Mother
Mommie dearest.
Until Avatar came along, Bong Joon-ho’s wonderful monster movie The Host was the all time top-grossing movie in South Korea. His fourth feature, Mother is an impeccably made, deeply affecting thriller which,…
Read review ↗CRITICISM / CULTURE / CINEMA
A life in
the pictures.
Films that stay with you.
Writing that looks a little closer.
Explore the collected reviews of Linda O’Brien.
397 REVIEWS · ONE CRITIC’S PERSPECTIVE
mother!
Traumatic birth.
The title of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film is mother! Lower case m, exclamation point. In a way, this very particular use of punctuation could be said to demonstrate a microcosm of the…
Read review ↗
Mr. Turner
A brush with genius.
In terms of his work alone, J.M.W. Turner is a deeply intriguing proposition. Compared with his contemporaries such as Constable, Turner was a man out of time, his work foreshadowing that of…
Read review ↗
Museum Hours
A broad canvas.
Johann (Bobby Sommer) has led an interesting but loud life. In his younger years, he managed pop bands, driving tour buses around Europe, his ears ringing at gigs. Then as a woodwork…
Read review ↗
Mysteries of Lisbon
A long story.
There are two things that keep popping up in discussions of Mysteries of Lisbon; first that its mammoth running time of four and a half hours simply flies by without you noticing…
Read review ↗
Nightcrawler
Newsworthy.
In Los Angeles, times are hard for Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal). Unemployed and unemployable, he scrabbles a living from theft, while devouring self-help literature in the hopes that a positive mental attitude…
Read review ↗
Now You See Me 2
A feat of misdirection.
Magicians have always had a reputation for being quite naff; a reputation no doubt born from the over the top stagecraft, the preponderance of velvet waistcoats and the smugness that so often…
Read review ↗
Nymph()maniac: Volumes I & II
Carry on Dogme.
So it’s come to this; the release of a new Lars Von Trier film and one of its stars is making a bigger social nuisance of himself than the director. Yes, while…
Read review ↗
Oculus
Unbreakable.
Mirrors. Scary things really…and I don’t just mean that shock you get when you peer at yourself through bleary-eyes after a night on the sauce. Their sinister potential has been exploited in…
Read review ↗
Office Christmas Party
Yule be sorry.
When did chaos become a substitute for wit in American screen comedy? Well, it was probably around the time that Todd Phillips and his Hangover crew wrecked a Las Vegas hotel room…
Read review ↗
On the Road
Beat down.
Admittedly, it’s a long time since I read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road but I definitely remember there being a lot more road involved than what I saw in Walter Salles’ new…
Read review ↗
Oranges and Sunshine
Suffer little children.
Between the 1940s and 1970s, thousands of children, many of whom were in the care of that state, were forcibly deported from the United Kingdom to Australia. Many were told their parents…
Read review ↗
Our Children
Suffer little children.
As a visual statement of intent, the sight of five small white coffins slowly ascending into the hold of a plane is pretty unequivocal. This is one of the first scenes of…
Read review ↗
Our Family Wedding
An invitation to reject.
You’ve got to wonder what goes on in Forest Whitaker’s head. There are few actors working today that can match him for careening wildly between great work and utter turkeys. Already this…
Read review ↗
Out of the Furnace
Brothers in arms.
Out of the Furnace comes out of the traps with intent as we are introduced to a character named Harlan DeGroat (a ferocious Woody Harrelson) in a violent and atmospheric scene set…
Read review ↗
Oz the Great and Powerful
A whiz of a wiz.
When I was younger I was scarred for life by the 1985 movie Return to Oz. Where The Wizard of Oz is all glorious technicolor and ruby slippers, Return shows a murky,…
Read review ↗
Paranormal Activity 2
Stars of CCTV.
The horror sequel has always been a difficult thing to pull off but the found footage film is surely the most difficult thing to follow. As the genre relies heavily on the…
Read review ↗
Patrick’s Day
Crazy stupid love.
Writer director Terry McMahon (he of the horrendously received Charlie Casanova), has made a deeply unglamorous film about mental illness and for this, he should be commended. Far too often mental illness…
Read review ↗