Comedies up for British Independent Film Awards

Brian And Charles & Good Luck To You, Leo Grande are nominated for the British Independent Film Awards.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

I enjoy watching Leo Grande but I'm unconvinced by it.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

For its first 35 minutes or so, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande foregrounds one of the most fascinating, maddening conversational duets in a good long while--the kind of extended two-hander that definitely feels like transplanted theater but rarely suffers from that feeling.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

The endlessly versatile actor plays a reserved widow ​who ​hires a ​sex worker ​in this ​enjoyably subversive but not quite believable​ romp​.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack star in this feel-good sex comedy, in which a middle-aged woman solicits a sex worker. Katy Brand writes and Sophie Hyde directs.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

Truthfully, the film is almost not a film at all, but a stage two-hander director Sophie Hyde works hard to give big-screen zing.

In a twist on the usual May-December romantic fiction trope, Good Luck To You, Leo Grande casts Emma Thompson as a retired religious education teacher who hires a sex worker to explore her never awakened sexual desires. Her gigolo of choice is about as far as it's possible to get from the sleazy, damaged hustler familiar from Jon Voight's turn in Midnight Cowboy though. In a modern age where high-end sex workers sell an experience via an app (and expect a modicum of understanding and respect from their clients), Thompso''s character, the pseudonymous Nancy, first meets the titular Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) in a smart hotel room, where she babbles nervously about his impressive vocabulary and her own sexual deficiencies while he calmly talks to her like a therapist trying to work through why she's never been able to achieve an orgasm.

It's all very civilised and director Sophie Hyde, working from a script by British TV comedian and writer Katy Brand, shoots it like a British romantic comedy, with some of the attendant stiltedness those films have. But as the characters get more intimate, so too does the film, with McCormack and, especially, Thompson cutting through the film's more mechanical execution to deliver rounded portraits of people yearning for human connection in a judgmental world.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

Deftly handled direction from Sophie Hyde and a thoroughly impressive dual performance from Emma Thompson 
and Daryl McCormack enlivens an electric script, tackling taboo sexual subjects with wit, flair and welcome realism.

Film review: Good Luck To You, Leo Grande

Emma Thompson shines in a complex comedy of sexcapades.

Sundance Film Festival 2022 review: Good Luck To You, Leo Grande

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is a warm and emotionally intelligent picture that tackles its themes of sex and self with an unwavering honesty.