Film Reviews by Alphaville

Superior plane-in-peril movie, both in the air and on the ground, given realism and heft by Gerard Butler’s authoritative performance and Jean-Francois Richet’s assured direction. Nothing ground-breaking here, but it has everything you want in an action thriller. Taut, tense and action-packed. There’s one brilliant hand-to hand fight scene filmed in one long single take, not dismembered into meaningless visual snippets as is commonplace these days. There’s also a great set of DVD Extras that go some way to explaining why this film really works. For best results try to avoid watching the trailer and reading the DVD sleeve notes and other reviews that unforgivably give away the whole plot.

The first half-hour consists solely of people sitting around having an erudite discussion about classical music, shot with a static camera. It mighty be of interest to patient music students. If you get through that there are still two hours to go as one longueur follows another. This would be more suitable as a play on stage or radio. It’s not a film. It’s an anti-film.

Must have been watching a different film from other reviewers. The blurb promises a ‘breath-taking’ origins story about a ‘young boy’ with ‘extraordinary powers’. It isn’t. It’s a plodding drama about a female psychologist who tries to help a man who can make things burn. He’s a sad, sullen victim throughout and much of the script is little more than a two-hander. Occasional simple cgi effects add nothing of interest. Perhaps a bigger budget and a more dynamic director could have done something more with the material, but what’s on screen, despite some nice fjord scenery, is a damp squib.

A cosmonaut returns to earth with an alien lifeform inside him. In an isolated installation in Kazakhstan our heroine doctor struggles to save him, herself and everyone else. Director Egor Abramenko keeps the direction tight and focussed, relying more on tension than Hollywood-style cgi set pieces. The creature itself is very effective, prompting some gruesome sequences more befitting a horror film. And the icing on the cake is a beautiful twist dénouement (no spoilers) that’s impossible to see coming.

Forget the “colour-blind” casting. This pantomime version of Dicken’s book has the cast ham it up like amateur actors in a student fringe production. Really? Do we need this? What’s the point? Director Armando Iannucci just doesn’t get film. He should stick to TV satire.

Beautifully orchestrated, engaging, warm-hearted and amusing film about the 1969 music festival. The plot, based on real people, follows local farmer’s boy Elliot as he becomes increasingly drawn into the hippie ethos of love and peace. Instead of featuring any musical acts, director Ang Lee focusses on the experience of being there and sublimely manages to capture the feel-good spirit of the times.

This two-hander set in an empty theatre has actress Emmanuelle Siegner auditioning for a part in director Mathieu Amalric’s adaptation of the Sader-Masoch (SM) book of the title. It’s a necessarily dialogue-heavy piece about the power-play between the two. Director Roman Polanski does more than most would be able to with his camera to keep it interesting in such a restricted space, but it remains little more than a curiosity piece.

This bloated, indulgent mess of a film about the early days of Hollywood begins with a chaotic pre-titles sequence that goes on and on and on for so long (a whole half-hour!) that you’re willing it to end. Enough already. We get it. Move on. It’s so repetitive it may well alienate you for the next 2½ hours… not that you’re likely to last that long anyway. It’s shot in a tiresome overexcited-student-trying-too-hard kind of way that never overcomes the emptiness of the content, with barely any character among the ensemble cast of caricatures to care about. Not even Brad Pitt, normally a reliable chooser of roles, can salvage anything worthwhile here. Hint: even if you watch this out of curiosity, best keep the remote within arms’ reach.

This is like one of those old Ealing films that turn up to fill a gap in the schedule on afternoon TV. At least you know what you’re getting. Even the title gives away the plot. It’s warm-hearted, cosy, completely predictable, completely dull and, despite the title, completely devoid of cinematic imagination.

If you’ve not seen the first two films in the trilogy you’ll have a job picking up the plot. If you have seen either of the first two films, you won’t be watching this anyway. It’s slow, it’s talky and it’s hammily acted. Even if you ignore all the boring political intrigue, the swordfight scenes are repetitive and undramatic. Despite all the jumping around and screaming, they just go on and on. Not that you’d care who wins anyway.

They really must be running out of plots. A black ball brings teenagers back from the dead and makes them kill people in order to earn points and become alive again. Yes, really, a black ball. There’s one good action scene on a subway train, but the bulk of the 155min run time (not the 79min noted on the DVD sleeve) is a boring talkathon.

Don’t laugh, but the Guillotines of the title are Qing dynasty swordsmen sent to crush rebellious Herders. Yes, it’s all nonsense and impossible to care about. Even worse, the amateurish direction is coupled with fight scenes ruined by awful camerawork and fast-edited into a visual mishmash.

Nothing to see here unless you’re a Marvel/DC fanboy devoid of any critical faculties. Dwayne plays a one-expression ‘flying magic man’ as one character calls him, but most of the time he’s replaced by a cgi avatar to deal with the usual cgi flash-bangs. Neither Dwayne nor even normally reliable director Jaume Coillet-Serra can do anything with this tripe.

This stately but beautifully realised film gains from its fish-out-of-water setting as our bored American housewife heroine is pursued by a stalker through the streets of Bucharest. Its unsettling and watchable throughout, even though you wonder what she’s doing with that uncaring husband of hers. So why only three stars? Because there’s nothing new here, it’s instantly forgettable and if you’re looking for scares there are none.

Lacking creativity, you want to make an autobiographical film about a black kid growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in a depressed neighbourhood beset with crime? Great! No-one’s ever done anything like that before! He’s gay as well? Even better! Lacking imagination, you want to set it in the actual neighbourhood, film it documentary-style and use non-actors? Even better! We’ll throw money at that! No white critic would dare give this a bad review. It might even win an Oscar (Best picture, 2017).

You know where it’s going right from the start. It opens with a black man singing “Every n-word is a star”. Presumably he’s a black man because in today’s Orwellian world only certain people are allowed to use certain words. Of course, being black, he doesn’t have to use the euphemism “n-word”. If he had, now that might have been the start of something interesting. As it stands, this vanity project of a film has its heart in the right place but not one iota of cinematic interest to engage the viewer.