★★★★
‘Here we are again!’ Bellows an, unusually charismatic, Douglas Booth throughout Juan Carlos Medina’s The Limehouse Golem. Booth is playing the real life figure of Dan Leno – a Victorian music hall star, renowned for his drag entertainments – and is one of many players in this, Penny Dreadful-esque, Victorian murder mystery whose delightful performance succeeds in elevating an otherwise fairly predictable film into something really rather smashing. Karl Marx shows up too.
★★★
For filmmakers, an attempt at retiring must echo the plot of His Girl Friday. Try as they might, directors simply can’t escape the attraction of getting behind the camera. First returned Hayao Miyazaki and now Steven Soderbergh is back with Logan Lucky, a fun but bizarrely ill-conceived heist caper from (questionably-real) first-time writer Rebecca Blunt.
★★★
There’s an undeniable neatness to the concept of an indie film, about overcoming socioeconomic obstacles to realise your dreams, being plucked from relative obscurity for wide release. As with Michael Showalter’s delightful The Big Sick, earlier this year, Patti Cake$ – from feature-newcomer Geremy Jasper – is a beneficiary of such a ‘rags to riches’ journey, having been snapped up by Fox at Sundance for an impressive $9.5m.
The Film Blog 