Film Review: Never Let Me Go

[Potential spoiler alert]

Within five days I saw Never Let Me Go not once, but twice. It’s not often I’ll pay twice to see the same film in the cinema, so it’s a testament to how thought-provoking and beautiful the film is.

My overriding impression is of how astonishingly brilliant Carey Mulligan is. I’d never seen her in anything else, and was blown away by how emotive she is. Often she communicates more in her facial expressions than can be expressed in words, and her poignant protagonist Cathy undoubtedly makes the film as powerful as it is.

Film Review: The Kids Are All Right

Last night I managed to catch the new Lisa Cholodenko film The Kids Are All Right. My knowledge was limited to the cinema programme’s description as ‘a moving and funny family drama that’s both an intimate character study and a comedy of errors’ and a rather lovely poster I’d seen on the Tube last week.

It explores the ordinarily complex relationships between five people – a family of four complicated by the somewhat awkward introduction of the sperm donor who fathered the children. That the parents in this otherwise nuclear family are a lesbian couple, each of whom mothered one of the kids is slightly secondary to the film; it is subtlety of this smart screenplay that makes the movie so engaging.

Film Review: I’m Still Here

It was the ‘special thanks’ to Sean Coombs and Ben Stiller that laid to rest my prevailing questions about the I’m Still Here. Their extended cameos clearly must have been scripted to a degree. Though it opens the gateway for excruciatingly detailed analysis about what proportion of the film was spontaneous and what was concocted in the deep dark depths of Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix’s brains, it almost doesn’t matter.

The truth about the mechanisms behind the film was always going to emerge in due course, so for me the admirably long-haul practical joke is not the key point of the film. What IS interesting though, is the excruciating self-mockery that pervades the movie. Phoenix gets kudos for having the balls to submerse himself into scenes where the movie-Phoenix is utterly cringeworthy; the shot where his burgeoning attempts at hip-hop are met with a despairing grimace from P Diddy springs to mind.