Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

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.