The Escape (2017)

15 Saturday Dec 2018

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Art, Depression, Dominic Cooper, Dominic Savage, Drama, Gemma Arterton, Marital problems, Paris, Review, The Lady and the Unicorn

D: Dominic Savage / 101m

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Dominic Cooper, Jalil Lespert, Frances Barber, Marthe Keller

Tara (Arterton) is a young, stay-at-home wife and mother. Her husband, Mark (Cooper), works long hours, while their two young children, Teddy and Florrie, are of school age but still young enough that they prove a constant source of struggle for Tara as she tries to deal with their beahviours. She is unhappy in the marriage, particularly with Mark’s constant need for sex, which she finds distressing (though he doesn’t know this). When she finally begins to express her unhappiness, Mark is confused, and tries his best to be more supportive, but when Tara puts forward the idea of taking art classes, his support wavers at the first mention. Things come to a head one day when Mark castigates her for being clumsy; Tara packs a bag and leaves right then. She travels to Paris to see a series of tapestries titled The Lady and the Unicorn (the source of her desire to start art classes), and to begin a new life free from the stifling constraints of marriage and motherhood. At the museum she meets a Frenchman, Phillipe (Lespert), and they strike up a friendship, but what seems to be a much needed turning point in Tara’s life, instead brings more problems…

The story of an unhappy woman looking for both meaning and satisfaction in her life, The Escape is a sombre, emotionally redolent drama that isn’t afraid to explore the dark side of being a wife and mother. At one point, Tara confesses that she doesn’t care about her children – at all – and she knows they hate her. It’s a startling admission, relayed in a low-key, subdued manner by Arterton, but exactly the kind of transgressive admission that mothers aren’t supposed to make. This reflection of the depth of Tara’s misery is the movie’s key revelation, the heart of what ails her (if you prefer), and once that particular genie is out of the bottle, it’s obvious that it can’t be put back. Tara will flee the nest she’s built but now detests, and she’ll seek to give her life a renewed purpose. Is she genuinely unhappy with her life? Has she genuinely fallen out of love with Mark? Is she depressed, or suffering from some other form of mental illness? The screenplay (by the director) doesn’t clarify matters – and deliberately so. Tara can’t fully articulate her distress herself, and Savage uses this as a way of holding things back from the viewer. But it’s this that proves the movie’s undoing.

We never get to know what has brought Tara to this point in her life, and why she feels so unhappy. And when she reaches Paris, her initial pleasure at being there soon dissipates once her liaison with Phillipe takes a more serious turn than expected. This section of the movie is the least effective, with Tara’s motivations lacking full credibility, and a brief scene featuring Keller appearing to have been thrown in just to provide a resolution to Tara’s time in Paris. Through it all, Tara remains an emotional enigma, and despite a tremendous performance from Arterton, it’s hard to fathom entirely what’s going on in her head, and why. More successful is Cooper’s distraught husband, unable to fathom why his marriage is falling apart, and without the skills to deal with Tara’s unhappiness. As his efforts to save their relationship fail at every turn, Mark becomes a source of profound pity, and more so than Tara. Cooper and Arterton are great together, and the movie is all the better for the scenes they share, while Lespert’s amiable Frenchman is given short shrift by Savage’s decision to handicap the character in a way that he doesn’t with Tara. The end is deliberately elliptical, and seems to hint at Tara being stuck in the same depressive mind-set as at the beginning – which if true, hints at a broader meaning to events, but one that hasn’t been made clear.

Rating: 6/10 – sterling performances from Arterton and Cooper add lustre to a movie that is much more successful as an exploration of a marriage in freefall, than as an examination of a woman’s need to feel fulfilled; with its writer/director taking a broader approach to the latter theme, The Escape ultimately feels disingenuous once it reaches Paris, and the movie never recovers from its change of scenery and narrative opacity.

Come Sunday (2018)

14 Friday Dec 2018

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Carlton Pearson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Condola Rashad, Drama, Heresy, Jason Segel, Joshua Marston, Lakeith Stanfield, Religion, Review, True story, Tulsa, Universal reconciliation

D: Joshua Marston / 105m

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jason Segel, Condola Rashad, Lakeith Stanfield, Martin Sheen, Stacey Sargeant, Danny Glover, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Ric Reitz

1998, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Carlton Pearson (Ejiofor) is the pastor of the Higher Dimensions Family Church. His congregation is a mix of blacks and whites and his services are attracting around six thousand members each week. He is highly regarded in the community, and has the respect of his peers, and the people who work for him at the church. Things begin to change, though, after he watches a programme about the Rwandan genocide. Believing that he has received an epiphany from God, Carlton begins to refute the notion that non-Christians will automatically go to Hell, and asserts that Jesus Christ died to absolve all of humanity’s sins, not just those who are saved or given absolution. This goes against the received teaching of the church, and it proves too much for many in his congregation, who elect to leave and worship elsewhere. The loss of so many parishioners is further exacerbated by his being declared a heretic by the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops. Throughout it all, Carlton wrestles with his faith, but remains true to his belief that God has spoken to him, even when it seems that God has now deserted him…

When watching a movie that explores notions of faith and religious belief, it’s often tempting to ask the question, just how is that faith going to be portrayed? Are we going to be treated to a blood and thunder show of Biblical proportions, or a quieter, more considered affair? Come Sunday, the true story of Carlton Pearson and his belief in universal reconciliation, opts for the second approach, but there are certain moments where a bit of blood and thunder wouldn’t have gone amiss. Despite the inherent drama that overtakes Carlton’s life, and which sees him lose his ministry, there’s much about Marcus Hinchey’s otherwise well constructed screenplay that keeps the movie from being as dramatic as it should be. Too many confrontational scenes – between Carlton and his associate, Henry (Segel); between Carlton and his mentor, Oral Roberts (Sheen); between Carlton and the Bishops – lack the vitality and energy that would allow them to stand out from the connective scenes around them. It’s like going to a revivalist meeting, only to find that everyone in the choir has laryngitis and they’re singing in a whisper. Even the scenes between Carlton and his wife, Gina (Rashad), where we learn there are marital problems, have a restraint about them that makes them feel of little consequence in the overall scheme of things.

But where a quieter approach proves more effective is when Carlton begins to question if his new-found belief is right. When everyone except for Gina and his assistant, Nicky (Sargeant), desert him, Carlton’s faith is rocked, and he begins to feel that God has deserted him too. Thanks to a terrific performance from Ejiofor, Carlton’s growing anguish is revealed through the star seeming to shrink physically on screen, while relaying the character’s conflicting emotions through a range of searching looks and pained expressions. There’s subtlety and range to Ejiofor’s performance, and it’s a good thing too, as Marston relies on his star more and more as the movie progresses. The director’s cautious development of the material is another reason why the movie doesn’t soar as it should, and why its examination of true faith feels laboured whenever it’s debated. There are fine supporting turns from Segel and Stanfield (as Carlton’s AIDS-affected musical director), but Sheen is miscast as Roberts, and Rashad is stifled by a role that borders on caricature. In the end, it’s a pallid movie that lacks energy, and which spends much of its running time steering clear of being anywhere near as controversial as Pearson was.

Rating: 5/10 – with its neutered narrative and sub-par dramatics, Come Sunday treats Pearson’s struggle to be explain his epiphany and subsequent denunciation as a heretic as if it were a footnote in a much larger story; with an ending that’s even more low-key than what’s gone before, the message seems to be clear: God isn’t the sure-fire draw He used to be.

Chameleon (2016)

13 Thursday Dec 2018

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Chile, Drama, Gastón Salgado, Home invasion, Jorge Riquelme Serrano, Paula Zúñiga, Paulina Urrutia, Review, Thriller, Violence

Original title: Camaleón

D: Jorge Riquelme Serrano / 80m

Cast: Gastón Salgado, Paula Zúñiga, Paulina Urrutia, Alejandro Goic

For couple Paulina (Urrutia) and Paula (Zúñiga), it’s the morning after a party for their friends to say goodbye to Paulina before she embarks on a trip to England. Their house overlooking the ocean is a mess, but Paula soon sets to cleaning up, while Paulina showers and gets dressed. They share breakfast together, then while Paula tends to a sink that’s overflowed, there’s a knock at the front door. Paulina opens the door to find Gastón (Salgado), there on behalf of their mutual friend, Franco (Goic), who has sent Gastón to apologise for Franco’s rude behaviour at the party. Franco has sent wine glasses that Paulina likes, and a bottle of wine. Paula is a little dismayed by Gastón’s arrival, as she was expecting to spend the day alone with Paulina, but the pair make Gastón welcome, and soon the wine has been poured, and the three of them are discussing various matters related to their jobs, and as time goes on, the relationship between the two women. As Paula becomes more and more drunk from the wine, animosities are revealed, and when she becomes incapacitated, Gastón’s true reason for being there is revealed…

A slow, carefully paced thriller that is unsettling to watch on several occasions, Chameleon is also a telling drama that examines themes surrounding sexual identity and class. When we first meet Gastón, it’s in a prologue that shows him flirting and being intimate with Franco, and so when he later admits that he’s only known Franco since the night before, no one is surprised, and it all seems like a normal occurrence. And Serrano is in no hurry to disabuse the viewer of this idea, even though Gastón is wearing one of Franco’s shirts, and Franco can’t be contacted. Gastón’s presence seems plausible enough, and even though Paulina suspects him of lying about his work, there’s no sense that he’s there for any other reason than the one he’s mentioned. Instead, the greater threat – if any at this stage – comes from the adversarial nature of the two women’s relationship. Paulina is the boss, while Paula adopts a more servile attitude, but the wine allows Paula to express her true feelings about Paulina’s superior attitude, and the lack of a child in their relationship. Throughout all this bickering and emotional unloading, Gastón remains calm and quietly supportive of both of them, and seems genuinely concerned when Paula begins to feel unwell.

This all accounts for the first half of the movie, and Serrano maintains a slow build up that shows a calculated restraint in setting up what is a much darker, less “normal” second half. What happens once Paula is put to bed is a nightmare scenario that plays out in a matter-of-fact way that is augmented by Serrano’s decision to make the viewer an unwilling observer. Ensuring that the camera is there to record what happens instead of providing the viewpoint for any one of the characters, Serrano challenges the audience to keep looking, even though there’s nothing graphic to see. Instead, he builds on the menace that has been there from the beginning, from that unremarkable prologue with Gastón and Franco, and tightens the screws accordingly. It’s a home invasion movie with a grim sense of foreboding about it, and it’s one that doesn’t supply the viewer with any easy answers as to Gastón’s motives (some can be guessed at, but none are definitive). There are solid performances from Salgado and Zúñiga (Urrutia’s character is too one-dimensional to be entirely effective), and Cristián Petit-Laurent’s cinematography is disposed primarily to unnerve the viewer, something that it achieves with verve. And then there’s the ending…

Rating: 8/10 – an undeniably tough watch from the halfway mark onwards, Chameleon is a dark, uncompromising thriller that knows how to make the viewer uneasy – even when they’re not sure why they should be; an impressive debut from Serrano, it’s a movie that’s best approached with as little knowledge about it as possible, and with a willingness on the viewer’s part to accept that the painstaking build up of the first half is a necessary precursor to what follows.

The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

12 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bank robberies, Casey Affleck, Crime, David Lowery, Drama, Forrest Tucker, Manhunt, Review, Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, True story

D: David Lowery / 93m

Cast: Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Tika Sumpter, David Carradine, Isiah Whitlock Jr, John David Washington, Elisabeth Moss, Robert Longstreet

In 1981, and in his Seventies, career criminal Forrest Tucker (Redford) is still doing what he’s best at: robbing banks. As the founder of The Over the Hill Gang, Tucker, along with his associates, Teddy (Glover) and Waller (Waits), takes a low key, gentlemanly approach to robbing a bank. He smiles a lot, he pretends to have a gun, and no one ever gets hurt. Of course, the police don’t see it in quite the same light, and a detective, John Hunt (Affleck), becomes determined to catch Tucker and put him away. But this is easier planned than done, as Tucker stays one step ahead of everyone while he also romances a widow called Jewel (Spacek). As Hunt learns more and more about Tucker, and vice versa, a mutual respect develops between the pair. But even knowing Hunt is on his trail, and the promise of an easy retirement with Jewel is within his grasp, Tucker can’t help but keep on robbing banks. It’s not until the police finally track him down, and he’s forced to go it alone, that Tucker has to decide on what kind of future he really wants…

If Forrest Tucker hadn’t been a real life character (he passed away in 2004), and if he hadn’t really escaped from prison around sixteen times (including once, in 1979, from San Quentin), and made an estimated four million dollars from his robberies over the years, then the movies would have had to have made him up. And if a casting director had been charged with finding the perfect actor for the role, then they would have had only one choice: Robert Redford. Widely acknowledged as Redford’s swansong performance, Tucker is a fitting role for an actor who has encompassed all the qualities that David Lowery’s screenplay – itself based on a 2003 article by David Grann – imbues the character with. He’s charming, he has a relaxed manner, he appears unhurried and thoughtful, and he has that smile, that signifier that if you stick with him, everything will be okay, and most of all, a lot of fun. Redford could almost be playing himself, or an older, wiser version of the Sundance Kid, such is the modern day Western vibe that infuses the movie. And he doesn’t even have to do too much to be effective; it’s possibly the most relaxed he’s ever been, and it shows. It’s a performance that feels effortless.

But this being a David Lowery movie, it’s not just about Tucker and his almost carefree attitude to life and other people’s money. It’s also about time – what we do with it, how it affects us, whether the past informs our present, and whether the future should be something to be concerned about – and how our memories can influence how we look at time. Tucker has nothing but fond memories of his life, even though he’s spent most of it locked up, while Jewel feels regret for not having been more selfish with her time when she was married. It’s not difficult to work out which one of them feels that they’ve really been in prison, and just as easy to work out which one is the more fulfilled. But while it would be easy to look at this as another, off-kilter version of the Follow Your Dream experience, the movie is a lot subtler than that, and has a much more solid and dramatic foundation. That Lowery has chosen to layer his movie with a poignant meditation on getting old doesn’t detract from the enjoyment to be had from it, and the discerning viewer will find much that resonates along the way.

Rating: 9/10 – a movie that remains wistful and pleasantly languid for much of its running time, The Old Man & the Gun is still chock full of dramatic moments that highlight the underlying seriousness of Tucker’s “work”; with terrific performances from all concerned, and enchanting cinematography from Joe Anderson, this may end up being regarded solely as a fitting tribute to Redford and his career, but it has so much more to offer, and is so much more rewarding.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

11 Tuesday Dec 2018

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Amy Ryan, Drama, Drug addiction, Father/son relationship, Felix van Groeningen, Literary adaptation, Maura Tierney, Review, Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, True story

D: Felix van Groeningen / 120m

Cast: Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan, Kaitlyn Dever, LisaGay Hamilton, Andre Royo, Christian Convery, Oakley Bull, Timothy Hutton

After his teenage son, Nic (Chalamet), goes missing for a couple of days, freelance writer David Sheff (Carell) discovers that Nic has a drug habit. David arranges treatment for Nic at a rehab clinic and the teenager makes significant progress, however it’s not long before he goes missing again and his habit becomes an addiction. With the support of his father, and his stepmother, Karen (Tierney), Nic makes a full recovery and goes off to college to focus on writing. Nic relapses, though, and soon he’s back to taking drugs, particularly crystal meth, while insisting that he has everything under control. When an overdose puts Nic in the hospital, David and his ex-wife, Nic’s mother, Vicki (Ryan), decide that he should live with her while he attends rehab sessions. Again, Nic makes significant progress, and is sober for over a year before anxieties about relapsing cause the very thing he’s afraid of to happen. Reconnecting with an old girlfriend, Lauren (Dever), Nic’s addiction spirals even further out of control, which leaves David with a tough decision to make: whether to continue trying to help his son, or admit that he can’t help him at all…

From the synopsis above, it’s easy to guess just how much Beautiful Boy is going to be a movie based around a succession of terrible lows and tantalising highs, and though it’s based on a true story, this is exactly how the movie plays out: Nic takes drugs, Nic gets better, Nic relapses, and so on. Unfortunately, while the quality of the central performances isn’t in doubt – Carell and Chalamet are superb – and van Groeningen’s direction ensures the viewer remains interested throughout, the repetitive nature of the material leads to an emotional distancing that becomes more pronounced as the movie progresses. Though the effects of Nic’s drug addiction clearly take their toll on him and everyone around him, once he’s relapsed the first time (and so early on), you know that it’s going to happen again, and again. The script – by van Groeningen and Luke Davies – does its best to offset this by focusing on David’s efforts to understand his son’s addiction, though strangely, it’s on a more physiological and intellectual level; when Nic explains how drugs make him feel, David doesn’t get it at all. So, while Nic experiences feelings and sensations that make drug addiction, to him, more desirable, David remains somewhat aloof. Even after he’s taken cocaine himself, David is unchanged, and any effect the drug may have had isn’t revealed.

With both father and son unable to connect anymore in a meaningful way, the movie seeks to remind its audience of the tragedy that’s occurring by resorting to flashbacks that show the bond David and Nic shared when he was much younger. These are placed at key points in the narrative and serve as leavening moments against the grim nature of Nic’s addiction. But these too lose their impact through over-use, and by the time Nic reaches rock bottom, the idea of one more poignant remembrance is one too many. But though the structure and the content of the movie hampers its effectiveness, it’s the performances that stand out. Carell has rarely been better, using David’s anger and shame at not being able to help his son, to paint a portrait of a man coming up against the hard fact of his own limitations. As Nic, Chalamet continues to impress, imbuing the character with a desperate, anguished fatalism that is heart-wrenching to watch. The father/son relationship is the heart of the movie, and van Groeningen pays close attention to it, letting it dominate the movie accordingly, while leaving Tierney and Ryan with little to do as a result. At least it doesn’t seek to be profound, or to provide any glib answers to the issues it explores, and that at least is something to be thankful for.

Rating: 7/10 – adapted from books written by both David and Nic, and which allow for a powerful yet emotionally subdued movie, Beautiful Boy is bolstered by two stand out performances, and its refusal to compromise on the dispiriting nature of its storyline; while it doesn’t work as well as it should, and it might not be everyone’s idea of a “good time”, there’s still more than enough on offer to keep the average, or even casual viewer hoping that, by the movie’s end, Nic finds some semblance of peace.

Assassination Nation (2018)

10 Monday Dec 2018

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Abra, Drama, Er0str4tus, Hari Nef, Odessa Young, Review, Salem, Sam Levinson, Secrets, Social media, Suki Waterhouse, Thriller

D: Sam Levinson / 108m

Cast: Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef, Abra, Maude Apatow, Anika Noni Rose, Joel McHale, Colman Domingo, Bella Thorne, Bill Skarsgård, Cody Christian, Danny Ramirez, Kathryn Erbe, Jennifer Morrison

In modern day Salem, Massachusetts, Lily Colson (Young) is a high school senior whose main interests are art, challenging the views of the adults around her, and hanging out with her best friends, Em (Abra), Sarah (Waterhouse), and Bex (Nef). She has a boyfriend, Mark (Skarsgård), but also appears to have a relationship with someone called “Daddy”. One day, a mysterious hacker known only as Er0sta4tus begins a campaign of releasing photographs and texts that expose the secrets of a number of well-known townspeople, including the mayor and Lily’s school principal (Domingo). Damage is done in both instances, but it’s when a massive data dump exposes the secrets of half the town that things spiral out of control. Mark finds out about “Daddy”, and Lily is cruelly victimised as a result. A week later, matters worsen for Lily and her friends when a group of vigilantes assert that she is responsible for the data dump. With all four at Em’s house, they find themselves under attack, and unable to count on being rescued by the police…

A triumph of style over substance, Assassination Nation is an angry movie that raves against the intolerance it perceives to be prevalent in the US today, but in the same way that a certain elected proponent of the “fear” factor paints a self-serving, one-sided version of the truth, so too does writer/director Sam Levinson. With the movie lacking in introspection, and unable to provide the necessary causality to make its second half anywhere near convincing, it’s a frustrating experience that starts off well (an early montage of coming attractions that include violence, transphobia, fragile male egos, and giant frogs is a particular highlight), but which soon abandons any attempts at satire, or subtlety, as it morphs from an impassioned critique of small town hypocrisy into a below par, gender-focused variation of The Purge. Levinson has some pretty big targets in his sights, but doesn’t quite know how to approach them, riffing on the perils of social media and toxic masculinity, but from a cautious distance that only feels truly immersive when he’s subjecting Lily to all sorts of physical humiliation. These moments are also gleefully exploitative, and wouldn’t feel out of place if they’d been lifted from the likes of Day of the Woman (1978).

There’s the temptation to believe that Levinson has set out to shock and upset his audience deliberately, although if that is the case, the why remains a mystery. The one truly upsetting thing about the movie is its lack of narrative clarity. It doesn’t help either that the characters remain singularly one-dimensional from start to finish, with several individuals’ motivations proving murky at best, or risible at worst. It’s fortunate then that the look of the movie is all the more arresting and confidently handled. Thanks to DoP Marcell Rév, Assassination Nation is one of the bolder and more vivid movies released this year, and the visual flair on display is often breathtaking in its audacity. Utilising split screen techniques, filters, odd camera angles, fluid camera work, and tight framing where it’s most effective, Rév makes the movie soar beyond the pedestrian nature of the narrative. It also has a terrific, and eclectic soundtrack that mixes classical, avant-garde, pop, and alternative rap to superb effect. Against this, the performances range from the committed and convincing (Nef), to the perfunctory and underwhelming (Waterhouse, Christian), and in the case of Young, hampered by poor writing and direction.

Rating: 5/10 – a vibrant, visually startling movie that’s also a mess of half-thought out ideas and narrative cul-de-sacs, Assassination Nation wants to get in its viewer’s face and scream about the unfairness of bigotry and hypocrisy, but in the end it’s too unfocused to get its message across except in the clumsiest of fashions; it also has a tough time justifying its “girls can be tough too” approach when their own revenge spree smacks so much of being an obvious male fantasy brought to life.

The Sweet Life (2016)

09 Sunday Dec 2018

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Abigail Spencer, Chris Messina, Comedy, Drama, Golden Gate Bridge, Review, Road trip, Rob Spera, Romance, Suicide

D: Rob Spera / 90m

Cast: Chris Messina, Abigail Spencer, Maggie Siff, Tyson Ritter, J.D. Evermore, Karan Soni, Glenn Plummer, Nick Searcy, Josh Pence, Jayne Brook

After another day of poor returns, depressed ice cream salesman Kenny Pantalio (Messina) contemplates throwing himself off a bridge and ending it all. But he’s interrupted by Lolita Nowicki (Spencer), a young woman with her own suicidal tendencies. When they discover they have the same therapist, it leads to them wandering through night-time Chicago until outside a swanky restaurant, Kenny is mistaken for a valet parker, and is given the keys to a Mercedes. Lolita convinces him to take the car, and that they should travel together to the Golden Gate Bridge where they can both commit suicide. As their journey takes them across country, Kenny and Lolita find themselves in a number of weird situations, from trying to rob a convenience store on the promise of their having a gun, to Kenny’s stealing a car that has a surprising cargo on the back seat, to a side trip to meet someone from Kenny’s past. Through trial and error they arrive in San Francisco, where Lolita’s own past catches up with her, and her relationship with Kenny prompts a sudden decision…

Despite the best of intentions, and the best efforts of its screenplay – by Jared Rappaport – its director, and its two leads, The Sweet Life lacks the necessary credulity to allow the viewer to connect with the characters and the plot. From the moment that Lolita interrupts Kenny’s suicidal reverie, the movie goes off in several different directions all at once, and it tries to become a drama, a comedy, and yes, a romance, and often, all at the same time. This scatter gun effect works well at certain moments, but falls flat at others, leaving the movie feeling haphazard and poorly constructed. Even if you accept the unlikely “meet-cute” that brings Kenny and Loilta together, the contrived nature of their subsequent relationship remains a recurring problem. The idea is that they will support each other during their road trip, but this rarely happens, as each is as selfish and inwardly focused as the other, and even when they do put aside their differences to come to each other’s rescue, it’s always because the script needs them to, not because it makes their journey that much richer or profound. That said, their journey does avoid easy sentimentality, and there are trenchant moments that work surprisingly well.

What Rappaport’s script also avoids is any in-depth explorations of Kenny and Lolita’s reasons for wanting to commit suicide. There are hints and clues, but none that are fleshed out enough to make sense, or allow the viewer to feel sorry for them. Kenny is depressed, and as it transpires, for a variety of reasons; Lolita is the same. But their intention to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge always feels like a stretch, the road trip a way of giving them time to realise that their lives aren’t as bleak as they think, and for the movie to make a number of telling comments about the nature of happiness. If you were watching the movie, and didn’t know why they were heading to San Francisco, you could quite easily believe this was merely another modern rom-com where opposites attract. And on many levels, when the script isn’t addressing this issue directly, the movie is much better for it. Messina portrays Kenny with an increasingly endearing manner that proves likeable by the movie’s end, but Spencer has the very hard task of making Lolita look and sound like someone who would exist in the real world. In the end, Spera’s direction proves too wayward to help matters, and the outcome is both dramatically and emotionally spurious, something that undermines those moments earlier in the movie that do work.

Rating: 5/10 – with little in the way of depth, and little in the way of examining the serious side of suicidal tendencies, The Sweet Life is a rom-com with dramatic pretensions it’s unable to pull off; a frustrating experience, it’s a low-key, genial movie that offers odd moments of poignancy, but never gels into anything more substantial.

The Guilty (2018)

08 Saturday Dec 2018

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Court appearance, Denmark, Drama, Emergency East, Gustav Möller, Jakob Cedergren, Jessica Dinnage, Kidnapping, Police officer, Review, Thriller

Original title: Den skyldige

D: Gustav Möller / 85m

Cast: Jakob Cedergren, Jessica Dinnage, Omar Shargawi, Johan Olsen, Jacob Lohmann, Katinka Evers-Jahnsen, Jeanette Lindbæk

Asger Holm (Cedergren) is a police officer working as a call handler for the Danish emergency response services. He’s doing this while he waits for the outcome of a court appearance that will determine if he remains a police officer. It’s his last shift before his court date, and with around half an hour to go he’s having to deal with the usual amount of time wasters and people who want an emergency response there and then. But one call brings Asger out of his self-imposed funk: a young woman called Iben (Dinnage) tells him she has been kidnapped and is in a vehicle, but she doesn’t know where she’s being taken. Asger knows roughly the area she’s in, and once he gets Iben to reveal the colour and kind of vehicle she’s in, he calls the appropriate police force to look for her. But as Asger’s shift ends and he decides to stay on, he becomes more and more involved in finding Iben and reuniting her with her two children, who are still at home. But his efforts have unexpected consequences…

With all the action taking place wihin the confines of the Emergency East call centre, and for much of the movie within the further confines of an office where only Asger is situated, The Guilty relies heavily on both its plot, and Cedergren’s performance. Luckily, the plot is a gripping, edge-of-your-seat race against time scenario that sees Asger make a number of mistakes – some avoidable, some not – that both highlight and complicate the urgency of the situation, and which rely on the drip feed of information that some viewers will be able to piece together before Asger does. It’s a scenario that requires Asger to be a very good listener, but with his own issues weighing heavily on him, this proves difficult for him to achieve, and as he gets in deeper and deeper – even to the point of involving one of his police colleagues, Rashid (Shargawi) – his feelings of guilt over the incident that has brought him to the call centre begin to overwhelm him, and his efforts to do the right thing become more and more desperate. As Iben’s situation worsens, so too does Asger’s, and as he strives to save her, it becomes obvious that he’s trying to redeem himself at the same time.

This duality of purpose becomes more and more explicit as the movie progresses, and thanks to a sterling performance from Cedergren, Asger’s taciturn, dismissive demeanour gives way to a maelstrom of unexpected emotions that ultimately prove to be both the source of his undoing and his redemption. Asger isn’t the most sympathetic of characters, and Cedergren makes no attempt to soften him or make him more agreeable, but the narrative is still looking for that positive outcome, and if only Asger can swing it, then that’s okay. Möller and editor Carla Luff instill the movie with a sinewy, muscular rhythm that deflects from just how many times the camera placidly, but effectively observes Asger in close up, and the restrained camera work by DoP Jasper J. Spanning is suitably claustrophobic, making good use of the limited space Asger occupies and further highlighting the urgency of the situation. With good supporting performances from his voice cast, Möller teases out the truth in stages, and confounds audience expectations on a couple of occasions while playing to the gallery at others. It’s a compelling thriller, commendably staged and cleverly executed, and one that balances the demands of its main plot with that of Asger’s own situation with style and a surfeit of brooding self-confidence.

Rating: 8/10 – Denmark’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at next year’s Academy Awards, The Guilty is a riveting, tightly constructed thriller that doesn’t short change the viewer, or betray its own internal logic in the final third as so many thrillers do; quietly devastating in places, its relatively short running time means not a moment is wasted, and there’s depth lurking beneath the simplicity of the main set up.

Oh! the Horror! – The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018) and The Harrowing (2018)

06 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Arnold Vosloo, Cadaver, Demons, Diederik Van Rooijen, Drama, Grey Damon, Horror, Jon Keeyes, Matthew Tompkins, Morgue, Psychiatric hospital, Review, Shay Mitchell

The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018) / D: Diederik Van Rooijen / 86m

Cast: Shay Mitchell, Grey Damon, Kirby Johnson, Nick Thune, Louis Herthum, Stana Katic, Maximillian McNamara, Jacob Ming-Trent

Megan Reed (Mitchell) is an ex-cop still suffering the lingering effects of PTSD from a shooting that saw her partner killed. Getting back on her feet, she takes a job working the night shift at the Boston Metro Hospital morgue. Working alone in her part of the building, her main responsibility is to see in any “new arrivals” and get them processed into the system. Her first night on the job passes by without incident, but on the second night something more out of the ordinary happens: the body of a young woman (Johnson), the victim of a deranged killer who has hacked her body and tried to burn it, is brought in. Alerted to the fact that the killer is still at large, Megan sets about trying to process the body, but her equipment fails at every turn. Later, while seeing in another body, a man (Herthum) slips into the morgue, and hides away. Later still, Megan becomes aware of his presence, and finds him trying to haul the young woman’s body into the incinerator. She overpowers him, and it’s then that he tells her that the young woman, Hannah Grace, isn’t dead…

A modest little horror flick from Sony/Screen Gems, The Possession of Hannah Grace has slipped into cinemas recently, and though there’s always the temptation to think that if it’s in cinemas then it must be better than the usual horror fare released these days, in this case that wouldn’t be entirely appropriate. Originally entitled Cadaver, this has good production values for its budget, a good central performance from Mitchell, and a handful of creepy moments that are as much to do with its setting as it’s title character. However, the story holds about as much water as a paper bag, and the details of Hannah’s possession can best be described as “flaky to the max” (and that’s being generous). This flakiness is the excuse for the supporting characters to be picked off one by one, but on each occasion, the contrivance is obvious and perfunctory. Van Rooijen keeps the scares simple if predictable, but is unable to rein in the preposterousness that runs rampant through the screenplay. The end result is a movie that falls short of being as gripping, or frightening, as its setting should have made it, and which relies too heavily on its title character’s ability to make weird clacking noises when she (inevitably) moves around.

Rating: 4/10 – another frustrating horror movie experience foisted on our cinema screens, The Possession of Hannah Grace is unlikely to bother anyone who’s seen any of the four million other possession movies released in the last few years, or indeed, anyone coming to the genre for the first time either; dull in stretches, with a back story for its heroine that is as unnecessary as these things usually are, it does at least have an ending, and thankfully, not one that sets up a sequel.

The Harrowing (2018) / D: Jon Keeyes / 111m

Cast: Matthew Tompkins, Arnold Vosloo, Arianne Martin, Michael Ironside, Damon Carney, Hayden Tweedie, Michael Crabtree, Susana Gibb, Morgana Shaw, James Cable

Ryan Calhoun (Tompkins) is a vice cop working a sting operation with his partner, Jack (Carney), and newbie, Greenbaum (Cable). While he’s out getting coffee, something goes wrong in the apartment they’re monitoring, and when Ryan gets there, he finds the prostitute who’s been working with them, her trick, and Jack all dead, horribly mutilated, and apparently killed by Greenbaum. Greenbaum attacks Ryan, who shoots him dead, but not before Greenbaum has mentioned something to do with demons. Although he’s removed from the case by his superior, Lieut, Logan (Ironside), Ryan does his own investigating, and discovers that Greenbaum was a patient at a psychiatric facility before joining the force. Electing to go undercover at the facility, which is run by Dr Franklin Whitney (Vosloo), Ryan looks for answers as to why Greenbaum would have committed such a terrible act. Soon he learns that Greenbaum wasn’t the only patient who believed in demons, and that both himself and the other patients are in danger from something truly diabolical…

Beginning with a prologue that proves entirely superfluous to what follows, The Harrowing is a less than sure-footed attempt at blending a variety of genres, from the humble police procedural to the psychological thriller, and with a heavy coating of supernatural drama ladled on top. There’s the hint of a neat little mystery here, but it’s buried under a welter of kaleidoscopic lighting effects, more cutaways than could ever be necessary, and a fragmented screenplay that has a defined ending in mind but which doesn’t know quite how to get there without tripping itself up along the way (and more than once). There’s certainly ambition on display here as well, but writer/director Keeyes has opted for visual and aural excess over subtlety in telling his story, and the result is a shouty mess that lacks the coherence needed to keep the viewer intrigued or motivated to keep watching. Things aren’t helped by a truly awful performance from Tompkins, and a number of very questionable directorial decisions made by Keeyes as he tries to create a nightmare fusion of reality and fantasy, but succeeds only in creating a nightmare that the viewer is forced to navigate. By the end, it’s hard to care how it all turns out, and when it does, it does so abruptly – which is some consolation at least given the extended running time.

Rating: 3/10 – when veterans of this sort of thing like Vosloo and Ironside look as if they’d rather be elsewhere, then you know there’s a problem, though for The Harrowing it’s just one of many; another example of low budget equals low return, Keeyes has been doing this sort of thing for a while now, something that begs the question, isn’t it time to try another genre altogether?

The Carer (2016)

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

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Brian Cox, Coco König, Comedy, Drama, Hungary, János Edelényi, Lifetime Achievement Award, Parkinson's disease, Review, Sir Michael Gifford

D: János Edelényi / 88m

Cast: Brian Cox, Coco König, Emilia Fox, Anna Chancellor, Karl Johnson, Andrew Havill, Selina Cadell, Emily Bevan, Roger Moore

Sir Michael Gifford (Cox) is a British acting legend, equally at home in movies and on television, but mostly on the stage. Now retired and suffering from the early onset of Parkinson’s disease, Sir Michael is being urged to accept having a full-time carer by his daughter, Sophia (Fox), and his housekeeper (and ex-lover) Milly (Chancellor). Resistant to the idea, Sir Michael finds that the introduction of Dorottya (König), a Hungarian care worker who has applied to study drama in the UK, isn’t quite the imposition he expects it to be. With her love of, and ability to quote, Shakespeare, Sir Michael finds Dorottya’s sympathetic approach and youthful enthusiasm something of a tonic – though he reserves his usual dyspeptic disposition for everyone else. However, when he’s put forward for a Lifetime Achievement Award, it causes friction between him and Sophia (who thinks he’s too infirm to attend), and Sophia and Dorottya (who thinks it would be good for him). Sir Michael decides he’s going to go, whether his daughter agrees or not, but before he does he has to recconnect with Dorottya, who has been sacked by Sophia…

In a similar vein to Venus (2006), The Carer is about a crusty, cantankerous old thespian who finds an unexpected kinship with a much younger carer, and in doing so, learns a number of valuable life lessons. And… that’s it. There are Shakespeare quotes a-plenty (with King Lear getting the lion’s share for obvious, though, undercooked thematic reasons), occasional nods to the indignities of getting old (adult nappies), regrets and recriminations flying thick and fast from all sides, and a tendency to soft-pedal any really serious issues through the use of ill-focused humour. Nothing about the movie is surprising or unexpected. It ticks along in time-honoured fashion, hitting each required beat with almost metronomic regularity, and relying on its talented albeit under-served (and undeserved) cast to rescue it from the doldrums of its own making. At no point do you feel that this could be happening in real life, or that you might meet any of the characters while walking down the street. With the action largely taking place at Sir Michael’s baronial hall of a home, a grim sense of claustrophobia soon settles in as Sir Michael takes profanity flecked inconstancy to new levels of banality; he’s the least disagreeable misanthrope you’re ever likely to encounter.

More problematical is the character of Dorottya. The Carer is a Hungarian/British co-production, with a Hungarian director, and dozens of Hungarian crew members, and so the inclusion of König as the title character is, like much else, unsurprising. But Dorottya doesn’t ring true on any level. She’s so one-dimensional you half expect her to disappear when she turns sideways. With the barest of motivations for what she does, and not even the required knowledge that medicaton and alcohol don’t mix, Dorottya is a lumpen plot device designed to allow Sir Michael to play to one last appreciative audience before popping his theatrical clogs. Making her feature debut, König does her best but hasn’t got a hope of imbuing the character with any meaningful traits or mannerisms, thanks to a script that makes very little effort to add depth or texture at any stage of the proceedings. There are misguided attempts at pathos, scattered instances of poorly judged poignancy, and an acceptance speech from Sir Michael that is part ramble, part soliloquy, and all contrived; it’s the musings of an actor who really can’t improvise. Cox is fine despite all this, and it’s fun to see him in his younger days through movies and posters, but if this was a role that was written with him in mind, he shouldn’t feel so flattered.

Rating: 4/10 – visually as bland and uninviting as the storyline proves to be, The Carer strives for emotional resonance and comes up short every time; acceptable only on a very basic level, and even then with reservations, this is a misguided and unconvincing movie that wastes the time and efforts of its cast, and never appears to be aspiring to anything other than being merely perfunctory.

Green Book (2018)

04 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Concert tour, Don Shirley, Drama, Linda Cardellini, Mahershala Ali, Music, Peter Farrelly, Racism, Review, The Deep South, Tony Villalongo, True story, Viggo Mortensen

D: Peter Farrelly / 130m

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, Dimiter D. Marinov, Mike Hatton, P.J. Byrne, Joe Cortese, Brian Stepanek

In 1962, in New York City, club bouncer Tony Villalonga (Mortensen) (known as Tony Lip) finds himself temporarily out of work. Though a number of opportunities are open to him, he becomes intrigued when he’s approached through a friend to be a driver for a doctor on a trip down south. At the interview, Tony meets Dr Don Shirley (Ali), and is surprised to learn that Don isn’t a medical doctor, but a doctor of music (amongst other things). The trip down south is a two-month concert tour that will eventually head into the Deep South, and Don needs someone who can keep him out of trouble during the tour. The two men agree terms, and aim to be back in New York City on Xmas Eve. Setting out, their differences in attitude causes friction between them: Tony is uncultured and lacking in certain social graces, while Don is refined and sophisticated. As the trip continues however, Tony and Don begin to develop a mutual respect and understanding, at the same time as the Deep South’s racist agenda begins to threaten the tour’s completion…

If you were black in the early Sixties, and wanted to travel in relative safety through the South, then a good investment would have been a copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book by Victor Hugo Green, a book which listed hotels and restaurants that would accept black people. Tony is given a copy at the start of the tour, and though he has own racist tics, he’s bemused by the idea of such a book. He’s an Italian-American who’s lived his whole life in New York City; his interaction with the kind of institutional racism practiced in the South has been next to zero. For Don, it’s the very fact that this kind of racism is prevalent that he carries out these tours; it’s about not taking the easy option and staying in the North and (literally) playing it safe. But while Green Book has a clearly defined backdrop that encompasses contemporary racism and the social politics of the period, it’s not specifically about those issues. Instead it’s about the blossoming friendship between two men from two very different cultural and social backgrounds who find a common ground through their experiences travelling together. Each learns from the other, and each is a better man for it.

Now, so far it’s another standard tale of friendship achieved between polar opposites, but it’s played out in such a way that both men are made better versions of themselves and without the need for either of them to lose or change any aspect of their character or personality. Instead, they improve themselves, and willingly, seeing their own lives through the ideas and thoughts of each other. This approach takes place over time, and the script – co-written by Villalonga’s real-life son, Nick (who also has a role as one of Tony’s relatives), Farrelly, and Brian Hayes Currie – doesn’t rush things out of any sense of dramatic necessity, relying instead on the subtleties and nuances on the page, and two magnificent performances from Mortensen and Ali. Both actors are on superb form, teasing out small but important revelations about their characters, and relishing the opportunity to work with such strong material. Farrelly, whose output in this decade has been less than compelling – The Three Stooges (2012), anyone? – here hits a home run, getting it tonally and thematically right, and without recourse to unnecessary melodramatics or forced sentimentality. There’s humour amidst the drama, of course (“I knew you had a gun”), but again Farrelly balances it all with skill and intelligence. This is the kind of road trip that you’ll want to go on on a second and maybe a third time, and if you do, you’ll still be as entertained as you were on the first.

Rating: 9/10 – at times, Green Book appears effortless in its attempts to tell a simple story without the need for artifice or contrivance, and it’s this simplicity of style and content – along with a generous helping of cinematic heart and soul – that makes it such a wonderful experience; again, this isn’t about the time period or the geographical area it’s set in, or any combination of the two, it’s about two men with different outlooks and predispositions who become lifelong friends in the unlikeliest of circumstances, and against some pretty long odds.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

03 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Chloë Grace Moretz, Desiree Akhavan, Drama, Forrest Goodluck, Gay conversion therapy, God's Promise, Jennifer Ehle, John Gallagher Jr, Lesbian, Literary adaptation, Review, Sasha Lane

D: Desiree Akhavan / 92m

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, John Gallagher Jr, Jennifer Ehle, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, Emily Skeggs, Owen Campbell, Melanie Ehrlich, Christopher Dylan White, Quinn Shephard, Kerry Butler

For Cameron Post (Moretz) and her best friend, Coley Taylor (Shephard), being discovered having sex in the back seat of one of their boyfriends’ cars on prom night was not how the evening was meant to turn out. Although not their first sexual experience together, they’ve kept their relationship a secret from everyone, and Cameron, though certain that she’s a lesbian, is still coming to terms with how it will affect her life. However, being discovered leads her aunt (Butler), who is a devout Christian (and who has been raising Cameron since the deaths of her parents), to enrol Cameron in a gay conversion therapy centre called God’s Promise. Run by brother and sister, Reverend Rick (Gallagher Jr) and Dr Lydia Marsh (Ehle), the centre views homosexuality as a sin, and its programme is designed to help young people who are “confused” by their sexuality into making the right changes and embracing heterosexuality. Cameron soon makes friends – mainly with fellow lesbian Jane (Lane) and two spirit Adam Red Eagle (Goodluck) – but she also finds her own certainty about being a lesbian brought into question…

Imbued with a healthy dose of skepticism about the whole notion of gay conversion therapy, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is not the strident call to have these institutions banned that you might think it would be. Instead, it’s a much more subtle piece, adapted from Emily M. Danforth’s novel, and thanks to its historical setting – the movie takes place in 1993 – the movie is able to explore the issues it raises – freedom of sexual expression, religious fundamentalism, nature vs nurture, even free will – with a lightness of tone that seems at odds with the seriousness of its subject matter, but which enables it to get its points across more effectively. This isn’t a movie that wants to pound its viewers over the head with damning rhetoric. Rather, it explores Cameron’s experiences at home and at the centre in a way that gets its message across without it feeling forced or contrived. Cameron poses her challenges to the centre’s programme in a wry, humorous way that makes clear her confusion – not about her sexuality, but whether or not Reverend Rick or Dr Lydia even know what they’re doing (tragically, they don’t). There’s no war of attrition, no acting out or playing up, just an awareness that God’s Promise is not an answer to anything, and so, perhaps not worth the effort to take it seriously.

In adapting Danforth’s novel, director Akhavan and her co-scripter, Cecilia Frugiuele, paint the adults as either blinkered or over-reaching, and the young people as doing what teenagers do best (or worst, depending on your point of view), and that’s working out what kind of people they’re going to be. Anchored by Moretz’s best performance in years, and with strong supporting turns from Lane, Goodluck and Skeggs, Akhavan draws out each character’s strengths and insecurities in such a way that they don’t feel like stereotypes, and the emotional upheaval that they’re experiencing feels genuine. It’s often a delicate balancing act, but Akhavan is more than up to the task, and this is a terrific follow up to her first feature, Appropriate Behaviour (2014). Bristling with confidence in the material, and the approach she’s taken, Akhavan finds nuance and perception in the smallest of details, and without feelig the need to hold the viewer’s hand throughout. The title claims that Cameron has been miseducated, but by the end of the movie, when Cameron, Jane and Adam decide to take matters into their own hands, you could argue that this has been a misstep rather than a miseducation. Either way, it’s a well observed piece that doesn’t skirt the issues it raises, or treat them lightly.

Rating: 8/10 – a movie that doesn’t labour the points it’s trying to make, and which avoids both sentimentality and the need for polemics, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a sly dog of a movie that sneaks up on the viewer and makes a quiet, yet effective impact; whatever your feelings about religion and homosexuality, and the way the two butt heads so often, this is a movie that stresses humanity over dogma, and finds beauty in the struggle for personal acceptance.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)

25 Sunday Nov 2018

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Channel Islands, Drama, Katherine Parkinson, Lily James, Literary adaptation, Michiel Huisman, Mike Newell, Mystery, Penelope Wilton, Review, Romance, Tom Courtenay, World War II

D: Mike Newell / 124m

Cast: Lily James, Michiel Huisman, Glen Powell, Matthew Goode, Jessica Brown Findlay, Katherine Parkinson, Penelope Wilton, Tom Courtenay, Kit Connor, Bronagh Gallagher, Bernice Stegers, Clive Merrison

In 1946, author Juliet Ashton (James) is in the middle of promoting her latest book, when two things happen simultaneously: The Times Literary Supplement asks her to write a series of articles on the benefits of literature, and she receives a letter from a Guernsey man named Dawcey Adams (Huisman) who is part of a literary society on the island. Intrigued by the idea of a literary society formed during the war, Juliet opts to visit Guernsey and meet Adams and the other members. Just before she sails from London, her American beau, Mark (Powell), proposes to her and she accepts. On Guernsey, Juliet meets all but one of the members of the literary society, and is told that the absent member, Elizabeth McKenna (Findlay), is away on the continent. When she mentions writing an article about the group, one of them, Amelia Maugery (Wilton), refuses to agree to the idea. Sensing there are things that she’s not being told, Juliet remains on the island and soon finds herself beginning to piece together the mystery surrounding Elizabeth’s absence…

Based on the novel of the same name (and how could it be anything different?) by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a lightweight slice of rose-tinted nostalgia filtered through the lens of modern movie-making techniques, and with even less substance than the culinary creation in its title (which sounds like a stodge-fest of epic proportions). It’s by-the-numbers movie making with no surprises, an ending you can guess all the way from the rings of Saturn, and as many softly poignant moments designed to raise a tear that can be squeezed into a two-hour run time. It’s cosy, and reassuring in its approach, and it requires almost no effort at all in watching it. In short, it’s a perfectly enjoyable confection that’s written and directed and performed with a keen understanding that it has to be made in a certain way, and that way is to provide audiences with the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. So lightweight is it that the mystery of Elizabeth’s absence isn’t even the most dramatic aspect of the movie – and that’s bcause there’s nothing dramatic about any of it, no matter how hard the script tries, and no matter how hard its director tries also.

Thankfully, all this doesn’t mean that the movie is a bad one, just predictable and bland and almost a perfect tick box exercise in terms of it being a romantic drama with a wartime background. It does feature a clutch of good performances, with James suitably bullish and radiant at the same time, Courtenay delivering yet another example of his recent run of lovable old codgers, Goode effortlessly suave and supportive as Juliet’s publisher, and Powell as the boyfriend who you know is going to be dumped near the end to ensure that true love prevails as it should. Only Huisman looks out of place (and there’s a distinct awkwardness and lack of chemistry between him and James), while Parkinson and Wilton deliver pitch-perfect portrayals of a gin-making (and swigging) spinster, and a still grieving mother respectively. It’s handsomely mounted (though sadly, none of it was actually shot on Guernsey), with impressive production design and period detail, and equally impressive effects shots detailing some of the destruction suffered by London during the Blitz. But still, there’s that traditional romantic storyline that anchors the movie and keeps it from straying too far into original territory. And if there’s one thing that the movie knows above all else, it’s that familiarity – when done correctly – is all you need.

Rating: 7/10 – a movie that can be criticised easily for what it doesn’t do, The Guersey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a modest movie with modest ambitions, and likely to have a modest effect on its audience; a good-natured bit of celluloid fluff, it’s perfect viewing for a wet and windy Sunday afternoon, or when all you need is something that doesn’t require too much effort in order to enjoy it fully.

How It Ends (2018)

24 Saturday Nov 2018

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Black List script, David M. Rosenthal, Drama, Forest Whitaker, Grace Dove, Post-apocalypse, Review, Road trip, Seattle, Theo James, Thriller

D: David M. Rosenthal / 113m

Cast: Theo James, Forest Whitaker, Grace Dove, Kat Graham, Kerry Bishé, Nicole Ari Parker, Mark O’Brien

Will (James) and Sam (Graham) are a young couple living in Seattle who have recently discovered they are going to have a baby. Will flies to Chicago to ask Sam’s father, Tom (Whitaker), for his blessing to marry her, but the evening goes badly due to Tom’s domineering nature. The next morning, as he prepares to fly back to Seattle, Will is talking to Sam on the phone when something mysterious happens and the line is lost. Heading back to her parents’ home, Will finds Tom ready and packed to travel across country to Seattle to find Sam. With all flights grounded, Will goes with him. Their trip is fraught with all sorts of dangers, particularly when an encounter with a police cruiser leaves their car banged up and Tom with a couple of broken ribs. Reaching a small town, they meet Ricki (Dove), a car mechanic with plans to head west. Tom convinces her to come with them, and as they head towards Seattle, the mystery of what happened on the West Coast becomes ever more puzzling. With the US heading into a post-apocalyptic future, the trio have to overcome a number of threats and obstacles in order to find Sam and ensure she’s safe…

The script for How It Ends – by Brooks McLaren – was on the 2010 Black List of highly regarded yet unproduced screenplays. Now that it has been made, it would be interesting to make a comparison between the original Black List script and the final version used here, because this is yet another occasion where the initial hype is very far from justified. For one thing, the characters are paper thin, and barely fleshed out beyond their screenwriting 101 archetypes. Will is a lawyer but his occupation hardly matters as he has no personality or recognisable character traits to make him stand out in any meaningful way. Tom is the classic overbearing father, convinced no one is good enough for his “little girl” and initially dismissive of Will’s presence and minimal capabilities (during the encounter with the police cruiser, he can’t even use a gun properly). Of course, the pair will bond over time, and mutual respect will be formed, but here it happens almost as an afterthought, as if McLaren had forgotten about it, and then realised he needed to tick that particular narrative box before it was too late. The secondary characters are even less interesting, there to help move things along as and when necessary, though Ricki does add a little flavour to proceedings (though this is largely due to Dove’s performance, which looks out of place because she’s actually trying).

The narrative relies on too many moments of convenience – Tom talks their way through a military roadblock, Will convinces a town sheriff to let them through a barricade – and it creates danger at nearly every turn, with almost everyone they meet on the road out to rob them or kill them or both on nearly every occasion. This wouldn’t be so bad if director David M. Rosenthal was able to make these sequences tense or suspenseful, but there’s much that goes wrong in the editing of these sequences, so much so that they lack any appreciable impact, leaving them to slot into a movie that proceeds along a steady, measured pace for much of its running time. The mysterious occurrence on the West Coast goes unexplained for the most part (though there is a conspiracy theory trotted out near the end that is meant to sound plausible but isn’t), and its effects vary from late scene to late scene, until the movie climaxes with a final image that will literally have viewers saying, “This is how it ends…?” But by then, it will have failed to matter long before, making this an apocalyptic event that could have done us all a favour.

Rating: 4/10 – with nods to the breakdown of civilisation that is always expected to occur in these occasions (but within a day or two – and country wide?), How It Ends strives for relevance where it doesn’t need to, and aims for resonance where it doesn’t have to, making this a turgid trip through a less than convincing post-apocalypse Twilight Zone; with no one to connect to, and a series of repetitive encounters with people who have conveniently “turned bad” at the drop of a hat, the movie struggles with a number of ideas it doesn’t know what to do with, and instead of trying, it settles for being banal and dramatically commonplace.

To the Bone (2017)

23 Friday Nov 2018

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Alex Sharp, Anorexia, Carrie Preston, Catch Up movie, Drama, Eating disorders, Keanu Reeves, Lili Taylor, Lily Collins, Marti Noxon, Review, Treatment

D: Marti Noxon / 107m

Cast: Lily Collins, Carrie Preston, Lili Taylor, Keanu Reeves, Alex Sharp, Liana Liberato, Retta, Leslie Bibb, Maya Eshet, Alanna Ubach

Ellen (Collins) is a twenty year old college dropout suffering with anorexia. Returning to her father and stepmother’s home after a failed stint at an in-patient programme, she finds herself put forward for yet another treatment regime, this time run by unconventional therapist Dr Beckham (Reeves). At the urging of her stepmother, Susan (Preston), and younger sister, Kelly (Liberato), Ellen agrees to take part, and goes to stay at a home run by Beckham where sufferers from eating disorders can receive treatment and learn to remind themselves that “life is worth living”. There Ellen meets a variety of fellow anorexics (and bulimics), including Lucas (Sharp), a young, British-born ballet dancer whose career has been cut short by a knee injury and his subsequent anorexia. The pair develop a friendship that sees Lucas act as Ellen’s personal advocate, encouraging her to eat more and to see the world in a more positive light. But Ellen’s demons – largely in the form of something she did that prompted another girl to take her own life – aren’t so easily overcome, and her initial progress is soon derailed by events that she has no defence against…

Early on in To the Bone, Ellen and her sister are sitting talking quietly, an unidentified city spread out before them. Kelly is voicing her concern about Ellen’s condition when Ellen replies, “I’ve got it under control. Nothing bad’s gonna happen.” To which Kelly answers, “How many people do you think are down there? Like 2 million? I bet a bunch of them who are about to die just said the exact same thing.” It’s a poignant moment, and one that highlights the problem on both sides of the eating disorder divide: the sufferers think they’re in control of what they’re doing, while their loved ones wish it were true. And there’s no middle ground. It’s moments like these, where hope and despair collide and cancel each other out, that makes Noxon’s debut as a feature writer/director all the more affecting. A movie that for the most part offers little in the way of concrete answers, To the Bone is instead a powerful and unflinching examination of both the physical effects of anorexia, and the psychological damage that accompanies it. Based around Noxon’s own experiences, the movie steers clear of being yet another “disease of the week” TV-style outing, and instead focuses on what can be done to make someone with an eating disorder value their life again.

Despite some odd moments of fractured humour, mainly expressed through Lucas’s flamboyant behaviour, this isn’t a movie designed to entertain or make the viewer feel good. Which is a good thing, as this would have trivialised the serious nature of the subject matter, and undermined the good work of all concerned. Collins gives an exemplary performance, expressing Ellen’s anger and sense of hopelessness at her situation, and doing so with a clarity and a precision that allows Ellen’s rough-hued antagonism to have a credible emotional and psychological footing. There’s good support from Taylor as Ellen’s mother, unable to deal with her daughter’s suffering because of her own problems, Preston as Ellen’s stepmother, a woman out of her depth but willing to make mistakes if it helps matters (though usually it doesn’t), and Liberato as the younger sister who misses the version of Ellen that she’s meant to be. If there’s one thorn in the narrative ointment, it’s related to Reeves’ character, a therapist whose benign manner and intuitive insights are jettisoned during a misjudged scene in which Beckham tells Ellen that the answer to her problems is to “grow a pair”. It’s a moment that sits uncomfortably within the rest of the material, but fortunately it’s a rare mis-step in a movie that is otherwise moving and empathetic.

Rating: 8/10 – confidently handled by Noxon, and compellingly structured, To the Bone benefits from an excellent central performance from Collins, and the decision to be non-judgmental of its characters; a journey worth taking then, sincere and unapologetic in its examination of a difficult and important subject, and worthy without preaching or being condescending.

An Interview With God (2018)

21 Wednesday Nov 2018

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Brenton Thwaites, David Strathairn, Drama, Faith, God, Interview, Journalist, Marital problems, Perry Lang, Religion, Yael Grobglas

D: Perry Lang / 97m

Cast: David Strathairn, Brenton Thwaites, Yael Grobglas, Charlbi Dean Kriek, Hill Harper, Bobby Di Cicco

Paul Asher (Thwaites) is a talented young journalist whose coverage of the war in Afghanistan has brought him a measure of acclaim and a good position at the newspaper he works for. He writes religious, faith-based articles, but while his career is going well, his marriage to Sarah (Grobglas) is failing, and his own faith is crumbling in the wake of his experiences in Afghanistan. Not knowing how to resolve any of the issues he’s facing, he finds some distraction in an interview with a man claiming to be God (Strathairn). Paul arranges to meet the man on three consecutive days for thirty minutes at a time. On the first day, the man blithely avoids answering Paul’s direct questions, and poses plenty of his own that Paul finds himself responding to. Later, at home, Sarah’s absence leads him to the realisation that she has left him. Meeting the man again the next day, the interview becomes more adversarial, with “God” insisting that he is there to help Paul, but with Paul refusing to believe him. Confused and scared by the effect the interviews are having on him, Paul struggles to come to terms with the very real possibility that this man really is God…

In An Interview With God, the Almighty is a middle-aged man in a bland suit who dispenses axioms with all the dexterity of someone used to bamboozling the people he meets. In the more than capable hands of David Strathairn, he also conforms to the idea that God is unknowable, even when God Himself is telling you all you need to know about Him – or isn’t. This is at the heart of the initial mystery of whether the man really is the One True God, or whether he’s just a con artist looking to exploit Paul’s emotional problems for unknown reasons. But this being a Christian movie first and foremost, it doesn’t take long for the mystery to be jettisoned and God’s identity to be confirmed (it happens during the first interview). What follows is a jittery, dramatically unstable examination of faith and how its loss can have a profoundly negative effect on our lives, and particularly in relation to personal trauma. However, Paul’s experiences in Afghanistan are never explored in a way that would allow us to have any insights into what ails him, and his failing marriage hinges more on Sarah’s feelings than his own. He may be in pain, but – and here’s the irony – we have to take it on faith that he is.

The script – by Ken Aguado – does its best to explore notions of salvation and free will, but skims over questions such as why do bad things happen to good people (the answer? They just do). With God answering Paul’s questions often with another question, their conversations soon feel like empty existential banter tricked out to sound illuminating and profound. Also, such is the amount of cod-philosophical repetition in these scenes, it’s hard to decide if Aguado and director Perry Lang were aware that this approach was stifling the material, and making it feel stilted. In the end, the movie opts for a literal answer to the question of God’s identity when a more ambivalent one would have suited the material better. As the embattled Paul, Thwaites acquits himself well but is hampered by his character lacking sufficient depth for us to care about him except superficially, while Strathairn opts to play God as a kind of exasperated guidance counselor. Both actors are good in their roles, but mostly this is against the odds, as their characters remain ciphers throughout. With artifice increasingly the order of the day, and faith sometimes treated as an abstract concept, the movie ends on a feelgood note that it hasn’t quite earned, or is deserving of.

Rating: 5/10 – the tagline asks, What Would You Ask? but this is as profound as An Interview With God ever gets, thanks to a wayward, not fully realised screenplay, and some awkwardly staged scenes between Paul and his boss (Harper) (and Paul and Sarah… and Paul and God…); in the end it proves nothing except that God continues to work in mysterious ways – if you believe in that sort of thing – and none more so than in allowing this movie to be made as it is.

Almost Adults (2016)

19 Monday Nov 2018

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Comedy, Drama, Elise Bauman, Friendship, Justin Gerhard, Lesbianism, LGBTQ+, Natasha Negovanlis, Review, Romance, Sarah Rotella

D: Sarah Rotella / 90m

Cast: Natasha Negovanlis, Elise Bauman, Justin Gerhard, Winny Clarke, Mark Matechuk, Pujaa Pandey, David John Phillips

Cassie (Negovanlis) and Mackenzie (Bauman) are best friends on the verge of leaving college and heading out into the wider world. Cassie has recently split up from her boyfriend, Matthew (Matechuk), while Mackenzie is coming to terms with being a lesbian. While Cassie tells Mackenzie about her love life, Mackenzie feels awkward about coming out to Cassie; she’s told their mutual gay friend, Levi (Gerhard), and recently her parents, but is unsure how Cassie will react. Persuaded by Levi to look for a girlfriend on Tumblr, Mackenzie continues to avoid telling Cassie she’s a lesbian, while a couple of chance encounters with Matthew lead Cassie to wonder if she is over him. Inevitably, Cassie finds out about Mackenzie’s “secret”, and her disappointment causes a rift between them. As they navigate the new dynamic of their friendship, with each finding fault with the other for their attitudes and behaviours, both Cassie and Mackenzie try to come to terms with all the new feelings and emotions they’re experiencing. Mackenzie begins a relationship with Elliot (Clarke), while Cassie focuses on getting the job she wants. As they focus on their own needs, though, their friendship suffers even more…

In any movie where one character keeps something a secret from their family/friends/workmates (delete as appropriate), the reason for their doing so often remains unanswered at best, or spuriously explained at worst. Almost Adults opts for the second approach and never makes Mackenzie’s reasoning convincing. Fortunately, this narrative misstep doesn’t hurt the movie too much, but it does mean that the animosity that develops between Cassie and Mackenzie feels unnecessarily contrived; in real life, Mackenzie’s reticence probably wouldn’t make such a difference. But where Adrianna DiLonardo’s subtly observant screenplay scores more highly is in its depiction not of two characters falling out because of a poorly motivated secret, but because they are finally learning how to be responsible adults. Their friendship – when we first meet them – is the kind that has them swearing to be in each other’s lives forever, the kind of promise that teenagers make out of a desperate need to be needed. DiLonardo soon waves off this affectation, and has Cassie and Mackenzie behave like the insecure and selfish young adults they really are. When faced with the demands of moving on to the next stage in their lives – and their friendship – life soon finds them unprepared and trying their utmost to control everything around them, including each other.

Although the movie falls under the LGBTQ+ banner thanks to its inclusion of openly gay characters, it’s not a movie about being gay. Rather it’s a movie about finding your place in the world, and at a pivotal moment in most people’s lives, when growing up becomes a mandatory requirement. Look what can happen if you don’t, the movie seems to be saying, and though it does include its fair share of coming-of-age clichés, it’s not weighted in favour of either character, and it does its best not to make easy judgments. Making her feature debut, Rotella handles the material with a lightness of touch that helps the movie through some of its rougher patches, and she has a knack for positioning the camera at odd yet effective vantage points. As the warring BFF’s, Negovanlis and Bauman have an easy chemistry that makes their characters’ falling out all the more dramatic, while Gerhard steals nearly all his scenes as the mandatory wise gay friend. The movie balances comedy and drama (with a smattering of romance) to good effect, and proves appealing throughout. It’s not ground-breaking stuff, or particularly original, but what it does it does with a quiet confidence and skill, and in a way that impresses more than it disappoints.

Rating: 7/10 – by not taking the obvious route in telling its story of a friendship undone by poor choices and a crippling lack of self-awareness on both sides, Almost Adults avoids looking and feeling like every other LGBTQ+ movie you might have seen recently; enjoyable though not exactly profound, and with two praiseworthy central performances, it’s a lovely, self-effacing diversion, and well worth anyone’s time and attention.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

17 Saturday Nov 2018

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Comedy, Drama, Ethan Coen, Gold prospector, James Franco, Joel Coen, Liam Neeson, Outlaw, Review, Tim Blake Nelson, Tom Waits, Wagon train, Western, Zoe Kazan

D: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen / 133m

Cast: Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Zoe Kazan, Harry Melling, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jonjo O’Neill, Chelcie Ross, Saul Rubinek, Tom Waits

Six tales from the Old West: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in which the titular singing outlaw (Nelson) rides into a small town and finds himself threatened with being shot at almost every turn; Near Algodones, in which a would-be bank robber (Franco) underestimates the difficulty of robbing his latest target, and winds up on the verge of being lynched; Meal Ticket, in which a grizzled impresario (Neeson) travels from town to town in a wagon that converts into a small stage that allows an armless and legless young orator called Harrison (Melling) to perform; All Gold Canyon, in which an aging gold prospector (Waits) discovers a valley that may just provide him with the strike he’s being hoping for; The Gal Who Got Rattled, in which a young woman (Kazan) travelling to Oregon by wagon train with her brother, finds herself alone and at the financial mercy of an unscrupulous trail hand; and The Mortal Remains, in which a group of travellers on a stage coach discover that their destination may not be exactly the one they’re expecting…

The Coen brothers have apparently been writing Western short stories for years, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs showcases some of those stories, plus one based on a story by Jack London (All Gold Canyon), in a handy compendium sized movie that offers a variety of pleasures for the interested viewer. Each tale or segment is different from the others both in terms of content and approach, though the Coens’ trademark humour can be found in all of them, and each is self-contained and thematically restrained. With no overlaps or need to wonder if a character from one story will pop up in another one, the various tales are linked only by a framing device that depicts each story as part of a volume entitled The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier. With this conceit established, the Coens proceed to have a lot of fun with their opening story, with Scruggs breaking the fourth wall and taking part in a series of shootouts that are ingeniously and very cleverly staged (the confrontation between Scruggs and Clancy Brown’s poker player is simply genius). There’s more physical humour to be found in Near Algodones, and though it is funny to watch, it’s the slightest of the six tales on offer.

The tone changes completely with Meal Ticket, and the story ends on a dark note that is a little uncomfortable, as commerce and altruism make for uneasy bedfellows (kudos too to the special effects work that makes Harrison’s limbless nature so convincing). Another switch is provided by All Gold Canyon, practically a solo performance by Waits and supported by some of the most stunning natural scenery seen in any movie this year. It speaks towards determinism and self-will, and like its predecessor, provides a wry commentary on the hardships of frontier life. Perhaps the most fully realised and affecting of all the stories is The Gal Who Got Rattled, which skillfully blends comedy and romance into its narrative, and which features a terrific performance from Kazan as an innocent abroad whose naïvete eventually gets the better of her (be warned: there are illustrations that accompany the stories in the framing device, and this one hints strongly at the story’s outcome). And lastly, The Mortal Remains sees the Coens ending the movie with a tale that strictly speaking isn’t related to the Old West or the frontier, but will be familiar to anyone who enjoys tales of the macabre or supernatural. All in all, the Coens have taken a chance in combining so many disparate stories within one movie, but such is their control over the material, and their confidence in their abilities as writers and directors, that as a result, it’s a movie that works exceptionally well throughout, and has much to offer – even for those who don’t like Westerns.

Rating: 8/10 – a compendium of stories that each hold their own, and which offer different narrative rewards, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an affectionate tribute to the Old West from a couple of writers/directors who clearly have a fascination for the period and its hardships; very funny in places, and with a dramatic flair to match, the movie sees the Coens back on form after the perceived stumble of Hail, Caesar! (2016), and showing that there’s still life in the Old West if you know where to look.

Peterloo (2018)

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

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Drama, History, Manchester, Massacre, Maxine Peake, Mike Leigh, Politics, Radicals, Review, Rory Kinnear, St Peter's Fields, True story

D: Mike Leigh / 154m

Cast: Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, Pearce Quigley, Karl Johnson, Neil Bell, Philip Jackson, John-Paul Hurley, Tom Gill, Vincent Franklin, Jeff Rawle, Philip Whitchurch, Martin Savage, Roger Sloman, Sam Troughton, Alastair Mackenzie, Tim McInnerny, Dorothy Duffy, Victoria Moseley

In the wake of Napoléon Bonaparte’s defeat on the Continent in 1815, the working classes in the north of England turn their attention to protesting against the lack of fair political representation, and asking for extended voting rights (one vote per household). Getting wind of this, and viewing it as impending sedition, the British Government – as represented by the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth (Johnson) – decides to do all it can to ensure that this new movement is unsuccessful, and preferably crushed before it can begin. While local radicals from the Manchester Observer, including its founder, Joseph Johnson (Gill), organise a great assembly to take place at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester on 9 August 1819, with a speech to be delivered by the great reformist orator Henry Hunt (Kinnear), government spies and local magistrates plot to have Hunt arrested and the crowd dispersed by force if necessary. With a crowd of around 60,000 people attending, the local militia’s attempts to break up the gathering lead to a terrible tragedy…

Beginning on the battlefield in 1815, Mike Leigh’s latest movie features several firsts for the director in terms of action and bloodshed, but Peterloo is also his most fiercely political movie to date. In telling the story of one of Britain’s worst tragedies, Leigh takes us on a vital history lesson, ranging from the semi-rural mill towns of Lancashire and their inhabitants’ clamour for fair political representation, to the richly decorated rooms of the Establishment and their unwillingness to ease the yoke of political oppression, to the austere courtrooms of the local magistrates and their callous disregard for the lives of the working class. In meeting rooms and at outdoor venues, Leigh explores and illuminates the political and social climate of the period, and through the use of lengthy speeches and extended conversations, brings to life a time when liberty was a luxury afforded only to the ruling elite, and the working classes were so beaten down they were constantly in danger of dying from starvation and disease. Leigh brings all this to life, and gives powerful voice to both the ideals of the radicals and their supporters, and the arrogance of the Establishment. By the time the massacre gets under way, the audience knows exactly what is being fought for (albeit peacefully), and why it matters. And why the elite are so determined to impede any progress.

If all this sounds irredeemably dry and didactic, then nothing could be further from the truth. Like Eric Rohmer, whose movies often consist of just two people talking at length but which are still fascinating to watch, Leigh has the same ability to draw in the viewer and make the expression of ideas as compelling as the action that inevitably follows in their wake (though if anything, the massacre itself isn’t as well realised as the rest of the movie, and carries a strangely muted impact, as if Leigh didn’t want to go too far in depicting the violence). There are real emotions on display, however, from the peacock-ish pride of Henry Hunt, to the cautious reticence of Peake’s unconvinced wife and mother, to the fervour and enthusiasm of the leaders of the nascent Manchester Female Reform Society, to the priggish belligerence of the Prince Consort (McInnerny). In this, the cast are uniformly excellent, with special mention going to Bell as radical reformer Samuel Bamford, and Franklin as the vituperative, apoplectic Magistrate Rev Etlhelson. With expressive, beautifully composed cinematography by Dick Pope that further brings the period to life, along with Suzie Davies’ highly impressive production design, this is a gripping account of a despicable act of state-organised domestic terrorism.

Rating: 9/10 – not for all tastes, but a compelling and revealing look at a key moment in 19th century British history nevertheless, Peterloo sees Mike Leigh working at the height of his considerable story-telling powers; absorbing, intelligently handled, and brimming with vitality, this does border on being unashamedly polemical at times, but when the quality of the material is this good, it’s something that can be easily forgiven.

I Think We’re Alone Now (2018)

12 Monday Nov 2018

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Charlotte Gainsbourg, Drama, Elle Fanning, Mystery, Paul Giamatti, Peter Dinklage, Post-apocalypse, Reed Morano, Review, Sci-fi

D: Reed Morano / 99m

Cast: Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning, Paul Giamatti, Charlotte Gainsbourg

In a small US coastal town, Del (Dinklage) is apparently the only survivor of a worldwide catastrophic event that has seen everyone else killed off. Something of a loner before this happened, Del has adjusted quickly to being alone, and divides his time between his job at the library, and systematically cleaning homes and disposing of bodies. He’s content, until one day he sees fireworks going off across the bay. The next day he encounters a young woman, Grace (Fanning), who has suffered a head injury in a car accident. His surprise at finding someone else alive is muted by his wanting to be alone; he tries to get Grace to move on, but she appears to be just as alone as he is. An uneasy relationship begins to develop between them, and Grace helps with the house cleanings and body disposals. Days pass in this way, with the pair coming to terms with each other’s quirks and foibles, including Del’s collecting photographs of the people who lived in the houses he’s cleaned. But it’s Grace’s story that intrudes more decisively – with the arrival of Patrick (Giamatti) and Violet (Gainsbourg)…

The second feature of cinematographer/director Reed Morano, I Think We’re Alone Now is a slow, meditative, yet absorbing examination of what it’s like to be alone, and what it’s like to want to be alone. In a muted, largely contained performance from Dinklage, Del comes across as the de facto embodiment of survivor’s guilt, taking on the responsibility of looking after the dead and their homes and belongings, as if by doing so he can atone for being alive when they’re not. No explanation is given for the apocalyptic event that has caused people to drop dead wherever they are (though not in the street apparently), and no explanation is given as to why Del hasn’t died as well. This adds to the melancholy feel of Del’s predicament, one that he’s embraced but which also feels like a guilty fait accompli. The arrival of Grace has a profound effect on him: how can he continue to feel the same way when she’s obviously happy to be alive, and this is how he should really be feeling? It’s not a question that Del – or Mike Makowsky’s screenplay – is able to answer with any authority, and before there’s any likelihood of the issue being addressed, along come Patrick and Violet to take the story in a different direction altogether.

To be fair, this narrative switch has been signposted a couple of times already by then, but when it does happen, the movie ceases to be about loneliness and becomes something else entirely. Examining what that involves would be to spoil things (mostly), but it can be noted that the movie ceases to be as effective or as absorbing as it’s been with just Del and Grace as our guides to this eerie new world (it also feels like something of a cheat, as if two competing narrative strands had been glued together for the sake of a dramatic final third). This also leaves the careful construction of the relationship between Del and Grace in limbo, and offers Del a chance to play the unlikely hero. Unconvincing as this may be, Morano, who directs in a formal yet expressive manner that adds a layer of hazy unreality to the overall mise en scene, provides moments of serene beauty but is unable to rectify the larger problems with the script. It’s a shame as Dinklage and Fanning make for a great “odd couple”, and there’s a decent enough central idea on display. But more work needed to be done on the movie as a whole, making this compelling and frustrating at the same time.

Rating: 6/10 – with its post-apocalypse background serving as the anchor for its tale of melancholy self-negation, I Think We’re Alone Now strives for resonance but falls short thanks to the vagaries of its script; good performances from all concerned are sadly not enough to prop up the movie, but Morano does more than enough to cement her growing reputation as a director to watch.

Hurricane (2018)

11 Sunday Nov 2018

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David Blair, Drama, History, Iwan Rheon, Milo Gibson, Poland, RAF, Review, Stefanie Martini, True story, World War II

aka Hurricane: Squadron 303

D: David Blair / 108m

Cast: Iwan Rheon, Milo Gibson, Stefanie Martini, Marcin Dorociński, Krystof Hádek, Christopher Jaciow, Slawomir Doliniec, Radoslaw Kaim, Adrian Zaremba, Hugh Alexander, Nicholas Farrell, Rosie Gray

Having seen their country overrun by the Nazis, a number of Polish fighter pilots, including Jan Zumbach (Rheon) and Witold Urbanowicz (Dorociński), find their way to England where they join the Royal Air Force. It’s 1940, and Britain is suffering heavy casualties in the air, and is fast running out of both planes and pilots. With the RAF top brass unwilling to let them fly their best planes because of doubts about their skills and experience, it takes a while for the Poles to find a role in the War. Eventually, they form 303 Squadron, based at RAF Northolt aerodrome, and take to the skies during the Battle of Britain. Their courage and determination brings them aerial glory, and despite some resentment among some of the British pilots, the Poles soon find themselves highly regarded. Jan begins a relationship with a WAAF called Phyllis (Martini), but as the war continues and inevitably, his comrades are killed, Jan begins to experience an ambivalence about the war that sees him become angrier and more reckless…

Of the many stories to come out of World War II, the story of the Polish fighter pilots who served in the RAF is one of the more remarkable. In the first six weeks of combat, they claimed an unprecedented hundred and twenty six kills, and by the end of the war, 303 Squadron had the highest ratio of enemy aircraft destroyed to their own lost. With such a notable history, it’s a shame then that Hurricane resorts to lazy soap opera dramatics in telling the Poles’ story. The tone is set when we see Jan steal a plane in France in order to reach England: instead of being a perilous endeavour that could go wrong at any moment, it’s treated as something of a practical joke on Jan’s part. Good-natured banter ensues between the Poles while they wait to be put to good use, and only when the RAF top brass assign lucky Canadian John Kent (Gibson) to oversee their training. Rule-breaking and insubordination are the order of the day from then on, alongside skirmishes with British pilots who are brought in to be unpleasantly racist, something that’s heightened by Phyllis dumping her usual man (Alexander) in favour of Jan. It’s history perhaps, but played out in a distant, modern fashion that doesn’t suit the period.

While the movie does get darker as the war continues – and the Polish body count rises – we see flashbacks to the fates of Jan and Witold’s spouses at the hands of the Nazis. This sobering of the narrative is necessary but feels underwhelming; there’s always another soap opera moment waiting just around the corner, such as when Jan seeks to repay the hospitality of a working class family, only to find their home has been destroyed in a bombing raid (the inference is clear but Jan never actually checks to see if they’re dead or alive). Elsewhere, there’s a member of the squadron suffering from cowardice, plenty of stiff upper lip moments, and the strange sight of a book on Rudimentary Polish that’s the size of War and Peace. Thankfully the aerial dogfights rescue the movie from its self-inflicted doldrums, though the anonymity of the pilots in these sequences (despite as many cockpit close ups as possible), lessens the impact when one of them is killed. The cast are proficient without being asked to do too much, and TV veteran Blair does his best to cope with the few demands of Robert Ryan and Alistair Galbraith’s patchy screenplay. All in all, it’s a great story, but here it’s also one that never seems like it’s being encouraged to truly “take off”.

Rating: 5/10 – lacklustre, though enjoyable in a basic, just-go-with-the-flow kind of way, Hurricane is the kind of movie that doesn’t even tell you its title is the make of plane its main characters are flying; without the requisite energy needed to make it as compelling as it should have been, the movie founders under a weight of good intentions and unrealised ambitions, something that can’t be said of its Polish pilots in real life – dzięki Bogu.

Brothers’ Nest (2018)

10 Saturday Nov 2018

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Australia, Black comedy, Clayton Jacobson, Drama, Kim Gyngell, Lynette Curran, Murder, Review, Shane Jacobson, Thriller

D: Clayton Jacobson / 93m

Cast: Shane Jacobson, Clayton Jacobson, Kim Gyngell, Lynette Curran, Sarah Snook

Brothers Terry (Shane Jacobson) and Jeff (Clayton Jacobson) arrive at their childhood home early one morning, and set about preparing to kill their stepfather, Rodger (Gyngell), and make it look like suicide. Jeff has come up with the plan pretty much all by himself: the idea is to stop Rodger inheriting the family home and then selling it when their mother (Curran) passes away (she has cancer and only a few months left to live). Looking at it as a way of ensuring they keep what they regard as theirs, and to honour their biological father who killed himself when he discovered Rodger was having an affair with their mother, the pair work through Jeff’s plan down to the minutest detail. As time passes, the brothers reminisce about their childhood, and the impact Rodger has had on their lives. They also learn things about each other that makes Terry begin to question if what they’re doing is necessary, Finally, and as expected, Rodger arrives at the house, but Jeff’s meticulously devised plan begins to unravel from the moment that Rodger doesn’t enter the house straight away, forcing the brothers to improvise…

A pitch black comedy that starts off slowly before ramping up the tension and making at least two scenes very uncomfortable to watch, Brothers’ Nest is an assured, finely tuned movie that has a lot going on “under the hood”. Reuniting the Jacobson brothers for the first time since the sublime Kenny (2006) (though Clayton had a much smaller role), the movie spends much of its first half in exploring each brother’s reasons for being there, and the complicated family and emotional ties that have led them to contemplating murder as a way of solving problems they can barely articulate (at one point Jeff insists on their being honest with each other, but it’s an idea neither is able to commit to). It’s tempting to speculate that the Jacobsons – working from a script by Jaime Browne – have drawn from their own relationship in order to portray Terry and Jeff, but if that were so then you’d be seriously worried for them: both brothers have enough unresolved issues to keep a team of therapists busy for years. Clayton teases out a number of subtle character moments that point to things going wrong even if they go right, and these are based on equally subtle undercurrents that inform the characters’ motives and the quality of the performances.

It’s when things do start to go wrong that the movie kicks into a higher gear and becomes a dark, uncompromising thriller, with the brothers forced down a path that brooks no return or chance of redemption. The humour, which so far has been a mixture of unsettling and morbid, becomes blacker still, but it’s all in service to the desperate efforts of Terry and Jeff to rescue their plan, and when that’s no longer possible, for one of them to save himself at any cost. The movie does lose its way in the final twenty minutes, when the confines of the house are overtaken by events that take place outside, but there’s a messy desperation to these events that seems appropriate even as the material, and its credibility, is stretched a little too thinly. Throughout it all, Clayton uses low level camera angles and subdued lighting to emphasise the off-kilter nature of the brothers’ plan, while sound designer/supervisor Emma Bortignon provides cues and effects that add to the discomfort the movie promotes throughout. With tremendous performances from both Shane and Clayton, the movie works best when focusing on Terry and Jeff’s fractured relationship, but when it takes a (much, much) darker turn, it still manages to keep them at the centre, while exploring their fragile bond even further – even when it proves increasingly uncomfortable to do so.

Rating: 8/10 – despite a last act detour into violent melodrama that’s tonally at odds with what’s gone before, the bulk of Brothers’ Nest is a quietly disturbing look at fratricidal dysfunction set against a simmering backdrop of unresolved family betrayals; tense and tautly executed, let’s hope it’s not another twelve years before the Jacobsons work together again.

Burn Burn Burn (2015)

09 Friday Nov 2018

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Ashes, Chanya Button, Chloe Pirrie, Comedy, Drama, Indie movie, Jack Farthing, Laura Carmichael, Review, Road trip

D: Chanya Button / 105m

Cast: Laura Carmichael, Chloe Pirrie, Jack Farthing, Joe Dempsie, Alice Lowe, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Sally Phillips, Melanie Walters, Jane Asher, Nigel Planer, Matthew Kelly, Alison Steadman

Following the death of their friend, Dan (Farthing), best friends Seph (Carmichael) and Alex (Pirrie) find themselves tasked with spreading his ashes at four different locations. To help make sense of his choices, Dan has made several short videos that the pair have to watch when they arrive at each destination. At first, though, they aren’t keen on the idea, and decide not to do it. But when their grief and anger and confusion over Dan’s death from cancer causes both of them to lose their jobs (and Alex discovers her girlfriend is seeing someone else), they head out on the road to carry out his final wishes. Along the way, Seph begins to doubt whether she and her boyfriend, James (Dempsie) should be together, a detour to visit Alex’s mother (Walters) leads to the exposure of uncomfortable truths for Alex, and Seph’s behaviour threatens to cause a rift between them that’s exacerbated by some scathing comments by Dan on his videos. It all leaves Seph and Alex wondering if agreeing to Dan’s wishes was the right thing to do…

A charming mix of drama and comedy that often hides a melancholy centre, Burn Burn Burn is a deceptively sincere meditation on the nature of regret and the emotional toll it can take. Dan regrets the life he’ll no longer live and what he perceives as the mistakes he’s made with his mother (Asher). Seph regrets the choices she’s made both professionally (she works as a nanny for a therapist who consults from home) and personally (her relationship with James). And Alex has regrets over a childhood incident that causes her to push people away. It’s no wonder that they all became friends: how could they not when they’re such kindred spirits? The beauty of Charlie Covell’s nimble screenplay is that Dan uses his regrets as a way of challenging Seph and Alex to examine and overcome their own problems, and as the journey progresses from location to location, so Seph and Alex confront and overcome the things that are holding them back. There’s a welcome lack of empty sentimentality, and none of the cloying mawkishness that might ordinarily come with a movie such as this, and Button, making her first feature, keeps a tight control over the emotional dilemmas and resolutions that the screenplay delivers with aplomb.

The movie also offers up several surprising scenes that seem out of place at first, but which on closer inspection, relate closely to the characters and their predicaments. Alex makes a startling confession while tied to a cross (she’s standing in for an AWOL am-dram Jesus), while an overnight stay at a commune headed by counter-culture philosopher Adam (Rhind-Tutt) sees the pair part of a group gazing at the stars and determining what’s important in life. Moments such as these add appreciable depth and no small amount of artless candour to the narrative, and help make the characters’ problems relatable. As the troubled pair, Carmichael and Pirrie both provide astute, sympathetic, and likeable performances, and there’s fine work from Farthing that roots around in the despair of dying too young with a frankness that’s often unsettling to watch. The rest of the cast looks like a who’s who of acceptable British cameo providers, and Lowe aside (who’s once again asked to play the same character she normally plays, just in a medieval costume), they acquit themselves well, offering deft touches and character beats that flesh out their roles. Their portrayals are all in service to a movie that eschews the usual quirky road trip analogies, and which centres instead on telling its heartfelt story with quiet verve and incisiveness.

Rating: 8/10 – a winning blend of honest drama and good-natured comedy, Burn Burn Burn is a modest yet effective first outing from Button that is a pleasant and rewarding alternative to the huge number of similar movies that are out there; brimming with confidence, and unafraid to tackle some difficult topics head on, it’s bolstered by a moving score and soundtrack courtesy of Marc Canham and the indie band Candy Says, and leaves you wanting to know just how Seph and Alex get on once their trip is over.

Widows (2018)

08 Thursday Nov 2018

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Chicago, Colin Farrell, Crime, Cynthia Erivo, Drama, Elizabeth Debicki, Literary adaptation, Michelle Rodriguez, Review, Steve McQueen, Thriller, Viola Davis

D: Steve McQueen / 130m

Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Carrie Coon, Garret Dillahunt, Lukas Haas, Kevin J. O’Connor, Jacki Weaver, Matt Walsh, Adepero Oduye, Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson

In the wake of her husband’s death in a heist gone wrong, Veronica Rawlings (Davis) finds herself in a whole lot of trouble. Her husband, Harry (Neeson), along with three of his friends – all career criminals – stole two million dollars from gang boss Jamal Manning (Henry), and though his money is gone, he expects Veronica to pay him back within a month. With no money of her own, and only a notebook Harry left her that gives details of his previous heists – and the one he had planned next – Veronica decides her only option is to contact the wives of the other men in Harry’s gang, and persuade them to help her carry out his next robbery, which will net them a cool five million. Two of the women, Linda Perelli (Rodriguez) and Alice Gunner (Debicki), agree to help, but the fourth, Amanda (Coon), isn’t interested. Needing four of them to carry out the heist, Linda recruits her babysitter, Belle (Erivo). They move forward with the plan, but are unaware that they’re being watched…

An adaptation of Lynda La Plante’s novel, Steve McQueen’s latest movie is an odd beast indeed, quite formal in its approach, but with occasional directorial flourishes to remind the viewer that this isn’t just a heist movie, it’s a serious heist movie, unlike, say, Ocean’s Eight (2018). Here, lives are at stake, and the cost of failure is unthinkable. It’s a dour, earnest movie that explores notions of sexism, political expediency (care of a subplot surrounding a ward campaign involving Farrell’s reformist alderman versus Henry’s aspiring gang boss), proto-feminism, spousal betrayal, and personal legacies. The script, by McQueen and author Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects), is adroitly constructed, but though the pair have worked hard to bring the characters to life and present them against a credible backdrop (well, as credible as these kinds of movies can manage), there’s not much here that will either come as a surprise, or which doesn’t follow in an expected order. Even if you’re not familiar with La Plante’s novel, or the original British TV series, the few twists and turns in the narrative won’t have much of an impact, and getting through the movie almost becomes a tick box exercise.

That’s not to say, however, that the movie is bad, or disappointing, just oddly straightforward and dramatically sincere without ever rising above the expectations of the genre. Perhaps this kind of story has been told too many times before for McQueen to provide us with anything fresh or new. And there’s the small matter of Davis’ and Debicki’s characters having more screen time than Rodriguez’ and Erivo’s. This lop-sided approach to the main quartet seems a little counter-intuitive in a movie that seems to be promoting female solidarity, and often, some character beats are cut short in order to move on to the next phase of the heist and its planning. On the agnate side, the likes of Duvall, Kaluuya and Dillahunt are saddled with perfunctory, under-developed secondary roles, while Farrell does his best to make sense of a character whose ambivalent motives rarely make sense. Thankfully, Davis and Debicki are on hand to provide two excellent performances. That Davis is so good is a given, but it’s Debicki who shines the most, imbuing Alice with a steely survivor’s determination to make life better for herself that is both complex and credible; whenever she’s on screen, she holds the audience’s attention in a vice-like grip. That the rest of the movie doesn’t manage to do this, is again, something of a surprise, but in playing out as expected, it doesn’t disappoint entirely. Instead it’s a respectable effort that isn’t as memorable as we all might have hoped.

Rating: 7/10 – despite all the effort and all the talent involved, Widows lacks the kind of verve needed to make the thriller elements thrill, and the dramatic elements resonate; McQueen directs as if his brief was to be a pair of safe hands, and though it’s technically well put together, somewhere along the way, any idea of elevating the material doesn’t appear to have been acted on.

Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (2017)

07 Wednesday Nov 2018

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Andrea Sisson, Desert, Drama, Indie movie, Joseph Cross, Julia Garner, Pete Ohs, Review, Sci-fi, The Crystal Lake

D: Pete Ohs, Andrea Sisson / 91m

Cast: Julia Garner, Joseph Cross, C.S. Lee, Jillian Mayer

Trekking across a nameless desert with no destination in mind, or any particular idea of where he is in relation to anywhere else, Lernert (Cross) is alone except for a robot head he carries with him, called Susan (Mayer). Lernert has a plan to provide Susan with a new body, but the occasional items he finds on his journey are largely unsuitable. One day he discovers a young woman (Garner) who has eaten a poisonous root vegetable. Saving her life, he attempts to connect with her, but she prefers to continue her own travels by herself. Later, the tables are turned when Lernert suffers an injury that renders him unconscious, and the woman, whose name is Rola, tends to his wound. While he’s unconscious she finds an illustrated book that Lernert is writing called The Quest for the Key. The story mentions a crystal lake, which Rola finds too coincidental: she is searching for a semi-mythical crystal lake located somewhere in the desert. When Lernert comes to, he tells her he doesn’t know anything about it, but they agree to look for it together. And when they find a power source that allows Susan to be “woken up”, she reveals that she knows how to gude them there…

If you’re a fan of slow moving, leisurely paced, yet absorbing sci-fi movies set in an uncertain future, then Everything Beautiful Is Far Away will be exactly what you’re looking for. Winner of the US Fiction Cinematography Award at the 2017 Los Angeles Film Festival, the movie looks and feels like an elegiac meditation on the will (and the need) to believe in something greater than oneself – the crystal lake as a symbol of hope, and possibly, redemption – and the importance of the journey towards it. Lernert appears to have a purpose in wandering the desert, but it’s mainly to stay alive and avoid any signs of civilisation (at one point a city can be glimpsed in the distance, but the ominous cloud hanging over it acts as a warning: don’t go there). Whatever has happened, Lernert is doing his best to get away from it. Likewise Rola, though her goal is clearer and more defined: there’s a crystal lake and even though there’s no proof it exists, she’s determined to find it. Part wishful thinking, part survivalist mantra, Rola’s search for the lake brooks no discussion. With nothing better to do to occupy his time, what else should Lernert do but accompany her?

Most movies of this nature would soon have its lead characters becoming romantically attached, but screenwriter and co-director Ohs has other ideas, and keeps Rola and Lernert at arms length from each other. Instead they become friends, and this is much more realistic and in keeping with the movie’s modest aims and ambitions. Ohs slowly builds up their relationship, and their increasing reliance on each other, and as their journey continues, they also learn from each other. Ohs and Sisson ensure these developments play out naturally and with little to no artifice, and their efforts are rewarded by note perfect performances from Garner and Cross. There’s subtlety and nuance to both their roles, and though we learn nothing of their characters’ back stories (or what catastrophe has befallen the world), we’re more than happy to follow them on their search for the lake. The co-directors also keep things interesting visually, emphasising the bleakness and the beauty of the desert landscapes Rola and Lernert are traversing, while also including themes relating to our reliance on technology, and why our belief systems are so important to us. It’s perhaps a polarising movie – you’ll either love it or hate it – but there’s no denying that it’s unexpectedly compelling, and a refreshing change from more mainstream fare.

Rating: 8/10 – a singular movie that takes chances with its narrative, though they’re rewarding ones over all, Everything Beautiful Is Far Away is affecting and beautifully rendered; the sci-fi elements are downplayed in favour of a more traditional dramatic approach, Alan Palomo provides a musical backdrop that is oddly reflective of Lernert and Rola’s unusual journey, and the cinematography – by Ohs and Christian Sorensen Hansen – is well deserving of its festival award.

The Joke Thief (2018)

06 Tuesday Nov 2018

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Car dealership, Comedian, Daniel Baldwin, Drama, Frank D'Angelo, Indie movie, Review, Stand up comedy, Sugith Varughese, The Comedy Basement, Uber driver

D: Frank D’Angelo / 81m

Cast: Frank D’Angelo, Sugith Varughese, Daniel Baldwin, Jason Blicker, Tony Nardi, Alyson Court, Art Hindle, Mike Marino, John Ashton

Simon McCabe (D’Angelo) has wanted one thing his whole life: to be a comedian. But although he’s had a number of opportunities, he’s never been able to make the most of them. Now, with one last opportunity having landed in his lap – a spot on a show at the Comedy Basement which is being filmed for cable TV – Simon has to decide if he really wants his dream to come true. It’s a decision he appears ill-equipped to make, as over the years his lack of success has soured him, both professionally and personally. Having turned his back on the family business, a car dealership founded by his father (Hindle), Simon avoids responsibility and treats others, including his brother (Blicker), with disdain. What doesn’t help is that Simon has a reputation as a “joke thief”, someone who uses other people’s material in his act. While on his way to the Comedy Basement, Simon finds himself opening up to his Uber driver, Jerry (Varughese), and reflecting on various moments from his life that have led him to where he is now…

A melancholy, bittersweet, but ultimately rambling movie that dosn’t make as much sense as its writer/producer/director/star was probably aiming for, The Joke Thief relies too heavily on stand up performances from the likes of Marino to pad out an already slight storyline that revolves around Simon’s last shot at personal redemption. It also paints Simon as a misanthrope, and despite a last minute change of heart and soul – thanks to the clumsy intervention of Jerry the Uber driver, who tells Simon to have faith – he’s not a character you can warm to. Yes, he is funny, albeit in an offhand, determinedly rebellious kind of way, but D’Angelo’s script can’t decide if his being a joke thief is a bad thing or not. Baldwin’s host and Comedy Basement owner doesn’t like him, and only lets him have a slot as a favour to a fellow comedian (Nardi). But his other fellow comedians are courteous and encouraging toward him, which makes his reputation something that is certainly remarked upon but which remains unexplored. With all the flashbacks that D’Angelo inserts into the narrative, we never get a clue as to why Simon doesn’t write his own material, or why he’s chosen to plagiarise others.

In the end, D’Angelo makes an awkward fist of things, from Simon’s regret at not being with his father when he died, to being there for his mother’s last breath only for her to berate him for being sad and unhappy, and his regular dismissal of, and attempts at exploiting, his brother’s affection for him. There’s also Simon’s treatment of women, which is also exploitative and wildly inappropriate, and such is D’Angelo’s skewed approach to the character, he actually rewards his behaviour with the prospect of a long-term relationship (one that appears to be his first). But it’s the character of Jerry the Uber driver that belies any sense that D’Angelo has worked out in advance what his movie is about. Jerry is the balm for Simon’s misery, someone who doesn’t get his jokes but who knows he’s a good man and a good comedian anyway. Jerry has faith, and amazingly, during the course of a short trip, convinces Simon to have faith as well and believe in himself (ah, if only Life were so simple to work out). Apparently, D’Angelo only spends a couple of days writing his scripts, and sadly, it shows. Somewhere in this movie is a mordaunt meditation on the rehabilitation that can be achieved through humour, but here it’s a blunt message that doesn’t convince, and which comes at the expense of any sympathy for the main character.

Rating: 4/10 – surrounding himself with comedians who really do know how to be funny, D’Angelo struggles to make Simon anywhere near as good, and this disparity hurts The Joke Thief tremendously; with modest performances all round, but in service to material that doesn’t lend itself to providing viewers with anything too memorable, it’s a movie that frustrates more than it impresses.

Overlord (2018)

05 Monday Nov 2018

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Action, Drama, Horror, Jovan Adepo, Julius Avery, Mathilde Ollivier, Nazis, Pilou Asbæk, Review, Thriller, World War II, Wyatt Russell

D: Julius Avery / 109m

Cast: Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Pilou Asbæk, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Iain De Caestecker, Jacob Anderson, Dominic Applewhite, Gianny Taufer, Bokeem Woodbine

The night of 5 June 1944: a squad of paratroopers have been tasked with destroying a radio mast located in the tower of a church in a small Normandy village. When their plane is shot down before they can reach the drop zone, the survivors band together in order to complete their mission. Under the command of Corporal Ford (Russell), a demolitions expert, Privates Boyce (Adepo), Tibbet (Magaro), and Chase (De Caestecker), reach the outskirts of the village, where they encounter Chloe (Ollivier). Distrustful of them at first, Chloe agrees to help them once she realises what their mission is. But there’s a problem: the church has become part of a Nazi compound, and is heavily guarded. It soon becomes clear that there’s something strange going on in the compound, something that has seen the Nazis – under the command of Wafner (Asbæk) – abduct many of the villagers, who haven’t been seen again. A visit by Wafner to Chloe’s home, and Boyce unexpectedly finding himself inside the compound, ensures the mission becomes about more than just blowing up a radio mast…

Though the above synopsis is light on detail – and deliberately so – what you can gauge from the trailer for Overlord is that this is pretty much a big budget version of all those Outpost movies we’ve been “treated” to over the last ten years; it also bears a strong resemblance to Frankenstein’s Army (2013). Whatever the inspiration for its making, though, the key question is: is it any better than those movies? Fortunately, the answer is yes. However, the script – by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith – doesn’t push the basic storyline in any new directions, and runs out of dramatic steam once Boyce gets in and out of the compound with remarkable ease. From then on, the material plays out in entirely familiar fashion, and regular viewers of this kind of thing will be able to predict each narrative development with a minimum of effort. The characters are broadly drawn too, with Boyce at first showing fear at every turn before displaying true bravery (as we know he will), Ford the taciturn brute, Tibbet the mouthy sharpshooter, Chloe the plucky heroine, and Wafner the smarmy villain who gets a taste of his own medicine (literally). Sometimes these stereotypes can be reassuring, but here they stop the audience from engaging with anyone. Instead, they and the viewer, are stuck with going through the appropriate (e)motions.

The movie is loud and violent and glaringly obtuse at times, though punctuated by odd moments of quiet where the script attempts to provide some depth to the characters, even though it’s already too late. Avery, who provided his first feature, Son of a Gun (2014), with a rough around the edges energy that suited the material, here finds himself constrained by the demands of both the material and the requirements of making a more mainstream movie. The cast do what they can, but there’s no challenge to any of the roles, and Asbæk opts to portray Wafner as a pantomime villain almost from the off. Along the way, there’s some good practical effects work (though none of it is as shocking as might be hoped for), and one scene where a paratrooper – and then everyone else – gets a nasty “wake up” call, is splendidly staged and proves to be the movie’s highlight. But all in all it’s the movie’s lack of inventiveness that stops it from being as successful as its makers would have hoped, and which robs of it any appreciable thrills and spills.

Rating: 6/10 – despite being better than its low budget rivals, Overlord still falls into the same traps as those movies, and proves to be a modest diversion at best; once again we’re confronted with a mainstream horror movie that falls way short of its aims, and which serves as a reminder that money can’t buy everything.

The White Orchid (2018)

02 Friday Nov 2018

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Drama, Hotel Rex, John Carroll Lynch, Morro Bay, Murder, Mystery, Nichelle Nichols, Olivia Thirlby, Review, Steve Anderson, Thriller

D: Steve Anderson / 88m

Cast: Olivia Thirlby, John Carroll Lynch, Janina Gavankar, Nichelle Nichols, Brendan Sexton III, Rachael Taylor, Jennifer Beals

A freelance investigator for Social Services, Claire Decker (Thirlby) is conscientious and very thorough when it comes to finding relatives of people who have died, seemingly, alone. But when her boss (Beals) gives her a new challenge, it’s not Claire’s usual type of case. The headless, mutilated corpse of a woman has been found on the beach of nearby Morro Bay, and though she appeared to be well-known in the area, the police have discovered that her name and I.D. were fake. Tasked with finding out who the murdered woman really was, Claire spends time at the woman’s home, and finds clues that the police have overlooked, clues that she keeps from the local police chief (Lynch). When Claire talks to some of the woman’s neighbours, she meets Teresa (Nichols), a blind lady who was asked to look after a suitcase the woman left with her before she died. The contents add to the mystery of the woman’s death, but by now Claire has worked out that the woman’s real name was Jessica, and that her murder is somehow linked to a hotel in San Francisco called the Hotel Rex…

Like many thrillers, The White Orchid sets out its central mystery as soon as its central character has been established as one type of person, and then has that same character behave increasingly in ways that don’t seem to match the character’s established personality. All this is in pursuit of the truth, of course, but it does make you wonder why it is that the movies do this. Are we meant to find a flawed heroine more interesting? Will determined and resourceful ever be enough? And what is it about Claire Decker that makes her want to dress up like the murder victim (as she inevitably does; it’s signposted so obviously) and put herself in harm’s way, especially as she knows there’s a potentially dangerous man lurking around who knows what she’s doing and has found out? These are all good questions, but sadly, not ones that writer/director Steve Anderson is interested in answering. Claire’s motivations remain murky throughout, and there’s something of a character swerve late on in her investigation that comes out of the blue, and which has the awkward effect of making the viewer review everything they’ve seen so far (though clues are there).

Of course, with Claire playing dress up in the dead woman’s clothes and wigs, there’s a psycho-sexual aspect to it all, and Thirlby is required to wear the kind of underwear that looks nice but which women don’t sit around in in real life. These voyeuristic moments aside, the mystery develops at a steady pace, teasing out the truth while failing to put Claire in any danger whatsoever. This leaves the movie tension-free, and largely unsure of where it’s going, content to plod along happily until a showdown between Claire and the killer that falls flat bcause of how contrived it all is. Much of the movie’s running time is taken up by scenes that hamper the flow of the narrative, from Claire discussing the case with her roommate (Gavankar), to one of Claire’s neighbours (Sexton III) expressing his worries over his daughter’s safety because a man with a gun was looking for our largely unconcerned heroine. With Anderson’s screenplay unsure if it wants to be a solid mystery thriller, or an exploration of the sexual awakening of a woman with no apparent social life (but a liking for the neck of a particular blonde), the movie is only fitfully intriguing, and rarely gets out of second gear.

Rating: 5/10 – acceptable as a way of filling time until something better comes along, The White Orchid is a laboured attempt at a modern day film noir, but without the skill and ingenuity needed to bring its over-burdened narrative to life; Thirlby and the rest of the cast acquit themselves well enough playing staple characters of the genre, and there’s some good location work along the California coast, but ultimately this is forgettable stuff that jars more than it gels.

Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018)

01 Thursday Nov 2018

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Asa Butterfield, Boarding school, Comedy, Crispian Mills, Drama, Finn Cole, Fracking, Horror, Michael Sheen, Monsters, Review, Simon Pegg

D: Crispian Mills / 104m

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Finn Cole, Simon Pegg, Michael Sheen, Hermione Corfield, Nick Frost, Max Raphael, Kit Connor, Isabella Laughland, Tom Rhys Harries, Louis Strong, Margot Robbie

Slaughterhouse is a traditional English boarding school, with the sons and daughters of the rich and famous and the establishment primed to follow in their parents’ footsteps. When a rare placement comes the way of Don Wallace (Cole), a teenager from a single parent, working class background, he doesn’t really want to go, but does so to please his mother. Once there, he’s placed in a room with Willoughby Blake (Butterfield), whose disaffection with the school leads him to carry out small acts of subversion. But the cruelties and occasional moments of relief from life at Slaughterhouse soon take a back seat to the consequences of a nearby fracking operation that has opened up a sinkhole. On a weekend when most of the pupils have gone home, the headmaster (Sheen), one of the teachers (Pegg), Don and Willoughby, along with a number of other pupils, find themselves fighting off attacks by a “frack” of subterranean monsters that have emerged from the sinkhole. It’s time to put personal differences aside and keep each other alive…

You know that feeling when you’re around five to ten minutes into a movie and you just know that you’re going to be disappointed – because you are already? That’s the feeling viewers of the first feature from Stolen Picture, a production company set up by stars Pegg and Frost, will have once they’ve started watching this ill-advised and poorly assembled comedy horror. It’s not just that Slaughterhouse Rulez isn’t that funny, or very effective in terms of its horror elements, it doesn’t work because it’s another movie that tries waaaaay too hard to be funny, scary, and exciting all at the same time, while not being able to strike a proper balance between all three. The script – by Mills and Henry Fitzherbert – adopts a kitchen sink approach to the comedy, with physical pratfalls, visual gags, terrible puns or references (you can guess the line that inevitably accompanies the apparent demise of the headmaster’s dog, Mr Chips), and lots of frightened yelling, screaming and running in fear. Like much else in the movie, it’s these efforts, and the extended effort that goes into them, that make you wonder if everyone’s trying too hard because they know the material isn’t strong enough to support itself.

So, the comedy is broad and buffoon-like, with the adult characters suffering the most, from Pegg’s lovelorn teacher, to Frost’s stoner anti-fracking campaigner, to Sheen’s priggish headmaster. These are caricature performances that have been done to death in dozens of other British (so-called) comedies, and they’re still not funny even now. The horror relies on gory special effects, and rapid fire editing to hide the deficiencies of the animatronics and prosthetics, while the monsters themselves look like they wouldn’t even pass muster in a Doctor Who episode. It’s also a movie that fails to exploit the issue of fracking and approaches it in a simplistic, “fracking is bad” fashion that makes the whole thing a plot contrivance instead of anything more rigorous. Potshots at boarding school life are numerous but offer nothing new, and the characters are as passively stereotypical as you’d expect. Tasked with breathing life into a movie that begins tired and winds up positively comatose by the end, the cast can only struggle to make their characters’ plight convincing; though they’re hampered by Mills’ pedestrian and uninspired direction. A disappointing movie, then, and one that would have benefited from taking more risks with the material than it does.

Rating: 4/10 – not the auspicious debut for their production company that Pegg and Frost would have wished for, Slaughterhouse Rulez lacks energy and purpose, and doesn’t even charm on a pizza-and-beer-on-a-Saturday-night basis; as it goes through the motions, the same will be true of viewers wondering how they can escape this mess with their sanity intact.

The Happy Prince (2018)

30 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Biography, Colin Firth, Colin Morgan, Drama, Edwin Thomas, Emily Watson, France, History, Oscar Wilde, Passion project, Review, Rupert Everett

D: Rupert Everett / 106m

Cast: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan, Edwin Thomas, Tom Wilkinson, Béatrice Dalle, Anna Chancellor, Julian Wadham, John Standing, Ronald Pickup

Oscar Wilde (Everett) has served his time in Reading Gaol and is living in France, supported by the kind attentions of one of his few remaining friends, Robbie Ross (Thomas). Suffering from ill health as a result of his stay in prison, Wilde is a shadow of his former self, wracked by torment and disillusionment, and his passion for writing exhausted. Against the better judgment and advice of his friends, including Reggie Turner (Firth), and his estranged wife, Constance (Watson), Wilde is reunited with the source of his downfall, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas (Morgan). They live together, though the relationship is strained, and Douglas’s selfish behaviour begins to drive an irreversible wedge between them. When their families each threaten to remove their financial support for the pair, the relationship founders completely, and Wilde becomes a lonely figure wandering from café to café spending what little money he has on alcohol. With his health deteriorating even further, Wilde becomes incapacitated, and is forced to see out the remainder of his days in a dingy Paris hotel room…

When actors or directors announce that their next movie will be a long cherished passion project, it’s often time to nod sagely and mutter, “that’ll be nice”. Rupert Everett had been trying to get a movie made about the final three years in the life of Oscar Wilde for over five years, and he’s finally succeeded. You can imagine the pitch to potential investors, though: a movie about an alcoholic writer in the decrepitude of his final years, and without any chance of a happy ending. Full marks then to Everett for his perseverance, because despite the downbeat nature of the material, and the sadness of seeing a once great man reduced to abject penury, The Happy Prince is a fascinating and poignant examination of the last three years of Wilde’s life, and how those years took a further, irrevocable toll on him after two years in prison. It’s a largely melancholy, subdued account, but there are moments of joy and laughter and hope in amongst the heartbreak and despair, as Wilde reflects on his success and his subsequent downfall. Unafraid to show Wilde at his worst, and with the worst happening to him, Everett presents an unflinching portrait of the artist as an old man robbed of all his powers.

The movie has all the hallmarks of a grim tragedy, from Wilde, Turner and Ross being pursued in Italy by English thugs looking to intimidate and bully a great man brought low, to the inevitability of Douglas’ rejection of Wilde when money becomes an issue. Everett is magnificent in a role that he’s often unrecognisable in, the quality of the make up obliterating the actor/director’s angular features; he’s like a poster child for rampant, self-inflicted dissolution. What Everett captures perfectly is the sense of a man who knows his life is effectively over, but who clings to it, desperately, and however he can, even if it’s inappropriate (his drinking etc.). Everett, who also wrote the script, is a confident, detailed director, and he has a good eye for composition that some more practiced directors would be envious of. He’s an unselfish actor too, allowing the likes of Morgan and Thomas to shine in roles that might otherwise have appeared to be in subservience to the orbit of Everett’s own. That the movie isn’t as heavy going as it looks is another testament to the skill with which Everett assembles the various elements of Wilde’s post-prison experiences, and the way he weaves the story of the Happy Prince through the narrative, and has it reflect the state of Wilde’s own life depending on where the story has gotten to. For a first-time writer/director, Everett has revealed himself to be someone who should be encouraged to get behind the camera again as quickly as possible.

Rating: 8/10 – though the movie examines the tragedy of Wilde’s final years, The Happy Prince isn’t the depressing, maudlin experience that some viewers might be expecting, and instead is a quietly powerful expression of the will to survive in the bleakest of circumstances and surroundings; with effective supporting turns from the likes of Firth, Watson and Wilkinson, and appropriately gloomy cinematography by John Conroy, this is yet another potent reminder of Wilde the man, and his legacy.

Galveston (2018)

29 Monday Oct 2018

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Beau Bridges, Ben Foster, Crime, Drama, Elle Fanning, Literary adaptation, Lung condition, Mélanie Laurent, Mob enforcer, Review, Texas, Thriller

D: Mélanie Laurent / 93m

Cast: Ben Foster, Elle Fanning, Beau Bridges, C.K. McFarland, Robert Aramayo, Adepero Oduye, María Valverde, Lili Reinhart

An enforcer for a local crime boss (Bridges), Roy Cady (Foster) finds out he has a lung condition but he refuses to have treatment for it. On the same day he’s given a job to scare a local lawyer into staying silent on a case that his boss is involved with; he’s also advised not to take a gun. Roy ignores this instruction, which proves fortuitous as it’s a set up that’s meant to see him killed and framed for the lawyer’s murder. Fleeing with Rocky (Fanning), a young girl he finds at the scene, Roy deliberates on what to do next, but before he can decide, Rocky persuades him to take her home so she can pick up some things. Circumstances mean that Rocky returns with her three year old sister, Tiffany, and the trio end up staying at a motel. There, Roy tries to work out the importance of some paperwork he found at the lawyer’s house, while a bond develops between him, Rocky, and her sister. He’s also approached by another resident at the motel, Tray (Aramayo), about taking part in a robbery at a local pharmacy, but it’s when the truth emerges about Rocky’s home visit that their lives are put in even further jeopardy…

For the first twenty minutes of Galveston, it’s business as usual as Foster’s brooding, moody mob enforcer acts in a brooding, moody manner in a movie that looks as if it’s going to be brooding and moody all the way through. But once Roy has been forced to rely on his violent proclivities, and he flees the lawyer’s home with Rocky in tow, the movie takes a left turn away from the kind of modern noir it looks and feels like, and becomes a different beast altogether. That noir feeling hangs around in the background waiting to be employed again, but not before the storyline morphs into a relationship drama that sees Roy become a de facto father figure to Rocky and Tiffany, and while he also explores – albeit hesitantly – his impending mortality. As Roy learns to be responsible for someone other than himself, the movie settles down into a melancholy groove that sees Rocky reveal a tragic past, and fate catch up with both of them. That this all takes up most of the movie’s running time, and the various plot strands are all tied up with almost indecent haste in the final twenty minutes, makes for a thriller that avoids being a thriller as much as it possibly can.

Part of this is undoubtedly due to the movie’s structure, and a script that was originally written by Nic Pizzolatto (who also wrote the novel from which this is adapted), but which received “contributions” from Laurent that led to Pizzolatto leaving the project (he’s credited under the pseudonym Jim Hammett). Whatever Laurent’s “contributions” were, the end result is a movie that underwhelms during its extended middle section, and which often strives for relevance in terms of its characters and the situation they find themselves in. Though Foster is as convincing as ever, this is still a role he could play in his sleep, that of the taciturn loner gradually brought out of his shell. But this time around his performance is in service to a story that doesn’t develop his character fully enough to make audiences care enough about his belated attempts at redemption. Likewise, Fanning is stranded in a role that gives Rocky little to do except make terrible decisions without ever learning from them. Laurent’s direction is uneven too, with individual scenes carrying much more weight than others (or the movie as a whole), and while the whole thing benefits from Arnaud Potier’s striking cinematography, the movie remains a frustrating exercise that never quite catches fire in the way it promises.

Rating: 6/10 – Foster and Fanning are a great pairing, but with both of them shackled by a script that doesn’t examine their characters’ relationship too closely, or exploit its potential, Galveston fails to impress in the manner that Laurent may have been hoping for; one to approach with caution then, but with sufficient bursts of the movie it could have been to make it an occasionally interesting experience.

Juliet, Naked (2018)

28 Sunday Oct 2018

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Chris O'Dowd, Comedy, Drama, Ethan Hawke, Jesse Peretz, Literary adaptation, Musician, Review, Romantic comedy, Rose Byrne, Sandcliff, Tucker Crowe

D: Jesse Peretz / 97m

Cast: Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Chris O’Dowd, Azhy Robertson, Lily Brazier, Ayoola Smart, Phil Davis

For Duncan Thomson (O’Dowd), there is only one recording artist of any merit: Tucker Crowe (Hawke), a singer-songwriter who twenty years before walked away from a promising career as a musician after making a highly regarded first album called Juliet. Duncan has set up a blog site dedicated to Crowe and his short-lived career, and this takes up most of his spare time. Which doesn’t leave much room for his partner, Annie (Byrne). Having been together for fifteen years, Annie is beginning to realise that Duncan isn’t going to change, and things such as having children, or cutting back on the time he spends in Crowe-land, aren’t going to happen. When Duncan receives a CD that contains demo versions of the tracks on Juliet, the fact that she listens to it first causes a row between them. This leads to Annie posting a disparaging review of the demo versions on Duncan’s blog, which in turn leads to Annie receiving a response from Tucker himself. They begin corresponding (a fact that Annie keeps to herself), and soon find they’re able to be really honest with each other about their lives. And then Tucker reveals that he’s coming to London…

An adaptation of the novel by Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked is one of the most easy-going romantic comedies of recent years. Treading a delicate path between meandering introspection and trifling whimsy, it’s a movie that could be the very cinematic definition of flimsy, so thin is its storyline and narrative arc. It’s also a movie that will have you wondering out loud about the characters and their pasts, and how they’ve come to be leading their lives now, from Tucker’s slacker muso and proto-dad, to Annie’s emotionally doused museum manager. Both Tucker and Annie seem to be treading water, waiting for someone or something to come along and free them from the traps they’ve fallen into. Tucker has allowed his talent to fray to nothing through fear of responsibility, while Annie has gone the opposite route and allowed responsibility to wither her creativity. They’re practically perfect for each other, albeit in an anodyne, nondescript fashion that makes their inevitable romance as cautious as they both are with everything else. Only Duncan remains true to himself throughout, even if he is thoroughly self-absorbed and operating entirely out of self-interest. Selfish he may be, but at least he’s doing what he really wants.

Thankfully, and despite the often vapid nature of the whole venture, the movie is rescued from being overwhelmingly twee by a trio of performances that elevate the material and make the characters more than the slavishly opaque stereotypes that the script – by Evgenia Peretz, Jim Taylor and Tamara Jenkins – seems determined to make them. Byrne makes Annie gentle yet resilient, put upon perhaps but not entirely a victim, and willing to take a stand when she needs to. Hawke plays Tucker as a man adrift from his own life but also willing to make amends for the mistakes he’s made; it’s a carefully crafted portrayal that Hawke pulls off with ease. O’Dowd appears to have the hardest task of all, that of making Duncan more than the arrogant, annoying arse that he clearly is, but there’s no small amount of pathos in his performance, and Duncan emerges as more rounded than expected. Elsewhere, Tucker’s family issues occupy a good deal of the running time, and though they feel very much like the movie’s token dramatic thread, they at least offset the predictable nature of the romantic elements. Peretz directs with an emphasis on keeping things light and airy, and succeeds in making both the romance and the comedy as agreeable as possible, but in the end, at the expense of achieving anything new or different.

Rating: 7/10 – so thin it’s almost diaphanous, Juliet, Naked is a tribute to the efforts of its cast and director in making a movie that borders constantly on being insubstantial without actually crossing that line; engaging enough to be enjoyable without being anywhere near memorable, it’s a light-hearted tale told with a sprinkling of playfulness that makes it all the more tolerable, and on this occasion, that’s entirely okay.

Madeline’s Madeline (2018)

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Drama, Experimental theatre, Helena Howard, Josephine Decker, Mental illness, Miranda July, Molly Parker, Review, Theatre group

D: Josephine Decker / 93m

Cast: Helena Howard, Molly Parker, Miranda July, Okwui Okpokwasili, Sunita Mani, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Curtiss Cook

Sixteen year old Madeline (Howard) is part of an experimental theatre group run by Evangeline (Parker). The group is working on a new production that will explore aspects of mental illness, but first, Evangeline wants them to take on animal roles and become the animals they choose. Madeline chooses to be a cat and a sea turtle, and she impresses Evangeline so much with her efforts and her commitment that Madeline soo receives more of Evangeline’s attention, and a bigger role within the production. While things are going well within the group though, at home it’s a different matter. Madeline lives with her mother, Regina (July), and they have a somewhat adversarial relationship, due mainly to the fact that Madeline has mental health issues that require her to take medication on a regular basis. When the lure of the group, and Evangeline’s attention, proves too powerful for Madeline to ignore, she becomes immersed in the production and begins to use her own experiences as a basis for her performance, something that causes a rift between Evangeline and the rest of the group (because she encourages it), and sees Madeline making a number of unwise decisions…

From the very beginning of Madeline’s Madeline (a reference to the immersive quality of her performance, where Madeline effectively plays herself), first-time writer/director Josephine Decker seeks to show the audience just how Madeline experiences the world around her. When she’s not taking her medication this means the world is a confusing, fractured series of blurred images and out-of-sync audio. It’s no wonder Madeline looks so overwhelmed all the time; it must be a continual struggle for her to assimilate what’s going on and/or why. At first, she’s shy but desperate to impress, quiet but not lacking in confidence in her acting abilities. Except she isn’t acting. Decker makes it clear: Madeline doesn’t know how to act, all she can do is inhabit a character – whether human or animal – and be herself as that character. There’s no role to create, just Madeline being Madeline. As she becomes more and more accepted, by Evangeline and by the group, the blurred lines between performance and reality fall away to reveal a young woman whose sense of self is so overwhelming that she cannot behave in any other way. And yet her mental illness is the very thing that allows her to stand out. But is it appropriate for Evangeline to exploit this?

Watching the movie you could be forgiven for thinking that it takes a side on the issue, but Decker is clever enough to make it a more difficult proposition to consider. By making Madeline wholly complicit in her own exploitation – and encouraging it – the issue becomes a question of just who is exploiting who. This ambiguous approach helps maintain a grim fascination as the story plays out and Madeline’s behaviour, particularly at a party at Evangeline’s home, becomes ever more worrying and unsettling. Howard, making her acting debut, is simply superb as Madeline, bright, intelligent, fearless, and giving such an assured, indelible performance that she dominates the whole movie, and leaves veterans such as Parker and July trailing in her wake. That said, Parker is also on exceptionally good form as Evangeline, her mother hen nature hiding a naturally cruel streak that brooks no contradiction because she knows what’s best for the group. July swings between Regina’s anguish and pride at Madeline’s behaviour, while there are telling moments from members of the group that mark them out as not just the followers they appear to be. In assembling such a provocative story, Decker has made an experimental movie about an experimental theatre group that is endlessly inventive and evocative, and which takes the viewer into the mind of its very erratic title character – which proves to be a place that’s hard to forget.

Rating: 8/10 – not a movie for all tastes, Madeline’s Madeline is a tremendous achievement by Decker, and features an equally tremendous performance from Howard; with wit and skill and an abundance of imagination, this is that rare movie that takes you to a world you think you know, and presents it in such a remarkable manner that you can’t help but be impressed by both its verve and the underlying simplicity of its approach.

On the Road #2 – Better Start Running (2018)

22 Monday Oct 2018

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Alex Sharp, Analeigh Tipton, Brett Simon, Comedy, Drama, FBI, Jeremy Irons, Maria Bello, Review, Road trip, Roadside attractions, Romance

D: Brett Simon / 92m

Cast: Alex Sharp, Analeigh Tipton, Jeremy Irons, Edi Gathegi, Maria Bello, Karan Soni, Chad Faust

Working at an All Shop, Harley (Sharp) is enamoured of Stephanie (Tipton), who in turn is the object of store boss’ Mr Hankey’s (Faust) inappropriate attentions. One night, with the store closed, Hankey makes a play for Stephanie in his office, then attempts to rape her, but Harley comes to her rescue. In the ensuing scuffle though, it’s Stephanie who causes Hankey to fall through a window to his death. Panicking, Harley calls the police to let them know what happened, but in doing so, unwittingly sets the FBI – in the manic form of Agent McFadden (Bello) and her neophyte partner, Agent Nelson (Soni) – on his and Stephanie’s trail. Not content with it being just the two of them, Harley also takes along his war veteran grandfather, Garrison (Irons). Intent on using being on the run as an excuse to visit a number of roadside attractions on their way to meet an old flame of Garrison’s, the trio become a quartet when they pick up wannabe hippie, Fitz Paradise (Gathegi). As the trip continues, they visit several of the attractions on Harley’s map, and discover they share a camaraderie that deepens the longer the trip goes on…

From its opening scenes where Harley moons over the object of his affections while she behaves as if she’s in a world of her own (which, it turns out, she is), Better Start Running sets out its stall as a quirky indie romantic comedy. That it’s only partially successful is down to the narrative vagaries inherent in the script by Chad Faust and Annie Burgstede, which keeps realigning its focus every few scenes and adds moments of drama to the mix that don’t always sit well with the movie’s overall rom-com vibe. Whether it’s Bello’s gung-ho bordering on psychotic FBI agent, or Irons’ irascible and lovelorn grandfather, or even Gathegi’s mid-life crisis experiencing husband and father, the movie takes occasional lurches into more serious territory before righting itself and remembering it’s a rom-com. And even then the romantic elements are subdued, with Harley and Stephanie only coming together as a couple out of necessity rather than anything resembling true love. Maybe the movie is being deliberately counter-intuitive, but if the romantic angle doesn’t convince, then why have it there in the first place? In truth, it suffers because of all the other elements the script has seen fit to squeeze in along the way.

So the movie is uneven and often frustrating, though when it strikes the right note, it does so with a great deal of charm and skill. Some of this is down to the performances – Irons and Bello add a great deal of energy to proceedings – some of it is due to the offbeat nature of the roadside attractions that get a visit (give a big shout out to Devil’s Tower, everyone), but mostly it’s because this is a movie chock-full of laugh out loud one-liners. From Garrison’s earnest instruction to Harley (“If you must come to tomorrow, I need a flash light, concertina wire and buckshot!”) to Harley’s own admission early on (“I’m sorry. I have to go now. I’m going on the run.”), Faust and Burgstede’s script ensures that the movie retains a spirit of fun throughout, even when it can’t help but slide sideways into Seriousville. Simon juggles the various elements with aplomb but can’t unite them into an acceptable whole, and he never finds a way to offset the feeling that the writers have deliberately ensured that Harley and Stephanie aren’t the brightest bunnies in the petting zoo (which isn’t necessary at all). Still, it is amusing, and thankfully so, otherwise this would have been one road trip best conducted from the driveway.

Rating: 6/10 – with the comedic aspects triumphing every time over the script’s other, less developed or worthy elements, Better Start Running is a mixed bag that sadly, doesn’t always gel as well as it should; likeable overall, it should still be approached with caution, a bit like Agent McFadden when she’s got a perp in her sights: “A cost of a year’s incarceration? $50,000. Cost of a bullet? Fifty cents. Do the math.”

On the Road #1 – The Fundamentals of Caring (2016)

21 Sunday Oct 2018

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Comedy, Craig Roberts, Drama, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Literary adaptation, Paul Rudd, Review, Road trip, Roadside attractions, Rob Burnett, Selena Gomez

D: Rob Burnett / 97m

Cast: Paul Rudd, Craig Roberts, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Ehle, Megan Ferguson, Julia Denton, Frederick Weller, Bobby Cannavale

Ben Benjamin (Rudd) is a retired writer who takes a course to become a caregiver in order to support himself. He has a wife, Janet (Denton), but they’re in the process of getting divorced. Ben’s first job is to look after Trevor (Roberts), an eighteen year old suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, while his mother, Elsa (Ehle), is at work. As the two get to know each other, Ben becomes aware that Trevor has a fascination for roadside attractions, particularly the World’s Deepest Pit. Ben suggests they take a road trip to the Pit and take in some other attractions along the way. Trevor wants to but is scared of leaving his home, while Elsa has her own worries about his safety. In the end, he and Trevor set off on a trip that will take them a week. On the way, they give a lift to Dot (Gomez), who’s hitchhiking to Denver to restart her life after the death of her mother, and later to Peaches (Ferguson), a young pregnant woman heading home to Nebraska. But it’s Trevor’s determination to visit his absent father in Salt Lake City that changes the nature of the trip indelibly…

The road trip movie is a staple of American movie making, the country’s wide open highways and variety of physical locations often providing a vivid backdrop for what is usually a journey of self-discovery. Adapted from the novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison, this is yet another movie that takes that basic set up and offers a mix of heartfelt drama and sprightly humour as it plays out its simple storyline. This is a straightforward, no frills, no surprises feature that ticks all the boxes dramatically and comedically for this kind of movie, but which does so in such an inoffensive, pedestrian, but likeable manner that it’s hard not to approve of it, even though a lot of the time you’ll be wondering, Is this it? At first, Ben is out of his depth, but soon becomes adept at caring for Trevor, while Trevor’s initial snarky behaviour (and practical jokes) soon transforms into a respect for Ben that he hasn’t shown toward any of his previous carers. So far, so predictable then, but it’s the lightness of Burnett’s direction, and the relaxed performances of Rudd and Roberts that help offset any criticism. For once, a movie’s benign approach to the material makes it all the more enjoyable.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t address some serious issues along the way, because it does. Ben has a tragic past that is affecting his divorce; Trevor wants to resolve the emotional issues he has surrounding his father (who left when he was diagnosed at the age of three); Dot has her own father issues; and there are minor shout outs to the quality of disabled access at roadside attractions, depression, self-imposed guilt, and betrayal. But again, this isn’t a heavy drama, rather it’s a movie that makes its points with a laidback approach that suits the material and which is content to explore these matters with a restraint that underscores the characters’ emotional states throughout, and with a subtlety that’s refreshing. That old phrase, Less Is More, applies here, even when the material does thin out alarmingly in places, but it always slips back on track, thanks to the solid work of its cast, Burnett’s sense of rhythm and pace, and evocative camerawork by DoP Giles Nuttgens. The whole thing ends on a perfect coda, as well, one that will viewers away feeling good about the movie and having seen it in the first place. And what more could you ask for…?

Rating: 7/10 – anyone expecting a movie with the kind of depth that the World’s Deepest Pit might be a metaphor for, will find The Fundamentals of Caring to be anything but; however, it’s a lovely movie full of bright moments and with good intentions, and though you can accuse it of being slight and innocuous, on this occasion, these are actually strengths that make the movie more than it seems at first glance.

Private Life (2018)

20 Saturday Oct 2018

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Drama, Egg donor, Infertility, IVF treatment, Kathryn Hahn, Kayli Carter, Molly Shannon, Paul Giamatti, Review, Step-niece, Tamara Jenkins

D: Tamara Jenkins / 124m

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Kathryn Hahn, Kayli Carter, Molly Shannon, John Carroll Lynch, Emily Robinson, Desmin Borges, Denis O’Hare

Now in their forties, Richard (Giamatti) and Rachel (Hahn) are trying desperately to have a child before it’s too late. They’ve tried several attempts at artificial insemination but none have paid off. It’s only when they try for the first time with IVF treatment that they discover that their previous failures have been due to Richard having a blockage that stops him from providing sperm. He undergoes surgery to correct this, but still the IVF treatment isn’t successful. Their consultant, Dr Dordick (O’Hare), suggests they look into the possibility of finding an egg donor, but at first, Rachel is against the idea as she will have no biological input into any child that’s born. It’s only when their step-niece, Sadie (Carter), comes to stay with them after cutting short her college writing programme, that the couple begin to see a solution to their problems. It’s not an ideal solution – will Sadie want to give up some of her eggs, will it go down well with her parents, Cynthia (Shannon) and Charlie (Lynch), will it even be successful – but having warmed to the idea, Rachel and Richard decide to ask Sadie if she’ll be their egg donor…

Although it’s an often touching, and moving exploration of the trials and tribulations of trying to have a baby (but not in the old-fashioned way), Tamara Jenkins’ latest, only her third feature in twenty years, is refreshingly non-judgmental about its lead characters and their determination to have a child. But Private Life leaves the viewer knowing almost nothing at all about why the couple want a child, and in terms of their back story, we learn that Rachel is a well regarded writer, while Richard was a well regarded theatre director who now owns and runs an artisan pickle company. With the how and the why of where they are now left unexamined, their plight – though well developed and scripted by Jenkins – means their struggle to conceive (or adopt if absolutely necessary) doesn’t have the impact needed to make viewers empathise with them as much as might be expected. The impetus seems to be with Rachel, while Richard seems to be going along with it all to please her or, worse still, keep her happy. It’s this aspect of their relationship that’s more intriguing, but unfortunately, Jenkins doesn’t go that deeply into things, preferring instead to focus on how they’re feeling right now.

Inevitably, things don’t always go to plan for them, and the setbacks and attendant emotional pain and suffering that they endure is tellingly handled by Jenkins and her very talented cast. Hahn is perhaps a surprising choice for Rachel, but it’s possibly her best performance yet, with shading to the character that doesn’t appear to have been in the script. Whether angry or sad, or miserable or elated, or just plain confused by how difficult it all is, Hahn’s portrayal is authentic at every turn. As Richard, Giamatti suffers a little bit through his character’s continual ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time and seem entirely shallow in comparison to Rachel. It’s still a good performance – Giamatti is one of the few actors working today who seems unable to give a bad performance in anything he does – but Richard isn’t as fully fleshed out as he could, or should, have been. The indignities of IVF and egg donor treatment are given due emphasis, and it all hinges on Sadie’s suitability as a donor, which is treated correctly as something beyond Richard and Rachel’s control. Overall, the movie is sympathetic to its desperate parents-to-be, though it does come close to being yet another teary-eyed tale of middle-class aspirations gone awry, something that would have derailed it from the start.

Rating: 7/10 – an observant and measured mix of emotional drama and physical comedy, Private Life still allows its characters hope in amongst all the setbacks they endure; thanks to Jenkins’ (mostly) incisive script, its cast being en point throughout, and a determination not to be melodramatic in any way, this is a compassionate and often witty study of infertility anxiety.

The Curse of Good Intentions – Halloween (2018)

19 Friday Oct 2018

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Andi Matichak, David Gordon Green, Drama, Haddonfield, Horror, Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Review, Sequel, Serial killer, The Shape, Thriller

D: David Gordon Green / 106m

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Haluk Bilginer, Rhian Rees, Jefferson Hall, Toby Huss, Virginia Gardner, Dylan Arnold, Miles Robbins, James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle

And it seemed like such a good idea at the time… ah well…

In the UK, on 10 October – and in advance of the release of Halloween (2018) – some cinemas screened the original Halloween (1978). Those screenings were prefaced by an interview/introduction with John Carpenter that was shot in 2015, and in which he gave an overview of the original’s production and the problems he faced in getting it made. Seeing the original on the big screen, and in the Panavision format that Carpenter had designed it to be seen in, was a potent reminder of just why it has become such a seminal movie in the ensuing decades. With a further nine movies having been foisted on audiences since then, it looked as if Rob Zombie’s disastrous Halloween II (2009) had killed off Michael Myers (aka The Shape) once and for all. But in Hollywood, you can’t keep a popular serial killer dead forever, and so we have the latest (eleventh) instalment in a franchise that you could be forgiven for thinking had exhausted all the avenues open to it in telling, and re-telling, Michael Myers’ story. And you know what? You’d be right…

Halloween seeks to earn brownie points with fans and newcomers alike by ignoring entries two through ten, and by taking up the story forty years after the events of the first movie. In this retconned version, Michael Myers was captured after being shot by Dr Sam Loomis, and has spent the intervening years in a state-run sanatarium. Meanwhile, the lone survivor of The Night He Came Home, Laurie Strode (Curtis), has had a daughter, Karen (Greer), who in turn has had her own daughter, Allyson (Matichak). Laurie and Karen are estranged because Laurie is beyond paranoid in her belief that Michael will return to Haddonfield one day, and come for her. Allyson is less censorious, and keeps trying to get her mother and grandmother to reconcile. Inevitably, Michael escapes during a bus transfer to another facility, and as predicted, heads for Haddonfield. Soon he’s butchering people left, right and through the throat in a wilful display of murderous impunity. And just as inevitably, he finds his way to Laurie’s home and the showdown she’s been waiting and planning for for forty years.

Comparisons with John Carpenter’s original movie are entirely relevant here, as writers David Gordon Green, Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride have made clear their intention to honour the spirit of Carpenter’s movie, while continuing and expanding on the mythology set out in the first two entries. What this means in practice is a movie that constantly references iconic moments from the original while putting a “clever” spin on them, such as Laurie falling from a balcony and having disappeared the second time Michael looks down. It also means that this Halloween is a sequel-reboot that ignores the subtlety and atmosphere of the original in favour of gory kill sequences that happen only so that Michael has something to do (at one point, he’s literally going from door to door in his efforts to kill people), and pulls off a left-field “twist” involving a secondary character that might have been halfway effective if it wasn’t so dramatically laughable. What Green et al seem to have forgotten in their efforts to update the story and make it more “attractive” to modern audiences is the main reason why the original was so compelling: it was genuinely scary. This plays out as a thriller more than it does a horror movie, and a clumsily handled one at that. By attempting to go back to the franchise’s roots, the makers haven’t just retconned the original storyline, but they’ve gotten lost along the way as well. To paraphrase a well known saying, “It’s Halloween, John, but not as we know it.”

Rating: 4/10 – with its muddled, and misguided attempts at reinvigorating the series, Halloween can’t even get the title right (shouldn’t there be a II in there somewhere?); Curtis is the movie’s MVP, but that’s not saying much when the script develops her character at the expense of all the others, and where the notion of creating anything remotely resembling tension seems to have been abandoned right at the start of shooting.

Funny Cow (2017)

18 Thursday Oct 2018

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Adrian Shergold, Comedienne, Comedy, Domestic abuse, Drama, Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine, Review, Stand-up, Tony Pitts

D: Adrian Shergold / 102m

Cast: Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine, Tony Pitts, Alun Armstrong, Macy Shackleton, Stephen Graham, Kevin Eldon, Lindsey Coulson

Growing up in Yorkshire in relative poverty, ‘Funny Cow’ (Peake – we never learn the character’s real name) experiences physical abuse from her father (Graham), indifference from her mother, and suffers attempts at bullying from other children. Through it all she remains defiant, using humour to help her through the worst of occasions. As a young woman, she meets and marries Bob, but although he’s loving and attentive at first, soon he reveals a violent nature that resembles her father’s. A night out at a local working men’s club offers an unlikely escape route: a comedian (Armstrong) helps ‘Funny Cow’ realise that this is something she can do, and which could offer her some form of independence. Meanwhile, she meets a bookshop owner, Angus (Considine), and a relationship develops between them. But Angus wants more from her than she is able to give, and her first attempt at taking to the stage falters due to her nervousness. While she tries to pull her life together, and make something positive out of it, another chance to prove her skill as a comedienne unexpectedly presents itself…

Told through a stage performance by its main character when it appears she’s reached a period of success, Funny Cow recounts her life more as a form of therapy than as a part of an established routine (if you were in the audience you’d be wondering when the jokes are going to start). Starting with her childhood and moving through the various stages and relationships that have brought her to this point, ‘Funny Cow’s story is one that proffers a dispiriting look at the life of a woman struggling to find happiness, and a true sense of her place in the world. It’s a harsh movie about a harsh life, relentless in the way it portrays domestic abuse and the psychological effects it has on ‘Funny Cow’, and unforgiving of the Northern working class background that she comes from. Almost everyone is either violent, depressed, selfish, abusive, or a mix of all four. Only Angus is different, but it’s his difference from all the other men she’s known that makes him unacceptable; she just doesn’t trust that he can be so naturally kind. With happiness feeling like a dream that’s not just out of reach but completely unobtainable, co-star Tony Pitts’ screenplay keeps ‘Funny Cow’ firmly in her place, trapped by her past and fearful of the future.

Of course, she has a wilful streak that gets her into trouble, and during her first stand up performance, out of it as well. But even her humour is harsh and unrelenting. A heckler suffers for his efforts, ‘Funny Cow’ using him as catharsis for all the abuse she’s suffered in the past. But she’s suffered too much for this to be anything but a temporary release. She’s angry too, and by using her stand up routine to express her anger, ‘Funny Cow’ finds a part of her life where she finally has some measure of control. As the unnamed title character, Peake is on superb form, audacious, brash, haunting, and fearless in her exploration of someone whose past is inextricably entwined wth her present, and to deleterious effect. Whether ‘Funny Cow’ is being mournful of her relationship with Angus, or laughing manically after having her nose broken by Bob, Peake is nothing less than outstanding. Making only his second feature, director Shergold adds poignancy to proceedings by having the older ‘Funny Cow’ cross paths with younger versions of herself, and he ensures that the humour is often pitch black – but still as devastating as the violence that’s depicted.

Rating: 8/10 – though as far from being a feelgood movie as you’re likely to find, conversely there is much to enjoy in Funny Cow, from Peake’s stellar performance, to a truly scabrous stand up routine, and flashes of magical realism in amongst all the tragedy; challenging and compelling, it also takes a sharp look at sexist attitudes of the period (the Seventies), and offers audiences an unflinching look at one woman’s attempt to break free from the patriarchal society that has continually aimed to hold her back.

Birthmarked (2018)

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

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Andreas Apergis, Comedy, Drama, Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, Experiment, Marital problems, Matthew Goode, Michael Smiley, Nature vs Nurture, Review, Toni Collette

D: Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais / 90m

Cast: Toni Collette, Matthew Goode, Andreas Apergis, Jordan Poole, Megan O’Kelly, Anton Gillis-Adelman, Michael Smiley, Fionnula Flanagan, Suzanne Clément

Ben (Goode) and Catherine (Collette) are two scientists who are interested in examining the whole Nature vs Nurture debate through an idea for an experiment they have. Newly married and with a baby on the way, their idea is to raise their own child and two adopted babies against their genetic predispositions. They’re lucky enough to find a backer for their experiment, Randolph Gertz (Smiley), and they raise the children in a remote cabin in the woods, home-schooling them as well and focusing their minds on becoming an artist (their own son, Luke), an intellectual (their adopted daughter, Maya), and a pacifist (their adopted son, Maurice). They’re aided by an ex-Olympic level Russian marksman called Samsonov (Apergis) who defected to the West in the Seventies. With twelve years of a thirteen year experiment having passed, Gertz’s assessment that the children aren’t extraordinary examples of Nurture over Nature prompts Ben and Catherine to try harder to get the results they need, but their efforts come at a cost to their marriage, their professional relationship, and the needs of the children…

Somewhere in the midst of Birthmarked there’s the germ of a good idea struggling to be noticed. Like the children that are the subject of Ben and Catherine’s slightly less than ethical experiment, the movie wants to be something it’s not allowed to be: sprightly, perceptive, and engaging. It is funny in places, though in a law of averages kind of fashion that only highlights how much of Marc Tulin’s screenplay doesn’t gel cohesively, and it has an appealing cast who are at least trying their best to put over the material, but thanks to some poor decisions along the way, the movie coasts on too many occasions, and never hits a consistent stride. A great deal of what hampers the movie from being more successful is its inability to focus on one storyline over the rest, with Ben and Catherine’s marriage drawing more and more attention during the latter half, while each individual child receives occasional turns in the spotlight, but not in such a way that we get to know them. Then there’s Gertz, the obvious bad guy of the piece, and his equally obvious machinations (revealed late on but easily guessed at long before). Add in Samsonov’s presence – friend or foe? – and you have too many characters who lack substance, and who only occasionally drive the movie forward.

All this has the misfortune of making the movie uneven and feeling like the cinematic equivalent of a patchwork quilt that has several panels missing. Hoss-Desmarais, making only his second feature, has no answers for any of this, and though some scenes work better than others, often this is due to the cast’s efforts instead of his. Goode plays Ben as a rather blinkered, the-experiment-is-all character who behaves badly for no other reason than that the script needs him to, while Collette goes from entirely reasonable to inexplicably depressed over the course of a couple of scenes in order to provide the last third with some unneeded secondary drama. The young cast are often the best thing about the movie, and that’s largely due to their playing their roles like ordinary children (which they are, despite the intention of the experiment), and there’s some beautifully austere winter photography by Josée Deshaies that at least provides the action with a backdrop that reflects the muted dramatics. In the same way that Ben and Catherine’s experiment lacks coherence in the way they deal with any problems that arise, the movie also struggles to offer a consistency of tone or content. Maybe the movie, like the experiment it’s exploring, needed a longer nurturing period before committing itself to audiences.

Rating: 5/10 – sporadically amusing, with a cast that play their roles as capably as possible, Birthmarked is moderately appealing for the most part, but is mainly frustrating thanks to the opportunities it wastes; too wayward then to work effectively, it’s a movie that should be watched under proviso, or maybe as an experiment in itself.

Operation Finale (2018)

15 Monday Oct 2018

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1960, Abduction, Adolf Eichmann, Ben Kingsley, Buenos Aires, Chris Weitz, Drama, Israel, Mélanie Laurent, Oscar Isaac, Review, True story

D: Chris Weitz / 123m

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Mélanie Laurent, Lior Raz, Nick Kroll, Haley Lu Richardson, Joe Alwyn, Michael Aronov, Greta Scacchi, Pêpê Rapazote, Peter Strauss, Simon Russell Beale

In Buenos Aires in 1960, a young woman called Sylvia Hermann (Richardson) begins dating a young man, Klaus (Alwyn), who tells her he lives with his uncle, who has been looking after him since his father died in World War II. The kindly uncle actually is his father, Adolf Eichmann (Kingsley), long wanted for war crimes, and now the focus of an Israeli attempt to kidnap him and bring him to trial. Mossad assembles a team that includes Peter Malkin (Isaac), a brash, opportunistic agent who was involved in a previous attempt to capture Eichmann that ended tragically; Rafi Eitan (Kroll), an intelligence specialist; and Hanna Elian (Laurent), a doctor and former agent. The team travels to Buenos Aires where they organise a safe house, and plot Eichmann’s abduction. Once captured, though, they find themselves with a problem: the only way they can get Eichmann out of the country is on an El Al plane that’s scheduled to leave in ten days’ time. But first, El Al wants a signed affidavit from Eichmann that he is willing to travel to Israel to stand trial…

The capture and subsequent “extradition” of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to Israel in May 1960 has all the hallmarks of an exciting adventure story, with the Mossad team working in secrecy, and under the very real threat of being captured by the Argentinian police and finding themselves put on trial for espionage. And that’s without the substantial number of Nazis and Nazi sympathisers living in Buenos Aires at the time, who would most likely have had them killed on the spot. Eichmann’s capture was a huge coup for the Israelis, and though Operation Finale conflates much of the background detail – e.g. Sylvia Hermann began dating Klaus Eichmann in 1956 – it remains true to the spirit and the general sequence of events that saw one of the principle architects of the Final Solution finally brought to justice. However, Matthew Orton’s screenplay only provides an occasional sense of the danger Malkin and his colleagues were facing, and director Chris Weitz doesn’t seem able to make the movie as tense and exciting as it should be. Instead, we’re treated to a number of scenes where the team debate whether or not to kill Eichmann there and then (even though that’s not the mission), and several repetitive scenes where they endeavour to get him to sign El Al’s affidavit, but to no avail.

It’s a shame, as though this is a distinct improvement on The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996), it never really gels as the historical thriller that was so clearly intended. The performances are uniformly good, with Kingsley subdued yet calculating as Eichmann, and Aronov matching him for intensity as chief interrogator Zvi Aharoni, but they’re in service to material that is often dry and unimaginative. Dramatic flourishes such as flashbacks to the death of Malkin’s sister (which put Eichmann unconvincingly at the scene), and a party where the entire gathering shouts “Sieg Heil!” and gives the Nazi salute over and over, stand out because they are more emotive, but elsewhere the movie treads an even keel and rarely strays from feeling perfunctory and ever so slightly mannered. Even the last minute race against time to get to the airport with the police on the team’s tail is less than exciting, just another cog in the story’s wheel that the makers feel obliged to turn for the audience’s sake. It’s another moment of restrained pretence in a movie that lacks the kind of emotional impact such a dramatic story truly deserves.

Rating: 5/10 – despite the good use of Argentinian locations, and David Brisbin’s detailed production design, Operation Finale feels more like the cinematic equivalent of a first draft than a finished product; with a handful of soap opera elements that further dilute the drama, the movie is too broad and too uneven in its approach to be anywhere near successful, but on its own terms it will suffice until the next interpretation comes along.

Support the Girls (2018)

14 Sunday Oct 2018

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Andrew Bujalski, Comedy, Double Whammies, Drama, Female solidarity, Haley Lu Richardson, James Le Gros, Regina Hall, Review, Sexism, Sports bar

D: Andrew Bujalski / 90m

Cast: Regina Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, James Le Gros, AJ Michalka, Dylan Gelula, Shayna McHayle, Lea DeLaria, Jana Kramer, Brooklyn Decker, John Elvis, Lawrence Varnado

It’s another day of problems at Double Whammies, a Hooters-style sports bar-cum-restaurant (or ‘breastaurant’) managed by the ever-reliable and ever-resourceful Lisa (Hall). What with having to carry out interviews before the bar opens, dealing with a man stuck in one of the air vents, organising a car wash with the proceeds going to a staff member who’s in financial difficulties, solving the issue of the TV screens having lost their signal, and the unwanted management advice of bar owner Cubby (Le Gros), as well as the prospect of a similar, rival company opening a restaurant nearby, Lisa has her work cut out for her – and that’s without providing support and practical advice to the staff, who have their own issues. Lisa is more of a den mother than a manager, but her expertise lies in treating everyone like family, and for this she gets back a lot of respect and loyalty. As she sidesteps further potential problems that arise as the day progresses, it’s not until an encounter with Cubby that she begins to question whether or not it’s time to move on…

Although the setting for Support the Girls is a tacky, less than appealing restaurant that promotes “family values” and which has a zero tolerance policy on customers who are disrespectful to the waitstaff, this isn’t about the restaurant itself, but about those waitstaff, and their manager, and the sisterhood that they promote amongst themselves. It’s this sense of solidarity, and everyone pulling together, that gives the movie much of its heart and soul, as writer/director Bujalski paints a portrait of ordinary women working in a low paid, low reward job but finding a purpose in supporting each other that makes up for the problems that said job throws at them on a daily basis, whether it be unruly patrons, unfair rules and prohibitions (Cubby won’t allow two black women to work the same shift), or their own unrealised needs and/or ambitions. Lisa does her best to juggle all these things and to keep Double Whammies running as smoothly as possible, but she’s like the classic image of a swan: on the surface she seems able to deal with anything, but below the surface she’s paddling like mad to maintain that semblance of being in control.

Adding depth to proceedings are themes surrounding perpetuated sexist attitudes, the socio-economic climate that keeps workers such as these from doing any better for themselves, and how senior management or owners are divorced from the day-to-day realities of managing such a business. These issues are given their due without the need for strident politicising or deftly written monologues bemoaning the current state of employment matters in the US, and this is because Bujalski is focused on how female solidarity allows the staff to feel and be more fulfilled than perhaps they would be otherwise. It’s a positive message given in the unlikeliest of locations, but it’s also the reason why it works so well. These are women who are working in an environment where it’s not just their gender that can come under attack but their sexuality, their physical appearance, their class, their race, and that’s without any challenges to their ability to do the job. That the movie balances all this without being too blunt or obvious, is a testament to the skill of Bujalski’s screenplay, and his confidence in handling the material. It’s also due to the talents of a terrific cast, with Hall giving her best performance yet as a woman doing her best to keep everything going, and by being that rare thing in the movies: consistently nice.

Rating: 8/10 – a comedy that avoids clumsy attempts at satire by being sincere in its approach to its characters’ environment, and their hopes and dreams, Support the Girls does just that, and in an affecting, heartwarming manner; as a snapshot of what it’s like to be a woman in 2018 America, it could be construed as dispiriting, but what it shows instead is that female solidarity is alive and well and ready for anything – and on its own terms.

Eighth Grade (2018)

13 Saturday Oct 2018

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Anxiety, Bo Burnham, Comedy, Drama, Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Middle school, Peer pressure, Review, Social media, Video blogs

D: Bo Burnham / 94m

Cast: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson, Jake Ryan, Daniel Zolghadri, Fred Hechinger, Imani Lewis, Luke Prael, Catherine Oliviere

For Kayla Day (Fisher), coming to the end of eighth grade and leaving middle school should be a cause for celebration. But Kayla has a bunch of personal issues to contend with: she posts self-help videos on YouTube that hardly anyone watches, she’s naïve about boys but wants a boyfriend, her classmates give her a “Most Quiet” award, her dad (Hamilton) doesn’t understand how important social media is to her, and despite her best efforts, she’s never been able to fit in with the “regular” crowd let alone those girls thought of as most popular. A surprise invitation to the birthday party of one of those popular girls leads Kayla to attempt taking some of her own video advice and be more confident and take more chances. But even though she does so, things don’t automatically change, and it’s not until she attends a high school shadow day and meets twelfth grader Olivia (Robinson), that her efforts begin to pay off. Another invitation, this time to spend the evening with Olivia and some of her friends, leads to a moment of self-awareness that causes Kayla to reassess everything about her life, and what’s truly important to her…

Movies about the perils of being a high school student in the US are practically ten a penny, with every variation on the theme pretty well exhausted by now, but there are few that examine the perils of middle school. And of the few that are out there – e.g. the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Jessica Darling’s It List (2016) – none are as astutely handled or feel as authentic as Eighth Grade. First-time writer/director Bo Burnham has obviously done his homework, as he doesn’t strike one false note throughout the entire movie, from the dialogue to the exploration of Kayla’s anxiety, to the pervasive nature of social media, and the way in which peer pressure can lead to young people making ill-informed decisions in order to “fit in”. Burnham also presents Kayla’s relationship with her dad (a single parent doing his best since his wife left them both) as a convincing mix of adversity and co-dependency, their exhanges never working out the way either one of them wants them to. But the bulk of the movie examines Kayla’s efforts to establish herself as someone worth knowing, even as she strays far away from who she truly is.

One of the successes of Eighth Grade is that if you’re the age the movie depicts, the chances are that you’ll identify with the characters and the situations they find themelves in. Male or female, Kayla’s anxiety and insecurities are very relatable, from being seen at the party in an unflattering lime green swimsuit, to admitting to the boy she has a crush on that she has “dirty” pictures of herself on her phone in the hope that he’ll be interested in her. Kayla’s naïvety and inexperience lead her into some unpleasant situations, none more so than a backseat game of Truth or Dare that is as uncomfortable to watch as it is awkward and manipulative. Burnham is often uncompromisingly honest in his depictions of the lives of middle schoolers, and he doesn’t sugar coat the real life consequences that some ill-advised choices can have. This approach is aided by a terrific, nuanced performance from Fisher, who incorporates some of her own tics and behaviours into playing Kayla, and in doing so, is able to make the character entirely credible and sympathetic. She’s the movie’s ace in the hole, and interprets Burnham’s script as if she were Kayla herself – and who’s to say in some ways she isn’t?

Rating: 9/10 – an unexpectedly genuine examination of teen life that is able to resonate with people of all ages, Eighth Grade is a triumph: funny, knowing, sincere, poignant, affecting, and bracingly honest; with a standout performance from Fisher, and a script that’s unwilling to provide any obvious or disingenuous answers – but which does offer hope for Kayla instead – this is something to recommend to anyone who’s about to turn thirteen.

22 July (2018)

12 Friday Oct 2018

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Anders Danielsen Lie, Bombing, Drama, Jonas Strand Gravli, Literary adaptation, Norway, Paul Greengrass, Review, Terrorist attack, True story, Utøya Island

D: Paul Greengrass / 144m

Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Jonas Strand Gravli, Jon Øigarden, Maria Bock, Thorbjørn Harr, Seda Witt, Isak Bakli Algen, Ola G. Furuseth

On 22 July 2011, a right-wing extremist named Anders Behring Breivik (Lie) carried out two acts of domestic terrorism in Norway. In the first, he set off a bomb outside the executive government quarter in Oslo. Less than two hours later, at a summer camp on Utøya Island, he shot and killed dozens of the people there, most of whom were teenagers. With the two attacks, Breivik killed a total of seventy-seven people and injured over three hundred others. Breivik surrendered to police on Utøya, and was soon charged with carrying out both attacks. His lawyer, Geir Lippestad (Øigarden), suggested that Breivik opt for a defense based on insanity, and Breivik was assessed by psychiatrists who diagnosed him as being a “paranoid schizophrenic”. But at trial, and even though the prosecution had to accept the diagnosis (which would potentially have seen Breivik committed to an institution rather than prison), Breivik realised this would blunt the message he wanted to make. Insisting that he wasn’t insane, Breivik made it clear he was fully cognisant of his actions, and that he carried out the attacks out of a sense of necessity…

Any retelling of a tragedy of the scale of the 2011 Norway attacks needs a sensitive approach, and it’s no suprise that when the movie was first announced, a campaign to stop its production was raised, and 20,000 signatures were generated. But those who didn’t want to see the movie made needn’t have worried, because 22 July is as restrained and as unsensational as you could possibly get. Thanks to an intelligent, well-constructed script (by Paul Greengrass), and equally intelligent, perceptive direction, this adaptation of Åsne Seierstad’s book, One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway – and Its Aftermath, is less about the terrorist attacks and more about what happened in their wake, from the trial of Breivik and its conclusion, to the physical, mental and emotional rehabilitation of a (fictional) survivor of the Utøya shootings, Viljar Hanssen (Gravli), to the ways in which Norway as a country dealt with the horror of such events happening on its native soil. Successfully mixing the broader details of this last with the personal details of Viljar’s struggle to regain his sense of self, and Breivik’s self-aggrandising polemical references, Greengrass avoids any potential accusations of unnecessary melodrama, and opts instead for a quiet sincerity that permeates the whole movie.

What this gives us is a movie that approaches the material in a patient matter-of-fact way that eschews the need for tension or more traditional thriller elements, but which does pack several emotional punches into its structure. Like much of the movie, these moments are quietly devastating, often coming out of the characters’ need to understand what happened and, more importantly, why it happened to them. To his credit, Greengrass doesn’t offer very many answers, and it’s this sense of confusion that carries much of the movie’s middle section, as conversely, it becomes clear that whatever larger motivations Breivik may have had, notoriety seems to be the one that he’s most comfortable with (there’s a horrible moment where he complains casually about a cut to his finger caused by a “skull fragment” from one of his victims). Lie is excellent in the role: smug, condescending, without an ounce of remorse, and chillingly banal; Breivik might not be a paranoid schizophrenic, but in Lie’s interpretation, he’s definitely got some kind of dissociative disorder. Gravli is equally compelling as the good-natured teen forced into some very dark corners through being a survivor, and Øigarden displays Lippestad’s patient forbearance of his client with great skill and diplomacy. In fact, this is that rare cast where everyone is on top form, and as they’re all Norwegian, that’s something that couldn’t have been better.

Rating: 8/10 – with only a tendency to drag during a middle section that repeats a number of encounters and narrative discursions to be held against it, 22 July is further proof that Paul Greengrass is one of the best writer/directors currently making movies; insightful and incisive, he’s crafted a movie that does full justice to the terrible events of that fateful day, and he does so with great skill and an abundance of straightforward honesty, something that should placate all those who didn’t want the movie made in the first place.

Nasty Baby (2015)

11 Thursday Oct 2018

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Brooklyn, Drama, Harrassment, Kristen Wiig, Performance art, Reg E. Cathey, Review, Sebastián Silva, Surrogacy, Tunde Adebimpe

D: Sebastián Silva / 101m

Cast: Sebastián Silva, Kristen Wiig, Tunde Adebimpe, Reg E. Cathey, Mark Margolis, Agustín Silva, Alia Shawkat, Lillias White, Neal Huff

Performance artist Freddy (Sebastián Silva) has two current ambitions: to complete a short movie that sees him explore what it is to be a baby (and with himself portraying one), and to have a baby with his best friend, Polly (Wiig). But Freddy’s sperm count is too low, which rules him out as a donor. This leaves Freddy’s partner, Mo (Adebimpe), as a potential substitute. At first, Mo is supportive and willing to take over from Freddy, but when it comes to making his first “contribution”, he finds he can’t do it. Meanwhile, Freddy decides to expand the content of his movie to include other people, including Mo, Polly, and his assistant, Wendy (Shawkat). Having secured a possible spot at a local art gallery, Freddy is keen to complete the project as quickly as he can, but as well as the issue of Polly’s pregnancy – which Mo eventually has a change of heart about – one of his neighbours, a mentally disturbed man who calls himself The Bishop (Cathey), is the source of anti-social behaviour that has a greater and greater effect on Freddy, and Polly as well…

Sometimes, when discussing a movie, it’s hard to do so when that movie trundles along quite happily in one direction – and for most of the running time – and then suddenly it changes tack, and heads off into the unknown or the unexpected. This is the case with Nasty Baby, writer/director Sebastián Silva’s ode to creativity and creation, and a movie that is for the most part quite amiable (if a little under-nourished in the drama department), but which becomes a different movie entirely in its last twenty minutes. Nasty Baby was (somewhat famously) meant to premiere at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, but the festival organisers didn’t like the ending and suggested Silva change it. Silva stuck to his guns, but so too did the organisers, and it wasn’t until the 2015 Sundance Film Festival that the movie was first shown to audiences. Watching the movie now, you can understand Toronto’s reluctance, and also Silva’s determination. The ending of the movie is so tonally and dramatically separated from what’s gone before that it’s hard to work out if Silva intended it all along, or it was designed to provide an ending where there wasn’t one before. (Hmmmm…)

On the other hand, the ending is much more dramatic than anything else that’s gone before. The rest of the movie is engaging enough, even though not much happens, and it features good performances from Wiig and Adebimpe, but there’s a tremendous sense of waiting – waiting for Silva to pick up the pace, and waiting for Silva to plot a through line that doesn’t feel forced or lacking in focus. The surrogacy issue is left largely unexplored, as well as Polly’s need for a baby, and Freddy’s performance art work lacks a reason for being also, making this a movie where things are set up for no discernible reason, and it jumps from scene to scene without many of them having an impact. Even Cathey’s mentally disturbed neighbour, who provides the movie’s only real source of conflict, soon becomes tiresome due to the repetitive nature of his harrassment. A trip to visit Mo’s family further underlines the waywardness of Silva’s screenplay, with an awkward dinner table conversation about the suitability of a black gay man being the sperm donor for a straight white woman, and how this would affect the child. It’s awkward not because the subject matter is obviously contentious, but because, like so many other aspects of the movie, Silva hasn’t quite worked out what he’s trying to say.

Rating: 6/10 – though on the face of it, Nasty Baby has the look and feel of an accomplished indie movie, the truth is that it stumbles way too often for comfort, and keeps its characters at a distance from the viewer; the aforementioned performances go a long way toward making up for the movie’s shortfalls, and Silva does at least make good use of his Fort Greene, Brooklyn locations, but overall this is a movie that lacks the cohesiveness needed to make it work effectively.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

10 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Armie Hammer, Boots Riley, Comedy, Drama, Lakeith Stanfield, Power Caller, RegalView, Review, Satire, Telemarketing, Tessa Thompson, WorryFree

D: Boots Riley / 111m

Cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Armie Hammer, Jermaine Fowler, Omari Hardwick, Steven Yeun, Terry Crews, Kate Berlant, Michael X. Sommers, Danny Glover, Robert Longstreet, Patton Oswalt, David Cross

For Cassius Green (Stanfield), life in an alternative-present Oakland is something of a struggle. When he lands a job at RegalView, a telemarketing company, things look like they might be about to improve. But despite his eagerness to succeed, he finds it hard to get anywhere with the sales leads he’s given. It’s not until a colleague, Langston (Glover), advises him to use his “white voice” that Cassius sees his fortunes improve. Soon he’s RegalView’s top salesman, but at the same time that the workforce are being prompted to strike for better pay and conditions by union organiser Squeeze (Yeun). Promoted to the position of Power Caller, Cassius opts for more money and prestige over helping his friends and colleagues, including his girlfriend, Detroit (Thompson). But entry to the upper echelons of RegalView reveal a side to the company that sits uncomfortably with Cassius’s political and social beliefs, beliefs that are challenged even further when he discovers a connection to WorryFree, an organisation that promotes a life of free food and lodging, plus no bills, but on condition that people accept a lifetime’s working contract…

For much of the its first hour, Sorry to Bother You is a sharply detailed, refreshingly adept satire that pokes fun at working-class aspirations and the various ways that the lower middle-class stops those aspirations from being successful. The sales floor at RegalView is used as a metaphor for those aspirations that remain stifled at every turn, while the management provide their workers with mixed messages and false assurances that success is only a few calls – or a positive attitude – away. Cassius’ eventual rise to the level of Power Caller serves as a further satirical swipe at the establishment’s exploitation and integration of talented individuals for its own nefarious purposes. It’s a little bit obvious, and borders on being a little trite in its execution, as are the problems it causes for Cassius with Detroit and his friends at work, but first-time writer/director Boots Riley gives the material a fresh enough reworking to offset any real concerns, and once the viewer has settled into the movie’s comfortable narrative groove, he introduces Cassius to WorryFree’s head honcho, Steve Lift (Hammer). And from there, the movie goes in a completely unexpected direction.

As the poster has it, this is “something you need to see to believe”. What Riley has up his sleeve will either grab you and keep you watching thanks to the sheer lunatic audacity of it all, or it will make you say to yourself, “nope, that’s it, I’m out of here”. But it does put an entirely different spin on things, and is a completely original take on the lengths that corporations will go to to maximise profits while exploiting their workforce. It’s a brave approach by Riley, but also one that makes Sorry to Bother You an unforgettable experience that really takes huge, confident strides forward in its second half, both in terms of the narrative, and in terms of the characters’ involvement. Cassius is torn between securing a good life for himself and the extent of the growing social responsibility he feels once he discovers what WorryFree is up to. Stanfield, whose potential as an actor has been obvious for a while now, grabs the role with both hands and gives a terrific performance that’s far more difficult than it seems because for most of the movie Cassius is more passive than aggressive. There’s terrific support too from Thompson as Detroit (whose choice of earrings is something to keep track of), and Hammer as Lift, the entrepreneur without a soul or a social conscience.

Rating: 8/10 – with an arresting visual style, and no shortage of humour, Sorry to Bother You is an audacious, bold, and confidently handled exposé of the perils of unchecked elitism and its association with new capitalism; it may get “weird” but by (mostly) playing it straight, the movie still makes a considerable impact, and is definitely not a movie that you’ll forget in a hurry – and that is very much a good thing.

Happy End (2017)

09 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alcoholism, Calais, Depression, Drama, Dysfunctional family, Family relationships, Fantine Harduin, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Michael Haneke, Review, Suicide, Unhappiness

D: Michael Haneke / 107m

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Kassovitz, Fantine Harduin, Franz Rogowski, Laura Verlinden, Toby Jones

For the Laurent family, life is full of challenges. Patriarch Georges (Trintignant) is in his mid-Eighties and suffering from dementia. He has two children, Anne (Huppert), who runs the family construction business, and Thomas (Kassovitz), who is a well respected surgeon. Anne is divorced, but has a grown son, Pierre (Rogowski), who is in line to take over the family business, but he has a drink problem and is prone to angry outbursts. Thomas is married to Anaïs (Verlinden), who is his second wife; they have an infant child. He also has a twelve year old daughter from his first marriage, Eva (Harduin). Eva comes to live with her extended family when her mother falls ill from an overdose of tablets and is admitted to hospital. As she navigates both a bigger family and a bigger house (in Calais), Eva soon learns that everyone has their secrets, from Georges’ determination to commit suicide while he still has the mental and physical will, to her own father’s extra-marital activities, and Anne’s unwillingness to let Pierre assume control of the family business. In different ways, each supposedly well kept secret is revealed over the course of a short space of time, and the Laurents are exposed as the dysfunctional people they truly are…

If you’re a fan of the work of Michael Haneke, then you’ll no doubt appreciate the irony of his latest movie being called Happy End. Here, happiness is in very short supply, and when it is “allowed out” (as it were), it isn’t for long. With themes such as suicide, depression, alcoholism and immorality highlighted within the narrative, it’s no wonder that this is at times heavy going, with no light at the end of the tunnel for either the characters or the audience. Sombre movies such as this one don’t necessarily have to be a chore, or “difficult to watch”, and Haneke is a master at teasing out the most obscure of motivations for his characters’ behaviour, and making them telling, but here the knack seems to have abandoned him. This is a dour soap opera populated by people who are stuck in the routine melodramas of their daily lives and have no idea of how to change anything – except to make themselves even more unhappy. The odd one out is Anne, whose relationship with British lawyer Lawrence (Jones), provides the only expression of hope in the whole movie.

With terrible events happening in isolation or viewed from a distance – a collapsed retainer wall at a Laurent construction site early on is a great example – Haneke ensures that the audience is kept at a distance from both the events themselves and the characters who experience them. This has the effect of dulling the emotional pull of such scenes and denying the audience any connection with what’s happening and to whom. When Pierre visits the family of a construction worker injured during the collapse of the retainer wall, Haneke opts for a long shot from beside Pierre’s car. When Pierre is assaulted, the camera remains fixed, even when he staggers back to the car. This distancing has the effect of negating any sympathy we might have for the character, or any sense of shock or outrage. Only the concern of a passerby registers as an emotional response, but again, Haneke’s approach appears unconcerned with such details. Inevitably, it’s hard to work out just what Haneke is trying to say, or even if he has a message for us in the first place. The situations and conversations Georges et al experience are interesting on a basic level but rarely resonate, and when they do, it’s in a superficial, stylistically clever yet empty fashion that makes you wonder why anyone would want to spend time with such a bunch of self-absorbed ingrates.

Rating: 6/10 – with impressive cinematography by DoP Christian Berger that enhances Olivier Radot’s equally impressive production design, it’s a shame that Happy End emerges as a cold, uninvolving melodrama that tries too hard to make you care about its characters; still, the performances are good – Huppert is superb in what at times feels like a supporting role – but as they’re in service to a script that isn’t quite as well thought out as it needed to be, this remains, at best and worst, the movie version of a curate’s egg.

10×10 (2018)

08 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Drama, Kelly Reilly, Kidnapping, Luke Evans, Mystery, Noel Clarke, Revenge, Review, Suzi Ewing, Thriller

D: Suzi Ewing / 87m

Cast: Luke Evans, Kelly Reilly, Norma Dixit, Skye Lucia Degruttola, Olivia Chenery, Jason Maza, Stacy Hall

Cathy Noland (Reilly) owns a florist shop in a small town, and seems happy being on her own. What she doesn’t know is that Lewis (Evans) has been watching her for months, learning everything he can about her, and tracking her daily routines. When she leaves a yoga class at the end of the day, Lewis grabs her in the parking lot and quickly ties her up and gags her before putting her in the boot of his car. He takes her to his home where he puts her in a soundproofed, hidden room. It soon becomes clear that Lewis has some questions for Cathy, and they may have something to do with a medical malpractice trial that he’s following on television. Cathy tries to escape, but isn’t successful, and as time passes, Lewis presses her to tell the truth about herself (starting with her name) and how it all relates to his wife, Alana (Chenery), and how she recently died. When Lewis finally learns the truth, it isn’t what he’s expecting, and he’s caught off guard when Cathy makes her next attempt at escaping…

The kind of mystery thrller that comes and goes without anyone really noticing it, 10×10 starts off well, but then stumbles repeatedly on its way to a violent showdown between Evans’ angry kidnapper and Reilly’s resourceful captive. Again, as with a lot of mystery thrillers, there’s the germ of a good idea here, but Noel Clarke’s screenplay (he also produces, and cameos as a waiter in a diner) is unable to connect the narrative dots in such a way that the movie forms into a cohesive whole. The script also tries to subvert audience expectations by throwing in a couple of “unexpected” twists along the way, and though these attempts are laudable in and of themselves, they don’t carry any weight or have any dramatic impact. Instead of being surprised, or even shocked, the average viewer’s reaction is likely to be a shrug of indifference. Part of the problem is the movie’s unfortunate habit of presenting scenes that act independently from the ones that precede and follow them, or which fail to increase the tension. One such scene involves Lewis driving to a favourite spot he and Alana went to. A squad car pulls up, and for a moment it looks as if Lewis is going to be in trouble. Only for a moment, though…

With scenes such as these being resolved too quickly, all that remains is for the cat and mouse game between Lewis and Cathy to hold the attention and provide all the thrills (the violent assaults that pepper the narrative soon become derivative and perfunctory in the way they’re staged and play out). Alas, once Cathy is kidnapped, any tension soon dissipates as the script’s awkward machinations are further undermined by first-time director Ewing’s unoriginal handling. Between the house’s open plan living area and the hidden room is a corridor; the number of times Lewis and Cathy run down it in either direction is about the only scary thing the viewer can rely on. In the end, and despite Evans’ and Reilly’s best efforts, the movie loses its way completely and becomes yet another generic thriller that is so generic it even includes a scene where the villain of the piece is supposedly dead – only to be miraculously resurrected the very next minute. When a movie resorts to such crude tactics in order to raise some excitement, then you know it’s been in trouble for some time already.

Rating: 3/10 – a woeful movie that is almost wholly free of subtext or metaphor, 10×10‘s main achievement is that it was made in the first place and induced both Evans and Reilly to take part; almost an object lesson in how not to create a tense, exciting thriller, this is one to avoid in favour of almost anything else.

Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town (2017)

07 Sunday Oct 2018

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Alia Shawkat, Carrie Coon, Christian Papierniak, Comedy, Drama, Engagement, Haley Joel Osment, Los Angeles, Mackenzie Davis, Review, Romance

D: Christian Papierniak / 87m

Cast: Mackenzie Davis, Carrie Coon, Alex Russell, Alia Shawkat, Haley Joel Osment, Lakeith Stanfield, Annie Potts, Rob Huebel, Brandon T. Jackson, Sarah Goldberg, Meghan Lennox, Dolly Wells

Izzy (Davis) wakes one morning to find herself in the bed of a stranger (Stanfield). As she navigates leaving without waking him, she learns that her ex-boyfriend, Roger (Russell), is getting engaged to her best friend, Whitney (Goldberg), and there’s a party to celebrate that evening. Determined to get to the party and stop Roger from going through with it – she’s convinced he still loves her – Izzy sets off with plenty of time to get there. But obstacles soon present themselves. Her car isn’t ready at the garage, she can’t get enough money for cab fare, she takes a tumble on the bike she borrows and it’s too damaged to keep using, and the one person (Shawkat) who does give her a lift leaves her stranded in a neighbourhood she doesn’t know after going just a short distance. It’s only thanks to the help of another stranger (Potts) that Izzy is able to finally get to the engagement party. But when she does, things don’t exactly go as well as she’d planned…

There’s much to like in Christian Papierniak’s feature debut, not the least of which is Davis’s bullish, spiky performance, but Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town is a movie whose episodic structure hampers both its flow and its effectiveness. It’s to be expected that Izzy will encounter setbacks in her journey to her ex’s engagement party, but it’s whether or not those setbacks are interesting or reflect on Izzy’s own emotional state that is the key. And that’s where Papierniak’s screenplay lacks consistency. Too preoccupied with trying to make eloquent statements about the nature of fate, or the validity of personal expectations and needs in relationships, the script often stops the action to contemplate these matters, and in doing so, negates the urgency of Izzy’s journey. What should be a more and more desperate race against time as the movie progresses, becomes instead a kind of semi-serious, semi-humorous series of bunny hops across Los Angeles as Izzy deals with one uninterested potential Samaritan after another (until Potts’s sympathetic romantic idealist comes along). Izzy herself is someone it’s well worth spending time with, and Papierniak is on firmer ground when she’s the focus of a scene, but the other characters don’t have anywhere near the same impact.

Again, this is largely due to the uneven nature of the script, and Papierniak not fully realising his thematic and subtextual ambitions. But it’s also due to a remarkable performance by Davis, who dominates the movie in a way that makes everyone else seem like they weren’t paying attention when Papierniak gave out notes. As Izzy, Davis is mercurial, fiery, amusing, good-natured at heart, abrasive when pushed, and altogether a person rather than an indie caricature (the drawback of both Shawkat and Osment’s characters). Only Coon as Izzy’s estranged sister, Virginia – they were a musical duo once before Virginia split them up – is as compelling, contrasting Davis’s messed up free spirit with a steely-eyed turn as a woman whose sense of responsibility is just as skewed as Izzy’s but in a way that has deadened her emotionally (there’s a hint that this could be Izzy’s ultimate fate but it isn’t developed any further). When it’s not trying to be serious about life and love, the movie is on much better footing, with a sly sense of humour that elevates the material, and there’s a bittersweet ending that feels antithetical to what’s gone before, but actually proves to be a bold move by Papierniak, and one that rounds off the movie much more effectively than if – well, you’ll just have to see for yourself.

Rating: 6/10 – although Davis steals the limelight and gives an indelible, finely-tuned performance, Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town is let down by an uneven script and less than interesting secondary characters; that said, Papierniak isn’t afraid to throw in some odd stylistic choices that at least show he’s trying to do something different, and there’s a terrific moment that involves a bathroom, a change of lighting, and the exposure of past regrets.

Oh! the Horror! – The Giant Gila Monster (1959) and The Trollenberg Terror (1958)

06 Saturday Oct 2018

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Aliens, Don Sullivan, Drama, Forrest Tucker, Fred Graham, Gila monster, Horror, Hot rods, Janet Munro, Jennifer Jayne, Laurence Payne, Lisa Simone, Quentin Lawrence, Ray Kellogg, Review, Switzerland, Texas, Thriller

The Giant Gila Monster (1959) / D: Ray Kellogg / 75m

Cast: Don Sullivan, Fred Graham, Lisa Simone, Shug Fisher, Bob Thompson, Janice Stone, Ken Knox, Gay McLendon

In rural Texas, the disappearance of a teenage couple prompts the local sheriff (Graham) to enlist the help of the couple’s friends in determining if something has happened to them, or they’ve maybe eloped. Over the next few days, there are further disappearances, and increasing evidence that something strange is happening out near one particular ravine. When the couple’s car is finally found, there’s no sign of them. By now though, the sheriff and local car mechanic/hot rod enthusiast, Chase Winstead (Sullivan), have come to the conclusion that the cause of all the strange incidents might be some kind of abnormally large animal. The truth is revealed when the town drunk (Fisher) sees a giant gila monster, and it causes a train wreck. Before the sheriff can arrange for the state troopers to help kill the creature, it attacks a platter party being held a barn, an attack that prompts Chase to come up with a way of dispatching the monster once and for all…

Okay, so it’s not a gila monster, it’s a Mexican beaded lizard, and yes, the special effects involving it are shoddy and unconvincing (the trainwreck is not a highlight), but The Giant Gila Monster is definitely a cult classic. With its authentic Texan locations, mutually beneficial cooperation between its teenagers and the sheriff, unexpected rendition of The Mushroom Song by Sullivan (and twice, no less), and more hot rod inspired slang than you can shake a nerf bar at, the movie has a rudimentary charm that more than makes up for its deficiencies elsewhere. The performances are perfectly acceptable, Kellogg’s direction is simple yet effective, and the script by Jay Simms ensures that the characters (mostly) aren’t too one-dmensional. Like so many Fifties sci-fi/horrors it’s let down by the quality of its monster and the model work that surrounds it, and although this is the source of much amusement, there are sufficient good ideas present that if there had been a bigger budget, it would have meant a much more polished movie. It’s also that rare Fifties sci-fi/horror that can be watched more than once, and which remains way more superior than Gila!, the made-for-TV remake that escaped in 2012.

Rating: 6/10 – if you can ignore the low budget trappings, and the lack of any real threat from the titular creature, then The Giant Gila Monster is something of a pleasant surprise; almost gratuitously good-natured in its approach, this really isn’t a sci-fi or a horror movie, but it is more interesting to watch than the majority of its ilk.

The Trollenberg Terror (1958) / D: Quentin Lawrence / 81m

aka The Crawling Eye; Trollenberg Horror

Cast: Forrest Tucker, Laurence Payne, Jennifer Jayne, Janet Munro, Warren Mitchell, Frederick Schiller, Andrew Faulds, Stuart Saunders, Colin Douglas

Following several unexplained climbing deaths on the Swiss mountain of Trollenberg, UN investigator Alan Brooks (Tucker) travels to the observatory there in order to unravel the mystery of both the deaths and the presence of a radioactive cloud that doesn’t appear to move. On his journey he meets sisters Anne and Sarah Pilgrim (Munro, Jayne). Anne is telepathic and finds herself drawn to the mountain, cutting short their planned trip to Geneva. While at the local hotel, the trio encounter an Englishman called Philip Truscott (Payne), as well as a geologist called Dewhurst (Saunders) who is planning a trip up the mountain with a guide called Brett (Faulds). When their trip goes awry and Dewhurst is killed, Brett returns after having been lost overnight. But at the first opportunity he attempts to kill Anne, and when he’s stopped, Brooks and the rest, now assisted by observatory director Dr Crevett (Mitchell), learn that whatever is in the radioactive cloud is targeting anyone who goes onto the Trollenberg – and shows no sign of stopping…

Adapted from the 1956 UK TV series of the same name, The Trollenberg Terror is a sci-fi/horror movie that does its best on a limited budget, and though some of the model effects are particularly shoddy, its alien creature is one of the most effectively designed and realised of its time (those tentacles, though!). It’s played incredibly straight throughout, with its cast seemingly banned from raising a smile unless it’s absolutely necessary (and even then, only with written permission), and the serious nature of the aliens’ threat is emphasised at every turn. However, this doesn’t stop the movie from being enjoyable to watch – in a daft, you couldn’t make it up kind of way – and the performances, though a little po-faced at times, go a long way to selling the absurdity of it all. Lawrence, whose first feature this was, shows a knack for staging the horror elements to ensure maximum impact – the opening scene is grisly without being explicit – and though this is clearly set in Switzerland by way of a studio in Middlesex, there’s a keen sense of time and place.

Rating: 7/10 – let down by a final ten minutes that cruelly exposes its limited budget, The Trollenberg Terror is still a better than most example of late Fifties sci-fi/horror; apparently a partial inspiration for John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), it’s a movie with some clever ideas, and one that isn’t afraid to throw a number of wild ones in there as well (zombies, anyone?).

The Fury of a Patient Man (2016)

05 Friday Oct 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Antonio de la Torre, Drama, Luis Callejo, Raúl Arévalo, Revenge, Review, Robbery, Ruth Díaz, Spain, Thriller

Original title: Tarde para la ira

D: Raúl Arévalo / 92m

Cast: Antonio de la Torre, Luis Callejo, Ruth Díaz, Raúl Jiménez, Manolo Solo, Font García, Pilar Gómez

After taking part in a robbery (as the getaway driver) that goes wrong and leaves one person dead and another in a coma, Curro (Callejo) is sentenced to eight years in jail. His girlfriend, Ana (Díaz), stands by him and they have a son together. In the weeks before Curro is due to be released, a stranger, José (de la Torre), begins to frequent the bar where Ana works – and which is owned by her brother, Juanjo (Jiménez). José is quiet, but soon becomes friends with Juanjo, and an attraction develops between him and Ana. Days before Curro is released, the pair sleep together, and José shows an unexpected interest in the details of the robbery, and Curro’s compatriots. When Curro is released, his angry nature drives a wedge between him and Ana, and José is able to persuade her and her son to come away with him to his family home in the countryside. When José returns alone, and tells Curro he wants to see him, he can have no idea of the journey that he and José are about to embark upon…

The winner in the Best Film category at the 31st Goya Awards – previous winners include All About My Mother (1999) and Blancanieves (2012) – The Fury of a Patient Man is a slow-burn thriller that doesn’t take too long in revealing its central character’s intentions (the clue is in the title after all), but which does leave the viewer guessing as to just how far José will go in his desire for revenge. Up until Arévalo reveals the answer in the movie’s most memorable scene, things unfold at a steady yet involving pace, with great care taken to establish the characters and the interplay between them. This allows Ana to be more than just a pawn in Jose’s game, and Curro to be more than just an angry thug, decisions that help the narrative immensely, and which also leaves the viewer with characters other than José to consider when wondering what will happen to them. Curro may not be entirely sympathetic but it’s soon obvious he’s in way over his head, while Ana could be accused of using José just as much as he’s using her, but it’s this kind of ambiguity that ensures the movie isn’t rote or predictable.

Once José and Curro meet, and they begin a road trip that will change both of them (albeit in very different ways), Arévalo and co-screenwriter David Pulido quicken both the pace and the tone of the movie, and throw in a couple of violent set-pieces that are unflinchingly brutal but still in keeping with the needs of the material. There’s also an uncomfortable moment when a minor character, only minutes after being introduced, is revealed to be pregnant. The camera switches to José whose passive features betray nothing of what he’s thinking. It’s another, potent example of the ambiguity that runs like a thread through the narrative, and the way in which Arévalo is able to tighten the screws at will. de la Torre is terrific as José, effortlessly diffident at the start and slowly but surely revealing the rage he’s nursed for eight years. As José cuts a bloody swathe through Curro’s compatriots, de la Torre’s portrayal becomes even more insular, with the character’s violent outbursts proving expectedly cathartic, and yet leaving him emotionally detached. Callejo and Díaz provide good support, and there’s exemplary camerawork from DoP Arnau Valls Colomer, especially in the opening scene, which is shot entirely from the back seat of Curro’s getaway car – crash and all.

Rating: 8/10 – a movie that builds tension through the motivations of its characters, and is often unflinchingly violent because of those motivations, The Fury of a Patient Man is both subtle and judicious in its character building, and blunt and uncompromising once it steps up a gear; an English language remake is in the pipeline, but it already has its work cut out for it if it’s going to be as good as this version.

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