Film Reviews by AER

School! Who needs to relive school years? Even if you were vaguely popular, nobody's life peaked at school - it was never a high point. So here we have an amiable, utterly relatable story about an American eight-grader on the cusp of teenagerdom. It's a sensitively played if ultimately slight drama that benefits from excellent performances and an astute script. Well-played.

7.5 out of 10 - excellent if not all that memorable

Cool rethink of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers without the gooey SFX. A woman designs a plant that releases a pathogen to make us feel happier. The plant gets smart and evolves to ensure that humans keep them alive (because they cannot replicate organically). It's quite chilling and well-acted, but like those infected by Little Joe, something wasn't quite right. Did the plant just alter personalities to make people happier as was the design, or was everything all in the mind of the characters? Who knows? A film that keeps you at arm's length by design or by mistake, you decide. I'm on the fence.

5 out of 10

This new interpretation of JM Barrie's Peter Pan succeeds where others have flunked because of its level of visual freestyling and the high quality of child acting. It's an amazing free-spirited remix that gets to the heart of being a child and it's done in a way we can all identify with. When you're as old as I am you realise that the golden period of being young is actually so fleeting, really short (10 - 15 measly years!)

This is a new film that didn't really get a wide cinema release in UK, but everyone should check it out because it's so different from the crap that Hollywood pump out these days. Well, worth a look. It's a 12 certificate, so tweenies may like it too...

The trailer is magical.... Give it a spin.

8 out of 10

This promises to be the last film about 'The Essex Boys' and I'm happy with that. These films offer a morbid curiosity into the weirdly boring legend of Pat Tate, Tony Tucker, and Craig Rolfe. Actor/producer Terry Stone has left no 'stone' unturned in this five film series that has employed just about every British actor (at the shallow pay-to-play end of the pool) and I'm not sure I believe anybody when they say this series has abated. Mediocre acting, repetitive scenes, and a long running time make this a fait-a-complis. If you are still watching by the fifth film, like I am, you've got yourself to blame, Terry Stone and his mates are only fulfilling an appetite that they think exists - they are business men. It's still doo-doo.

1.5 out of 10 - Rise of the zzzzz

Something failed to spark in this reimagining of the Punch and Judy story - I'm not sure why I didn't click with it, but maybe I don't like fairy tales. it reminded me of Red Riding Hood or The Brothers Grimm - the acting and set production evoked thase two films for me. Well-acted, the story doesn't aim to provide us with anything interesting. Made in Australia, I could hear wavy accents all over the place. Sorry, this one felt flat.

3 out of 10

Resident Evil - Welcome to Racoon City only seems to exist to make the first series of films starring Milla Jovovich look better. I've seen all of those ones and there was something strangely watchable about them, maybe Milla Jovovich's gravitas and the variety of monsters and settings (alongside some snappy dialogue). This reboot has a few good SFX but on the whole its a lazy, sloppy retread made on a much lower budget. No imagination has been applied to making this; the script consists of everyone saying 'What the f*ck?' every five seconds (literally).... It's a cut-n-paste script. From reading other reviews, the director has made something closer to the game by recreating scenes, settings and POV shots, so there maybe something salvageable for gamers - but I'm more a fan of the old films....

Most disappointing of all is that it's boring - by reintroducing game/name characters like Clare Redfield and Wesker played by vacant actors, this is DOA. Let's hope this one is forgotten about quickly and no sequels ordered from above.

Rancid and avoidable.

Minus 1 out of 10

Ray Burdis returns with a pitiful comedy that features many of the cast of Quadrophenia. Leaning heavily into mod culture, this is a shoddy rush job which is unfunny, badly acted and an embarrassment for all concerned. It's very amateurish compared to Burdis' The Wee Man, and even his older films like Love, Honour and Obey... One to avoid like roadkill for dinner.

0.5 out of 10

Will Smith and the stunning tennis on offer are the reasons to see this. Surrounded by a fantastic ensemble cast playing his family which includes Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton as two of the greatest tennis players of all time, Serena and Venus Williams. Aujane Ellis plays the mother of this outstanding family in a biopic the details the lengths her husband, Richard Williams will go to ensure their daughters (all five) have a much better shot at life than he ever had. It's stirring stuff as Will Smith doesn't portray RIchard as an likeable man - he's mercenary and calculated to the exclusion of much else except for a shining love for his family. It's the performances and the characterisation that elavtes this above the standard sporting biopic. The end match seems to go on for about a day, making the film slow to halt at the end - another negative is that the dramatic score doesn't shut up for a second. Even Will Smith pouring a glass of milk gets an orchestra!

Good performances, but it's not going to change the way films like this are made. In that respect, it's quite pedestrian.

Watch it for Will. His very best role in years.

6 out of 10

Terry Gilliam's films are always chaotic. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is completely bonkers, visually amazing, and endlessly creative. I hadn't seen it before and loved every second of this utterly nuts cacophony of mad ideas, gargantuan sets and wild casting - John Neville, Sarah Polley, Robin Williams, Eric Idle, Jack Purvis, Uma Thurman, Oliver Reed, Jonathan Pryce, Bill Paterson, Sting!!, and Alison Steadman... Loved it.

Ghostbusters 4 - Afterlife may put the tormented souls of 2 and 3 to rest but this is because it plays a very safe game - It's 100 % fan service. So well-versed are Hollywood-execs at producing films that answer to internet speculation and spoiler-addicted fans, this Ghostbusters entry offers the viewer nothing new. Imagine Super-8 (or Stranger Things) thrown into a blender with Ghostbusters 1 and you're there (and you've probably used about the same amount of imagination as the execs who created this). In playing it safe, the film is actually entertaining and occasionally funny. It's light entertainment and has some fab SFX - it's streets better than Ghostbuster 2 and 3, so at least this does well to re-align the series and make it watchable. The first film casts a very long shadow over this one, and as a consequence, it will end up being fairly unmemorable which is a shame because the error teaser trailer promised us something a bit deeper, a bit more interesting, and like the original something unique. To these ends it barely scrapes a pass mark.

5.5 out of 10

It's an interesting film where you can't warm to the characters but not through any fault of the movie. The performances are uniformly excellent in this film about a Canvey Island family that centres around an anorexic woman struggling with drug addiction and her re-assimilation back into family life. The characters are brittle, unlikeable, and all too real in this slice of life that rarely gets shown with a straight face in cinema. It shows that anorexia is not just a teenage problem and it also shows the effects that such an affliction can have on your life. Tough to watch at times, it's only downside is that it juggles a few too many plot points to fully process the level of emotion coming through, and also some of the directorial flourishes are a bit unwelcome. It's a brave film and a unique one.

Well-acted, fast-moving and predictable, Ingrid Goes West capitalises on the cult appeal of Aubrey Plaza. It's a telling satire for our times where social media rules everything. This is a comedy about a young woman's obsession with an IG influencer to the extent that she moves to LA and infiltrates her life. Only we (the viewer) see how vapid and fake the influencer (played by Elisabeth Olsen) is. It's funny, and light offering moments of troubling drama. It's a sharp tack in with all the vapid Mean Girls clones.... Worth a one-off watch.

6 out of 10

It's a great shame that Christopher Smith, one of the UK's best and most original film directors, has delivered such an incoherent horror/ghost story. There is none of his usual flair, ability to shock, or imagination at play in The Banishing. It's just trundles about, wallowing in cliches, played-out jump scares, and tropes we've got tired of 20 years ago. Also this contains terminally bad child acting too, which wrecks the films authenticity from the start. Sadly, this is boring, slow, and difficult to follow (maybe because it is so repetitive) or it's just badly edited and written. A big shame as Creep, Severance, Black Death, and Triangle are all ace. The director halts one of the best runs by a British film director - please don't banish him though, this could be a blip!

2 out of 10 - dull, unscary, and unoriginal.

There is no better time to see Summer of Soul, it's a fantastic musical odyssey and document of a forgotten music festival that took place in Harlem, NY in 1969. What a year that was too! I think the DVD will be chocka with extras, I saw it at the cinema and it was a whistle-stop tour of the live performances interspersed with people that attended, the performers, and famous NY-based music enthusiasts. Directed by member of The Roots, Queslove, a renowned record collector and memorabilia fiend, he's perhaps the best qualified to put this material together in some semblance of order. It works as a good gateway to the black experience in 60s America, but if you are well-versed in the history already there's enough fresh material on show through the superb gig footage.

6 out of 10 - Inspiring and thank goodness it's been restored and shared at last!

Jessica Hausner's Hotel is a superb, chilling little film about a young woman, Irene (Franziska Weisz) who has just begun a new job at a hotel in the Austrian Alps. She has replaced a girl called Eva who went missing, and the police are still investigating the mystery. However, this perceptive woman begins to pick up on some peculiar vibes and odd occurrences seem to stalk her.

The atmospherics are subtle but there is a lot of suggestion that there could be a murderer or something supernatural at play. The film lets you decide, as right up until it's non-ending, it had me gripped. The ending felt like a cop-out though - this one is about the journey. Wonderful performances all round - especially from Weisz.

7 out of 10