Total Film Reviews

Everyday

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

One-man UK film industry Michael Winterbottom continues his genre hopping with this gentle kitchen-sink experiment.

Shot over five years, it stars Shirley Henderson and John Simm as a couple separated by his prison sentence, and features a real family of four as their kids, who grow and change over time as the adults stay, tragically, the same.

The result is a slice of raggedy realism with ultra-naturalistic performances.

Although detractors might wish for something more profound, capturing the poignant pointlessness of life passing by feels like a noble pursuit in itself.

Everyday News and Features

V/H/S

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

The problem with portmanteau films such as New York Stories (Coppola and co) and Four Rooms (Tarantino et al) is that they’re always baggy with bravado, because no one wants to waste their best work on a joint venture, or admit they’re coasting by allowing someone else to make judicious cuts.

The genius of this horror taster, which features six up-and-coming filmmakers breathing new life into the found-footage genre, is that everyone’s eager to prove themselves, so they all bring their A-game.

Shot on actual VHS, and correspondingly hard to watch, Adam Wingard’s wraparound tale is surprisingly weak (given the maturity of his earlier work A Horrible Way To Die), a repetitive tale of burglars searching through a pile of cassettes in a spooky house.

First out of the pile – and best of the bunch – is David Bruckner’s Amateur Night.

A woozy tale of fratboy porn star wannabes on the pull, it’s as scary for what it says about internet age sexual politics as its excellent, unsettling SFX.

Ti West’s Second Honeymoon suffers by comparison, a sagging stalker tale in the wrong place for a slow-burner.

The strike rate soars in the second half.

Glenn McQuaid’s Tuesday The 17th is a witty Friday The 13th riff with an imaginatively rendered digi-villain – ironic given all the analogue.

Best scare award goes to Joe Swanberg’s nifty The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger, a series of anxious late-night Skype calls between an absent medical student and his anguished girlfriend.

Last but far from least is 10/31/98, written, directed by and starring a collective called Radio Silence, a dazzling, FX-filled haunted-house jaunt that’s all punchline and no set-up.

That’s actually a good thing in this format, where speed and scares trump narrative subtlety, and more such patterns emerge when you watch these disparate stories back-to-back.

There’s a whole university paper to be written on the troubling sexual invasiveness of young men with video cameras, for example, and it would be nice to have some female directors redress the balance.

Besides bolstering viewers’ must-watch lists (start with Bruckner’s The Signal and West’s The House Of The Devil), it’s a wholly appropriate way to hail the new masters of horror.

V/H/S News and Features

McCullin

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

The subject of this powerful documentary, Don McCullin, is uncomfortable being defined as a war photographer, even if his work in covering countless armed conflicts across the world has revealed the horrifying experiences endured by civilians and combatants alike.

Defined by his Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans as “a conscience with a camera,” the septuagenarian McCullin emerges in David and Jacqui Morris’ accomplished film full of integrity, dignity and empathy.

His story’s also a sobering primer in the hard-hitting photojournalism of the ’60s and ’70s.

McCullin News and Features

Grabbers

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

A midnight movie with matinee charms, Jon Wright’s genial Irish creature feature proved a crowd-pleaser in the late spot at this year’s FrightFest, and seems to have been cannily calibrated for exactly that kind of audience.

“It’s always the quiet places where the mad shit happens,” says caretaker copper Lisa (Ruth Bradley), when she joins alcoholic colleague Ciarán (Richard Coyle) on his patrols of remote Erin Island.

She’s soon proved calamitously correct when space monsters wash ashore and begin bothering the locals, a collection of salty sea dogs, drunks and tall tale tellers, not necessarily in that order.

Ticking all three boxes, Lalor Roddy’s old-timer keeps his surprise catch of the day in his bathtub, a decision the whole island lives to regret…

If sci-fi movies are only as good as their aliens, then even the most seasoned viewers are in for a treat here.

Shimmying across the screen in octopoid swirls, the dark-blue ‘grabbers’, designed by Shaune Harrison, are as beautifully realised as Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (if a little less threatening), and Trevor Forrest’s sundappled cinematography is extremely easy on the eye.

Writer Lehane manages to create a real sense of community on Erin – something Tremors was rightly applauded for – and hits upon the entertaining notion of making the aliens, like the locals, vulnerable to the effects of alcohol.

The raucous centrepiece, in which everyone from Russell Tovey’s uptight ecologist to the island’s old biddies get hammered for their own safety, is great fun, with Bradley proving one of the best screen drunks we’ve seen for a long time.

Although cynics will say the results are too sweet to really fire the imagination – and they have a point, half-hearted decapitations aside – Grabbers is so good-natured you’d be mad to mind.

And frankly, if making well-crafted alien-invasion flicks were as easy as Wright and co make it look, we’d be overrun with the buggers.

Grabbers News and Features

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

You don't need to be a foodie to appreciate this charming documentary, which delves in to the life and work of Tokyo sushi master Jiro Ono.

Charting his rise to near-legendary status via interviews and fly-on-the-wall observation, it captures his endless quest for perfection; aged 85, he refuses to call it a day (“You have to fall in love with your work,” he barks.“Never complain about your job”).

Director David Gelb rustles up some tasty dressing: measured pacing, an elegant soundtrack (by the likes of Philip Glass) and suitably edible cinematography.

It’s a simple tale, but one to savour.

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi News and Features

Monsters, Inc. 3D

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Pixar's latest 3D release seems a cruel joke at the expense of Mike Wazowski, the walking peeper lacking the second eye needed to appreciate its slick stereoscopy.

But then Pete Docter’s 2001 picture is a faintly sadistic affair, its freakish alt-world being dependent on power derived from terrorising children.

Not that this will prevent anyone enjoying this sparkling cartoon, peppered as it is with gags, slapstick and action made incrementally more exciting by the extra dimension.

This version also boasts the “company play” outtake you might’ve missed first time around.

Monsters, Inc News and Features

Repulsion

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Roman Polanski's first english language film made a hell of an entrance; so much so, had he fallen under a bus the day after the premiere, he’d still have gone down as one of the greats.

Catherine Deneuve is sensational as a young manicurist living in 1965 London, who progressively sinks into madness when she stays alone in her sister’s apartment and some ill-fortuned suitors come to call.

Filled with indelible images and punishing sound design, Repulsion casts a shadow over everything from Eraserhead to Black Swan, but there’s nothing quite like the real thing.

Repulsion News and Features

Chinatown

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

“Forget it, Jake it's Chinatown!”

The most memorable sign-off ever, right? Wrong.

Roman Polanski’s peerless gumshoe mystery actually ends with a testy cop ordering rubberneckers to “get off the street”.

Fortunately that’s one of the few unremarkable lines in Robert Towne’s script, a magnificent dissection of corruption boasting career-best turns from Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston.

A hurrah too for the ensemble, the likes of Burt Young and weak link in this 1974 masterpiece.

Unforgettable.

Chinatown News and Features

The Girl

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Poor Toby Jones. Every time he gets a plum part, something comes along to overshadow it.

First there was Dobby the House Elf in the Harry Potter films, a computer-generated homunculus forever destined to be Gollum’s poor relation.

His Truman Capote turn in Infamous was accomplished but struggled for attention in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-grabbing interpretation.

And now it happens again, his performance as Alfred Hitchcock in this BBC/HBO co-production having the misfortune to arrive just as an Anthony Hopkins-led biopic hits the big screen.

You could say the same of Sienna Miller, a star whose private life always seems to lure attention away from her achievements as an actress.

In that respect the pair are ideally matched in Julian Jarrold’s film, a behind-the-scenes melodrama that explores the complex relationship Hitch had with Tippi Hedren over the course of making what were arguably the former’s last two decent movies.

The first, of course, was 1963’s The Birds, a masterpiece of unsettling avian horror that catapulted former model Tippi to international stardom.

According to Gwyneth Hughes’ screenplay, however (based on Donald Spoto’s 2008 tome Spellbound By Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock And His Leading Ladies) her success did not come easily, Hitch responding to an early rebuff of his advances by making the shoot as physically arduous and psychologically tortuous as possible.

Tensions reached their apogee during the filming of the attic scene, a gruelling ordeal that saw Hedren fending off real birds for seven exhausting days.

This is recreated effectively and harrowingly in Jarrold’s drama, as is another unpleasant moment when Hitch sends a fake crow smashing into Hedren’s phone box set with no prior warning.

The way Hughes tells it, it’s a wonder she made it out alive.

But what’s really astounding is that she chose to go through it all again by shooting another picture with Hitchcock straight afterwards – a mystery left unanswered in a film whose portrait of the director as a creepy, lascivious ogre amounts to nothing less than a wholesale character assassination.

The Marnie section is the weaker here, Jarrold spurning the opportunity to give Sean Connery a role in what, Imelda Staunton’s cameo as Alfred’s wife notwithstanding, is pretty much a two-hander.

It’s good then that the leads click so well together, a subtly prostheticised Jones proving memorably reptilian and a predictably glamorous Miller nailing both Hedren’s glacial exterior and the terrified naïf within.

The Girl News and Features

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The year 2012: a good one for archers, Michael Fassbender and swearing bears. Fantasy movies, not so much.

Wrath Of The Titans was bigger, more personal and just as dull as its predecessor. John Carter wound up in the red. Mirror Mirror or Snow White & The Huntsman? Hard to say which was grimmer.

But luckily, hope is not lost for fans of lairy dwarves…

Back in his wheelhouse after tripping over The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s return to swords, sorcery and beards deserving of their own postcodes is fantasy how it ought to be.

True, there’s a sense that we’ve been here and back again before – especially as An Unexpected Journey follows a similar road-map to The Fellowship Of The Ring, with a motley group (13 dwarves, one wizard, one hobbit) questing across perilous lands.

But in the tussle between déjà vu and Jackson’s authoritative ability to draw you into richly conceived otherworlds, it’s the latter that emerges champ.

Besides, the Kiwi auteur does take risks. Making three films out of three books is one thing; doing the same with one relatively terse volume, something else.

In terms of key incidents, AUJ doesn’t burrow too far into Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings-predating novel. Yet it rarely feels like Jackson has had the rolling pin out, overstretching the material.

Nudging three hours, it moves at an even clip – and that’s with the plot delayed by two prologues.

The first is a dazzling shard of backstory that introduces – in blazing glimpses – one of this trilogy’s major foes; the second re-introduces Elijah Wood’s Frodo and Ian Holm’s ageing Bilbo, framing our tale as one passed down to a younger generation.

A bedtime story? Tolkien wrote a book for kids, but Jackson hasn’t made a movie for them. This trip to Middle-earth treads a pleasing middle ground between the whimsy on the page and the portent of the later books/earlier films.

It’s a delicate balance between, on the one hand, singsongs, camomile tea and cute, ailing hedgehogs; and on the other, lopped limbs, chilly hints of evils to come and wild-eyed wolf-monsters that get right up in the viewer’s grill thanks to Jackson’s 3D.

The director’s first foray into stereoscopy occasionally has a cut-out quality that can pull you out of the alt-world immersion he cultivates so successfully.

But it comes into its own with Jackson’s God’s-eye-view camera swooping over, under and through the luxurious landscapes (real and digital).

Total Film saw the film in the contentious new 48 frames per second format – yes, it takes a few scenes to adjust to and yes, it’s a bit like watching live TV.

But the pay-off is a striking smoothness and sharpness: a helter-skelter tumble into the heart of a mountain, or a breathless battle through goblin territory.

Never mind the elaborate action sequences: Jackson has his work cut out for him choreographing 15 protagonists for a spot of supper.

It was perhaps to be expected, but not all the dwarves emerge as rounded personalities on this first showing.

But still, Ken Stott makes a thoughtful Balin (the snowy-haired one), Stephen Hunter avoids getting slap-stuck as Bombur (the fat one) and there’s an Aragorn-y vibe to Richard Armitage’s Thorin, the leader of the pack who brings brooding focus to the simple but emotive theme of wanting to find a home.

For the title character, meanwhile, it’s all about getting off your arse and seeking new horizons.

Peter Jackson worked around Martin Freeman’s Sherlock schedule to nab him as Bilbo. You can see why.

Elijah Wood’s Frodo may have carried an incalculable burden but he was, frankly, a bit of a whinger. Freeman’s Bilbo likes a moan too, but the part gives the Brit licence to show off his sitcom-honed comic touch.

Not that there’s anything showy-offy about his subtlety; as The Office viewers will recall, he’s a master of the deadpan put down (“Is he a great wizard,” he asks Ian McKellen’s once-again grey Gandalf; “or is he like you?”) and makes exasperation seem understated.

He also straddles the tone’s comic/dramatic divide. Just when you worry his self-effacing performance is getting lost in the monster mash, along comes the centrepiece confrontation with Gollum (Andy Serkis, showstopping as ever), a game of riddles where Bilbo’s wit and mettle are shaded with genuine anxiety.

Freeman’s the all-too-human face of Jackson’s gargantuan vision, his performance indicating that the emotional stakes will keep pace with the ramped-up challenges ahead. “Home is now behind you,” Gandalf counsels Bilbo. “The world is ahead.” Right beside you, little man.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey News and Features

American Mary

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Rape-revenge is the most morally dubious of genres, often made by those more interested in filming the former than dealing with its fallout.

Some theorists even compound the crime by calling the likes of 1978’s leery I Spit On Your Grave “feminist” because they show a woman fighting back.

Nice try.

Though it loosely follows the formula, American Mary is one of the first such films that can legitimately lay claim to that label.

Made by writer/director sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska – aka “The Twisted Twins” – and starring the formidable Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps, Freddy Vs Jason), it’s a film that’s not about humiliation, but empowerment.

Mary Mason (Isabelle) is a promising surgery student who stitches turkeys back together in her spare time.

Auditioning as a stripper to make ends meet, she’s called upon by club owner Billy (Antonio Cupo) to fix up a torture victim, and soon becomes a kind of black-market saw-bones for mobsters, misfits and body-modification addicts such as Beatress (Tristan Risk), who wants to turn herself into a kind of living doll.

Then things get really twisted. With her sheer black hair, bright red lipstick and ice-cool demeanour, Mary is a kickass heroine, and when her path leads her into sexual violence, we never abandon her POV for a moment.

This is a character who refuses to be turned into a victim – or worse, an object – and the film follows her lead, opening up all sorts of debates on how women might flip the tables on men, reclaiming themselves, and their bodies, from becoming prisoners of patriarchy.

True, amateurish supporting performances, a too-loose last act and other low-budget complaints threaten to turn the film from five-star classic to three-star contender.

But it’s still a hell of a mission statement from the Soskas: sensitive, shocking and funny as hell.

Besides, stitching two disparate halves together seems wholly appropriate under the circumstances.

American Mary News and Features

Jack Reacher

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:01:00 GMT

It can be exhilarating to watch when an actor finds a director they click with.

The moment Tom Cruise strides into Jack Reacher, smouldering like an active volcano, that ‘click’ can be heard loud and clear.

It’s been a dozen years since the Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) directed his only film to date – the highly underrated modern western/noir The Way Of The Gun.

In that time, however, he co-wrote the script for the Cruise’s WW2 pic Valkyrie; enough to convince the actor to collaborate on this adaptation of British writer Lee Child’s 2005 thriller One Shot.

The ninth novel in Child’s Jack Reacher series, the title bears relation to the sniper’s creed – “one shot, one kill” – a maxim of deadly economy which McQuarrie reflects in a super-lean opening sequence.

A shooter arrives in a parking lot, assembles his rifle and takes down five seemingly random passers-by. But carelessly dropping a shell-casing on the floor, he also leaves a conspicuous fingerprint on the coin he slots into a nearby parking meter.

It doesn’t take the cops long to trace it to James Barr (Joseph Sikora), a former military sniper. Promptly arrested, he refuses to talk – requesting just one thing: Jack Reacher.

A former military police officer (where “every suspect was a trained killer”), Reacher is now a drifter living off the grid – “a ghost” with little in the way of a past or, it seems, possessions (just the clothes he stands in).

“He doesn’t care about proof. He doesn’t care about the law. He only cares about what’s right,” says Barr.

But while that makes Reacher sound like a tagline to an ’80s thriller, his roots lie elsewhere. Part Jason Bourne, part Dirty Harry, Reacher is the outsider-vigilante, an anti-hero who lives a minimalist, monastic-like existence.

The twist – the first of several – is that Reacher is no friend of Barr’s. Rather, he believes the guy is guilty for a crime he committed years earlier but got away with on a technicality.

Yet gradually, as he begins to look at the case in conjunction with Barr’s lawyer, Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike) – who just for added spice is going up against her District Attorney father, Alex Rodin (Richard Jenkins) – he becomes convinced the accused is innocent.

From the rather obvious trail of clues leading the police to Barr to the fact that a trained sniper missed one shot (and parked his van in an inopportune location), it seems he’s been set up. But by whom?

What can be said is that a shadowy figure, The Zec (Werner Herzog), a scarred Soviet gulag survivor, lurks in the background, alongside Jai Courtney’s henchman.

Unquestionably, the casting of Werner Herzog is the masterstroke. Although not a first for the German director, never has he been in such a high-profile Hollywood film.

Whatever next – Michael Haneke in The Expendables 3?

Still, enrolling Herzog as the villain is inspired thinking on McQuarrie’s part; that unmistakable Teutonic brogue that’s graced so many of his documentaries elicits multiple shivers when it’s welded to the character of The Zec.

A chilling, ruthless creation, with not an ounce of pity in his bones, Herzog delivers his lines with absolute cold-hearted malice.

But the trouble is, having crafted one of the most potentially memorable screen villains in recent Hollywood history, McQuarrie’s adaptation never quite gets to grips with Herzog, who almost lurks too far in the film’s background.

It doesn’t help that when he finally comes to the fore, in the film’s quarry-set finale, the action is so abrupt he barely has time to register. It’s one of Jack Reacher’s few missteps, in what is an otherwise on-target thriller.

Pike proficiently handles the testosterone-driven universe she steps into, while Robert Duvall arrives late for a welcome cameo.

As for Cruise, he may be shorter than the 6ft 5in Reacher of Child’s books – a topic that vexed some fans – but that doesn’t deter from one of his most intense, determined performances in recent memory.

From buzzing around town in a red Chevy muscle car to beating up a squadron of guys in a bar brawl, it’s Cruise at his most rough-hewn – even if he does find time for a muted smile when a bus passenger lends him a baseball cap to evade police attention.

Prioritising intrigue over body count, McQuarrie keeps the action clean and clinical, even if that troubled finale feels like a Call Of Duty free-for-all.

The Hollywood rumour mill has it that he could be in line to direct Cruise in Mission: Impossible 5; on this evidence, their ‘click’ will be worth hearing again.

Jack Reacher News and Features

The Impossible

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

At a time when horror movies had turned to schlock, Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage (2007) brought emotional care to screen scares with an adult fairytale about clinging onto the impossible even when all hope seems lost.

For his follow-up, he tackles similar themes with far greater ambition yet no loss of control.

The disaster movie is its field, but Bayona’s tragic true-life tale is a far cry from The Day After Tomorrow on all fronts: its visceral force is more aggressive, its emotions cut deeper and its intelligence makes fiercely affecting work of close-to-the-bone material.

Which is to say, Bayona may have achieved the near-impossible.

A film about the Indian Ocean tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 could have been crass. Make it too grim and it might look exploitative – too much, too soon. Hammer on a happy ending and it could become a Hollywood gloss on a human catastrophe, a Euro auteur compromised on his English-language debut.

Yet Bayona and his writer Sergio G. Sanchez get almost everything right, starting with the decision to follow one family’s (based on real-life Spanish family the Belons) arc.

Sure, the choice seems iffy given how many lives were lost; sure, too, the decision to cast English-language actors seems commercially calculated.

But zeroing in on Henry Bennett (Ewan McGregor), his wife Maria (Naomi Watts) and their sons Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin) works by subverting the ensemble emphasis of most disaster movies.

Instead of skimming the surface of several characters in order to energise pacing, Bayona focuses on one tight group, putting keen characterisation before momentum.

The opening scenes are slightly stiff, but they give us time to get know the family as they arrive at the beach resort of Khao Lak, Thailand, for what should be a blissful Christmas break.

As presents are given, lanterns lit and ball games played, the knowledge of what’s to come embeds our fear for their well-being in the narrative: you could call that manipulative, but it’s careful, effective manipulation.

Proof comes when the tsunami hits, in a devastating 10-minute sequence that never loses sight of the anguish at its core. Disaster porn? Think again.

Beginning with distant eco-horror rumbles and then slamming the screen so hard you’re left breathless, Bayona opts for the fear and confusion of first-person filmmaking over the cruder option of show-us-the-money-shot awe.

As wave upon wave wallops Maria and oldest son Lucas senseless, their terror hits us like a gut-punch, an impact boosted by Oriol Tarragó’s pulverising sound design.

The decision to shoot using practical effects pays off: this is physical filmmaking of implacable immediacy.

In many films their survival would be the climax, but what follows is equally crucial to Bayona’s tale of hope in a dark place.

Mum and son make their way to safety, but their fight isn’t finished. Maria has incurred horrific injuries, not just from the waves but from the debris that tore her flesh underwater.

And they have a family to hunt down, a mission that sees Lucas dispatched to find them in and around a makeshift hospital resembling something from a war movie, where the increasingly resourceful kid recalls Christian Bale’s Jim in a bloodier Empire Of The Sun.

The Spielberg comparison fits, because Bayona borrows the best of the ’Berg and adds his own raw power.

Wide shots and extreme close-ups are navigated with a symmetry comparable to classic Spielberg’s fluency.

The command of spectacle is astoundingly evolved and considered for a sophomore director, like Spielberg’s watery breakthrough Jaws in more testing waters.

The respect for children echoes Spielberg minus the sentiment, with Lucas played as a pain in the arse who grows before our eyes.

And the hope and compassion draw on Berg’s humanist qualities, though Bayona lets the drama get believably messier than Spielberg might have done.

Fernando Velázquez’s score recalls Spielberg’s weaknesses too, perhaps nudging too hard when only nuance was needed, but the cast are note-perfect.

Watts is all flayed nerves and flesh as a mother at life’s jagged edge: gored, emotionally ravaged, yet exuding fierce parental love even when bed-bound.

McGregor stumbles at first but comes into his own, playing tender havoc on our heartstrings during a mobile phone call.

Holland gives both a run for their money, persuasively scared and brave as Lucas is called on to provide little – but, in this context, huge – acts of kindness for other families.

And there’s a tingly cameo from The Orphanage’s Geraldine Chaplin, delivering a potentially sappy but – again, in context – tenderly moving monologue about death.

The climax could have been pure syrup too, but Bayona judges it just right. A nightmarish flashback and lines of body bags ram home the fact that closure doesn’t come easily after a tragedy like this, if ever.

Far from providing pat uplift or a devastating downer, Bayona treads a finer line with care, crafting a structurally satisfying close, at the same time acknowledging that the struggles are far from over. The experience may never leave the survivors.

Like the rest of this smart, sensitive film, it’s a smart, sensitive end note that sticks with you.

The Impossible News and Features

Quartet

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

The respective ages of Quartet’s leads (72, 69, 75, 77…) reads like a game of geriatric bingo.

But then their director is no spring chicken either, septuagenarian Dustin Hoffman having just as much right to a free bus pass in the country where his first feature is set.

Quite why it has taken Benjamin Braddock so long to step behind the camera is anyone’s guess.

Yet he proves an efficient enough ringmaster in this gentle portrait of nursing home oldsters, set in a facility for retired opera stars whose declining capacities don’t stop them acting like divas.

It’s not just Dame Maggie Smith’s presence that recalls The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel here, Hoffman’s mellow adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s 1999 play being just as brazenly targeted at the lucrative grey pound.

Yet Quartet has the edge on John Madden’s 2011 outing, its poignancy feeling honestly and legitimately generated as opposed to cynically engineered and laid on with a trowel.

Pauline Collins is especially effective as a kindly biddy gradually losing what is left of her marbles, while Tom Courtenay embraces the chance to play a romantic hero in his role as a tetchy tenor whose hopes of a “dignified senility” are shattered by the arrival of old flame Maggie.

Billy Connolly, meanwhile, hardly breaks a sweat as a randy git with priapic hots for Sheridan Smith’s long-suffering resident doctor.

Yes, Michael Gambon is preposterously hammy as kaftan-sporting despot Cedric, while a scene in which Courtenay likens opera to rap for the benefit of some teenage visitors feels like a pathetic sop to a fantasy demographic (Hoodie-wearing Verdi fans? Mozart lovers with ASBOs?).

It’s hard, too, to care that much whether the titular foursome resolve their differences in time for a climactic charity concert.

Still, picking holes in Quartet is like playing a practical prank on your nan. Sure, it’s fun while you do it, but you’re bound to feel bad about it afterwards.

Quartet News and Features

Safety Not Guaranteed

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:30:00 GMT

The past has never seemed so inviting as it does in Colin Trevorrow’s DIY time-travel romance.

Like a low-key Back To The Future, this unexpected indie is propelled by a delicious premise, a classified ad that reads: “Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me.”

Advising any applicants to “bring your own weapons”, it also assures readers that “I have only done this once before.”

Jeff (Jake Johnson), a rather feckless journalist for a Seattle magazine, is assigned to investigate.

Along for the ride come two interns, Darius (Aubrey Plaza) and Arnau (Karan Soni), though it soon becomes clear that Jeff has more interest in the fact their journey takes them to the Washington town where his high school sweetheart still lives.

It’s left to Darius to trace the would-be time-traveller – who, it soon emerges, is a grocery store clerk named Kenneth (Mark Duplass).

Is he a nutjob or the sanest man around? Has he really ripped the fabric of the space-time continuum before?

Derek Connolly’s finely tuned script teases us with the answers throughout. While the film may lack Looper-style flourishes, there’s enough time-travel talk for brainiacs to chew over.

But Safety Not Guaranteed is not so much about the science of time travel as the emotion of it – why we feel the need to revisit the past.

Both funny and heartfelt, Trevorrow stops it from ever becoming too mawkish or melancholy.

What really impresses, however, are the performances. Mumblecore actor/director Duplass and Parks And Recreation star Plaza forge a tender bond, playing to the reality of the situation and never undermining their characters.

Best of all, it builds towards a quite marvellous ending that, even if it cost half the budget, was seriously worth it.

Safety Not Guaranteed News and Features

Midnight's Children

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:15:00 GMT

So often dubbed “unfilmable”, Salman Rushdie’s 1980 Booker-winning novel is bravely taken on by director Deepa Mehta, crafting an ambitious but flawed adaptation.

Narrated by Rushdie, it’s a generational saga following Saleem (Satya Bhabha), a boy born in 1947 on the night India declared independence from England and imbued with special mystical powers.

Mehta does well in subtly depicting India’s postcolonial history, but the book’s ‘magic realism’ feels weak and unfocused.

There’s humour and heart here, but it’s an overlong tale as meandering as the Ganges.

Midnight's Children News and Features

Code Name: Geronimo

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Racing Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty to the screen, this death-of-Bin Laden docudrama courted controversy when producer Harvey Weinstein’s plugged in extra Obama scenes just before the US election.

A mix of Bourne-esque Pentagon chin-scratching and shaky Call Of Duty shoulder-cams, the result is a smug national revenger that doesn’t leave much room for politics anyway.

Director John Stockwell’s (Blue Crush) made-for-TV jarheads do a good job, but they’ll be forgotten after Bigelow’s bigger names take down al-Qaeda again in time for the Oscars.

Code Name: Geronimo News and Features

Neil Young Journeys

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

When soft nostalgia is the norm for many ageing rockers, Neil Young’s doggedness is an example to cherish.

Jonathan Demme’s third Young concert movie concurs.

A potentially sentimental journey to Young’s old hometown, Omemee, prompts touching anecdotes about... incinerating turtles and insulting OAPs.

The interviews are less thrilling than the gig footage, though, which looms close on Young as he makes guitars belch, flobs on the camera, mangles classics and draws heavily on his fractious 2010 album, Le Noise.

If this is raging against the dying of the light, long may he rage.

Neil Young Journeys News and Features

So Undercover

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

You know something really bad has happened when the FBI are forced to call in Miley Cyrus.

Leaving behind her life as a tough teen PI to infiltrate a sorority house (where something really bad has happened), she brushes her hair slightly differently and magically transforms into an annoying, shallow rich girl.

Cyrus gives fans what they want in this bubblegum Miss Congeniality riff – rolling her glazed eyes at cliquey girls and hot boys whilst she rasps through a confusing non-story.

Scarier still is a cameo from Kelly Osbourne – one spoilt pop princess in the movies is more than enough, thanks…

So Undercover News and Features

Sexual Chronicles Of A French Family

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Pascal Arnold and Jen-Marc Barr’s film opens with a teenage girl masturbating in close-up. But that is as raunchy as it gets.

18-year-old Romain (Mathias Melloul) is still a virgin, though his brother and sister are at it like petits lapins.

When he’s caught jerking off in biology class the resultant fuss leads to an outbreak of sexual frankness in his respectable family.

It’s all strangely tepid, though: the numerous sex scenes flatly un-erotic.

It doesn’t help that this is a censored version, lacking some 20 minutes.

You’ll have more fun staying at home.

Sexual Chronicles Of A French Family News and Features

Boxing Day

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Bernard Rose follows Ivansxtc and The Kreutzer Sonata with another lo-fi Tolstoy update, based on the short story Master And Man and again starring Danny Huston as a noxious blowhard in dire straits.

Here, however, he has a reluctant companion in the form of Nick (Matthew Jacobs), a local chauffeur who shuttles him to foreclosed properties in wintry Colorado that he hopes to make a hefty profit on.

Their prickly banter prompts some mild humour before an abrupt detour steers the film into redemptive tragedy and self-sacrifice.

Yet bleak as it is, its rigour proves darkly compelling

Boxing Day News and Features

Les Miserables

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Known in luvvie circles as The Glums, Les Misérables has been seen by so many people since its 1985 London premiere it’s a marvel there’s anybody left to do so.

Well, Tom Hooper’s (The King’s Speech) epic movie version will send the devoted home happy and likely demonstrate to the few uninitiated what all the fuss is about.

For the latter, a quick catch-up. First published in 1862, Victor Hugo’s five-volume French door-stopper follows a paroled ex con, Jean Valjean, as he reinvents himself from petty thief to upright model citizen.

Yet try as he might he can’t seem to shake Inspector Javert, a dogged lawman who hounds him even as he becomes a wealthy mayor, surrogate father to an orphaned moppet and, eventually, reluctant participant in a Paris student uprising.

Boldly retaining the show’s sung-through format with vocals recorded live on set, Hooper opts for a gritty, authentic approach - at once intimate and epic - that generally eschews theatrical flourishes.

His leads respond in kind with unabashedly emotional, tear-sodden turns, Hugh Jackman projecting a wounded intensity as Jean Valjean and Anne Hathaway channelling her inner Susan Boyle as Fantine, the ill-used wench who sings ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ (a highlight, even escaping SuBo’s considerable shadow).

OK, so Russell Crowe keeps his upper lip stiff as Javert - no mean feat given the strangulated wheeze he assumes in the pic’s weakest bit of warbling.

For the most part, though, this is a gloriously immersive wallow in squalor and degradation, lightened intermittently by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as a pair of comically rapacious innkeepers, and lit up throughout by a sense of indomitable human spirit.

The biggest drawback is structural, with the second half less kinetic than the first, though Eddie Redmayne’s performance does much to energise his earnest intellectual’s wavering between Amanda Seyfried’s delicate Cosette and Samantha Barks’ earthy Éponine.

Without an interval to refresh, viewers might find themselves exhausted and emotionally drained. But things pick up in time for a musket vs cannon face-off on the barricades thrown up by Redmayne’s band of Arab Spring-mirroring rebels.

Come the wrenching, rousing finale, there won’t be a dry eye in the house.

Les Miserables (2012) News and Features

Baraka

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

A sleepy monkey nodding off segues into a solar eclipse – no, this isn’t 2001: A Space Odyssey the remake, although it has similar pace and scope. Instead, Ron Fricke’s 1992 documentary is a gorgeous travelogue shot in 24 exotic countries across 14 months on 77mm film stock, the idea being to map the interconnectivity between man and planet.

In practice, this means stunning landscapes, scurrying cityscapes and naked people praying.

Depending on your tolerance for the aforementioned it’s either an awesome vision of the world in all its time-lapsed wonder or visual whale music.

Baraka News and Features

Dead Europe

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Adapted from a 2005 novel by controversial Aussie author Christos Tsiolkas, Tony Krawitz’s vivid travelogue follows Ewen Leslie’s antipodean photographer to Greece to scatter his father’s ashes and lay a family curse to rest.

It’s not the only thing he ends up laying, despite his opportunistic shag-tourism being repeatedly interrupted by Kodi Smit-McPhee’s (The Road) spooked teenage refugee.

Saddled with a plank-like performance from Leslie, it’s intriguing and pretentious in equal measure, capturing the feeling of being adrift in a foreign world, but then failing to capitalise on it.

Dead Europe News and Features

False Trail

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:00:00 GMT

A belated sequel to one of Sweden’s biggest box-office hits (1996’s Jagärna), this glum slice of Nordic noir – renamed and repackaged in a similarly tardy attempt to cash in on The Killing – sees Stockholm copper Rolf Lassgård return to his rural home town to investigate a young girl’s brutal murder.

His arrival does not sit well with hunting enthusiast Peter Stormare, for reasons that take a long time to become apparent in a film stocked with more atmosphere than action.

“The truth always comes out, sooner or later,” sighs one character midway through.

Trust us: it’s later.

False Trail News and Features