The Children Act

This Ian McEwan adaptation gives Emma Thompson the best solo vehicle she’s had in a while, as a Chidren’s court judge who finds her marriage collapsing as she adjudicates for a young Jehovah’s witness boy whose life requires a blood transfusion, something his religion forbids. It feels in some ways like a companion piece to McEwan’s earlier work, Enduring Love – a look at the costs and obligations an apparent act of kindness can impose on someone. And Thompson serves the film well – giving away the emotional tempest that hides under a judicial exterior. But there is a tendency here to play things so emotionally restrained that everything stays at a slight distance – Thompson’s character is so determined to not have the emotional conversation and engagement she clearly needs to have with the people around her. And put next to the pure warmth of Stanley Tucci whose every step shows how ready he is to accept her if she’ll just lower the barriers slightly, the very English resolve gets incredibly frustrating. There are some decent supporting performances here – Jason Watkins, in particular, steals scenes wholesale with a glance as Thompson’s clerk – but this never quite goes beyond a theoretical exercise in moral dilemmas into something more emotionally accessible.

Widows

This is a thick pulp-crime genre piece packed with interest. Three women left behind after their criminal husbands die in a robbery gone wrong, all desperate to get a piece of a five million dollar plan their husbands left behind, find themselves up against rival gangsters and Chicago politics at its most venal. Led by a powerhouse Viola Davis, determined and tough, there’s a great ensemble cast here all playing in top gear (Michelle Roduiguez hasn’t been served material this meaty since her debut in “Girlfight”, and Elizabeth Debecki finally gets her breakthrough from “interesting bit of the supporting cast” to something far more central, this is probably the best Colin Farrell’s been with an American accent, Brian Tyrese Henry brings an intimidating authority and Daniel Kaluyaa a terrifying stillness). Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn have rewritten Lyda LaPlant’s pulp 80s miniseries into an exploration of class, gender, race and power as they come up against each other in a crime movie that serves both the pulpy pleasures, a whole lot of emotional thoughtfulness and a playing out of wider social forces against a group of very distinctive individuals. I’d hoped this would be interesting. I got something that delighted me all the way through to the final shot. Absolutely recommended.

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Another attempt for Disney to raid the archive for themes they can use for live action movies, “Nutcracker and the Four Realms” imposes a period fantasy narrative on the Tchaikovsky ballet previously featured in “Fantasia” to mixed results. This has the same girl-coming-of-age-enters-a-damaged-fantasy-land-that-she-can-repair dynamics as the recent “Alice in Wonderland” live action film, and while it’s nice to have a fantasy land that’s Russian-themed (and exposition via ballet), this still sits somewhere below a skilful recreation. Mackenzie Foy has all the externals that a good girl heroine should (she’s inventive and brave and succeeds by her wits far more than any physical skills), but she’s a little stodgy. The supporting cast has a few entertaining turns – in particular, Keira Knightley grabs the opportunity to turn her performance up to 11 as a delightfully hammy Sugar Plum Fairy – silly, sultry and far more exciting than I’ve seen Knightley be previously. But this doesn’t quite make it as quality family entertainment – it’s all a little too desperate to fit into the mould of what’s worked previously, and just not enough fun when Knightley’s not on screen.

Anna and the Apocalypse

This Scottish-High-School-Christmas-Zombie-Musical is a fun little entertainment – the story of a girl about to leave her small country town to see the world when one Christmas the zombie apocalypse threatens her friends and family, it combines gleeful songs and choreography with splatter and gore in a mix that is frequently joyously irresistible. If the fun starts to pall towards the end as the film attempts a more serious emotional resolution (and a key human villain ends up being somewhat overacted), and it possibly ends up slightly less than the sum of its parts, there’s still a lot of parts that put a smile on the face. Yes, having two of the characters blissfully celebrate the season while oblivious to the undead lurching in the background is gag not unlike one of “Shaun of the Dead”s most memorable sequences, but if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. And perhaps the songs are a mixed bag, with a few too many wannabe power ballads near the end. But there’s enough here to bring a reasonable amount of seasonal joy.

Overlord

A team of soldiers parachute into Nazi-occupied territory to take down a transmitter. In the storm of battle, they discover something far worse – secret experiments the Nazis have been conducting that could change the war forever. This hybrid of war movie and horror movie is familiar stuff, though done with a reasonable amount of polish. It tends to work better as a war movie, particularly in the first ten-fifteen minutes as the paratroopers fly over Europe under heavy fire and then jump into danger, then later on, as the monstrous experiments are pretty familiar iconography at this point and the squad of soldiers never quite transcend their stereotypes of “the jewish one”, “The Italian one” etc. But while it doesn’t exactly innovate or surprise, it’s still effective in hitting the familiar notes and getting the familiar thrills and action.

I used to be normal: A Boyband Fangirl's story

Four different women of four different era declare their love of boybands. Through the Beatles, Take That, Backstreet Boys and One Direction, we get the sense of how deep and primal the appeal of a decently non-threatening set of boys with interesting haircuts can be.

Things that are targeted directly at a female audience tend, by and large, to get more pop-cultural mockery than things that are targeted directly at a male audience. And there’s no essential reason why this should be so. Yes, it’s undoubtedly true that a lot of it has some pretty heinous views about gender roles, wildly vague and nonsensical lyrics, and is shallow as all get out, but can you really say male-targeted popular culture doesn’t suffer from some of the same issues? This documentary does the admirable thing of taking all four women seriously (yes, even the wildly screaming teenage One Direction fan who gives the documentary its title) – but it also uses that serious access to ask the question – what do they get out of their fandom, what do they read into it, how does that relate to the rest of their life, and where does this lead them. The film’s clearly made over a number of years, meaning we see fandoms develop and morph as different stages of life approach these women, and this gives this an element of something like the “Up” series, as you get a genuine sense of life being lived on camera. It’s warm and happy and sweet-natured and thought provoking and all the good things a documentary should be. Thoroughly recommended.

Fantastic Beasts - The Crimes of Grindelwald

The first “Fantastic Beasts” was a bit of a hodgepodge of a movie. Weaving a story out of the ephemera and backstory of the Harry Potter universe, it tried to combine a charming innocent-abroad-who-just-wants-to-look-after-his-animals story with a deep delving into the hidden backstories of the battles that had rocked the world of wizards before Voldemort came along. It wasn’t entirely successful, but fortunately most of the focus was on the befuddled charming zoologist and his cute beasties, not on the messy backstory, so it remained reasonably charming as it moved the locale from a vaguely contemporary England to 1920s New York and introduced a nice bunch of characters it was fun to spend time with.

The follow up, alas, doubles down on the messy backstory – while still keeping our befuddled charming zoologist and the cute beasties. And the backstory gets very very messy (and indeed, infects the charming zoologist and his friends, all of whom manage to get hit by the stupid stick a few times in order to manipulate them into various positions so that they can be, pointlessly, at odds for a lot of the film).  Eager to almost immediately invalidate the ending of the previous film (so a character who was presumed dead is now alive, and another character who was imprisoned is freed again), there’s a vast number of exposition dumps. There’s some nice costume and art design, but quite frequently we’re rushing past it so much that we can’t enjoy it properly (and the climax takes place in an ugly cellar).  The animal stuff is the one bit that still works, but at this point it’s like gluing the Crocodile Hunter onto the Simirillion – it all feels extremely messy. And by the end of the film, we still feel like everything’s barely got out of first gear – it’s still all preparation-for-battle rather than anything actually happening in this film. There’s a vast detour into irrelevant genealogy for characters who are only ever going to appear in this film and who amount to red herrings in the grand scheme of things. And under the dead weight of all this lore, nothing like an actually fun movie gets a chance to escape. So alas, this is a shemozzle. But with a couple of very cute animals.

Shoplifters

This Palme D’Or winner tells of a family of low-income Japanese people gathered in one house in the middle of an unnamed city. Grandma, mum, dad, sister and brother are joined when mum and dad find a lost neglected young girl on her own and bring her into her family and their hardscrabble existence enhanced by a little light shoplifting. As the seasons pass and she gets more used to the tricks and cons that she’s surrounded by, the little scams begin to appear less like fun and games and more like something risky that could see their family falling apart at any moment.

I must admit for a reasonable amount of the length of this film, I found it a little bit aimless – the scenes didn’t seem to be building so much as just a series of events that could end at any time without much change to the film. Events in the last quarter of the film change that, and there’s a couple of surprising revelations (at least one of which is a little melodramatic). But there’s also some deeply emotive performances across the cast, both young and old, and an unflinching view of the hidden modern Japanese underclass. This is not perfect cinema, and I’m not entirely sure it’s really a worthy Palme D’Or winner, but it provides interesting viewing none the less.

The Old Man and the Gun

This is one of those case where we’re not so much getting a film as we’re getting a retirement gift to one of Hollywood’s longest running leading men. And certainly, as a celebration of Robert Redford’s considerable charms, this does the job well. Playing a bank robber whose repeated thefts see him living his life largely on the run, his entanglement with a woman of roughly his age (played by Sissy Spacek) asks the question whether he can really keep on running.

The chemistry between Redford and Spacek is off the charts, and is the prime reason to see this. There’s some good work in the supporting cast as well (Casey Affleck as the cop on his trail, Tom Waits and Danny Glover as two gang members), but the warmth and joy that exists between Spacek and Redford is the prime reason to see this. There’s little that’s particularly surprising, and it’s another “based on a true story” where the content of the story is more an anecdote than a full narrative, and in many ways this is an exercise that gets by on pure charm, nostalgia, our affection for the leads and some decently nostalgic cinematography. But if it’s a comfortable pair of socks of a movie, it’s at least a good pair of socks to be in.

Boy Erased

After an incident at his college, a young man is taken by his parents to an anti-gay treatment centre. As the sessions continue, he sees more and more the damage this is causing both to himself and to the other people around him, as the centre tries to delve deeper into his psyche to change him into something he isn’t.

This is well acted and a good and interesting topic to discuss, but it never quite develops the power it might. The conversion centre is largely seen as incompetent and unwise – a very banal kinda evil (though there’s one point where one treatment on another patient is extremely intense), but our protagonist is never really put under particularly excessive pressure – and it means that a lot of the power seems slightly removed and displaced – he’s a nice middle-class boy who goes through something that’s a little bit unpleasant but it’s never really the case that he’s in particular danger of anything other than being bored and lectured to for an extended period. There’s details that distract slightly (Troye Silvain does a good performance as one of the other candidates but his hair seems too flamboyant for a guy who’s meant to be trying to duck under the radar), and it’s another film about gay people that seems slightly scared of showing what gay love might actually be like to a mass market audience (much like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, it can’t portray a happy gay relationship beyond mild handholding and loose hugging, and that can only ever be in the margins). Which is not to say this is a bad film – it’s just not what it could be.

The Girl in the Spider's Web

The return of Lizbeth Salander, peak hacker and cyber-warrior, sees her, unfortunately, dropped into a somewhat more generic narrative than the previous stories – in this case, being tasked with helping a programmer recover his nuclear missile control technology to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. When, inevitably, it still ends up in the wrong hands, Salander’s sent on a chase that will see her tangling with multiple security agencies and a mysterious group known as the Spiders – and finally being dragged back into the past she thought she’d escaped.

Based on the fourth novel of the series (and the first not to be written by Stieg Larrson, whose death after the third novel resulted in some complex legal shenanigans with his surviving partner, meaning that not even incomplete notes of Larsson’s work made it into this one), this sticks our unconventional modern heroine into a pretty regulation action movie that just happens to be largely set in Sweden. Claire Foy has all the externals that should go into making a good Lizbeth Salander (the cool exterior, detached yet devastatingly direct in achieving her aims) – but the story around her never really gives her much of a chance to stick out particularly. There’s some odd casting in there (Stephen Merchant in particular sticks out in a conventional role as the guy who wrote the program that’s the McGuffin of the story – there’s no particular reason why he’s doing this role other than because it got offered to him), and a couple of decent action/heist moments, but the ending, in particular, is annoyingly pat and doesn’t really give us reason to stick around. Given the English language adaptations have skipped two books, there’s also a couple of character details that seem newly grabbed from the missing two books that are just sorta slapped on screen without any of the narrative support that would have meant they meant anything in particular. Salander’s periodic sidekick from the books, Mikail Blomqvist (yes, Salander was his sidekick in the first book but given her name’s on the title of all of them, he’s slipped back into sidekick territory), is back but he feels pretty marginal and could easily have been removed without anybody particularly noticing. This feels like a reduction of what was a smart thriller series into just another airport novel runaround (much as the recent Jason Bourne felt like it was going through the motions without any real reason to exist), and while it’s never particularly unwatchable, it doesn’t inspire a lot of reasons to go particularly looking for it either.

Susperia

This remake of Dario Argento’s seventies shocker combines modern dance and horror in an exploration of the connections between art, feminine power, control and revenge. It’s a visually beautiful film, and there are sequences that are astounding in their impact – particularly any of the dance sequences. But for some reason it never quite grabbed me emotionally or on a primal level – this is horror as thesis statement, for me, rather than something I feel deep in my soul. I can recognise intellectually the excellence in a lot of this (Tilda Swinton stands out in two very different roles) and it’s never dull to watch. But for some reason I come away from it recognising the skill and art involved, but never quite feeling it. It’s well made, and I’d never call it empty or soul-less, but it’s still a little too distant for me to take to my heart.

Bohemian Rhapsody

This is enjoyable nonsense, in many ways. As a biopic, it’s got flaws running through it – history is rearranged, facts are left out, and at least one dead person is given a portrait that is borderline defamatory – but it has two key strengths. One is that the unlikely story of the rise of Freddie Mercury and Queen is material that is just too fascinating to resist, even when told with some tone-deaf dialogue and clunky situations, and Rami Malek gives the role everything he has and everything the part can take, giving both the wild charisma bomb of a front man and the slightly insecure, isolated boy stuck in the middle of an international phenomenon. And the music is given its appropriate place in the forefront of the story – the plot of the movie basically ends fifteen minutes before the credits and we get a pitch perfect presentation of Queen’s Live Aid set (minus one song that’s been cut for time). It somehow doesn’t matter that none of the other members of Queen get to display much of a discernible personality, that its presentation of the gay scene seems drawn almost entirely from the seedy world of “Cruising”, and that it’s very definitely built as a mainstream audience pleasure machine rather than a deeper analysis of the group (if you were hoping to hear why Queen thought touring South Africa during the apartheid bans was a good idea, you’re outta luck). But as that mainstream audience pleasure machine, it works gangbusters.

The House with a clock in its walls

This is in many ways a throwback to the 80s Amblin era entertainments, with an orphaned child taken in by his uncle who lives in a house full of magic and strangeness. And as he settles into his new home, he discovers a threat lurks within the house, a threat that could endanger everything he knows…

This has charismatic adults (Jack Black and Cate Blanchett most prominently, but also Kyle McLachlan and Renee Elise Goldsberry) and none-too-bad work from the kids either, yet it fumbles into being mostly fairly mediocre. Nothing really builds up a head of steam – this tends to be a series of incidents, rather than necessarily a well rounded plot (even when the backstory is revealed and turns out to have interesting details, it still feels kinda flat) – this just doesn’t have the verve that a good kids fantasy movie should have, as the adventure becomes overwhelming and you’re caught up in the wonder – instead, it just sorta sits there flatly. Black still has the twinkle in his eye, and Blanchett shows a nice sense of wit, but there just isn’t quite enough for them to do, so it all feels like so much sludge.

Rampant

Somewhere roughly between the 1600s and 1800s, a small Korean kingdom is under threat from demons (who behave remarkably like western Zombies - for Korean purposes, they’re demons, but I’ll refer to them as zombies to stop cognitive dissonance). The crown prince, who has been living in idleness in another kingdom, returns to carry out his brother’s last request, bringing his wife and unborn child away from the turbulent court, only to find out the petty politics of succession are the least of his worries, as unrelenting hordes of zombies begin attacking first an outlying village, and then the imperial palace…

My knowledge of Korean history before the Korean war is pretty sketchy, so I spent way longer at the beginning of this film than I should have wondering “when does this take place? Where are all these other cities? What nationality are the westerners who sold the rival warlord guns – they sound Dutch but that could be anything, really”. And then I realised this was not something I should be thinking about, I should be thinking about how well this carries out its goals – yes, this is your standard zombiethon, but it’s got enough oddities of design and presentation to make it a bit more interesting. The arc of our hero being initially a careless playboy who’s pretty much dragged into involvement with the people who he should, by rights, be ruling over, gives us some reasonable character work, and even the annoying-comedy-relief gets noticeably less so as the story goes on. This isn’t by any means even the best zombie movie of the year, but it still functions pretty well as a good meat-and-potatoes version of Korean action with a twist.

Ghost Stories

The multi-story anthology has a pedigree – in the horror genre, “Dead of Night”, “Trilogy of Terror” and “Creepshow” stand out particularly as compilations of short stories with startling twists and turns, some more or less held together by a linking device. This film by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson (Dyson being the writing partner of the League of Gentlemen, Nyman being an occasional actor, along with co-writer and co-director of a number of illusionist Derren Brown’s shows), combines a trio of stories being told to Nyman (playing a skeptical investigator of the paranormal) – though of course it turns out he has more at stake in these stories than we initially know. Unfortunately most anthologies suffer from uneven-ness, and this is no exception. The first story, starring Paul Whitehouse as a night watchmen exposed to startling phenomena, probably works best – the second feels like it wraps up too quickly, and the third really never gets off the ground. And the wraparound, when it reveals its secrets, feels tricksy for the sake of being tricksy. There’s a couple of interesting moments of style (in the shooting style, this sometimes feels a bit like a Ken Loach horror movie – very entrenched in the working class in the north of England, with worn and weary houses and emotional malaise), but this never really got me particularly engrossed.