• Taken 3

    January 9, 2015 - By 

    Producer/writer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton are filmmakers with a very specific set of skills, ones they have acquired over very long careers, and ones they apply liberally to Taken 3, Liam Neeson’s third round of familial brouhaha as Bryan Mills, retired spook and walking diplomatic incident. They can take the plainest of scenes, like two people in a room talking, or a basic freeway car chase, and turn them into impenetrable garbage. They can look at the reception to Taken 2, identify everything about it audiences disliked (the jumps in plot logic; the fun-sucking attention on Maggie Grace’s gormless suffering daughter routine; the softened…

  • The Theory of Everything

    January 8, 2015 - By 

    There are mercifully few equation montages in Theory of Everything, the hazy, heartfelt biopic of celebrity English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. There is a scene early on where Stephen (Eddie Redmayne), an spiritedly disorganised graduate student searching out a thesis topic at 1960s Cambridge, seeks inspiration by scribbling out theorems on a blackboard, with a hugging, affectionate camera angle and an upbeat piano score. Even then, what strikes clearest is the jittery chalk transcription, a warning of the doom to come. It is one of the film’s few concessions to the tropes of the ‘damaged genius’ biopic: elsewhere, an enthused physics student explains black hole theory…

  • Birdman

    January 6, 2015 - By 

    There are many motifs that come to mind when discussing Alejandro González Iñárritu. A deft comedic hand is not really one of them. An overly long trip on the Expresso-Depresso bus to Interconnectivity of Life Boulevard with a brief detour through Ugly Face Of Humanity Avenue is more akin to what has come to expect from a man whose work included 21 Grams, Amores Perros and Babel. His films are often negative to a fault, as is the case with his previous effort, Buitiful, which painted a portrait so devoid of any kind of salvation that you lost all sympathy…

  • Tokyo Godfathers: A Hunky Dory Christmas

    December 22, 2014 - By 

    Christmas films are a tough nut to crack, if you’ll pardon the pun. They require an almost faultless balance of pathos and sentimentality, lest we forget that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is about the failure of common man and suicide as well as angels attaining wings. If you go too far in one direction, you can end with a film which seems insincere, idiotic and full of saccharine trust. The inverse of that is you end up with a nasty, hateful film which just sneers at the audience. Every now and then, a film gets the balance just right; Satoshi…

  • Paddington

    December 4, 2014 - By 

    Like its eponymous Peruvian exile, the cinematic adaptation of Michael Bond’s iconic children’s book series arrives under choppy circumstances. A late-in-the-game change of lead voice talent (from Colin Firth to Ben Whishaw) and a flat teaser trailer were casting doubts on the viability of StudioCanal’s most expensive film to date. They need not have worried: like its marmalade-guzzling, duffle-clad hero, Paddington is a sweet, immensely likable creation that is sure to find a hearty welcome on adopted shores. Writer-director Paul King and co-plotter Hamish McColl have delivered a lovey, lovely live action/animation film which doubles as a great Christmas watch.…

  • Life Itself

    November 26, 2014 - By 

    The owlish, circular Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert famously championed 1994’s Hoop Dreams, an early documentary by Steve James looking at the aspirations of a group of black city kids, and with Life Itself James repays the favour. Lovers of film and film criticism will find much to appreciate in the film, which uses the memoir of the same name to tell Ebert’s story, from his beginnings in print journalism to his final days at home and at hospital, scenes James captures with intimate proximity. Life Itself is a candid and moving film about how to relate to art and…

  • The Drop

    November 14, 2014 - By 

    The Drop is a good example of how short stories and screenplays are different forms with different expectations and demands. Dennis Lehane, who writes the film, translates the material straightforwardly from his 2009 story ‘Animal Rescue’, producing a low-level Brooklyn crime drama which often feels both undernourished and padded. Director Michael R. Roskam impressed in 2011 with Bullhead, a Dutch-language feature about the animal hormone underworld in Belgium, and here he finds a similar, if less complex, story about day-to-day mob operations and the guarded, tense blue-collar men caught up in them. Bob (Tom Hardy) and Marv (the late James…

  • Interstellar

    November 7, 2014 - By 

    Houston, we have a problem. Christopher Nolan may be a spectacularly skilled constructor of film, but he’s no storyteller. In his last non-Batman film, Inception (2010), Nolan marshalled his technical enthusiasm into a giddy, multi-layered hacking of subconscious dreamworlds. With Interstellar he rockets off in the opposite direction, sling-shoting Matthew MaConaughey and a band of cosmonauts into the cold blackness of the far-away night, a fantastic voyage through wormholes, black holes and narrative rabbit holes. The feverishly anticipated Interstellar is a gorgeous, meticulously staged, hyper-expensive celebration of human discovery and a thrilling rebuke to the timidity of the average studio…

  • The Book Of Life

    October 29, 2014 - By 

    Perhaps more than even Christmas and Halloween, the Mexican Dia de los Muertos (‘Day of the Dead’) is a holiday ripe for cinematic exploitation: it is, after all, a festival of colourful and gothic storytelling. Jorge Gutierrez, who has previously channeled his love for Mexican folklore into the award-winning El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera for Nickelodeon, pairs up with screenwriter Doug Langdale and uses the day as a backdrop for The Book of Life‘s imaginative story of childhood rivalry and feuding gods. It’s a moderately ambitious but highly charming fantasy-animation with a fun multi-level narrative. We open on…

  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

    October 16, 2014 - By 

    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles combines two of the least appealing trends in current pop culture. The first is an unearned nostalgia for television cartoons that were already pretty ropey to begin with (only worsened by the recent dominance of the listicle). The second is the relentless grimification of pulpy comic book material for the PG-13/12A multiplex crowd. TMNT is an inexplicable and gormless film, which seems to have been made with some fictional demographic in mind. There’s none of the pulpy stylishness of the comics, or the light-hearted silliness of the television series. It’s a Nickelodeon production but I can only imagine children will be quickly bored by the unending humourlessness…