Mean Creek first published by Movie Gazette, 6 April 2005 From Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) to films as varied as John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982),…
Down in the Valley first published by Film4, 14 March 2006 It may be shot in expansive anamorphic widescreen, and feature an outlaw gunning for mythic glory, but David Jacobson’s latest feature unfolds not in Monument Valley like most Hollywood oaters, but in California’s present-day San Fernando Valley, with its 12-lane freeways and suburban sprawl. …
Lymelife first published by Sight & Sound, July 2010 Review: “This feels like a perpetual acid trip.” It is the late 1970s, and dazed, hopeless Charlie Bragg (Timothy Hutton) is trying to describe the bewildering effects of Lyme disease to his 15-year-old neighbour Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin). Scott has never ingested LSD (although he will…
The Last Thing Mary Saw first published by Movies on Weekends The Last Thing Mary Saw begins with young Mary (Stefanie Scott) opening a book to a story entitled The Old Lady of Bethabara, and starting to read. The next scene is separated from this not just by the film’s title, but by time. For…
Lords of Chaos first published by Sight & Sound, May 2019 Review: “Based”, as introductory text states, “on truth, lies, and what actually happened”, and adapted by Dennis Magnusson and director Jonas Åkerlund (Spun, 2002; Polar, 2019) from Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s 2003 book of the same name on the early Norwegian black metal…