Movie Review: Last Night In Soho (2021)

Genre: Supernatural Psychological Horror Drama Mystery  

Director: Edgar Wright  

Starring: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg  

Running Time: 116 minutes  

Synopsis: Mild-mannered Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) was raised by her grandmother to love 1960s music and culture, and now moves to London to pursue a fashion design education. She rents a room from the kindly Ms Collins (Diana Rigg) in the SoHo neighbourhood, and starts experiencing visions of the vivacious Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who arrived in 1960s London seeking fame as a singer. Sandie is spotted by talent agent Jack (Matt Smith), who appears helpful but has vile intentions. Ellie is initially inspired and exhilarated by her visions, but when Sandie's story turns dark, Ellie's life becomes a nightmare.

What Works Well: In this mind-bending and genre-melding delight, director and co-writer Edgar Wright explores themes of loneliness and fitting-in while simultaneously saluting and persecuting the Swinging Sixties. After a careful introduction to Ellie's ambitions, character, and mental state, Sandie enters the picture with a bang, Anya Taylor-Joy luxuriating in a fearless role. London of the mid-1960s is recreated with loving affection boosted by a terrific soundtrack, inventive cinematography, and clever use of mirrors. But the defining fashions and nightclub pizzazz also hide an exploitive culture feeding on vulnerable young women. A devious across-the-decades crime mystery draws Ellie into danger beyond just nightmares triggered by the past.

What Does Not Work As Well: The horror sequences featuring ghost-like beings lean towards excess and diminish the more effective psychological suspense milieu.

Key Quote:

Ellie: Has a woman ever died in my room?

Ms Collins: This is London. Someone has died in every room in every building and on every street corner in the city.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Menu (2022)

Genre: Satirical Mystery Drama  

Director: Mark Mylod  

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, John Leguizamo, Janet McTeer  

Running Time: 107 minutes  

Synopsis: Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) travel to a small island for an invitation-only dinner at Hawthorn, the restaurant of celebrated Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). Tyler is a wannabe foodie, but Margot is less than impressed with the whole event. The other dinner guests this evening include food critic Lillian (Janet McTeer), a fading movie star (John Leguizamo), a married couple, and three obnoxious business bros. The evening of set-menu courses starts normally enough with Slowik introducing each plate, but events turn weird in a hurry.

What Works Well: This is a humorously acidic descent into an unexpected nightmare, augmented by attentive service and thoughtful wine pairings. Writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy line up a range of targets including a dictionary-mining food critic, crass corporate types, a clumsy foodie with his nose pressed-up against the sophistication window, and an undeserving celebrity. Their horror chamber is a chic evening out where director Mark Mylod unleashes fury from the kitchen in the form of class warfare spiced with Agatha Christie. Ralph Fiennes is chillingly effective, Nicholas Hoult has rarely been better, and Anya Taylor-Joy is the only guest packing streetwise scrappiness.

What Does Not Work As Well: Despite the controlled duration, padding creeps in with some irrelevant interludes, including a hide-and-seek excursion. The time could have been more meaningfully invested in deeper dinner guest definitions.

Conclusion: Societal pretension, personal retribution, and a side of psychosis.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

The Movies Of Anya Taylor-Joy

All movies starring Anya Taylor-Joy and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Morgan (2016)

Split (2016)

Thoroughbreds (2017)

Last Night In Soho (2021)

The Menu (2022)

Amsterdam (2022)

Dune: Part Two (2024, uncredited cameo)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Thoroughbreds (2017)

A drama and dark comedy with crime thriller elements, Thoroughbreds seeks to subvert superficial expectations while poking at scars of emotional detachment. 

In suburban Connecticut, teenagers and former grade school classmates Amanda (Olivia Cooke) and Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) resume a friendship after a period of estrangement. Amanda admits to not feeling any emotions and is undergoing psychological assessments for harming a thoroughbred horse. Lily is pampered and comes from an exceptionally rich family, but hates her stepdad Mark. Lily is also keeping some secrets to herself.

Amanda suggests to Lily that maybe she should consider killing Mark. After initially recoiling, Lily warms up to the idea. The girls approach their acquaintance and petty drug dealer Tim (Anton Yelchin) to do the dirty deed, but not surprisingly, their half-baked plans will go sideways.

Exploring themes of friendship, the class divide, and most acutely the hidden damage within teenagers, Thoroughbreds is captivating and disquieting. Writer and director Cory Finley imports Hitchcockian touches (notably from Strangers On A Train) into a Generation Z world presented as over-analyzed, over-medicated and empathy-deficient, and adds mean streaks of humour and disorienting unpredictability.

The two girls are currents of turmoil beneath a calm surface. Amanda speaks her mind with dumbfounding directness, is always one mental step ahead of everyone else, and never hesitates to reveal her smarts. Lily hides behind the prim and proper facade of the elite. Both harbour violent tendencies born out of life's disillusionments and absentee fathers. Amanda openly embraces her weirdness while Lily is more coiled, circumspect and perhaps repressed. Despite their combined psyches inching towards malevolence, their rebuilt friendship also emits a warm glow of authenticity.

Other than a typically edgy Anton Yelchin assist (in one of his final roles), the film is essentially a two-character drama and rides entirely on the shoulders of Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke. Both actresses deliver less-is-more performances of understated efficiency, finding the manipulative gaps between truth and lies to advance individual versions of deception deployed for survival.

The film buzzes with style thanks to an unhinging mood, playful sound effects and camera work alternating between curiously gliding and passively observant. However, Finley's shortcuts are sometimes severe, and the film cries out for more than the 92 minutes of running time. All the key events in the lives of the two girls happen off-screen, and stepdad Mark is too quickly consigned to the evil category. The mothers of the girls appear in ultimately meaningless snippets.

Thoroughbreds races on a new course of its own creation, original and stark if not quite perfect.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Split (2016)

A psychological suspense thriller, Split combines to good effect a disturbing story of dissociative identity disorder with a girls-in-captivity drama.

Teenage friends Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) and their blacksheep classmate Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) are abducted by Kevin (James McAvoy), a troubled man with 23 distinct personalities. The girls are held in the windowless basement of an unknown building, and are gradually introduced to Kevin's various identities, including the obsessive compulsive Dennis, the prim and proper Patricia, and the childlike Hedwig.

The girls try various tricks to escape, while in flashback Casey recalls her dark childhood experiences being taught to hunt deer by her father and uncle. Another of Kevin's personalities is the artist Barry, and he frequently visits psychologist Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley) apparently seeking help but unable to articulate his latest crisis. A bad situation threatens to get worse when Hedwig warns the captive teens that The Beast, a destructive 24th personality, is about to come forth.

Split splits its time telling three satisfying stories, as director and writer M. Night Shyamalan weaves together elements from the past and present. The abduction and captivity is the centrepiece, and although fairly traditional in premise and execution, the strained dynamics between the duo of Claire and Marcia and Casey's darker disposition introduce intriguing texture. Shyamalan makes excellent use of the subterranean maze where the girls are being held, a dank and forgotten basement filled with unlabeled doors and endless hallways lined with pipes.

With James McAvoy never less than intimidating in a career defining performance, the sequential emergence of Kevin's various personalities also maintains an edge, although only about five of the 23 are properly introduced

The second parallel story is Kevin (with Barry presenting) interacting with psychologist Karen. She has a deep understanding of what and who she is dealing with, and doggedly probes Kevin's dense psyche to try and understand why he is reaching out for help. Karen's quest is not made easier by the broader psychology community's general skepticism about the reality of DID.

And finally, and in some ways most absorbing, are the flashbacks to Casey's childhood. Here Shyamalan gradually builds to horrors awaiting a young girl, starting with an innocuous introduction to wildlife hunting as a core life skill and ending with lifelong trauma.

Shyamalan builds enough material towards a powerful final act, but decides to undo some of his own good work. The director with an insatiable penchant for twists decides to steer Split towards a different final dimension, and the climax is a relative disappointment compared to the build-up, the suspense and human psychology elements left in a crumpled heap in favour of a late-arriving novelty theme.

But before the splits widen to cracks, Split offers a provocatively multi-faceted experience.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.