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

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

Cafe De Flore

Cafe De Flore Domestic drama and New Age spiritualism form an unlikely alliance here, but let yourself go with it and you’ll have something to ponder after the credits roll. To start, there are parallel stories with different timeframes: a mother (Vanessa Paradis) and her Down syndrome boy in Paris in the 60s; a troubled DJ (French-Canadian singer-songwriter Kevin Parent) and his broken-but-mending family in present-day Montreal. The connection isn’t obvious, and it doesn’t become clear till near the end, but along the way you’re so hooked into possible clues that you’re inclined to hang on through the structural confusion and puzzling tangents. The clues are mostly visual, building a surreal sense of broken memory and perception, and even if you end up not buying the explanation, there’s no doubt that director Jean-Marc Vallée has come up with an intriguing angle on love, fate and letting go. And if you did happen to live in Paris in the 60s, this is the kind of film you’d argue about with friends in some cool, smoky café for hours afterwards. 3.5/5 HW

Carnage Curious: Roman Polanski’s adaptation of this four-hander stage play is so intelligently shot and so well cast that the limits of the source material become glaringly obvious… and yet, being so intelligently shot and so well cast, it’s still a treat to watch. Two New York pre-teen boys get into a fight. One knocks the other’s teeth out, and the parents of the evil-doer go over to the victim’s apartment to apologise to his parents. Much back-handed courtesy ensues; and then things go downhill; and then things go off a cliff. Jodie Foster reminds you just how good she can be; her role is perhaps the juiciest, but Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, and John C Reilly all shine as the other warring spouses. Polanski’s direction is a masterclass in getting the most out of a small set without resorting to attention-getting weird camera placement stunts – brief opening and closing sequences aside, the film takes place entirely in one small New York apartment, but it never feels cramped or visually static. The play ultimately wastes its best satirical opportunities in favour of over-the-top couples-on-the-warpath humour, but it’s hard to object too strenuously when it’s done this well. 3.5/5 DL

Chinese Take-Away

Chinese Take-Away The obvious phrases to describe Chinese Takeaway – “charming”, “warmhearted”, “delightful” – would be perfectly adequate, except that the opening, a prologue of wonderful absurdity, introduces an almost magical element that wafts this Argentinian film beyond cliché. In Buenos Aires, the chance meeting of a solitary, grumpy shopkeeper (Ricardo Darín of The Secret in Their Eyes) and a penniless Chinese immigrant (Huang Sheng Huang) sparks a tale of human connection and coincidence that unwinds gently and surprisingly without ever feeling engineered. Darín is deadpan amusing, and Huang’s almost exclusively nonverbal performance is just right. 3.5/5 HW

Coriolanus Taut and thrilling, Ralph Fiennes’ adaptation (with writer John Logan) of this Shakespearean tragedy is a triumph for him as both actor and director. Set in Rome but with sly visual referencing of contemporary theatres of civil war (Eastern Europe, the Middle East), this production takes the concept of “opening it up” by the scruff of its neck and hurls us into a cinematic telling that’s visceral and urgent in look and feel, yet never sacrifices the tragic psychology at its heart. Shaven-headed and dead-eyed, Fiennes is a truly scary Martius – dubbed Coriolanus after he saves Rome – a soldier hero lugging a bag of pride, anger and disdain which curdle into a shocking vengeance that we know cannot – must not – end well. Even his mother Volumnia (pretty dodgy herself when it comes to patriotic bloodlust, as underscored by Vanessa Redgrave’s appearance in military drag), cannot tame the monster in her son. Fear and pity indeed. Showing in Auckland and Hamilton only. 4/5 HW

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

Jiro Dreams of Sushi The perfect subject for an unlikely hit biographical documentary meets not quite the perfect film-maker. Jiro Ono is a Japanese sushi chef. Actually, he’s the Japanese sushi chef, 85 years old when this film was made and widely viewed as the zen master of his field. People wait months and years for a booking at his little Tokyo sushi bar, where he serves them whatever he thinks they ought to eat: the simplest of food, prepared by a living exemplar of the principle that you should devote your life to perfecting your art. And what kind of father and boss does a man like that make? We meet Jiro’s various apprentices, one of whom is his son and presumptive heir; they’re stoical about the decades they’re expected to devote to learning to cook rice, after which Jiro may, possibly, allow them to invest further decades in learning to slice fish. It’s fascinating material, but it presents director David Gelb with a problematic challenge: when your subject is constantly emphasising the importance of getting the little things right, your audience is likely to pay more attention than usual to your editing, your choice of music cues, and, generally speaking, your broad-spectrum technical competence. To say that Gelb’s work is not up to Jiro’s standards is to put it kindly, because few people’s would be – but a lot of directors would come far closer than he does. 3/5 DL

L

Last Will

Last Will A reporter yawning her way through the annual Nobel Prize ball in Stockholm is shocked awake when the couple next to her on the dance floor gets gunned down. One of them was a controversial genetics researcher. The other was the head of the Nobel committee. Which one was the target? Before she can follow up, the police slap a gag order on her: and if you imagine she doesn’t follow up anyway, or that her research doesn’t nearly get her killed, you’re imagining a far less by-the-numbers story than this one. As crusading journalist murder mysteries go, this is entertaining enough, but it suffers from one of the major problems of the form – having asked you to switch your brain on and attend to its trail of clues, it then has to come up with a plot resolution which doesn’t insult your intelligence. Don’t hold your breath. 3/5 DL

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

Magic Mike Stephen Soderbergh’s male stripper movie, starring Channing Tatum in all his manly glory. The word on this is that it’s surprisingly entertaining, and possibly even a great American movie. The latter assessment comes from Slate’s Stephen Metcalf, and has me really wishing I’d managed to get to the film. Alas: at the point where I could have seen it, it would have been my ninth film in two days. It turns out that’s one more than I can deal with; or it was on this occasion. I’ll try to see this soon and report back. DL

Margin Call Moral fibre is conspicuous by its absence in JC Chandor’s compelling imagining of what happened the day the music died on Wall Street. Or rather, the day the musician-traders watched in paralysed horror as the volume began to fade from 11. The resulting overnight scramble, overseen by a CEO based not-so-loosely on Lehman Brothers’ John Tuld, and played to eminence gris perfection by Jeremy Irons, is a visual orchestration of internalised spinelessness and panic. It also earned Chandor a well deserved screenplay nomination in this year’s Oscars. And unlike documentary treatments of the crisis (eg., Inside Job), there are no whizzbang diagrams or jargon garble to grapple with. Some of these players admit to not really getting any of this stuff either, so, usefully for us, have to have it explained over and over. It’s an example of the way the film humanises those we would normally label greedy bastards, but it doesn’t let them off the hook, either. Kevin Spacey heads a good, solid ensemble of unshowy performers, and a nice surprise is that one of them is Demi Moore. Review here. 4/5 HW

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 have six festival blog posts: one, two, three, four, five, six.

O

One Man, Two Guvnors I can’t remember when I last laughed as loud and as long as I did in this brilliant piece of tomfoolery from the National Theatre. I missed it first time around, in last season’s NTLive, but I’m not surprised it’s being given another trot (along with its stable mate, Frankenstein). Nicholas Hytner’s production, and Richard Bean’s adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters is like the Best of British broad comedy (farce, panto, a bit of stand-up and improv) in a homage to commedia dell’arte, and it’s a perfect antidote to mid-winter blues. The cast is impressively sure-footed – or bumble-footed in Tom Edden’s case, with his OTT turn as a hapless waiter – but front-and-centre is the large presence of James Corden (The History Boys). He’s the one man of the title, juggling a full and sometimes confusing complement of plot complications even as he desperately tries to keep his two guvnors apart. Recently awarded a Tony for the role on Broadway, he turns impeccable timing, physical comedy and even a spot of musical skill into an arresting, delicious performance. All right, it’s more a filmed production than a piece of cinema, but who cares when you’re laughing this much? Do not miss. 5/5 HW

P

Prometheus

Prometheus You have a long directing career. You have made half a dozen highly popular films, but only two of lasting importance, and you made them thirty years ago. You decide to go back and make follow-ups to each of them. In the case of Alien, you opt for a prequel. Alien starts with the discovery of an unknown species on an unexplored planet, so right off the bat, your audience know that whatever happens in your new film, word of it will not get back to Earth. This rather reduces the suspense as to the likelihood of many of your characters surviving, so it would appear that you either 1) have a cunning plan for moving this franchise, which has produced as many bad films as good ones, out of the suspense game, or 2) have a cunning plan for wresting suspense from the jaws of your audience’s expectations, or 3) are inviting the inevitable comparisons with your younger self to no good purpose whatsoever. But it surely won’t be the last of these? You’re Ridley Scott, legend! You even made a film called Legend once! Though you prefer not to talk about that one much these days. And if you were smart, you would have given yourself the option of not taking about this one either. By not making it. It’s a mess. A confused and desperately pretentious screenplay attempts to fuse lofty questions about the meaning of human life to the old “Who’s going to die next?” game, with a side order of poorly judged and poorly executed body violation horror. The original film was a tightly constructed Freudian nightmare, startling to its first audiences in ways that are hard to appreciate three decades later. Scott was never likely to equal it, though the hope that he might come close has driven pre-release expectations of Prometheus quite as much as its expertly conducted marketing campaign. He’s delivered an undeniably handsome film, and some will find its striking visuals partial compensation for its narrative and thematic failure. I go the other way. So much talent on display to so little purpose makes me grind my teeth with frustration. If Scott’s upcoming Blade Runner sequel is as disappointing as this one, he will be hearing from my dentist. Full review here. 2/5 DL

R

Rock of Ages

Rock Of Ages As the owner of the Bourbon Room, a fictional club on the Strip in Los Angeles during the 80s rock scene, Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin in a long, tragic wig) promises “a sea of sweat, ear-shattering music and puke!” Well, no. It never gets that assaulting, or dangerous, or grungey. This is 80s-lite, based on a Broadway musical about stars-in-their-eyes kids making it in Hollywood, so reality is of the heightened kind, not gritty. You’ll pick that from the way a load of strangers bursts into song around our young small-town heroine, Sherrie (perky Julianne Hough), as she rides the bus to LA to seek fame and fortune. She meets Drew (pretty Diego Boneta), an aspiring singer; things go well, then badly, etc. And so it goes in this slight, briefly entertaining diversion that mildly spoofs the era and its characters, features Tom Cruise in Bret Michaels mode (he sings and takes his shirt off, but he’s no rock god), and Catherine Zeta-Jones trying, and failing, to convince that she hates rock ‘n’ roll. Strangely, the soundtrack never really grabs, but what does come across is the exuberance, energy and optimism of all that young ambition. 2.5/5 HW

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. 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 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 Spark of Life

The Spark of Life The new film from Spanish director Àlex de la Iglesia — whose off-the-wall horror-comedy The Last Circus thrilled and scared nzff audiences in 2010—doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. La Chispa de la Vida (As Luck Would Have It, a.k.a. The Spark of Life) follows Roberto, a middle-aged, out-of-work ad-agency creative in Madrid. Early in his career—as a teenager, in fact—he came up with a slogan for a Coca-Cola campaign: “Life’s little spark.” (Hence the film’s much better local title.) After being rejected at a job interview, he decides to get out of the city and heads to the hotel in Cartagena where he and his wife (Salma Hayek) spent their honeymoon. Only, the hotel’s not there any longer: a Roman theatre was discovered underneath it and is slowly being excavated. Our protagonist stumbles into the “Museo Teatro” press tour and after taking a wrong turn, trips and is left hanging on to a statue suspended by a crane a few hundred metres above the ruins’ floor. He falls, and a piece of iron girding is lodged in his skull. Doctors can’t operate on him trapped like that, but the 24-hour news cycle loves it. PR reps and the media, some of whom assume his fall was a suicide attempt, descend upon him; for a fleeting moment, he is a celebrity. Scored like a horror film, written and performed as a comedy, and shot like a bland mainstream drama, La Chispa de la Vida doesn’t quite know what genre it wants to belong to. This isn’t usually a problem for de la Iglesia: his previous few films—2008’s The Oxford Murders and 2004’s Crimen ferpecto are worth seeking out, as is The Last Circus—blended genres spectacularly. His latest, though, perhaps hampered by a script from Randy Feldman (who wrote so insightfully about the human condition in the plots of Tango & Cash and Metro) is bland studio fare. If this was meant to be an attempt at exploring the same ideas about the nature of brief fame that Billy Wilder so brilliantly examined in Ace in the Hole, it fails spectacularly. As a piece of simple entertainment, it’s just plain forgettable. 2.5/5 HL

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

Trishna You don’t need to know Tess of the d’Urbervilles to appreciate Michael Winterbottom’s reinterpretation of Thomas Hardy’s novel, but it might help you over the hump of its melodramatic finale. If you’re not familiar with it, keep in mind that in transporting the action from 19th century England and the Industrial Revolution to 21st century India and globalisation, Winterbottom’s making a valid point about the unintended human cost of social change. The film’s very much in his style – such as it is, given his predilection for trying different genres – with its docudrama rhythms and inclusion of non-actors. Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto makes a gorgeous Trishna/Tess, and the palaces of Rajasthan make a lovely counterpoint to the rush of Mumbai. 3.5/5 HW

W

What To Expect When You’re Expecting Not the sequel to Bridesmaids, and certainly not in that league in its humour, but an entertaining enough merry-go-round of the state of pregnancy. An ensemble of five loosely-related couples at different stages of relationship nudges the film towards something close to unwieldy, but the business (comic) and busyness (narrative) help zoom over the cracks. There are even jokes for blokes, courtesy a tragic stroller-pushing fathers’ group, but they’re mostly lame and irrelevant – which kinda goes for the group itself. There are tears as well, and twists and turns that give the characters simple story arcs in lieu of anything more profound. It’s a shame to single out anyone from this large, competent cast, but Glee’s Matthew Morrison looks pretty happy to have scored his first big film role opposite Cameron Diaz, and Elizabeth Banks delivers good comedy along with a baby. Good clean fun, and minimal cringe except for a bit of barfing and obviously prosthetic baby bumps. 3/5 HW

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