Comedy and Tony McKibbin

Fine, Totally Fine

9 Jul 2009

Less character-driven than character trait-driven, Yosuke Fujita’s film follows three youngish incompetents as they try to make the best of their lives, all played charmingly by well-known young Japanese actors. There is Yosiyosi Arakawa’s Teruo, the…

Funuke, Show Some Love, You Losers

9 Jul 2009

A long-winded title for a film that ultimately runs out of puff, Funuke is at its best in the early stages. As a conceited struggling young actress comes back to her hometown after her parents’ death, Sumika (Sato Eriko) is as trapped in denial as she…

Catholic Boys

28 May 2009

(15) 100min This is a lightweight study of teenage boys coping with the problems and pains of adolescence, kids equally burdened with the demands placed upon them by a Catholic education. Set in Brooklyn in the mid-60s, Catholic Boys stars Andrew…

Slacker

17 Jan 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 93min (Metrodome rental/retail) Originally released in 1991, Richard Linklater’s fine low-budget second feature may bring to mind one of contemporary cinema’s most over-used storytelling devices: the multiple character tale. But…

The Twelve Chairs

4 Jan 2008

COMEDY DRAMA (12A) 93min (Network DVD rental/retail) When Hipolito (Enriqye Saniesteban) hears that his dying mother-in-law has left a fortune in jewels stashed away in one of her dozen imported chairs, he determines to find the missing fortune.

Les Bronzes

1 Nov 2007

This surprisingly engaging little 1978 comedy by Patrice Leconte (My Best Friend, The Hairdresser’s Husband) was a huge hit in France when it was released. Managing to be both cynical and warm as it takes a jaundiced look at the holidaying French…

Romuald et Juliette

1 Nov 2007

With broad hindsight it can often seem that too many French films made in the 80s centred around life swapping scenarios or sudden shifts in perspective and expectation – whether that happened to be Bertrand Blier with mischievous satires like Tenue de…

The Ex

4 Oct 2007

(15) 90min (Icon/Rental) COMEDY Meet the Parents meets There’s Something About Mary with a bit of Garden State thrown in for good measure just about sums up the hardly original but often amusing latest Zach Braff vehicle. Playing a husband who’s…

Labyrinth of Passion

4 Oct 2007

(18) 94min (Tartan/DVD Retail) SCREWBALL MELODRAMA It was with this, Pedro Almodovar’s second film, made in 1982, that the brand of melodrama which has become known as ‘Almodorama’ – essentially a combination of melodrama and screwball comedy…

Do You Remember Dolly Bell? - DVD review

Do You Remember Dolly Bell?

11 Dec 2006

COMEDY/ROMANCE Emir Kusturica usually works a combination of nostalgia and rumbustiousness, but often the former loses out to the latter and many of his films (like Underground, Black Cat, White Cat) end up like crazy multiple circus acts. Which is…