Pedro Almodóvar directs Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte and Rossy De Palma in this tale of a woman retracing her life to understand why her daughter disappeared from it.

Whisper it but I’m not that big a fan of Almodóvar. For every decent Live Flesh or The Skin I Live In, there are a dozen of his films I find gratingly camp, screechingly histrionic and suffocatingly arch. Yes, even the Oscar nominated ones. But like the two just mentioned, Julieta is based on literary source material and something about that seems to anchor down Pedro’s worst excesses and force him to make a fine film. This one trades bludgeoning melodrama for quiet despair, catty farce for subtle but constant homages to Hitchcock. The opening segment is a mother and daughter twist on Vertigo, then we get a kinky Strangers on a Train / The Lady Vanishes interlude, while the excellent Rossy De Palma turns in a Galician variation on Mrs Danvers. Intertextual playfulness aside this more restrained approach allows the auteur to do, what even I concede, he does best; strong and multilayered female roles, gorgeous sex scenes and unmistakable eye catching colour schemes. Sonia Grande’s brilliant costume design in particular stands out. Accessible and pleasing.

6

Susan Seidelman directs Susan Berman, Brad Rinn and Richard Hell in this independent about a talentless young woman trying to barge her way into NY’s dying punk scene.

Made at the tail end of punk and just before the mainstream interest in US independents, Seidelman’s debut operates in the paragraph space of the two scenes. Working best as a glancing, over the shoulder look at bankrupt New York (squats, boarded up business, rubble pits where prostitutes lurk, ballrooms turned dive bars) like Stranger Than Paradise, Beat Street or Brother From Another Planet you get the feeling you are glimpsing a long ignored and forgotten Big Apple of squalor. The destitution and colours are hypnotic. The plot following the toxic relationships and fading hustle of Berman’s Wren is at times annoying, other times sympathetic. As obnoxiously as she is portrayed you hate the sad fate suggested for her in the final moments. Seidelman retooled this uncanny ability to celebrate the free spirited but blunt with Madonna in the superior Desperately Seeking Susan. That is the better film but this has some fascinatingly unique rough edges.

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Walter Hill directs Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi and Ed O’Ross in this East meets West buddy cop movie.

No ones favourite Arnie movie – this feel very much like it is going through the motions. Arnold is great in the role of the monotone Russian cop who is the Fish Out of Water in grimy Chicago (What is this? 1988?!) but essentially this is a rehash of Hill’s superior 48 Hrs. Entire scenes, plot wrinkle and characters are lifted wholesale from the better film. Belushi is given a little too much leeway and his ‘comedy’ scenes slow things down, he does the same schtick better in K-9. Having said all that… Red Heat is slickly made and would certainly be a decent excuse to crack open a six pack and order a Dominos.

6

Todd Phillips directs Miles Teller, Jonah Hill and Bradley Cooper in this “based on a true story” of screw ups who become arms dealers for the Pentagon. 

Like an equally bloodless The Big Short, this wants to replicate the absurdity and rush of some white collar crime craziness (tutting at the end at the behaviour it was lauding only ten minutes earlier) but never quite comes anywhere near the dizzying gold standard of its shared template: Goodfellas. In fact the only film that ever has managed to speak convincingly in that modern classic’s bold language is Scorsese’s own The Wolf of Wall Street. Jonah Hill shone in that and here he is the best thing in War Dogs too. From his girlish giggles to his glee at firing off machine guns via his long perfected schmuck grin when making serious bucks, he proves captivating. The gory cavity where any heart of the tale should be. When he is off screen things dull right down and numbers are thrown at us. A million dollar deal here and there; Miles Teller reminds us, for the seventh time, a few months earlier his stooge was massaging guys for a mere $75 dollars an hour. We live in a universe where the protagonists and writers and director and producers all think $75 dollars an hour is breadline poverty. Also one where nobody really gets their comeuppance. Teller has to go back to earning seven times minimum wage and spending time with his family – oh the humanity! At least he was the nicer of the two death merchants. We leave Jonah Hill’s obstential villian in his plush office possibly facing four years in prison – we never see him giving up his ill-gotten lifestyle nor do we suffer the pain of the deaths that happen in his wake. Only a epilogue scene, where Teller has an impressively guarded conversation with bigger fish Cooper in the aftermath, carries any of the threat or tension or genuine moral turpitude the rest of the running time severely lacks. Still, Hill continually celebrating any arms deal to some choice soundtrack proves diverting, if you go into this looking for cynical entertainment. Leave your ethics at home.

5

Nimród Antal directs Adrien Brody, Walton Goggins and Topher Grace in this late third pure entry into the sci-fi / horror hybrid. 

The dusty  1994 Robert Rodriquez script seems to have been written with a “wouldn’t it be cool if…” vibe overriding everything so here we have giant predators, alien game reserves, yakuzas, Colonel Kurtz style survivors, a variation on the original abandoned Predator design loloping through the trees and the supercool Danny Trejo all lobbed into the mix. It makes for an amazing trailer first and a perfectly fine film second. Problem is this wasn’t made in 1994 when a decent Predator film would have cleaned up, it was made 20 years after Predator 2. After two decades of radio silence, apart from the ignored static bursts from those dreadful Alien Vs Predator pair, this really needed to knock it out of the park if it was to reignite the franchise. The action is good but never really builds up a head of steam, the deaths mainly occur off screen (robbing the series of its trademark illicit violence) and Brody is the first lead you are genuinely surprised makes it to the end – he is clearly just not Alpha enough, despite a good stab from the script to suggest otherwise. Of a decent ensemble this leaves Goggins and Grace to walk away with the film. Goggins in particular is an absolute hoot in his death row oranges, ready to take on his killer compatriots and any weaponised alien shit that might come his way with psychotic glee and a homemade shiv. The Bill Paxton School of Movie Stealing has its first true Honours student.

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James DeMonaco directs Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell and Mykelti Williamson in this continuation of the dystopian night where all crime in America is legal.

I love The Purge Franchise. Visually inventive, unrelentingly dark and filled with full on bursts of violent mayhem – it ticks a lot off from the shopping list of a lad raised on The Warriors and Mad Max. This might be the least streamlined , least daring one (there is certainly not the gleefully expansive upgrade that occurred between so 1’s home invasion “bottle episode” and 2’s Escape From New York inspired city wide adventure) yet… but it still delivers exactly what the true believers want. We get masked up nastiness both glimpsed in passing rear view mirrors and leaping right up on us in immersive set pieces, we get several mini plots tee’d up (more like the first act of a disaster film than a sci-fi horror) at the start knowing that not many will end with their bubble unburst by the morning, and we get another serving from Grillo – possibly my favourite current B movie star. Striding through the chaos like Humphrey Bogart with an oilslick for hair has learnt mixed martial arts, any plot that has his him front and centre, gun out and calling people he has just bled out “Motherfucker!” can just take my money. More please.

8