Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

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.