2019

MA

Cert 15 99mins Stars 3

Parents trying to party down with the kids is always mortifying to teenagers but are rarely as terrifying than in this fun and functional revenge driven high school horror.

Another bloody and low-budget shocker by the makers of The Purge franchise, it’s a grab bag of drunk teens, public humiliation, sexual assault and torture.

It’s headed up by Octavia Spencer who leads the game young cast in a merry dance, and is supported by stalwart performers such as Juliette Lewis and Luke Evans.

Spencer plays a veterinary nurse suffering a serious case of arrested development who attempts to curry the favour of local teens when she puts the basement of her remote house at their disposal for illicit parties.

In an entertaining change of pace from the wise motherly types she more frequently portrays, Spencer is having a great time teasing out her inner psycho.

Though the eye watering violence is late to the party, they provide a fresh impetus just as the flagging party needs it the most.

 

 

 

GLORIA BELL

Cert 15 102mins Stars 4

Julianne Moore negotiates the perils of middle-aged singledom in this intimate portrait of self-discovery in the latest drama from writer and director Chilean Sebastian Lelio, and is an English language re-imagining of Gloria, his 2013 film.

Gloria is a middle-class insurance agent with an unremarkable existence which Moore brings to life with a combination of charm, sensuality, fragility, vulnerability and rising fortitude.

Her new boyfriend is a slack bag of weakness with commitment issues which allows a marvellous John Turturro to demonstrate his versatility and wonderful lack of vanity.

The cast also includes Jeanne Tripplehorn, Rita Wilson and Michael Cera, with each offering understated excellence at awkward family gatherings where new beaus meet former spouses and adult children.

It’s hard to tell where on the scale of great-to-brilliant Moore’s performance lies, partly due to her having seemingly played similar roles before, and also because she’s required to repeat everyday snapshots of life, such as feeding a cat, and singing along to the car radio on her daily commute.

These scenes don’t allow for grandstanding fireworks of emotion but the small changes in these routines reveal Gloria’s gradually changing attitudes to life.

Bonnie Tyler’s epic rock ballad Total Eclipse of The heart soundtracks a wonderfully aggressive moment of catharsis, leading to a dance floor scene which is well, glorious.

 

 

 

 

LIAM GALLAGHER: AS IT WAS

Cert 15 85mins Stars 3

With even the biggest screen barely able to contain his formidable charisma, the former frontman of 1990’s rockers, Oasis, swaggers into cinemas with this indulgent documentary charting his recent life with a cheerily casual and charitable eye.

It’s a reasonable attempt to rebrand the notorious hedonist as a fitness-minded family man and tea drinking elder statesman of rock music.

He was rescued from a post-Oasis creative, personal and financial low by his new manager and romantic partner, Debbie, and their complex relationship has interesting echoes of the marriage of reformed wild man, Ozzy Osbourne and his wife Sharon.

Liam’s mother is a scene-stealing Irish charm, and he can’t resist sticking the boot again into his brother, Noel, whose absence along with the songs of Oasis is a loss.

Irresistibly funny and foul-mouthed, Liam’s a fascinating mix of humility, arrogance, sensitivity and bravado. Plus judging by recent musical output, he’s also the most interesting and talented member of the family.

LATE NIGHT

Cert 15 102mins Stars 3

Tune into this comedy-drama to watch Emma Thompson dig deep into her stand-up comic roots to compensate for the deficiencies of a well-intentioned but tame and clumsy script.

The two-time Oscar winner plays a TV chat show host whose ratings slump threatens the shutdown of her career, so in desperation she employs an inexperienced woman of colour to freshen up her writing team of entitled whinging white guys.

Scriptwriter and actor Mindy Kaling plays the eager Molly Patel, and her screenplay draws heavily on her own experience of being a ‘diversity hire’ as a writer of the US version of TV’s The Office.

However her millennial point of view patronises Thompson’s character and age group, by suggesting a middle-aged woman twenty year high profile media career wouldn’t comprehend the importance of social media.

Important points are made about employment gatekeeping and inequality, but for a room full of supposed comedy writers, it’s insufficiently funny.

 

 

 

 

SOMETIMES ALWAYS NEVER

Cert 12A 89mins Stars 4

Bill Nighy is a debonair delight in this charming, elegant, whimsical and unexpectedly moving gem of British comedy-drama mystery.

Sporting an initially distracting Scouse accent, Nighy plays a scrabble-loving tailor who is called to the morgue to identify a body which possibly is that of his missing adult son.

A sensitive veil is drawn across the detail of this gruesome errand, and leads to the elderly widower attempting to reconnect with his surviving family.

With great precision Bootle-born director Carl hunter, uses uniquely beautiful and highly-stylised set design and a deliberate sense of artificiality to bring an air of timelessness to this warmhearted and funny fable.

A uniformly excellent featuring Jenny Agutter, Sam Riley, and Alexei Sayle, are fortunate to work from the wonderfully droll and articulate script by Liverpool-born writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, who finds joy in the everyday and ordinary and whose love of words and language is in every line of delicious dialogue.

 

 

MEN IN BLACK: INTERNATIONAL

Cert 12A 114mins Stars 3

This big budget sci-fi action comedy sequel to Will Smith’s 1990’s blockbuster trilogy offers plenty of glossy CGI action but is surprisingly a little beige beneath the surface.

Fresh from starring in mega Marvel superhero smash, Avengers: Endgame, Chris ‘Thor’ Hemsworth and Tessa ‘Valkyrie’ Thompson step into shoes of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as galaxy defending secret agents.

They’re armed with memory altering gizmos, lots of shiny laser weapons and of course the essential black sunglasses, as they encounter lots of small, cute aliens, plenty of large, tentacled, angry ones, and those that change from one to another.

Star of the show  is the warm and watchable Tessa Thompson, who plays a computer hacker recruited by Emma Thompson’s boss of the Men In Black organisation, and given the codename, Agent M.

She’s sent to London to team with Hemsworth’s agent H, where the duo’s mission to protect an alien dignitary goes horribly wrong.

A mole is suspected in the MIB, and the most powerful weapon in the universe is being sought by a species of warmongering aliens, the Hive.

Very much written as a spy caper, it merrily riffs on the world of superspy James Bond with Hemsworth very knowingly playing the hard-drinking womaniser as comically arrogant, reckless, a bit dim and vaguely inept.

And it’s complete with glamorous international locations, flash cars, gadgets, and a beautiful femme fatale in the shape of Rebecca Ferguson’s intergalactic arms dealer. Plus Kumail Nanjiani adds a lot of humour voicing a pint-sized alien called Pawny.

F. Gary Gray directed 2017’s eighth instalment of the Fast and the Furious franchise, and despite rocketing his cast about the globe he can’t get the pace here up to a similar speed.

Will Smith’s swagger is a big miss and script should be sharper, but the natural easy chemistry of its attractive stars prevent the film from crashing to Earth.

 

X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX

Cert 12A 113mins Stars 2

This final episode in the long running live action comic book superhero series fails to finish in a blaze of glory, and instead flames out in a CGI puff of indifference.

Set mostly in 1992 it stars a willing Sophie Turner as young superhero Jean Grey, who along with fellow X-Men team members, is involved in a deep space rescue of a space shuttle.

She’s exposed to a solar flare which gives an immeasurable boost to her mind-reading telepathic and ground-shaking telekinetic powers, but back on Earth she struggles to control her enhanced abilities.

Soon she’s being pursued by two competing groups of X-Men, the US military, and a band of homeless alien shape-shifters lead by Jessica Chastain. It’s alarming and dispiriting to see an actress of her quality slog through CGI landscapes and grossly functional dialogue and direction with such grim determination.

Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult don’t fare any better as blue skinned mutants, while James McAvoy’s bald and brainy Professor X, and Michael Fassbender’s anti-hero Magneto, are rolled out once more to read minds and bend metal.

Given an eight year head start on rival superhero franchise, the Avengers, but with ten fewer films under its belt, the X-Men series suffers from previous creative decisions resulting in a confused and contradictory patchwork of cast changes, multiple timelines and repetitive narratives.

This twelfth X-Men yarn is a sombre and plodding retread of the series’ 2006 third instalment, X-Men: The Last Stand, and feels at all times like a rehashed greatest hits package of uninspired action scenes.

Sorely missing the fan-pleasing muscle of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, at least we should be grateful this repeat adventure doesn’t see former football Vinnie Jones reprise his role as the super-villain, Juggernaut.

‘Nobody cares anymore’ exclaims Fassbender at one point. It’s as if he can read my mind.

 

ALADDIN (2019)

Cert PG 128 mins Stars 4

Will Smith unleashes his magic charm in Disney’s confident, colourful and crowd-pleasing live action remake of their 1992 classic Oscar winning musical animation.

Hollywood’s once biggest star delivers a larger than life performance as the giant magic genie of the lamp, and burns charisma, warmth and heartfelt maturity in the role originally played by the comic, Robin Williams.

The story very closely follows the original, with street thief Aladdin teaming up with a genie to win the heart of the princess Jasmine and help save the desert kingdom of Agrabah from the unfettered ambition of Marwan Kenzari’s villainous vizier, Jafar.

Unlike Tim Burton’s lumbering Dumbo remake, this is full of fun, excitement and of course glorious songs, with fresh sparkle given to the diamond tunes of ‘Friend Like Me’ and ‘A Whole New World’, with ‘Prince Ali’ is delivered in grand show-stopping style.

Mena Massoud is an earnest and endearing romantic lead as Aladdin, and is game for the thankless task of playing the straight man to not just Smith and the rest of the human cast, but a flying carpet and the adorable monkey, Abu.

I wish his opposite number Naomi Scott, had more to do as Jasmine, but she makes the most of her screen time with constant bridling at the constraints of her gilded cage existence in a star-making performance.

She has enjoyable chemistry with Nasim Pedrad’s handmaiden and knocks her solo song out of the park. ‘Speechless’ is one of two new numbers, and is an assertive anthem about challenging authority which Scott delivers with impressively fierce defiance.

Director Guy Ritchie desperate for a hit as his last box office success was nearly a decade ago, with the second of his and Robert Downey, Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes adventures, so it’s  a canny movie to style the climax in the CGI manner of a Marvel superhero film.

This rarely feels like a Ritchie movie and whether you consider that a good thing, he’s certainly put a shift in with this huge production, which sees him successfully negotiate the different demands of action, romance, comedy, special effects and big song and dance numbers.

The two eight year olds I took to the screening had a great time even though they aren’t familiar with the original animated version, or with Smith’s lengthy TV, music or movie career, and he’s certainly won two new fans of the next generation.

And as Smith swaggers into silver screen musical theatre, it’s great to see the Fresh Prince discover a whole new jam.