Film Reviews by Alphaville

Another gorgeous hand-drawn animation from Studio Ghibli, this time from a Dutch director (Michael Dudok de Wit) who understands the medium as Miyazaki did. You’ll never be satisfied with computer-based animation again. It’s about a man shipwrecked on a desert island. Don’t worry that the title makes it seem like a children’s film. The turtle makes only a brief appearance and is merely a plot catalyst. The film is full of adult themes and moving moments, but AVOID THE TELL-ALL TRAILER, which ridiculously condenses the whole 77-minute story into 2 minutes and spoils the several story twists. Why do they do that?

The sets are wonderfully scenic and colourful, with an exceptional quality of light rarely seen in animation. The director also stretches the medium to its fullest, using all kinds of pseudo-camera angles and shots that would not be possible in live-action. In short, it’s a stunning cinematic watch. The DVD also has a fascinating feature that shows the

The Rock takes on baddies in a burning supertall Hong Kong skyscraper and it’s film-making by numbers, complete with Mandarin-speaking co-stars for the lucrative Chinese market. It’s that cynical. The action scenes are so derivative they’re boring. On more than one occasion our muscled hero’s left hanging high above the abyss by his fingertips. Will he manage to pull himself up? Guess. He has to jump huge gaps. Will he manage? Guess. He has a wife and two children running around screaming. Will he save them? Guess.

It’s so predictable it’s laughable instead of thrilling. He even talks to himself to let us know what he’s up to. Danish actor Roland Moller makes an insipid chief baddie and sub-baddie Pablo Schreiber, so effective in Den of Thieves, gets bumped off too early. Expect lots of scenes of cgi flames and crowds at the foot of the skyscraper craning their necks upwards. Will they clap and cheer? Guess. The half-hour of extras on the DVD is more interesting.

A one-off superhero movie with adult depth, featuring an immortal superhero (Hugh Jackman) who wants to die. Excellent action sequences, including a fight on a speeding Japanese bullet train that brings back fond memories of the first Mission Impossible movie. Added to this is an unexpectedly moving love story, mainly thanks to the warmth of the performance of Tao Okanato as the woman Jackman must protect.

Unfortunately it all goes pear-shaped at the end, with the usual juvenile cgi-heavy climax and a terrible post-credits coda that brings the wolverine back into the X-men franchise. Without that and the unnecessary superhero powers, this could have been a superior dark action romance.

There’s nothing new in this second entry in the children’s Jurassic World franchise. People run from dinosaurs firstly on an island and finally in the villain’s underground lair, with a climax filmed in poor light.

Same dinosaurs, same people in peril just managing to escape gaping jaws, same bombastic orchestral score. There’s an adventurous girl for the kiddies to identify with but no drama for adults. Even the new ’Indoraptor’ is just another angry dino with different claws and teeth. Guess how every single baddie (every one a man) gets his comeuppance. Much more interesting is the raft of other features on the DVD, including star Chris Pratt practising his moves, interviewing the crew and playing it for laughs.

Lara Croft goes in search of her father, who has disappeared looking for a mythical queen buried on a Pacific island. It’s based on a video game but it’s nevertheless a good hook on which to base an action adventure. Without reaching any heights, it has some good jungle locations and action set pieces, and with Alicia Vikander as our heroine and Roar Uthaug (of Cold Prey fame) directing, it’s more grounded and realistic than the previous Angelina Jolie attempt. While being watchable throughout, it needs a bit more oomph and imagination to raise it above the ordinary, especially at the climax inside the cavernous royal tomb.

If you like stunts, there are a couple of good ones here: a skateboard escape at the beginning and a motorbike chase on water half-way through. As for the remainder, it’s the usual Vin Diesel macho sexist rot.

Prolific director Takashi Miike used to make interesting films, but he appears to have run out of steam. This one, based on a long-running manga, is as silly and bloodthirsty as ever, seemingly in an attempt to outdo the body count in 13 Assassins. Basically it’s a series of stylised samurai-type sword fights interspersed with boring static dialogue scenes.

The only novelty here is that our charisma-free hero can’t die because sacred bloodworms keep repairing his body. Yeah, right. He’s also cursed with an annoying shouty girl for company. The fights are bog-standard and there’s no drama abut the outcome, no matter how many posturing foes he has to cut down. The DVD has an English commentary that adds useful material, but the film hardly deserves it.

A vlogging mom (Anna Kendrick) befriends another who disappears. Kendrick is thankfully a bit less irritating than usual, but her limited emotional range and mugging to camera remain an acquired taste. After an hour or so the mystery deepens, but the lightweight tone, as Woody Allen has found out before, robs the plot of any drama. The ho-hum sub-Gone-Girl resolution fails to convince and is eventually played for laughs, with lots of shots of Kendrick vlogging to camera. The alternative ending on the DVD even develops into nauseating musical theatre.

You may well feel short-changed, especially if you’ve been enticed by the brilliant British trailer, which plays mostly without dialogue to an evocative Coeur de Lion song. The song, which isn’t in the film, adds an air of darkness and sophistication that’s at total odds with the film itself. Listen to the album instead.

A creature feature with The Rock facing off against giant animals sounds like fun, but it’s only in the final half-hour that the film begins to live up to its title. The first hour is full of irrelevant dialogue and techno-speak as the characters explain themselves to each other. There’s even another big boring cgi gorilla (enough already). As if the filmmakers realise something more is required, they insert a ho-hum plane crash in an attempt to liven things up, but that’s hardly what we want form a Rampage movie.

Things pick up in the third act when the gorilla, together with a giant wolf and alligator, lay waste to Chicago. With some good aerial shots of the destruction, this is more like it. Shame it took so long to get there.

Real adult sci-fi is thin on the ground these days, the space having been taken over by juvenile superhero films, so it’s good to see a film that’s so full of ideas in concept, plot and set design. Constantly surprising, with a dark strain of humour, it grabs you from its start to its whirl of a climax.

Reviewers who place the film in the action-horror genre, not helped by the abysmal spoilerful trailer, should be ignored. All you need to know is that Logan Marshall-Green, “not man, not machine” as it says on the DVD cover, is out for revenge. With a subtext of free will v determinism, this is a superior piece of sci-fi that’s both intellectually and emotionally satisfying. It’s also an exciting action-packed ride.

The film started as an art installation and it shows. It’s even a satire about that same art installation. Like much of modern art, it’s little more than a concept that fails to materialise into anything worthwhile. It’s the kind of minimalist European cinema that wins awards at film festivals (step forward in shame Cannes) and has you puzzling why. Long, static camera shots of documentary-style talking heads make for a tough and pointless watch. More for the emperor’s-clothes art crowd than lovers of good film.

Bland tale of a young woman in the French countryside, told for no reason in flashback. She’s bored by petty rural life and so is the viewer. Compare the brilliant evocation of rural Italy in the wonderful Call Me By Your Name. It’s the kind of film that focusses on irrelevant inconsequential things. When it opens with close-ups of food being eaten by a family in a car, you know what you’re in for. There’s not much to say about it except to describe the oh-so-slowly developing plot, and if you know that there’s no point in watching the film at all. In fact watch the tell-all trailer and save two hours of your life.

It’s about a folk singer down on his luck. He plays an acoustic guitar. Many times. We follow his progress. There’s a lot of folk music. As with the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou, if you’re immune to such simple stylings, you won’t get past the first few minutes.

Typically dire Ken Loach film. Film? The critics who like this are having a laugh, as though all that matters is the underlying socialist polemic content. It’s like watching a soap with the same level of visual interest and on-the-nose dialogue. The paucity of cinematic imagination is gobsmacking. Come back, superhero films, all is forgiven.

Composers talk about their film scores, but we learn little. The gist? Music is emotional and there are no rules. It’s hardly ground-breaking stuff. Don’t blame the composers, but watching talking heads telling us what music they like for 90 mins isn’t engrossing, even interspersed with film clips of movies they like. What would be interesting is to hear why some scores work better than others. Let’s hear just one voice who doesn’t think overblown orchestral superhero music is brilliant. This film is pure hagiography, like Oscar night for composers. The only real interest is in seeing the faces behind the names on the end credits.