Suffragette

Director: Sarah Gavron (2015)

Political passion and personal punishment power a prodigious performance in this stirring historical drama.

In the dark, violent world of 1912, a young mother risks everything as she battles the government for the right to vote.

Fictitious characters mix with real people and events to create a gripping story filled with emotional truth.

Following her excellent turn in Far From The Madding Crowd (2015), Carey Mulligan gives another mesmerising performance as factory worker and reluctant activist Maud Watts.

Her young son George is ominously diagnosed by Helena Bonham Carter’s chemist as ‘a bit chesty’.

Hardworking and aspirational, Maud is drawn into the bosom of the suffragettes and their world of nighttime rallies, back room meetings and property attacks.

Soon she feels the full force of the law in the form of the intelligence gathering Special Branch and truncheon wielding constables.

With Maud’s behaviour considered to be madness not badness, she’s ostracised, beaten, jailed and endures a hunger strike.

Radicalised by her experiences, she is soon waging a guerrilla war alongside veteran campaigner Emily Davison.

It mostly involves blowing up the UK’s communications infrastructure. i.e. postboxes.

Corrupt politicians collude with the media to keep the violent campaign off the front pages.

In desperation to  be heard, the women seize upon a target so big as to be impossible to ignore.

At times the heartbreaking events resemble the grimmer moments of Les Miserables (2012). With the thankful exception of the awful sing-alongs.

It’s an inspiring tale of kindness, courage and comradeship Which at times tries too hard. We’ve long since been won over by Maud by the time she’s reduced to waiting in the rain.

An intelligent script insists the women are fighting a war and the dialogue includes frequent exhortations for them never to give up.

It celebrates their bravery and solidarity against the state who use covert surveillance and brutality to suppress a popular political uprising.

However it aligns the direct methods and organisational prowess of the suffragettes with historical and contemporary terrorist groups such as the IRA.

This may prove problematical to viewers. It’s certainly the starting point for an interesting debate.

Cinematographer Edu GrauIt captures the drama in palettes of browns and greys, as films of this sort so often are.

Better known as James Bond’s Q, soft spoken Ben Whishaw is counter-intuitively cast as Maud’s working class barrow boy husband Sonny.

His subtle acting suggests a marriage of convenience and as the story progresses, Sonny’s feebleness adds perspective to Maud’s situation.

Geoff Bell stops shy of pantomime as an abusive factory boss and the film is not too sure what to do with Brendan Gleeson’s cop. His concerned reasonableness challenges you to remember he’s one of the guys.

Meryl Streep makes a brief and typically stagey appearance as head girl Emmeline Pankhurst. It veers towards an impersonation of Maggie Smith in TV’s Downton Abbey.

In The Iron Lady (2011) cinema’s grand dame won an Oscar for playing the famously unsisterly first female Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

During her divisive time in office she was not for turning when it came to civil unrest and terrorist campaigns.

Spoken of in hushed voices in her absence, Pankhurst addresses a crowd messianically from a balcony and a signed book is passed around as if a holy relic.

This is the nearest religion comes to being referenced in the film.

There are no priests in the church which offers sanctuary to the dispossessed and the position of the established church seems to be one of benign neutrality.

This despite organised religion having a poor track record in the public arena of women’s rights.

Made In Dagenham (2010) showed car factory workers campaigning for equal pay in the 1970’s. Suffragette is a spiritual prequel and in the 60 odd years between the periods portrayed, it’s sobering to realise how little progress had been made.

As a representative of all the foot soldiers of the suffrage movement, Mulligan’s emotional performance puts us at the heart of their struggles against the established order.

She easily wins my vote for 2016’s Best Actress Oscar.

★★★★☆

Leading Lady

Director: Henk Pretorius (2015)

A prickly rose blooms in the heat of the veldt in this amiable and unremarkable Afrikaans romcom.

It’s a pleasant enough trip but one lacking in any ambition except the desire not to cause offence. It’s absolutely unobjectionable, almost insultingly so.

Irish actress Katie McGrath plays Jodie, a drama school teacher and aspiring big screen thesp who heads to South Africa to research a film role she has yet to win.

Her accent is determinedly none specific except when her natural intonation breaks through.

On arrival she’s nearly run over by hunky Bok van Blerk who agrees to take her back to his drought-ridden farm so she can sample rural life.

He’s sort of intense, she’s kind of bossy. They bicker and seem ill-matched. Who knows what the fates may have in store for them.

In return for board and lodge she agrees to direct the annual farmyard concert. This allows the script to drive in a flock of local eccentrics.

As weak attempts at humour fall to take root on the barren comedy ground, the green shoots of romance are blighted by unexpected arrivals.

With Nelson Mandela, blood diamonds and sci-fi allegory dominating the country’s cinematic exports, it’s nice to encounter a South African offering which purposefully avoids politics in any form.

It’s a shame then this the RSA equivalent of a Richard Curtis chocolate box movie. It’s cosy, affectionate and full of regard for ordinary country folk and their amusing little ways. And it’s none too funny.

The agreeable cast go about their business with enthusiastic competence.

But there’s an unforgivable lack of villainy or devilment. The uneven script can’t even bring itself to be beastly about the British, and lord knows we’ve supplied them with enough historical ammunition.

Even the traditional romcom dash to the airport is reduced to a brief skip across the front porch.

Truths are spoken, lessons are learnt and personal growth occurs. But it time seems to move so slowly in the countryside it’s hard to care.

★★☆☆☆

I Believe In Miracles

Director: Jonny Owen (2015)

Revisiting one of the more endearing successes in English football, this celebratory documentary has a joyous end of season feel to it.

A shameless and entertaining nostalgia trip, fabulous footage of Nottingham Forest’s fluid football is married to a soul music soundtrack to fun effect while former players contribute well practised anecdotes

It’s an energetic telling of the well trod tale of how maverick manager Brian Clough utterly transformed the fortunes of struggling Nottingham Forest FC.

And the Middlesbrough-born maestro did it in only five years.

Having made Derby County FC unlikely champions of England before falling foul as the boss of Leeds United, we begin in 1974 with a televised Teesside tiff between the unemployed Clough and the England boss Don Revie.

The next season Clough took charge at The City Ground and dragged the struggling team from the lower end of the domestic second tier to become 1980 European champions.

And to prove it wasn’t a fluke, Clough lead his team to a second European Cup triumph the following year as well.

Rather than trying to cover every blade of contextual grass, a route one approach focuses on the players’ experience as John Robertson, Viv Anderson, Martin O’Neil and others contribute well practiced anecdotes.

As enjoyable as these misty eyed reminisces are, they carefully avoid any muddy swathes of personal problems by flying up the pristine narrative wings of on-field success.

Plus they fail to adequately explain why their achievements were astonishing then and practically impossible for a club of Forest’s fiscal flow to repeat now.

Other than the headline-making first million pound player signing, there’s little talk of the financial side of the game.

In a bygone world of halftime cigarettes, a diet of chip butties and booze and more days off than those spent training, tactical advice consists of ‘give it to the short fat b****** on the wing.

Or John Robertson as his parents named him.

Season ticket holders to the Brian Clough fan club won’t find anything new.

Surprisingly Old Big ‘Ead isn’t allowed the last word but the man who famously described himself as being in the top one remains as charismatic and engaging as ever.

★★★☆☆

Red Army

Director: Gabe Polsky (2015)

Russian sportsmen skate on the thin ice of Cold War politics in this cracking ice hockey documentary.

With drama on an off the rink, it’s an irrepressible combination of huge egos, fabulous action, political power games and private gain.

This film is built around interviews with the charismatic former champion player Viacheslav ‘Slava’ Fetisov.

Hugely rude, arrogant and compelling, he’s also the world’s most decorated ice hockey player.

He’s a shockingly refreshing antidote for anyone who suffers the bland, PR controlled and media-trained offerings of English football’s players and pundits.

The presentation of his achievements is one of many sequences that use humour to hurry the puck of narrative along.

In football terms Slava and his team mates play in a style best described as Total Hockey.

With even my limited exposure to or understanding of the game, the footage is as exciting and demanding as any sport I’ve seen.

Like many players Slava was specifically drafted to be eligible for the army team, it formed the vanguard of the USSR’s propaganda wing.

This relationship between the state and the individual is explored through the prism of Slava’s career, an astonishing accumulation of trophies, teams, air miles and vendettas.

With consummate timing Red Army holds back it’s best shot until the last minute.

For anyone with an interest in sport, history, politics or just wants to admire some really cool cold war kits, this is a brilliant watch.

★★★★☆  

The Martian

Director: Ridley Scott (2015)

Blast off to the red planet in this breathless, big budget sci-fi adventure which rockets along to a disco beat.

Based on Andy Weir’s 2011 novel, director Ridley Scott has rarely had so much fun or provided so much clever, crowd pleasing entertainment.

Scott washes away his reputation as a dry visual perfectionist by splashing wild torrents of humour and humanity over his typically brilliant design and cinematography.

When a Nasa team is forced to abort their experiments on the surface of Mars, Mark Watney is assumed dead and left behind.

Intelligent and likeable, Matt Damon is terrifically cast as the marooned astronaut forced to improvise to survive.

His resourcefulness allows him to farm water, oxygen and food but is constantly beset by technical problems, not least having no communications with colleagues in space or on Earth.

The operation he performs on himself is not as graphic as the one Noomi Rapace endured in Scott’s flawed Prometheus (2012) but still not for the squeamish.

Meanwhile Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara and Michael Pena begin the long journey home in their spacecraft.

When a Nasa technician discovers Watney’s alive, his now not-dead presence presents a tricky PR problem, especially if they fail to keep him alive a second time.

It’s a race against time, budgets, office politics and technical limitations.

As harassed Nasa officials, the comic ability of Jeff Daniels and Kristen Wiig are used to good effect in straight roles.

British Oscar nominated star of misery memoir 12 Years A Slave (2013) Chiwetel Ejiofor brings charm and warmth.

Sean Bean is a gruff conscience who brings heart to the constant equation crunching and scores for a big laugh.

The huge success of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) combination of humour, action, state of the art effects and pop tunes is clearly an influence. But this is more grounded and less smug.

With the exception of a strangely retro-titled ‘advanced supercomputer’, an excellent script offers plenty of plausible sounding sciency stuff.

Remember the killer scene in Apollo 13 (1995) when the Nasa techies have to improvise a new gizmo from old hairdryer parts and a vacuum cleaner? Most of The Martian is that scene – but bigger.

There are scenes in China which may well be extended when the film is released in that market. Unlike films such as Iron Man 3 (2013) the Chinese element feels a necessary part of the narrative.

Ideas and motifs touched upon in Silent Running (1972) Robinson Crusoe On Mars (1964) appear.

There’s little bitterness, fear or insanity but vast amounts of hope, hard work and optimism.

The Martian celebrates the courage, ingenuity and loyalty of humanity. It is a cry from the heart for the return of to an age of space exploration.

Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski worked on Scott’s flawed Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). Scott often has him shoot from a low angle to include ceilings and skies in his shot, heightening the sense of Watney’s captivity and suffocating isolation.

Special effects by British SFX house Framestore bring the same bravura technical skills we saw employed to Oscar winning effect in Gravity (2013).

Having made two definitive pieces of sci-fi early in his career with Alien (1979) Blade Runner (1982), Scott has finally added a markedly different but triumphant third at the tail end of it.

Although much of the humour is as dry as the beautiful Martian landscapes, with music by Abba, Donna Summer and the O’Jays, there’s no shortage of atmosphere in this outer space epic.

★★★★★

MacBeth

Director: Justin Kurzel (2015)

This bold and bleak adaption of Shakespeare‘s Scottish play is violent and visually arresting but curiously unmoving.

A moody, macho and masochistic Michael Fassbender frets for a couple of hours upon the stage.

He drips with menace and blood and there is much sound and fury.

After serving his King by quelling an insurrection, Macbeth encounters three witches who prophesy a royal future.

Encouraged by his wife he murders his way to the throne, and becomes consumed by madness.

A macabre tone is struck from the start with the burial of an infant. Among the battles, murders, ghosts, and witches, the rural feudal society is chillingly and chillily realised.

The relentless rain-lashed realism captures the grim hardships of the era, but there is also beauty is the landscapes, a children’s chorus and the craftsmanship of cloaks and daggers.

Fiona Crombie’s strong production design offers fine detail and heavy weathering, anchoring the actors in the period.

It’s a consistent vision, utilising wild exteriors in what was a gruelling shoot for cast and crew.

Interiors were filmed in the magnificent and contemporaneous Ely Cathedral.

Cinematographer Adam Arkapaw frames some lovely images but fellow Australian, director Kurzel rarely use his camera to fully bring out the drama of the verse.

The pair are stronger on the hoof, creating some terrific moments in battle and in the hunt.

Kurzel’s brother Jed adds to the tone with an unsettling screeching soundtrack.

Three writer’s have acceptably trimmed Shakespeare’s verse. But it’s sadly compromised through frequently flat recital, caught within beards or lost thick fog of a Scots brogue.

There’s also tendency by most of the men to employ a throaty whisper as often as possible, so we have to strain for understanding.

Only Englishman Sean Harris as Macduff and the French actress Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth offer engaging readings. Both characters are motivated by grief for lost children.

Elizabeth Debicki has a moment on fire but David Thewlis, Jack Reynor and Paddy Considine seem oddly removed from events around them.

Shakespeare put humour in his tragedies to emphasise his antagonists’ fall and make their doom compelling.

As Fassbender’s Macbeth moves from military machine to murderer to madman, the actor fails to find the humanity.

Devoid of love, humour or a conscience to lose or regain, the tragedy is missing in action.

What remains is a blood-soaked slog through the fog of 10th century war.

★★★☆☆  

Convenience

Director: Keri Collins (2015)

Offering limited discount fun, this budget stretching British black comedy is long shift for all concerned.

The film trades heavily on the acerbic gum popping presence of shop assistant Vicky McClure who suffers a bad night in a 24 hour petrol station.

She’s held up by desperate dimwits Ray Panthaki and Adeel Akhtar. They’re in a hurry to steal the 8 grand they owe to Russian gangsters.

But the time locked safe won’t open until 6am and having taken hostages, are forced to front the shop until dawn.

Comedy swearing grannies and light-fingered taxi-drivers wander the aisles. Anthony Head is very depressed as Verne Troyer pops by in a cowboy outfit.

There are a couple of nicely played moments of self discovery but far too few comic moments succeed.

It’s a relief when a shotgun stand-off eventually arrives and smartly allows for a character arc to come to fruition.

It’s great to have a film where the gender and race of the three lead characters is accepted without comment and is of no importance to the plot.

It would be nice for this not to be a remarkable occurrence in cinema.

The director is unable to restrain his camera and an ill advised gag reel is included in the end credits.

★★☆☆☆