Drama

NO FATHERS IN KASHMIR

Cert 15 Stars 3

There are few more promising dramatic scenarios than teenage romance in a war torn country, but this modern day coming-of-age tale is more concerned with raising awareness for its tragic real life background than delivering gripping spectacle.

Noor is a British teen visiting her grandparents who live in Kashmir, the poverty stricken border country which has been the centre of a war between India and Pakistani since 1947.

Zara Webb’s smartphone wielding attitude is wholly convincing, but she occasionally struggles to carry the emotional weight asked of her.

Through her relationship with a scooter-riding local charmer played by Shivam Raina, the script explores the tragedy of the thousands of ‘disappeared’ men who have been taken by the army, leaving the village women not knowing if they are wives or widows.

Threadbare thriller elements and grim reality sit uneasily with the underpowered romance and too many characters exist simply to explain a point of view.

There’s no doubting the filmmakers sincere intent but this may have been better structured as a straightforward documentary.

BOMBSHELL

Cert 15 Stars 5

This shocking, compelling and explosive real life drama explores the real life serial sexual abuse at the top of a TV network and the drama is powered by several brilliant and award worthy performances.

Oscar nominated Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie are joined by Nicole Kidman to complete an outstanding trio of talent, playing the sharp, smart, professional and highly polished news presenters, seeking to bring down the predatory boss of the Fox News TV network, Roger Ailes.

John Lithgow makes the most powerful man in American TV a horribly grasping and paranoid figure, who’s created an atmosphere of fear in order to maintain his monstrous regime of systematic sexual abuse.

Fox News and Ailes himself lack the cultural resonance in the UK they have across the pond, but imagine if Holly Willougby, Alex Jones and Steph McGovern announced they and a dozen more presenters had been abused by the Director General of the BBC, and you’d have some idea of the high profile shockwaves the case caused.

Robbie plays a fictional ambitious new employee called Kayla who’s model looks and  sweet nature puts her immediately on Ailes’ radar.

However it’s Theron who dominates the film as Megyn Kelly, Fox’s most high profile journalist, a spiky and demanding presence who describes herself as a lawyer not a feminist, and is more keen on high ratings than popularity with her colleagues.

Kidman has the least flashy but vital role as Gretchen Carlson, who sues Ailes after being demoted then fired after refusing Ailes sexual advances, which leads to his behaviour being made public for the first time.

Sadly the three actresses only appear altogether in the one brief scene, so we’re denied the fun of seeing three great acts sparking off each other.

The sheer volume of testimony is extraordinary and the scale of abuse is staggering, especially as we’re left with a postscript which is perhaps the most devastating revelation of all.

THE HUNT

Stars 4

Fans of Scandinavian drama will enjoy this absorbing and darkly disturbing tale of mass paranoia set in a small Danish village.

It centres on the members of a close knit hunting party when Mads Mikkelsen’s primary school teacher, Lucas, is accused of indecent behaviour towards the child of another.

Investigation is followed by arrest and the loss of his job but as Lucas awaits formal charges, the village turns against him and a campaign of violence begins.

Lucas’s sense of isolation is heightened by the haunting winter landscapes and the semi-rural environment where everyone regularly carries knives and rifles.

Mikkelsen is on award winning form leading a uniformly excellent cast that includes Alexandra Rapaport and Thomas Bo Larsen.

The taut and paranoid atmosphere is punctuated only by the black humour of Lucas’s brother in law, who is not afraid making callous jokes in the face of extreme adversity at Lucas’s expense.

Slow and quietly gripping tension is firmly built and when violence erupts it’s with a powerful and shocking fury.

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

Stars 2

Clint Eastwood drags his old bones out of acting retirement for this amiable and undemanding tale of family set in the world of baseball.

As Gus Lobel, Eastwood is a baseball scout who is given one last chance to prove his worth or he’ll be forcibly retired.

He is joined by Amy Adams as his estranged daughter on a scouting trip to North Carolina, where he’s to check out the boy who maybe the next big baseball star.

Eastwood enjoys himself as a beer guzzling, growling, gimlet eyed, grim faced monolith, but it’s the always engaging Adams who grabs centre stage as a corporate lawyer who’s juggling love, life and lawsuits.

John Goodman and Justin Timberlake offering support, but struggle with everyone else with a predictable plot as creaky as Clint’s knees, and dialogue as weak as his eyesight.

Despite the cast valiantly doing their best to raise the script far beyond what it deserves, this will be a poor epitaph to Eastwood’s career if it proves to be his last screen appearance.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

Stars 2

Here’s a Hollywood movie that celebrates the endearing, warm, funny and romantic side of mental illness.

The Hangover star Bradley Cooper, plays Pat Solitano, a bipolar sufferer released into the bosom of his loving family, headed by the OCD afflicted Pat Snr, Robert De Niro.

While trying to woo back his straying wife, Pat meets Jennifer Lawrence’s beautiful but equally troubled Tiffany, and as the two bond over medication, law breaking and ball-room dancing, a complicated situation soon develops.

This emotionally dishonest disaster wants to be a sympathetic portrayal of the mentally ill while simultaneously using their wacky behaviour as a springboard for humour.

The humour is weak, the violence misplaced,  the romance cliched and the the Dirty Dancing Over the Cuckoo’s Nest finale is such a badly judged mash-up of low comedy and cringing sentimentality that I was generating my own anger issues.

END OF WATCH

Stars 3

The writer of the Oscar winning smash hit Training Day, returns with another gritty police thriller set in South Central LA, but with a Denzel Washington-shaped hole where the charisma should be.

Writer and director David Ayer, shot entirely on location in fidgety, semi-documentary, police-cam video style, creating a loud and tense gun and drug movie where the highest ambition police officers have is to survive their shift and have their timesheet signed off, End Of Watch.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Mike Zavala Michael Pena are patrol car partners who come across a safe house belonging to a Mexican cartel who immediately put a price on their heads for disrupting their lucrative drugs trade.

The cops aren’t the brightest guns on the street but they are mostly honest and unquestioningly brave. Patrolling is a series of verbal abuse, brutal fist fights and vicious gun battles, and even the music is aggressive.

Off duty, Anna Kendrick and Natalie Martinez provide strong acting support as their wives, with America Ferrera and Frank Grillo as their fellow officers.

Watching this film is like being trapped for two hours in a small steel cage with a pair of uniformed, squabbling, slurping, chattering caffeinated kids, before being released on a regular basis to be shot at by angry Uzi abusing gangsters.

Ayer doesn’t wholly commit to his handheld format which reduces its authenticity, and the last two scenes are unnecessary and lessen the films impact.

Despite this the two officers hold your sympathy and attention because although they’re not as interesting or entertaining as the film believes they are, even the most basic police work involves being screamed and shot at.

Their wives are the only lightness in their lives and in the movie and are a sweet and sassy counterpoint to the constant aggravation the men experience on duty.

This is a portrait of a city in a state of siege, and the only advice the script can offer is to wear comfortable shoes and a bulletproof vest.

ARGO

Stars 4

Ben Affleck’s impressive directing career goes from strength to strength in this funny, thrilling and barely believably heist based on a true story.

In 1979 the US embassy in Iran has been overrun and the staff taken hostage. Six have managed to escape and are hiding in the Canadian embassy and the CIA have a very short time to extricate them without the Iranians finding out and executing them.

Much to his bosses mistrust, Ben Affleck’s top CIA agent decides that the only way to safely liberate the escapees is to create a fake science fiction movie called ‘Argo’ and pretend they are part of his film crew.

Affleck the actor is in excellent form as the taciturn agent, hiding his Hollywood looks behind a dodgy ‘70’s beard and hair combo, so when he drives around in a camper van he resembles the character, Shaggy, from TV’s Scooby Do cartoons.

A great cast features a strong turn from Victor Garber as the Canadian ambassador, with  excellent comic support from Alan Arkin and John Goodman Hollywood producers roped in to bring authenticity to Affleck’s scheme.

The film moves smoothly between the mostly comic US scenes and the Iranian scenes of deadly tension. There are a lot good jokes at Hollywood’s expense which also serve to highlight the seriousness of the mission.

Real TV footage from the era is integrated into the movie and helps to create the atmosphere of murderous disorder and paranoia of a country under martial law, and the film is careful to highlight how there were Iranians who risked their aiding the US civilians.

Produced by George Clooney, this confident, well judged and gripping movie downplays American triumphalism in favour of focusing on squeezing every particle of entertainment and tension from the human drama.

CREED II

Cert 12 Stars 4

Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren return to reignite the Cold War as they face off once more in a typically two-fisted and enjoyably bruising bout from Sly’s ‘Rocky’ boxing franchise.

A loose retelling of Rocky 4, the former fighters are now the trainers of the younger generation, which sees Michael B. Jordan’s world heavyweight champ take on the son of the Russian who killed his dad.

It scored a knockout £160m worldwide on a puny £40m budget due to the strong character work and screen history that gives emotional weight to the heavy punching.

POSSUM

Cert 15 Stars 3

This disturbing psychological British drama from debutant director and writer, Matthew Holness, is a deeply unsettling small budget success.

Sean Harris oozes self-hate as Philip, a gaunt and socially inadequate puppeteer who returns to his dilapidated childhood home in Norfolk to confront his dark past.

Once there he’s confronted by Alun Armstrong’s aged relative, who mocks Philip with memories of a calamitous fire which damaged the property sometime ago.

This is a dark portrait of shame, guilt, anger and torment which refuses to offer comfort or shelter to the audience.

APOSTASY

Cert PG 95mins Stars 4

There’s an acute emotional intimacy to this deliberately downbeat drama based in Oldham’s community of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It’s a religion pretty much all but ignored by cinema and is part of the multi-faith working class town where it’s shot on location with local accents.

At the story’s heart are a trio of wonderfully natural and unsentimental performances, lead by Siobhan Finneran. She plays a devout single mum who struggles to square the demands of her congregational elders with the needs of her young adult daughters, Molly Wright and Sacha Parkinson.

As questions of faith and religion battle family and science, the script by debut director Daniel Kokotajlo is careful to not to condemn the religion and offer an explanation how a middle aged woman finds herself in a rainswept shopping precinct and spreading the word of Jehovah.

Catholicism is dismissed as being as ‘airy-fairy’, which is possibly the nicest comment my religion has received in the history of movies.