Matt Bittenelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett direct Samara Weaving, Adam Brody and Andie MacDowell in this black horror comedy where a new bride finds herself being hunted down on her wedding night by the wealthy family she has just married into.

A high concept treat that does exactly what it says on the tin. As the poster promises you get a blood spattered bride turning the tables on the fucked-up elite. Like the Happy Death Day movies it is a pitch I should really love but there’s something in the execution that holds me back from fully embracing it. The scares aren’t quite impactful enough, the satire proves a bit one-note. Some decent gore aside, I’d say the strongest flavour is our game female lead who transcends type (a Happy Death Day comparison again!). Samara Weaving is seductively foul mouthed and raggedy as her nightmare night progresses. Despite slight reservations I should say the adventure reaches a solid punchline too. You’ll gasp and giggle in the closing moments. Very good but not quite a new classic.

7

John Crowley directs Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman and Jefferey Wright in this adaptation of Donna Tartt’s ‘great American novel’ about a child survivor of a terrorist attack in an art gallery, who stole and kept a valuable painting with him through his adolescence.

Opening to terrible reviews I expected the very worst from The Goldfinch. Rich people with rich people problems… my most despised sub-genre. Yet for most of the runtime I was caught up in its soapy machinations, its wealth porn furnishings and its cold, intriguingly hard to pin down performances. The acting is caged and guarded like a Terrence Rattigan play or an Ishiguro adaptation. This allows the emotions to fleetingly erupt through with pleasing destructive force when those preppy shirts and $300 scarfs give way, and also the metaphors to remain neatly obtuse. The Goldfinch is a film that doesn’t massively hold your hand as it unspools its secrets, shifting through timelines and keeping certain character’s partially glimpsed mysteries beyond the end credits. That is brave storytelling in modern day cinema, Crowley has already proven with his superior Brooklyn he has a masterful control when birthing these prestige literary refurbishments. I liked the Dickensian scope and brave lack of blunt explanation. It made me want to read the novel…. but perhaps in a decade when the more obvious highlights and turns have faded a little from memory. Where the film stumbled for me, the uninitiated casual viewer, is in the ending. A crime narrative is forced in, seemingly for a bit of trailer friendly gunplay. Then left unresolved. A character we like and are invested in tells the lead what happened next to tie off all the loose ends over coffee in a monologue. That works fine as a device on the written page but this is the fucking movies. A talking head filling in the blanks is something we should have been shown, not overheard. We have befriended our new, temporary narrator enough in the second half that for the spotlight to change over to him in the final twenty minutes wouldn’t have been a difficult transition for the viewer. He has always been presented as a ‘man of action’ and a catalyst for change in the story. To end on such an inert way does rob the film of a pleasurable conclusion, even if it ironically rings true with the boy child we have watched grow up over two and half hours. The ultimate point of the tale is fear stops him from taking responsibility over his life… I think? Maybe it makes sense that he is relegated down to a secondhand spectator for his own epilogue. Even with this stumble at the finish line… The Goldfinch has plenty of melodrama and beauty to keep you entertained in an old fashioned, grand kinda way. You can imagine a Douglas Sirk or a Nicolas Ray having a field day with this over abundance of material in the fifties.

6

Rob Cohen directs Vin Diesel, Asia Argento and Samuel L. Jackson in this extreme-sports-lunkhead-is-recruited-to-spy-in-Eastern-Europe actioner.

Pitched as “What would 007 be like if he guzzled Pepsi Max, listened to Limp Bizkit and had some gnarly tats around his nipples?” The answer is dull, cheap looking and leaves rising star Vin Diesel looking utterly gormless by the end set-piece. Die Another Day has aged better than this.

4

J.Lee Thompson directs Charles Bronson, Lisa Eilbacher and Gene Davis in this serial killer thriller where Brosnon breaks the rules to try and stop a nude slasher.

Messy and sloppy. Only really comes to life in the stalk and stab sequences and these have been done better in purer horrors. The cop procedural stuff is particularly weak and diluted. Mindlesshunter.

3

Claude Barras directs Gaspard Schlatter, Sixtine Murat and Paulin Jaccound in this French stop motion animation about a boy who goes into care.

Well made, well reviewed and well intentioned – but aside from critics and awards panels who is it for? Too stark for kids, too twee for adults and too naive for animation fans.

6

Adrian Grunberg directs Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega and Yvette Monreal in this violent action sequel where John Rambo rescues his niece from a Mexican sex ring and turns his farm into a Home Alone-style booby trap.

Average first act… average second …. Holy shit! What just happened to that guy’s face? Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill ,kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill ,kill, kill, kill! I still can’t figure out the physics or the anatomical logistic to how John Rambo fucked up that cartel member’s face. He… like… obliterates…. his face…. to the spinal cord. It been 10 days now… please someone tell me… What happened to that guy’s face?

6

John Boorman directs Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren and Nigel Terry in this full life story take of the King Arthur legend.

Murky muddy, paint red blood, glowing green backlit armour and pale pink perky flesh. Camelot by way of Kurosawa, comic book and folk horror. It is a rich film, tasty at first, off puttingly tart eventually, but then commendably epic and weird by the close. It bores, it arouses, it is laughable, it is incredible. You are never 10 minutes away from a painterly image… more often than not involving a vamping it up young Helen Mirren. The only credible bit of acting though comes from Williamson’s playfully obtuse Merlin. This probably would work better on the big screen or with the sound off as an art installation. Still I’d watch it again for all its hubris.

7

Mike Flanagan directs Kate Siegel, John Gallagher Jr. and Samantha Sloyan in this horror where a lone deaf mute is besieged in her isolated home by a masked killer with a crossbow.

Slick and undemanding cat-and-mouse antics. Not as smart as it thinks it is but with some keen splatter and tense moments. Siegel is a solid, mature final girl – a nice mixture of vulnerable and indomitable. Why doesn’t the killer break one of the glass doors earlier? Well, we have 90 minutes to fill and it is that kinda movie. Some nights there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that kinda movie.

6

James Gray directs Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland in this space epic where a career astronaut follows his long lost father’s trajectory into the far reaches of the solar system in the hope of making contact.

There are two ways to approach Ad Astra. A space adventure with set pieces that include a moon buggy demolition derby and a horrific side rescue mission on an seemingly deserted laboratory. These sequences thrill and grip, come with such a measured regularity that Ad Astra can be broached as a mature thrillride in the same vein as The Martian. Yet even these set pieces have a sonic and visual sophistication that suggest Gray is aiming for something more ambitious. For Ad Astra can also be embraced as a character study of a lonely, career focussed man journeying into oblivion and slowly revealing his psychological cracks and emotional needs. An exploration into the soul of modern man, distant from his father yet on the exact same track and overly aware of the inadequacy of others he must rely on. A portrait of modern masculinity in and out of a vacuum. I’m going to be honest, I preferred the beautiful big screen rollercoaster elements but here is a generous work of cinema that scores each way. Pitt is excellent (again) as the closed-off questor. Gray finally cashes in on his long promised reputation. His previous films have all been museum grade forgeries. Explicit Coppola clones without the heart, noodling around ground broken by a superior creative decades before. There still are shades of that here… Hell… Ad Astra essentially has the plot of the film owing as much to that vibe (retracing the steps where the last pioneer generation overreached) as it does Apocalypse Now / Heart of Darkness in space. Yet for such a stark, sparse experience the key difference is this 8th film by Gray is never boring or cold even if it operates within the same core programming as his earlier heroic failures. Something in the code has finally debugged, after 30 years of Hollywood indulgence he’s finally made a bonafide good one.

8

Paul Verhoeven directs Sharon Stone, Michael Douglas and Jeanne Tripplehorn in this sex thriller where a sociopathic bisexual author is accused of murder, and seduces the cop enthralled by her dangerous lifestyle.

Premium trash, gory gloss. A whodunnit where who did it doesn’t matter as everyone’s doing it. A thriller where the lunging attacks and impressive car chases are overshadowed by the mind fuck games and aggressive fucking. Every time these characters get naked or unguarded then they are in more danger than in any of the shoot-outs. Intimacy is the killer, baring all is the only way to break the other. Stone is brilliant here. Her Catherine Tramell; in control yet vulnerable, poisonous yet possibly innocent. That iconic scene where she reveals her noo-noo is infamous but pointedly that’s all she reveals in a police interrogation. She still holds all the cards, her attractive body is just a tool she has mastered the most obviously. Whether you approach her as villain or victor, she is never victim. A rarity. I’d struggle to think of another modern Hollywood film that presents such a complex yet teasingly undefined female character as this. The role of a lifetime. It is an undeniably erotic film… mixing lingering acts of sexual violence with high end fashion framing gorgeous bodies. Now, I’m not saying Basic Instinct is perfect. The ending is a slight fudge, wanting to have its twisty cake and eat it, and while there are a fair few dated wasteful moments that push it firmly into 1990s camp. Warts and all, this is a DVD we watch with satisfying regularity in the Carroll household. Probably more so than a lot of your wholemeal movie classics. I just have to hear that floating, thrusting seductive score and know I’m going to be enthralled and tickled for two hours. Jerry Goldsmith rips-off Bernard Herrmann yet it heralds a superb evening of neo-noir naughtiness. One so brazen, repeat viewings are mandatory.

8