robert pattinson

Mickey 17

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Mickey floating in a spacesuit

Well Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer didn’t quite work, and nor does his Mickey 17, and for pretty much the same reasons. Small stuff – great; world building – great; political satire – gruesome. It’s Robert Pattinson in the lead, vaguely back in the sort of fantasy territory that made his name (I mean Harry Potter and Twilight), as an “expendable” in a dystopian future where humanity is fleeing Earth, heading out towards the brave new world of Niflheim on board a spaceship. He’s the living equivalent of a crash-test dummy, the one sent in to check things out whenever a new situation arises. Is it poisonous, will it eat us, will it cause our flesh … Read more

The Batman

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Catwoman and Batman

The Batman. Let’s get the plot out of the way first, since it’s the most straightforward aspect of the latest bulletin from Gotham City. A caped crusader, a trio of villains in the shape of Paul Dano’s Riddler, Colin Farrell’s Penguin and John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone, a campaign of murder being waged against city officials. The mayor dies first, in the opening moments of the film, forcing Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) to call in Batman – he rates the mysterious vigilante but no one else does. Along the way Catwoman (ZoĂ« Kravitz) becomes involved, a good girl in this version, and a crimefighting sidekick, should Batman want one, which he doesn’t seem to. … Read more

Waiting for the Barbarians

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Colonel Joll and the Magistrate

It’s a Sondheimian title, Waiting for the Barbarians – as in, “don’t worry, they’re here” – a story about the white man’s civilising mission on some distant frontier and how it gives licence to people whose instincts are far from civilised. The uniforms are deliberately non-specific but for the sake of argument we might as well say it’s the British who are in the spotlight, especially as Brit Mark Rylance is the star. He’s also almost the entire focus of a film about a kindly magistrate way out in the midst of a sandy nowhere whose humanist tendencies are crushed underfoot by the arrival of one badass after another. Enter Johnny Depp, in … Read more

Tenet

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Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington

After pausing for Dunkirk, a (for him) human-scale drama, Christopher Nolan is back on Inception/Interstellar territory with Tenet, a grandiose exercise in hi-tech bogglement that doesn’t shortchange the fans. It’s spectacular like Operation Desert Storm was. Designed to shock and awe, it’s a technological marvel that would almost rather there were no human involvement at all. Can’t we just get drones to do the acting? Actually, drones have done a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the plot, because rather than come up with anything too new, Nolan has taken a whole load of James Bond bits and pieces and then given a quick wipe over with a massive spend … Read more

Cosmopolis

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Robert Pattinson gets his haircut in Cosmopolis

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 September Occupy Wall Street starts, 2011 On this day in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement, unable to set up its protest against US financial institutions in its original two preferred locations, took over Zuccotti Park, New York. With its rallying cry “We are the 99 per cent,” it made reference to the growing disparity in income distribution in the US (back more or less to its levels around the time of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, in spite of more than 80 years of relative prosperity) and set off a wave of similar protests all over the world. … Read more