“That’s what I want. No pity,†explains François Cluzet’s quadriplegic, Paul, to his adviser about his “pitiless†carer, Driss (Omar Sy, very convincing), a Senegalese rough diamond from a La Haine-style estate in Paris.
“If you’re bigger and more stupid you’d be a bully too, it’s called survival of the thickest,†explains the rotund Neil to Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), a boy who can see ghosts.
Katharine Isabelle convinces as Mary, a budding surgeon who stumbles into body modification to make ends meet in this grisly horror from the Soska twins, aka the Twisted Sisters.
Denis Lavant’s “performerâ€, while being ferried around Paris in a white stretch limo, adopts 10 different guises –including a withered old lady, a troubled parent, a hoodlum and, most memorably, a one-eyed, barefoot, flower-munching troll/leprechaun.
A bold, atypical thriller from Ealing, scripted by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and starring Maggie Smith in her first film role.
The spirit of Carry On pervades this limp sex comedy, which centres on the invention of the vibrator in Victorian London.
Forget the excellent John Thaw series. In Nick Love’s joyless take on Flying Squad hard-nuts Ray Winstone and Plan B play Regan and Carter, boozing, corrupt coppers who are being investigated by internal affairs (Steven Mackintosh) for their diabolical tactics: “There’s even talk of baseball bats”.
James Marsh’s determinedly downbeat tale, set in 1993 during the Northern Ireland peace process, centres on Colette (Andrea Riseborough, excellent), an inept IRA terrorist who is captured by MI5 after bungling a London Tube bombing.
I’d tell you to forget Sylvester Stallone’s overblown Judge Dredd movie, but you probably already have.
Strip this bootlegger tale of its extreme violence and what you’re left with is one of those hokey, cliché-ridden afternoon TV movies.