Film Reviews by AER

Talk To Me comes with a lot of hype as 2023's most inventive and scary horror film. Whilst it's an effective chiller with a good degree of momentum to its plot, it doesn't have much to offer that I haven't seen elsewhere. Essentially, this is OUIJA in Australia. Unsympathetic and stupid characters populate Talk To Me, and there are a few plot holes which made me wonder, what's so special about this one? It's more gory than scary too. Mind you, if you're after a fast moving horror on a Saturday night, you can do a lot worse.

5 out of 10

Christopher Nolan definitely got better at making films (to state the obvious). I've seen a lot of low-budget British indie films and this is MOR when compared to some gems out there. It's taken me a long time to come and seek out Following, I'm glad I've seen it. Great end twist aside this is let down by uncertain and flat performances from a game cast. A curio nonetheless but pretty poor. There were quantum leaps made in quality when compared to Nolan's next film, Memento.

How he got a shot in Hollywood based on Following is a mystery, as it really isn't anything special.

2 out of 10

Set-bound with theatre-style acting of the broader kind, The Outfit suffers from uncertain performances, strange continuity errors, and a wordy script. Mark Rylance leads an interesting ensemble of American and British actors (with shakey American accents), and whilst it is watchable, it is essentially a filmed stage play. It's not remotely cinematic and the twisty plot isn't at all convincing or plausible. Characters stand around listening to others villainous or moral reasons for their motivations when a fast gun would have made it all a bit easier to swallow. I'm not a fan of Mark Rylance (who overracts) or Johnny Flyyn (who's always a bit wooden), so I found them distracting. Also Zooey Deutch's role was thin, and she was miscast. Sorry, I love period gangster movies but this one didn't work.

3.5 out of 10

Patricio Guzman's potentially fascinating documentary that blends subjects as wides as the extraterrestrial origins of water, Pinochet's reign of murderous terror, and the genocide against Chile's indigenous tribes of the South over the centuries. As a gateway to gleaning stories and information, The Pearl Button is a good start but at an hour and 18 minutes long, this packs too much in and you only get a mood flavour as opposed to a focused message.

Not arf! This made-for-TV film is a funny fossil. I saw it in the 90s at some point when the BBC was replaying a lot of these 'play for today' kind of TV movies. Better in the memory than today, the style of acting and delivery is that of Only Fools and Horses and On The Buses. It's not very sophisticated but once upon a time, I found this hilarious, which is the reason I looked it up. It doesn't stand up well enough as a timeless classic but it is fun if you want to see London how it was in the 70s, and to revisit a film that probably won't get streamed or even remembered in another few years. It stars old TV.Movie staples like NIGEL HAWTHORNE, MICHAEL ELPHICK, MAUREEN LIPMAN, GILLIAN TAYLFORTH, DAVID RYALL, JONATHAN LYNN, and in the lead the all-but-forgotten MICK FORD (SCUM and HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING).... WRITTEN by Jack Rosenthal (LONDON'S BURNING) and directed by BOB BROOKS (SPACE 1999)....

From the same team that made CUBE, this Canadian sci-fi has a lot of interesting ideas and ramps up the intrigue enough to keep you guessing the outcome. Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu lead the cast in this twist on the Simulacrum theory that also spawned The Matrix and Dark City. However, it doesn't quite stick the landing, and as it's quite a low-budget film, the ambition outreaches the abilities of the SFX team. It's very watchable but the conclusion is very corny and inevitable. Shame it didn't save enough of its originality for the final stretch.

Recommended for those that love small sci-fis with big ideas. It's better acted than Cube, but perhaps not quite as dynamic.

6 out of 10

I saw this on release at the cinema and over the intervening years so many people have asked me if I've seen it. It's a real small-scale gem of the type of film we see get made so rarely anymore. The cast is great especially Peter O'Toole (in his last cinema role?) Dog lovers will fall in love with the way the script and performances skewer what's great about being dog and the way it tunes into a dogs head space with out anthromorphosising it. Sam Neill is expert in this. It's a delight to see actors that you don't see all that often anymore in funny and rewarding roles like Bryan Brown, Judy Parfitt, Art Malik, Ramon Tikaram, and even Jeremy Northam (where's he gone?)

Great gentle fun for dog lovers. Some might find it old hat and too quaint.

9 out of 10

This reminded me of Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch in tone and its depiction of shady government agencies. Its situation in Greece also reminded me of Interzone/Morocco. I loved the ideas of future eroticism and the accelerated evolving human bodies on show and the also the mutation of celebrity and art. teeming with ideas and otherworldliness, I don't think I'd have been ready for this when I was a younger person. But this is peak Cronenberg, only he can pull off something this fresh and original. I thoroughly enjoyed it and expect it will improve on further watches. It was gory, and almost like an arthouse version of Saw without the vindictive/pious serial killer.

Recommended but it s clearly not for everybody, not even for all Cronenberg fans.

8 out of 10

Who would've thought that the 11th Saw film would be amongst the very best of the sequels. I may even be the best sequel. Just when it looked like it was all out of ideas, they made Spiral with big stars. It was a disaster and came across as a fan-made fart of a film... Saw X thinks outside the box and gives us something different (whilst still containing the gory traps that are central to the film). Somehow, they;ve made Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) semi-sympathetic by making his victims even worse than he is (by miles). But the film's strength lies in plain sight, it gives the most intriguing charcter, Jigsaw, centre stage. And Tobin Bell is a fine actor, and he recognises that this is his turn to shine.

It's a shame that the film kind of conks out towards the end and the pay-off hinges on coincidences rather than mapped out plans. But given that this is set between Saw 1 & 2, Jigsaw and Amanda were still early in the game and prone to making mistakes. They just claim everything went to plan at the end... even after they lost control of their captives. An interesting sequel. Not without it's faults, it's still very entertaining and stands out from the pack. Definitely an improvement on Spiral, that's for sure.

5.5 out of 10

I was really hyped up to see The Creator. In this day and age we are lucky to see films crafted from original scripts and not sequels/reboots/superhero stuff. However, The Creator, as amazing as it looks, failed to turn me on as the plot was basic, and the characters a bit flat. After Tenet, again John David Washington doesn't quite flesh out his protagonist, he seems something of a reluctant performer. I loved the child actress, she was very convincing but had little to do. I was remind of the films of Neil Blomkamp especially Elysium (they share a similar ending) who's work is similarly inspired by the drawings of Syd Mead. So basically, if it's originality you're after, go elsewhere, however, The Creator isn't short on spectacle and I;d like to see a return to non-franchise cinema....

5.5 out of 10

Interesting insight into the religious procedures of Jews living in 1980s Brighton Beach, NY. A young man David navigates teenagerdom whilst living with his grandfather in an apartment located with in a synagogue complex. This runs parallel to David's burgeoning homosexuality. It has an even pace, but the characters are well-developed even if the path is well-worn.

Sadly this film depiction of Harriet Tubman is very thin in the telling with an 80s-90s TV movie feel. Decent performances are scuppered by an endless parade of scenes containing dialogue made up of nothing but speeches and prayers. It's good Harriet Tubman's life and achievements have been turned into a movie at last, but this weak, dumbed-down approach to the subject was a mistake. All the more surprising that his was made by Kasi Lemmons who's earlier Eve's Bayou was a masterpiece. A let-down.

In a nutshell, if you came back for the fourth Expendables film, you must be a fan of the first three. They are fairly unique in their dedication to delivering wafer-thin action stories filled with lots of heavy gun-fire, hand-to-hand combat and heaps of corny dialogue. I've not even mentioned crap plot twists that can be spotted a mile off. Sadly I went back as I was looking forward to see Iko Uwais and Tony Jaa - but sadly a lot of thier efforts were squandered. In tight camera shots rendered a lot of choreography reduncant. None of fighting was seen in long shot - everything was close in and rapidly edited for crash band wallop, but I find that this limits the spectacle. Obviously this was the cheapest of the lot, they couldn't even afford anybody to write good jokes....

I look forward to Expendables 5 though as I still had fun despite the short-comings of this dorky sequel.

I'm sorry but I didn't know what was happening so I stopped watching around halfway. That's rare for me.

SPOILERS - Oppenheimer 5 out of 10 - As you know, I'm into movies I can get some emotional push and pull from and this one left me cold. OK, what did I expect from a business-like biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, the godfather of the H-Bomb? Well, a bit of coherence and focus for a start but this low-stakes drama seemed to want to ditch the scientific aspects and achievements in favour of endless commie witchhunt interviews which didn't turn me on at all. We've been here before but more interestingly in films like Michael Mann's The Insider, and Oliver Stone's JFK, only in Oppenheimer it never really comes to life. I would've been more interested if they'd focused on the moral dilemna at this story's heart - if the military are the only ones to finance your experiments to push the boundaries of known physics, how would you feel if your creation was used as a WMD? How far does your patriotism go? I found the film muddled. It wasn't so much that I was too daft to follow what was going on (for once), I just had the feeling that it wasn't very good at communicating what was happening very clearly.

Plus points go to the actors and the SFX... the bombastic score (at times is impressive) and the editing was superb.

5 out of 10