Film Reviews by Alphaville

A Chinese detective story with a difference. Sherlock Holmes has nothing on our two heroes as they face off against the bad guys. Confusing characters and plotting make it hard to get to grips with on occasion, but it’s worth the effort for the incidental delights. People are being shot but there are no bullets (and no, they’re not made of ice that then melts). One is killed in a locked room. Best of all – learn how to escape from the rope on which you’ve been hung.

The premise of the movie produces a one-joke plot that trundles along pleasantly enough without ever hitting any heights (except for a cameo near the end). It’s written by Richard Curtis so expect a typical romcom that you’ll find either charming or cringeworthy. Still, if it can introduce post-millennials to Beatles music, even on a one-man acoustic guitar, it’s to be applauded. For the same age group it also features busker Ed Sheeran, who turns out to be a good sport. The DVD Extras feature an arguably superior alternative ending with a twist and a commentary by writer Richard Curtis and director Danny Boyle.

Father and daughter are stuck in the crawl space beneath a Florida house in a hurricane and alligators are circling. From that simple premise the story develops into a tense, exciting, full-blown action movie. Director Alex Aja films with his usual style and relish on a Serbian set that stands in for Florida so well you’ll never spot the difference.

From early claustrophobic shocks in the crawl space the action opens out and ramps up to a rousing climax, with plenty of jumps and laughs along the way. It may not be a film that would ever trouble the Oscars, but what more do you want from a creature feature? The DVD also contains a fascinating 30min Making Of feature that shows how the hurricane and floods were achieved and what the actors had to go through for our vicarious pleasure.

What if an alien with superpowers turned out to be a sociopath? Aided by a chilling score, that’s the premise of this tense, thrilling film. Instead of the standard superfisticuffs and cgi flash bangs of the bland Marvel and Avengers franchises, this explores a 12yo extraterrestrial boy’s growing awareness that he’s special and can ‘take the world’. If the film has any genre it’s ‘scary thriller’, with horror overtones, and it really works.

As the boy’s powers grow, so does the danger in which everyone in the small town of Brightburn finds themselves. We know they shouldn’t mess with him, but they don’t know that, which adds to the growing sense of menace when they confront him over bad behaviour. We especially root for his well-drawn parents, who have no idea what they’re letting himself in for when they try to chastise him.

Brightburn is a ‘superhero’ film so refreshing to see that it deserves 4/5 stars both for aspiration and execution. As for the rousing climax… it cries out for a sequel.

Robert Pattinson’s stuck on a spacecraft with a crying baby. Doesn’t sound too promising and it is indeed a slow burn, poorly shot by art house doyenne Claire Denis, here making her first English-language film. After half an hour a voice-over tells us what Rob’s doing there ( so much for ‘show don’t tell’). You’ll probably know this much anyway from the promo material, so you can cut the first half-hour. Claustrophobic spacecraft scenes plod along, intercut with enigmatic bits of scenes back on earth and flashbacks about the crew.

Kudos to Pattinson for making some interesting film choices since Twilight, but they’ve been a mixed bunch. Slower even than the soporific Moon, High Life will bore most viewers outside the Emperor’s Clothes art house circuit. There’s less here than meets the eye, and there’s little for the eye in the first place. Congrats if you make it through to the end. Plus points? The Gravity-light score has its moments.

The DVD Extras feature a Q/A with Denis that is just as obscure and pointless.

Superior drama about two GIs pinned down in the desert by a sniper at the end of the 2007 war in Iraq. One’s shot in the open while the other takes refuge behind a crumbling wall. It develops into a battle of wits between him and the unseen sniper. How good can a minimalist single-location film be? Gripping when you put Doug Liman (director of The Bourne Ultimatum) behind the camera. On a raft of excellent DVD Xtras he explains how he sought inspiration from Lumet’s single-location Twelve Angry Men and how he structured the film in 10-minute sections to keep the surprises coming (DO NOT watch the tell-all trailer). And those sandstorms (filmed in the Mojave Desert) are real.

This third entry in the Fallen series is less spectacular than the first two because this time Gerard is on the run rather than fighting destruction and chaos. Apparently everyone involved wanted something different. Mistake. This lacks the dynamic of the first two films. Even worse is a different director (Ric Roman Waugh) who uses a hand-held camera to film too close-in on the action, which is then over-edited into a visual mess.

Things do improve as the film progresses, with some surprises along the way (as long as you avoid the trailer and tell-all reviews). And there is some satisfying action towards the end, if not on the scale of the first two superior films. It’s nearly all ruined again by a puerile end-credits coda, but for the most part Gerard holds the film together and it makes an enjoyable watch.

This dire film, shot on the cheap in Romania, is one of the most badly directed westerns you’ll ever Fast Forward through. Often composed in giant close-ups so that not even a whole face can be seen, and often with no score to make up for lack of drama, this is just awful. To say it’s made for tv would be to overpraise it.

Like most second-rate Hong Kong martial arts films, most of this is ridiculous and boring. What’s Michelle Yeoh doing playing an assassin called Drizzle in tosh like this? To mislead punters, the usually reliable John Woo is credited on the DVD cover as co-director, but in the film’s credits he’s listed only as producer. The plot is nonsense, the acting irrelevant and the arbitrary fight scenes shot too close-in and over-edited. The whole film is a mess.

A would-be creepy film about a guy who sees ghosts. Some excellent films of this nature have come out of Asia but this South Korean effort isn’t one of them. With nothing more than atmosphere to maintain interest, it’s slow, uninvolving and never delivers.

If you like films such as Arctic and The Revenant you’ll like this, based on a true story. In WW2 the last survivor of a 12-man sabotage mission has to cross Arctic Norway to Sweden. He only has one boot, has been shot in the toe and nasty Nazis are after him. There are some terrific scenes. One pays homage to North By North-West as a plane strafes him while he’s skiing across a snowfield and starts an avalanche. Other scenes will make you squirm, especially when he has to amputate a gangrenous toe. The climactic scene is spectacular and barely believable were it not for a caption at the start of the film telling us that ‘the most incredible events are the ones that actually took place’. AVOID THE TRAILER so as not to spoil the surprise (why do they keep putting spoilers in trailers?)

It would be a 5-star film were it not for two problems. At 130 minutes it could do with some pruning. Of course, it’s difficult to cut out characters who actually existed, but our hero’s adventures do become a bit repetitive at times. However, the main problem is the edit. The story is told in flashback, so we know from the start that he will survive and that his 11 companions won’t. This takes the sting out of some of the drama. Even the Nazi attack on the boat carrying the men to Norway is only shown in flashback near the end of the film, so it’s only then that we understand why he only has one boot. Telling the story in linear fashion would add extra drama to it. Nevertheless, this is a film that is both thrilling and amazing.

A franchise spin-off for fanboys only. Cartoonish biffing and bashing, contrived messy over-edited action scenes, pseudo-cool funk and rap score, pointless talkie scenes to space out the runtime to 130 minutes, schoolboy dialogue. There are even a few car cashes (now that’s novel) and a vomit-inducing ditty over the end-credits. In other words, it’s as unwatchable as the main franchise.

Set in 1969, this is a feast of nostalgia for baby boomers but lacks focus as a drama. It owes too much to one of Tarantino’s favourite 60s films – Jacques Demy’s ‘The Model Shop’, which has a similar lack of plot to drive the movie forward. The two leads at its heart – fading star Leonardo DiCaprio and his stuntman Brad Pitt – are too one-dimensional to hold the viewer’s interest. This results in a patchwork of episodes, most of which go nowhere.

That’s not to say there are no standout scenes here. Damian Lewis is a hoot in a cameo as Steve McQueen. Brad has a rollicking fight with Bruce Lee and his visit to the Manson compound pulsates with tension. Sharon Tate goes to the cinema to watch herself in The Wrecking Crew – a scene made powerful because we know what’s going to happen to her (the viewer’s knowledge of the events of 1969 is taken for granted).

But just when the film’s beginning to grab, Tarantino ruins it all again in the third act with a voiceover that pointlessly describes everything we’re seeing on screen. And yet… turnabout again with a final outburst of violence that is more unexpected and powerful than you might imagine. All told, there’s some really good stuff here, but it could have been so much better with a tighter script.

Another ho-hum instalment in the franchise. It’s a competent re-working of the usual hokum, long on cgi and short on anything that will make you care two hoots about superheroes and supervillains who fight each other yet again. Phoenix can fly and only has to raise a palm in someone’s direction to send them flying too, so nothing new here.

The plot retreads the standard story arc so expect the usual superhero soul searching and climactic bash. Bland Sophie Tucker isn’t up to investing her lead character with any charisma and there’s even a female baddie called Vuk (make up your own jokes). Any plus points? Hans Zimmer’s orchestral score is less annoying than usual.

This miserable little Irish film, shot mainly in dingy interiors so dark you can barely see what’s happening, is a travesty of a Western. Right from the beginning, when it opens with a funeral and a sermon by a hellfire preacher in a dingy church, you know it’s going to be more concerned with setting a downbeat naturalistic tone than satisfying a paying audience. It will make any Western fan (indeed any film fan) want to put their foot through the screen. The fact that Irish writer/director Ivan Kavanagh has won awards on the film festival circuit adds to arthouse cinema’s increasingly bad name.