The Sex Of The Angels (El Sexo De Los Angeles) (2012)

The Sex Of the Angels (aka Angels of Sex) (or, my alternative title, How Difficult It Is To Set Up And Maintain A Threesome) is a very dry look at how Bruno, happily committed to his girlfriend Carla, encounters and starts having sex with Rai, a dancer, but despite the actors' obvious commitment to the film's positive polyamorous message and the attempt to keep things titillating with butt shots and sex scenes, this thruple never feels even slightly like it would go the distance, and the film is ultimately only as exciting as a well-intentioned public service announcement. 

★★☆☆☆

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Enigma (2018)

When a television show approaches the mother of a murdered woman proposing a 90-minute true-crime special that might help reveal the truth of the daughter's death, the mother is torn because first her husband, sisters, and large number of daughters must address some matters that until now have been dealt with as deeply private, and although this is an important and very well-acted film, there is something infuriating about watching all the extended family members and friends whispering and gossiping for an hour over something that, outside of conservative Chile at least, shouldn't stand in the way of a murder investigation.

★★☆☆☆

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Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

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Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

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If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

Mary Bronstein, who appears as Dr Spring, wrote and directed the engrossing and exhausting If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (no comma), apparently basing it on her own traumatic time caring for a sick child, and its the truth at the core, along with Rosie Byrne's "performance of a lifetime", that makes this unflinching look at motherhood - the guilt, the shame, the obsession, and the killer power - so utterly captivating: a comedy so dark it more than verges on horror, and you've got to love the reviewers, many male, saying it (read 'two hours of motherhood') is monotonous, too long, and not the entertaining experience you want when you go to the cinema!

★★★★☆

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A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantastica) (2017)

This is a marvellous character study, not just of the fantastic woman at the movie's heart, who resiliently navigates first the death of her partner, then the suspicion she encounters from the man's family, friends and the police, but also of the world around her, which struggles with challenges to its polarised gender constructs, with every scene in this smart, snappy movie crammed with unmistakable signs - uncertain air kisses, awkward handshakes, stammered titles - that betray the fact that the world is organised, now perhaps more than ever before, to exclude, not include.

★★★★☆

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Serenity (2019)

Interstellar, another movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a father separated by vast stretches of time and space from his child, was released five years earlier than Serenity, which is surprising because Serenity feels like the retro, 8-bit, pixelated version, playing with similar themes but in a story that awkwardly melds '40s film noir with family drama and a tuna-fishing adventure, all steeped in odd moments of reality-bending fantasy that may signal McConaughey's character's post-war trauma playing havoc with his head - or else something else delivered in not very stellar fashion.

★★☆☆☆ 

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Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness (2019)

There really is a tv show, apparently, televised in Iran in which criminals get a chance on camera to be forgiven for transgressions sometimes as serious as murder, and this movie takes that concept as its basis and tells the story of Anar, a young woman seeking mass public forgiveness for murder - a bit melodramatic for me, but thriller-like tension arises from the fact the young woman is not as contrite about the crime as the show producers and the murdered man's wife would like.

★★★☆☆

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The Teacher's Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (2023)

I love movies about school - school is such a perfect hotbed of issues - and this German film is a ripper with Leonie Benesch perfect as the fresh-faced and idealistic teacher who sees all her hard work creating a harmonious classroom environment undone when speculation runs rife through the school campus that one of their own is a thief.

★★★★☆

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Cast A Dark Shadow (1955)

Well, you pretty much have to watch this 1955 thriller play adaptation - the play is called Murder Mistaken - not just for a well-delivered surprise towards the end but also for the jaw-dropping endscenes in which one particular female character stands up to a killer in a terrifying shouting match that I think is unprecedented in its melodrama - the only similar scene I can think of is Sigourney Weaver's Helen Hudson inviting a crazed serial killer to put up his dukes in that rooftop scene in Copycat. 

★★★☆☆

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Where The Crawdads Sing (2022)

In this D-grade To Kill A Mockingbird that takes Harper Lee's Southern Gothicism and replaces it with Hallmark schmaltz, a patently absurd Boo Radley archetype — a "Marsh Girl" ostracized by townsfolk despite being polite, independent, self-sufficient, strong, well-groomed, self-educated, and someone who easily attracts a spunky local boyfriend not once but twice, and who sets herself up as a mussel-monger and later as a book illustrator by communicating winningly with local shop owners and uppity city book publishers — is made a cause célèbre when she contrives a way to have her abusive boyfriend drop sixty-five feet from a firetower.

★☆☆☆☆

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Not Without My Daughter (1991)

Sally Field is Betty Mahmoody, the real woman who turned her experience being abducted with her daughter by her husband into a best-selling novel adapted here into a gripping movie with Alfred Mollina playing the Iranian doctor who tricks his American family into a one-way trip to Iran.

★★★☆☆

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Parenthood (1989)

 

Steve Martin stars and is perfectly uptight as Gil Buckman, a family man trying not to freak out on the rollercoaster of parenthood, but there's a veritable Love Actually-sized ensemble here too: a single mother (Dianne Wiest) struggles to raise a teenage boy (a young Joaquin Phoenix) while trying to steer an older daughter (Martha Plimpton) away from no-hopers like Tod (Keanu Reeves playing Ted again), and more (Rick Moranis, Tom Hulce, Mary Steenburgen, and Jason Robards) all in Ron Howard's comedy smash hit about the trials and tribulations of the privileged white raising kids in traditional family units.

★★★☆☆

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A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

In Woody Allen's inconsequential, breezy romantic comedy - which I quite enjoyed - Timothée Chalamet's gloomy Gatsby Welles shuffles hunch-shouldered, arms in pockets around a rainy New York City, spending a day with sunny partner Ashleigh that doesn't go to plan, and just as you think it yourself about his slight and self-aware performance, Allen has Chalamet say - ostensibly about another character but far too applicable to his own performance to be coincidence - "[He's] a James Dean minus the acting chops".

★★★☆☆

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Heist (2001)

There's a gunfight near the end that has the actors barely bothering to point their guns in the right direction, a sign that the actors' care factor, like the audience's, has dwindled to nothing over the course of David Mamet's increasingly unlikely crime caper, which is a shame given the movie's arresting start that introduces, mid-caper, our gang of grifters headed by Gene Hackman's Joe Moore, the mastermind who, yes, needs to do one more job but this time accompanied by the inexperienced nephew (Sam Rockwell) of his fence (Danny DeVito).

★★☆☆☆

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The Power of the Dog (2021)

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Campion's solemn and unaffecting Western, an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Savage, reminds me of the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson — The Master and Phantom Thread, for example — in the way its gorgeous, elaborate evocation of a world — cattle ranching in (New Zealand standing in for) Montana — ends up being for nought, the grand staging in the end unwarranted by what turns out to be just a queer little episode of crime involving four characters all so deeply repressed that their motivations scene-to-scene — if they are not vanished completely in one of the choppy-changey tv-series-style chapters — remain a mystery — in lieu of personality is offered up homosexuality and alcoholism, as if this is all we need to know.

★★★☆☆

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Every Secret Thing (2014)

You have to wonder at the atmosphere within the home of husband and wife authors David Simon and Laura Lippman: he wrote that rivetting but grim-as-grim true crime brick Homicide, and she is the author of over twenty detective novels, including the bleak one upon which this movie is based, about a detective (Elizabeth Banks) investigating a case of baby abduction that puts her back into contact with two kids, now adults, who seven years prior were charged, like the boy killers of real-life James Bulger, with the kidnap and murder of an infant - a sobering plot (and dinner-table conversation in the Simon-Lippman household, one presumes) given it is more interested in probing baby killer psychology than having fun with mystery reveals.

★★★☆☆

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Unforgettable (2017)

Unforgettable is precisely what this psycho thriller is not with Katherine Heigl playing an uptight 'Bree Van de Kamp' type ex-wife determined to ruin her ex-husband's new partner's life by browsing through her stolen mobile phone, wearing the dresses she likes, catfishing her former abusive partner, accusing her of violence, and other forgettable midday movie stuff like that.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Astronaut's Wife (1999)

Charlize Theron, at least, got a chance at a do-over in The Devil's Advocate, another, better scifi-fantasy in which a woman with a boy-cut experiences mental collapse while her husband becomes distracted by otherworldly issues at work, a concept that works well within the context of a morally bankrupt law firm but which here, set in Florida and centred around NASA male astronauts and their wives who wait fearfully on Earth, never is definitively a story about mental health nor alien abduction nor paranormality nor trauma, is never exactly a story about the after-effects of space travel, of loneliness, of body snatching, nor twinship, just a long string of ponderous scenes, the tedium of which is eventually put to death by an hysterical ending so random it is as if it comes suddenly from outer space.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)

The fact that the ensemble of characters in this romantic comedy (based on a Karen Joy Fowler bestseller) spend each month reading a Jane Austen novel and meeting to discuss it simply means that they are forever comparing Austen's troubled marriages, burgeoning romances, and complicated love triangles to their own: these parallels come thick and fast but are superficial, meaning you can smile - very gently - at this romcom even if you've never read a word of Austen yourself.

★★★☆☆

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