Latest Posts
18 May 2015-05-18
Out This Week Ex Machina (Universal, cert 15) Joining Gravity and Interstellar, as well as a host of lower budget films, Ex Machina shows we’re in a golden age of sci-fi, this film’s theme being consciousness and whether the Turing Test has been passed: that a robot has become intellectually indistinguishable from a human. Or is it the Test itself that’s being tested? Domhnall Gleeson is the geek brought in by his messianic megatech wizard boss (Oscar Isaac) to give the yay or nay, Alicia Vikander is the robot he clearly falls for the very first second he claps eyes on her – and with face, breasts and buttocks Vikander’s own, while the rest … Read more
11 May 2015-05-11
Out This Week Wild (Fox, cert 15) Apart from The Young Victoria (which was a hack job done for cash, I suspect), the Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has had a good run of interesting films since his breakthrough with 2005’s C.R.A.Z.Y, and then more recently with Café de Flore and Dallas Buyers Club. All have showcased his knack for allying music (often 1970s – he loves glam rock) with well crafted images. His lighting, composition and editing are generally exquisite. Vallée is a great storyteller, and uses all his skills brilliantly in Wild, a film that sounds potentially like either a monumental drag – a woman reconnecting with herself on a gigantic trek … Read more
4 May 2015-05-04
Out in the UK This Week Foxcatcher (E One, cert 15) Not unlike Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra in many ways, Foxcatcher tells a similar true story of a young impressionable man being taken up by an older man and being groomed, things all falling apart when the young man says “enough”. With Soderbergh the spotlight was on strapping Scott Thorson and his gay relationship with Liberace, whereas Foxcatcher focuses on potential Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz and the strange grip that the super-rich amateur wrestler John du Pont, owner of the Foxcatcher gym, had over him. The hoo-haa surrounding the film is generated mostly by the really rather remarkable performance by Steve Carell as du … Read more
27 April 2015-04-27
Out in the UK This Week Birdman (Fox, cert 15) And coming right out of the sun to bag this year’s Best Picture Oscar, a director whose films had become increasingly up themselves, and a star whose career looked increasingly over, in one of the most purely enjoyable yet also intelligent films in years. It’s a reminder of the sort of film Hollywood used to produce in the 1930s, with screwball comedy clearly the inspiration for this backstage farce about a once-upon-a-time superhero actor (Michael Keaton) and his attempt to re-invent himself by acting in, producing and directing a stage performance of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. … Read more
20 April 2015-04-20
Out in the UK This Week Annie (Sony, cert PG) The “Black Annie” this has been called. With the button-cute Beast of the Southern Wild’s Quvenzhané Wallis in the lead as Annie and Jamie Foxx in the Daddy Warbucks role and with Jada Pinkett and Will Smith producing, you could call it that, if these things matter to you. If they don’t, what you get is perhaps the epitome of the “turn that frown upside down” musical, carefully updated – Annie is no longer an orphan but a foster kid, Foxx is a cell phone billionaire, a couple of new songs have been added to the familiar ones (Hard Knock Life, Tomorrow, I … Read more
13 April 2015-04-13
Out in the UK This Week The Signal (E One, cert 15) An underrated sci-fi adventure about three young hacktivists who are abducted by aliens and then wake up in a clinical facility where Laurence Fishburne and co – all in hazmat suits – are looking after them. We arrive at the facility about 15 minutes in to the film, so I haven’t given away much of the plot, which uses tropes of Close Encounters, The Matrix and Vincent Natali’s Cube to great effect. Director William Eubank ties it all together with clean and precise direction of his stars (Brenton Thwaites, Olivia Cook, Beau Knapp), and the Mogwai-meets-Wendy Carlos soundtrack by Nima Fakhrara lifts … Read more
30 March 2015-03-30
Out in the UK This Week Interstellar (Warner, cert 12) I wasn’t a fan of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films – too long, too much yak, humourless, over-insistent and with a poor grip on action – so I wasn’t exactly warming up a welcome for this much hyped slide sideways into space fantasy. How wrong was I? This is the best “hard sci-fi film” for decades, so grand in scale that it dwarfs Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway. McConaughey is the star, playing the retired Nasa astronaut heading back into space after years kicking his heels on a world heading towards annihilation. There he finds that, out on the edge of a … Read more
Havoc
What’s this – lovely, sweet, wide-eyed Anne Hathaway saying “fuck”? Getting into a fight? Showing us her breasts? Giving a blowjob? And within the first ten minutes of the film starting too. Someone, it seems, is after an image makeover, and thanks to director Barbara Kopple, she gets one. That might be what Havoc is most remembered for, in fact, because in most other respects this is a rather disappointing “moral panic” movie like the ones from the 1950s where teenagers would race bikes too fast or hang with the wrong crowd, or both. Here the wrong crowd is people of colour and it’s the white people who get into trouble hanging with … Read more
Volver
Pedro Almodóvar is bang back on form in a film celebrating a way of life he’s spent the best part of his artistic life revolting against – family centred, non-cosmopolitan, conservative, Catholic. Well, Generalissimo Franco has been dead a while now.The word Volver means “return” in Spanish, and if Almodóvar is returning to something he long ago rejected – with a fair degree of tenderness (ah, maturity) – Penelope Cruz is also back in a Spanish speaking role, in her home country, in the sort of film she started out in, a drama with its feet in familiar soil but its head who knows where (see Abre los Ojos). It’s set in one … Read more
The Departed
Martin Scorsese’s remake of the brilliant 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs adds 50 minutes of flab to what was a lean, taut thriller. The plot is the same – cop bosses Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg send in undercover man Leo DiCaprio to bust a gang. Unbeknown to the boys at the precinct, gang boss Jack Nicholson is one step ahead of them and has been grooming a placeman of his own (Matt Damon) for years, and he’s now deep deep inside their gangbusting team. The drama springs from the “Who is going to get whacked first?” premise as each side works out after a while that there’s a mole on the … Read more
23 March 2015-03-23
Out in the UK This Week Winter Sleep (New Wave, cert 15) The Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest thing of recalcitrant beauty is three hours long and breaks down neatly into three acts, each about an hour in length. In act one we meet Aydin, a progressive baby-boomer with a bit of money, a local luminary, a former actor, a newspaper columnist, a soft touch. Winter Sleep follows him, much in the way Michael Haneke did with Hidden, as that nice liberal carapace is pressure-tested, in Aydin’s case when the son of one of his tenants breaks his car window with a stone. Tenants? Yes, that’s how come Aydin is so comfortable, … Read more
16 March 2015-03-16
Out in the UK This Week The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (Lionsgate, cert 12) Jennifer Lawrence works the adenoids in the third dump of Hunger Games literalism, in a series that has consistently mistaken event for drama. Being the first of two parts, Mockingjay was never even aiming to line up all its battalions, send them into battle and bring them safely home again. But even so, this is a very thin outing for Katniss and co – now she is being groomed as the mascot of the rebels and as such is off out with a camera team making propaganda TV infomercials. How very quaint – TV, camera crews, a world … Read more
