A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

A Royal Affair

A Royal Affair The story is genuinely startling, the cast is excellent (especially Mads Mikkelsen), and the writing… is very good in places. We’re in the Danish court, late in the 18th century, and the not-entirely-sane king has just taken a young English bride. Things are not going well between them; the king’s cruel sense of humour and fondness for prostitutes don’t help. A newcomer to the court wins the king’s confidence and starts nudging him in the direction of much-needed social reform. The old aristocracy grind their teeth. Then the newcomer catches the unhappy young queen’s eye. Things quickly get very complicated indeed. Director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel has a slightly heavy hand when it comes to political intrigue, but the unlikely love triangle at the heart of this film is well realised and affecting. 3.5/5 DL

B

Bel Ami I have never been inclined to blame Robert Pattinson for the shortcomings of the Twilight movies. For one thing – every time I say this in public I feel as though I’m committing a perverse act of braggadocio, “Look! I have minority opinions and I stand by them, damn you!” – I quite like some of the Twilight movies. For another, the things that are wrong with his sparkly Twilight vampire, Edward, are wrong in the original novels. (On the one hand, Edward is a manipulative, patronising killer; on the other, he’s described in terms so glowing, no actor should be blamed for failing to live up to them). This adaptation of de Maupassant’s story about a destitute young soldier bed-hopping his way to prominence in 1890s Paris is the first time I’ve seen Pattinson required to carry a film with actual acting. Wow. A more resounding belly-flop you will never see. Pattinson is not the only person looking awful here, I hasten to add; co-directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod also extract career-worst performances from Uma Therman, Christina Ricci, and Kristin Scott Thomas, playing the owners of the beds through which our soldier works his grimy way. So possibly the jury on Pattinson’s abilities is not quite in yet; or at least it’s only clearing its throat, waiting on a chance to see him in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. Meanwhile, if you’re curious to learn just how boring and lifeless serial seduction can be made to look, congratulations. You’re in possession of the only possible motive for watching this wretched film. 2/5 DL

Bernie

Bernie Richard Linklater’s new movie marks the second time he’s worked with Jack Black. (The first was the director’s rambunctious comedy School of Rock, nine years ago). The new film, Bernie, is a fictional retelling, with documentary inserts, of the events detailed in a 1998 Texas Monthly article called “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas.” (Linklater wrote the film’s script with the article’s author, Skip Hollandsworth.) In 1985, Bernie Tiede, a mildly effeminate mortician (he preferred “funeral director”), moved to the sleepy, oil-rich town of Carthage, quickly won the townspeople’s hearts, and, some time in the early to mid-’90s, befriended a widow, Marjorie Nugent. No one really liked her—everyone thought she was a mean little old lady—and so they were slightly taken aback when Bernie became her constant companion all of a sudden. People weren’t too concerned, though, when she disappeared—it got to the point where no one had laid eyes on her for nine months—and, amazingly, they weren’t even shocked when Bernie later confessed to having fatally shot her in the back four times with a low-powered rifle intended to be used for getting rid of armadillos. (He stuffed Marjorie’s corpse in a deep-freeze because he sweetly believed everyone deserves a proper burial. Funnily, at least one interviewee remains convinced of Bernie’s innocence.) Linklater’s film is a documentary examination of these events woven through with a fiction-film retelling of same. Humorous anecdotes about Bernie and Marjorie from Carthage residents who knew the couple are mixed with performances by actors, with Black in the lead. (Some of the interviewees, the credits reveal, were stand-in actors; it gets kinda difficult at times to tell who’s real and who’s just pretending to be “real.”) The townspeople’s anecdotes are, maybe bizarrely given Black’s comedy pedigree, much more entertaining than the rest of the film, mostly for their bitchiness and the great Southern turns of phrase they keep using. Black is pretty great as Bernie, though in the parts where he has to sing he relies a little too heavily on the shtick he perfected back in his “Tenacious D” days. (Bernie reportedly had a great voice—“You got to admit nobody could sing ‘Amazing Grace’ like Bernie could,” someone said in Hollandsworth’s original article—and Black overdoes it to the point where you’re almost momentarily taken out of the story.) Shirley MacLaine, who plays Marjorie, and Matthew McConaughey, who plays the town’s D.A., the wonderfully named Danny Buck, don’t really do much with their roles, not that they could: the director chose—to the film’s detriment—to not embellish or dramatise the story. What he’s delivered, then, is an uneasy hybrid of documentary and black-comedy fiction. Linklater, an Austin native, really knows and has great affection for the people involved at every level of the story, but this is an uneven trifle of a thing; when it comes down to it, Bernie’s story is so deeply unexciting, so ‘unsexy’ in a tabloid sense, and so lacking in malice or violence, that it’s ultimately not even worth recounting. 1.5/5 HL

Brave

Brave If you’re a parent looking for a yes/no answer to the question, “Should I take my kids to this?”, it’s a yes. Energetic, looks great, story works okay; attempt at getting feminism and mainstream American conservatism to hold hands and pretend to be friends laughably inadequate, but that’s par for the kids movie course. If you’re a Pixar watcher looking for a yes/no answer to the question, “Was Cars 2 just a blip?”, things get a bit more complicated. This is certainly a much better film than Cars 2, the one that broke Pixar’s 15 year “no bad movies” streak. It has decent voice acting – one of the things we used to take for granted with Pixar, before Larry the Cable Guy’s awful turn as Mater in the Cars films – and it’s fun. And gorgeous to look at of course; that, we can still take for granted. On the other hand, this has been trumpeted as the first Pixar film with a girl hero. You have to ask yourself – with 12 features about boys being boys behind them and not one that centers itself on a female point of view, what exactly does “telling a girl’s story” mean to Pixar? Apparently, it means 1) make her a princess, that always worked for Disney, and incidentally allows us to 2) put her in a society with an incredibly confining notion of female behaviour, so she can be rebellious and feisty just by virtue of not wanting to be married off at 15, and then let’s 3) make her express her rebellion by shooting arrows at things, so we can have action scenes. In other words, this is a girl who superficially behaves like Pixar’s idea of a boy, while acting out the tamest possible version of a female empowerment story: if she can manage to achieve less freedom than the audience’s great great grandmothers had, we’ll call that a happy ending. But any little girls out there hoping for a positive role model can take some comfort: she has amazing hair. Meanwhile, the film is mostly bereft of the originality that made Up and Wall-E so memorable, and it can’t own its mainstream American values the way the Toy Story films can, because it’s busy trying to make the princess thing work. Pixar’s grand magus, John Lasseter, was the man who announced, shortly after Disney brought him in to save their animated films from irrelevance, that Disney was getting out of the princess game – but this lively, forgettable thing is a Disney princess film with a make-over. 3.5/5 DL

C

Cheerful Weather For The Wedding Remarkably inert period piece, clearly aimed at Downton Abbey fans – the manipulative mother of the 1930s English country estate where what I shall very loosely term the action takes place is played by Downton‘s Elizabeth McGovern, and there are broad gestures at Amusing English Character Types on display wherever you look. I am of the Downton-watching tribe, I confess it freely (despite season 2). But the humour here is forced, the drama lacks drama, and the central question – will bride-to-very-shortly-be Dolly change her mind and run off with the Man She Has A Past With – could be settled far more satisfyingly by flipping a coin. 2/5 DL

H

Hope Springs

Hope Springs Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carrell – of course hope springs. How could it not?  Sorry. This is one of those films that mistakes timidity for restraint. Granted, there are pleasures to be had in watching Streep and Jones play a married couple trying (very reluctantly, in his case) to regain the spark, under the tutelage of Carrell’s relationship counselor. And granted, there are so few mainstream films about older people that even the mediocre ones could be said to serve a demographic need. But enough with the granting things: I almost fell asleep watching this. Vanessa Taylor’s script takes the perfectly reasonable proposition that the smallest of communication problems can look huge from the inside, and uses it as an excuse for presenting us with two people who have very little to learn, and are going to spend a very long time learning it. (Taylor’s not-exactly-preparing-herself-for-this-challenge credits include Alias and Game of Thrones, and it may be worth mentioning that she’s decades younger than her characters here). Streep and Jones make their holding pattern marriage look real, but beyond a certain point they can’t make it look interesting; wasting their talents like this should be a criminal offence. Carrell is given so little to do, and there’s so little else to focus on, that I spent a lot of the film wondering whether his role represents a Robin Williams-style sideways step into a Disney-level nice guy persona. Director David Frankel worked with Streep on The Devil Wears Prada, so clearly he’s not afraid of films with a little bite. But the more relevant detail here is that he also helmed Marley and Me. If you find that a recommendation, you and I do not have a shared understanding of the words “saccharine”, “sentimental”, or “boring”, and you should probably ignore my view that this film merits all three. 3/5 DL

How Far Is Heaven Sober, restrained New Zealand documentary which follows the inhabitants of a tiny Whanganui valley township over the course of one year, paying particular attention to the interactions of the local kids with three resident nuns of the Sisters of Compassion. Directors Miriam Smith and Christopher Pryor make very few overt moves to shape our response to this community, for the most part simply presenting their footage without comment. But they have sure instincts for the telling detail, and the film leaves an indelible sense of a brutally impoverished social reality – and of the nuns’ humble desire to be of use to people they know very well they don’t fully understand. Full review here. 4/5 DL

I

Iron Sky

Iron Sky The thing about shooting for “so bad it’s good” is that you end up in such a disastrous place if you only just miss. There are moments in this bizarre I-guess-it’s-satire about Nazis on the moon which connoisseurs of high camp will definitely treasure. There are also moments that are very hard to read – does Finnish director Timo Vuoresola intend his jokes to thud to the floor quite so heavily? (The answer would seem to be, “He’s Finnish. Of course he does”). So, Nazis. On the dark side of the moon. They’ve been hiding out there since 1945. A publicity stunt moonshot timed for an American presidential campaign discovers them, and the Nazis, who are not up on current events, think they’re being invaded. They decide to strike first. This thrills the American president, because she can’t imagine anything more likely to guarantee re-election than going whoop-ass on some Nazis. It turns out, in fact, that some of these Nazis are rather nice people, who’ve grown up believing Hitler was all about peace and love. (What a nasty surprise they have coming). Whereas the world’s politicians and their publicist lackeys really are Nazis. You think there’s a message there? This is the film I’ve been dreading ever since we started giving star ratings, because with the right crowd and in the right mood it’s a 4-star feast of deliberate clunkers. But viewed straight, it has to be rated… 1/5 DL

I Wish In his new film I Wish, the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda once again focusses on children and their amusing indifference to the actions of the adults around them. The film’s central characters are two twelve-year-old brothers; geographically separated by their parents’ divorce, they excitedly await the day when a bullet train will connect their towns, and hatch a plan to meet. The film’s Japanese title, Kiseki, can also be translated as “miracle”; this is underlined by the brothers’ belief that the fleeting moment when two bullet trains pass each other creates a sort of sonic wishing-well that helps realise the hopes and dreams of anyone yelling into the rushing noise. Free from the strictures of home, and each travelling with a small gang of friends, the brothers embark on their journey. The film thus contains a road movie of sorts—albeit one in which tarmac is replaced by train-tracks. The plot is not entirely concerned with the children’s stories—there are a handful of amusing asides with the adults—but, once they’re out on their own, unsupervised, the kids’ collective presence lends the film a magnificent charm. I Wish isn’t nearly as great as Still Walking or Nobody Knows—arguably Kore-eda’s two best films—but there’s certainly something in his new film’s subtleties of character and the almost joyful naïveté with which these two young brothers experience the world. Full version here. 3/5 HL

L

Le Havre I hesitate to call this a sweet, funny comedy of intergenerational kindness – although it’s a description anyone coming out of the film would be likely to agree to enthusiastically – because the humour is so understated, so deadpan, that it takes a while to creep up on you. In other words, not a good film to go into expecting instant hilarity. An old man and his elderly neighbours help a young illegal immigrant evade France’s immigration police, just because it strikes them as the right thing to do. Full review here. 4/5 DL

Letters To Father Jacob A simple tale that’s all done in 74 minutes, yet with the depth, meaning and impact of something much, much bigger. Father Jacob, elderly and blind, lives in a far-flung corner of Finland. The letters are from seekers of advice and comfort, and the task of reading them aloud to him is taken up by Leila, a surly ex-prisoner, recently pardoned. They barely communicate, yet out of the sparseness of her daily routine and silent observing, a glimmer of compassion begins to grow. The quiet unfolding of the story has that compassion taking her to a place that neither she nor we could have suspected, and yet, even as we recover from the intensity and emotion of the surprise, it all makes perfect sense. Crafted beautifully, shot atmospherically, and performed with the kind of restraint that speaks volumes, this is an affirmation of faith, forgiveness and humanity that even nonbelievers can buy Full review here. 5/5 HW

M

Margaret

Margaret Watching Kenneth Lonergan’s masterpiece in its truncated 150-minute theatrical cut is like reading a canonical novel with a few hundred-page chunks ripped out here and there: the framework and the meat of the thing remain, but some of the character development is noticeably absent. There are some jarring moments: in some cases, entire scenes have been excavated, but—perhaps oddly, and certainly owing to Lonergan’s deft command of his engrossing, all-encompassing script—this doesn’t detract from the experience. Shot in 2005, the film features a mesmeric, fiercely controlled central performance from Anna Paquin, some brilliant photography by the Polish cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski, and an enchanting score by the acclaimed young composer Nico Muhly (who was, back then, virtually unknown). The film spent many years—six, to be exact—embroiled in post-production difficulties (among them several lawsuits, some of which are on-going). The result was a compromise: a two-and-a-half-hour cut of the film, made with the occasional help of Martin Scorsese and his editor Themla Schoonmaker, that the studio deemed at least moderately commercially viable. (They largely failed to make good on that promise however, ‘burying’ the film as best they could upon release.) This cut, which the writer-director was happy with releasing, was slowly ushered into US theatres for a limited run. (Lonergan’s full—read: unkempt—cut, which runs some 179 minutes, is now on DVD in foreign markets; it’s preferable to begin with the theatrical, if only because it’s more polished—and as with almost any film, it’s best seen in a big-screen cinema.) Paquin, who back then probably hadn’t even heard of True Blood, plays a 17-year-old high-school student, a New Yorker named Lisa Cohen. She witnesses a fatal traffic accident—a woman dies in her arms—and becomes involved in its taxing physical, mental, societal, and spiritual aftermath. That may sound like a lot of ground to cover, but this is an ambitious, wide-ranging film that is as much about its central character’s journey toward a kind of self-knowledge—a subject on which it is by turns disarmingly frank and tenderly honest—as it is, for example, about the grief and pain that lingered in the city after 9/11. (Bill Gosden, writing the blurb for Margaret’s World Cinema Showcase screenings, was correct in describing the film as “novelistic”; ditto Peter Bradshaw calling it “sprawling.”) The film’s expansive cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, Kieran Culkin, Olivia Thirlby, John Gallagher, Jr., and Jean Reno, among others. As Lisa’s mother, Lonergan’s wife J. Smith-Cameron turns in a fiery, assured performance. Lisa is a character you love to hate: she is by turns galling, arrogant and self-righteous, and moody and self-centred, but, in her own way, she fearlessly strives for what she knows is right, consequences be damned. Her collisions with various types of bureaucracy—law and order, primarily, but also more intimate (and therefore more painful) social structures—give the story its stepping-stone plot-points, but between those Lonergan places smaller encounters (with teachers and classmates, family and friends—and the network that gathers around the accident victim after her passing) that shape and influence the characters in myriad ways and broaden the film’s emotional scope. Lonergan’s unapologetically writerly vision is of such complexity that the film does not take its title from any of its direct characters, living or dead, but from a line in a poem read by Matthew Broderick, one of two schoolteachers who are given narrative breathing-space. This is one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve seen in many years; it’s also one of the best films about loss and grief, and one of the best films about post-9/11 New York, full-stop. 4.5/5 HL

Magic Mike

Magic Mike Stephen Soderbergh’s male stripper movie, starring Channing Tatum in all his manly glory. Well, most of his manly glory. Fear not, insecure straight male readers, the giant screen will confront you with no giant penises if you troop along to this. And you should, it’s the most entertaining film Soderbergh has made since Erin Brockovich. Somehow, he manages to deliver a bubbly, immensely likeable fantasy about a guy who needs to admit that he isn’t living quite the dream life he thinks he is, while at the same time commenting quite chillingly on the fast-withering prospects of working class men in Big Money’s America. Tatum is wonderful in the title role, and Matthew McConaughey, as an over-the-top strip club owner with a cold eye for the main chance, gives him a great foil. Alex Pettyfer does the best work of his career as the young friend Mike introduces to life on the stage; this is saying very little indeed, but the character is meant to be a cipher, and Pettyfer measures up to that mark nicely. 4/5 DL

Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom New Penzance Island, 1965: Wes Anderson’s summer of love. On the cusp of adolescence and enamoured of one another, our protagonists Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop, portrayed by first-time actor and actress Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, elope—but only to the far side of the island. After an exchange of letters in which he gives her detailed, orienteering-like instructions on how, when, and precisely where to meet, they walk toward each other in a field—he clutching a bunch of wildflowers, her carrying a kitten in a wicker picnic-basket. As a ferocious storm approaches, a search party is assembled; this comprises Sam’s scoutmaster (Ed Norton), searching with some of his troops, and Suzy’s parents, played by the ever-wonderful Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, as well as the island’s sole police officer, played by—who else?—Bruce Willis. The soundtrack is made up chiefly of music by Benjamin Britten (his didactic 1946 opus The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra features prominently) but also makes use of a couple of Hank Williams tunes and moreover, at their makeshift seaside retreat, the film’s lovebirds dance to a 45 of Françoise Hardy’s “Le temps de l’amour.” Anderson employs other Britten pieces on the soundtrack, but the pièce de résistance at its core is Alexandre Desplat’s score. It comprises a suite, “The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe,” that, in part, interpolates and reshapes, with Desplat’s idiosyncrasies, some of the motifs in Britten’s Guide—and it stands with Desplat’s compositions for The Tree of Life as some of his best work to date. The film is grounded by the heartfelt, simple love story at its centre, but this is still a wholly Andersonian world: every frame is meticulously composed, every part of the mise-en-scène painstakingly pored-over. This may just be the American master’s best film yet. Longer review here. 5/5 HL

N

New Zealand International Film Festival As I write this the Auckland branch of the festival is already well under way, and screenings will be going on round the country until the end of October. This is the big film event of the year; or rather it’s a collection of so many film events it’s difficult to cover with anything like the breadth or depth it deserves. Helene Wong’s preview piece is here, David Larsen’s is here, and David Larsen and Hugh Lilly staggered out from the festival with a final count of six blog posts: one, two, three, four, five, six.

S

Safe The pun in the title is possibly the only thing that’s a little bit smart about this piece of studio fodder, but if you’re in the mood for a spot of Jason Statham action – spray-shooting, car-wrecking, bone-cracking mayhem – then knock yourself out. New York’s the setting, the bad guys are a three-headed monster of locals and foreigners, and the object of their desire, whom Statham’s character naturally leaps to protect, is a small Chinese girl with a head for numbers. Exposition is delivered under fire – which is marginally better than ponderous discussion – but there’s no knowing if any of it makes sense. Not that it matters, except for the fact that the end hints at a sequel. If there is, they’ll need to find a better reason – chemistry or something – for these two fugitives to turn up together on screen again. 2/5 HW

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen I thought this was supposed to be a satire of British politics, based on Paul Torday’s book, but Simon Beaufoy’s script has channelled most of the comedy into a light and quirky romance, producing more of a chickflick than commentary. Odd couple Harriet – assistant to a progress-minded Yemeni sheik who decides to have a go at introducing North Atlantic salmon to the desert – and Fred, the government fisheries expert recruited to help her, spend most of the film behaving as though what we know is going to happen between them isn’t going to happen, only you couldn’t exactly call it sexual tension. Despite the contrivance and predictability, it’s gentle and amusing enough to pass the time – although when the satire does put in an appearance, in the form of an OTT Kristin Scott Thomas as the PM’s media minder, it almost punches a hole in the screen with the force (farce?) of its caricature. And thus loses much of its satirical power. Emily Blunt as Harriet, and Ewan McGregor as Fred are fine, but are hardly exercised by this material. OK if you like your salmon in spring water rather than oil. 2.5/5 HW

Shut Up And Play The Hits

Shut Up And Play The Hits On April 2^nd last year, concluding a sold-out five-night run at Madison Square Garden, the dance-punk band LCD Soundsystem played their last ever show, a calculated frenzy that lasted more than three hours and comprised two lengthy setlists, involved a plethora of special guests (including Reggie Watts), and ended, after one of the band’s best songs—the plaintive “New York, I Love You,”—in a deluge of big white balloons. Working with what must have been at least a dozen cameras, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s hybrid documentary/concert-film Shut Up and Play the Hits makes palpable the energy generated by the interactions between the 18,000-strong capacity crowd and the dozen or so musicians—as well as some fleeting, ecstatic backstage moments. Tied to an interview recorded in the week prior with frontman James Murphy by the sportswriter and pop-culture critic Chuck Klosterman, the film cuts performances with Murphy’s morning-after reflections on breaking up the band and, in response to Klosterman’s proving, incisive questioning, some well-expressed musings on fame and the ephemerality and accessibility of media (Re: “Losing My Edge”) in the early part of 21^st century. Though Southern and Lovelace have relatively little filmmaking experience, Hits is an infectiously ebullient audio-visual event best seen and heard as big and loud as possible. Longer review here. 4.5/5 HL

Snow White and the Huntsman

Snow White and the Huntsman There are so many lousy fantasy and science fiction films around these days. This isn’t just another one. First time feature director Rupert Sanders has the very best of intentions, you can feel it in the shape and flow of his story. He really does want to pay attention to character and narrative logic. He wants to take a fairy tale and spin it into a grand fantasy adventure, full of darkness and wonder. He just doesn’t quite know how. Where most bad films in the mega-budget range go astray by staking everything on the effects budget and piling on too many poorly constructed action sequences, Sanders errs on the side of too many slow, awkwardly handled character-developing moments. It’s actually rather charming. And the film looks splendid; most of the visuals are clear lifts from the likes of Tim Burton and Hayao Miyazaki, but if you’re going to have fantasy influences, those aren’t bad ones to have. Still, it has to be said: all in all, this is lame, and it has exactly the wrong person playing Snow White. I do like Kristen Stewart, but the reason she works as Bella in the Twilight films (and I insist that she does) is that she always, always looks slightly conflicted. Sanders is constantly telling us that his Snow White’s power lies in her purity. Purity, in conventional fantasy terms, is the opposite of corruption, but in acting terms its opposite is ambivalence: if you’re always registering multiple, conflicting emotions, you are by definition not purely any one thing. With everything else that’s against it, this film really didn’t need a heroine who looks like she’s wandered in from an indie romcom and isn’t quite sure how she feels about being in the wrong place. 3/5 DL

T

Take This Waltz Girl meets boy. Girl already has a boy. Girl goes to other girls and discusses being torn between boys. “New things are shiny!” says one girl. “New things get old”, replies another. This is the moral of writer/director Sarah Polley’s romantic comedy-drama, and it would be a better film if it didn’t work quite so hard to help you see that yes, it has a moral. It’s the writing that does it. Polley keeps getting her characters to explain things to each other. On the other hand, her eye for a strong image is extremely good, and she has Michelle Williams to play her lead. Also Seth Rogen and Luke Kirby, as the other angles of our romantic triangle, and they both do fine work; but really – Michelle Williams. She’s all the reason you need. Full review here. 3.5/5 DL

Ted

Ted What is it with American men and their stuffed toys? Mel Gibson and his beaver, Jason Segel and his Muppety puppet … and oh, look, here comes Mark Wahlberg and his teddy bear. OK, arrested development, I get that. A psychiatrist could expound at length on other theories, but in movies, the critters tend to be devices to shepherd their owners across the divide into adulthood. And so it is with Ted, in which a walking-talking bear owned by Wahlberg’s character (whose name is plain John, which is probably deliberate), forms part of a classic boy/girl/boy’s-best-friend triangle. Mila Kunis plays the forbearing (ha!) girl, and though she’s the smart one, she’s not smart enough to figure out how to come between boy and bear. Or maybe she’s just being smart about it? Whatever. Anyway, the main selling point of this Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) debut feature seems to be to have the bear talk dirty. So – farts, turds, sex, race etc., all get a trot, but frankly, this isn’t as offensive as you expect. It’s more serial titter territory, sprinkled with moderately amusing if random cameos: Norah Jones, Sam Jones aka Flash Gordon, Ryan Reynolds, Tom Skerritt among others, with Patrick Stewart lending British irony as narrator. There’s a bit of heartstopping drama toward the end – a kind of “Exit bear, pursued by villain” moment – but mostly a good time seems to be had by all. Whether YOU will or not depends on how shockable you are, but let’s be clear: Team America: World Police it’s not. Oh, BTW, for all his foulmouthedness, the bear’s pretty appealing and his motion-capture animation is actually very good.2.5/5 HW

The Amazing Spiderman

The Amazing Spiderman Be amazed… it’s pretty ordinary. Though “ordinary”, in the through-the-looking-glass world of big budget CGI franchise movies, is not the ordinary ordinary. It’s the ordinary of “Hey, we told this story ten years ago – let’s do it again, only dumber!” Andrew Garfield is a likable Peter Parker, though he doesn’t make sense in the role the way Tobey Maguire did. (Why is Spiderman more interesting than Superman? Because Superman pretends to be Clark Kent, but Peter Parker pretends to be Spiderman. Why does Peter Parker need a wise-cracking heroic alter ego? Well I could bore you with the long version, because I grew up on this stuff, but the salient point here is that Peter Parker is an insecure nerd who can’t get a date. Even in The Social Network, which at least gave him a well written character to play, it didn’t really seem plausible that someone as pretty as Garfield could be so unused to social success). The fight scenes are the best thing about this long, only superficially coherent version of the Spiderman origin story. The actual story bits are all over the place, as though several different writers each had their own ideas for where to take things and they thought it would be fun to use all of them. It’s certainly a long way from the worst superhero movie we’ve seen, but… is the bar Sony has to clear to relaunch this franchise really set as low as “not the worst we’ve seen”? Okay, maybe I’m amazed after all. Full review here.  3/5 DL

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Not to be mistaken for any kind of masterpiece, but don’t underrate the professional expertise required to put a good, likeable ensemble culture-clash comedy together. Director John Madden throws a dream cast of senior British actors – Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton – into a run-down Indian “luxury retirement facility”, and they have a satisfying amount of fun there. At its weakest when it tries to be serious and meaningful, but never less than pleasant. Longer review here. 3.5/5 DL

The Bourne Legacy

The Bourne Legacy Don’t bother. Unless you’re liable to find it fascinating to watch a franchise which alchemised style into substance crumble into substance-free style in the hands of a director who clearly doesn’t understand his own strengths. In which case do bother, but be aware you’re attending a car crash. Tony Gilroy co-wrote all three of the previous Bourne films. He also wrote and directed Michael Clayton, for which he deserves, and got, praise, and Duplicity, for which he deserves, and got, a slap on the wrist. In co-writing and directing this attempt at freeing the Bourne action franchise from its dependence on Matt Damon, he completes a disastrous three film trajectory: from restrained competence to self-defeating albeit still mildly enjoyable cleverness, to the least thrilling thriller imaginable. You don’t realise just how good the Damon Bourne films were until you see someone manage to reproduce their look and basic shape without capturing any of their excitement. The first scene shows us a man hanging suspended under water, an obvious enough move – “Look! We meet our Jason Bourne replacement doing exactly what Jason Bourne was doing in the first and last scenes of his trilogy!“ - but not necessarily a bad one. Except Gilroy supplies us with no reason for the scene to exist: it’s there purely to claim Bourne status. This sort of thing is going to happen all through the film. The figure stirs, kicks to the surface, emerges. It’s Jeremy Renner. He personifies the curious should-work-but-doesn’t quality of the film, because on paper he’s just about the perfect guy to replace Damon, a rugged everyman actor with some substance to him and the physique to be a plausible action hero. But here he’s simply bland. He makes you see how much charisma Damon brings to what appears to be a very understated performance. Similarly with the action sequences. The stories of the Damon films are so simple they’re only just there; the films’ power to entertain is a function of well conceived moment-by-moment forwards-driving action, built up out of good choreography, good acting, good camera work, good editing, an expertly composed score… the list of elements that work just right is a long one, and every item on it matters. The governing idea is that Bourne, frequently a lousy strategist, is a tactical genius: put him in danger and he’ll think faster than the people trying to catch him, and also faster than the audience, and yet his decisions will be comprehensible, and when we see where they’re leading, we’ll go “Ah-ha! Of course!” This is hard to pull off. Watch Gilroy’s film try, and you’ll realise just how hard. Again and again, we can see where Renner is going long before he gets there, and we’re given no particular reason to care whether or not he makes it. Jason Bourne was a man trying to assume moral responsibility for his past; the films didn’t make a huge deal of this, but it was always clear that we were meant to compare him with his government official would-be nemeses, avatars of the out-of-control post-9/11 American security apparatus. Watch Green Zone, which does make a huge deal of America’s dubious response to 9/11, and you’ll see how badly Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass needs someone like Gilroy to temper his preacher tendencies. But The Bourne Legacy demonstrates how much more badly Gilroy needs someone like Greengrass. Here the conspiratorial security world is a vast, stultifying presence, full of secrets which will turn out to be trivial once we’ve laboured our way through reams of cryptic exposition, and one secret which has very non-trivial implications, none of which Gilroy seems alert to. Without giving the plot away – though it would save you so much time if I did – Gilroy decides to center his tale on the issue of just how men like Jason Bourne could function at such a seemingly superhuman level. Most action thrillers have the sense to leave this awkward question strictly alone; in foregrounding it, Gilroy does not reduce the absurdity of all those professionally aimed bullets that somehow never quite hit our hero, but he does manage to burden himself with a boring, no-stakes plotline. He also takes the series a long way down the road towards science fiction dystopia, and with no apparent awareness of having done so. There was no fundamental reason why this franchise rejig should not have resulted in another sleek, high octane pop culture classic – except for the most fundamental one of all, which is that good action movies are not easy to make. Someone please tell Tony Gilroy, before he botches another one. 2.5/5 DL

The Campaign

The Campaign Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis star as North Carolina politicians in this unambitious, low-brow comedy from director Jay Roach (the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents/Fockers franchises). Ferrell plays Camden Brady, the all-American, unexpectedly incumbent representative for the 14^th congressional district. Galifianakis—reprising his lisp-hindered ‘brother Seth’ character—plays Marty Huggins, the parochial, dim-witted challenger. Dan Ackroyd and John Lithgow look incredibly bored in cameos as the ‘Motch’ brothers, the powerful corporate heads who, in order to oust the politically ‘difficult’ Brady, back Huggins as the rival candidate. (They’re plainly stand-ins for the Koch brothers, who seem to have taken the joke seriously; the gag is funnier nearer the start, when the name is, I think, mispronounced “Marx”). Dylan McDermott and Jason Sudekis round out the core cast as political-marksmen/aides. McDermott aside, assembling a trio with such innate comedic talent—Galifianakis’ comedy pedigree is renowned; Sudekis’ Biden and Ferrell’s George W. Bush characters have been reprised season after season on SNL—should at least result in something vaguely enjoyable. Alas, even if you’re a fan of the two leads, The Campaign is a chore, largely because of its uninspired, bottom-of-the-barrel script (by TV writers Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell). A recurring gag with an Asian-American maid generates the film’s only laugh-out-loud moments, and even then only barely. Dinner-table scenes, even though they look like they were fun to shoot, are continual fodder for lame jokes: Brady’s wife announces she’s about to use some ‘TV-mature’ language, and advises the kids to put their iPod earbuds in; the joke—which can be seen a mile away and is reprised to little effect in the third act—is that the kids are listening to Three 6 Mafia. The Campaign is fairly inconsistent in the way it approaches its subject: given the film’s epigram (a Ross Perot quote, “Politics has no rules,” used anachronistically), at one time in the pre-production brainstorming process the filmmakers may have held genuine ambitions of creating a political satire; in the finished product, the ‘funny’ derives almost entirely from fart- and sex-jokes. A baby getting punched in the face occasions a neat bit of super-slow-mo CGI, though, if that’s your sort of thing. 1.5/5 HL

The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises There will be only one spoiler in this review, and it will not be for Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie; if you treasure your continued ignorance regarding the final beats of a 26 year old comic, stop reading this now. At the end of The Dark Knight Falls, the final volume of Frank Miller’s 1986 Dark Knight graphic novel series, the sacred text of the post-Adam West we’re-going-to-take-batarangs-seriously-now Batman revival, we see Batman die. (In single combat with Superman, now the debased toady of a degenerate American government; Miller has never been one for soft pastels). But it turns out the hero has faked his death, in order to take himself off the world’s radar and work against the powers that be from behind the scenes. This is the hidden message in the title of Nolan’s final Batman movie: by flipping falls into rises, he’s hinting that this time, we won’t get fake death and then victory. We’ll get fake victory and then death. It’s a nice little mind game – bluff, or double bluff? – but the more interesting question, obviously, is “Do we care?” Having been deeply underwhelmed by every part of Nolan’s Dark Knight that wasn’t Heath Ledger, I’m surprised to find myself saying this, but I did care. Nolan, as ever, approaches his story with deathly seriousness, and mixes realism and fantasy to a recipe quite unlike those of other superhero movies. He turns the usual credibility problem of long-running action franchises to good account by making Christian Bale’s near-middle-age an explicit roadblock – this, visibly, is an older, frailer Batman, trying to push his body to do things it used to do easily – and at the same time asks us to swallow scientific and medical idiocies and villains whose ultimate motivation makes sense only in kindergarten terms. Every significant turn of the plot is fully predictable, and the film progresses with an unhurried lack of pace which translates to a running time of over two and a half hours. All of which a disenchanted reviewer could present as reasons to stay away, but for my money Nolan manages to convert them into assets: this is an honest, well crafted genre piece, which uses its massive length not to cram in a random jumble of this-worked-last-time ingredients, but to back its hero into a terrible corner, and then show him attempting to get out. There is no performance to equal Ledger’s Joker, which is to say there’s no unimpressed personification of chaos making the film’s self-serious choreography look pompous, but Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the usual regulars all do good, satisfying work. Of this year’s superhero movie crop (I still can’t believe we live in a world where this is a sentence I have to write), I admired Joss Whedon’s Avengers for doing everything the studio execs insist a franchise movie has to do, and yet still (somehow) being great fun. The Amazing Spiderman is useful as an instance of the typical franchise sins, and useful for nothing else whatsoever. Nolan doesn’t have Whedon’s infectious love for this material, but give him credit for this: he knows his craft, and he knows that stories need endings. In today’s Hollywood that’s all too rare. 4/5 DL

The Door All the right things seem in place for this to be good – Helen Mirren, Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others), director Istvan Szabo (Mephisto, Being Julia) and a post-war Hungarian setting that casts a visual spell with its spare, cool ambience. The story’s about a complicated and frequently testy relationship between Mirren and Gedeck’s characters, divided by class, personality and experiences, but in the end it’s about too many things, stretched across an episodic narrative with no clear theme. I suspect there are autobiographical elements in the novel it’s based on (by Magda Szabo – no relation) which are responsible for this, so the adaptation struggles to locate an arc for the film. It’s also distracting – no, irritating – to find that the accents have been replaced by overdubbed British. Why? 2.5/5 HW

The Expendables 2

The Expendables 2 You know why this is cool? Because Arnold Schwarzenegger is out of politics and available for extended cameo duty. When lame satire on lame 1980s action movies has Arnold in it, it becomes instantly less lame. This is axiomatic, by which I mean it’s a completely indefensible position which I am going to assert anyway. The first of these get-togethers for superannuated muscle men was quite remarkably soggy. Basically, if you’d spent the previous 20 years down in the mouth because you weren’t getting to see Stallone pretending to suffer hideous pain so he could inflict hideous pain on other people, your wait was over. There’s every bit as much self-puffery from the former Rambo this time round, and pretty much the same amount of violence – that would be LOTS – but the incidental pleasures are easier to locate. The film is less a hamhanded recreation of the unlamented tropes of the genre than its predecessor, and more a self-aware lampooning of them. Do not mistake this for a ringing endorsement, but I went in with very low expectations, and I came out smiling. 3.5/5 DL

The Way “You don’t choose a life, Dad; you live one” is the line that tells you what you’re in for. Just so you know. Which isn’t to say this road movie is just an episodic greeting card, but it does have flat patches and the kind of plot predictability that has you knowing what’s going to happen just before it pops up on the screen. Never mind. It has great scenery, since it’s a kind of tourist doco for Spain (interestingly, the landscape looks a lot like New Zealand). An American widower (Martin Sheen) travels to Spain to collect the body of his son, killed when walking the 800km Camino de Santiago, a popular pilgrimage from the French Pyrenees to the Atlantic coast. Dad then decides to do the walk too, but has to suffer some unwanted companions: an irritatingly cheerful Dutchman, an acid Canadian and a garrulous Irishman (sounds like the basis for a joke, but at least the actors here are capable of lifting them above mere stereotype). Sheen does his crusty old bugger routine, and much international bickering ensues before the inevitable hugging and learning. And only after lots of shots of walking, drinking and smoking, some minor jeopardy and a final extraordinary piece of religious theatre which I won’t spoil by divulging. Directed and written by Emilio Estevez, Sheen’s son. The better-behaved one. 2.5/5 HW

The Well Digger's Daughter

The Well Digger’s Daughter Daniel Auteuil directs his own adaptation of a Marcel Pagnol novel: Pagnol being the author of Jean De Florette and Manon of the Spring. Neither of those books was adapted by Auteuil, and though he was in the films, he didn’t direct them, so it’s worth emphasising that he does a decent job getting this one onto the screen. He also stars, and when he’s got his acting hat on he’s more than decent. His Pascal Amoretti is a solid working class man in rural 1930s France, thoroughly lacking in imagination and just barely coping with the responsibilities of raising his six daughters on his own. The eldest, Patricia, falls in love with the wrong man and gets pregnant, and Amoretti’s response takes his family instantly to the brink of tragedy. This is a four-square, swelling-symphonic-music, golden-light-on-the-wheat-fields historical drama, with very few surprises, but it’s solidly made, and I found myself genuinely caring about the characters. There isn’t quite the distinction there needs to be between Auteuil the actor and Auteuil the director; his character is incapable of seeing his daughter’s point of view, and the film doesn’t always seem aware that she has one. It really should have been called The Well Digger. But it’s still moving. 3.5/5 DL

Tortoise In Love In a quiet way, this is one of the strangest films you’re likely to see this year. It’s so very close to complete lifelessness you wonder the people behind the camera didn’t nod off. Maybe they did. It would explain a lot. A young Brit returns to his small town home after a failed attempt at making a life in the big smoke, gets a job as a gardener, falls madly in love with a young Polish woman who’s working Up At The Manor, and… nothing much happens. Lots and lots of nothing much. He’s of the “can’t talk coherently to woman he likes” school of romantic hero; but the town is full of well meaning salt-of-the-earth types, and they all see what’s going on, and… nothing much happens. They make jokes. They give him bad advice. They hold village fetes. It’s all fairly good humoured and utterly lacking in spark. You can imagine it on British TV in the 1960s. Or do I mean 1950s? How it found its way onto movie screens today I can’t imagine, but as empty vessels go, it’s harmless enough. 3/5 DL

Total Recall

Total Recall “Inspired”, claim the end titles boldly, “by We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, by Philip K Dick”. Well, it’s true that this bizarre mishmash of genuinely astonishing design, lacklustre science fiction world building, exciting action and, um, much less exciting action does quote three whole sentences from Dick’s story. That’s more than Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Schwarzenegger vehicle can boast. It’s also true that it isn’t one of Dick’s stronger or stranger works, so the new film shouldn’t be castigated for ignoring most of its ideas. (Fun trivia game for people who read too many film reviews: count the number of times any given Dick adaptation is accused of missing the best filmic opportunities inherent in the master’s writings). But what We Can Remember It For You Wholesale does have is a Matryoshka doll structure, hiding buried memories within buried memories so that every time you think you’ve got to the truth of Doug Quail’s adventure, you turn out to be wrong. (Yes, the character was originally called Quail, not Quaid. Apparently a name meaning “shrink fearfully away from” wasn’t manly enough for Ah-nold). This capacity to surprise at every turn is exactly what Len Wiseman’s remake lacks, and it’s exactly what it needs. Because it is, indeed, a remake, changing the setting and the details of Verhoeven’s film but somehow managing to retain every last significant plot beat. If you’ve seen the original, you’ve essentially seen this. I cannot express just how perversely misjudged this is. The prime opportunity offered by a story about false memories is the constant wrong-footing of the audience, and this opportunity only becomes greater when your audience already has a strong set of expectations as to where the story will go. A film about a man who wrongly thinks he remembers his past, which we all have memories of having seen before? Come on! Set us up to see what’s coming, and then do something else! But no: once again, lowly manual worker Doug Quaid will ask for a false-memory vacation trip in which he’s a superspy… and discover that he really is a super-spy. Once again, his wife will turn out not to be his wife, and the woman he dreams of will turn out to be real, and… well, if you didn’t see the original, don’t let me spoil the ending. Those of us who do know the original are forced to fall back on admiring the setting, which is almost Blade Runner-level impressive, and the action sequences, which are constant, and rather well executed… until the absurdly drawn-out finale, which just will not end, and which, at the basic level of “where are all these objects in physical space”, falls a long way short of coherence. This was the first point in the film where I was forced to remember that Wiseman is the auteur of the Underworld series. Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel are fine in their lead roles, and so, surprisingly enough, is Kate Beckinsale, usually one of my least favourite C-listers. The science fiction idiocies which underpin the plot are no more risible than the Hollywood norm, and a lot less risible than Verhoeven’s oxygenate-Mars-by-pushing-this-button concept. Fundamentally, all the film lacks is the one thing it needs most: any degree of suspense. Unless you never saw the original and like chase scenes, in which case it’s not a bad night out. 3/5 DL

Click here for more stories and reviews by David Larsen, here for more stories and reviews by Helene Wong.