Quick Synopsis: Frankenstein is fed up with being lonely, so he asks a doctor to give him a bride. A corpse that just so happens to be possessed by Mary Shelley is chosen.
I’m writing this review less than a week removed from Jessie Buckley winning best actress at the Academy Awards for her performance in Hamnet. Personally, I didn’t love that film as much as everybody else seemed to, but I’m glad to see she won because she’s one of my favourite performers at the moment. Her performance as the titular character in this is one of the highlights. Her manic energy is exhilarating and makes you want to see her let loose in films a bit more, rather than being restrained to emotional and high-art pieces; give her the villain role in a slasher movie, and she’ll kill it. Without her in this movie, it would be a lot worse, and that’s saying something.
I should have liked The Bride. I want to look at it and see something lovingly crafted, feminist as fuck, and batshit insane. It is all of those things, but it’s also messy. Not in a “blood and guts everywhere” way, In a “this needs to be better” way. It’s telling that the film it most reminds me of is Joker: Folie A Deux. But whilst that felt like a musical that didn’t want to be a musical, this feels like a film that wants to be a musical but isn’t. It’s horrifically anachronistic, and it feels deliberately so. A film set in 1930’s Chicago that features references to astronauts, and a club that plays modern techno music support the theory that it’s deliberate, but it’s also incredibly annoying as a viewer to have the story break like that in completely inconsequential ways. It would be like if the Starbucks cup in Game Of Thrones was a deliberate choice.
Let’s be honest, though, a lot of the film is inconsequential. The Bride inspires a feminist uprising, where women across the country mimic her style in a show of defiance. Guess how that plays into the plot? The women torture a mobster during the closing credits, or to put it another way, it doesn’t tie into the plot in an important way. It should have. How can you have a Frankenstein movie that involves an angry mob and NOT have a “villagers storming the castle by torchlight” scene? It should have been a big part. Frank and The Bride should have had an argument which led to her leading the group to his home. Maybe not that, but something. The Bride leading a group of women would be an incredibly powerful scene to witness, but we don’t get it.
The Bride! has so many good ideas contained within: the allusions to Old Hollywood, the isolation that the monster feels, a wronged woman seeking revenge against an uncaring society. All of them are perfect ideas for a story like this, yet it tries to do all three and has no idea how to connect the differing threads. So it doesn’t bother to try; instead, it just has the two characters lurch (lol, Addams Family reference) from one scene to the next like two characters in a video game.
The characters don’t even feel consistent. We’re never given a reason for The Bride to like Frank. At one point, she even decries the name Bride of Frankenstein, saying she just wants to be known as The Bride. She is her own person, she is independent, and she doesn’t need to be tied to a man for happiness and fulfilment. Then, a few minutes later, they’re portrayed as soulmates who will spend eternity together. No matter how cool the moments are on their own, there’s no cohesion between them.
Before seeing this, I had one of my friends tell me she thought it was “the worst film of the 2020’s”. Personally, I feel that that’s War Of The Worlds erasure. It’s not quite the worst film of the decade, it’s not even the worst of the year, but it’s probably the biggest gap between potential and result that I’ve seen in a long time. Like I said, it has some great moments, and the story being told is interesting, but it doesn’t make for a good final product. Ultimately, it’s like a really drunk person retelling Paddington 2 who keeps getting distracted by the football results: you can tell there’s a good story underneath the bullshit, but you don’t have a shovel big enough, and all you want to do is tell them to focus the fuck up.
combined with his veneer of a can-do attitude, echoes many promises the recession generation were educated on, but didn’t have delivered. Showing how ruthless someone really has to be to achieve the ever elusive American dream.
manipulative, and downright evil at times. “If it bleeds, it leads” as is repeated multiple times in the film, with Rene Russo giving a chemical turn as the News show runner, clearly taking inspiration from 1996’s Network, with the satirisation of the ultra-violet media being the focus of that film, but as I haven’t seen it, can’t comment further.
Gyllenhaal, giving still a career best performance in an already well versed one, dropping 20 pounds and digging deep to portray a mere reflection of a real man. The other being Dan Gilroy’s dark, clever and witty script; both married perfectly to fully realize and bring this character and story to life, and give us a sociopath for the digital age. (Move over Sherlock)
Behind the camera Dan Gilroy does a clean job of making the L.A. nightscape a very cold and isolating place, reflecting its lead character, and sharing many shades with Michael Mann’s Collateral, which was clearly an influence. It’s a high-class and pristine looking film, especially for a directorial debut, having a gorgeous neo-noir style; and his motifs of focusing on camera screens to establish how the camera sees things – instead of exactly how they actually are – works as a great and sometimes surreal effect.
anything wrong with the direction, just compared to its other elements. It doesn’t seem like it pushes the envelope as much, and has left me wondering how the film would have turned out in the hands of a David Fincher or a 
The second film this year from Indie director superstar Noah Baumbach, after his critically acclaimed While We’re Young, which was…okay. But he makes up for it here in this sharply funny and very earnest film about adult life, facing your limitations, and the fact that the people who act the happiest rarely really are. All as seen from the POV of an introverted university student as she gets to know her new manic pixy hipster step-sister. Again a bit of a plot-less film, but the shear energy Greta Gerwig brings to her role, and the zany dynamic she and every other character has, takes this film and its characters to a whole other level, and then turns the comedy around to look at the tragedy of it all. It’s possibly his best work since The Squid and the Wale. 
From the director of Anchorman of all people comes the other awesome investigative film of the year, and don’t believe the trailers, that is what this film is. Selling itself as some form of Ocean’s 11 but about the 2008 Credit Crunch, what this film actually turned out to be is a very in-depth and detailed look into all the fraud and corruption the Bank’s did to cause the financial crash. And it’s told from three different parties separately looking into it, each group led by an outstanding Christian Bale, Steve Carell, and Brad Pitt. But the trailer didn’t completely lie; this is a comedy (if a thrilling emotional one), with most of the big laughs coming from an enjoyably
sleazy Ryan Gosling who narrates the film while also having his own place in it, trying to explain to us the inner workings of stock broking, and introduces some ridiculous celebrity cameos. Surprisingly well directed, and masterfully written and acted, it has a few bums and clunks in its tone, but is much more than the fast and funny caper the trailer tried to sell it as.
of felt bad if I didn’t mention it somewhere, but that’s far from the biggest reason it’s here. The Voices is a delightfully quirky black comedy from the director of Persepolis (because of course), led by a possibly career best Ryan Reynolds as a mentally ill serial killer who talks to his dog and cat. If that doesn’t sell it to you, nothing will. This film revels, revels, in its warped quirky darkness, and manages to be simultaneously, outlandishly funny, disturbingly dramatic, and just plain charmingly odd because of it. It’s a film with a bonafide destiny to be a cult classic, for the people who like their comedy, dark, violent, and silly. And with this, 
The oddest but most accurate description I’ve heard for this 70s set coming of age dramedy, is that it’s the spiritual sequel to Inside Out…now they don’t mean that the titular teenage girl has a bunch of voices in her head, but is instead referring to that it follows the growing development of a young soon to be woman. As Inside Out ends with Riley on the cusp of teenhood, The diary of a teenage Girl picks up a few years later with a fifteen year old girl’s sexual awakening (forgive me for using the word sexual in the same sentence as Inside Out), and that’s what the film is about in a nutshell; sex. It’s about the first time and the times after that, it’s about becoming comfortable with yours and other’s bodies; 
it’s about experimenting and working out what gets you off, and then finding the limits. And I have SUCH respect for this film, because it’s about a fifteen year old’s sexual awakening and it shows it. There are no cutaways or clever angles, you see all of her, and that adds such authenticity to her and her story; because the fact that the film doesn’t shy away from you, means you don’t shy away from it; through every sweet, funny, and emotional moment, on this journey to the end of innocence and the start of everything else.
that’s the perfect mix of cynicism and cheese ball romance, of those little moments and grand gestures. And is the best non-blockbuster/ Edgar Wright film Simon Pegg has ever done. Following a 30 something woman in a romantic rut, she ends up stealing someone else’s blind date, and going on an amazing date with them instead. Now with that set-up this could have easily turned into a basic liar revealed plot, but I’m happy to say it doesn’t (if it did would it be here), and instead goes off in much sweeter and funnier directions. It’s definitely one of the funniest films of the year, and the perfect date movie for people who hate date movies.
This is just funny. Yeah it’s sweet, raunchy, and romantically mature too at times, but mostly it’s just funny. Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie make a strong double act, playing two sex addicts who start a platonic friendship to try and help each-other deal with their relationship issues, and of course fall in love along the way. So it does get a bit too cliché at the end, but the journey there is so fun and so tastefully raunchy it’s still definitely worth a watch.
Diary of A Teenage Girl, this is the other film pushing the boundary for ‘comedy’ this year. Not because it isn’t funny, it’s filled to the brim with funny teen angst and witticisms, but it’s also about a girl dying of cancer, and this isn’t no Fault in Our Stars shit (I say actually liking that film), and stays far away from schmaltz, opting for a much bleaker and deadpan look at teen life and death, and has no quorum ramping up the seriousness and heart wrench when the time comes. Now it maybe too self-indulgent and referential for some people and it definitely reeks of 90’s teen dramedy at times, but past that I found a very earnest and true look at teen life on the outside and at dealing with death, that really captures the teenage voice.
Troubled Productions 