Film Reviews by Alphaville

This cod-Austen shenanigans has less substance than the emperor’s clothes. The cast do their best with the stilted dialogue but can do little with their stylised characters, which have the depth of cardboard. On wishes devoutly that they wouldst vouchsafe their smug opinions less and do something interesting.

In any case, the film opens with so many confusing characters, whose relationships are indicated by brief subtitles, that many viewers will soon give up caring. This difficulty is even hinted at by one of the cast on the ‘Making Of’ DVD extra. Jaded critics found the stilted dialogue witty. The viewer is more likely to find it wince-inducing.

The film is based on an early Austen novella but it plays like a misconceived am-dram concocted by a talentless Austen wannabe who just doesn’t get her. The culprit is writer/director and arthouse favourite Whit Stillman, whose visual sense is as perfunctory as ever. Point the camera and shoot. The whole adds up to a stagey exercise in emptiness. It even makes Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seem like a masterpiece. One star for the production values and costumes.

Despite a poor opening, this is a top-drawer loner-seeks-vengeance western. Like John Wick in the Wild West, our loner hero (Ethan Hawke) is lumbered with flashbacks and a dog that understands everything he says to it – a stagey device to allow the viewer to know what he’s thinking. Happily matters improve when baddies rightly take umbrage with the mutt and give Ethan cause to advance the plot and begin his revenge spree. Not before he explains all this over the dog’s grave, of course.

Although there’s too much time spent anthropomorphising the animal as if it were Rin Tin Tin, the excellence of the film’s second half surprisingly turns it into an irresistible western, rising to an exciting climax laced with deadpan humour. Even John Travolta as the town marshall Ethan is up against puts in a solid shift for once, and there’s an appealing dynamic with the teenage hotel keeper (Taissa Farmiga) who takes a shine to the loner in town. A spaghetti western vibe adds to the fun, especially in the opening titles and in Jeff Grace’s iconic score, paying homage to Morricone.

Once it gets going, this is writer/director Ti West’s best film yet and, if not reaching the status of classics such as Unforgiven and Open Range, proves that a good western can still hit the spot.

Poor hitman Keanu Reeves, lumbered with flashbacks and a dog we’re supposed to find cute. Happily the mutt’s bumped off by some Russians in order for a plot to kick in. Plot? He spends the remainder of the film bludgeoning his way through the gang. Luckily they can’t shoot straight and they come at him one at as time like in martial arts films. A percussive score tries but fails to make it exciting. Instead it’s contrived, repetitive, cartoonish and sorely lacking in imagination. Even worse, so many people liked the mind-numbing violence that they made a sequel.

This is a film overawed by its subject matter – the 2013 Boston marathon bombing – and its need to pay homage to the heroes and victims. It’s more of a commemoration to Boston and its inhabitants than it is a feature film. The first half is awful, totally unfocussed and filled with banal backstory snippets and newsreel-type depiction of the marathon and the bombing chaos itself. It plays like Act 1 of a 70s disaster movie.

The characters’ real-life counterparts appear on camera themselves at the end of the film and provide moving testimony, but their on-screen portrayal is sketchy and mawkish. They say ‘I love you’ over and over again to plinky-plonk piano muzak you just want to stop. The score, by the normally brilliant Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is terrible.

But just when you think the film will never be anything but a drawn-out news bulletin, it changes tack and gathers momentum. The second hour develops into the search for the bombers and, as a piece of thrilling cinema, it starts to grab the attention. Director Peter Berg is at his best when he’s able to focus on these more contained confrontations and milk them for tension and thrills, as he did in Lone Survivor.

There are some exciting incidents that almost save the film, but then it returns to the mawkishness with which it began. American critics like this film, as they did Berg’s similar Deepwater Horizon, but they’re judging the concept rather than what’s on-screen. Perhaps it’s best viewed in this light, as a well-intentioned commemoration of a tragic event, its heroes and victims and even the city of Boston itself.

You want to know what’s wrong with arthouse cinema? Try to watch this so-called ‘film’ – a dreadful 250 minute sequence of static, stagey, score-less, tell-don’t-show scenes. You know the kind – longueur after longueur of silences mingled with people yapping away while nothing at all happens on screen. In short, the antithesis of cinema.

Supposedly a Filipino re-imagining of Crime and Punishment, it’s a crime against cinema and a punishment to sit through. On the DVD cover the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls it ‘gripping’ and the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Robey calls it ‘spellbinding’. Some critics should have their licences revoked. Somebody tell them that film is a visual medium. We must stop them now before they encourage more of this deplorable drivel.

There’s a plane crash. Air traffic controller feels guilty, husband of dead family feels grief. As the trailer has it. ‘two lives will collide’. If only. It’s based on a true story but the by-the-numbers plot arc and emotional drama make for predictable cinema. In fact you don’t need to watch the film at all. The trailer will tell you everything and save you having to sit through it.

This insufferable Sundance-winning high school talkfest stars the supremely irritating Miles Teller. Described as ‘an effortless charmer’, he’ll have you pressing the off button in less than two minutes. If you don’t believe that, check him out on the trailer.

Creepy IT expert takes a fancy to his boss’s (Pierce Brosnan’s) teenage daughter. Pierce gives him the brush-off. Mistake. Cue an engrossing thriller that’s also a commentary on the dependency of modern society on computers and hackable personable data: financial records, social media, medical records, even a hi-tech house and car. Can Pierce fight back as his life is pulled apart by the IT guy?

The film was unfairly panned by critics but it’s a terrific premise whose pace never lets up. It has no pretensions to being other than a good tense thriller, but in that it succeeds admirably. John Moore directs with visual flair and Timothy Williams contributes a thumping score. Well worth a look.

You’ve probably given up on M. Night Shyamalan by now, but you might want to give him another shot with this. James McAvoy has 23 multiple personalities, kidnaps three teenage girls and keeps them in a locked room. You’d think the girls would take one of several opportunities to beat him over the head with one implement or another, especially in his 9yo boy guise, but we have to skip over this gaping plot hole. After all, it isn’t Room.

There’s very little variety in what happens on screen except to explore McAvoy’s various personalities, padded out with a subplot concerning his psychiatrist and pointless flashbacks to our main heroine’s childhood. However, there’s a nice sense of foreboding as we learn that there may be a 24th personality called the Beast. This builds to a silly but fun climax and a great coda. This is a flawed film, but at least it’s a Night film you want to keep watching.

Castaway Paul Dano finds a dead body (Dan Radcliffe) washed ashore. Using his farting body as a jet ski, he escapes to the shore of Humboldt Redwoods. That’s not the talking body’s sole usefulness in this surreal comedy, which amazingly manages to maintain the conceit for 94 minutes. It’s a challenge for the Daniels (writer/directors Scheinert and Kwan) to keep such a two-hander interesting for so long, but the film really works.

In the excellent DVD extras (making of, behind the scenes, interviews, film commentary etc.) they explain how they wanted to make ‘a celebration of friendship and collaboration’ as well as ‘a beautiful and heartfelt movie about a farting corpse’. Incredibly, they succeed on all counts. It’s a film in which you never know what’s going to happen next, which is unfortunately rarer than ever these days. Watch and wonder

Josh Hartnett stars in a Korean film and chooses the wrong one. This is one of those thriller that has no thrills. The plot goes nowhere as director Tran Anh Hang gets bogged down in one longueur after another. Worth dipping into for an eccentric score (including Radiohead) and the charismatic screen presence of Lee Byung Hun. At his moody best as a Hong Kong gangster, he effortlessly steals every scene he’s in with barely any dialogue.

This travesty of a film takes all the tropes of a thriller and turns them into clichés. Bank heist, sassy girl gang leader, suave sadistic adversary, confusing rapid-edit fights, Morgan Freeman as a corrupt senator (who literally phones in his performance from a different country). Tick.

It’s not long before all that pointing of guns at each other starts to grate. You’ll not care a jot about any of it. Typical dialogue: ‘You’re really starting to piss me off’ and ‘I’m fed up playing your games’. People still write this sort of stuff?

Writer/director Matt Ross doesn’t put a foot wrong in this absorbing tale of a man bringing up his children in the backwoods as personable and literate. Every barb directed at the establishment and consumerist society hits home, from governmental failings to obesity and processed food. But the kids are also socially inept, and the film doesn’t shrink from portraying that.

It’s a wonderful film to watch, never flagging for a second and constantly entertaining and surprising. With the picturesque sheen of an escapist hippy fantasy, it both tugs at the heart and makes you think, which is no mean feat. The performances, including those of the six children, are flawless and there are some great dialogue exchanges. A sure-fire winner.

If you like Mama Mia, for reasons best kept to yourself, you might even like this. Who knows? Who cares? The pre-titles dance sequence is well choreographed but to the most dire non-song you’ve ever heard. It’s downhill from thereon, with increasingly amateur hoofing to muzak of which even an elevator would be ashamed. At least Mama Mia had some ABBA tunes to ruin.

There’s even some bad jazz. The hero tries to explain his love of jazz to our heroine, which only succeeds in confirming a jazz-hater’s worst suspicions about it. Our heroine, meanwhile, is into the film business, hence the film’s Oscars (Hollywood loves to stroke itself).

One star for competent camerawork and production values. West Side Story it ain’t. Cabaret it ain’t.

What sounds like a fun concept becomes bland in the realisation. This is a by-the-numbers retelling of P&P with a few zombies shoe-horned in to occasionally attack the principal characters. It needs to be anchored in Austen reality, but the cod-Austen dialogue never rings true. We never care about these cardboard characters so the zombie attacks soon bore.

Charles Dance strikes the right note as the straight-faced Mr. Bennett, while Matt Smith makes a fair stab at a humorous Mr Collins, but Lily James as Lizzy and especially Sam Riley as Darcy never convince. One of those films that seems to have been more fun to make than to watch.