Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

It must have been a thin year when this won best film at the 2014 Italian Golden Globes. Chapter 1: An estate agent gets out of his depth in a loss-making investment fund. Chapter 2: we see the whole scenario again from the fund manager’s wife’s point of view. After an hour, all this becomes irrelevant in Chapter 3, when the estate agent’s daughter takes centre stage and we get a plot about a cyclist being killed in a hit-and-run accident.

Human Capital? That’s a calculation used by insurers and has nothing to do with the film until we get an explanation as the credits roll. The film’s repeated scenes as the chapters are replayed could have been interesting if the different characters’ points of view were connected or held any interest. Instead it’s a muddled and undeveloped exercise that goes nowhere.

After making such an interesting job of the first Twilight film, Catherine Hardwicke left because of creative differences, leaving the remainder of the saga to sink to the level of Hunger Games teenage pap. Instead she turned to Red Riding Hood to repeat her success, but with mixed results.

The forested mountain environment is as prettily filmed as in Twilight but the story is over-familiar and the performances under-powered. With a plot of two soppy teenage boys both in love with Red, it’s Twilight light. There’s a cartoonish big bad wolf lurking in the woods, but it could really do with a vampire to spice up proceedings. Wolf-killing priest Gary Oldman arrives to add a bit of gravitas and Julie Christie plays the glamorous granny, but even with a wist ending it’s impossible to shake off the so-what silliness of the whole enterprise.

One star for its smoothly filmed picturesque settings plus an extra one for some interesting soundtrack choices (e.g. Fever Ray). If you really want to see a gripping and haunting modern fairy tale, check out Hansel and Gretel, the stunning 2007 South Korean film directed by Pil-Sung Yim.

This is a spectacular survival epic about mountain men in the 19th century American wilderness. The sense of place is beautifully captured with exhilarating visuals by Gravity cinemaphotographer Emmanuel Lubezki. His fluid, sweeping camerawork should be compulsory viewing for every shakycam action director.

Director Alejandro G. Inarritu films with total conviction and his cast performs likewise. The wide screen is filled with images both powerful and startling in their audacity. The opening riverside skirmish between trappers and Indians is a masterclass in how to capture the brutal randomness and confusion of battle in a cohesive manner. It’s as jaw-dropping as the opening battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan.

The prolonged bear attack, filmed as a remarkable single shot, has to be one of the greatest cgi scenes ever filmed. Equally brilliant is a scene that recalls the famous shot in Lawrence of Arabia where the shimmering shape in the heat haze hoves into view as Omar Sharif on a camel. Here a dot on a frozen lake becomes our hero Leo DiCaprio. Kudos also for a poignant score by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

The Revenant is many things: a paean to the wilderness, a primer in survival, an actioner full of meaty set-pieces and a truly visceral experience. It will be hated by those whose idea of a good night out is a romcom and a box of popcorn. It’s raw, its elemental, it’s haunting and it’s brilliant. After Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, his son’s Desierto and Inarritu’s Revenant, the new wave of Mexican directors is going to be worth watching.

This is the tale of an innocent model trying to make it in the corrupt big city. Wow! Never seen anything like that before! In the hands of director Nicolas Winding Refn, who brings a sense of ennui to all his films, the result is an intensely irritating viewing experience.

Perhaps it’s the mostly static chest-high camera, or the preponderance of medium close-ups, or the deliberately one-note performances and long silences, or shots held too long, or the lack of anything happening on screen except talking heads.

While not as bottom-numbing as previous Refn efforts such as Valhalla Rising, you feel there could have been so much more here given a director with some cinematic sensibility. It should have been directed by whoever was responsible for the punchy trailer, which shows what the film could have been. As it stands, patience soon runs thin.

An interview with lively star Elle Fanning on the Extras shows what a charismatic heroine she could have made given rein to express an emotion. In the Extras Refn admits to being more interested in the filmmaking process than the results. Maybe therein lies his problem.

One star for the terrific Cliff Martinez electronic score. Forget the movie, watch the trailer and listen to the soundtrack album instead.

This is an unashamedly old-fashioned western, with echoes of Unforgiven, so comfortingly familiar that it’s impossible not to succumb to it. Kiefer Sutherland is the taciturn hero who can’t escape his gun-toting past, but can he stand by while the baddies run roughshod over the father who despises him, played by his real father Donald? Acting together for the first time, their real-life relationship adds an extra layer of depth to their feisty on-screen relationship.

You can guess the outcome, but for the duration of its 90 minutes it’s like meeting an old friend you haven’t seen for ages and didn’t realise you missed. There are dastardly baddies, a morally ambiguous good-baddie, an unrequited love subplot and a satisfying climactic shootout.

Most recent westerns have been revisionist, which makes this classic reading of the genre seem almost revolutionary. Jon Cassar, Kiefer’s 24 director, directs with smooth economy. The only problem is Jonathan Goldsmith’s occasionally orchestra and piano plinky-plonk score, which underscores every scene to the point of mockery.

No masterpiece, but eminently watchable.