humour
Owen Richards
Romcoms. We all know the tried and tested formula: immature guy, uptight girl, they meet, they like each other, hate each other, and end up in love. It’s as reliable as it is unrealistic, and sometimes it takes a film like Baby Done to remind you there is a better way. One that is funnier, more believable, and yes, even more romantic.Stand-up comic Rose Matafeo and Harry Potter alum Matthew Lewis star as Zoe and Tim, the last couple standing in the marriage and baby stakes. Everyone else is boring and settling down, but these two (and Zoe’s new-age friend Molly) are quite happy as things are Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After nine successful series, a Bafta and an Emmy nomination, Taskmaster has moved from Dave to Channel 4 – amusingly, the broadcaster that its creator Alex Horne first took it to but which turned it down. It has made the transition seamlessly – ie, without changing a thing – and is still utterly daft and a joy to watch. But then, when you have a great concept that's well executed, why muck around with it?For the uninitiated: in each series a different group of five comics or comedy actors solve a succession of parlour-game tasks, using just silly props and their ingenuity, against the clock Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It only takes a few seconds of Saint Maud – dripping blood, a dead body contorted on a gurney, a young woman’s deranged face staring at an insect on the ceiling, an industrial clamour more likely to score the gates of hell than the pearly ones – to make us realise that the film’s title is a tad ironic. That irony will become even sharper, and mordantly witty, when we find that for the eponymous hospital nurse turned private carer (references no doubt fudged for the private sector), sainthood would be most welcome. “What’s the plan?” she asks of God, with whom she Read more ...
Owen Richards
Barring a few outliers, British indies tend to follow the same formula: serious subjects told seriously. Whether it’s a council estate, a rural farm, or a seaside town, you can always rely on that trademark tension and realism we Brits do so well. What a shock to the system Eternal Beauty is then, filled with more imagination than almost anything else out this year.Sally Hawkins stars as Jane, a woman struggling to keep a grasp of her mental health. Her issues are compounded by her sociopathic mother (Penelope Wilton), narcissistic sister (Billie Piper), and a fiancée that dumped her at the Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Katharina Volckmer’s début novel The Appointment follows one woman as she vents her frustrations, confusions and regrets to her doctor during a lengthy appointment in London. Ranging through ideas from sex to Nazism, religion to technology, this novel provides a panorama of modern life via the deeply personal journey of its narrator, and frames the highs and lows of human existence with vibrancy and humour. Volckmer offers a refreshing view on many themes that are traditionally approached with the utmost trepidation. At times breathless, other times pensive, this is a book whose tone varies Read more ...
Gaby Frost
Deft and funny prose, in a feather-light translation by Ted Goossen, is the signature of Hiromi Kawakami's latest collection People From My Neighbourhood, a series of surreal and playful short stories offering a glimpse at the most curious and intriguing of all beings: neighbours.It’s like a dream woven from the fragments of a world seen from a window. Each story is just three or four pages long. Sometimes the chapter titles only make sense in the final line of the story, and even then, we ask: why that detail? There are themes which link individual stories: gambling brings together the Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ever felt like you could express yourself more freely, if only you could get away from everything that made you who are? British romcom How to Build a Girl tackles this paradox in joyful fashion, using the 90s music scene as the backdrop for a journey of self-discovery, via every embarrassing mistake it’s possible to make.Based on Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical novel, the film follows aspiring teen writer Johanna Morrigan, who dreams of leaving her Wolverhampton council estate for the bright lights of London. After winning the chance to review Manic Street Preachers for D&ME Read more ...
Owen Richards
At a point in the early noughties, every third film was a teen comedy about a road trip to lose one's virginity. It’s a genre most were glad to see the back of. What a pleasant surprise Come As You Are is then, which brings much needed heart and relevancy to this tired trope.Based on a true story, we follow Scotty, Matt and Mo as they travel to Montreal to visit a brothel. But this isn’t some sleezy trip – each of the characters has a physical disability, and with their parents as their primary carers, having an active sex life has been nearly impossible. So, with the support of driver/nurse Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Maria Reva’s humorously gloomy debut collection, centring on the inhabitants of a block of stuffy apartments in Soviet (and post-Soviet) Ukraine, starts, predictably enough, with Lenin. Instead of an austere symbol of ideology, he’s a statue who “squinted into the smoggy distance. Winter’s first snowflakes settled on its shoulders like dandruff.” A clumsy figure, whimsically at one with the amplified dreariness around him, he fits comfortably within the brisk, deadpan comedy of the stories that follow. By the end of the book, he’s been reduced to “a concrete pedestal”. “Only his feet remain Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Curling could be an enigmatic contemporary noir, but for the fact that it was made in the depths of winter in rural Quebec. Shades of brilliant white and murky grey predominate, as witnessed in an early sequence where Jean-François and his 12-year old daughter Julyvonne trudge home from an optician’s appointment along a windswept snowy road. Spurning the offer of a lift from a police officer, Jean-François’s reluctance to engage with the outside world is established within minutes. A craggy, taciturn loner holding down a couple of menial jobs, he’s an over-protective single parent unwilling Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
DI John Major (Daniel Mays) has been dead a year, shot in the line of duty, though we’re far from that series in terms of tone. Now he’s back at the London Met, artificially augmented, but not very intelligently. If anything he’s a bit more shit than he was before, as one of those involved in the shooting observes.“Think of me as Oscar Pistorius,” he encourages his wife Kelly (Anna Maxwell Martin) who’s strangely reluctant to welcome the new part-AI him back home, probably because she and his partner DI Roy Carver (Stephen Graham) are in a relationship. In fact on the night he was shot, they’ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's interesting to note that this Netflix series – the second of Ricky Gervais's study of bereavement, which he writes, directs and stars in – is broadcast during lockdown. We've quickly become used to a different pace of life – slower, less rooted in strict timeframes of work or family routines – so we should, in theory, be able to ease ourselves into the slowness. But there's slow, and there's “nothing much happening here, mate”.The first season of After Life, in which Gervais plays Tony, a journalist on a free local newspaper in the fictional town of Tambury, who lost his wife, Lisa ( Read more ...