Movie of the Week – Tangerine
One of the year’s best movies opens this week. Tangerine is a thrilling tale of two trans prostitutes traversing a very non-seasonal Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. Shot on iPhones and featuring a largely amateur cast, the film is quietly revolutionary in execution and theme, but offers the sort of tight narrative storytelling Hollywood long ago forgot how to produce. A must see!
Steve Jobs
The long awaited Steve Jobs finally arrives this week. Set over three product launches, the film borrows its structure from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with various characters, who may or may not be products of Jobs’ imagination, showing up to prompt the tech guru to examine his humanity. Michael Fassbender is magnetic in the title role, and the dialogue is some of the best you’ll hear this year, but we never really get a sense of who Jobs was and why he was so revered.
The Hallow
The Hallow is an effective little Irish horror in which a British couple find themselves terrorised by demonic fairies in rural Ireland. It loses its way in the climax but has some good scares up to that point.
Friday the 13th Part 2
Speaking of scares, for the date that’s in it, the Lighthouse is screening Friday the 13th Part 2 tonight. The scares continue at the Lighthouse tomorrow night with the cult movie Roar, in which Tippi Hedren, star of Hitchcock’s The Birds, is besieged this time by angry lions. And you can round off the weekend at the Lighthouse with a screening of Ryan’s Daughter on Sunday as the venue continues its David Lean season.
By Eric Hillis
