You’re a lot more likely to fall in love with the very alternative musical duo Sparks after watching Edgar Wright’s comprehensive, affectionate rock doc THE SPARKS BROTHERS. Wright interviews famous fans (often having fun with the captions in the process), collaborators and the Mael Brothers themselves and tells the remarkable, weird and wonderful story of their career with footage from performances, backstage, music videos and animation. It’s about their relationship and their work more than their lives, which intentionally remain illusive, so don’t come expecting any massive personal revelations about the Brothers Mael. What you can expect is passionate album-by-album discussion of the music, what it means and what it means to people all presented in a playful, knowing style worthy of Sparks themselves. SSP
Review in Brief: The Sparks Brothers (2021)
Review in Brief: The Suicide Squad (2021)
The best and the worst thing about THE SUICIDE SQUAD is that writer-director James Gunn was given complete creative freedom by Warner Bros. On the one hand you have fun character interplay and dues given to compelling, previously Z-List comic characters (particularly Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2 and David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man). On the other you have a fairly unwieldy film with an over-stuffed and circuitous middle section and more than a few sequences that feel like they’ve been made ultraviolet or nasty for the sake of provoking a reaction (particularly those involving John Cena’s Peacemaker). While not everything lands and it could probably do with a tighter edit and sense of purpose, this is unashamedly comic-booky entertainment and Gunn still brings mischief, heart and some batshit (maybe that should be ratshit?) imagery to bear. SSP
Review in Brief: Werewolves Within (2021)
WEREWOLVES WITHIN is an absolute treat for horror-comedy fans, and cements Josh Ruben as a new master of meta scares. Not many horrors would open with a Mr Rogers quote, but it works creepily, atonally well. Believe it or not it comes back around as a plot point later as well. Mishna Wolff’s (talk about nominative determinism) script is peppered with deadpan exchanges (“I’m going to find out what killed your dead husband”) and the whole cast lead by the likeable Sam Richardson entertainingly sell this whodunnit with werewolves. Ruben makes the most of a modest budget and confined setting and just like in his debut SCARE ME does more with shadows and sound design than many lesser directors do with the newest and shiniest of VFX. SSP
Review in Brief: Another Round (2020)
Alcohol: the great social liberator and the great destroyer, or as Homer Simpson famously put it “the cause of, and solution to all of life’s problems”. ANOTHER ROUND follows a group of middle-class friends and teachers in Denmark who experiment with the concept of having a little alcohol in your bloodstream during the day improving their performance, passion and dynamism. Inevitably, they take things too far. Director Thomas Vinterberg deftly guides his film through a tonal labyrinth and has made something that manages to be hard-hitting and hilarious, reflective and raucous, a terrific time and a terrifying one, a lot like many people’s relationship with drinking really. The core cast are all wonderful but the MVPs are undoubtedly Mads Mikkelsen’s listless history teacher Martin and regular Vinterberg collaborator Thomas Bo Larsen as over-compensating PE teacher Tommy – between them they are given the most memorable and hard-hitting moments including a joyous finale that fully utilises Mikkelsen’s former life as a dancer. SSP
‘Planet of the Apes’ at 20 – Review
Review in Brief: The Woman in the Window (2021)
The most annoying thing about THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is that Amy Adams gives a good performance. The next is that the film, about an agoraphobic child psychologist who is convinced she witnesses a murder in the house across her street, not only lifts heavily from Hitchcock thrillers (a lot of films do, so what?), but shows REAR WINDOW and SPELLBOUND on screen, directly inviting those comparisons. There’s very little to recommend in the film aside from a committed Adams; the rest of the cast are wasted and it’s stylistically overblown and clumsily written throughout. Even if you’re thinking things are just inoffensively watchable, dully derivative at the halfway point, the hectic final act and its multiple stupid twists will ensure you’re begging for the end. SSP
Reviews in Brief: Fear Street Trilogy (2021)
Welcome to Shadyside for a trilogy of horror films telling the story of the curse of Sarah Fier. This might have been inspired by the books of RL Stine, but be warned – GOOSEBUMPS this ain’t.
FEAR STREET PART 1: 1994 starts out as a blatant SCREAM ripoff but becomes considerably more interesting as it goes on. Multiple killers are running around Shadyside, a town with a dark past, now a Scooby Gang of teens must solve a mystery involving a witch’s curse as they are hunted. The occult twist on the usual slasher formula works really well and the characters – including a tender queer romance front-and-centre – are interesting and sympathetic enough for you to root for them not all to die.
FEAR STREET PART 2: 1978 flashes back 16 years to an earlier supernatural killing spree at a summer camp and digs further into the legend of Sarah Fier. The destructive rivalry between twin towns, prosperous Sunnyvale and deprived Shadyside remains from the first film, and here the kills are more plentiful and gory, the story is more evenly paced than Part 1 and the performances and killer needle drops give this instalment a much needed shot of energy. Overall it’s a stronger film, even if it has the middle chapter problem of setting up the finale.
FEAR STREET PART 3: 1666 takes us right back to the beginning and concludes the trilogy in thrilling and hugely entertaining fashion. Here what it’s all been about is made explicit, all the previous cast get to play new but connected historical counterparts and some really great late-game twists reward those who have stuck with the series. There’s clearly more to Leigh Janiak’s trilogy than the run-of-the-mill teen horror release; familiar genre tropes are used, but re-shaped to tell a new story with real empathy behind it. “I don’t fear the devil. I fear the neighbour who would accuse me. I fear the mother who would let her daughter hang”. SSP
SSP Thinks Film 