Film Reviews by Alphaville

Beautifully written, acted and directed, this intense thriller doesn’t waste a scene as it immerses you in the search for two missing girls in rural Pennsylvania. There are suspects and father Hugh Jackman isn‘t going to play by the rules no matter what frazzled cop Jake Gyllenhaal tells him. Does the title refer to the girls, the suspects or Hugh and Jake? It’s brutal, disturbing, exciting and packed full of engrossing scenes.

A film about ‘young adults’ that, at last, for the most part, isn’t just for teenagers. They’ve been bred to crew a spaceship to a planet that only their grandchildren will reach. It’s not 2001 A Space Odyssey, but the screenplay does ask some interesting questions… If you’re going to die en route anyway, why be good?

Unfortunately, as the trailer gives away, it develops into an adolescent Lord of the Flies. It all gets very silly, with some risible montages, reminiscent of an old Monty Python sketch, that are apparently meant to represent growing sexual awakening. It’s never less than watchable, but ultimately the whole is less than the sum of its parts and ends up as little more than another film with the logline: In space no-one can hear you scream.

B/w 1957 film, second in Andrzej Wajda’s classic anti-war trilogy, about resistance fighters fleeing Nazis through the sewers of Warsaw. Most of the film is set in the sewers and is very dark, with incidents that are somewhat samey, but overall it stands up well for its age and remains a priceless document. Some of the early travelling shots still startle and you’ll not forget the ending.

B/w 1958 film, third in Andrzej Wajda’s classic anti-war trilogy, follows a resistance fighter on the day the Nazis surrender. Our hero Zbigniew Cybulski, the ‘Polish James Dean’, is tasked to kill a communist bigwig, but then he meets a woman. Will he choose love or duty? Some political subplots have lost their bite, but we always come back to our mesmerising hero, who commands the screen in every scene he’s in. The ending is unforgettable. Like Dean, Cybulski was tragically killed in an accident a few years later. Some of Wajda’s shots still astonish and make the film essential viewing for anyone who loves cinema.

Tragic drama set on the Isle of Lewis in 1916. Act 1 (i.e. first 30 minutes) is little more than Sunday night TV fare, then a tragic incident changes the life of our heroine and from then on it’s increasingly engrossing. The trailer gives the game away so do avoid that if you want to experience the film at its best. It’s hardly a fun watch, but you become so involved in the heroine’s plight that what at first seemed a one-star film now seems worthy of four stars, even if the ending is a tad unbelievable. And the production does seem to have misunderstood Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’, which was meant to be ironic: whichever road you take, it makes no difference.

Unless you’re a fan of Nicholas Cage’s mannered overacting, a film in which he plays a fictional version of himself will drive you up the wall. There’s no doubt it’s meant to be humorous, but a little goes a long way. After half an hour a plot kicks in about him developing a film, which turns out to be the one we’re watching. This could have been a neat idea, but most of the in-jokes and slapstick come across as self-indulgent. It’s an oddity that deserves marks for trying and is watchable throughout, even when it makes you wince, but is it the ‘wildly entertaining action-packed comedy’ that the DVD guff promises? Er, no.

Wonderful, fast-paced adventure yarn about a Jewish woman aiding the resistance in WW2 Holland. It’s an epic saga crammed to overflowing with incident. Of course, as directed by Paul Verhoeven, expect nudity, torture and more surprises than in old-fashioned war films. It will certainly keep your eyes glued to the screen, constantly making you wonder what can possibly happen next (as long as you avoid the tell-all trailer). Another Verhoeven master-class in film-making.

This horrible film has four men murder a woman after a failed rape and chase her friend up a mountain rock face. There’s nothing wrong with having baddies chasing a heroine, but these men are despicable and we have to spend most of the film listening to them as the contrived plot leaves our heroine on her own with no dialogue. Sample dialogue: ‘I’m coming for you, bitch.’

To cut down costs, the bulk of the film takes place at night on a set representing the ledge of the title, so there’s no more than a few brief climbing scenes and scenic shots. The misogynists are on the ledge and the woman is trapped beneath them below an overhang. It’s static, it's ridiculous and it's awful.

For a film that features state-of-the-art cgi dinosaurs, this sequel is incredibly bland. Far too much time is spent re-introducing a surplus of characters from previous films in the franchise, all of whom are forced to exchange such excruciating banter that the actors can do little with it but phone it in. You have to wait nearly an hour before a bog-standard dino-on-the-loose chase is rolled out and it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Naturally Chris Pratt rides a motor bike and only extras get killed. Tick. Then it’s another hour before the last bog-standard confrontation. This franchise ran out of ideas about what to do with cgi long ago.

Even if you don’t already know the story from the celebrated 1956 film The Man Who Never Was, the trailer will tell you anyway. That leaves a film that has little to do but go through the motions, retelling the story with barely a surprise along the way. You can predict every beat as the stiff-upper-lipped Brits devise their elaborate plan (yes, Colin Firth is present and correct). It’s padded out with titbits to give the main characters some backstory, but that merely bogs the drama down even more. All of this turns an extraordinary real-life wartime episode into a peculiarly unmoving viewing experience. Even worse, there’s a pointless voiceover and a laughable climactic clapping scene, presumably for the benefit of transatlantic viewers.

A man with heart disease watches people in the street from the balcony of his apartment and we follow their lives. Unfortunately their lives turn out to be not very interesting and the various unconnected plots, if they can be called that, go nowhere. It’s a quintessentially French film, but there’s not a lot going on here behind the city centre cafes and boulangeries. You wait for it to get going but it never does and what remains on screen is less than riveting. The unoriginal theme is ‘seize the day’, so why not do that by watching a wonderful Parisian film that celebrates life and love in a way this film never manages: ‘Paris, 13th Arrondissement’.

Disjointed plot, mad laughing killer, pedestrian police investigation, lead cop with a troubled home life, risible climax… all add up to a right old mess. There may be a good serial killer thriller lurking in here somewhere, but it never sees the light of day. Not the best work of normally reliable director Danny Pang (The Eye, Bangkok Dangerous).

The problem with most disaster movies is you know what’s coming but still have to sit through screeds of character development to reach the action. Here, however, the build-up is believable and engaging, more of a detective story.

It’s a kinda-sequel to The Wave (also excellent), with the action shifting from Norway’s fjord country to Oslo. Our hero geologist, now a broken man estranged from the family he saved from the wave, now has to save them again as he begins to find evidence of what’s coming next. His efforts in a city of collapsing buildings really ramps up the tension in some terrific scenes of peril.

Documentary-style actor’s film about Jackie Kennedy, focussing on Natalie Portman’s portrayal of her. If true-to-life it’s educational, but judged purely as a film there’s nothing here to tempt an audience disinterested in the subject matter. The West Wing TV series had more life.

A ‘slow burn’ trumpets the trailer. Yep, you know what that means. A slow, bleak, actorly film about mental illness that ends in mass murder. However well-meant, is this really what you want from a viewing experience? Do check out the trailer first. That should be enough to put you off.