• The Nice Guys

    June 14, 2016 - By 

    These guys aren’t really that nice. That’s the joke, I guess, but it’s hardly their fault. No-one’s particularly congenial in this 70s L. A. smogscape, where even the birds are giving up and dropping out of the sky. The Nice Guys, written and directed by Shane Black, Hollywood’s go-to guy for snappy, emotionally wounded buddy comedies, is smeared with the film-maker’s fingerprints. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are a mismatched pair of low-level private investigators. There’s a dead wife, quipy banter, a lot of boozing, a stray Christmas jingle and at its centre two figures of bruised, broken masculinity, struggling…

  • 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,…

  • Cinema 16 For ’16: Goodnight Mommy

    March 15, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to. Rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. One of the most hyped European horror films for some time, Goodnight Mommy, finally arrives on these shores amid some glowing, ‘caution, not for the faint-hearted’ reviews. Austria’s entry in the 88th Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film category, which is some going for a horror…

  • 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…