kikiclogwyni Reviews

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

The Incredible Hulk Meets Thelma and Louise ....

[5/10 · 22 April 2024]

.... and none of them live happily ever after.

This film if full of very graphic violence and fairly graphic sex scenes. I wouldn't say either are gratuitous, given that sexual obsession and revenge are central themes of the film, but if you are troubled by either I would give this one a swerve.

The entire feel of this film is gritty and depressing. We first meet Kristen Stewart's character, Lou, with her hand down a feces-filled blocked literal loo. The pragmatist in me immediately wondered why there were no toilet plungers in this part of the American South (New Mexico). However, this was clearly intended to introduce her character as subsumed in the filthy, sweaty, steroid-fueled world of the body-builder.

The first act revolves primarily about her budding relationship with a female body-builder who is just passing through on her way to Vegas, the second act veers off into extreme violence and the third act ..... well that just get weird.

It is not to say this film was not worth seeing - it was - and the performances by the main characters gritty and compelling. But there was such limited character development that, by the end, I didn't really care who died (and it was odds on for a while that everyone would).

Most enjoyable was the cinematography. Here this movie really stood out. The isolated locale of the gym where much of the first act takes place was juxtaposed, with all its fluorescent-lit grime, against a backdrop of gorgeous desert, star-filled skies. But the natural beauty of the surroundings only highlighted the unrelenting dreariness of the lives of the protagonists. You will want a shower after watching this film.

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

Take lots of snacks and stay hydrated

[5/10 · 22 May 2023]

This was one of those odd films that I really did not enjoy, but in a perverse way I was glad I saw. The reason for my review title is that it is three hours long. As an opera fan, who has sat through Wagner's Ring Cycle on several occasions, I am not someone who has a problem with long performances, but staying engaged through this was a struggle that had me checking my watch numerous times.

Beau is Afraid is basically a long living nightmare. We meet the titular character as he's preparing to go home to visit his mum, preparations that necessitate a visit to his therapist and new medications. The nightmare begins as he is leaving for the airport, late, and momentarily leaves his keys in the door of his apartment and his case in the hallway. After he's rushed around grabbing last minute items he returns to his door to find the keys and the case gone. Things spiral out of control alarmingly from there and rest of the film is about his frustrated attempts to get home. I am sure most of us have had nightmares where we are desperately trying to get somewhere and can't - well this one is three hours long and you paid to take part in it!

There are some truly memorable scenes that one can envision being good movies in their own right - the idyllic-looking suburban home that shelters a Stepfordian couple, a traumatized and traumatizing ex soldier and a truly psychotic teen being one and a rather beautiful animated sequence of Beau's alternative life being another. But instead they are just steps along this unrelentingly horrific story that never seems to want to end.

At the heart of this tale is Beau's over-bearing mother - appearing in her current day iteration towards the end and deliciously played by Patty LuPone. She has told child Beau that his father died at Beau's conception from a heart condition that Beau has inherited. She recounts this tragedy in rather too explicit detail to the young Beau, thus scoring the ultimate "no slut is good enough for my son" mother's dream of ensuring that, if he can't have sex with her (ew), he won't have sex with anyone. Just in case any of us miss the Freudian and Oedipal over (done) tones of the film, at one stage Beau goes into his mother's attic to meet his father, only to be met with an enormous Jabba The Hutt-like monster shaped like an enormous penis and balls. Which almost immediately kills someone. No one will ever accuse the writer/director Ari Aster of subtlety.

I have no doubt there will be many hailing this as a work of genius, citing a dozen or so obscure "art films" along with other cultural references in their reviews and slyly suggesting that people who didn't love it are just too simple to "get" it. But I go to the movies to be entertained, made to think, sometimes made uncomfortable, to laugh myself stupid or simply for escapism. This provided me with none of those things. All I can say is that, as the first credit came on screen (note the film continues as the credits roll) my fellow patrons got up as one, blank faced and silent, and we all stumbled gratefully into the night.

A Thousand and One (2023)

Gritty New York tale

[7/10 · 8 May 2023]

The first 10-15 minutes of this film had me wriggling in my seat and wondering if I was going to be able to sit through it. It starts with the central character, Inez, a hard-faced inmate leaving Riker's Island and re-starting her life back in New York after an unspecified prison term. Inez is clearly a tough cookie and even her first meeting her son Terry on the street had me silently screaming "run, kid, run!" It turns out that Terry had been put in foster care and, when he ends up in hospital shortly after, Inez goes to visit him and decides to kidnap him from the authorities under whose care he had been placed.

However, I found myself getting sucked in to the story, as grim and sometimes hard to watch as it was. Here we had a woman who had nothing - no money, no home and few prospects - grabbing a child because she somehow believed she could give him a better life. Her first act after snatching him was to phone around former acquaintances to beg for a free place to stay and it was truly heartbreaking to watch her desperation and the glimpse of the life she had brought this child into.

Yet she manages to get on her feet and the rest of the movie follows her, Terry and the man she marries, Lucky, as they if not thrive certainly survive. As compelling as the human characters become, there is another star of this film and that is the New York neighbourhood of Harlem. With the liberal use of overhead shots and long street scenes we see the neighbourhood go from grungy through a gradual gentrification. This is reflected more intimately in a sub plot where their new landlord tries to manipulate the family out of their low rent home, and leave them with fallen ceilings, broken pipes and a non-functioning shower.

There is a plot twist at the end that made my jaw drop which I see some people didn't like, but which I thought fleshed out the character of Inez quite well and gave depth to her motivations. All in all a gritty movie that was hard to watch in some places, a raw and honest depiction of the brutal poverty in which people sometimes live, but underscored by excellent performance by all.

Return to Seoul (2022)

Two hours long - seemed longer

[3/10 · 31 March 2023]

I really wanted to like this film, but I really really didn't. It showed great promise - a young French woman of Korean ancestry finds herself in Seoul and decides to try and find her birth parents - but never lived up to it or anywhere close. It could have been a great "finding one's identity" piece, but instead just had me gradually losing the will to live.

I have two main criticisms of this film. The first is that it was FAR too slow and WAAAAY too long. There is literally a sequence about five minutes long where all that is happening is the main character dancing, not spectacularly well and we only see her from the waist up. Absolutely no point, except to perhaps, yet again, show the difference between this lively and extroverted European-raised woman and her two more subdued Korean friends, who do not join her. When I finally escaped the cinema you could have told me the film was actually 5 hours long and I would have believed you.

My second complaint is that the main character, who is on screen for virtually every interminable minute, is thoroughly unlikable. No fault of the actress, who is very effective, but the material she is given to work with depicts a selfish, manipulative, cruel young woman who is mean to everyone who is unlucky enough to get close. There is no explanation for her meanness - by her own account her adoptive parents were good to her and we only see her adoptive mother briefly and yes she gets yelled at - so one can only presume that she is just plain vile. This makes her journey of self discovery even harder to sit through.

In truth the only thing I enjoyed about this film was the bag of Licorice Allsorts I snagged on my way in!

Women Talking (2022)

Stunning Tour de Force

[10/10 · 21 March 2023]

This beautifully shot movie, long on words and short on action, is one that stays with you long after the lights have gone up. Ostensibly it is about a small group of women who have been chosen by all the women in a religious colony to decide how they should respond to a series of violent rapes that have been committed. But it is about so much more!

During their deliberations the women, a stellar cast of actors of all ages and nationalities, discuss forgiveness versus violence, fleeing versus fighting, all against the backdrop and expectations of their faith. But more than that, we see a disparate group of women discuss and finally agree to a course of action, showing us how a consensus can be reached from a place of division.

All the while we learn about these isolated and illiterate women, who sometimes don't even have the words necessary to describe their experiences. In one remarkable scene one of the older women explains how they can't ask even the good men to help, and she lists all the things she has never asked her husband to do for her, from passing the salt at the dinner table to resting a hand on her back as she pushes yet another child out of her body. One of several amazing scenes.

For all the stillness and wordiness of this movie, it does manage to build up tension towards the end. But do not expect any flashbacks to the violence or any kind of Hollywood style climax. This is a Canadian made movie! The horrors the women have lived through are hinted at but never depicted. Which makes it all the more chilling.

Sarah Polley and her cast have made a truly wonderful movie.

Alice, Darling (2022)

I really wanted to like it, but I didn't

[3/10 · 21 March 2023]

This movie is supposedly about a woman trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship, and as such had great potential to be an interesting and moving piece. It starts off with three women friends meeting for a drink with one of them, Alice (Kendrick), receiving multiple texts throughout the evening. At some point she takes a photo of her chest and sends it to someone.

We later see her with her live-in boyfriend who we discover is an artist with an upcoming show. It takes a while for us to realize that this is the apparent abuser and even longer to discover that he is the recipient of the photos. And this is where the problems started for me. There is little to suggest, in the scenes with them together, emotional abuse. He doesn't seem to treat her badly and is pleasant to her friend when she comes to his opening. Indeed the first sign of trouble we see is when Alice lies to him about why she needs to go out of town for a week, inexplicably saying it is for work whereas she is actually going to a cottage with her two friends. It is only once there, and after a very silly scene involving a lost earring, that she admits she is having problems with her controlling boyfriend. At this point the friends stage some kind of clumsy "intervention".

And from this moment on I found the film positively annoying. As I said, we saw no signs of abusive behaviour from the boyfriend, but Alice proceeds to tell us what has been going on. Has no one involved with the film heard the old adage "don't tell me, show me?" The deficiencies of the lead actor also come to the fore at this point. Kendrick has made a name for herself playing smart-assed women always ready with a dead pan put-down, but a role requiring emotional depth and genuine anguish is clearly quite beyond her. She swerves from sullenness to hair pulling anxiety and back again, with really nothing inbetween. In the hands of a more skilled actor we might have been more drawn in and sympathetic to her situation, but I just found her unconvincing.

There is also a ridiculous sub plot about a missing girl that Alice goes searching for, but this just serves as a distraction that goes nowhere. Indeed Alice finds something in the woods that could have been a clue to the girl's whereabouts, but instead of handing it over to the authorities, she just hangs on to it. It is not only pointless, it also eats up a lot of screen time that could have been better used developing the character and explaining her life. By the time the supposed climax happens, you almost find yourself rooting for the "abuser" and hopes he gets away and never comes back.

A movie with a lot of potential that ended up being a slow, boring tale with unsympathetic characters at its heart and very little in the way of storytelling.

Denial (II) (2016)

Wonderful court procedural

[9/10 · 24 June 2021]

This movie is based on the real-life court battle between Jewish academic Deborah Lipstadt and Holocaust denier and discredited historian David Irving. Irving brought a case of libel against Lipstadt in 1996 after she published a book in which she called him a Holocaust denier, falsifier and a bigot.

This film uses verbatim court transcripts and quotes which adds to the realism. My reason for 9 stars instead of 10 is simply because I would have like more scenes from the actual court case - I love that stuff - although I can't think of any of the scenes that took place outside of the court that could have been cut. They show how Lipstadt's legal team decided - against her wishes - to not bring in survivors to bear witness to the fact that the Holocaust happened and to not allow her to testify in the case. This tension between the defendant in the case and her legal team brings out some of the best performances of the whole movie. Rachel Weisz is really good as the academic who is used to her voice being heard and yet finds herself being silenced by people who are supposedly on her side. Timothy Spall.is, as usual, excellent as David Irving managing somehow to convey a person who actually genuinely didn't seem to understand how repulsively racist his views were. Andrew Scott does a fine turn as Lipstadt's lawyer who insists that no survivors will be heard, not (as she initially believes) out of a lack of understanding for their history but actually because he wants to keep them protected from Irving.

But the movie really belongs to Tom Wilkinson. How every shelf in his house isn't in a state of collapse under the weight of awards is quite beyond me! He plays her barrister Richard Rampton. He skillfully navigates his character's arc from seemingly unfeeling insensitive ass when visiting Auschwitz (he wasn't being insensitive as he later explains to Lipstadt - he was viewing it as a crime scene rather than the shrine she saw it as) to a person genuinely disgusted by Irving's blatant racism and inability to see it. His face when he refuses to shake Irving's hand at the end of the trial spoke volumes as did his admitted deliberate refusal to look him in the eye when questioning him. Beautifully nuanced performance by a great and generally underrated actor.

All in all a compelling movie about an important case. In a time when truth is once again falling victim to lies masquerading as free speech this should be a must-watch movie. Highly recommended.

An Imperfect Murder (2017)

Couldn't watch it

[2/10 · 24 June 2021]

I can't really write much of a review for his movie as I only got about 10-15 minutes in. I kept warning my screen that if a plot didn't start happening in x number of minutes I would turn it off and I finally made good on my threat. Now, on reading reviews of people with more patience than I, I am glad I did. Seems the makers were so intent on trying to be clever they forgot that a film needs a plot.

Juliet, Naked (2018)

A rare Rom-Com in that it is both romantic and funny

[10/10 · 28 February 2021]

This movie is about three people - and unhappy woman underachieving in a boring seaside town, her smug obsessed boyfriend and a reclusive rock star who is the object of said boyfriend's obsession. The woman, Annie, is played wonderfully by Rose Byrne who manages to portray a slightly frumpy museum curator in spite of her being, as usual, gorgeous. Her mildly depressed ennui is keeping her in a job where she is unappreciated and in a relationship where she plays second fiddle to a long disappeared rock star with whom her boyfriend is obsessed. Chris O'Dowd plays the boyfriend Duncan and he is perfect, managing to infuse the smug, self-absorbed and utterly undeserving character with just enough humanity to allow you to laugh at him rather than just hate him. The scene on the beach where he finally meets (and doesn't recognize) his idol is perfection that few other than O'Dowd could pull off. The final piece of this unlikely threesome, the rock star Tucker Crowe, is played by Ethan Hawke with a kind of shambling charisma that again makes him perfect for the role.

Annie is sick of Duncan's obsession and there is a wonderful throwaway scene that perfectly sums up their relationship, where she knocks the batteries out of her dildo so that he can put them in his Walkman and listen to a Tucker Crowe CD that has mysteriously arrived in the post. Annie posts a disparaging critique of the CD on Duncan's Tucker Crowe fanpage and Tucker responds, starting a lengthy email correspondence between the two. They finally meet when Crowe comes to the UK with his youngest son to visit his new-born grandson. Crowe has fathered - and lost touch with - multiple children and several turn up at his hospital bedside (won't spoilt the reason for him being there for you) in a scene that is just a delight, with Annie awkwardly trapped while trying to get out as ever more children and ex lovers keep appearing.

On the whole this is a wonderfully low key and heart-warming romance, very British, with no fireworks or passionate love scenes. Indeed you have to watch while the credit roll to get how it all ends. The performances, the script, the scenery and the soundtrack all make this a delight from start to finish. I have already watched it several times and will again. Especially whenever I need a antidote to the more usual Hollywood schlock.

Unhinged (I) (2020)

Pointless and unpleasant

[3/10 · 21 February 2021]

I get the premise of this movie, I really do - it isn't original after all. It was done decades ago, and much better, in Spielberg's Duel. This, I promise you, is no Spielberg movie. Certainly "road rage" was not something people talked about back then and as such it is much more in our collective consciousness these days. But that is no excuse for this gratuitously violent horror. Whereas in Duel there were no cell phones and they were travelling through a rural desert landscape, here they are in a major city surrounded by people. At one stage, stuck in traffic, the victim's car is repeatedly rammed yet no one in the surrounding cars notices or does anything, and she never thinks to honk her horn to attract attention even though that is the very thing that got her into trouble in the first place. No one intervenes during his rampage and the victim never thinks to go to a police station so that they could track him using her cell phone after he's stolen it. Most importantly there is no build up of suspense, no gradual ramping up of the horror such as was done so masterfully in Duel. We go from a rather distracted young single mum quietly struggling to cope with her life (mid-divorce) one minute to a full on manic Russell Crow killing indiscriminately everyone who gets in his way the next. And don't get me started on his every changing accent - no idea why he started off with a generic southern accent but it moved around the continent faster than he hauled ass around the city. No moral or message comes from this film, other than don't waste your time watching the bloody (in every sense) thing.

Then Came You (2020)

Dreadful rom com that is neither romantic or funny

[2/10 · 15 February 2021]

The screenplay for this film was written by Kathie Lee Gifford and she stars as the female lead. That fact alone should have warned me off, but I love Craig Ferguson so I watched it anyway. KLG has written something that is self-indulgent in the extreme, giving herself a role of a woman show is supposed to be funny (she isn't), sexy (she isn't) and warm (she isn't) who wins out over Elizabeth Hurley! Yeah, right! It all makes for a thoroughly unbelievable love story that is at times positively excruciating - the cutsie black and white homage to the silent era (he is always complaining that she talks too much) is an attempt to be clever and coy but actually falls flatter than the house that narrowly misses Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr. This could have been an adorable story about two widows finding love at a later stage of their lives but, because KLG is trying to defy the ageing process, it fails remarkably and ends up just being weird and wholly unbelievable. Nice scenery though.

Pieces of a Woman (2020)

Didn't love it ....

[5/10 · 12 January 2021]

This is not a bad film, but it is certainly not as good as the hype and not as good as it could have been. The problem is it is trying to be too many things as once - a film about the loss of a baby and and also a film about the legal jeopardy midwives can find themselves in when assisting with home births. Either of these movies would have been great, but this movie, in trying to be both, fails at both. Furthermore, the middle section really drags. The grief of the couple and their nearest and dearest seemed to manifest itself in nothing but meanness to each other. The court section was shoved in at the end with no explanation as to why they decided to sue the woman who clearly did nothing wrong, and the ending was, frankly, trite. It's a shame because the performances were excellent.

Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

Super califragalistic expialadocious

[10/10 · 30 March 2020]

I was raised watching the original Mary Poppins and my kid loved it as much as I did, so I approached this remake / sequel with some trepidation. But it was unwarranted. I absolutely loved this new version. It certainly follows the format of the original - there is a long animated sequence, a group musical number with lamplighters that is very reminiscent of the "Step in Time" number from the original, a final scene in the park with balloons instead of kites to name but a few; the father figure, who was the son in the original, is also stressed out and not enjoying his children just as in the first one. But these nods to the original are, to my mind, part of the strength of this remake. You cannot improve on something that is Practically Perfect in Every Way, so update it and have fun!

Emily Blunt is wonderful as the title character. She is no Julie Andrews vocally - who is? - but she is a delightful surprise as a singer and a dancer nonetheless. Lin-Manuel Miranda is lovely as her cheeky Cockney friend Jack, a lamp-lighter this time instead of a sweep, and he does a far better job of the accent than Dick van Dyke did in the original. There are several cameos - Meryl Streep as a crazy cousin (the Uncle Albert replacement and fabulous), Angela Lansbury as the balloon seller (aka bird seed seller and wonderful) and Dick van Dyke himself comes back as the old chairman of the bank (remarkably sprightly). The music is great and upbeat - possibly not as memorable as the songs from the original, but as we have all heard them multiple times and these only once or twice, it could be a question of familiarity. The only thing missing was a song with the poignant beauty of "Feed the Birds", my favourite from the original. But that is a small quibble.

All in all an absolute joy. I will be watching it again and again.

London Fields (2018)

Awful. Just awful

[1/10 · 28 March 2020]

One of the worst movies I've ever watched. Amber Heard plays a woman who has foreseen her own murder and spends the rest of the film trying to work out who her killer will be, apparently by ... shall we say "sleeping with" .... all the possible suspects.

I am writing this while half way through it and I already want to kill her myself. She sashays and vamps around valiantly, but cannot pull off the film noir vibe. Heaven only knows what Jim Sturgess thought he was doing. I would like to say he chews up the scenery, but I doubt his crack-head yellowed teeth would be up to the job. Billy Bob Thornton is, well, Billy Bob Thornton, only sleepier than usual. The only high spots are the few appearances by Johnny Depp as a cheerfully villainous Cockney gangster, but he is uncredited in the final product. One can only presume he did not want to be associated with this abomination.

Pretentious, badly acted, boring tosh. Total waste of a good book and almost two hours of my life! Awful. Absolutely awful.

The Guard (2011)

A Gleeson masterclass

[9/10 · 28 March 2020]

A wonderful picture of rural Ireland and the laconic way their local cops - the titular Guards - deal with a new drug operation and the FBI agent sent in to "help" deal with them. I'm not sure anyone but the magnificent Brendan Gleeson could have made the lovable rogue at the heart of this story at once a dissolute cop with questionable morals and a hero. But he does. He is one moment funny, then annoying and then, in the scenes with his dying mother, absolutely heart-wrenching. A masterclass from him to be sure (to be sure), but Don Cheadle and Mark Strong are also excellent. An unexpected delight.