Film Reviews by Alphaville

A boy racer drives a heist getaway car while grooving to 50s-type rock-and-roll muzak. This is intended to be cool. Spoiler: it isn’t.

The movie is a lightweight time-passer that moves along snappily enough, but the incessant muzak really irritates. Director Edgar Wright first had the idea for the film 22 years ago and the soundtrack’s even older. He’s responsible for it. He needs to upgrade his musical tastes.

Overall it’s yet another distasteful caper movie that, lacking Tarentino-esque dialogue, views robbery and murder as nothing more than funky fun. Critics who rated it need to look at themselves. The DVD extras also irritate, offering nothing but a hagiography of the director.

Based on an adolescent killing game, Assassin’s Creed has a premise and plotline that are pure hokum. Michael Fassbender is a descendant of a 15th century Spanish assassin and is able to regress to that time to find the Apple of Eden, which contains the genetic code to free will. Yeah, right.

Get past that and any cinema-lover is in for a treat. As an action-adventure film it’s a quantum leap better than the comic book franchises that disfigure modern multiplex cinema. With style to spare, it’s beautifully filmed in real-time in real locations with swooping drone and wire shots. The wirework action would not look out of place in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and there can be no higher praise than that.

Some of the world’s top parkour and slackline experts were recruited as stuntmen and real locations were used instead of cgi to enable the action to be captured in-camera rather than in post-production. This gives the film an epic quality and a thrilling realism missing from Marvel-type franchises. A kinetic chase over the rooftops of Malta is worth the price of admission alone. A mention also for the evocative electronic score by director Justin Kurzel’s brother Jed, which adds to the mystical atmosphere.

Ignore the plot-bound critics and gameboys who judged the film on content alone. It may be nonsense, but it’s pure cinema. It’s a film to lose yourself in, to wallow in the images, the score and the mystical ambience. Even the DVD Extras, rarely mentioned either by professional critics or amateur reviewers, are a cut above average. They include an exciting feature on the location stuntwork that gives an insight into why the action is so compelling. Watch and wonder.

I agree with the review by RS. Critics seem to confuse this film with the heroics of its real-life hero Desmond Doss. As a film it starts well, with a well-observed vignette of small-town Americana, but after half an hour Desmond joins the army and it degenerates into a stereotypical war movie. The depiction of boot camp is like every war movie you’ve ever seen, with an unconvincing Vince Vaughan playing a shouty sergeant ridiculing the recruits.

The ensuing war scenes in the WW2 battle for the Pacific island of Okinawa are bloodily enhanced by cgi to ram home (i.e. revel in) the horror of war, but we have no emotional engagement with any of the characters.

Presumably Catholic director Mel Gibson was interested in the subject because of Desmond’s religious convictions, which stopped him carrying a gun. There’s a debate to be had there, but the war against fascism (evil?) would not have been won without guns. Apart from that angle there’s nothing new in this movie and nothing that’s not been done better many times before.

A group of young people get caught up in an alien invasion in Moscow. It’s B-feature fare but has a lot going for it. It’s fast-paced with real characters and snappy dialogue. No one acts like a moron and an absence of stand-out stars means that anyone may be bumped off at any time. The effects are on the cheap side but are well thought out with Predator-type visuals. It’s also fun to see Moscow getting zapped instead of New York, Paris or London. The apocalyptic vision of a Moscow devoid of people has an almost epic quality. All in all, this is a good, old-fashioned late-night sci-fi B-feature that’s well worth it’s 80 minutes run time.

Grossly over-rated movie about an 11yo girl joining a troupe of female dancers who sometimes gyrate as though having fits. Forget plot or characterisation, or even much dialogue, in this cheap-looking single-location indie movie full of annoyingly boisterous women cavorting around in their studio. There may be some confused message about coming-of-age, belonging and even health, but you’re unlikely to care or hang around for the whole mind-sapping duration. The opening shot, of the girl doing sit-ups in close-up while she counts, is typical of a director who, even with a run time of only 70 minutes, elongates scenes well past the point of boredom. 1, 2, 3... 21, 22…

After a visually inventive pre-titles sequences set in 1944, in which an American and Japanese pilot parachute onto the island, the rest of this 1970s-set film is as predictable as you’d expect. The motley cast form an expedition that flies into the island by battle helicopters, all of which fly close enough to Kong for him to swat them down. It’s laughably inept, as is everything else about the movie. Expect the usual coterie of cgi creatures for Kong to fight and leave the viewer wondering: why bother to remake this film yet again?

The cgi is okay, as you’d expect these days, but the more realistic you make Kong (and Godzilla and Planet Apes etc.) the less fun and more ridiculous the whole idea becomes. Apart from the pre-titles sequence and a brief end-credits postscript, nothing unexpected happens here and the only thing worth looking at is the Hawaiian and Vietnamese scenery.

Few directors are as inept with both actors and camera as Oliver Assayas. See my review of his Les Destinees Sentimentales. Personal Shopper is almost as bad as that and his other borefest Clouds of Sils Maria. This attempt even won the director’s prize at Cannes, which is an affront to cinema and surely a Gallic joke.

Right from the long opening scenes of Kristen Stewart wandering silently around an empty house you know you’re in for a long haul. Another long tedious section has her conducting a conversation by that most cinematic of devices: text messaging. Nothing of note occurs. Kristen does some shopping and waits for a sign from her dead brother. There’s a final static 3 minute shot. The End.

The acting, as in all Assayas’ films, has no life. Kinder critics call it subdued or understated. It’s as though a dead hand has been placed over all emotion. Assayas is simply in the wrong profession. Somebody please stop him attracting finance and giving arthouse cinema a bad name.

Jim Jarmusch makes gentle, quirky films full of well-observed detail and ironic humour. Paterson is bus driver happy with a routine that gives him space to write poems in his secret notebook. It’s Jarmusch’s skill to make that routine constantly engrossing. But what if Peterson’s routine is broken? And what does that say about what it is to be human?

Jarmusch’s films either soar or fail to take wing. This is one of his best – a film to lose yourself in.

Another boring mismatched cop-buddies movie (Nicholas Cage and Elijah Wood). The drug plot is a cliché, the drama non-existent and all attempts at humour fall flat. The jaunty music manages to make it seem even worse. In 2016, how did this ever get made? Even with a sparse running time of 88 minutes, it’s 88 minutes too long.

This Nevada-set thriller is a real poser. Writer/director Christopher Smith uses split screen and divided plot lines (similar to Sliding Doors) to tell his nourish tale of a seedy trio of characters on the make. There are times when the conceit causes the plot to lose focus, but stick with it if you’re in the mood for a film that’s both intelligent and a puzzle. Chris thinks it’s his best film, but it’s not a patch on the brilliant Triangle.

Brothers on opposite sides of the law. One’s a cop, the other’s a thug. Wow, that’s an original concept. Why did no-one think of it before? Even worse, it’s directed so ploddingly it’s sleep-inducing. A real disappointment from director Guillaume Canet.

The Making Of feature on the DVD is more interesting. Guillaume seems to have found making his first American film difficult, which perhaps explains its lack of oomph. If you haven’t seen his brilliant Tell No One, watch that instead.

Filmed like a poorly directed lo-rent TV soap, so over-reliant on ugly close-ups that it’s impossible to care about the boring plot. If you can stand it for an hour a silly creature appears to turn it into a so-called ‘horror’ film. Rubbish from start to end.

It’s the same old bog-standard Alien movie in which spaceship crew members get bumped off one by one. The first 30 clichéd minutes are wasted getting to know the wisecracking crew. When, incredibly, they find an earth-like planet, their unbelievably po-faced acceptance of it and its massacred humanoid civilisation is laughable. Fortunately the aliens soon appear to start killing them... as long as you like your killings blood-soaked. As for the supposedly surprise ending, is there any viewer who hasn’t already figured it out?

It’s better than Prometheus (it had to be) but why is Ridley Scott bothering to direct virtual remakes of his original Alien? Listen to his on-the-nose commentary, which merely describes what’s happening on screen and shows no insight whatsoever, and you begin to wonder if he’s simply running out of imagination. Still, the action scenes are well orchestrated if you like watching aliens dispatching humans.

An adventure yarn set in northern Norway, where Pal Sverre Hagen and party go in search of the Viking myth of Ragnarok (a Nordic Godzilla). It’s well set-up, with Hagen a single parent to two children, all of whom act with an engaging naturalism often missing in Hollywood films.

The plot develops an edge when it turns out the monster might be real and there are some exciting moments, especially in a tense set-piece on a zipwire over an ominous lake. The film has no pretence to being anything other than a good old-fashioned creature feature and on that level it works better than most. The special effects, straight out of the 1950s, add to the fun.

Best judged as a children’s film, with cartoon characters (especially the humans), playschool monsters and unfunny slapstick cgi action. There’s no plot worthy of consideration, including father-son bonding rammed home with Cat Stevens singing ‘Father and Son’ on the soundtrack. The long talkie sequences feature inane dialogue full of lame jokes. It’s even worse than the original film. Have special effects ever been so boring?