Tag Archives: film review

The Pretty One Film Review

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The Pretty One has a lot going for it. A unique storyline, dazzling performances from all of the actors, a banging script and the two wonderful leads, Zoe Kazan and Jake Johnson. Jake has slowly been building up a stellar career, moving from bit parts to New Girl, he is having a career peak at the moment. Zoe Kazan is something to behold. She is just perfect in this film. Oh, and adorable.  Both her and her character.  She plays both twin sisters, Laurel and Audrey.  Laurel is shy and stayed with their father after the death of their mother, looking after him and painting with him. She even wears her mothers old clothes. A lot of people think she is strange. Audrey is confident, ballsy, the woman everyone is in love with. 

After Audrey dies in a head-on collision whilst driving with her sister, just after they switch seats, Laurel doesn’t realise who she is straight away. And when she does it seems that people don’t really care that much, her step-mother even says it was a good thing Laurel died as she would not have coped with losing her sister. Devastated, Laurel decides to become her sister and live her life. As the consequences mount, and the lie becomes bigger she has to decide whether to come clean or continue living the lie. What will she do?

 

theprettyonedvdreview the pretty one

The Pretty One is a truly wonderful, uplifting film, despite its moments of tragedy. I loved it and so did the people I watched it with. It is newly out on DVD and I highly recommend it. It is surely set to become a classic. It is funny and warm, tragic and sad all rolled into one perfect ball of a film. The DVD also has a great, delightful, visual effects featurette.

 

The Pretty One is available here.

 

Directed by Jenée LaMarque. With Jake Johnson, Zoe Kazan, Ron Livingston, Frances Shaw.

 

 

Fruitvale Station Film Review | Sundance 2014

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One of the most praised dramas at Sundance USA last year and early Oscar contender to boot, Fruitvale Station finally got it’s UK bow at this year’s festival. The true story drama has been hoovering up acclaim and awards over the last year and it is very easy to see why. Over the course of December 31st, 08 and January 1st, 09 we track Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan), a young father and resident of Hayward, California who begins his day determined to turn his life around. Following a spell of recent criminal convictions and prison spells, Oscar is resolved to get his house in order; get a new job, cut off bad habits and treat his family right including his adoring yet straight talking mother (Octavia Spencer). However, this search for redemption is to have a tragic end as a New Year’s Party in the city culminates in a cruel, needless tragedy that leaves the community -and America- in shock.

Fruitvale Station sundance 2014

Having an entire movie rest largely on a single performance is a risky business indeed. If your lead is underwhelming or just flat out doesn’t convince then you and your movie are dead in the water. Debut writer/director Ryan Coogler was surely aware of this going into production on Fruitvale Station. But he must also have been aware when he cast Michael B. Jordan that he really didn’t have to worry much. Still perhaps best known for playing the young, doomed drug dealer Wallace in the exceptional TV series The Wire, Jordan is an absolute flat out revelation here, a breakout role if ever there was one. Throughout Grant’s trials and tribulations over the course of the film, there is the feeling of raw anger and frustration at his surroundings and even many of those who surround him. Yet Jordan never feels like he’s showing off on a soap box like a lot of other ‘awards worthy’ performances have a habit of doing. Every beat, glance and observation feels real and lived in. The story of of fallen man going straight could easily fall into cliche yet the sheer humanity of the performance is more than enough to steer clear of any pitfalls. As mesmerizing as Jordan is it would be unfair to dismiss other cast members especially, Octavia Spencer on blinding form as Oscar’s rock steady mother. Her crumbling composure at the film’s climax is going to break hearts.

As a director, Coogler keeps a steady hand on incendiary material. Make no mistake, this is an angry film and rightly so. Rather than letting that anger disrupt the story and tone, he keeps everything on an even keel. There’s no fuss or confusion to the film’s beautiful and precise shooting. There’s even a touch of playfulness with Oscar’s text messages popping up on screen à la BBC’s Sherlock (don’t worry; it’s nowhere near as gimmicky or intrusive as it could be). We witness actual phone footage of the Fruitvale incident in the films opening act so there’s no surprise to the terrible outcome yet we feel all the gut-wrenching tension and heartbreak as Oscar goes about his daily grind and moves steadily towards his fate. It’s almost unbearably upsetting yet Coogler has managed to find the beauty and tenderness in the frank observations of an individual in his last moments. It’s a paean to life in America in all its wonder – and indeed its horror – and it deserves every bit of your attention.

A Thousand Times Good Night | Film Review By Leslie Shaip

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Erik Poppe’s latest film, A Thousand Times Good Night (Tusen ganger god natt) (2013) begins with funeral rites for a woman who is still alive. Minutes later, she straps a bomb to her chest and say tearful goodbyes to her relatives. This imagery that straddles the line between life and death is both beautiful and tragic. It is repeated in different forms throughout the film as war photographer Rebecca (the incomparable Juliette Binoche) tries to capture the essence of these desperate acts.

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Rebecca puts herself through hell on earth to share the stories of people about whom the world would like to forget. The disregard for her own safety, however, puts a significant strain on both her marriage and her family life. When she is nearly killed tailing a suicide bomber, Rebecca’s husband, Marcus (Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) gives her an ultimatum. She must choose between her life’s work and the family she loves.

A Thousand Times Good Night is not the story of a working mother trying to balance her job with her family. It’s a look at the life of a woman who must make an impossible choice between the essence of her self and those she loves most. I’m sure an academic paper could deconstruct this as a feminist work, but I’ll just say I appreciated that the main character is a woman, but more importantly, she is a human being, and who better to give such a raw performance than Juliette Binoche? I’ve never seen her in a role she didn’t seem born to play, and as usual, she gives the audience all of herself. She is unafraid to show a woman the way she really looks, acts, and feels. Though, let’s be honest, even when her character is supposed to look unkempt and harried, Binoche still exudes natural beauty.

This film was a seamlessly powerful look at both the world most of us are guilty of ignoring and what it can do emotionally to those who dare to watch. The screenplay (written by director Erik Poppe, Harald Rosenløw-Eeg and Kirsten Sheridan) does an excellent job of providing a balance between the two worlds. When the story jumps between the war zone of Afghanistan and Kenya and Rebecca’s more peaceful home in Ireland, the scenes shift naturally.

The images throughout the film also serve the balance between the world of the living and that of the dead. From several incidences of white, flowy barriers between characters and the ocean that Rebecca treads during her near-death experiences, we watch Rebecca drift between the two worlds. In fact, one of the most open conversations in the entire film occurs when Rebecca and her daughter, Steph (Lauryn Canny) sit on opposite beds, separated by white mosquito netting. This physical barrier somehow makes it easier to share their feelings, as if the netting will keep those freshly exposed words safe.

Finally, the score is simply breathtaking. It’s beautiful, haunting and ephemeral. As if some of the situations and images aren’t moving enough, the music comes in at just the right moments and in just the right key to push said emotions to the edge of your eyes and down your cheeks. The film premiered at the Montreal film festival last year and is currently making its way across the globe (look for it in the UK on May 2). So while this may seem like a fangirl post for this movie and Binoche in general (maybe just a bit), you really should give it a shot if comes your way.

A Thousand Times Good Night from director Erik Poppe and starring Juliette Binoche and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Premiered at the Montreal Film Festival last year and will be in UK cinemas on May 2nd.

http://gallimaufrylife.com/

By Leslie Shaip

Third Contact Film Review

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A permanent sense of dread and the unknown hangs over this impressive low budget British psychological thriller from debut writer and director Si Horrocks. Filmed on location in London for a shoestring budget and on a single handheld camera, the film has benefited enormously from a successful Kickstarter campaign, pulling in independent funds to secure an international screening tour both at festivals and local venues. It’s another brilliant inspirational example of filmmakers marshalling their own resources and bringing their own unique vision to a broad audience.

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Private psychiatrist David Wright (Tim Scott-Walker) is in utter despair; he is hounded by memories of his long lost love and the guilt over a patient’s recent and seemingly pointless suicide. At his nadir and contemplating his own suicide, David is contacted by the patient’s sister Erika (Jannica Olin) who is seeking answers to her brother’s death. United by their grief and loss, the pair investigate the suicide further and soon uncover a mysterious and sinister agenda that defies both their expectations.

Early in the drama of the film, one of David’s patients relates to him the theory behind ‘quantum suicide’, a concept that theorizes that the universe can be split open at the firing of a gun into two states: one of life and the other of death. It’s a lofty, ambitious concept to hit your audience with moments out of the start gate of your movie. Yet that’s all the more credit to Third Contact, a thriller that avoids the cliches and conventions of other projects made under similar circumstances. Writer and director Horrocks discards tired indie Brit cliches of gangsters and banal romance for cerebral science fiction, with a fine eye for minute detail and delivering in a fresh, fractured narrative style. Shot on a relatively inexpensive handheld camera, Horrocks has worked wonders with the films visual look. Filmed in a bleak and stark monochrome, the portrait of urban London comes to a vibrant and urgent life whilst remaining disconcertingly alien and hauntingly lonely. It reminded me somewhat of Christopher Nolan’s debut feature Following, also filmed for pennies and looking spectacular. This is matched by the eerie and otherworldly soundscape where sound and score seem to bleed into each other and become indistinguishable, not unlike the work of David Lynch.

Horrocks has taken on a one man band approach with the project but has still surrounded himself great talent to round out the project. Tim Scott-Walker is pretty terrific in central role, successfully convincing David’s fraying mental state and anguish and his increasingly fraught encounters with those he meets. It’s a world where no one can be fully trusted and supporting players are very effective at portraying characters whose allegiances are uncertain. That this team have managed to come up with such a well constructed project with minimal resources is nothing short of remarkable as is the films unique and dogged release strategy. On the basis of this, the concept of the writer/director with a larger budget is very enticing indeed.

Crystal Fairy Film Review

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crystalfairyfilmreviewA young American in a foreign land, ignorant to the culture and the language, at the crossroads of life, in search cheap booze and an ecstatic high. At first impressions, Crystal Fairy seems depressingly familiar. I’ve personally seen enough dopey nonsense about Americans running amok overseas to last a lifetime. Thankfully such thoughts are quickly dismissed in this unpolished original, made as a small off the cuff project next to psychological thriller Magic Magic by writer and Sebastian Silva. Shot in a largely improvised manner, the film centres on Jamie (Michael Cera, also star of Magic Magic), an obnoxious and self centred young man travelling across Chile with a group of local friends. Drunk at a party, he runs into a fellow American going by ‘Crystal Fairy’ (Gaby Hoffmann), an incredibly enthusiastic mystic willing to see the good in everyone and everything. He inadvertently invites her along with his friends to the north coast where they plan to sample the famed San Pedro cactus juice, known for it’s potent hallucinogenic effects. It’s an idea he immediately regrets as her easy going charm rubs his selfish impulses the wrong way and the group gravitate far more towards her than him. Perhaps losing their heads together may be the only way to get on with one another…

 

In a set up that seems painfully familiar, Crystal Fairy’s primary success is finding a fresh vitality in the worn material. Part of this is down to the beautiful photography of the film. From the urgency of the cityscape to the desolate yet hauntingly beautiful Atacama Desert, the handheld camerawork gives a woozy vibrancy to the films look that matches up with the story tone perfectly. The camera is constantly roving to find detail from the rhythms of everyday local life to fleeting gestures that betray the characters inner thoughts and motives. Its a style that best suits the semi improvisational tone of the writing and characterization. While there is a sense of narrative drift that some viewers may not have the patience for, if they do they will be rewarded by a deviation from the norms you expect from the set up. Jamie and Crystal sound on paper like incredibly two dimensional characters; the ignorant jerk and the manic pixie dream girl. Yet in the midst of the bleak landscape, wry humour and refreshing honesty they come to life in a believable manner that fleshes both of them out.

 

This characterization is further complimented by the excellent performances of both Cera and Hoffman. Cera’s presence could have potentially drawn more unwelcome parallels with thestereotypical fool abroad trope. Having made his name in nebbish, exasperated roles from Arrested Development onward some would argue that he has acted his way into a typecast corner. It’s refreshing to see him not only acting in such a niche project but also that he embraces such an unlikeable character. Jamie is spiky, attention seeking and outwardly hostile to pretty much everyone he crosses paths with. It’s a credit to Cera that his naive charm manages to overcome Jamie’s imperfections and make the inevitable softening of his edges work. Hoffmann pretty much steals the show, her eccentric energy lightening up the screen in pretty much every appearance and avoiding the pitfalls of annoyance that similar characters have fallen into. Together they see through a film that thankfully sidesteps convention and offers up a telling glimpse of young fears, desires and potential hope.

Crystal Fairy [DVD]

Lone Survivor – Film Review

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lone_survivor_poster__spanNow I might be a man – actually scratch that. Now I might be an alpha male, no, scratch that again. I am an alpha male but call it what you will I have had my full of all those macho ‘Saving Private Ryan’ type flicks. The sort where everyone just dies in front of you and the director just relishes putting you in the thick heart of brutal battle. It is little wonder then that I was more than a little pessimistic about this film; let’s face it the title says it all.

However this Peter Berg film; director of blockbuster movie Battleship, in which the US Navy drove off an alien invasion opened with a much different kind of flavour than I was used to. Lone Survivor, opens by focussing on the inner endurance battles of these men as they go through training and the bonding they forge as a team, a brotherhood. In the opening montage we see them taught to handle pain, inhospitable conditions (sometimes naked), what’s more we see many people quit. It comes across as an insatiable drive to reconnect the audience with reality. It is this understanding and a mixture of top class acting and proficient story-telling that makes this film different to the run of the mill films we have seen.

It is little wonder actually, the film’s plot comes from the real life account of Marcus Luttrell, a former US Navy SEAL, and describes an operation in the mountains of Afghanistan in 2005, in which four American soldiers found themselves caught on the prongs of a moral dilemma.

Sent to assassinate a Taliban warlord, they unexpectedly encounter three goat herds; an elderly man, a young boy and a scowling teenager. They have three choices, each one with its own type of consequence. They can kill them, tie them up or let them go. After a lengthy discussion about the ethics and morals as well as what could happen to them they decide they are not animals and decide on the latter and that is where things go wrong.
The Taliban are as merciless as you would expect, and in as many ways as some may argue we are led to believe but what they don’t lack is in numbers and resources.

Where this film really succeeds is bringing the reality and the injustice of war to your eyes. The Marines, played by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster carry the film well and although the film becomes very frantic it remains coherent in its set up; we know who the men are, who’s married, who has kids and what each man stands to lose. I thought it was very brave too that the soldiers were not portrayed as superheroes. In one scene, cornered by the enemy they decide to fling themselves down a cliff to escape and we see their bodies smashed and ground by both rocks and bullets. It was very unnerving to see such a common scene shown for the reality it is.

The film doesn’t let up even at the last chapter and although some scenes are clichéd, based on the reality it is founded upon is something you can forgive. There are some real touching scenes there too which are executed very well.

So, how does one rate this film, do you rate it on the entertainment, the quality of the action and acting? do you rate the reality or just the horror of it? I guess I will praise it for the account it portrays about the men and women who put themselves in the position where such an account could be wrote. As a film it is not exceptional and is far from stylish, but I don’t think it was meant to be. However, the story it tells is certainly worthy.

Girl Most Likely | Film Review

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girlmostlikelyfilmreviewI should probably start this review with the fact that I love Kristen Wiig. She is just an amazing actress and this film is no exception to her talent.

 

The film has great performances, a brilliant and funny storyline and great characters. After Imogene, played by Wiig, gets dumped by her high-society boyfriend, and then also loses her job as she crashes into despair, Imogene fakes a suicide bid to try and win back her boyfriend. This goes wrong when her friend (using the word loosely!) comes instead and her mother is called instead and comes to get her and take her home.
Her relationship with her mother is strained at best. Hilarity ensues. This is a great film, and I love Annette Bening as the mother who does her best, even when it is getting her daughter arrested for borrowing her car because her CIA lover (Matt Dillon on top form) tells her that the best way to find a person is to accuse them of a crime. This is a great romantic comedy with a twist, but also a great comedy about family.

Girl Most Likely is a smart and funny romantic comedy starring Wiig as Imogene, a once promising New York playwright whose meteoric rise has fizzled out, thanks to a crisis of confidence. Also heavily in denial about being dumped by her high society boyfriend, Imogene uses her flair for drama to stage an elaborate meltdown as an appeal for his sympathy. But her attempt backfires when she’s put into the custody of Zelda, her estranged gambling addict mother (Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right) in Jersey Shore.

 

Desperate to get back on top, Imogene will need the help of her family, including her slightly odd younger brother (Christopher Fitzgerald, Revolutionary Road), Zelda’s new boyfriend The Bousche (Matt Dillon, You, Me and Dupree), and the hot new lodger (Darren Criss, Glee). Things can only go up from here, and they do in this wildly quirky rom-com about family, life and love.
Starring Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids, Anchorman 2, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Matt Dillon (Me, You and Dupree, There’s Something About Mary), Darren Criss (TV’s Glee) and Christopher Fitzgerald (Revolutionary Road),

Girl Most Likely can be bought here

GIRL MOST LIKELY… DVD/BD Information:
Release:                     3rd Feb 2014
Number of discs:       1
RRP:                            £17.99/£21.99
Certificate:                 12
Sound:                        Dolby Digital Surround 5.1
Running time:            99/103 Minutes Approx.

 

Penthouse North Film Review

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penthousenorthdvdgiveawayPenthouse North has a few things going for it but the main one has to be Michelle Monahan. A brilliant and underrated actress. There are not enough films with a female lead and Penthouse North shows what a waste that is.

The other thing Penthouse North has going for it; it’s an enjoyable thriller. And it has Michael Keaton on top form. Barry Sloane, of Revenge fame, is also good as a violent and sadistic thief.

Michelle Monahan’s character Sara has got to be one of the unluckiest women in the world. As a photojournalist in Afghanistan she loses her sight after a suicide bomber detonates in front of her. She has become reclusive, mostly staying in the penthouse apartment of her boyfriend. But her boyfriend is not what he seems.

Fresh from his leading role in Robocop 2014 Michael Keaton (Batman) stars alongside Michelle Monaghan (Source Code) in action-packed thriller Penthouse North, from Sleeping with the Enemy director Joseph Ruben (Money Train) which comes to DVD and Blu-ray on 3 February 2014.

It’s New Year’s Eve in New York City and a young woman’s (Monahan) penthouse is invaded by Hollander (Keaton) and his sadistic partner. The vicious pair will do whatever it takes – torture, tear the place apart and even kill to find what they’re looking for. While the party rages outside, inside Penthouse North Sara must fight for her life. It’s kill or be killed in this pulse-pounding, non-stop fight to the finish thriller.

While I sometimes found it hard to watch a women being abused by two men, especially one who is blind, Penthouse North is overall a good, triumphant and entertaining film. You see Sara become stronger and stronger throughout. She had become reclusive and introverted, but her survival instinct kicks in; she becomes stronger than ever before. I don’t want to give too much away but it is perfect for an evening’s entertainment. Spoiler Alert; also; don’t worry, the cat wins in the end.

We have two copies of Penthouse North to giveaway.