Film Reviews by Alphaville

Laboured, boring anti-cinema, stolidly edited and grimly acted. Head shots of couple conversing incessantly interspersed with graphic sex scenes that must be amongst the most unerotic and off-putting ever filmed.

Director Gaspar Noé should be confined to making porn for his own satisfaction. He can’t make feature films.

This is a good 2015 film about the moral dilemmas of drone warfare. Unfortunately it was beaten to the punch by the equally good 2015 film Good Kill. Both films place a nice family in harm’s way as collateral damage when the Brits and Americans decide a bomb needs to be dropped on the terrorists next door. Whereas Good Kill focussed on the dilemmas of the drone pilots, Eye in the Sky focusses more on the ethical and political dilemmas faced by the ‘kill chain’ – the military, the politicians and the lawyers as well as the pilots.

Placing an innocent girl at the heart of the bomb zone is an obvious manipulative device but works well as a focal point for the debate. The film could easily have become just another political polemic with a plot you can see a mile off, but director Gavin Hood maintains the tension and turns in an engrossing thriller.

Hong-Jin Na’s follow-up to The Chaser is another exciting action thriller with even more chases in it. It’s beautifully structured, escalating in thrills from a simple premise to a Peckinpah-like riotous climax. If you’re expecting Hong Kong-style martial arts you’re in for a pleasant surprise from this ace South Korean director. He films his action as realistic and graphic. He uses too much handheld camera at times but he really knows how to build action and tension.

The chief baddie is a relentless chaser, like the T-1000 in Terminator 2. When our hero jumps into the sea to escape, the baddie jumps in after him for a swimming chase. And that’s just the start of a long multi-transport chase. But be warned that it’s not for the squeamish. In various scenes of mayhem, everyone’s pretty handy with an axe.

The DVD extras include useful tips on how to flip a trailer-truck. Why Hollywood doesn’t come calling for Na is a mystery.

Another Tarzan film? Why? More cgi apes? Why? They reckon they’re doing something different here by introducing an anti-slavery and anti-ivory poaching message into the plot, but it’s still the same old swinging through trees and love-ins with cgi animals.

There are good things in it. The story attempts to be different by beginning with Lord Greystoke (Tarzan) returning to the jungle rather than growing up in it, but we still get multiple flashbacks to that anyway. Alexander Skarsgard brings a refreshing poise to the title role. Christoph Waltz, as always, makes a suave baddie. The Gabon landscape is sweepingly captured. On the minus side, the action is confusingly edited and the bog-standard orchestral score irritatingly underlines every single beat.

It’s not a bad film, it’s just that we’ve seen it so many times before.

This is one of those tedious talkies that French cinema makes far too many of. It opens with a domestic squabble filmed as talking heads and never gets any better. What’s the point of wide-screen if all you do is put a single talking head in the middle of it? The images are so sleep-inducing you deserve a medal if you last the whole 172 minutes.

Director Olivier Assayas simply has no sense of cinema. After this 2002 effort he went on to make other borefests such as Clouds of Sils Maria in 2015. They keep giving him money and calling him ‘acclaimed’. This film was even an official entry at Cannes, He must be stopped.

His films are everything the Nouvelle Vague railed against. Where are the new Jean-Luc and Francois when you need them?

Hong-Jin Na’s third film isn’t quite as thrilling as his first two (The Chaser, Yellow Sea) but he’s a director to watch. He begins his films in such an oblique way that you’re never quite sure what genre you’re watching, never mind what’s going on. Comedy? Detective story? Horror? The story soon focusses on defiantly non-Hollywood leasding man Do-Won Kwak, overweight and hopeless as a bewildered police officer. You’ll soon be rooting for him.

Once his daughter becomes ‘possessed’ the film develops an increasing sense of dread. Na wanted to make a thriller that ratchets up the tension without resorting to violence, but there are some wild and exciting scenes here, some of which are beautifully shot in rainstorms in the South Korean mountains.

Who’s the mysterious Japanese man who feeds on raw deer carcass in the woods? Who’s the beautiful young woman who watches him? Who’s the cool-dude shaman and his terrifying exorcisms? And is that a zombie with a rake in his head?

As usual with Na, there’s no Hollywood formula here to tell you what’s coming next. As tension grows, expect the unexpected. You’ll be happy to go along for the ride.

This is another of Allen’s 30s pastiche movies, an instantly forgettable tale of Jesse Eisenberg (as diffident as ever) trying to woo Kristen Stewart in the social whirl of Hollywood and New York. It looks good and Stewart is luminous, but we’ve seen it all before in better films.

It’s as though Allen’s run out of ideas. The poorly-structured plot meanders and goes nowhere, while the bland soft jazz score is as predictable as ever. Even the voiceover Allen contributes is tired and superfluous. He needs to watch Jules et Jim again to see how it should be done. Although it’s painful to say, he needs a co-writer.

Another beautifully hand-drawn pastoral animation from Studio Ghibli. Hollywood computer animation looks crass beside it. Shy 12yo Anna spends the summer at a seaside village where she befriends Marnie, but is Marnie real? It’s a slight but engaging story that manages to mix heartfelt emotion with other-worldliness. And the climactic revelation is a zinger.

There are moments when the animator’s artistry simply stops you in your tracks. The breaking of a wave, the billowing of a dress in a breeze, the play of light and shadow on a face. Some Ghibli output has focussed too much on monsters and creatures, but this tender human drama is almost as good as Only Yesterday.

The version with American voices is better than usual, but as always with Ghibli the original Japanese version is superior.

A grand old-fashioned western but one that springs no surprises and has no real high points. The over-familiar plot holds little interest and neither do the sketchily drawn seven characters. The gunfights are never more than perfunctory because the baddies can’t shoot straight and the Seven seem invincible until one or another goes out in a blaze of glory. The Wild Bunch it ain’t.

The retro score by James (Titanic) Horner is also a drag. It’s hard to be critical because he wrote it without seeing any footage and was then killed in a plane crash. The resulting bland music is more of an homage to him that a help to the film.

Yet director Antoine Fuqua never makes a boring film and it bumbles along nicely at a good pace. It’s watchable if only to notice what it lacks. The best thing about it is the New Mexico scenery, built for wide-screen and luminously filmed with Fuqua’s sweeping camera. If only it held more resonance in the manner of modern Western classics such as Unforgiven and Open Range.

What’s the point of remaking Wyler’s 1958 classic if you’ve nothing new to offer? This is lightweight fodder for the Twilight crowd. What’s even more surprising is how dull it is, like a sword and sandals TV melodrama. It takes 40 minutes for Messala to squabble with Judah and send him to the galleys. Wyler’s brilliantly intense galley sequence is then reduced to a few brief cgi shots. The whole sequence of Judah in Rome is omitted, leaving a gaping hole in the story. And the ridiculous new twist ending makes a mockery of the whole narrative arc.

Jack Huston and Tony Kebbell play Judah and Messala as though auditioning for Hollyoaks. Let’s be kind and say they’re miscast. But the real culprit is director Timur Bekmambetov. He directs with an in-your-face vibe, using a hand-held camera to further diminish the film’s epic quality. The dialogue is fatuous, the score is Movie-of-the-Week abysmal, the list goes on. The costumes are okay.

Once you’ve had your fill of the melodrama, skip forward to the chariot race to see what a mess they’ve made of that too. It’s shot so disjointedly with chopped-up edits that it makes you ache for Yakima Canutt to return and show them how to do it properly. The obvious cgi-generated falling horses and crashing chariots further diminish what should have been a thrill ride. You’ll probably just laugh.

The best thing about the DVD is the Extras piece on how the cgi enhancements were made. The film itself is a masterclass in how not to make an epic.

Taciturn action-man Jason Statham zaps around the Pacific from one exotic location to another annihilating bad guys in one set-piece after another. The film’s signature scene (it’s on the DVD cover) sees him climb the outside of a Sydney skyscraper and swing out over the abyss beneath a cantilevered swimming pool. If you’re a Stath fan, what’s not to like? He even gets a romantic subplot with Jessica Alba, testing his acting powers to the limit.

The fisticuffs get a bit tiresome, especially as Statham is overly invincible, so It never reaches the thrill level of the Mission Impossible franchise it most closely resembles. But it’s still fun ride with some great stunts and scenery. Dennis Gansel directs smoothly with lots of attractive aerial shots of far-flung holiday destinations, legendary action director Vic Armstrong (Bond, Indiana Jones etc.) shoots the stunts and Mark Isham contributes an insistent score. The DVD extras are also worth watching for Isham’s master class in the vocabulary of film music.

Of course it’s brainless. It’s also fast-moving, good-looking and fun.

Dull, lo-key, soapy British sci-fi drama for kids, like a Dr Who rip-off. Robots have taken over the world and, fortunately for the budget, have made all humans stay indoors. How this works in the rainforest or the desert we’re not told because the film’s set in a British seaside town. It’s up to kids to save the world, which of course they do, but even at 86 minutes the film’s a drag.

The idea comes from a dream writer/director Jon Wright had. He should have thought it through. Even worse, the hand-held camera he uses to mimic edginess merely highlights the humdrum misjudgement of the whole production.

It’s another would-be-scary horror film so what do you expect? Every year, for 12 hours, ordinary folk are legally permitted to become homicidal maniacs to ‘purge’ themselves of their killer human instincts. Yeah, that makes sense.

There’s the usual half-hour set-up before the baddies arrive. A family straight out of central casting lock their house down – mum, dad, teenage daughter, younger son. The house lights fail in order to enable baddies to jump out of shadows unexpectedly. Mum and dad search for them with torches to make themselves targets. They hold their torches to their heads to enable us to see their faces.

Yes, all the clichés in the manual are present and correct, yawn, yawn. Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey bring a touch of class and it’s competently directed, but it’s a hopeless task. If you have to watch this sort of film, this one will do. It even spawned a sequel. Weep.

One of the ironies of modern cinema is how boring the technical wizardry of motion capture and CGI become when there is no characterisation or plot on which to hang them. Here, for example, we have giant orcs beautifully realised but less interesting than the cartoon penguins with which Dick Van Dyke dances in Mary Poppins.

The film is based on a game so expectations are immediately low. As well as orcs there is, for instance, a Star Wars-type Force called the Fel and a Merlin-type character called the Guardian (queue lots of swirly blue lines to indicate magic). The dialogue is comic-book functional and the minimal plot is irrelevant (orcs fight humans).

Still, for people who like this sort of thing (fans of similar nonsense such as Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones), this is the sort of thing they’ll like. For the rest of us, one star for the special effects and for watching Dominic Cooper slumming it as the King of Azeroth.

Hold the front page! This is the film about sub-prime mortgages for which you’ve been so avidly waiting. Not.

It darts around all over the place trying to make a boring subject cool, but that merely highlights the emptiness of the whole project. We’re presented with such a slew of financial characters that we need a Ryan Gosling voiceover to keep up. Celebrities break the fourth wall to explain financial products to the viewer. Mannered performances, jump cuts and irritating zooms all add to the irritation.

As a result, rather than making you angry at the banking crisis, the film makes you give up caring, which is a tragedy. Don’t be fooled by its Oscar nominations. Hollywood loves to pat itself on the back for addressing important issues. Step forward Argo, for instance. The film has received good reviews simply for its subject matter, but those reviews come from critics who care only about its subject matter. In which case, they should watch a documentary.

As a piece of cinema, this is a boring mess about financial institutions. You’ll want to rush to see it. Not.