Film Reviews by Alphaville

This film tells the story of the investigation by the Spotlight team of the Boston Globe into institutionalised child abuse by Catholic priests. It’s an important true story and this has caused many critics to overlook the film’s shortcomings. It certainly never reaches the heights of All the President’s Men and lacks the dynamism that Hoffman and Redford brought to that.

The drama is deliberately played down and this reduces its emotional impact. It’s filmed in a straightforward, restrained manner (‘style’ would be too strong a word). To further distance the viewer, the frame is mostly medium-shot with few close-ups. Despite plot revelations, dramatic high points are even fewer. Nevertheless the story itself is sensational and well-presented. It is this that carries the film and makes it continuously watchable.

Take out the diarrhoea scenes, the causal sexism and the incessant cursing for effect and there’s a good film trying to get out here. The sweeping Monument Valley landscapes are stunning, the score is Big Country splendiferous, the characterisation is winning and the jokes are actually often funny.

Comedies are usually too upfront and poorly directed to be memorable beyond their run-time, but star/writer/director Seth MacFarlane has a surprisingly good ear and eye for his material. There’s even a surreal dream sequence that is quite stunning. Shame about the many lapses of taste.

With its documentary style, washed-out colours and obsession with operational detail, this unconvincing film about Guantanamo Bay guards and detainees was never going to be a cinematic masterpiece. With its left-wing political agenda, the plot about new guard Kristin Stewart’s growing sympathy for the plight of one detainee (naturally innocent) springs no surprises. With its confined spaces, where most conversation takes place on opposite sides of a locked cell door, it’s more suited to the stage than cinema.

It also has to be said that Kristin needs to rein in her staccato mannerisms, which served her well in Twilight but here make her acting and hence her character unbelievable. This is her most unfortunate performance too date, although one suspects she was ill-served by the director as few of the other performances are believable either. It all gets a bit wearing, especially as there’s no doubt where the plot’s going. It even ends with a nauseatingly plaintive ballad on the soundtrack. Politics aside, it’s best viewed as an information film.

Although not a film of any great note, an intelligent Steven Knight script does enough to keep the audience guessing and Robert Zemeckis directs with his customary fluency. As the star-crossed lovers, Brad Pitt is his usual charismatic screen presence and Marion Cotillard is less so. The high point is a brief but beautifully shot sex scene in a car in a sandstorm.

There’s some brief action in the first half but the main thrust of the story is a second half of Hitchcockian suspense. Warning: the trailer is a spoiler that shows everything except the last few minutes. Avoid that and you’ll find here a finely-tuned drama that merits an indulgent wallow for a couple of hours.

This Harry Potter spin-off will either keep children happy or it won’t. The sole interest for adults is the cgi. Half an hour in, there’s an imaginative sequence that introduces multiple strange beasts in various interlinked habitats. There are several other watchable cgi sequences at intervals thereafter. The in-between bits are irrelevant, despite a standard orchestral score attempting to impart drama to them.

Guess what – it’s the same old childish Star Wars drivel. Who’d have thought? The once-promising George Lucas writes the clichés and the never-promising Gareth Edwards provides the disjointed direction. The same old message is that rebels are good and imperialists are bad. There’s little more plot and none of the characters matter. Felicity Jones is anonymous as the heroine. Donnie Yen appears for Far East marketing. All dialogue is expository.

There are intermittent cgi explosions and the climax is the usual cgi space battle. Ho hum. The overbearing martial orchestral score, underscoring every beat like a cartoon, is horrendous. One wishes its mockery was intentional. A subtitle says ‘Thrilling music playing’. Er, no.

Well done if you make it through to the end.

A morally repugnant downer of a movie. Who wants to spend time with two small-town low-life bank robbers to a soundtrack of excruciating country and western drivel? Their excuse is they need to pay off a mortgage to prevent an eviction. The background is the sub-prime financial crisis. They’re really victims, you see. No, they’re not. They’re criminals who terrorise and kill people. Director David Mackenzie thinks he’s blurred the lines between good and bad. No, he hasn’t. On the DVD extras he calls his protagonists ‘damaged heroes’. No, they’re not.

The two robbers have no redeeming features. They’re not even interesting. They have little to say or do. Typical dialogue: ‘You’re f***ng kidding me.’ Oh, they visit a casino. There are some nice shots of the wide-open spaces of West Texas and a weary nostalgia for bygone times that struck a chord with American critics, but there’s less here than meets the eye. When yet another montage to an oh-so-earnest C&W ballad begins you want to put your foot through the screen. It’s what fast forward was invented for.

The only likeable lead character is laconic Sheriff Jeff Bridges, who seems to have strolled in with an array of one-liners from a different and better film. Any interest is packed into the third act when he finally gets to confront the robbers. But then the film peters out again to yet another subtle C&W refrain called ‘Outlaw State of Mind.’ Just in case you haven’t got the gist by now.

Lo-budget sci-fi tends to disintegrate into screeds of exposition and that’s what happens here. Time travel should throw up some interesting ideas and paradoxes but none are explored. When a second version of our protagonist comes through a wormhole into this universe, all the film does is have them avoid each other. Presumably it was cheaper to film without the special effects this would entail.

Repeating scenes from a different viewpoint is an interesting idea that can add layers of meaning (see 1989’s Millennium, for example). Here the conceit merely bores. There’s also a subplot romance with a mysterious and poorly written female character that strains credulity and patience.

Most of the inaction takes place in a claustrophobic lab, where our hero and his buddies constantly fiddle with the machinery. The wormhole turns out to be a bright light. Who’d have thought? The nonsensical plot grinds to a standstill and isn’t worth the effort of trying to understand. Don’t expect any excitement, either visually or intellectually. This is a dialogue-heavy film that would have looked laboured even in the original Star Trek series.

The problem with superhero origin stories is that you know where they’re going. We know Doctor Strange is going to get his powers but have to spend an hour watching him do so while listening to screeds of psychobabble. ‘We never lose our demons,’ intones The Ancient One, ‘we only learn to live above them.’ Yeah, right. To their credit, the writers seem so embarrassed by what they’re having to write for the fanboy audience that they have Doctor Strange mock it.

At least we get more action in the second half, where our Doctor has to face the Dormammu of the Dark Domain. Unfortunately he turns out to be nothing more than a big face in the sky.

Nevertheless, there are redeeming qualities to be found here. To say it’s better than most Marvel movies is to damn with faint praise, but this one does play with issues of time, immortality, evolution and the multiverse. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mads Mikkelsen are wasted as Strange’s sidekick and enemy, but Benedict Cumberbatch raises the tone of the piece as the doctor. The architecture-bending, gravity-defying special affects are also noteworthy. A chase through an Escher-like spatially-changing New York is a highlight that should have been reserved for the climax.

The bombastic score, highlighting every beat of the film, is as horrendous as in all Marvel films and there’s a coda that augurs ill for a sequel: the Doctor is going to help Thor and his big hammer. Whatever merits can be gleaned from this film, it’s surely all going south from now on.

Chris Meloni left the SVU TV series to make this load of tripe? He plays a sweary version of his SVU detective who is investigating bank robberies. The dialogue he has to work with is embarrassing. Colleague: ‘F*** that.’ Chris: ‘F*** you, f*** that.’ The plot is a complete cliché. The action, shot with hand-held camera, is muddled. Bruce Willis gets star billing but only phones in a bit part as an evil business chief.

Is this the best screenplay they could come up with? It’s so bad it will give you an occasional laugh, which accounts for its one star rating. Chief culprit? Hopeless B-movie director Steven C. Miller.

With multiple viewpoints, loads of voiceover and irritating flashbacks that slow the narrative, this must have worked better in book form. Maybe the lead character struck a chord with some readers, but the immediacy of the big screen reveals her as a drunken pain.

Her involvement with other characters strains credibility. The many flashbacks, full of incessant soul-searching (sometimes even in the clichéd psychiatrist’s chair), strain patience. Even the ridiculous, overwrought climax, when at last something happens, is weakened by flashback and introspection.

The whole project is so old-fashioned, melodramatic and trite that even these attempts to spice it up with a cut-and-paste approach merely highlight its emptiness. Listen to director Tate Tyler’s boringly descriptive audio commentary on the DVD and you’ll understand why the film is so bland.

This is less a thriller than a character study of an autistic accountant who also happens to be a martial arts and gun expert. It’s never clear exactly what’s going on behind the scenes with our hero’s dealings with unseen crooks and there are only minor bursts of confusing action.

Ben Affleck is fine as the lead but Anna Kendrick as the damsel in distress is intensely irritating as she ums and ahs her way though her dialogue. Fortunately she’s irrelevant to the plot and soon drops out of it. Not that there’s much room for plot with screeds of explanation to get through concerning autism and backstory.

There’s some climactic plot development and action, but it comes too late and you’ll probably find it laughable anyway. There’s even a terrible score complete with ill-judged nauseating ballads. It’s a grown-up film, which deserves kudos these days, but the package needs more thrills than this.

Real-life disaster becomes action movie. A docbuster. A film of two halves: the build-up and the explosion. The first half is all oil rig banter and technical jargon (subtitles will help). The second half is a cgi extravaganza of explosions and pyrotechnics.

The whole oil rig and fire above the base is cgi. It’s brilliantly done by ILM (check out the excellent DVD extras) but you either revel in this sort of thing or you don’t. The search for authenticity makes the action confusing, as it undoubtedly was in the real-life incident on which the film is based. Shaky hand-held camerawork doesn’t help.

It’s hard to take the politicking seriously when the BP man in charge is played by supercilious John Malkovich doing his usual hammy acting. It’s also hard to feel any emotional ties to the men who died as we never get to know them. If this were fiction they’d be viewed as expendables extras, which induces a feeling of guilt in the viewer in the face of the real-life tragedy. As for the melodramatic ending, you’ll cringe at the religious overtones and excruciating soundtrack ballad.

Nevertheless, this must have been a hard directorial gig to pull off. As Peter Berg showed in Lone Survivor, he’s at his best when it comes to visceral filmmaking and there’s plenty here to keep pyromaniacs happy. Others may find it all a bit samey. Check out the DVD extras for some fascinating behind-the-scenes-footage.

This is an old-fashioned film with an old-fashioned vibe. Tom Cruise is on the run from baddies with a woman and a daughter in tow. Yep, he’s saddled with one of those annoying teenage daughters that American filmmakers seem to love. In the DVD Extras Tom calls it a ‘crime thriller’ but to call that an overstatement would be an understatement.

Patrick Heusinger makes a worthy baddie but otherwise everything about the film is lazy, dull and uninspiring. None of the characters convinces. The plot never develops any momentum. The action is too low-key to be exciting. Edward Zwick directs with little flair. The by-the-numbers climactic fight even takes place during a clichéd New Orleans parade. Is that the best they could come up with?

You know those pieces of conceptual art that have nothing to show beyond a concept? This is the cinematic equivalent, except that ‘cinematic’ it isn’t. Amy Adams lies around staring into space while the thriller she’s reading plays out for us in flashback. There’s supposed to be synergy between the two timelines, but the present timeline is too inane and boring to care about. There’s even a third unnecessary backstory shown in flashback.

The thriller timeline is the only one with any interest so you’ll probably give up on the others and try to catch that by fast forwarding to the interleaved clips of it. That said, it’s an unpleasant rape/murder story that salivates in the victims’ terror. Writer/director Tom Ford seems to like degradation. The film even opens with some grotesque obese nude dancing that may well have you hit fast forward immediately.

Rather than a thriller, this is more a slow-paced, forced melodrama, with stilted acting and dialogue. The only real success is the detective who investigates the murders. As played by Michael Shannon he injects a much-needed dose of reality.

Nocturnal Affairs reminds you of those bum-numbing painterly pieces Peter Greenway used to make in the 70s. It’s like a student exercise. On the DVD extras Ford explains the concept and, as with most conceptual modern art, that’s more interesting than the piece itself.