A horror/thriller film centering around a family-run mortuary run by Coroner Tommy Tilden (Brian Cox) & his trainee son Austin (Emile Hirsch).Business is pretty dead for the night (geddit) when the local police force arrive at the mortuary with the dead body of a young woman found naked,no ID & no visible signs as the cause of death who just happened to be found in a house where multiple murders had been carried out.
As Tommy & his son Austin prepare the body of the mysterious unknown woman for an autopsy (cause of death) mysterious things start happening like the relentless thunderstorms outside,the flickering of lights & strange groaning noises coming from the ventilation system which shows the inevitable signs that this is no ordinary body or an ordinary murder case to solve but as things proceed with the autopsy they start unravelling something far more sinister at play.
The fact that entire film is more or less filmed in one place (the mortuary) may sound a bit boring but the camaradarie & banter between father (Cox) & son (Hirsch) & slow unravelling plot that is at times unexpected (particularly the ending) I found it a pretty good film.7/10.
Director Sean Baker's follow up to Tangerine is set during a stifling summer in the shadow of Disney World,although very vibrant it accurately depicts life on the bread line.The story follows Moonee and Halley,a mother and daughter combo who instead of feeling sorry for themselves,try and live life to the full around the dilapidated Magic Kingdom Hotel they call home.Despite the very sullen and real subject matter this was one of the best feel good films of last year due to the brilliant script and wonderful acting from Brooklyn Prince and Brie Vinaite.
1970s effort starring Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely currently doing the rounds on TCM. Christopher Lee appears as Mycroft, showing where the modern Sherlock stole its idea of him having a shady position in the Government spook world and warning Sherlock off investigating/meddling in certain things.
Slightly odd mix of comedy and mystery, and feels a bit episodic. The director Billy Wilder apparently wanted to make it 3 hours long and have other "mysteries" added into it. I think the studio was wise to nix this idea : you could easily miss out the first half hour which has really nothing to do with the rest of the plot and just seems like an over-extended excuse to make jokes about whether Holmes and Watson were a gay couple (Holmes pretends to be to get out of an embarrassing proposition to father a child with a retiring Russian ballerina. Watson is not amused). It seems a bit too much like this sub-plot was included to justify the film's title and some cheap laughs.
The story does not really get going until after all that, when a mysterious amensia-suffering woman is delivered to Baker Street, having been fished out of a river.* Then it gets more interesting as they follow a trail of clues up to Scotland in search of the woman's missing husband.
Robert Stephens is a fairly creditable Holmes, though he apparently had a nervous breakdown during the filming.
(*An idea, incidentally, recycled in the other 1970s Holmes film "The Seven Per Cent Solution" , where Holmes goes to Vienna to be cured of cocaine addiction by Sigmund Freud, and ends up investigating a similar case of an unidentified woman rescued from a river after apparently having been deliberately dumped and left to drown ).
Oh - and if you do watch it on TCM, for God's sake record it and/or use "Live Pause" for a bit to be able to fast forward through all the commercial breaks, or you'll be there forever !!!!
Sofia Coppola's seductively feminist take on Thomas Cullinan's novel sees a wounded union soldier nursed back to health at an all girls school only to become an object of the students desires,without really putting up much of a protest.Well acted by all the cast especially Colin Farrell,Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning.Just as effective as the excellent Clint Eastwood version.
I had no idea the tone of this would so dark compared to the previous films but I loved, i should have known with this film being a 12 and the previous films being a PG, the rest of the films in the series from here on a 12 rated so something tells me it’s gonna get a lot darker lol.