MAN DOWN

Cert 15 Stars 2

This is the drama which made headlines when it made only £7 at the UK box office. It’s not quite as bad as all that, and certainly it’s heart is in the right place.

Though somber and sluggish, it serves to highlight the plight of veterans who suffer PTSD.

Shai LaBeouf’s typically introvert and intense performance sees him engaged in a macho grunt-off with the Jai Courtney.

They play best buds who patriotically sign up for the Marines and tour Afghanistan. On return LaBeouf’s family are missing and the pair set off to find them.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

ALIEN: COVENANT

Cert 15 122mins Stars 5

Scream as though no-one can hear you as the galaxy’s greatest space horror franchise is back to terrorise us once again.

Director Ridley Scott returns to the sci-fi thriller which made his name, and delivers an epic of spine-busting action, exotic locations and stunning design.

The Oscar winning director made the original Alien in 1979 when he was a young man in a hurry. As one of cinemas elder statesmen, in 2012 he belatedly  followed up with the grandly ambitious but less well received, Prometheus.

Now he splices the pair to create an explosive hybrid of blood-splatting thrills and apocalyptic destruction on a mythic scale. It’s all very familiar and at times daringly new.

There are chest-bursters, face-huggers, and acid blood. Orifices are penetrated and cavities evacuated, as we’d expect. But Scott plays on our knowledge of the franchise to skilfully toy with our expectations of the narrative.

We’re challenged to have some sympathy with the the ferocious flesh hungry parasitic alien, called a Xenomorph. A seduction is played with such subtle grace and integrity, it disguises how audacious and mind bendingly freaky it is. 

Set ten years after Prometheus, a small team of colonists are stranded on a planet and are unable to communicate with the orbiting mothership.

As the script wrestles with the big questions of existence, our heroes have to grapple for their lives.

Leading the fight for survival is Daniels, played by Katherine Waterston. The tall, dark-haired beauty is slyly styled by Scott to resemble the undisputed queen of the franchise, Sigourney Weaver.

Despite displaying Weaver’s kick-ass aptitude, Waterston is overawed by a majestic Michael Fassbender. He’s mesmeric in a dual role as synthetic androids, David and Walter.

Scott’s final theatrical flourish sends the franchise spinning out in a new direction. This is screamingly great cinema.

MINDHORN

Cert 15 89mins Stars 3

Tune into this telly detective spoof, where the Bionic Man meets Bergerac.

Back in the 1980’s, Richard Thorncroft was the star of the TV crime series, Mindhorn. The ‘best plain clothes detective on Isle on Mann’ was equipped with a truth-reading cybernetic eye.

Thorncroft sees an opportunity to reignite his career when he’s roped in by the real police to help solve a murder.

Relying heavily on nostalgia for TV shows which are probably best forgotten, too many scenes drift, and jokes about acting auditions are funnier for the cast than the audience.

However, Julian Barratt is a paragon of deluded middle age as Thorncroft. It’s a consummate performance in the vein of Steve Coogan’s failed sportcaster, Alan Partridge.

Coogan is part of an impressive cast which sees cameos from Kenneth Branagh and Simon Callow.

The design looks suitably cheap and the films one joke is milked relentlessly, albeit with energy, conviction, and occasionally laughter.

 

SLEEPLESS

Cert 15 95mins Stars 2

This run of the mill thriller may offer some respite for sufferers of insomnia.

The stakes are established early and fail to escalate, so we idly watch some decently-staged action scenes and the glossy neon glow of Las Vegas at night.

As a corrupt cop called Vincent, the well fed Jamie Foxx sees his chickens come home to roost when his son is kidnapped by the mob.

These include gangsters, a casino boss, more corrupt cops and Michelle Monaghan’s Internal Affairs police officer, who ambitiously wants to arrest everybody at once.

At the centre of the plot is a bin bag of cocaine who everyone wants to get their hands on.

As the cast chase each other a crowded Las Vegas casino, the cocaine changes hands in the manner of a fizzing bomb in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. By the end I’d forgotten who had it or why I cared.

UNLOCKED

Cert 15 98mins Stars 2

This silly thriller seems designed to unleash a female rival to James Bond on the unsuspecting world of international espionage.

The topical Europe-hopping plot includes a reasonable amount of action. But the film is unevenly paced, predictably plotted and the moments of broad humour dilute the under-powered tension.

Noomi Rapace and Orlando Bloom play a CIA interrogator and a former marine. They’re on the run and have to prevent the detonation of a biological bomb in London.

Michael Douglas and John Malkovich add Hollywood gloss as CIA top brass, with the latter not taking his role with absolute seriousness.

Filming wrapped in January 2015, and since then the movie has collected dust on a shelf. Presumably it’s being released now to cash in on the fact its stars are about to return to cinemas in much bigger films.

Rapace appears next week in Alien: Covenant, the follow up to sci-fi epic, Prometheus.

Meanwhile in two weeks, Bloom attempts to kickstart his stalled career with a return to The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. In the first Pirates film, Bloom was the romantic hero. But Johnny Depp swaggered up as Captain Jack Sparrow and sank Bloom’s career as a leading man.

Bloom has since failed to offer any evidence he’s anything other than a posh pretty boy of reasonable talent and an inoffensive screen presence. He’s astonishingly miscast here in a role more suited to the rough charm of Jason Statham.

And now forty years old, Bloom seems beset by an early mid-life crisis. He’s sporting tattoos, an ill advised haircut and a desire to prove his physical prowess.

This uninvolving mess was directed by Michael Apted, who made 1999’s not great 007 film, The World Is Not Enough. I’m sure any plans for Rapace to make a sequel to this remain locked up and for her eyes only.

 

 

 

A DOG’S PURPOSE

Cert PG 100mins Stars 2

Time seems to pass in dog years watching this fluffy-minded fable featuring a mutt which ponders the meaning of life while repeatedly reincarnating.

This sun kissed sentimental soap opera is directed in typically treacly style by Lasse Hallstrom, who last made a sentimental meal of Helen Mirren’s The Hundred Foot Journey.

Josh Gad voices Bailey the dog with puppyish enthusiasm. Each time it’s born again, the pooch changes breed, gender, and owners.

This allows this mongrel of a film to move from it’s setting from suburban drama to Chicago cop show. There’s also a Sex and the City style interlude where Bailey experiences some doggy style puppy love.

There are Lassie type heroics involving burning buildings and arresting wrong-uns. He also chases his tail, rolls in the mud and chases chickens.

Dog lovers may enjoy it, but for cat people such as myself it will raise your hackles and make you want to hiss.