This was published 4 months ago
Hello and welcome to this week’s film review wrap – the big movies landing in cinemas this week.
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Crime 101
★★★
(MA) 140 minutes
Cars swarming along a Los Angeles highway at night, skyscrapers glittering on the horizon, a city full of lonely souls yearning for connection… For anyone raised on the hardboiled side of US cinema, Bart Layton’s Crime 101 will feel deeply, invitingly familiar.
The source for Layton’s screenplay is a 2020 novella by Don Winslow, with the same unpromising title. But the larger debt here is to the films of Michael Mann, particularly Mann’s classics Thief and Heat.
The Mannerisms aren’t restricted to the city-symphony montages and the atonal electronic score, supplied in this case by the British composer Benjamin John Power, otherwise known as Blanck Mass.
FILM
“Wuthering Heights” ★★★
(M) 136 minutes
The period picture is receiving a thorough shake-up. Forget those meticulous Merchant Ivory recreations. Today’s period filmmakers prefer to recast the past as a sexed-up version of the present in fancy dress.
The trend began with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. Then it was given a vigorous nudge by the TV series Bridgerton. Now we have Emerald Fennell’s take on “Wuthering Heights”, which raises the stakes with a wealth of heaving bosoms, straining bodices and sexual metaphors. Watch for the close-up of the copulating snails.
To read the full review, head here.
Whistle
★★½
(MA) 100 minutes
I felt a modest glow of national pride watching the horror movie Whistle, the clearest demonstration yet that Talk To Me – a fair-sized international hit for the Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou in 2022 – is viewed by other filmmakers as a source worth borrowing from.
Talk To Me concerned a group of bored Adelaide teenagers who unwisely get involved with the occult, using an embalmed hand as a conduit to the next world. Brought to us by the British team of director Corin Hardy (The Nun) and writer Owen Egerton (Blood Fest), Whistle chronicles the series of unfortunate events that unfold after a comparably sinister artifact – an Aztec “death whistle” in the shape of a skull – shows up in the locker of the heroine, Chrysanthanum (Dafne Keen), known as Chrys for short.
The whistle has the power to “summon your death”, as we learn from Ivy Raymore (Michelle Fairley), one of two representatives of the older generation who share the task of supplying exposition (the other is a chain-smoking teacher played by Nick Frost, winkingly named Mr Craven after Wes Craven, director of Scream).