Film Reviews by Alphaville

This film exists for its set pieces and they’re quite something. The opening visual fusillade uses all the tricks in the filmmakers’ arsenal and is a wonder to behold: aerial shots, crane shots, wire work, bullet time… all seamlessly edited into an exhilarating action sequence. The insane plot catapults 17th century warrior Donny Yen into present day Hong Kong and concerns something to do with Shiva’s penis. But who cares when we have a fight in a blizzard with Donny outrunning an avalanche by using his shield as a snowboard?

In-between action scenes the film sags drastically with a ham-fisted romantic subplot played for comedy – never Donny’s strong point. Fortunately the next set piece is never far away and the climactic set-to on a Hong Kong suspension bridge is worth sticking around for.

Of course the film has been routinely dismissed as lame-brained by critics who judge films purely on content and prefer the paint-drying theatre of bore-fests such as The Assassin to pure cinema. Ignore them. Director Wing-cheong Law films with effortless verve. When Iceman hits the spot, it delivers style to spare.

This unnecessary and ill-imagined update of 1969 French film La Piscine soon outstays its welcome. If the original French film was languid and slow-moving, this pointless update moves at a positively glacial pace. A sense of ennui pervades both acting and direction. The plot goes something like this: nothing happens for the first 90 minutes, then something happens, then the film ends 30 minutes later. It’s all about the predictably complicated relationships among the featured quartet of characters but it’s impossible to care. It’s little more than a soapy potboiler.

Ralph Fiennes plays the only character with any vivacity, but he’s such an overbearing bore that he’s as much a pain to the viewer as he is to the rest of the cast. To warrant the title, there’s a lot of jumping in the pool of a Mediterranean villa, where most of the inaction occurs. There’s a clichéd local festival. A few brief flashbacks are thrown in for no apparent reason save to break the monotony. One star for the island of Pantelleria, which looks nice in the sun.

A 17th century god-fearing New England family are overly concerned about witchery in the woods in this low-budget fare. With a deathly slow pace and overwrought religiosity, the film will soon have your finger hovering over the fast forward button. The tense atmosphere is well-drawn, which seems to have won over a number of critics but, with apologies to a cast that does its best to animate the slender material, there’s little here to warrant a look. The Crucible it ain’t.

For a would-be scary movie it’s completely scare-free. Valiant attempts by an eerie soundtrack to up the ante merely begin to pall. In the words of Monty Python, it all gets rather silly, with laugh-out-loud scenes involving a devilish billy-goat (uncredited in the end-titles). At 88 minutes it still seems long. You know a film’s failing when the publicists resort to a misleading image of a naked woman on the poster to reel in voyeuristic customers (who will be sorely disappointed).

Iconoclastic director Sion Sono makes films that are either arresting or complete misfires. This one is deeply disappointing. The typically surreal story concerns a timid office worker who wants to be a rock star. His pet turtle has the magical power to make his wishes come true but becomes increasingly gigantic (in animated form) as it does so. It could be silly enough to be interesting but it isn’t. The music’s dire, the acting hammy, the so-called special effects laughable (deliberately, one can only hope) and the direction throwaway The whole package smacks of a director who needs someone who can tell him some home truths before he loses the plot completely. If you’re new to Sono, watch his wondrous four-hour extravaganza Love Exposure instead.

Be warned: this film is built around 13 (yes, thirteen) excruciating Proclaimers’ ditties and could induce fatal irritation. Apologies to all behind and in front of the camera but it’s all about the muzak and, boy, don’t those Proclaimers proclaim. Unless your musical tastes are so atrophied that you’re willing to submit your ears to painful mind-numbing singalong pub karaoke, you are advised to give it a very wide berth. Watch with care and keep your finger hovering over the fast-forward button in case of emergency.

A film about the end of the golden age of samurai films gets the golden treatment from director Ken Ochiai. The wonderfully expressive Seizo Fukumoto plays an ageing sword-fighting stuntman who strikes up a friendship with an aspiring samurai actress. In real life Fukumoto is indeed a famous samurai extra – ‘the man who lives for the art of dying’. He has been killed on screen literally tens of thousands of times, with his signature death inspired by the way Chaplin executed his pratfalls.

This is an elegiac film about a lost way of life and is full of poignant moments. There’s lots of choreographed sword-fighting on film sets to enjoy, with some scenes even recalling Truffaut’s paean to filmmaking ‘Day for Night’, but it’s the human drama that draws you in. The climactic fight scenes even pull off the remarkable trick of being both exciting and moving at the same time. This is a beautiful film that grows on you with every frame.

The good news is that this is one of Spielberg’s adult films. The bad news is that he’s overcompensated with laboured direction. Mark Rylance’s performance as the suspected Russian spy in 1950s America is likewise woefully understated. Tom Hanks’ usual lively performance as Rylance’s attorney consequently provides a welcome breath of fresh air.

The plot holds few surprises even if you don’t know the real-life story on which it is based. It does become more interesting when the ‘action’ moves to Berlin… after a whole hour, but that’s too late to pick up much dramatic momentum. Adding to the underwhelming package is Thomas Newman’s irritating score, which visits every cliché from military trumpets to plinky-plonk piano. You can imagine the kind of scenes to which such snippets add unneeded emphasis.

Described as a dramatic thriller, the film is rarely dramatic and never thrilling. The best Cold War thriller remains Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. If you haven’t seen that, do so.

Nearing his 90s now, the incorrigible Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky has lost none of his verve and imagination. Expect startling images, sweeping camerawork and sumptuous surreal scenes of epic proportion. Jodorowsky also appears as himself, talks to the camera, does voiceover… he never does things by half. Unfortunately it won’t make any sense to anyone but him (it’s about his childhood). In his own words: ‘Something is dreaming us. Embrace the illusion.’ Newcomers to his work may find it hard to do so. It ranges from deliriously cinematic through impossibly irritating to downright boring.

It’s his first completed feature film for 26 years but seasoned Jodorowsky hands will feel at home with scenes containing, Nazis, amputees, maggots… Newbies may well watch proceedings open-mouthed. Anyone for a full-frontal female urination scene (his mother’s ‘healing waters’) performed as an opera? If you haven’t seen a Jodorowsky epic before, perhaps it’s better to start with The Holy Mountain (1973).

Punchy drama-cum-thriller about a British squaddie caught between Protestants and Catholics during the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’. The mise-en-scene, aided by an insistent soundtrack, is terrific but there are two major downsides. Would-be exciting scenes are ruined by the use of irritating shaky-cam and the central figure of the squaddie is too poorly fleshed out and acted to make us care enough about his predicament. The tragic pointlessness of the conflict certainly comes across but that makes it a depressing watch. That may be the point, but the best war films can be uplifting, using the tragedy of war to heighten a lust for life. Nevertheless, a promising debut feature from director Yaan Demange.

Judged purely as a film, this is no more than a TV-style documentary with notable directors talking about Hitchcock’s films, together with extracts from the famous week-long interview that resulted in Truffaut’s ground-breaking book on his work. For anyone who loves cinema it’s nevertheless a fascinating document. Both directors were great filmmakers who believed, in Hitchcock’s words, in ‘pure cinema’. There are plenty of great clips from Hitchcock’s films to illustrate this, with extended analyses of Vertigo and Psycho. The extras, including Q&As with director Kent Smith, are also worth watching.

Of course it’s an important and worthy film. It couldn’t BE more worthy (in Chandler’s voice). It ticks all the politically correct boxes required to vacuum up Oscar nominations. Add plinky-plonk piano and swelling strings where appropriate and it’s a shoe-in. Judged purely as a cinematic experience, however, it’s more of an obligation than a pleasure to sit through.

It has one thing to say. The clue is in the title. It’s an in important thing to say but it’s rammed home again and again with no discernible increase in impact. The story is entirely predictable and overly precise direction robs even tragic scenes of their emotional impact. A less heavy-handed approach might have enabled the story to breathe. Instead we have an historical document. A one-note, episodic, polemical treatise on the awfulness of slavery.

It sounds churlish to say so but this makes it a less than riveting watch. Any film you can fast forward and dip back into without missing much lacks something. Everyone acts their socks off and the camera loves to watch them do it. There’s only one major exception: an intense whipping scene near the end, filmed imaginatively in a single take by a roving camera. It shows what the film could have been.

A minor made-for-TV unfunny absurdist comedy set in a small coastal town in northern France. It was devised as a four-part TV serial and its bland TV aesthetic shows. It unaccountably gained some positive reviews from critics who see no difference between TV and film but if you watch the trailer first you’ll know not to look any further.

This is a deceptively inconsequential little film that sneaks up on you until it grips. In the wrong hands, understated acting and precise direction can render the most exciting story bland, but here it serves to ramp up the tension. Director Saul Dibb sets a perfect tone and leads Matthias Schoenaerts and Michelle Williams (never better) are equally perfect as the German officer and the Frenchwoman (with a faultless English accent!) with whom he is billeted.

This may not be the first film to explore star-crossed relationships in wartime but it's a riveting addition to the genre. Shot entirely on location in France and Belgium, it is a beautiful, subtle, elegant film that has a cinematic aesthetic unusual for a director from a documentary background. Adding to its authenticity is the fact that the story was written at the time, in the 1940s. If the title means nothing to you, it certainly will after the poignant climax and end-titles.

It turns out that Prince Vlad (aka Dracula) was actually a nice guy who became a vampire simply to gain the strength to lead his motley band of Transylvanians against the superior Austrian army. Who knew? This is a crossover movie that wants to be an epic but is in fact a load of tosh. There's even a 'brothers' backstory between Vlad (an underwhelming Luke Evans) and the Austrian commander (an underused Dominic Cooper), which rips off the Judah/Messala dynamic from Ben-Hur.

It's all so earnest and downbeat, with unexciting cgi battle scenes and a generic orchestral score that puts a damper on everything. Even worse, we have to sit through lashings of boring melodrama as a simpering Vlad deals with his psychological demons. Nice ending, though, and this sort of thing CAN work. Check out the wonderful Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer, where Dominic Cooper really gets to do his stuff.

Another wearing effort from 'master Swedish director' Roy Andersson. A grim, absurdist, dry-as-dust comedy that is no more than series of formal, stilted, TV-like sketches filmed as single shots with a static camera. This does not constitute cinema. It is unlikely to hold the attention.