LOVE LIES BLEEDING**

British writer-director Rose Glass (ST MAUD) returns to our screen with a Tarantino-esque GRINDHOUSE movie where romance and violence sit together in a film in which earnest emotions, comic-book stylings and laugh-out-loud absurdism sit uneasily together. For me, the film was less than the sum of its parts, but there's no doubt that the BFI Flare crowd loved it, laughing uproariously throughout. My question is whether they were laughing at, or with, a film that seemed to waste Kristen Stewart's earnest performance.

Stewart stars as Lou - a gay woman who works at a gym in a dusty desert border town seemingly run by her gun-running badass father (Ed Harris in comedy hair extensions). Lou only sticks around to protect her sister (Jena Malone) from her abusive husband. This doesn't sit well with Lou's new lover Jackie (Katy O'Brian), who dreams of winning a body building championship in Vegas and driving to the coast with Lou for a new life. 

What could've been a deeply felt emotionally intense relationship drama becomes a nasty little crime movie when Jackie goes Hulk-Smash on Lou's scumbag brother-in-law and we discover Lou's talent for cleaning up murders. I love a grungy scuzzy crime caper, but what made this a bit frustrating is that I was being asked to take the central relationship with Hulk seriously. It felt like every tonal shift was pinging me about and what was so bad it's good finally just became it's bad.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated R. It played Berlin, Sundance and BFI Flare 2024 and is currently on release in the USA. It opens in the UK on April 19th.

SHARPER**

A millennial trendy antiquarian bookdealer meets cute a pretty young girl and starts a love affair unreasonably quickly.  So begins a tricksy, slippery, addictive, knowingly post-modern thriller. 

Sadly, reader, I'm not here to tell you about Netflix' smash hit TV serial killer show You.  Rather, I am here to tell you about Benjamin Caron's distinctly mediocre crime "thriller", SHARPER.

The bookseller is an earnest trust fund kid called Tom (Justice Smith) and the girl is Sandy (Briana Middleton).  She needs a bunch of money to get rid of a personal entanglement, he hands it over, she leaves, he falls into a broken-hearted depression.  So ends the first act of this film. We then move back to Sandy's story, and this is a film about con artists so you get the play here. She is being groomed to the con by Sebastian Stan's charming psychopath Max, and he's apparently into another, bigger con, as his mother (Julianne Moore) is handily dating a billionaire (John Lithgow).

It's hard to say much about how and why this film doesn't work without ruining the plot. That said, if you watch a lot of thrillers or read a lot of detective fiction, you'll probably figure it out half way through as I did. Once that happens, it's just tab A into slot B to the end.

My issue with the film is that it doesn't have the ambition to do anything visually interesting or to make any social commentary or to interrogate the concept of the con. This is a very basic film once you get beyond the four part character-led structure. With all that plutocratic wealth on show, and all the sheen, one might expect more satire, or more wit. But no. This is rather basic. And the sum is less than its parts. 

SHARPER is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes. It is available to stream on Apple TV.

REBECCA

Daphne Du Maurier's nasty little thriller, Rebecca, is both iconic as a short story and as its film adaptation by Hitchcock. It's a grim tale about a banal simpering middle class spinster who falls for an unattainable rich aristocratic widower.  Which is not to say she doesn't attain him. For reasons that are still murky to me, he marries her, maybe to protect himself from the ghosts of his first and titular wife.  But the new, unnamed wife will never really possess her husband because he remains obsessed by the cynical and manipulative Rebecca - a woman beloved by all including her obsessive and diabolical housekeeper Mrs Danvers.  At the end of the novel, there is no happy ending. The couple are trapped overseas in a loveless and frigid marriage. The only triumph is that the second Mrs De Winter realises her husband never loved his first wife. At the end of the Hitchcock version we get a slightly soupier Hollywood ending. Joan Fontaine's second wife has gathered some courage and supported Laurence Olivier through his trial. He clings to her like a parasite. But it's no marriage of equals. Nonetheless, both original novel and film are of a tone - sinister, nasty, dark, cynical, blighted, thwarted and corrupt. It is Rebecca who sets the tone.

In this new adaptation by a director I very much admire, Ben Wheatley, the tone is altogether different. The south of France is lush and sunlit and Mr De Winter and his second wife (Armie Hammer and Lily James) seem young, healthy, vibrant and jarringly contemporary despite the period setting.  He takes her home to a lavish mansion but instead of the gothic gloom of the original we have Kristen Scott Thomas chomping through the scenery in a high camp version of Mrs Danvers that made me laugh at it rather than shudder from it. I had to question whether I was watching a Ryan Murphy film. And so it goes on, bad casting and bad direction. Sam Riley is utterly toothless as Rebecca's nasty cousin. The thriller/drama utterly uninteresting. It winds on to its ending which is about as cynical and Hollywood happy as anything I've ever seen. All is happy and sexy and fruitful. Rebecca has truly been vanquished. Along with any credibility Ben Wheatley ever had.

REBECCA has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film was released on Netflix on October 21st. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD - Crimbo Binge-watch #2

HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD is a darkly funny, very well observed  low budget British comedy from writer-director Ben Wheatley (FREE FIRE).  The conceit is that Colin Burstead (Neil Maskell) as has invited his extended family to a stately home for a New Year's Eve party. As with any good family drama, this exposes us to resentment, anger, jealousy, but also love and the hope of redemption.  Sam Riley (BRIGHTON ROCK) is particularly good as the black sheep of the family and Charles Dance is unusually avuncular as the paterfamilias. The feeling is Dogme with a sense of humour - raw, gonzo, truthful, sometimes brutal, but occasionally laugh out loud funny.  Well worth watching. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD has a running time of 95 minutes and was broadcast on British television this weekend.

HIGH-RISE - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Four

Yeah so, I love J G Ballard and High Rise is one of my favourite novels, and I really love Ben Wheatley's gonzo horror craziness, having done retrospective podcasts on his earlier films.  Tom Hiddleston is obviously not just a great actor but a nice guy.  So I was super excited about this new film.  The problem may have been high expectations. The problem may be that High Rise is a high concept novel and these can sometimes come across as flat on screen. But whatever the reason, HIGH-RISE was utterly underwhelming.

The movie, and indeed the novel on which it is pretty faithfully based, are set in 1970s England - another time of deep social inequality and financial disruption.  The high concept is that an architect has built a high-rise apartment block complete with all amenities - swimming pool, school, gym, supermarket - so that one need never leave.  And in classic English fashion, the social hierarchy is perfectly preserved inside - lower orders in floors 1 to 10, middle classes to floor 35 and upper classes above, with the architect as God in the penthouse.

STOKER

"A high camp B-grade thriller more akin to Dark Shadows than Oldboy."

What is that we love about the cinema of Park Chan Wook?  For me, there are so many things:  the carefully staged tableaux; the precise use of colour as symbolism; the willingness to mine the very darkest areas of human psyche - sexual violence, incest; the melodramatic plots of vengeance and redemption; the rich vein of black humour.  When you watch a Park Chan Wook film you know you will be taken somewhere unique and memorable.  Looking back now, it's been years since I've seen his work, but certain scenes are still vivid in my mind.  Lady Vengeance plunging her face into the redemptive white tofu.  Her daughter holding a knife to her throat, threatening her Australian adoptive parents to take her back to Korea.  Mr Vengeance slashing the Achilles tendons of his victim in the water.  The amazing, almost video-game shot, of Oh Dae Su violently dispatching the guards of the prison-hotel. 

All this should explain why I was left cold by STOKER.  It's Park Chan Wook's first American film, and is about as watered down and weak-minded as Wong Kar Wai's incredibly disappointing MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS. I'm not sure whether something was literally lost in translation, or whether the American producers constrained Park Chan Wook's trademark hypnotic excesses.  Maybe it was the script by Wentworth Miller,  better known as the actor who played Michael Scofield in Prison Break - a script that teases us with the potential for deep dark sexual secrets, and taboo attractions but doesn't have the courage to take us deep into depravity.  Which isn't to say that STOKER is a subtle, discreet film. While it dances round the edges of chaos, it contains performances of high camp.  Both Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode have line deliveries that are flat out funny, and not in a good way.  Too often scenes which should be menacing and uncomfortable are just absurd.

But to go back to the beginning, STOKER is not a horror film and certainly contains no vampires or references to Bram Stoker.  Instead, it plays like a high-camp B-grade thriller, akin to DARK SHADOWS.  We open with a kooky family in an isolated country house.  India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) is a withdrawn emo teenage girl mourning the death of her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney).  Her alcoholic mother (Nicole Kidman) flirts outrageously with her mysterious brother-in-law, but Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) seems transfixed on his niece instead. She resents him, but is also darkly attracted to him, and so chooses to overlook the strange and threatening events that seem to surround him.  Moreover, she is a slippery and unreliable point of view.  Is she fantasising, remembering, distorting the truth?  

All of this seems like a great set up for some truly messed up taboo familial craziness and violence, but sadly it all ends with a whimper rather than a bang.  By the time we got to anything faintly resembling craziness the movie had lost all credibility.  There was no emotional heft and investment similar to the Vengeance films, where I cared deeply what happened to the main characters. The only saving graces were Mia Wasikowska's finely modulated performance, cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon' luscious visuals and Nicholas deToth's editing.  There's a scene where Nicole Kidman's hair morphs into a field of grass.  It's the image that I'll remember in ten year's time, if I remember this poor excuse of a film at all.

STOKER played Sundance 2013 and will be released on March 1st in the UK, Ireland and the USA. It opens in Singapore and Taiwan on March 7th; in Greece, Italy and Romania on March 28th; in the Netherlands on April 11th; in Argentina and Iceland on April 19th; in Denmark on April 25th; in Belgium, France, Portugal, Brazil and Mexico on May 2nd; in Chile and Germany on May 9th; and in Australia and New Zealand on August 29th.

STOKER has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

BLACK SWAN - glorious trash

Darren Aronofsky's much-praised new film, BLACK SWAN, is beautifully-produced trash, and I say that with all respect and admiration. It brings an auteur sensibility to material that is basically a camp psycho-sexual horror flick, in the style of Polanski's REPULSION or Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA. While the material may superficially resemble Powell and Pressburger's seminal ballet melodrama, THE RED SHOES, BLACK SWAN contains none of that film's elegant framing or love for high-art. Rather, BLACK SWAN is the ultimate B-movie - a genre movie that wears its balls-out craziness on its sleeve. The result is beautiful and exhilarating, but I can't say that it affected me as emotionally and as profoundly as Aronofsky's previous film, THE WRESTLER.

In fairness to Aronofsky, the B-movie craziness of BLACK SWAN can be traced back directly to its roots - the ballet Swan Lake - a Gothic melodrama containing elements of body-horror, psychotic doubling and ending in transformative suicide. If that isn't the stuff of a Polanski horror flick, I don't know what is. In the ballet, an evil wizard transforms the innocent princess Odile into a were-swan. The love of the handsome prince should set her free, but her evil doppelgaenger Odette seduces the prince, with results varying depending on which version of the ballet you watch. In the film, Natalie Portman's Nina Sayer has been infantilised by an over-bearing mother (Barbara Hershey). Under pressure to be the perfect "sweet girl" and ballerina, Nina self-harms, is bulimic, has a pathological desire to please, and a psychotic fear of imperfection. When given the role of the Swan Queen, Nina has to bring her innate sexuality, so suppressed by her mother, out into the open, to inform her dancing of the Black Swan. She simply cracks trying to reconcile her mother's expectations of pre-pubescent innocence and her ballet director's (Vincent Cassel) aggressive demands that she be as instinctively sexual as her understudy (Mila Kunis).

What follows is a movie that creates a sense of building tension through the use of claustrophobic interior shots; invasive close-ups; visual trickery with mirrors; and sound editing that suggests an inner self trying to break through. The movie is never pure horror despite plenty of shots involving nail-clipping and skin-scratching.  After all, we never really doubt whether what we are seeing is real or imagined. Nina is shown to be an unreliable witness too early in the movie for that. What we do have is a powerful display of hysteria - but heightened to the point where it is sometimes unintentionally funny (an early scene bedroom scene, for example) and moves so far beyond realism that one feels almost disengaged from it. Nina is less a person to sympathise with than a delicate compendium of every single neurosis that can arise from intensely un-boundaried parenting.

The thematic material in BLACK SWAN is very similar to THE WRESTLER. In both movies we have individuals who are so dedicated to and defined by their profession, that they ultimately sacrifice their physical and mental well-being to it. The Wrestler staples himself and batters himself to entertain, just as Nina breaks her toes and punishes her body. The Wrestler and Nina may be extreme examples of self-destruction, but they hint at the systematic physical abuse that their professions entail. That's why Aronofsky's shooting style is so perfect. By taking the cameras on-stage, by using tracking shots that immerse us in their worlds, Aronofsky is making us look behind the costumes to see the grueling physicality. He wants us to see the sweat, the muscles, the bleeding toes and the broken bones. 

In a sense, Aronofsky is making a bigger point about the demands the entertainment industries make of its professionals, begging the obvious question of how far this applies to his profession, with its pressure to maintain youthful good looks with botox, plastic surgery and aggressive dieting. To that end, one can only view the casting of Mickey Rourke in THE WRESTLER and Barbara Hershey in BLACK SWAN - both self-mutilated by plastic surgery and injury - as provocations. By casting these actors, Aronofsky is himself blurring the line between actor and character - just as Nina can't separate reality from fiction. Similarly, the use of Winona Ryder to play the prima ballerina Nina supplants is inspired. Ryder was a beautiful young actress whose early success morphed into career stagnation and personal humiliation.  Who else better signifies crushing rejection in reality and on screen?

Still, for all the similarity in material, and in the vérité shooting style used in the apartment scenes, to my mind BLACK SWAN is at once a greater and lesser film than THE WRESTLER. It is a greater film insofar as it shows Aronofsky and DP Matthew Libatique in perfect command of vérité shooting style but also able to inter-cut this with its exact opposite - a super-heightened gothic horror shotting style using chiaroscuro and close-ups. It also shows that Aronofsky can do genre cinema with the best of them. But BLACK SWAN is a lesser film insofar as that willingness to leap into melodramatic horror is ultimately a distancing device. Nina Sayers is such a compendium of crazy - under such extreme pressure - that she becomes a device rather than a person. Accordingly, as the film moves into its final act, it is beautiful but it isn't emotionally arresting. Nina's self-destructive tailspin is transfixing, wonderful, crazy and all-consuming - but it never made me feel the visceral hurt that The Wrestler did. That is BLACK SWAN's only flaw - but it is a serious one.

BLACK SWAN played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London 2010. It opened last year in the US and Canada. It opens this Friday in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Poland. It opens on the 27th in Chile, Greece, Slovenia and Lithuania, It opens on February 4th in the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Iceland and Norway. It opens in France, Singapore and Mexico on February 10th. It opens on February 17th in Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Russia, Estonia and Spain. It opens on February 24th in Belgium, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Finland and Turkey. It opens in Sweden on March 4th, Italy on March 11th and the Czech Republic on April 7th.

MOON - the first sci-fi flick to make it to my Best Of list

MOON is the assured debut feature from writer-director Duncan Jones, featuring a stand-out performance from Sam Rockwell as an astronaut suffering from acute loneliness.

Jones wastes no time in establishing the conceit with a pitch-perfect faux-TV-spot. In some indeterminate future, Earth has solved all its energy problems by mining Helium-3 from the dark side of the moon. The operation is mostly automated, but there's a poor schmuck overseer on a three-year contract (Rockwell). In the final weeks before returning to his wife and daughter he suffers an accident and starts, apparently, hallucinating an alternative, clean-cut super-functional Sam. Is his sub-conscious creating a play-mate? Or is their something more sinister afoot?

Showing just how much you can do with a limited budget and some miniature models, Jones perfectly evokes the shabby-futuristic lunar base, complete with HAL-like omniscient robot Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). I particularly liked the naff touch of having him show emotions through emoticons! But this is truly Rockwell's movie, with assured performances in two very different characters - Sam at the start of the mission - a neat, ambitious, temperamental man: and Sam at the end of the mission - mellowed, messy, apathetic. And while this is, basically, a serious, ideas-based movie, there are moments of humour, or perhaps better put, weirdness, as the two characters face off over a ping-pong table on the road to friendship. The real trick is that by the end of the film, I felt completely emotionally invested in the fate of Sam Bell, and was on the edge of my seat for the final twenty minutes.

I am not a big sci-fi fan, and I can imagine some purists getting cheesed off at the lack of zero-gravity and whatnot. But I think you can take a more high-level view that this movie is sci-fi at its purest. Rather than getting bogged down in super-impressive CGI shots and action sequences, you have sci-fi as it was meant to be - exploring ideas. You also get a film that is steeped in the sci-fi classics and has subtle nods to them while also creating something new and interesting. I can't wait to see what Jones does next, and I'm hoping that the movie's indie status and limited release doesn't bar Rockwell from some acting gongs.

MOON played Sundance, Tribeca and Edinburgh 2009. It opened earlier this summer in the US and Canada. It is currently on release in the UK. It opens in Russia on September 17th; in Australia on October 8th; in the Netherlands on October 15th and in Spain on October 23rd.