Film Reviews by Alphaville

This is an old-fashioned British WW2 drama about female spies. We see them being recruited, trained and sent to France. In other words, it’s a by-the-numbers plot. You can almost predict what’s going to happen next. The film opens with a torture scene followed by the dreaded caption Three Months Earlier – always a sign of a film not confident that it’s first act will keep you interested.

It’s based on true stories of brave women and is well-meaning, but that doesn’t make it a good film. Stolid first-time direction by an ex-producer drains every scene of life and gives it a Sunday evening TV drama vibe that makes it disappointingly flat and uninvolving.

If you know director Kelly Reichardt (eg Meek’s Cutoff) you’ll know her films are deathly slow. As soon as this opens you know you’re in for a long haul, with still shots that go on forever. 15 minutes in and all that’s happened is that someone has picked some mushrooms. Then it gets worse. At least you can see the mushrooms. Much of the rest is filmed in darkness because there was no artificial lighting back in Old Oregon, don’t you know.

The thing is, you see, Kelly doesn’t make films. She seems like a nice person, but she makes anti-films. Which must be why the arthouse crowd like her, because otherwise her success is unfathomable. She even films in the old 4:3 ratio, apparently for close-ups but patently because the big wide screen is beyond her capabilities. She should exhibit in a conceptual art gallery for like-minded souls who think Duchamp’s urinal constitutes high art. A cow appears in a few scenes.

Here’s some advice, Kelly. Open up the screen, learn what a camera can do, learn to compose a shot, learn to edit, stop shooting in the dark, give your actors more to do than mumble and add at least a modicum of life to the occasional scene. In short, watch some real films and go to film school.

The Hong Kong film industry’s 2000 attempt to go international with an English-language martial arts movie fails miserably. The irrelevant plot features two clichéd cops played by pop idols. The acting is woeful and the direction unimaginative. The silly choreographed fights, accompanied by soundtrack grunts, soon pall. Wirework has never been more obvious. Nearly all the best bits are in the trailer, so watch that instead.

If you’re drawn to this by Leigh Whannell’s terrific second and third films as director (Upgrade, The Invisible Man), this first feature will be a terrible disappointment. It’s nothing more than a clichéd jump-scare wannabe horror film. It’s shot mostly in the dark (which people of course explore with torches) and gets its “horror” tag from a “supernatural demon” who may or may not appear out of the shadows or jump from off-screen to a shriek of orchestral muzak. Nothing wrong with the direction, but the whole film is just one long boring cliché. The only thing worth watching is the Making Of featurette about the one interesting scene featuring a car crash.

A family of ordinary Brits, with American accents for foreign sales, are terrorised by silly humanoid monsters that are attracted by sound. Yes, it’s a rip-off of the far superior A Quiet Place. Still, it begins well enough, with people acting unusually normally for a horror film and a welcome absence of annoying American teens (even if the acting is a bit hit-and-miss). Director Scott Jeffrey has an eye for framing and composition that makes for a nicely tense first act.

Unfortunately the film then runs out of ideas and, even with a run time of only 68mins (always a warning sign), becomes repetitive. Some of the characters keep screaming and whining even though the whole premise of the film is that they need to keep quiet. Among a host of other things that don’t make sense is their liking for being covered in blood instead of wiping it off. Overall, a disappointing failure after a promising start, but if you want to be amused and annoyed, it’ll pass an hour and a bit.

An impressive if ultimately uninteresting attempt at shooting a limited-budget film on an iPhone from the Butler-Harts husband-wife team. They write, he directs, she stars. Unfortunately it features only one character in a duff plot that goes nowhere fast. A couple of short talking-head cameos add nothing. Don’t be fooled by the exciting music on the trailer – there’s none in the film. And no excitement either.

She wakes up bound and gagged in an attic and tries to get out. This happens again and again while she has flashes of what’s going on. By the third reset you’ll be getting restless, but even if you FF to the end the explanation will have you thinking so-what.

The whole exercise raises interesting and perhaps worrying questions for the future of film, which makes the Making Of feature on the DVD more interesting than the film itself. A one-star film with an extra star for imaginative use of a technically limited iPhone.

82 minutes of bargain-basement drivel. Little more than a series of poorly shot shoot-outs between cardboard humans and aliens masquerading as cardboard humans. To save money, one such shoot-out occurs in a building, another in a wood that represents an alien planet. A sleepwalking Bruce Willis mumbles his way through it and the dialogue is pure cliché. Example: “With all due respect, Sarge, f--- you”. Any redeeming qualities? Nope.

Four software designers find a portal to alternative universes. Fortunately they’re intelligent young people and not the usual nerdy teenagers you get in too many American films, so it’s fun to watch as they explore the possibilities.

Isaac Ezban is making a name for himself with intelligent, cinematic sci-fi movies that look good and make you think. He directs this with pace, verve and real style.

The plot spirals off in so many directions that sometimes it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on, but it’s both grounded and silly enough to carry it off. We also know, from a perfectly pitched pre-titles sequence, that it’s not all going to be sweetness and light. When you think about it afterwards, that tense, puzzling pre-titles sequence is the one that will stay with you. Four stars? Yes, it’s crazy, but there’s never a dull moment and how many films can you say that about these days?

Another dud from writer/directors Benson and Moorhead. The film doesn’t even begin until after the first 20 minutes. Before then is a pointless backstory with a death-bed scene and a pub fight with bland dialogue and 50% cursing. Then we move to Italy for more swearing with some loutish Brits on holiday.

If you haven’t given up by now, the plot concerns the protagonist meeting a girl who occasionally metamorphoses into a monster. You’d think that at least would be interesting, but the so-called “horror” scenes are short and laughable. Will he stick with her? Who cares?

How this film attracted some good reviews on the DVD sleeve is a mystery. If you’re familiar with Benson/Moorhead films you’ll know they drain the life out of everything they touch. At least they’re not acting in this one, but it’s small mercy.

Despite the spoiler on the DVD sleeve, this is an intriguing sci-fi thriller that really works. Theo James lives in a remote research facility in the woods (beautifully filmed in a snowbound Hungarian landscape), where he builds increasingly human-like robots. He has three, with ages equivalent to 6, 16 and adult. The 16yo is one of the most fascinating AI creations since HAL. Teenagers!

Add to this a number of other interesting ideas, including the title notion of being able to “archive” a consciousness after death and there’s plenty here to keep the mind occupied as well as the eye and ear (a terrific electronic score by Steven Price).

If you’re expecting something as hidebound as Moon (on which Archive director Gavin Rothery was designer), prepare to be startled. This is wonderfully visual sci-fi that bears comparison with Silent Running. Only in the middle section do you begin to wonder if it’s beginning to run out of ideas, but then it winds up again to a brilliant ending that will stay with you.

Avoid tell-tale trailer if possible.

Touted as a horror film with ‘shocking violence’, this is anything but. Just watch the trailer. It consists of people telling shaggy dog stories in bars. You hope they’re all going to tie together at some point, but it’s all so boring you probably won’t hang around to find out. A tense score attempts to add atmosphere, but this is little more than a dialogue-heavy, over-written play that belongs on the stage.

Far-fetched, silly, gung-ho SAS romp, full of shoot-em-ups and earthy squaddie banter. It’s a cinematic, American-style thriller with the added bonus of some suitably full-on English swearing instead of bland American euphemisms such as sonovabitch.

The action mostly revolves around the hijacking of a train in the Channel Tunnel, where the scenery and fights do become a tad repetitive, but the book-ending start and end action sequences up the exotic quotient. Director Magnus Martens keeps things moving along at a slick pace and stars Sam Heughan and Ruby Rose are easy on the eye. Instantly forgettable but go with the flow and it’s good old-fashioned entertainment.

After a brilliantly colourful and imaginative pre-title chase sequence on a tropical island, this immediately hits rock bottom in office buildings, where we’re supposed to find klutzy Christine Wiig and clownish loser Pedro Pascal interesting. Gal Gadot hardly gets a look in. For a painful hour of banal dialogue this is soapy melodrama that even East End writers would have binned.

The plot involves a crystal that makes wishes come true, which is a cheesy way of enabling the writers to resurrect a dead Chris Pine from the previous instalment in the franchise. Pascal gets transformed into a megalomaniac. Wiig gets transformed into a beautiful woman, which we know because (cliché alert) she gets big hair and stops wearing her glasses. Naturally they get superpowers and there are even a few Me Too virtue-signalling moments. Yes, it’s painful stuff.

The long-awaited face-off between them and Gadot is the usual overwrought cgi comic-book nonsense, and that’s not even the worst of it. Still to sit through is a melodramatic finale so tear-jerkingly awful it should come with a medical warning that you might split your sides laughing.

Frances McDormand is a poor “houseless” woman who lives in a van and travels around the American West. If this was a British film it would be a political diatribe against “the system”. Instead it’s a wonderful paean to life on the road, the joys of solitariness, the spirit of community among like-minded travellers and, not least, the beauty of the Western landscape.

It adopts a documentary-style approach, with some of the travellers she meets being real-life people rather than actors and with scant a plot apart from the changing of the seasons and the triumphs and disappointments of everyday living. But it’s so gentle and beautiful to watch that you soon get drawn into the life and the epic landscapes along with the travellers.

Worthy, documentary-style Mexican drug movie, with long-held shots and little score to heighten the drama. It’s all filmed from the POV of our heroine, who gets drawn in to drug smuggling. She’s the only real character in the film, which is a real problem as she’s not very interesting and is mostly just a passive pawn in proceedings. This makes it difficult to care about or even follow most of what’s going on around her.

There’s some nice camerawork here and there among the odd shoot-out, but there’s never any emotional involvement in what’s going on. It’s like watching the news. The film’s worthiness has even enabled it to garner some good reviews. The wildly OTT DVD blurb spouts nonsense about it being “explosive”, “mesmerising” and “leaving you gasping for air”. You’re more likely to be “gasping for the FF button”.