Film Reviews by Alphaville

A 2009 Korean spaghetti western set in the Manchurian desert by talented director Kim Jee-Woon. It has its OTT cringe moments thanks to a Jackie-Chan-type character (the ‘weird’), but the ‘good’ is suitably heroic and the ‘bad’ is brilliant, thanks to Lee Byung-Hun’s usual charismatic screen presence.

Above all, the set pieces, as in all Kim films, are glorious. He revels in the power of visual cinema, playing with the image in an almost Godardian way. The opening train heist is flamboyantly filmed with swooping fly-cams and travelling shots. Even better: a sweeping 12 minute chase sequence across the desert that is part of a brilliant last half-hour paying homage to Sergio Leone.

This Kim Ji-Woon film from 2005 was one of his early actioners and all the elements are in place. Beautiful cinematography and an engaging score that is part epic and part ironic keeps the viewer glued to the screen even between the set-pieces. Lead Lee Byung-Hun makes a charismatic Alain Delon lookalike who carries the movie. Just to wallow in the image as he drives around Seoul to a mesmerising score makes you realise the magic that only cinema can produce.

The film is let down by an uneven pace and a climax that stretches incredulity, but the set pieces are explosive. This is not Kim’s best, but it’s still better than most so-called action thrillers.

Called Kilo Two Bravo in the US, this is a riveting war movie about British paras trapped in a minefield in the 2006 Afghan War, with casualties mounting. It’s hard to criticise when it’s so well staged and based on a true incident, with profits from the cinema release going to charity. Nevertheless, judged purely as a piece of film, it’s certainly not a feel-good night’s entertainment.

It’s filmed with documentary-style naturalism with unknown actors, naturalistic drama and no score. The first half-hour is full of male banter and military jargon that’s hard to follow. The attempt at authenticity is laudable but it’s more of a filmed document than a great film in its own right. However, it certainly keeps you glued to the screen.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are stuck on the spaceship Avalon, the only passengers to have awoken early from suspended animation. For the first half-hour this is one of the most evocative portrayals of man alone in space since Kubrick’s 2001. This is despite the fact that we know Lawrence is going to appear because her picture’s on the poster. Note: make sure to avoid the awful tell-all trailer.

The remainder of the film focusses on the relationship between the two. It would be a corny love story were it not for the exotic location and the deftness of its handling. The set design and visuals are stunning throughout. Unfortunately the last act degenerates predictably into the standard explosive nonsense.

Like 2001, Passengers proves that you don’t need Aliens, Predators and other monsters to make an engrossing space movie. It looks amazing and it deals with moral and existential issues that, for most of its run-time, add a much-needed grown-up feel to current Hollywood output.

Unaccountably loved by critics, this Charlie Kaufman piece was, in his own words, ‘designed not to be seen’. It was conceived as a stage-read radio play and should have stayed that way. Even worse, it’s realised in stop-motion, that least imaginative of all animation techniques. Even with the addition of 3D-printed faces, it’s stylised and flat.

There’s not even any substance to the trivial tale of a mundane man soul-searching in a hotel. Critics have read cod-philosophy into this but it’s as mundane as the whole misconceived enterprise. Around an hour in there’s some perfunctory puppet sex, but even that just makes you pine for Team America.

One can only assume the critics loved it because it’s a Charlie Kaufman film, and he does indeed need to be encouraged, but not with made-for-radio films. One star for the DVD extras, in which he talks about the current state of Hollywood, where it’s the marketing department that now decides which films get made. Mind you, they were sensible enough to turn down Anomalisa.

At last a grown-up sci-fi film arrives. If only it was better. The first half-hour of this first-contact story, before we meet the aliens, is the usual scriptwriter’s plod through the set-up of a three-act structure. Linguist Amy Adams then has to figure out how to communicate with the aliens. It’s not without interest, but it’s more about linguistics than compelling sci-fi ideas. Unfortunately the sudden jump to understanding the alien language is poorly explained. The viewer just has to accept it, which would be fine if we hadn’t just watched Amy working on the basics in painstaking detail.

The attempts at communication do pull you along but none of it would bear a second viewing because there’s nothing else going on. It’s not exciting, not dramatic, not beautiful, not moving. All energy seems to have been drained out of the acting and direction. It’s almost mundane, which is a cardinal sin in a sci-fi film.

Director Denis Villeneuve confesses in the DVD Extras that he was initially concerned about the material’s dramatic possibilities and its ending. He was right to have doubts. The confusingly edited third act, even if you can make sense of it, just seems ridiculous. Without giving away any spoilers, Nietzschean scholars will realise it’s based on the principle of Eternal Recurrence, but it’s presented in such a cursory, haphazard way that it veers into the realms of meaningless fantasy. You may well need to study the DVD Extras for enlightenment.

Being able to see every second of an inevitable future would be like being trapped. Knowing a car will hit you but still having to walk out into the road? In any case, how can knowing the end of a film not affect your viewing of it? Arrival does make you think, but only about its philosophical flaws. Don’t the aliens know what’s going to happen?

This is what’s known as a tour de force. That is not a good thing. Our man Saul is a prisoner in a Word War 2 concentration camp. The camera follows him around in close-up, documentary-style. Everything else is out of focus or out of shot. Often all we see is the back of his head. Perhaps the intent is to make the horror all the more poignant by only catching blurred glimpses of it. Instead, the technique merely becomes wearing. A whole film in handheld close-up with no score? No thanks. Eventually, when the camera operator runs, the image inevitably degenerates into wobble-cam.

The content is of course important, as in ‘this film must be seen’ etc. It was an ‘official selection’ for Cannes, which is always a bad sign. It’s director Laszlo Nemes’ first feature. He intended it to be visceral, but it’s the opposite. It commits the cardinal sin of making the viewer bored with the cinematic image. On the DVD Extras there’s one of his earlier short films. It uses the same technique. He needs to change his style.

An unwatchable mess of a film. The kind William Burroughs might have made using his cut-up technique. A mish-mash of confusing timelines, narrative non-sequiturs, disjointed close-ups and random editing. Like a talentless art student’s attempt to be different.

Apparently it’s about the investigation of a missing girl, but it makes no narrative or dramatic sense. It’s a mystery how it ever got released. Most viewers will have already given up on it before the opening credits appear.

Remember the long conversational scene at the start Inglorious Basterds? Tarantino has turned it into a 160min film. It feels longer. It begins slow, it continues slow, there’s a half-hour gory section, it fizzles out.

The endless chat about the Civil War and racism does little to advance character or plot. It’s self-indulgent, ponderous and tedious. Because it’s Tarantino, you may sit through it waiting for something to happen. You’ll wait a long time. This is a film made by someone in love with the sound of his own dialogue and little else. If he was a student scriptwriter he’d fail the course.

The opening snowscapes augur well but we’re soon inside a stagecoach, then a staging post, for the rest of the film. It’s like an Agatha Christie locked-room whodunit with stereotypical characters, none of whom we care about. Why film in Super Panavision 70 when it’s no more than a filmed play that nearly all takes place in confined spaces?

Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson etc, go through their usual paces. Ennio Morricone’s musical choices are ridiculous (White Stripes?!). Tarantino’s camera direction is banal. He needs someone to tell him.

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.