Film Reviews by Alphaville

How did this ever get the green light? Billed as a sci-fi actioner, it surely contravenes the trades descriptions act. Monsters? Blink and you’ll miss them. Same with so-called ‘starring’ Milla Jovovic. It’s basically a two-handed talkathon in which a father and teenage daughter retreat to an island and learn to live off the land. If only Ben Fogle would turn up to see how they’re getting on and relieve the boredom. To further ease you to sleep, most of the scenes are filmed in a dark room. The only action, if there is any, appears to happen off-screen. This is film at its misleading, stagey, mind-numbing worst

An over-acted play. Hugely over-rated. People in a room photographed talking. The end. At least it looked cheap to make.

Boring characters, boring script, point-and-shoot camerawork, much of it filmed in the dark. But let’s face it, you’re here for the dinosaurs. They do make an appearance after a long half-hour, and the cgi is fine, but most of the action consists of a lot of running and shooting and it’s hard to care. The trailer's far more exciting.

Two women are stuck on a zipwire in the Dolomites while baddies try to get at them. It’s a refreshingly welcome and ambitious set-up for a British movie, even though it’s filmed in Cyprus. Unfortunately, despite some dramatic moments and some gory action, the drama is more laughable than tense. The characters are bland and the studio backdrops are obvious. Our heroine(s) could at least have had a backdrop of mountains rather than boring blue sky as they swing back and forth. Plus the plot is padded out with unnecessary scenes, especially at the end when the zipwire action’s over and done with. A 2-star film with an added star for ambition and a good laugh.

This intimate, theatrical drama has an occasional moment but hardly deserves the accolades it has received as a film. Basically it’s a downbeat, closely-observed soap with a family-issues plot that goes nowhere. Expect 129 minutes of long, lingering silences, a surfeit of emoting and a somnambulant score to help you drift off.

All the camera does is observe the actors talking (or just looking). Ironically, one of the main characters is a film director who hates TV soaps because (according to the subtitles) they lack ‘visuals’. To liven things up, there are occasional jumps back and forth in time, but they add nothing that isn’t covered in the present. If you’ve seen previous Trier films, you’ll know what to expect.

Trier’s first film – a sub-novelle-vague take on a young author who becomes psychotic. It’s slow, not very interesting, often confusing as it jumps back and forth in time, and goes nowhere. It has its moments if you can be bothered to get into the characters, but it’s hardly worth the effort. And don’t be misled by the fast-edited trailer, which has a dynamism the film sorely lacks.

The DVD cover’s 4-star reviews and the exciting trailer promise much, but the film disappoints. It’s a bloodthirsty, curiously cold, actioner about a group of people who murder horrible people. One of them is ‘the old woman’ of the title, but she’s not that old and can still fight and run up stairs like the youngsters, so the film loses its main pitch. It moves along from one killing to another, somewhat incoherently, making it difficult to invest in any of the characters. The repetitive fight scenes become tiring and the climactic one is so unbelievable and drawn-out that it becomes laughable.

A young woman on parole gets a job as housemaid to a psychotic wife and her hulky husband. Obviously it’s not going to go well. But if you think you’ve seen it all before, just hang on in there. This is unexpectedly riveting stuff, especially if you don’t know the book on which it’s based. The three leads are great, the script keeps you on edge and the direction is flawless.

After two exciting films, this fourth film in the franchise actually manages to be even worse than the third. Awful script, risible dialogue, amateur direction. The actors stand no chance. It’s for brain-dead gore fans only. Well done if you get through even the first drawn-out sequence of nonsense before reaching for the FF button. And if you can stand an even worse viewing experience, try watching it with ‘super-excited’ director Nia DaCosta’s commentary to discover, like, how amazing she thinks it all is, like.

This is more of a low-budget re-enaction than a feature film, with a single-house location and all dialogue copied from a transcription of a real FBI interrogation. Doesn’t sound like a must-see, but it’s surprisingly engrossing, even thrilling. If you don’t know Reality’s story (Reality is the lead character’s name) it will draw you into her predicament when FB guys (all guys) accost her outside her house. What do they think she’s done? Why doesn’t she ask them? As the reasons unravel, it’s increasingly involving. It’s also fascinating to see how the FBI work in real life - extremely polite but with a menacing edge of steel. Don’t expect a visual treat but, at just over an hour, this is an engrossing watch.

The unforgiveable problem with this absurdist, episodic, scatter-gun satire on modern society is that it doesn’t engage the viewer. The first episodes work – zombified students on their phones, a mother having her murdered son cloned – but the whole is an OTT mess. It’s more of an intellectual exercise than an engaging film, built around a ridiculous guy from the future who’s here to save us. I think he’s meant to be funny but he doesn’t half go on. The whole is certainly to be applauded for making a cinematic effort at having something to say, but unfortunately I’d given up caring long before the ridiculous ending with the giant cat.

I saw this when it first came out in 1972, but even then the tale of a bunch of hippies finding a hidden valley complete with tribespeople in the wilds of New Guinea was a disappointment. The main draw for us in those days was the hippy vibe and the Pink Floyd score. Seeing it again, it hasn’t aged well. It really is amateurish film-making. The plot and direction are virtually non-existent and so is the the Pink Floyd score. Worth a look, maybe, but notable only as a curiosity and, considering its time, for its full-frontal male nudity.

For our standard Japanese anime schoolgirl heroine, everything has a colour aura. This enables the director to play with the film’s colour palette… and it’s well-animated in the typical Japanese school-set lo-key way… but the long talky scenes, expressionless faces and one-note vocals (even in the VO) soon pall. The drawn-out flimsy plot has her joining an electronic band and this eventually leads to the film’s saving grace. If it gets as boring for you as it did for me, FF to the last fifteen minutes, where the band perform a beautifully-realised rock-on concert. If only the rest of the film had such energy.

A shaggy-dog tale of two troubled guys who kidnap a female exec believing she is an alien. Although billed on the DVD sleeve as a comedy, there are no laughs and at times it delves into horror tropes. The main problem is that it’s overlong and the snail-pace plot just can’t fill the time available. Cue long drawn-out dialogue scenes and characters who don’t always act ‘in-character’ in order to inject plot twists. It would probably work better as a theatrical chamber piece. So why as many as three stars? It does make you wonder what’s eventually going to happen next, and the blasts of ironic music certainly perk matters up.

There’s so much wrong with this movie. The in-yer-face camerawork that wears you down, the scattergun plotting, the sleazy characters, the annoying snippets of music… But the main problem is the main character, who is a pain to spend any time with. As for the table tennis, there’s barely any… and swinging a shaky-cam left and right to film the players doesn’t help. Plus it’s far too long. I gave up during the seemingly endless boring central section involving New York gangster types.