Michael J. Bassett directs James Purefoy, Rachel Hurd-Wood and Pete Postlethwaite in this horror fantasy about a hellbound pilgrim who kicks ass and takes names.
As an action piece this lacks thrill, as a horror it never lets its very well designed grotesques doing anything memorably shocking. Shame really, as the iconography is potent and Purefoy (who rocked as a virile, no nonsense Mark Anthony in HBO’s brilliant Rome) deserved a breakthrough cinematic vehicle. He seems overly subdued by this penitent, reluctant ass-kicker role leaving Rachel Hurd-Wood to do all the eye catching as the sexy in sackcloth, pure as a glass of milk, damsel in distress.
Andrey Zvyagintsev directs Maryana Spivak, Aleksey Rozin and Matvey Novikov in this tragedy about a warring couple approaching divorce, and their child shunted further and further into the sidelines of their battles.
I have been going to movies more and more with as little knowledge as possible about them going in. I’m avoiding reviews and trailers if I know I am going to see it already. I chose this based on Zvyagintsev’s previous grim family dramas. Those showed a relentless state system forcing hardship onto a family unit, this sees the family unit tearing itself apart with the state caring very little about them. It is a very bleak film, with dessicated driftwood and derelict buildings given more favourable lighting than tender sex scenes and middle class homes. A looming ironic eye watches the drama unfold, mocking the adults more concerned about Instagram and retaining their sales jobs than giving any attention to their doomed child. Doomed? The kid is introduced in a sequence that feels like a direct lift from Don’t Look Now, all ominous pools of water, primary red clothes and unsupervised play. Going in blind meant the dark unmapped routes this explores were genuine surprises.
Clint Eastwood directs Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos in this biopic of three Americans backpackers (two off duty military personnel) who subdued a terrorist spree killer on a European train, the heroes playing themselves onscreen.
A neat tribute to three real life John McClanes, there was a lot of audible blubbing in the matinee screening I attended when the survivors received their medals. The final twenty minutes recreating the attack are heart pounding stuff. Clint plays the long game here. He lets three amateur actors reenact the boring humdrum of their lives. There’s little excitement as they become friends, struggle in the military and flirt with other tourists and see the sights. But then in those desperate minutes, when they step up and awkwardly subdue a killer, a eureka moment occurs, akin to the finales of M Night Shyamalan. We have witnessed the very points in their lives when, sometimes only in passing, the essential skills, strengths and mindsets have been acquired. The random tools from their more everyday backstories come into play in those gruelling minutes of vigilantism. Clint makes his heroes ordinary, occasionally fuck ups. But his statement is all people are capable of being heroes, even if much of their mundane existences have led them away from these moments. It feels very much like a Guardian baiting movie; the kids have NRA stickers on their bedside cabinets, God and prayer and Jesus are intoned at regular intervals, the antique humour is that blokey comradely joshing you haven’t seen onscreen since John Ford’s heyday, the acting would struggle to make the final cut of The Only Way is Essex. Maybe Clint is laying out the harsh reality that if you were on that train, and the shit hit the fan, you’d want these average Joes with their untrendy politics blocking for you, rather than a lefty liberal movie star hiding behind his or her stunt double. As Dirty Harry says “Yeah, well, when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard – that’s my policy.” Politically I disagree, but this a very diverting case study from the opposition.
Lynn Shelton directs Keira Knightley, Chloë Grace Moretz and Sam Rockwell in this romantic comedy about a woman, who has always subconsciously avoided making big decisions, putting off her impending elopement by hanging out with some high school kids.
A female recalibrated Adam Sandler movie where the arrested development slacker embraces a compromise adulthood after leaning hard into sleepovers, park drinking and proms with the cool kids. The jokes aren’t there but the core cast have inbuilt likeability and great chemistry together. You smile enough to forget you’ve rarely laughed.
Krzysztof Kieślowski directs Jerzy Stuhr, Malgorzata Zabkowska and Stefan Czyzewski in this kitchen sink satire on a new father who becomes obsessed with making amateur workplace documentaries after buying a Super8 to film his daughter’s childhood.
A really neat little comedy. Matter of factly lampooning the artist’s struggle against the controlling influences of funding board, distributors, film festivals and award ceremonies at a sweetly micro level. As the initially supportive factory owners give notes and demand final cut and a poker faced Jerzy Stuhr destroys his marriage with his new creative obsession, it is delightful how much humour and truth is retained in Kieślowski’s wry human study.
Julius Onah directs Daniel Brühl, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Chris O’Dowd in this space station finds itself in another dimension sci-fi thriller.
Jack Ryan. The Mummy. Cloverfield. Franchises that coddle you in their eternal averageness. You’ll occasionally get a seven (Clear and Present Danger, 10 Cloverfield Lane) but you’ll never risk a disaster. Watchable, cruise control entertainment. This reality hopping Ten Little Indians has no design on being the next Alien, merely being satisfied aiming for the fairway ahead of Life or The Europa Report. And for the most part this is forgettable fun… the cast is mature, attractive and personable… there’s no flash Ryan Reynolds or Rebecca Fergusons coming with their movie star baggage and their guessable from the credits order life expectancies. And while it doesn’t pursue them to hard sci-fi levels of mind expansion, the hi-jinks that occur onboard are pleasingly comic book surreal. Once the survivors find themselves in an alternate reality that wants to cancel out the aberrations and adds a few new crew members to the mix the fun and games are pretty playful. Arms disappear into solid walls! Protein worms rehouse themselves into a host! A pool of water hits the freezing temperatures of the infinite abyss! The Final Destination style deaths are pretty, pretty neat. Only the hastily reshot scenes to shunt this into the Cloverfield Universe jar. On the whole this is the modern day equivalent of a direct to video treat.
Andrzej Wajda directs Tadeusz Łomnicki, Urszula Modrzyńska and Roman Polanski in this wartime thriller about a young Polish worker who joins the communist youth resistance.
Often a very simple piece of propaganda that is improved utterly by three things. An unsentimental, nuanced lead. A strong sense of visual poetry… especially in the sweet romance that unfolds. Thumping action sequences full of palpable risk.
Ron Clements and John Musker direct Tate Donovan, James Woods and Danny Devito in this animated musical retelling of the greek myth.
The beginning of the end of the Disney renaissance. There’s good… Woods’ and Devito’s spirited voice-work, the muses’ gospel and soul narration, a slightly more complicated love interest in Meg… but none of it is great, and it all certainly doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts. The Gerald Scarfe designed characters are unusual but flatten out too much in the animation process. Woods takes aims for showstopping shtick of the genie in Aladdin but isn’t given the gags, the plot aims for Aladdin’s fluid gripping action sequences but lack the kinetic sweep that made that blockbuster bust blocks. Why not just watch Aladdin instead?
Francis Ford Coppola directs Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Laurence Fishburne in this Vietnam war movie following a soldier’s attempt to track down a rogue U.S. colonel in country, to “terminate with extreme prejudice”.
“The horror. The horror.” This will always suffer from the fact I first watched it way too young and way too immature to in anyway appreciate it. That first time it was an overlong drag. Too little war, no heroic battles, dead eyed characters, no obvious narrative, eventually leading to a grim cul-de-sac where a shadowy tyrant quotes garbled poetry and a bull is slaughtered. Now as I’ve gotten older… via multiple rewatches and Reduxes, the legend of its unique production fleshed out by New Hollywood histories like Easy Riders Raging Bulls and making of documentaries like Hearts of Darkness… I truly love this sprawling beast. In its theatrical form though. The Redux just adds to the mess. The theatrical length captures the chaos and the beauty. The horror, the horror. It is a consistently iconic movie of drifting, feverish moments. Even a striptease USO show (look at those costumes – sexy, cartoonish, metaphorical… they were all just kids playing at war) ends in an misanthropic conflict, pessimistic spectacle.
I love how viscerally real it all is. Coppola built villages in situ only to burn them… all the Hueys and explosions and signal smoke are done in camera, on site, in the shit. You can taste every frame of Apocalypse Now… it tastes ashen and salty and metallic. I love The Doors soundtrack, and the electronic synth wail when there is no Doors soundtrack. I love the compelling vision of war as a purgatory… Heaven is the unseen, forgotten innocence before. Hell is to go deeper into the destruction or worse yet survive, time out, and go home. It was too much movie for a peacetime teenager. The eponymous Jarhead Anthony Swofford recounted how his platoon watched Apocalypse Now before being sent to Iraq in 1990 in order to get excited for war. I would have been watching it that first time right about then. You can get lost in this jungle, in this mindset. I was eleven, maybe twelve. I wanted to get lost in Star Wars, not real wars. This epic movie will always be playing catch-up because of little Bobby Carroll’s first gag inducing bite. Palette undeveloped, tastes unrefined. Too big a dish, a five course meal. I couldn’t finish a Big Mac then. There was no way I was ready. Not ready for the ash, salt and metal.
I love Robert Duvall’s Kilgore, restarting the movie from scratch, re-centering it entirely around his cocksure hubris and then disappearing back off again. “This war’s gonna end someday…”
Alexander Payne directs Matt Damon, Hong Chau and Christoph Waltz in this comedy parable about an average all American who shrinks himself to improve his lifestyle.
Is there any good director quite as hit and miss as Payne? He is either wonderful (see Election or The Descendants) or woeful (I refer you to About Schmidt or this). Downsizing lacks humour and form. The satire is obvious, the ultimate point and journey erratic. The only time the Friday night multiplex audience laughed was when the Vietnamese refugee love interest (easily a more intriguing character than Damon’s sad sack) said variations on the word “fuck” in a thick accent. I couldn’t join them on that but was glad they wrenched some pleasure out of this misfire.
