The Owens family is an interesting study. A family of bloodline witches who are born with incredible power and a powerful curse. We first met them in Alice Hoffman’s book Practical Magic. Sister Sally and Gillian face evil and learn to love more, not less. In Hoffman’s book, we go …
Olive Smith loves rom-coms: funny, cute meets, impractical circumstances, unlikely love- it’s great. But not when she’s living one! You see, her best friend, Anh, is really into a guy that Olive dated like once and didn’t even like that much. But Anh won’t date him because of “girl-code”. Olive …
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. What a perfect opening line. Immediately, you are drawn in. Who are the Owens women? Why are they blamed for everything? Why not the Owens men? You have to keep …
It is a pleasant surprise that the two lead performances of Coward shared the Best Actor prize at this year’s Cannes. In the announcement, the jury mentioned that is because these performances change how masculinity is normally portrayed onscreen. But what the performances in Coward do is meet the current …
The existence of art for art’s sake is always wonderful to see. It might not necessarily meet the moment or fill a need, but people have gone to some trouble to create it and this hard work and good cheer is always fascinating. The Man I Love is precisely just …
This charming little movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does do three things. It makes the case that Haley Bennett is one of our most overlooked movie stars, it introduces Austrian actor Elyas M’Barek to English-speaking audiences, and it tells a serious story of unsupported female ambition with a …
Romantic movies told from the male point of view tend to focus on the guy, especially a guy able to recognise something in a woman – beauty, brains, talent – that she didn’t know she had. Through the guy’s actions the woman is able to get what she deserves, which …
In A Kiss of Crimson Ash, we bounce between four main characters: Taara, the new queen; Garjan, her new husband; Bhediya, his mistress; and Roland, a thief. Their relationships shape everything that happens in A Kiss of Crimson Ash. The Goddess has chosen them to save the empire; if they fail, all …
The Four Seasons returns for a second series on Netflix, following the same group of friends throughout the year. The first season was a masterpiece of observation about love, life and middle age. It could be argued that it was so good it didn’t need a second series, and mostly …
Jocasta just wants to have a normal life. But let’s face it, as Death’s only child, that was never going to happen. So far, she has mostly managed to steer clear of the chaos that comes with being a child of old ones. She’s found a place, a small college …
For a movie designed around a teenage pregnancy it’s a surprise that We Are All Strangers focuses on the baby’s father. What writer-director Anthony Chen is exploring here is how family responsibilities force young men to grow up. The assumption seems to be that women have achieved maturity already, regardless …
The Cannes Film Festival normally chooses a lighthearted French movie as its opener, mainly to celebrate the kind of movie that doesn’t always get its due. Tragedy can be very easy to make, but comedy – especially romantic comedy – is tough. You need great control over mood, you need …
First we must congratulate Laura Caselli, the casting director for Two Pianos, for realising the male movie star currently working in France whose vibe best matches Charlotte Rampling’s is François Civil. He has a tendency to play hotheaded romantic heroes and recently carried the two-part adaption of The Three Musketeers …
When the world is a smorgasbord of tastes and sensations you can’t blame someone for wanting to sample it all, but at a certain point you’ve got to admit you know what you prefer. The gimmick of the novel Allegro Pastell is a very good one: it’s the text and …
A true Europudding includes plenty of gratuitous nudity and loads of sex, but those are the only things missing from the supremely ridiculous The Blood Countess. This movie is not good, but it is such a stupidly fun good time that you should see it anyway. It is always a …
A very pretty singer and an extremely handsome actor best known for television star in a romcom directed by someone with a solid career in light entertainment. There is some concern expressed as to whether the movie could be a success because the director is a woman and the stars …
It’s been a while since a movie has been so good at textures, both visual and aural. In Satisfaction you get an extremely clear sense of the sensations the characters are experiencing and the world through which they are moving. The plot in itself is much less pleasant, as it’s …
A lot of people are missing the point of The Bride! because they don’t want to consider the price paid for our entertainment. This is possibly because, in service to its original concept, this barnstorming horror movie contains only two original ideas not directly lifted from other films. The first …
It makes no sense when a movie spoils itself through its own marketing. The central relationship in Washed Up has a twist that you probably haven’t been able to avoid! This is a giant mistake, because most of the humour and a great deal of the charm comes in how …
If you think Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetics will get more refined after his films have, over the years, preferred a more digitized (read: pixelated, desaturated, out-of-focus) aesthetic, think again! His latest film, within a corpus of slow cinema experiments, What Does That Nature Say to You, contains many of …