Tag: comedy
-
My Accomplice.
Lacking in all direction and chemistry, My Accomplice is a perfect example of a director getting thoroughly carried away in their own work. This feeble and poorly judged romantic-comedy is crucially lacking in both romance and comedy. There is barely any plot to speak of and the whole affair is dangerously self indulgent and lazy. Two strangers meet…
-
Life After Beth.
Zombies are back and as versatile as ever. Jeff Baena’s Life After Beth demonstrates just how diverse the zombie movie has been able to become in recent years. Balancing both romance and the un-dead, Life After Beth brings a more personable story to life with its ghoulish comedy. We first meet Zach as he enquires about black napkins in his local…
-
The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s return to the big screen made me ask the following question: Would Wes Anderson’s films still be charming if he made them in a different language? Jeunet’s latest feature isn’t without its charming moments but making a film in English, rather than his native French, seems to have led to something a little too sickly…
-
22 Jump Street.
Typically, sequels are never as good as their predecessors and nobody is more aware of this than the writers of 22 Jump Street. When 21 Jump Street came out over two years ago I wrote about how pleasantly surprised I was by it. The first instalment succeeded in making an American comedy with truly great comic writing and…
-
Fading Gigolo.
I hardly need to mention what a huge Woody Allen fan I am. Equally, I admire John Turturro and his body of work which is so often at its best when he works alongside Joel and Ethan Coen. With their on-screen nihilistic traits and their off-screen New York backgrounds, it makes perfect sense for Allen…
-
Frank.
There are just too many things that have inspired and influenced Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank so I won’t even begin to go into them. But I will say this: this is not the biography of either Frank Sidebottom or Chris Sievey, although both have had an impact on the film in different ways. When Jon, a slave to…
-
Man on the Moon.
The most beautiful element of Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon is that it encapsulates everything that performance artist Andy Kaufman was about and believed in. I say “performance artist” specifically because it is important to understand, above anything else, that Andy Kaufman was not a comedian. He didn’t claim to be and didn’t want to be…
-
Burn After Reading.
The Coen brothers know how to do so many things. They know how to tell a steady and suspenseful story like Fargo and they know exactly how to poetically linger on loneliness and whimsy, demonstrated in Inside Llewyn Davis. Perhaps what they do best of all is chaos; the madness and genius we find in Burn After Reading would certainly…
-
The Royal Tenenbaums.
This is possibly Wes Anderson’s most complete and perfect film. Often I find his approach a little too extreme and absurd. I like his films but I find that they sometimes drag on for too long. I couldn’t help but admire the artistry that went into Fantastic Mr. Fox but it drifted so far away from the…
-
American Hustle.
American Hustle is a delightful whirlwind of nail varnish, comb-overs, quiffs and hairspray. The eccentric costumes are fitting of both the time setting of the film as well as the characters – whose natures are artificially glamorous, fake and nasty. David O. Russell has created a film with a fun and nostalgic visual aesthetic that reflects…
Hannah McHaffie 