Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

Tarsem Singh has made some of the most beautiful films ever to hit the cinema screen. The Fall was sheer visual poetry. Here he turns his hand to a thriller and the result is engrossing.

When the consciousness of the dying Ben Kingsley is transferred into Ryan Reynolds’ body, you know there’s going to be a catch. He discovers the body has unexpected skills, like Jason Bourne’s, and this leads to a fun ride with plenty of action and intrigue as he investigates the mystery.

Singh’s own screenplays sometimes lack focus and punch, but given the well-honed material here he produces an anti-Greengrass-shakycam psychological thriller that’s as smooth as silk and a joy to watch. Get on board for the ride.

Nice idea soon runs out of steam. God is a cantankerous old man living in Brussels who hates mankind so much that he makes the toast fall jam side down. His 10yo daughter rebels and texts everyone to tell them the date they when they will die. There are some humorous moments here, but there are still 1½hrs to fill. So the daughter collects six disciples and each relates his/her boring ‘gospel’ with much use of voice-over and stagey talking to camera. Some reviewers seem to find this hilarious, but for most viewers patience will be in short supply.

Committed theists may find material here to titillate or offend them but it’s a pretty bland satire boringly filmed. Worst of all is the awful Benoit Poelvoorde, a Carry On character who shouts his way through the film as God searching for his daughter. And the Carry On score doesn’t help. Deicide was never more justified. A film for those who think that quirkiness compensates for depth of character, sustained

narrative or imaginative imagery.

If you’re drawn to check this out because it was directed by Babak Najafi prior to London Has Fallen, you’re in for a major disappointment. It’s about drugs and low-life criminals in Stockholm and is as dismal as it sounds. It’s a sequel to an execrable original directed in shakycam style by Daniel Esposito, and Najafi has the same awful characters and dire material to work with. Don’t bother.

Gerard Butler’s ‘Fallen’ series shows the Bourne and Bond franchises how to do it. No messing around with subplots or filler chat. Just pitch your hero against overwhelming odds and let him get on with it.

Like a breath of fresh air, ‘London’ deliberately sets out to combat the Greengrass shakycam school of filming by using smooth, considerate camera shots that have real pizazz. Sweeping crane and aerial shots capture the spectacle brilliantly. Kudos to director Babak Najafi on his first actioner. The hilarious dialogue makes Bond sound doubly cheesy. Sample. On-the-run American president to Gerard: ‘What happens if you don’t come back?’ Gerard: ‘You’re fucked.’

It’s hard to believe, as yet another London landmark bites the dust, that it was filmed on a Bulgarian backlot, where they even built another Piccadilly Circus. There’s an exciting car chase, an exciting helicopters v missiles aerial battle and much more. The initial assault on the baddies’ stronghold is filmed as a 2½ minute single travelling shot that would not look of place in Cuaron’s Children of Men. Brilliant stuff.

Note to Matt Damon: Paul Greengrass cannot direct film. His trademark in-your-face shaky camera shots ruin every movie he’s ever been involved with. As shot by henchman cinemaphotographer Barry Ackroyd, the camera judders uncontrollably. Snap-editing further fractures the image into mash-up cinema.

The two culprits both come from a British TV documentary background and they should have stayed there. They couldn’t film a visually coherent sequence if they tried. We know Paul is your friend, Matt, but he’s ruined what could have become a franchise to rival Mission Impossible. Instead of opening out the action, as Doug Liman did so memorably in the original Bourne Ultimatum, Greengrass closes it down.

He also had a hand in the banal script. The plot is irrelevant. Treadstone nonsense for the fourth time. The dialogue is dire. Sample (After Bourne has escaped yet again): ‘We’ve lost him. Sir.’ Lost Bourne? Who’d have thought? Motor cycle chase? Check. Car chase that involves weaving against traffic on the wrong side of the road? Check. Assassination attempt in a crowded hall (screaming crowds, confusion etc.)? Check. Yawn and pass the popcorn. And someone stop that relentless staccato muzak, please!

Talents such as Alicia Vikander and Vincent Cassel are wasted. Alicia spends most of the film in a room or a van peering at computer screens. Vincent, such a charismatic villain in superior films such as Mesrine, has little to do but wander around with a determined look on his face shooting extras as he passes. His climactic fist fight with Damon is a damp squib.

Only once the end-titles roll is there relief, when Moby’s ‘Extreme Ways’ returns to rekindle fond memories of Doug Liman’s original film and remind us how well the Bourne franchise began before Greengrass ruined it.

It’s rare for a socially important film to be any more interesting than a Ken-Loach-type diatribe against the establishment, but Mustang is wondrous cinema. It’s an absorbing, beautifully realised film that will both uplift you and make you as angry at Turkey as Midnight Express did.

Five sisters, as free-spirited as the Wild West horses that give the film its title, are scolded for playing innocently with boys on their way home from school. For this they are subjected to a virginity test. ‘One minute we were free and then it all turned to shit,’ says the youngest, Lale, in voice-over. Their house becomes a prison and a ‘wife factory’. They’re forced to wear ‘shit-coloured dresses’.

If the premise sounds unpromising, the viewing experience is a revelation. Filmed in a style that is both naturalistic and luminous, it’s like an amalgamation of two other brilliant films: Virgin Suicides and Innocence.

Director Deniz Gamze Erguven is a French-Turkish Sofia Copola. Provocatively, she films her innocent girls in various states of undress around the house, which has drawn howls of reactionary outrage in Turkey. This merely proves Erguven’s point that Turkish society defines everything women do in terms of their sexuality. The backlash to Mustang in her home country has been violent, with she and her cast subjected to such threats that she has vowed never to make another film there.

In Turkish cinema it has been a long time since the heady days of Yilmaz Guney, who directed his amazing 1982 film Yol by proxy from a prison cell. Mustang is searing, shining cinema that bears comparison. As well as being a trenchant critique of rural Turkish society, it’s about coming of age, making the most of one’s options whatever one’s circumstances and much more besides.

Can the girls escape their lot? You’ll be rooting for them, especially the feisty Lale, Deniz’ alter ego, as the narrative builds to a tense climax.

MI6 agent Mark Strong buddies up with his moronic brother Sacha Baron Cohen for action japes. From the DVD extras, it at least seems to have been fun to make. Shame none of that transfers to the screen. Wanna see naked fat people run? Wanna see Cohen suck poison out of Strong’s testicle? To cackling fans of gross-out images it’s pointless to say that this film has no redeeming cinematic merit, but less brain-dead viewers may well find it unfunny, formulaic, irritating and abysmal.

A dark Danish medieval fairy-tale melodrama the likes of which you won’t have seen before. It’s supposed to be the first in teenage-type trilogy but don’t let that put you off. The intriguing premise pits a shamer and her daughter, who can see what people are ashamed of and make them atone, against the evil Dragonlord, who unfortunately isn’t ashamed of anything.

It’s beautifully realised and played as an emotionally real cat-and-mouse chase through the Dragonlord’s city, a kind of dark Alice in Wonderland. There are lapses of pace but 12yo Rebecca Emilie Sattrup is convincing as the lead and a tone-setting melodramatic score perfectly underscores the action.

The film draws you in inexorably and builds to a rousing climax. As for the alligator-like dragons in their pit, shorn of Hollywood-style glitz, surely there have never been scarier CGI reptiles than these. Such an odd film that it will stay with you.

Terrific chase movie that plays like Terminator 2’s T-1000 cyborg chasing Bear Grylls in the hot desert. Rabbit hunter Jeffrey Dean Morgan is out to stop the unjustly deported Gael Garcia Bernal and his fellow Mexicans from illegally entering the States. Even as we root for on-the-run Bernal, Morgan brings to the screen the same charismatic presence that bewitched The Good Wife on television. He’s impossible to dislike, even when he’s picking off Bernal’s party with his high-powered rifle.

A lesser film would wallow in moral judgements and intersperse the action with boring backstory, but Desierto just gets on with it and let’s us thrill to a classic cat-and-mouse chase. Director Jonas Cuaron, following impressively in the footsteps of his father Alfonso (Gravity) directs flawlessly, making the most of the big wide landscapes: rocks, canyons, playas, cacti… And the percussive score by Woodkid provides rousing support.

Ignore American reviews that overload the film with political symbolism. At a mean, lean 84 minutes it’s as impressive a master class as Duel in showing how to make an unrelenting thriller. The only downside is a mawkish end-titles song. Also: avoid the tell-tale trailer.

This is one of those films that must have been more fun to write and make than it is to watch. It consists of three interleaved but independent fairy tales from a 17th century Italian book and is sheer nonsense. It’s directed by ex-painter Matteo Garrone, so any production still will look good, but as a whole the film has no more life than Peter Greenway’s painterly 1980s films. Yes, it’s just a silly fairy tale so we shouldn’t expect too much of it, but Branagh’s Cinderella showed you can still make an audience care. Here the characters are cyphers and the plot paper-thin ludicrous.

Garrone has an eye for an arresting image and the film has impressive production values, but characterisation, narrative thrust and subtext are so simplistic that the viewer has no reason to care. One story, for example, is about a princess forced into an arranged marriage. Yawn, yawn. In the DVD extras Garrone sees the film as ‘an emotional journey’. In which case he’s failed completely. One star for the pretty pictures. Best fairy-tale picture remains Ridley Scott’s magical Legend, but only in its American release version with Tangerine Dream score.