Film Reviews by Alphaville

A silly tale given over-earnest treatment. With the help of his family a boy with mysterious powers – he can ‘think’ a satellite out of the sky – is on the run from the government. Something is about to happen, but what? The premise is intriguing and there’s enough incident to keep you watching, but the plot is all.

The deliberate pacing and mainly static medium close-up camerawork rob the few action scenes of any excitement. Too many scenes take place in darkness and shadow, further making for a dull watch. When we finally get an inkling of what’s going on after an hour, it’s all rather ridiculous and ultimately unsatisfying. It’s 80s Spielberg sci-fi without the flair.

A slow-burning, lo-key, sub-par Le Carré in which a poetry lecturer gets involved with a Russian mafia boss wanting to defect. It’s all pretty ho-hum with no twists and turns, little excitement, boring politicking and nothing we haven’t seen done better many times before. An hour passes before our hero is in any peril at all. Pedestrian direction from TV stalwart Susanna White and a bland score add a sheen of sameness to every scene, but even Bernard Herman would struggle to add any tension to this one.

This is gentle, undemanding fare, acted and directed in gentle, undemanding fashion, more suited to a television than a cinema screen. If you don’t expect the excitement and intellectual brilliance we’ve come to expect from a Sherlock Holmes tale, especially since Cumberbatch took on the role, the film passes amiably without hitting any heights. The plot pitches Holmes as a doddery 93yo trying to remember his last case. It’s a slight story, focussing mainly on Holmes’ relationship with his housekeeper and her young son, while the old case seen in flashback doesn’t have the impact or resonance the script would like to think it has. The whole is less about Holmes the detective than a meditation on old age, regret and loneliness.

When the opening scene features a car crash that focusses on the naked breasts of the dead porn star driver, you know you’re in for a distasteful time. This oh-so-uncool movie even pokes fun at Richard Thomas’ (John-Boy in The Waltons) facial mole. The film is set in 1977 – cue an awful, funky, wah-wah soundtrack that makes it even more difficult to watch. It’s supposed to be a buddy action comedy in the Lethal Weapon tradition. To be fair, it does try to be funny. Boy, does it try. Ryan Gosling turns every reaction into a hamfest while man-mountain Russell Crowe, here auditioning for the title role in The Incredible Hulk, effortlessly ruins every one-liner he’s given. Not that the script gives them much to work with. It makes the remake of Starsky and Hutch look good.

Obviously there’s a dumbed-down market for this sort of tedium because it did well in the States, but you’d be wise to check out the trailer before sitting through the whole wince-inducing package. One star for the female cast, especially Angouri Rice as a precocious 13yo who steals scenes like a young Hayley Mills or Jodie Foster.

If you’re looking for something relentlessly earnest, dark and grim, look no further than this version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play by director Justin Kerzel. The cast does its best with the difficult text but the talking heads soon bore, while the few battle scenes are drained of excitement by slo-mo and other stylised effects. Even the occasional Scottish Highlands exteriors are made to look dank and oppressive. The whole package, although undoubtedly well-intentioned, is completely lifeless. What’s meant to be tragic consequently comes across as merely dreary. It should carry an adult certificate because it will put children off Shakespeare for life.

This 1995 film about urban violence in the Paris suburbs is shot in arresting monochrome using a Steadicam that circles elegantly around the action as though eavesdropping on it. Yet the action itself holds little interest. The three social outcast leads are totally unsympathetic, although skinhead Vincent Cassel does show glimpses of the charismatic actor he would become. The relentless anti-police bias further distances audience engagement and dulls any message the film is trying to purvey about its subject matter.

In a complete misjudgement the film makers decided that the best way to film Tolstoy’s sweeping drama was to set it in a small theatre with interchangeable backdrops, using only a few exteriors. The result, despite the acting talent on show, is like an am-dram misfire cobbled together in a church hall. The hall is even incorporated into the play, as when Anna walks across the stage past a man sweeping the floor. Such a conceit makes it impossible to engage with anything that’s happening. As if that isn’t enough, the awful, incessant, cartoonish, orchestral soundtrack mimics and choreographs the action until you want to scream.

A dark mood piece marketed as horror but more disturbing than horrific. Its lack of narrative thrust, together with overlong static shots of expressionless faces, makes it a slow burn that requires patience to watch. But it certainly has imagination to spare. A group of odd women live on a wave-swept rocky island with their ten-year-old boys, who are subjected to mysterious medical operations. It’s an intriguing set-up but the plight of the boys, only one of whom exhibits any semblance of an expression at all, fails to make us care. Only the mystery remains to hold interest and you know that’s never going to be fully resolved. Not a patch on the writer/director Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s equally mysterious but wonderful Innocence.

This tense cops-on-the-make saga, in the tradition of TV series The Shield, has no right to be so riveting. Chiwetel Ejiofor, cinema’s 12yr slave, is charismatic as the chief baddie. John Hillcoat directs with pace and a sharp eye. The gifted Atticus Ross underpins the action with an insistent soundtrack. He should be employed on superhero films to wean them off John Williams-type generic muzak. Even Woody Harrelson’s stereotypical hard-bitten detective and Casey Affleck’s congenital mumbling become less irritating as the plot negotiates its twists and turns. The whole package gets better and better as the complex narrative unfolds, so much so that you may even temporarily forget Heat and LA Confidential.

Looking for an exciting period Japanese swordplay movie? Look elsewhere. Pantomime acting, laughable fighting and ponderous directing make Ichi one long, slow bore. Lead actress Haruka Ayase, playing the blind ace swordwielder, has little to do but look gorgeous, which she does brilliantly, but neither that nor Lisa Gerrard’s contribution to the soundtrack can save this one.

De Sica’s 1948 social drama is routinely regarded as a 5-star classic but surely only because it was the first example of Italian neo-realism, even to the extent of using non-professional actors. It’s hard to watch these days. Its influence on British cinema stretches from the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s to the unwatchable lottery-funded social dramas of today so it has a lot to answer for. For those who hanker after this sort of thing, there’s a surplus of slice-of-everyday-life dramas and documentaries on TV. We should expect something more imaginative from cinema. It’s enough to make you pine for some superhero nonsense. Ironically, such Italian films were lip-synched in post-production, making all dialogue tonally identical and destroying any semblance of realism. Truffaut rightly mocked the tradition in Day for Night. Thank goodness the French Nouvelle Vague arrived to reinvigorate European cinema.

An intriguing plot and, for a claustrophobic bunker-piece, more visually inventive than you might expect. Dan Trachtenberg directs with verve and Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes a resourceful heroine. Is John Goodman her captor or saviour? The film can’t escape its origins as a low-budget three-hander called The Cellar but it does remain involving. Its biggest mistake is its title, which for film buffs is a spoiler that drains it of much of the tension. When you know the third act surprise, plot attempts to manipulate audience expectations make no sense. If you can ignore producer J. J. Abrams misguided attempt to make the film a ‘spiritual successor’ to Cloverfield, it stands on its own merits.

The first act setup is good. The second act has some nice twists and turns, despite some padding out with boring backstory reminiscences and even a laughable musical montage of everyday bunker life. There are no great dramatic highpoints, but the air of tension is maintained throughout and it remains involving. The third act is both sillier and more exciting. It does deliver to some extent, but J.J. has already hinted at what’s coming and fans of Cloverfield may well be disappointed.

A watchable-enough, warm-hearted but ultimately innocuous talkie about a reporter interviewing a writer on tour. Jaded critics loved it because it’s adult, it’s intelligent and it has a few nice lines, but there’s no plot and zero visual interest. Feels like a grad-school directorial calling card. Note to Jesse Eisenberg: the giggling and stuttering are beginning to pall.

This is a movie of two contrasting halves. For the first 1½ hours it’s awful. The incoherent fanboy plot centres on whether Batman and Superman are goodies or baddies. It’s as ponderous and downright boring as you’d expect from a standard ‘dark-side’ superhero film. If you can get through that, however, everything changes. Just fast forward to the point where Batman at last fights Superman, because after that a new iridescent monster appears and the film takes wings. The resulting experience may be too much for sensitive souls for whom cinema equals social drama with talking heads, but the audio-visual onslaught is pure cinema, with kaleidoscopic images that are almost late Turneresque. There’s even a thrilling new soundtrack motif that’s the best since Terminator. It’s at this point you realise why Zack Snyder, director of 300 and Sin City, wanted to make the movie. If only it hadn’t come too late to rescue the film as a whole.

The poster and title promise a martial-arts extravaganza. Instead we get a would-be-arty affair about court intrigue in ancient China, filmed as a series of static tableaus. Some critics have described this as beautiful, but only if you judge it in terms of still-life group portraits. Cinema, it ain’t. 69-year-old director Hsiao-hsien Hou has never made a martial arts film before because he thought them too difficult. It shows. The brief action that he does attempt is ineptly handled. Never thought I’d say this, but one even pines for Jackie Chan to swoop in from the wings and add some zest to proceedings. Don’t be misled by the poster’s multi-star reviews from critics who don’t understand the basics of film grammar. Check the trailer before you fork out money on this.