Film Reviews by Alphaville

This Boys Own fantasy adventure for the school market is so obscure, slow, solemn and incoherent that it will lose much of its target audience. There’s a sorcerer (Matthew McConaughey, baddie), a gunslinger (Idris Elba, goodie) and our boy hero. At the centre of the universe is a dark tower that somehow keeps demons from outside the universe ‘trying to get us’, and the sorcerer for some reason wants to destroy it by sending rocketloads of children into it. Don’t ask.

Fortunately Idris has a six-shooter to save the universe. The baddie’s minions also have guns but fortunately they can’t shoot straight and Idris can kill dozens of them without breaking sweat. The American gun lobby must love this film. It’s based on a Stephen King series of novels, but the whole idea is so inane that the books must have severe literary merit to deserve any film adaptation at all.

It gets worse. According to director Nikolaj Arcel on the DVD extras, the idea was to keep the film real by leaving out ‘movie stunts’, i.e. the only bits that would make it worth seeing. Even the blooper reel is the unfunniest ever. With a running time of less than 90 minutes before the end credits, It’s obvious something was very wrong with the project throughout.

Matt Damon gets miniaturised to live in a community of small persons and so save planetary resources. The concept is full of holes but initially draws you along, wanting to know what happens next (as long as you avoid the trailer and spoiler reviews). The problem is that nothing much happens next and there’s little else except special effects to maintain interest during the 130-minute run time. Instead of exploring the concept dramatically or philosophically, co-writer/director Alexander Payne commits the cardinal cinematic sin of being simply mundane.

Still, the seamless effects make it watchable and the fascinating DVD extras, arguably better than the film itself, explain how they were achieved. Afterwards, re-watch The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) to see what this film could have been.

Looking old and bored, Arnold Schwarzenegger slums it in a guns-and-macho-posturing Z-feature – a misogynistic gung-ho movie that hits all the wrong notes. It opens with a man torturing a woman. It flashes back to a sleazy party with topless hookers. It’s badly written in terms of both plot and dialogue, which mostly consists of gratuitous swearing. It’s directed with all the pizzazz of a TV drama. As for Arnie’s clichéd clinch with the younger Olivia Williams, it’s enough on its own to justify the MeToo movement. Those American critics who found merit in this irredeemably nasty David Ayer film need to take a good look at themselves.

Typical Chinese faux-historical concoction of colourful costumes, hyperactive action, schoolplay acting and zero drama. The cgi action is unconvincingly madcap and soon palls, like Jackie Chan played straight. One prolonged battle set-piece features a bull stampede in a canyon, which our hero outruns at lightning speed with a general on his back. Oh, and there’s a flying goddess. Baddie Nicholas Tse is the only actor on view with any charisma, as he so often is. With over-obvious wirework and disjointed direction from ‘acclaimed director’ Chen Kaige, it’s a shame the imagination on show doesn’t add up to something more captivating.

Beautiful Montana landscapes are the best thing about this low-key Western that plays like an old-fashioned B-feature. A grizzled Bill Pullman plays a dim-witted old ranch-hand who sets out to avenge his boss’s murder. Staidly directed, it’s a character piece that goes nowhere fast, making the actors do all the work in one slow talkie scene after another. Occasional gunfights lighten the longueurs but nowhere near enough.

Heartfelt drama hits all the right notes, beautifully written and paced to draw you along effortlessly into the lives of deftly-drawn characters you soon feel you know intimately. Even minor characters with only a few lines are well-rounded with something interesting to say. As he showed in In Bruges, writer/director Martin McDonagh has a knack for dialogue that’s moving, shocking and humorous all at the same time. Not a word is wasted.

The plot concerns Frances McDormand’s efforts to get small-town sheriff Woody Harrelson, who is dying of cancer, to find the murderer of her daughter. Confident to mix darkness with light, Mcdonagh shifts our emotions with one plot twist after another. It’s the kind of film that makes you quite happy for it to go on and on. The only misjudged note is the score of mawkish C&W ballads.

This is director Jaume Collet-Serra and star Liam Neeson’s fourth action thriller after Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night and it seamlessly clicks into gear. Instead of the action being set on a plane (Non-Stop), this time it’s on a train. As usual, Collet-Serra’s direction is perfectly in sync with the subject matter. It bowls along with pace, precision and clarity, whether the camera is prowling around a train carriage or focussing in on Neeson’s predicaments. It’s also refreshing that, unlike other leading men, Neeson’s not scared to play a 60-year-old. It doesn’t affect the action. There’s a train fight here that’s better than anything since From Russia With Love.

The far-fetched plot sometimes makes it difficult to suspend disbelief and go with the flow, but put your brain on hold for a while and it’s a fun film with rarely a dull moment.

This intelligent, engrossing and kinky biopic is about the psychology of emotions and the nature of male/female relationships. Marston is a Harvard psychology professor. With his even cleverer wife (a sparkling Rebecca Hall) he invents the lie detector. They both love their female assistant.

Inspired by the two women in his life, Marston creates Wonder Woman to show girls they can be anything they want to be, but this is defiantly not a superhero film. It’s much more than that. It’s a brilliant, unconventional film about brilliant, unconventional people. Unlike most anti-intellectual multiplex fodder, it’s chock full of interesting ideas as well as being grounded in three compelling characters. As the trio fall foul of social norms and Wonder Woman comics are publicly burnt, you’ll be rooting for them all the way.

The whole film is a clarion call for the freedom to live your life as you wish. In Marston’s words, ‘Who are you to judge us?’ One thing’s for sure, you’ll never look at Wonder Woman the same way again.

It’s sensitively directed by its writer Angela Robinson with a commitment and compassion perfectly attuned to its subject matter. The DVD extras explore the background and making of the film with similar heart.

Bruce Willis is an ageing ‘cool dude’ private eye in L. A. We know the film is meant to be an action comedy because he skateboards in the nude to get away from baddies (or rather his stunt double does). He’s also a sex-magnet for younger women. Played with irony, it might work. Played straight, it’s just wrong on so many levels.

You know it’s a British arthouse film as soon as it opens. Close-up after close-up without establishing any context. Dismal artfully-lit illumination. Terse dialogue. A static camera angle. Short scenes that cut before any build-up of drama, as in Monty Python’s ‘and now for something completely different’. And again, that agonisingly static camera. This is more a series of portraits than a movie. Some of the stills, unaccountably, are of a cat. Even with an 80-minute run time before the credits, it seems like a long ‘movie’. As with too many British films, it plays more like an ill-lit over-wrought hour-long period TV drama.

Judging from the interview with first-time director William Oldroyd on the DVD extras, he seems more interested in the idea of making a feminist film than in mastering the art of cinema.

By the way, the film has nothing to do with Lady Macbeth. It’s a 19th century piece in which Mrs Lester revolts against her tyrannical husband and gets it on with the hired hand. And worse. She’s more like a nasty Lady Chatterley. The behaviour of all the characters is unbelievable. The hired hand’s character arc in particular is just ridiculous. You end up feeling sorry for the actor.

Mindless superhero films shouldn’t be judged by normal critical standards, but this is the pits. The fact that so much money was obviously thrown at it only shows up its inadequacies more. It’s film-making by numbers, completely devoid of drama or surprise. You expect a ridiculous plot – about the king of a technologically-advanced kingdom hidden in the heart of Africa – but this is plain nonsense. What may have worked as a Marvel comic book didn’t have to make every actor work with an African accent. Kudos to poor Forest Whitaker for a brave attempt and to a miscast Martin Freeman as a CIA agent with an American accent.

Dialogue, plot and characterisation are all risible. But the film’s worst crime is that it’s so boring, with lots of longueurs between the bog-standard over-edited man-fights, which exhibit a surprisingly sparse use of superhero cgi-abilities.

It’s also unremittingly racist to both the black and white characters. Makes you wonder whether the American critics who loved this film were too in thrall to political correctness to recognise the fact. The only character with any magnetism is the baddie – a black American bad boy called Killmonger (yes, really). He unashamedly wants to ‘liberate people who look like us’ from ‘the colonisers’. Oh dear. His presence does bring some much needed charisma to the screen, but imagine a white superhero film with such a racist premise.

French thriller in which mild-mannered accountant Francois Cluzet, France’s answer to Dustin Hoffman, takes a job with a shady organisation and finds himself involved in skulduggery. The set-up is intriguing and Cluzet is as sympathetic a lead as ever, but pacing and direction are too staid for a thriller. The plot does build as his predicament worsens, but the film is too Kafkaesque for its own good and never hits any heights.

In director Aaron Sorkin’s own words, this is ‘a poker movie’. If you don’t like poker, give it a miss. If you don’t like incessant voiceover, give it a miss. Molly is a poker hostess. Her prattling, quick-fire voiceover, telling us everything we’re watching on screen, is a pain. Sometimes it’s more like listening to an audio book than watching a movie. Sorkin has previous in this, as a writer on The West Wing, but while verbosity may work on TV it rarely does on film.

Another mistake is having the film’s structure alternate between a present-day court case and flashbacks of how Molly got there. This is never a convincing plot ploy. Giving the end game away merely makes the flashbacks predictable. There are even further pointless flashbacks to her childhood with her father. One suspects the script stays too loyal to the real-life Molly’s autobiography. The poker-game flashbacks zip along pacily enough if you’re interested, but the whole film lacks drama and amounts to little.

Slow, reserved, painfully painterly remake of the Clint Eastwood film from the point of view of the women. It’s as beautifully observed as you would expect from Sofia Coppola, but there’s nothing else going on. Abrupt shifts of character don’t ring true. Short disconnected scenes bide time but build no momentum. Nothing happens for an hour and when it does it’s entirely predictable even if you haven’t seen the Eastwood original. In any case, the trailer tells you the whole story and, by managing to make it look like a thriller, deserves more kudos than the film itself.

The set is a colonial mansion in pre-electric times and is lit (or not lit) accordingly. Nearly all scenes take place in darkness, shadow and candlelight. A feast for the eyes it isn’t. The DVD Extras show how the scenes actually looked while being filmed, and one wishes for some of that light in the finished version. The darkness adds to the dreariness of the plot and the reserved characterisations. It’s best viewed as a mood piece, but do not watch while feeling sleepy.

After a promising plane crash in the mountains this turns into a soapy luvvie-fest between survivors Idris Elba and Kate Winslet. Much of it takes place in constricted dark spaces at night – the plane, a cave, a shack – as they get to know each other. Interestingly, the trailer shows none of this… for good reason.

Idris is more convincing than you’d think in a more dialled-down role than usual, but Kate with an American accent is at her most actorly. Nor does the inane dialogue do them any favours as they spend the film wittering and squabbling endlessly. They’re even stuck with a mutt whose annoying whimpering matches theirs.

As their cloying relationship develops you won’t need a spoiler to tell you where it’s going. There are opportunities for an interesting ending but the screenplay typically bottles it. For Milles & Boon fans only.