Category: Movie

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 90 minutes
Synopsis: Liberals decide to kill conservatives
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: clever themes, good ending, biblical imagery
What I don’t like about it: mostly a talky play and not a great one

Review:
A group of friends gather for a regular dinner party, they discuss liberal political topics and quaff expensive wine. They take in a stranded traveller who does not share their views and in fact turns out to be very racist. This escalates into a confrontation in which one of the group kills him. After clearing away the mess, they find they have quite the taste for killing awful conservatives and even flatter themselves that doing so may “prevent the next Hitler” and so they arrange to do it again, this time intentionally inviting people whose opinions they dislike and poisoning them. They do it again and again, with increasingly less stringent vetting, before an ending ties the themes up nicely and makes a solid, somewhat-unexpected statement in doing so. Not a great film overall but well worth watching for the execution (pardon the pun) of its ideas.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, racism and hateful dialogue

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon (sometimes on iPlayer)
Length: 110 minutes
Synopsis: Surreal social comedy about ‘hustle culture’ and labour relations
Recommendation rating: 5/5

What I like about it: radical, hilarious, cool
What I don’t like about it: gets weird

Review:
The Coup frontman and avowed communist Boots Riley makes his directorial debut with this parable of modern life. LaKeith Stanfield plays Oakland telemarketer Cash Green (*smirk*) who finds a secret that improves his job performance and splits his loyalties away from his less-successful friends, who are organising a union. Things come to a head when he ingratiates himself with his Silicon Valley CEO and sees life from his perspective. It’s absurd from early on and gets so surreal at the end that it’s all people tend to remember of the film if they don’t get it, but it’s genius.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, body horror

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 80 minutes
Synopsis: French farce
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: wordplay, farce, not too long
What I don’t like about it: requires significant attention

Review:
Rich snobs hold a regular dinner party where they compete to bring the biggest “idiot”. One of them meets his match in his latest mark and his life unravels in the style of a farcical play. A fun mix of comedy-of-manners and comedy-of-errors.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): ableism in dialogue, less in plot

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: little over 2 hours
Synopsis: Biopic on the IRA’s top general from the Easter Rising to the Civil War
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: history, tactics, guerrila warfare
What I don’t like about it: Julia Roberts is awful, Alan Rickman not a lot better

Review:
Liam Neeson plays the title role of the reluctant but dutiful soldier. Features great history such as his surgical co-ordinated assassination of British Army officers and the British Army’s massacre of civillians which followed, as well as de Valera’s prison break and the start of the Irish Civil War.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 95 minutes
Synopsis: Impressive psychological dramedy about young adulthood
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: fascinating, often funny, great direction
What I don’t like about it: can be unpleasant, slow to build

Review:
A young Jewish woman caters a shiva with three unwelcome guests – her sugar daddy, her successful ex and a crying baby. Debuting writer-director Emma Seligman is a genius and the baby is used to incredible effect, their crying punctuating heavy moments for the lead character, and my favourite directing touch in this is how the baby isn’t shown and it becomes noticeable that the main character is avoiding looking at them, until she does and we get a radiant two-second insert of the little darling before she has a complete meltdown. Amazingly well-made.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): a baby screams most of the way through the movie, sex work, eating disorder