Film Reviews by GI

This is one of those great little films you come across almost by accident and wonder how you've never seen it before. On its initial release it gained a quick reputation and garnered strong critical reviews. If you've never seen this gem of a film then I urge you to find a copy and you'll have a real treat. This is a gritty crime thriller and stars the late and great Bill Paxton, who didn't often get the lead role in films but his presence always lifts a movie above and beyond expectation. He plays the Chief of Police of a small Arkansas town. He's a family man, friendly and enthusiastic about his job and people in general, his nickname 'Hurricane' says it all. The story begins in Los Angeles where three criminals, the coolly nasty Pluto (Michael Beach), the unstable Ray (Billy Bob Thornton, who also co-wrote the script) and the naïve Lila (Cynda Williams) rip off a drug dealer and murder six people in the process. They go on the run pursued by two LA detectives and head for Lila's hometown which is where 'Hurricane' is the Chief. Built into this great thriller is a clash of cultures narrative between the professional big city cops and the almost childlike innocence of Paxton's local hick town cop. The dynamics between the three baddies is compelling and surprising and there's also some warped romance involved too (Hurricane and Lila have a history!). This is an absolutely fantastic film, it has some tough violence and some western genre elements thrown in and is entertaining throughout. I cannot recommend it enough.

Arguably Sergio Leone's best film and certainly a landmark piece of cinema. For true cinephiles this is an absolute masterpiece and a very important film. This is Leone's first study of the origins of modern America told through the mythological genre of the western, a genre that Hollywood and the USA in general considered its own hallowed ground. Leone, an Italian, redefined it with this film. Where the western film has traditionally dealt with quite simple themes such as the frontier and its role in the foundation of America, or simple revenge with the gun as the symbol of power, Once Upon A Time In the West is an elegiac and complex study of betrayal, corruption and greed as the basis for modern America. Leone explored this further in his later works too but here he used the legends and myths of the cinematic west to condemn the 'American Dream' as something rather nasty at heart. Claudia Cardinale plays Jill who arrives out west to join her husband and his family on a remote desert property. On arrival she finds he and all his children have been murdered. Failing to understand why she is soon caught up in the crooked dealings of a railroad magnate (Gabriele Ferzetti), his ruthless and ambitious hired gun Frank (Henry Fonda), a local outlaw (Jason Robards) and a mysterious stranger with his own agenda (Charles Bronson). With a really beautiful and haunting score by Ennio Morricone and a genre defining style (the crane shots alone are so wonderful) this is a highly detailed, wonderful film that never fails to captivate me. Westerns have lost their appeal with modern audiences but in the history of film they are some of the best of movies and this is one of the best of all westerns and a motion picture it's hard to top.

With nods to The Shining (1980), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Ring films this is a damp squib horror about a possessed swimming pool. As daft as that sounds that's actually what this is about and apart from the obvious shots of murky depths and inky clouds forming there's nothing much of a scare here. Kerry Condon, fresh from her award winning performance in The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), plays the mum of a family who move into a new house after her husband, a professional baseball player, is diagnosed with MS. He soon finds that swimming in the pool revives his health but the pool demands payment! The film follows an all too familiar story arc, first the prequel where an earlier family has a tragedy linked to the pool, then the new family arrive, see the odd strange thing, then find out there's a spooky history, research it and finally confront it. None of which remotely gets you on the edge of your seat. A routine horror that delivers little.

Probably the most Tarantinoesque of all of Quentin Tarantino's films this love letter to Hollywood, his greatest passion, may well divide audiences but this film will grow in stature and reach cult status pretty damn fast. Here we have a gloriously outrageous film set in 1969 Hollywood as we follow Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio on top form) a former big TV star and now reduced to playing bad guys as his career wanes, DiCaprio gives him a barely noticeable stutter to highlight his vulnerability, and Cliff Booth, Rick's stunt double, played brilliantly by Brad Pitt - a hilarious performance of easygoing and sinister strength - and who is his best friend and factotum. Rick lives next to Roman Polanski and his actress wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie in a very nuanced performance) and eventually these characters get caught up with the Charles Manson gang. Now this is a fairy tale ode to Hollywood and so it's a subverting, outrageous, disorientating and thoroughly enjoyable and a brilliantly conceived story. And it's also enormously funny, the scene of the contest between Cliff and Bruce Lee will leave you laughing long after it's over, and the climax to the film will leave you gasping and shocked even as you try and suppress a chuckle. It never fails to surprise me how QT can pull a laugh out of me from the most shocking of events. If I'm critical the film is a little overly long so you have to stick with it but this is modern cinema as only Tarantino can produce. Don't listen to naysayers this is top stuff.

Written, produced by, starring and directed, his debut, by Dev Patel this is an over the top revenge thriller clearly influenced by the John Wick series with various homages to Kill Bill Vol 1 (2003), the films of John Woo and with it's dark, neon lit, and mostly silent anti-hero it echoes Only God Forgives (2013). It's a relentlessly grim, very stylish, occasionally a little meandering and narratively confusing and ultraviolent, indeed you need to be prepared as some of it is very realistic. Patel plays a nameless character who calls himself Bobby. He is haunted by the murder of his mother when he was a child and now is a masked cagefighter paid by a seedy crime boss (Shalto Copley) to lose fights thus ensuring big earnings for his boss but little for him. It's as the story develops that we learn 'Bobby' has deliberately infiltrated the corrupt and cesspool underworld of Mumbai in order to find and kill those he holds responsible for his mother's death and their ruthless exploitation of the poor and helpless. It doesn't go all his way though and eventually he has to hide and prepare to take on the bad guys and their hordes with some dedicated training and help from a group who have rescued him. The fights are very fast and bloody as you'd expect here because ultimately this is not that original a concept and scenes of gruesome fights in hotel kitchens for example have been done many times before. But Patel proves his action chops and the film is entertaining if you can stomach the bloody violence.

Rather a gruesome film from director Ron Howard who is usually a bit more restrained but this western is a riveting experience. The story is a simple one but made exceptional by the performances and the character relationships which bolster the structure of the film. Cate Blanchett plays a frontier woman who has some medical skills and is often called upon to help her neighbours with ailments and injuries. She has two daughters and lives with a handsome rancher (Aaron Eckhart). One day her estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones) turns up much to her consternation as many years ago he abandoned the family and went to live with Indians. But she finds she needs him when a renegade Apache (Eric Schweig) and his band kidnap her oldest daughter and other local girls. Father and daughter have to unite on the dangerous trail to rescue the abducted girls before they reach Mexico and are lost forever. The narrative adds in some interesting ideas around spiritual belief and there's the hint of the supernatural within the story. There are some great action set pieces and some nasty deaths. This is an entertaining film that deserves to find a new audience as it seems to have been a bit forgotten. With Val Kilmer in a small cameo and co-starring Evan Rachel Wood and Elisabeth Moss this is worth seeking out.

Partly written by Michael Crichton, produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Jan de Bont you really can't go wrong with this action adventure with it's witty dialogue, great effects and a sort of ensemble cast led by Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt aided by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cary Elwes and Lois Smith. A disaster type movie with extreme weather as the cause, in this case tornadoes which are given their own personality to add to the menace even though the sheer size is enough. The opening tragedy sets the film up as an emotional ride as storm chaser Dr Jo Harding (Hunt) leads a team trying to get close enough to a tornado to launch a new device into its centre. Her estranged husband Bill (Paxton) shows up, who invented the device, with his new girlfriend wanting his divorce papers signed. But of course he's lured back to his instinctive passion for storm chasing and of course they're still in love with each other! Add all this together and you have a pure, adrenalin filled entertainment that is simply great fun.

With nowhere to go with the Toy Story franchise Pixar released this origin story for the iconic Buzz Lightyear with an opening credits explanation that this is the film that inspired the merchandise that so enthralled Andy, the boy from the first film, that he wanted his own Buzz toy. This is an entertaining addition to the Toy Story series even though it's limited to just the one character from the original films, it has plenty of humour although it drags on a little too long and is really for fans longing for Buzz Lightyear's return. Here, voiced by Chris Evans, Buzz is responsible for his exploration spaceship crashing on a distant plant thus stranding the 1200 persons aboard. He vows to put things right by redeveloping the fuel necessary for them to escape the planet. But in typical Buzz fashion things got awry, over and over again, eventually resulting in Buzz and some new friends having to battle a robot army. Josh Brolin and Taika Waititi lend voice duties. There's some fun to be had here but the film lacks the wit and originality of the main series.

With a Grindhouse vibe this noir thriller is great not least due to the top performance from Kristen Stewart, an actor of considerable talent. She plays Lou, the manager of a small town gym, where she has the mundane duties of clearing blocked toilets and dealing with the testosterone fuelled customers. Then into her life comes Jackie (Katy O'Brien), a gay body builder, devastatingly attractive and passing through on her way to a competition in Las Vegas. They begin a relationship and fall in love but Lou introduces her to steroids which affects Jackie in a surreal way especially when the two of them have to contend with Lou's nasty brother in law (Dave Franco) and his abuse of her sister (Jena Malone) and Lou's crimelord father (Ed Harris), a seedy gun range owner with a very bad past. This is a tale of murder, revenge all wrapped around a theme of feminine control. It goes in directions you'll not expect and is a constant joy, very often because it is firmly tongue in cheek and humorous. What's particularly great here is that whilst it goes over-the-top it also remains very subtle mostly due to the fantastically nuanced performance of Stewart.

This epic film is a visionary masterpiece. It's a long film and was savagely cut by the studio on its initial release resulting in it gaining a poor reputation. But when it was later restored to director Sergio Leone's final cut it was revealed as a masterclass in modern film making. Its a gangster film and along with some of Leone's other films it's a study of the birth fo modern America. Robert De Niro, in one of his finest roles, is David 'Noodles' Aaronson who returns to New York in 1968, thirty five years after fleeing the city. His return sparks his memories of the 1920s & 30s when he was a member of a gang of four who rise from street gang to run a powerful organised crime group during the prohibition. His close friendship with Max (James Woods), who gradually becomes more erratic and unpredictable, forces Noodles to betray him. With the narrative cleverly cutting between the various timelines and with a stunningly beautiful and realistic recreation of a period New York this is not only a really engrossing film but also one that has some staggeringly marvellous scenes. There's some sharp and gritty violence and some of it is uncomfortable to watch but overall this is an elegiac piece of film art and you'll struggle to find a movie as good as this. With Elizabeth McGovern, Joe Pesci and others in the cast there's little to find wrong even when the film may seem a little enigmatic. If you've never seen this film then it really is one you should seek out as soon as possible.

This is a comedy/horror misfire, a film that is trying to be a teen coming-of-age comedy and a Heathers cum Beetlejuice (both 1988) horror spoof all at the sometime and effectively being mediocre at both. I found the film a bit of a bore to be frank. Lisa is an introverted teenager mostly due to her mother having been murdered by a mad axe murderer and now she's growing up with her father and new stepmother (Carla Gugino) who is an acid tongued cow! On a fateful night Lisa has her party drink spiked by a nasty schoolmate and a violent storm reanimates a 19th century corpse in a nearby cemetery. Lisa befriends the corpse (Cole Sprouse) and decides to help him regain his lost body parts and help him to full restoration via a faulty tanning machine. It's all rather silly and haphazard in tone and pace. It's certainly nowhere near the great comedy/horrors that have been made.

A typical British underdog story that bears similarities to The Dig (2021), a much better told story, where an amateur battles with the establishment. Based on real events although with some controversy as the actual persons involved have criticised the way events have been portrayed here. This is the story of amateur historian Philippa Langley's (Sally Hawkins) dogged determination to find the remains of Richard III, eventually uncovered in a Leicester car park. Into this story we are given the family drama of Langley and her collapsing marriage to husband, John (Steve Coogan, who also wrote the screenplay) and her battles with mental illness. These are used as devices to highlight her struggles to get a search organised by the University of Leicester and the established archaeological and historical academics. Where the film takes on a thread of ridiculousness is in it's putting front and centre that Langley is driven by feelings and hunches rather than research and these feelings are given to her by her hallucinating that Richard III (Harry Lloyd) is visiting her and giving her clues. I suspect this is where Coogan has attempted to give the story a vague comedic slant. Whatever the reasons it makes the film seem daft and despite the solid central performance by Hawkins I'm left with the view this story would have been better served by a more serious script. Additionally the clichéd characterisations of some of the establishment, for instance Lee Ingleby's University representative as a misogynstic, condescending individual, is unnecessary when showing the scepticism that Langley no doubt faced. A film that is a bit of a let down.

A charming comedy drama from writer/director John Carney that follows a theme he's pursued in other films namely that music can be a transformative power. With Eve Hewson giving a magnificent and quite nuanced performance as Flora, a Dublin based single mum, who had a baby as a teenager and has regretted it since. Her son, Max (Orén Kinlan) is repeatedly in trouble with the law for shoplifting and they have a confrontational relationship. Flora rescues a damaged guitar from a skip and has it repaired for Max's birthday but he rejects it so she decides to learn herself. This decision brings her into an online flirtation with Los Angeles based guitar tutor, Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who teaches her about the power of music. Soon she and Max begin to bond over his passion to for electronic music and their lives begin to take on a new beginning. Jack Reynor costars as Flora's ex husband and Max's father. This is a simple, straightforward story with a soft centre and whilst it has it's flaws it's an entertaining film with an undeniably star lead actor in Hewson and it's well worth your time.

This humble, low budget gem of a film will warm the cockles of your heart. Set in Dublin it's a romantic, humorous drama about a young busker (Glen Hansard) who has a talent for songwriting but doesn't know how to get a music career going. Then one day he meets a young Czech immigrant (Markéta Irglová) and she encourages him to play, write and record his songs with her help. They slowly and gently fall in love during their journey together. Director John Carney shot using long lenses for the street scenes so ordinary people were caught up in the everyday drama. The music by Glen Hansard (of the band The Frames and who also had a small part in 1991s The Commitments) is fantastic and the songs essentially tell the story of the love that blossoms between the two main characters. This film has been much admired by the likes of Steven Spielberg for its simplicity and beautiful story and it really is a delight. There are some wonderful moments that are very subtle and watched carefully you can see where the these two young people begin to fall in love. What a little cracker of a film, there was even a stage show based upon it after it's reputation grew. If you've never seen this then I highly recommend it.

This remains one of the finest of American motion pictures notable for introducing Marlon Brando's genius to the screen. He plays Terry Malloy, a low level dock worker who once had a chance at a major boxing title but being under the control of corrupt union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) cost him his chance. When Terry inadvertently lets Friendly's thugs find and murder Joey, an informer, Terry's conscience is awakened. When he begins to fall for Joey's sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) and his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) is also murdered and influenced by a local priest (Karl Malden) Terry agrees to testify against Friendly at risk to his own life. This is ahead of its time for a Hollywood film, a story of corruption and social injustice and a crime/social drama that it's difficult to top. A gritty realistic portrayal of organised crime, the ineffectiveness of the justice system and the story of the small man rapped behind a culture of violence and suppression. A key American film and a must see. All the performances are topnotch and the film won 8 Oscars including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress.