Film Reviews by Alphaville

If you think flamenco is all about stamping around with castanets, this film will be a revelation. If you find films about dance boring, this film will be a revelation. If you’ve never seen or heard of Antonio Gades, this film will be revelation. It’s a kind of acted/danced documentary in which rehearsals for the Blood Wedding of the title become so intense that we forget they’re rehearsals and become involved in the action itself. Perhaps the closest film to it in spirit is West Side Story.

Ditch the castanets for starters. This is flamenco ballet like you’ve never seen it. Gades is a such a mesmerising presence that you can’t take your eyes off him. The climactic knife fight is brilliantly executed in slow motion, beautifully shot in real-time by Carlos Saura’s prowling camera.

At a brief 80mins, it’s worth giving it a shot. It was such a success at the 1981 Edinburgh Film Festival that Gades brought his company to Edinburgh the following year for an equally stunning live performance, and a year later he and Saura reunited for a film version of Carmen.

After 2010’s terrific Skyline, the sequel Beyond Skyline, by a different director, was a disappointment. This third film in the series, again directed by Beyond Skyline’s Liam O’Donnell, hits rock bottom. The SFX are good enough but soon pall with nothing of interest happening on screen.

The usual motley crew of stereotypes that populate this type of film are sent to an alien planet to fight aliens. It plods along leaving no cliché unturned with on-the-nose dialogue that even Dr Who writers would have rejected: ‘Let’s go!’, ‘Watch our back!’. If the long, drawn-out scenes were re-edited to reduce the overlong 2hr run time, at least some pace might have been injected into it. The fight scenes, on the other hand, are ruined by rapid-fire editing. And why does this planet never have any sunlight to brighten the dour look of the whole affair? There’s so little drama, tension or excitement that it’s difficult to keep your finger off the FF button. And if you want to be put off even more, watch lost-in-Hollywood starlet Lindsey Morgan telling us on the DVD Xtras how wonderful everyone is.

A big-scale Christopher Nolan movie is an event and Tenet is no exception. It has a great concept, features spectacular set-pieces and is beautifully directed. The plot zips around the world with John David Washington and Robert Pattinson playing James Bond-type agents attempting to prevent the end of the world. No expense or location is spared. Where to hold a meeting? On a racing catamaran of course. How to get to the top of a skyscraper? Bungee jump from the adjacent one of course.

What makes it different is that their adversaries are ‘inverted’ villains moving backwards through time. Yep, you read it right. And therein lies the film’s major problem. It’s almost impossible to make sense of. The characters become mere tokens to propel the plot. Chief villain Kenneth Branagh seems almost a sideshow and his abused wife Elizabeth Dembecki (the film’s only engaging character) gets stuck in a pointless subplot about her son.

The converging and competing timelines, and the explanations we’re given of them, become increasingly confusing, as do the characters themselves when they’re forced to wear oxygen masks in an alternate timeline. So not only do we not understand what’s going on, we’re sometimes not even sure whom we’re looking at. Consequently the spectacular OTT climax (will the world survive or not?) is as likely to provoke as much bemused humour as dramatic tension.

In short, it’s a confusing, flawed and irritating film that teems with imagination, chutzpah and sheer cinematic mastery. A nonsensical 4-star film? Even that’s nonsensical in itself. Watch and wonder. And give suave agent Robert Pattinson a film of his own.

With Thunder Road and now this, Jim Cummings is carving out quite a name for himself as a writer/director/star. And unlike many a writer/director/star, he does not indulge in vanity projects. This is a proper film that re-invigorates the tired old werewolf formula. Sure, people are torn apart at full moon, but this is more of a murder mystery set amidst the Rocky Mountains of Utah. It also has a nice line in sardonic humour as Jim (a local police officer) is beset by a whole world of problems both personal and professional. He flatly refuses to accept the existence of a mythical werewolf, unlike his deputy, but then “he thought Men in Black was a documentary”.

At a taut 81mins there’s not a frame wasted, right up to the satisfying resolution of the mystery. And if, amidst the action and the humour, you can’t quite put your finger on the supporting subtext that tackles nothing less than the human condition, watch the short DVD Xtra. It will add to your admiration of what is a small but unexpected gem.

The scatter-gun approach to film: an arbitrarily edited jumble of disjointed scenes shot by waving a camera around. Add a charisma-free leading man and exploitative female nudity to reel in the saddos and you have a film that is virtually unwatchable.

After a boring opening full of talking-heads in close-up it’s downhill all the way. Where to start? The script’s awful, the acting am-dram and the direction abysmal. To make it even worse, it’s filmed with a shaky-cam in claustrophobic interiors. The plot concerns an alien on a spaceship (yawn, yawn). To avoid the need for any special effects, it takes over humans and turns them into zombie-like crazies. There’s not an iota of imagination in the whole thing. Feel very sorry for Bruce Willis that his career has come to this.

Benson and Moorhead’s best film yet, with the added bonus that they’re not acting in it as well as writing and directing it, but it still has all the faults of their previous work. For half the film we’re subjected to disjointed scenes of two paramedics (Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan) dealing with the effects of the drug of the title. Then a sci-fi element kicks in and things become more interesting as Mackie himself explores the drug’s effect. Dornan, meanwhile, is wasted in a thankless part as his moaning mate.

It’s all nonsense, of course, and becomes increasingly so. To give away the silly sci-fi premise would be a spoiler (NB Avoid spoiler-heavy Cinema Paradiso review before viewing), but at least the film’s second half becomes more engaging and less wearing to watch than the first half. At the end, there’s even some emotional engagement with the characters, which is unusual in Benson/Moorhead films. A thrilling score, featured heavily in the excellent trailer, only serves to expose the film’s ridiculous premise more.

You know how bad films seem even more disappointing when they have a wonderful subject matter to work from? Well here’s a prime example. In films such as A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) Jean Seberg was a muse to the filmmakers of the 1960s French New Wave. So what does this bio do — concentrate solely on the few years when the FBI’s men-in-suits investigated her for her involvement in the Black Panther movement in the US. It’s a dull tale. Did the filmmakers learn nothing from the films of Godard, Truffaut and other greats who showed how imaginative and exhilarating cinema can be?

Staidly directed family drama about a young mother with post-natal depression… or is it more than that? A kind of mystery thriller that’s never really believable, it’s competent enough if you like slow-burn Sunday night TV fare. More likely, you may find you don’t give a toss.

Slow-burn drama about… wait for it… an auditor looking into a bank’s books. The title refers to cryptocurrency shenanigans around which the plot develops. Subtitles may help you follow all the tech-talk and acronyms. It’s pitched as a thriller but, despite a pounding electronic score, never develops much thrust. It even begins at a climactic stand-off to prompt interest before flashing back to the beginning – always a sign of a film unsure of maintaining interest.

Despite this, it’s an engaging, well-mounted piece with a couple of appealing leads in our autistic leading man and his tech-guy mate, and it has surprising heart.

A Korean pulp gangster movie that’s such an over-edited mish-mash of jump-cut images (slo-mo, stills, silhouette etc.) that it alienates from the first frame. The director was apparently trying to make a film about “movement” rather than story or character, so he must shoulder all the blame. No doubt it’s meant to be edgy and cool, but it just comes across as amateur and tiresome.

Don’t be fooled by the title. This is no sci-fi actioner. It's more like an Enid Blyton story called Four Go Wild in the Woods. The plot? Four teenage astronauts land on an alien planet and go walkabout in the woods with occasional gory moments. Apart from the lack of plot or pace, static direction, pointless dialogue and one-note “acting” make it seem like a shoestring-budget amateur production totally lacking in imagination. Even at a meagre 75mins, it fails on all counts.

An old-fashioned WW2 submarine film, ruined by being dubbed into English for morons, which destroys all sense of realism and involvement. The Belgian trailer shows what it might have been, but the original language Belgian version is not available on the DVD.

After an impressive above-ground (and wordless) action opening, there’s little here anyway but a Boys Own adventure with heroic resistance fighters and dastardly Germans. The main plot involves transporting uranium in a stolen Nazi U-boat and the claustrophobic underwater scenes are a clichéd bore you’ve seen a hundred times before. It might be better in the original language version, but probably not much.

What begins as a touching character study, about an ailing veteran living in a motorhome and hunting in the woods of a wintry Maine, develops into a suspenseful thriller when he finds himself hunted by a gang of criminals. An aged Tom Berenger, in his best film for a long time, anchors the piece as a thoroughly believable character you’ll root for. He even has trouble bending to pick up his rifle.

On the down side, the film lacks high points, Tom’s behaviour sometimes seems contrived for the sake of the plot, and it will disappoint anyone looking for in-your-face action. Otherwise, set in an austere environment so well captured you can almost feel the chill, this is a seductive 90min watch.

Beautifully realised French drama about a young man and his 7yo niece. The main plot point is a shocker that affects their lives. To say more would be a spoiler, even though many reviewers seem to want to spoil the viewing experience by giving the game away (why do they do that?). Even the trailer, for once, is safe to watch.

The film is intriguingly plotted, beautifully acted and directed, makes Paris look wonderful and takes you on an emotional ride. Only the French make films like this, when even a bicycle ride through the city, evoking memories of La Nouvelle Vague, is a joy to watch.