Film Reviews by Alphaville

Orlando Bloom joins a Chinese cast struggling with their English in this ho-hum by-the-numbers actioner. He gets kudos for doing his own stunts but otherwise it’s one big cliché from start to finish. Judging by the out-takes shown over the end-credits, it was more fun for the cast.

A bucolic fantasy in the Ghibli tradition, this features gorgeous landscapes and cityscapes with a central plot that completely lacks drama. Two teenagers – a country girl and a city boy – swap places and inhabit each other’s body while asleep. They lead double lives and communicate through journals.

There’s scope here for humour, but director Makoto Shinkai doesn’t do humour. Nor does he do drama, with voiceovers that are subdued to the point of whisper. The result is a drawn-out affair too low-key for most Western tastes but worth watching if you love beautiful animation. In the DVD Extras Shinkai describes how he wants to ‘depict scenery overflowing with emotion’. You want to live in a Shinkai landscape and this is his most beautiful film yet.

In this neat and seductive little film – Jim Jarmusch’s best for ages – a few centuries-old cultivated vampires eke out their existence in the dark corners of the world while contemplating the mess ‘zombies’ (i.e. humans) are making of the planet. Typical of Jarmusch’s off-kilter take on life, it’s not like any other vampire film you’ve ever seen and will be too languid for anyone brain-fried by the Marvel universe. Don’t be put off. The tone is elegant and languorous. The plot is quirky and tense. The dialogue is funny and thoughtful. The menu includes iced blood lollipops. Like all the best films, it sucks you in until you don’t want it to end.

Tom Hiddleston is excellent as a reclusive floppy-haired electronic musician who once wrote an adagio attributed to Vivaldi. He still lives the romantic life he learned from Byron and Shelley. Both he and his music are really cool, man. (Check out the soundtrack by Jarmusch’s band SQURL on YouTube.) Tilda Swinton is Tom’s enigmatic wife, who is ‘quantum coupled’ with him even at a distance. John Hurt has a cameo as Christopher Marlowe, who apparently really did write Shakespeare’s plays. Mia Wasikowska is the headstrong younger sister who’s about to put them all in danger (Don’t go clubbing with her!).

Can they survive in the modern world? Even zombies will be rooting for them.

Slow moving, slow plotted story about an investigation into the trafficking of Asian women in an Australian desert small town. Everything is as pared back as the landscape. It’s s-l-o-w. Even the score, minimal at best, is built around a plaintive piano, as is often the case in films enamoured of their own self-importance. Don’t be fooled by the DVD cover picture of our two cop heroes firing rifles. There’s only some brief out-of-character action at the climax.

The flat desert landscape is lovingly photographed, the two leads are good and there’s the kernel of a good story here, but it’s a long haul to the end credits. Shouldn’t a ‘mystery thriller’, as the writer/director calls it on the DVD extras, be dramatic?

British actioners with the pizazz of Hollywood are thin on the ground. When one turns up, it’s to be applauded. Mercifully unsullied by British cinema’s love affair with social realism, this is escapist fare far superior to recent staid Bond efforts. Dominic Cooper struts his stuff as an SBS operative, there’s a ruthless baddie and an MI6 mole. The action includes a car chase in Rome, a boat chase in London and stunts with a double decker bus. Simon West (Con Air, The Expendables etc.) knows how to direct action (see DVD Extras for a ‘making of’ feature). Sure, it’s derivative, clichéd and by-the–numbers, with the usual orchestral muzak score, but it’s more fun to watch than most British films. Go, go, go!

Spoiler: FF8 begins with a car race between two cars. Vin Diesel wins it. In his vest! Who’d have thought? No. 8 in the franchise and it’s still breaking new ground! It sets new records in the cliché count. It reaches new heights in inane dialogue. It pulls out all the stops in finding new ways to shoot scantily clad pneumatic young women. The bald stars’ stunt men are at last given their due by having their appearance in action scenes made obvious. The thunderous score achieves new levels of bombast. Oh, and there’s a lot of car mechanics to add to the intrigue.

The plot revolves around Vin going rogue. Surely not. You’ll be on tenterhooks to find out why. New to the franchise, he even attempts emotion in a couple of scenes. It’s ground-breaking stuff. There are car crashes, fist fights and flash bangs, especially during the drawn-out climax, which thankfully keeps repeating explosions so that we can see more fire. There’s even a prison riot set to hip-hop music. Really cool, man.

The film looks good and is mercifully devoid of shaky cam. Apart from that it richly deserves the zero-star rating it has worked so hard to earn.

A cleaning lady takes pity on an amphibian man held in a research establishment and plans to rescue him. Guillermo del Toro is a good director, but this overlong slow-burning fairy tale is somewhat less than enthralling. This often happens when directors get to write and make their ‘dream project’, as he calls the film on the DVD extras.

It’s a retread of Beauty and the Beast set to a score of elevator muzak featuring flutes and human whistles. Hearing del Toro discuss it is even more off-putting. Love and water are ‘the most powerful things in the universe’, he opines. Yeah, right. The three characters who plan the rescue are all one person. Yeah, right. It’s set in 1962 because that was a ‘horrible time for love’. Yeah, right.

Vastly over-praised because of del Toro’s reputation, it has a few interesting moments but overall is no more than a disappointing time-passer.

An investigation into the murder of a Native American woman in the snowy wilds of Wyoming’s Wind River Range turns out to be less an adventurous than it sounds. Filmed in Utah, with little mountain scenery, writer/director Taylor Sheridan admits on the DVD extras that his main interest was in the campaign for Native American rights. It’s well observed and watchable, but basically it’s a mood piece with a dismal score that further turns it into a feel-bad evening at the cinema.

Jeremy Renner is fine as the wildlife tracker with detection skills, but Elizabeth Olsen’s out-of-her-element FBI agent has an increasingly irritating manner and voice. Seeing Renner in the mountains only makes one hanker for the similar but more exciting early scenes of The Bourne Legacy, but it’s not that kind of film. Here he merely snowmobiles around the forest.

The film does eventually feature some action to liven things up a tad, perhaps as a sop to the audience, but even this is diminished by the dismal score. And there’s a flashback of the murder that should have been placed earlier to ramp up the meagre tension in the plot. The writer/director has previous with this. There were similar story problems with his screenplays for Hell or High Water and Sicario (see my reviews). Re-edited, with a better score, this could have been a much more successful film.

Another adventurous choice for the ever-watchable actor that Daniel Radcliffe has become since putting the boy wizard behind him. Dan and his fellow backpackers go walkabout in the Bolivian jungle. Based on a true story, the first half is an old-fashioned adventure story of Man v Jungle and it works admirably on this level. The characters feel real, the locations are gorgeous, director Greg McLean keeps the story moving along with pace and you’re drawn along into the adventure, even with a tinge of envy. Of course, things don’t go well.

The second-half turns into a survivalist tour-de-force that, as they say on TV, ‘some viewers may find distressing’. There are some gross-out scenes, but it would still work if not for the sudden introduction of flashbacks and hallucinations that dissipate the tension. To give you some idea of what’s in store, the rea-life character that Dan plays actually came out of the jungle with 13 worms burrowed in his body.

The DVD has a raft of fascinating extras that show the considerable physical discomfort Dan put himself through during filming. A gripping watch that with more focus could have been a classic.

An intelligent talkie about the Washington Post’s 1971 dilemma abut whether to publish details of the Pentagon Papers, which disclosed that four US governments had misled the country about the Vietnam War. Stephen Spielberg and stars Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep obviously intend the story to have modern parallels about press freedom, but it will be tough to follow for viewers unfamiliar with the era and its politicians.

As a prequel to All the President’s Men it suffers by comparison. While that was thrilling and had star quality, this has little going on behind the surface sheen. Hanks is good as the editor but Streep as the owner is overly mannered and tangential to what is really interesting – the newsroom floor and the stories of the actual reporters and whistle-blowers.

As a one-sided take on the affair, what it doesn’t address is the damage the revelations might do, as with more recent computer hacks of intelligence data. Instead, it concentrates on the newspaper’s dilemma about whether to ‘publish and be damned’, as the Duke of Wellington one famously put it. After the first half sets the stage the second half becomes laughably manipulative of the audience as it tries to keep us on tenterhooks about whether the Post will publish or not. But we know they will or there’d be no film. Cue montage of print-setting to generic John Williams music score. Will it all end with clap-happy cheering? It’s a Stephen Spielberg film. Of course it will.

Female backpacker meets nice local man in Berlin. They spend half an hour getting it together. You can zap that, as does the trailer. Then he keeps her locked up in his flat. That’s it. The trailer tells the whole film in less than two minutes, so watch that and save having to sit through this awful film

It might have been cheap to make, but it’s another distasteful film about a misogynistic man who tortures women. It’s unpleasant and predictable, running through all the usual clichés: she cajoles him, she fights him, she tries to escape… Whoever thought that such a grotesque story was still suitable cinema material in 2017? Shame on the female producer and female director who made it. And shame on the critics who unaccountably found merit in it.

This is a curiously episodic film that can’t decide what it wants to be, which results in some ridiculous creative choices. In the first half Jennifer Lawrence, after spending five minutes being a leading Bolshoi ballerina (!), is forced to go to ‘whore school’ to learn how to be a honey-trap spy. It’s voyeuristic nonsense, with full-frontal nudity (male, of course, because this is the 21st century) and gratuitous sex scenes (despite what the director says on the DVD commentary).

After an hour or so a proper plot kicks in when our Jen is assigned to extract secrets from CIS agent Joel Edgerton. Will she use this as a chance to escape her fate or won’t she? A cat-and-mouse game ensues, but the film never lets us know which side she’s on. It mistakenly puts mystery above empathy, which diminishes the drama. Another tonal mistake is a gratuitous torture scene straight out of a horror film.

Curiouser and curiouser, the plot seems to skip beats, as though scenes are missing, which further adds to the mystery of many of the characters’ dramatic arcs. And on top of all this, the shenanigans is played put to a score that’s more suited to a melodrama.

The result is a film so curious that is actually quite watchable, even if only for its mis-steps.

In his worthy attempts to divest himself of the boy wizard, Daniel Radcliffe for once makes a poor career choice as an FBI agent who infiltrates a neo-Nazi group. Alongside the big and brutish gang members his earnest Boy Scout character never convinces, nor does Toni Collette as his curiously light-headed boss. The film is well-intentioned and there are a few good scenes, but it never generates much excitement and trundles on to a damp squib of a climax.

How much you get out of this depends on how much you like computer gaming, but even fanboys must be disappointed with this Stephen Spielberg kiddies film. Mostly set in a VR world of avatars, it’ like an updated version of Tron and just as instantly forgettable. The plot is irrelevant (the kids have to find three keys to save whatever) and the real-life characters have even less depth than their avatars. Add bog-standard cgi action and the usual relentlessly awful superhero score of orchestral muzak and you have a movie that plays like an overlong Tom-and-Jerry cartoon.

Film buffs will find occasional relief in references to artefacts such as Zemeckis Cube (which turns back time 60 seconds) and brief homages to old movies such as The Shining and Mechagodzilla. 80s fans will also find familiar references, as in the film’s one imaginative sequence – a dance in a zero-gravity dance hall set to Staying Alive. But nothing can overcome the overall grinding drama-free boredom.

It will be no spoiler to learn that our child heroes win through after a flash-bang battle against an array of other cartoon characters. And of course it all ends in the real world… pass the sick bag… with cheering. Please make it stop.

That the book on which the film was based was optioned before it was even published says much about today’s mainstream Hollywood output. As for Spielberg’s involvement, one can only hope this was an aberration brought on by his love for the 80s.

Unlike most of the teenage Marvel franchise, this has proper characters, good plotting and real dialogue. It’s silly, of course. Even the title makes no sense unless you realise Spiderman is coming home from a previous film set elsewhere. And Spiderman is actually 15yo Spiderboy, but presumably that moniker sounds less cool to the target audience. Tom Holland makes a likeable hero, the film avoids becoming bogged down in cartoonish fights and director Jon Watts keeps matters moving forward apace. As he explains on the DVD extras, he’s always wanted to make a high school movie and this is what marks Homecoming out from other superhero films.

There’s a vertiginous set-piece atop the Washington Needle that’s so neatly choreographed and shot that it even evokes memoires of Tom Cruise’s climb on the Burj in MI Ghost Protocol. But the film runs out of steam after that and has to bring in Iron Man to chivvy things along. It’s no spoiler to reveal that Spiderboy spins more webs and it all builds to a fight against his nemesis The Vulture – a bog-standard, underwhelming climax that provides a damp-squib ending to what began more promisingly.