Filmed In Supermarionation(PG) 119mins
★★★★✩
Thunderbirds visionary Gerry Anderson railed against the limitations of puppetry.
Showing posts with label film review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film review. Show all posts
Tuesday, 7 October 2014
Film review: Filmed In Supermarionation (PG)
Filmed In Supermarionation(PG) 119mins
★★★★✩
Thunderbirds visionary Gerry Anderson railed against the limitations of puppetry.
Friday, 6 June 2014
Film review: Benny & Jolene (15)
WHAT'S ON
Benny & Jolene
(15) 86mins
★★✩✩✩
Filmmaker Jamie Adams seems to have been especially keen to make his debut. He called in favours from friends and pulled together this mumble core micro-budget mockumentary in a matter of days.
Saturday, 29 March 2014
Film review: Starred Up (18)
WHAT'S ON
Starred Up
(18) 106mins
★★★★✩
The process of de-humanising begins from the first frame. Eric (Jack O'Connell) is moved like a pawn, treated like a loon and reduced to a series of louse-ridden tick boxes.
Thursday, 27 February 2014
Film review: Non-Stop (12A)
WHAT'S ON
Non-Stop
(12A) 106mins
★★★★✩
Amid the airport warnings about gels, baby milk and sharp objects, there should be a 6ft 5in silhouette of wounded bear Liam Neeson. You simply don't want to be sharing cabin class with this gravity-stricken trouble magnet.
Thursday, 23 January 2014
Film review: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (12A)
ENTERTAINMENT
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
(12A) 105mins
★★★✩✩
In the weeks of angst and meditation that is pre-Oscar season, it's easy to forget the frantic pleasure of fast-administered popcorn.
Thursday, 6 June 2013
Film review: Behind The Candelabra (15)
FILMBehind The Candelabra
(15) 118mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Beyond the sequins, the hypocrisy, the lies and the teeth, director Steven Soderbergh finds an unlikely tale of a very real relationship.
Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Film review: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (15)
SCREEN
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
(15) 98mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
No messing, but plenty of mess, as the rebooted Grimm siblings get busy with the witch-slapping.
REVIEW
Deep down, somewhere primal and icky, fairy tales have a potency beyond reason.
But Norwegian writer-director Tommy Wirkola doesn't do deep down. Instead, he puts Hansel and Gretel in the title for the sake of clarity and gets on with the business of splatting so much gore on the floor that it fills the tread of his reboot.
Offal you might say. But this is what you wanted, right?
With the pre-title sequence (which is an animated highlight) he gets done with the Grimm fairytale of the brother and sister lured to a witch's candy house but who escape before their tormentor turns them into an incestuous risotto.
Now it's 15 years later and Grimm becomes gruesome as the two bounty hunters with a nifty arsenal of steampunk weaponry and a visceral hatred are busy gaining coinage and notoriety by dispatching a forestful of Olay-deprived child-snatchers.
The witches are heartless, lupine, fast and not afraid to hoik a spade in the mush of a foe.
They are also grotesque - except Famke Janssen's top trump meanie Muriel who needs the upcoming blood moon, a stone circle and a coven of gnarly crones to nail immortality.
Final ingredient in her brew is Gretel herself for a reason that has our leather-clad siblings pondering their past. They want to understand why they were abandoned in the forest by their parents in the first place.
Like a broom-born witch tethered to a tree, this goes round and round. There isn't much of a story and the character development is minimal but you don't give Jeremy Renner a bottle blonde white witch skinny dipping in a healing pool and expect a brooding soliloquy on the unfathomable inequities of the human condition.
Together with a delicious Gemma Arterton, who is feline in action and minxy in outlook, the pair (who have a sparky chemistry) do what they do best - witch-slapping.
Director Wirkola says: "I wanted the vibe of the original fairy tale but I also wanted to spice it with the things I love most in movies - comedy, horror and graphic action."
So witches get dispatched in the foulest of ways with the wickedest of weapons and the greatest of delight. Against a baroque setting of higgledy-piggledy houses and ancient forests, the pair grapple with the sisterhood and the riddle of their DNA.
Dialogue is clunky, a headbutt passes for a riposte and the undertone of misogyny is kicked in the crotch.
A director with a mischievous eye would have mercilessly mashed up the fairytale subculture, Shrek style, but, apart from some porridge, not too hot or not too cold, Wirkola eschews playfulness in favour of a 12-bore to the face wart.
Saturday, 16 February 2013
Film review: Hitchcock (12A)
FILM
Hitchcock
(12A) 98mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
An amusing take on Alfred Hitchcock is over-reliant on non-existent menace and barely-there suspense.
REVIEW
Standing outside the auditorium of one of the few screens where Psycho was allowed to play, an arm-waving Alfred Hitchcock conducts the audience within.
Listening through the door, he raises them to a crescendo of screams, he cues the stabbing violins and punches in the next round of screeching. He is in total command of his material, total command of his audience.
The same cannot be said for the enjoyable but disjointed Hitchcock, which tells of the making of his seminal film and his relationship with Alma Reville, his underappreciated wife and collaborator.
The book on which this movie is based is an exhaustive slog through the creative process and the producers admitted the first challenge was to bring a tautness to the work.
Perhaps they should have stuck to the index and a few footnotes. Writer John J McLaughlin and director Sacha Gervasi try different avenues into the core of the story but never have the courage of their convictions.
The dry, droll humorous approach is by far the most effective - it is in keeping with Hitchcock's delicious black humour - but others come and go like the fridge Post-Its of a hesitant therapist.
We have some nightmare sequences, a suggestion of paranoia, pseudo madness, conversations with a phantom Ed Gein, (the real-life model for Norman Bates) but Hitch doesn't lend himself to a dark Lector-type investigation (even though Anthony Hopkins is on hand to provide voice and menace).
That is not to say the film is not fun. It's tremendous fun. But not fun for long enough or often enough.
Anthony Hopkins bathes in the role of the most famous director in movieland, licking his rubbery lips at the prospect of taking on the Hollywood establishment. The behind-the-scenes stuff is invested with period charm, authenticity and insight.
Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Jessica Biel as Vera Miles go mad in the dressing-up box and the nod and a wink to the audience is delightfully played with the director addressing us, the cinema audience, as he would before his TV specials.
With Hopkins dumping words like they're cockney tree stumps, Helen Mirren has to do the heavy-lifting on the acting front. As usual, she is superb, with the right level of brittle schoolma'am weariness.
Together they are great too. The chemistry suggests a long marriage, forgiving and scornful. The script tries to suggest dark undercurrents and psychological complexity but from the outside it looks very much like garden variety over-familiarity.
Hitchcock once said: "Film should be stronger than reason." Someone thought way too hard about this.
Hitchcock
(12A) 98mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
An amusing take on Alfred Hitchcock is over-reliant on non-existent menace and barely-there suspense.
REVIEW
Standing outside the auditorium of one of the few screens where Psycho was allowed to play, an arm-waving Alfred Hitchcock conducts the audience within.
Listening through the door, he raises them to a crescendo of screams, he cues the stabbing violins and punches in the next round of screeching. He is in total command of his material, total command of his audience.
The same cannot be said for the enjoyable but disjointed Hitchcock, which tells of the making of his seminal film and his relationship with Alma Reville, his underappreciated wife and collaborator.
The book on which this movie is based is an exhaustive slog through the creative process and the producers admitted the first challenge was to bring a tautness to the work.
Perhaps they should have stuck to the index and a few footnotes. Writer John J McLaughlin and director Sacha Gervasi try different avenues into the core of the story but never have the courage of their convictions.
The dry, droll humorous approach is by far the most effective - it is in keeping with Hitchcock's delicious black humour - but others come and go like the fridge Post-Its of a hesitant therapist.
We have some nightmare sequences, a suggestion of paranoia, pseudo madness, conversations with a phantom Ed Gein, (the real-life model for Norman Bates) but Hitch doesn't lend himself to a dark Lector-type investigation (even though Anthony Hopkins is on hand to provide voice and menace).
That is not to say the film is not fun. It's tremendous fun. But not fun for long enough or often enough.
Anthony Hopkins bathes in the role of the most famous director in movieland, licking his rubbery lips at the prospect of taking on the Hollywood establishment. The behind-the-scenes stuff is invested with period charm, authenticity and insight.
Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Jessica Biel as Vera Miles go mad in the dressing-up box and the nod and a wink to the audience is delightfully played with the director addressing us, the cinema audience, as he would before his TV specials.
With Hopkins dumping words like they're cockney tree stumps, Helen Mirren has to do the heavy-lifting on the acting front. As usual, she is superb, with the right level of brittle schoolma'am weariness.
Together they are great too. The chemistry suggests a long marriage, forgiving and scornful. The script tries to suggest dark undercurrents and psychological complexity but from the outside it looks very much like garden variety over-familiarity.
Hitchcock once said: "Film should be stronger than reason." Someone thought way too hard about this.
Saturday, 19 January 2013
Film review: Django Unchained (15)
FILM
Django Unchained
(15) 136mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Quentin Tarantino is best to his swaggering, infuriating and brilliant best with this audacious take on America's slave past.
REVIEW
Little wonder director Quentin Tarantino squirmed under scrutiny over movie violence.
In attempting to hold the high ground he had seized by claiming credit for dragging America's slave-owning past into the public arena he then painted himself into a corner.
He tried to insert simplistic gradations between "cathartic violence" and "entertaining violence" which can only translate as "violence that hurts baddies - necessary" and "violence that hurts goodies - worthy".
His revisionist Western (set in the South) contains much of both flavours and whether it's slaves set on by dogs or slave-masters castrated by shot, the result is just the same and usually found on walls and in puddles.
His needless justifications attempt to elevate a gore-fest beyond its very simple roots as a revenge movie.
In many ways, this is a companion piece to Inglourious Basterds. In both, the traditional opponents are redrawn and replaced with a new paradigm.
In the war-time sprawl, the Germans were defeated by the Jews. In the over-long but audacious Django Unchained, the plantation owners are done for by a former slave.
The director's impatience with the argument is understandable. If you're going to see a Quentin Tarantino movie, you know what's coming.
Lavish, unfurling scenes in which razor sharp characters have time to present their philosophies before unleashing hell on their foes.
It's all done with a swagger, lashings of scorn, a respectful tilt at genre, a painful self indulgence and a brazen disdain for queasiness.
Dr King Schultz, as played wonderfully by Christoph Waltz, is, therefore, the perfect QT character. The German bounty hunter has a gift of the gab as well as a dead-eye with a gun.
When he buys slave Django (the underpowered but charismatic Jamie Foxx) to help him track down his next bounty he finds a protege and a purpose.
For Django's slave wife (Kerry Washington) is named after a character in a German myth, a princess atop a hill for whom an adventurer must go through hellfire to rescue.
And so the quest to free Broomhilda is set and brings, by circuitous routes (there are lots of circuitous routes) the charming doctor and his taciturn sidekick to the plantation of ruthless boy king Calvin Candie (another star turn by Leonardo DiCaprio).
But the ruse that brings them to the bargaining table comes under scrutiny by repulsive house slave Stephen (rubberised Samuel L Jackson) - and their treachery will not go unchallenged.
Yet again, Tarantino has mined his love of cinema to create a brilliant, infuriating and rewarding event.
Django Unchained
(15) 136mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Quentin Tarantino is best to his swaggering, infuriating and brilliant best with this audacious take on America's slave past.
REVIEW
Little wonder director Quentin Tarantino squirmed under scrutiny over movie violence.
In attempting to hold the high ground he had seized by claiming credit for dragging America's slave-owning past into the public arena he then painted himself into a corner.
He tried to insert simplistic gradations between "cathartic violence" and "entertaining violence" which can only translate as "violence that hurts baddies - necessary" and "violence that hurts goodies - worthy".
His revisionist Western (set in the South) contains much of both flavours and whether it's slaves set on by dogs or slave-masters castrated by shot, the result is just the same and usually found on walls and in puddles.
His needless justifications attempt to elevate a gore-fest beyond its very simple roots as a revenge movie.
In many ways, this is a companion piece to Inglourious Basterds. In both, the traditional opponents are redrawn and replaced with a new paradigm.
In the war-time sprawl, the Germans were defeated by the Jews. In the over-long but audacious Django Unchained, the plantation owners are done for by a former slave.
The director's impatience with the argument is understandable. If you're going to see a Quentin Tarantino movie, you know what's coming.
Lavish, unfurling scenes in which razor sharp characters have time to present their philosophies before unleashing hell on their foes.
It's all done with a swagger, lashings of scorn, a respectful tilt at genre, a painful self indulgence and a brazen disdain for queasiness.
Dr King Schultz, as played wonderfully by Christoph Waltz, is, therefore, the perfect QT character. The German bounty hunter has a gift of the gab as well as a dead-eye with a gun.
When he buys slave Django (the underpowered but charismatic Jamie Foxx) to help him track down his next bounty he finds a protege and a purpose.
For Django's slave wife (Kerry Washington) is named after a character in a German myth, a princess atop a hill for whom an adventurer must go through hellfire to rescue.
And so the quest to free Broomhilda is set and brings, by circuitous routes (there are lots of circuitous routes) the charming doctor and his taciturn sidekick to the plantation of ruthless boy king Calvin Candie (another star turn by Leonardo DiCaprio).
But the ruse that brings them to the bargaining table comes under scrutiny by repulsive house slave Stephen (rubberised Samuel L Jackson) - and their treachery will not go unchallenged.
Yet again, Tarantino has mined his love of cinema to create a brilliant, infuriating and rewarding event.
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Film review: Seven Psychopaths (15)
FILM
Seven Psychopaths
(15) 110mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Martin McDonagh's pitch-black gore-fest is a sharp comedic treat although it veers wildly and ends up in competition with itself
REVIEW
Stuck in an office, kicking around for ideas, little wonder that so many writers turn to the act of writing for inspiration, even less wonder that they turn writers into action heroes.
To be frank, it is a vaguely dispiriting notion - but it can be done.
Charlie Kaufman had huge success creating a sweaty fictional Charlie Kaufman writing Adaptation and Stephen King is forever casting the blocked author as a mighty warrior.
Now acclaimed Limehouse-based Irish writer-director-producer Martin McDonagh follows up the inspired In Bruges with a slice of bleak comedy which features a central character called Marty going toe to toe with the fiendish cunning of a blank piece of paper.
Marty (Colin Farrell) dreams of finishing his screenplay Seven Pyschopaths but he lacks focus and drinks too heavily.
"I got the title - I just haven't been able to come up with all the psychopaths yet," he says.
He becomes embroiled in the petty dramas of actor-cum-dognapper Billy (Sam Rockwell) and his debonair partner Hans (Christopher Walken).
It is typical of this lopsided film that Marty becomes a subplot, rapidly overwhelmed with the end-of-the-pier loop-the-loop of his gun-totin' circus freak pals. (He doesn't actually announce he's become a subplot but every other story device gets a name check.)
Bonkers Billy takes the beloved shih tzu of psychopath Charlie Costello (Woody Harrelson) and before the slabs of this stop-start thriller settle, vast and skewiff like a toppled henge, there will appear the requisite number of psychos to fulfil the promise of the title.
Rockwell and Walken in particular have fun with McDonagh's rich (if bitter) confection. Highlight is Billy's fantasy final shoot-out gore-fest that if it wasn't played out as a dream sequence in this movie would be a shoo-in for Tarantino's next.
Without the central sparkle of McDonagh's characterisation and script, this project would have veered into the roadside ditch, upended and undone by its mannered quirkiness and love of self.
But the sharp dialogue, juicy riffs, plentiful gore, sly sense of humour and engaging performances just about keep this ramshackle drama on track.
Pity McDonagh was behind the camera.
A kinder, if crueller, director would have culled some of the excesses and let the best of the writer shine.
Film students would weep (because they love a bit of meta) but the rest of us wouldn't leave the cinema talking of diamonds in the dust.
Film review: Great Expectations (12A)
FILM
Great Expectations
(12A) 128mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Mike Newell's adaptation shows grit and integrity but lacks magic and gets lost in the fog.
REVIEW
"I won't deny there have been too many secrets," declares solicitor and guardian Jaggers - and a wry snicker circles the auditorium. Too true, too true, we think.
Great Expectations may be Charles Dickens' most beloved book but it also ranks alongside his most preposterous
Boiled down into a series of confrontations, revelations, familial convolutions and cliffhangers, the resulting pulp would colour the most outrageous of American daytime soaps.
But Dickens turned this mush into magic by gumming words together like no man before or since - with a tragi-comic brilliance and - most crucially - with energy.
Yet this earnest and charm-deficient adaptation of the story of Pip - from blacksmith's boy to London gentleman by means of a mystery benefactor - is left to mope on a leash.
David Nicholls writes and Mike Newell directs a film that longs to be the definitive version of the age.
And the ingredients are there - the mud and blood of the marshes and the streets of London; the script sonorous and gratifying; the pacing busy and condensed; the cast neatly picked but where's the fun? The moment?
Fog rolls across the marshes and also across the eyes of the participants.
Take for example Miss Havisham in yellowing dress, doll-like and fragile in her remote rat-strewn stately home.
All the ingredients of a Tim Burton gothic comic epic are present (including Helena Bonham Carter).
But she is pallid, inconclusive, neither frightening nor comic nor weird.
A few of this excellent if lacklustre ensemble turn up the heat - David Walliams an inspired choice as Mr Pumplechook; Ewan Bremner bright-eyed as Wemmick, Ralph Fiennes throatily grim as Magwitch - but they are beaten down by their eerily subdued fellows - Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, Sally Hawkins as Mrs Joe, Jason Flemyng as amiable Jo.
Maybe the trouble lies with this particular story. The best bits are at the beginning, in the graveyard, in Satis House with the spooky Estella and boisterous Pale Young Gentleman.
Beyond that, an unravelling. The middle section is ramshackle and the last act a welter of improbabilities.
Pip (Jeremy Irvine) is honourable but unresolved so the onslaught of revelations appear pedestrian or barmy and his love for Estella (Holliday Grainger) a fiddly distraction.
Nicholls (Starter For Ten, One Day) has professed his love for this work from the earliest age but the adoration has translated into stilted awe.
This film is a checklist of iconic scenes and, despite the twists and turns, comparison of adaptations provides the best route through.
Not bad, of course, but not as good as it should have been and so, sadly, qualifies as a disappointment.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
Film review: Looper (15)
FILM
Looper
(15) 118ms
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Confident writer-director Rian Johnson delivers some mind-bending twists in an ambitious tale of time-travelling gun slingers.
REVIEW
Looper doesn't just deliver one mind-bending action movie - it delivers about four. The fact that two of that number are Back To The Future and Terminator shouldn't irretrievably damage the IQ - for the other two are far more ambitious, complex and intelligent.
Like Inception (which also starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the premise is simple but the implications are extraordinary and require a switched-on, forward-facing audience.
The story - along with the stripped down, lo-fi 2044 that is the film's drab setting - come from the fernickety mind of writer-director Rian Johnson, who made a stylish impact with 2005's Brick, also starring Gordon-Levitt for whom he wrote the part of hitman Joe.
Gordon-Levitt's appearance jars at first - like Ed Miliband post-op - but the reason for the brutish physog becomes apparent when the older version of himself is dumped back in his time - it's Bruce Willis.
The head-scratching conceit is this: In the future, the Mob use illegal time-travelling technology to send their marks into the past.
There, hitmen, called loopers, take their lives and the silver strapped to their backs - and dispose of bodies that don't technically exist.
But the loopers are not forward-thinkers. In exchange for loot now, they will have to kill off their future selves at some point.
When Bruce Willis comes back for dispatch, the younger Joe loses his nerve and Willis flees, heading off on a cold-blooded killing spree of his own in order to save his future family.
In some kind of Oedipal nightmare, Young Jo has to destroy his older self because Mob boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), sent back in time to oversee this end of the operation, will ensure both incarnations are bumped off.
But Future Joe, in Terminator style, is on the trail of the kid who will grow up to be the Rainmaker, the fearsome uber-boss who triggers his death 30 years' hence.
Present Joe has sufficient clues to predict his targets and finds himself in the remote homestead of tough-but-vulnerable Emily Blunt where she tends to the needs of odd toddler Cid.
While the blank (indeed unpleasant) duo of Present and Future Joe lack any kind of sympathy or charisma, Blunt's Sara is the damaged soul who, finally, brings a welcome human dimension to the movie.
But Blunt doesn't take top acting honours. They go to wee Pierce Gagnon who manages to convey menace and enigma despite being cute as an psycho button.
This hard-but-brittle flick is a slow-starter (all that infernal exposition) and the downtime is too easily spent ticking off the derivative time-travelling tropes.
However, the spectacular (and genuinely shocking) final sequences make up for the shortage of early charm and tie up the cleverly twisting plotlines with panache.
The film is not always likeable but it is a solid two hours of truly mind-bending entertainment.
Looper
(15) 118ms
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Confident writer-director Rian Johnson delivers some mind-bending twists in an ambitious tale of time-travelling gun slingers.
REVIEW
Looper doesn't just deliver one mind-bending action movie - it delivers about four. The fact that two of that number are Back To The Future and Terminator shouldn't irretrievably damage the IQ - for the other two are far more ambitious, complex and intelligent.
Like Inception (which also starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the premise is simple but the implications are extraordinary and require a switched-on, forward-facing audience.
The story - along with the stripped down, lo-fi 2044 that is the film's drab setting - come from the fernickety mind of writer-director Rian Johnson, who made a stylish impact with 2005's Brick, also starring Gordon-Levitt for whom he wrote the part of hitman Joe.
Gordon-Levitt's appearance jars at first - like Ed Miliband post-op - but the reason for the brutish physog becomes apparent when the older version of himself is dumped back in his time - it's Bruce Willis.
The head-scratching conceit is this: In the future, the Mob use illegal time-travelling technology to send their marks into the past.
There, hitmen, called loopers, take their lives and the silver strapped to their backs - and dispose of bodies that don't technically exist.
But the loopers are not forward-thinkers. In exchange for loot now, they will have to kill off their future selves at some point.
When Bruce Willis comes back for dispatch, the younger Joe loses his nerve and Willis flees, heading off on a cold-blooded killing spree of his own in order to save his future family.
In some kind of Oedipal nightmare, Young Jo has to destroy his older self because Mob boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), sent back in time to oversee this end of the operation, will ensure both incarnations are bumped off.
But Future Joe, in Terminator style, is on the trail of the kid who will grow up to be the Rainmaker, the fearsome uber-boss who triggers his death 30 years' hence.
Present Joe has sufficient clues to predict his targets and finds himself in the remote homestead of tough-but-vulnerable Emily Blunt where she tends to the needs of odd toddler Cid.
While the blank (indeed unpleasant) duo of Present and Future Joe lack any kind of sympathy or charisma, Blunt's Sara is the damaged soul who, finally, brings a welcome human dimension to the movie.
But Blunt doesn't take top acting honours. They go to wee Pierce Gagnon who manages to convey menace and enigma despite being cute as an psycho button.
This hard-but-brittle flick is a slow-starter (all that infernal exposition) and the downtime is too easily spent ticking off the derivative time-travelling tropes.
However, the spectacular (and genuinely shocking) final sequences make up for the shortage of early charm and tie up the cleverly twisting plotlines with panache.
The film is not always likeable but it is a solid two hours of truly mind-bending entertainment.
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Film review: Comes A Bright Day (15)
FILM
Comes A Bright Day
(15) 87mins
★★✩✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Bellboy Sam Smith follows his heart - right into the middle of a languid hostage drama.
REVIEW
There's little disguising writer-director's advertising background in this fractured vignette.
Everything is elegant, languid, poetic and, in places, artificially stage-bound - perfect for a story of soft-held love, yearning and luxury.
Unfortunately, Simon Aboud allies these impeccable qualities (and performances) to a jewellery shop heist that is executed ineptly by both armed gang and director.
Comes A Bright Day is a hostage drama, with stuttering psycho Cameron, his bumbling sidekick Clegg (Cameron and Clegg, geddit?) holding at gunpoint wistful jeweller Charlie (Timothy Spall), earnest bellboy Sam Smith (Craig Roberts) and radiant shop assistant Mary (Imogen Poots).
Sam is smitten with Mary but crippled with nerves while Mary is a romantic in a brutal world. Charlie mourns the loss of his life's grand love.
The hostage plot is without tension, despite the bloodshed, and Kevin McKidd struggles to find consistency in Cameron - part Tarantino nutter, part A Fish Called Wanda's Ken Pile.
The film works best when Charlie, Mary and Sam pass the time in agreeable and unhurried fashion swapping tales of opulent romance.
But their fragile spell is too frequently undone by clumsy intrusions.
Comes A Bright Day
(15) 87mins
★★✩✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Bellboy Sam Smith follows his heart - right into the middle of a languid hostage drama.
REVIEW
There's little disguising writer-director's advertising background in this fractured vignette.
Everything is elegant, languid, poetic and, in places, artificially stage-bound - perfect for a story of soft-held love, yearning and luxury.
Unfortunately, Simon Aboud allies these impeccable qualities (and performances) to a jewellery shop heist that is executed ineptly by both armed gang and director.
Comes A Bright Day is a hostage drama, with stuttering psycho Cameron, his bumbling sidekick Clegg (Cameron and Clegg, geddit?) holding at gunpoint wistful jeweller Charlie (Timothy Spall), earnest bellboy Sam Smith (Craig Roberts) and radiant shop assistant Mary (Imogen Poots).
Sam is smitten with Mary but crippled with nerves while Mary is a romantic in a brutal world. Charlie mourns the loss of his life's grand love.
The hostage plot is without tension, despite the bloodshed, and Kevin McKidd struggles to find consistency in Cameron - part Tarantino nutter, part A Fish Called Wanda's Ken Pile.
The film works best when Charlie, Mary and Sam pass the time in agreeable and unhurried fashion swapping tales of opulent romance.
But their fragile spell is too frequently undone by clumsy intrusions.
Friday, 10 February 2012
Film review: A Dangerous Method (15)
SCREEN
A Dangerous Method
(15) 100mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
An impeccable ensemble talk to each other in pretty rooms about sex and Keira gets spanked in David Cronenberg's drama of ideas.
REVIEW
There's an old joke that goes like this: Two doctors meet at a party. One says to the other: "You're fine. How am I?"
And there's something of that knowing-me-knowing-you sentiment going on here as the father of psychoanalysis, the suave Sigmund Freud and his starchy heir apparent Carl Jung swap dreams for each other's stimulation.
At the centre of this story is this fleeting, fractious but fascinating friendship between the two titans of breadbox-bothering and that is where the best of this film is to be found.
Their meaty discourse about the perils of the libido and the limits of the "talking cure" is good value, although rarely cinematic.
Based on a play by Christopher Hampton, the film betrays its stately and static roots as people talk and smoke in pretty rooms.
Added to the mix (in reality as well as on film) is Sabina Spielrein, the hysteric who became Jung's patient, lover and then his student.
It is Jung's guilt over his infidelity and his lies to his mentor that begin the schism between the two great thinkers. While Jung and Spielrein shed tears, the real bruised love of this story is that of Freud and Jung.
Gurning for Britain, Keira Knightley adopts a jutting jaw and an accent to bring to life the confused but spellbinding Russian who was abused by her father and who now finds herself aroused by spanking.
That Knightley manages to knit together straitened intellect and hee-hawing madness into one convincing character is much to her credit and she is the equal of Michael Fassbender as the wounded stalwart Jung and Viggo Mortensen as the increasingly prissy Freud in this impeccable ensemble.
Director David Cronenberg's shot choices are placid and reverential and he has drawn visual inspiration from Magritte to create a brave if dour drama that respects the great men and their ideas but often needs a kick up the Keira.
A Dangerous Method
(15) 100mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
An impeccable ensemble talk to each other in pretty rooms about sex and Keira gets spanked in David Cronenberg's drama of ideas.
REVIEW
There's an old joke that goes like this: Two doctors meet at a party. One says to the other: "You're fine. How am I?"
And there's something of that knowing-me-knowing-you sentiment going on here as the father of psychoanalysis, the suave Sigmund Freud and his starchy heir apparent Carl Jung swap dreams for each other's stimulation.
At the centre of this story is this fleeting, fractious but fascinating friendship between the two titans of breadbox-bothering and that is where the best of this film is to be found.
Their meaty discourse about the perils of the libido and the limits of the "talking cure" is good value, although rarely cinematic.
Based on a play by Christopher Hampton, the film betrays its stately and static roots as people talk and smoke in pretty rooms.
Added to the mix (in reality as well as on film) is Sabina Spielrein, the hysteric who became Jung's patient, lover and then his student.
It is Jung's guilt over his infidelity and his lies to his mentor that begin the schism between the two great thinkers. While Jung and Spielrein shed tears, the real bruised love of this story is that of Freud and Jung.
Gurning for Britain, Keira Knightley adopts a jutting jaw and an accent to bring to life the confused but spellbinding Russian who was abused by her father and who now finds herself aroused by spanking.
That Knightley manages to knit together straitened intellect and hee-hawing madness into one convincing character is much to her credit and she is the equal of Michael Fassbender as the wounded stalwart Jung and Viggo Mortensen as the increasingly prissy Freud in this impeccable ensemble.
Director David Cronenberg's shot choices are placid and reverential and he has drawn visual inspiration from Magritte to create a brave if dour drama that respects the great men and their ideas but often needs a kick up the Keira.
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Film review: Man On A Ledge (15)
The route from ledge to ground is uncomplicated and usually ends brutally.
It appears these laws of entropy and potential energy are at the heart of the film-maker's thinking when compiling this movie.
Whereas endeavours with more self-involved ideals may have presented a melange of conflicted images and souls, this thriller fulfills the promise of the title within the first few minutes and never stops.
This feat is not to be scoffed at (as many critics have done) when the purpose of the movie is pure popcorn hokum.
I mention popcorn because a jumbo cola would be a bad idea. The condensation mixing with the inevitable sweat of your palms would make for an embarrassing lubricant.
But, unlike the movie, I digress. Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) is on a ledge, a cop trying to proclaim his innocence and expose the conspiracy that saw him jailed for nicking a tidy gem from magnate David Englander (a hardball Ed Harris).
Opposite the eponymous ledge is the vault in which said diamond, he claims, is still residing.
And while he brings New York to a standstill - and occupies the tender mercies of something-to-prove negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), bro Joey (Jamie Bell) and his feisty girl are breaking through Englander's fortress protection.
Any more revelation and the twists may untangle but it is sufficient to say this is a well done and swift thriller - corny as hell but never shortchanging on thrills.
The simple start explodes all over the place and the finale is pulsating and mad in equal measure, which is not a bad equation.
It appears these laws of entropy and potential energy are at the heart of the film-maker's thinking when compiling this movie.
Whereas endeavours with more self-involved ideals may have presented a melange of conflicted images and souls, this thriller fulfills the promise of the title within the first few minutes and never stops.
This feat is not to be scoffed at (as many critics have done) when the purpose of the movie is pure popcorn hokum.
I mention popcorn because a jumbo cola would be a bad idea. The condensation mixing with the inevitable sweat of your palms would make for an embarrassing lubricant.
But, unlike the movie, I digress. Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) is on a ledge, a cop trying to proclaim his innocence and expose the conspiracy that saw him jailed for nicking a tidy gem from magnate David Englander (a hardball Ed Harris).
Opposite the eponymous ledge is the vault in which said diamond, he claims, is still residing.
And while he brings New York to a standstill - and occupies the tender mercies of something-to-prove negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), bro Joey (Jamie Bell) and his feisty girl are breaking through Englander's fortress protection.
Any more revelation and the twists may untangle but it is sufficient to say this is a well done and swift thriller - corny as hell but never shortchanging on thrills.
The simple start explodes all over the place and the finale is pulsating and mad in equal measure, which is not a bad equation.
Film review: Martha Marcy May Marlene (15)
The title - a composite of the names that Martha is called or calls herself - gives a clue to the central theme of this film from first-time director Sean Durkin.
Who exactly is this girl and why is she skipping out on her bucolic haven in Upstate New York?
Martha can run away - to sweet sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) - but can she ever escape?
The memories of her time in the country glide in and out of her new reality, mesmerically conjured by Durkin. So she's swimming at Lucy's lake-side summerhouse but she's also with her faux-family, white limbs in black water, thrashing like an orgy.
Back in the cult, under the watchful eye of sly father-figure Patrick (a sinewy John Hawkes), misery is joy, privacy is the enemy and conscience is obtuse. Good and evil blur into one thing after another, unmeasured and unremarked, a potent, hazy mix that encourages mindlessness.
They all find serenity there, the girls, and make their subdued torment a featureless part of the pastoral idyll. Martha comes away imbued with its mantras - that to make something abnormal into something normal, it is first a rite and then a habit and then just a thing that happens.
Used to free love, she sidles into bed with Lucy and fractious hubby Ted (Hugh Dancy) as they have sex. She scorns their materialism but has no alternative except the fortune cookie philosophies of her charming abuser.
Elizabeth Olsen in her debut makes the fragmented film work. Open-faced yet hollow-eyed, she is bemused and bewildered, formless and muddled. She sweeps through, rarely emoting but always puzzling.
The dreamy, sinuous direction and the perverted sanctuaries of the farmhouse and summerhouse leaven the terror into its own kind of banality. Rarely does conflict break the glassy surface.
And therein lies a flaw in this otherwise consummate exercise in film-making. These mosaic pieces compile to make an exquisite character study but to not much end.
Martha needs to be filled with something new or different but she, nor the bizarrely incurious Lucy, know what that may be and no-one is in a hurry to find out.
As the final shot hangs, we are left lingering not with the possibilities of what might come for Martha but with the notion that her journey was not as interesting as the film would have us believe.
Who exactly is this girl and why is she skipping out on her bucolic haven in Upstate New York?
Martha can run away - to sweet sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) - but can she ever escape?
The memories of her time in the country glide in and out of her new reality, mesmerically conjured by Durkin. So she's swimming at Lucy's lake-side summerhouse but she's also with her faux-family, white limbs in black water, thrashing like an orgy.
Back in the cult, under the watchful eye of sly father-figure Patrick (a sinewy John Hawkes), misery is joy, privacy is the enemy and conscience is obtuse. Good and evil blur into one thing after another, unmeasured and unremarked, a potent, hazy mix that encourages mindlessness.
They all find serenity there, the girls, and make their subdued torment a featureless part of the pastoral idyll. Martha comes away imbued with its mantras - that to make something abnormal into something normal, it is first a rite and then a habit and then just a thing that happens.
Used to free love, she sidles into bed with Lucy and fractious hubby Ted (Hugh Dancy) as they have sex. She scorns their materialism but has no alternative except the fortune cookie philosophies of her charming abuser.
Elizabeth Olsen in her debut makes the fragmented film work. Open-faced yet hollow-eyed, she is bemused and bewildered, formless and muddled. She sweeps through, rarely emoting but always puzzling.
The dreamy, sinuous direction and the perverted sanctuaries of the farmhouse and summerhouse leaven the terror into its own kind of banality. Rarely does conflict break the glassy surface.
And therein lies a flaw in this otherwise consummate exercise in film-making. These mosaic pieces compile to make an exquisite character study but to not much end.
Martha needs to be filled with something new or different but she, nor the bizarrely incurious Lucy, know what that may be and no-one is in a hurry to find out.
As the final shot hangs, we are left lingering not with the possibilities of what might come for Martha but with the notion that her journey was not as interesting as the film would have us believe.
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