They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor, 2023)

A drug dealer, a pimp and a prostitute in an all-black neighbourhood uncover a sinister conspiracy of social control over their community. The fact that the three are blaxploitation archetypes proves to be a fundamental part of what they unearth, as the film takes an abrupt turn into Soylent Green/Stepford Wives territory.

Much of the appeal of They Cloned Tyrone, apart from the comic interplay between the trio, peppered with every pop culture refence imaginable, lies in its splicing of genres that don't often meet. It's not so much that the individual components are new, but the blend certainly is, and makes for an entertaining ride which also manages to make serious points about the sense of the ghetto and boundaries laid down by race and background in the U.S. being a prison you can't escape from, thereby adding a layer to the satirically-tinged sci-fi set-up.

6/10

Living (Oliver Hermanus, 2022)

Whilst I'm no fan of remakes per se, largely due to the constant bastardisation of foreign originals by Hollywood to make them palatable for the U.S. audience and because the studios are too bereft of ideas themselves, every so often the source is so far removed in culture and time that it might just be an excusable act. Here, the source is Kurosawa's Ikiru from 1952, transposing the story of a grey Tokyo bureaucrat who only learns to live when he finds out he has terminal cancer to London in the same era. The plot sticks so closely to the original, that all that needs to be changed is the language and minutiae of the environment for it to ring true.

Of course, having Bill Nighy on top form in the wan lead role virtually guarantees that it will be no debasement, but other small tweaks also add to, rather than subtract from, the whole: the subtle use of a colour palette that plays endless shades of grey against period hypercolour flashes, understated turns of phrase to wryly satirical effect, such as the repeated refrain "we can keep it here for now" whenever a new document is forwarded to Nighy's office by the byzantine bureaucracy, and the toxic omnipresence of the social stratification of the time also plays a significant part.

All in all, a remake well worth doing which becomes quite affecting as it unfolds.

8/10