MARTY SUPREME*****

MARTY SUPREME is a gonzo caper about a narcissistic arsehole who will exploit everyone and everything to fulfil his dream. The challenge for writer-director Josh Sadie is to make us root for him, and maybe even like him, nonetheless.

Timothee Chalamet stars as the titular protagonist Marty Mauser - an acne-scarred hen-pecked shoe-salesman who dreams of travelling to England to become a champion table-tennis player.  Destroyed in that final by his Japanese opponent, the balance of the film sees Marty try to con and finagle his way into enough cash to go to Japan for the rematch, including but not limited to getting a schlubby put-upon live-at-home man called Dion to produce branded table-tennis balls called the "Marty Supreme", and conning a mafiosi (improbably played by Abel Ferrara) whose dog he was sitting, while also being on the lam from some white hick racists and a psychopathic rural farmer. And that's before we even get to Marty's two love interests: the  woman who loves him - his pregnant childhood friend turned lover played by Odessa A'Zion - and the woman who sees right through him - a faded starlet and trapped trophy wife played by Gywneth Paltrow. 

As that attempt at a synopsis might suggest, MARTY SUPREME is an absurd film, over-stuffed with memorable characters and crazy plot-twists.  It picks you up and takes you on a breathtakingly audacious ride. The running time is long but it never flags, thanks partly to pairing the 1950s setting with a superb 1980s synth-pop heavy soundtrack, just because.  But behind all of its craziness, there's depth.

We are in the mid-1950s, and the world is still recovering from the horrors and bigotry of World War Two. Everyone is shocked that Marty's Japanese opponent is allowed to travel given the recent travel-ban; Marty's good friend and competitor is a Holocaust survivor; and Marty will even exploit his prison camp experience to distract a love-rival.  There's also something to the idea of a film that posits a world of extreme self-actualisation. Marty is the ultimate fake it till you make it manipulative showman, who wants a woman just because she's a symbol of success.  In a weird way his charm is that while he IS manipulative he is also strangely honest.  He just can't help himself from mocking Gywneth Paltrow's heartbroken starlet for sleeping with him. He barely acknowledges anybody's wants and needs above his own, although does seem to have some kind of heavily submerged set of core values. He punches his pregnant lover's husband, saying "shame on you" and seems to mean it. I think he really does seem to see some talent in Dion and root for him.

The only weakness of the film is that Josh Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein decide to give Marty a transformative and perhaps even redemptive moment at the end of the movie.  I think I might have preferred if they had kept him as he was, but I cannot deny that I had an amazing time watching the film nonetheless.  This is full speed ahead, full commitment film-making.  Josh Safdie and Marty Mauser are as one. 

MARTY SUPREME is rated R and has a running time of 150 minutes. It will be released on Christmas Day in the USA and Boxing Day in the UK.

ROOFMAN**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 8

Derek Cianfrance (BLUE VALENTINE) returns to our screens with ROOFMAN - a rather melancholy, occasionally funny, but ultimately rather whimsical and moving true crime story.  The weird thing is that the dayglow poster and goofy plot set-up make you think you are walking into a gonzo crime caper.  And yes, the film may have elements of that, but it has far more depth and emotional heft. 

Channing Tatum (MAGIC MIKE) stars as the titular Roofman - a demobbed soldier with a talent for observation and charm to spare.  Without the cash to spoil his wife and kids, he turns to armed robbery, knocking off 45 fast food restaurants.  His kind heart and general goofiness get him caught, but his aforementioned observational smarts also allow him to plot an audacious prison escape. And all this is in the first forty-five minutes of the two-hour-plus film!  The balance of the film sees Jeffrey in a kind of purgatory: out of prison but on the lam and unable to spend time with his actual family. So, he ends up hiding out in a Toys’R’Us for literally months, hacking the security systems. Even more audaciously, he ends up making friends at a local church, and romancing local single mother and employee Leigh (Kirsten Dunst).  Jeffrey now has a new identity where he is the good guy, John, and everybody loves him - even Leigh’s emo teenage daughter. The problem is, he makes the same mistakes again and again: trying to buy people’s affections.

This is a film that floats along with mild good humour and a lot of warmth, thanks mostly to Channing Tatum’s innate charm and the fact that while he may be feckless he at least he owns his mistakes. It makes for an interesting contrast with JB Mooney, the lead character in Kelly Reichardt’s THE MASTERMIND.  Where Jeffrey is a loveable rogue who takes accountability but just can’t help himself, Mooney is an entitled prick.  They are both simultaneously brilliant and stupid.  But the former actually cares for his kids, and indeed seems to be a rather warm-hearted individual more generally.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film, not least for its heavy 1990s nostalgia and a lovely pair of cameos from Peter Dinklage as the dickish store manager and Ben Mendelssohn as the parish priest.  Kirsten Dunst brings so much heart and warmth and intelligence to everything she does, and Tatum is so charming, that it’s just a fun two hours.  Not a rollicking comedy as the marketing campaign would have you believe, but perhaps more worth your time for all that. 

ROOFMAN has a running time of 126 minutes. It played Toronto 2025. It was released in the USA last Friday.

THE MASTERMIND*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 7

Kelly Reichardt’s THE MASTERMIND is an odd film. As one would expect, it is formally beautifully constructed and has her typically restrained, measured tone with the subtlest hints of humour. But its central character is so selfish, smug and feckless, it’s hard to know what to do with the film’s requirement for us to engage with his story. 

The movie takes place in the early 70s in smalltown America, with society divided between the successful, conventional middle class family to which our protagonist belongs, and the young hippies protesting Vietnam. Josh O’Connor plays an art school drop out turned failing cabinet maker essentially bankrolled by his wealthy mother (Hope Davis). He is married with two young sons and as the film opens we are in media res: he is casing a local art museum for a heist. We quickly realise that he is a man of little moral worth: he uses his sons as cover and smuggles out a stolen figurine in his wife’s purse while letting them go through security on his their own. Later in the film he will claim he did it for them: the LFF audience guffawed at that. 

Josh O’Connor (CHALLENGERS) is brilliant as the “mastermind”, JB Mooney, in a thankless role. This is basically his film - he is in every scene - and if he were any less personally charismatic the film would be unbearable. Alana Haim’s role as his wife is even more thankless as her character is emotionally withdrawn. It’s a real relief when we get a great cameo from John Magaro (PAST LIVES) who at least brings some warmth and humanity to the film. 

Reichardt’s lensing and colour palette are beautiful. There’s a particularly elegant bravura shot that goes 360 degrees in a motel room. I was genuinely curious how the third act would play out. But the real star behind the lens is composer Rob Mazurek who gives us a kinetic jazz score that propels act one - the heist - and act two - the concealment. It is notable that as that score, and the action, falls away in act three, the movie really loses its energy. 

THE MASTERMIND is rated R and has a running time of 117 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London. It will be released in the USA on October 17th and in the UK on October 24th.

WALLACE & GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL*****

It's hard to believe that Wallace & Gromit have been entertaining us for over 35 years. They have become veritable national treasures, along with their inventor and animator Nick Park.  And this latest instalment of their adventures, given a prime-time slot of Christmas Day in the UK, is an absolute delight!  The films remain as wonderfully funny, heat-warming, cine-literate, and genuinely pleasing to all ages as the rest of the franchise. We were guffawing, spell-bound and heartily pleased.

Park is joined by co-director Merlin Crossingham, on debut, in VENGEANCE MOST FOWL.  We begin with our beloved inventor Wallace, now voiced by Ben Whitehead, creating a household helper called Norbot to help with his long-suffering sidekick Gromit's daily tasks. Of course, the mute dog Gromit can never voice his scepticism at the ruthless efficiency of Norbot, but his expressively animated face tells us that he is not the least bit surprised when Norbot is hacked and placed in Evil mode, spawning a whole series of nefarious droids.  And who has hacked them? None other than our duos nemesis, Feathers McGraw!  Currently incarcerated in a zoo thanks to Wallace & Gromit's past crime-fighting capers, McGraw is out to re-steal the Blue Diamond, with the help of his minion-Norbots. Can our trusty duo save the day?!

This film has everything you might hope for in a Wallace & Gromit spectacular. Lovingly hand-crafted clay-mation. Tons of visual gags and cinema references, particularly to break-out films and heist movies.  And some wonderful voice cast cameos - not least Diane Morgan aka Philomena Cunk as Onya Doorstep, a local news reporter.  In the main cast, I loved Reece Sheersmith (Inside No.9) as Norbot and newcomer Lauren Patel as PC Mukherjee.  

WALLACE & GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL is rated PG and has a running time of 79 minutes. It was released on BBC One in the UK on Christmas Day and will be released on Netflix on January 3rd.

HUSTLERS

HUSTLERS is THE BIG SHORT for working class women - a film about what happens when people dependent on the trickle-down effect of boom-era money turn desperate in the post-Lehman Brothers economy. It stars CRAZY RICH ASIANS' Constance Wu as naive Destiny, who is schooled in the art of making phat cash through stripping by smart, cynical Ramona (Jennifer Lopez).  The game is to target uber-wealthy Wall Street bankers and flatter and twerk them into spending big.  Then the crash happens.  Destiny tries marriage and motherhood but comes crawling back to New York and Ramona. Only this time they have to pro-actively fish for their prey - luring in men from bars with the promise of the night of their life. And when that proves irksomely slow-going, drugging them, stealing their credit cards, and threatening them with blackmail if they go to the police.  This being a morality tale, it isn't that easy, especially when Ramona starts taking chances of her accomplices and clientele.  But the provocative question this films asks is how far the women really deserve to be punished when the people they are ripping off already ripped off the entire economy?

The result is a film that is smart and thoughtful alongside it's dazzling dance numbers featuring an absurdly athletic J-Lo. In a performance to match her best, she and her colleagues show us the truth about stripping. Indeed, the first ten minutes of this film is one of the most depressing I've ever seen. And then we get a star-studded cameo of girls in a dressing room discussing the absurd expectations men who date strippers have - made all the more real by the fact that Cardi B used to be a stripper.  It's rare to see such an unflinching female-centric movie at all. And even more rare to have that truthfulness play out amidst enough glitz and glamour to leaven its political agenda. Nicely done, all involved. 

HUSTLERS is rated R and has a running time of 110 minutes. It played Toronto 2019 and was released last year. It is now available to rent and own. 

AMERICAN ANIMALS

AMERICAN ANIMALS is a beautifully crafted docu-drama about four feckless college students who decided to try to steal some valuable books - including Audobon's Birds of America - from their college library. They don't need the money. One of them even aspires to join the FBI when asked to join the heist.  They seem to do it just because... maybe boredom, or the need to feel special in some way?  It's all so moronic it hurts my brain. Nonetheless, it makes for a fascinating story because documentary director Bart Layton (THE IMPOSTER) does a fantastic job of contrasting the slippery memories and justifications of the real life protagonists -interviewed on screen - with his docudrama recreation (starring Barry Keoghan - THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER).  For those of you who loved the conflicting memories and elisions of I, TONYA, then this is the film for you. In brilliantly edited and framed scenes Layton takes us from his fictional characters reminiscences of events to the real people, deftly altering the "record" and showing how untrustworthy it actually is. There's also a superb attempt to take us inside the mind of its protagonists, showing us the heist as they imagined it might go, in an Ocean's Eleven style, Dave Grusin scored tour-de-force. And the end of what do we get? Genuine remorse - yes. But also a faintly disturbing feeling that is what kids being raised on a diet of instant gratification will aspire to - life experience and defining moments that are unearned.  Frightening, indeed. 

AMERICAN ANIMALS has a running time of 116 minutes and is rated R. It was released in the USA this summer and is currently on release in the UK.

OCEAN'S EIGHT

The OCEAN'S films - when they work - work because they show us a group of people who are all friends in real life, having a really good time getting up to no good.  The original Rat Pack oozed cool and elegance - they created an exclusive guy's club but had the generosity to let us inside for 90 minutes. The cast of the Stephen Soderbergh remake may not have all been best friends in real life, but the relationship between Brad Pitt and George Clooney was real enough, and they all did genuinely look like they were having a blast. Moreover, they were lucky enough to be filmed by Soderbergh with a deliciously luxe, cool, 70s infused kinetic energy, and to have a soundtrack of Dave Grusin-y goodness.

The problem with this new all-girl remake is that it fails to deliver that spark, that fun, that attractive glamour.  I didn't believe these girls were actually friends or had any kind of relationship.  The movie had no tension. It had only one genuine laugh. And at its centre - the message was rather cold. 

Let's break it down. The movie opens with Sandra Bullock playing the late Danny Ocean's sister Debbie. As in the Clooney version, she gets out of jail with a plan for a heist and assembles the gang to pull it off together with her best friend and sidekick Lou (Cate Blanchett in biker chic mode).  There are some surprisingly big names in the ensemble cast and then a smattering of younger musicians in there - Rihanna, Awkwafina - presumably to attract a younger more diverse audience. So much of this film feels made on a spreadsheet by the finance department calculating to maximise revenue. The con is that the girls will get a fashion designer (Helena Bonham Carter playing herself with an Irish accent) to insist that a Hollywood star (Anne Hathaway satirising herself) wears a $150m Cartier necklace to the Met Gala.  From there, the girls will make the actress eat a dodgy bowl of soup, throw up it the bathroom, and have the necklace switched with a 3-D printed fake.  Their jewellery expert (Mindy Kaling) will break up the necklace and the girls will wear different parts of it out. 

All of this sounds promising enough as a basic heist story. The problem is that the girls have no fun together.  Only Anne Hathaway really has any fun with it.  The script contains no tension or wit - and why you'd give such a major project to a first time screenwriter - Olivia Milch - is beyond me. I don't care if she's the producer, she's out of her depth, and the soggy, mediocre script sinks the movie. Then you later on pedestrian direction from Gary Ross (THE HUNGER GAMES) and a really mediocre repetitive score from Daniel Pemberton (ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD). The result is a film that can't really be truly bad given the talented cast, but one that simply fails to ignite. The final nail in the coffin is that this film has no heart. In the first movie we forgive Danny his criminality because he's charismatic and fun, but most of all because he wants to win back his girl.  In this film, his avatar is setting up a treacherous ex (Richard Armitage). This lends a subtly petty and nasty undertone rather than a loving glow. 

OCEAN'S 8 has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film was released in cinema's this summer. 

MORTDECAI

What really annoys me about this piss-poor attempt at a caper film is that Johnny Depp's vanity project is likely to put people off reading the marvellous source novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli.  And this is a shame because those novels combine the wit of P.G. Wodehouse, the political incorrectness of George Macdonald Fraser and a surprising familiarity with the intricate workings of crime.  Taken together they create a marvellous world of 1970s intrigue in which our hero, wily art dealer Charlie Mortdecai, outwits various intelligence agencies and evil-doers, with his loyal sidekick and thug, Jock.  To be sure, the books vary in style - the first two are basically thrillers - the third is a detective story and the last is a prequel more akin to a high seas adventure.  All of them contain a rich vein of comedy running through them but they aren't just or even mostly comedies.  And Charlie himself, while a very witty man, is not chiefly a comedic character. He's middle aged, overweight, often wrong, but very very cunning and can always be relied upon to outwit his enemies.  He is also not remotely camp.

And yet, in this woeful excuse for a film, Charlie Mortdecai becomes just another Johnny Depp weirdo - as camp as a row of buttons - sporting an absurd British accent and a moustache hardly worthy of the name.  Worse still, the movie plays as pastiche, rather than straight, which is always the death of comedy.  I feel that the director, David Koepp (writer of the similarly woeful last INDIANA JONES film) and screenwriter Eric Aronson didn't really know how to tackle the novels. So instead of just adapting the first, which would have been coherent in tone and style - being a James Bond style thriller - they use elements of all three. The result is an incoherent mess - is it a detective story or a caper?  Moreover, they do not seem to know when they want to set the movie.  It looks like the present day, although clearly Charlie could not be a plausible undercover agent in such a world, and yet Mark Ronson has provided a campy 1970s score. 

The result is so bad it's embarrassing. To be sure, Johnny Depp is the worst offender, but Gwyneth Paltrow - utterly miscast as Johanna Krampf - is utterly irritating. Paul Bethany plays Jock as a thug but without that softer side and without his very deadpan humour.

Avoid at all costs, but please do try the books.

MORTDECAI is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes.  The film is on global release. 

AMERICAN HUSTLE

AMERICAN HUSTLE has swagger and style and enough hairspray to raise the Titanic. It has whizz bang energy and crazy characters high on their own con. There are times when it's outlandish hype slips into self-conscious kitsch - times when the performances are so balls-deep in crazy you wonder if the movie has just become BAD, but it's so fun, so bizarre, so outlandish you can't help but stick with it. 

So what's the skinny?  AMERICAN HUSTLE is a very loose retelling of the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s - an FBI sting operation that spiralled out of control, eventually targeting US senators and congressmen with a fake Arab sheikh offering cash for a passport.  The whole thing was murky as hell.  I mean, the guys took the bribes, but this was entrapment and selection of targets as an artform.   In this version of the story, the original conmen are Irving Rosenfeld, played by Christian Bale, and his partner Sydney, played by Amy Adams. They're caught on a small time charge by FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), who gets so glamoured by their lifestyle that he decides to become part of the con, using them to entrap politicians.  Key among them is a New Jersey mayor, Carmine Polito - a mobbed up man, to be sure, but one who genuinely speaks from the heart when he says he wants to use the fake Sheikh's money to reinvigorate his home town.

Director David O Russell is far less concerned with the technicalities of the plot and the con than with the characters and their conscious and subconscious motivations. This is absolutely right.  And ironic.  In a movie so concerned with surface - the hairstyles, the clothes, the moves - there is no superficiality.  When a character extravagantly combs over his hair, or creates a tight perm, or wears a dress cut to the navel - they're becoming a character and the whole point of the movie is to watch them reimagine themselves as they'd like to be. So when the movie becomes a cheap melodrama, that's maybe because that's how these characters see themselves - as the stars of their own C-list caper movie.

Another delicious irony - the most honest man in the film is the original conman, Irving Rosenfeld.  And when I say honest, what I mean in the context of a film about self-delusion is that Irving is totally self-aware.  He knows he's a schlubby conman.  He knows he's going to be ensnared by his manipulative wife forever. And he knows he can stay safe by staying small, and not letting greed get the better of him. He's even self-aware about his weakness - his need to disguise his baldness.  This gives Irving a kind of wisdom and humanity that's lacking in the other, almost universally more narcissistic characters.  He's fully aware that Carmine Polito is a good man dirtying his hands to do good works, and is the only character who shows any kind of moral courage in warning him off.  There's a kind of brilliance in Bale's understated performance - the flash of knowledge that passes across his face as he acknowledges that DiMaso is out of control and makes the call to effectively switch sides.  And, yes, I see the added irony of calling Bale's performance subtle. But it is. Under the weight gain, and the combover, and the velvet wide-lapel suits, it's a great subtle performance. 

By contrast, we have Brad Cooper in appropriately manic mode as Richie DiMaso, the henpecked mama's boy who sees the glamorous "Lady Edith" (Sydney's con character) as his ticket to reinvention as a kind of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, super-cool, super-macho, big-time PLAYA. He over-reaches in a way that Irving never would - to Lady Edith - to Senators - and his tragedy is that unlike Irving he really can't handle reality. 

Irving's wife Rosalyn is as deluded as Richie but to gloriously comic effect. She's a young single mother so fortunate as to have Irving provide and adopt her son.  But in her mind, she's always in the right, always responsible for the good things, never responsible for the bad, and a star in her own universe.  Jennifer Lawrence is so unbelievably hilarious and captivating in her few scenes that she threatens to unbalance the movie just as she unhinges the con, and if her Oscar nomination last year was generous, this year it will be thoroughly deserved. 

Sadly, Lawrence's incadescent Rosalyn put Amy Adams "Lady Edith" in the shade.  Adams, cast against time as the vamp, just can't carry off the super sexy outfits and in the inevitable final act confrontation between Irving's lover and his wife, it's Rosalyn/Lawrence who comes out triumphantly on top.  In fact, they seem to be in different films - and maybe that's the point.  Adams/Edith is playing in a romantic tragedy whereas Lawrence/Rosalyn is in a lurid supersexy melodrama. Adams has the  emotional crisis, but Lawrence has all the fun. 

All the way through watching AMERICAN HUSTLE I felt like I was right on the edge where so bad it's good becomes just bad.  But the more I think about it, the more I think that's the point. These characters are all, more or less, actors, hustlers, putting a con on themselves and us. Some do it better than others.  And David O Russell has made a movie that isn't so much his take on the Abscam scandal, as a patchwork of all these hustlers own perceptions of their con.   Maybe I'm being generous. And if I'm wrong, there are times when the performances and the direction in this film are so broad and pastichey and kitschy they are bad.  But if I'm right, then this is a film working on a meta levels of brilliance while all the time being entertaining in the most basic of ways. 

AMERICAN HUSTLE has a running time of 138 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 12A in the UK.

AMERICAN HUSTLE is on limited release in the USA and Australia. It opens on December 20th wide in the USA and in the UK. It opens on December 26th in Israel, Singapore and Vietnam; on December 31st in Taiwan; on January 1st in the UK and Italy; on January 2nd in Lebanon; on January 9th in Greece; on January 17th in Romania; on January 23rd in Argentina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Serbia and Turkey; on January 31st in Japan; on February 5th in France; on February 7th in Brazil and India; on February 12th in Belgium and Germany; on February 21st in Finland and Sweden and on March 20th in the Netherlands. 

COFFEE TOWN

COFFEE TOWN is essentially a straight-to-video movie that deserves attention because its the feature directorial debut of Brad Copeland, a writer and producer on THE INBETWEENERS and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT - some of the funniest comedies of the last decade. His first feature is is a low-budget caper comedy that almost fires but doesn't quite.  

The protagonist Will (Glenn Homerton - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) is a guy who works at his local coffee shop, baiting the coffee shop manager (Brian Huskey) and striking up a friendship with a couple of the regulars, including an ineffectual cop (Ben Schwartz - House of Lies). In between trying to woo Becca (Adriana Paliacki - Agents of SHIELD), the cop tells Will that the coffee shop is about to be sold to another business that is impressed by the area’s low crime rates. So the hapless friends decide to stage a robbery on the shop to dissuade the sale of the shop. The film has some nice only mildly funny scenes of friendly banter between the guys who hang out at the shop. I mean, it’s so mild you really do wonder if it’s even worth watching this film - you could just go to your local coffee shop and hang out with your own friends! Still, there are far worse films out there, even in this is still rightly a straight-to-video release.

COFFEE TOWN has a running time of 87 minutes.  The movie is on release in the USA.

GIMME THE LOOT

Sofia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcolm (Ty Hickson) -
charismatic stars of GIMME THE LOOT

GIMME THE LOOT is a wonderful joyful movie that proves that you don't need a big budget and big stars to make an exceptional movie - you just need love-able characters with real chemistry and deep sense of place.  In his début directorial feature, Adam Leon provide both of these to create one of the most charming, real, memorable movies of the year to date.  Amateur stars Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson star as Sofia and Malcolm, two close friends and graffiti artists, on a mission of revenge against the rival gang who defaced their designs.  This involves a MacGuffin about graffiting a dumbass fixture at a sports stadium, which in turns requires raising enough cash to bribe the security guard.  This is the driving heart of the movie: watching the two friends trying to scam and steal their way to the pathetically small amount of money and seeing them being scammed and cheated on in turn.  It's a rare feat - but the director manages to show just how savage and dog-eat-dog the streets are, without ever making this film seem downbeat or miserable.  Instead, we root for our plucky hero and heroine.  We laugh at the unexpected joyful victories of Malcolm, when he improbably scores with a trust-fund chick, and feel his humiliation when she rejects him.  We sympathise with Sofia's world-weary, ever-scammed existence, and root for her to catch a little of Malcolm's levity.  And behind it all, we get a real feeling for the heat and hustle of the City, the rat-a-tat dialogue keeps us laughing, the shooting style involves us, and the score reminds us of those long-hot summers when as kids we felt we owned the city.  This is a film not to be missed. 

GIMME THE LOOT played SXSW 2012 where it won the Grand Jury prize for Best Narrative Feature. It also played Cannes and London 2012. It opened earlier this year in France and the USA and opens in the UK tomorrow.

GIMME THE LOOT has a running time of 80 minutes. The movie is not yet rated.

The Best of 2012 - GUILTY PLEASURES

Of the 139 movies I watched, some of the worst were the heavily hyped, high production value epics that fell flat. (PROMETHEUS, I'm looking at you.) By contrast, some of the best times I had at the cineplex were watching movies that were balls-out crazy, silly, goofy and spoofy.  These were movies without pretensions of greatness.  Movies without the budgets to look slick.  But they never forgot the real reason why most of us go to the cinema on a Friday night - to have a bunch of fun.

The year began with Michael Dowse's GOON, a film that totally surprised me with its big heart and big laughs.  The movie features Sean William Scott as a stupid, buff ice hockey player whose basic role is to beat people up during the match. He falls for a sassy chick played by Alison Pill before she betrayed the Sisterhood in HBO's piss-poor Newsroom.  GOON is gritty, grungy, chaotic and yet you really care about every single character, not least Liev Schrieber's ageing goon Ross Rhea - maybe the funniest, most moving cameo of the year.  Unjustifiably overlooked - you'd be a fool not to rent goon for DVD date night.

Next up was Baltasar Kormakur's remake of his own caper film, CONTRABAND. Starring Mark Wahlberg as the head of a crew stealing art and shipping them home on a freighter, the movie was fast-paced, very funny and centred on the totally believable camaraderie among the crew.  It's also notable for having another one of those eye-rollingly insane Giovanni Ribisi performances which have become the stuff of hilarity. If there's a sequel, I'm going to be first in line.  The movie also underlines just how talented Mark Wahlberg is, in that he can move between starring in the utterly earnest THE FIGHTER as this kind of anonymous, downtrodden kid brother, to being the mischievous, charismatic leader of a crew. Kudos.

In April, I laughed my ass off watching Phil Lord's loving spoof of 21 JUMP STREET, falling in love with the chemistry between Jonah Hill's  Schmidt and Channing Tatum's Jenko. Indeed, as much as we talk about the McConaughasence, this really was Tatum's year, with this star turn and his producer-writer-actor credit on break-out indie hit, MAGIC MIKE.   21 JUMP STREET "got it" in a way that many TV series reboots don't.  You need to spoof the genre with a generous heart, allowing the audience to fall in love with the central characters and conceit even as they laugh at it.  Also, I'm thinking that Johnny Depp had been waiting YEARS to exorcise his hatred of the teen TV soap with his hilarious piss-taking cameo at the end. 

In June, I had a bunch of fun watching Timo Vuorneslea's IRON SKY, a low-fi Finnish sci-fi spoof about Nazi Zombies.  Let me say it again. NAZI ZOMBIES. Do you need another reason to watch this film? Yes it's script is all over the place, and there as many hits as misses, but when it works it's really hilarious and you have to admire the amazing special effects on such a low budget.  Oh yeah, and NAZI ZOMBIES. 

Perhaps the movie I was most embarrassed to like was the Farrelly Brothers movie of THE THREE STOOGES starring Sean Hayes, Will Sassso and Chris Diamantopoulos.  This isn't a show that entered the British cultural psyche in the way that it did in the USA and I normally don't respond to slapstick humour and dayglow production design. But after a slow start, I really got into the movie, caring about the characters and responding to the light-hearted cultural teasing. Towit, one of the funniest moments of the year was watching the Stooges beat the crap out of the cast of Jersey Shore.  So don't listen to the haters, and watch it!

The penultimate film in this category is a movie that could have been designed for me: a comedy about a bunch of Aussie park cricketers who tour India.  Boyd Hicklin's SAVE YOUR LEGS! has heart, makes you laugh, and reminds you why you love the prince of sports.  Damon Gavreau gives one of the best comedic performances of the year as Stavros but it's the genuine camaraderie between the cast that makes you enjoy the movie.  And as much as there as certain jokes that really work for cricket fans, there's enough relatable material about growing up and getting new priorities to give this movie a wider audience. It's out in Australia on February 28th and I reallty hope it gets a UK release date, ideally during the summer Ashes series. 

Finally, let's hear it for everybody's rogue cop with a heart, Chulbul Pandey. Arbaaz Khan's follow up to the smash-hit, DABANGG 2 repeats the formula of the original almost slavishly but to great effect. Salman Khan is hilarious as the smalltown cop tough on crime and the causes of crime.  Every time he dances by tugging on his belt or puts his sunglasses on the back of his collar, you just have to smile.  And Katrina Kapoor gives us the best item number of the year with Fevicol Se.

All of these films were released in 2012 and are available to rent and own with the exception of SAVE YOUR LEGS! which will be released in 2013 and DABANNG 2 which is currently on theatrical release and has not yet been released on DVD.

CONTRABAND

CONTRABAND is about as perfect as a caper movie gets - fast, fun, thrilling, intelligent.  To be sure, it's basic plot components are pretty conventional, but it has a tricksy enough story, and enough good humour to be the perfect Friday night-forget work-have some fun movie!

Mark Wahlberg plays a former smuggler turned straight, drawn back into "one last job" to save his idiot brother-in-law from the local drug dealer (a typically over-the-top Giovanni Ribisi).  He assembles a crew that's going to smuggle in forged currency from Panama in J K Simmons freighter. Of course, "one last job" movies are never simple.  And this one involves a double-cross back home; getting caught up in a Panamian armed robbery; an art heist; and a superbly choreographed fit-up job.  A few plot twists are predictable but there are enough genuine surprises, and I love that no plot thread is left untied.

The movie is directed by the Icelandic actor-writer-producer-director Baltasar Kormakur (JAR CITY) who wrote and starred in the original.  Together with DP Barry Ackroyd (GREEN ZONE) he directs the movie with real style and pace, and a surprisingly light touch!  There are many scenes and lines where it's clear that the smugglers are having a great time, despite or even because of the high stakes - more young kids up to some japes than Michael-Mann style existential angst.  I also really liked the casting (ex Ribisi) - being particularly impressed by Kate Beckinsale, of all people!, actually doing some proper acting as Wahlberg's wife. 

Flicking through the IMDB review page it becomes clear that CONTRABAND has taken a bad rap for being too genre-cliche-ridden.  Whatever. I had a bunch of fun watching it, and it's in my Best Of list for the year. Not every film has to be a heart-wrenching, life-changing Iranian art-house flick. There will always be room on this blog for good honest popcorn entertainment.

CONTRABAND is on release in the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Singapore, Bulgaria, Canada, Pakistan, Israel, Kuwait, Estonia, Iceland, Romania, the Philippines, India, Syria and Poland. It goes on release in Hong Kong on February 9th; in Australia and New Zealand on February 23rd; in Portugal on March 1st; in the Netherlands on March 8th and in Germany, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Turkey and the UK on March 16th. It opens on March 22nd in Belgium, Denmark and Hungary; on April 19th in Argentina; on April 27th in Brazil and Lithuania; on May 4th in Sweden and on May 16th in France and Italy.

London Film Fest Day 5 - MICMACs

Jean Pierre Jeunet of DELICATESSEN and AMELIE fame is back with a delightful, inventive, visually stunning movie about a bunch of misfits who bring arms dealers to account! It's a movie that is steeped in cinema history, but wears that knowledge lightly. It has everything from the finest in physical comedy, reminiscent of Tati and Chaplin - to the practical jokes and explosions of Tex Avery - to post-modern insider jokes worthy of Charlie Kauffman. I had a thoroughly good time watching MICMACs!

So what's it all about, Alfie? In a set-up that's a paragon of efficiency, Jeunet shows us a French soldier killed by a landmine in Algeria. Back at home, his wife goes insane with grief and his little boy, left to a convent, escapes in a laundry van. Thirty years later, he's manning a video store, lipsynching to The Big Sleep, when a drive-by shooting leaves him with a bullet in his brain, without a job or a flat, and on the streets. And who is to blame for his predicament? Why, the two arms companies who sold the landmine and the bullet respectively.

Our hero is picked up and be-familied by a wonderful group of people united by having scraps of metal in their bodies. They salvage old junk, fix it and sell it. Together, they help our hero exact revenge through ingenious practical jokes and tricks - the "micmacs" of the title.

The resulting movie is a goofy caper - a screwball romance - a visual and linguistic delight. It's funnier and more endearing than Amelie and I hope will have as much success.

MICMACS played Toronto 2009. It goes on release in Belgium and France on October 28th; it opens on November 26th; on December 17th in the Netherlands; on January 8th in the UK; and on January 24th in Germany.

THE PINK PANTHER 2 - Cinema Hate-Crime

Peter Sellers made five great comedies playing the incapable but serendipitous French cop, Inspector Clouseau. Herbert Lom seethed with anger as his boss. Burt Kwouk exemplified physical comedy genius as his side-kick Cato. Those movies are Cinema Gold. That Steve Martin fool-headedly decided to remake the Clouseau movies, churning out the piss-poor 2006 film, was bad enough. That he lacked humility enough to try it again is unforgivable. The resulting cinema dreck troubled the multiplexes only briefly, and rolled onto DVD with a mere USD70million gross. Here's hoping that's the end of this humiliating little experiment.

As to the particulars, the plot sees The Tornado stealing priceless world historical arefacts as well as the eponymous French diamond. An international dream team of cops is brought together to track them down. Clouseau embarasses them all, almost loses his sweet-heart Nicole, but finally foils the thief. The movie is set in a stylised picture-postcard Europe, and peopled with characters in stylised costumes and deliberately hammy accents. One can only assume that the likes of Jeremy Irons, Lily Tomlin, Alfred Molina, Jean Reno and Andy Garcia were doing it for the phat cash alone. The exception is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, who presumably also did it to raise her profile in Western cinema, and whose uneven Anglo-Brit accent is presumably not deliberate. The physical comedy is predictable and worst of all, leans heavily on CGI. The direction is competent at best. The plot is utterly predictable. The only surprising thing about the film is that it us written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber who also wrote 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.

THE PINK PANTHER was released in spring 2009 and is available on DVD.

JCVD - The harsh truth of the camera eye

Policier: Central to Unit 27. Jean-Claude Van Damme's robbing a post office. I need back-up.

I thought JCVD was going to be a post-modern comedy in which Jean Claude Van Damme, the Muscles from Brussels, star of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, spawner of bizarre-o zen epithets, serial husband, tax evader and general 80s wash-up, would satirise himself for my amusement.

Not so my friends.

The only funny thing about self-described comedy JCVD is the name of the Director of Photography, Pierre-Yves Bastard, and the opening studio logo animation.

JCVD is, in fact, one of the most sinister movies I have ever seen. Jean Claude Van Damme plays an exaggerated version of himself as a pimped out washed up actor desperate for cash. He's caught in a bank heist, but the cops think he's responsible. And all the while, the grainy, grimy action footage is interspersed with surreal flashbacks to court hearings and a much-lauded straight to camera confessional that's wince-inducingly embarrassing.

Some people have dared to praise Jean Claude's acting chops in this movie. I can't quite agree. This is no WRESTLER. All I can do is admire his courage in acting in such a raw film. Which is not to deny the fact that I found this movie incredibly difficult to watch and not wholly successful either as poignant satire or as post-modern heist.

JCVD was released in France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Turkey and Spain in 2008. It also played Toronto and Rome. It opened in Japan, Sweden and the UK earlier this year and is also available on DVD.

London Film Festival Day 14 - THE BROTHERS BLOOM

THE BROTHERS BLOOM is the visually delightful but ultimately self-indulgent follow-up film from writer-director Rian Johnson. His first film, BRICK, reinjected noir with a teen sensibility and seemed genuinely unique. It's tragic, then, to see Rian Johnson decide to make a film that seems to be something of a Wes Anderson rip-off. The elaborately designed sets; the anachronistic costumes; the richly choreographed sight-gags; the international jet-set milieu; the suffocating family relationships; the longing romanticism........oh, it's all there. And if the best of Anderson is present in this movie, so too is the worst. All that carefully placed beauty and absurdity does get a bit, well, boring after a while. And the layers and layers of artifice alienate the audience, and prevent us from feeling the reality of the attempted emotional ending. So much for the critique, what of the substance? THE BROTHERS BLOOM opens with a tour-de-force prologue which is narrated entirely in rhyme in a sort of Dr Seuss fashion. Two orphan brothers grow up poor in a rich town. The younger romantic boy wants to talk to a sweet girl but can't work up the courage. So his protective older brother comes up with a complex con in which he'll make some cash, his brother will impress the girl and all the kids will think they've stumbled upon a magic cave. Fast forward twenty years and the elder brother (Mark Ruffalo) is still trying to find the perfect con and the younger brother (Adrien Brody) is still looking for real love. They are joined by a female Japanese equivalent of Silent Bob (Rinko Kikuchi) and their mark, cloistered millionairess Penelope (Rachel Weisz). The first hour of the film is brilliant fun. Kikuchi steals every scene she's in and Weisz shows that she has real comic acting ability. Even Ruffalo and Brody are fine. The problem is simply that the fun and games go on too long and deaden the impact of the ending. 

THE BROTHERS BLOOM played Toronto and London 2008. It goes on release in the US on December 19th.

BURN AFTER READING - a bleak tragedy shoehorned into a screwball comedy format

BURN AFTER READING is a profound discussion of middle-aged angst - nihilistic, bleak, depressing - shoe-horned into the form of a typical Coen Brothers screwball comedy. It's as if the atmosphere of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN has infected THE BIG LEBOWSKI. The result is, unhappily, pretty painful to watch. It's a film in which unhappy people make bad choices, creating an mess that signifies nothing. As the lights went up, I wondered what I had just witnessed and the answer was, basically, the most wilfully mis-marketed film of the yar. Maybe that was the point - that underlying all comedy is tragedy. But, the odd laugh aside, it was neither as enjoyable as the great Coen Brothers comedies nor as profound as their best work. More superficially, without Roger Deakins at DP the film lacked visual flair - all the more noticeable since it is set in Washington DC and yet makes no use of that environment.

The plot of the movie, for what it's worth, is a caper gone wrong. Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt play gym instructors who chance upon a CD containing "CIA secret shit". They use it to blackmail John Malkovich's CIA agent. Of course, he's a mess too - an alcoholic, fired from his job, being divorced by his wife (Tilda Swinton) who's cheating on him with a marshall (George Clooney) who is also sleeping with Frances McDormand's character, and himself being divorced. George Clooney's character is also deeply tragic - an insecure man who slips from woman to woman always looking for an audience to impress and signs of adoration. Wires get crossed, people die, characters become ever more desperate for love and whatever they think will make them complete. The CIA looks on in bewilderment, shovelling all the stupidity all under a rug and closing the manilla folder. What do we learn? That disillusionment lies ahead. That most things are empty and meaningless. All of which is fine subject for a movie, but why choose the comedy-caper as the vehicle for such a message and advertise with George Clooney pulling his trademark zany face and Brad Pitt with the trademark Coen Brothers crazy hair?

BURN AFTER READING played Venice 2008. It opens in the UK on September 12th; in the US on September 12th; in the Netherlands on September 18th; in Russia on October 2nd; in Spain on October 10th; in Australia on October 16th; in Norway on October 17th; in Finland on November 21st; in Belgium and France on December 10th.

Guy Ritchie retrospective - SNATCH

SNATCH follows the exact-same formula as LOCK, STOCK except that this time, the world of underground gambling and narcotics has been replaced with diamond-smuggling and under-ground boxing. The visual style is similar - flashy editing, video-game manipulation of action and the all-knowing mockney voice-over, this time from our protagonist Turkish (Jason Statham). To that extent, SNATCH is doomed to be less satisfying than LOCK, STOCK because it's less of a surprise.

On the other hand, I do really like SNATCH because it's even less compromising than LOCK, STOCK. Accents are thicker, and in the case of Brad Pitt's charver, deliberately impenetrable. The violence is harsher - including an arson attack and a particularly nasty form of dispatching errant crooks. The humour is darker, the double-crossing is nastier, the sets are grimier and the language is filthier. Despite the Tarantino-like comedy anecdotes, Alan Ford is genuinely menacing as the evil gangster Brick Top, and unlike LOCK, STOCK, there are several scenes of genuine peril. The most memorable of these is a scene where footage of hare-coursing is inter-cut with footage of a small-time burglar getting nabbed by Brick-top's men. It's outstandingly well put-together. Similarly, the boxing scenes are really well shot, even if they take heavy inspiration from RAGING BULL.

My over-riding feeling after watching SNATCH was that this was a holding picture. Ritchie was still in his comfort zone regarding characters and settings but had become a lot more accomplished technically. He was set up nicely for a third film. That was until he took a left-turn into Kabbalah and up himself with SWEPT AWAY and REVOLVER.

SNATCH was released in 2000 and is available on DVD.

Guy Ritchie retrospective - LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS

Do you remember when Britannia was cool? Do you remember when we were Common People? Do you remember when Jason Statham was just some skinny bald git? Do you remember when Guy Ritchie was the saviour of British cinema? Before the marriage to the cinematic kryptonite that is Madonna - before the kabbalistic drivel of REVOLVER - before the straight-to-video disaster of SWEPT AWAY....

LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS remains the best of Guy Ritchie's movies - full of energy, cartoonish-fun, a genuinely new visual style, and a script so tight and complex you could put a cherry on top and call it a weasel. It was a shock to the system when it first came out. It celebrated all that was great about the old Ealing comedies and caper films, but amped it up for the video-gaming age with sharp editing, pop-culture references and a Tarantino-like fondess for the absurdity of violence.

The plot is too byzantine to discuss in any detail. Suffice it to that, as with all Ritchie films, it takes a slice of London life in all its grimy glory but puts it through the filter of a cartoon-sensibility. So we have posh kids producing drugs; working class kids losing heavy money gambling; heists and counter-heists; cockney gangsters and immigrant scams. The whole things ties together with a neatness that is awe-inspiring. Instead of dumbing everything down to a sort of universally understandable but banal language and set of character types, Ritchie glories in the quirkiness of Londoners. He goes out of his way to create outlandish characters and loves their particular idioms and squalid hang-outs. He doesn't want Hollywood-handsome. He wants "Barry the Baptist" and "Nick the Greek".

Ten years later you can still stick this on the old DVD player and have a laugh and that's more than you can say about most movies. Critics and audiences weren't wrong to get excited about what this mockney was going to do next. LOCK STOCK didn't just have promise, it delivered.

LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS hit the screens in 1998 and is available on DVD.