Film Reviews by TB

Not even Jacob Tremblay can save this.

3 boys with their different problems within school bunk off. Along the way they deal with learning to kiss girls, handling drugs and speaking to each other in dialogue that kids that age would never say.

I lasted about 40 minutes then gave up. There was also another element to this film which is quite unsettling and does need to be said: for all the "life lessons" these boys learn, they are far too young to be exposed to these types of scenarios and it does border on fairly dodgy ground what happens on screen, and not in a good way.

Did you watch Inception and think "If only this film had even more unlikeable characters, a plot which literally would take 4 or 5 repeat viewings to in some way understand and scenarios which become so turgid and confusing, you give up caring or even feigning interest in?" Well, then Christopher Nolan's new film is for you.

When the ACTUAL cast could not explain even basic elements of the film concisely, you know there are problems. I am not even going to bother trying to explain it. It is a convoluted and egomaniac mess, where lots of explosions/action scenes happen, with various characters you don't know or care about shouting words at each other that make no real sense. The protagonist is called, wait for it, The Protagonist and even refers to himself on more than one occasion in the 3rd person. Maybe Nolan wanted it to come across as meta. To me and probably a lot of people, it just comes across as sanctimonious and stupid.

Most of the rest of the characters are in a similar vein: Kenneth Branagh plays a cardboard cutout Russian villain who drinks vodka & shouts when he wants to make a point; Elizabeth Debicki plays yet another beaten mistress (following on from her performances as a beaten wife in Widows and Night Manager;) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays someone from the future, or is it the past, or is it the present? Whichever it is, I didn't care...

Thank God for Robert Pattinson. He is the only person you actually are interested about and enjoy spending time with. Pattinson plays this role with more than a little tongue in cheek and amusingly I thought it was almost his Bond audition. His carefree & wisecracking Neil is the only real joy to be had.

It has to be said that of course, being a Nolan film with a massive budget, it looks great and the stunts are welcomingly mainly real (Nolan actually crashed a jumbo jet into a hanger.) This insistence on using very little CGI is one of the main reasons this film gets 2 stars and not 1.

But Tenet's problems are massive. It is a bloated, convoluted mess, a cold film with nothing that grabbed me or made me want to come back to rewatch it and work out what different parts of it mean. It may mean a lot to certain people, but I haven't met a single person who enjoyed or even liked it. Here's hoping Oppenheimer is a better film.

In 2005, The Jeremy Kyle show started on ITV. Despite the show in its first few programmes seemingly genuinely wanting to help people, very quickly it descended into what a judge called "Human bear baiting." People called up, thinking that their issues could be helped, but instead were taken in, split up and goaded by staff members before being put on stage like some sick circus act from a hundred years ago to be vilified on TV and then later YouTube.

The show only ended after the widespread reporting of a guest who took his own life. Following that, the dam burst and multiple people who worked both on and had been featured on the show came forward to detail their mistreatment at the hands of a programme who exploited mainly the most vulnerable people in society.

And the fact that this DVD has been published even further shows the naked exploitation by Kyle and ITV. A sickening & utterly immoral programme which thankfully has been condemned to the scrapheap, although sadly Kyle is still employed to give his "advice and insight."

Banned by the BBC, who originally commissioned the film, due to the (what was considered in those days) graphic violence, this still remains an extremely unsettling & upsetting film. Other elements such as disgusting racism & casual violence are also commonplace.

The film focuses on the new inmates to a borstal and their interactions with the staff and fellow kids. It is in many ways an updated Lord of the Flies, except the oppressors are also the adults.

As much as Ray Winstone is in many ways seen as the lead, I was most moved and horrified by Davis who should never have been in the borstal in the first place. The way this vulnerable & slightly mischievous boy is destroyed is heartbreaking to watch, especially the later scenes.

But as much as it is difficult, it is also an incredible production. The young actors involved, as well as the seasoned pros, all do magnetic work. As much as it is difficult to watch, this is sadly a piece of history which needs to be seen, learnt from and yes, enjoyed as great cinema.

With this film, following on from Lock Stock, Guy Ritchie cemented his reputation as the master of the Cockney comedy.

Often copied but never bettered, this multiple-plotline film takes in diamond dealers, unlicensed boxing promotors and gangsters. All the stories perfectly fit together and the humour is never bettered.

The cast are uniformly great, whether it's Brad Pitt or ADE as Tyrone. The slightly dated look due to the budget also really helps the film.

Watch this, laugh your head off, then rent RocknRolla, which was in many ways the continuation of this incredible universe. Just avoid Revolver...

This film is for many people Mike Leigh's masterpiece, a jet black plunge into misery, hopelessness and hell. But for me, it was akin to walking through treacle whilst being spat on.

The strange thing is that I am often a big fan of films/characters which are anti-heroes to the extreme, the best example being Ewan McGregor's character Joe in Young Adam. Anti-heroes can go, in my view, to far more honest and impactful places than a standard protagonist. But even they have to have some redeemable features.

But Johnny, the lead in Naked, is just vile. As in really, really horrible. You wonder why anyone would want to hang around with him and how he even is able to be tolerated by the people he meets. Talking in machine gun fashion, spewing out bile and judgement, he may to some be this incredible sage who is stepping outside society to critique it. But his own life and view of things makes him the most pitiful & squalid of anyone. And whilst he may in some ways acknowledge this, to then spend a whole film with him casting judgement on others is just repugnant in the extreme. The honest truth however, as shown by the film's events, is that what he is above everything else is a thief, either of property or other people's emotions and empathy.

The other thing which has to be said about Johnny's rants are that, as much as there is the odd clever thing he may spit out, most of it is just tedious, stupid and unfunny. The main response I found myself thinking was "If this society is so heinous, move to a monastery, give up all your possessions and become a monk. Then you'll be surrounded by people who only worship God, and as you practically consider yourself one, you'll have the perfect person to evangelize."

The other part of this film that I had a huge problem with was the misogyny. The film opens with Johnny violently raping a woman and then fleeing. But the film then shows him with women either throwing themselves at him or certainly putting up with him belittling them non-stop. The film's message seems to be that the women of this "world" are perfectly happy to tolerate and even find this way of treating them something to accept. At least Joe knew what he was and would remove himself from the situation, telling one woman "I am not someone you want to marry."

I gave up watching the film after about an hour. As much as part of me felt I should watch it to the end, the honest truth is I didn't want to. Leigh's London is not a place I wanted to stay, especially not to spend the entire time with someone who deserves almost nothing but contempt.

I so wanted this to be amazing. The trailer looked great, the cast incredible (especially Rami Malek coming off the back of his Oscar win,) and the actual story had the potential for something incredible. It was teased as a slow-building, old-style whodunnit cop story, particularly in the style of Insomnia, one of my favourite cop thrillers of all time. Amusingly, Insomnia also starred 3 Oscar winners and focused on an oddball loner weirdo. But sadly that's where the similarities end.

The film as a whole is dreadful. It is an unbelievably dated, boring and glacial trudge through a standard rote story. The biggest problem was the script, which is where the dated criticism is most poignant. The film itself was first written in 1993 and you get the sense that had it been made & edited then, it would have turned out very different and probably would have been inestimably better. But it got stuck in development hell and sadly this is the result.

And I genuinely wanted to love it. It does have a lot going for it. The cast are some of the best actors working today, but they are squandered. For example, one of the biggest missed opportunities was with Malek and Leto. The two of them have and can tap into such a creepy, idiosyncratic and unsettling energy that I thought a proper face-off between them, either in an interrogation room or out on the street would not only be phenomenal but also a given. But this never properly happens. All we get is Malek as the dependable cop who follows Leto and then when the two do meet face to face, it ends not with a bang but a damp squib.

And speaking of Leto, there is something frustrating in the way that he is portrayed, both in terms of his attitude & also his look. I know that there is a temptation in these types of films to make the suspect look guilty, but this is just taken to ludacris levels in The Little Things. Albert Sparma is every single caricature & stereotype it's possible to be. He looks like what a tabloid-reading, curtain-twitching paranoid middle-class housewife would imagine a man suspected of those type of crimes would look like. The only thing Leto doesn't do is cackle, look at the screen and scream in a high pitched voice "I'm doing these evil things!!! Hahaha!" And this is another thing which totally derails the movie: it is too ridiculous to work in a real-world drama and would even struggle in a fantasy/comic book world.

Washington brings the usual gravitas he can muster with ease, but again the film wastes him, which is even more criminal considering the first few scenes with him set up what could be a fascinating story.

The film is fairly competently directed by John Lee Hancock and does have some achingly beautiful night shots as well. But this cannot and does not rescue the film from its schlocky & slow path towards an ending with no real payoff and a movie that never manages to capitalise on the potential it had in spades.

Despite having the pedigree of Chan-wook Park directing, plus also the erotic thriller elements which I often love in films/adds real spice to the narrative, this just never caught fire for me.

I was at times confused, but then in the end just didn't care. There were double-crosses and the cast really were committed to their parts, but it didn't translate for me.

But, one saving grace of this film was how it looked: the cinematography, colour palette and mise-en-scene were perfection. So, even though I didn't care what was going on on the screen, at least it all looked good whilst it was happening.

A long, grimly lit and unfortunately quite boring film which never really goes anywhere.

Ewan McGregor plays a private investigator who is following Judd's character, a serial killer, and then falls in love with her, to the extent he starts covering up for her crimes.

As much as it is an interesting premise and Judd in particular is at times very enigmatic, I just lost interest in it. I did manage to get to the end, but the plot becomes ridiculous and the ending quite silly.

A shame that it wasn't more, as there was potential for it to really go to some unexpected places.

When Crank first exploded onto our screens, it established a type of film where a famous A lister (in that case Jason Statham,) would literally be put in situations where the most outrageous things you could imagine happened. Whether it was doing coke off a filthy club toilet floor or running around in a hospital gown with a medically-induced erection, pretty much nothing was off-limits. And because of that crazy energy, Crank was an absolute blast.

It is very clear that Jason Lei Howden has not only seen both Cranks multiple times, but also loves that world and wants to put his own spin on it. The biggest asset he has, amusingly enough, is Radcliffe. As has been noted by pretty much everyone, since finishing Harry Potter, Radcliffe has done everything possible to distance himself/go in the opposite direction to his most famous role. It is a masterclass in not being typecast. Whether it's playing an undercover agent/Neo-Nazi, or a farting corpse guide, his work has been completely unique and massive praise should be given to him.

But as much as Radcliffe is game for the different situations he finds himself in, the film as a whole is too clunky to really smash it out of the park. Whereas Crank had a lightness of touch which meant everything worked and zipped along at a nice pace, this gets bogged down in story and exposition, none of which I really cared about. There is a very funny and interesting angle in terms of the film posing the question "What would happen if all the disgusting trolls on the internet finally got their comeuppance?" But this can't sustain an entire film.

But it does in a weird way work. Radcliffe is good in the action scenes and as much as it could be schlocky, there was just enough good stuff to offset the bad. It's not a film I'd watch again but it definitely is an interesting world to dip into, especially to see the ridiculous situations the child star of Harry Potter willingly put himself into.

On paper, this looked like a riot. A superhero film of baddies, blackmailed and forced to take on a supernatural villain, with a director in David Ayer who has made some great films before. Plus, there was no 12A/PG-13 requirement from the studio to censor the film, such as in the case of The Expendables 3, to ruin things. And finally, there was the most incredible cast, including Will Smith, Jared Leto, Viola Davis & Margot Robbie. What could go wrong?

It turns out, a lot.

Unfortunately, it would have taken a miracle for this film to not have been a total and utter mess. The behind-the-scenes/production troubles have since become legendary, the main one being that the entire tone of the script/film had to be changed 6 weeks before shooting started. There was also a change in lead actor from Tom Hardy to Joel Kinnaman due to the delays. And finally, which has resulted in a petition to get the “Ayer Cut,” the studio took over the film editing and released a totally different version of the film than the director wanted.

I have to be honest though, irrelevant of what changes could be made and reshot, I think the film’s problems are far, far bigger. For a start, this isn’t a fun movie. It’s a dark, dank, turgid and glum film, which isn’t helped by the grimy look Ayer decided to give it. Unfortunately, this is another example of the world that Christopher Nolan so brilliantly created in The Dark Knight trilogy being copied over, without the other parts which made those films masterpieces. As much as yes, it wouldn’t work if the sun was always out, to be so dark and dank is also not something that lends itself to the lightness that the film is in many ways wanting to achieve.

The other thing which became so grating after a while was the constant talk from all the characters about how “They are the bad guys.” When the film has to keep reminding you that this is the case, but also is trying to be edgy and fun, it’s not doing its job correctly. It’s like the cast desperately saying to you with perma-grins “We really enjoyed making this. You should be enjoying watching it!”

The narrative choices also affect the cast and performances, especially Jared Leto’s Joker. In the end, for a film which so heavily featured the Joker in its trailers and marketing campaign, his screentime is probably around the 20-minute mark. Leto himself has commented about how upset he was to learn that so many of the scenes he shot got cut. When Leto is on screen, he really is good, but even he cannot surmount the script and narrative issues. Everyone else does their best and there are some great action scenes, especially from Smith. But saying these action stars are good at action scenes is a bit like saying Seabuscuit is a fast horse... We know they can be great, now please give them a good film to act in!

When you try to describe the plot of this film, there will always be bewildered faces staring back at you: “Errr so it’s about a successful CEO called Walter Black, who finds a beaver puppet, then has a mental breakdown, thinks the puppet is talking to him and then takes over his life. He is then alienated from his entire family and destroys his business, but finds the meaning he craves along the way...?” “Yes, basically.”

But this film is so weird and yet so straight-faced, that actually a lot of it works in a strange way. Gibson commits completely and utterly to this role, never once having an ounce of self-consciousness. The movie as a whole is also very well-directed by Jodie Foster, who also stars as Gibson’s wife.

But unfortunately, around the middle section of the film, things then just don’t work and start to fall apart. The premise, which just about held together up to that point, collapses. For example, there is simply no way that Walter would not have been sectioned. It’s all very well showing the toll Walter’s antics with the puppet take on his family, but any self-respecting and loving wife would have called the psychiatric emergency number to get her husband medical care. Then the final section, including a shocking act of violence, just pushes everything over the edge. When the film attempts redemption, it is done so nakedly and cynically that you just tune out.

But despite this, it’s still worth a watch. It is at times genuinely funny and maximum praise must go to Foster and Gibson for actually trying something new and really pushing the boat out. Sadly, on this occasion it was more miss than hit.

In the past couple of years, Nicholas Cage has had a career renaissance. Gone (for the most part,) are the multiple films churned out each year with little to no quality, with many of them really scraping the bottom of the barrel. We now are treated to films such as Mandy, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and one of my other personal favourites Joe.

But this film really is exceptional, for so many reasons. One of the biggest is that it is in many ways a complete rug pull from what you expect. One review I did read, which said it better than anyone else, was that many people would look at this and think "Taken, but with a pig instead of a daughter, but then becomes the furthest thing from that imaginable."

I am going to do my best to be as vague as possible, because this is one of those films which, the less you know, the better. But this is the most extraordinarily sensitive, delicate and emotional film you could imagine. Cage's ex-chef character, Rob Feld, lives an isolated and idyllic life, making his living foraging for expensive truffles with his prized and irreplaceable-to-him pig. Then one night he is brutally attacked and his pig stolen, emotionally destroying him. This sets off a journey to find and rescue his pig.

For many people, as referenced above, this is where they imagine that we get a full crazy Cage performance and ludicrous story. But this story does the total opposite to that and thank God. Because this film then becomes an odyssey through the underbelly of Portland, taking all sorts of turns you wouldn't imagine.

But the other thing is just how bloody emotional this film is. It is in parts so sad and makes you feel this profoundly. You understand, through the skill of Cage's performance, just how much he loved his pig and his life up to that point. Far from being a joke, this is a film of redemption and trying to carry on when you are drowning in pain.

And this film really does belong to Cage. He is incredible, moving, brilliant and perfect in the role. In this micro-budget film (so small that they couldn't afford a trained pig or do additional takes, meaning every shot was either the first or second one filmed,) he absolutely fills the screen with brilliance.

For me, the only reason it didn't get 5 stars was because sadly, there was some excess material which made the film that little bit too long, even at just under 90 minutes. There were also a couple of scenes that did go on that little too long, but this are minor minor quibbles.

This film is amazing, I loved it and I hope there are plenty more performances like this that we are to be treated to from Cage.

After Lee Tamahori had ruined James Bond with the atrocious, terrible Die Another Day, rather than be left alone for a while to think about what he'd done, he was immediately given the keys to another franchise, although this one had nowhere near the pedigree of Bond.

When this film was released, I remember the wall to wall terrible reviews. So when I was staying with a friend and we went to Blockbuster to rent something (remember those days?!) when he said this was what he wanted to rent, I was completely against it. Especially when there were many classic Arnie and Stallone films we could have got. But he was adamant that we got this so I gave in.

When we got home and put it on, I lasted about 25 minutes. If you thought Die Another Day looked tacky and gaudy, you're in for a treat. This film is headbangingly terrible, literally like sticking your head inside a washing machine full of cutlery. The CGI has this polished, unreal and totally alien look, which just gives you a headache. The performances make Tommy Wiseau look like a combination of De Niro, Pacino and Day-Lewis.

The only funny thing I remember of that night was that after I'd walked out, saying it was terrible, about 5 minutes later my friend came out as well and in a low voice said "Yeah that sucked..."

Back when Nicholas Cage was taking every script & offer that came his way, this was one of the films which sadly didn't really work, despite his best efforts.

The basic story of a mob boss targeted and his daughter murdered, then the desperate attempt to find and punish her killers, is a story as old as time. But this script is terrible, full of unconvincing acting and strange choices.

Mercifully however, and what gets it 2 stars, is an INCREDIBLE Cage freak-out at one of his henchmen. As you see the meltdown coming, you start to rub your hands with glee. And absolutely it is worth the wait.

When the ending comes, for many people it will have been a terrible film. But there are those little nuggets of charm that slightly elevate it above awful.