fantasy and reality become increasingly indistinguishable as Ruth’s friendship with Jade develops, the film becoming increasingly impressionistic, and whilst the ending may well be a tad cliched, the build up to it is beautifully done. Impressive stuff.

This very subtle but extremely powerful film shows us a day in the life of Jane, a young graduate who has started working at a film production company with the goal of ultimately becoming a producer. The film starts as it means to go on, with Jane walking into the office first thing in the morning, director Kitty Green spending the first 20 minutes showing Jane's many mundane duties (taking calls, booking cars, cleaning floors, stacking bottles, washing dishes etc) in real time. But for whom is she doing all this? All we get is an important “he” who everyone knows, everyone wants to impress and everyone talks about - the fact that we don’t get his name or his face is a clever touch.

There's not much in the way of 'plot' which might frustrate many (and clearly has some press reviewers!), but the film is strongest in its silences, entirely in control of a subtext that screams without making a sound; it's clearly inspired by stories of Harvey Weinstein’s years of criminal behaviour with women in the film industry, but there's little direct reference to this, or in fact to any names that might seem too familiar other than a film festival (Cannes) or a crime scene (Beverly Hills’ Peninsula hotel). This approach works brilliantly, as it treats the viewer as intelligent enough to read between the lines and shout back at the screen with every micro-aggression thrown at Julia, even when she won’t let herself say anything. The most compelling scene sees her come close to breaking, as she sits across the desk of HR manager Wilcock, whose low-key but terrifying dismissal of Jane's complaints are compounded by his attempt to turn the tables on her and make her seem like the one in the wrong. Back in the office, meanwhile, her co-workers treat it all as a joke - the complicity of everyone in the company being obviously one of the main issues the film explicitly criticises.

Julia Garner is wonderful in the role, her facial expressions always speak volumes; her eyes seeming to remain dry through arduous effort. She makes it easy for us to draw parallels with so many real-life stories of distrusted women staying silent in unfair situations for too long. Without cliche, without melodrama, the film portrays an ongoing cultural evil with intelligence and some sophistication.

Leigh Whannell’s new, loose adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel begins with a backstory of abuse. Elisabeth Moss plays Cecilia Kass, an architect who, in the first scene, stealthily and fearfully escapes from a gated and electronically guarded oceanfront compound, in Northern California, where she lives with her boyfriend, Adrian, a fabulously wealthy inventor who specialises in optics. Adrian’s abusive violence is quickly in evidence when he punches his fist through the window of the escape vehicle—driven by Cecilia’s sister Emily. Cecilia takes refuge in the home of her friend James, a police officer, and his teenage daughter, and stays there in a state of panic, unwilling even to set foot outside for fear that Adrian is spying on her and planning to harm her. Adrian’s house is decked out with a panoply of security cameras and other devices, and she left him because of the devastating methods of surveillance and control—of psychological manipulation—to which he subjected her. Adrian “controlled how I looked,” she tells James and Emily, and also what she wore and ate, and when she went out; then, she adds, he controlled what she said and was trying to control what she thought. What’s more, she says that he wanted her to have his child—and, knowing that, with a child, she’d be essentially tied to him for life, she secretly took birth-control pills.

Cecilia’s fears are, she thinks, finally put to rest, soon thereafter, when Adrian turns up dead at his home; but of course things get progressively creepy from this point, with the effect that makes Cecilia begin to doubt her sanity (and making those around her doubt it, too). Whannell concocts these schemes with clever attentiveness to the role of current technology; mobile phones, laptops, passwords, and various security devices all play crucial and natural roles in the action. At the same time, there are other tricks that are powerfully imaginative if yet left undeveloped visually and thematically.

The plot-centred nature of the film is undoubtedly its strength but also its basic trouble. Whannall comes up with some neat, clever twists that give rise to both great suspense and some keenly defined moral themes, notably when Cecilia plans to turn the tables and exact revenge, whilst several sequences make clever use of the edges of the frame in relation to surveillance devices. For all this, however, the characters are given little identity, little personality. Though the film rests heavily on its backstory, its protagonist has virtually no substance: though it almost entirely takes Cecilia’s point of view, what she knows, remembers, what her insights are, are unknown to us. So all in all, watchable enough with many good moments (although a big suspension of disbelief is often required!), but for me an intriguing idea that hasn't been fully realised.