A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (2009)

07 Monday Jan 2019

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China, Drama, Gansu province, Ni Dahong, Ni Yan, Remake, Review, Sun Honglei, Thriller, Wang's Noodle Shop, Xiao Shenyang, Zhang Yimou

Original title: San qiang pai an jing qi

aka The First Gun; A Simple Noodle Story, Zhang Yimou’s Blood Simple

D: Zhang Yimou / 86m

Cast: Sun Honglei, Xiao Shenyang, Ni Yan, Ni Dahong, Cheng Ye, Mao Mao, Julien Gaudfroy, Zhao Benshan

Situated in a small desert town in China’s Gansu province, Wang’s Noodle Shop is overseen by its owner, Wang (Ni Dahong0, but managed and run by his wife (Ni Yan). Wang is cruel and abusive towards his wife, which has led her to contemplating having an affair with Li (Xiao), who works there along with Zhao (Cheng) and Chen (Mao). The arrival of a travelling Persian weapons salesman (Gaudfroy) gives Wang’s wife the opportunity to buy a gun with three bullets in it. Having it makes her feel safer, but when her husband is told that she’s actually having an affair with Li, he employs a local policeman, Zhang (Sun), to kill them both and dispose of the bodies. But Zhang has other ideas: he offers Wang manufactured evidence of their deaths, and then uses the gun Wang’s wife has bought to shoot Wang. What follows is a twisted and deadly game of cat and mouse between Zhang and Wang’s wife and Li, and between Zhang and Zhao and Chen, who are looking to get into Wang’s money-laden safe…

A remake of thw Coen brothers’ debut, Blood Simple (1984), Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop isn’t the kind of movie you’d expect from the director of such international arthouse successes as Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and House of Flying Daggers (2004). For though it may be as beautiful and visually striking as those movies, with its heavily stylised colour palette and bold desert landscapes, the movie is also a departure in that it wilfully embraces elements of slapstick humour and out and out screwball comedy (albeit in a Chinese fashion). Many of the movie’s early scenes showcase a lightness of touch and a comedic sensibility that Zhang has yet to revisit in his career, and the antics of would-be lovers Li and Wang’s wife, as well as the devious machinations of Zhao and Chen, allow the spirited cast a chance to overact wildly but to very funny effect (though bear in mind this is Chinese humour, and not always compatible with Western sensibilities; best just to go with it). As the misunderstandings and murderous plottings begin to accumulate, Zhang ensures that the humour remains a key ingredient in his adaptation, but as the movie becomes darker, so too does the comedy, until it’s as pitch black as Wang’s heart.

Fans of Blood Simple won’t be too surprised by this, as the screenplay – by Zu Zhengchao, Shi Jianquan and Zhou Xiaofeng – follows the Coens original story more closely as the story unfolds. Thanks to Zhang’s willingness to experiment with his own directing style, and to try something entirely different, the movie remains faithful while carving out its own unique approach, with its veteran director making terrific use of space and light, and editor Meng Peicong increasing the rhythm and pace as the movie progresses. It’s all anchored by a wonderfully deadpan performance from Sun, whose passive features still manage to express disdain, and boredom with events, as a matter of course. With all the crazy, buffoonish behaviour on display elsewhere, it’s Sun’s straight man who has the most impact, and he’s a pleasure to spend time with. As the would-be lovers, Xiao and Ni Yan bounce off each other with increasing delight, and there’s a terrific cameo from Zhao as a slightly cross-eyed police captain that is short but very entertaining. Zhang may not be delving into the motivations and desires of his characters as closely as he would normally, but then he’s wise enough to know that the material doesn’t require it, and by painting everyone with broad brush strokes, it helps the movie enormously.

Rating: 8/10 – not for all tastes, and certainly not the usual fare expected of Zhang Yimou, nevertheless A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is hugely entertaining, both on a comedic level, and thanks to Zhang’s skill with visual imagery; occasionally surreal, but always intriguing, it’s a movie that is handled with a deftness and a simplicity that many other movie makers would do well to emulate, and features a bravura noodle making scene that is even more impressive for giving the impression that it was all done in one take.

In the Fade (2017)

03 Thursday Jan 2019

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Bombing, Denis Moschitto, Diane Kruger, Drama, Fatih Akin, Germany, Grief, Neo-Nazis, Revenge, Review, Thriller

Original title: Aus dem Nichts

D: Fatih Akin / 106m

Cast: Diane Kruger, Denis Moschitto, Henning Peker, Johannes Krisch, Samia Muriel Chancrin, Numan Acar, Hanna Hilsdorf, Ulrich Brandhoff, Ulrich Tukur, Yannis Economides, Rafael Santana

Katja (Kruger) is married to reformed Kurdish drug dealer Nuri (Acar), and they have a precocious six year old son, Rocco (Santana). Having put his criminal past behind him, Nuri runs a small travel agency in Hamburg. One day, Katja drops off Rocco at Nuri’s office and heads off to meet her best friend, Birgit (Chancrin). When she returns later to meet them, she finds that a nail bomb has gone off outside the office and Nuri and Rocco have both been killed. She identifies a woman (Hilsdorf) she saw earlier who left a bike outside the office, and eventually the woman is identified as a Neo-Nazi, and with her husband (Brandhoff), is arrested and charged with the bombing. A trial ensues, but despite the best efforts of Katja’s lawyer, Danilo (Moschitto), enough doubt is raised about the couple’s guilt that the court is forced to acquit them. Distraught by this unexpected decision, Katja retreats into despair, until an idea presents itself as to how she can avenge the deaths of her son and husband…

Taking the 2004 Cologne bombing as its inspiration, which also saw Neo-Nazis detonating a nail bomb in a busy commercial street, In the Fade is a stylish and fascinating thriller that is also a tough, uncompromising examination of one woman’s grief in the aftermath of a horrible tragedy. Featuring a superb performance from Kruger, the movie paints an uncomfortable picture of both the emotional despair that Katja feels and the physical impact it has on her as well. Katja’s bright, confident manner in the movie’s opening scenes is soon replaced by a withdrawn, cynical veneer that (barely) hides the pain that she’s feeling. Even the drugs she takes to help her cope (a decision that has dire consequences later on) aren’t enough to numb the sadness that she’s feeling. As the trial steers ever closer to its unhappy conclusion, Katja’s anger at the injustice that’s taking place builds and builds, and remains in waiting as she recovers from the court’s decision, until it can be refocused into a steely determination to take matters into her own hands. All of this is portrayed by Kruger in a career-best performance, as she plumbs the depths of Katja’s misery in a way that is both urgent and persuasive.

However, without Kruger’s passionate and powerful performance, In the Fade isn’t quite as well constructed or purposeful as it might seem. Akin is a fiercely political movie maker, and his movies are often full of political statements, but here the message isn’t as clear cut or as concisely made as they would be normally. True, he takes potshots at the perceived indolence of the German authorities in reining in the activities of Neo-Nazi groups in modern day Deutschland, and the endemic racism of a police force that would rather focus on the criminal past of a bombing victim than catching the actual bombers, but these don’t have the impact that would make viewers become as outraged as Katja does. The movie is at its best in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, when the only point it wants to make is about the unbearable weight that grief can impose on a person, and then during the courtroom scenes, the inexorable turning of the tide of guilt is played out with a grim fascination that is horrifying, albeit in a different way. But the post-trial scenes – set in Greece, and providing a beautiful contrast to the constantly overcast, rainy environs of Hamburg – prove to be something of a let-down, and the momentum the movie has built up until then is squandered by poor narrative choices and giving Katja unconvincing motivations for her actions. It’s another movie whose ending undermines the good work that’s gone before, and for some viewers, being denied their own catharsis may prove a deal breaker all by itself.

Rating: 7/10 – with an unsettling score courtesy of Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, and good supporting turns from Krisch and Tukur (as the father of one of the bombers), In the Fade is an urgent, often uncompromising thriller that’s let down by some flaccid plotting and a final section that is more frustrating than rewarding; Kruger is excellent in only her first German-speaking lead role, and there’s a sparseness to the production design that plays well with the rigour of Kruger’s tightly wound presence, but all in all this doesn’t succeed as a whole but is instead an exercise in (unfulfilled) anticipation.

Beast (2017)

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

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Drama, Geraldine James, Jersey, Jessie Buckley, Johnny Flynn, Michael Pearce, Murder, Review, Romance, Thriller, Violence

D: Michael Pearce / 106m

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Johnny Flynn, Trystan Gravelle, Geraldine James, Oliver Maltman, Charley Palmer Rothwell

On the island of Jersey, three young women have been murdered recently and the killer is still at large. Moll Huntington (Buckley) is a twenty-something tour guide who still lives at home with her parents. On the night of her birthday, she leaves the party her mother (James) has organised, and heads to a nightclub, where she meets a young man (Rothwell), who later tries to take advantage of her on their way home. She’s rescued by local poacher and odd job man Pascal (Flynn), and the pair strike up a tentative romance. That same night, a fourth girl is abducted and later found murdered. Suspicion points toward Pascal, who has a violent history, but Moll has become so infatuated with him that she lies to the police about being with him the whole time she was at the nightclub. However, doubts about his innocence begin to plague her, and when she learns about his past, this causes her to doubt him even more. When a break in the case appears to clear Pascal, it’s still not enough to convince Moll, and she starts to challenge what seems to be the truth…

Based very loosely on the real life Beast of Jersey who broke into homes at night and attacked women and children during the 60’s and 70’s, Beast is a psycho-drama that is heavy on atmosphere, and rife with undercurrents of dread and barely contained mania. There’s madness here too, but the source isn’t what (or who) you might expect, as writer/director Michael Pearce slowly unravels the identity of someone who isn’t the Beast, but who is, in many ways, far worse. Both Pascal and Moll have violent pasts – she stabbed a fellow pupil when she was thirteen as revenge for bullying, he assaulted his girlfriend of the time – and Pearce explores the different mindsets that have kept both of them from having any real friends, or from being in a long-term relationship. They’re both outsiders, Pascal because he doesn’t “fit in”, and Moll because she doesn’t want to. Together their different social exclusions help them bond and this bond allows a twisted form of romance to develop. But as the movie progresses, and we learn more about them, Pearce reveals that their relationship is less of a romantic connection, and more of a strange co-dependency.

Pearce places this odd, and very disturbing central relationship against a backdrop of bucolic imagery that hints at darker deeds to come, and which also offers little in the way of comfort for the easily dismayed viewer. Bolstered by two terrific performances from Buckley and Flynn, the movie works best when it’s exploring Moll’s tortured psychological motivations, with Buckley navigating the kind of dark emotional territory that is both unnerving and frightening for the scale of its intensity. Flynn makes Pascal more of a tragic figure than he first appears, and though his past misdeeds point at the poacher being involved in the murders, there’s an ambiguity that remains in place even when Pearce affects a narrative sleight of hand that changes things irrevocably for both Moll and Pascal. But this sleight of hand also means that the movie goes off at a tangent that isn’t anywhere near as convincing as what’s gone before, and it raises more questions than Pearce’s screenplay has answers for. It’s a shame, as up until then, the movie is a confident, tightly controlled thriller that plays with audience expectations, and which offers complex characterisations instead of the usual thriller-style stereotypes. It’s also beautifully composed and shot by DoP Benjamin Kracun, and features an eclectic but effective score by Jim Williams.

Rating: 7/10 – a compelling, and malice-filled first feature from Pearce, Beast isn’t quite the sum of its parts, but when it’s being mysterious and malignant, it’s hard to look away for fear of missing something either horrible or important, or both; Buckley is outstanding, but the secondary characters, including James’s stern-faced mother and Gravelle’s lovelorn policeman, aren’t as well developed, while Maya Maffioli’s sometimes hesitant editing doesn’t always allow certain scenes to flow as smoothly as they should.

Lizzie (2018)

30 Sunday Dec 2018

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Chloë Sevigny, Craig William Macneill, Double murder, Drama, Fiona Shaw, Jamey Sheridan, Kristen Stewart, Lizzie Borden, Review, Thriller, True story

D: Craig William Macneill / 106m

Cast: Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart, Jamey Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Kim Dickens, Denis O’Hare, Jeff Perry

Fall River, Massachusetts, 1892. Lizzie Borden (Sevigny) is the youngest daughter of respected local businessman Andrew Borden (Sheridan). Unmarried at thirty-two, Lizzie is constantly at odds with her father over the way in which she conducts herself. She finds a supporter of sorts when her father engages a new servant, Bridget Sullivan (Stewart). Known as Maggie, Bridget and Lizzie develop a close bond just when Andrew begins receiving anonymous threats to his life. Consulting with his brother-in-law, John Morse (O’Hare), he alludes to a will that would see Morse inherit his estate if his wife, Abby (Shaw), were to pre-decease him. Lizzie overhears this conversation and decides to take matters into her own hands. Her actions lead to an outbreak of violent events within the Borden household, while at the same time, Lizzie and Bridget become lovers. Lizzie’s father discovers their relationship and forbids Lizzie from having anything to do with Bridget unless it is related to her role as a servant. And then on the morning of 4 August, Lizzie discovers that someone has killed her father…

Something of a cause célèbre even now, the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden have become the stuff of gory legend, spawning a famous rhyme (“Lizzie Borden took an axe…”), and maintaining a lurid fascination that is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon. Of course, the main problem with any re-telling of the story is that Lizzie was tried and acquitted of the murders, and no one else was ever accused (though Morse was viewed as a possible suspect for a while). With this in mind, any explanation for the murders must be conjecture only, and Bryce Kass’s chilly screenplay chooses to adopt the theory put forward by crime writer Ed McBain in 1984, that Lizzie killed her father and stepmother after her lesbian relationship with Bridget had been discovered. The issue of the will adds a further twist to the story, and seems as likely as any other reason, but the script approaches these theories as if they are fact, and any ambiguity is abandoned with the recreation of the Bordens’ deaths. Up until then, the movie has established an atmosphere of subdued yet inevitable violence that is almost suffocating; knowing what’s going to happen makes it all the worse. And when it does, it’s almost as cathartic for the viewer as it appears to be for Lizzie.

Lizzie is brought to life thanks to a wonderfully astute performance from Sevigny that highlights both the character’s rebellious nature and the deeper passions that she had to keep hidden. It’s an intelligent, well constructed portrayal that never falters in its conviction and which isn’t afraid to make Lizzie unsympathetic, as in the aftermath of the murders when she appears unperturbed (we see these scenes before we see the murders). Stewart has the more emotional role, and projects Bridget’s discomfort at the situation she finds herself in with empathy and compassion. There’s sterling support from Sheridan as the domineering Andrew Borden, and O’Hare is suitably nasty as the avaricious Morse, but Shaw and Dickens are left with precious little to do except when it suits the screenplay. Macneill directs with a keen understanding that Lizzie feels very much like a prisoner in her own home, and Noah Greenberg’s exemplary cinematography captures and expands on this idea through careful framing and extensive use of close ups. There are some minor issues with pacing as the movie introduces both the characters and the psychological backdrop to their behaviours, and the score by Jeff Russo doesn’t always complement the action, but overall this is an impressive, richly detailed recreation of two visceral, unsolved murders that continue to enthrall and captivate us over a hundred and twenty years on.

Rating: 8/10 – anchored by a sterling performance by Sevigny, and a palpable sense of impending dread, Lizzie is a subtle, yet powerful movie that explores what can happen when repressed emotions remain that way for too long; beginning as a perceptive character study before descending into startling, but necessary melodrama, it’s an intriguing, intelligently expressed piece that is confidently handled and often unflinching in its approach.

Black ’47 (2018)

29 Saturday Dec 2018

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Action, Drama, History, Hugo Weaving, Ireland, James Frecheville, Lance Daly, Review, Stephen Rea, The Great Famine, Thriller

D: Lance Daly / 100m

Cast: Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville, Stephen Rea, Freddie Fox, Barry Keoghan, Moe Dunford, Sarah Greene, Jim Broadbent, Dermot Crowley, Aidan McArdle

In 1847, Martin Feeney (Frecheville), an Irish ranger who has served in the English army, returns home to Connemara only to discover that his mother has died of starvation and his brother has been hanged for stabbing a bailiff while being evicted. Staying with his brother’s family, their own eviction from the property they’re squatting in, leads to the death of Martin’s nephew, and his arrest by the constabulary. Escaping from the barracks where he was being held, and burning it down in the process, Martin is targeted by the British authorities, and an up-and-coming lieutenant called Pope (Fox) is assigned to find and kill him. He’s aided by a veteran of the British Army called Hannah (Weaving), and a young English private called Hobson (Keoghan). While they attempt to track him down, Feeney goes on a revenge spree, beginning with the man who took advantage of his mother’s plight by purchasing her home after her eviction, to the judge (Crowley) who sentenced his brother to hang, and all the way to the biggest landlord in the area, Lord Kilmichael (Broadbent). And it’s not long before the paths of everyone involved come together…

Expanded from the short, An Ranger (2008), which was written and directed by P.J. Dillon (here one of four co-writers), Black ’47 explores a period in Irish history that hasn’t really been seen on the big screen before. The title refers to the worst year of a famine that lasted from 1845 to 1849, when as many as a million people died from starvation and disease brought about by a potato blight. Here the use of the Great Famine as the backdrop to a tale of violent, unmerciful revenge helps the narrative greatly, giving it an immediacy and power – and depth – that allows the movie to become more than just another exercise in morally doubtful vigilantism. The nature and the widespread effects of the famine can be seen in scene after scene, with communities decimated and starving families congregating in fields or at the side of the road because they no longer have homes, and work is unavailable. Feeney is an avenging angel, targeting the corrupt Irish officials who have opted to collude with the British, and the British authorities, whose arrogance and greed has led them to view the famine as an opportunity to make themselves richer by removing the labourers and farmers they never wanted on their lands in the first place.

By allowing the backdrop to become a big part of the movie’s foreground, director Lance Daly ensures that what’s at stake on a national level isn’t entirely forgotten, even if it’s not the movie’s primary focus. Feeney may be an Irishman with “a very particular set of skills” for the time, and he may be taciturn out of expediency, but he’s also someone who accepts that he can’t change anything; he’s just doing what he can. Frecheville is an imposing figure, his eyes glowering with suppressed rage, and he makes Feeney as much a victim as an avenger. Weaving adds a sense of melancholy to his role, making Hannah the most conflicted character of all thanks to a connection with Feeney that complicates things when they matter most. However, these characters, and Rea’s world-weary translator, are the only ones that have any meat on them (excuse the pun), and as a result, the script struggles to make their actions and motives entirely credible (Hobson has a mad moment of naïve idealism that is jarring thanks to its unlikely occurrence). Sometimes the politics is a little pedantic as well, but when it comes to Feeney exacting his revenge, the movie is on much firmer ground, and Daly provides viewers with a number of exciting, well staged – and brutal – action sequences. It’s not an entirely successful movie, but it is gripping, and for anyone who has seen An Ranger, yes, the pig is back.

Rating: 7/10 – though a markedly genre exercise (a Western) set against a grim historical backdrop, Black ’47 uses said backdrop as a way of adding depth and intensity to its otherwise generic main storyline; with starkly beautiful imagery thanks to DoP Declan Quinn (and this despite some very dodgy matte work), and equally impressive production design courtesy of Waldemar Kalinowski, this is a movie that tells its simple story in ways that help elevate the material, and make it a far more emotional experience than expected.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Undercover Grandpa (2017)

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

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Action, Comedy, Dylan Everett, Erik Canuel, Greta Onieogou, James Caan, Jessica Walter, Review, The Devil's Scum, Thriller

D: Erik Canuel / 94m

Cast: Dylan Everett, James Caan, Greta Onieogou, Jesse Bostick, Jessica Walter, Paul Braunstein, Louis Gossett Jr, Kenneth Welsh, Paul Sorvino, Lawrence Dane

Jake Bouchard (Everett) is a typical teenager: he’s easily embarrassed and/or annoyed by his parents, he has one really close friend, Wendell (Bostick), he does well enough at school, he wants to go out with Angie (Onieogou), the cool girl he’s known since they were four – oh, and he has a grandfather (Caan) who’s ex-military and so paranoid he sees enemy agents at every turn. On the very night Jake has finally arranged a date with Angie, his grandfather comes to dinner and he has to meet up with her later. Before that can happen, though, Angie disappears after letting Jake know that her car has broken down. Jake discovers that his grandfather is pretty good at finding clues that point to who might have abducted her, but just as they’re getting somewhere, they themselves are intercepted by a secret intelligence agency that grandpa Lou used to work for. Having been told to stay “retired” by his former boss (Walter), Lou elects instead to enlist the help of four of his old comrades in arms – the Devil’s Scum – to help him and Jake find Angie and the people who abducted her…

When a movie has a title like Undercover Grandpa, it’s likely that the average viewer won’t be expecting much from it at all, and may be watching it because a) they’re a big James Caan fan, b) they’re intrigued by the cross-generational approach of the material, c) they have an hour and a half to kill, or d) all of the above. This is definitely one of those movies that you didn’t know had been made until you came across it buried deep within a streaming service, or back in the good old days of the video store, when it might even have been a featured new release (for a week). It also fits into the “Whatever happened to…” niche that a lot of actors fall into as they get older and the really good roles start drying up. For James Caan this is one of those movies, another in a long, recent line of low-budget, barely seen movies that have kept him (at least) continually employed. But it is a throwaway movie, once seen, barely remembered, and only memorable as the movie where Kenneth Welch’s character is seen traversing a river bed in an old diving suit and navigating with a Zimmer frame. (That really is it, and despite the script’s good intentions.)

Is it sad to see Caan reduced to such shenanigans at the ripe old age of seventy-seven? Well, it is and it isn’t. It is because Caan clearly isn’t as mobile as he used to be (his stuntman is possibly in this movie more than he is), and it isn’t because it does appear that Caan is having fun. It’s not his best performance by a tollgate mile, and there are times when some of the dialogue defeats him entirely, but even when beset by low production values and a less than impressive script, Caan is still a good enough reason to give a movie a chance. But a chance is all you’ll need to identify this movie’s shortcomings, what with its pantomime villain (Braunstein), teen-oriented tweeness, stolid by-the-numbers approach, and it’s elderly, sub-par A-Team dynamic. The jokes are as old as the combined ages of the Devil’s Scum, Canuel’s direction shows why he’s more often employed in television, and the whole thing is as tired as the aging cast look. That movies like this one get made every year by the bucket load is a given, but the bigger question is, why do stars of the calibre of Caan agree to make them?

Rating: 4/10 – on a superficial, leave-your-brain-at-the-door kind of level, Undercover Grandpa offers few surprises but does provide the unsuspecting viewer with a degree of innocuous pleasure; one to watch then if you’re in the mood for something completely undemanding, but otherwise a movie with a likeable basic concept but very little else.

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.

10×10 (2018)

08 Monday Oct 2018

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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.

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

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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.

Monthly Roundup – September 2018

30 Sunday Sep 2018

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Action, Adam Driver, Adventure, Alien, Animation, Anjelah Johnson-Reyes, Anna Faris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, BlacKkKlansman, Bob Odenkirk, Boyd Holbrook, Brett Dalton, Children's movie, Christopher Robin (2018), Dallas Jenkins, Darrell Roodt, Destination Wedding, Documentary, Drama, El club se los buenos infieles, Eugenio Derbez, Ewan McGregor, Fele Martínez, Hayley Atwell, Horror, John Campopiano, John David Washington, Justin White, Katherine Barrell, Keanu Reeves, Kenne Duncan, Killing Gunther, Ku Klux Klan, Lake Placid: Legacy, Lluís Segura, Marc Forster, Melvin Goes to Dinner, Michael Blieden, Overboard (2018), Raúl Fernández de Pablo, Religion, Remake, Reviews, Rob Greenberg, Robert Clarke, Romance, Ronald V. Ashcroft, Sci-fi, Sequel, Shane Black, South Africa, Spain, Spike Lee, Stephanie Courtenay, Taran Killam, The Astounding She-Monster, The Predator, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, Thriller, Tim Rozon, Trevante Rhodes, Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary, Victor Lewin, Winona Ryder

Christopher Robin (2018) / D: Marc Forster / 104m

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael, Mark Gatiss, Oliver Ford Davies, Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett, Peter Capaldi, Sophie Okonedo, Toby Jones

Rating: 7/10 – having left behind his childhood friends at the Hundred Acre Wood, an adult Christopher Robin (McGregor), now married and weighed down by the demands of his work, is reunited with them just at the moment that they all most need each other; a live action/CGI variation on A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories, Christopher Robin is an enjoyable if lightweight confection from Disney that features good performances from McGregor and Cummings (as both Pooh and Tigger), but which also takes a very straightforward approach to its story, and allows Gatiss to overdo it as the smug villain of the piece.

Melvin Goes to Dinner (2003) / D: Bob Odenkirk / 83m

Cast: Michael Blieden, Stephanie Courtney, Matt Price, Annabelle Gurwitch, Maura Tierney, David Cross, Melora Walters, Jack Black

Rating: 7/10 – two friends agree to meet for dinner but two other people end up joining them, leading to an evening of surprising connections and revelations that causes each to rethink their own opinions and feelings about each other; adapted from the stage play Phyro-Giants! (and written by Blieden), Odenkirk’s debut as a director is an amusing examination of what we tell ourselves to be true while being closely examined by others who may (or may not) know better, making Melvin Goes to Dinner a waspish if somewhat diffident look at social mores that feels a little forced in places, but is well acted by its cast.

BlacKkKlansman (2018) / D: Spike Lee / 135m

Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Jasper Pããkkönen, Ryan Eggold, Paul Walter Houser, Ashlie Atkinson, Michael Buscemi, Robert John Burke, Frederick Weller, Corey Hawkins, Harry Belafonte, Alec Baldwin

Rating: 9/10 – the true story of how, in the early Seventies, the Colorado Springs Police Department’s first black officer, Ron Stallworth (Washington), infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan with the aid of a fellow, Jewish officer, Flip Zimmerman (Driver); a return to form for Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman is entertaining and frightening in equal measure for the way it deals with contentious issues surrounding politics and racism that are as entrenched today as they were back in the Seventies, and for the deft way in which Lee allows the humour to filter through without negating the seriousness of the issues he’s examining.

Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary (2017) / D: John Campopiano, Justin White / 97m

With: Mary Lambert, Dale Midkiff, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist, Peter Stein, Elliot Goldenthal, Miko Hughes, Susan Blommaert, Heather Langenkamp

Rating: 6/10 – a look at the making of Pet Sematary (1989), with interviews and recollections from the cast and crew, and an assessment of the movie’s impact and legacy in the years that have followed; coming across very much like a labour of love for its directors, Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary features a wealth of details about the making of the movie, some of which is fascinating, and some of which is less so, making this a mixed bag in terms of content, but if you’re a fan of Pet Sematary, this will be a must-see, and should offer up behind-the-scenes information that hasn’t been seen or heard before.

Lake Placid: Legacy (2018) / D: Darrell Roodt / 93m

Cast: Katherine Barrell, Tim Rozon, Sai Bennett, Luke Newton, Craig Stein, Joe Pantoliano, Alisha Bailey

Rating: 3/10 – a group of eco-warriors discover a remote island that’s not on any maps, and find a genetically altered apex predator that soon begins whittling down their numbers; the sixth entry in the franchise, Lake Placid: Legacy ignores the previous four movies and acts – without explanation – as a direct sequel to the original, though that doesn’t make it any less abysmal, and it’s easily the worst in the series, something it achieves thanks to a dreadful script, Roodt’s absentee direction, the less than stellar efforts of the cast, and just by being greenlit in the first place.

Killing Gunther (2017) / D: Taran Killam / 93m

Cast: Taran Killam, Bobby Moynihan, Hannah Simone, Cobie Smulders, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Allison Tolman, Paul Brittain, Aaron Yoo, Ryan Gaul, Amir Talai, Peter Kelamis

Rating: 4/10 – an assassin, Blake (Killam), hires a team of other assassins to help him track down and eliminate Gunther (Schwarzenegger), the world’s most feared, and successful, hitman; ostensibly a comedy, Killing Gunther is yet another ill-advised movie where the script – and the cast – try way too hard to make absurdist behaviour funny all by itself, and where the tone is as wayward as the narrative, something that makes the movie an uneven watch and less than successful in its attempts to entertain – and the less said about Schwarzenegger’s performance the better.

Overboard (2018) / D: Rob Greenberg / 112m

Cast: Eugenio Derbez, Anna Faris, Eva Longoria, John Hannah, Swoosie Kurtz, Mel Rodriguez, Josh Segarra, Hannah Nordberg, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Payton Lapinski, Fernando Luján, Cecilia Suárez, Mariana Treviño

Rating: 6/10 – when a rich, arrogant, multi-millionaire playboy (Derbez) falls overboard from his yacht and loses his memory, a struggling single mother (Faris) that he’s treated badly sees an opportunity to exploit his misfortune for her own personal gain; a gender-swap remake of the 1987 original, Overboard is pleasant enough, with well judged performances from Derbez and Faris, but it plays out in expected fashion, with only occasional moments that stand out, and never really tries to do anything that might make viewers think of it as anything more than an acceptable remake doing its best to keep audiences just interested enough to stay until the end.

El club de los buenos infieles (2017) / D: Lluís Segura / 84m

Cast: Raúl Fernández de Pablo, Fele Martínez, Juanma Cifuentes, Hovik Keuchkerian, Albert Ribalta, Jordi Vilches, Adrián Lastra

Rating: 7/10 – four friends, all married but experiencing a loss of desire for their wives, decide to start a club for men with similar problems, and in the hope that by “seeing” other women, it will rekindle their desire; based on a true story, El club de los buenos infieles starts off strongly as the men explain their feelings, but soon the ridiculous nature of their solution leads to all sorts of uncomfortable moments and situations that stretch the credibility of the material, leaving the principal cast’s performances to keep things engaging, along with Segura’s confident direction (which helps overcome much of the script’s deficiencies), and a couple of very funny set-pieces that are worth a look all by themselves.

Destination Wedding (2018) / D: Victor Lewin / 87m

Cast: Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves

Rating: 5/10 – two misanthropes (Ryder, Reeves) invited to the same wedding (he’s the groom’s brother, she’s the groom’s ex), find they have much more in common than expected, including an attraction to each other; the kind of movie that has its characters spout pseudo-intellectual nonsense at every opportunity in an effort to make them sound wise and/or studiously profound, Destination Wedding could have been much funnier than it thinks it is, and wastes the talents of both Ryder and Reeves (yes, even Reeves) as it leaves no turn unstoned in its efforts to be a romantic comedy that isn’t in the least bit romantic, or comic.

The Resurrection of Gavin Stone (2016) / D: Dallas Jenkins / 92m

Cast: Brett Dalton, Anjelah Johnson-Reyes, Neil Flynn, D.B. Sweeney, Shawn Michaels, Patrick Gagnon, Tim Frank, Tara Rios

Rating: 6/10 – a former teen TV star whose adult acting career isn’t going as well as he’d hoped, finds himself doing community service at his hometown church, and discovering that having a lack of religious faith is the least of his problems; a bright and breezy romantic comedy, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone wears its Christian beliefs on its sleeve, while doing absolutely nothing that you wouldn’t expect it to, thanks to likable performances from Dalton and Johnson-Reyes, a solid if predictable script, and workmanlike direction that never lets the material stray from its formulaic constraints, though if truth be told, on this occasion that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The Predator (2018) / D: Shane Black / 107m

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Sterling K. Brown, Olivia Munn, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey, Yvonne Strahovski

Rating: 5/10 – a rag-tag band of PTSD sufferers and an army sniper (Holbrook) find themselves taking on a couple of Predators while a secret arm of the US government atempts to exploit their presence on Earth; a movie that could and should have been so much better (soooo much better), The Predator is unnecessarily convoluted and stupid at the same time, and despite Black’s best efforts, remains the kind of sequel that everyone has high hopes for, only to see them drain away with every dumb moment that the script can squeeze in, and every tortuous twist of logic that can be forced onto the narrative, all of which leaves everyone hoping and praying that this is the end of the line.

The Astounding She-Monster (1957) / D: Ronald V. Ashcroft / 62m

aka Mysterious Invader

Cast: Robert Clarke, Kenne Duncan, Marilyn Harvey, Jeanne Tatum, Shirley Kilpatrick, Ewing Miles Brown

Rating: 3/10 – kidnappers take their hostage up into the mountains, unaware that a space ship has crash landed nearby, and the sole occupant (Kilpatrick) is more than capable of defending itself; not a cult classic, and not a movie to look back fondly on for any low-budget virtues it may have (it doesn’t), The Astounding She-Monster is a creature feature without a creature, a crime drama with an annoying voice over, a sci-fi horror with minimal elements of both, and a movie with far too many scenes where the cast run through the same stretch of woods trying to get away from an alien whose only speed is ultra-ultra-slow.

Manhunt (2017)

23 Sunday Sep 2018

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Action, Crime, Drama, Ji-won Ha, John Woo, Lawyer, Masaharu Fukuyama, Murder, Osaka, Qi Wei, Review, Tenjin, Thriller, Zhang Hanyu

Original title: Zhui bu

D: John Woo / 109m

Cast: Zhang Hanyu, Masaharu Fukuyama, Qi Wei, Ji-won Ha, Jun Kunimura, Angeles Woo, Nanami Sakuraba, Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, Tao Okamoto, Kuniharu Tokunaga

Du Qiu (Zhang) is a Chinese lawyer whose work for Tenjin Pharmaceuticals in Osaka has made him successful and widely admired. At a party to celebrate Tenjin’s intention to launch a new drug on the market, Du is approached by a young woman, Mayumi (Qi), who wants to discuss a trial he won on Tenjin’s behalf three years before. They spend some time together before Du goes home. When he wakes the next morning, it’s to find the dead body of a woman in bed beside him. He calls the police, and Inspector Asano (Tokunaga) arrives. With evidence pointing to Du being the killer, Asano arrests him, but as they leave his apartment building, Asano makes it look as if Du has killed another officer while escaping. On the run, Du tries to stay one step ahead of the police, while trying to find out who’s framed him. Another detective, Inspector Yamura (Fukuyama), is also assigned to the case, and the more he investigates, the more he too begins to believe that Du was framed…

Made as a tribute to the late Ken Takakura, who starred in the 1976 original version, Kimi yo Fundo no Kawa o Watare (itself adapted from the novel by Juko Nishimura), Manhunt sees action auteur John Woo return to the style of movie making that made him famous back in the late Eighties and early Nineties. With its typically kinetic action sequences, and blistering bursts of gunfire, the movie acts like a compendium of Woo’s greatest hits as a director, with nods to Hard Boiled (1992), A Better Tomorrow (1986), and The Killer (1989) – which Woo will be remaking soon in an English language version. There’s plenty of slo-mo gunfire, explosions, guns being fired while people spin in mid-air, glass shattering at every turn, extended bouts of chaos, vehicular destruction (on land, on water, and in houses), and bone crunching fight scenes. There’s also the usual themes around identity, trust, honour, and respect; romantic elements that grow as the movie progresses; several moments of otherwise silly and unnecessary humour; and, of course, doves. For fans of the director who has given us at least five bona fide action classics, but whose more recent output hasn’t brought him the attention he deserves (though Red Cliff (2008-09) is superb), this is like welcoming back an old friend who’s been away too long.

That said, the storyline isn’t exactly original, and some of the newer material struggles for relevance (Tenjin doesn’t exist in the original version, and its making a weaponised designer drug strains credulity at every turn). It does all tie together, though the presence of Ha and Woo as assassins, and orphaned sisters to boot, feels like one sub-plot too many, while the ease with which Du gets around suggests a background as a spy rather than a lawyer. It’s all very melodramatic and giddily over the top, but with Woo the movie is also in safe hands. No matter how absurd it gets, Woo is there to bolster things with another expertly choreographed and executed action sequence, with more blood squibs going off than you can count in any one scene. Away from Woo’s trademark balletic violence, the movie is breathtakingly shot by DoP Takuta Ishizaka, and Yohei Taneda’s impressive production design provides the perfect backdrop for all the mayhem. If there’s one area where the movie feels like it’s been let down, it’s in the performances, but this isn’t because the cast are uniformly bad – they’re not – it’s simply because their characters aren’t given enough room to develop.

Rating: 7/10 – with its turgid narrative and unremarkable characters, Manhunt is disappointing on a basic movie making level, but with Woo in the director’s chair, it’s a also a movie that often transcends those issues and makes you forget about them; not, overall, one of Woo’s absolute best, but successful enough to remind audiences that he still knows what he’s doing when it comes to action.

Mile 22 (2018)

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Espionage, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Lauren Cohan, Mark Wahlberg, Overwatch, Peter Berg, Review, South-East Asia, Thriller

D: Peter Berg / 94m

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey, Carlo Alban, Terry Kinney, Emily Skeggs

If you’re thinking of going to see Mile 22 at your local cinema, please bear in mind the following:

Option 1: Seeing the movie (not recommended).

Option 2: Seeing something else.

Option 3: Staying at home and seeing something else.

Listing the ways in which Mile 22 is bad is waaaay too easy, so here’s a challenge: if you do go and see it, see how many ways you can come up with – you’ll run out of fingers and toes long before the end.

Rating: 3/10 – an appalling waste of time and money and effort, Mile 22 is so shallow and conceited it actually thinks it’s making a statement, though if you can work out what that statement is, you’re better than Berg and screenwriter Lea Carpenter, who clearly don’t have a clue between them; Wahlberg’s performance is excruciating (and probably his worst yet), while once again, the action/fight scenes have been so badly stitched together in the editing suite as to make no visual sense whatsoever, and the whole thing is as convincing as the brush strip stuck to Malkovich’s head.

Summer of 84 (2018)

19 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Anouk Whissell, Cape May Slayer, Drama, François Simard, Graham Verchere, Missing children, Mystery, Review, Rich Sommer, Serial killer, Thriller, Yoann-Karl Whissell

D: François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell / 105m

Cast: Graham Verchere, Judah Lewis, Caleb Emery, Cory Gruter-Andrew, Tiera Skovbye, Rich Sommer, Jason Gray-Stanford, Shauna Johannesen

For fifteen year old Davey Armstrong (Verchere), life is full of mysteries, conspiracies and unexplained phenomena. Living in the small town of Cape May, not much really happens until the police announce that a serial killer has made his presence known in the area by (anonymously) admitting to being responsible for a number of children having gone missing over the past decade. When Davey sees a teenage boy in the home of his neighbour, police officer Wayne Mackey (Sommer), and that same boy is later reported as missing, Davey enlists the help of his best friends – Eats (Lewis), Woody (Emery), and Curtis (Gruter-Andrew) – in proving that Mackey is the so-called Cape May Slayer. They set about gathering evidence, but most of it is circumstantial, until Davey finds the missing boy’s bloodstained sweater in Mackey’s garden shed. He presents his “evidence” to his parents who are horrified by the boys’ behaviour, and make the four apologise to Mackey for what they believe is unwarranted harrassment. Mackey is understanding of what they’ve done, and even though a suspect is arrested soon after, Davey still can’t shake the idea that Mackey is really the Cape May Slayer…

A mystery thriller where the main mystery is why it was set in 1984 in the first place, Summer of 84 takes a generic, well established storyline and makes it very obvious whether or not Mackey is the killer – and it does so very early on. With the material played out slowly, if not entirely assuredly, the movie takes a while to get into its stride, but it’s aided by good performances from its young cast – even if they’re playing established stereotypes – and a deliberately creepy turn from Sommer as Mackey. What hinders the movie most is the sense of familiarity that it engenders, from that first sighting by Davey of a boy in Mackey’s house, to the policeman’s highly suspicious purchasing of digging tools and hundreds of pounds of dirt. These are tried and tested (and trusted) story developments, seen dozens if not hundreds of times before, and it’s this stretch of the movie that takes too long to play out. We already know if Mackey is the killer or not, so having to go through said story developments seems redundant, even though it’s expected.

Thankfully, Leslie and Smith have a surprise up their combined sleeves, and it comes in the form of the movie’s final twenty minutes, where the material takes a sharp left (or wrong) turn into full-on horror territory, and where the fate of Davey and his friends is thrown into real doubt. This is the point where the movie drops out of generic storytelling mode, and into something completely unexpected. It’s a shame that the rest of the movie couldn’t have been as bold in its approach, but it does mean that the movie ends in a way that compensates for much of what’s gone before. Making their second feature together, the trio of Simard and the Whissell siblings display a fondness for the period, but aside from a handful of clumsy and/or forced references, and the generic nature of the material, this could have been presented as modern day and it wouldn’t have made any difference. There’s an unlikely sub-plot involving Davey and an older ex-babysitter, Nikki (Skovbye), that aims to provide depth but lacks credibility, while some of the motivations of Davey and his friends rely more on the needs of the script than any believable tendencies. There’s a decent enough story in here somewhere, and it’s entertaining for the most part, but that final twenty minutes aside, it won’t linger in the memory.

Rating: 6/10 – good performances, and a Tangerine Dream-style soundtrack by Le Matos, help prop up a less than compelling storyline, leaving Summer of 84 feeling hard done by by its own creators; watchable, certainly, but one to approach with reservations, or with an eye to holding out for better things towards the end.

Yardie (2018)

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Aml Ameen, Drama, Drugs, Idris Elba, Jamaica, Literary adaptation, London, Review, Shantol Jackson, Stephen Graham, The Eighties, Thriller

D: Idris Elba / 101m

Cast: Aml Ameen, Shantol Jackson, Stephen Graham, Fraser James, Sheldon Shepherd, Everaldo Creary, Calvin Demba, Naomi Ackie

As a child in Jamaica, Dennis Campbell aka “D” (Ameen), saw his father shot and killed by another child, Clancy, who was never apprehended. His father was trying to broker peace between two rival gangsters, and in the wake of his father’s death, Dennis was taken under the wing of one of them, King Fox (Shepherd). Ten years later, Dennis works for King Fox, but his quick temper keeps getting him into trouble. To keep him from getting into any further trouble, Fox sends Dennis to London, to deliver a package to a local associate of Fox’s called Rico (Graham). But Dennis isn’t impressed by Rico’s mock-Jamaican phrasing and attitude, and decides to keep the package (which contains cocaine) for himself and find another distributor. He’s able to reconnect with his wife, Yvonne (Jackson), and young daughter, and he also becomes involved with a group of friends who want to break into the world of sound system competitions and become DJs. It’s when he discovers that Clancy is now working for Rico that Dennis’s actions begin to cause real problems for him, and for those around him…

Victor Headley’s debut novel, from which this is adapted, was a publishing sensation when it was first released in 1992, and it paved the way for a wave of new black fiction that continues today. Now regarded as something of a “cult” novel, Headley’s debut has been given the big screen treatment, and as perhaps could have been expected, Idris Elba’s debut feature treats the source material with obvious respect and admiration. Beginning in the Seventies in Jamaica, the screenplay by Brock Norman Brock and Martin Stellman shows a time in Dennis’s life when his father was a true source of optimism and inspiration in the face of gang warfare. His father’s death acts as a trigger for the pessimism and violent expression that Dennis displays as a young man, and the script, plus Elba’s confident direction, rightly keeps Dennis away from the path of redemption. Instead, he follows his own vengeful path, even when it means harm being caused to others. The script shows how much his anger has consumed him, and despite the assurances he gives Yvonne of changing things around and leading a better life, these are just empty words that not even he believes.

With such an anti-hero as a lead character, Yardie has something of a distance about it, thanks to Dennis being someone we wouldn’t want to know in real life, and also because he’s choosing a criminal lifestyle when he could do so much more – and has the opportunity to do so. Elba wisely exploits those moments of rare self-reflection that bring Dennis up short, but dramatically they’re not as convincing as they should be as Dennis soon returns to his criminal activities or thirst for revenge. Despite a very good performance by Ameen, Dennis remains a character on too rigid a journey to make him sympathetic, and unfortunately none of the supporting characters are fleshed out enough to make a difference. What we’re left with is a movie that’s well constructed by Elba and his cast and crew, but which fails to connect with its audience on an emotional level. So much of the material, and the narrative, plays out in a connect the dots fashion, leaving little room for spontaneity or surprises, that the movie often feels rote. Perhaps Elba and co have been too respectful and admiring of Headley’s novel, as this adaptation lacks the consistent passion and energy needed to make it work as well as it should.

Rating: 7/10 – though London in the Eighties is recreated with considerable skill, and given vibrant expression by DoP John Conroy (along with recurring visual motifs aplenty), Yardie can’t overcome the lack of attention given to the material and how to make it more gripping; a terrific soundtrack (naturally) adds to the sense of time and place, and though it’s not entirely successful, Elba shows enough talent behind the camera that if he were to give up his day job, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

Oh! the Horror! – The Nun (2018) and Strange Nature (2018)

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

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Corin Hardy, Deformed frogs, Demián Bichir, Drama, Horror, Jim Ojala, Lisa Sheridan, Minnesota, Mutations, Review, Romania, Series, Taissa Farmiga, Thriller

The Nun (2018) / D: Corin Hardy / 96m

Cast: Demián Bichir, Taissa Farmiga, Jonas Bloquet, Bonnie Aarons, Charlotte Hope, Ingrid Bisu, Sandra Teles

The fifth entry in the mega-successful Conjuring series, The Nun sees the franchise try to take a previously minor character and expand on them to make a stand-alone movie that fits in with the established mythos, while also providing the requisite scares and universe building that we’ve come to expect. But this is a horrible mis-step, a movie that makes absolutely no sense from beginning to end, but which does make you wonder if all this universe building is being as carefully planned and worked out in advance as it should be. On this evidence, the answer has to be a resounding No, because The Nun is truly terrible, with the slackest plotting seen so far, characters who barely register as recognisable human beings, a setting that seems arbitrary rather than necessary, a number of poorly executed paranormal effects sequences that are both narratively redundant and tiresome, and an overall vibe that says, “we did this because we could, not because we should”. And that’s without dialogue of the calibre of, “I’m afraid there is something very wrong with this place.”

In many ways, James Wan and co should be congratulated for the success they’ve had in creating the Conjuring universe, but this should be the point where they stop and take stock of where they’re taking the franchise, and why. The Nun is like the movie that quality control forgot. Watching it is akin to seeing a cinematic car crash happening in slow motion, but instead of bodies in the road it’s the makers’ reputations. Hardy, making his second feature after The Hallow (2015), appears to have been a director for hire only on this occasion, as he brings none of the visual flourishes he brought to that first feature, and his direction is largely anonymous. The cast don’t have a chance thanks to the banal nature of regular scribe Gary Dauberman’s screenplay, and Bichir in particular looks uncomfortable and/or wishing he’d taken another gig altogether. The set pieces rely on roving camera work to hide the so-called scares (which are astonishingly predictable), but worst of all, the title character remains a bystander in her own movie, brought out occasionally for a cheap jolt, and at the end for what amounts to a showdown. Anyone expecting to learn more about Valak and his origins (and why a nun) will be looking in the wrong place, as this is so badly constructed as to be completely nun-sensical.

Rating: 3/10 – The Nun‘s box office performance – $133 million so far – proves that you can fool a lot of the people (initially), but this is far from being a good movie, or one that deserves to do so well; a chore to sit through and woeful on so many levels – and just having a character called Frenchie is bad enough – this is movie making without thinking or conviction.

Strange Nature (2018) / D: Jim Ojala / 99m

Cast: Lisa Sheridan, Jonah Beres, Bruce Bohne, Faust Checho, Stephen Tobolowsky, John Hennigan, Carlos Alazraqui, Justen Overlander, David Mattey, Chalet Lizette Brannan, Angela Duffy, Tiffany Shepis

In Strange Nature, the world we’re introduced to is one that we can more easily recognise than in The Nun, but it’s not without its own unexplained phenomena. Based on a mystery that dates back to the mid-Nineties, when deformed frogs began appearing in ponds throughout Minnesota, the movie takes this as a jumping off point (excuse the pun) for a tale of mutations that begin with said frogs and which then makes its way up through the biological food chain until it starts to affect humans. Working with a limited budget, first-time feature writer/director Ojala has created a horror movie that trades on established genre tropes but which does so while doing its best to focus on a small town community that finds itself under attack from both outside and within. Ojala uses the character of Kim (Sheridan) as our guide to the ensuing developments, as stories of people going missing slowly become forgotten as the potential reason for their disappearances becomes more obvious. As Kim delves deeper into the mystery of the deformed frogs, various culprits – agricultural fertilisers, waterborne parasites, nature gone haywire – are explored, but as with real life (where the problem has since spread to India and China), the movie doesn’t settle for one easy explanation over the rest.

The movie wears its horror credentials on its sleeve, and peppers the narrative with various examples of body horror (a deformed puppy, skin sloughing away from flesh), but the effectiveness of these scenes is hampered by the budget, and though Ojala opts for practical, in-camera effects wherever possible, many of them betray the lack of funds available (editor David Mattey does what he can, but in trying to obscure the lacklustre effects he actually draws attention to them even more). Away from the more overt horror elements, Ojala does a good job of developing the sense of a small town whose initial scepticism soon gives way to fear and paranoia, and adds a layer of tragedy when one character’s pregnancy doesn’t end in the blessed event she was expecting. The performances are adequate, with Tobolowsky suitably oily as the town mayor, and the Duluth, Minnesota locations add a degree of verisimilitude that works well as a backdrop for the action. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Strange Nature, and it’s certainly not as bad as some other horror movies out there (see above), but it does suffer from a surfeit of ideas that it doesn’t have the wherewithal to explore fully, and refreshingly, keeps any unnecessary melodramatics to a minimum.

Rating: 6/10 – though its narrative arc is entirely predictable, and some of the characters remain stereotypes throughout, Strange Nature works exceedingly well as a cautionary tale, and is well worth a look; with a sense of ambition often missing from low budget horror movies, Ojala’s feature debut unfolds confidently, and more importantly, with a purpose that is often missing from some of its bigger budgeted brethren.

Hyena (2014)

10 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Corruption, Crime, Drama, Drugs, Elisa Lasowski, Gerard Johnson, Peter Ferdinando, Review, Richard Dormer, Stephen Graham, Thriller

D: Gerard Johnson / 112m

Cast: Peter Ferdinando, Richard Dormer, Neil Maskell, Elisa Lasowski, MyAnna Buring, Stephen Graham, Tony Pitts, Gordon Brown, Orli Shuka, Gjevat Kelmendi

For Detective Sergeant Michael Logan (Ferdinando), being an undercover police officer means striking deals with European drug syndicates, and along with his fellow task force colleagues, Martin (Maskell), Keith (Pitts), and Chris (Brown), receiving a cut for looking the other way. Logan is negotiating one such deal when his Turkish contact is murdered by Albanian gangsters the Kabashi brothers (Shuka, Kelmendi). With the brothers looking to expand their power base, Logan is forced to begin dealing with them instead. As he begins to salvage his original deal (which he has invested £100,000 into), Logan finds himself transferred to the vice squad, and onto an operation spearheaded by an old rival of his, Detective Inspector David Knight (Graham). The focus of the operation is the Kabashi brothers, and Logan finds himself walking a fine line between keeping his deal going and keeping it quiet from Knight. He also has Detective Inspector Nick Taylor (Dormer) from the Professional Standards department threatening to expose his crooked dealings. Beset from all sides, Logan finds things spiralling out of his control, and each new desperate attempt to maintain his position sees things get increasingly worse…

A dark, gritty, violent crime thriller, Hyena is a movie that takes the viewer on a trip through a sordid criminal underworld as experienced by its lead character, anti-hero Michael Logan, and in the process, it paints a very dark portrait indeed of police corruption and casual immorality. This is a bleak movie throughout, with plenty of violence (some of which is uncomfortable to watch), plenty of drug taking (Logan gets through a prodigious amount of cocaine), plenty of corrupt behaviour (mostly from the police, the villains aren’t quite so duplicitous), and plenty of amorality (courtesy of just about everyone except Logan’s friend, Lisa (Buring), and his boss on the task force). The message from writer/director Johnson is clear: this is a world you don’t want to be a part of. But at the same time, he makes it just fascinating enough for the viewer to become embroiled in Logan’s story and just how bad it can get. Johnson doesn’t disappoint, with even the one good thing that Logan does – rescuing a woman, Ariana (Lasowski), from the brothers’ clutches – inevitably causing him more trouble than he bargained for. How doomed, or damned, must he be that an actual good deed so quickly backfires on him?

The answer lies in Logan’s initially diffident, unconcerned nature. Even when he sees his Turkish contact killed and dismembered (a recurring violent motif), Logan’s shock soon wears off, and he’s back quickly to making deals and taking charge. It’s when he meets Ariana that his self-serving attitude begins to change. But Johnson is clever enough to obscure Logan’s motives for doing so. Is it because he has feelings for her, feelings he finds it hard to articulate? Or is it because, deep down, he still has a sense of right and wrong, however compromised? Thanks to the script’s ambiguity and a potent performance from Ferdinando, Logan’s motives remain a mystery even until the end. You could argue that there is good in him, but it’s unlikely Logan would agree with you. The character makes for a perfect guide into a world where notions of right and wrong are interchangeable, and where subterfuge exposes the flaws in those characters who need to lie in order to make personal connections. Johnson explores the tragedy of what this means for Logan as an individual, and in a wider sense as a police officer who’s strayed so far from the right path it’s like a distant memory.

Rating: 8/10 – an uncompromising look at personal, professional, institutional, and emotional betrayal and corruption, Hyena has a substantial streak of nihilism running through it, one that makes it relentless in its depiction of the pitiless world Logan inhabits; with first-rate performances from all concerned, and a tremendously fetid atmosphere that’s exploited to the full by Benjamin Kracun’s restless, probing cinematography, Johnson’s powerful, oppressive thriller is a tough watch but more than worth it.

Searching (2018)

09 Sunday Sep 2018

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Aneesh Chaganty, Debra Messing, Drama, FaceTime, Internet, John Cho, Missing daughter, Mystery, Review, Thriller, YouCast

D: Aneesh Chaganty / 102m

Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, Joseph Lee, Sara Sohn, Briana McLean, Erica Jenkins, Steven Michael Eich

It’s been two years since David Kim (Cho) and his daughter, Margot (La), lost their wife and mother respectively to cancer. In those two years the pair have grown distant, with both waiting for the other to talk about what happened. Instead, David focuses on Margot’s education (she has a gift for playing the piano), while Margot tries to focus on being a normal teenager. One night, they speak via FaceTime while Margot is at a study group, and everything seems fine. Later that night, she tries to call David but he’s asleep and misses her calls. The next day, she doesn’t respond when he tries to call her back. Expecting her to be at a piano lesson after school David calls the tutor, only to learn that Margot cancelled her lessons six months before. When he finds himself unable to track her down, David calls the police and reports Margot as missing. The detective assigned to the case, Rosemary Vick (Messing) asks David to look into Margot’s background, her school life and her friends. But when he does he discovers things about his daughter that don’t make any sense, and which only make her disappearance that much more inexplicable…

Cleverly constructed from the start until the end, Searching is a mystery thriller that utilises modern technology in such a way that the movie feels – for much of its running time at least – like it hasn’t been filmed at all. Using a variety of virtual photography tricks and sleights of hand, we see the action unfold within the foreground of computer screens and other electronic devices, and against a backdrop of computer apps. Sometimes there’s so much going on on the screen that it’s hard to take it all in, but it’s all so cleverly assembled and handled that, much like reading subtitles, the eye and the brain soon compensate and pick out what’s relevant and what isn’t. David is our guide, and in Cho’s more than capable hands, we follow him willingly as he begins to piece together the various clues that go to make up the details of Margot’s disappearance. Whether he’s using FaceTime or Google or accessing photos, or trawling through Margot’s vlogs on YouCast, David takes us on a journey that is fascinating and akin to exploring a foreign country.

With the movie’s visuals broadening to include news footage (amongst others), and remaining compelling until the end, it’s a shame then that it’s all in service to a screenplay by director Chaganty and Sev Ohanian that can’t sustain the initial promise of its first hour. In amongst all the internet pages and online research that David carries out, and amid all the relevant information that Margot leaves behind (unknowingly), the script throws in a number of massively signposted clues that will have keen-eyed and -eared viewers shaking their heads in disbelief at how obvious the solution is. Up until the hour mark, Chaganty has kept the mystery elements front and centre and each twist and turn of the narrative has been smartly handled, but the need to start revealing things and head into the finishing stretch sees the movie lose momentum and its carefully assembled credibility. By the end, and a confession that sounds like the very definition of contrived, the movie has lost its way completely, and not even Cho, who is on superb form, can bring it back from the abyss it seems so set on throwing itself into. Make no mistake, this is a tense, visually arresting movie, but also one that doesn’t have a narrative that remains consistent enough throughout to match the quality of its presentation.

Rating: 7/10 – compelling and persuasive (for that first hour), Searching is a visual breath of fresh air, effectively handled and confidently displayed; a shame then that more attention couldn’t have been applied to the script, which lets down the visuals and which also hinders a terrific performance from Cho.

10 Reasons to Remember Burt Reynolds (1936-2018)

07 Friday Sep 2018

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Action, Actor, Career, Comedy, Deliverance (1972), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Thriller

Burt Reynolds (11 February 1936 – 6 September 2018)

If it hadn’t been for a series of injuries that ended his college football career, we might never have heard of Burt Reynolds. Faced with rethinking his future, Reynolds at first opted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a police officer. But his father, with tremendous foresight, persuaded him to finish college (albeit with the intention of becoming a parole officer afterwards). There, Reynolds impressed his English teacher so much that he was given the lead role in a production of Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound (for which he won a state drama award). A career in the theatre followed on from this, and through the Fifties Reynolds honed his craft on the stage before transferring to television at the end of the decade.

Reynolds made his movie debut in Angel Baby (1961), but it would be a further decade before he found his breakout role as Lewis Medlock in John Boorman’s survivalist thriller Deliverance (1972). Finally given a role that he could make something of, Reynolds impressed critics and audiences alike, and thanks to a number of canny career choices that saw him take the action comedy genre to new box office heights. Always perceived as an easy-going, likeable actor, Reynolds channelled this perception into an on-screen good ole boy character that saw him become a major star across a succession of movies such as White Lightning (1973) and Smokey and the Bandit (1977). In the Eighties he segued from action comedies to action thrillers, but his star began to wane and his success at the box office was no longer guaranteed. Reynolds kept working steadily though, and returned to television at the start of the Nineties, particularly in the series, Evening Shade (1990-94).

Reynolds enjoyed something of a career resurgence with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), and his performance gained him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, which must have felt good after his previous two movies, Meet Wally Sparks and Bean (both 1997) (and even though he hated the movie itself). But though he continued to appear on both the big and the small screen, often it was in supporting or guest roles, with an occasional lead role thrown in. Health issues plagued him throughout his later years, and by the time he gave what might be called a valedictory performance, in Adam Rifkin’s The Last Movie Star (2017), his obvious frailty made it seem unlikely he would appear in any more lead roles. That said, he was due to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but he passed away before he could begin shooting his scenes.

Reynolds was once asked to play James Bond but he wisely turned it down, saying an American couldn’t play Bond; it wouldn’t be right. You could argue that he was an actor of limited range, but a more apt description would be that he was a movie star for nearly two decades, and an actor on either side of that period. And with a movie career that spanned fifty-seven years, that makes him an actor first and foremost – and one who will be sorely missed.

1 – Sam Whiskey (1969)

2 – Deliverance (1972)

3 – The Longest Yard (1974)

4 – Nickelodeon (1976)

5 – Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

6 – Hooper (1978)

7 – Sharky’s Machine (1981)

8 – City Heat (1984)

9 – Breaking In (1989)

10 – Boogie Nights (1997)

American Animals (2018)

06 Thursday Sep 2018

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Art heist, Barry Keoghan, Bart Layton, Blake Jenner, Drama, Evan Peters, Jared Abrahamson, Lexington, Rare books, Review, Thriller, True story

D: Bart Layton / 117m

Cast: Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner, Jared Abrahamson, Ann Dowd, Udo Kier, Gary Basaraba, Wayne Duvall, Spencer Reinhard, Warren Lipka, Eric Borsuk, Chas Allen, Betty Jean Gooch

In 2003, in Lexington, Kentucky, an art student by the name of Spencer Reinhard (Keoghan), feeling that his life has no meaning, looks for something exciting to happen to him. A visit to the Transylvania University library’s rare book room gives Spencer the idea to steal several of those rare books, including Audubon’s The Birds of America. Enlisting the help of another student, Warren Lipka (Peters), the pair begin to plan how to steal the books. When they learn that the books they’re targeting could bring them as much as $12 million, they decide they must go ahead with their plan. However, they soon realise that carrying out the theft by themselves is impractical, and they enlist the help of fellow students Erik Borsuk (Abrahamson) and Chas Allen (Jenner). Their first attempt, with all four disguised as elderly men, is abandoned when they realise there are too many other people in the rare books room. Warren quickly arranges a private visit for the next day, and despite the reservations of the others, the robbery goes ahead…

With a storyline that’s straight out of the “so crazy it must be true” box of cinematic adaptations, American Animals – a reference to animals inhabiting Kentucky caves from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, one of the targeted books – is a movie that throws a curveball at the audience almost from the beginning, when we meet the real Spencer Reinhard and the real Warren Lipka and they start to comment on the action as it unfolds. It’s a clever way of approaching the material, but what’s even more clever is the way in which their own memories of what happened don’t always tally. Whenever a movie is based on a true story, there’s always that doubt in the viewer’s mind: did it really happen like this? Here, we get as close as possible – probably – and the essential details are there, but it’s these sometimes hazy recollections that make everything seem more realistic, rather than just being Layton’s interpretation. If it all added up, it would be too neat. So, rather than being an odd framing device, or a matter of dramatic contrivance, the movie benefits greatly from being a mix of documentary and drama.

The actual story itself is played out with a great deal of verve, with first class performances from Peters and Keoghan, and solid support from Jenner and Abrahmson, and as the librarian in charge of the rare books, the ever-reliable Dowd. It’s a tale that beggars belief, as well, as woven within the fabric of the robbery’s planning, are subtle hints that none of it will work out as they hope. Also, there are fantasy elements embedded in the narrative, where Spencer and Warren quote lines from the movies to illustrate the ease or difficulty of what they’re doing, as well as assigning each other names from the characters in Reservoir Dogs (1992) (and look how well that heist turned out). There’s a disconnect from reality that makes you wonder just how they could have believed they could have not only stolen the books but fenced them as well (and to a buyer (Kier) in Amsterdam). Layton lays it all out in clinical yet thrilling fashion, stepping up the tempo during the robbery itself and then highlighting the inevitable ways in which it all falls apart. But it’s the way in which Spencer et al reflect on what happened – and how, or why – that makes the movie so impressive, and which elevates this from being just another movie based on a true story.

Rating: 9/10 – absorbing, intelligent, gripping, and refreshingly character-driven, American Animals is a cautionary reminder about getting what you wish for, something Reinhard should have done before deciding that robbing a rare books collection was a way of adding excitement to his life; with an impressive screenplay by Layton, first rate cinematography from Ole Bratt Birkeland, and an immersive production design from Scott Dougan, this is heady stuff indeed, and one of this year’s best.

Happy Hunting (2017)

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

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Action, Bedford Flats, Desert, Drama, Joe Dietsch, Ken Lally, Louis Gibson, Manhunt, Martin Dingle Wall, Review, Thriller

D: Joe Dietsch, Louie Gibson / 91m

Cast: Martin Dingle Wall, Ken Lally, Kenny Wormald, Connor Williams, Gary Sturm, C.J. Baker, Jeremy Lawson, Michael Tipps, Liesel Hanson, Kenneth Billings, Frederick Lawrence, Sherry Leigh

Warren Novack (Wall) receives news that an ex-girlfriend of his has died in Mexico, and that he has a daughter by her. Intending to travel to Mexico to do right by his daughter, Warren first has to negotiate a meth deal with a local drug dealer, Bo Dawg (Lawson). But the deal goes wrong, and Bo Dawg and his associate wind up dead. Warren heads for Mexico with two of Bo Dawg’s other associates (Williams, Lawrence) on his trail. On the way, Warren stops at the small town of Bedford Flats, close to the border. There are notices announcing an annual hunting event, but Warren has a more pressing concern: his chronic alcoholism and the need to go cold turkey before meeting his daughter. Help appears in the form of Steve (Lally), a local who runs a sobriety meeting. When Warren finds out Bo Dawg’s associates are in town, he accepts an offer of dinner with Steve and his wife (Leigh). But their hospitality has an ulterior motive, and after being drugged, Warren wakes to find himself, Bo Dawg’s associates and one of the townspeople, the objects of the annual hunt…

A tough, uncompromising reworking of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Happy Hunting is an unashamedly brutal tale that puts its central character through the wringer time and time again while celebrating his impressive knack for survival. Warren comes with a minimal back story, but he has been in the Army (even though it didn’t work out), and he has a quick, intuitive mind that helps him problem solve being chased by the gun-toting hunters of Bedford Flats. With any movie that pits one person against a gang of would-be killers, it’s the ingenuity on display that counts, and the script, by co-writers/directors Dietsch and Gibson, is full of ingenious moments that keep the savagery and violence from being just that. It helps that Warren is given more motivation than usual to stay alive, and this, added to the clever solutions he comes up with, gives the movie a greater depth than usual. For every bloody injury and unforeseen setback, Dietsch and Gibson ensure Warren stays one (mangled) step ahead of his pursuers, and is able to turn the tables on them each time – even if it’s at a physical cost to himself (which is often).

Though the movie isn’t averse to showing the effects and consequences of the violence meted out – some of it is admirably hardcore – it’s shot through with a sardonic sense of humour that makes much of it easier to accept. There’s irony too in places (Warren encounters a group of Mexicans crossing into the US), and there’s a willingness to make the escalating bloodshed a little too extreme for comfort, but it’s all done with a calculated energy that serves the material well and which doesn’t allow it to become too outrageous or over the top. Wall is a terrific choice for Warren, his weather-beaten features and gruff manner perfectly suited to the needs of the character, while the largely unknown supporting cast add verisimilitude to the people of Bedford Flats. It’s all shot by Dietsch with an eye on the natural grandeur of the Californian desert locations, while he and Gibson edit the movie with a keen sense of how to maintain or increase the tension as required. Fans of this sort of thing will find much to enjoy, but even casual viewers should find this a rewarding, if occasonally harrowing experience – though in a good way.

Rating: 8/10 – harsh, gritty, and single-minded in its approach, Happy Hunting is an action thriller that doesn’t pull any punches, and which is unapologetic about doing so; with a terrific performance from Wall, and an ending that acts as a gut punch, this is strong, mature stuff that is gripping and expertly assembled.

Monthly Roundup – August 2018

31 Friday Aug 2018

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Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, Action, Adventure, Alicia Vikander, Alyson Walker, Animation, Antoine Fuqua, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Bird, Clay Kaytis, Clown, Comedy, Coralie Fargeat, Craig T. Nelson, Damien Leone, Dark Web, Denzel Washington, Dominic West, Doug Murphy, Drama, Drugs, Dylan O'Brien, Erdal Ceylan, Fergal Reilly, Frank Welker, Game adaptation, Gore, Grey Griffin, Holly Hunter, Horror, Incredibles 2, Jason Sudeikis, Jenna Kanell, Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, John Boyega, Josh Brolin, Josh Gad, Kaiju, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin Janssens, Mandie Fletcher, Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Mexican cartels, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Paranormal, Pedro Pascal, Revenge (2017), Roar Uthaug, Samantha Scaffidi, Sci-fi, Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost, Scott Eastwood, Selfie from Hell, Sequel, Sicario 2: Soldado, Stefano Sollima, Steven S. DeKnight, Terrifier, Terrorists, The Angry Birds Movie, The Death Cure, The Equalizer 2, The Flare, The Mystery Gang, Thriller, Tomb Raider, Tony Giroux, Violence, WCKD, Wes Ball

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016) / D: Mandie Fletcher / 91m

Cast: Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks, June Whitfield, Kathy Burke, Celia Imrie, Robert Webb, Lulu, Emma Bunton, Rebel Wilson, Barry Humphries, Wanda Ventham, Kate Moss

Rating: 3/10 – fashionistas Edina (Saunders) and Patsy (Lumley) flee to the south of France after thinking they’ve killed supermodel Kate Moss; making this yet another British TV comedy success story that goes badly, horribly wrong when transferred to the big screen, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is another reminder that humour needs context in which to work, and rehashing the same old jokes over and over is less about giving fans what they want and more about lazy screenwriting.

Revenge (2017) / D: Coralie Fargeat / 108m

Cast: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchéde

Rating: 7/10 – a married CEO (Janssens) takes his mistress (Lutz) along with him on a hunting weekend with two friends (Colombe, Bouchéde), but things go badly wrong, and all three men find themselves being hunted instead; a visceral and very, very bloody thriller, Revenge is relentlessly nihilistic, and with characters so broadly drawn they might as well be archetypes, but Fargeat makes good use of the desert landscapes, and Lutz is a resourceful and unapologetically violent heroine.

Incredibles 2 (2018) / D: Brad Bird / 118m

Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Huck Milner, Bob Odenkirk, Catherine Keener, Samuel L. Jackson, Brad Bird, Isabella Rossellini, Jonathan Banks, John Ratzenberger

Rating: 9/10 – when a successful businessman (Odenkirk) approaches the Parr family with a plan to have Supers allowed to use their super powers again, it proves to be good timing as a new super villain, the Screenslaver, makes himself known; following directly on from the original, Incredibles 2 retains the Sixties vibe, visual ingenuity, and genuine laughs from before, and continues to focus on the Parr family first and foremost, making this a hugely entertaining sequel – even if the villain (as in a lot of superhero movies) is the movie’s weakest link.

Sicario 2: Soldado (2018) / D: Stefano Sollima / 122m

Original title: Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner, Jeffrey Donovan, Catherine Keener, Manuel Garcia-Ruffo, Matthew Modine, Shea Whigham, Elijah Rodriguez

Rating: 7/10 – Federal agent Matt Graver (Brolin) is tasked with taking the fight to the Mexican drug cartels when evidence points to their helping terrorists get into the US; an odd sequel that goes off in an unexpected direction partway through (and which sets up what’s likely to be a banal third chapter), Sicario 2: Soldado is still head and shoulders above most action thrillers thanks to returning scribe Taylor Sheridan’s taut screenplay, Del Toro’s singular performance as the Sicario of the title, and a handful of well choreographed action scenes.

Terrifier (2017) / D: Damien Leone / 84m

Cast: Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, David Howard Thornton, Catherine Corcoran, Pooya Mohseni, Matt McAllister, Katie Maguire

Rating: 4/10 – one night, two young women (Kanell, Scaffidi) find themselves being pursued by a killer clown (Thornton) intent on murdering them and anyone they come into contact with – and as gruesomely as possible; old school practical gore effects are the order of the day here, with Terrifier using every trick in the book to make viewers wince or look away, while building a fair amount of tension, but it’s let down by the usual non-investment in credible characters, lacklustre direction, and making its villain indestructible.

Tomb Raider (2018) / D: Roar Uthaug / 118m

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Kristen Scott Thomas, Derek Jacobi, Hannah John-Kamen

Rating: 6/10 – Lara Croft (Vikander) sets off in search of her missing father (West) when she discovers a clue to where he went missing, while looking for an ancient artefact that could have devastating consequences for the modern world; another unnecessary reboot, Tomb Raider tries hard – sometimes too hard – to make its by-the-numbers storyline exciting, but too many perfunctory action sequences, allied to so-so performances and Uthaug’s corporate directing style makes this an unlikely contender as the opener for a whole new franchise.

Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) / D: Steven S. DeKnight / 111m

Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Callee Spaeny, Burn Gorman, Charlie Day, Tian Jing, Jin Zhang, Adria Arjona, Rinko Kikuchi

Rating: 5/10 – a new threat to Earth’s defences brings the Jaeger force back into operation, but they soon find themselves fighting against a foe whose plans don’t just involve the Jaeger force’s destruction, but the return of the Kaiju as well; there’s an element of dumb fun about Pacific Rim: Uprising that keeps things ticking over, but though DeKnight is able to provide a decent amount of energy to proceedings, the looming threat to Earth lacks the first movie’s effectiveness, and the Kaiju arrive too late to improve things.

The Death Cure (2018) / D: Wes Ball / 141m

aka Maze Runner: The Death Cure

Cast: Dylan O’Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Ki Hong Lee, Dexter Darden, Will Poulter, Jacob Lofland, Rosa Salazar, Giancarlo Esposito, Patricia Clarkson, Aidan Gillen, Barry Pepper, Walton Goggins

Rating: 8/10 – with their friends imprisoned in the Last City, a WCKD stronghold, Thomas (O’Brien) and his fellow Gladers must find a way of freeing them, and of finding a cure for the Flare, before it’s too late; the final part of the Maze Runner trilogy, The Death Cure ensures the series goes out with a bang, with high octane action sequences, a strong emotional undercurrent to proceedings, and though it’s a little bit too long, it does provide each of the main characters with a suitable and satisfactory conclusion to their story arcs, and doesn’t leave things hanging on the possibility of there being any further chapters.

The Angry Birds Movie (2016) / D: Clay Kaytis, Fergal Reilly / 97m

Original title: Angry Birds

Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader, Peter Dinklage, Sean Penn, Keegan Michael-Key, Kate McKinnon, Tony Hale, Hannibal Buress, Ike Barinholtz, Tituss Burgess

Rating: 6/10 – trouble comes to an island of (mostly) happy birds in the form of green pigs who aren’t quite as friendly as they seem, leaving the unlikely trio of Red (Sudeikis), Chuck (Gad), and Bomb (McBride) to save the day; a brightly animated game adaptation that will appeal to children far more than adults, The Angry Birds Movie is acceptable fun within the confines of its basic storyline, but the humour is inconsistent, the plot developments seem designed to pad things out instead of feeling organic, and the whole thing becomes less interesting as it goes on.

The Equalizer 2 (2018) / D: Antoine Fuqua / 121m

Cast: Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Orson Bean, Bill Pullman, Melissa Leo

Rating: 6/10 – ex-spy Robert McCall (Washington) goes after the people responsible for the murder of his ex-boss (Leo), and finds himself up against a cadre of mercenaries with a similar skill-set; Washington’s first sequel, The Equalizer 2 is unremarkable at best and unnecessary at worst, with a banal storyline and cookie cutter character motivations that are offset by Fuqua’s authoritative direction, Washington’s commanding performance, and several very effective fight sequences.

Selfie from Hell (2018) / D: Erdal Ceylan / 76m

Cast: Alyson Walker, Tony Giroux, Meelah Adams, Ian Butcher

Rating: 3/10 – strange paranormal events that have a connection to the Dark Web begin to affect a young woman (Walker) when her cousin (Adams) comes to visit; even for its modest running time, Selfie from Hell soon outwears its welcome, thanks to its confused plotting, wayward acting, leaden direction, and meaningless frights, all of which add up to yet another horror movie where things happen because they can instead of because they make sense within the terms of the story.

Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost (2018) / D: Doug Murphy / 77m

Cast: Frank Welker, Grey Griffin, Matthew Lillard, Kate Micucci, Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis, Marcus Samuelsson, David Kaye, Dana Snyder, Jason Spisak

Rating: 7/10 – the Mystery Gang travel to Bar Harbour to help Fred’s Uncle Bobby deal with a ghost that’s jeopardising the opening of a culinary resort; the format and the jokes are all present and correct, making Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost another satisfying entry in the series, but it’s also one that highlights just how predictable these movies are becoming.

Gemini (2017)

31 Friday Aug 2018

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Aaron Katz, Actress, Drama, Film noir, John Cho, Lola Kirke, Murder, Mystery, Paparazzi, Review, Superfan, Thriller, Zoë Kravitz

D: Aaron Katz / 93m

Cast: Lola Kirke, Zoë Kravitz, Greta Lee, John Cho, Michelle Forbes, Nelson Franklin, Reeve Carney, Jessica Parker Kennedy, James Ransone, Ricki Lake

Jill LeBeau (Kirke) is the personal assistant to famous actress Heather Anderson (Kravitz). Heather has been in talks to make a new movie but has decided to take a break for a while instead. She persuades Jill to tell one of the producers, Greg (Franklin), the news, and he’s predictably angry. Ensuing attention from a self-proclaimed superfan (Kennedy), as well as a paparazzi, Stan (Ransone), adds further stress to Heather’s decision. When Heather asks Jill to borrow her gun because she doesn’t feel “safe”, Jill reluctantly agrees. At Heather’s home one morning, Jill tries to take back the gun but it goes off accidentally. No one is hurt, but Heather keeps the weapon. However, when Jill comes back later, she finds Heather dead from multiple gun shot wounds. It isn’t long before the police, led by Detective Ahn (Cho), deduce that Jill was the last person to see Heather alive, and that only her fingerprints are on the gun. With the residue from the misfire on her hand as well, Jill quickly becomes the prime suspect in the eyes of the police, but she determines to find out for herself just who did kill Heather…

For much of the first twenty minutes of Gemini, the nature of the relationship between Jill and Heather is somewhat blurred, and perhaps deliberately so. There’s a hint that they might be lovers, something that’s given a degree of credence when one of Heather’s ex-boyfriends, Devin (Carney), calls to say that he knows “what’s going on” (and to make a convenient death threat). Later, when the superfan asks if they’re an item, Heather’s response is indignant, but she doesn’t deny it outright. Nor does she when Stan the paparazzi asks the same question. But on another night, they share a bed at Heather’s home, and Heather whispers “I love you” while Jill sleeps. With the possibility of a deeper emotional relationship existing between the pair, writer-director Katz establishes a more profound meaning for Jill’s solo investigation of Heather’s murder: she’s not just keeping herself out of jail, she wants to find the killer of someone she truly cared about. This informs much of Jill’s quest to keep one step ahead of the police, while also providing the narrative with a depth that is both unexpected and entirely welcome.

What also helps is the modern day film noir vibe that the movie gives off, with Jill in the role of erstwhile private investigator, and the list of suspects such that any one of them could have done it. Katz manipulates the various clues and potential culprits with a great deal of skill, even including a scene where Jill speaks to Greg and he tells her who he thinks is the killer – if he were writing the whole thing as a script. Clever touches such as this, along with a number of visual flourishes, keep the movie from feeling stale or inevitable, and it’s further embellished by a terrific performance from Kirke, giving Jill a resourcefulness that keeps her focused and willing to take calculated risks, whether it’s sneaking into Devin’s hotel room or evading the police on a motorcycle. It’s a confident portrayal of a confident woman, and Kirke proves throughout that Katz was right to choose her for the role. In support, Kravitz is sweet natured yet nervy as Heather, while Cho is charmingly off kilter as the detective who would usually believe in the heroine’s innocence but instead is convinced she’s guilty. It’s another quirky, atypical choice from Katz, and like much else, makes Gemini more than just a pleasant diversion.

Rating: 8/10 – an conventional murder mystery given an unconventional spin, Gemini is an unexpected delight, thanks to Kirke’s self-assured performance, Katz’s witty screenplay, and a tremendously atmospheric mise en scene; only occasionally betraying its modest budget, it’s a movie that provides far more than meets the eye for the viewer willing to delve deeper into its seemingly straightforward plotting.

Don’t Go in the Water! – The Meg (2018) and Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018)

27 Monday Aug 2018

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Action, Bingbing Li, Cliff Curtis, Danielle Savre, Darin Scott, Drama, Jason Statham, Jon Turteltaub, Literary adaptation, Megalodon, Michael Beach, Rainn Wilson, Research facility, Review, Rob Mayes, Sci-fi, Sequel, Sharks, Thriller

It happens so often that it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. A major studio release is announced, and before you know it, a “rival” production is rushed onto our screens. These so-called “rivals” often operate on a fraction of the budget of the mainstream release, have a cast that few people have heard of, and betray their lack of originality at every turn. Such is the case in 2018 with The Meg being pipped to the release post by Deep Blue Sea 2, a sequel/remake that no one wanted or needed (especially nineteen years after Renny Harlin’s enjoyable if still risible original).

The Meg (2018) / D: Jon Turteltaub / 113m

Cast: Jason Statham, Bingbing Li, Rainn Wilson, Cliff Curtis, Winston Chao, Ruby Rose, Page Kennedy, Robert Taylor, Shuya Sophia Cai, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Jessica McNamee, Masi Oka

The Meg is a silly, silly movie – let’s get that out of the way from the start. It provokes far more laughs than it does gasps, but at least it’s aware that it’s preposterous. This is most definitely a good thing, because if it wasn’t so self-aware, this would be an horrendously difficult movie to sit through. There are moments where the script (by Dean Georgaris and Jon and Erich Hoeber from the novel by Steve Alten) strives for serious drama – usually when someone dies, or the gravity of the situation needs reinforcing – but otherwise keeps things easy-going for much of its running time. It’s as if it can’t wait to poke fun at itself, whether it’s by giving Statham lines of the calibre of “Meg versus man isn’t a fight… it’s a slaughter” (though he does miss out on saying “Megalo-don’t”), or having its characters behave foolishly (add up how many times they deliberately put themselves at risk when there’s no need to). It’s also a movie that seems reluctant to give the Meg free rein when the script puts a resort full of swimmers, and a small dog, in its path. Anyone expecting mass carnage is going to be disappointed; better to watch Piranha 3D (2010) instead.

Of course, this is all professionally made with a suitably excessive budget needed to make the special effects look as impressive as possible, but as with many movies that have a larger than normal protagonist at its centre – see also Rampage (2018) – there are problems with the Meg’s size, and keeping it proportionally realistic in relation to its human co-stars. But there are bigger problems: the movie soon settles for being a series of showdowns between Statham’s gung-ho marine rescue specialist and the Meg that rely too often on the Meg swimming off once their encounters are over; so much for being a super-predator. Of course, this repetition is to allow the cast of characters to be picked off one by one, even though it’s obvious just who is still going to be around when the Meg is finally taken care of. Statham is fine as the improbably named Jonas (the makers clearly wanted to call him Jonah – but too much context maybe?), while Curtis and Wilson stand out because they both seem to have the measure of the material, and are obviously having fun. Turteltaub’s direction is competent without being flashy, there’s one climax too many, and sadly, Statham doesn’t get to punch or head butt the Meg (what were the makers thinking?).

Rating: 6/10 – nothing more or less than a summer popcorn movie with no other ambition than to provide audiences with a good time, The Meg is surprisingly toothless when it matters most; glossy and sleek, it goes where it needs to, but doesn’t offer the necessary thrills to make it stand out from the crowd, all of which just goes to prove that size isn’t everything.

Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018) / D: Darin Scott / 94m

Cast: Danielle Savre, Rob Mayes, Michael Beach, Nathan Lynn, Kim Syster, Jeremy Boado, Adrian Collins, Cameron Robertson, Darron Meyer

Where The Meg is a silly, silly movie, Deep Blue Sea 2 is a dreadful, dreadful movie, an uninspired retread of the original, and a chore to sit through (unless your standards are non-existent or you’ve suffered a recent brain trauma). Having the number two in the title would seem to make it a sequel, but in fact this is an unofficial remake, with several scenes rehashed from the first movie, and the action taking place in yet another submerged research station where genetic experiments have been carried out on – surprise! – a number of bull sharks. Sooner than you can say “shark lunch in a tin can”, things start to go wrong, and the tasty morsels – sorry, characters – inside the research facility are being picked off one by one. This tries for grim humour at times, but manages to miss the mark at every attempt; it can’t even raise some much needed unintentional humour either. Instead, the main response it provokes is one of profound ennui, and a deep regret that you started watching it in the first place. To say that it lacks energy, pace, commitment, good performances, and a decent script would be stating the obvious.

It does trade in a healthy amount of rampant absurdity, though, as evidenced by the decision to give the sharks a female leader who gives birth (thankfully off-screen) to a dozen or so little nippers who take over their mother’s murderous duties, and who make loud screeching noises when they attack (these sounds are audible above the water line – of course). Unlike The Meg, Deep Blue Sea 2 has no problem with showing the gory after effects of a shark attack, but against the odds this is one of the very few aspects it gets right. Again, the performances range from very poor (Savre) to perfunctory (Mayes, Lynn), while Beach outdoes the sharks for chewing the scenery as (the meg)alomaniacal sponsor of the research facility. Scott, clearly a long way from his days as a producer on movies such as To Sleep With Anger (1990) and Menace II Society (1993), struggles to make anything out of the by-the-numbers screenplay, its dreary nature and one-dimensional characters proving impossible to root for. If you have to see one shark-based movie in 2018, then make sure it isn’t this one. You have been warned.

Rating: 3/10 – awful enough to make you wish for a shark to come along and put you out of your misery, Deep Blue Sea 2 is the cinematic equivalent of chum in the water; brazenly stealing all the best bits from its predecessor and then doing nothing constructive with them, this is a movie that wastes no time in wearing out its welcome, and becoming irredeemably, dramatically soggy.

Operation Avalanche (2016)

23 Thursday Aug 2018

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Andy Appelle, Apollo 11, CIA, Conspiracy theory, Drama, Found footage, Jared Raab, Matt Johnson, Moon landing, NASA, Owen Williams, Review, Thriller

D: Matt Johnson / 94m

Cast: Matt Johnson, Owen Williams, Andy Appelle, Jared Raab, Josh Boles, Ray James, Sharon Belle, Krista Madison, Joe J. Thomas

It’s 1967 and the US space programme is focused entirely on getting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and in doing so, honouring a promise made by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, and stealing a march on the Soviet Union. When the CIA discovers that secrets about the space programme are finding their way to the Russians, they launch Operstion Zipper, an attempt at finding the mole within NASA. When recent CIA recruit Matt Johnson hears that the CIA is planning to send an agent who will be pretending to be a scientist – something Johnson believes would be doomed to failure – he manages to convince his boss, Director Brackett (James), to send himself and three other new recruits (Williams, Appelle, Raab) along to NASA posing as a documentary movie crew. The initial stages of their investigation reveals a startling truth: NASA won’t be able to put a man on the moon until 1971 at the earliest. This gives Johnson an idea: what if footage of the proposed moon landing could be fabricated, and broadcast as if it had really happened…?

By now, most of us will be aware of the conspiracy theory that the US faked the Apollo 11 moon landing, and that it was all shot in a studio somewhere. Capricorn One (1978) switched the moon for Mars, while in Moonwalkers (2015), Stanley Kubrick is approached to shoot the moon landing by a CIA agent. Operation Avalanche uses the notion of Kubrick’s involvement as well (and includes a shot that is technically very impressive for such a low budget movie), but in the end, takes a very different route in telling its somewhat laboured story. As a concept, Johnson and co-writer Boles’s take on things is a little off-kilter, with Johnson able to pull the wool over the eyes of his colleagues way too easily (he lies to them when he tells them Brackett has agreed to their shooting the moon landing as real). He’s also able to manufacture the “moon landing” so anonymously that when it looks as if either the Russians or the CIA themselves are monitoring his activity, he’s still able to bury the supporting evidence of what he’s done in a field – in broad daylight. Overall, these are minor issues, but when the movie takes a darker turn in the final third, a lot more reveal themselves.

For the most part, Johnson’s tale within a tale is a fascinating construction, taking many of the conspiracy theory clichés that are out there and building a largely cohesive story around them. Johnson’s alternate version of 1967 is studded with detail, and the recreation of the period is done remarkably well on such a low budget, but it’s the early scenes of the team’s subterfuge within NASA that Johnson handles really well. When it becomes clear that Johnson and his team are under surveillance, and they don’t know by whom, the movie kicks into gear after a slow start, but though the narrative picks up speed, Johnson’s behaviour becomes more and more erratic and paranoid, leading to a falling out with Williams, and the fear that Operation Avalanche might end up being sabotaged by the CIA (though the script can’t come up with a reason why this might happen). Some of it is risible, some of it is eerily effective, and there’s more that feels as if Johnson and Boles had several more ideas but they couldn’t find a way to fit them all in. The movie closes on a moment of artful ambiguity that is deceptively powerful, and incredibly apt considering the subject matter.

Rating: 6/10 – technically very impressive for a found footage movie, in the end Operation Avalanche raises more questions of its script than it provides pseudo-answers to the moon-landing-as-fake-footage question; with good performances and a subversive sense of period humour, it’s a movie that aims high, but much like the mission it’s “aiding”(?), it doesn’t always attain the goals Johnson has set out for it.

A Window in London (1940)

21 Tuesday Aug 2018

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Crane driver, Drama, Herbert Mason, Jealousy, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, Remake, Review, Sally Gray, The Great Zoltini, Thriller, Waterloo Bridge

aka Lady in Distress

D: Herbert Mason / 76m

Cast: Michael Redgrave, Sally Gray, Paul Lukas, Hartley Power, Patricia Roc, Glen Alyn, George Carney

Peter (Redgrave) and Pat (Roc) are a young married couple whose jobs are keeping them apart. Peter is a crane driver working construction on Waterloo Bridge during the day, while Pat works as a hotel telephonist overnight. One morning, while travelling to work by train, Peter witnesses what looks like a murder being committed at an open window in one of the buildings opposite the rail line. He gets off the train and makes his way quickly to the flat where he saw the murder, only to find a couple – stage magician The Great Zoltini (Lukas) and his wife, Vivienne (Gray) – both alive and well and with an explanation for what Peter saw. A reporter covering the bridge’s construction hears about Peter’s heroism and the story ends up in the papers. But when Peter learns that Zoltini and his wife have duped him, it leads him into a world of sexual jealousy, showbusiness and danger that has potentially terrible consequences, both for Peter and his marriage, and for Vivienne, whose unhappiness proves to be the catalyst for a whirlwind twenty-four hours…

A remake of the 1939 French movie Métropolitain starring Albert Préjean, A Window in London had, until 2015, been unseen in its original UK version since its release (the US version was trimmed by eight minutes). It’s a shame, as the movie is a deceptively dark thriller that deserves better recognition than it’s received since 1940, and which features strong performances from Redgrave, Gray and Lukas in what is really an unlikely love triangle. An early scene sets the tone for Peter and Pat’s marriage: two years in and only able to spend any quality time together on a Sunday, Peter goes to kiss Pat “goodnight” only for her to yawn and turn away. It’s a telling moment, rendering the increasing awkwardness of their situation in one small action, and in Peter’s disappointed reaction, paves the way for his becoming embroiled in Vivienne’s wish to get away from her abusive husband. It’s rare for a British movie from the early Forties to deal with the subject of domestic abuse, but here the script by Ian Dalrymple doesn’t shy away from the violent emotions that underpin the Zoltinis’ marriage. It makes the scenes between Gray and Lukas crackle with tension, and when that tension boils over, what happens is abrupt and shocking.

What’s also fascinating is the ease with which Peter allows himself to become attracted to Vivienne. It’s as if she reminds him of the feelings he had when he first met Pat, when their relationship was new and exciting (if not so perilous). Drawn along in her wake, Peter is in way over his head, and doesn’t seem to care; Pat is forgotten as he follows Vivienne down the rabbit hole of her showbiz connections and a past that could be her only salvation. The movie maintains a terrible hold over the viewer, as it continually teeters on the edge of a happy ending – surely there’ll be a happy ending – but there’s a continual sense of foreboding throughout. And when the ending does arrive, it’s like a gut punch delivered full force. It’s a movie that’s tough and uncompromising in its own way, and which doesn’t pander to the accepted values of the time, preferring instead to retain the fatalistic Gallic flavour of the original. With an intriguing look at pre-war London, and scenes taking place at the site of Waterloo Bridge’s construction, this is an intimate and unsettling reflection of a time before things became really, really dark.

Rating: 7/10 – with fine performances from its three leads, and a dark, unnerving tone that Mason exploits to maximum effect, A Window in London is a minor British classic that deserves a wider, modern audience; a psychological drama in many respects, it’s also a nervy thriller and a doomed love story – though not in the way that you might be expecting.

NOTE: There’s no trailer currently available for A Window in London.

Let the Corpses Tan (2017)

13 Monday Aug 2018

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Action, Belgium, Bruno Forzani, Crime, Elina Löwensohn, France, Gold bullion, Hélène Cattet, Literary adaptation, Review, Stéphane Ferrara, Thriller

Original tltle: Laissez bronzer les cadavres

D: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani / 88m

Cast: Elina Löwensohn, Stéphane Ferrara, Bernie Bonvoisin, Hervé Sogne, Michelangelo Marchese, Marc Barbé, Marine Sainsily, Pierre Nisse, Dorylia Calmel, Dominique Troyes

On a remote outcrop of land, an abandoned church and its surrounding buildings has become the home of a once in-demand artistic muse Madame Luce (Löwensohn), her partner, an unscrupulous lawyer called Brisorgueil (Marchese), and a bohemian writer, Max Bernier (Barbé), who was once her lover. One day they are joined by a group of men – Rhino (Ferrara), Gros (Bonvoisin), and an unnamed young man (Nisse) – who, while on their way back from getting supplies at a nearby town, rob an armoured car of 250 kilos of gold bullion. But as they head back to the church, they find themselves picking up a woman, Mélanie (Calmel), her young son, and the boy’s nanny (Sainsily). The woman proves to be Max’s wife, there to hide out after abducting her son from her ex-husband who has custody. Meanwhile, two motorcycle cops (Sogne, Troyes) become intrigued by a sighting of Max’s wife, and decide to ride out to Madame Luce’s, a decision that will prove to have a number of far-reaching consequences for everyone there…

A Franco-Belgian production adapted from the novel of the same name by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid, Let the Corpses Tan is a heavily stylised kaleidoscope of unflinching violence supported by a bravura visual palette that employs all kinds of cinematic trickery to tell its tale of intrigue and betrayal and the legacy of the Golden Woman (Löwensohn’s Madame Luce, albeit in younger days). It’s an absurdist Euro-meta-Western, straight out of the late Sixties and early Seventies, and with compositions by Ennio Morricone from the period that fit neatly into Cattet and Forzani’s excessively mounted pastiche. Replete with every trick in the book to add energy and pizzazz to its flamboyant tale, the movie is exhausting to watch, with the camerawork and the editing designed in tandem to assault the eyes and render any resistance as futile. This is a movie that wants to dominate its audience into submission, to send it reeling away at the movie’s end having been visually assaulted by the extent of Cattet and Forzani’s colour drenched aesthetic. But while it does have an excess of, well… excess, Let the Corpses Tan doesn’t quite reach the giddy heights it sets for itself, and for all the visual distractions, its basic premise lacks conviction.

It’s nearly always the same: the more striking a movie is to look at, and the more its creators rely on creating an overly stylised mise en scene, the more likely it is that the story isn’t on the same level. Here this is unfortunately the case, as Cattet and Forzani (who also wrote the screenplay) forget to make any of the characters relatable or sympathetic, and though you could argue that this might be deliberate, when you don’t even care who gets out alive – or at all – then an opportunity has been missed. Such is the case with a movie where the expected body count happens at regular enough intervals but without any of them making an impact or eliciting an emotional response in the viewer. It’s rote storytelling, with the original source material diluted and weakened by the visual artifice it’s asked to support. The cast struggle too, with Löwensohn behaving as if Madame Luce is still tripping from the Seventies, while the male characters are pretty much indistinguishable from each other. And by the end even the violence has become tiresome. There’s a better movie hidden somewhere inside Cattet and Forzani’s screenplay, but in allowing themselves free rein with the movie’s look, that particular version was always doomed to stay hidden.

Rating: 6/10 – though visually adventurous and on occasion quite audacious – a fantasy sequence where the nanny’s clothes are ripped to shreds by gunfire leaving her naked is a prime example – nevertheless Let the Corpses Tan is only partly successful; a movie with style in (over-)abundance, but without the necessary substance to back it up, this can be enjoyed on a basic level, but those looking for more than just visual panache would do better to look elsewhere.

Skybound (2017)

06 Monday Aug 2018

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Alex Tavakoli, Disaster, Drama, Gavin Stenhouse, Mystery, Private jet, Review, Rick Cosnett, Scarlett Byrne, Stowaway, Thriller

D: Alex Tavakoli / 81m

Cast: Scarlett Byrne, Gavin Stenhouse, Rick Cosnett, Morten Suurballe, Tyler Fayose, Carla Carolina Pimentel, Jerry Coyle

For their first date together, Matt (Cosnett) decides to take Lisa (Byrne) on a cross-country flight from The Hamptons to Malibu in his parents’ private jet. Joining them are their friends, Odin (Fayose) and Roxy (Pimentel), and by a twist of fate, Matt’s brother, Kyle (Stenhouse), with whom Lisa had a brief relationship the year before. At first the flight is uneventful but as they approach Chicago air space, a sudden electrical failure affects some of their systems, including the warning signal that alerts other planes to their presence. When Matt tries to rectify things he discovers they have a stowaway, Erik Harris (Suurballe). When Erik tries to take over the jet, Kyle ends up being shot before the stowaway can be overpowered. Needing to land and seek help for Kyle, they aim for Chicago but soon find dozens of other planes waiting in the sky as well, and all with the same problem warning signal problem. They decide to travel on, and the further they fly, the more they come to realise that staying skybound is their best option, as whatever has happened below the clouds is likely to mean their deaths if they land…

The debut feature of writer/producer/director Tavakoli, Skybound is a low-budget disaster movie that often belies its constrained production values, scattershot dramatics, and unlikely characters. It’s also a disaster movie that plays as a mystery for much of its running time, as Tavakoli makes a stab at increasing the tension of the situation and whether or not Matt and everyone else will survive the journey. But though it’s often stodgy in its execution, with some really tortured dialogue to complement the wayward character motivations, Tavakoli also manages to keep it all chugging along with a rude energy that flags on occasion but which also ensures a surprising level of enjoyment. Make no mistake, Skybound is exactly the kind of movie for which leaving your brain at the door is a prerequisite, but somehow – and against all the odds – it’s never tiresome or overstays its welcome. What it is, is a movie that revels in its implausibility and never apologises for it. It also piles on a number of WtF? moments that should hurt it irreparably, but which just add to the enjoyment of it all. Tavakoli may not be the best movie maker in the world, but here he does more than enough to hold the viewer’s attention.

The mystery elements are played to the fore, with Suurballe’s villainous stowaway employed as a narrative red herring, but the character’s presence does add a further layer to the riddle of what’s happening on the ground, and as more and more information is gathered, Tavakoli does a good job of delaying the big bad reveal. When he does, it proves to be less far-fetched than expected, and more credible than some of the other hypotheses that his characters come up with, especially those who’ve seen 2012 (2009). It all culminates in a last ditch effort for survival that relies on a level of narrative absurdity that is so absurd that you can only go with it or give up. But again, in a weirdly effective way, Tavakoli knows what he’s doing, and though it all depends on one character’s unexpected mathematical smarts and the most ridiculous act of self-sacrifice seen in many a recent disaster movie, it’s still carried off with a flair and a level of self-aware chutzpah that you have to applaud its creator’s audacity. And with low-budget disaster movies, how often can you say that?

Rating: 5/10 – bad movies can sometimes be really bad and still be enjoyable, and despite its many drawbacks, Skybound is one of them; a flawed production to be sure, but if given the right amount of leeway, it’s a movie that brings its own unexpected rewards, and one that has no right to be as entertaining as it is.

Siberia (2018)

05 Sunday Aug 2018

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Affair, Ana Ularu, Blue diamonds, Drama, Keanu Reeves, Matthew Ross, Mirny, Pasha D. Lychnikoff, Russia, St Petersburg, Thriller

D: Matthew Ross / 105m

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Ana Ularu, Pasha D. Lychnikoff, James Gracie, Veronica Ferres, Molly Ringwald, Dmitry Chepovetsky, Rafael Petardi, Eugene Lipinsky

Brought to St Petersburg by the promise of a high-figure deal, diamond merchant Lucas Hill (Reeves) arrives to find his Russian business partner, Pyotr, has vanished, and with the single blue diamond he was meant to give Lucas to help initiate the deal. The buyer, a shady businessman named Boris Volkov (Lychnikoff), allows Lucas two days in which to bring him the sample and the other twenty blue diamonds that make up the deal. Learning that his partner is waiting for him in the Siberian town of Mirny, Lucas flies there, only to learn that his partner has moved on again. With bad weather keeping him there, Lucas, who is married, begins an affair with café owner, Katya (Ularu); he also gets to know her fiercely protective brother, Ivan (Chepovetsky). Returning to St Petersburg, Lucas manages to find the sample diamond and discovers through bringing Katya to him, why his partner was in Mirny: he left another sample diamond there, but this one is a fake. As Lucas begins to piece together the details of the deal Pyotr was arranging, he comes to realise that his life is in danger – and so is Katya’s…

It has to be acknowledged that Keanu Reeves, away from the John Wick series (and any possible mention of a third Bill & Ted movie), appears to be much in demand and works steadily as a result. However, his choice of movies leaves a lot to be desired, and for every good movie he makes, there’s a five-to-one ratio of movies he makes that aren’t. Siberia definitely falls into the latter category. It starts off well enough, but that’s just the first ten minutes, with Lucas arriving in St Petersburg (to a cheery welcome from Ferres’ desk clerk), and learning that he’s already well on the way to being shafted by all and sundry. Thankfully, Lucas can speak Russian, a fact that doesn’t stop everyone around him talking in their native language as if he can’t understand them. This is one of many narrative decisions made by Scott B. Smith’s irritating screenplay that hinders the flow of the material, but none more so when the movie morphs from nascent crime thriller to fully fledged romantic drama within a handful of scenes. This development is too absurd to be credible: Katya is literally the only woman we see in Mirny, and she tells Lucas they might as well have sex because everyone else will think they’ve done it anyway.

So the middle third of the movie is taken up with scenes of Lucas and Katya having sex at every opportunity – bear in mind he’s only there for two days – and then having more sex when she’s in St Petersburg. The couple’s emotions are created to order, there’s little chemistry between them, and their pillow talk is of the “do you know why I like blue diamonds?” variety. As if this aspect of the movie isn’t bad enough, the shady business deal involving passing off fake diamonds as real never really holds any weight or plausibility, though Lychnikoff’s smiling dirtbag (while still its own kind of stereotype) is mesmerising in a callous, offhand manner that works better than it should. None of this is even remotely believable, and it all leads to a violent showdown that only goes to prove that the makers had painted themselves into a corner in terms of a credible outcome. Ross, making only his second feature after the much more accessible Frank & Lola (2016), fumbles things badly throughout, and the movie’s wayward tone undermines any serious attempts at drama – or thriller elements – that the script might be aiming for. There’s an obvious joke about being sent to Siberia, but on this occasion it’s too ironic for comfort.

Rating: 4/10 – another dire entry in the Reeves resumé, Siberia adds up to a collection of scenes and characters that feel like they were assembled by someone with only a rough idea of how to put a script together; definitely one to avoid unless you’re a committed Reeves fan, and even then you should think twice.

Monthly Roundup – July 2018

31 Tuesday Jul 2018

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Abby Kohn, Action, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Schumer, Ari Aster, Backlash (1956), Christopher McQuarrie, Comedy, Donna Reed, Drama, Dwayne Johnson, Edward Lexy, Fred Ellis, Gabriel Byrne, Henry Cavill, Hereditary, Horror, I Feel Pretty, John Sturges, Lily James, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Marc Silverstein, Mary Clare, Michelle Williams, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Mrs. Pym of Scotland Yard, Murder, Musical, Mystery, Neve Campbell, Ol Parker, Rawson Marshall Thurber, Richard Widmark, Romance, Skyscraper, Thriller, Tom Cruise, Toni Collette, Western

Hereditary (2018) / D: Ari Aster / 127m

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd

Rating: 7/10 – following the death of her mother, miniaturist artist Annie (Collette) and her family begin to experience strange phenomena that hint at supernatural forces at work around them, and which appear to be malevolent in their intentions; this year’s critics’ favourite in the horror genre, Hereditary does boast a superb performance from Collette, and creates a fervid atmosphere in its first half that is genuinely unnerving, but this is a movie where the sum of its parts isn’t equal to a satisfying whole, and what should have been a tense, psychological thriller becomes a grandstanding Rosemary’s Baby for the new millennium, an outcome that robs it of much of its impact.

Mrs. Pym of Scotland Yard (1940) / D: Fred Ellis / 64m

Cast: Mary Clare, Edward Lexy, Nigel Patrick, Janet Johnson, Anthony Ireland, Irene Handl, Vernon Kelso

Rating: 7/10 – the predicted deaths of two members of a Psychic Society leads Scotland Yard to assign their lone female detective, Mrs. Pym (Clare), to the case in an effort to track down the victims’ killer; a boisterous little crime caper with a delightful performance by Clare (in her only starring role), Mrs. Pym of Scotland Yard retains a freshness nearly eighty years on that some movies can’t manage after eighty days, a feat that can be attributed to Ellis’s sprightly direction, a handful of engaging secondary performances, and a script – based on stories by Nigel Morland and adapted by Ellis and Peggy Barwell – that knows when to be amusing and when to be dramatic, and when to be delightfully daft (which, thankfully, is often).

Backlash (1956) / D: John Sturges / 84m

Cast: Richard Widmark, Donna Reed, William Campbell, John McIntire, Barton MacLane, Harry Morgan, Robert J. Wilke

Rating: 7/10 – while searching for his father’s killer, Jim Slater (Widmark) crosses paths with a woman (Reed) who may be connected to his father’s death, and who may be able to provide him with information that will lead him to the man responsible, an outcome that, when it happens, isn’t as straightforward as he’s been led to believe; a tough, muscular Western with psychological and film noir elements, Backlash is also a taut, uncompromising revenge tale that doesn’t pull its punches and which takes a sudden narrative turn halfway through that puts a whole different spin on Slater’s journey, something that Widmark handles with his usual aplomb, and Sturges – who would go on to helm Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) – handles the twists and turns with confidence and no small amount of directorial flair.

Skyscraper (2018) / D: Rawson Marshall Thurber / 102m

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Chin Han, Roland Møller, Noah Taylor, Byron Mann, Pablo Schreiber, McKenna Roberts, Noah Cottrell, Hannah Quinlivan

Rating: 4/10 – the world’s tallest building, The Pearl, is ready to open but needs a final sign-off from security analyst Will Sawyer (Johnson), but when terrorists set the building on fire, Sawyer has a greater problem: that of rescuing his family who are trapped above the fire line; there was a time when a movie like Skyscraper would have been a must-see at the cinema, but this Die Hard meets The Towering Inferno mash-up (scripted by Thurber) is a soulless, empty spectacle that can’t even put Sawyer’s family in any appreciable peril, wastes its talented cast by having them play one-dimensional stereotypes, and which uses Sawyer’s disability as a narrative parlour trick whenever the plot needs it.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018) / D: Ol Parker / 114m

Cast: Lily James, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, Colin Firth, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Dominic Cooper, Andy Garcia, Jeremy Irvine, Josh Dylan, Hugh Skinner, Jessica Keenan Wynn, Alexa Davies, Celia Imrie, Cher, Meryl Streep

Rating: 7/10 – with the reopening of her late mother’s hotel just days away, Sophie Sheridan (Seyfried) is worried that everything won’t go according to plan, while the story of how a young Donna Sheridan (James) came to own the hotel in the first place, plays out simultaneously; if you liked the first movie then you’ll definitely like Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, another love letter to the music of ABBA, and a movie that has no simpler ambition than to charm its audience at every turn and provide fans with as good a time as before, something it achieves thanks to generous dollops of good-natured humour, a talented cast giving their all, and an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach that works wonders on what is very familiar material indeed.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) / D: Christopher McQuarrie / 147m

Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Vanessa Kirby, Angela Bassett, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Monaghan, Wes Bentley

Rating: 9/10 – a mission in Berlin to retrieve three plutonium cores leads Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his IMF team into a high stakes race-against-time chase across the continents as they try to avert a terrorist attack orchestrated by the followers of arch-nemesis Solomon Lane (Harris); number six in the franchise, and Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the best entry yet, with hugely impressive action scenes, the strongest plot so far, and a surprisingly emotional core drawn from the interactions of the characters that puts this head and shoulders above every other action movie you’ll see this year – and who would have bet on that?

I Feel Pretty (2018) / D: Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein / 111m

Cast: Amy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Tom Hopper, Rory Scovel, Adrian Martinez, Emily Ratajkowski, Aidy Bryant, Busy Philipps, Lauren Hutton, Naomi Campbell

Rating: 5/10 – when an insecure woman, Renee Bennett (Schumer), who works at an international cosmetics company suffers a blow to the head, she wakes seeing herself as beautiful and capable of achieving anything – but in reality she looks exactly the same; what should be an immensely likeable shout out to the power of self-belief, I Feel Pretty is hampered by the bludgeoning approach of the script (by directors Kohn and Silverstein), and the incredible ease with which Renee powers her way up the corporate ladder, aspects that are at least more palatable than the way in which the men are treated as accessories, something that, if the roles were reversed, would likely cause an outcry.

The Nile Hilton Incident (2017)

29 Sunday Jul 2018

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Cairo, Corruption, Crime, Drama, Egypt, Fares Fares, Mari Malek, Murder, Review, Tarik Saleh, Thriller, Yasser Ali Maher

aka Cairo Confidential

D: Tarik Saleh / 111m

Cast: Fares Fares, Mari Malek, Yasser Ali Maher, Ahmed Selim, Hania Amar, Mohamed Yousry, Slimane Dazi, Hichem Yacoubi, Ger Duany, Mohamed Sanaaeldin Shafie

January 2011, Cairo. At the city’s Nile Hilton hotel, a man is seen leaving the room of a well-known singer, Lalena. Later, the same chambermaid, Salwa (Malek), who saw the first man leave, hears cries from the same room and another man leave. The singer has been murdered, and the investigation is given to Major Noredin Mostafa (Fares) of the local police. When he looks through her effects, Noredin finds a receipt for some photographs. When he collects them, he finds compromising pictures of the singer with a high profile politician, Hatem Shafiq (Selim). At this point the official verdict is given as suicide, but Noredin confronts Shafiq about his relationship with Lalena. To Noredin’s surprise, instead of arranging his dismissal from the police force, Shafiq uses his position to have the case reopened, and he asks Noredin to continue his investigation. But while a suspect is soon revealed – a club owner called Nagy (Yacoubi) with a profitable sideline in blackmail – what seems like an open and shut case soon becomes something much more insidious, and much more dangerous…

Set in the run up to the Egyptian Revolution of Dignity that began on 25 January 2011, The Nile Hilton Incident is a tense, riveting thriller that also uses the murder of Lebanese Arab singer Suzanne Tamim in Dubai in 2008 as the basis for its main storyline. It paints the Egyptian capital as a hotbed of political avarice and corruption, with bribery, torture, intimidation and murder as commonplace occurrences – and that’s just the police. Once Noredin takes on the case, it’s expected that he will tow the official line as instructed by his boss (and uncle) Kammal (Maher). But though he’ll steal cash from a murder victim, and accepts how important bribery is in keeping the status quo, Noredin is straightforward in his sense of justice: murder is untenable. With Shafiq backing him, he finds himself at odds with his own department, and in time, with the State Security services. And that’s without the added problem of an unexpected relationship with Lalena’s friend, Gina (Amar), who works for Nagy. As he learns more and more, he also finds that he can’t trust what he knows, or anyone around him. And when Salwa is targeted, Noredin has no choice but to keep her alive to ensure justice is served.

A tremendously atmospheric and moody thriller, with a terrific central performance from the ever-reliable Fares, the movie uses its political and procedural backdrop to great effect, and with the impending revolution brewing in the background, has an immediacy that draws in the viewer and maintains its grip from start to finish. Saleh, directing his own script, keeps things tightly focused every step of the way, even if the reason for Lalena’s death remains a mystery right until the end, and the motivation for Shafiq’s hiring Noredin is unnecessarily oblique. These niggling issues aside, the movie shifts and turns relentlessly, throwing Noredin and the viewer off track with smooth regularity, and in doing so, it keeps the depths of its corruption angle suitably obscured. Throughout, Saleh highlights the economic divide between Cairo’s elite and its less better off denizens, and foreshadows the revolution with judicious use of contemporary footage and casual remarks made by the characters. Alongside Fares there are good performances from Malek and Amar, and Pierre Aïm’s gritty cinematography adds to the compelling sense of a time and a place when the political and social norms were on the verge of being swept away forever.

Rating: 8/10 – a powerful and arresting thriller, The Nile Hilton Incident is intelligent and provocative, and coercive in its depiction of the events happening in Cairo at the time; rarely has the gradual exposure of a society’s seedy underbelly been this persuasive, or portrayed so vividly and matter-of-factly.

Hotel Artemis (2018)

25 Wednesday Jul 2018

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Action, Charlie Day, Crime, Dave Bautista, Drama, Drew Pearce, Hospital, Jeff Goldblum, Jodie Foster, Review, Sofia Boutella, Sterling K. Brown, Thriller

D: Drew Pearce / 94m

Cast: Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum, Charlie Day, Dave Bautista, Jenny Slate, Zachary Quinto, Brian Tyree Henry

In the US in 2028, water has become a precious, but privatised commodity. When punitive restrictions are put in place by the company that controls the water supply, a riot breaks out that sweeps through Los Angeles. Using the riot as a cover, brothers Sherman (Brown) and Lev (Henry), plus two accomplices, plan to rob the vault of an up-market bank. Their plan backfires, and during their escape, Sherman and Lev are wounded by the police, Lev quite seriously. They manage to get to the Hotel Artemis, a kind of field hospital for criminals, where they are safe from the police, and thanks to the rules, any other criminals who might be there. Run by Nurse (Foster), with assistance from “health care professional” Everest (Bautista), the Artemis offers anonymity in the form of code names based around the room(s) they stay in. With female assassin Nice (Boutella) and loud-mouthed arms dealer Acapulco (Day) already there, Sherman begins to wonder just how safe he and his brother are going to be, especially when Nurse lets in a wounded police officer (Slate) – otherwise a strict no-no – and word reaches them that local crime boss, and founder of the Artemis, the Wolf (Goldblum) is on his way, and in need of medical attention…

Let’s get the obvious comparison out of the way: the Hotel Artemis is the medical facility version of the Continental Hotel in the John Wick movies. But that’s as far as the comparison goes, because in the self-assured hands of writer/director Drew Pearce, Hotel Artemis is a tribute to an era gone by, a high-tech yet nostalgic shout out to a time when honour amongst thieves actually meant something. By pitching the movie ten years on, Pearce is able to draw a distinction between the growing feudal state of affairs outside the hotel, and the semblance of order that Nurse feels compelled to uphold within the hotel’s walls and its rooms. It’s meant to be a neutral base for everyone, but machinations and plotting abound, and it’s not long before alliances are being forged, threats are being backed up, and an escalating sense of impending violence is allowed to bear fruit. The sense of an era coming to an end, imploding in on itself, is highlighted by the encroaching riot, and the swift descent of the hotel “guests” into murderous anarchy. There are rules, but once they begin to be broken, there’s no difference between inside and outside.

Pearce handles all this with a downplayed sense of fun, casting cruel aspersions on the morality of his characters – even the “good guys” do some unpalatable things in this movie – and by making sure everyone suffers to one degree or another. The humour is pitch black at times, but plays in support to the drama rather than overwhelming it, and Pearce draws out strong perfprmances from his cast, with Foster reminding us just how good an actress she is, while Brown continues his rise to the A-list, and Boutella exudes a silky menace that is captivating and unpleasant at the same time. Some things, however, are less successful. Slate’s wounded police officer awkwardly provides Nurse with a back story that feels forced and unnecessary, and Day’s obnoxious, sexist arms dealer seems like a throwback to the Nineties. But the real MVP of the movie is the Artemis itself, a triumph of cinematography, lighting, production design, art direction and set decoration that reflects the tired glory of the premises through the faded glamour of its hallways and rooms. It’s the perfect setting in which to record the end of an era…

Rating: 8/10 – flecked with nostalgia and a wistful harking back to simpler times, Hotel Artemis is a violent crime thriller that has a surprising amount of heart, and which tells its story with a welcome measure of simplicity; boosted by the detailed backdrop of the hotel itself, it’s a welcome entry into a sub-genre of crime drama that has slowly been cannabalising itself for far too long.

The Catcher Was a Spy (2018)

21 Saturday Jul 2018

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Baseball, Ben Lewin, Drama, Literary adaptation, Mark Strong, Morris "Moe" Berg, Nuclear bomb, Paul Rudd, Review, Sienna Miller, Thriller, True story, World War II

D: Ben Lewin / 95m

Cast: Paul Rudd, Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce, Paul Giamatti, Giancarlo Giannini, Hiroyuki Sanada, Connie Nielsen, Shea Whigham

In the years before the US enters World War II, Morris “Moe” Berg (Rudd) is a catcher for the Boston Red Sox. Regarded as the “strangest man ever to play baseball”, Berg is an average player, but of above average intelligence, being able to speak seven languages fluently, regularly contribute to the radio quiz programme Information, Please, and read and digest up to ten newspapers daily. A man of singular interests but also leading a very private life, Berg pursues a relationship with a woman, Estella (Miller), that he won’t acknowledge publicly, while on a trip to Japan, he takes it on himself to shoot footage of the Tokyo harbour. After Pearl Harbor, Berg uses the same footage to wangle himself a desk job with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Soon though, his expertise in languages lands him a job in the field: to track down the noted physicist Werner Heisenberg (Strong) and determine if his work for the Nazis will give them a nuclear weapon – and if it will, then Berg is to kill him…

Another tale of unsung heroics set during World War II, The Catcher Was a Spy (a title that’s both derivative and clever) is a movie that takes a real life person and spins a mostly true story out of events they took part in, but does so in a way that alerts the viewer very early on that, despite the mission, Berg won’t be put in any danger, so any tension will evaporate before it’s even got up a head of steam. So instead of a movie that should be increasingly tense and dramatic, we have a movie that plays matter-of-factly with the material, and is presented in a pedestrian, if sure-footed manner. Working from an adaptation of the book of the same name by Nicholas Dawidoff, director Ben Lewin and writer Robert Rodat have fashioned a moderately engaging espionage tale that moves elegantly yet far from robustly from scene to scene without providing much in the way of emotional impact. Partly this is due to Berg’s own nature, his muted feelings and intellectual prowess being ostensibly the whole man, and while the movie and Rudd’s performance adhere to Berg’s character, it leaves the viewer in the awkward position of being an observer and not a participant.

With Berg introduced “as is”, and with only the most minimal of character arcs to send him on, the movie soon becomes a wearying succession of exposition scenes, or opportunities to show off Berg’s gift for languages (which Rudd copies with aplomb). The early scenes with Estella show Berg trying to be “normal” but not quite knowing how to, give way to the mission to find Heisenberg, but the movie’s switch from domestic tribulations to wartime emergency – Berg literally has Heisenberg’s life, and possibly the fate of the world in his hands – dovetail at the same pace and with the same lack of urgency. Even a sequence where Berg, accompanied by military man Robert Furman (Pearce) and friendly physicist Samuel Goudsmit (Giamatti), try to thread their way through a town overrun by Germans lacks the necessary sense of imminent peril needed to make it work. Another issue is Andrij Parekh’s humdrum cinematography, which deadens the effect of Luciana Arrighi’s murky yet effective production design. Against all this, Rudd is a good choice for the enigmatic Berg, and the moments where he expresses Berg’s self-doubts, offer a rare glimpse of the man behind the façade. But, sadly, these moments aren’t plentiful enough to offset the flaws that dog the rest of the movie, and which keep it from being far more impressive than it is.

Rating: 5/10 – proficient enough without providing much more than the basics of Berg’s life as a catcher or an OSS man, The Catcher Was a Spy isn’t dull per se, just not as compelling as it could (or should) have been; Rudd aside, a quality cast is left with little to do except recite their lines in a competent manner, and any notions of political or intellectual morality are left undeveloped or overlooked.

Most Beautiful Island (2017)

19 Thursday Jul 2018

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Ana Asensio, Caprice Benedetti, Drama, First feature, Illegal immigrant, Mystery, Natasha Romanova, New York, Party, Review, Thriller

D: Ana Asensio / 79m

Cast: Ana Asensio, Natasha Romanova, Caprice Benedetti, David Little, Nicholas Tucci, Larry Fessenden, Anna Myrha, Ami Sheth, Brian Kleinman

Luciana (Asensio) has come to New York following a personal tragedy that occurred in her home country of Spain. She’s an illegal immigrant, sharing an apartment she can’t afford because she can’t get a permanent job (she doesn’t have a social security number, or a work visa), and when she’s unwell, dependent on the ministrations of a doctor (Little) who’s willing to provide her with medicine. Luciana has a friend, Olga (Romanova), with whom she occasionally works on cash-in-hand jobs. When Olga tells her that there’s a party where the girls can earn a lot of money for one night’s work, and it’s not that kind of party, Luciana agrees to go in Olga’s place when she’s asked. At a Chinese restaurant she’s given a padlocked purse and told to go to another address. There she finds other women (like her they’re attired in high heels and little black dresses), and Olga. While she tries to discover just what kind of party she’s a part of, one by one the women are chosen and led into another room, a room that many of the other women are frightened of…

When writer/director/actress Ana Asensio moved to New York City in 2001, little did she realise that a party she would work at, one that was “dangerous and illegal”, would help form the basis of her debut feature, the taut, award-winning thriller Most Beautiful Island. It’s perhaps a good thing that she did attend that party, because out of it, Asensio has fashioned a compelling, darkly unsettling movie that begins somewhat predictably, with Luciana travelling to the offices of Dr Horowitz to cajole him into giving her the medicine she needs, and then to Luciana arriving home to find a final reminder about the rent she owes. So far, an unremarkable exploration of the likely experiences of an undocumented immigrant, and one that will have viewers most likely wondering what further obstacles she will have to overcome. But Asensio isn’t interested in pursuing this kind of immigrant story; we’ve seen these kinds of trials before, after all. Instead, she takes Luciana, and the viewer, on a different kind of journey, with a very different kind of trial at the end of it, one that is expertly constructed and which relies on very little exposition.

Asensio creates a heavy sense of increasing dread from the moment Luciana arrives at the Chinese restaurant and is told she can’t take her shoulder bag with her, one that contains her personal effects. The inference is clear: without it she becomes anonymous, and if anything were to happen to her, who would know? The padlocked purse provides a further sense of mystery (when the contents are finally revealed, the moment provides a frisson of sick surprise that’s hard to ignore), and the gradual revelation of the party’s raison d’être is paced with great skill by Asensio’s confidence behind the camera, and Carl Ambrose and Francisco Bello’s incisive editing skills. This is a movie that grows uneasier to watch as it goes on, and the use of Fessenden and Tucci as crypto-villains cleverly adds to the anxiety Asensio builds up, while Benedetti’s role as the party’s organiser – all surface glamour and reptilian emotions – is hard to tear yourself away from. Asensio herself is a winning presence, deftly portraying her character’s desperate need for money without resorting to melodrama or making Luciana’s predicament more than it is. She also makes a handful of telling comments about the plight of female illegal immigrants, but this is no feminist polemic. Instead it’s a quietly impressive thriller that lingers in the memory, and a remarkable debut from its creator.

Rating: 8/10 – with only a small handful of awkward moments that serve as a reminder that this is Asensio’s first feature, Most Beautiful Island is still an intense, powerful experience that makes the most of its low budget and constrained production values; Asensio is definitely a movie maker to watch out for, and on this evidence, her next feature can’t come soon enough.

Entebbe (2018)

16 Monday Jul 2018

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Air France, Daniel Brühl, Drama, Eddie Marsan, Hijacking, José Padilha, Lior Ashkenazi, Literary adaptation, Review, Rosamund Pike, Thriller, True story, Uganda

aka 7 Days in Entebbe

D: José Padilha / 107m

Cast: Daniel Brühl, Rosamund Pike, Eddie Marsan, Lior Ashkenazi, Denis Ménochet, Nonso Anozie, Ben Schnetzer, Mark Ivanir, Angel Bonnani, Zina Zinchenko, Amir Khoury

On 27 June 1976, Air France Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked following a stopover in Athens. The hijackers – two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations, and two members of the German Revolutionary Cells (Brühl, Pike) – diverted the flight to Benghazi in Libya for re-fueling before heading to their planned destination of Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Once there, the passengers and crew were herded into the transit hall of an out-of-use terminal, where eventually, the Jewish passengers were separated from the rest. With the hijackers and their associates on the ground in Entebbe receiving support from Ugandan leader Idi Amin (Anozie), they made their demands to the Israeli government, then led by Itzhak Rabin (Ashkenazi): $5 million for the release of the plane, and the release of fifty-three Palestinian and Pro-Palestinian militants. With Israel having a no negotiation with terrorists policy, they made it seem that they were willing to break with their standard protocol, but while the hijackers began to feel that their mission was going to succeed, the Israelis actually had other plans…

With three previous movies about the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 already released, and all of them within a year of the actual event, the first question to ask about Entebbe is, why now? (A second might be, and does it retain any relevance?) The answer to the first question remains unclear, as the movie, freely adapted by Gregory Burke from the book Operation Thunderbolt (2015) by Saul David, has a tendency to flirt with the truth for dramatic purposes, and in doing so, it manages to dampen the drama by lacking the necessary focus to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. The second question is easier to answer: it doesn’t, and for much the same reason as the answer to the first question. With the script trying to cover too many bases – the hijackers, the Israeli government, the hostages, Idi Amin’s need for personal aggrandisement, the raid that ended the whole thing, and a dancer taking part in a performance of the traditional Jewish song Echad Mi Yodea – the movie never settles on any one aspect for long, and never maintains a sense of the terror and danger that the hostages must have experienced.

It’s a curiously bland affair, with plenty of gun-waving by Pike, but more navel-gazing from Brühl than is necessary, and lots of scenes where the enormity of the situation is trotted out for any slow-off-the-mark viewers – and with increasing emphasis. Most of the characters are forgettable, even the hijackers, as they’re treated more as functioning stereotypes than real people who existed in a real environment and experienced real emotions (much of this by the book). Pike’s angry revolutionary pops a lot of pills but we never learn the reason why, while Brühl’s softly softly bookseller seems out of place entirely. Ashkenazi is a tortured Rabin, Méncohet is the flight engineer who’s scared of no one, and Schnetzer gets his own journey as one of the Israeli commandos who take part in the raid (though why we need his journey is another question the script can’t answer). Only the ever-reliable Marsan, as hawkish Israeli Minister of Defence Shimon Peres, delivers a credible performance, and that’s against the odds, as Burke’s script and Padilha’s direction continually combine to undermine the cast in their efforts. Worst of all though, is the raid itself. After all the build-up, and all the foreshadowing, it’s shot using techniques and a style that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any of the movies made back in the wake of the hijacking.

Rating: 5/10 – handled with a dull reluctance to make it the thriller it should be, Entebbe lacks energy, pace, and any conviction in the way that it tells its story; fascinating only for the way in which it does a disservice to the event itself, it’s a movie that wastes so many opportunities, it’s as if the material itself has been hijacked – but no one told the producers.

Last Seen in Idaho (2018)

15 Sunday Jul 2018

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Action, Casper Van Dien, Crime, Drama, Eric Colley, Hallie Shepherd, Murder, Premonitions, Review, Shawn Christian, Thriller, Wes Ramsey

D: Eric Colley / 109m

Cast: Hallie Shepherd, Wes Ramsey, Shawn Christian, Casper Van Dien, Alexis Monnie, Ted Rooney, Richard Carmen, Eric Colley

When Summer (Shepherd) discovers that her boss, Dex (Colley), is knee-deep in murder and corruption, she does so through finding two bodies brought to him by local crime boss, Lance (Christian), for disposal. When matters worsen, and Lance kills another of Dex’s employees at the same time, Summer – who has captured the murder on her phone – makes a run for it. She gets to her car but loses control trying to get away; she’s thrown clear and her car blows up. When Summer wakes in the hospital, it’s to learn that she has no memory of anything that happened immediately before the crash, that she was dead for five minutes, and that she has begun to be plagued by strange visions that show her events that haven’t happened, including her death. While Lance and his gang wait for a sign that Summer is beginning to remember what happened, she begins to realise that these visions are actually premonitions. Forced to confront the very real possibility that she could soon be dead, Summer tries to piece together the reasons why someone would want her killed…

Written by its star – who also serves as producer and co-editor with Colley – Last Seen in Idaho is a moderately entertaining, but uneven mix of female-centric crime thriller and elaborate mystery drama. There’s a reason the movie runs a hundred and forty-nine minutes, and it’s because Shepherd doesn’t know how to trim a scene – either on the page or in the editing suite. This leads to several moments where the material feels like it’s been stretched too thinly, and certain scenes lack the energy or pace required to keep them interesting. The opening scenes between Summer and her sister, Trina (Monnie), are padded out, and the dialogue soon becomes repetitive, and there are lots of other scenes where some judicious pruning would have been advisable, while in others there are narrative leaps that go unexplained or barely acknowledged. Shepherd is to be congratulated on writing a script that she’s managed to get made (as well as star in, produce, and co-edit), but the services of a script editor during the production’s early stages would have been a major benefit. That said, Shepherd does use Summer’s premonitions to wrong foot the audience from time to time, and the structure itself is sound, but too much feels either extended (for no reason) or superficial.

This being a movie made on a relatively small budget, there are further limitations that harm the movie and make it unintentionally awkward, from the very sudden flip and burn of Summer’s car, to a rooftop conversation between Summer and love interest-cum-possible bad guy, Franco (Ramsey), that is so poorly lit that the background looks false. It does win points for having a strong female central lead, but then wastes that advantage by having the only other notable female role portrayed as a spoilt brat throughout, and by including an unnecessary and uncomfortably misogynistic scene where Van Dien’s callous assassin sexually assaults the girlfriend of one of the gang members. It’s this unevenness of tone and approach that ultimately stops the movie from making any headway or proving sufficiently entertaining except on a basic level. There’s ambition here, certainly, but Shepherd isn’t as good a writer as she needs to be, while Colley’s direction is flat and uninspired, and the performances all appear to operate independently of each other. It all ends in a violent, slightly cartoonish showdown that raises as many laughs as it does gasps of excitement, but is at least, one of the few times when the movie manages to elicit more than a polite reaction from the viewer.

Rating: 4/10 – many’s the time a movie could have been improved by its makers simply taking their time in assembling their picture, and paying close attention to all the working parts, but with Last Seen in Idaho, that hasn’t happened; rough and ready as a finished item, it’s a movie with plenty of ambition, but without the wherewithal to achieve – or come close to – that ambition, making it yet another movie to be filed under Missed Opportunity.

The Forest of Lost Souls (2017)

10 Tuesday Jul 2018

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Daniela Love, Drama, Horror, Jorge Mota, José Pedro Lopes, Mafalda Banquart, Portugal, Review, Suicide, Thriller

Original title: A Floresta das Almas Perdidas

aka The Forest of the Lost Souls

D: José Pedro Lopes / 71m

Cast: Daniela Love, Jorge Mota, Mafalda Banquart, Lígia Roque, Tiago Jácome, Lília Lopes

A young woman (Lopes) travels to a remote area of forest that’s a favourite destination for people looking to commit suicide. She comes to a lake and takes a dose of poison. Wading out into the water she waits for the poison to take effect. When it does she collapses into the water. Some time later, an old man, Ricardo (Mota), also comes to the forest. There he meets a young woman, Carolina (Love); both are there (ostensibly) for the same reason: to take their own lives. Ricardo is there because he believes himself to be a failure as a father and a husband. Carolina is fearful of getting old and suffering the ill effects that old age brings. They venture deeper into the forest, and talk about their reasons for being there, and the lies they’ve told in order to be there without raising any suspicions amongst their friends and families. When Ricardo asks Carolina if she knows where the lake is, it leads to a turn of events that suggests their meeting wasn’t entirely accidental…

The first feature from writer/producer/director Lopes, The Forest of Lost Souls is a darkly disturbing psychological horror movie that spins its own version of Japan’s Aokigahara Forest, and in doing so depicts an unexpectedly grim portrait of extreme personal need. The poster sadly gives away something of the dynamic between Carolina and Ricardo, and acts as a warning as to where the movie is heading once they meet, but even with that marketing mis-step, Lopes does more than enough with his stripped back narrative to ensure that viewers will be wondering if Carolina’s “secret” will be matched or exceeded by Ricardo’s. As they challenge each other’s views and feelings on the mistakes they’ve made that have led them there, the pair spar in ways that hint at deeper motivations lurking beneath the pain that Ricardo is experiencing, and the jaunty cockiness that Carolina expresses (it’s not her first time in the forest, and she’s quick to point out the pros and cons of committing suicide if you’re not fully prepared to die). As they venture nearer to the lake, and a friendship of sorts develops between them, Lopes adroitly holds back from revealing which one of them might leave the forest alive. And then…

Well, and then the movie takes a left turn into vastly different, and yet completely related territory (there are hints of this in the trailer, but thankfully they’re not too blatant). Leaving behind the solitary, isolated forest with its occasionally discovered corpses, Lopes takes the movie and one of its two central characters off in a new direction, and cleverly links past and present through the use of a mobile phone and a sense of dread that’s borne out of knowing what must come next. As Lopes allows these scenes to play out in an unsettling and matter-of-fact manner, there’s the temptation to feel that this new direction is an unnecessary transition from the realm of psychological horror into more predictable slasher territory, but Lopes has a further trick up his sleeve, and connects the two halves of his movie with a coda that explains a great deal of what’s happened, and which does so in a way that wraps things up neatly and with a great deal of confidence and skill. It’s all enhanced by Francisco Lobo’s often beautiful widescreen compositions, with their sense of space and detachment, and the characters seemingly lost amidst the wider, wilder landscape.

Rating: 8/10 – for once, a movie’s brevity is a positive, as The Forest of Lost Souls and its deliberate pacing provide rich dividends for the viewer prepared to see it to the end; brutal in places but not gratuitously so, it’s a movie that is spare and unflinching when it needs to be, and is possibly the only psychological horror outing to name drop Nick Hornby not once but twice.

Batman (1943) – Chapter 15: The Doom of the Rising Sun

03 Tuesday Jul 2018

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Action, Columbia, Douglas Croft, Drama, J. Carrol Naish, Lambert Hillyer, Lewis Wilson, Review, Serial, Shirley Patterson, Thriller

D: Lambert Hillyer / 20m

Cast: Lewis Wilson, Douglas Croft, J. Carrol Naish, Shirley Patterson, William Austin, Charles C. Wilson, Gus Glassmire, John Maxwell

Trapped inside a wooden crate, Batman seems doomed to be fed to Daka’s crocodiles, but when the crate is dropped into their pit, Daka and his goons are surprised to learn it’s one of their own who’s inside the crate. With help from Robin and a handy Morse Code device in his utility belt, the Caped Crusader has switched places with Daka’s unlucky henchman, and has trailed the crate to Daka’s lair. Using Alfred as a diversion, Batman and Robin sneak into the Cave of Horrors that serves as the entrance to Daka’s hideout. Overcoming several of the villain’s henchmen, and while Robin ties them up, Batman is apprehended by two of Daka’s zombies and forced into Daka’s laboratory, where he is strapped to a chair and threatened with being turned into a zonbie. Meanwhile, Alfred finds himself apprehended too: by a policeman who takes him to see Captain Arnold; soon he’s returning with more police (well, three of them) than you can shake a Japanese spy ring at. But will they be in time to save Batman from having his secret identity revealed and being turned into a zombie…?

And so, we reach the end of Batman’s first screen appearance, thanks to those good folks at Columbia, and the efforts of a cast and production crew who you could argue were suffering from serial fatigue from the very outset. It’s been a very patchy affair, with chapters that failed to advance the (very basic) plot, and performances that could provide the dictionary definition of perfunctory. The direction was inconsistent too, with Hillyer seemingly engaged in some episodes, and treading water in others (along with everyone else). In short, when Batman was good, it was really good, and when Batman was bad, it was really bad. Seventy-five years on, it’s not a serial that’s stood the test of time, but as a curio it has its good points, and is worth seeking out if you’re a fan of the Caped Crusader, or if you’re a fan of the serial format. Be prepared though to wade through some very tortuous moments in order to get to the good stuff, and then repeat as often as the script deems it necessary – which is a lot. Surprisingly, this was Columbia’s largest-scale serial production to date, but watching it, you have to wonder where the money went to.

And sadly, the problems that have plagued the serial throughout the first fourteen chapters are still present in the last, and are exacerbated by the need to wrap things up. The radium remains completely forgotten, the references to Daka as a “Jap” are rehashed (three times by Batman, who can’t refer to him in any other way), Daka’s zombies continue to hang around like glorified human ornaments, and the fight scenes are as clumsily choreographed as ever – but are now much shorter as Daka’s men prove to have glass jaws all of a sudden. Aside from being tied to a chair for a few minutes, it’s all too easy for Batman, and Daka’s fate is sealed with a minimum of (ironic and appropriate) fuss. If there’s one positive aspect about the whole thing, it’s that Robin gets to save the day not once but twice, but even then he remains as invisible as ever. If you watch each chapter closely, you’ll find that Batman is always referred to in the singular, and there’s no mention of Batman and Robin. Perhaps it’s an oversight, perhaps it’s deliberate, but it is indicative of the lack of care taken in the script, something that happens a lot, and which, sadly, stops this particular serial from scaling the heights of some of its predecessors.

Rating: 6/10 – narrative short cuts and the need to wrap things up neatly leads Chapter 15 into a dramatic cul-de-sac that sees what should be an energetic and exciting finale become something of a chore to get through; historically important for being the character’s first screen outing, Batman isn’t the best example of the Forties serial format, and it’s only sporadically rewarding (oh for the heyday of Chapters 6-8), all of which ensures that this particular episode fits right in in the overall scheme of things.

Monthly Roundup – June 2018

01 Sunday Jul 2018

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Action, Adam West, Animation, Austin Stowell, Ayla Kell, Batman vs. Two-Face, Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, Biography, Borg McEnroe, Bruce Greenwood, Bryce Dallas Howard, Burt Ward, Charles Barton, Chris Pratt, Crime, Dave Davis, Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A., Dominic Cooper, Don E. FauntLeRoy, Drama, Elliott Maguire, Francine Everett, Francis Lawrence, Gail Patrick, Guy Pearce, Horror, J.A. Bayona, Jack the Ripper, Janus Metz, Jennifer Carpenter, Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Literary adaptation, Murder, Mystery, Nicola Holt, Pierce Brosnan, Randolph Scott, Red Sparrow, Rick Morales, Sam Liu, Shia LaBeouf, Simon Kaijser, Simon West, Snakehead Swamp, Spencer Williams, Spinning Man, Stratton, Sverrir Gudnason, SyFy, The Ferryman, Thriller, True story, Wagon Wheels, Western, William Shatner

Borg McEnroe (2017) / D: Janus Metz / 107m

Cast: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny, Leo Borg, Marcus Mossberg, Jackson Gann, Scott Arthur

Rating: 7/10 – the rivalry between tennis players Björn Borg (Gudnason) and John McEnroe (LaBeouf) is explored during the run up to the 1980 Wimbledon Tennis Championships, and the tournament itself; with a script that delves into both players’ formative years (and if you think Borg is a terrific choice for the young Swede then it’s no surprise: Bjōrn is his dad), Borg McEnroe is an absorbing yet diffident look at what drove both men to be as good as they were, and features fine work from Gudnason and LaBeouf, though at times it’s all a little too dry and respectful.

The Ferryman (2018) / D: Elliott Maguire / 76m

Cast: Nicola Holt, Garth Maunders, Shobi Rae Mclean, Pamela Ashton, Philip Scott-Shurety

Rating: 4/10 – following a suicide attempt, a young woman, Mara (Holt), finds herself experiencing strange phenomena and being pursued by a mysterious hooded figure; an ultra-low budget British horror, The Ferryman is let down by terrible performances, cringeworthy dialogue, and a patently obvious storyline, and yet it’s saved from complete disaster by a strong visual style that’s supported by a disconcerting soundtrack, an approach that first-timer Maguire exploits as often as possible.

Red Sparrow (2018) / D: Francis Lawrence / 140m

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louise Parker, Ciarán Hinds, Joely Richardson, Bill Camp, Jeremy Irons, Thekla Reuten, Douglas Hodge

Rating: 6/10 – Ex-ballerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) is recruited to a secret Russian organisation that trains her to use her body as a weapon, and which then uses her to expose a double agent working in the heart of the Soviet system; a movie made up of so many twists and turns it becomes tiring to keep track of them all, Red Sparrow is an unlikely project to be released in the current gender/political climate, seeking as it does to objectify and fetishise its star as often as possible, but it tells a decent enough story while not exactly providing viewers with anything new or memorable.

Spinning Man (2018) / D: Simon Kaijser / 100m

Cast: Guy Pearce, Pierce Brosnan, Minnie Driver, Alexandra Shipp, Odeya Rush, Jamie Kennedy, Clark Gregg

Rating: 4/10 – when a teenage student (Rush) goes missing, suspicion falls on the professor (Pearce) who may or may not have been having a relationship with her; with arguably the most annoying character of 2018 propping up the narrative (Pearce’s commitment to the role doesn’t help), Spinning Man is a dreary mystery thriller that has its chief suspect behave as guiltily as possible and as often as he can, while putting him in as many unlikely situations as the script can come up with, all of which makes for a dismally executed movie that can’t even rustle up a decent denouement.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) / D: J.A. Bayona / 128m

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon

Rating: 7/10 – with the volcano on Isla Nublar about to erupt, a rescue mission is launched to save as many of the dinosaurs as possible, but it’s a rescue mission with an ulterior motive; clearly the movie designed to move the series forward – just how many times can Jurassic Park be reworked before everyone gets fed up with it all? – Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom concentrates on the horror elements that have always been a part of the franchise’s raison d’être, and does so in a way that broadens the scope of the series, and allows Bayona to provide an inventive twist on the old dark house scenario.

Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. (1946) / D: Spencer Williams / 61m

Cast: Francine Everett, Don Wilson, Katherine Moore, Alfred Hawkins, David Boykin, L.E. Lewis, Inez Newell, Piano Frank, John King

Rating: 7/10 – making an appearance at a club on a Caribbean island resort, dancer Gertie La Rue’s free-spirited behaviour causes all sorts of problems, for her and for the men she meets; an all-black production that takes W. Somerset Maugham’s tale Miss Thompson and puts its own passionate spin on it, Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. overcomes its limited production values thanks to its faux-theatrical mise-en-scene, Williams’ confidence as a director, a vivid performance from Everett that emphasises Gertie’s irresponsible nature, and by virtue of the relaxed attitude it takes to the themes of race and sexuality.

Wagon Wheels (1934) / D: Charles Barton / 59m

Cast: Randolph Scott, Gail Patrick, Billy Lee, Monte Blue, Raymond Hatton, Jan Duggan, Leila Bennett, Olin Howland

Rating: 5/10 – a wagon train heading for Oregon encounters trials and hardships along the way, including Indian attacks that are being organised by someone who’s a part of the group; a middling Western that finds too much room for songs round the campfire, Wagon Wheels takes a while to get going, but once it does, it has pace and a certain amount of B-movie charm thanks to Scott’s square-jawed performance, and Barton’s experienced direction, benefits that help offset the clunky storyline and one-note characters.

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018) / D: Sam Liu / 77m

Cast: Bruce Greenwood, Jennifer Carpenter, Scott Patterson, Kari Wuhrer, Anthony Head, Yuri Lowenthal, William Salyers, Grey Griffin

Rating: 6/10 – in an alternate, Victorian-era Gotham City, the Batman (Greenwood) has only recently begun his efforts at stopping crime, efforts that see him cross paths with the notorious Jack the Ripper; though kudos is due to Warner Bros. for trying something different, Batman: Gotham by Gaslight doesn’t always feel as if it’s been thoroughly thought out, with too much time given over to the mystery of Jack’s real identity, and a sub-plot involving Selena Kyle (Carpenter) that seems designed to pad out a storyline that doesn’t have enough substance for a full-length feature.

Batman vs. Two-Face (2017) / D: Rick Morales / 72m

Cast: Adam West, Burt Ward, William Shatner, Julie Newmar, Steven Weber, Jim Ward, Lee Meriwether

Rating: 6/10 – when a laboratory accident turns Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent (Shatner) into arch-villain Two-Face, Batman (West) and Robin (Ward) soon end his criminal activities, only to find themselves battling all their old adversaries – but who is manipulating them?; what probably seemed like a good idea at the time – have West and Ward (and Newmar) reprise their television roles – Batman vs. Two-Face is let down by a tired script that does its best to revisit past TV glories but without replicating the sheer ebullience the 60’s series enjoyed, making this very much a missed opportunity.

Stratton (2017) / D: Simon West / 94m

Cast: Dominic Cooper, Austin Stowell, Gemma Chan, Connie Nielsen, Thomas Kretschmann, Tom Felton, Derek Jacobi, Igal Naor

Rating: 4/10 – a Special Boat Service commando, John Stratton (Cooper), teams up with an American military operative (Stowell) to track down an international terrorist cell that is targeting a major Western target – but which one?; the kind of action movie that wants to be packed with impressive action sequences, and thrilling moments, Stratton is let down by a tepid script, restrictive production values, poor performances, and despite West’s best efforts, action scenes that only inspire yawns, not appreciation.

SnakeHead Swamp (2014) / D: Don E. FauntLeRoy / 86m

Cast: Ayla Kell, Dave Davis, Terri Garber, Antonio Fargas

Rating: 3/10 – a truck full of genetically mutated snakehead fish crashes, releasing its cargo into the Louisiana swamp land, where they soon start making their way to the top of the food chain; another lousy SyFy movie that mixes mutant creatures, endangered teens, a muddled voodoo subplot, and sub-par special effects to less than astounding results, SnakeHead Swamp might best be described as a “no-brainer”, in that it doesn’t try very hard, FauntLeRoy’s direction is rarely noticeable, and the cast – even Fargas – don’t come anywhere near making their characters credible or realistic, all of which is down to a script that should have been rejected at the title stage.

Lavender (2016)

28 Thursday Jun 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Abbie Cornish, Dermot Mulroney, Diego Klattenhoff, Drama, Ed Gass-Donnelly, Horror, Justin Long, Memories, Murder, Mystery, Review, Supernatural, Thriller

aka Trauma

D: Ed Gass-Donnelly / 92m

Cast: Abbie Cornish, Diego Klattenhoff, Lola Flanery, Dermot Mulroney, Justin Long, Sarah Abbott, Liisa Repo-Martell, Peyton Kennedy

1985 – Jane Ryer (Kennedy) is the sole survivor when her family is murdered in their remote farmhouse; she’s found covered in blood and holding a cutthroat razor. Twenty-five years later, Jane (Cornish) is married to Alan (Klattenhoff), and has a young daughter, Alice (Flanery). She runs a photographer’s studio that showcases the pictures she takes of often abandoned rural properties, and is plagued by lapses in her memory. A stay in hospital following a car accident reveals Jane has several skull fractures from when she was a child, but she has no memory of being injured. She also comes to learn that one of the farmhouses she has photographed is one that she owns, even though she has no memory of it, or an uncle, Patrick (Mulroney), who has been paying the taxes on it and maintaining it. Drawn to discovering what happened when she was a child, Jane, Alan and Alice decide to meet Patrick and stay at the farmhouse. Soon, Jane discovers that the house is the source of a series of supernatural occurrences that relate to the murder of her family all those years before…

From the outset, with Patrick being informed of the deaths of his sister’s family and the horrific aftermath being presented in a series of tableaux, it seems as if Lavender isn’t interested in offering viewers another generic rural ghost story. But that opening sequence, culminating in the discovery of a clearly traumatised Jane, unfortunately marks the beginning of the end in terms of originality. Jane’s plight, going from being forgetful to being plagued by supernatural events and visions, is played out in too flat a manner for it to be entirely effective. While the script – by director Gass-Donnelly and Colin Frizzell – takes its time in revealing the details of just what happened in 1985, it does so in a measured, unhurried way that robs the movie of any appreciable pace or momentum. This doesn’t even allow for a slowburn approach to the material, and instead, has the opposite effect, making the viewer wish some scenes would hurry up, while wishing others wouldn’t repeat motifs and experiences that Jane – and we – have already witnessed over and over. As a result, the central mystery is treated with sincerity but lacks verve, and the characters are forced to repeat conversations and actions that harm the movie’s narrative structure.

When presenting supernatural events on screen, many directors and screenwriters adopt a kind of “kitchen sink” approach, and throw in scares and jolts and all sorts of shenanigans because they might look good (or cool), and because even a cheap scare can be a winner. Lavender has a number of these moments, such as when adult Jane and her younger sister, Susie (Abbott), hide under a sheet in the stables. As something wicked comes nearer – cue heavy footfalls – Susie urges Jane to run, and when she does the sheet becomes more voluminous than it should be and when she finally escapes from it, she’s in the middle of a field. The juxtaposition between the expanse of the field after the confines of the sheet works well, but in terms of dramatic effect, it makes no sense (we already know Jane’s mental state isn’t the best). Gass-Donnelly works hard to give the movie a tense, unnerving atmosphere, and employs a grimly portentous score from Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld to help matters along, but the material is too thinly stretched in places, and too flatly handled, for their efforts to be successful. By the time things pick up for the climax, and some energy is injected into the proceedings, some viewers might have already taken their leave.

Rating: 5/10 – with the performances proving merely adequate (Cornish, though, makes a virtue of appearing blank-faced), and the script veering off at odd tangents at odd moments, Lavender is a lukewarm psychological horror that doesn’t follow through on its initial promise; tiresome in places, and with a central mystery that shouldn’t come as a surprise when it’s exposed, the movie struggles to be consistently interesting, and passes on several opportunities to better itself.

2036 Origin Unknown (2018)

27 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ARTi, Drama, Hasraf Dulull, Katee Sackhoff, Mars, Mystery, Ray Fearon, Review, Sci-fi, Steven Cree, Thriller

D: Hasraf Dulull / 94m

Cast: Katee Sackhoff, Ray Fearon, Julie Cox, Steven Cree, David Tse

In 2030, the first manned space flight to Mars reaches the surface but is destroyed by an unknown force. Six years later, the company behind the flight, United Space Planetary Corporation, has scaled back the involvement of human personnel in its space flight programme, and has entrusted its missions to an artificial intelligence called ARTi (Cree); some employees have been retained as supervisors, though. One of them is Mackenzie ‘Mack’ Wilson (Sackhoff), and she and ARTi have been tasked with investigating the fate of the earlier mission. Mack has a personal connection: her father was the lead astronaut. Sending a reconnaissance probe to the Martian surface, Mack and ARTi are shocked to find a mysterious cube-like structure. News of this is fed back to Mack’s sister (and high-ranking USPC executive) Lena (Cox), but instead of seeing it as an incredible discovery, she downplays the news and behaves in a way that makes Mack worry about the true parameters of the investigation. And when two things happen – a link is discovered between the cube and ARTi’s design, and the cube disappears (only to reappear somewhere completely unexpected) – Mack becomes convinced that her search for the truth has been severely compromised…

The second feature from visual effects supervisor Hasraf Dulull, 2036 Origin Unknown wears its heart on its sleeve right from the opening frames. This is a cinematic love letter to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with imagery cribbed from that movie’s Star Gate sequence, and an AI creation that may or may not be as infallible as it seems. Add in further imagery and ideas from 2010 (1984), and you have a de facto homage to the finest science fiction movie ever made (and its laboured sequel). Now this would probably have been a good thing if Dulull – who also wrote the script – had been able to concoct a coherent and/or credible story in the first place. Instead, he’s created something of a sci-fi monster in celluloid form, with an awkward, poorly assembled storyline, some of the most confusing and confused exposition heard in a sci-fi movie for some time, and pretty visuals that barely compensate for the dramatic liberties taken elsewhere. Dulull may have had good intentions when he began writing his screenplay, but somewhere along the line no one pointed out that the awful dialogue, the one-note characters, and the unconvincing scenario, didn’t add up to anything meaningful.

Take one example of how confused Dulull’s plotting becomes as the movie plods on from one “revelation” to another: the connection between ARTi and the cube is given centre stage at one point, but why or how that connection has been made remains unexplained, even after there’s a scene that explores the idea (but in as little detail as possible). Other unexplained anomalies abound – the importance of magnetism in relation to the cube, the involvement of government spook Sterling (Fearon), and why Mack has to bear so much responsibility for the death of her father. These and other issues arise too often for comfort, making the movie an uncomfortable watch for anyone used to seeing intelligent sci-fi, and not this amalgamation of other directors’ greatest hits. Despite this, the ever-watchable Sackhoff maintains her ability to make even the worst of material sound better than it has any right to be, and there’s good support from Cree as the slightly supercilious ARTi. The visuals are clearly designed to be the movie’s standout feature, and Dulull’s background in visual effects ensures their effectiveness, but it’s a shame that more attention couldn’t have been given to the hazy material.

Rating: 4/10 – a frustrating foray into the arena of mystery sci-fi, 2036 Origin Unknown is a hodge-podge of half-formed ideas and possibilities that are hampered by a muddled, perplexing screenplay; and don’t believe the poster: the “origins of our existence” aren’t explored at all.

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