Film Reviews by Alphaville

Sion Sono’s first English-language film is even more unclassifiable than his previous work. With explosives attached to his privates, gangster Nick Cage sets off on his push-bike to rescue a woman from the land of no escape. Not that the plot matters as it barely hangs together from one scene to the next. What matters is the epic scale, surreal visuals and wild confrontations. For example, one monumental set has hordes of people trying to stop the hands moving on a giant clock to stop the universe exploding. You’ll either give up on it all after a few minutes or sit open-mouthed in wonderment. The final guns and swords climax, played out to a dramatic orchestral score, is a tour de force of operatic grandeur. It’s a divisive film not without many faults, but a Sion Sono movie is always an event worth catching.

Absurdist drama about a man who loves his deerskin jacket and goes to increasing lengths to stop anyone else wearing any jacket. One drab scene follows another as he wanders around in his jacket and talks to it in his hotel room. Unfortunately it’s not funny and it goes nowhere. It’s probably the longest 73-minute film you’ll ever see. Even as a ten-minute short it might be pushing it.

You’d hope a film directed by and based on Steven Spielberg’s early life would be full of wonder and insight about cinema, but those moments are few and far between. It’s mostly a bland family drama that takes a whole hour (out of an overlong 2½ hours) to get going. After that there’s some heartfelt drama among family members at last and a couple of telling cameos from Judd Hirsch as a black-sheep uncle and David Lynch as John Ford. Otherwise it’s little more than a vanity project with little flourish and disappointingly meh.

Another devilish, unclassifiable, remarkable film from Japanese director Sion Sono. Is it sci-fi? Teenage drama? Fantasy? Voyeurism? Gothic horror? An exploration of free will v determinism? Who cares when it’s this weird and wonderful. The gruesome, surreal opening coup de cinema, thankfully not shown in the trailer, is startling in its audacity. Things tail off for a bit after that as we become involved in teenage girl shenanigans (hence only 4 stars instead of 5), but soon we’re back among the action and plot twists. Not the masterpiece that was Love Exposure, but pure cinema. Why can’t the British film industry wean itself off social realism and make something as weirdly wonderful.

A sort-of Korean John Wick that never quite works. The feeble set-up has our trained assassin hero looking after a teenaged girl played by a K-pop star (yawn, yawn). But the main problem is his stoney-faced indestructability, which robs the fight scenes of any drama. There are a couple of well-choreographed fights – one filmed in a single Steadicam take and the final one against the main blond villain, but the long between-fight scenes really sag. It always seems to be on the verge of taking off but never does. In the end I got so bored with the hero that I wanted the villain to win.

Dull, would-be horror thriller about a girl troubled by an ‘evil entity’ (don’t laugh). If you’re hoping to see more of the devil-man who appears in the trailer and over the opening DVD play page, forget it. That’s about the sum of his appearance. Most of the film, especially the first hour, is just people talking. There are no thrills or scares and it’s not even silly enough to be funny. Final nail in the coffin – the end-credits are shown in woke order!

The latest thriller from M. Night Shyamalan is as tense as that opening scene in Inglorious Basterds. Most of it takes place in a cabin in the woods where a male couple and their adopted daughter are forced to make a kinda Sophie’s Choice: either one of them kills one of the others or mankind ends. It sounds preposterous, but so was The Sixth Sense and that worked. And we do get to see convincing apocalyptic scenes such as planes falling out of the sky.

The family are given this choice by a quartet of (very strange) strangers that burst in on them, but it’s not a home invasion movie as the incomers are not bad guys – they’re in as much peril as the family and have come to help them make the necessary choice. It’s hard to take the premise seriously and there’s no way it can lead to a satisfying climax, but it does hold the attention throughout with some tense and exciting action scenes.

You’ll know what this is about so it’s relief when the killer girl doll finally makes an appearance about a quarter-way through. Until then we’re stuck with its creator Allison Williams, who is one of those American actresses who speaks with an annoying vocal fry (frog voice). Fortunately things improve when the doll turns out to be a mixture of live action and animatronics that really works. You can guess where the plot’s going but the predictable climax doesn’t disappoint. (although the spoiler trailer does its best to ruin it by showing the best bits). The DVD offers two options: theatrical release or uncategorised, but disappointingly the only extra material the latter has are a few f-words that some snowflake must have objected to.

Yet another snooze-fest drops off the seemingly endless conveyer belt of British dramas that lack even a scintilla of visual imagination. It’s the kind of film that’s advertised by the lead actor’s brilliant/unforgettable/remarkable (choose your own adjective) performance. Just plonk the camera in front of him/her and hey, we have a film. This one’s full of long, drawn-out, static conversations that drain it of any interest, whatever the subject matter. Naturally it has been nominated for awards, which is probably one reason why nothing improves in the British film “industry”.

Always good to see a new Western being made these days, with wide New Mexico vistas and bad guys out to kill good guys. Unfortunately, and not for the first time, pedestrian direction from Walter Hill sucks the drama out of every scene. He shoots too close in, on one face or another, swivelling the camera around to mimic action. Most of the characters don’t work, especially the confused female lead around whom the story unfolds. It plays like one of those 1960s low-budget Italian Westerns, but with barely even a score to add some excitement to affairs. Compare with a much better new Western: The Old Way.

Superior plane-in-peril movie, both in the air and on the ground, given realism and heft by Gerard Butler’s authoritative performance and Jean-Francois Richet’s assured direction. Nothing ground-breaking here, but it has everything you want in an action thriller. Taut, tense and action-packed. There’s one brilliant hand-to hand fight scene filmed in one long single take, not dismembered into meaningless visual snippets as is commonplace these days. There’s also a great set of DVD Extras that go some way to explaining why this film really works. For best results try to avoid watching the trailer and reading the DVD sleeve notes and other reviews that unforgivably give away the whole plot.

The first half-hour consists solely of people sitting around having an erudite discussion about classical music, shot with a static camera. It mighty be of interest to patient music students. If you get through that there are still two hours to go as one longueur follows another. This would be more suitable as a play on stage or radio. It’s not a film. It’s an anti-film.

Must have been watching a different film from other reviewers. The blurb promises a ‘breath-taking’ origins story about a ‘young boy’ with ‘extraordinary powers’. It isn’t. It’s a plodding drama about a female psychologist who tries to help a man who can make things burn. He’s a sad, sullen victim throughout and much of the script is little more than a two-hander. Occasional simple cgi effects add nothing of interest. Perhaps a bigger budget and a more dynamic director could have done something more with the material, but what’s on screen, despite some nice fjord scenery, is a damp squib.

A cosmonaut returns to earth with an alien lifeform inside him. In an isolated installation in Kazakhstan our heroine doctor struggles to save him, herself and everyone else. Director Egor Abramenko keeps the direction tight and focussed, relying more on tension than Hollywood-style cgi set pieces. The creature itself is very effective, prompting some gruesome sequences more befitting a horror film. And the icing on the cake is a beautiful twist dénouement (no spoilers) that’s impossible to see coming.

Forget the “colour-blind” casting. This pantomime version of Dicken’s book has the cast ham it up like amateur actors in a student fringe production. Really? Do we need this? What’s the point? Director Armando Iannucci just doesn’t get film. He should stick to TV satire.