biopic

I, TONYA

Cert 15 119mins Stars 4

This sharp and alarmingly funny real life ice skating drama scores highly for artistic interpretation and technical accomplishment.

Aussie actress Margot Robbie has been deservedly Oscar nominated for her unruly, sympathetic and physically demanding performance as disgraced skater Tonya Harding.

The 23 year old Olympian became infamous in 1994 when her rival Nancy Kerrigan was attacked with a steel baton.

Blisteringly bracing and based on interviews with the key players of Team Harding, this is a very knowing tale of denial, delusion, snobbery and celebrity. Kerrigan’s voice isn’t heard.

We hear Harding’s story via Robbie’s brash turn as the first woman to perform the notoriously difficult triple salchow in competition.

A redneck prodigy, she grows up an unrepentant, athletic and brazen success. With her bad hair colour, tiny outfits and being forced to try to act posh to succeed, she’s basically all five Spice girls rolled into one. But with Olympic talent.

Fellow Oscar nominee Alison Janney won best supporting actress BAFTA as her chain smoking, foul mouthed domineering parent. She’s the most terrifying mother in cinema since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Best known as Marvel’s Winter Soldier, Sebastian Stan plays Harding’s husband Jeff as a violent and emotionally abusive idiot.

Both deny culpability in the unforgivable assault on Kerrigan which is referred to as ‘the incident’. We see it executed with extraordinary ineptitude by a third party.

Though the graphic domestic violence is condemned, the film’s raucous tone makes it bearable to watch and also highlights the mostly male stupidity on show.

Robbie uses her power as the film’s producer to craft a film which never preaches but lifts the lid on sporting concerns. These include the partiality of competition judges, abuse of aspiring stars, and the crossover between the media, corporate sponsorship and success.

With the world’s eye on the Winter Olympics, Tonya’s cautionary tale is as well timed as her dazzling routines.

 

 

THE HATTON GARDEN JOB

Cert 15 92mins Stars 1

A gem of a real life story is wasted in this botched attempt at a crime caper.

In 2015, four retired ex-cons exploit the British publics love of a Bank Holiday Monday, to pull of the UK’s biggest ever bank heist.

Using nothing more complicated than their experience, a blow torch and some wheelie bins, they made off with an estimated at £35 million from a bank vault in London’s Hatton Garden diamond district.

Phil Daniels and Larry Lamb lead the pilfering pensioners, but they’re made supporting characters in their own drama.

Instead Matthew Goode’s middle class master criminal is crowbarred into proceedings, and steals all their thunder. And posh thesp, Joely Richardson, is wildly miscast as a Hungarian mobster.

Desperate editing employs freeze frames, fast cuts and random funk tunes to try to hold our attention, but to now avail.

This is a depressing waste of likeable talent, and not worth disturbing your retirement for.

THE LOST CITY OF Z

Cert 15 140mins Stars 3

Plod your weary way across South America with this historical jungle trek.

It’s a handsome, sincere and stiff upper lipped affair. There’s none of the swinging adventurous fun of a Tarzan romp. And it lacks the barking mad genius of the classic, Aguirre: Wrath of God, to which it aspires.

We join Geordie actor Charlie Hunnam as he sails up the Amazon, searching for the fabled city of Z. The Sons Of Anarchy TV star plays Colonel Percy Fawcett, a real life military man-turned-explorer.

Hunnam’s a perfectly capable actor who always seems far more comfortable on the small screen than the silver one. As a result he’s out of his depth in more ways than one.

He sadly hasn’t the necessary range to express Fawcett’s obsessive nature, and there’s not enough action to play to his strengths. His favoured means of expression are monotone whispers or the shouting of grand declarations.

Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland pass through the revolving door marked fellow travellers, sporting remarkable beards and threadbare clothes. Sienna Miller does well in a non-role as the Fawcett’s much neglected and stay at home wife.

Pattinson would have made for a more interesting choice as Fawcett, and arguably would be a bigger box office draw. Meanwhile Holland is about to swing into the Hollywood stratosphere as the new Spider-man.

Fawcett made several journeys between 1905 and 1954. Rather than streamlining the story into two trips, the script plods pedantically on, marking every stop from the Irish countryside, to stuffy London and into deepest Bolivia.

There’s opera in the undergrowth, alligators on the river and treachery in the hearts of men. They’re attacked by cannibals, abandoned by guides and face starvation and disease.

This wants to be a film about about obsession, faith and spirituality, but it never finds the transcendence it manfully strives for.

PATRIOTS DAY

Cert 15 130mins Stars 4

Mark Wahlberg teams up with director Peter Berg to deliver a third example of their highly effective brand of real life, patriotic blue-collar heroism.

They’ve fought in Afghanistan in 2013’s Lone Survivor, and survived exploding oil rigs in last year’s Deepwater Horizon. Now the Boston Marathon terror attack of April 15, 2013, acts as the starting pistol for this tense action thriller.

Limbs and lives are shredded in when two homemade bombs are detonated in thirteen  seconds, just yards from the finishing line. It was the worst act of terrorism on US soil since the 911 Twin Tower attack in 2001.

The re-staging of the carnage and chaos is harrowingly effectively and filmed in a documentary style. It’s never sensationalist and leaves us in no doubt as to the scale of the human damage.

This local tragedy becomes a national emergency when the two brothers responsible head to New York, to set off more bombs, kidnapping and killing along the way.

With the exception of Mark Wahlberg’s character, all the main players are based on real life individuals. The star plays Tommy Saunders, an amalgam of real police officers involved in the pursuit of the of the terrorists. Though he’s an actor of limited range, Wahlberg once again excels in a role which riffs on his tough yet tender persona.

John Goodman and Kevin Bacon appear as a police chief and a FBI investigator.

Despite the male-heavy narrative, Melissa Benoist and Khandi Alexander are superb in a single scene showdown, where a suspects wife is interrogated by a female FBI agent.

Patriots Day was created with the involvement of those who were injured and so can be enjoyed without a sense of exploitation. Exciting, violent and sensitive to the  many who suffered, it is a rousing hymn to duty, family and the community spirit of the city under seige.

AMERICAN ANIMALS

Cert 15 117mins Stars 4

Wildly ambitious and superbly crafted, this intriguing, tense and funny real life heist thriller is a light fingered and dexterous modern day morality tale.

In 2004 four misfit college students infamously stole rare books worth millions from a university library, they are astonishingly idiotic and incompetent amateurs.

Actors recreate the theft using typical Hollywood storytelling conventions such as the recruiting of the specialist members of the gang, and meticulous planning scenes.

Plus there are many nods and winks to the films such as Ocean’s 11, which the likeable conspirators watch to discover how to commit the perfect robbery.

However interrupting at regular intervals in confessional documentary style, are the actual gang members.

Now older and somewhat wiser, they question each other’s account of events, turning this extremely entertainingly thriller into a commentary on the glamorisation of on-screen violence and criminal behaviour, with the script emphasising there is no such thing as consequence-free crime.

Catch these American animals if you can.

THE HIGHWAYMEN

Cert 15 Stars 3

Bonnie and Clyde were the Great Depression era outlaw killers whose definitive screen portrayals were by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn’s 1967 masterpiece.

With little new to say about them, this handsomely mounted period crime drama is focused on the lawmen who tracked the duo down.

There’s no hardship in keeping company with class acts Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the Texas Rangers brought out of retirement by Kathy Bates’ state governor. 

Their humour and wry chemistry give a dignified gloss to a standard tale of two good old boys rediscovering self-worth in later life.

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.

STAN AND OLLIE

Cert PG 98mins Stars 4

Hats off to Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly who don the famous bowlers of Hollywood’s  most popular double act and do delightful justice to the supreme slapstick talent of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Blessed with two modern performers at the top of their game, this funny, affectionate and respectful tribute is also surprisingly moving as it touches on age, fame and friendship, with an array of headwear charting the state of their messy relationship.

Sixteen years after an acrimonious split at the height of their big screen stardom, it’s now 1953 and the pair arrive in Newcastle Upon Tyne for a live tour of England’s low rent theatres, intended to showcase their talent with the hopes of catapulting them back to the big time in film.

Dogged by ill-health and financial issues, their fans believe them long retired,  younger generations don’t recognise them, and to add to the pressure their formidable wives are flying in with high expectations.

Played by the waspish Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda, they’re a scene-stealing double act whose comic chemistry is a venomous echo of the mens.

Coogan and Reilly bring out the competitive best in each other and perfectly capture Stan and Ollie’s famous mannerisms to an almost unnervingly accurate degree.

Their affecting and testy relationship have us believe they’ve spent years together honing their act as they deliver the familiar evergreen gags with great skill and immaculate timing.

Stan And Ollie is nominated for Best British film at this year’s BAFTAs which also sees Coogan nominated for Best Actor as he again demonstrates what a skilled dramatic actor he is, while Reilly was nominated for Best Comedy Actor at this weeks Golden Globes.

But as Stan says, ‘you can’t have Hardy without Laurel’, and it’s as a team they bring heart and humanity to this poignant portrait and a long overdue celebration of a pair of comedy giants.

 

 

 

 

PAPILLON (2018)

Cert 15 130mins Stars 3

Geordie TV star, Charlie Hunnam, takes on one of the iconic roles of Hollywood legend, Steve McQueen in this effective period prison drama remake.

As a prisoner nicknamed Papillon, he sweats through the vicious regime of a remote island prison in French Guiana, before being sent to the notorious Devils’ Island.

He befriends a forger called Dega, and as good as he was as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek is no Dustin Hoffman.

This second adaptation of Henri Charriere’s famous 1969 autobiography is straightforward, sturdy and handsomely designed with impressive location work and always commits to the brutality of the story.

But it cleaves so closely to the earlier film without offering any new perspective on criminal justice, colonisation, racism or any other subject, I wonder why they bothered.

And Hunnam’s a piece of casting on a par with Carl ‘Apollo Creed’ Weathers, stepping into Oscar winner Sidney Poitier’s shoes in the 1986 remake of 1958 chain gang classic, The Defiant Ones.

ROCKETMAN

Cert 15 121mins Stars 4

Taron Egerton launches his inner diva into the spotlight with a wonderfully versatile performance as Elton John, in this redemptive musical biopic of the singers stellar career.

Charting his rise from suburban schoolboy to global superstar, we sees the tears behind the tantrums as Elton struggles with a lack of self-worth which results in a multitude of self-destructive addictions including, drugs, booze, sex and shopping.

Packed with greatest hits such as Crocodile Rock, and Your Song, it’s an orgy of clothes,, cars, mansions, and um, orgies, though unlike the outrageous costumes, the intimate sex scenes are tasteful, sincere and won’t scare the horses.

I’ve never been a fan of Kingsman star Egerton, though I did enjoy his turn as a singing gorilla in 2016’s animated caper, Sing.

But no there’s no denying the range, commitment and all round excellence of his performance as the Pinball Wizard, particularly his ability to transition in a moment from from heartbroken heap to grandstanding onstage star.

He makes Elton a magnificently flawed, petulant, often unpleasant figure who wins our sympathy through his honesty and eventual willingness to confront his demons. And the actors playing the childhood Elton are also terrific.

Jamie Bell plays Elton’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin and their bromance is the beating heart of the movie.

As Elton’s abusive manager, Richard ‘Bodyguard’ Madden is a compellingly sharklike, and Bryce Dallas Howard is breathtakingly cold as Elton’s mother.

From playing as Babyface in kiddie caper, Bugsy Malone, to making The Proclaimers jukebox musical, Sunshine on Leith, and taking up the reins on last years smash, Bohemian Rhapsody, director Dexter Fletcher is a veteran of big screen musicals.

His dynamic and slickly choreographed numbers full of visually inventive flights of fancy reveal his empathy for Elton and is  clearly a huge fan of the Rocketman. And so will you be after this.