Film Reviews by RT

Version I saw: UK DVD release (subtitled)

Actors: 6/10

Plot/script: 6/10

Photography/visual style: 7/10

Music/score: 6/10

Overall: 6/10

It's probably a bad sign that, when I came to review this film, I remembered very little of the plot, and needed to look up a synopsis to refresh my memory.

The story follows Momo, a preteen city-girl whose father dies, forcing her and her mother to move to her mother's rural childhood home. There, she accidentally summons three mischievous yokai (mystical creatures from Japanese folklore somewhat akin to fairies or goblins) who shake up her life with their antics, forcing her to confront her unresolved family and other issues.

It's a fairly well-trodden path narratively, but I think it owes most to iconic Studio Ghibli works including Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbour Totoro. The attempt, it seems, is to create a version of these stories aged up to the tween demographic.

Although Momo and her mother are voiced by fairly inexperienced actors, the three yokai are played by a selection of tried-and-trusted veterans: Cho, Koichi Yamadera and Toshiyuki Nishida. What life and energy there is emerges mainly from this trio of likeable, cartoonish agents of chaos.

The art style, tasked with marrying up magical fantasy with everyday realism, presents what seems an authentic portrayal of the Japanese countryside, but perhaps leans further in the direction of realism and away from the fantastical than I might have liked.

If I have one major criticism though, it is not of the film itself at all, but the subtitles. With white lettering and no border, they became difficult to read against any bright background, and impossible when the background was white, as it often was. To make things worse, they are dubtitles - the script of the English dub, in which extra lines have been added - so on some occasions we see a line of dialogue pop up into complete silence. The only way this can have passed is if nobody at western distributor Anime Limited bothered to watch the finished product before shipping it, and fraknly, it is not good enough.

Aside from the subtitles, I don't honestly think there is a great deal wrong with A Letter To Momo. If it has weaknesses, they are just in extent. On pacing, they erred on the side of slow and gentle. The human characters are recognizable and relatable, to the extent of being humdrum and mundane. The tone is bittersweet, but I might have preferred a bit more of the undeniable charm and warmth that can be seen at times.

The end result, though, is somewhat middle-of-the-road, lacklustre. I enjoyed the 2 hours-ish I spent watching it, but the fact is that there are many better films I could have been watching instead.

For my full review, see my independent film review blog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I saw: UK cinema release (dubbed)

Actors: 6/10

Plot/script: 5/10

Photography/visual style: 6/10

Music/score: 6/10

Overall: 6/10

Pokemon is a global cultural phenomenon and massive multimedia franchise, but despite being a Japanophile, it has largely passed me by, possibly because my family were more Playstation players than Nintendo.

For the 20th anniversary of the anime TV series, they created this cinema-release movie, editing together some of the key episodes and adding in some new footage that smooths out the joins between them.

At every level, the main contributors are all long-time Pokemon insiderds. The director is Kunihiko Yuyama, who directed the original TV series. Original writers Satoshi Tajiri and Takeshi Shudo are joined by comparative newcomer Shoji Yonemura. On the voice talent side, Sarah Natochenny has been playing Ash for some years, and the likes of Michele Knotz and James Carter Cathcart have ben there, in multiple roles, from the outset.

When it comes to Pokemon, the games are the core, and everything else is arguably advertising for them, so it should not have surprised me as much as it did that this film started (after the certification card, so it is part of the edited film) with an advertisement for a Pokemon toy, and ended with several 5-minute short films which I gather summarize the plots of the various games for new fans (i.e. potential customers). The whole thing was essentially a 96-minute advert!

Still, they do commit to it. The animation, while unremarkable artistically, is crisp and modern-looking, with new shots integrated smoothly. None of it looked out of place on a big cinema screen, and I could believe they actually did some work on restoring and cleaning up the 90s footage.

The plot is confusing at times, including a dream section that made no sense for more reasons than the expected dream-weirdness, and an apparent resurrection during the climactic battle through means I could not fathom. Would more dedicated fans have the background knowledge to fill in these gaps? Or indeed, would nostalgia for the characters and world carry them through? I don't know, you'd have to ask them... but I can believe it would.

What I, an outsider, got was a fairly entertaining, if unevenly plotted, child-friendly, ordinary shonen adventure story that did not overstay its welcome. Dedicated fans will probably get the required nostalgia hit, but I would not really recommend it to newcomers.

For my full review, see my independent film review blog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I saw: UK cinema release (3D)

Actors: 7/10

Plot/script: 7/10

Photography/visual style: 6/10

Music/score: 7/10

Overall: 7/10

Taika Waititi was midway through a meteoric rise when he made this big-budget effects-laden Marvel blockbuster.

To the already stacked cast he added fellow antipodeans Cate Blanchett, Karl Urban and himself, and brought the production to his native New Zealand for filming. Standouts include Mark Ruffalo in a surprisingly prominent role that makes this a stealth Hulk film, and Jeff Goldblum bringing his idiosyncratic acting style that turns out to be a good match for Waititi's offbeat humour.

While keeping some aspects directly drawn from the comics, Waititi and scriptwriters Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher L. Yost picked and chose what to retain and what to dispose of from previous instalments. Among the elements lost are Thor's trademark 'ye olde' phrasing, and love interest Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), although I am inclined to ascribe this to scheduling conflicts, given her return in Love & Thunder.

Visually it is very much a Marvel film, with crisp photography in bright colours and lots of spectacular settings and action. However, Waititi's wit and sense of silliness are also very much in evidence. Some have actually said this is a bad thing, as it undermines the tension, but I found it very enjoyable.

Thematically, the film deals with ideas around the reassessment of history and how to cope with disaster. I think it has more depth than many give it credit for.

I have not yet seen Love & Thunder, partly because the broad consensus is that it is poor, which is a shame for multiple reasons. I hope we get more in future from Thor and from Waititi.

For my full review, see my independent blog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I watched: UK cinema release

Actors: 7/10

Plot/script: 7/10

Photography/visual style: 6/10

Music/score: 7/10

Overall: 7/10

I'm going to say it: Blade Runner 2049 is better than Blade Runner.

It could so easily have gone wrong. Ridley Scott, the director of the original iconic future-noir, also created Alien, and that franchise has very much foundered in recent years.

However, it seems that the semi-legendary talents like composer Hans Zimmer (with Benjamin Wallfisch), cinematographer Roger Deakins and director Denis Villenueve have been careful not to rehash superficial elements for cheap fan satisfaction. Instead, they thought deeply about what made the original so loved in their own areas of expertise, brought that in, and then developed it with their own flourishes into something even greater.

The cast is typical of this approach. Harrison Ford is back, as is Edward James Olmos briefly, and another character who I will not specify for spoiler reasons. However, their contributions are pointed and positive to the story. Joining them are a selection of younger, fresher talent such as current star Ryan Gosling, rising star Ana de Armas, as well as Dave Bautista and Sylvia Hoeks whose talents and abilities are used to great effect.

Yes, it is probably longer than necessary, with specific scenes that could have been cut and others overextended. Yes, some scenes have a voyeuristic attitude specifically towards the women in the film, although that is less fair because calling out that misogyny is a key pillar of the thematic drive, and would not work if the lascivious eye were not there to be challenged. Perhaps it is no accident that the film ends up able to eat its cake and have it: if you wish to look at beautiful people like de Armas and Hoeks (and yes, Gosling too) and don't mind being implicitly and explicitly criticized for your objectification, you will certainly find that here.

Maybe I m the wrong person to make this assessment. I am exactly the kind of person who ought to like Blade Runner, but it has never quite grabbed me despite several watches. I can appreciate its seminal position and the many incredible contributions it made to cinema in general and science fiction in particular...but I cannot quite love it in the way some do. It never immersed me. The story did not fire my intellect at Blade Runner 2049's does. I like it, I just don't... love it, and that leaves room for a sequel like this to take a position above it in my estimation.

All I can say is that, after all these years, this sequel could have been a disaster, and BR2049 is not that!

For my full review, see my independent film blog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I saw: UK cinema release

Actors: 7/10

Plot/script: 7/10

Photography/visual style: 6/10

Music/score: 7/10

Overall: 7/10

Armando Iannucci's background is in satire, and he uses those skills in this farce of beta personalities and impostor syndrome at the very top of one of the great empires of the 20th century.

The title is fairly literal, drawn from Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin's graphic novel, on which the film is loosely based. Even in a comedy, a story like this has to address the brutality of Stalin's regime, and it does so in a couple of ways. There are literal scenes of mass murder, depicted starkly but with deftness that weaves them into the overall narrative. The rest of the film is also underpinned by a sense of peril, as characters dance around the knowledge that any move they make will bring them nearer to or further from death.

It is a very funny film, bringing comedy on several different levels: the surreal, the witty and the merely silly. The cast are drawn from the regulars across the modern comedy greats: main character Syeve Buscemi and Jeffrey Tambor from the Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam's close friend Michael Palin, and Edgar Wright regular Paddy Considine, among others. However, Jason Isaacs outshines them all as the brash, fearless, guileless General Zhukov, who (despite only appearing halfway through) dominates every room - and every scene - in which he appears.

If I have a criticism, it is only that I struggle to see much in the film that can be applied to our modern world in Britain or America of 2022 (although, having said that, the machinations at the top of the British Conservative party at the time of writing may bear some comparison). The main take-home lesson for me is an idea that, in their own hearts, even the people in the upper echelons of power know that they don't really know what they are doing, and are just muddling through. In a time when internet conspiracy theories try to claim someone shadowy person or persons play us all like puppets, there is some value in that.

For my full review, see my film review weblog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I saw: Sony Movie Channel stream

Actors: 6/10

Plot/script: 7/10

Photography/visual style: 8/10

Music/score: 7/10

Overall: 7/10

Tarantino can be great at his best, btu I have no patience for him at his worst, so I was not sure what to expect from this film.

A large part of what I noticed and liked was not actually directly attributable to QT. The legendary Ennio Morricone's Gothic-tinged score. Robert Richardson's excellent cinematography - both in sumptuous landscape photography during the external scenes and he unusual but effective use of extremely wide angle shots in the interior sections. The superb environment that is the Millie's Haberdashery set, dressed to the nines and oozing period atmosphere, into which a large part of the film's narrative comfortably nestles.

Quentin can certainly take direct credit for the script, which bears his distinctive fingerprints all over it. The sharp repartee is there in spades, but what impressed me is how much exposition it concealed. Often the baiting and backbiting between the strangers gathered at this isolated waystation allowed one of them to take up the task of explaining a plot detail for us without it seeming like an infodump.

It helps that many of the cast are Tarantino regulars, and veteran actors to boot. They know exactly where they stand with him, and have the experience to work out the kind of territory into which they have been placed. So, it is no slight on them to say that a lot of them are over-acting their pants off. This is just that kind of movie, and smart performers play up to it. They probably had a lot of fun, in fact. There is a knowing archness to the production, a little like a Wes Anderson film. It is also quite stagey, but in a good way - I admire the craft it takes to bring a drama to life using a very limited number of locations and angles.

The length of the film is a problem, though. At 2 hours and 48 minutes, it is not quite epic, but I still found that it tried my stamina. The problem is not that it contains unnecessary scenes; I cannot honestly say that I spotted any scene that did not need to be there. Instead, I would say that many - perhaps even most - scenes went on too long. He's done it before with Death Proof, although in that case he had the excuse that it was padded out from the intended segment of the larger Grindhouse project. Here, I cannot see that he had any such prior circumstances to blame. It just seems like self-indulgence, a weakness to which he has always been vulnerable.

The irony is that QT very vocally admires, imitates and celebrates a range of sub-genres and categories whose characteristics are formed by their limitations, either in terms of budget or outside interference by studios or censors. Given the kind of creative freedom he has, they would never be stooping to some of the measures in which he appears to revel.

The Hateful Eight is an enjoyable film, well-made and successfully delivered, and nothing else matters anywhere near as much as that. I think better, more disciplined editing could have resulted in a shorter, tighter, better version, but then again that was never going to happen, because it's Tarantino. That's not what he does. This is what he does.

For my full review, see my independent film weblog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I saw: LoveFilm DVD rental

Actors: 7/10

Plot/script: 6/10

Photography/visual style: 7/10

Music/score: 7/10

Overall: 7/10

At the time of writing, one of the films vying for awards in 2021 is Mank, a movie about those who struggled for recognition around the domineering persona of one Orson Welles. In 2008, Richard Linklater created another such film.

Me and Orson Welles stars teen heartthrob Zac Efron (fresh from High School Musical stardom), former teen heartthrob Claire Danes (Romeo + Juliet, Princess Mononoke) and Zoe Kazan, and yet the title role was given to a total newcomer, Christian McKay.

Linklater is one of the most varied directors around. His core is a set of films about the everyday, life-defining events from which ordinary lives are constructed. The Before trilogy laid the groundwork that culminated in (for me) the apotheosis of Boyhood, and arguably Slackers is in this category too. Alongside those, though, he has turned his hand to science fiction, comedy, music, crime drama, rotoscoped animation... an incredible variety of genres and media. Linklater knows film, so of course he knows Welles.

Orson Welles holds a privileged position in the annals of cinema history. Citizen Kane is often voted by critics and filmmakers as the best film of all time, and yet it is only one of a handful of Welles classics that redefined the medium. And yet, Me and Orson Welles is not one of those "films about films" that Hollywood loves. Or rather, not exactly.

This film takes us back to Welles' theatre days; he was a legend of stage as well as screen. Zac Efron plays Richard Samuels, a young hopeful caught up in the Welles whirlwind. Orson builds him up, gives him a prominent role in the play he is producing... but all while undermining and dimishing others, so that our hero Richard seems overdue a fall.

I am revealing very little of the plot there, because much of it plays out as you would expect. Everything revolves around, and is ultimately consumed by, Welles' whirlwind ego. And it takes a while to happen too; by the end, I felt little sympathy for Richard, when he faces the same fate as others around him, and yet somehow failed to predict when we, the audience, saw it coming a mile off.

This is not to say the film is bad. The 1930s were a vibrant era for New York, and the film does a great job of bringing this vibrancy to life, in its costume design, set design, music and more. The leads have bags of charisma too, and sell their parts well. We know (and knew) what Efron and Danes can do, and they do not disappoint.

McKay too fits the bill. Welles has been portrayed on screen many times, but often they amount to nothing more than impression. McKay's delivery of Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr.'s debut script is something more. In this film, the narcissist Welles is the arch-manipulator. His mastery of the thespian arts is such that he can make anyone believe anything, and uses it ruthlessly to his advantage. Even when he seems sincere in praise or condemnation, it could just be more dissembly from the master of lies.

I enjoyed the film. If it is a bit lightweight, it is at least light in a good way, tripping through that middle section where not much happens. It gets off to a spicy, snappy start, and continues intelligently with a sharp smartness that reminded me a little of Aaron Sorkin's work.

I feel like Me and Orson Welles is one of those films that flatters to deceive. As producer as well as director, Linklater has put together a slick production, with excellence in most departments. The ultimate point is not a facile one either: theatre is taken as an exemplar of all the collaborative creative industries, as prone as they are to domination by a prima donna. I am just not sure the film says anything you couldn't already have worked out for yourself...

For my full review, see my independent review on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I saw: UK cinema release (2D)

Actors: 6/10

Plot/script: 7/10

Photography/visual style: 7/10

Music/score: 8/10

Overall: 7/10

It seems that each Christopher Nolan film since Inception has seen a decreasing return in plaudits than the previous one, and Dunkirk is no exception, but there is still a large cadre of film fans for whom he has yet to put a foot wrong.

Dunkirk is his war drama about one of the most famous incidents in British history. Nolan depicts it using a trademark of his: non-linear storytelling. He splits the events into three narrative strands, each covering one of the theatres of war, and each set over a different timescale. Harry Styles is a soldier on the land, in events that take place over the course of a week. Mark Rylance is an amateur yachtsman drafted into the effort on the seas, seen over the one day. Tom Hardy is a pilot in the air during the most critical hour of the operation.

Here, Nolan took on a whole range of difficult tasks - managing the timescales, negotiating the challenges of filming in difficult conditions, and more - but on the whole, he makes it look effortless.

Yes, there is a bit of a lull in the middle, especially in the see and air strands, and I can slightly understand some viewers losing enthusiasm over this segment, but I was carried, thanks partly to Hans Zimmer's fantastic score. He weaves a constant ticking sound in and out of the soundscape that maintains and then steadily builds tension to a resounding emotional crescendo.

As all three strands reach their climaxes at the same time, I felt my heart squeezed, thrashed about, and ultimately lifted. As an illustration of a historic event to a modern audience who view it with some distance, Dunkirk is very good. As a nail-biting, tense tale of peril and inspiring heroism, it is superb. You have to focus, and be a bit patient during the initial build-up, but by golly, it is worth it!

For my full review, see my independent film weblog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I saw: UK cinema release (2D)

Actors: 8/10

Plot/script: 10/10

Photography/visual style: 10/10

Music/score: 8/10

Overall: 10/10

I saw mother! Right after Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, and even that did not carry enough tension to compare to Darren Aronofsky's most recent (at the time of writing) masterpiece. It sets out its store very early as a work made with incredible control and precision, so that the later descent into seeming utter chaos can be correctly viewed as a deliberate procedure, deftly managed under a turbulent surface.

The film seems to have split opinion to an astonishing degree, garnering as many 10/10 reviews as 1/10 reviews, and although I maintain that it is damn-near perfect, I can see reasons for the detractors. Firstly, there is a perception among some viewers that it is a fairly naked retelling of the Bible in a different context, with some seeing no greater subtext than that. I vehemently disagree. The Biblical allegory is there, but also an environmental theme - 'Mother' being, on one level, a version of Mother Earth - and an exploration of artistic creativity and sexual procreation as being analogous with each other. Everything is wrapped in a certain folkloric logic, as evidenced in the character names: not 'Steve' or 'Jane' but 'Mother', 'Him' (Javier Bardem), 'Woman' (Michelle Pfeiffer), 'Whisperer', 'Idler', 'Aesthete'. Not so much characters as archetypes. I keep thinking of more layers of metaphor and meaning behind every scene and combination of scenes.

Indeed, this could be a part of the problem in itself. If there is one level on which the film could be said not to completely work (and there isn't), it is the literal. People do things that seem inexplicable if you judge them solely in the light of what you would do in that situation. The film is deeply metaphorical, and that must be understood if you are to get anything from it.

Another cause of confusion is the star, Jennifer Lawrence, and her fan base. Starting out mostly in young adult work - aside from the excellent drama Winter's Bone - she has become inarguably one of the biggest, most bankable names in the last 10 years. Any kind of audience coming to mother! For blockbuster thrills would come away bitterly disappointed. The film is really one to confound the focus groups.

And yet she is the perfect person for the role, or the same reasons that made her a star: she has a remarkable ability to project down-to-earth humanity. In mother!, that ability helps anchor the audience through otherwise baffling events, be it the sparse, sedentary pacing of the start - resonating with those of us who are familiar with social anxiety, but perhaps less affecting to others - or the frenetic chaos of later scenes. Every scene is from her point of view.

Mother! Has been described in some corners as a horror film, and this has been met with opposition by its advocates. Well, I say it is a horror film, and anyone who takes that as a criticism doesn't understand horror. Mother! Builds tension - and ultimately pays off on it - in ways constructed using the tools of horror cinema. It may have few jump-scares, and little (but some!) gore, but what Aronofsky has put together would be very recognizable to Wes Craven or David Cronenberg.

The late scenes of the film are mindbendingly frenetic. Such were the narrative twists and revelations that I was scared to blink, lest I miss the next. It has a way of throwing you off-balance before you have even recovered your balance from the last shock, a visceral, heart-pounding effect that sent me out of the cinema drained yet euphoric.

My top few all-time favourites are fairly static these days, yet mother! Immediately took a place among them. It saddens me that so many are so critical of it, because they clearly don't know what they have missed.

For my full review, see my independent weblog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.

Version I saw: Netflix stream

Actors: 6/10

Plot/script: 4/10

Photography/visual style: 7/10

Music/score: 5/10

Overall: 5/10

By the time I saw this film on the second day of release, it was already getting very bad word-of-mouth. Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's original manga and the anime adaptation are both widely considered to be high-water marks of their forms, so it seemed an obvious choice for Netflix, and indeed only a matter of time, but...

Many of the changes it makes are entirely reasonable, and I have no argument with them. Transplanting the action to America, renaming characters, all par for the course. However, the more subtle changes betray that the director and writers did not have a clue what they had.

At its heart, Death Note is a competition of elaborate mind games between two beguiling but amoral genius psychopaths, Light Yagami and the mysterious investigator L. Genius chess, if you will, but with lives on the line. Director Adam Wingard and writers Charley and Vlas Parlapanides and Jeremy Slater reframed their Light Turner as a clever but awkward, emotionally wrought teenager. This might seem like an understandable decision, to make him relatable to a western audience... but that would be fundamentally missing the point of Death Note! We end up with something that is a lot more generic, and a lot more mediocre.

There is a lot of good and a lot of bad in the adaptation. Willem Dafoe is superbly cast as the demonic Ryuk, and some of the plot developments are indeed fairly clever. It's visually pretty stylish too, with plenty of visual flair that feeds into the emotional tone from the outset. On the other hand, the soundtrack is very cheesy, and there are some daft decisions regarding props and set dressing too.

To be good on balance, a film has to have more good than bad, and this Death Note adaptation simply doesn't. For every good detail or element - and there are plenty of them - it has something rubbish. I can't recommend it at all.

For my full review, see my independent film blog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno: https://cinemainferno-blog.blogspot.com/