Monthly Archives: November 2017

Monthly Roundup – November 2017

30 Thursday Nov 2017

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Arrest Bulldog Drummond (1938) / D: James P. Hogan / 57m

Cast: John Howard, Heather Angel, H.B. Warner, Reginald Denny, E.E. Clive, Jean Fenwick, Zeffie Tilbury, George Zucco, Leonard Mudie, Evan Thomas

Rating: 6/10 – on the eve of his wedding, Drummond (Howard) gets involved in the murder of an inventor of an electrical device that can cause explosions from a distance; another robust entry in the series, Arrest Bulldog Drummond has all the usual elements in place and keeps things moving in sprightly fashion thanks to a spirited sense of adventure, and a well-versed cast who all know exactly what they’re doing.

Blue, White and Perfect (1942) / D: Herbert I. Leeds / 75m

Cast: Lloyd Nolan, Mary Beth Hughes, Helene Reynolds, George Reeves, Steven Geray, Henry Victor, Curt Bois

Rating: 7/10 – ace detective Michael Shayne (Nolan) finds himself on the trail of industrial diamond smugglers, just as his long-suffering girlfriend, Merle (Hughes), thinks she’s finally got him to marry her; the Michael Shayne series hits its midway point and proves just as entertaining, if not more so, than its predecessors, with Nolan fully invested in the role, a number of narrative twists to keep the viewer guessing, Leeds’ easy-going direction, and an appealing sense of humour throughout that makes Blue, White and Perfect an engaging and fun-packed franchise entry.

Tales of Halloween (2015) / D: David Parker, Darren Lynn Bousman, Adam Gierasch, Paul Solet, Axelle Carolyn, Lucky McKee, John Skipp, Andrew Kasch, Mike Mendez, Ryan Schifrin, Neil Marshall / 97m

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Daniel DiMaggio, Barry Bostwick, John F. Beach, Tiffany Shepis, Lin Shaye, Barbara Crampton, Lisa Marie, Mick Garris, Stuart Gordon, Marc Senter, Pollyanna McIntosh, Ben Woolf, Keir Gilchrist, Gracie Gillam, Dana Gould, James Duval, Amanda Moyer, Nick Principe, John Landis, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Sam Witwer, Kristina Klebe, Pat Healy, John Savage, Joe Dante

Rating: 4/10 – ten tales set around Halloween in a small, suburban town, and encompassing everything from the Devil, aliens, axe murderers, trick ‘n’ treat, warring neighbours, and psycho imps; ten tales are arguably six too many, with several of the entries in Tales of Halloween proving lukewarm at best (and dull at worst), with Mendez’s Friday the 31st segment standing out from the rest of the pack thanks to its gonzo mix of gore and humour.

The Time of Their Lives (2017) / D: Roger Goldby / 104m

Cast: Joan Collins, Pauline Collins, Franco Nero, Ronald Pickup, Sian Reeves, Joely Richardson, Michael Brandon

Rating: 4/10 – a faded Hollywood star (Joan Collins) hijacks the goodwill of a put-upon housewife (Pauline Collins) in her efforts to attend the funeral of a former leading man and ex-lover; a tepid comedy-drama that meanders from one dispiriting scene to another in its efforts to be entertaining, The Time of Their Lives wastes the talents of both its leading ladies while it insists on cranking out endless platitudes about what it is to be old and unappreciated, something that, at some point, this movie will succeed in being.

Wheelman (2017) / D: Jeremy Rush / 82m

Cast: Frank Grillo, Caitlin Carmichael, Garret Dillahunt, Shea Whigham, Wendy Moniz, John Cenatiempo, Slaine

Rating: 6/10 – a getaway driver (Grillo) finds himself trying to stay one step ahead of the various “interested parties” who want the money he has from a bank robbery gone wrong – and who’ll stop at nothing to get it; an action movie variation on Locke (2013) with much of the action filmed from within the confines of the getaway car, Wheelman strives for a stripped-back, gritty aesthetic, but suffers from having Grillo’s unnamed character repeating the same lines over and over, the action taking place in a strange night-time netherworld where the police are perpetually absent, the unlikely involvement of the driver’s teenage daughter (Carmichael) towards the end, and the car’s speedometer never getting above zero.

The Book of Henry (2017)

29 Wednesday Nov 2017

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D: Colin Trevorrow / 103m

Cast: Naomi Watts, Jaeden Lieberher, Jacob Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, Dean Norris, Lee Pace, Maddie Ziegler, Bobby Moynihan, Tonya Pinkins, Geraldine Hughes

A movie that inspires audiences to stare at it with the phrase, “say what?” firmly embedded at the forefront of their minds, The Book of Henry is both shockingly bad and hugely enjoyable at the same time (though it’s not quite the kind of movie that’s “so bad it’s good”). This may seem like a contradiction, but this could easily be many people’s idea of a guilty pleasure, a movie that you know from the start is pretty awful but which you can still derive an awful lot of pleasure from. The first draft was written in 1998 by author and screenwriter Gregg Hurwitz, and you can believe that the final screenplay as used in the movie, is exactly the same draft. And on this evidence, you can perhaps understand also why director Colin Trevorrow isn’t going to be at the helm of Star Wars Episode IX.

Shying away – perhaps deliberately – from creating a tonally consistent narrative, The Book of Henry sets itself up initially as a bucolic drama dealing with the ups and downs of the Carpenter family: single mother Susan (Watts), eleven year old whizzkid Henry (Lieberher), and younger son Peter (Tremblay). Susan works at a diner and dreams of writing and illustrating children’s books. Henry acts as the de facto man of the house, and is something of a financial genius, having invested very successfully in the stock market (Susan literally has no idea how wealthy they are as a family which is why she continues to work at the diner). And Peter is bullied at school, though Henry always comes to his rescue. Add their neighbour’s stepdaughter, Christina (Ziegler), into the mix as a kind of surrogate daughter/sister, and you have a family bordering on dysfunctional but in a winning, adorable way that makes you want to ruffle their hair and remark on how winning and adorable they are.

So far, so cute. But into every sunny life some shadows must appear, and it’s not long before Henry realises that Christina is being abused by her stepdad, Glenn (Norris). However, he’s the local police commissioner, and he has connections within social services, so Henry’s attempts to involve them and save Christina fail at the first hurdle. And before he can do anything more, he’s struck down by a brain tumour and promptly dies. But Henry being such a whizzkid (and apparently having had far more time on his hands than most eleven year olds), he’s not about to let Glenn off the hook. Before he dies, he compiles a book in which he leaves instructions for his mother to… contact and convince social services to investigate Glenn? Gather further evidence to prove her case? Put Glenn on notice that if he continues he’ll be exposed for the paedophile he is? Well, actually, no. As Peter so aptly puts it when he first looks at the book, “Henry wants us to kill Glenn!”

And so the movie lurches from bucolic family drama to child in danger drama to disease of the week melodrama, and all the way to vigilante thriller in little over an hour. Except none of these tonal shifts work as an organic whole. It’s as if the movie feels compelled to hit the restart button every fifteen minutes or so. And while it does so, it drops a handful of sub-plots and characters in and out of the mix at random, from Susan’s co-worker, Sheila (Silverman) and her problems with alcohol, to the bullying Peter experiences at school (which happens once… and that’s it). Hurwitz’s script is like a melting pot of ideas and themes and narrative devices all shoehorned into the smallest space available and then left to fight it out amongst themselves for the best amount of breathing space. One classic example: the school principal (Pinkins) dismisses Henry’s concerns about Christina when he raises them, but later is convinced by the interpretative power of dance (no, really). And then there’s the sight of Susan in a treehouse with a sniper rifle…

So absurd and so silly is The Book of Henry, the only way to approach it is as a drama that forgot it was meant to be a comedy. If you do, and it really is the best way to approach it, then the movie can be enjoyed despite its being a terrible mess that’s only on nodding terms with credibility. There are laughs to be had – deliberate and otherwise – and a whole raft of scenes that feel like filler (see how many times Susan covers over Peter, or the leaves in her yard are mentioned), but still the movie exerts a strange fascination, like a road traffic accident that you just can’t look away from. Hurwitz’s script, combined with Trevorrow’s meandering sense of direction, leaves the movie high and dry and static in its efforts to be effective, and the only area in which it does succeed is in its use of its Hudson Valley locations, all beautifully rendered by John Schwartzman’s richly autumnal cinematography.

The performances are a mixed bunch also. Watts has a good grasp of her character’s interior life, but it’s a shame that Susan’s exterior life is so bland and uninteresting. Aspects of Lieberher’s performance might prompt viewers to believe that Henry is on the spectrum, while Tremblay, the go-to child actor right now, is otherwise kept firmly in the background, good for a couple of scenes of emotional poignancy but little else. Spare a thought too for Silverman playing blowsy with a heart of gold, and Pace as the doctor who keeps popping up and may, at some distant point when the movie is over and done, prove to be Susan’s next love interest. The cast as a whole are admirably committed to the material, and it is fun watching them trying to legitimise some of the more absurdist moments in the script, but when there’s more enjoyment to be had from watching them fail than succeed then it’s time to ‘fess up and admit that things just haven’t worked out in the way that the producers would have hoped for.

Rating: 4/10 – silly, funny, and endlessly entertaining in all the wrong ways, The Book of Henry has at least one unfulfilled potential: that of being a cult midnight movie where the audience interacts with it a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975); such a misfire that it has to be seen to be believed, it’s a movie that doesn’t know when to rein in its ridiculous nature, but in failing to do so (and entirely against the odds), makes itself into perhaps the most unlikeliest must-see movie of 2017.

Top 10 Pixar Movies at the International Box Office

28 Tuesday Nov 2017

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With Coco (2017), the latest Pixar movie, stomping all over the competition since its release on 22 November – over $155 million worldwide and counting – it’s a salient reminder that Pixar, despite a run of less than stellar pictures in recent years, still know how to surprise and engage us, and that worldwide haul, achieved in just five days is not to be sneezed at, denigrated, or viewed as anything other than a major achievement for a company that seemed in danger of having lost its edge completely (especially since those little yellow Minions came along). But even when Pixar doesn’t exactly hit a home run with its releases, they’re still making huge profits and are still able to draw in audiences around the world. Whatever you may think about the likes of Cars 2 (2011), or The Good Dinosaur (2015), Pixar are still winners at the box office. Don’t believe it? Then read on…

10 – Cars 2 (2011) – $562,110,557

If there’s one movie that you could be forgiven for thinking should be on this list it’s WALL-E (2008), but both this movie and Brave (2012) were more profitable worldwide. With the critical drubbing Cars 2 received, not to mention its subsequent reputation as the worst Pixar movie ever made, this disastrous “spy caper” was Pixar’s first serious misstep in a dozen movies, and its success can only be put down to audiences ignoring the reviews and heading to cinemas anyway. That anyone came away pleased that they went is another matter entirely, but there must have been quite a few who were wondering if they could try and turn back time just as Holley Shiftwell tries to in the movie.

9 – Monsters, Inc. (2001) – $577,425,734

Still perhaps one of Pixar’s most engaging and sharply realised movies, Monsters, Inc. is a monstrously enjoyable fairy tale that like all the best Pixar movies, carries a tremendous amount of emotional depth, and feeling, around with it. There’s also the inspired casting of Billy Crystal and John Goodman, an incredibly detailed world for their characters to inhabit, and Pixar’s trademark heart and soul to anchor all the drama and the laughs. Pixar’s fourth movie saw them gaining more and more confidence, both in terms of the animation and the storylines, and this remains one of the best examples of Pixar’s ability to create a world out of nothing and make it entirely credible.

8 – Ratatouille (2007) – $620,702,951

Ten years on, and though it may be unfair to say so, there’s a sense that, along with A Bug’s Life (1998), Ratatouille is the Pixar movie that people forget is a Pixar movie. Fantastically entertaining and richly rewarding in its depiction of a culinary world that puts food on a pedestal (and then provides another pedestal for its central character to reach the soup tureen), it’s another inspired movie that works on so many different emotional levels that it’s almost embarrassing (for other animation studios to watch). It’s also a movie that contains one of the finest moments ever created by Pixar, the moment when detached and dismissive food critic Anton Ego tastes Remy’s ratatouille and is immediately transported back to the more carefree days of his childhood. Sheer perfection.

7 – The Incredibles (2004) – $633,019,734

Pixar does superheroes – and in the only way they know how: by making them a mostly dysfunctional family with more problems than whether or not some evil villain is planning to take over the world. The Incredibles can lay claim to being the funniest Pixar movie so far (“Where’s my super suit?”), but it’s the way in which it takes superhero tropes and visual stylings and melds them to its own way of looking at the world through demoralised superhero eyes that makes it work so well. That, and the fact that the action sequences are cleverly orchestrated, something that the movie doesn’t always get an appropriate amount of credit for. With a sequel fast approaching, let’s hope it adds to this movie’s lustre and legacy, and doesn’t wind up as another unnecessary, and underwhelming, Pixar sequel.

6 – Up (2009) – $735,099,082

Justly celebrated for that opening montage of the highs and lows of a couple’s life, Up peaks incredibly early, and the story that follows isn’t quite able to raise the bar any higher, but the movie carries itself well, and it’s still an enjoyable jungle romp that harks back to the old-time serials of the Thirties and Forties. It’s touching, thrilling, funny, happily melodramatic when it wants to be, and is the first Pixar movie to deal with notions of mortality in a way that isn’t indirect or which sidesteps the issue. And like a lot of Pixar movies, it’s about the power of friendship, a theme that is given full and credible expression through the unlikely, yet growing co-dependence of an old man and a boy scout.

5 –Monsters University (2013) – $744,229,437

Not one of Pixar’s best received sequels – and despite its being a major financial success – Monsters University did well because of the affection audiences have for Mike Wazowski and James P. Sullivan. But it encumbered them in a storyline that showed promise but which petered out in terms of originality and audience engagement (even Crystal and Goodman seem to be giving muted performances), and there were awkward, unresolved issues with the timeline and its connection to Monsters, Inc. There were also too many occasions where it seemed to be trying too hard, something that afflicted Cars 2 as well. By this stage, Pixar wasn’t the creative juggernaut it had been just a few short years before, and the caché they had built up was slowly being eroded. Thankfully, they took a two year break, and then came back with…

4 – Inside Out (2015) – $857,611,174

The movie that reaffirmed our faith in Pixar’s ability to “get the job done” and present us with a highly original idea rendered in a highly original fashion, Inside Out was and is a triumph of production and character design, and it provides moments of intense meditation on how difficult it is to find yourself while going through the maelstrom of puberty. Alternately touching and reflexive, the movie covers so much ground, both emotionally and intellectually, that it’s hard sometimes to work out just how Pixar got this so right, and without making any glaring mistakes in the process. Effortless, and extremely likeable, this is a movie that should resonate with anyone who struggled through their teenage years.

3 – Finding Nemo (2003) – $940,335,536

Pixar’s first true box office juggernaut, and their fifth release over all, Finding Nemo‘s simple premise works precisely because it is so simple. Blessed with a terrific vocal performance by Ellen DeGeneres as Dory, the movie is made up of one distinctive scene after another, and plays with its notions of family with intelligence and heartfelt honesty, making this – yet again – a Pixar movie that works on far more levels than it has any right to, and which succeeds brilliantly in capturing the anxiety and fear of being separated from a loved one, and never knowing if you’ll ever see them again. It’s so good it’s hard to work out who’s likely to be more shaken by its tale of abbreviated safety: the parent or the child.

2 – Finding Dory (2016) – $1,028,570,889

In many ways a re-run of its predecessor, Finding Dory is a Pixar sequel that has all the hallmarks of a “safe bet”: it brings back a good many of the original characters, sends them on another journey where humans act as unwitting imprisoners, and throws in a number of set pieces that are both energetic and well thought out, but there’s something missing that stops it from being as good (even if audiences didn’t think so). DeGeneres is still good value though, and helps the movie over some unexpected rough patches, but though this isn’t too far off the top spot in terms of money earned, it’s not quite the success that its position warrants. Still, if you settle back and don’t think it about it too much, then it can be as funny and as engaging as you want it to be.

1 – Toy Story 3 (2010) – $1,066,969,703

That rare beast, a second sequel that’s as good, if not better, than the original or its immediate sequel, Toy Story 3 is Pixar’s most financially successful movie after twenty-two years and nineteen movies. As animated movies go, it’s near perfect: a combination of earnest sentimentality, wistful regret, touching emotional candour, and the kind of endearing behaviour we’ve come to expect from such an amazing cast of characters (aided and abetted of course by some group of humans who aren’t nearly as important). It has some darker elements that would have made the movie feel false if they hadn’t been included, and like the montage at the beginning of Up, is almost guaranteed to reduce you to tears towards the end. A fitting conclusion to what many people regard as the “best trilogy ever made”, and even without that affirmation, a genuinely superb movie that rewards the viewer every time they watch it.

The Disaster Artist (2017)

27 Monday Nov 2017

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D: James Franco / 103m

Cast: Dave Franco, James Franco, Alison Brie, Seth Rogen, Ari Graynor, Paul Scheer, Josh Hutcherson, Jacki Weaver, Zac Efron, Jason Mantzoukas, Hannibal Buress, Nathan Fielder, Megan Mullally, Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith, Bryan Cranston

Every now and then a movie comes along that defies both its own creation and its own inherent drawbacks to achieve cult status amongst movie fans. Instead of disappearing into obscurity, perhaps never to be seen again (or only in the early hours of the morning on channels such as Movies 4 Men when they haven’t got a poorly dubbed spaghetti western to show) some movies take on a life and a reputation all their own, and succeed against – or in spite of – all the odds. One such movie is The Room (2003), written, produced, directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau. Generally regarded as one of the worst movies ever made, and critically lambasted on its initial release, The Room plays regularly at midnight showings throughout the US, and has the kind of dedicated fans who dress up like their favourite characters and throw items at the screen at relevant moments. Think The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), but without the wit or the ingenuity (or indeed, the songs).

Wiseau made the movie with and for his friend, Greg Sestero, who eventually wrote about his experiences being Wiseau’s best friend, and making The Room, in a book called, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Film Ever Made. And now we have an adaptation of that book, and a recreation of the making of the movie, that is both entertaining and irresistible. In the hands of James Franco, The Disaster Artist is a fresh, appealing movie that looks at the dangers of following your dreams, and how those dreams can become the source of bitterness and disappointment. It’s a movie that works on a number of levels, and thanks to a perceptive screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, it’s a fully rounded piece that embraces drama, comedy, and darker facets of both in its tale of deluded ambition.

The movie begins in 1998, with Tommy (James Franco) and Greg (Dave Franco) meeting at acting classes and forming a strange, unorthodox friendship. Tommy is secretive and elusive, making out that he’s from New Orleans when he clearly has an Eastern European accent, and insisting that he’s the same age as Greg when clearly he’s much older. There’s also the matter of his being independently wealthy. Where does his money come from? Nobody knows. They move to Los Angeles, where they both try to break into Hollywood. Greg quickly gains an agent (Stone) but finds his career stalling just as quickly. Tommy remains unemployable as an actor, but can’t understand why. All he sees is his talent going unrecognised. Eventually they decide to make a movie on their own, a movie that will star Tommy and Greg and make their fortune. Tommy writes the script, and in 2002, production begins. And what a production it proves to be…

This being a good movie about the making of a bad movie, it’s tempting to wonder just how accurate this movie is in recreating the details of the production itself. There are moments of pure comedy, such as shooting Tommy’s first scene (“What is line?”), or the awkward mechanics of a sex scene (“Why is he having sex with her belly button? He knows where her vagina is, right?”), but there are also much darker moments when Tommy behaves like a dictator and riles the crew with his indifference and misplaced anger. It’s at these moments that Tommy is shown as a selfish, manipulative child, and none more so than when he refuses to let Greg have a day off to appear in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle (and at the request of Bryan Cranston himself). Tommy’s jealous intransigence casts a sallow light on his behaviour and his character, but it’s a measure of both the script and Franco’s performance that Tommy remains a figure to pity rather than be angry with.

What comes across is the importance of his friendship with Greg and the determination to make the movie he wants to make. When challenged about his on-set behaviour, Tommy cites Hitchcock and Kubrick as directors who didn’t care about their actors, but without realising that they had talent to make up for their callow attitudes. At every turn, Tommy doesn’t understand anything about what he’s doing, and he can’t see that the decisions he’s making are undermining almost everything that he’s trying to do. Everyone around him sees this, but Tommy’s insecurity won’t let him acknowledge it. He’s a lonely man looking for approbation, and though his friendship with Greg goes some way to meeting his emotional needs, it’s a much wider appreciation that he’s searching for. And the movie makes it clear that this is the dream he really has; the movie is just a means to that end. Franco nails the accent, and Wiseau’s own off-centre thought processes, and gives one of his best performances: at times sad, defensive, jealous – of Greg’s relationship with girlfriend, Amber (Brie) – antic, effusive, melodramatic, and emotionally shallow.

He’s matched by an intuitive and likeable portrayal of Greg by his younger brother, and there are plenty of enjoyable supporting performances, including Rogen as the script supervisor who becomes the de facto director when Tommy is “acting”, and Graynor as the female lead who possesses the aforementioned “belly button”. Elsewhere there are plenty of cameos and talking heads (at the beginning) to keep viewers on their toes, but it’s the recreation of those hectic days when The Room was being shot that proves the most compelling, and Franco the director assembles it all with an eye for the absurdity of it all and the misguided passion that pushed Wiseau to make the movie in the first place. An auteur’s folly, then, but one that has survived and prospered over the years, and which has afforded Wiseau exactly what he wanted: recognition. But as The Disaster Artist proves, passion without talent is just passion, and dreams often require luck as well as a determination to succeed.

Rating: 8/10 – a wonderfully bizarre tale given the kind of respectful treatment that only highlights how unlikely it all was at the time, The Disaster Artist doesn’t need anyone to see The Room before watching it, as the off-camera turmoil is captured with aplomb by Franco and his cast and crew; a testament to the power of friendship (and pinky swears), as well as not giving up on your dreams, this is also a cautionary tale about what can happen when ambition becomes obsession, and the pursuit of fame turns everything (temporarily) sour.

Dismissed (2017)

26 Sunday Nov 2017

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D: Benjamin Arfmann / 87m

Cast: Kent Osborne, Dylan Sprouse, Rae Gray, Alycia Delmore, Chris Bauer, Leslie Thurston, Robert Longstreet, Mark Kelly, Randall Park

Movies where the central character is menaced by someone they’ve upset or betrayed, or just plain let down in some way (at least in the eyes of that someone), aren’t exactly new, and in many ways the format has been done to death over the years. With each new release riffing on storylines and characters and situations that have been done so often before, it’s difficult for any new movie to buck the trend or provide viewers with anything tangible enough to qualify as “original” or even “offbeat”. With so many movies out there having paved such a wide path already, anyone attempting a psychological thriller has their work cut out for them from day one. So what can an aspiring thriller do to overcome such hurdles?

In the case of Dismissed, the first feature from Benjamin Arfmann, the solution is to embrace those already firmly established tropes and values that come with the territory, and in doing so, treat them with a healthy dose of respect. The result is a thriller that is very much aware that it’s not telling a new story, or that it’s venturing into territory that won’t be over-familiar to anyone watching it. But what the movie does do, is to present everything in a low-key, matter-of-fact way that makes it look and feel more persuasive than if it had played as a flashy, strident melodrama. Thanks to Arfmann’s patient direction, and Yong Ok Lee’s deliberately unremarkable production design, Dismissed is that rare beast: a psychological thriller that doesn’t make the mistake of going overboard in its efforts to keep the viewer on the edge of their seats. Instead it builds tension by degrees, and the screenplay by Brian McAuley allows each new development to happen with a grim sense of inevitability, as what starts off with petty acts of revenge becomes more and more sinister and violent.

The central protagonists are high school English teacher David Butler (Osborne), and new transfer student, Lucas Ward (Sprouse). David’s class is largely disinterested in his teaching them about Othello, or Crime and Punishment (though this level, and kind of lethargy is only seen in the movies), so when super-knowledgeable Lucas makes his presence felt, David is only too glad to have a student who actually knows some (if not all) of the answers. But when David gives one of Lucas’s assignments a B+, Lucas makes his displeasure known: he’s a straight-A student, and that’s what David should have given him for his work. David sticks to his guns, and so begins a series of incidents that are the beginning of Lucas’s retaliation. David leaves for school only to find his tyre is flat. In the classroom his marker pens don’t work, and in the staffroom, his lunch is missing from the fridge. But it’s when his application to a prestigious university, one that will make him a professor and give him tenure, is replaced by a version that costs him the position, David begins to realise that Lucas is behind everything.

Now, at this stage, you might be saying, all this is over a grade? And while that does sound a little shallow, or even a little risible as a motive for Lucas’ behaviour, what the movie does really cleverly is to make Lucas’s psychopathy not only about being the best at all costs, but also what it means in terms of his “place” in the world. The opening scene shows video footage of a young child practising facial expressions, and from this we can understand that Lucas wants to fit in, even if ultimately it’s on his terms. The why is more understandable, and McAuley’s script leaves subtle clues here and there as to the details of why, but in keeping with the genre, it’s the how that leaves much to be desired. Lucas may be outwardly charming and persuasive, but like all good movie psychopaths, inside he’s as hollow as an Easter egg. Cue the aforementioned incidents of petty retaliation, plus the emotional manipulation of another student (Gray), attempted blackmail, veiled threats, murder, and evidence of Lucas having done similar things before.

In assembling all this, the movie does suffer from a handful of narrative short cuts that hurry things along, particularly in the last half an hour, and some of these short cuts are awkward in nature and upset the movie’s measured pace. But these are small prices to pay in respect of a movie that is otherwise confidently handled by Arfmann, and which features two central performances that anchor the story and give both central characters sincerity and credibility. Osborne is quietly effective as the English teacher who’s initially out of his depth in dealing with a teenage psychopath, but as the movie progresses his genial, accommodating persona becomes more steely and determined. At the point where he tells Lucas that if he comes near David’s family, he’ll kill him, Osborne delivers the line in just the way you’d expect an average man to say it: not like an action hero, but with genuine feeling. It’s moments like these, where the supposedly weaker character “turns” but it’s done with care and attention to the character’s personality, that helps make the movie more impressive than expected.

For some viewers though, the main attraction will be Sprouse, making his first acting foray since saying goodbye to  the role of Zack Martin in The Suite Life on Deck (2008-11). From TV star to murderous psychopath, one could be forgiven for thinking that Sprouse is doing his best to put behind him the lovable moppet he played for six years, and for the most part he does, making Lucas the kind of over-achiever who really should set off more warning bells than he does. As his plan to get that all-important A inevitably falls apart, Sprouse stays true to the character and keeps him removed from any recognisable emotion until the screenplay requires him to ramp things up for an overly melodramatic showdown that’s as unnecessary as it is unfortunate (the one time the script really drops the ball). Sprouse is on solid ground with his portrayal, and in his own way, is as quietly effective as Osborne. Both actors seem aware of the requirements of the genre they’re working in, and provided with good support from Arfmann, who facilitates the action with a darkly portentous quality that makes it more involving than you might think at first glance, they help the movie overcome some of the more uninspired aspects of the material, and ensure that the game of cat-and-mouse David and Lucas engage in remains as credible as possible.

Rating: 7/10 – a movie that does a lot more with its simple premise than is immediately apparent, Dismissed is let down by the inconsistent way in which it treats some of its supporting characters (David’s wife, Rachel (Delmore), is a perfect example), and those previously noted narrative short cuts; with much to admire, it’s the movie’s decision to adhere to many of the genre’s devices but in a way that’s not lazy or convenient that marks it out from all the other psychological thrillers out there.

2:22 (2017)

24 Friday Nov 2017

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D: Paul Currie / 99m

Cast: Teresa Palmer, Michiel Huisman, Sam Reid, Maeve Dermody, Remy Hii, Simone Kessell, John Waters, Richard Davies, Kerry Armstrong

When a movie provides the viewer with an intriguing concept (and does so early on) it sets itself something of a problem: namely, how to maintain that sense of intrigue the longer the movie goes on, and the more that has to be explained. There are plenty of movies where that intriguing concept flounders soon after being introduced, and plenty more where it doesn’t go anywhere at all. And then there are the movies that keep that concept evolving and expanding, and in doing so, keep the viewer engaged and entertained throughout. But these movies aren’t as prevalent as we might like, and though it does its best to join that elusive and elite group, 2:22 has a basic flaw that stops it from gaining a place at the table: it never decides to settle for one cause out of three or four for the events that take place.

Dylan Branson (Huisman) is an air traffic controller living in New York. He has the ability to see patterns in all things, which makes it easy for him to make predictions out of what appear to be random variables. It also means that some of the flights under his control can sometimes take off and land within yards of each other, something that, frighteningly, his boss and his colleagues treat as more of a trick to be bet on than as an inappropriate way of dealing with hundreds of lives each time. But when a cosmic event – the shock waves from the collapse of a star in space from thirty years before – has an effect on the Earth, Dylan’s attention becomes focused on the patterns that are revealed through the waves, and he is lucky to avoid the deaths of around nine hundred people when this occurs. Rightly suspended, Dylan still goes about his daily routine, but soon begins to notice that the same things keep happening each day, and at the same times. However, it’s a fascination with Grand Central Station, and the time of 2:22pm, that he’s unable to shake.

As the patterns and repetitions become more and more ingrained, Dylan finds himself drawn into the story of three deaths that occurred thirty years before on the concourse at Grand Central. A love triangle that ended in tragedy, it saw a singer and her boyfriend, and a cop, all shot and killed. Dylan becomes obsessed with finding out why he’s seeing all this within the patterns, and why from so long ago. And when he meets Sarah (Palmer), an art gallery manager, he begins to realise that their relationship is in some way connected to the events of the past. What this all means is what Dylan feels compelled to work out, but at first it frightens Sarah, and she distances herself from him, but as their story begins to dovetail with the story from 1985, and too many coincidences occur to dispute what seems to be happening, Dylan tries to ensure that there isn’t a repeat of the concourse tragedy, and that he and Sarah can make it past 2:22pm.

There’s not exactly a glut of intelligent, well thought out science fiction movies available to audiences these days, and 2:22 clearly has ambitions to fulfill that particular requirement, but while it begins well – and with a couple of airport runway scenes that should have even the most blasé of frequent fliers gripping their upright tray tables – it’s not long before it gets bogged down in an unwieldy narrative, and it starts tripping over itself in its attempts to provide a coherent, viable framework for the mystery of thirty years ago and its relevance to what’s happening around Dylan today. At first, it’s clever, but then the movie tries to be too clever, and before long it has Dylan sounding like he’s in need of some serious medication. Sarah avoids him because he sounds crazy, the truth of the past reveals itself piece by piece, and it’s all done in such a way that makes it confusing as to whether or not it’s all in Dylan’s head, or the result of this strange cosmic event, or some kind of reincarnation version of history repeating itself. As to which one of those is the actual reason for Dylan’s visions of the past, the viewer is free to take a guess.

It may be that there is one true answer, but the screenplay by Todd Stein and Nathan Parker (from a story by Stein) is too respectful of its muddled internal logic to settle for a definitive solution. Instead it piles erratic images and mismatched scenes on top of one another, and as if it needs to add a sense of confusion to proceedings, when it does attempt to explain matters, it falls just shy of being convincing (which unfortunately leaves Michiel Huisman holding the exposition bag quite awkwardly a lot of the time). It’s obvious that the movie doesn’t want to come across as a sci-fi variation of Groundhog Day (1993), and so it throws too many extra elements into the mix, but without testing first to see if they match the level of intrigue required, and/or the details. Currie orchestrates matters with an eye for a compelling image at times, but on other occasions, there’s a pedestrian vibe to many of the scenes early on that aren’t exactly involving; thankfully, as the narrative speeds up, Currie’s confidence in his handling of the material increases also.

The well chosen cast do as well as can be expected with some of Stein and Parker’s more utilitarian dialogue, and overall Huisman and Palmer make for an interesting pairing, their characters not quite the star-crossed lovers they’re made out to be, but competently played nevertheless. By the end though, the sci-fi elements have been shoved aside so that the thriller elements can be pushed to the fore, and there’s a stretch where the familiarity of the narrative – or the obvious nature of it – casts a pall over proceedings as the screenplay manipulates the story into getting Dylan and Sarah, and her jealous ex-boyfriend, Jonas (Reid), to the station on time for the 2:22 deadline. Faced with these strong-arm tactics, the movie has no choice but to go along for the ride and hope that the drily philosophical dictum quoted at the end, “A star shines brightest right before it dies”, strikes the viewer as poignant instead of ironic.

Rating: 6/10 – narrative trips and tumbles aside, 2:22 is a modest sci-fi thriller with modest ambitions, but ones that should be applauded nevertheless; that it doesn’t work entirely is down to the lack of focus in the storyline, and some occasionally lazy “hey, kids, let’s connect the dots for the viewer” decision making, but though it’s very rough around the edges, you could do a lot worse, sci-fi wise, than to give this “out of its comfort zone” movie a chance.

Hangman (2017)

23 Thursday Nov 2017

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D: Johnny Martin / 98m

Cast: Al Pacino, Karl Urban, Brittany Snow, Joe Anderson, Sarah Shahi, Chelle Ramos, Steve Coulter, Sloane Warren

Not every movie can be accomplished, original, or a must-see. In fact, the majority of movies – the vast majority – often have the effect of making you wonder just how they got made in the first place. And why. Sometimes it seems that there’s a lot of people out there with money to burn. Other times it’s as if a movie has been made on a dare. Some movies challenge the very notion that quality was ever a consideration when the movie itself was being made. And some movies provoke such an abject response – what the hell is all this? – that there’s nothing for it but to carry on watching in the vain hope that the whole sorry mess will find some way to improve (not that it does though). There are literally thousands of these movies made each and every year, and if there’s an end in sight to all of them, then it’s so far off in the distance as to not to be there at all.

And so we come to Hangman, the latest movie to feature Al Pacino in a performance that makes him look like a disinterested bystander and not the lead character. It fits so neatly into the genre of underwhelming thriller movie that should never have been made, that it’s almost scary. It’s bad in a way that actually elevates average movies into looking and sounding better than they are, and provides further evidence – if any were needed – that if you take a script that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever and film it, then the finished product won’t make any sense either. A project that has been in development since at least 2011, Hangman arrives to dispel the notion that if you spend enough time on something then you can iron out all the kinks and grooves in a script and make something of real quality. Let’s make this clear: whatever time Michael Caissie and Charles Huttinger spent on putting the screenplay together, it wasn’t enough.

In a feat akin to shoving a square peg into a round hole, the makers of Hangman have taken one of the world’s most famous and enduring guessing games, and tried to make it the modus operandi of a serial killer (Anderson) whose motivations remain obscure and unconvincing throughout. And not only that, but the word the killer is challenging the police to solve isn’t even in English, a decision that further adds to the confusion created over the killer’s psychological state, and what drives him to murder. All this is as tortuous as it sounds, and the plot – such as it is – quickly surrenders any high ground and goes meekly along with whatever delirious developments Caissie and Huttinger’s screenplay can come up with. This leaves Pacino’s retired detective Archer, and Urban’s moody active detective Ruiney (pronounced Rooney), led by their noses from one staged, and unlikely, crime scene to another while they are gifted clues by a script that really doesn’t care how poorly constructed it is.

The presence of Snow’s Pulitzer-nominated journalist, Christi Davies – no offence, but really? – on assignment to shadow Ruiney for an article, adds a further level of creative insult to the mix as her “signed off by the mayor” involvement sees her included in crime scene searches, put at risk by Archer and Ruiney at almost every turn, and provided with a back story that should be relevant but isn’t. As for the serial killer himself, he’s yet another “brilliant” psychopath who’s always several steps ahead of the police, and can stage the most elaborate murder scenes at the drop of a hat. Thankfully, he’s also susceptible to the kind of cod-psychology musings that Archer comes up with when they finally meet, and Christi’s life is in danger. There are other characters, and much less important ones at that, such as Ruiney’s captain, Lisa Watson (Shahi), who finds herself targeted by the killer, potential suspect, Joey Truman (Ramos), and a raft of even more minor characters who are there to make up the numbers (or the killer’s victims). It’s a measure of the script’s desperate attempts to give these characters some kind of “life” on screen that Ruiney’s wife may have been the killer’s first victim some time before, Watson is in a wheelchair, and Joey and the first victim are lesbians into BDSM.

Wandering through it all, though, as if his reputation as one of the finest actors of his generation, or his position as joint president of the Actors Studio didn’t mean a thing is Pacino. The actor looks permanently surprised in so many scenes it’s hard not to think that each time it happens it’s as if he’s just realising how bad it all is. Whether he’s mumbling his lines or reacting just a beat too slowly to what’s happening around him, it’s a performance that could easily qualify as his worst, even worse than his portrayal as himself in Jack and Jill (2011). There’s no spark here, no animation in his performance, just the sign of an actor treading water and going through the motions. It’s a sad sight, and adds another level of dismay for the viewer to contend with. In contrast, Urban at least tries to inject some energy into his role, but he’s held back by his character’s bull-headed nature and one-note demeanour. Snow fares no better, and the movie wastes her talent as an actress by having her follow her male co-stars around while waiting to be the killer’s eventual last victim.

Making an even worse fist of things than he did on Vengeance: A Love Story (2017), director Johnny Martin continues to show a lack of aptitude behind the camera that, in conjunction with the terrible script, means the movie has no chance of succeeding as the clever, gritty thriller it so desperately wants to be. Whether he’s putting the camera in the wrong place or leaving his talented cast to fend for themselves, Martin does little to lift the material or make it interesting. As a result, the movie lacks pace and intensity, and stutters from scene to scene without any apparent attempt to connect them into a meaningful whole. By the time Archer and Ruiney come face to face with the killer, it’s doubtful just who the average viewer will want to see put out of their misery more: the killer, Archer and Ruiney, or themselves.

Rating: 3/10 – spectacularly awful in a way that, surely, couldn’t have been intended, Hangman is a low-concept thriller that misfires at every step, and makes for one of the  laziest, most apathetic movies of 2017; wrong on so many levels, this should be held up as an object lesson in how not to construct and shoot a movie when the script isn’t there, the director hasn’t a clue, and its main star can’t be bothered.

Crown Heights (2017)

22 Wednesday Nov 2017

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D: Matt Ruskin / 100m

Cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Nnamdi Asomugha, Natalie Paul, Amari Cheatom, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Bill Camp, Luke Forbes, Zach Grenier, Josh Pais, Ron Canada, Nestor Carbonell, Skylan Brooks, Sarah Goldberg, Adriane Lenox

Crown Heights ends with a sobering statistic: of the 2.4 million people currently in prison in the US, it’s estimated that 120,000 are likely to be innocent. The movie, winner of the Audience Award for US Dramatic Film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, examines a case that, though it all began back in April 1980, could still be relevant today, both for its victim and his friends and family. Following the murder of sixteen year old Melvin Grant in a reported drive-by shooting, eighteen year old Colin Warner (Stanfield), is arrested and accused of being the driver when the murder was committed. Despite his protests, the police tell Colin that they have an eyewitness and they know he’s guilty. The case proceeds slowly but inexorably to trial, where the eyewitness, fourteen year old Clarence Lewis (Brooks), retracts his original testimony and clears Colin of any involvement. But it makes no difference. With Colin connected to his co-defendent (and actual shooter) Anthony Gibson (Forbes), he’s convicted and sentenced to fifteen years to life.

And so begins twenty-one years of incarceration thanks to a combination of mistaken identity, perjury and official misconduct. The police aren’t interested in whether or not Colin is innocent, the district attorney is in cahoots with the police, and it doesn’t matter that there’s no physical evidence or actual eyewitness testimony to place Colin at the scene of the crime – his fate has miscarriage of justice written all over it. Once in prison, Colin pins his hopes on various appeals but they’re all denied. On the outside, his friend Carl ‘KC’ King (Asomugha), tries his best to have Colin’s conviction overturned but encounters setback after setback. It’s not until Carl meets attorney William Robedee (Camp) that there’s a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. Robedee examines the case and determines that the only way for Colin to have a chance of being released is not to try and have his conviction overturned, but to reinvestigate the case and prove once and for all that Colin wasn’t involved in the murder of Melvin Grant.

How Robedee and Carl achieve this is forms the basis of the movie’s final half hour, but before then director and screenwriter Matt Ruskin confidently and credibly explores the way in which Colin was effectively framed by the police, first as Melvin’s killer, and then, when Gibson was arrested and admitted committing the murder, as his accomplice. The relentless nature of the police’s efforts to see Colin convicted is reflected in scenes where the lead detective (Grenier) goads and intimidates potential witnesses (whether they are or not) into identifying Colin as the killer. And in some of them the district attorney (Pais) hovers in the background, impassive and implacable. It’s a tragic situation, made all the worse by the implicit sense of impotency that soon settles on Colin as his fate slowly unfolds and the enormity of the injustice he’s facing becomes more and more apparent, and more and more soul-destroying. Once in prison, Colin struggles to find his place, briefly uniting with his Trinidadian brethren, and challenging the authority of the guards before settling into a more stoic existence.

Further injury is added to the insult he’s already experienced when his parole hearing focuses on his previous bad behaviour rather than the strides he’s made since then. Even a blossoming romance involving Antoinette (Paul), a young woman from his neighbourhood (the Crown Heights of the title), isn’t enough to completely dispel the despair Colin begins to feel more strongly as the years pass by. As the beleaguered Colin, Stanfield plays him throughout and is quietly impressive, drawing out a solid portrayal of a man betrayed and ignored by an unjust system, and sometimes justifiably angry at the way he’s treated. It’s not a showy, attention-seeking performance, but rather an attempt to reflect the ways in which Colin sought to keep himself from submitting to self-pity or just giving up altogether (though he comes perilously close to doing both at times). Ever since his debut in the original, short version of Short Term 12 (2008), Stanfield has become an actor to watch, and here he shows an empathy and an understanding for Colin’s situation that is both intuitive and well judged, impassioned and subtly observed as well.

The movie stays with Colin for most of the first hour, and charts the various setbacks he experiences, until it shifts the focus to Carl and his renewed efforts to see his friend restored to freedom. This section of the movie is just as much about one man’s determination to see justice done as it is about the price that justice demands. Carl nearly loses his wife, Briana (Blake), and his children in his efforts to free Colin, and the movie asks the question, is such a selfless and dogged pursuit ever worth the potential pitfalls or drawbacks? Sensibly it leaves the answer for the viewer to decide, but Carl’s commitment and the subsequent drawing together of the people who can prove Colin’s innocence is assembled with a methodical adherence to the rules of evidentiary procedure, and proves unexpectedly gripping. As the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place, the viewer should be asking themselves, why didn’t the police do this in the first place?

Questions such as these arise throughout the movie, but Ruskin is wise not to explore them too closely or for too long. He even avoids highlighting the obvious issue of the institutionalised racism prevalent in the police force at the time, and leaves it unsaid, more of a given than something that needs explaining. Similarly the pressures of being in prison are given expression through Colin’s attempts to fit in, and Ruskin allows these moments to play out matter-of-factly and with few overly dramatic embellishments. The movie remains steadfast in its approach from start to finish, with Ruskin displaying a command of the material that makes it all the more effective, and all the more emotive when it needs to be. Aside from a handful of sequences where Colin imagines he’s free – sequences that have a hallucinatory, visually powerful feel to them – the movie has a dour, unsettling visual style to it that reflects Colin’s mindset and situation, and which is used with an admirable sense of restraint. Ruskin has put together a modest, yet haunting movie that tells its tale simply but with a depth that’s borne out of the writing and the performances, both of which complement and dovetail around each other with a modest skill that is the hallmark of the movie as a whole.

Rating: 8/10 – a low-key gem that sneaks up on the viewer and gradually reveals just how good it really is, this could have been yet another angry tirade against an uncaring and unfair system, but Crown Heights is more than that, and it deserves a much wider exposure than it’s likely to receive; with Stanfield and Asomugha heading up a splendid cast, and Ruskin able to subvert or overcome so many of the clichés that are inherent in this type of movie, this is sincere, moving, and if those statistics are to be believed, entirely relevant as a commentary on the current US criminal justice system.

Trailers – A Quiet Place (2018), A Bad Idea Gone Wrong (2017) and Game Night (2018)

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

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The premise of A Quiet Place is a simple one: a family must remain ever vigilant and ever quiet, or some things will find them and kill them. At this stage, the whys and the hows of this particular scenario remain unknown, which makes the trailer that much more effective. Star John Krasinski also directs – making this his third feature after Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009) and The Hollars (2016) – and he’s rewritten the original script by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, so this is close to a one-man show, but with an additional dose of nepotism, as Blunt is Krasinski’s real-life wife. This has the potential to be as scary as a mofo, and it will be interesting to see just how long the movie goes on for before a word is spoken, and if at all. Though it will inevitably include sound effects and music, what might be a modern day silent movie is an intriguing idea, and if Krasinski has got a confident grip on the tension and what looks to be a slowburn build up of terror, then the movie could be a breakout hit that attracts audiences wanting to be terrified.

 

When two life-long friends (and loveable schlubs) plan a burglary at a house that they absolutely know will be unoccupied, you just know that it’s not going to go according to plan. And so it proves in Jason Headley’s feature debut, the kind of indie comedy that looks down its nose at more mainstream comedy fare, and then sneezes heavily and appropriately (or inappropriately), as the case may be. As the two friends, Matt Jones and Will Rogers make for a good pair of lunkheads, and Headley’s script seems well set up to provide a mix of belly laughs, moments of wry amusement, and a knowing sense of the story’s complete and utter absurdity. Adding a measure of romance to the mix may be a smart move on Headley’s part, but whether or not the movie needs it is another matter. Unlikely as it may be that the movie will find a wider audience than expected, this still looks as if it could overcome the expectations everyone has for it and gain a lot more kudos for itself along the way.

 

Comedy thrillers are notoriously difficult to pull off, and though Game Night is billed as such, the trailer seems determined to skirt around the movie’s thriller elements and concentrate on the comedy. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen, but what is promising is a cast that includes Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, and Jesse “give this man more starring roles” Plemons. The idea, that a kidnapping of one of a group of good friends may or may not be real, and they have to decide which is the case, could and should provide plenty of laughs, and the trailer does its best to confirm this, but there’s the nagging sense that the best bits have been included in it, and the movie will prove less sharp than it looks (though the squeaky toy is inspired). Still, Bateman et al are all good value for money, and this could be just the silly alternative that’s needed when every other movie in 2018 looks like it’s going to involve superheroes being, well, super and heroic.

Battle of the Sexes (2017)

20 Monday Nov 2017

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D: Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton / 121m

Cast: Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Natalie Morales, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman, Alan Cumming, Elisabeth Shue, Austin Stowell, Eric Christian Olsen, Jessica McNamee

Ah, the Seventies, a golden era for cinema, but not quite so good if you were a woman, or more specifically, a sportswoman. The disparity between what the men were paid and what the women were lucky to receive, by comparison with modern standards, was insulting. Battle of the Sexes, the latest from the directors of Little Miss Sunshine (2006), is very loosely based on the efforts of women tennis players such as then champion Billie Jean King (Stone) and several of her fellow players to break away from the United States Lawn Tennis Association, and establish their own independent, Women’s Tennis Association. In doing so, they not only challenged the entrenched male perspective that women’s tennis was somehow “inferior” to men’s tennis, but also that “people” didn’t want to watch women’s tennis because it wasn’t exciting enough.

This patriarchal view was espoused by the likes of Jack Kramer (Pullman), the head of the USLTA. It was refuted by Billie Jean and her (apparent) agent/manager Gladys Heldman (Silverman). Kramer’s blackballing of the women players who refused to play in any of the USLTA’s tournaments proved to be an unintended blessing in disguise, as it allowed them to find their own sponsorship and play in their own tournaments, and for more approrpriate sums of money (when Billie Jean won the US Open in 1972 she received $15,000 less than men’s champion Ilie Năstase). The movie depicts the effectiveness of this approach in establishing the quality of women’s tennis, and bringing it to a wider public, but then along comes Bobby Riggs (Carell), a one-time world tennis champion in the late Thirties and Forties. Riggs, a tireless self-promoter, challenges King to an exhibition match, asserting that he can beat any of the top women players purely because he’s a man. King initially declines his offer, but when he beats her rival, and current world number one, Margaret Court (McNamee), Billie Jean feels she has no option but to play him, and hopefully, advance the cause of women tennis players immensely. But if she were to fail…

Battle of the Sexes is an enjoyable mix of comedy and drama that has an ambitious streak that’s about a mile wide. Not only does it focus on tennis’s version of the glass ceiling, but it also finds time to explore the wider sexism of the time, as well taking a sideswipe at the era’s unhappy approach to gender equality and sexual liberation. Alongside the grandstanding of the match itself, King’s burgeoning awareness of her true sexual identity is dealt with by her having an affair with a hairdresser, Marilyn Barnett (Riseborough). This aspect of the movie is played out with a great deal of restraint, not just in how it’s presented physically, but also emotionally, with Billie Jean trying to put the genie back in the lamp and pretending nothing has happened. She can’t, of course, but the movie does make the viewer wait for her to stop pretending; after all, everyone else around her knows what’s been going on, including her husband, Larry (Stowell). In the end, the relationship becomes less and less important in the grand scheme of things, and the idea that it was somehow better to address the issue of Billie Jean’s sexual preferences than not, becomes more and more apparent.

Sadly though, and while the movie is enjoyable, it’s ultimately too lightweight for its own good. With themes such as sexism and sexual politics thrown into the mix, there’s ample opportunity for the movie to provide probing examinations of both these themes, but instead it skirts around them, looking to come up with a telling bon mot rather than something more substantial (in one of the movie’s more corny moments, Alan Cumming’s unsurprisingly gay fashion designer, Ted Tinling, tells Billie Jean that one day, they’ll both be able to love freely). There’s also no real sense that anyone is being held back or hampered from doing anything, or that any obstacles can’t be overcome (and at the first opportunity). Billie Jean’s affair with Marilyn relies on Larry being completely understanding about “everything” and not causing a fuss, while Gladys gets their first tour up and running with ease, and every run in with Kramer sees him being knocked down a peg by King at every turn, leaving him looking and sounding like a sexist bogeyman, something that is too simplistic an approach to work effectively (and which even Pullman struggles to pull off). All the real drama is saved for the match, but by then it has to work extra hard to reel in the viewer, who probably has a good idea (if not an actual one) as to the outcome.

Stone is terrific, rescuing some of the milder and less interesting portions of the movie by virtue of her commitment to playing Billie Jean and her ability as an actress to fold herself into the character, so that she brings her own vulnerability as a person to the role and uses her own feelings to establish that character’s interior life. It’s a much subtler performance than you might expect, and Stone is to be congratulated for the layers she brings to her portrayal, shading Billie Jean’s personality in such a way that it helps overcome the script’s more pedestrian moments. Matching her for commitment and sincerity is Carell, a perfect choice for Riggs who plays him as a man whose public persona is used to hide the insecurities he feels since retiring from the one thing that he’s good at (he does play the senior circuit but is unfulfilled by it). Carell has a great deal of fun with the role, and the viewer has every right to have fun right along side him, but Carell also ensures there’s an air of melancholy about Riggs that’s equally affecting.

Faris and Dayton assemble the material with a deft appreciation for the period it’s set in, and the politics of the time, but it’s Simon Beaufoy’s subdued screenplay that holds them back from making this entirely successful (which makes one wonder how the movie would have turned out if original choice Danny Boyle had been able to direct it). Still, they do manage to elicit good performances from the cast, and if there’s not enough in the way of truly emotional or dramatic highs and lows, they do keep things ticking over with a great deal of style and visual panache thanks to Oscar-winning DoP Linus Sandgren. If the movie doesn’t quite achieve its own ambitions, it’s still a good effort that can be enjoyed and appreciated for what it is, even if the material does lack depth and it decides not to take a more extensive look at its various themes and topics.

Rating: 7/10 – a movie that tries hard to draw parallels with modern day issues surrounding sexual politics, Battle of the Sexes is buoyed by Stone and Carell’s performances, and a giddy sense of the absurdity of the whole situation surrounding the “battle”; but while it’s enjoyable on a basic level, any attempt to look deeper under the surface will reveal a movie that trades too heavily on what’s superfluous and not enough on what’s meaningful.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)

19 Sunday Nov 2017

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D: Noah Baumbach / 112m

Cast: Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Elizabeth Marvel, Grace Van Patten, Judd Hirsch, Rebecca Miller, Candice Bergen, Adam Driver, Matthew Shear, Sakina Jaffrey, Gayle Rankin, Michael Chernus

Harold Meyerowitz (Hoffman) is a semi-famous sculptor who hasn’t had a show in years, and who has become somewhat marginalised within the New York art world. His work is admired by those that know of it, but his contemporaries, such as L.J. Shapiro (Hirsch), are still exhibiting and still getting the recognition that Harold thinks they don’t deserve. Harold is on his fourth marriage – to Maureen (Thompson) – and has two children from his first, Danny (Sandler) and Jean (Marvel). Danny is in the midst of separating from his wife, and has a precocious teenage daughter, Eliza (Van Patten), who is about to leave for college. Jean is a spinster but leads an otherwise happy life. Harold has another child from his third marriage, Matthew (Stiller), but he lives in LA, and works as a financial consultant. He’s successful, and has a young son he would like to spend more time with. This is the family Meyerowitz, and despite outward appearances, many of which they foster themselves, they all need help (oh boy, do they need help).

What’s impressive about Noah Baumbach’s latest feature is that he takes a stereotypical dysfunctional family, and spins that stereotype ever so slightly off its axis, so that each nugget of information about any of the characters seems fresh and unexpected, even though a closer inspection reveals tropes and metaphors that we’ve seen countless times before. This is due to Baumbach’s very eloquent and very astute screenplay, a piece of writing that manages to include a number of complex and yet succinct observations on the nature of father-son relationships and the effect that an inwardly scared parent can have on their children. It’s no surprise that Baumbach has chosen to examine the issue of what children need from their parents as this has formed the basis of much of his work in the past, from The Squid and the Whale (2005) to While We’re Young (2014). But this is easily his most impressive and most fully realised project, and it has a smoothness and an ease about it that makes it all the more enjoyable to watch.

The main focus is, at first, on Danny. With his marriage coming to an end and Eliza going off to college, Danny has to reassess what he’s going to do with his life (he’s been a house husband up until now, having chosen that as his “career” instead of being a musician). He and Jean get involved in arranging a retrospective of Harold’s career, but Baumbach is quick to make the viewer realise that this isn’t being done out of love or affection, and not even necessarily out of respect for their father’s work. Like so many other things connected to Harold that they do, it’s done because they view it as the right thing to do; it’s a familial obligation. But Harold is obsessed with how his work is perceived, because his work is the only thing that, to him, makes him stand out from the crowd. He’s constantly seeking approbation from everyone around him, and insists he receives it from his kids. But if they don’t, then he’s oblivious to both them and their needs. Such is their lives as adults, such was their lives as children.

Harold’s narcissistic expressions about himself, and his short-fuse dismissal of anyone he deems unimportant, has had an unpleasant effect on all three of his children. Danny has spent an enormous amount of time and energy in raising Eliza so that they’re more like friends instead of father and daughter. As a result he’s a better father than Harold was to him, but the irony is that in its own way, it’s as unhealthy as the relationship Danny had with him as a child. Baumbach makes the point well: too little attention or love can be just as bad as too much. But while that may seem obvious (and it is), it’s the way in which Danny tries to strike a balance between the two, and without necessarily being aware that he’s doing it, that makes all the difference. Jean has her own reasons for keeping her life separate, and though it seems that she’s perhaps the most “adjusted” of the three, this later proves to be incorrect. And then there’s Matthew, who professes to be “over” his father’s ability to make him angry for having a successful life (Harold is almost as obsessed by money as he is by maintaining his reputation). Matthew, like Danny, is trying to be a better father than Harold was, but he can’t seem to connect with his son, despite his best efforts.

Watching these four people struggle to communicate with each other, and struggle to find the answers that are often in front of them, should be frustrating for the viewer,  but Baumbach, and the sharpness of his script, helps avoid all that. The family dynamic is entirely credible and perfectly judged, with superb performances from all concerned. Sandler has only been better once before, in Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and here he proves that he can be a fine dramatic actor when he wants to be (which isn’t often enough). Sandler displays a warmth and a heartfelt sincerity as Danny that allows the viewer a way in to the Meyerowitz family and its myriad issues. He’s a sweet, caring guy trying to do his best, and he has enough self-awareness to know that he doesn’t always get it right. Stiller is equally as good, channelling Matthew’s anger at being unfairly singled out for Harold’s praise as a child when the praise, and what it related to, wasn’t important to Matthew at all. In support, Marvel, Thompson and Van Patten offer touching performances, while there are a clutch of more minor roles that allow for a few scene-stealing moments (Chernus as a snippy nurse is a treat). But this, perhaps expectedly, is Hoffman’s movie, his portrayal of Harold as a manipulative, emotionally remote artist one of the best things he’s done in years.

Baumbach approaches the material and the characters with a great deal of care and attention, and it’s this that makes the movie so effortlessly dramatic, and so effortlessly funny. Nobody behaves in a manner that might seem odd or inappropriate because that’s how they’ve always behaved. With some questions there’s an answer provided, but many’s the time when Baumbach keeps the viewer in the dark, as if to say, “these characters still need time to figure things out, and it’s not going to happen before the movie’s over”. It all adds up to a remarkably humane and sympathetic look at expectations between the generations, and how personal legacies can hamper the growth of those who are raised in the shadow of them. Thoughtful and considerate of its characters’ foibles and muted aspirations, Baumbach’s latest is a sprightly mix of drama and comedy that succeeds on both fronts, and is his best work yet.

Rating: 9/10 – that rarity: a comedy-drama with heart as well as intelligence, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is a cautionary tale that never once feels forced or that it’s struggling to find its own voice; the characters linger in the memory, along with Baumbach’s clever script and fluid direction, and a number of quality performances, making this a movie that everyone should try and see, and especially as an alternative to more mainstream, big-budget moviemaking.

Justice League (2017)

19 Sunday Nov 2017

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D: Zack Snyder / 120m

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Ciarán Hinds, Amber Heard, Joe Morton

If Justice League required the writing of a school report card, then that report would likely say, “Must do better.” A movie that furthers Warner Bros.’ insistence on building the DC Extended Universe one laborious movie at a time, this is unlikely to upset fans (who may well point to its lighter tone as reason enough to be happy with the finished product), but it should still provide cause for concern for anyone able to watch the movie objectively or without a vested interest. Although this is an improvement on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), there are still plenty of problems on show, some of which seem inherent in Warner Bros.’ approach to the DCEU, and some that have arisen out of the efforts made to address those same problems. If Justice League is to be as financially successful (if not critically) as previous entries in the DCEU – and early box office returns are casting doubt on this – then even more lessons need to be learnt.

The movie begins with the world mourning the death of Superman (Cavill), and crime apparently on the increase (though strangely, it’s hate crime that the movie chooses first as an example). Batman (Affleck) is still fighting criminals, as is Wonder Woman (Gadot), but an encounter with a strange, alien creature, a Parademon, leads the Caped Crusader to believe that a major threat is coming to Earth (alas, how and why he believes this, is left unexplored, possibly because it would add yet another plot hole to the many already on display). Wonder Woman confirms this, telling him that Earth is being targeted by Steppenwolf (Hinds), the “ender of worlds”. Steppenwolf and his Parademons are looking for three Mother Boxes, power sources that if linked together, could destroy Earth entirely (why he’d want to do this is another plot hole left for the movie to fall through). With one box entrusted to the Amazons on Themyscira, the second to Atlantis, and the third hidden by man, Steppenwolf collects the first two with unseemly ease, leaving Batman and Wonder Woman with only one choice: to find other people with “abilities” who can help try and defeat Steppenwolf; and yes, you guessed it, save the world.

Batman recruits the Flash (Miller) in record time, but has little luck with Arthur Curry (Momoa), the so-called Aquaman. And then there’s Cyborg (Fisher), part man, part machine, whose existence is due to his scientist father’s use of the third Mother Box (conveniently discovered for this very purpose) after his death in a car accident. Keeping hold of the third Mother Box long enough to resurrect Superman (more of which later), Batman and his new friends, including a newly motivated Aquaman, trace Steppenwolf to an abandoned nuclear power plant in Russia (plot hole alert!), and attempt to stop him uniting the Mother Boxes and destroying the world. In the process, Batman, the archetypal loner, learns to become a team player (even though everyone in the Justice League is, effectively, an archetypal loner, it seems to be more relevant to him than anyone else).

In assembling their own version of the Avengers, Warner Bros. and DC have tried to cut narrative corners by curtailing any origin stories and sidelining any character arcs. This leaves the newcomers looking and feeling like late additions to the story rather than integral parts of it. Batman and Wonder Woman are placed front and centre to provide the gravitas this series is committed to, while the Flash is used primarily to ensure there are plenty of laughs to be had (an improvement on previous entries, definitely, but by the end of the movie, a little over-used). But if any one aspect of Justice League should raise concerns about Warner Bros. and DC’s abilities to handle this franchise effectively, it’s in their treatment of Superman. The decision to kill him off at the end of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was possibly that movie’s best idea, but here his resurrection is handled so badly that it feels like an insult. Resurrected purely so that there can be a showdown between Superman and the League, the movie ignores the possibility of a much stronger and more long-term story arc* in favour of a ten-minute punch-up that’s abruptly halted by the appearance of Lois Lane. If anyone is in any doubt that Chris Terrio’s screenplay isn’t up to much (even with Joss Whedon’s additions), then this is the moment that confirms it.

The movie retains the series’ inconsistency of tone, and superficial world building, as well as its plodding attempts at exposition, as well as its over-reliance on big, flashy, hollow set-pieces that deaden the senses and lack imagination (hero hits villain with crushing blow, villain hits hero with crushing blow – and repeat, again and again). It jumps from scene to scene without the slightest concern for its own internal logic – which is continually ignored in favour of getting to the next showdown – and it takes liberties with its minor characters; if you’re not Wonder Woman, but you’re still a female character, be prepared to be given short shrift at almost every turn. Shoehorned into the narrative for no particular reason than that they’re part of the canon, the likes of Commissioner Gordon (Simmons) and Martha Kent (Lane) appear briefly and for little purpose. And yet again, the villain is the least interesting character in the movie, a fully-CGI character who is effectively a thug from another dimension, and who has all the villainous intensity of a playground bully.

For a movie that reportedly cost $300 million to make, Justice League also looks a little on the cheap side at times, with some backgrounds looking incredibly fake (check out the cornfield scene with Lois and Clark for an idea of just how awkwardly the marriage of CGI and on-set footage can be rendered). Snyder still manages to direct as if he can’t believe he’s been given the chance to shepherd such a huge franchise in the first place, and his inability to make individual scenes work as part of a greater whole remains firmly in place. As for Joss Whedon’s contribution, there are certain scenes that bear his imprint, but not enough to offset the dour approach adopted by Snyder, and even though the movie is demonstrably lighter in tone than its predecessor, the inclusion of some much needed humour isn’t enough to make up for the pedestrian plotting and the lack of a convincing storyline (or indeed, any storyline). “Must do better” indeed, and as soon as possible.

Rating: 5/10 – still unable to contend with, or overcome the issues that hold back the DCEU from achieving what it’s capable of, Justice League is what might best be described as “a happy mess”, but that’s doing the lacklustre nature of the overall material something of a favour; Gadot and Miller head up a cast who can only go with the flow and hope for the best, while the mythology building is put on hold in favour of several underwhelming scraps that reinforce the notion that whatever else happens in future DCEU movies, it’ll still be safe to assume that buildings will continue to crumble, and important storyteling lessons will still need to be learnt.

 

*What if the following had happened: Superman returns from the dead but is different, less interested in doing good, more selfish and unapproachable. Unwilling to help defeat Steppenwolf, the League has to find a way to defeat him themselves as a team (which they do). And so, by the time of the next Justice League movie, their foe is Superman himself, whose transition to the “dark side” has become more pronounced (oh, and there’s no Kryptonite to help them out). Now that sounds like a great storyline.

A Brief Word About Justice League (2017)

16 Thursday Nov 2017

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The hype over Justice League, the fifth movie in the DC Extended Universe series, is at fever pitch. Released internationally tomorrow on a tidal wave of an…ticipation, it’s a movie that has so much riding on it, that it can’t possibly meet or exceed the expectations Warner Bros. and DC, and fans, have for it. The criticisms that dogged the first three entries in the franchise – Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), and Suicide Squad (2016) – and which seemed to have been at least partially addressed in Wonder Woman (2017), still appear to be in place. The various trailers that have been released give the impression that there will be more humour (a good thing), and even more destruction porn (a bad thing). These things were obvious, but there was also something else that was obvious from the trailers: the lack of an appreciable story.

So far, the one thing missing from any advance discussion of the movie is its storyline. We know its plot: evil villain (is there any other kind?) Steppenwolf comes looking for three Mother Boxes on behalf of his master Darkseid and battles the newly formed Justice League. And… that’s it. It’s simple enough, but lacks any appreciable depth. Anyone looking for something more (except for various explosions and the usual one-on-one pummellings these characters endure) is likely to be disappointed. Warner Bros. have at least restricted the run time to two hours, and for this restraint they are to be congratulated, but this just means that the script will have to work extra hard in between the punch ups and the CGI-reliant action sequences to maintain the viewer’s attention.

It’s a shame for any franchise to have begun so poorly and so quickly, and not been able to learn from its mistakes. But this and the previous three entries have all been made in the last three years, and the writing of each movie must have overlapped. So, perhaps there’s an overall vision for the DCEU that we may not be aware of yet. If so, then Warner Bros. and DC need to start letting people in on it. Not the details – we don’t need those – but perhaps a better understanding of the ambition behind the franchise, or its goals. There’s a whole raft of DCEU movies heading our way in the next few years, but if the same approach is going to be continued, then it’s likely that we’ll be having the same reaction each time (increased antipathy), and be asking the same, inevitable two-pronged question: when are Warner Bros. going to start focusing on the characters and when are they going to start providing convincing, intelligent storylines, and not just showing us how much money they can spend on a universe that is already in danger of collapsing in on itself?

Small Crimes (2017)

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

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D: Evan Katz / 95m

Cast: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Gary Cole, Molly Parker, Robert Forster, Jacki Weaver, Macon Blair, Pat Healy, Michael Kinney, Daniela Sandiford, Shawn Lawrence

At one point in Evan Katz’s Small Crimes, the lead character, ex-cop and recent ex-con Joe Denton (Coster-Waldau) sets out to blackmail the local DA (Kinney) by setting him up with an obliging stripper in a motel room. With a camera in place to record the “tryst”, Joe settles back in an adjacent room and waits for the DA, Phil Coakley, to turn up. Coakley duly arrives but just as it looks as if Joe’s plan is going to work, along comes the stripper’s boyfriend – and with a gun. The boyfriend bursts in, Joe hears shots fired, and then looks out the window to see Coakley emerge unscathed with a gun in his hand. Rushing to the room, he finds the stripper and her boyfriend are both dead and the camera is gone. It’s not the first of Joe’s plans to go wrong since he got out of jail (nor will it be the last), but as the movie continues, and there’s no immediate follow up with either Coakley or Joe, it leaves the viewer wondering: where does all that fit in?

This happens several times during the course of the movie, and though it’s all part of Katz’ and co-screenwriter (and supporting actor) Macon Blair’s screenplay, such a non-linear approach – while it can be applauded as a way of making the movie more distinctive than some of its many cinematic cousins – doesn’t help the viewer to become more involved in the plot and with the various characters that pop up here and there, do their thing, and then disappear again. Only Joe is consistent in his appearance and involvement, and while the viewer can be thankful for this, Joe himself is less of a protagonist and more of a violence-attracting bystander. On his very first night of freedom after spending six years in jail for an extremely vicious assault on the same DA he later tries to blackmail, Joe graciously offers a young woman (Sandiford) a ride home from a bar. But it’s a honey trap, one that Joe fights his way out of, only to learn that the young woman is Coakley’s daughter.

Coincidence or set up? A set up is the likely answer, but the script fumbles this, as it does quite a lot else that could be explained by the odd line of exposition, but Katz and Blair aren’t interested in keeping things simple. Instead their brief seems to be the murkier the better. Motivations are kept frustratingly vague, and even when some decisions or events have to be explained, they’re done in such a way that often it makes it even more difficult to understand why something is happening, and where it fits in. Sometimes a scene will play out, and though it may feel important in the grand scheme of things, that scene will find itself isolated from the rest of the script until such time as Katz and Blair decide they can return to it. And sometimes, they never do. What this all means is that Small Crimes often feels arch and tiresome, as if it can’t make up its mind just what sort of tone it should be adopting, and is trundling along in the hope that inspiration will strike and help it on its way.

The movie has been adapted from the novel by Dave Zeltserman, and while it may seem to have all the requirements for a modern day noir – Joe just wants to go straight for the sake of his kids, who he’s not allowed to see – there’s no femme fatale, there’s no devious figure in the background pulling all the strings, and the only mystery involves a death that occurred before Joe went to jail and which he may be responsible for. The machinations that are set up once Joe is out of jail don’t always make sense, and though all the main characters are surprisingly well drawn (even Molly Parker’s superfluous cat lady-cum-love interest), they’re all in service to a narrative that only occasionally flexes its muscles, and which does so only when there’s violence involved. Otherwise, personal animosities are the order of the day, Joe’s efforts to extricate himself backfire then succeed out of nowhere once too often, and the material tries too hard to be ironic when it just needs to be sincere.

There’s humour then, but not so much that it makes watching the movie a more enjoyable experience. It’s often at a cost to the credibility of Joe himself and Coster-Waldau’s performance, which is through necessity, a more passive role than might be expected. Joe makes a lot of noise when he needs to, but that’s all it is: a lot of noise. He’s also surprisingly naïve in his thinking, believing that he can get himself out of the fix he’s in without there being any bloodshed. There’s noise too from Joe’s mother, Irma (Weaver), who seems there only to shout at him in a disapproving, angry manner. Later, she suffers an injury that could have been avoided, but the irony is in the detail of what happens. Alongside her is Joe’s father, Joe Sr (Forster), her antithesis, a man who is calm and confident and coordinated, and apparently unflustered by anything anyone says. Each gives a better performance than might be expected, and though Coster-Waldau is as charming as ever, there are times when he tries too hard, and the result is some obvious mugging.

The movie at least tries to be interesting, but its tired old scenario isn’t gripping enough for it to make a consistent impact, and some viewers may well be asking themselves why, with admittedly a lot going on, that there’s a distance between the material and the viewer. The simple answer is that what’s happening on screen isn’t anything so convincing or compelling that the viewer is ever likely to maintain continued interest throughout, or care about the characters and what happens to them. And even when the movie pulls a surprise out of its hat at the end, what should be a highly effective, and emotional moment, is undermined by there having been so little previously that would warrant that kind of reaction when it’s needed. Things are further hindered by Katz’s low-key directing style and the bland visual palette used to make the characters seem more interesting than they are. When murder and mayhem in a small town are this unaffecting, then it’s time to look elsewhere for your villainy and deceit.

Rating: 5/10 – patchy and rarely absorbing, Small Crimes unfolds patiently but with few moments where the pace quickens enough for the movie to become entirely interesting; the performances help, but the main storyline lacks cohesion and there’s a distinct sense that the material is laboured, something that it never finds a way to overcome.

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (2015)

14 Tuesday Nov 2017

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D: Ryan Moody, Mark Columbus, Sarah Jean Kruchowski, Shadae Lamar Smith, Vanita Shastry, Simon Savelyev, Jeremy David White / 97m

Cast: James Franco, Abigail Spencer, Rico Rodriguez, Matthew Modine, Kate Mara, Amber Tamblyn, Kristen Wiig, Tony Cox, Jimmy Kimmel, Jim Parrack, Natalie Portman, Thomas Mann, Keir Gilchrist, Bo Mitchell, Jacob Loeb, Kelsey Ford, Tyler Labine

A collection of seven short movies adapted from the short story collection of the same name by Robert Boswell, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards is that inopportune beast, a movie with no clear, discernible focus other than a plan to relate various tales of longing and regret, and all with the same dour approach to each of the “slices of life” that are depicted. A project that was assembled by graduate students of James Franco’s UCLA moviemaking class, it’s telling that the movie was first seen at the Atlanta Film Festival back in March 2015, but is only now receiving a limited release in the US. It’s an arthouse movie, structured in a way that makes it seem more knowing and truthful than it actually is, and which proves only moderately successful in its aims and ambitions.

The seven tales on display are a mixed bunch, both in terms of their content, and in their relation to each other. The first, A Walk in Winter, sees Conrad (Franco), a young man returning to his hometown to identify the remains of a body that may be that of his long-missing mother. An extended visit to the sheriff’s office reveals a childhood beset by abuse and further mystery. The second, Guests, concerns a young boy, Charlie (Rodriguez), who has to deal with his ailing, cancer-stricken father (Modine) and a school bully at the same time. He’s the quintessential chubby kid who’s picked on because he’s different (thanks to his dad), but he’s not the pushover everyone thinks he is. In the third tale, Almost Not Beautiful, sisters Lisa (Mara) and Amanda (Tamblyn) revisit aspects of their childhood while also trying to reconnect after spending some time apart. In doing so they discover a mutual dependency that they’d forgotten about. The fourth tale, Miss Famous, features a maid, Monica (Wiig), whose antipathy towards her clients provokes fantasies where she is rich and famous.

In the fifth, Lacunae, a young man, Paul (Parrack), also returns to his hometown, ostensibly to see his parents, but also to see an ex-girlfriend, Laura (Portman), who may have given birth to their son. Paul is adamant that the child isn’t his, but he can’t resist seeing for himself. In the sixth tale, Smoke, three friends (Gilchrist, Mann, Mitchell) sit round a camp fire and tell bogus stories of their sexual exploits. Each is seeking approbation from the other two, and each story is clearly a longed-for fantasy. And in the final tale, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, another young man, this time called Keen (Loeb), attends a party where he not only hooks up with a young woman, Lila (Ford), but also finds himself in serious trouble with the law. Each tale is bookended by clips and randomly assembled stills from old home movies and family celebrations, and all of which adds a melancholy feel to the material, and which also serves to provide a sense that these tales take place in a time and a place where nostalgia doesn’t provide a soothing balm, but quite the opposite.

With any collection of stories that are meant to have a unifying theme, that theme needs to be evident – even if it’s to varying degrees – in order for the overall movie to work effectively, and also to offset the obvious problem whereby the viewer is forced to reinvest their attention every ten to fifteen minutes in a new story and new characters, while also attempting to assimilate each tale into an organic whole. This is where any portmanteau movie succeeds or fails, but in this case, it’s very nearly a draw, with three stories lacking any appreciable impact by themselves, three other stories working effectively on their own, and one having a foot in both camps. As a whole, though, the movie remains sporadically engaging, with its broader themes of memory and fantasy pushed to the fore when its more telling themes of disappointment and paralysed ambition should be front and centre. This isn’t a feelgood movie, and nor does it come with any message of hope for its characters. Mistakes have been made, and more mistakes will be made as they move forward with their lives. The question is, will any of them learn from their mistakes?

With childhood trauma leading the way in explaining why these characters behave and struggle as they do, each director approaches their tale in a way that, unfortunately, isolates each one from the rest. There’s no symmetry to the stories, and no unifying directorial approach (other than that there is no unifying approach), all of which leaves each episode feeling under-developed or prosaic. Despite some good performances – Franco, Tamblyn, Wiig, Portman, Loeb – the movie relates each tale as if it contains a singular message within itself, and a broader message for everyone to pick up as well (though just when is difficult to work out). But the problem is that with only three of the stories working effectively enough on their own – and they are A Walk in Winter, Guests, and The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards – too much of the movie feels like there should be more to it, and too much of the movie feels like it should be making more of a connection with the viewer.

That said, there’s no denying the ambition and some of the talent on display behind the camera – Moody, Columbus, and White stand out in particular – but it’s all in service to material that isn’t as compelling as it should be given Boswell’s talent as a writer (he also provides the movie with a jaundiced, earnest narration). Some viewers may find some of the tales hard to decipher, while others may feel there’s no need for any deciphering at all, but what is clear is that some amount of interpretation is required, but that it won’t benefit the viewer in the long run. Sometimes, a teenager bragging about having sex with an older woman, is purely wish fulfilment and nothing more. It doesn’t need to resonate, and it doesn’t here. This, ultimately, is where the movie falters, by failing to resonate. And no matter how much effort has been spent, and no matter how much artistic endeavour is on display, when the tale itself isn’t able to carry the viewer forward then it’s time to move on to the next one… unless the next one has the same problem.

Rating: 5/10 – a great idea for a graduate project that proves to be less than a great idea for a movie as a whole, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards wants to be engaging and meaningful, but hasn’t the consistency to make it all work; some tolerance is required to get through the more sluggish and unaffecting episodes, but despite a clutch of good performances, it remains a frustrating experience and one that should be approached with caution.

Only the Brave (2017)

13 Monday Nov 2017

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D: Joseph Kosinski / 134m

Cast: Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Connelly, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, Andie MacDowell, Geoff Stults, Alex Russell, Thad Luckinbill, Natalie Hall

What to say, and how to say it…

Only the Brave tells the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of firefighters who were part of the Prescott, Arizona fire department. They attained elite hotshot status in 2008, only six years after they were first formed. A hotshot crew can be called upon to fight large, high priority fires in any part of the US, and due to the training they receive, are often required to work for long periods of time, in remote areas, and with little in the way of logistical support. They are quite simply, the best at what they do. And until 30 June 2013 and the Yarnell Hill fire, so were the Granite Mountain Hotshots. Led by their superintendent, Eric Marsh (Brolin), nineteen of the twenty Hotshots found themselves cut off from their escape route and having to deploy their fire shelters as the blaze swept towards them. It was not enough. All nineteen men perished.

In telling their story, Only the Brave does what a lot of biographical dramas do, and that’s focus on the good points of all concerned, tell their individual stories (well, some of them at least) with a good deal of easy-going charm, and paint a picture of deep-rooted camaraderie allied to unwavering support from their families and friends. Oh, and the rest of the Prescott townsfolk are similarly unwavering in their support. With everyone on the same page or side – as it were – the movie has to overcome the minor problem of where to find the drama it needs to tell the Hotshots’ story, and effectively. It’s a peculiar bind for a true life drama to find itself in, and it’s one that Joseph Kosinski’s direction, from a script by Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer (itself based on the GQ article No Exit by Sean Flynn), finds it difficult to overcome. In truth, the Hotshots’ tale is one full of drama and excitement, but here, it’s all a little too tepid for comfort, and a little too restrained in terms of any urgency. These are firefighters, operating in some of the most challenging conditions known to man, and yet – and yet – even when they’re in mortal danger, the movie fails to convince the viewer that they’re anywhere even near mortal danger.

Part of the problem with the narrative, and the wider material as a whole, is that it lacks urgency in its firefighting sequences, and its homebound elements are moribund and unappealing. Away from the forest fires, the movie maintains two distinct subplots, both of which involve children, albeit for different reasons. Marsh is staunchly against having kids, but his wife, Amanda (Connelly), is becoming less and less agreeable to this, and wants to start a family. Meanwhile, rookie firefighter and junkie trying to go straight Brendan McDonough (Teller), has just become a father even though at first, Natalie (Hall), the young woman who has given him a daughter, wants nothing to do with him. But while Brendan tries to be a good father, Eric ensures he avoids any discussion with Amanda about having kids. These storylines are meant to provide texture and depth to the proceedings, and to help the viewer get to know these characters as real people, with real lives and real feelings. But these storylines exist in a vacuum, wheeled out between scenes of firefighting in order to give the cast something more to do than trudge around New Mexico (where the movie was shot).

There’s more than a faint whiff of soap opera about these scenes, with Brendan unable to connect with his infant daughter because firefighting keeps him away from home for long stretches, and Amanda driving home one night and falling asleep at the wheel (the car’s a write-off but she walks away with barely a scratch). Minor incidents like these come and go, but these too exist in a kind of vacuum, introduced by the script and then quickly abandoned because their dramatic potential is limited. Even when Brendan is bitten by a rattlesnake, what could have been a nerve-shredding race against time to get him to a hospital is glossed over in a matter of minutes, and has all the impact of watching an infomercial. There’s bags of potential in the Hotshots’ story and their tragic demise, but it’s all wasted thanks to the tepid nature of the script and the distant nature of Kosinski’s direction. There are long periods where the movie feels flat and lifeless, as if it’s going through the motions, and even the CGI-augmented forest fires lack a true sense of their enormity and the devastation they must have caused. And if the depiction of raging, out of control fire isn’t gripping, then how is anything else in the movie going to work anywhere near as effectively?

While the ball is dropped dramatically and often, leaving the viewer to wonder why this movie was made in the first place – this is, after all, another US movie that celebrates failure by calling it heroism – the above calibre cast do their best, but aren’t helped by some redundant dialogue (“I’ll probably be home by lunchtime,” says Eric on the day of the Yarnell Hill fire), or paper-thin characterisations (Bridges’ role as a supporter of the Hotshots is remarkable for his not being given a reason for being so). Brolin gives a solid but unspectacular performance, Teller does the same, all of which leaves it to Connelly to inject some much needed energy into the often dull, often banal proceedings. (Kudos though to the casting team of Jo Edna Boldin and Ronna Kress for hiring an actor called Forrest Fyre to play the Prescott mayor.)

As a tribute to the fallen firefighters of the Granite Mountain Hotshots – Brandon was the group’s only survivor – Only the Brave defaults towards being trite and devoid of meaning on too many occasions for the movie to be anywhere near successful. This is hammered home by a scene where Amanda puts aside her grief to help prop up Brandon and disavow his (understandable) sense of guilt at being alive. It’s a scene that screams Hollywood! at the top of its voice, so lacking in subtlety and credibility is it. Sadly, the movie also coasts along for much of its running time as well, and by the end, you’ll be wondering if any of this will have been worth it. The firefighters’ story could have been an exciting, terrifying tale of extreme bravery and making the ultimate sacrifice. Instead, any bravery is smoothed aside, and as for an ultimate sacrifice, it’s a shame that the firefighters’ sacrifice has led to this turgid and shallow exercise in hagiography being made in the first place.

Rating: 4/10 – top heavy with dramatic clichés, and enough soap opera dialogue to stun the fiery bear Marsh sees in his dreams, Only the Brave is a disappointing addition to the “men in peril” sub-genre of true stories; with Kosinski unable to connect with the material, neither can the viewer, making this an uneasy recreation of a group’s tragic, and unwanted, claim to fame.

The Villainess (2017)

12 Sunday Nov 2017

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Original title: Ak-Nyeo

D: Jung Byung-gil / 123m

Cast: Kim Ok-bin, Shin Ha-kyun, Bang Sung-jun, Kim Seo-hyeong, Jo Eun-ji, Lee Seung-joo, Son Min-ji, Min Ye-ji, Kim Yeon-woo

Beginning with a bravura Hardcore Henry-style action sequence where a lone female takes on a warehouse full of goons before despatching their boss (who may have killed her father), The Villainess makes one thing very clear: this isn’t going to be the kind of generic, Hollywood-style action thriller we’re all used to. Instead, this is going to continue the trend where the Far East shows us just how to put together an exciting, pulse-pounding, and above all, gob-smacking slice of mayhem, with its shoot/stab/gouge first, don’t even bother with questions afterwards characters lashing out in all directions and sending blood flying all over the place (even on the camera lens). This is brutal, uncompromising, stunt-filled stuff that combines excellent fight choreography with sometimes astonishingly fluid camera work, and yet still finds the time to tell a compelling story of love and revenge, as well as layering the action with an emotional weight that is expertly expressed by its cast.

Our heroine is called Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin), a young woman whose father is killed over his possession of a rare and valuable jewel. She witnesses his death as a young girl, but is saved from being killed herself by aspiring gangster Joong-sang (Shin). He raises her as his own and trains her in the art of assassination. When she becomes an adult, her feelings for Joong-sang lead her to marry him. But shortly afterwards, he’s killed, and apparently by the man we see Sook-hee kill at the beginning. Having avenged both her father’s death and her husband’s in one fell swoop, Sook-hee allows herself to be arrested, but instead of being put on trial she finds herself being recruited into a secret South Korean government agency. There, under the watchful eye of her commander, Chief Kwon (Kim Seo-hyeong), Sook-hee’s skills as an assassin are added to, and she is offered a chance at a normal life if she works for the government for ten years as a sleeper agent. She agrees, and is soon set up with a new life as an actress, and with an apartment for her and her daughter, Eun-hye (Kim Yeon-woo) (Sook-hee was pregnant with Joong-sang’s baby when she was arrested).

Sook-hee moves in on the same day as her neighbour, Hyun-soo (Bang), and they soon strike an easy friendship. But Hyun-soo also works for the agency, and is there to keep an eye on Sook-hee. Their relationship becomes gradually more and more romantic until he asks her to marry him, ostensibly as part of his cover but because he has fallen in love with her for real. She’s sent on a couple of missions, neither of which is entirely successful, but it’s the third assignment she’s given that makes all the difference. Tasked with carrying out this assignment on her wedding day, Sook-hee is shocked to discover that her target is someone from her past, someone who she believes is dead. With her loyalties potentially in question (the hit is botched), Sook-hee is watched even more closely by the agency, while also coming to the attention of her target. Soon, no one is safe as Sook-hee’s past comes back to haunt her, and no one in her present day life is safe from harm…

The Villianess tells the bulk of its story in non-linear fashion, skipping backwards and forwards between episodes of Sook-hee’s life as a child, her time with Joong-sang, and her time working for the government. Thanks to a taut script by director Jung Byung-gil and Jung Byeong-sik, there isn’t an ounce of narrative flab on the movie’s carefully constructed bones, and each development and revelation in the script is expertly crafted to provide the maximum effect as Sook-hee first tries to adjust to a “normal” life and at last finds a measure of true happiness, and then sees it all put at risk. As she fights to preserve life instead of wantonly despatching it, the movie invests Sook-hee’s character with a desperate craving for the peace she’s never truly known. And though when that peace is destroyed she reverts to the crazed killer instincts she has managed to keep under wraps, for once it’s entirely understandable that she does so. Revenge is an easy motive in too many action thrillers, but here there’s an emotional element to it all that makes Sook-hee’s murderous retaliation all the more credible.

As with so many of the best action movies coming out of South Korea these days, the movie isn’t just about the action, and there’s strong character development to offset some of the more predictable aspects of the script (it’s not an original story by any means but it is better assembled than most). As the tormented Sook-hee, Kim Ok-bin gives a terrific performance, tough as nails when in a scrap, and yet tender and vulnerable in her scenes with Bang and Kim Yeon-woo. Bang portrays Hyun-soo as a bashful romantic with a floppy fringe, and his role is a nice counterpoint to the testosterone-fuelled bellicosity of his other male colleagues, as well as some of Sook-hee’s fellow students. In the pivotal role of Joong-sang, Shin is equally as tough and tender as Sook-hee, and this ambivalence in the character makes him more intriguing than expected.

But when all’s said and discussed, and despite the need for a compelling narrative to fill in the gaps between the action sequences, The Villainess is still a movie that stands or falls on the quality of said action sequences. And it doesn’t disappoint at all. The opening sequence is a blast, slickly choreographed and edited (and with yet another bloody showdown in a corridor; what is it since Oldboy (2003) about corridor fights?), and as brutal as anything you’ve yet seen. Individual set pieces punctuate the rest of the movie, and maintain a similar intensity despite being briefer, but then Jung ups the ante and provides viewers with an incredible final showdown that includes Sook-hee and the principal villain fighting on the outside of a building, and a section involving a bus where bodies are flung all over the place, even through the rear window and onto the bonnet of a car. It’s impressively bonkers, and shows more visual invention and technical prowess in roughly twenty minutes than most Hollywood action thrillers manage in two hours (even John Wick isn’t this outrageous). If there is to be a Hollywood remake, rest assured it won’t be as good as it is here. But then, we all know that already, don’t we?

Rating: 9/10 – with a great deal of heart and soul amidst all the blood and broken bones, The Villainess is fierce, imposing stuff that has plenty of OMG moments as well as quieter, more character focused moments that help elevate the material throughout; bold in its visual design and enervating cinematography (take a bow, Park Jung-hun), this is everything you could ever want from a South Korean action thriller, and a lot more besides.

The Only Living Boy in New York (2017)

11 Saturday Nov 2017

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D: Marc Webb / 89m

Cast: Callum Turner, Jeff Bridges, Kate Beckinsale, Pierce Brosnan, Cynthia Nixon, Kiersey Clemons, Bill Camp, Wallace Shawn, Tate Donovan, Anh Duong, Debi Mazar, Ben Hollandsworth, John Bolger

Pity poor Thomas (Turner). He’s the quintessential college graduate who can’t work out what he wants to do with his life. His father, Ethan (Brosnan), is a brusque senior editor at a publishing firm, and his mother, Judith (Nixon) appears to be a nervous soul who surrounds herself with people from the arts in order to offset her nervous disposition. Thomas has been discouraged by his father from becoming an author, and he doesn’t seem to have a fall-back career to help him move forward. Instead he spends time with his best friend Mimi (Clemons). He’s in love with Mimi, but his love isn’t reciprocated. One day, Thomas meets W.F. (Bridges), who’s just moved into his building. They strike up a friendship, and soon Thomas is sharing his woes and actively seeking advice from his new-found friend. Soon after, while Thomas and Mimi are out together one evening, they see Ethan in the company of another woman. From this, Thomas decides to find out who the woman is, and to stop any affair she and her father may be having.

The woman is Johanna (Beckinsale), a freelance book editor who has been working on and off with Ethan over the past year. Thomas tells W.F. about his father’s affair, but instead of being equally outraged or supportive of Thomas’s efforts to sabotage the affair, W.F. questions his motives, asking him if he, Thomas, wants to sleep with Johanna instead, and making it plain that this is the reason why Thomas wants to put an end to the affair… Of course, this is all true, and in the way that only the movies can offer, Johanna proves receptive to Thomas’s advances and they begin their own relationship. It’s at this point in the movie when it’s likely that many viewers will throw their hands up in the air and cry, Wish Fulfilment! It’s also the moment when the movie, struggling already to make us care about Thomas or any of the other characters, throws in the towel and decides to play out its insubstantial narrative with all the emotional finesse of an after hours drinking contest.

It’s always hard to work out just who qualifies as the potential audience for a movie like The Only Living Boy in New York, with its self-torturing central characters, middle class aspirations, mock intellectualising (W.F. quotes Ezra Pound at one point), and lazy approach to character building. Oh, and let’s not forget the usual number of occasions where people talk in riddles and never… explain… themselves… fully. It’s hard to understand just why so many of these movies get made, especially when the aim is to try to make these tortured souls and their mock-important lives relevant to the average viewer. Even if this is exactly the social milieu that you inhabit, and even if many of the characters on display reminded you of people you actually know, would you still be interested in watching them whine about how hard done by they are, or how sad or lonely or misunderstood they are? (It’s probably very unlikely.) So if even the people this truly relates to aren’t likely to engage with this particular story, why should anyone else?

Granted, some viewers might be attracted to the movie by the talent involved. Actors of the stature of Jeff Bridges and Pierce Brosnan will always garner interest in any movies they appear in, but on this occasion, they’re at the mercy of a script that challenges the audience to be emotionally involved at nearly every turn. No matter how good the performances – and Brosnan is very good (which is really nice to see after some of the movies he’s made in recent years) – if the script isn’t up to it, or isn’t as compelling as it should be, then no amount of acting experience can compensate for a story that carries little or no emotional weight. And Allan Loeb’s screenplay has exactly that problem: it’s dry and superficial, and any sympathies for Thomas et al. can only be arrived at by a huge amount of effort on the viewer’s part, and an effort that isn’t rewarded at any point during the movie. Even when the movie tries to be clever with the introduction of a back story that, once mentioned, gives away a large chunk of the plot, it stumbles on looking for a payoff that won’t feel forced or intrusive (hint: it doesn’t succeed).

Following on from the much more engaging experience that was Gifted (2017), director Marc Webb does his best to make the various plot developments more interesting than they are, but too often finds himself trying to coax some much needed animation into the material, and struggling to provide any sense that all this is happening in the real world and to “real” people. He’s not helped by Turner’s less than stellar performance, his interpretation of Thomas unnecessarily making viewers wonder just why Johanna would sleep with him, or why Mimi – in a plot “twist” that can be seen coming from space, let alone a mile away – eventually decides she really does love him. It’s a role that unfortunately exposes Turner’s limited range as an actor, and especially in his scenes with Bridges, and it sometimes he does more harm to the movie than even the script. Bridges is good value as always, Beckinsale is trapped by a character arc that is actually one long downward spiral, Nixon does anxious (and should be on medication) because that’s the only thing we know about Judith, and Clemons shows flashes of inspiration as she attempts to make Mimi more than just the best friend whose knowing comments get ignored by the main character.

In the end it all builds to a confrontation that lacks energy, emotion, and purpose (except to help wind things up quickly). An awkward, and unnecessary, coda undermines everything that’s gone before, and is so dramatically redundant that it’s like a slap in the face to the viewer. It reinforces the notion that whatever message the movie is trying to make, whether it be about relationships and how hard they can be, or finding one’s way in the world (by sleeping with your father’s mistress; always a good starting point), or even selecting a career based on what you know you can’t do, the movie itself hasn’t fully made up its mind what that message is, or even if it’s sure about it. In that way it’s a lot like Thomas himself: confused, hoping for inspiration to strike, and held back by so many missed opportunities to do the right thing.

Rating: 4/10 – a glossy snapshot of a semi-privileged lifestyle that proves as empty as the shallowness of the characters and their wretchedly expressed desires, The Only Living Boy in New York is pretentious on one side, and wilfully obtuse on the other; a tale that lacks passion despite its use of affairs and sexual exploitation, it’s another exercise in trying to make middle class angst interesting when we’ve seen it waaaaay too many times before.

Love of My Life (2017)

10 Friday Nov 2017

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D: Joan Carr-Wiggin / 106m

Cast: Anna Chancellor, John Hannah, James Fleet, Hermione Norris, Hannah Emily Anderson, Katie Boland, Greg Wise

Extended families, eh? What can you do with them? (Run as fast and as far away as you can is the best answer.) In the movies, there’s another answer: use them to ask questions about love and fate and dying and the meaning of a life, and much more besides. This is the main idea behind Love of My Life, an uneven look at what happens when a middle-aged woman, Grace (Chancellor), is told that she has a brain tumour that, hopefully, surgeons can remove in five days’ time – or maybe not. Grace is an architect, and she’s married to Tom (Fleet), her second husband after her marriage to prize winning author Richard Feekery (Hannah) broke down when he had an affair with Tamara (Norris). Grace and Richard had a daughter together, Zoe (Boland); she lived with her father who married Tamara. Grace married Tom and they had a daughter as well, Kaitlyn (Anderson). Now, Grace’s ill health brings them all together over the course of the few days before her operation.

Everyone has a different reaction to the news, of course. Grace tries to be optimistic and carry on as usual, going to work and making sure that the latest project she’s overseeing continues as planned. Tom goes to pieces, and hits the bottle in order to numb his feelings of despair (and also because he’s a bit of an alcoholic anyway). Kaitlyn is concerned, obviously, but allows herself to be reassured by her mother. Richard turns up unexpectedly, professing his love for Grace and intent on winning her back. Zoe comes with him, and though she too is upset by the news, she has her own problems that occupy her thoughts more. And then Tamara arrives as well, convinced – correctly – that Richard wants to seduce Grace, while also suspecting that Grace wants him to. As the day of the operation approaches, old animosities and betrayals are aired with ever increasing frequency, relationships shift and slide in the wake of secrets revealed and feelings expressed, life changing decisions are made, and one character does something so irretrievably stupid and selfish that you can’t believe you’re seeing it. There’s definitely a lot going on, but is it enough?

Curiously, the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no, and it largely depends on which character is speaking at any given time. Grace is meant to be the voice of reason, the sensible one treading a median line through all the tantrums and the emotional wreckage that’s been cast up by the news of her tumour. She’s also the audience’s connection to the material, and how she behaves governs how the audience responds to it all. She’s attractive, intelligent, has terrific relationships with her daughters, can be self-deprecating when needed, clearly loves Tom despite his being a bit of a bumbling, blithering idiot (note to casting directors: is James Fleet the only actor who can play these roles?), and comes to realise that the work she’s doing as an architect hasn’t been challenging her – so she changes things for the better. In essence, she’s exactly the kind of person you’d want to be if you found out you have a brain tumour that might prove to be inoperable. In the capable hands of Anna Chancellor, she’s also witty, charming, and a delight to spend time with.

But this is the movies, and inevitably, there have to be challenges, obstacles for Grace to overcome on her way to the operation. And this is where the movie begins to wobble. If we had been presented with a portrait of a woman whose illness prompts her to reassess her life and change things for the better, this could and should have been a warm, endearing movie about the power of self-belief and second chances. That would have been a drama worth seeing. Instead, we have a “dramedy” where Grace (and the audience) has to contend with a collection of supporting characters who, Kaitlyn aside, are self-indulgent, self-important, and relentlessly self-flagellating in their efforts to make you feel sorry for them. Richard is the misunderstood genius – with words at least – using every trick he knows to remind Grace of the wonderful time they had when they were married, as if all that negates the affair he had with Tamara. Richard’s level of self-interest is at least consistent, and is actually more convincing than when he begins to reveal a more sincere, and more soulful side to his relentless self-aggrandising.

At least, though, some effort has gone into writer/director Joan Carr-Wiggin’s script into making Richard at least halfway interesting, and something of an acceptable foil for Grace’s more credible behaviour. If there hadn’t been that effort, we would have been left with a handful of supporting characters seemingly designed to test our patience and our sympathies. Tom is, as already mentioned, a bumbling, blithering idiot, and he behaves stupidly throughout, making you wonder why Grace is with him in the first place. Tamara, played by Norris as a combination of Wicked Witch and jealous harpy, is manipulative in a way that can only be regarded as comic, while Zoe might as well have “airhead” tattooed across her forehead, such is the vacuity that she expresses at pretty much every turn. Kaitlyn survives by virtue of being as level-headed as her mother, something that the viewer has to be thankful for, as the only other character of note is Grace’s boss, Ben (Wise), who she may or may not have hidden feelings for. Seeing these characters interact so ungraciously, and with scant regard for each other’s emotions or histories, isn’t very appealing, and Carr-Wiggin rarely stops them from trying to impose their own ideas and desires on each other, and without any moral imperative to stop them (that Grace has a brain tumour and might just die seems to carry no weight at all with any of them).

The script does try to make some informed (or what seems like informed) comments on life and love, and envy and lust and regret, but it does so in such a way that any effect is muted by the attitudes of the characters. There’s always a degree of sermonising in this kind of movie, and it’s often trite and unprepossessing; Love of My Life embraces this kind of posing and tries to be relevant and incisive all at the same time. That it’s not successful in its aims is purely down to the way in which Carr-Wiggin manipulates her happy bunch of malcontents into acting and sounding like children who’ve been naughty and had their favourite toy taken away as punishment. Against this, only Chancellor and Anderson emerge unscathed, with Chancellor proving that she’s a much better actress than the material she’s working with, and Anderson giving a measured performance that some of her more experienced co-stars could have done well to adopt for themselves (to be fair, though, Hannah tries his best, and gives an earnest portrayal as Richard, but he’s just not sympathetic or likeable enough for anyone to care). In the end, what happens to the people orbiting around Grace fails to engage the viewer, and this takes away from learning more about Grace herself, and what makes her (actually) so intriguing.

Rating: 5/10 – with some obvious humour, a spirited if slightly curtailed performance by Chancellor, and a jumping off point that could have led to something more, Love of My Life ends up being yet another movie where a number of self-absorbed characters bemoan their lots in life – and as if this was anywhere near interesting; a muddled time frame doesn’t help (there are moments when five days seem to be four), and a dull, uninspired visual design helps even less, leaving the movie feeling less than the sum of its parts, and straining too hard to be relevant or meaningful.

M.F.A. (2017)

09 Thursday Nov 2017

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D: Natalia Leite / 92m

Cast: Francesca Eastwood, Clifton Collins Jr, Leah McKendrick, Peter Vack, David Sullivan, David Huynh, Marlon Young, Jess Nurse, Mary Price Moore

A movie that invites the viewer to play an extended version of Spot the Influence, M.F.A. (that’s Master of Fine Arts in case you didn’t know) is a splatter cake of references and themes from other features, most of which are really obvious, and which have an unfortunate tendency to interrupt the narrative, and pull the viewer out of the strange effect that the movie creates in between these interruptions. So every now and then, the viewer is forced to exclaim, “Hey! That’s from [insert relevant movie title here]” before being able to reconnect with art student Noelle (Eastwood) and her attempts at university-based vigilantism. That’s the first, really obvious influence: Michael Winner’s seminal Death Wish (1974). But don’t worry, there are plenty of others to pick out. (There’s a game derived from Withnail & I (1987) where the viewer is required to have a drink every time one of the characters has a drink; you might want to train for it. You could play a similar sort of game with M.F.A. and have a drink every time a movie influence, or reference, appears on screen.)

At first, this is all kind of fun, but the movie soon runs the risk of adding all these references to the detriment of the script as a whole, with Eastwood’s revenge focused antagonist seemingly at the mercy of every pause and insert that writer, producer and co-star Leah McKendrick can come up with. It all begins well enough with under-achieving Noelle in danger of failing her class and not graduating due to a lack of emotion in her paintings. As if this wasn’t bad enough, she gets an invite to a party by a guy she likes, Luke (Vack), and while she’s there he takes her to his room and rapes her. Understandably shocked, she’s further shocked by the attitude of her best friend, Skye (McKendrick), who tells her to forget about it, and a school councellor, Mrs Sanders (Moore), who questions Noelle as if she were making it all up. When Luke invites her over to his place as if nothing has happened, he ends up dead and Noelle begins to walk a very dark path of revenge and cold-blooded murder.

By this stage, the movie has begun its salute to Death Wish, and has done so via a shout out to The Hunting Ground (2015). We learn that Balboa University, the fictional campus where Noelle studies, has never acknowledged the rape of a student within its grounds in its entire history, and the script winds this into the narrative in an effort to make a point about contemporary gender politics, but while it’s a noble aim, it feels just as forced as the idea that a counsellor would dismiss a claim of rape entirely (especially these days), and just as forced as the idea that because they’re male and likely to be sports stars, rapists will always get away with it (even if there’s widely available video evidence to prove they did it). The script adopts then a very black and white attitude that seems intent on providing Noelle with a reason for going all Paul Kersey, but which also doesn’t forget to include moments of sexploitation when she does so (her first targeted victim has to be seduced before he dies). Despite this kind of direct approach, the combination of McKendrick’s screenplay and Leite’s direction doesn’t ensure this means an effective approach, and the two elements tend to work against each other.

Of course, Noelle isn’t satisfied with avenging her own assault, though it’s only when she becomes aware of another rape – that went unpunished – that she decides to do something more. As she works her way through a list of rapists, Noelle finds that her art work gains that missing emotion, or passion, that was holding her back. This idea, that murder can be an inspiration for artistic expression, has been seen several times before, including the likes of House of Wax (1953) and Color Me Blood Red (1965), but here it seems like an afterthought, so long does it take for Noelle to begin using her new feelings in order to improve her work (which of course is immediately recognised as being significantly better by her tutor and the rest of her class). And of course, once she begins killing her fellow students, Noelle has a detective on her trail called Kennedy (Collins Jr), who’s always one step behind her until the end (though like Rick Deckard in Blade Runner (1982) he doesn’t actually do any detecting, but is gifted her identity when an intended victim survives her attack on him). The tropes and long range subtleties of low budget horror thrillers are all present and correct, from the ease with which Noelle carries out her crimes, to the fetishisation of Eastwood herself, as she’s called upon to wear revealing outfit after revealing outfit before finally appearing nude.

With M.F.A. throwing together so many disparate elements, and sometimes in the same scene, it’s inevitable that the movie itself doesn’t always work as well as intended. Some of the dialogue is clunky and several moments of exposition sound like they’re being read from cue cards, but in a strange way the movie is quite hypnotic to watch. This is partly due to the various influences on display (which one will the viewer spot next?), and partly due to Eastwood’s committed performance, which anchors the movie and helps gloss over some of the longueurs that occur when the script tries to be didactic. Utilising a sympathetic approach to the character of Noelle that she manages to retain even when she’s wearing her vigilante hat, she gives an emotionally redolent, purposeful performance that could well prove to be her break-out role. In support, Collins Jr has very little to do except grow a beard very quickly, while McKendrick is erratic as the poorly written best friend whose involvement in Noelle’s life leads to an easily anticipated tragedy.

But again, even with all this going on, the movie is worth a watch, it’s strangled dynamic proving unexpectedly gripping in places, and with a dark thriller atmosphere that, for the most part, is well handled by Leite and which adds power to the material. There are brief moments of levity, a few nods to the kind of life Noelle could have had if she didn’t become a vigilante, and a couple of painful instances where Noelle’s self-awareness has the potential for self-destruction. The ending at least is dramatically satisfying, even though the build-up to it is wayward and not entirely confident in what it’s trying to say. A good try, then, and one that shows promise for all concerned.

Rating: 7/10 – thematically bizarre, and unabashedly dogmatic in places, M.F.A. is nevertheless a dour but entertaining, low budget rehash of the vigilante movies of the late Seventies; with a persuasive central performance by Eastwood, it’s a movie that wears its influences on its sleeves, and which isn’t afraid to mix things up – even if that mixing isn’t too successful – in order to tell its uncompromising tale.

Guest in the House (1944)

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

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aka Satan in Skirts

D: John Brahm / 121m

Cast: Anne Baxter, Ralph Bellamy, Aline MacMahon, Ruth Warrick, Scott McKay, Marie McDonald, Jerome Cowan, Margaret Hamilton, Percy Kilbride, Connie Laird

A semi-remote house on the cliffs of Maine, a psychiatric patient who can’t help her manipulative ways, a family about to be torn apart thanks to jealousy and the propagation and belief of certain lies, and a dark, brooding atmosphere to cap it all off. Welcome to the psycho-noir theatrics of Guest in the House, a movie that is as brazen and as wanton as it can be given the decade it was produced, and which was unfairly derided on its initial release. Time hasn’t been entirely kind to the movie, as seeing it in its original full length is now very difficult – most extant prints run around one hundred minutes – but it’s definitely one to seek out and admire for its fervid tone and rampant paranoia.

Adapted for the stage by Hagar Wilde and Dale Eunson, from a story by Katherine Albert, this screen adaptation by the wonderfully named Ketti Frings (who would go on to write the screenplays for The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) and Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) amongst others), and with an uncredited contribution by André De Toth, is a cuckoo in the nest tale that concerns Evelyn Heath (Baxter), who suffers from a heart condition and a traumatic past. She’s been a patient under the care of Dr Dan Proctor (McKay), and now they’re engaged. Having decided that she needs peace and quiet in order to recover from a recent bout of ill health, Dan brings her to his home on the Maine coast, and persuades his family to let her stay there indefinitely. Although she’s initially fearful of her new environment, and stays in her room a lot, Evelyn soon earns the sympathy of Dan’s family – his artist brother, Douglas (Bellamy), Douglas’s wife, Ann (Warrick), their daughter, Lee (Laird), and Dan and Douglas’s aunt Martha (MacMahon) – as well as their good friends, Miriam (McDonald), who lives there and works as a model for Douglas, and Mr Hackett (Cowan).

Douglas is an attentive and supportive substitute for Dan, and though she has feelings for Dan, she soon decides that she needs to clear the way in order that she and Douglas can be together permanently. She begins by insisting that Dan returns to the clinic where they met and continue his work there; she also maintains that she’ll be reunited with him when she’s better (so no patient-doctor dilemma there). With Dan out of the way, Evelyn sees to it that, one by one, everyone else is either forced to leave the house or leaves of their own accord thanks to the web of lies she weaves. A once happy and carefree household becomes a hostile, prejudicial environment where not even Lee is safe from Evelyn’s machinations. And as Douglas becomes more and more withdrawn from the people who love him, and falls victim to Evelyn’s plan, his antipathy and anger towards them appears to be the one thing, that if it remains unchecked, will see Evelyn achieve everything she’s aiming for.

Guest in the House is a movie that betrays its stagebound origins at almost every turn, and while there’s an awful lot of scenes that require the cast to go up and down stairs as if it’s going to break out into a farce at any minute, these scenes do serve to highlight the increasing aloofness of the characters from each other, and the dramatic significance of what goes on behind the closed doors on the house’s upper level. The house is used in quite a clever way, looking and feeling bright and airy and welcoming (particularly to Evelyn) at the beginning, but becoming increasingly claustrophobic as the movie continues. This is helped tremendously by Lee Garmes’ cinematography, which adds more and more shadows to bolster that sense of claustrophobia, and which acts as a measure of the psychological effect that Evelyn’s plotting has on all concerned. The weather too transforms from bright and sunny to dark and stormy, further adding to the sense of impending disaster, and in the hands of director John Brahm (himself brought in after original director Lewis Milestone fell ill, and second choice John Cromwell was unavailable), the movie’s tone becomes equally as dramatic and the characters more and more isolated thanks to their location.

As a psychological thriller, its success or failure rests entirely on the character of Evelyn, and though there are times when her manipulation of others is likely to strike viewers as entirely too obvious, and Baxter’s performance borders too often on being overly melodramatic, in the end it’s the effect she has on the other characters that is compelling rather than whether or not she’s credible in her actions and her dialogue. Seeing Douglas and Ann’s marriage unravel makes for disturbing viewing, not just for the ease with which Evelyn makes it happen, but for the way in which Douglas – our hero, at least at the beginning – embraces it. Overlooked for the most part, it’s Douglas’s descent into antagonsim and dissent that is the movie’s strong suit, and the psycholgical underpinnings that allow him to do so are exploited superbly, making Bellamy’s performance much better than usual – it’s a far cry from the second-string romantic roles he played in movies such as Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) and Affectionately Yours (1941).

The cast as a whole contribute solid, considered performances, and there’s fine supporting work from the likes of MacMahon and Warrick, and Hamilton as the housekeeper whose morality is offended by the lies that Evelyn fosters. It all races to an over the top finale that stretches credibility quite a bit, but where a degree of ambiguity may have made for a better ending, what there is is satisfying (for the most part) on a dramatic level, if not a psychological one. Brahm orchestrates the sometimes over-ripe material to maximum effect, and throws in odd visual moments that are startling in their appearance, such as Evelyn looking intently out of a rain-swept window. Elsewhere, there are times when certain scenes wouldn’t feel out of place in a Hitchcock movie, and despite its often florid approach, it maintains a mordaunt sensibility that keeps the viewer in thrall to the unfolding narrative.

Rating: 8/10 – not a masterpiece by any means, but still a terrific example of what might be described today as a “home invasion” thriller, Guest in the House is subtler than it looks, and more gripping than you’d expect; with a troubling, unsettling subtext relating to sexual desire to make it even more interesting, it’s a movie that deserves to be rediscovered, and hopefully in its full length version.

NOTE: At present, there is no trailer for Guest in the House.

Ingrid Goes West (2017)

07 Tuesday Nov 2017

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D: Matt Spicer / 98m

Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O’Shea Jackson Jr, Wyatt Russell, Billy Magnussen, Pom Klementieff

In today’s social media obsessed society, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t have some kind of social media account, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter, or any of the myriad other “services” that allow people to connect with each other, and in doing so, provide them with a sense of belonging that they might not otherwise be able to achieve. Being “liked” is important to so many people across the world that it’s become akin to having an addiction, but instead of drugs, it’s about being recognised and having your life, and your lifestyle, acknowledged, admired, and affirmed. If you have thousands of followers (millions if you’re a global celebrity), then what does that do for your self-esteem? And equally, what does it say about the people who follow you? With all the advice that’s out there about being an individual, and being true to yourself, how does social media support that?

That’s just one of the broader issues addressed in Ingrid Goes West, a movie about appearance and image and wanting to find your place in life. Ingrid Thorburn (Plaza) is a fantasist who’s never learnt how to make friends the “normal” way. Instead she looks to Instagram as a way of meeting new people and beginning new relationships, but at the same time she’s not aware of the ephemeral nature of those relationships. Believing that if she receives a Like on a post then it means she’s made a new friend, Ingrid is predisposed to believing that she has a long-lasting friendship, and that she is important to that person. At the beginning of the movie, Ingrid gatecrashes a wedding and sprays mace in the bride’s face. Why? Because Ingrid wasn’t invited. Later, the truth is revealed: there was no friendship, it was all in Ingrid’s head. A brief spell in a mental hospital combined with the recent death of her mother leads Ingrid to try and reassess her feelings, but she’s undone by an Instagram posting by a social media influencer called Taylor Sloane (Olsen). Ingrid comments on Taylor’s post, Taylor responds politely, which prompts Ingrid to decide to move to California, and using over sixty thousand dollars she’s inherited, do her best to become Taylor’s new best friend.

How she does this involves liking the things and places that Taylor recommends, and doing some low-level stalking. Then she kidnaps Taylor’s dog, Rothko, and returns him the next day, leading to Taylor and her husband, Ezra (Russell), admitting her into their lives and the three of them becoming friends. As the movie allows Ingrid the opportunity to make a real and lasting friendship, it also shows how she’s incapable of doing such a thing. Ingrid weaves a web of lies when she doesn’t need to, and does so not just with Taylor and Ezra, but also with her landlord, Dan (Jackson Jr), an aspiring screenwriter and Batman afficionado. But though she does all this, she manages to avoid any major trouble, keeping herself just this side of “normal”, and managing to gain a degree of trust from both Taylor and Ezra that Ingrid herself is unable to return.

Inevitably, things start to go wrong. Ingrid’s lies and ulterior motive for getting to know Taylor begin to unravel, but in the process, the movie cannily shows how similar Ingrid and Taylor are, and how both women, in their own ways, are seeking approval and affirmation from the people around them, and the wider world. The role of social media is hugely important to all this, and the dependency that both women have is explored in a way that tries to be non-judgmental but which can’t help but come down on the side of taking a step back and not using social media as a guide to life. Ingrid has mental health issues, so her obsessional behaviour can be explained, but Taylor has used Instagram to create a public profile for herself that isn’t too far from her real personality. So, the movie asks, which character has the real problem? (It’s still both, but at least the movie is trying not to be simplistic in its approach.) In the end, Ingrid is forced along the road to despair, while Taylor remains seemingly unaffected by having a de facto stalker in her life. Though how Taylor would feel about the twist the movie reveals in the final scene, would be worth seeing.

There’s a sincerity and a purpose about Ingrid Goes West that makes its forays into the darker side of social interaction, whether via electrronic devices or in person, far more astute than is readily apparent. This is not a comedy, though there are humorous moments, but instead it’s a tragedy, one that attempts to highlight how the perception of peer pressure isn’t the preserve of troubled teenagers, but can also affect adults as well, and have a much more lasting, negative, effect. The script, by director Spicer (making his feature debut) and David Branson Smith, maintains its tone as a tale of social horror throughout, even going very dark during an ill-judged section of the movie that involves kidnapping and attempted murder, but always returning to the notion that everyone, even the good-natured Dan, is struggling to find themselves and their place in the wider world. Ingrid thinks she’ll find her place by associating with someone she believes is “cool”, while Taylor thinks that’s she’s already found her place by sharing her opinions about what she believes is “cool”.

The pervasive nature of social media in our daily lives is reflected by the number of photographs Ingrid takes (as if it won’t be real unless she can record it), the number of posts Taylor shares, and the number of followers that both accrue over time. Both have convinced themselves that their engagement with social media will improve their lives – Ingrid, literally – but both women look and sound as shallow as their dependency makes them. As Ingrid, Plaza gives a desperate, sharply expressed performance that is by turns sympathetic and horrifying, her character’s emotional detachment a reflection of the focus she needs to maintain in order not to ruin things. She treats Dan badly, betrays confidences without a second thought, and doesn’t have a clue about real relationships. Olsen is equally as good as Taylor, the self-made social media guru who’s lost sight of the person she once was, but who can recognise herself in Ingrid’s need to be a part of something bigger than either of them. Jackson Jr brings a much needed sweetness to the role of Dan, but Russell is hampered by his role as a pretentious “artist” who wouldn’t dream of doing anything so banal as selling his work. With stylish cinematography by Bryce Fortner and perfectly judged editing from Jack Price, this is a trenchant, relevant look at a generational battleground that shows no sign of abating, or improving.

Rating: 8/10 – a persuasive and intelligent drama that doesn’t hold back in terms of showing how desperate some people can be to “fit in”, Ingrid Goes West is blackly comic in an “if-you-don’t-laugh-you’ll-cry” kind of way that emphasises the dramatic nature of the material; with terrific performances from Plaza and Olsen, and confident direction from Spicer, this is a cautionary tale that should resonate with anyone who’s liked a post by somebody they don’t know in the hope that their like will be liked as well… and so on.

Brigsby Bear (2017)

06 Monday Nov 2017

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D: Dave McCary / 97m

Cast: Kyle Mooney, Greg Kinnear, Matt Walsh, Mark Hamill, Michaela Watkins, Ryan Simpkins, Jorge Lendeborg Jr, Alexa Demie, Claire Danes, Kate Lyn Sheil, Beck Bennett, Jane Adams

James Mitchum (Mooney) is in his mid-twenties and has never strayed beyond the immediate confines of the underground bunker that he and his parents, Ted (Hamill) and April (Adams), live in due to the outside air being poisonous (though the cause is left unexplained). James has grown up watching a TV show called Brigsby Bear Adventures, which concerns a bear called Brigsby and the adventures he has in space as he tries to stop the evil Sunsnatcher from destroying all the light in the universe. Brigsby is aided by two twins, the Smile Sisters, who are roughly eight or nine. James knows the show inside out, and for good reason: it’s the only TV show he’s ever seen. But James’ life is turned upside down when police arrive at the bunker, and it’s revealed that James was stolen as a baby from his real parents, Greg (Walsh) and Louise Pope (Watkins).

United with his birth parents, and his younger sister, Aubrey (Simpkins), James finds much that is puzzling about this new world he’s been thrust into, and his obvious lack of social skills don’t help, but the one thing he has that he can rely on, the one thing that continues to make sense to him, is Brigsby Bear. But when he’s informed that Ted created the character and made all the shows himself, instead of trying to put this information into the context of his “abducted” life and its structure (the video tapes of the show that Ted made were as much educational as they were entertainment), James decides to make a Brigsby Bear movie, and use it as a way of completing Brigsby’s story. James’s reasoning is plain: if Ted can no longer finish the story, who better than James? With the aid of some of Aubrey’s school friends, including budding movie maker Spencer (Lendeborg Jr), and admirer Meredith (Demie), and police detective Vogel (Kinnear) (who helps with “access” to some of the show’s original props), James sets about making his dream come true.

If you see a movie that’s more sincere and more touching than Brigsby Bear in 2017, then that movie definitely needs to be brought to everyone’s attention, because this movie is both those things and much, much more. A feelgood movie that takes a truly original notion and explores it with unexpected depth and compassion, Brigsby Bear is a terrific, wonderfully constructed movie that touches on universal themes of acceptance and individuality and belonging, and does so in such a well thought out and affecting way that it’s hard not to find yourself smiling to yourself without always realising it while the movie is playing. Conceived and written by its star, Kyle Mooney, and his friend, Kevin Costello, James’s own adventure is one that is both touching and heartfelt, and which pulls the viewer along by the sheer exuberance that emanates from the screenplay and its use of the characters involved. James isn’t a socially awkward teenager in an adult’s body, he’s a socially awkward adult with a teenager’s mindset. But his commitment to Brigsby Bear isn’t a sign of a child whose emotional growth has been stunted by prolonged exposure to the show. Instead it provides clear evidence that James has absorbed many of the life lessons that Ted has tried to teach him; all he has to do now is recognise the situations in which he should use them (it’s an interesting subtext – that Ted has actually done a good job of being a father to James despite the circumstances – that, sadly, isn’t followed up).

That he gets so many things wrong becomes understandable, but Mooney and Costello’s screenplay, ably realised by McCary, also shows how James develops as a person, and how he learns from his mistakes. Mooney is superb as James, always seeming as if he’s just on the verge of working out some diffuse mystery, and always in a way that keeps everyone around him slightly on tenterhooks, unsure of where his enthusiasm for Brigsby will take him. It leads to some wonderfully charming moments that emphasise and highlight the joys of extremely low budget movie making, and how the making of this particular movie serves as a final chapter for the first part of James’s life; it’s his way of putting the past behind him and beginning to move on. And as he reconciles his past with his future, more lessons are learned and James’s growth as an individual helps him to forge the new relationships that will allow him to rebuild his life.

Directed with confidence, and with a focus on the emotional core of the screenplay by McCary (making his feature debut), the movie is quirky, and infused with a sweet-natured humour that allows for easy laughs throughout, but not at the expense of the sentimental nature of the drama. Some viewers may find that the movie isn’t “dark” enough, as if the initial set up should lead on to darker material, but that idea is quickly undermined (and dismissed) when Vogel asks James if the Mitchums ever “touched” him. James confirms this, saying it happened often, and demonstrates by shaking Vogel’s hand. This isn’t a movie where any physical or psychological damage to its lead character is either mandatory or relevant – there are plenty of other movies where those aspects are addressed. Instead it’s a movie that in its own compassionate way, avoids those issues but only because it’s not the story it wants to tell. (And even when James is sent to a psychiatric hospital, there’s still the opportunity for laughs rather than misery.)

With great supporting turns from the likes of Kinnear (as a cop with thespian leanings), Danes (as a domineering therapist), and Hamill (as the not quite so evil abductor that you’d expect), the movie is also careful to portray the Pope family dynamic as one of protracted confusion mixed with dwindling hope that James will ever be fully integrated into that dynamic. The script provides answers to many of the questions it raises (including that one), but is shrewd enough to keep James’s future an enigma that even he may never solve. This ambiguity allows the movie to end on a high note that is actually more poignant and more apt when considering where James’s story began, and which is in keeping entirely with its off-kilter nature. Few movies this year are likely to be as engaging or as captivating as this one, and that’s because this movie is a true one of a kind.

Rating: 9/10 – with its fully rounded central character, offbeat yet creative scenario, and effortlessly endearing atmosphere, Brigsby Bear is like a surprise present you weren’t expecting – at all; smart, funny, and genuine, it’s a movie that eschews moralising for optimism, and does so in such a warm, convivial manner that it’s entirely too hard to resist.

Breathe (2017)

04 Saturday Nov 2017

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D: Andy Serkis / 118m

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Tom Hollander, Stephen Mangan, Hugh Bonneville, Jonathan Hyde, Ed Speleers, Steven O’Donnell, Miranda Raison, Harry Marcus, Dean-Charles Chapman, Sylvester Groth, Diana Rigg

In December 1958, while working in Kenya, twenty-eight year old tea broker Robin Cavendish (Garfield) was struck down by polio, leaving him paralysed from the neck down and dependent on a mechanical respirator in order to remain alive. He was brought back to England where at first he was given three months to live, and then a year. His own reaction was to have his respirator turned off. He saw no future for himself and wanted his wife, Diana (Foy), whom he’d recently married and who was still only twenty-five, a chance at a better future for herself. To her credit, and his good fortune, Diana refused to entertain the idea, and told Robin in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t going to give up, even if he wanted to. They also had an infant child, Jonathan, to consider. Still facing a bleak future though, Robin’s only wish was to leave the hospital where he was effectively confined. Against the advice of his doctor (Hyde), he left the hospital, and the Cavendish’s moved into their own home in the countryside, where Diana took on the roles of wife, mother and nurse with the help of friends such as Colin Campbell (Speleers), and her twin brothers Bloggs and David (both Hollander).

In the way that only real life can manufacture, that could, and perhaps should have been the end of Robin’s story, but a truncated lifespan wasn’t on the cards. With the aid of his friend, Oxford professor Teddy Hall (Bonneville), Robin conceived the idea of a wheelchair with a built-in respirator that would allow him to leave the house, and eventually go on trips with the further aid of a converted van. Now more mobile than he could have ever predicted, Robin decided to show the progress he’d achieved to other disabled people, and the medical community. Thanks to private funding, Hall was able to construct a fleet of wheelchairs such as Robin’s, and these enabled other disabled people to leave hospital, and to function in the “outside” world. Robin soon became an advocate and champion for the rights of the disabled, and by the time of his death in 1994, was regarded, quite rightly, as a medical phenomenon, having lived with his deteriorating condition for thirty-six years.

The directorial debut of Andy Serkis – it should have been his version of The Jungle Book, but delays on that production have pushed it back to 2018 – Breathe is exactly what it looks like from the poster and anything you may have heard about it: a tale of inspiration and personal courage. Though Serkis is best known for his motion capture performances as Gollum, King Kong and Caesar, as a director he’s clearly learnt a lot from those he’s worked with over the years because the movie is an assured, likeable production that tells its story in a measured, positive manner that allows the viewer to fully understand Robin’s plight, and the feelings that come with it. Thanks to an equally assured script by William Nicholson, Breathe tackles the various issues related to quadriplegia (though it studiously avoids the issue of sex) with sympathy and no small amount of understanding, most of which is provided by yet another excellent performance by Andrew Garfield. Following on from impressive turns in Silence (2016) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016), Garfield makes sure that every emotion, every feeling, every consideration or decision that Robin makes is clearly expressed so there can be no misunderstanding for the viewer. It’s a performance that also reflects the innate humanity that Robin possessed, and his complete and utter love for Diana, something that could have caused the movie to become cloying and overly sentimental, but which Serkis avoids through a combination of his knowing direction and Garfield and Foy’s awareness of, and immersion in, the characters.

Inevitably, it’s not all triumph over adversity and lives lived happily ever after. This is a movie that starts off on a bright summer’s day at a cricket match where Robin and Diana meet. It couldn’t be more lovely, a replication of happier days when falling in love seemed so easy and uncomplicated. But once he’s struck down by polio and his lifestyle is curtailed, Robin’s life takes on an urgency and a scariness that makes for a number of scenes that are nail-biting even though we know the outcome must favour Robin. At home, their dog catches the lead to the respirator and pulls it out of the electrical socket. We already know that he can’t survive for more than two minutes without it (or someone using a manual respirator), and Serkis plays out those two minutes to the second, creating tension even though we know everything will be fine, but still making the viewer apprehensive and nervous as to how he’ll be saved.

Other moments such as the wheelchair respirator blowing up on a trip to Spain, and the deterioration of the lining of Robin’s lungs, serve as reminders as to the reality of his situation, and they’re used for maximum impact. But if there’s one scene, one image that highlights both Robin’s past predicament, and those of thousands of disabled people across the world at that time, the Sixties, it comes during a visit to a German hospital that is highly regarded for its treatment of the disabled. It’s the movie’s most impressive moment, one of tragedy and despair as we see rows of disabled people like Robin stacked on top of each other in gleaming iron lungs. And when Robin enters the room, the reaction of the head doctor (Groth) is one of horror and embarrassment: horror at the difference between Robin and his patients, and embarrassment at being so badly caught out for treating said patients so appallingly. It’s moments like this one, where the movie challenges the medical and social attitudes of the time that adds depth to the narrative and reminds us all that Robin wasn’t just making these improvements to his life for his own sake, but for the thousands of others just like him.

Breathe is also one of the most beautifully realised movies of the year, with Serkis and cinematographer Robert Richardson combining to provide a richly detailed series of shots and compositions that are often breathtaking in their simplicity, and in their ability to add an emotional layer to scenes that accentuate and support the performances at every turn. The score by Nitin Sawhney is another aspect of the production that Serkis uses to good effect, never allowing the music to overwhelm a scene or prove intrusive, using it instead to provide another sensitive layer to the proceedings. Garfield and Foy have a definite chemistry that makes the enduring love between Robin and Diana entirely credible, and there are terrific supporting turns from Hollander and Mangan (as Robin’s doctor in later life). In covering nearly forty years of one man’s life, the movie is necessarily episodic, and there are occasional lulls in the drama as the story moves from one period to the next, but other than this and some of the supporting characters having little to do except hang about marvelling at Robin’s progress, this is an admirable and accomplished feature debut by Serkis that isn’t afraid to “go dark” when it needs to, and which is inspiring without sounding like it’s preaching.

Rating: 8/10 – a sincere and affecting look at a man’s life and the positive choices that can be made even in the face of extreme adversity, Breathe is a testament to Robin Cavendish’s determination to still lead a fulfilling life, and the equal determination of his wife, Diana, that he should be able to; a moving and immensely entertaining movie, it bodes well for any future turns behind the camera that Serkis embarks on, and is one of the few “lead character with a disability” movies that doesn’t seem like it’s been made just so it can garner nominations and win awards in the year ahead.

Hampstead (2017)

03 Friday Nov 2017

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D: Joel Hopkins / 103m

Cast: Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson, Lesley Manville, Jason Watkins, James Norton, Simon Callow, Adeel Akhtar, Alistair Petrie, Hugh Skinner, Will Smith, Brian Protheroe, Rosalind Ayres, Deborah Findlay, Peter Singh, Phil Davis

Hampstead is a curious movie, one that’s inspired by a true story, but structured in such a way that it seems to be deliberately insulting the memory of the real-life person that Brendan Gleeson’s character is based on. That man was called Harry Hallowes, an Irishman who was evicted from his flat in Highgate, London in 1987 and who built a makeshift home for himself in a corner of Hampstead Heath. When property developers tried to evict him, the case went to court and he was able to claim squatter’s rights because he had been “resident there” for over twelve years. In 2007 he was awarded the deed to the half-acre of land on which he was living; it was worth over £2 million. Hampstead takes that story and makes it into a lightweight romantic comedy that flits along unobtrusively and in banal fashion while making it more about Diane Keaton’s American widow in London, Emily Walters, than it does the movie’s fictional Harry Hallowes, Donald Horner.

Emily lives in an apartment building overlooking Hampstead Heath. Her husband has died leaving her in financial difficulties that she’s doing her best to ignore. She works part-time in a charity shop, but otherwise is fairly aimless, and spends much of her spare time trying to avoid her friend, Fiona (Manville), who also lives in the building and who is doing her best to set up Emily with a new man. One day, while looking through her husband’s things in the attic room she finds a pair of binoculars and uses them to look out over the heath. She spots Horner’s makeshift home, and becomes intrigued enough to continue spying on it, and eventually him. When she sees him being attacked, she calls the police, but doesn’t come forward until a few days later when she sees him in Highgate Cemetery. They become uneasy friends at first, then a romance develops, but it’s when Emily learns about the efforts to evict Donald that she finds a new purpose in her life and determines to help Donald whether he likes it or not.

It’s a measure of Robert Festinger’s underwhelming screenplay that Donald’s plight can only be addressed through the intervention of a woman who’s looking for some meaning in her life. That she takes on his cause for herself is both selfish and self-serving, but the script ignores this in its efforts to make Emily appear selfless instead. As a result, she isn’t quite as sympathetic a character as perhaps was intended, and she comes across as a busybody with good intentions rather than the supportive friend (and eventual lover) that she’s meant to be. It makes watching long stretches of the movie difficult as Emily, under the guise of making a difference, does so in order to make herself feel better about her life. In other movies this might be acceptable – it’s a standard character arc, after all – but when this is in service to someone else’s story, someone who actually existed, then it comes across as insensitive and inconsiderate. Was Hallowes’ story so undramatic that it needed a fictional character, and a self-centred character at that, to give it relevance and/or meaning?

The answer is obviously No, but still, it’s the path the movie has chosen to take in its efforts to tell a version of Hallowes’ story. On that basis though, the movie is still unsuccessful in its aims as it tries to create a romance out of convenience, and a drama out of necessity (there’s broad humour in there too but it’s not the movie’s strongest suit). The movie ambles along during its first half, building the relationship between Emily and Donald, and making it all so innocuous and inoffensive that when they eventually sleep together, it’s hard to actually believe that they did anything more than just sleep together. In this particular rendition of “normal life”, sex is something to be referenced but not explored, or regarded as believable. This further undermines the credibility of the relationship between Emily and Donald, and makes it seem even more artificial than Festinger and director Joel Hopkins would like.

With the central relationship so hamstrung by the needs of the script, and with Hopkins unable to make more of it than there is on the page, it’s left to Keaton and Gleeson to do what they can with the material and hopefully flesh it out. But neither of them is able to do much more than provide the odd frisson to their roles, and despite their best efforts, both Emily and Donald remain as insubstantial at the end as they were at the beginning. Character traits are embedded from the word go, and they remain firmly in place throughout. Emily may appear emotionally tougher by the end, but it’s not because of her time with Donald, but because she has no choice in the matter; she either toughens up or goes under, and the script naturally chooses the former for her. Donald though, remains the same throughout, and in a chauvinistic approach that the movies love to continue peddling, gives Emily no choice in how their relationship will continue after the court case (it also makes Emily look as if she hasn’t been paying attention to anything Donald has told her about his lifestyle, and why he lives the way he does).

In the end, Hampstead doesn’t have enough substance and/or depth to make it all work, and the movie ambles along quite predictably and with a soupçon of charm to help guide it over the rough spots. The courtroom scenes are played for humour rather than the drama that’s required, the supporting cast all meld into one with the exception of Manville’s deliberately obtuse friend and Watkins’ would-be Romeo to Emily’s Juliet, and there are too many occasions where the movie is trying way too hard to appear whimsical or poignant. Felix Wiedemann’s cinematography is a welcome bonus, as is Stephen Warbeck’s score, both elements helping to give the movie a boost from the obvious nature of the material, but when all’s said and done, this is a movie that takes a remarkable story and uses it as a backdrop in order to tell an unremarkable story that, sadly, we’ve seen hundreds of times before.

Rating: 4/10 – amiable, and watchable enough if you approach it with few expectations, Hampstead rarely gets out of first gear, and when it does it’s only to slip into neutral, where it stays out of being comfortable; Keaton and Gleeson’s performances are undermined by the paucity of the material (and Hopkins’ static direction), and the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the real-life Harry the Hermit are given less than their due, something that should have been addressed before even the first draft was considered.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017)

02 Thursday Nov 2017

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D: Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk / 98m

With: Al Gore, John Kerry, Konrad Steffen, Philip Levine, Eric Schneiderman, Marco Krapels, Lyndon Rive, Piyush Goyal, Cristina Gonzales Romualdez, Alfred Romualdez, Christiana Figueres, Dale Ross

When Al Gore’s campaign to educate people about the dangers of climate change was adapted for the screen in 2006 as An Inconvenient Truth, few could have predicted the effect that a small-scale documentary would have around the globe. The movie won a Best Documentary Oscar at the 2007 awards, and has been used as an educational tool (with some clarifications) in various school systems the world over. It was the first movie to address the issue of climate change head on, and in a way that the average person could understand. And it made a number of predictions about the way that climate change would affect the world in the coming decades unless governments worked together to prevent the situation from worsening.

Eleven years on, and Gore is still out there, still attempting to educate as many people as he can about the continuing climate change issue, but with the aid of over three and a half thousand activists who use Gore’s presentation in their own communities to foster greater awareness. This is the Climate Reality Project, begun by Gore in 2006, and one of the elements of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power that shows to what extent things have either moved on or changed, or even remained the same, since the release of its predecessor. What definitely hasn’t changed is Gore’s passion for the issue, and his seemingly tireless pursuit of getting the message across that traditional fuel methods such as coal and gas can no longer be allowed to be the first choice of countries looking to provide reliable energy sources for their populations. It’s a message he gets across, though, through Scotland being able to provide one hundred per cent of its electricity in August 2016 from wind power, to Chile’s solar market, which has grown from 402mw at the end of 2014 to 848mw at the end of 2015, and in 2016, was estimated to reach approximately 13.25gw.

Gore puts forward a strong case for renewable energies such as solar and wind power to take the place of fossil fuels, and he’s able to show that even in the US, where conservative attitudes might decry the message Gore is trying to get across, that some cities have already elected to provide one hundred per cent renewable energies for its citizens, and that as with An Inconvenient Truth, the need for change isn’t seen as a political one, but a moral one, an imperative that should be agreed across the political spectrum. That these cities have taken up the challenge and made it work is one area where Gore’s passion and commitment have been rewarded. But as with any crusade, it’s not all plain sailing, and even though Gore has continued to press for environmental change, it’s still an uphill battle against vested interests and political inertia, a fact that’s cruelly pointed out by a coda added to the movie after filming had been completed. Here, we see Gore’s dismay at hearing of President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation.

Alongside Gore’s promotion of renewable energies, the 2015 Paris Agreement is the movie’s secondary focus, showing how Gore helped to bring about India’s commitment to the agreement and the behind the scenes efforts that brought this about (though it does make it look as if Gore was the sole instigator, which isn’t entirely true). The movie also finds itself in the midst of an unfortunate event that occurred two weeks before the conference, where a live twenty-four broadcast featuring Gore and some of the conference’s key players had to be cut short in the wake of the November 2015 terror attacks, including the mass shooting at the Bataclan theatre. Gore makes an impromptu and heartfelt speech that is the movie’s most emotional moment, and it serves as an unexpectedly poignant reminder that climate change, important an issue as it is, isn’t the only global issue that needs addressing at this moment.

But where the movie really hits home, as with its predecessor, is in its presentation of the many increasing natural disasters that have occurred in the last ten years, and the reasons why they’ve happened. Gore visits a Swiss Camp Climate Station in Central Greenland where he has to climb a ladder to go inside the main hut, something he wouldn’t have had to do a few years before, but has to now because the surface mass of the area has dropped so much in such a short time. He talks with the mayor of Tacloban City in the Philippines which was devastated by Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013, and includes footage of the destruction, footage that in recent years we have become all too familiar with from other devastated cities around the world. But most telling of all is the footage relating to the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy in parts of New York in October 2012. Gore predicted this could happen in An Inconvenient Truth, and that it would affect the site of the World Trade Centre memorial. He drew a lot of flak for suggesting this, but was proved absolutely right. This is the point in the movie where you have to ask yourself, what more does the man have to do to get our undivided attention?

When he’s on stage giving his presentation, Gore is energised and persuasive and committed and often angry. But privately, there are moments where he looks tired and a little despairing, as if doing all this for the best part of twenty years is beginning to take its toll. It’s a sobering thought, but Gore will be seventy years old next year, and though he doesn’t always look it, there are times when he does and it’s these times that give rise to the idea that this sequel is perhaps the best chance he’ll have to bring the issue of climate change back to the attention of a general public who may have forgotten the warnings he made over ten years ago. Gore has fought long and hard over this issue, and the movie does spend time exploring what continues to motivate him, and why the issue is still so important to him that he devotes so much of his time to it. It’s a key element, one that wasn’t there as much in the first movie, but it does go hand in hand with the still timely message that none of us, not even a “recovering politician” such as Al Gore, can afford to ignore.

Rating: 8/10 – not quite as powerful as its predecessor, but still a necessary reminder that there’s a long way to go before the issue of climate change can be seen to have been addressed effectively, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is a salutary ode to the power of one man’s commitment to change; if it’s a more personal movie in that sense, that’s not a bad thing, as Gore continues to be the best guide a lay person can have in understanding why climate change is still so divisive, and why it still remains the most important issue facing future generations, generations who may not have a choice in the world they’ll inherit.

Jungle (2017)

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

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D: Greg McLean / 116m

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Thomas Kretschmann, Alex Russell, Joel Jackson, Yasmin Kassim, Luis Jose Lopez, Lily Sullivan, Jacek Koman, Angie Milliken, John Bluthal

After serving three years in the Israeli military, and forgoing his father’s wish that he study to become a lawyer, Yossi Ghinsberg (Radcliffe) travelled to South America where he spent time travelling around the region until he wound up in Bolivia in 1981. There he made two new friends, Swiss school teacher Marcus Stamm (Jackson), and Marcus’s friend, Kevin Gale (Russell), an American and an avid adventurer-cum-photographer. Yossi also met an Austrian named Karl Ruchprecter (Kretschmann). Karl persuaded Yossi and his two new friends to go on an expedition into the jungle to find a lost Indian tribe that Karl was certain could be found. They set off on foot, and were soon miles from any kind of human habitation. But the dynamic of the group began to sour, especially when Marcus’s feet became badly blistered and he became unable to keep up the pace. With the expedition only partly completed, Karl announced that he was going back on foot, but that the others could use a raft to traverse the river that would take them to their destination. Marcus went with Karl, and Yossi and Kevin put together a raft and set off. But when the current proved too strong, and an accident caused the two to be separated, it left Yossi alone in the jungle, and with no tools to help him survive or find his way to safety…

As Jungle is based on the book of the same name by Ghinsberg himself, there’s no surprise in how the movie ends, but what is surprising is how compelling it all is once Ghinsberg is separated from Kevin, and the perils of being lost in the jungle become all too apparent. However, before all that, the viewer has to wade through some fairly tortuous scenes in the first hour, where the four main characters are introduced but without providing them with any appreciable depth, or Yossi aside, any clear motivations as to why they’re all there in the first place. Karl remains a mystery right until the end, when we learn something very important about him, while Kevin and Marcus come across as the unfortunate tag-alongs who share part of Yossi’s trials and tribulations, but whose own dilemmas don’t rate as much interest in Justin Monjo’s straightforward screenplay.

Once tensions arise within the group, it’s Yossi’s unintended lack of sympathy for Marcus’s plight that provokes the turning point where the quartet split up, but once that happens, the movie seems to breathe a huge sigh of relief, as if now it can concentrate on the story it really wants to tell. And aided by yet another impressive performance from Daniel Radcliffe, the movie quickly comes into its own and puts both Yossi and the viewer through the wringer as days pass and Yossi’s situation worsens with every step. He has to combat starvation, fatigue, disorientation, hallucinations, jungle predators, and the likelihood that he will wander round and round in circles without ever coming close to being found. It’s a horrifying situation to be in, and the script (perhaps unfairly) revels in giving Yossi moments of hope only to have them dashed a moment later. But these occasions also help to sharpen the narrative and accentuate the idea that the jungle has no time for sympathy if you’re unprepared for what it can do.

As the beleaguered Yossi, Radcliffe provides further evidence that he’s a more than capable actor, and though the role of Ghinsberg could be considered as just another in the long line of physical endurance roles that actors take on from time to time, thanks to Radcliffe’s commitment and understanding of the effects these rigours can have, Yossi’s deteriorating physical appearance and fast-eroding mental stability is made all the more credible and shocking when at last he reveals the extent of his (admittedly CGI enhanced) malnourishment. Ghinsberg somehow managed to survive for nineteen days before he was found, and though McLean fumbles the moment of discovery through some poor editing choices, there’s still an emotional kick to be found that is undeniable.

In telling such a dramatic true story, McLean and Monjo have crafted an old-fashioned survival story that focuses (eventually) on its central character’s will to cheat death and find their way back to civilisation, no matter how remote. McLean knows how to maintain dramatic tension – even if he hasn’t applied that ability to some of his more recent movies; The Darkness (2016) anyone? – and he uses close ups and an always unsettling, always encroaching soundscape to highlight both the pressure and the impending sense of doom that Yossi is experiencing. It’s a shame then that all this tension and pressure doesn’t come into play until around the halfway mark, and that McLean hasn’t been able to make Munjo’s script as compelling from the first page as it is to the last. Still, it’s a movie that goes someway to redeeming McLean’s “street cred” as a director, and there are plenty of moments where his skill as a director can be recognised in the claustrophobic nature of the jungle itself, and the ease with which he integrates Yossi’s hallucinations into the narrative so that they look and feel like an organic part of the whole.

True stories ultimately stand or fall based on the risks a movie maker is willing to take with the material, and though McLean has been stuck in something of a creative rut in recent years, here those risks relate to the various hallucinations/dream sequences that Yossi has, some of which provide some much needed humour into the mix. By taking Yossi, and the viewer, away from the threatening environment of the jungle, McLean gives both a chance to grab a breather and prepare themselves for the next part of Yossi’s heroic journey. The jungle itself is a fearsome opponent, and helped by cinematographer Stefan Duscio, McLean disorients and distracts both Yossi and the viewer so that each new setback to his finding safety increases the sense of fearfulness and increasing despair that the real Yossi must have felt all those years ago. That his predicament has proven so effective in terms of his will to survive, is as much a testament to the man himself, as it is – for the most part – to the movie itself.

Rating: 7/10 – an unfortunate first hour aside, Jungle is a harsh, unblinking look at a stranger in a strange land and the unwise decisions that cause him to be lost and alone in an inhospitable and deadly setting; Radcliffe is the main draw here, and then it’s McLean, and though McLean could have been tougher with some of the narrative decisions that were made, all in all this is a tough, unsentimental true story that impresses more than it disappoints.