Brittany (Jillian Bell) is the unhappily overweight life of the party, numbing her lonely life with booze and acerbic one-liners as she nears 30. Bad medical news makes her obsessively turn to running, eventually entering the New York marathon, with side-effects include an ambiguous romance with slobby fellow house-sitter Jern (Utkarsh Amdudkar).
If the recent period of British history that has involved recession, austerity, the hostile environment and Brexit is to have chroniclers, who better than Ken Loach and his trusty screenwriter Paul Laverty. Their blend of carefully researched social realism and nail-biting melodrama is angry, shaming, essential. Only the coldest-hearted bureaucrat or corporate heel could leave the cinema dry-eyed.
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining ended in ice, Stephen King’s in fire which consumed the Overlook Hotel. King’s frightening, emotionally rich novel was written by an alcoholic about an alcoholic, Jack Torrance, and his suffering family.
San Francisco has rarely looked more unattainably golden than in Joe Talbot’s Sundance prize-winning gentrification parable.
This is a departure in every sense for François Ozon. The prolific French director has established himself as a master of ludic style in past dramas played out by predominantly female casts, the exceptions, among them his sad black-and-white period romance Frantz from two years ago, largely proving the rule.
Starting life as a comic strip in 1938, The Addams Family seems to have reinvented itself for every generation. It’s the story of an odd-ball family from ‘The old country’ (where that is geographically located is by-the-by), who love the grim and gothic. Their outlandish ways were neatly juxtaposed against the wholesome values of American suburbia.
In the opening scene of Alejandro Landes’s strange, beautiful but finally unsatisfying Monos, eight teenage guerrillas are playing football blindfold on a high mountain plateau. Why the blindfolds? Perhaps to warn us not to expect any light to be thrown on whys and wherefores in this unsettling, visually stunning film, with its echoes of Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now.
Sentient machines have taken over the Earth. The leader of the human rebellion is so effective that a robotic ‘terminator’ is sent back in time to ensure he’s never born. A guardian follows, to ensure he is. We’ve been here before.