Latest Posts
9 March 2015-03-09
Out in the UK This Week The Imitation Game (StudioCanal, cert 12) Benedict Cumberbatch plays code-breaking genius Alan Turing as an Asperger’s Kenneth More in this superior biopic set in the era of stiff upper lips and laws against homosexual deeds. This drama returns to those laws several times, when it’s not busying itself with the actual big stuff – defeating the Germans. Of course, as everyone in the world knows but the UK’s cultural gatekeepers don’t acknowledge, the Americans and the Russians won the Second World War, with Britain luckily on the winning side but making useful contributions. The cracking of the Enigma code, which allowed the Germans to communicate with each other … Read more
The Reception
The Reception is a film that seems to be heading gloriously in one direction, only to actually be heading disastrously in another. It tells the surely thorny enough story of Jeannette, a rich French-American woman (Pamela Holden Stewart) and her African-American lover Martin (Wayne Lamont Sims), who live in bucolic splendour in upstate New York, where he gains her financial patronage for his career as a (blocked) painter, in return for his companionship and quiescence about her drinking – the few glasses of red per night generally turning into a torrent. Then her daughter Sierra (Maggie Burkwit) turns up with her husband Andrew (Darien Sills-Evans) and the delicate balance is undone. It turns … Read more
2 March 2015-03-02
Out in the UK This Week Leviathan (Artificial Eye, cert 15) Not to be confused with the clankingly atmospheric 2012 documentary about trawler-fishing, this Leviathan is something like a retelling of the story of Job – a man who has the lot being tested in his faith as he loses it all. As we open, Kolya has a beautiful wife, a lovely beachside property, a teenage son and is respected in his community. Over the next two and half hours we watch most of it being stripped from him – in fact as Andrey Zvyagintsev opens his film there’s already trouble hemming Kolya in on most sides. The question is: which faith is it testing? … Read more
Barnyard
Otis, the barnyard bull, has udders. Because, kids, that’s what bulls have, isn’t it? Voiced by Kevin James, and with a first name that is generally appended to a male, it’s clear that either Otis is a transgender animal or cowardice has taken hold somewhere at the design stage in the latest animal CG comedy off the conveyor belt. This “me too” effort from Paramount also has a plot that seems determined to fit in, not stand out, it being a recycling of The Lion King. Growing a pair, ironically, is what it’s about too. Otis is the young motorbiking cowlet (I’d call him a bullock but he clearly isn’t) about town who has … Read more
23 February 2015-02-23
Out in the UK This Week Serena (StudioCanal, cert 15) After Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper clearly have decided they can do no wrong, and so overreach themselves with a Depression-era Gone with the Wind-level epic about a wilful woman and a powerful man thrust together against a backdrop of urgent social blah. Susanne Bier directs, and it’s clear that the further this highly talented Dane gets away from the boilerhouse domestic dramas she’s so good at (Brothers and After the Wedding), the bigger her films, the less powerful they become. There is a lot to like here – the mist rolling over the Smoky Mountains locations where … Read more
The Plague
The story behind this film is that it was made for buttons (£3,500) by 20something Londoner Greg Hall, and was then beginning the long slow slide towards festival obscurity when Mike Leigh saw it, started championing it, and hey presto, it has a cinema release. The story at its front is about an culturally and ethnically mixed crew of young, urban Londoners from a council estate. They walk the line between high spirits and illegality, these self-assured youngsters, but suddenly get into trouble by straying beyond the world of tagging, pills and parties. If it isn’t tied up maybe as well as it should be, The Plague has enough of a plot to … Read more
16 February 2015-02-16
Out in the UK This Week The Babadook (Icon, cert 15) The Babadook is a horror story about a nervous lone mum with a hyperactive and emotionally fractious six/seven-year-old child who was born the day his father died… in the car which crashed rushing his labouring wife to the hospital. If that isn’t the backstory to something psychologically intense, then what is? The Babadook has a lot going for it – the sombre production design and the creepy drawings in the book about the ghoulish Babadook that the mother ill-advisedly reads to her child as a bedtime story are just for starters. But it succeeds mostly, like all the best horror films, because it … Read more
The Guardian
The career of Kevin Costner seems to have come and gone. After having a run of mad popular success with The Untouchables, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, JFK and The Bodyguard (even the Robin Hood movie: Prince of Thieves did pretty well), he followed up with two epic failures. First Waterworld, which went down like the Titanic. Then The Postman, which was so vainglorious – this is the one in which our hero restores civilisation to a post-apocalyptic America – that it stunned reviewers into a kind of embarrassed silence. These belly flops seem to have busted Costner back down to private and since then he’s gone for more modest assignments. The … Read more
9 February 2015-02-09
Out in the UK This Week Dracula Untold (Universe, cert 15) Dracula gets the superhero treatment, bagging an origin story that places him somewhere between Batman and Superman – Batman’s damaged psyche (the Turks want to take his son) and Superman’s special powers (thanks to a “gift” from an ancient cursed beast that lives in a dark cave). It’s the story of the 15th century Romanian/Wallachian ruler Vlad the Impaler, not such a bad guy if you ask many an East European, who claim he was more bark than bite, a sentiment this film largely goes along with, until his mwah-ha-ha transformation, at least. Shot in Northern Ireland and with Game of Thrones looks, … Read more
2 February 2015-02-02
Out in the UK This Week Gone Girl (Fox, cert 18) Authors are often not the best adapters of their own work for the screen, because they’re too close to the original – Norah Ephron’s Heartburn (a novel and film about her disintegrating marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein) being the classic example. But Gillian Flynn does an impressive job turning her smash novel into a big screen property, keeping most of the plot curlicues, and maintaining for as long as possible the “did he/didn’t he” structure. Ben Affleck plays the husband painted by every shred of evidence turned up by the police as the murderer of his disappeared high-maintenance wife (Rosamund Pike). It’s another example … Read more
Life and Lyrics
Ashley Walters first became well known as Asher D in the London garage/grime outfit So Solid Crew. Since it was a gigantic collective of competing egos two things were on the cards – the band was unlikely to produce enough revenue to support all 19+ members, or it was going to fall apart spectacularly. Either way spelt trouble. Luckily for Walters, he had a second line of work, having been acting even before the band became well known with their single 21 Seconds. Its success got Walters better job offers on TV and he gradually progressed from bit parts to leading roles, usually playing the streetwise London youth you probably didn’t want to be … Read more
To Write Love on Her Arms
Is there anything more life-sapping than listening to a druggie talking about drugs? Yes, a film about one, and it’s not less boring but more if it also offers a redemptive ta-daa. To Write Love on Her Arms is a film about one such, a young woman, played twixt K-Stewart sulk and ScarJo pout by Kat Dennings, an actor with a face straight from Babylonian antiquity and a career trajectory which surely guarantees she won’t be paddling in these waters again too soon. And, having had these thoughts, and affronted by what felt like an assault by the god squad for the long 118 minutes of this melodrama, I felt such a heel when … Read more
