Film Reviews by LW

I wasn't overly fond of The Batman but I was intrigued by an unrecognisable Colin Farrell as The Penguin. This spin off series serves as an origins tale that retreads the familiar fall of Gotham's old underworld and the rise of its more manic and colourful villains. The Penguin works as a crime drama because Farrell delivers a horribly plausible sociopath. His Penguin is a character you root for despite his being a manipulative, self serving killer who has no redeeming features, but is excellent at faking them, conning the audience as well as his victims. The episodes are perfectly paced and lurch from cliffhanger to cliffhanger with breathless pace. Like the other antagonists you are drawn along with the momentum of Farrell's scheming Oz Cobb as he wheels, deals and betrays his way to the top of Gotham. The series even manages to end with a cruel and downbeat finish that reminds us what the consequences of trusting in monsters can be. There are also a few hints at future developments in this iteration of the DC franchise.

An FBI agent and a witness end up in a plane over the Alaskan wilderness with a pilot they don't trust and uncertain if their allies on the ground. Everything proceeds efficiently, Wahlberg is effectively unpleasant and there are enough twists and turns about who on the ground can be trusted. At less than 90 minutes this is simple thriller doesn't outstay its welcome or try and drag out the simple premise either.

I liked the charm of Venom's first two outings. This garbled plot is not on a par with its predecessors. The film manages the usual bad action movie trick of being overly long and rushing its insubstantial plot to the point of incoherence. Very much in the category of, 'only watch if there is nothing else on and I can't get off the sofa'.

I quite liked the Sonic outing. This latest segment is total gibberish. Jim Carrey's manic Dr Robotnik was the stand out of the previous films but in this version the inane animated characters and weak CGI even Carrey can't save it.

Astronauts witness a nuclear war from the International Space Station and turn on each other with murderous paranoia. This could have said something about the futility of conflict, the transcendence of scientific co-operation, the futility of humanity in the vastness of space or even been a tense thriller. It never really does any of these things, it leans one way, then another, it looks too cheap to thrill but not so cheap as to be embarrassing, a bit of action, a bit of paranoia and there is the usual band of characters so flawed you wonder how they survived training for space. The whole thing is average and non commital. It passes the time but is totally forgettable.

This film is a bizarre mess. It seems more pastiche than serious attempt at creating the atmosphere of Chandler's down at heel investigator and his cynical forays into the overlapping worlds of the venal rich and the lethal sleaze of L.A.'s underbelly. This is not a Chandler story and it shows painfully. To make matters worse the entire cast is geriatric. This is set in the 1930s before Chandler's first novel and shows a 70 something Neeson playing a character who should be stocky, hard hitting man in his mid 30s, not a pensioner. The whole character has been changed, his back story is embellished with a WW1 experience, he gets a nice office and a secretary, the dialogue lacks the snap, the ending rings false and just everything is wrong. It isn't a badly made film, it just is an average action thriller with period hats and a bit of iffy 1930s decor. To the reviewer griping that noir is old fashioned I say watch the real thing or read the real books (much sleazier than ever made it to the screen). Like Chandler famously wrote, Marlowe has a hat, a coat and a gun. He meets idle millionaires, venal schemers, drug dealing doctors and broken people who've fallen off the bottom rung. He bends the law but stays the right side of it, shoots only one person in all his literary appearances and specialises in being hit on the head or beaten by corrupt cops. The grime of 40s and 50s L.A. is the core of the books, not some sepia nostalgia. This is a bland and misguided film that utterly misunderstands its subject.

Go into this expecting a thriller, a heist movie or anything vaguely realistic and you will hate this. What you will get is a meditation on the relationship between art, technology and survival. Defoe's art thief is trapped in a malfunctioning hi tech apartment, at the mercy of machines, unable to meet the staff of the building he can see on the monitor, slowly retreating into a feral state amidst the modernist gleam of his surroundings. His escape attempts are a series of symbolic gestures in which his battle to survive and his diminishing sanity leave their traces as symbolic works of art. His final act is to write a note telling the owners that their home, as a symbol of a cold, modern technological dystopia, perhaps needed to be destroyed. The time is perhaps 20 minutes too long. Defoe is fantastic but he struggles to bridge the gaps and things drift from the core message at some points. When this works as a social commentary it really works and when it doesn't it drags. I enjoyed it, found it interesting as a concept, Defoe is magnificent, but I probably wouldn't watch it again.

This is deliriously blood soaked fun if you like tongue in cheek gore. Like the previous Terrifier films there is a mix of genuine menace, knowing daftness and wildly over the top old school practical FX gore. Art is as malevolent as in his earlier appearances and the series develops its supernatural lore for the killer clown nicely. If you liked Childs Play or The Evil Dead and their respective sequels and outrageous television outings, then you'll like this. If you aren't into killer clowns, 80s syth styled credit music, Tom Savini cameos and maniacallly contrived gore effects then you won't like this. If a bit of old school splatter with a comedy carol number is what you are after then this is for you. That Terrifier carol gets it up to five stars for me!

This is a ponderous apocalyptic fantasy of the sort that appeals to people who want to try and survive an apocalypse but wouldn't last an hour if we dumped them in the DRC. A group of photo journalists covering a stylised fantasy of a near future American Civil War set out on a road trip to interview the doomed President in Washington and encounter lots of tropes and forced meaningful images along the way. There is something really unpleasant about a film whose underlying take seems to be that suffering and horror aren't relatable unless they are a first world play fantasy in the style of The Walking Dead.

Like everything Alex Garland writes this takes an interesting idea for a film and then does nothing with it. I don't see a commentary about a divided America or anything topical at all. This is just another post apocalyptic road trip fantasy. It just feels empty of purpose beyond its narrative. There is endless meaningful imagery and motifs but no actual meaning. There are no clues as to why this Civil War started, no clues as to what the sides stand for, every set piece is contrived and borrowed from better films and series and the combat scenes are ludicrously badly staged. The climax at the end sees staggeringly improbable use of military equipment that even Michael Bay would shy away from.

The focus on war photography might have had some symbolic value, but, as there doesn't seem to be anything to symbolise there is no point. A war without a point or where nobody knows which faction is theirs or where the audience is clueless as to what sort of victory they just saw at the end makes an excellent idea for a near future sci fi tale. The problem is that I think these might be my attempt to salvage a lesson from the story rather than anything Garland actually wanted to convey. This is just a lot of pretty bland that looks pretty and that nicks its best stuff from other films, books and series. The best part is spotting just how much of is taken from somewhere else where a writer actually had a message to convey.

I've never read the book but I can say that the film is a leaden handed tale of rapacious colonisation and exploitation of the buffalo herds of the American west. There are a few nods to Moby Dick and other far better Westerns, like Culpepper Cattle Company, in a simple narrative of a young man from back east joining forces with an obsessive hunter (Nicholas Cage doing manic stares). The story plods, the buffalo get shot, annoying string instruments muffle the dialogue in attempt to build an atmosphere and then nothing happens. I mean nothing. Thet shoot buffalo, sit round a fire, grumble, someone gets murdered, someone dies in an accident and the buffalo hides are ultimately worthless. There is less a plot than an overlong meander through symbolic events and clumsy camera work and none of it goes anywhere.

There is a patronising bit of text in the end credits about Indian tribes that is the typical one dimensional stuff about traditional cultures and harmony with nature. It turns out shooting buffalo may be exciting but is bad, but this film might as well be bad because it is dull.

I say in advance that I went into this with low expectations and found it genuinely daft and charming. The concept was loosely lifted from an ancient t.v. series but shares a title with it and not much else.

The plot follows a stuntman who, having suffered a disasterous injury, cut himself off from his career and the love of his life. A mysterious request from the agent of the mega star he used to double for sees him travel to Australia to track down the missing actor, save his ex's debut film and win her back whilst staying one step ahead of the bad guys. There's lots of daft slapstick and stuntwork and if you want to be charmed by its fluffy sense of fun then you will be. It actually reminded me of Romancing the Stone in its tonal blending of action set pieces, one liners and flirting leads. If you are in the mood for smiling, silly and action then you should find this passes the time nicely.

This a pretty straightforward thriller that ticks the boxes for the rape revenge thriller and the 'rich people hunt others for sport' genres. Despite an infantilising 'trigger warning' at the start there is little shocking on display. The gimmick is that the victims are being drugged to forget their abuse on the seemingly idyllic private island of a sinister tech billionaire. An implausible remembering scenario triggers a round of mundane retributive violence and there's a smug twist at the end. The build up of menace is nice but this is too heavy handed to be insightful social commentary, too predictable and sure of itself to be thrilling, not darkly funny enough to be a satire and nowhere near brutal enough for the schlock fan. It is efficient, slick and forgettable.

It is hard to believe that there has been a quarter of a century of Bad Boys. Only Michael Bay could have said the original film belonged to his earlier restrained period. This latest installment exudes the same explosive daftness, the same preposterous drug cartel fighting antics and the frantic caricature performances of Lawrence and Smith. The two heroes are showing their age and focus on the profanity laden back and forth bickering that makes the films so watchable. The more physical action is left to the younger cast. This is slick action comedy and, when Bay runs out of new things to blow up he sends in a giant albino alligator.

The first film was an entertaining creature feature and the sequel amped up the action. This prequel has no clear idea of what it is about. It doesn't offer any clues as to what the monsters are or why modern firepower couldn't stop them. We get a street level view in the style of Cloverfield in the form of a terminally ill poet who gets stranded in New York and goes looking for pizza. This character is insipid and meets some equally wet blankets along the way. Luckily she has her cat in tow or there would be nobody to root for. The set pieces are few and formulaic and tension never builds. The central character doesn't get her pizza and decides that life isn't worth living. Much like the audience. It wants to be evocative and poignant but it feels forced and trite with the whole thing an excuse for some cgi cityscapes. The monsters remain as elusive as the point of this snooze fest

This murky offbeat thriller is halfway grim, halfway tongue in cheek and won't be everyone's taste. The basic premise sees a junior FBI Agent assigned to help an investigation into a 25 year old series of murder suicides linked by coded notes. The puzzle is who or what is the connection? This is certainly a tale of the demonic but, unlike a lot of the genre, it isn't American fan fiction for the bible or a straight up monster. Longlegs is a moody retro thriller set in the late 90s with a focus on events in the 1970s, the latter an excuse to use T-Rex on the soundtrack. The disconcertingly wide angle camera work, eerie landscapes, darkened searches of barns and autumnal season set the mood. The whole thing makes you nostalgic for The X-Files and has hints of Silence of the Lambs and 90s David Lynch. There are no jump scares, just a deep sense of unease at the unexplained and some nervous laughter at Nicholas Cage's demented titular killer. Cage is kept in the background until the final third of the film and he leaves the audience with more questions than answers. The film ends with predictably mean twist and an ambiguous cut to credits. This feels very like if Nicholas Cage had been the monster of the week in a classic X-Files episode and it is excellent fun if that appeals to you. Hail Satan!