Film Reviews by Alphaville

You’ll soon give up on this over-edited, frenetic tracking of an ex-FBI agent searching for her kidnapped baby in Marrakesh. Lots of local colour and annoying use of slo-mo and overlapping dissolves. Neither situation or characters convince. Plot and dialogue is irrelevant. Fight scenes look ridiculous owing to the modern scourge of shooting too close up with a shaky camera, then over-editing into bite-sized clips.

According to the trailer Howard J. Ford is an ‘acclaimed director’, but if you’ve seen his previous zombie effort The Dead you’ll know what to expect. This one is like a cheap knock-off of a good action movie, like all those unwatchable Italian westerns that followed Leone’s. Truly boring but one star for a British director who at least isn’t bogged down in social realism.

If you thought Jeremy Saulnier’s film Blue Ruin was sluggish, this boring mumblethon, best watched with subtitles, is worse. Even Patrick Stewart, here slumming it, is reduced to a muttering monotone. A band is trapped in a room and attacked by drug dealers. With poorly drawn characters, ugly lighting and a plot that has nowhere to go, it’s purgatory to be stuck in there with them. It’s like sitting through a lo-budget, drawn-out student film. Doses of gore are added to arouse those who find such things arousing, but they’re pure cliché. Worst of all, as in Blue Ruin, Saunier can’t direct actors, none of whom will be putting this on their résumé. It has received good reviews from obscure journals and gore geeks, but when Imogen Poots finally utters the line ‘Tell me those stupid fucking words are his last’ it’s a relief that her wish comes true. Assault on Precinct 13 this isn’t.

This is an affecting true-life story about a family searching for each other in the aftermath of the 2004 Thai tsunami. It’s so well staged, acted and directed that you’d have to have a heart of stone not to warm to it, especially with swelling violins telling you how to react. It wastes only 15 minutes in getting to the exciting tsunami sequence, but the majority of the film is spent in hospitals afterwards, where things get a bit maudlin and samey. No opportunity to manipulate audience emotions is spared. It certainly wouldn’t bear a second viewing, but if you enjoy a good tearful wallow get a box of tissues ready and draw up a seat.

Yet another ugly-looking, boring British film with zero visual imagination. It’s a simple story with an annoying twist ending, but you probably won’t get that far before bailing. It’s more of a concept than a film, as the ‘making of’ feature proves. Lottery funded? You guessed it. The concept may have worked in book form, but you need more than a concept to transfer it to the screen. The execution is awful. No sense of pace or narrative drive. Just a series of ugly, poorly chosen, handheld, too-close-up shots cobbled together to no particular purpose.

Why handheld? Why so close up? It’s cinema. Open it out. Hold the camera steady. Add a sleep-inducing score and you’re in for a bum-numbing hour and a half. Writer/director Omer Fast makes those pretentious concept video installations you may have tried to watch in art galleries. This is in the same category. It’s his first ‘feature’. Makes you weep for British cinema.

This irresistible cgi extravaganza about gods and mortals in ancient Egypt is a wonder to behold. There’s more imagination packed into its two hours than in all the Marvel films put together. The images are ravishing, chock full of imaginative design. The fantastical non-stop action, with elements of Star Wars and Indiana Jones thrown in alongside the swords and sandals, is seamlessly executed with technical brilliance. Sure it’s nonsense, but the fact that it revels in its cheesiness just makes it all the more engaging.

Gerard Butler as a strutting 10ft-tall Scottish Egyptian baddie-god who can metamorphose in to a monster? Geoffrey Rush as a cantankerous spaceship-dwelling sun god who burns every mortal who looks at him? A forlorn giant sphinx who’s response to having his riddle solved is ‘Oh, bother’? Air chariots pulled by flying beetles? You gotta love it.

Alex Proyas, totally in command of his green-screen medium, directs with sweeping style and verve. His best film since The Crow and Dark City. Ignore the disdain of arthouse reviewers, engage child mode, sit back and enjoy the sense of wonder that only cinema can engender.

Even one of J. G. Ballard’s lesser books is better than most and deserves better than this. It knows it’s a tough watch because it shows you the end at the beginning, in a failed attempt to foster interest while it jumps back three months for the long, slow build-up.

Nothing happens in the first half of the film, then the social network of the high-rise building breaks down, as the prologue has already shown us it will, then nothing interesting happens in the second half of the film. None of the stereotypical characters are worth caring about and the social satire (upper floors v lower) is trowelled on with the subtlety of a pantomime.

With no focus or momentum, it goes nowhere and adds up to nothing. One star for effort because it’s at least a step-up visually from previous tedious Ben Wheatley films such as Sightseers.

This terrific disaster movie shows Hollywood how to do it. No stupid characters, no banal dialogue, no bad guys and no heroics. Just an ordinary family, emotionally real, fighting for their lives in an apocalyptic nightmare of a situation. A mountain is about to fall into a fjord… and it’s tourist season. The effects may not be perfect but they’re exciting enough. Following his brace of serial-killer-in-the-snow Cold Prey films, director Roar Uthaug ratchets up the tension to breaking point and delivers a gripping vision of hell.

This dour, one-note western never gets going. There’s so much wrong with it – the script, the direction, the sound, the score… None of it has any life at all. The acting is so monotone that it seems to have been post-dubbed in a recording booth, and it feels like you’re in the booth with them rather than in the great outdoors. Clichéd flashbacks explain the relationships among the characters but they’re irrelevant and further reduce what little narrative drive there is. The climax occurs inside a shack at night and is a masterclass in how not to direct action. It’s dark, it’s confusing, it’s shot too close-in with a handheld camera and is absolutely dire. Not that you’ll care who lives or dies anyway. The trailer shows all the best bits in two minutes without the flashbacks so just watch that instead.

The spirit of Fellini lives on. An ageing one-book author contemplates his life. There’s no drama and precious little narrative. Long scenes of talking heads are ponderous and pretentious, all voiced in monotone (was this film post-dubbed in a booth?). It’s the sort of wordy borefest that gives ‘arthouse’ cinema a bad name.

Yet the boring scenes are interspersed with ravishing camerawork by director Paolo Sorrentino. Some of the tracking shots are mesmerising, especially the pre-title sequence, where a magnificent rooftop shindig seems to go on forever as the camera prowls around it. If only. Once the talking heads start you’ll be fast-forwarding to the next bit of cinematic bravado. The trailer gives some idea of both the beauty and the boredom and for once gives no plot points away… because there are none to give away. Not as great a film as arthouse critics would have it, but well worth dipping into.

Idris Elba plays a maverick (surprise, surprise) CIA operative in Paris, running roughshod over everyone he meets. He drives too fast and walks with a street swagger. The character is a joke and Elba’s off-hand delivery of admittedly dreadful lines also fails to convince. He’s still playing Luther rather than a CIA operative – not a great calling card for the part of James Bond for which he’s always touted. The dialogue is dire. He’s soon ‘off the reservation and on his own’. Natch. The filmmakers seem to think that Dirty Harry still works in the 21st century.

On the plus side the film has some good things going for it. Richard Madden makes a resourceful pickpocket caught up in a bomb plot and Thierry Godard from French TV’s Engrenages (Spiral) makes a good villain. The plot is convoluted and fast-moving and the action is well choreographed and briskly directed by James Watkins, even if the modern curse of rapid editing sometimes makes them difficult to follow. There’s a great rooftop chase and a riotous fight in the back of a careering runaway van. Watched with tolerance, this is an enjoyable escapist film.

Films about the nice neighbour/babysitter/guest from hell are usually one-trick bores but The Guest takes the genre to a whole new place. Dan Evans is such a deceptively charismatic lead that the plot grips from the start. Even the teenage daughter character, often played as an airhead, is here given a new lease of intelligent life. But hold on a minute. Why is Dan being SO nice to the family that takes him in? You’ll have no idea unless you watch the trailer. DO NOT watch the trailer.

Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out the film breaks out of the formula and ramps up both the intrigue and the action. And the humour. The third act climax is a riot, a complete mish-mash of genres that is startling in its choices yet fully delivers. It left some unimaginative reviewers struggling to keep up with the tonal shifts, but praise to director Adam Watkins for his ambition. Praise also to Steve Moore for a terrific Goth-electronic score featuring bands such as Hocico and Front 242. Brilliantly original.

This is a film, based on a true story, about the building of a baseball team around player stats. Sounds fun? Yeah, right. It’s competently written and directed but it’s impossible to care. The baseball movie A League of Their Own worked because it focussed on the players as characters but the players here are barely sketched. Instead the film focusses on the team’s general manager (Brad Pitt) and his obsession with the stats. Brad gives such a charismatic performance that it almost makes the film worth seeing for him alone, but even he is saddled with an irritating father-daughter sub-plot. ‘How can you not be romantic about baseball?’ he asks. If your answer is ‘quite easily, actually’ the film will hold little interest.

This poorly realised thriller is little more than a character study in which very little happens at a funereal pace. Bodyguard Matthias Schoenaerts, a soldier suffering from PTSD, is assigned to protect Diane Kruger and her son. We follow him closely as he goes about his business. Very closely. His head looms large in every shot. It’s a bodyguard procedural. Nothing happens until half-way through the film, and then only briefly, after which everything grinds to a halt again. Schoenaerts’ PTSD is barely relevant and his relationship with Kruger is poorly sketched. There are moments of tension, as signalled by the soundtrack, but nowhere near enough to elicit much interest.

A man drives from Birmingham to London at night while talking to people on his phone. The camera watches him. So do we. However good the acting or the writing, we watch a man sitting in a car. At least it was cheap to make. It would be boring in the theatre never mind the cinema. Perhaps it would make a good radio play. The heart aches for some cinematic imagination.

This film is so badly written and directed that the actors stand no chance. Let’s hope we’re laughing with them rather than at them. In any case, who ever thought that Hayden Christensen would convince as a Crusader knight? Not that he’s the worst of the film’s problems. It’s obvious we’re in trouble from the very beginning. The pre-title battle sequence is filmed as an over-edited mess of blink-and-you-miss-them shaky-cam shots. This is always a sign of a director who has no idea how to compose and marshal comprehensible action. Step forward stuntman and first-time director Nick Powell, following in the footsteps of equal offender Paul Greengrass. Watchable only as a masterclass on how not to make an action film.