Film Reviews by Alphaville

This film about an indigenous detective trying to solve a murder case in the Australian outback has its admirers among jaded critics. Perhaps it enabled them to catch up on some sleep. There may be a good film trying to get out here but it’s stifled into submission by the treatment.

It’s one of those affairs where everyone speaks oh-so-deliberately with long pauses in conversations and lingering looks. There’s no drama, no thrills, no intensity, no pace. The story’s minimal. There’s not even any music to brighten things up and trigger some emotion.

Writer/director Ivan Sen hasn’t yet learned how to use a movie camera. The clue’s in the word ‘movie’. He mostly just plonks it down in front of someone speaking. And he can’t even frame that with any visual interest.

There’s a shoot-out at the end but who cares? It’s soooooo slow. Well done if you can keep your finger off the Fast Forward button.

In the wake of several good films on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s ‘Butcher of Prague’, Anthropoid ruins a terrific story so thoroughly it makes you angry at the waste. The film gets off to a bad start with confusing, handheld, too-close-in shots of a parachute landing. It has the aesthetic of a poorly-made home movie. It settles down for a while after that but every time the action hots up the images go haywire again. Perhaps director Sean Ellis couldn’t afford a Steadicam.

The budget is certainly underpowered. We hardly ever see Heydrich, or indeed any German until the last half hour. The overriding vibe is a theatrical tell-don’t-show. Most of the film takes place in closed rooms with action relayed by characters entering stage right or left. Ellis manages the seemingly impossible task of draining all drama out of the story, reducing it to scene after scene of indoor planning.

The on-the-nose dialogue is banal throughout, leaving the viewer to seek interest in watching a selection of British and Irish actors struggle with thick Czech accents. At least, one presumes they are meant to be Czech.

You might be sorely tempted to skip the plodding first hour before the assassination attempt, but be warned that this only lasts a couple of minutes anyway. And don’t get me started on the ending – a long shoot-out that’s an amateurish handheld visual mess. Has Ellis never seen The Wild Bunch?

The film’s only success is the rumbling score, which does its best to add much-needed tension. Otherwise this is a terrible disappointment. It sent me scuttling back to the superior 1976 version Operation Daybreak.

This third adaptation of Dan Brown’s books about symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) starts well and goes downhill from there on. There’s a terrific prologue about the extinction of mankind due to overpopulation and an intriguing opening with Hanks in hospital, shot in the head, with no memory of what happened and with a hit woman breaking in to finish him off.

It develops into a prolonged chase around some European cities, with Hanks pursued by various bodies while he tries to decipher cryptic clues as to what’s happening. Felicity Jones is too lightweight to act as a foil as the girl on the run with him. It gets sillier as it progresses, with some preposterous plot intricacies leading to an overblown climactic set-piece that descends into pure comedy.

It nevertheless remains watchable, if not always for the intended reasons. Director Ron Howard can always be relied on to deliver a solid production, the locations look good and Hans Zimmer contributes one of his less bombastic scores. It’s a shame it’s all so ridiculous.

This is a seedy film about an ex-con (Mel Gibson) on the run from a Mexican drug cartel (yawn) with his off-the-rails 17yo daughter (Erin Moriarty). Naturally there’s some father-daughter bonding to be done (yawn). There are lots of tattoos and cursing and of course Gibson gets to ride a motor bike (yawn).

There are some token shoot-em-ups and the film has a gritty reality, but you never care about any of the dislikeable characters. Trashy, downbeat, B-movie fare.

I don’t normally review children’s films but this masquerades as an adult film so it deserves all it gets. Think Starship Troopers with none of the creativity, imagination and intelligence. A moronic cgi-fest for brain-dead game-boys. So cynical it even features Chinese product placement for the international market.

For all the cartoonish alien destruction on show, the leading characters never seem to be in any danger. Drama and dialogue are at pre-teen level. Every predictable beat is emphasised by a bombastic score.

Will our heroes survive? Will it end with a lot of whooping? You have to ask? Even the gag reel is embarrassing. Watch and weep.

An engrossing, well-mounted account of an ill-fated 1996 Everest expedition. Director Baltasar Kormakur insisted on keeping it real. ‘Please, no acting,’ was his instruction to his actors. The cast dutifully immerse themselves in the snow with gusto and even the Italian Alps make a great understudy for Everest itself.

It seems churlish to carp, but the film’s attempt to remain authentic and true to its real-life participants makes it not without flaws. Firstly, when we’re impatient for the action to start, there’s a long flashback that sets up the backstory of the main participants before they hit the climb. Others in a large cast are so poorly sketched that when there’s a reference to them we don’t who they are. Like Everest itself, the cast is overcrowded.

Secondly, mountaineers wearing heavy gear and goggles in a storm are difficult to distinguish from each other. Among the bit players especially it’s often hard to know who’s who. All of this diminishes audience involvement and makes the viewer feel guilty for not feeling more when a ‘minor’ character (based on a real person) dies.

Given these caveats, Everest is well-made and remains one of the better fact-based mountaineering films.

After being evicted from his home, Andrew Garfield joins forces with cynical realtor Michael Shannon to earn money by evicting others. Yep, it’s a film about the sub-prime mortgage financial crisis but, guess what, it’s riveting. Unlike other failed attempts at the same subject, such as The Big Short, this really hits the mark.

Garfield takes a step up in class from his Spiderman persona as the conflicted hero. We follow his progress and his moral dilemmas, half-hoping, half-fearing for him. There’s a deal going down for 100 homes. So why is the film called 99 Homes?

Director Ramin Bahrani keeps a tight grip of the action and moves it along at a brisk pace, aided by an insistent rhythmic score. It plays like a thriller with heart and builds dynamically to a tense climax. Well worth catching.

Laboured, boring anti-cinema, stolidly edited and grimly acted. Head shots of couple conversing incessantly interspersed with graphic sex scenes that must be amongst the most unerotic and off-putting ever filmed.

Director Gaspar Noé should be confined to making porn for his own satisfaction. He can’t make feature films.

This is a good 2015 film about the moral dilemmas of drone warfare. Unfortunately it was beaten to the punch by the equally good 2015 film Good Kill. Both films place a nice family in harm’s way as collateral damage when the Brits and Americans decide a bomb needs to be dropped on the terrorists next door. Whereas Good Kill focussed on the dilemmas of the drone pilots, Eye in the Sky focusses more on the ethical and political dilemmas faced by the ‘kill chain’ – the military, the politicians and the lawyers as well as the pilots.

Placing an innocent girl at the heart of the bomb zone is an obvious manipulative device but works well as a focal point for the debate. The film could easily have become just another political polemic with a plot you can see a mile off, but director Gavin Hood maintains the tension and turns in an engrossing thriller.

Hong-Jin Na’s follow-up to The Chaser is another exciting action thriller with even more chases in it. It’s beautifully structured, escalating in thrills from a simple premise to a Peckinpah-like riotous climax. If you’re expecting Hong Kong-style martial arts you’re in for a pleasant surprise from this ace South Korean director. He films his action as realistic and graphic. He uses too much handheld camera at times but he really knows how to build action and tension.

The chief baddie is a relentless chaser, like the T-1000 in Terminator 2. When our hero jumps into the sea to escape, the baddie jumps in after him for a swimming chase. And that’s just the start of a long multi-transport chase. But be warned that it’s not for the squeamish. In various scenes of mayhem, everyone’s pretty handy with an axe.

The DVD extras include useful tips on how to flip a trailer-truck. Why Hollywood doesn’t come calling for Na is a mystery.

Another Tarzan film? Why? More cgi apes? Why? They reckon they’re doing something different here by introducing an anti-slavery and anti-ivory poaching message into the plot, but it’s still the same old swinging through trees and love-ins with cgi animals.

There are good things in it. The story attempts to be different by beginning with Lord Greystoke (Tarzan) returning to the jungle rather than growing up in it, but we still get multiple flashbacks to that anyway. Alexander Skarsgard brings a refreshing poise to the title role. Christoph Waltz, as always, makes a suave baddie. The Gabon landscape is sweepingly captured. On the minus side, the action is confusingly edited and the bog-standard orchestral score irritatingly underlines every single beat.

It’s not a bad film, it’s just that we’ve seen it so many times before.

This is one of those tedious talkies that French cinema makes far too many of. It opens with a domestic squabble filmed as talking heads and never gets any better. What’s the point of wide-screen if all you do is put a single talking head in the middle of it? The images are so sleep-inducing you deserve a medal if you last the whole 172 minutes.

Director Olivier Assayas simply has no sense of cinema. After this 2002 effort he went on to make other borefests such as Clouds of Sils Maria in 2015. They keep giving him money and calling him ‘acclaimed’. This film was even an official entry at Cannes, He must be stopped.

His films are everything the Nouvelle Vague railed against. Where are the new Jean-Luc and Francois when you need them?

Hong-Jin Na’s third film isn’t quite as thrilling as his first two (The Chaser, Yellow Sea) but he’s a director to watch. He begins his films in such an oblique way that you’re never quite sure what genre you’re watching, never mind what’s going on. Comedy? Detective story? Horror? The story soon focusses on defiantly non-Hollywood leasding man Do-Won Kwak, overweight and hopeless as a bewildered police officer. You’ll soon be rooting for him.

Once his daughter becomes ‘possessed’ the film develops an increasing sense of dread. Na wanted to make a thriller that ratchets up the tension without resorting to violence, but there are some wild and exciting scenes here, some of which are beautifully shot in rainstorms in the South Korean mountains.

Who’s the mysterious Japanese man who feeds on raw deer carcass in the woods? Who’s the beautiful young woman who watches him? Who’s the cool-dude shaman and his terrifying exorcisms? And is that a zombie with a rake in his head?

As usual with Na, there’s no Hollywood formula here to tell you what’s coming next. As tension grows, expect the unexpected. You’ll be happy to go along for the ride.

This is another of Allen’s 30s pastiche movies, an instantly forgettable tale of Jesse Eisenberg (as diffident as ever) trying to woo Kristen Stewart in the social whirl of Hollywood and New York. It looks good and Stewart is luminous, but we’ve seen it all before in better films.

It’s as though Allen’s run out of ideas. The poorly-structured plot meanders and goes nowhere, while the bland soft jazz score is as predictable as ever. Even the voiceover Allen contributes is tired and superfluous. He needs to watch Jules et Jim again to see how it should be done. Although it’s painful to say, he needs a co-writer.

Another beautifully hand-drawn pastoral animation from Studio Ghibli. Hollywood computer animation looks crass beside it. Shy 12yo Anna spends the summer at a seaside village where she befriends Marnie, but is Marnie real? It’s a slight but engaging story that manages to mix heartfelt emotion with other-worldliness. And the climactic revelation is a zinger.

There are moments when the animator’s artistry simply stops you in your tracks. The breaking of a wave, the billowing of a dress in a breeze, the play of light and shadow on a face. Some Ghibli output has focussed too much on monsters and creatures, but this tender human drama is almost as good as Only Yesterday.

The version with American voices is better than usual, but as always with Ghibli the original Japanese version is superior.