Showing film results: From 6 to 16
Many short films are made as pitches for a potential feature film, and as such they tease an interesting concept while lacking the time to actually explore it in any detail. Working with co-writer Rumi Kakuta, director Yûta Shimotsu makes his feature debut, Best Wishes to All, by expanding his earlier short of the same name. While the feature length version develops the theme of the short, it never fully digs into what exactly it is it's trying to address. Viewers may be left frustrated by a rushed final act, but for fans of extreme Japanese horror, Shimotsu's debut is a must-see.
Like the boxing movie, you might think the prison drama should have grown stale by now, and yet it continues to surprise. Inside, the feature debut of Cannes-winning writer/director Charles Williams, might have the least original title for a prison movie imaginable, but it uses its familiar setting in distinctive ways that almost reinvent the sub-genre.
When it comes to coming-of-age comedies, the best ones of recent years have been centred on teenage girls (Lady Bird, The Edge of Seventeen, Eighth Grade et al) rather than their male counterparts. Comedies about teenage boys tend to portray them as one-dimensional horndogs whose only goal is to get laid before they graduate, whereas the female protagonists of such movies have far more complex concerns. It's a relief then to find that Lemonade Blessing is that rare teen comedy that offers us a well-rounded young male protagonist, one who isn't even all that bothered about losing his virginity.
RL Stine's series of 'Fear Street' young adult novels served as a gateway for a lot of young readers to discover the horror genre in the '90s. In 2021 Netflix released a trilogy of movies based on Stine's books, with instalments set in 1994, 1978 and 1666 that heavily drew on Scream, Friday the 13th and the folk-horror sub-genre respectively. Long envious of MCU fans who get to enjoy three or more interconnecting movies from their favourite cinematic universe every year, I was excited for a horror equivalent. Sadly the Fear Street trilogy was a mess that suffered heavily from getting itself bogged down in clunky universe building rather than telling three engaging horror stories. It may have taken the form of three movies but 2021's Fear Street was really just a TV show in disguise.
Wes Anderson's films are like intricately crafted dollhouses. The good ones feel human and alive, like a dollhouse a little girl has filled with her imagination. The bad ones are like a dollhouse on display in an upmarket shop window, existing to be admired rather than enjoyed. The Phoenician Scheme belongs to the latter category. It's not quite as visually meticulous as we've become accustomed to from Anderson, but it still looks better than 90% of the movies that will grace cinema screens this year. Yet while it's easy to admire the upholstery and carpentry of its sets, its story is almost impenetrably uninteresting, as are most of its characters.
So many horror movies have tackled grief that it's become something of a cliché in the genre. But unlike many horror movies, in which a death has occurred some time in the past and is still being processed by the protagonist at a later point, writer/director Julia Max's debut The Surrender is set in the immediate aftermath of the death of a loved one.
Anyone who has binged classic TV shows from the 1960s to the '80s will be familiar with the concept of recapping the first part of a two-parter at the beginning of part two. Such recaps often ran for as long as 10 minutes, eating into the running time and thus keeping the budget down. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning has no such budgetary concerns, and yet it spends an inordinate amount of time recapping not only its immediate predecessor, Dead Reckoning: Part One, but previous entries, as far back as the first movie from 1996. There are so many "Previously on Mission: Impossible" flashbacks that at times it resembles one of those dreaded "clips" episodes we used to get in TV shows, where a main character would fall into a coma and think about all the fun adventures they had over the course of the show's run.
Movies about super intelligent characters often fail to convince because they're clearly not made by super intelligent filmmakers who possess the ability to think as smartly as their fictional creations. Sew Torn is a comic thriller about a very smart and resourceful young woman, and it works because its first time writer/director, Freddy Macdonald, is clearly a mad genius himself. It's not often I find myself thinking "that's something I haven't seen before" while watching a new movie, but it's a thought that crossed my mind at several points in Macdonald's debut, which is an expansion of his 2019 short of the same name.
Watching a Final Destination movie is a lot like being a parent of a toddler for 90 minutes (or 110 minutes, as is the case with this latest instalment). "Don't put that in your mouth." "You'll put your eye out!" "Mind you don't step on that..." The genius of the franchise is that it doesn't have a physical villain. Death itself is the antagonist. Many characters die in the sort of manner that would see them nominated for a Darwin Award but others succumb despite doing their best to avoid trouble. The message is clear: you can't cheat death.
Just a week ago while reviewing the Deborah Levy adaptation Swimming Home I noted how so many recent movies were following the template set down by Jean Renoir in his 1932 satire Boudu Saved from Drowning, that of a wealthy family being shaken up by the arrival of an outsider. First time writer/director Nadia Conners is the latest filmmaker to channel Renoir with her Hollywood satire The Uninvited.
