Film Reviews by Alphaville

The trailer guys had a brilliant idea. Given that there’s nothing in the film itself to grab the viewer, let’s fast-edit clips to a soundtrack of Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ to at least make it sound interesting. Now imagine that trailer drawn out to 128mins without a Bowie score and you have just another long tedious coming-of-age teenage romance set in the 1970s.

The choice of soundtrack songs is dreadful. Well done if you can even get past the cheesy opening meeting set to a vomit-inducing ditty. It’s the kind of film that might eventually find a slot as slow afternoon fare on some obscure TV channel. A ‘timeless story’ trumpets the DVD blurb. Ironically… if for some unfathomable reason you decide to stick with it… you’ll be checking the clock to see how much longer you have to endure it.

Simplistic sword and martial arts saga with the usual flashing swords and somersaulting through the air, far too unsophisticated for Western tastes. The climactic set-to between Hero and Invincible atop the Statue of Liberty is little more than a cartoon.

If you miss Eric Rohmer and/or are a fan of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, you’re in for a treat. Director Jacques Audiard name-checks both on a Q/A on the DVD. Based on a comic book, the simple plot revolves around the lives and sexual relationships of four intelligent and likeable characters who live on the edge of Paris. In British hands this would have been a downbeat wallow in social realism. In Audiard’s hands it’s an elegiac celebration of life and love filmed in sparkling monochrome, sexually explicit but never prurient ? a welcome and deliberate antidote to what Audiard sees as today’s prudish age. Good to know the spirit of Rohmer is still alive and kicking across the Channel.

If you’ve never seen one of Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee or Young Detective Dee period extravaganzas, why not start with the first, even if Rise of the Sea Dragon is perhaps even better. This is cinematic grandeur to the nth degree. An epic sense of scale, a riot of colour and luxurious set design, startling images, a racing plot, a dramatic score, spectacular wirework action set-pieces… all captured by arresting camerawork.

The plot? It begins with the building of a 66-yards-high Buddha, inside which a man bursts into flames from the inside out. A talking deer recommends Detective Dee look into it and he’s soon on the case with two uppity sidekicks. The result? An unmissable feast for the eyes.

Money-laundering, a kidnap, an assassin – plenty of ingredients for a good cop movie, but a confusing plot and risible sentimental moments alienate the viewer. Fans of director Benny Chan will be treated to a couple of his trademark action set-pieces, but not enough to maintain interest. An early Chan movie from 2005, but still very disappointing.

In this Benny Chan sci-fi actioner mad mutant villains with superpowers are running riot in Hong Kong and it’s upto our heroes to whup them. If you can get past some hammy acting, especially by a comic lead character, there’s plenty here to keep you glued to the screen. Even the characters are more interesting than might be expected, with a high-kicking loved-up cop duo and a chief villain who hates what he’s becoming even as his powers grow. The set-pieces, using wirework stunts rather than boing Marvel-type cgi, are real and spectacular, while the mutants’ evolving power foreshadows an apocalyptic climax.

Better-then-average Hong Kong action film set among warring factions in old-time China. Unlike many Hong Kong films of similar ilk, the plot is intriguing, the characters are well-developed and the leading actors aren’t hammy. Unusually, the two main characters are introduced as baddies. Both Andy Lau as a general who becomes a Buddhist monk and his even badder side-kick Nicholas Tse are excellent, although how the flamboyant Nick can fight with floppy hair covering one eye is a mystery.

As for the action, director Benny Chan is a dab-hand at thrilling set-pieces, which here include an exciting cliff-top horse-and-carriage chase. The film sags a bit in the middle as Andy joins the Shaolin monks, but soon ramps up again to an extended action climax.

Honk Kong actioner in which a woman is kidnaped but manages to phone a stranger for help. All the ingredients are here, but with hammy acting and hammy stunts it’s not one of director Benny Chan’s best. There’s the odd good bit of action, but our heroine spends the whole film in hysterics, our hero’s a comic nerd and the baddies are all cardboard.

Guillermo del Toro’s 144-minute remake of a 1947 film, still set in the 1940s, is a film of two barely-connected halves. In the first half Bradley Cooper joins a rural carnival and learns how to pretend to read minds. While not exactly boring, it’s deliberately paced, sedately shot, has no score to add drama and lacks any plot thrust. Several well-known actors have bit parts before they’re unceremoniously dropped in Part 2. The whole 1hr+ of screen time could be cut to 5 minutes. Okay, maybe 10.

In the second half, with assistant Rooney Mara, Brad plies his trade in New York society, where he’s confronted by psychologist Cate Blanchett. This section gains some tension as he cons increasingly important people. There’s even a brief window of excitement, but it takes oh-so-long to get there.

On a whim, world-weary Swiss professor Jeremy Irons jumps on a train to Lisbon following a woman who has dropped a book that he finds interesting. In Lisbon he becomes fascinated by the former lives of the book’s real-life characters and their resistance to Portugal’s dictatorship.

Irons’ character is fascinating, but the film changes tack to deliver long flashbacks into resistance activities and these are nothing we haven’t seen before. This reviewer ended up zapping the flashbacks to return to the more interesting scenes involving Jeremy’s character arc.

The McGuffin that everyone’s after in this female-led action movie is a device that can access any computer system. Apparently it will be the end if the world as we know it unless our international posse of heroines can get hold of it. The result? Daft and surprisingly dull.

There are too many characters, good and bad, to care about any of them, so all the banter they share falls flat. That leaves the action, which is too often ruined by shaky-cam and over-editing. Consequently the exotic locations look under-used.

The actresses do their best with the ropey dialogue and the running around shooting, but it’s all a bit silly. About three-quarters of the way through there’s one unexpectedly dramatic scene that highlights what the rest of the film is missing (you’re sure to spot it). The main set-piece is an overlong action-light talkathon set in an auction house. The climactic shootout is equally meh. As usual in such films, our heroines are the only ones who can shoot straight.

The moon’s out of orbit and is approaching earth. If you thought it was made of cheese you’re wrong. It’s a hollow manufactured object. It’s the script that’s cheesy. By-the-numbers plotting, clichéd backstories, dialogue that will make you squirm… this load of nonsense has the lot. The hero even has a comic sidekick. Roland Emmerich is a dab hand at disaster movies, but this one’s a real mess that gets sillier and sillier as it progresses. Best line: “This doesn’t make any sense, Brian!” A one-star film despite a large budget and tons of cgi pixels swarming around the screen. Plus an extra star because it’s so inept it keeps you watching in disbelief.

With so many dull films around at the moment it’s a pleasure to sit back to an exhilarating 2017 Hong Kong actioner. A cop joins forces with a Thai colleague to trace his kidnapped daughter. With a fast-moving plot, well-rounded characters and hi-octane action, there’s not a dull moment to be had. The action is beautifully choreographed and imaginatively shot, particularly a dizzying rooftop chase sequence and the lengthy no-holds-barred climax. Wilson Yip, who also made the magnificent Dragon Tiger Gate, has to be one of the best action directors around. He makes great use of crane shots and travelling shots to showcase and keep up with what’s going on and even manages to come up with a moving denouement. It’s the kind of involving escapist film for which big screens were made.

Céline Sciamma’s dreary arthouse films are all about concept rather than execution. They’re like film-school student exercises for an art gallery. This is another that is painfully slow, sedate and scoreless (trailers for her films cheat by adding music and edits to seduce the unwary). Shot after shot, held far too long, is a medium or close-up of talking heads, either looking at the camera or at each other.

This particular strained effort has some nice coastal scenery, but it can’t make up for the lack of cinematic interest or plot substance. Naturally it has garnered good reviews among the “Emperor’s Clothes” arthouse crowd. What’s it about? If you must know, it’s about a relationship between two women, but who cares when it’s this painful to watch?

A second star for the opening set-piece and the brief Mirrorworld set-piece, which are imaginative. The rest? Meh. Same-old, same-old. One-star pell-mell film-making for those with TikTok attention spans. See the cgi flash-bangs! Hear the thumping muzak! Marvel at the Silly Green Goblin on his flying hoverboard! LOL at the spideyboy banter. Wonder… whether it will ever end. Okay, so it’s by no means the worst Marvel movie, but that’s not saying much, is it?