• X-Men: Apocalypse

    May 23, 2016 - By 

    Marvel’s X-Men comics sometimes led with a cheeky fake-out to tease the reader. We open in media res, our mutant heroes pitched in desperate battle against some foe. They’re battered and bruised. They’ve suffered casualties. And right before the moment of defeat, when all is seemingly lost, the scene fades away, leaving the super-powered faculty panting in an empty steel-blue hangar. It’s the Danger Room, the mansion’s holographic training facility. Cyclops, Iceman and co. were never in danger; the stakes weren’t real. X-Men: Apocalypse, the third film in the franchise’s origin reboot, is one long Danger Room scenario, a frictionless…

  • 10 Cloverfield Lane

    March 25, 2016 - By 

    Cloverfield’s monster, descended from the Japanese kaiju tradition, belonged to the skyline. 10 Cloverfield Lane, the accidental spiritual cousin/franchise cash-in to Matt Reeves and J. J. Abrams’ found footage original, takes us into the dirt. Several feet below Louisiana farmland surface, to be exact, to an air-tight doomsday bunker built and manned by an unstable conspiracy theorist named Howard (John Goodman) who, convinced the Ruskies or Martians or mutant space worms were coming, poured all his time into a cosy subterranean homestead. Unlike the rest of us sheeple, he alone would be prepared for when shit went down. It’s unnervingly domestic, feminine even,…

  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

    March 24, 2016 - By 

    Do you believe in Superman? Judging by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zack Snyder doesn’t. Indeed, the Man of Steel sequel/Batman reboot/shared-universe kickstarter (breathe!) doesn’t seem to have much faith in anyone or anything. It’s a superhero story with little story and even less heroism. We’re now two films deep with DC Comics and Warner Brothers’ marquee film franchise, and they’re still embarrassed by their frontman. Superman is such a phenomenally over-powered alien-god that his stories require an equally rich sense of humanity for his struggles to connect. How can Clark be good? Can he inspire Earthlings or is he doomed to endlessly save us from ourselves? How…

  • Anomalisa

    March 23, 2016 - By 

    The line you’re going to read a lot about Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman’s second film as writer-director, is ‘fake but real’. A stop-motion animation that’s nonetheless bursting with humanity. This is a fair assessment; like Kaufman’s work with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Synecdoche, New York, it’s a technically idiosyncratic look at very complicated emotional experiences, approached with curiousity and compassion. But this undersells just how stiflingly artificial the atmosphere of the film is; how deeply, deeply unreal the perspective of its protagonist feels. From the get-go, as the lonely customer service specialist Michael Stone drifts through the usual travel rituals – flight,…

  • London Has Fallen

    March 9, 2016 - By 

    Forty minutes into London Has Fallen, the air is suddenly thick with tension and the promise of conflict. Not from the film itself – believe me – but from the screaming match that has erupted half a dozen rows behind me. A complaint over the volume of a sweet-chomping audience member has escalated into a blazing row, the offender’s mother vocally attacking the manhood of her son’s accuser. Will either get up from their seats? What happens when the lights go up and they meet in the aisle? It was, by a country mile, the most exciting thing to happen…

  • The Survivalist

    February 16, 2016 - By 

    The Survivalist is a lean film for lean times. It’s seven years after the end of civilisation, the collapse of oil production having devastated world population levels, a setup communicated quickly via an efficiently severe line graph animation. Out in the Irish countryside (shot in Ballymoney forestry) lives the unnamed recluse, played by Belfast’s Martin McCann (’71, Boogaloo and Graham), alone in a cabin and eking out a basic existence off the land. Derry-born Stephen Fingleton’s feature debut opens with an audacious establishing section, silent except for the scrape of bark and sploosh of wet soil, following McCann’s hermit as…

  • Goosebumps

    February 5, 2016 - By 

    Even viewed through the forgiving prism of nostalgia, the Goosebumps books were always more goofy than scary, with their green sludge lettering, gotcha twists and titles like Say Cheese and Die! or Say Cheese and Die – Again! Coming nearly twenty years (!) after the Fox Kids television show, the big-screen outing for R. L. Stine’s sprawling series leans into its inherent silliness, producing an entertaining and entertainingly self-aware kids v. ghouls adventure. Teenager Zach (Dylan Minnette) and his mother (the always good Amy Ryan) have just moved into their new home in Madison, Delaware, for a fresh start after the death of his father, a pathos that is…

  • The Revenant

    January 13, 2016 - By 

    When we’re surrounded by movies running on autopilot, it seems perverse to fault a film for trying. But there’s trying and then there’s trying, and The Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new revenge Western, indelicately treads the line between the two. Loosely based on the real-life bear mauling and survival of nineteenth century frontiersman Hugh Glass, documented in Michael Punke’s 2002 novel, this is an in-your-face exercise in iron-blooded macho perseverance. It’s 1823 and Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is assisting a hunting party led by Domhnall Gleeson’s blue-blood Captain, tracking down valuable animals pelts in the wilderness claimed by the Louisiana Purchase. When the company men…

  • In The Heart of the Sea

    December 16, 2015 - By 

    Captain Ahab’s white whale is a metaphorical object for the ages. When it comes to In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard’s soggy nautical epic, an unconvincing take on the Moby Dick myth, the sea monster invites symbolic interpretations too tempting to ignore. Maybe Ahab’s desperate, pointless chase for the creature represents Howard’s search, now 23 features in, for a distinctive style or personality? Maybe the good ship Essex, our seafaring vessel for most of the two-hour run, is a stand-in for the movie, drifting through the endless blue, its maps and compasses pointing towards an ever-receding point or point of view? Or maybe the movie is the…

  • Tangerine

    November 27, 2015 - By 

    “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” Sin-Dee Rella is fresh out of a month-long jail stint, and she’s pissed. She meets up with her best friend Alexandria, also a trans women turning tricks on the Sunset Strip, at their local donut haunt, who drops the bombshell that Sin-Dee’s boyfriend/pimp has been unfaithful while she’s been away. “No drama!” warns Alexandria, but it’s too late: the revelation sets a vengeful Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) marching up and down Hollywood Boulevard, determined to wring the neck of the cheating Chester and his ‘white fish bitch’, instigated a winding, popping, one-crazy-night farce that will loop all…