Month: November 2015

30 November 2015-11-30

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Paul Rudd in Ant-Man

Out Now Ant-Man (Disney, cert 12) I’ve never signed up to the notion that Edgar Wright was the author of the Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, World’s End). That was Simon Pegg, clearly. But even so he was a vital component, and the news that he’d left this film before anything was in the can was a downer. On the upside, there is still plenty of his and Attack the Block’s Joe Cornish’s original script in Ant-Man – a fast, witty, inventive and playful thing, full of youthful energy, which Paul Rudd has made a decent fist of adapting (with Adam McKay). Rudd and McKay probably did the tinkering necessary … Read more

23 November 2015-11-23

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Tom Cruise hangs onto a cargo plane in Mission Impossible Rogue Nation

Out This Week Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Paramount, cert 12) Tom Cruise’s desire to be James Bond really gets the better of him in M:I5, a flabby action spectacular which has visited Vienna, London, Langley, Paris and Havana within its first 20 minutes or so, right after the pre-credits sequence which sees Jason Bourne, hang on, Ethan Hunt clambering onto the outside of a cargo plane as it’s taking off. A stunt done for real, we’re told, and impressive whether it was or wasn’t. Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed, so there’s plenty of that “who is the real bad guy?” attitude that was the making of The Usual Suspects, but here is … Read more

16 November 2015-11-16

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The Minions hitch a ride

Out This Week Minions (Universal, cert U) By the end of the first Despicable Me film, Gru, the archetypal bad guy, had been exposed as a bit of softie, which left Despicable Me 2 with nowhere to go, in terms of jokes about bad guys wheezing despicably and mwah-ha-ha-ing their way to world domination. But Gru’s Minions were still funny, and in this surprisingly lively, amusing, inventive spin-off, they get to show they can be funny at feature length, in spite of not being able to speak. Well, they do speak, but it’s a kind of Esperanto done with expressive voices and telegraphed emotions – Pingu, the Clangers and Shaun the Sheep territory. … Read more

9 November 2015-11-09

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Saoirse the kelpie goes for a swim

Out This Week Song of the Sea (StudioCanal, cert PG) The Irish tricolour is firmly nailed to the mast in the follow-up to Tomm Moore’s animation The Secret of Kells – opening and end credits are in Gaelic – a whimsical tale of a young lad unaware that his dumb younger sister is in fact a kelpie, a mythical sea creature. Moore has set out to do the things with animation that Pixar rarely does, using its possibilities in a more expressive, impressionistic way, recalling Studio Ghibli and Sylvain Chomet, though the resolutely 2D approach also contains echoes of Noggin the Nog and other Smallfilms productions. The story is pure Ghibli though – … Read more

2 November 2015-11-02

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Amy Winehouse

Out This Week Amy (Universal, cert 15) Amy is a misery-memoir documentary about the singer Amy Winehouse, whose life ended at the age of 27 after she drank herself to death – years of bulimia had rendered her body too weak to cope with booze as well as the crack, smack and partying she’d put it through. Director Asif Kapadia proceeds in much the same way as he did with his film Senna – hide the fact that it’s a talking-head doc by laying archive footage, newspaper headlines, TV appearances, radio interviews with Amy, whatever you’ve got, over the recollections of journalists who interviewed her, musicians who worked with her, friends, parents, and … Read more