Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

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.