Enola Holmes 3 review – Netflix mystery franchise is starting to lose steam

Millie Bobby Brown returns, along with the creative team behind Adolescence, for an often thoughtful yet ultimately lesser threequel Despite the ever-increasing size and dominance of Netflix, the streamer has continued to struggle with its most obvious aim. While viewers might flock there for smooth-brained dating shows, tawdry true crime, Harlan Coben thrillers and junky romcoms, the platform is yet to be known for creating original movie franchises, the bread and butter of most old-fashioned Hollywood studios, for better or worse. The problem Netflix often faces is that to turn a big-budget bet into a cultural event, it requires more than a low-stakes click at home and a brief weekend’s worth of chatter. Big numbers might have met wannabe franchise-starters Red Notice and The Grey Man but a lack of real long-term interest has meant that sequels haven’t followed, while its most expensive film ever, Chris Pratt vehicle The Electric State, sank with both audiences and critics. It’s why ...

Limbo review – hardbitten outback noir with a compassionate heart

Simon Baker plays a ruined cop investigating a cold-case murder in this tough, sandblasted thriller that coolly lays out the racism and discrimination the Indigenous population face

Indigenous Australian film-maker Ivan Sen brings to Berlin a terrific outback noir, a cold-case crime procedural that he has written and directed – and also shot in a stark monochrome, which makes the vast skies and cratered earth of South Australia’s abandoned opal mines look like another planet.

The setting is the town of Umoona, where a grizzled cop arrives, broodingly listening to a Christian talkshow on the car radio, and checking into a place unsubtly called the Limbo Motel, where his room is a bizarre stone grotto, apparently repurposed from one of the disused mines. This is detective Travis Hurley, played in careworn, weatherbeaten style by Simon Baker – very much resembling Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Hurley is a former drug squad officer who has become addicted to heroin; his superiors have quite clearly given him this hopeless job in the middle of nowhere as a means of getting him out of the way. His ostensible task is to reopen a 20-year-old case: the unsolved disappearance of an Indigenous woman. This was casually and incompetently investigated by white officers at the time, who were concerned only in getting a confession from (any) Indigenous man.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/9U4ZmWw
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton

Malaika Arora scolds 16-year-old dancer for inappropriate gestures: “He is winking, giving flying kisses”