ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE **** USA 2023 Dir: David Gregory. 100 mins United with experienced collaborators like cameraman Jim Kunz and editor Douglas Buck, Severin’s David Gregory has delivered a funny, insightful feature-length retrospective on the jaw-dropping Brucesploitation cycle that swiftly unleashed itself on the world in the wake of Bruce Lee’s untimely death. It opens with a whistlestop tour of the real Bruce’s short but remarkable life and career: actor David Chiang and expert Mike Leeder are among the talking heads reflecting on the Run Run Shaw factory and Lee’s international fame, with the kind of anecdotes that…
Author: Steven West
ORPHAN: FIRST KILL **** USA / Canada 2022 Dir: William Brent Bell. 102 mins Here’s a belated prequel to what seemed a memorably twisted one-off that surprises by not going the lazy route. Director William Brent Bell (of THE BOY films and WER) and screenwriter David Coggeshall, realising they can’t outdo the bravura second half twist of ORPHAN, find a different, satisfying way of subverting our expectations of what initially appears to be a join-the-dots cash-in. And, the biggest asset of both films, now-twentysomething star Isabelle Fuhrman, authentically inhabits (with the help of some cinematic trickery) the (even younger) body…
ORPHAN **** USA 2009 Dir: Jaume Collet-Serra. 123 mins Isabelle Fuhrman is terrific as Esther, one of cinema’s memorable Bad Seeds: a nine year old, Russian-born girl who charms Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard at CCH Pounder’s orphanage as they grieve the recent death of what would have been their third child. This intelligent, well-spoken orphan has her demons, however: bullied by bitchy classmates for her “Little Bo Peep” everyday clothes, she threatens or harms anyone threatening her new life. Sarsgaard is blinded by her charm while his wife slips into paranoia overdrive, determined to figure out her dark secrets.…
FALL **** UK / USA 2022 Dir: Scott Mann. 107 mins Here’s another in the sub-genre of nerve-wracking, single-location, one-word-title tiny-cast (it’s a two-hander for most of the running time) survivalist movies. Following the harrowing likes of BURIED and FROZEN (not that one), FALL is a vertiginous, sweat-inducing endurance test for audiences of a particular persuasion. And just a dynamic, intense cinematic experience for everyone else. It opens in CLIFFHANGER territory with a past-trauma prologue to launch the bereaved heroine’s narrative arc before the first half-hour positions all the essential elements that will pay off as major suspense beats later…
BARBARIAN **** USA 2022 Dir: Zach Cregger. 102 mins One of the prominent “sleeper” horror hits of the latter half of 2022, writer-director Zach Cregger’s picture offers everything from ironic needle drops and incidental social commentary to a couple of surprising narrative shifts in line with modern genre milestones as diverse as PSYCHO and AUDITION. The movie suggested by both the opening stretch and the (clever) marketing is not quite the one you get – and it’s all the better for it. The first half an hour is a masterclass in nervy tension, and it nods directly to the Hitchcock…