Film Reviews by Alphaville

The sort-of joint sequel to Breakable and Split expects you to remember everything about those films but makes it not worth the effort. Bruce Willis has little to do and looks too old to do it anyway, Samuel L. Jackson literally says nothing for an hour and James McAvoy’s motormouth multi-personality character is simply annoying. They’re cooped up in a psychiatric hospital for an encounter group with a shrink who doesn’t believe they have supernatural powers. And they talk and talk and talk.

When they do get out there’s some brief fisticuffs before we get bogged own again in tons more exposition and discussions about superhero tropes and clichés. It sounds like writer/director M. Knight Shyamalan lecturing the audience and is laughably bad. He seems to have forgotten how to make movies. This is tedious from start to finish.

This is a skewed take on Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) and her court in the early eighteenth century, complete with “scenes of a sexual nature”, as they say on TV. She’s frail and irascible, while her favourite Rachel Weisz runs affairs… until maid Emma Stone comes along. It’s as well made as any English heritage drama, with an added quirkiness that makes it constantly watchable. The dancing, for instance, is more Pulp Fiction than Jane Austen. Colman won an Oscar for her showy role, but if it’s an acting piece you’re after, there are more arresting performances here, especially Nicholas Hoult as the foppish leader of the opposition.

Film lovers will relish the “making of” short on the DVD Xtras. Director Yorgos Lanthimos explains how he uses wide angle and deep focus to give the picture a painterly look, and how he distorts the frame by using a convex lens. And yet… it all adds up to an historical drama that never gives us anyone to root for, never engages the emotions and fails to linger in the memory as anything other than a curiosity.

This worthy film must be the dullest ever made about Shakespeare. It’s set in 1613, when he gave up writing to return home to his family in Stratford. To do what? Gardening. He and his wife mope about in candlelit interiors to plinky-plonk piano music. They mourn their dead son and fret about their grown-up daughters, one of whom is stroppy and annoying.

The script by Ben Elton is equally moribund and make you wish for something with the dynamism of his Upstart Crow sitcom about Shakespeare. Despite the film’s title, this feels no truer than the sitcom. Sometimes you can here the writer pontificating. There’s even a subplot, would you believe, of female empowerment.

Kenneth Branagh stars and directs and is disappointingly reverential and bland in both roles. For instance, he chooses to film with no camera movement except pan and tilt. Why? The film comes alive only in one scene, when Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton visits Shakespeare and they share a scene of longing and unrequited love based around one of the sonnets. Otherwise, the DVD Xtras are more interesting, especially a fascinating on-stage Q&A where Branagh (describing the Southampton scene as a chess match) shows more animation than in the whole film.

The formula is as per the entertaining original, with our heroine forced to relive the birthday, Groundhog Day style, which ends with her being killed. The sequel tries to vary the formula by introducing a second version of reality into the time loop, but it all gets a bit repetitive, with more emphasis than before on unfunny adolescent high school humour. Waiting for the killer to pounce again soon palls and even worse – pass the sick bag – our heroine learns some life lessons, complete with plinky-plonk piano soundtrack.

Like many films about dystopian futures, this is another aimed at “young adults” reared on mindless combat video games. The plot revolves around another silly game. This time it’s called Motorball – a variation of Rollerball. The main character is also cgi-generated – a cyborg girl who can eat food despite having no digestive tract for waste disposal. Her combat technique is Panzer Kunst, a technique lost since the battle with the URM. No, don’t laugh. It’s based on a best-selling Japanese manga franchise. This film hopes to be the first in a corresponding film franchise. It’s a shame that all filmmakers can think of doing with modern computer technology is making this kind of nonsense.

The cgi is as flawless as you’d expect, but there would be more engagement with the action if the lead character was a real person, like many of the other characters. A cartoon Alita just looks weird beside actors with the calibre of Christoph Waltz, who is as charismatic as ever and the best thing in the film, even if it’s hard to take him as a hunter-warrior. There’s also a city in the sky, and an evil villain in it, but we never get to see more than brief glimpses of them because that’s held back for the planned sequel. But then, nothing about this fabricated universe makes sense anyway.

Story, character, dialogue and drama are all infantile, making for a bland 2hr watch for anyone with a brain. The fact that the filmmakers choose to regale us with a ditty by warbling popster Dua Lipa over the end credits tells you exactly who the target audience is. Even more depressing, on the DVD extras producer James Cameron, once such a great action director, tells us he’s going to spend the rest of his career making Avatar sequels. How has Hollywood come to this?

Ghostly 19th century shenanigans on a Scottish island. Generic, clichéd nonsense. Hasn’t this been done a hundred times before? Watch the trailer and laugh.

This so-called “film” displays everything that is wrong with modern British cinema. The fact that it’s developed from a 5-minute video artwork piece tells you all you need to know about it. If you’re nevertheless intrigued, just watch the equally abysmal trailer. Based on the artist’s background, it’s a 1980s slice-of-soap set in a Birmingham council flat and worse than any soap you’ll ever see on TV. Sample dialogue: “Pass a fag, Ray”. The “artist” hasn’t a clue about how to make a film. In case he makes another, remember the name: Richard Billingham. Avoid like the plague.

Watchable Icelandic thriller-drama about a doctor who tries to rescue his daughter from drugs and the dealer she’s in love with. How far will he go against his Hippocratic not to harm anyone? Well, let’s just say there are some bloody moments. Unlike a rampaging Liam Neeson, our hero is an everyman doing his best in increasingly perilous situations, beset by baddies on one side and investigating detectives on the other. While it could do with more dramatic highs, the film is a class above miserable Scandi-noir and you’ll be rooting for a happy ending for writer/director/star Baltasar Kormakur.

Why is it that Hollywood remakes of foreign-language films are worse than the originals? Even if they have the same director? Cold Pursuit is a remake of the superior Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, in which Liam Neeson plays a

snowplough driver who exacts revenge on the gangsters he thinks have killed his son. Even more so than the original, it’s a black comedy that sags through repetition. There are some nice snowscapes along the way, but the black humour and episodic plot, in which new characters appear just to get killed off, has a distancing effect that makes it impossible to care about any of it. With Liam warping into an emotionless serial killer, it soon becomes distasteful. Tom Bateman is a charisma-free chief villain, Laura Linney is wasted as Liam’s wife, the device of listing each new victim on screen after being killed soon palls and the whole film exhibits a complete misjudgement of tone.

An inviting title for a dull film. The brief scenes of the two killings are intriguing and well-shot, but this is mostly a slow character study of an aged WW2 veteran. Sam Elliott drowses his way through it all, while Aidan Turner is wasted as his younger self in flashbacks.

Dutch writer/director Martin Koolhoven has fashioned an original, compelling and exciting Western (in English). While not quite the masterpiece that some would have, it’s a heady concoction. It’s divided into four chapters and plays with time as masterfully as Pulp Fiction. It’s filmed mainly in the mountains of central Europe but the wide landscapes are as convincing as anything in John Ford. The winter scenes have an almost mythic quality. Dakota Fanning and newcomer Emilia Jones make appealing heroines and ruthless stalker Guy Pearce is the most terrifying preacher-villain since Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. Only would-be saviour Kit Harrington has the balls to stand up to him.

Chapter 1 begins starkly with episodic scenes left to stand on their own without any score, but once the various dramatic elements begin to fall into place, and a score kicks in to highlight the drama, it’s riveting. Chapter 2 ramps up the action and by Chapter 3 the characters, time shifts and plot are so engrossing that the 143 minute run time flashes by.

Many American critics unaccountably dismissed Brimstone as an exploitation film because of its treatment of women, but you could equally view it as a feminist film, as indicated by the title of Chapter 4: Retribution. It’s their loss. By getting hung up on political correctness they completely missed the thrilling motion picture that was unfolding on screen.

Sure it goes to some dark places that John Ford never would, but the way life and death in the old West is portrayed here is surely more realistic than a gunfight at sundown. There are certainly some unsettling scenes, especially involving 13yo Emilia Jones, but the camera holds back from anything horrific that would make it exploitative. Listen to the young actress on the DVD Extras saying how much fun she had on set.

Koolhoven was inspired by Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and it shows in his mastery of mood and landscape. While he’s unlikely on the strength of one film to be put in the same bracket as Leone or Ford, he’s made one helluva Western

A beautifully observed Norwegian thriller in which Thelma, a student at Oslo university, begins to have seizures. But what exactly is “seizing” her? And why are birds crashing into windows? One thing’s for sure, you don’t want to upset her because… but that would be a spoiler. Don’t expect any Carrie-like grandstanding. There are shocks along the way, but this is a more nuanced and enthralling film that draws you into Thelma’s predicament and gets creepier and creepier as the menace builds. She’s a compelling and complex heroine you’ll be rooting for all the way.

Writer/director Sarah Daggar-Nickson can’t direct plot or actors. Expect lots of dialogue-free close-ups of our ‘heroine’ going about her daily routine. Watch her punch a punch bag, watch her put her make-up on… This is basically a documentary-style polemic against male aggression, complete with victims telling their story to camera at a support group. Actors speak their lines without passion or drama, with no score to add any emotion to a scene. The director has no idea how to make a film interesting. If you’re drawn to this expecting action and thrills, you’re in for an 87-minute endurance test. It received some good press reviews, but the praise was biased for its feminist content. To call it a thriller is a joke. It’s awful.

He’s a bank robber, she’s a racing driver. You don’t need any spoilers to guess the plot. It’s a cliché from start to finish. Maybe it could work if the characters held any interest. They don’t. It might work if the heist or racing scenes were filmed in an interesting way. They aren’t. The English title has replaced the original French title of Le Fidèle to make it sound more exciting. It isn’t. Only someone with the calibre of a Michael Mann could give this any life.

Who’d have thought? A Transformers film with heart! English screenwriter Christina Hodson has written a heart-warming script far from the usual fanboy agenda and director Travis Knight embraces it with panache. In this prequel set in 1987, teenager Hailee Steinfield grieves for her dead father while forming a bond with injured Transformer Bumblebee.

It’s very silly, of course, but by focussing on their relationship it works like a more adult version of ET, with a killer score of 1980s pop classics and some great San Francisco North Bay scenery adding to the mix. It descends into the usual underwhelming cgi cartoon battle at the climax, but up to that point the journey is more involving than it has any right to be.