Film Reviews by Alphaville

Heartfelt drama hits all the right notes, beautifully written and paced to draw you along effortlessly into the lives of deftly-drawn characters you soon feel you know intimately. Even minor characters with only a few lines are well-rounded with something interesting to say. As he showed in In Bruges, writer/director Martin McDonagh has a knack for dialogue that’s moving, shocking and humorous all at the same time. Not a word is wasted.

The plot concerns Frances McDormand’s efforts to get small-town sheriff Woody Harrelson, who is dying of cancer, to find the murderer of her daughter. Confident to mix darkness with light, Mcdonagh shifts our emotions with one plot twist after another. It’s the kind of film that makes you quite happy for it to go on and on. The only misjudged note is the score of mawkish C&W ballads.

This is director Jaume Collet-Serra and star Liam Neeson’s fourth action thriller after Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night and it seamlessly clicks into gear. Instead of the action being set on a plane (Non-Stop), this time it’s on a train. As usual, Collet-Serra’s direction is perfectly in sync with the subject matter. It bowls along with pace, precision and clarity, whether the camera is prowling around a train carriage or focussing in on Neeson’s predicaments. It’s also refreshing that, unlike other leading men, Neeson’s not scared to play a 60-year-old. It doesn’t affect the action. There’s a train fight here that’s better than anything since From Russia With Love.

The far-fetched plot sometimes makes it difficult to suspend disbelief and go with the flow, but put your brain on hold for a while and it’s a fun film with rarely a dull moment.

This intelligent, engrossing and kinky biopic is about the psychology of emotions and the nature of male/female relationships. Marston is a Harvard psychology professor. With his even cleverer wife (a sparkling Rebecca Hall) he invents the lie detector. They both love their female assistant.

Inspired by the two women in his life, Marston creates Wonder Woman to show girls they can be anything they want to be, but this is defiantly not a superhero film. It’s much more than that. It’s a brilliant, unconventional film about brilliant, unconventional people. Unlike most anti-intellectual multiplex fodder, it’s chock full of interesting ideas as well as being grounded in three compelling characters. As the trio fall foul of social norms and Wonder Woman comics are publicly burnt, you’ll be rooting for them all the way.

The whole film is a clarion call for the freedom to live your life as you wish. In Marston’s words, ‘Who are you to judge us?’ One thing’s for sure, you’ll never look at Wonder Woman the same way again.

It’s sensitively directed by its writer Angela Robinson with a commitment and compassion perfectly attuned to its subject matter. The DVD extras explore the background and making of the film with similar heart.

Bruce Willis is an ageing ‘cool dude’ private eye in L. A. We know the film is meant to be an action comedy because he skateboards in the nude to get away from baddies (or rather his stunt double does). He’s also a sex-magnet for younger women. Played with irony, it might work. Played straight, it’s just wrong on so many levels.

You know it’s a British arthouse film as soon as it opens. Close-up after close-up without establishing any context. Dismal artfully-lit illumination. Terse dialogue. A static camera angle. Short scenes that cut before any build-up of drama, as in Monty Python’s ‘and now for something completely different’. And again, that agonisingly static camera. This is more a series of portraits than a movie. Some of the stills, unaccountably, are of a cat. Even with an 80-minute run time before the credits, it seems like a long ‘movie’. As with too many British films, it plays more like an ill-lit over-wrought hour-long period TV drama.

Judging from the interview with first-time director William Oldroyd on the DVD extras, he seems more interested in the idea of making a feminist film than in mastering the art of cinema.

By the way, the film has nothing to do with Lady Macbeth. It’s a 19th century piece in which Mrs Lester revolts against her tyrannical husband and gets it on with the hired hand. And worse. She’s more like a nasty Lady Chatterley. The behaviour of all the characters is unbelievable. The hired hand’s character arc in particular is just ridiculous. You end up feeling sorry for the actor.

Mindless superhero films shouldn’t be judged by normal critical standards, but this is the pits. The fact that so much money was obviously thrown at it only shows up its inadequacies more. It’s film-making by numbers, completely devoid of drama or surprise. You expect a ridiculous plot – about the king of a technologically-advanced kingdom hidden in the heart of Africa – but this is plain nonsense. What may have worked as a Marvel comic book didn’t have to make every actor work with an African accent. Kudos to poor Forest Whitaker for a brave attempt and to a miscast Martin Freeman as a CIA agent with an American accent.

Dialogue, plot and characterisation are all risible. But the film’s worst crime is that it’s so boring, with lots of longueurs between the bog-standard over-edited man-fights, which exhibit a surprisingly sparse use of superhero cgi-abilities.

It’s also unremittingly racist to both the black and white characters. Makes you wonder whether the American critics who loved this film were too in thrall to political correctness to recognise the fact. The only character with any magnetism is the baddie – a black American bad boy called Killmonger (yes, really). He unashamedly wants to ‘liberate people who look like us’ from ‘the colonisers’. Oh dear. His presence does bring some much needed charisma to the screen, but imagine a white superhero film with such a racist premise.

French thriller in which mild-mannered accountant Francois Cluzet, France’s answer to Dustin Hoffman, takes a job with a shady organisation and finds himself involved in skulduggery. The set-up is intriguing and Cluzet is as sympathetic a lead as ever, but pacing and direction are too staid for a thriller. The plot does build as his predicament worsens, but the film is too Kafkaesque for its own good and never hits any heights.

In director Aaron Sorkin’s own words, this is ‘a poker movie’. If you don’t like poker, give it a miss. If you don’t like incessant voiceover, give it a miss. Molly is a poker hostess. Her prattling, quick-fire voiceover, telling us everything we’re watching on screen, is a pain. Sometimes it’s more like listening to an audio book than watching a movie. Sorkin has previous in this, as a writer on The West Wing, but while verbosity may work on TV it rarely does on film.

Another mistake is having the film’s structure alternate between a present-day court case and flashbacks of how Molly got there. This is never a convincing plot ploy. Giving the end game away merely makes the flashbacks predictable. There are even further pointless flashbacks to her childhood with her father. One suspects the script stays too loyal to the real-life Molly’s autobiography. The poker-game flashbacks zip along pacily enough if you’re interested, but the whole film lacks drama and amounts to little.

Slow, reserved, painfully painterly remake of the Clint Eastwood film from the point of view of the women. It’s as beautifully observed as you would expect from Sofia Coppola, but there’s nothing else going on. Abrupt shifts of character don’t ring true. Short disconnected scenes bide time but build no momentum. Nothing happens for an hour and when it does it’s entirely predictable even if you haven’t seen the Eastwood original. In any case, the trailer tells you the whole story and, by managing to make it look like a thriller, deserves more kudos than the film itself.

The set is a colonial mansion in pre-electric times and is lit (or not lit) accordingly. Nearly all scenes take place in darkness, shadow and candlelight. A feast for the eyes it isn’t. The DVD Extras show how the scenes actually looked while being filmed, and one wishes for some of that light in the finished version. The darkness adds to the dreariness of the plot and the reserved characterisations. It’s best viewed as a mood piece, but do not watch while feeling sleepy.

After a promising plane crash in the mountains this turns into a soapy luvvie-fest between survivors Idris Elba and Kate Winslet. Much of it takes place in constricted dark spaces at night – the plane, a cave, a shack – as they get to know each other. Interestingly, the trailer shows none of this… for good reason.

Idris is more convincing than you’d think in a more dialled-down role than usual, but Kate with an American accent is at her most actorly. Nor does the inane dialogue do them any favours as they spend the film wittering and squabbling endlessly. They’re even stuck with a mutt whose annoying whimpering matches theirs.

As their cloying relationship develops you won’t need a spoiler to tell you where it’s going. There are opportunities for an interesting ending but the screenplay typically bottles it. For Milles & Boon fans only.

In this documentary-style slice of American underclass life, a single mother living in a cheap motel lets her feral brats run wild. Cue lots of shouting and screaming, and that’s not just the kids. There’s probably a message but you won’t want to hang around long enough to find out. OTT American reviewers praised the film for the performances of the children. Let’s hope they were indeed acting, although the Making Of feature on the DVD hardly endears them. Don’t be fooled by the sugar-coated trailer, which adopts a child innocence approach. You’d run from these people in real life. Ditto on screen.

Well-written, well-directed hard-bitten cops and robbers movie channelling the spirit of Michal Mann’s Heat, against which it loses nothing in comparison. Gerard Butler is in convincing form as the take-no-prisoners lead cop up against equally tough ex-Marine thief Pablo Schreiber. Gritty and immersive, supported by a perfectly judged insistent score, this is an intense, intelligent and involving movie. The cast spent two months at training boot-camp prior to shooting and it shows. You believe these guys. No dumb heroics here. This looks real.

The plot builds to a tense final act and gripping climax, with a fascinating dénouement it would be a spoiler to give away. It’s writer Christian Gudegast’s first film as director and he’s in total command of tone, cast and camera. Avoid the trailer and go with the flow. Den of Thieves nails it.

Even the DVD Extras deserve a mention. There’s a fun feature on boot camp and an excellent director’s commentary in which Gudegast, among other topics, explains how some of the shots were achieved. Take the brilliant opening shot: a seamless transition from helicopter to drone to Russian arm (look it up on YouTube).

Exquisitely directed, thrilling, thoughtful Western set in the 1890s. Indian-hating officer Christian Bale has to escort old Cheyenne enemy Wes Studi, now a dying man after several years in prison, and his family back to his Montana homeland. They’re joined by Rosamund Pike, whose family has been killed by Comanches in a riveting opening sequence. Who are the hostiles? It’s complicated. Comanches and Cheyennes also hate each other, and there are some bad white men around too.

There are some tense scenes as we become increasingly involved with the disparate group and their journey. Bale’s character especially is a fine construction, balancing a justified hatred for ‘savages’ with great tenderness. Despite this, and plenty of action scenes, the tone is surprisingly elegiac, encompassing a journey in spirit as well as in time and space.

The beautiful Western landscape allows room for all of these complex themes to develop. Don’t expect the usual Western clchés. The plot constantly surprises and is impossible to predict, as is the edge-of-seat climax. Writer/director Scott Cooper’s Hostiles is one of the most multi-layered and exciting Westerns to hit the big screen in a long time. It will stay with you.

20 years after Jumanji and 13 after Zathura, this third related film maintains and even surpasses the standard of the first two in what is becoming an entertaining if intermittent franchise. This time our heroes are trapped in a jungle game for an irresistible adventure set against a backdrop of picturesque Hawaiian scenery. If you liked Romancing the Stone you’ll love this.

As game avatars, a high school nerd becomes The Rock, his jock friend becomes weakling Kevin Hart, a demure girl becomes badass Karen Gillan and The selfie-obsessed class hot girl becomes Jack Black. All have fun with their game strengths and weaknesses. One of The Rock’s strengths, for instance, is his smoulder, while one of Kevin Hart’s weaknesses is cake, which makes him explode (they all have three lives).

The quartet have to band together for an Indiana Jones-type adventure and it’s fun all the way. The Rock plays winningly against type. Karen Gillan kicks ass. Jack Black has a blast teaching Karen Gillan how to flirt and discovering his penis. Even Kevin Hart isn’t irritating for once. Director Jake Kasdan has fashioned a real crowd-pleaser that’s impossible not to like, and for true film fans there’s also a raft of extras on the DVD.

In this likeable James Bond spoof (a sequel to OSS 117: Lost in Cairo), Jean Dujardin returns as the suave but hapless 1960s French secret agent. This time he’s chasing Nazis in Brazil and getting entangled with Chinese hitmen and hippy love-ins. He’s even more innocently sexist and racist than in his first outing, delivering laughably non-pc remarks with engaging charm and panache. Add in some scenic location work and this is an entertaining confection. Funniest scene: an hilariously slow chase in a hospital, in which Dujardin staggers after his Nazi foe at snail’s pace, both of them injured and carrying drips.

If you’re expecting a rip-off of the knowing Austin Powers films, forget it. This is more of an homage to Dean Martin’s Matt Helm spy spoofs of the 1960s. There’s even a Dino song over the opening titles. Film buffs will find much else to enjoy too, including a climax that spoofs Hitchcock’s Vertigo.