Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

Slow, stately drama of love and deception set in 1930s Korea. More of a mood piece than a gripping tale. It has garnered praise for its acting, especially the two female leads, who indulge in some graphic sex scenes. These may be ground-breaking for mainstream Asian cinema, but the portentous orchestral soundtrack makes them unintentionally ridiculous. Divided into parts, you may well find that the by the time the film reaches a major plot point after an hour, to launch us into a Part 2 flashback, you no longer care.

Film critics who rave about acting and ‘brave’ sex scenes should stick to the theatre. Film is so much more than that and so, generally, is much of modern, exciting Korean cinema. As if the trailer makers understand this, they try to lure viewers to The Handmaiden by fast editing and an exciting soundtrack that is at total odds with the dullness of the film itself.

Very silly, expensive, cgi-heavy kids’ movie that’s hard to stay awake for unless you’ve got a kid to watch as well. Adults will find it hard to sit through the inane plot, paper-thin characters, cartoon animals, juvenile dialogue and childish drama. But maybe only kids should review their films.

Less boring than most superhero efforts, this is almost a proper film with real characters and drama beyond silly special effects. Paul Rudd is an appealing lead, as he usually is, and Michael Douglas offers in-depth support. Compared to miniaturisation classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s lightweight stuff, but it’s above average superhero fare and, especially at the climax, boasts some imaginative imagery.

Teenager Saoirse Ronan moves from working in a shop in Ireland to working in a shop in New York in the 1950s while rooming in a boarding house run by Julie Walters. Still want to see it? After half an hour she meets Emory Cohen and their relationship develops. I could go on. The film certainly does, and the trailer will tell you all of it much more succinctly. Shot like a TV talkie by ex-theatre director John Crowley, it’s completely unmemorable both in content and style.

Although vastly over-rated by critics, Revenge is nevertheless worth a look once you get past the film’s distasteful first half-hour. In a desert house, Matilda Lutz wears skimpy clothes and teases three men until she gets raped and left for dead. That’s no spoiler because the film’s title and trailer tell us as much, so that’s half an hour wasted.

The remainder of the movie (the revenge part) is totally unbelievable, but it’s so well paced and shot that it’s one of those ‘so bad it’s good’ films that, late night after a few pints, could easily become cult viewing. It’s impossible to care about any of the characters, but it races along to a pulsating soundtrack with scenes so gory it almost verges into horror. Best thing about it? The lovingly photographed Moroccan desert, where all the action take place.

It’s 1976 and a group of Palestinian and German terrorists hijack a plane carrying Israelis and land it in Uganda. Even if you know the ending of this thriller based on true events, it’s still tense stuff. We see events mostly from the point of view of the hijackers, which makes it somewhat biased. There are scenes set in Israel, added at a later stage of script development to try and redress the balance, but they mostly concern politicking and rescue planning. The hijackers are the film’s emotional heart and the thrust of the film is anti-capitalist and anti-Zionist.

It’s well acted and directed but, as well as the bias, there are some ruinous flaws. Several flashbacks to the hijack’s planning slow the pace and contribute no information that couldn’t have been slotted into the present. But worst of all, the rescue attack by Israeli soldiers, to which the plot has been building, is intercut with scenes of an Israeli dance troupe performing on stage. It’s supposed to be a metaphor but it turns the otherwise tense attack into a laughing matter.

The poor title hides a fascinating subject. It’s 1940 and Germany is invading Holland, where the old Kaiser from World War 1 (played sympathetically by Christopher Plummer) is in exile. Who knew that? Which side is he on? Lily James is an Allied spy in his household. She and the German officer assigned to keep tabs on him (Jai Courtney) fall in love. Will Lily carry out her mission? What will her German lover do? What will happen to the Kaiser? What’s Himmler, played by a memorably chilling Eddie Marsan, up to?

This is an old-fashioned thriller with a terrific premise and a plot that keeps you hooked. The pacing will be too stately for Marvel universe fanboys, but as intrigue piles on intrigue the film delivers a tense third act that will have you rooting for the star-crossed lovers and others too.