2018

THE HAPPY PRINCE

Cert 15 105 mins Stars 3

This handsome biopic is a tender, sympathetic and bawdy character portrait of the scandal-ridden playwright, Oscar Wilde.

The journey to the big screen has been a decade long passion project for the writer, director and star, Rupert Everett. 

He gives a terrifically complex and rich performance as the self-obsessed 46 year old dandy who is exiled, destitute and debauched in turn-of the-century Paris, following imprisonment for homosexuality.

With Wilde’s reputation, marriage, and career in ruins, and a diet of champagne, cocaine and absinthe having wrecked his health, he begins to re-evaluate his selfish behaviour and life decisions.

Suitably, the film has a visual extravagance which would seem way beyond its means, with the finance depending on Colin Firth appearing in a small role.

Everett sprinkles his script with familiar examples of Wilde’s wit and doesn’t over burden it with plot. Using Wilde’s children’s story, The Happy Prince, as an analogy for the author’s life allows Everett to create an honourable ode to his hero. 

OCEAN’S 8

Cert 12A 110mins Stars 4

Be dazzled by a sparkling mix of high crime and haute couture in this hugely enjoyable diamond heist caper.

Sandra Bullock stars in this all female spinoff sequel to the super-successful Ocean’s 11 trilogy, which began way back in 2001.

It featured George Clooney as crook, Danny Ocean, who is supposedly now dead, and now the The Gravity star plays Debbie, his con-artist sister.

Leaving prison on parole after five years inside, she cuts a strikingly strong, sexy and smart figure as she promptly blags her way into an expensive hotel suite with plans for an audacious, risky and hugely profitable con.

Hooking up with former partner-in-crime, Cate Blanchett, they put together a multi-ethnic team of women which includes Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, and Awkwafina.

Helena Bonham Carter is entertainingly distracted as a fashion designer roped in to help, and popstar Rihanna is confident and surprisingly good as the teams technical genius.

It’s fun to hang out with the all-girl gang who have a convincing and easy going chemistry, and each of them is given their moment to shine in the spotlight and demonstrate their varied skills.

Dressed in a series of fabulous outfits, they plan to steal a $150 million necklace from an exclusive fundraising Gala in New York while it’s been worn by a famous actress, played with comic vacuity by Anne Hathaway. Though not everyone knows there is more than one con being played, which raises the stakes for all concerned. 

Cameos by worthies such as Vogue supremo, Anna Wintour, and tennis player, Serena Williams, are thankfully kept to a minimum. And not even the late arrival of James Corden to the party can spoil the fun.

This is a slick and highly polished good time, and is all the better for feeling as if it smells of expensive perfume rather than the men’s locker room.

HEREDITARY

Cert 15 127mins Stars 4

There’s a demonic creepiness to this slow burning supernatural horror which doubles as a tormented exploration of a very dysfunctional family.

Aussie actress Toni Collette gives an Oscar-worthy performance as a woman being torn apart by fear, grief and the pressures of parenting.

Her daughter has some very disturbing habits, her son has some serious issues and her mother is recently deceased but remains a malign influence. 

With echoes of 1968 classic, Rosemary’s Baby, this is an extraordinarily stylish and self-assured debut by director, Ari Aster, who seems to want to punish more than entertain us.

Intense, anxious, bleak and deeply unsettling rather than scary, Aster deliberately avoids the crowd pleasing thrills of the recent and more easily enjoyable horror, A Quiet Place, and he seems intent on shocking us into submission.

Hereditary has proved hugely divisive in the US, due in part to its controversial ending, but you’d best see it to make up your own mind. If you dare.

 

 

JURASSIC WORLD: THE FALLEN KINGDOM

Cert 12A 128mins Stars 4

Mammoth mayhem stampedes across the big screen in this meaty sequel to 2015’s monster smash.

This fifth dino-epic is set three years after the ending of the previous billion pound box office super-heavy weight, and the dinosaurs existence on the island home of the defunct Jurassic Park resort is threatened by a volcano.

So stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard helicopter in alongside a bunch of military mercenaries to ferry 11 species of dinosaurs to safety as the mountain erupts.

It’s a brilliant, breathless action sequence packed with dinosaurs, takes place on an enormous scale, and is exciting, scary and fun.

Once the creatures are saved, the second part of the film is framed as a haunted house horror and takes place in a huge gothic US mansion, where there is a nefarious plan to auction off the beasts to international arms dealers.

Though each half of the film is excellent in their own way, they’re very different and not entirely successfully spliced together, much like the new killer hybrid dinosaur on the loose, the Indoraptor.

Despite having more than enough of talent and empathy to anchor the series, Howard is sadly too often allowed to be elbowed out of the way so co-star Pratt demonstrate his smug wisecracking action-man prowess.

Veteran James Cromwell brings gravitas as Sir Benjamin Lockwood, and young Isabella Sermon as his vulnerable and brave granddaughter makes a strong debut. Rafe Spall plays his trusted right hand and is becoming one of my favourite actors.

Spanish director J. A. Bayona previously made tsunami drama, The Impossible and the teenage fable, A Monster Calls, and all his work is concerned importance of mothers.

Here he brings in elements of fable from his spooky horror, The Orphanage, which I suspect are closer to his heart than all his impressively staged blockbuster action.

Though at times too full on and grisly for the very little ones, the dinosaurs are back and they are roarsome!

 

WELCOME TO CURIOSITY

Cert 15 94mins Stars 1

There’s nothing inviting in this drab, tawdry and all round rubbish low budget British thriller.

Set in the fictional Cornish town of Curiosity, an escaped psychiatric patient and the heist of £6million draws various unconnected characters together with grim violence.

Cardboard characters wander through scenes devoid of visual interest, in a landscape dotted with vague bits of Americana, nods to the original intention to set the film in the US.

Former rapper and now Eastenders regular, Richard Blackwood is wholly unconvincing as a gangster. The rest of the cast such as Jack Ashton and Amrita Acharia will be familiar from Call The Midwife and games of Thrones.

They all deserve better than the lumpen and flavourless dialogue they’re asked to chew on.

The director has swallowed the ideas of far more talented people such as Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers and regurgitated them in a messy puddle, sadly with none of the colour or violent surprise this implies.

 

THE BOY DOWNSTAIRS

Cert 12A 89mins Stars 2

There’s little to laugh at in this slight, limp, frustrating and maudlin millennial romcom.

The likeable Zosia Mamet stars as aspiring writer and singleton, Diana, who has moved to New York after three years in London.

She takes a job in a bridal shop and this is probably intended as irony but the script fails to build on the idea.

Moving into an apartment Diana is surprised to discover her ex-boyfriend is the boy living downstairs and OMG, in a new relationship.

Matthew Shear’s struggling musician Ben is such a remarkably unprepossessing presence I’m staggered he can romance not one but two attractive women during the course of the film.

And that’s without his default behaviour which is clingy, spineless and dull.

Thank goodness for Diana’s best friend Gabby, who brings energy and humour and is far more worthy of our attention than her sadly scant screen time allows.

Plus her love life seems much more dynamic, interesting and well, fun.

THE LITTLE VAMPIRE

Cert U 82mins Stars 2

This bloodless animation offers thin pickings for all but the most undemanding cinema-goers.

It’s a cross-cultural bromance between two 13 year old boys, a Transylvanian vampire with punk hair, and a fresh-faced US holidaymaker on a creepy castle tour of Europe with his family.

They team up to rescue the vampire’s clan from a pair of inept villains. The head baddie is voiced by Jim Carter, best known as Downton Abbey’s butler, Carson. 

The only other recognisable names the budget stretches to are Miriam Margolyes and Tim Pigott-Smith, with not much left over for the animation, and even less for the script.

Mixes magic spells with some mechanical contraptions such as the Infra-dead vampire locating device, and I could have done with much more of the weaponised vampire-cow poo,

It’s so insubstantial it won’t cast a shadow in your memory, but it’s harmless and doesn’t totally suck. Though it’s probably best saved for the rainiest day of half term.

SHOW DOGS

Cert PG 92mins Stars 3

Enjoy a parade of pampered pooches in this canine crime caper which has a doggy style all of its own.

A New York police department rottweiler teams up with a human FBI agent to go undercover as contestants a Las Vegas dog beauty pageant.

They’re trying to unmask an international animal smuggling ring and rescue a super cute panda cub called Ling-li.

In debt to Tom Hanks’ 1989 Turner and Hooch, but now the animals can talk, courtesy of the voice of rapper, Ludacris, as Max the rottweiler, along with RuPaul and Shaquille O’Neal as fellow contestants.

Best known as the voice of Lego Batman, Will Arnett plays Max’s sidekick, but he’s a far less dynamic crimefighter here.

Raja Gosnell is Hollywood’s top dog for mutt movies having previously directed two live action Scooby Doo movies and 2008’s Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

He embraces the barking mad premise with a straight face, and dog fanciers will fall in puppy love with it.

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY

Cert 12A 135mins Stars 4
Experience a light-speed roller coaster ride in a galaxy far, far away in this rip-roaring Star Wars spin-off.

Set sometime before the original 1977 blockbuster, it follows the young Han Solo from a penniless street thief to becoming a swashbuckling space smuggler.

Having been brilliantly played by Harrison Ford in four films previously, I worried about how the new guy would measure up.

Especially as in the words of Princess Leia who famously quipped of Luke Skywalker, new star Alden Ehrenreich is probably a little short for a stormtrooper. In his defence, everyone looks short next to the enormous hairy frame of Chewbacca the Wookiee.

And Ehrenreich quickly wins us over with an endearingly cocky swagger, as Solo survives a mountainside monorail heist, meets Chewbacca for the first time, acquires his iconic spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, and falls foul of Paul Bettany’s master criminal, Dryden Vos.

Emilia Clarke from TV’s Game Of Thrones plays Solo’s childhood friend, Qi’ra, though she’s such a sweet on-screen presence she struggles to convince of the conflict within her character.

And it’s Donald Glover, as the roguish Lando Calrissian, who steals the film with his cosmic charisma.

A lot more fun than the other Star Wars spin-off, Rogue One, there’s no avoiding the background hum of war.

But this is far from the rarefied world of generals and emperors of previous films, this is a blue-collar world of miners, shipbuilders, and frontline soldiers, where people wrestle in mud for their lives.

Ron Howard’s safe pair of hands were brought in to reshoot large chunks of the film after original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were jettisoned when Disney were unhappy with their loose improvisational style.

Racing against the clock to complete the film it’s remarkable he’s crafted not only a coherent film, but a hugely entertaining one, packed with humour and big screen spectacle.

 

 

ALLURE

Cert 18 104mins Stars 2

Obsession and abuse leave a lot to be desired in this anguished, unconvincing and unsatisfactory low key thriller.

Intended as a character portrait, this is a kidnap story with more sympathy for the perpetrator than its victim.

Laura is a troubled house-cleaner who pursues a transgressive relationship with the under-age teen daughter of a client.

Most recently seen in TV’s Westworld, Evan Rachel Wood is impressively raw in the central role as the thirtysomething who struggles to control her manipulative and self-destructive impulses, the consequence of a traumatic early life.

However this also has repercussion for the impressionable object of her desires, the waif-like and angst ridden teenager, Eva, played with a tremulous efficiency by Julia Sarah Stone.

For debutant directors Carlos and Jason Sanchez this is an extension of their supposedly subversive and provocative career in fine art. Instead we have overwrought underpowered drama which lacks a moral or political position and I struggled to find anything to love about it.