2018

WALK WITH ME

Cert PG 93mins Stars 1

There’s not much to be learned from this  fly on the wall documentary which amounts to little more than an advertisement for a Buddhist retreat in France.

The filmmakers seem to have traded access for acquiescence and checked their critical faculties at the front gate.

Bells regulate the lives of the shaven-headed and celibate monks, at the sound of which all activities pause, in order to encourage ‘mindfulness’.

However enlightenment can be anyone’s for a mind expanding and eye-opening €550 per-person per-week, for a double room stay at the monastery.

As the film is coy about the prices, I looked them up on their website.

The concept  of ‘mindfulness’ seems to be that life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Well it was actually Ferris Bueller who said that, and he got to drive a Ferrari. Maybe those monks are onto something.

 

ANNA AND THE APOCALYPSE

Cert 15 Stars 4

Catchy tunes make the blood-splatting violence sing in this inventive and entertaining teenage zom-rom-com musical set in a Scottish school.

Ella Hunt, Malcolm Cumming and Marli Siu lead the bright, attractive young cast as they sing, dance and fight through a zombie apocalypse, which interrupts Anna’s plot to escape her humdrum small town life.

There’s evident glee at the volume of guts, gore, music and mayhem the filmmakers can squeeze out of the low budget, and it feels like a big screen version of the Buffy The Vampire Slayers’ musical episode, Once More With Feeling. And I mean that in a good way.

 

AVENGEMENT

Cert 18 Stars 2

Tattooed and muscular action star Scot Adkins, swaggers through this low budget British gangster thriller with two-fisted menace as an escaped convict out for revenge on his criminal former colleagues.

Reunited with writer and director Jesse V. Johnson with whom he made Adkins made the recent martial arts thriller, Triple Threat.

Nasty, violent and foul-mouthed, it‘s a cut above many of its type due to the efforts of cinematographer Jonathan Hall, and helped by a supporting cast which includes the always watchable Nick Moran, Thomas Turgoose and Kierston Wareing.

GHOST STORIES

Cert 15 97mins Stars 4

Investigate the paranormal with this devilishly scary supernatural British thriller.

Andy Nyman stars as a TV presenting Professor who is evangelical in his mission to debunk psychics and the existence of the afterlife.

But his faith in science is tested when he is challenged to solve three separate cases of ghostly experience.

As the tremendous trio of Paul Whitehouse, Alex Lawther and Martin Freeman anchor each segment, the spectre of A Christmas Carol haunts the story and Charles Dickens would have appreciated its bleak and dark turns. 

Beautifully played and with a theatrical insistence on in-camera special effects, it’s inventive and funny as events become increasingly bonkers.

Asylums, churches, caravan parks and the Yorkshire Moors provide a suitably damp and downbeat environment alongside a more traditional fog-bound forest.

We’re asked to contemplate the emptiness of life without the possibility of an ever-after. And by the time Ghost Stories have scared you to death, you’ll be praying there is.

HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES

Cert 15 103mins Stars 3

Three sex hungry teenagers have a very close encounter in this raucous and oddball 1970’s-set British sci-fi comedy.

Looking for an late night party in Croydon, the lads mistakenly blag their way into an avant garde latex fetish swingers club. Which almost always never happened to me when I lived in the South London borough.

Based on a short story from the weird and wonderful mind of  writer, Neil Gaiman, the central joke is no one can tell the difference between punks, aliens and Americans.

Dazzlingly put together by Brit multi-Oscar winning costume designer, Sandy Powell, the costumes are a riot of electric colours.

Nicole Kidman unleashes her inner anarchist as a punk matriarch called Boudicca, and Elle Fanning is demented as an alien with only 48 hours to experience life, or at least Croydon.

For all its punk posturing the film is more fun than ferocious, and its alarming appearance disguises a surprisingly sweet nature.

 

BEAST

Cert 15 106mins Stars 4

The pungent atmosphere of this throat-grabbing British thriller is a heady mix of earthy lust, poisonous snobbery and cold-hearted corruption.

It’s a modern-day fairytale inspired by infamous ‘Beast of Jersey’, a 1960’s paedophile who preyed on the islands inhabitants.

Moll is a red-haired Cinderella who escapes her strict mother to pursue a romance with a local poacher, only to see him suspected of being a multiple child rapist and murderer.

Irish actress Jessie Buckley will be familiar from Tom Hardy’s TV series, Taboo, and gives a mesmerising performance which swings from dead-pan subtlety to raw physicality. Johnny Flynn is vulnerable and wolfish as her boyfriend, Pascal.

A haunting choral soundtrack reinforces the timeless nature, and the arch script is a great example of how filmmakers are choosing to side-step the plot-ruining internet, by pretending it doesn’t exist.

This is a scarily confident directorial debut by writer Michael Pearce, and I’m intrigued to see what beastly surprises his talent serves up next.

SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE

Cert PG 116mins Stars 5

Along comes a Spider-man as you’ve never seen him before in this deliriously entertaining animated spin on your friendly neighbourhood superhero.

Joyous, thrilling and inclusive, it’s a pulsating neon kaleidoscope of jokes, action and invention as several versions of Spider-man team up to save the fabric of the universe being torn apart by the infamous crime lord, Kingpin. 

However this is not the Peter Parker character familiar from the Marvel films and comics, but another version of the web-swinger, Afro-latino schoolboy Miles Morales, and exists independently of the mainstream Marvel Connected Universe of the upcoming Avengers: Endgame.

Rapper and actor Shameik Moore gives a lovely grounded performance as the voice of schoolboy Miles, alongside an impressive cast which includes Oscar winners  Mahershala Ali and Nicolas Cage.

Miles is bitten in time honoured tradition by a radioactive spider but before he can learn to control to his great new powers, he’s given the great responsibility of saving the world from  the effects of a parallel dimensions machine.

Through this window to the multi-verse swing various Spider-types of different genders, styles and species which range from 1930’s noir, to Japanese manga and a sort of Porky Pig figure.

As well as providing a team dynamic and a lot of humour, this solves the problem of  Spidey otherwise having to talk to himself to explain the plot, and proves what a universal and flexible character Spider-man is.

Intent on villainy are a rogues gallery of familiar foes such as Green Goblin and Doc Ock, plus some super-menacing Spanish cyborg scorpion thing.  

It’s produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller who made 2014’s brilliant The LEGO Movie and they fill this with their fresh and infectious looney tunes-style energy and colour.

And while honouring its humble pulp comic origins they also capture the extraordinary optimism and dynamism of the character as well as offering a touching tribute to the creators, Steve Dikto and the recently departed, Stan Lee.

This reincarnation of their most popular superhero rivals the best of this years live-action superhero adventures, and is the most enjoyable Spider-man film yet.

BAD REPUTATION

Cert 15 94mins Stars 3

Raven-haired rocker, Joan Jett, is best known for her classic 1982 single, I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll, and as this unquestioning documentary amply demonstrates, she’s still rocking the free world at the age of 60.

While coyly skirting around her private life, Jett talks us through her career as part of the all-girl glam rock group, The Runaways, and later as singer of her own group, The Blackhearts, plus there’s a lot of onstage footage, artists such as Iggy Pop and Blondie are interviewed, while Miley Cyrus swings by to sing Jett’s praises.

Having emerged out of the Los Angeles LGBT club scene of early 1970s, and alongside the women’s liberation movement, Jett is presented as an important trailblazer in the macho and misogynist 1970’s rock industry.

But claims to legendary status are overstated due a deficit of hit songs and the lack of  evolution in her look and sound, especially in comparison for a singer born the same year as Madonna.

FIRST MAN

Cert 12A 142mins Stars 5

Have an out-of-this-world experience with this brilliantly ambitious biopic of history-making astronaut, Neil Armstrong.

He became the first man to walk on the Moon on July 21, 1969, during NASA’s Apollo 11 space mission, and we learn how this flight of global importance was a trip of deeply personal significance.

Superb cinematography and astonishing sound design convey the bone-shaking, ear-shattering and nerve-shredding experience of travelling in the extraordinarily primitive spacecraft in terrifyingly immersive sequences.

While attempting space travel in little more than a Morris Minor strapped to a skyscraper-sized firework, the spacemen have to calculate their trajectory with paper, a pencil and a slide rule.

In being inspiring, mournful, uplifting, terrifying and heartbreaking, it’s another staggeringly accomplished success from Damien Chazelle.

For 2016’s romantic musical, La La Land, he became the youngest ever winner of the best director Oscar, and he’s reunited with his star, Ryan Gosling, who is skilfully cast as the impressively impassive pilot who is inwardly troubled.

We follow the devoted family man on his seven year mission preparing to boldly go where no-one had gone before, and experience his arrival at an unexpected and emotional destination.

His down-to-Earth wife, Janet, is played with devastating precision by The Crown star, Claire Foy, and with Armstrong regarded as a US national symbol, their relationship becomes a reflection on the US during the 1960’s.

Corey Stoll is abrasively outspoken as Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, and is someone you wouldn’t want to spend two minutes in a lift with, never mind a week-long space mission.

And the Command Module pilot, Michael Collins, is played by Lukas Haas, the young Amish boy in Harrison Ford’s 1985 cop thriller, Witness, who still doesn’t look old enough to drive.

Elevated by the divine spectacle of outer space, this trip of a lifetime will leave you bruised, battered and moved to high heaven.

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

Cert 15 119mins Stars 3

Director Barry Jenkins returns with another melancholy character-driven mood poem to sit alongside his 2016 Best Picture Oscar winner, Moonlight.

There is a standout score, tremendous use of colour and strong performances, but Jenkins also tests our patience with his rejection of dramatic storytelling.

KiKi Layne and Stephan James are endearingly sweet as young lovers, Tish and Fonny, but she is pregnant and he is prison after being wrongly accused of the rape of another woman.

And Regina King deservedly follows in the footsteps of Moonlight’s Naomie Harris by being Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actress, as Tish’s mother.

Possessing the articulate elegance of James Baldwin, on whose novel this is based, this is less a night out, more a distillation of the late 20th century African-American experience.

But it’s frustrating to watch as the dreamlike narrative flits back and forth through time, and consequently Beale St. failed to challenge for the top Oscars.