Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

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.