Film Reviews by Alphaville

With so many dull films around at the moment it’s a pleasure to sit back to an exhilarating 2017 Hong Kong actioner. A cop joins forces with a Thai colleague to trace his kidnapped daughter. With a fast-moving plot, well-rounded characters and hi-octane action, there’s not a dull moment to be had. The action is beautifully choreographed and imaginatively shot, particularly a dizzying rooftop chase sequence and the lengthy no-holds-barred climax. Wilson Yip, who also made the magnificent Dragon Tiger Gate, has to be one of the best action directors around. He makes great use of crane shots and travelling shots to showcase and keep up with what’s going on and even manages to come up with a moving denouement. It’s the kind of involving escapist film for which big screens were made.

Céline Sciamma’s dreary arthouse films are all about concept rather than execution. They’re like film-school student exercises for an art gallery. This is another that is painfully slow, sedate and scoreless (trailers for her films cheat by adding music and edits to seduce the unwary). Shot after shot, held far too long, is a medium or close-up of talking heads, either looking at the camera or at each other.

This particular strained effort has some nice coastal scenery, but it can’t make up for the lack of cinematic interest or plot substance. Naturally it has garnered good reviews among the “Emperor’s Clothes” arthouse crowd. What’s it about? If you must know, it’s about a relationship between two women, but who cares when it’s this painful to watch?

A second star for the opening set-piece and the brief Mirrorworld set-piece, which are imaginative. The rest? Meh. Same-old, same-old. One-star pell-mell film-making for those with TikTok attention spans. See the cgi flash-bangs! Hear the thumping muzak! Marvel at the Silly Green Goblin on his flying hoverboard! LOL at the spideyboy banter. Wonder… whether it will ever end. Okay, so it’s by no means the worst Marvel movie, but that’s not saying much, is it?

The clue’s at the beginning, before the opening credits. Star Ethan Hawke appears in person to tell us what a great film it is. Nice try, Ethan. He appears again at the end, totally bemused, to say that was a promo and that he didn’t understand a word of the script. He took the part only because of writer/director Abel Ferrara, who’s made some interesting if not always convincing films in the past (eg The Bad Lieutenant). Ethan probably now wishes he’d stayed well away.

It’s such amateurish nonsense you’ll probably give up on it before any of it makes sense… if it ever does. Technically, it’s filmed in darkness with a handheld camera and mostly in close-up (‘guerrilla filmmaking’). In other words, there’s nothing interesting either to see or to hear.

Have a laugh at Ethan’s performance on the trailer and don’t be fooled by the exciting music.

“Slow burn” is an over-statement. Even at 82mins long including credits this seems to last forever. Lots of shots are no more than local colour as Andrea Riseborough wanders around Luxor doing nothing in particular apart from thinking in close-up. She meets old flame Karim Saleh and they wander around together. Thrillingly (!) they even meet other people and have conversations. In other words it’s another Sundance arthouse bore. Oddly there’s an even longer, even worse effort on the DVD that’s not even worth fast-forwarding through.

Antoine Fuqua can normally be trusted to bring home a good film (Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen), but he can do little with this script about a group of people (Infinites) who keep getting reincarnated. Mark Wahlberg is the Infinite who doesn’t know he’s an Infinite so he can have screeds of exposition thrown at him for our benefit. Chiwetel Ejiofor with a bad beard is the baddie out to get him because he has The Egg (don’t ask). Naturally Wahlberg gets to ride a motor-bike fast at some point.

You could say it’s no more stupid than your bog-standard superhero film, but it’s even more bogged down in dull exposition than the recent reboots of Dune and The Matrix. The only thing that makes it better than them, and maybe worth a look, is Fuqua’s penchant for action set-pieces. The opening full-throttle car chase through the heart of Mexico City sets a high standard, but after that it’s all downhill.

Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon are really really annoying as loud-mouthed buddies involved in spy stuff. They shout, babble and scream ‘humorously’. Painful to listen to and painful to watch.

This retread of the first Matrix film begins intriguingly with Keanu as a games-programmer who made the original trilogy, but this is merely a pretext for him to undergo the same plotline as the first film (unplugging from the matrix, meeting Morpheus, fighting Smith etc.). It’s full of talking heads swapping exposition and meaningless pseudo-babble. Someone tells Keanu, for instance, that Morpheus is ‘an algorithmic reflection of two forces that helped you become you.’ Yeah, right.

Keanu himself, looking as tired and disinterested as the viewer, sleepwalks through the film in a whisper. Surprisingly, the action is equally dull, simply repeating fisticuffs and shootings from the previous movies. There are even plentiful flashbacks to the earlier films as if to show us how much better they were. Who would have thought that a Matrix film could be so boring that you want to FF it?

How not to make a film: point the camera at someone and have them talk. Greta Gerwig seems drawn to such efforts. This so-called comedy thinks it’s cool. It isn’t. It thinks it’s funny. It isn’t. It tries hard, but the harder it tries the more desperately unfunny it becomes. It’s embarrassing to watch, so don’t.

What’s the point of this inferior remake? Every set-piece is worse than the original, from the opening fight scenes to the dance-hall meeting of Tony and Maria and the final rumble. Jerome Robbins choreography is sorely missed. The score lacks punch. As for the characters… the leads lack the charisma of George Chakiris, the athleticism of Russ Tamblyn and the screen magnetism of Natalie Wood, while the Tony character seems even more soft than ever. Even the colour is less striking.

Spielberg has his camera prowl around the action but fails to capture the drama in the way that Robert Wise’s more dynamic camerawork did. What’s left is little more than an earnest student musical that will send you back to the original to check that, yes, it really was that much better.

Johnnie To’s 2001 killer v killer movie suffers from comic-book characterisation and plot, but it’s still a stylish and attention-grabbing film. Technically, To’s camera is constantly on the move so there’s always something good to look at and he’s a master of crane shots that add extra flair to the action stunts. The stunts themselves seem to have been done by the actors themselves, including jumping off balconies (see illuminating Making Of feature on DVD). The scene where Any Lau is trapped between platform and speeding underground train actually seems to have been done for real. Add a score that puts a moody take on affairs and you have a film that, even when it makes no sense, is constantly watchable.

Nominated for 11 Césars, this is the kind of adventurous, imaginative, witty, romantic French comedy/drama Hollywood could never make. A company uses sets and actors to enable people to re-enact the past. You know you’re in for a ride in the opening few scenes, when a staid 18th-century banquet is interrupted by murderous gun-toting gangsters. You don’t need to know any more. Just get on board and let the plot and multiple characters take you when and where they will. It has heart, it has bite and it positively sparkles with energy.

Slow, deliberate, understated 70min French ‘film’ with long silences, long static shots of nothing in particular, naturalistic dialogue about nothing in particular. And no score to add any emotion (the trailer cheats by adding an emotional score that’s not in the film). The DVD sleeve calls it a ‘masterwork’. Joke. The director has no idea how to make a film. Check out the interview with her on the Xtras. All she talks about is the concept.

It’s about two 8yo girls (played by twins) who meet in the woods. There’s a message somewhere in here about loss, but who cares when it would be more interesting to watch paint dry. Perhaps you’re meant to close your eyes and just listen. If so, make it a radio play. Except you’d need to cut those silent longueurs. Which would reduce the run-time to less than half-an hour. You could also cut the numerous filler scenes of the girl brushing her hair or teeth, the father shaving, the mother doing a crossword, the girls making pancakes etc. In fact get a real screenwriter to rewrite the whole film, give it to a real film director, get in a composer and start from scratch. Never has 70 minutes seemed so long.

The DVD blurb promises a movie that’s “ruthlessly realistic” and “visceral”. What a joke. This is a pantomime gangster movie with melodramatic acting and blood that’s chucked on like red paint. Together with scattergun plot and direction and little action, you’ll soon be reaching for the off button. Even the trailer will make you laugh.

A 118-year-old man looks back on the twists and turns of his life. It’s about roads taken and not taken and we see all of the alternate life paths in a non-linear fashion. On the Making Of featurette star Jared Leto owns up to counting 12 possible lives. Director Jaco van Dormael likens them to Russian dolls. The man’s memories are confused and so will you be. This might have been okay if what’s on screen is interesting. Unfortunately it isn’t. The characters bore and the constant time and plot switches annoy.

If the film deserves more than one star it’s for its brilliant cinematography, which makes the 45min Making Of featurette more interesting than the film itself. Van Dormael uses different camera set-ups and movements for different time lines, and some of his technique is worthy of a more satisfying film. There’s a scene where the camera follows Leto towards a mirror then continues through it to follow his reflection out of the room. Even after watching it several times on the Making Of, it’s still difficult to fathom how it was done.

Dormael is a great filmmaker but this is not a great film. He’s already made his wonderful and absorbing masterpiece about life in his 1991 film Toto The Hero. If you haven’t seen that, watch now.