2016

WONDER WHEEL

Cert 12A Stars 4

Kate Winslet has been grievously overlooked during awards season for her magnificent turn in Woody Allen’s dark period drama, his 48th film as director.

When even your leading lady distances herself from your movie for personal reasons, one suspects time’s up for Allen’s big screen career.

Allen’s work exists within its own little bubble, and it’s the small differences which separate his films from each other. For the most urban of directors, it’s almost alarming to find this one is set on the beach and filled with bold saturated colour.

In a welcome gender inversion, she plays the ‘Woody Allen’ character, a neurotic and romantically minded waitress having an affair with a younger lover.

Justin Timberlake is the hunky lifeguard on whom she projects a fantasy future together.

As ever in Allen’s films, when someone chooses to pursue a fantasy existence over harsh reality, tragic events occur. This is not one of Allen’s funny ones.

 

MUTE

Cert 15 126mins Stars 2

This derivative sci-fi thriller is beautifully designed but an ambitious structure of two criss-crossing stories results in a disjointed and un-engaging journey.

Strong and silent Alexander Skarsgard plays a mute barman searching for his missing girlfriend, lumbering through the seedy criminal world of Berlin, forty years in the future.

Meanwhile Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux are mercenary military medics who drink and banter during surgery in a manner reminiscent of Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. One is desperate to relocate to the US and the other is happy to stay in order to indulge his dark impulses.

So visually and tonally different are these strands, they rub against each other without much in the way of action or humour, and generating static but no thrill power.

What comedy exists is launched in broad stabs, mostly from Rudd, and I suspect the occasional minor absurdity springs from the far reaching impact of cult British comic, 2000AD.

Women are even more mute than Skarsgard, being mostly confined to the background even when the plot is nominally concerns their wellbeing.

The dark neon style is borrowed wholesale from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and lacks invention or a sense of it’s own identity.

Director Duncan Jones is honest about being influenced by Scott’s 1982 masterpiece, though frankly they’d be no denying it. He certainly isn’t the first and won’t be the last. But the more closely Mute parades its primary visual source, the more we recognise it’s lack of identity.

Mute doesn’t possess the strong authorial voice, sharp storytelling or acute mind of its heroes. The script doesn’t question what makes us human, or make a highly politicised anti-war statement. This isn’t noir, or satire or action adventure. As towards the end it drowns in sentiment, I still wasn’t sure what it is.

Described as a spiritual sequel to his intriguing 2009 debut, Moon. Sam Rockwell cameos in the same role here but his presence serves to remind us how Jones has struggled to deliver on his early promise. Neither 2011’s Source Code or 2016’s Warcraft were as interesting, rigorous or successful in their execution.

After the extraordinary Blade Runner 2049 became a big budget casualty last year, it’s easy to see why distributors where wary of putting this into cinemas. Big budget sci-fi films not based on an existing book, film or even game have suffered in recent years.

So fair play to Netflix for giving it a platform for audiences to see it. I just wish it was more involving and gave me something to shout about.

THE GLASS CASTLE

Cert 12A 127mins Stars 1

Brie Larson fails to build on her 2016 best actress Oscar success with this shoddily constructed drama.

Based on the memoir of journalist Jeannette Walls, Larson plays the New York gossip columnist forced to confront her past when her parents move to a nearby bohemian squat.

Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts wholeheartedly commit themselves to the shabby material.

There is an astonishing unintentional disconnect between what we’re told to feel and what we see, as woefully misjudged as filming Wuthering Heights as a heartwarming tale of everyday farming folk.

Walls’ journey from poverty stricken childhood to successful adulthood was an itinerant experience full of neglect and alcoholism.

Yet the film drowns the story in romanticised mawkishness and presents her father as an unconventional romantic with huge dreams.

There’s a lack of emotional truth among the appalling abuse, fear and violence. And despite being based on a real story, I didn’t believe a second of it.

MOTHER!

Cert 18 121mins Stars 5

Jennifer Lawrence is back on Oscar worthy form in this fist in the mouth intense horror. It’s a nightmarish fantasy of biblical madness from the director who dared to cast Russell Crowe on a sea of trouble as Noah.

Billed only as Mother, she plays the wife of a writer who spends her time lovingly restoring their grand old farmhouse home, to which she seems to have an almost supernatural connection.

A fan of the writer calls by and her husband invites him to stay the night. The next day members of the stranger’s family arrive, bringing with them chaos and violence.

Still only 27 years old, Lawrence has every chance of a fifth Academy award nomination and a possible second statuette for this phenomenal and punishing performance.

Despite it’s early moments of dark humour, Mother! is a very different movie from the romcom Silver Linings Playbook for which Lawrence won in 2012.

A welcome temporary lull in her blockbuster commitment to the X-Men superhero franchise allows her to team up with indie darling Darren Aronofsky.

The writer/director inspired Mickey Rourke to a nomination in 2009 for The Wrestler and guided Natalie Portman to an Academy award in his 2010 horror, Black Swan. He does his absolute utmost to repeat a similar trick here.

His camera almost sits on Lawrence’s shoulders, immersing us in her world as it spirals insanely out of control.

Employing biblical allusions with tremendous finesse and huge ambition, Aronofsky unleashes an apocalypse of condemnation on his targets. These include the control organised religion exerts over women, the cult of celebrity, and the vanity of the male creative process.

Javier Bardem oozes narcissistic charm as the writer and Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer provide strong support.

With every department working at full mind bending tilt, this is an extraordinary experience which may leave you crying out for your own mother.

THE VAULT

Cert 15 91mins Stars 1

Clint Eastwood’s daughter Francesca leads a team of bank robbers in this a shoddy mess of a horror heist movie.

The actress is variously described as a model, television personality and socialite, and is best known for a reality series. She’s a decent enough actress undermined by some appallingly weak material.

Beginning the film as a baby doll blonde, she reveals herself as strong and determined character. But her best moves can’t save this shocker from its many flaws.

When the thieves find the safe boxes empty, James Franco’s asthmatic assistant bank manager tells them of an old vault downstairs, which many of the staff believe to be haunted.

There’s an unforgivable absence of fun to the brain drilling violence which follows, conducted with a grim determination to survive an increasingly difficult job. Which exactly mirrors my feelings towards the film. 

A nasty, repetitive, grisly and garbled work where nothing is more alarming than Franco’s 1980’s style stringy moustache.

 

GOON: LAST OF THE ENFORCERS

Cert 15 97mins Stars 2

A poor year for cinematic comedy continues with this violent ice hockey gross out comedy which left me cold.

Set in Canada’s minor league, this sequel to 2011’s sees many of the original cast reprise their roles. But the script leaves any decent jokes on the bench and whenever it strays from the playing arena, finds itself on thin ice.

Hard man team captain Doug has retired due to age and injury. Having taken a dull office job, he’s drawn back to the ice when his old team struggle without him.

Likeable actor Seann William Scott is strangely subdued in a film seemingly geared to his limited strengths. Thrust to fame as Stifler in the American Pie franchise and now 40 years old, he’s also struggled to adjust to a more adult career. 

The out takes over the closing credits are no more funny than anything include but you can console yourself the cast at least entertained themselves during filming.

 

 

LOGAN LUCKY

Cert 12A 118mins Stars 3

Having reportedly retired from making feature films in 2012, the director of classic heist movie Ocean’s 11 can’t resist returning for one more criminal caper.

Sadly for Steven Soderbergh as decent as Logan Lucky is, this is in all ways a down market riff on his glossy 2001 George Clooney Las Vegas smash. Though it is far better than the lamentable and self indulgent Ocean sequels.

Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play the good old Logan boys Jimmy and Clyde, whose family it is locally believed are cursed by ill fortune, hence the title.

Jimmy’s ex wife is taking their daughter to another State and he needs money to hire a lawyer to fight for custody. He’s also just unfairly lost his job at the nearby motor racing track, from which he promptly decides to steal a fortune.

He rounds up a crew which includes Daniel Craig. The 007 star is clearly having a blast a tattooed explosive expert.

Riley Keough, Katie Holmes and Katherine Waterston add glamour, romance and some brains.

Written by the fictitious Rebecca Blunt in the quirky comic style of the Coen Brothers, many suspect the writer was really Soderbergh himself, who has previously used the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard when working as an editor. If it is him then we know who to blame for various script issues.

With the absence of a bad guy and the police generally incompetent, the good guys are more or less pushing at an open door to get the loot. Nor is it always clear if the film is laughing with or at the dim witted desperadoes and townsfolk.

Subplots featuring Seth MacFarlane as a British racing driver and Hilary Swank as a FBI agent should have been cut to give proceedings a much needed sense of urgency. The pace mirrors the drawl of the hillybilly West Virginia characters.

As Logan Lucky failed to make a killing at the US box office, perhaps early retirement wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

ANNABELLE: CREATION

Cert 15 108mins Stars 3

There’s no escape from the blood dripping, knuckle crunching terror in the most scary of the fourth film in the Annabelle franchise.

A prequel to 2014’s Annabelle and the two related Conjuring films, Creation tells the origin of the demonic dead eyed doll, Annabelle.

Half a dozen orphan girls are bussed to a new farmhouse home, it’s owned by the craftsman who handcrafted Annabelle for his now deceased daughter.

The house has a deep well, a creaking dumb waiter, and a mask wearing mad woman locked in her room.

Prior to this episode the formula has led to the series making £680m from a combined budget of £51m.

And the producers stick rigidly to their successful financial formula by keeping the action to a single location, casting largely unknowns and using old school physical effects to keep the costs low.

But there’s no skimping on the horror and the shocks are as well crafted as the wooden girl herself.

RAW

Cert 18 Stars 5

You’ll need nerves of steel to stomach this gut wrenching horror based around the initiation ceremony at a university for aspiring veterinarians.

It begins with buckets of offal are thrown over their heads, and that’s just the beginning of the grisly week long rite of passage.

New student Justine has her vegetarian tastes tested from the off as she’s plunged into a wild, violent and blood soaked journey of outrageous appetites.

Full of finger licking behaviour, this graphic, visceral and extraordinary film will have you gnawing your fingernails as you try to digest the meaty pleasures on offer.

 

THE NUT JOB 2: NUTTY BY NATURE

Cert U 91mins Stars 1

It’s never a positive sign when reviews are embargoed until the day of release, as they were for this animated adventure.

The first movie was a solid win at the box office taking £94m on a £23m budget, and so here we are three years later with an unlooked for sequel to an unloved but reasonably successful movie.

An evil mayor has plans to turn the tranquil green oasis Liberty Park into a cash generating amusement park to line his own pockets. So reluctant hero Surly the squirrel rallies his friends to fend off the diggers.

The first was dim witted and this one aims for lowest common denominator in most departments.

However this does have Chinese megastar Jacki Chan voicing a ninja mouse, presumably parachuted in by the Chinese producers in order to market the film to their local audience.

This may be tolerable only if you’ve exhausted every other avenue of entertaining the kids during the holidays.