I’m surprised this fishy tale of aquatic love has made such a big splash at the Oscars, and being nominated for 13 Academy Awards is very much of a red herring.

A dark fantasy set in the early 1960’s during the Cold War, it sees a mute cleaner begin an amorous affair with an captured humanoid sea-beast. She is moved to pity, then love and finally to free him.

This curious hybrid is neither fish nor fowl. Imagine Free Wily being remade as a gothic fairytale with The Creature from the Black Lagoon having it away with Mrs Overall from TV’s Acorn Antiques.

It’s clear from an early moment of intimacy Brit actress Sally Hawkins, is playing a very different role to the maternal Mrs Brown in the Paddington Bear films. As cleaner Elisa she’s a romantic yet lonely soul. 

And her naked scenes with the rubber costumed Amphibian Man have an unfortunate Fifty Shades of kink to them.

The real monster on show is Michael Shannon’s evil head of security, who wants to see the creature sleeping with the fishes. And Soviet spies want the ‘asset’ for their own nefarious ends.

Following the box office disappointments of Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak, Mexican writer, director and producer, Guillermo del Toro, has had to scale back his previously outlandish budgets.

Though the production design is typically detailed and rich, his use of locations, cast and CGI are kept to a minimum.

Del Toro’s heavy handed script sees many characters unable to give voice to their true identities, and are forced to live lives of compromise without love or face repercussions.

Following Hollywood’s ongoing sex scandals, this plea for tolerance, openness and inclusion is undoubtedly the reason for the film chiming so loudly with the Oscar voters.

With the message weighing down the entertainment, it’s mostly due to Hawkins’ impassioned performance this fairytale just about holds water.

 

Set sail with Colin Firth in this real life adventure which is an endurance challenge for the audience.

At 57 years old he’s missed the boat by about twenty years for this role, and he looks as if he’s been borrowing Paul McCartney’s hair dye.

The Kings Speech star plays Donald Crowhurst, an amateur yachtsman who in 1968 took up the challenge to become the first person to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe without stopping.

I’ve always been bemused when foolhardy posh people call stupid activities a sport, and expect us to care when they go wrong. For example Richard Branson’s hot air ballon rides. 

Crowhurst’s business is ailing, and similarly to Branson he sees the jaunt as an advertising opportunity.

A sentimental script asks us to have sympathy for this cowardly, underprepared chancer who quickly resorts to cheating. That’s Crowhurst not Branson, by the way.

Meanwhile your enjoyment depends on the appeal of bunking up with Firth on a soggy seven month trip. Bon voyage, old bean.

 

Director Clint Eastwood gives us the slow burn on the fast track in this seat-gripping biographical drama.

On 21 August 2015, two unarmed off-duty US servicemen and a civilian buddy were on a Paris bound train armed only with extraordinary bravery, when they prevented a potential massacre.

In a remarkable show of faith and possibly filmmaking ego, Eastwood casts Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos as themselves, and in fairness they do a pretty decent job. Credit to the director for tailoring his film to their abilities.

The incident occupies only a small part of the film so Eastwood can show in depth just how ordinary these blue collar guys were, going as far back to when they were naughty school kids. Once we know and like them, he dumps us next to them on the train that changed their lives.

This isn’t about terrorism or even the unnamed terrorist, but an examination of what makes a hero. You’ll want to salute them.

 

An increasingly beefy Gerard Butler rips into his role as a sleazy Los Angeles cop in this effective action heist thriller.

If you’re in the right mood the Scots actor can turn any old nonsense into entertainment, and thankfully his material here is a cut above his previous outing in the all-round disaster movie, Geostorm.

He’s hunting a crew of former marines turned ruthless bank robbers who are led by Pablo Schreiber. They’ve muscled O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s barman into being their getaway driver in a plan to steal $30million from the only LA bank which has never been robbed.

Among the deafening shoot-outs, well staged action and a great deal of toxic machismo, there are conflicted loyalties and muddled morality, with the cops boasting of being worse than the bad guys and the thieves enjoying loving family lives.

There’s no lack of ambition but it fails in comparison with its biggest influence, Michael Mann’s 1995 crime classic, Heat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hit the road for a funeral in the company of three impeccably crafted characters.

With honest chemistry, mournful perception and tremendous ability, Steve Carell, Laurence Fishburne and Bryan Cranston play three former Vietnam war soldiers who reunite in 2003.

As Carell wrestles with the US government for ownership of his late son’s corpse, his companions squabble for influence over the grieving man’s soul.

A strength of Texan director and writer Richard Linklater is his never being afraid of making his characters at times unlikeable.

Moments of black comedy brings shade to the script’s deep sadness and humanity, and though strongly anti-war and anti-authority, this is a salute to comradeship and finding dignity and honour in the service of others.

This is an unofficial sequel to Hal Ashby’s 1973 drama The Last Detail, which saw Jack Nicholson Oscar nominated for best actor. And though the names have been changed, it’s interesting to see Cranston’s take on the same role.

Mount up for action with Chris Hemsworth in this impressively staged real life war movie.

The Thor star saddles up as the leader of a dozen special forces soldiers who ride horseback into Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the twin towers.

It’s a covert operation, and with military intelligence being what it is, only one of them knows how to ride. 

With a forward operating base nicknamed The Alamo, this feels as if it’s a western armed with automatic rifles.

They’re on a mission to assist local warlord take a strategically important city. In the grand tradition of General Custer, they find themselves outnumbered 5000-1 and facing missile launchers and tanks.

There are shades of Lawrence of Arabia as Hemsworth leads the locals’ charge into battle, but he’s no Peter O’Toole and Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig is certainly no David Lean.

There’s probably a really good thaddle Thor joke in here somewhere, put I just can’t seem to find it.

Though the action scenes are bloodily effective, the pace never manages to gallop.

 

Slog your way through the  pedestrian third and final episode of this meandering sci-fi adventure.

Conceived as male-orientated cash-in on Jennifer Lawrence’s wildly successful Hunger Games series, it’s set in a ravaged future where an incurable disease has shattered civilisation and created a race of rabid zombies.

Having escaped the lethal maze of the title, our immune merry band of photogenic outlaws have to break into the remaining city of a totalitarian regime, to rescue one of their own.

There’s a nifty train heist in a well constructed and exciting pre-title sequence, but it’s a misleading advert for the grind which follows.

Due to a serious on-set accident to lead hunk Dylan O’Brien, there’s been a three year gap since the previous episode.

Given the fickle nature of its young adult target audience and a longer than intended wait, it will be interesting if anyone still cares.

By the time this remarkably unmemorable marathon was over, I certainly didn’t.

 

English football is stuck in the dark ages in this deliriously daft family animation.

The makers of Wallace and Gromit return to the big screen with a pre-historic adventure, created in their trademark clay model characters and traditional stop-motion technique. 

From the kick off it’s filled with their familiar combination of slapstick, puns and glorious attention to detail.

A determinedly populist plot pits the local underdogs versus wealthy European sophisticates in a game of football.

Caveman Dug and his tribe are captured by a Bronze Age invaders, and only by agreeing to a football match can Dug’s tribe win their freedom.

Dug has to train his agricultural inclined players to work as a team, relying on hard work and heart, rather than those suspicious innovations of skill and tactics.

Exploitative foreign administrators and gloating Germanic players come in for some harsh treatment, and the way bad guys have used their mineral wealth to find a team of high maintenance mercenary foreign players will not be lost on fans of the beautiful game.

And there’s no escaping the gentrification of the game, with the principal players being voiced by posh actors Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston, while working class Johnny Vegas is pushed firmly to the back of the team.

From the beginning scene featuring a homage to the stop motion masterpieces of filmmaker Ray Harryhausen, this is is a riot of references to British film history and terrace culture.

So the famous words of commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme mingle with nods to Terry Gilliam and Gregory’s Girl. 

There’s a return to the directors chair for four time Oscar winner Nick Park, it’s his first feature film since the wonderful 2005’s Wallace And Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Another rabbit features prominently here, and despite some close shaves, no animals were harmed in the making of this movie.

 

 

A diminished Matt Damon runs in ever decreasing circles in this ponderous sci-fi satire.

The Bourne Identity star gives a pleasantly guileless performance as occupational therapist, Paul.

To solve financial worries, he signs up to be shrunk to five inches tall and live in an experimental community. However the reality of his gilded existence is not exactly as it says in the brochure.

It’s consistent in tone, well designed and acted, but over long, patronising and only intermittently entertaining.

And as in his previous two films 2011’s The Decendents and 2013’s Nebraska, writer and director Alexander Payne offers plenty of disdain for the working class, portraying them as fat, lazy, stupid and drunk.

Nor is the film’s premise isn’t as original as it thinks, being considerably less exciting than the 1957 classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, and a lot less fun than 1989’s huge hit, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Out on Wednesday.