With a track record which includes both Sicario movies, Hell or High Water and Wind River, Taylor Sheridan packs some muscle in the action-thriller department, though Those Who Wish Me Dead can’t match those previous highlights.
Fern (a luminous Frances McDormand) used to work in HR. Now, aged 62, she’s harvesting sugarbeets, hauling rocks, cleaning toilets in a trailer park and doing shifts in an Amazon warehouse. And she’s living out of her camper van, a shabby, lovingly restored RV she calls Vanguard. “I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,” she says, driving through vast Western landscapes under spectacular skies.
Emotions don't come in half-measures in Rare Beasts, with which Billie Piper makes a commendably edgy debut as writer-director onscreen while affording herself a stonking star part. Dedicated., we're informed, to "all my friends and all their woes", this self-described "anti-romcom" may be too stylistically indulgent for some.
Zack Snyder’s CV includes such fantastic fare as Watchmen, 300, Man of Steel and his career-launching zombie-fest Dawn of the Dead, so who better to helm a zombies-in-Vegas heist movie?
I wonder how many relationships have foundered during lockdown and how many have suffered the humiliation of being dumped over the phone or via social media?
Success for the Belgian-Dutch crime series Undercover has led Netflix to produce an origin story for the show’s drug lord character Ferry Bouman (Frank Lammers). While this may be a dream come true for a portion of the show’s diehard fans, this formulaic movie is stalling, predictable and riddled with every gangster cliché in the book.
Darkest Hour may have been director Joe Wright’s finest hour, but we can say for certain that, despite its impressive cast, The Woman in the Window isn’t.
It’s not until the final moments of End of Sentence that Frank (John Hawkes) lets himself laugh – he’s swimming in the icy waters of an Irish lake - and what a relief it is to hear. Icelandic director Elfar Adalsteins’s debut feature (Sailcloth, a wordless short starring John Hurt, won several awards in 2011) is a study in family shame, masculinity and keeping things inside.
In the UK, we usually get a peek inside The Villages in Florida every four years, when intrepid reporters take to their golf carts in the retirement community to test the water in presidential elections among its 132,000 residents. Their views provide a useful guide as to where the silver-haired vote stands.
Watching Milestone, a new Netflix original directed by Ivan Ayr, I was reminded of the films of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. This story about an aging truck driver facing redundancy whilst grieving for his wife attempts the still mood and loneliness that Kiarostami favoured in his quiet epics. Milestone borrows a lot from existing filmmakers – no problem in itself – but does Ayr offer a unique style?