It might only be early November but ’tis already the season for Netflix to litter its halls with boughs of cheap Christmas content, the most obvious time of the year for the streamer to model itself after the Lifetime and Hallmark channels, a strategy that’s undoubtedly, somewhat depressingly, paying off. Last year’s truly execrable A California Christmas was the streamer’s biggest film for a...
For decades, it’s been one of Hollywood’s darkest rumors: Natalie Wood was sexually assaulted by a top movie star more than twice her age when she met with him at a hotel in Los Angeles as a teenager. In a memoir coming out next week, Wood’s younger sister identifies the long-suspected assailant: Kirk Douglas. “I remember that Natalie looked especially beautiful when Mom and I dropped her off...
School of Rock star Jack Black was among those paying tribute to Kevin Clark, who as a 13-year-old had played drummer Freddy in the hit 2003 film, after Clark was killed in a collision on Wednesday 26 May. The Chicago Sun Times reported that Clark, 32, had been hit by a car while cycling in the Avondale area of the city late at night, and that the car driver had been issued with several citations...
The new Peter Rabbit film is here – as before directed and co-written by Will Gluck and the hero cheekily voiced by James Corden – presenting a U-certificate entertainment that shows rabbits wisecracking and getting up to larks but thankfully uninterested in breeding or sexual congress of any sort. Beatrix Potter’s creation has returned for a movie sequel that combines live-action humans and CGI...
The makers of the sub-Hitchcockian thriller The Woman in the Window would have you believe that its central mystery has to do with the hows, whys and whos of a grisly Manhattan murder. But any grim fascination we might have with finding out how it all ends is attached less to the twists and turns of the story and more to the mess that surrounds it, like staring at the wreckage of a car accident...
For the times of lockdown, Pedro Almódovar’s new short film is perhaps the most viable and relevant type of film production: a tale of someone isolated, regretful, anxious, unable to tell whether current arrangements are contingent or permanent, retreating into gestures of self-immolating despair. This theatrical piece is loosely based on Jean Cocteau’s 1930 stage play of the same name. It was...
Set in the late 1950s in a geographically vague American suburban town where fin-tailed cars roll sedately through the streets and women wear dresses shaped like great silent bells, local doctor Lewis (Chris Messina) and his Romanian-born wife Maja (Noomi Rapace) and their grade-school son Patrick (Jackson Dean Vincent) look like everyone else pursuing the American dream. But as the title rather...
The oppressive ugliness of the Saw franchise was, for an ever-diminishing core fanbase, its USP – the dank nastiness of both its hard-to-stomach gore and bleak descent-into-hell worldview giving the series a distinctive odour. For those less invested, there was still something compellingly loopy, and often genuinely surprising, about its serpentine plotting, each film admirably committed to a...
Thirty years have passed since the wedding to end all weddings closed Coming to America, John Landis and Eddie Murphy’s 1988 blockbuster comedy about an African prince who travels from the fictional African kingdom of Zamunda to New York to find a bride. A funeral lineup to rival Glastonbury occurs in the first act of this sequel, proving that the people of Zamunda still know something about...
Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving. I fell instantly under its spell, and found myself thinking of classic English tales such as Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, or The Child in Time by Ian McEwan. And there is an extra-textual pleasure in wondering exactly what its child stars thought...