Tag: comedy
-
Booksmart.
For anyone who had a reasonably good time at high school, the memories remain romanticised. The simultaneous frustration of wanting to escape and the overwhelming sorrow at a poignant chapter coming to a close, it remains bittersweet. It’s no surprise that so many teen movies conclude with graduation ceremonies – a hopeful and uncertain time.…
-
Us.
It’s not very often that a film is so striking, so complex and so delicious that attempting to write a review of it proves overwhelming. Where am I supposed to start with reviewing Jordan Peele’s Us? The director’s follow up to his 2017 debut confirms the true, consistent talents of Peele, undoubtedly a horror film…
-
American Animals
Dramatised non-fiction is old territory for director Bart Layton whose first feature documentary The Imposter included tense re-enactment. His latest work takes things even further in an attempt to intertwine documentary and drama even more tightly. American Animals, based on a shambolic real-life heist at an American University in 2004, is for the most part a…
-
BlacKkKlansman
Spike Lee’s latest, loosely based on the early career of police-officer Ron Stallworth, opens with an icon scene from 1939’s Gone With the Wind. An iconic moment in American cinema, a distressed Scarlett O’Hara is wading through a sea of injured civil war soldiers. The camera gradually draws out, revealing the vast extent of the wounded.…
-
Heathers: 30 Years On.
Popularity and cruelty have gone hand in hand since the dawn of the high-school movie. Every American coming-of-age romp explores high school’s twisted social hierarchy. Mean Girls, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Grease and The Breakfast Club; these movies all explore the inner politics of the playground within an age old status quo. A dog-eat-dog world, high-school has never been more…
-
Tully.
Three years after an astonishing feature debut – Juno – writer Diablo Cody gave us the criminally underrated Young Adult in 2011. The story of a high school princess struggling to find value at life in her early thirties after realising she may have just peaked at prom queen. The film’s blunt, cynical writing was excelled to even greater…
-
Funny Cow.
Beware. For Funny Cow is not the film you might be expecting it to be. It’s pitched itself as the story of a female comedian trying to make it on the comedy circuit in 1970s Northern England but proves far more interested in the turbulent childhood and marriage that proceeded it. Maxine Peake is Funny Cow, the otherwise…
-
The Disaster Artist.
Since its release in 2003, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has gained cult status, becoming a regular favourite among late night audience there to bathe in the absurdity of the whole affair. The stilted awkward delivery of a baffling script combined with the eccentricities of Wiseau’s central character, and a sprawling narrative that drifts from one incomplete story to…
-
The Big Sick.
From Jenny Slate’s desperately underrated Obvious Child to the wit and woe of The Skeleton Twins, American indie cinema has had a lot to say about modern romance in recent years. With the huge success of Aziz Ansari’s hit Netflix series Master of None and more recently the deeply cynical comical tragedy Friends from College, we find ourselves in a new…
-
Colossal.
Booted out of her New York apartment by her exasperated partner, Gloria finds herself back in her childhood town, sleeping on the floor of her now empty family home. Having been out of work for over a year Gloria’s life has become a toxic cycle of heavy late night drinking and sleeping through the day…
Hannah McHaffie 