Film Reviews by Alphaville

Low-key but involving drama about an ordinary mid-West Joe (Matt Damon) travelling to Marseille to prove his imprisoned daughter innocent of murder. Grounded in character and place, there’s no action and no set-pieces, but it’s is so well-plotted and efficiently directed that it keeps you invested from start to finish.

In fact the murder plot is less interesting than Matt’s growing relationship with the mother and young daughter with whom he stays in Marseille. This is beautifully handled.

If anything detracts, it’s the plot’s insistence on going its own idiosyncratic way, whether the audience cares or not. This is brave, but whether it’s successful or foolhardy, only you can judge.

Note to reviewers: please don’t give endings away.

It’s a Marvel movie so expectations are low… and met. First a few good points: the cgi’s good, the martial arts fights are silly but efficient and there’s a good set-piece featuring a runaway bus in San Francisco. Unfortunately the characters are cardboard cut-outs, the threadbare plot is merely a device to get from one fight to another and there’s no sense of drama at all. Half-way through we’re even introduced to cartoon animals and dragons. Tom and Jerry fights were more exciting.

It may keep undemanding kids amused for a while, but others may soon be reaching for the FF button. On the plus side, it will at least prompt a new admiration for all those crazy Hong Kong kung fu films that may now not seem so bad after all.

Great set-up, great set-design in a future-flooded Miami and moody atmosphere keep things interesting until it becomes obvious that there’s nothing going on here but a dull, relentlessly downbeat film noir. There’s even a world-weary voiceover to help you doze off.

One story told three ways by each of the protagonists, but Rashomon it isn’t. The first telling is all scene-setting, pompous score, horse-riding and in-yer-face medieval fighting with spurting cgi blood. The second and third retellings are little differentiated and the stilted dialogue soon becomes wearing.

This is the sort of tale that needs an Anthony Mann with his knack for shooting epic landscapes with figures. The final duel is not a patch on the one in ‘El Cid’. Director Ridley Scott suddenly switches to hand-held shaky-cam like in some two-bit action movie. And we don’t even care who wins.

Liam’s back in his world-weary action-man guise, on the run from both good cops and bad cops, and if that’s your bag this film won’t let you down. He looks and sounds a tad old for the part, but suspend disbelief, have fun spotting the stunt man and enjoy the fights and car chases. It could do with more dynamic direction and a more exiting climax, but it has a well-crafted plot that, unusually, features two bad cops who have their own set of problems, caught between Liam and the good cops. Note: only 86mins long, not the 99mins specified on the DVD sleeve.

Disappointing Mike Leigh film. A drawing-room drama full of period detail and lots of acting. If you like that sort of thing you might appreciate the period set design and actorly atmosphere. If you stick with it you might even learn something about the artist, although the emphasis on interior sets hardly does justice to his outdoor paintings. Others won’t make it far before hitting FF.

Bum-numbing drama about a Korean family moving to Arkansas in the 1980s to make a go of farming. It’s supposed to capture the ‘immigrant experience’, but it’s too dated for that and hardly universal. It’s plugged as ‘tender and sweeping’, but it’s hardly that either. Perhaps it worked as a book, but it needed a more cinematic approach to turn it into a good film. The end-result of the transfer to screen is uneventful, undramatic and unmemorable.

Despite a lack of thrills and cinematic flourishes, this over-sedate film works because of a pacy screenplay that keeps you watching to see what happens. There are even a few (too few) compelling scenes in the third act. It’s a good film but more dramatic camerawork and score would have done wonders for it. The problem with director Dominic Cooke, who made the stagey On Chesil Beach, is that he films as though he’s making a TV drama. For once it’s safe to watch the trailer, which unlike the CP critic review does not give the game away.

This gobsmackingly awful film is so disastrously bad you wonder why no-one realised during its making. Bad choices all around put the whole enterprise beyond mockery. Comic book characters include a weasel-man and a shark-man and naturally it ends with a cgi fight against a stupid monster. Plot, dialogue and set-pieces are so lame it’s hard to pick out one good scene. Equally hard to fathom is how it thinks it’s cool, with miserable attempts at humour to a jaunty soundtrack and (naturally) a terrible sweary rap ditty over the end credits. Warner Brothers, what’s happened to you?

Epic historical saga has all the twists and turns of a thriller. Even the occasional mis-step adds to the excitement. Artist Goya (Stellan Skarsgard) spends the movie trying to negotiate the contrasting threats of the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars. But the heart of the movie lies with Javier Bardem (initially a priest) and Natalie Portman (Goya’s model) and their devastating journeys through the years. It’s a rollercoaster of a film that will keep you glued to see what happens next and will stay with you afterwards.

This Italian production about Siberian gangsters after WW2 harks back to those awful spaghetti westerns that followed in the wake of a Fistful of Dollars. John Malkovich hams it up as criminal grandfather with a laughable heavy accent. As for the film, it’s simply terrible. Slapdash amateur film-making.

Totally predictable WW! drama, with noble working-class squaddies and idiot pompous generals. Our heroes have to dig a tunnel under the German lines. Will there be a tunnel collapse? What do you think? Dialogue is filled out with banter and voiceovers of letters written home. For most of its length it’s surprisingly unexciting for a war film, but it does break out towards the end. The awful trailer gives the whole game away anyway.

Not that it’s a bad film. It’s based on a true story and is well-meaning, well-mounted, well acted and sedately directed. It comes across as a high-end Sunday evening TV drama.

In this bog-standard superhero fare, another bunch of comic book ‘meta-humans’ fight another bunch of super-baddies to a random selection of pop songs. Perhaps one of the most boring of the whole genre. Not a single original idea or iota of intelligence in the whole by-the-numbers waste of screen time. Not even worth watching for the cgi fight scenes, which are an over-edited mess.

Semi-autobiographical film abut students at a Paris film school. All the trappings of a Nouvelle Vague film but none of the joie de vivre and all filmed in dull natural light with a static camera. The students mooch around, smoking, drinking and talking nonsense, like moody teenagers who think they know everything. Unless you’re interested in discussions about the nature of film, it’s as boring as the characters. And if you are interested in the subject matter, it’s annoying as well as boring. All hit films are rip-offs made for money, says one of the director’s mouthpieces. Film should recreate real life, says another. No room here for the flights of imagination on which cinema can take us. This is director JP Civeyrac’s 12th film and the first to get a British distribution. It may well be his last.

Director Jung-bum Lee wanted to make a humane action-packed gangster film and has come up with a surprising and enthralling winner that’s all heart.

The plot revolves around the relationship between our floppy-haired animé-type hero and a young girl who befriends him then becomes a victim of child trafficking. Little do the villains know that, behind the one eye that isn’t covered by his fringe, our hero has special forces skills. The villains too are a diverse and interesting bunch, especially Mr. charismatic English-speaking guy, who has some action-packed run-ins with the hero.

It’s hard to pin down why this film is so appealing but, even if (when) you sometimes can’t follow what’s going on or who’s who, it’s magnetic. There’s one startling scene, where the hero jumps out of a high window onto the street, that’s difficult to see how it’s done (watch the excellent DVD Xtras). An unexpected wallow of a movie.