Film review: Need For Speed (12A)

WHAT'S ON

Need For Speed
(12A) 130mins
★★★✩✩

How long will it be, I wonder, before the star of this game-to-screen howler loses his prefix?

Film review: The Look Of Love (18)

FILM
The Look Of Love
(18) 101mins
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
Confessions of the King of Soho are a guilty pleasure and a glorious evocation of an age of tawdry hedonism.

REVIEW
Actor Steve Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom have worked together three times before this film. 24 Hour Party People, A Cock & Bull Story and The Trip showed the inventiveness of one is able to thrive despite the singular presence of the other, and vice-versa.

Here, their partnership works brilliantly once more in a fast-moving, funny and bawdy biopic that should feel tawdry but ends up a gloriously guilty pleasure.

Although the life of Paul Raymond was marked by tragedy - the framing device of the drama - Winterbottom sets out his tonal preferences with his casting.

A plethora of cameos from the front rank of comedy illuminate the brown-and-orange backdrops of a Spam fritter Britain.

Chris Addison gets a meaty role as bearded acolyte Mike Power and Simon Bird gives a spot-on turn as a '70s hipster. Also blink-and-miss Stephen Fry, Matt Lucas, David Walliams, Miles Jupp and Dara O'Briain.

In an age of internet porn for 12-year-olds, Paul Raymond's daring burlesques appear like chirpy end-of-pier fodder and our sympathies are clearly with the rule-busting impresario.

Indeed, the joy of this beautifully-designed film comes in the unabashed schoolboy relish of a man let loose in the Candy (and Amber) shop.

Cheeky chappie Paul Raymond loved and lost many people, most poignantly, his family. Wife Jean (Anna Friel) quits Britain as a result of his affair with wily beauty Fiona Richmond (Tamsin Egerton), who also packs a suitcase.

Meanwhile daddy's girl Debbie (a mercurial Imogen Poots) dabbles in singing but drowns in drugs, dying of an overdose a month after dad is named Britain's richest man.

All the actors relish Matt Greenhalgh's whipcrack script which bundles along at speed and is packed with one-liners that are in places (and almost inevitably) pedantically Partridge-esque.

The Look Of Love is not only the Dusty Springfield song that the delicate Poots sings but also the illusion Raymond maintains to sidestep the corrupting debasement of his reality.

That the film neatly marries the two without diminishing the impact of either makes for a filthy, rich, and indelibly British, romp.

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.