Film Reviews by Alphaville

This is a film in the tradition of Douglas Sirk. It oozes class, from the sets to the acting, but it’s painstakingly one-paced. Todd Haynes has previous with his 2003 film Far From Heaven. If you liked that, you’ll like this, otherwise you’ll be shouting ‘Get a move on’ at the screen. Everyone sounds as though they’re half-asleep and if you’re not in the mood to wallow in the slow burn you may well soon be feeling a tad somnolent yourself.

You’d hope a story about same-sex love and homophobia in the 1950s would pack a punch and have something relevant to say about modern mores, but sadly no. It takes soooo long to get anywhere.

Critics loved it, but they are forced to watch so much trash that any movie with impeccable production values must warrant superlatives. The more discerning filmgoer may wonder what all the fuss is about. You know where this movie is going right from the start so don’t expect any surprises, plot-wise or visually. Even the ending seems arbitrary.

Also, why do so many characters in films vomit to show they’re upset? Aren’t there more subtle ways for filmmakers to show emotion?

After the wonder of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity comes the procedural plod of The Martian. Matt Damon is stranded on Mars. Will he get off alive? What do you think? The trailer gives nearly all the plot away anyway. It’s hardly a spoiler to say there’s an excruciating happy-clappy ending.

The film of course looks great but, weighing in at over two hours, it’s literally brought down to earth by tons of boring expository dialogue back at NASA and endless painstaking references to mission time constraints. Damon’s efforts to eke out his supplies also begin to pall. It turns out that DIY in space is no more interesting than it is on earth. Who’d have thought? (Anyone who saw Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, that’s who.) For marketing reasons there are also some blatant pro-Chinese scenes that stick in the craw like product placement. And to make things worse, it all plays out to a soundtrack of old disco muzak.

Ridley Scott has made some great films but is due a return to form. This isn’t it, but cut out 30 minutes of boffin speak and there might be an interesting film trying to get out here.

After a brilliantly-sustained gravity-defying opening shot we’re into by-the-numbers fisticuffs in a helicopter and Sam Smith’s nails-on-chalkboard falsetto credits song (even worse than Adele’s in Skyfall). Then it gets worse. Didn’t Bond used to be fun? It plods along efficiently enough but it’s all so relentlessly dour.

Sam Mendes was apparently induced back to the director’s chair because of some backstory about Bond and Blofeld, but it’s of zero interest. Mendes comes from a theatrical background and can’t direct action, which is surely a prerequisite of a Bond helmsman. Daniel Craig is painfully po-faced throughout. Come back Roger Moore, all is forgiven.

Shorn of sexuality to assuage feminist sensitivity, Lea Seydoux’s damsel-in-distress Bond girl role seems even more sexist than Pussy Galore’s. All dialogue is instantly forgettable. Chris Walz, such a good baddie in Inglorious Basterds, is seriously underwritten as the villain. He has nothing to do but talk. In a lightbulb moment, the screenwriter even has Bond tell him to get on with it: ‘Nothing can be as painful as listening to you talk.’ Unfortunately, this is true of everyone. Never has a Bond movie had so much banal, instantly forgettable dialogue.

You’ll soon be ignoring whatever plot there is and waiting for a bit of action. The only action of any interest is a fight on train, but even this only make one pine for a rerun of From Russia With Love. If you want to know how a Bond movie should be done, watch Kingsman.

A slow, deliberate, TV-like drama about a man living in a shack in the woods in a post-apocalyptic Ireland. One of those supposedly realistic character studies with no soundtrack music to highlight drama or emotion. There’s a spot of nudity for titillation and a few baddies turn up to excite then disappoint. There’s also some gardening.

Disparate scenes are patched together with no sense of continuity while a hand-held camera alienates the audience by staying too close to the ‘action’ to allow any spatial orientation. In a moment of awareness in the DVD extras, even the writer-director describes the film as ‘a pot boiler in a small space.’ The producer says: ‘The story’s the star.’ Not here, it isn’t. Compare Slow West, a similarly simple-concept film but one that oozes drama and excitement.

You could do worse than while away a couple of hours with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte as they attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail. Nothing dramatic or hilarious happens but the scenery’s nice, the camaraderie is amiable and the witty banter is straight out of Bill Bryson’s book.

The film rattles along pleasurably with infinitely more feel for the American wilderness than the over-rated Wild with its overwrought backstory. In this film, hiking is actually fun! Three stars, even four if you’re in the mood for some undemanding escapism.

This is one irritating film. Reese Witherspoon sets out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail without even having practised setting up a tent. She’s meant to be ignorant, but surely no-one’s THAT stupid? Any bona fide hiker will find her a cringeworthy screen presence.

Storywise, the film is fatally hampered by incessant flashbacks to her druggy backstory. It’s all based on a true story, and one wishes our real-life heroine well, but it makes for dismal viewing. What is intended to turn the film into a spiritual journey of female empowerment merely turns it into a borefest.

The film doesn’t even capture the magnificent scenery of the PCT because the filmmakers weren’t allowed to film the most jaw-dropping sections. Pedestrian (sic) direction doesn’t help. A Walk in the Woods, about Bill Bryson’s attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail, captures the joys of hiking the American wilderness much better. In A Walk in the Woods everything is an adventure. In Wild everything is an irritating obstacle to be overcome. American critics loved it. They need to get out more.

It seems silly to say that this absurdist comedy doesn’t make sense, but if a film doesn’t stay true to its internal logic it loses its audience. It requires you to buy into so many ridiculous scenarios that you may well lose patience. It might work as a book, but the particular realism of cinema demands a more thought-through scenario.

Given that you accept the basic premise of a hotel where guests have 45 days to find a mate or be turned into an animal, it’s difficult to believe that no one seems that interested in finding that mate. Characters behave more like Monty Python characters than recognisable humans. Main man Colin Farrell seems at times to be channelling the ghost of Dougal from Father Ted. If only. The acting is so relentlessly deadpan that there are few if any laughs. Some critics unaccountably described it as hilarious. It isn’t. There’s also an intrusive, pointless voiceover and an incessant classical music soundtrack, presumably intended as ironic, that doesn’t half grate.

As a piece the film just about holds the attention and the director certainly has an eye for composition that deserves a better film. Unfortunately he also wrote this one.

If you like your cinema to show some style, give this a body swerve. Grainy, hand-held, fly-on-the-wall, documentary-style filming with no soundtrack music makes this portentously-titled film hard to like. Some enthusiastic reviewers have mistaken its lack of style for intensity. Don’t trust them.

The action switches between soldiering in Afghanistan and a soapy family back home in Sweden before spending the second half of the film in Sweden after the soldiers come home. It’s all very heartfelt and well-intentioned and tackles serious issues about the morality of modern warfare, but the in-your-face approach has been done many times before and alienates rather than involves the viewer, making it difficult to empathise with the characters and their situation.

Morality-of-war films have been around a long time and the excellent Good Kill shows how it can still be done. Judged purely as a movie, A War is dour anti-cinema. The trailer tells the whole story, but watch it first to avoid disappointment.

Director Terence Malick began his career brilliantly with Badlands then swapped filmmaking for navel-gazing. Watching this is like being forced to sit through a stranger’s home movie. It would be unbearable even on fast-forward. What happens? Good question. Mostly a boring couple and their two boring kids wander around boringly to a soundtrack of orchestra and heavenly choir. Oh dear.

For pre-teenies and retarded fanboys only. If you like Star Wars, this is the sort of film you’ll like. If you’re new to Star Wars, it’s nonsense. Anyone looking for sci-fi thrills, humour, dialogue, plot and drama of an adult nature, look elsewhere. After showing such early promise in his career, director J J Abrams seems to be going down the George Lucas route into juvenilia.

It’s a shame. The cgi is faultless and the sets are imaginative. Keira Knightly clone Daisy Ridley shows verve as the heroine and Adam Driver (once he’s allowed to ditch that ridiculous helmet) adds some much-needed charisma. As for the rest… All clichés are present and correct.

There’s an anthropomorphic R2D2 update for the pre-pre-teenies. Those silly stormtroopers, like Dr Who cybermen, kill and get killed as boringly as orcs in a Lord of the Rings movie. There are the requisite number of explosions and cartoon-like spaceship fights to zap through on the DVD player. There’s the standard Mickey-Mouse rent-a-soundtrack to bludgeon home every single beat.

Naturally there’s no real ending, because there’s still money to be made out of the next sleep-inducing instalment in this interminable saga.

For the first 45 minutes it’s a dud. Another dystopian urban Blade Runner future, recalcitrant robots and a downbeat investigator. Roberto Rodriguez whispers his lines in such stilted English that you may well need subtitles to understand him. It’s all so depressing, turning what could be an exciting set-up into a world-weary plod.

Then suddenly there’s a game-changer and we’re into a wonderful new film. Baby-faced sexbot Cleo makes an evolutionary breakthrough, the visuals become stylish, there’s a finely-shot night-time car chase and the action moves to a beautifully-realised bleak desert called the ‘sandbox’, all underscored by an exciting percussive soundtrack. Just when you were beginning to give up on it, everything begins to fascinate. There’s even some potted philosophy on which to ponder. Example: ‘Surviving is not relevant. Living is.’

The best scene, which works on many levels, is where Roberto teaches Cleo to dance to ‘La Mer’ (great choice of music, again for several reasons) and accidentally triggers her sexual programming. The plot builds to a gripping Western-style climax with the baddies in greatcoats like Henry Fonda’s in Once Upon A Time In The West. In all, this is a film of two halves: an abysmal first half and a beguiling second half that leaves you wanting more.

Avoid the trailer, which (as usual these days) gives the whole plot away.

Clint’s western was such a good film that this almost scene-for-scene Japanese samurai remake rarely rises above curiosity value. It’s not a bad film but you’ll spend more time comparing it with the superior original than enjoying it for its own sake. Perhaps this explains why critics liked it better than audiences. Ken Watanabe (the Clint Eastwood character) plays it po-faced moody all the way through and this is not helped by a mournful strings-heavy score. The other characters are varyingly convincing and so are the confrontations. Only Charles Bronson lookalike Koichi Sato brings excitement and fun to the piece with his swaggering ‘sheriff’ (the Gene Hackman character). As with multiple American remakes of Kurasawa films, this is a missed opportunity to match or improve on the original. Payback time.

A bunch of sweary charisma-free characters live out their empty lives in a high-rise. An ill-conceived grainy look adds to the ugliness of it all. The pace picks up when a sniper starts taking pot shots at them, and an insistent electro score does its best to rack up tension but, like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, it’s hard to give a damn. Attack the Block it ain’t.

This undemanding time-passer recycles the previous three films in the franchise. Dinosaurs run wild? Tick. And that’s about it. With production values as proficient as ever, Spielberg’s Amblin stable concocts its usual airbrushed thrills for the kiddies while adults might pine for something a tad less prepubescent. Whether the film-makers intended it or not, our heroine neatly sums up the whole affair early on when she announces ‘No one’s impressed by a dinosaur any more.’

The final ho-hum fight between peerless cgi dinosaurs produces a less than enthralling been-there-seen-that climax. It’s enough to make the discerning viewer close his eyes and recall happier times of a man in an ill-fitting Godzilla costume stamping all over a miniature Tokyo set. That was more fun on so many levels.

A blast of a motorised chase movie that exposes the Fast & Furious franchise for the macho posturing shell that it is. Forget George Miller’s first three attempts to get it right. This is a step up in class. Thank goodness it took 14 years to get to the screen as this enabled Mel Gibson to be ditched along the way. Tom Hardy is no great replacement but he has little to do anyway. The movie belongs to ice-queen action-woman Charlize Theron. The under-written Max is just along for the ride.

Almost the whole movie is one big motorised chase across the desert. Abandoning any pretence of realism, the more ridiculous and outlandish the action gets the more fun it becomes. It’s easy to dismiss as a glorified video game and it certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste, but this is proper show-don’t-tell cinema. Just sit back with Miller at the tiller and let those sweeping Namibian landscapes and glorious saturated colours wash over you. A feast not for the mind but for the senses.