Film Reviews by Alphaville

Alternative title: How to Ruin a Classic. It’s just awful. Where to begin? Writer/director Greta Gerwig wanted to make a film about the girls as adults and makes the disastrous mistake of interleaving past and present scenes. It begins near the end, then flashes back and forward, often confusingly, even for just a few seconds. So the film begins with a set of spoilers. For instance, we learn immediately that Jo has turned down Laurie, thereby removing all forward momentum from that storyline and making many of the historic scenes redundant. Newcomers to the story will wonder why sit through the rest of the film.

Equally bad, the plot and dialogue have been irredeemably tainted by a woke mind-set. Gerwig’s aim was ‘to give a more modern take on women’s choices and life’ (according to the DVD Xtras). This turns the film into a travesty of the book. The four girls are supposedly endeared to us by a number of giggly scenes but basically they’re mouthpieces for Gerwig’s feminist agenda. Listen to woke princess Emma Watson pontificating on the DVD Xtras and you’ll want to put your foot through the screen.

Given this, it’s no surprise that Gerwig can’t write for or direct men. Even Timothy Chalamet, so brilliant in Call Me By Your Name, can do little with the role of Laurie, while Louis Garrel as Jo’s Prof has no chance with the few scenes he’s allowed. All this renders the Amy/Laurie and Jo/Prof plots nonsensical.

The direction is pure cliché. The Jo/Laurie break-up should be an emotional highpoint, instead of which it’s so badly shot and stitched together that it plays like am-dram. The only imaginative shot Gerwig chooses is so out-of-place that the producers should have had a word with her – she has Jo speak to camera! Perhaps after Ladybird Gerwig was too untouchable. She even tags on a clunker of a new feminist ending.

Even the music score is woeful, ramming home every beat like in a superhero franchise. She runs… fast music. She’s ill… plinky-plonk piano.

What makes the end-result even worse is that it’s based on such brilliant source material. This reviewer loathes it with a passion. To see how it should be done, watch the 1994 version by Gillian Armstrong. And for a coming-of-age film that really hits home, watch the brilliant Mustang.

Seduced by the Oscar-winning hype, anyone hoping for another movie as riveting as Shoplifters will be disappointed. It’s engaging enough if you stick with it, but it’s over-ripe, long-winded and far too cumbersome for its 2hr run-time. A family of four ingratiate themselves as home helps into a wealthy family’s confidence. When things start to go wrong (after a whole hour) it descends into farce. No spoilers about the outcome, but by the end you probably won’t care what happens.

Bong Joon-Ho is a great director but this isn’t his best screenplay. If you also thought Snowpiercer, his one American movie, was a dud (not his fault), do yourself a favour and watch The Host or Memories of Murder.

The first half-hour plays like a sociological documentary about a backcountry Brazilian village… then a drone appears and soon the villagers are battling an attacking force. The promo material bills it as sci-fi but there’s no sci-fi in it – it’s a glorified political allegory.

It’s nowhere near the fun ride that some reviewers would have you think it is. It’s far too long in the build-up and the final confrontation is a damp squib. But its main fault is that there’s no emotional engagement with any of the characters so that we don’t care about their fate. And if you watch the tell-all trailer you’ll be even more disappointed. Nevertheless, and with an eclectic soundtrack, it’s probably different enough to make you keep watching.

Laughter-free belated sequel to the superior Zombielend. The script has the cast simply play around in sketches that have little sense of plot, jeopardy or drama. Voice-overs and on-screen captions attempt to add missing humour but to no avail. Everything about the film smacks of trying too hard with insufficient ideas to merit the empty exercise.

To annoy UK viewers even more, there’s an annoying stupid American teenage girl along for the ride and a cloying sequence in homage to Elvis Presley. To further insult the audience’s intelligence, the unfunniest sketch of all has a tired cameo of Bill Murray killing yet more zombies during the end-credits. If you start fast-forwarding, pause after an hour for one single unexpected treat – a brilliantly choreographed single-shot brawl.

This unrelenting tale of a self-confessed ‘mentally ill loser’ is a distasteful character study of how down-at-heel Arthur becomes Batman’s nemesis Joker. It’s a complete downer of a movie with no forward momentum and nothing of interest to maintain attention along the way. Superhero fans will not be the only ones to be sorely disappointed. A low-key 2hr character study of a cardboard-thin comic book figure was always going to be a tough ask, and writer/director Todd Phillips makes a complete hash of it.

He’s not helped by a hammy Joaquin Phoenix acting his socks off, nor by a barely disguised anti-Trump plot. No one cares about people like Arthur, you see. He’s ‘ignored by the system’, especially by Bruce Wayne’s unfeeling capitalist father, who runs for mayor. Even Ken Loach wouldn’t make the parallels that obvious. To further twist the knife, Arthur even has a sick mother to look after. In a despicable Act 3, this unbelievably forms a basis for justifying rioting and murder. No wonder this stinker of a film has garnered good reviews from certain quarters.

Laughter-free belated sequel to the superior Zombielend. The script has the cast simply play around in sketches that have little sense of plot, jeopardy or drama. Voice-overs and on-screen captions attempt to add missing humour but to no avail. Everything about the film smacks of trying too hard with insufficient ideas to merit the empty exercise.

To annoy UK viewers even more, there’s an annoying stupid American teenage girl along for the ride and a cloying sequence in homage to Elvis Presley. To further insult the audience’s intelligence, the unfunniest sketch of all has a tired cameo of Bill Murray killing yet more zombies during the end-credits. If you start fast-forwarding, pause after an hour for one single unexpected treat – a brilliantly choreographed single-shot brawl.

An aged writer is found dead and private eye Daniel Craig interviews a cast of talking heads, in a house, in close-up, to find out who dunnit. How this gets any favourable reviews is unfathomable. It would have been past its sell-by date in the 1950s. It’s completely devoid of flair and drama and is unrelentingly boring. It’s even played out to the most annoying Carry On muzak score that over-emphasises every beat. Only Inspector Clouseau could liven this one up. Who dunnit? Who cares?

Makeshift disjointed film about a charisma-free detective and a vigilante chasing sexual predators. It’s poorly realised in all departments and soon loses interest. Watch any episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit instead.

In this defiantly anti-superhero movie, people with superhuman powers are the underclass, policed into impotence by advanced drones and robocops. Our hero Connor, a Class 5 Electric, rebels and joins a power-abled heist team to make money for an operation to save his ailing mom. Detective Park is on his case. It’s a fascinating ride to a terrific electronic score as we discover what powers each character has and watch them put them to use when thieves fall out.

Low-key thriller about an East German family’s attempts to escape to the West in 1979. After their initial hot-air balloon attempt fails it’s a race against time as the Stasi close in. It could do with more oomph and a stronger score, but you’ll be rooting for the family to make it. Settle in for a solid watch as the film builds to a nail-biting climax and unexpectedly poignant end-credits sequence.

Spooky sci-fi movie begins in melodrama mode as an extended American family gathers and squabbles in a house in the woods. Then weird things start happening. Unnatural lights and noises. People disappear. A lesser film would descend into horror territory, but this evolves into an engrossing mystery thriller that packs an unexpected emotional punch. The stunning third act is almost totally wordless, telling its story purely in pictures and music. Horror fans will hate it. Sci-fi fans will feel short-changed. Anyone who loves cinema will be mesmerised. None of it makes any sense, but neither did 2001. Just sit back and let the visuals take you on an enthralling journey.

With Solis and now this, writer/director/editor/producer Carl Strathie is a name to watch. If anything is more incredible than that final half-hour, it’s the fact that he made Dark Encounter on a small budget in Yorkshire with a British cast.

A cool detective chases a resourceful baddie through the Manhattan night. Eight cops are dead and that’s just the start. There’s no mismatched buddie nonsense, no stupid cops, no idiot baddies who can’t shoot straight, no bulletproof heroes, no love interest, no subplots. This is a straight-down-the-line intelligent action thriller directed with gusto by Irishman Brian Kirk, upping his game after work on TV series such as Luther and Game of Thrones. The two leads (Chadwick Bozeman, summoning his inner Denzel, and Stephan James) ooze charisma. Sienna Miller shows she should be an action star. Henry Jackman’s pulsating score echoes Bernard Hermann’s work for Hitchcock.

To delve deeper, listen to the director’s commentary on the DVD and learn how some scenes had to be shot by a parkour runner using a warp cam. Great stuff. It’s the best cop film since Den of Thieves.

This Russian WW2 tank movie could have been an interesting variant on war movies, but it fails miserably. Although it’s efficiently staged, the tank battles are simply boring and the long central Act 2 that sandwiches the two action set-pieces is even more so. The characters are stereotypes and the dialogue clichéd. Even worse, the Cinema Paradiso version is not available in the original Russian and the horrendously bad American dubbing destroys all sense of realism and seriousness. Maybe the original version would be worth a couple of stars (it did well in Russia), but this version is as dire as the film’s stupid English-language title.

This is the best entry in the Terminator franchise since T2, but that’s faint praise. It certainly lacks the wow factor of the first two films. The effects no longer startle and the plot is a retread of T2. A terminator is sent from the future to kill a woman and an enhanced human is sent back to protect her. Linda Hamilton and Arnie are along for the ride but, sad to say, they now look too old and weary to care. They’re not helped by staid direction, a long dreary central Act 2 full of talking heads, and a score that has mostly ditched the compelling franchise music for the kind of bland orchestral muzak you get in superhero films.

Despite this, Terminator fans will find plenty of interest during the two long action sequences that bookend the film. The opening metal-crunching set-piece is promising as we learn what the new super-terminator can do. The ending set-piece begins with some confusingly staged action aboard a crashing plane but ends with an exciting final confrontation that almost rescues the whole film. Overall the film fails to live up to its promise, but it keeps you watching.

This Japanese family drama is the kind of film whose subject matter and arthouse praise would normally encourage most people to avoid it like Covid-19. Force yourself to make an exception. This is brilliant stuff, well worthy of its best film Palme d’Or and Oscar. Beautifully observed, masterfully directed, heartfelt and wise, with a last half-hour that stirs and subverts in equal measure. It grabs from the start as the family take in a 5yo girl who’s both cute and abused. From there it draws you in unwittingly before exploding in a devastating final half-hour you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be gripped by.