BLITZ** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Opening Night Gala

Steve McQueen made a series of powerful TV specials under the banner of Small Axe, showing the experience of black people living in London in the 1960s.   In doing so, he was showing stories that had been under- or mis-represented.  The mission of his new feature film, BLITZ, is exactly the same. He wants to show the viewer just how multicultural London already was two decades before Windrush, and how the same prejudice blighted the lives of its black residents.  

As with Small Axe, some of the best scenes in BLITZ are those centred around music.  There's a tremendous flashback scene set in a dance hall where you feel the music pulse. There's an even better scene set in a luxurious Cafe de Paris style nightclub with a Cab Calloway style performer and the real-life pop star Celeste. And music is woven into other scenes - whether cockneys playing a washboard or gathered around a piano in the pub.  

It's hard to fault the way the film is put together. The recreation of bombed out East End streets - the peril and terror of houses on fire - the smouldering vistas the next morning. It's all immaculately recreated.  And it's hard to fault McQueen's earnest message of brotherly love. The problem is that this isn't a series of music -centred short films (as it probably should've been) but a feature film - and a feature film needs narrative propulsion and characters we care about.

We don't care about these characters because they are thinly drawn avatars.  Good guys vs racists. Saoirse Ronan's single mum Rita is good. The Fagin-style thieves played by Kathy Burke, Stephen Graham and Roddy from Slow Horses are bad. The almost angelic air raid warden Ife is good. And really good because he let's Rita's mixed-race son George feel proud of his blackness.  The nasty racist cockneys who want to put a sheet up to isolate the Sikhs are bad.  It goes on and on.

To make it worse, thin characterisation is met with thin dialogue.  And the poor kid - Elliott Heffernan - is given very little to do as George. He only exists to allow McQueen to follow his steps through the various vignettes that McQueen is actually interested in showing us.  

I also feel that - fatally - this film is miscast in its lead role. Ronan cannot do a convincing East End accent and she also cannot sing.  Having her lip sync to someone else's voice brings us out of the film.  For a character whose life is expressed in music - whose love for her son and father is shown through music - this is a real problem.

BLITZ is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 113 minutes.  BLITZ will be released in cinemas on November 1st and on Netflix on November 22nd.

DUNE: PART TWO***

DUNE: PART TWO is probably about as good a film as one can make about Frank Herbert's iconic religio-sci-fi book. The flaws I found in this film are mostly down to how distasteful and uninspiring I find the source material - with its superficial embrace of Middle Eastern and North African culture and the fact that its female characters are almost entirely reduced to breeding vessels. I understand that I am not perhaps the appropriate demographic for the books. But Denis Villeneuve has taken it and created two films of arresting visuals and a stunning score.  Greig Fraser's IMAX cinematography is bold and beautiful and truly envelopes us in Arrakis. And Hans Zimmer is at his finest combining sandworm-commanding drums, rock guitars, and menacing prophecy-reciting choirs.

As this instalment opens, we are mere days after part one. Paul Atreides and his mother Lady Jessica have survived the massacre of their House on the desert planet of Arrakis.  Paul has proven himself a fearsome warrior to the indigenous Fremen, some of whom think he is their long-awaited messiah.  This delights Lady Jessica and Atreides loyalist Gurney Halleck, who believes the Fremen will be a powerful fighting force. But Paul's lover Chani has it right - these prophecies are just stories being used to control the Fremen.  The narrative arc is powered by the choice that faces Paul. Will he be swayed by his prophetic dreams of devastating interstellar war and reject being a messiah. Or will he exploit the Fremen for revenge on the Harkonnens and seize the imperial throne?

There is so much to love in how Villeneuve brings this to the screen. He wisely leaves the sandworms as barely seen epic creatures. The production and costume design of the Harkonnen's world and of the Baron and Na-Baron in particular are arresting. 

But the performances veer from mediocre to weak. I found something almost comical in Timothee Chalamet's petulance as Paul and was unfortunately reminded of THE LIFE OF BRIAN - "He's not the Messiah - he's a very naughty boy!" Once you see the film through that lens - "the gourd!" - there's no turning back. There was zero screen chemistry between Chalamet's Paul and Zendaya's Chani which is odd as they seem to be constantly low-key flirting on the red carpet. Christopher Walken is hopelessly miscast as the Emperor - totally bringing me out of the film with his unique American accent. Only Javier Bardem stood out as Stilgar - petrifying in his increasing religious fervour.

I suspect that performances aren't really what interest Villeneuve. He is all about spectacle. Script and character are somewhat beyond the point for him. But this leads to weird choices around narrative. 

Most obviously, Villeneuve's choice not to allow the narrative to unravel over several years problematic. It felt as though Paul's journey from young pup to Emperor had taken place over a few weeks! Is it really so easy to seize power?  And how is this going to impact the timeline around Alia, who we see as a grown woman in Paul's dreams.  Another choice I disagree with is to minimise the influence of the Guild and put all of the machinations onto the Bene Gesserit cult. 

But perhaps the biggest macro issue I have with both books and film is that there's no-one to really root for. On the one hand you have a decrepit Emperor who seems flaccid and pointless. Then there are the comically evil and therefore uninteresting Harkonnens.  The Bene Genesserit are nuts and seem to have no endgame. The Fremen are religious extremists. And Paul is a self-acknowledged harbinger of mass genocide. It's like watching Succession but without the comedy swearing.

DUNE: PART TWO has a running time of 166 minutes and is rated-PG-13. It is on global release. 

THE CREATOR**

Gareth Edwards (ROGUE ONE) returns to our screens with a sci-fi film that feels like a cross between Battlestar Galactica and The Golden Child, except this time Sada Numpse is Allison Janney. I was surprised at just how slow, dull and soapy the film felt: all saccharine tears and overwrought emotion.  I wanted an intelligent interrogation of the real threat that AI poses. Instead I got sanctimony and a disappointingly guessable plot twist.

The film is set forty years in the future in a world where the West has decided to eliminate AI after it nuked LA, but for some unknown reason "New Asia" has decided it's cool with being out-evolved. For now, the US has the upper hand thanks to a suspiciously Death-Star hover-nuke called Nomad that can take out enemies at will, napalm-in-the-morning style. But New Asia is fighting back: its mysterious scientist Namrata has created a new AI that can neutralise any other tech, embodied in a cute little Cylon child. 

That's about as much actual sci-fi as we get. The film seems far more concerned with moody action sequences in beautifully evocative Asian settings. These hinge on John David Washington's US soldier Joshua being on the lam with the aforementioned Golden Child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) as they search for Namrata and Joshua's Asian wife Maya (Gemma Chan in a hugely underwritten part).  There are some car chases and a lot of shooting. Ken Watanabe has a rather moving cameo.  But the overwhelming feeling I had was, come on, are we there yet? And when we do finally get there, it's all so underwhelming, and indeed laughable (poor Allison Janney!)

The overall impression I get is that Gareth Edwards has made a film that looks fantastic, and imagines a beautiful, grungy, lived-in world.  But his choice to set the action in Asia and to use the Golden Child trope is problematic. His writing is very thin, and this hamstrings his actors. An example of the bad writing is given below: warning it contains spoilers.

THE CREATOR is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 133 minutes. It is on global release.

DUNE (2021) ****

Frank Herbert's iconic ecological sci-fi/fantasy series, Dune, begins its first book with our hero, a young aristocrat called Paul Atreides, being yanked off his luscious home planet to travel with his family to an arid desert planet called Arrakis. The evil Emperor has lured them there with the promise of Arrakis' riches - the ability to mine "spice" - a drug that makes interplanetary travel possible. Really, the Emperor is jealous of Paul's father's charismatic power and is backing House Atreides rivals, the Harkonnens.  But Paul's father feels he can mount a challenge if he can form an alliance with Arrakis' indigenous population of Fremen....

Dune is notoriously unfilmable and yet it feels like every film-maker who read it as a teenager or somehow got their hands on Jodo's epic designs (see Frank Pavich's superb documentary JODOROWSKY'S DUNE) has somehow filmed it without acknowledging it openly.  To read Dune is to realise how much everything from Star Wars to Game of Thrones has borrowed heavily from its tale of political infighting, inter-galactic warfare, and mystic religiosity. This means that anyone who ACTUALLY films Dune risks looking like they're ripping off later works who themselves ripped off Dune.  (Tatooine, Saarlaks and the Force anyone?!)  And then there's the terrifying experience of David Lynch in the mid-80s, creating a Dune that was a commercial failure, where he didn't have final edit, and where despite flashes of design brilliance the whole thing feels like a pantomime ghoulish mess. (See my DVD commentary here). 

So it takes a real fanboy to have the balls to actually film Dune, and that fanboy is Denis Villeneuve, most famous for his superb sci-fi film ARRIVAL and the recent  moody but unnecessary BLADE RUNNER sequel. It tells you a lot that despite his commercial track record, the studio was not willing to finance both films that would've covered book one of the series, wanting to wait and see if part one actually found an audience.  Hollywood scars run long and deep.

Villeneuve's DUNE is, I am relieved and happy to say, a visual and aural triumph.  From his creation of Caladan in the Norwegian fjords, to his stunning depiction of shifting sands in Arrakis, this is a film-maker with a keen sensibility who leaves us with instantly iconic scenes.  I also really loved his design aesthetic - with beautifully rendered space-ships and palace interiors and ornithopters that actually look like flying insects.  Where Lynch leaned into the grotesquery of Baron Harkonnen, Villeneuve realises that what lives in our minds when we read a book can look absurd when visualised on screen, and so he uses that character sparingly and in a very pared down design. Indeed, all the costumes and make-up feel sleek and and as modern as possible. Finally, behind the lens, Hans Zimmer's score is another triumph, and I am unsurprised to learn that he's another fanboy. 

The acting is by and large fine - with Charlotte Rampling's Bene Genesserit Reverend Mother the standout cameo. Timothee Chalamet - well he looks young enough as Paul - almost pre-pubescent - but it's just another Chalamet role where he plays a brooding kid.  He has zero range - or at least no range that I've seen. Let's see if he can actually look like a leader as and when the next film is made.  Javier Bardem is fun as Stilgar, but we see very little of him.  Where I started to have problems was the use of humour in the film. Herbert's book is really dour and unfunny and the insertion of a couple of deliberately funny scenes around Josh Brolin's Gurney Halleck sat awkwardly with the film's overall tone. And then there was the problem of the audience i watched this with laughing at Zendaya's Chani as she mocked Paul.  And again, given that she needs to take a much larger role in any sequel, that may prove a big problem.

Overall, my feeling is that I enjoyed being in Villeneuve's world and fanboys will be happy that setpieces such as the fight with Jamis make the cut. BUT - BUT - I did find myself looking at my watch a lot.  It's a really weird decision not to film the whole book and because of that not much actually happens, there's no real narrative drive, and it's all just set-up. That's fine for me - I'll happily wait for another film, but is a mainstream audience going to wait? And if not, is this film going to make enough money to warrant a sequel?

DUNE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 155 minutes.  DUNE played Venice and Toronto 2021 and opens in the UK on October 21st and in the USA on October 22nd.

HILLBILLY ELEGY

J.D.Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was something of a publishing sensation and I very much enjoyed reading his biography.  It appealed to me as a tale of a young kid born into the opioid crisis that bred Trump's base, complete with a drug-addict mum, rescued by a a battle-axe of a grandma, who somehow gets himself into an Ivy League law school and the Marines. Along the way, Vance speaks sympathetically about the social circumstances he grew up in while also criticising some of the more feckless behaviour it breeds.  This willingness to not simply to blame structural issues but also personal choices made the book controversial. 

I was surprised that the book was inspiring a narrative fiction movie rather than a documentary.  Things that might pass as credible in real life seem broad and crass and worst of all patronising when fictionalised. And there's not a little poverty porn about Ron Howard's new film. Glenn Close stars as "mamaw" complete with frizzy afro, drooping latex boobs and stomach and hideous glasses and teeth.  It's all so patronising and broad as to be offensive. And then we have Amy Adams as the addict mum Bev - another broad performance in a thankless one-dimensional role. Speaking of which, I give you poor Freida Pinto as the protagonist's supportive college girlfriend who seems to exist merely to further his career. As for the hero? He just comes across as banal and forgettable. I didn't want him to succeed - I wanted the movie to be over. 

HILLBILLY ELEGY is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It was released on Netflix on November 2th.

WIDOWS - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Opening Night Gala

In the early 1980s the soon to be celebrated thriller writer Lynda La Plante created a British TV miniseries called WIDOWS. It was about a group of women who decide to carry out the heist that their late husbands planned, rather than succumb to pressure from the police, and a rival gang, to turn over the late mastermind's book of secrets. All along their secret weapon is that everybody underestimates them. No-one conceives that a bunch of housewives could pull this off. Apparently this tale of under-estimation and prejudice spoke to a young London schoolboy called Steve McQueen and 35 years later the now acclaimed director (12 YEARS A SLAVE) has recreated the heist film but bringing his own brand of art-house style, deep emotional contemplation and political provocation to it.  I loved many elements of this reworking - particularly its visual style and its strong central performance from Viola Davis (THE HELP).  But I found the contemplative pace undermined the thriller, and the politics, while valid, was extremely heavy-handed. Overall, the film was a disappointment, and my least favourite of his films to date.

Let's talk about what's great first.  This is a film with a beautiful visual style and sensitivity - whether in its eye for detail and location, or in the way the camera is positioned and used. Speaking to the former, McQueen really immerses himself in the diversity of life in contemporary Chicago - whether the stunning laeshore apartment of Viola Davis' Veronica and her late husband Harry (Liam Neeson) - filled with beautiful objet d'art and stylish furniture - or the overcrowded warm-hued hair salon that the heist driver Belle (Cynthia Erivo) works at. Early on there's a tour-de-force scene inter-cutting the various gang members' funerals that beautifully shows the different churches and traditions of mourning. This is a film profoundly concerned with architecture.  One of the most impressive scenes that highlights this is one in which Colin Farrell's corrupt politician drives from the impoverished ward in which he's campaigning to his swanky town house. The camera stays outside the car rather than on the people conversing within it. We don't know why until it pulls up at the town house - and then we realise that we have been seeing a short journey from poverty to wealth, and that McQueen is wearing a particular point about the plebs and the elite.  Time and again we're treated to moments like this - when the camera angle or movement is just doing something subtle and above and beyond the standard direction. Or even a final scene in a cafe with mirrored pillars, where we see both Veronica and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) reflected in pillars looking away from each other. 

Now here's where the film doesn't quite work. It's being marketed as a heist but it's not really interested in that. It's really a contemplative piece about mourning and female self-empowerment and a political commentary on corruption, racial and gender prejudice. The first theme allows us to see some superb acting from Viola Davis but substantially weighs on the pace of the film. I didn't mind too much because I knew I was watching a McQueen film and expected something more slow-paced but I was wondering how mainstream audiences might react. I also think the film is rather unbalanced. Viola Davis just blows us away.  But Michelle Rodriguez is remarkably anonymous as her fellow widow - Elizabeth Debicki looks like wounded Bambi and has a rather heavy-handed and obvious journey to empowerment - in fact the only interesting woman other than Veronica is Belle. As for the men, I'll leave it to you to judge whether you believe Harry's motivation. The other gang members are anonymous.  The opposition gang is ludicrously drawn - Daniel Kaluuya's gangster jumps the shark repeatedly.  The only real interest for me came from Colin Farrell's politician and a hilariously angry cameo from Robert Duvall as his father. 

Finally, let's speak to politics. I get it. These are angry times.  But do we really need something as on the nose as a cop gunning down a black kid with no provocation as a major plot motivator, while Obama Hope posters flutter in the background?  Do we really need basically the entire Alice/Debicki arc?  I don't decry being political but let's have some more sophistication about how we do it. For instance, I could argue that just have Viola Davis on screen with her natural hair - just having the movie open with a passionate inter-racial kiss - just being able to show even-handed corruption between the black church and the white alderman - is politically provocative and far more interesting.

WIDOWS will be released in the UK on November 9th and in the USA on November 16th.

DUNKIRK

Christopher Nolan is a director of superlative technical skill, and his new film of the evacuation of DUNKIRK lives up to that billing.  However, in his choice to strip it of all historical context, and to keep a close-up on three sets of anonymous character tropes, he has created a film that has no epic sweep; that fails to convey the magnitude of Dunkirk; and that fails to move.  Where it works, it works because of fleeting nuanced moments of acting brilliance.  But this is no LAWRENCE and he is no Lean: he has failed to combine the epic with the personal.

So, some context, because the film gives you none. (I wonder if this will affect non-British audiences' ability to engage with the film?) We are in the early months of World War Two. Ignoring captured intelligence to German plans, French, Canadian and British and other allied troops have been lured into Belgium by a German feint and have now been encircled and driven back to the French coast. Roughly 340,000 men - the principal strength of the British army - crowded the beach at Dunkirk - a port protected by a mole, or sea wall, from which they could board the large vessels sent to ferry them back across the English channel.   In doing so, they were hugely aided by the French forces tangling up the German troops sent to cut them off at the Siege of Lille. They were also hugely aided by Hitler's inexplicable decision to order the Luftwaffe not to pursue the troops.  

The evacuation took days, and combined large ships taking people off the Mole with small requisitioned commercial vessels collecting soldiers from the shallows. All the time, the troops subject to aerial assault on the beach and in the water, and the risk of being torpedoes once aboard. The scale of the battle was thus immense - with the RAF flying 3,500 sorties and engaging the Luftwaffe in dogfights away from the beach (hence many soldiers wondering where the fuck they were) - 36 Royal Navy destroyers ferrying men home as well as the Small Ships flotilla - and c340,000 soldiers ultimately evacuated.  It was both a great military failure and a success - because as humiliating as the lost Battle of France was, it enabled Britain to survive to fight on with its men and materiel largely intact. 

Christopher Nolan makes the decision to avoid all of this explanation, and to give us a Dunkirk that focuses on the personal experiences of the war by land, sea and air.  These theatres are inter-cut but take place along different time-scales.  The land evacuation takes place over the week, although frankly days merge into each other and I couldn't keep track.  The sea rescue takes place over a day and the RAF dogfight takes place over an hour, roughly corresponding to a Spitfire's fuel limit.  I rather liked the concept of intercutting the three, and although we do get a cute crossover with the same character appearing in two of the theatres, Nolan doesn't make it too intrusive or incredible. 

Where I think his claustrophobic personal approach works best is in the air battles.  Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden play RAF Spitfire engaging in dogfights some distance from the beach. With IMAX cameras mounted on modified Yaks, Nolan takes us into the air for some quite spectacular aerial photography.  Nonetheless, the downside of this approach is that one gets the impression that the men on the ground are right to ask where the RAF are - that the scale of the aerial assault is minute when it wasn't.  I also find it absolutely incredible that a RAF pilot, knowing how desperate the British were for materiel, would risk his plane in the way that Hardy's character does.  This utterly took me out of the film. 

The sea battle is also done very well from a technical perspective.  We get a sense of the claustrophobia of being aboard ship, the shell-shock and the terror of a watery death, especially when combined with lit gasoline.  I thought the acting was by far the best in this segment.  I very much liked Mark Rylance's quiet earnestness as a civilian sailor sailing to Dunkirk with his son - the quiet communication between the two of them with glances - the profound sympathy toward Cillian Murphy's traumatised rescued RAF pilot.  And the scene of soldiers drowning under a fiery sea is one of the most memorable and rightly horrific in the film.  But I also had deep concerns with Nolan's portrayal of the naval evacuation.  He has Kenneth Branagh's Colonel declare that the Navy is only risking one Destroyer. This is just untrue. There were 36 in use! In general, his character summarises the worst of the writing on the film. He's not a character so much as a Patriotic Reaction Machine. When he gets teary at the sight of the Small Ships as Elgar floats up through the score (superbly done by Hans Zimmer), Nolan is telling us to shed a tear.  When he looks concerned at the Luftwaffe flying overhead, this is a cue for us to get concerned.  And when at the end he remains in peril to help the French, we are meant to think, ah well, this has been EXCLUSIVELY from the perspective of white male Brits, but never mind, we sorted out the French too.  Appallingly crass stuff. Still, this being Nolan, Branagh will probably get an Oscar nom for this nonsense.

Nonetheless, it is on the beach itself that this film ultimately fails.  We have small nuanced scenes of brilliance - a soldier decided to commit suicide by walking into the water - or the quietly proud smile of a Royal Engineer who has built a makeshift pier out of trucks - but there is no sense of scale or chaos. According to Nolan, the beach at Dunkirk was filled with about 3 columns of about 200 soldiers neatly waiting to be evacuated, and ducking and turning on cue to the director's megaphone. There's no fear, panic, chaos, disorder at all.  There's also no sense that we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of men.  Ultimately, then, Nolan has made a gross error.  He has given us a film that tries to convey intimacy - without ever naming a character or making a character more than a trope - and he has chosen NOT to convey the epic sweep of battle. Worst of all he has made gross historical simplifications and some outright errors that massively impact our understanding of what is happening.  And his refusal to name the enemy as the German army is simply perverse. 

DUNKIRK is rated PG-13. The film goes on global release the weekend of July 19th.

SCORE: A FILM MUSIC DOCUMENTARY

One of the most wonderful experiences of attending the San Francisco film festival was watching this fascinating film about film music in one of the theatres at the Dolby Laboratories - experiencing a visual and audio quality rarely seen in a commercial cinema. To be sure, this documentary didn't really warrant a screen that would've done a big budget action movie justice, but the sound quality was much desired.  Over 90 minutes, the film-makers give us an amazing insight into the history and current state of composing for film, including a quite dazzling access to composers including the pre-eminent Hans Zimmer.

The impression one gets is that movie composition has changed from writing and conducting a traditional orchestral score to something more akin to a polymath enterprise - creative originality; running a vast team of people; and enough IT knowledge to produce the music.  It's the middle part of that that really surprised me - these composers are essentially front-men for a team that includes people who will supplement their creative work, produce scores, and sometimes conduct so that they can be in the mixing booth ensuring the overall mix of the work produced.  And now they are supplemented by a new breed of conventional rock star turned composer bringing a new feel to the scores they create.

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE is even more arse-numbingly dull than last year's MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. - another action movie remake that not un-coincidentally starred The Tudor's Henry Cavill.  Cavill, just like his UNCLE co-star Armie Hammer, is an actor of beauty but little charisma.  In fact, it's a sad testament to the lack of star power at the centre of this movie, that the two most charismatic and shaggable men in it are Jeremy Irons (as Batman's butler) and Kevin Costner as Superman's dad.  Jesse Eisenberg plays Lex Luthor like a milder version of Jim Carrey's Riddler.  And what can we say of Ben Affleck's BATMAN?  All our worst fears, carried over from DAREDEVIL, are realised here.  He's the Ben Affleck of SOUTH PARK pastiches, square jaw, Blue-Steel troubled intense gaze, humourless anti-acting.  I'd go so far as to say that the only interesting thing about Batfleck's portrayal is his suit, which looks a bit like someone took an Iron Man outfit and spray-painted it black.  Apparently this is to imitate Frank Miller's graphic novel Dark Knight but it just looked laughably clunky, much like the screenplay.

FREEHELD

FREEHELD is a well-meaning and earnest film based on the true story of New Jersey cop Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore). She was a very carefully equivocal lesbian until she met her younger partner Stacie Andree (Ellen Page) who was openly out. They fell in love, moved in together, and Laurel came out to her partner of many years, Dane Wells (Michael Shannon). And then Laurel was diagnosed with stage four cancer and realised that her partner would not be eligible for her pension because they couldn't be married, and so Stacie would not be able to afford to stay in their home after her death.  Laurel and Stacie's case sat before the Freeholders of Ocean County, New Jersey - five men who were worried about their re-election prospects in a conservative county had they used the latitude accorded to them by state law in allowing Laurel to assign her rights to Stacie.  But not to fear.  Steven Goldstein (Steve Carrell) a politically savvy campaigner who clearly but openly wanted to use this case to promote his agenda for marriage equality, drummed up enough publicity to shame the Freeholders into giving in.  

It's a simple story, but an important victory on the road to equality.  Not sure it's entirely enough meat on the bone to be a feature length movie shown in cinemas. It sounds like more of an hour long TV drama and sadly that's what this film basically is, despite an all star cast.  It's just a big enough, conflicted enough story.  The characters don't grow. The lesbian couple are perfect and in love. The conflicted counsellor was always a good guy. The conservative counsellors aren't one over by argument or humanity but are rail-roaded by publicity.  And so it all feels a little thin and static and inconsequential which is a terrible shame for such an awful story of basic inhumanity.

FREEHELD has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The movie played Toronto 2015 and was released last year in the USA, Canada, Italy, Israel and Hong Kong. It is currently on release in France, the UK, Ireland and Taiwan. It opens on March 24th in Portugal, April 7th in Germany, May 6th in Spain, May 12th in Chile, May 19th in the Netherlands, and July 22nd in Sweden.

WOMAN IN GOLD

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here.

The Bloch-Bauers were a successful cosmopolitan Viennese family whose house formed a salon where one might meet Dr Freud or Arnold Schoenberg.  Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of Adele, the celebrated Woman In Gold, but this was confiscated by the Nazis along with many other works of art.  After the war the painting hung for decades in the Belvedere Gallery until Adele's niece Maria sued the Austrian government for its return.  Dispute instituting a restitution committee, the government was understandably reluctant to give up paintings which had, by then, become synonymous with Austrian culture.  The process was thus one that was obdurate and highly contested. 

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

Yeah so we all know the deal with Spidey, no?  He's was bitten by a mutant spider and got spidey-powers with which he solves minor league crime in New York City.  In this reboot sequel he's played by Andrew Garfield as a mumbling charismatic nerd which is just about perfect.  He's in love with Gwen Stacey but thinks they shouldn't date because he might put her in danger - foreshadowing anyone?  Meanwhile his friend Harry Osborn is dying of a genetic disease and wants to inject himself with Spidey-blood to save his life. Because that will go well. Meanwhile, Harry's employee, a nerd played by Jamie Foxx, has had a massive electric shock that has turned him into, you guessed it, Elektro!

Everything about this Sony produced sequel feels second-rate when compared to Marvel comic book movies.  It's not that it's bad. In fact, it's a lot better than the Tobey Maguire movies. For a start it has an amazing cast - everyone just feels more committed and acting their pants off - just compare Dale deHaan as Harry Osborn with James Franco, who looked bored and embarrassed to even be in a comic book movie.  It's just that it feels a bit mechanical - a bit Tab A into Slot B.  The effects are all big and glossy but left me uninvolved.   The only reason to watch this movie is the Gwen-Peter relationship which really is heartfelt.  And that suggests to me that what you need to do is wait for this film to come out on DVD and then fast forward through the action sequences.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 142 minutes.  The movie is on global release.

12 YEARS A SLAVE - LFF 2013 - Day Ten

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Steve McQueen is a young British artist turned director whose previous two movies - HUNGER & SHAME - both gave us an unflinching portrait of dark and complex issues - the IRA hunger strikes and sex addiction. Both combined strong central performances from Michael Fassbender with stunning visuals and painfully held tableaux.  Both were the stand out movies of their year at the London Film Festival.

Accordingly, 12 YEARS A SLAVE came to the London Film Festival on a sea of hype - so much so that twitter had been filled with unblemished praise from critics who had seen the film that morning.  And even Festival Director Clare Stewart seemed speechless in her introduction to the film.  After the screening, the BFI tweeted pictures of standing ovations at the cinema. Everyone agrees the movie is moving, important and destined for Oscar glory.

I'm sad to say that I don't agree.  Yes, the film in important and unflinching. It's beautifully shot - all the more horrible to contrast the beauty of the Southern landscape with the cruelty of slavery. And yes, the movie hinges on a powerful central performance from Fassbender.  But too much of the rest of it seemed to me to be redundant, and a worse crime, to descend into emotional manipulation.

But let's start at the beginning. The film is based on the true life story of Solomon Northup, a successful free black man in Saratoga, married with children.  He was tricked into a business trip, captured and sold into slavery, first to a relatively benign slaveowner called Ford and then to a more complex sadistic coupled called the Epps.  Finally, he is freed when he manages to get a message out through a liberal white Canadian, although that reunion is tinged with bitterness at leaving his fellow slaves behind. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor is said to have given the performance of his career as Solomon, and to be sure he has grace and power, but I personally prefer him in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS.  I do, however, hope that he wins awards for this because let's be honest, as a black actor, how many other starring roles of this gravitas is he likely to get?  In minor roles, I really liked American Horror Story's Sarah Paulson as the sadistic, jealous Mistress Epps, erging on her deeply troubled husband to whipping the slave, Patsey, that he seems to be sexually obsessed with.  I also rather liked Paul Dano as the classic nigger-hating plantation overseer Tibeats whose jealousy at the favour Ford shows Solomon leads to Solomon being chased off the estate. He brings real insecurity and violence to that role.  It's truly sinister.  But perhaps surprisingly, the one mis-step is perhaps the usually note perfect Benedict Cumberbatch as the nice plantation owner Ford. Admittedly, Cumberbatch has little to do in this rather thinly drawn part, but his Southern accent doesn't seem convincing.

For me, this film belongs to two actors - Michael Fassbender as the tortured Epps and Lupita Nyong'o's slave Patsey.  Fassbender brings layers of menace, vulnerability and borderline madness to his portrayal of the almost superstitiously religious man who has a bizarrely close tortuous relationship with his slaves that culminates in one of the most horrendous scenes of the film. Goaded by his wife, he cannot bring himself to whip Patsey so he forces Solomon to do it instead. This is psychosexual terror at its most devastating. As Patsey, Lupita Nyong'o is more than a match for Fassbender, bringing layers of pride and then terrorised desperation to her character.  It's a fine performance.

Behind the camera, Steve McQueen's usual austere framing is somewhat diluted here, in what is undoubtedly his most mainstream movie. The exception are two pivotal scenes of great power. The first is one when Tibeats has Solomon strung up, and the overseer leaves him there.  The camera stays on him in his suffering then pulls back showing us slaves, so fearful, that they have to continue their work around him. Then we pan round to show how close this hanging is to the main house, and to see the mistress of the house looking on almost lackadaisically.  It's a beautifully pointed scene.  The second is the forced whipping of Patsey that I referred to before, and then Epps taking the whip himself.  The detail is rightfully brutal.

So what stops this from being a great film?  Too long spent in the banality of Ford's plantation.  Too long spent away from Fassbender in general.  The rather absurdly drawn character of Bass, the liberal Canadian played almost like a salvation Jesus by Brad Pitt.  And the ending.  McQueen could have ended this film on the scene where Solomon leaves the Epps plantation - a close-up on his half-unbelieving, relieved and yet guilt-ridden face, as Patsey faints in the background. That would have perfectly summed up the conflict at the heart of this story of personal liberation.  Instead, he tacks on the standard schmaltzy scene of catharsis, where Solomon is reunited with his family - martyred apologies and group hugs all round. Conventional, unnecessary, sugary and ruinous. 

12 YEARS A SLAVE has a running time of 133 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

12 YEARS A SLAVE played Telluride, London and Toronto where Steve McQueen won the People's Choice Award.  The movie will be released in the USA on October 18th, in Germany and Spain on October 31st, in Greece on December 12th, in Singapore and Sweden on December 20th, in New Zealand on December 26th, in France, Finland and the UK on January 24th, in Norway on January 31st, in the Netherlands on February 20th and in Denmark on February 27th. 

RUSH

The short version:  There's nothing wrong with RUSH as two hours of good quality entertainment.  It's well filmed, well acted, takes you into the racing circuit with exhilarating speed, and delivers some nicely timed laughs.  But, ultimately, RUSH is a movie made by two people who don't really care about or know about Formula One. It's a movie about two drivers who weren't really rivals, weren't really as important as the movie claims they are, and who were probably more complex than this movie allows them to be.  Save yourself the worry: watch SENNA instead. 

The podcast version: You can listen to a podcast review of the movie below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes. 

The long version:  Ron Howard, a director of indifferent and inconsistent quality and no discernible style, returns to our screens with his take on the 1976 Formula One racing season, as defined by the intense competition between Maclaren's James Hunt and Ferrari's Niki Lauda. The blunt-talking Austrian, Lauda, had the better car and better technical ability, but British James Hunt has the superstar lifestyle and the raw aggression that made him a fierce competitor, if not for the long haul.  According to Peter Morgan's script, Lauda was jealous of Hunt's playboy charisma, and Hunt was envious of Lauda's respect and settled family life.  This spilled over into such vehemence that Lauda took points from Hunt on a technicality and Hunt goaded Lauda's colleagues into racing a dangerously slippery Nurburgring.  All F1 fans know that this resulted in Lauda being engulfed in flame for a full minute, as his face and lungs burned, and how he forced himself back into the racing car within three F1 races, placing fourth - arguably the ballsiest race run in F1 history.  So much is revealed in the movie's trailers.  But if you really don't know how the 1976 season ended, I'm not going to spoil it here.

There are four problems with RUSH.  The first is that Peter Morgan creates a script that is chock-full of sporting clichés and one-dimensional characters that barely register any kind of character development. James Hunt is the handsome playboy with a heart of gold (witness his beating up of the mean journo who taunts a burned up Lauda).  Lauda is a clichéd rational Kraut.  (And all this while Morgan does the interview circuit complaining about the cultural pigeonholing HE experiences as an Anglo-Austrian.)  It gets worse with the minor characters:  poor Alexandra Maria Lara's sole contribution as Mrs Lauda is to stand around looking concerned at crucial moments, while Olivia Wilde as Mrs Hunt has to look hurt. The only moment of character evolution comes with Lauda in his pivotal Fuji race but that's shown through some pretty cheesy flashback inter-cutting.

The second problem is that the movie is deeply patronising.  And I don't mean it stops every five minutes to give us a Basil Exposition guide to Formula One racing. In fact, US audiences less familiar with this majestic sport might find themselves short-changed on the sport and drowning in melodrama.   Rather, screenwriter Peter Morgan sees fit to give us a final scene between Hunt and Lauda in which they basically summarise all that has just occurred in the last two hours and what it all means for them and, thus, for us.  In a story that is basically very simple* and features very simply drawn characters, this is hardly necessary and underscores the fact that the movie has no real natural end because it doesn't really deal with a real-life proper rivalry.

The third problem with the film is director Ron Howard's inability to focus on the majesty of F1. And yes, I know, the races are well-filmed, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle does a great job with his grass level shots of whirring tires and mist soaked visors, but this movie still plays in the register of cheesy daytime drama.  Just look at the excruciating and unnecessary soft-focus under-water love scene between Mr and Mrs Lauda - pure schmaltz - and inserted, no doubt, too soften the edges of King Rat.

The fourth problem is clearly nobody's fault but bad luck: this movie will, whether it wants to or not, stand in the shadow of Asif Kapadia's peerless documentary SENNA.  And it fails miserably by comparison.  Why?  Here's why.  For a start, Aryton Senna would be in many people's top three of all time great drivers and Prost in the top five.  Lauda maybe makes the top ten, partly because of his miraculous comeback.  It's harsh, but Lauda and Hunt just aren't names to quicken the heart in the way that Prost-Senna do.  And then, to make it even worse, the complexity of the characters portrayed in RUSH don't come close to SENNA.  Aryton is shown to be a conflicted, contradictory, fascinating enigma - deeply spiritual, biblical, but also a playboy.  The ladies man that Hunt was, but also the rationalist, arguing not to race in bad conditions, that Lauda was.  He is more interesting on his own than Peter Morgan's Lauda and Hunt put together, and that's before we get to the amazingly complete driver Prost with his dark relationship to the really sinister FIA chief Balestre.  

But even if RUSH had been a fictionalised account of Prost-Senna, it would have still failed because it cannot compete with the real live race footage, the real life exhilaration and ecstasy of Interlagos 1991; the real life sobbing tragedy of Imola 1994.  

The conclusion:  RUSH is a movie made by two people who don't really care about or know about Formula One. It's a movie about two drivers who weren't really rivals, weren't really as important as the movie claims they are, and who were probably more complex than this movie allows them to be.  Save yourself the worry: watch SENNA instead. 

RUSH has a running time of 123 minutes and has been rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language, sex and scenes of bloody injury.

RUSH played Toronto 2013 and is on release in the UK, Canada, Israel, Denmark, Hungary, Brazil, Finland and Ireland. It opens on limited release next weekend in the USA, as well as on wide release in the Philippines, Taiwan, Belarus, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, Slovenia and Turkey. It opens on September 26th wide in the USA, in France, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Macedonia, Singapore, the UAE, Canada and Venezuela. It opens on October 3rd in Belgium, Australia, Germany, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Serbia, Norway and Sweden. It opens on October 10th in Hong Kong; on October 17th in Peru; on October 18th on Mexico and in February in Japan.

*Two formula one racers compete - one hot-headed one rational.  The rational one has a severe accident partly because of the goading of the hot-headed one but their rivalry helps him overcome his injury to race again. 

+I'm thinking something like Fangio, Clark, Senna, Schumacher, Alonso in the first rank.  Prost, Moss, Stewart, Vettel, Ascari in the second rank.  Then maybe Lauda, Villeneuve, Mansell, Piquet, Brabham, oh dear, maybe Lewis? in the third rank.  Hunt not even close. 

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

The sequel to Guy Ritchie's 2009 Sherlock Holmes reboot has just as much style, period atmosphere, wit and bite, but suffers from a rather baggy script from husband and wife team, Michele and Kieran Mulroney.  The result is a film that is certainly entertaining enough to justify a cinema ticket, but which propels the franchise no further, and does a great disservice to Noomi Rapace and Stephen Fry, stranded in under-written roles.

The movie is set in the Europe of 1891 - a febrile, uncertain place with anarchists rising against major powers, and the major powers signing peace treaties but all the while gearing up for what will become the First World War. Holmes' arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Mad Men's Jared Harris) seeks not just to corner the supply of weaponry but also to create the demand for them, by staging terrorist plots and assassination attempts that will bring Europe to war. Holmes (Robert Downey Junior) has to stop him, aided as always by his side-kick John Watson (Jude Law), interrupting his honeymoon with Mary (Kelly Reilly). The movie thus takes the result of a fast-paced, action-set-piece-packed ride across Europe, from London to Paris, by way of Cambridge, and on to the fateful Reichenbach Falls.  Along for the ride are Holmes' indolent but secretly powerful elder brother Mycroft (official National Treasure, Stephen Fry) and a rather random gypsy called Simza (Noomi Rapace - the original Lisbeth Salander). 

First the positive.  All the things that made the first SHERLOCK HOLMES a roaring success are present in the second. I love the dark, richly dressed sets, and CGI that bring to life the grim dirty Victorian cities of London and Paris, filled with dodgy clubs, filthy streets, but punctuated with glorious civic architecture and handsomely dressed upper class men and women.  For the keen-eyed, there's even a glimpse of the Sacre Coeur under scaffolding in Paris harking back to the use of an unfinished Tower Bridge in the first film.  I also love the way in which Ritchie gives us a more pugnacious Holmes than those dessicated twentieth century TV adaptations.  This feels truer to the books, where Holmes definitely has a grimy past and is in fine physical form.  I also love the device Ritchie uses to show his process of deduction - the careful editing, the bullet time replay of fights, the voice-over of every move selected. It all makes for the movies vitality and takes the novels back to their pop-cultural origins.  But most of all, any Holmes adaptation lives or dies on the relationship between Holmes and Watson, and what really sets these films alight is the genuine spark between Downey Junior and Law - the beautifully essayed mutual frustration, respect and affection.  I will always hand over money to see Holmes and Watson sparring.  Finally, to all these factors, we can add one more happy decision.  Jared Harris makes a superb Moriarty, and some of the best scenes in the film are (as they should be) the confrontations between the two - the matching of wits. 

All these good things just about make for the perfect winter blockbuster.  But, as I said before, the movie is severely let down by its script by Michele and Kieran Mulroney.  To be sure, they get some things right. I like the way small details early in the movie become important gags or plot points later on, particularly the urban camouflage!  This is a film in which one has to pay attention despite the superficial appearance of a brawny action flick.  But in too many major ways their script gets it horribly wrong.  The pacing in the first half is woefully slow.  There are some fun action set pieces but we don't really feel we know what the stakes are - what precisely Holmes is trying to do, what mystery he is trying to solve.  It's more than an hour into the over-long two hour run-time before we realise what the plot really is. Poor Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is pretty much thrown to the dogs, with barely an impact on Holmes.  But worst of all, the whole gypsy plot line is also a complete waste of time. You could easily have cut it from the film and had a tighter, more evenly paced 90 minute flick.  Presumably Guy Ritchie was happy to have another opportunity to indulge his fascination with gypsies, but is all that nonsense really worth it for 60 seconds of comedy dancing from Jude Law, and a short horse joke?  

As it is, we get poor Noomi Rapace cast as Simza - a talented actress who basically looks pained for 120 minutes.  Moreover, poor Stephen Fry is utterly short-changed in his role as Mycroft - I mean - what comic joy could have been woven from an encounter between Fry and Downey Junior on screen!  But the screenwriters simply had a naked arse gag. Poor.  The storyline also leaves poor Kelly Reilly rather short-changed as Mary, although she, unlike Noomi Rapace, does manage to steal every scene she's in and leave a favourable impression far outweighing her actual screen-time. Let's hope now that Simza has been rendered irrelevant, Mary and Mycroft will get more screen-time in the next film. And yes, I suspect that given the early box office there will be another film.  And yes, this instalment was still enough fun, despite its flaws, that I look forward to it. I only hope that the producers replace the screenwriters.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS is on release in the US, UK, Canada, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on December 22nd in Malta, Germany, Israel, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, Finland, Indonesia, Romania and Taiwan, Denmark and Norway. It opens on December 29th in Belgium, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Russia, Estonia, India, Lithuania and South Africa. It opens on January 5th in Armenia, Australia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and Poland. It opens in Brazil on January 13th; in France on January 25th; and in Japan on March 10th.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES - A movie so dull I walked out after 90 minutes

About fifteen minutes into the latest PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie, Dame Judi Dench -  her ear be-slobbered by Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow -  asks "Is that all?"  I felt very much the same way as I waded through this over-stuffed and yet ultimately vacuous blockbuster.  For let us be clear: this is an absolutely terrible movie. Derivative, muddled and, sin of all sins, dull.  I walked out after 90 minutes, leaving a good 45 minutes of the movie left to run.  Still, not to worry.  No doubt the shameless hacks chez Bruckheimer are penning episodes 5 asnd 6 of this lucrative franchise as we speak.

So, what it all about, Alfie? Three ships are sailing to South America to find the Fountain of Youth (TM).  One ship contains Spaniards, trying to capture the elixir for their king. (We don't hear much more about them.)  The second ship contains Captain Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush), who has swapped piracy for privateering - the only credible bit of character development in the film - and an interesting analogy for the way in which this franchise has sold-out from camp farce to clunking establishment milk-cow. The final ship contains Captain Blackbeard (Ian McShane, presumably cast because he is the only working actor more wrinkled than Keith Richards), Blackbeard's daughter Angelica (Penelope Cruz) and Captain Jack Sparrow himself.  The movie sees these crews assembled, reach land in South America, do battle with some cannibalistic mermaids, and then set off over land to find the fountain.  That's the point at which I left.

I left because it had become painfully clear that ON STRANGER TIDES was suffering from two structural problems that were not going to be resolved by simply hanging about for another forty five minutes. First up, the movie commits the cardinal sin of subverting the very formula that made it successful!  In the first flick, which I rather liked, the prevailing atmosphere was "camp family fun"! We had pretty young lovers to root for,  a little bit of spookiness, and every now and then a bit of naughtiness in the form of Captain Jack Sparrow - a pirate so effete and ineffectual he was a walking spoof of the pirate movie genre.  By contrast, in ON STRANGER TIDES, Sparrow is front and centre throughout, rather than being used as comic relief. His presence tires -  he has become the establishment - in fact, he's rather good at getting out of scrapes even if all the set-piece fight scenes are lifted straight out of Indiana Jones or earlier PIRATES films. Worst of all, the camp Jack Sparrow has to sustain the main love story, with a smouldering Angelica, utterly at odds with his camp style. All of this leaves Geoffrey Rush's Barbosa as by far the most interesting, and certainly the only entertaining, figure on screen.

The second big problem is the direction. Rob Marshall is, simply put, a terrible director. And here, I am looking to his previous films too - CHICAGO, NINE and MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA.  Marshall seems to direct by throwing everything at the kitchen wall - more characters, more plot, over-loaded production design, more angles, more cuts, more orchestration (Hans Zimmer particularly irritating here). The editing style is the biggest culprit here, especially in the set-pieces.  Marshall doesn't seem to be able to trust the action itself - the choreography (ironic given his background) to be interesting enough to hold our attention. So he cuts, cuts, cuts, all the time holding the camera so close to the action that I wanted to pull back for breath.  Take for example an early scene where Sparrow is dancing on top of the King's dinner table and then swings from chandeliers. Why not just let the camera sit back and see his quick, deft, steps across the table?  The whole thing smacked of complete lack of confidence in the material.

Of course, added to these two big structural problems, there are many minor irritations. The cavalier hijacking of the Indiana Jones format. The way in which the hero and heroine conveniently happen upon trap-doors. The fact that the producers evidently thought - "you know, those vampire movies are making a bunch of money - let's get some hot teenage girls and give them vampire teeth!".  Worst of all, the screenwriters actually gave us a love story between a priest and a mermaid. I have seen anything as crass since the notorious soap opera Sunset Beach had the Father Fit storyline.  Weak.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES is on global release.

HOW DO YOU KNOW

HOW DO YOU KNOW is a truly execrable relationship drama that was, for some reason, marketed as a light-hearted romantic comedy. Reese Witherspoon plays a pro soft-ball player cut from the national team as she turns thirty - a move that sends her into a life crisis.  She simply doesn't know whether she wants to be a normal girl with a boyfriend and eventually a baby, let alone who she wants to be with. The choices are Owen Wilson's wealthy but promiscuous pro sportsman and Paul Rudd's earnest but hapless failed businessmen. Hardly a great set of options.  Cue lots of sex with the pro sportsmen, lots of wannabe quirky-cute conversations with the failed businessmen, and a lot of really really boring scenes in which unlikeable narcissists ruminate on how shitty their lives are, all the time in perfectly designed rooms with perfectly quaffed hair.  Witherspoon is mawkish; Rudd is mawkish; and Wilson plays that charming rogue character he always plays.  But no-one is more ill-used than Jack Nicholson.  Where's the emotional insight and wry wit of James L Brooks' AS GOOD AS IT GETS?  Where's the real heart of James L Brooks' THE SIMPSONS.  Poor, poor, poor.

HOW DO YOU KNOW is on release in the US, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Egypt, France, Ireland, Spain and the UK. It opens in February in Estonia, Australia, Kazakhstan, Peru, Russia, Bulgaria, Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Iceland and Lithuania. It opens in March in Belgium, Kuwait, Malaysia, Portugal, Singapore, the Philippines, Poland and Norway. It opens on April 29th in Brazil.

MEGAMIND - A pocketful of Kryptonite

Right, you've all seen Superman? in every episode or comic strip, evil Lex Luthor kidnaps the feisty journalist Lois Lane in order to lure Superman to rescue her. Lex is clever, but truth, justice and the American Way wins out. Superman rescues Lois and she goes back to work with the trusty dull Clark Kent, unaware that he is really Superman. And poor photographer Jimmy Olsen never catches anyone's attention, as the Spin Doctors rightly observed. So, imagine what would happen if one day Lex Luthor actually defeated Superman and took over Metropolis. No Superman, Lois at a lose end, Jimmy tries to make his move, but is rebuffed, and Lex bored without an arch-enemy, tries to create a new superhero by zapping Jimmy with Superman's DNA. Only, turns out Super-Jimmy has been brooding with resentment all these years, as the Spin Doctors told us, and uses his powers for Evil, which of course, gives Lex the chance to...er....do good?!

Of course, you can't imagine DC Comics letting Superman get publicly mauled like this, so instead, you get MEGAMIND, wherein Superman isn't so much spoofed as Alan-Moore'd except, of course, with about a tenth of his wisdom and Tina Fey's jokes. The end-result is a ball of laughs, rather sweet, and definitely worth watching.

Will Ferrell plays Megamind - the Evil Genius who thinks he might just want to be nice for a change, wooing the feisty chick Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey). It's a a role Ferrell has played a number of times in recent years, typically in movies that alternate with his cruder SNL comedy skits-turned-features. MEGAMIND is one of the few films that allows him to be both vulnerable-sweet AND grossly-comical and the mix is a treat. The typecasting continues with the rest of the cast. Tina Fey does her usual sweet, neurotic, charming thing as Roxanne - Jonah Hill does his creepy, slacker, irritating schtick as Jimmy/Hal - and Brad Pitt basically plays Superman, sorry, Metro Man, as Brad Pitt - a famous star tired of the limelight.

The comedy is definitely three steps wittier and more consistent than DESPICABLE ME. I mean, just look at how good the physical comedy is when Megamind is pretending to be Bernard in his Evil Lair. Or just look at how funny the Minion losing oxygen scene is. That stuff doesn't happen without the intervention of a director like Tom McGrath (MADAGASCAR 1 and 2) and actors like Fey and Ferrell. But for all that, Megamind doesn't have the heart of a movie like DESPICABLE ME, and I really wonder how far young kids will keep up with a movie in which a major plot point is that characters can switch bodies at the touch of a wristwatch - or where a large part of the humour, and a major plot point comes from the lead character putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable of words?

MEGAMIND is on release in the US, Canada, Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Egypt, Kuwait, Georgia, Portugal, Argentina, Croatia, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Brazil, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in Australia, Venezuela, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Serbia and Estonia. It opens on Christmas Day in Finland and Sweden, on December 26th in Norway and on January 7th in Poland.

IT'S COMPLICATED - fails to be subversive

IT'S COMPLICATED wants to be a romantic-comedy that subverts convention by giving us an old formerly married couple indulging in an affair. Whether or not you will like this film basically rests on whether you find the concept of Meryl Streep declaring, "turns out, I'm a bit of a slut" funny or not. Sadly, writer-director Nancy Meyers does not develop the humour beyond the initial concept. Oh, I forget, she has ex-husband and current lover Alec Baldwin sneak around Meryl's house peering into windows at her new date (a completely under-used Steve Martin). Baldwin trips and falls. Oh, how funny.

Thin comedy aside, what else does this movie offer? A risible attempt to actually examine the impact this affair would have on the husband's new younger wife, her son, and on the couple's grown children. Any attempt at emotional profundity is undercut by the fact that the script is superficial; Alec Baldwin simply doesn't have the acting range; and Meryl Streep chooses not to use her god-given talent but instead simply mugs to camera.

Worst of all, this movie - which seeks to oh so daringly depict love among the fifty-somethings as a valid concern in our youth-obsessed age - is itself ludicrously obsessed with surface appearance. Indeed, it plays less like a rom-com and more like a feature length advertisement for life in Santa Barbara - all gorgeous properties, perfect interior design, chi-chi food stores, and sweeping drives. When Meryl Streep laments the fact that it took her ten years to get over her divorce and feel confident enough to remodel her house and get the kitchen she always wanted, you look at her current kitchen and wander what the fuck is her problem.

Overall, this is a movie about a bunch of people who live a life of over-designed ease. They are all basically self-obsessed and unlikeable. I didn't buy that they were having a genuine emotional journey. I didn't want them to live happily ever after. I wanted the movie to end very, very quickly indeed.

IT'S COMPLICATED was released in the US, Belgium, France, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Canada, Finland, Spain and Norway in 2009. It is currently on release in the UK, Australia and Argentina. It opens next weekend in Israel, Russia, Singapore and Estonia and opens on the 21st in Denmark, Germany and Sweden. It opens in Croatia on January 28th, in Romania on February 19th, in Japan on February 19th and in Brazil on February 26th. It opens in Turkey on March 5th and in Italy on March 19th.

SHERLOCK HOLMES - solid blockbuster fun, but what's with Adler?

I have read much of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, but was never as taken with it, qua detective fiction, as I was with Agatha Christie. The reason being that Conan Doyle did not play fair. His Victorian detective always solved crimes by means of arcane knowledge that only he could possess - the taste of a particular type of wax used by just one candle-manufacturer in Brittany. As a consequence, the clever reader cannot solve a Conan Doyle mystery in the same way that he can use pure logic and close observation to solve an Agatha Christie novel. So, I read Conan Doyle, as most schoolchildren do, for that sense of Britain at the height of imperial glory but also at the depths of urban degradation - and for that wonderfully subversive idea that Holmes was a bit of a bastard, possibly homo-erotically attached to his sidekick Dr Watson, and addicted to cocaine.

I would suggest that Guy Ritchie's new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes also works best as a mood piece, interspersed by some rather spectacular stunts. His London is out of Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD - all smoke-filled narrow streets and filthy docks contrasted with the opulent luxury of parliament, Mayfair hotels, and quasi-Masonic lodges. The production design is simply marvellous and makes good use of what is left of Victorian Britain in Manchester and London (from what I could tell). Ritchie also finally finds a suitable object for his obsession with posh chaps bruising with the chavs. He amps up Holmes' boxing, drug-taking and general down-and-dirtiness. Holmes is happy chatting with the local bobby, Clarkie, or with a grimy looking trawlerman. He is altogether more uncomfortable dining in a genteel restaurant.

As an action film, SHERLOCK HOLMES works well too. Ritchie gives us some marvellous stunts that truly make use of the Thames. There are three action set-pieces: one sees a ship slipped off its moorings during a fight between Holmes and a French giant; the second sees Watson set off a string of explosions at a riverside factory; and the final act confrontation between Holmes and his adversary, Lord Blackwood, takes places atop an as-yet-unfinished Tower Bridge. I would have happily paid the price of admission just to see the imagined Victorian vista from the top of that bridge.

Even better than as a mood piece and as an action film, SHERLOCK HOLMES works best as a "bromance" in the manner of all the best action/detective flicks. Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law, as Holmes and Watson respectively, utterly convinced me of their fondness for each other. With such a high-stakes and frankly ludicrous plot swirling about them, it was the credibility of their relationship that anchored the film. I loved their bickering; Holmes' resentment of Watson's new fiancée; and their genuine affection. We truly believe that, as in the books, Watson has brought Holmes back to the edges of respectable society. We also believe, in the first of a few annoying retcons, that Holmes keeps Watson's addiction to gambling in check. When all the explosions were over, I loved the scenes between these two, and I'll be watching the next film for those.

So all in all, I had a rather good time with SHERLOCK HOLMES as a beautifully rendered, action blockbuster, centred around a charismatic relationship between Holmes and Watson. Sure the plot was insane - Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) wants to use black magic to rule the world! But it does at least do that typical Holmes thing where something that seems supernatural can be explained with good old fashioned science. I know that Ritchie has exaggerated Holmes' bruiser antics in the manner of his Mockney flicks, but hey, what's life without a little indulgence? And, it finally looks like Ritchie has found a good excuse to use his slo-mo fight scene style!

That is not to say that there isn't a problem with this film. And that problem is the retconned introduction of Irene Adler - a love interest for Holmes. Anyone with any knowledge of the books will know that this is just plain wrong. But, producers aiming for a target demographic of horny teenage boys will have their way so it looks like we're saddled with her. Ritchie just doesn't do female characters. He doesn't know how to create a well-rounded, interesting woman on screen. And Rachel McAdams' Irene Adler is a victim of this. The concept of the character, nowhere in the books, is a good one - to have a criminal mastermind who has gotten under Holmes' skin. But for a woman to have married as many times as Adler and to have been up to as much crime, she would need to be older - nearer to Holmes' age. I would have loved to see Helen McCrory in this role. But more to the point, Adler was utterly redundant in this flick, except as a nod to the teenage male audience, and in helping to set up the second film. I mean, seriously, imagine a film without Adler. It would've been twenty minutes shorter and the better for it. So for the sequel, I'm hoping that McAdams will be booted, just like that awful Katie Holmes from BATMAN BEGINS, and replaced by someone older and frankly, better at acting. I'm also hoping the scriptwriters give her more to do.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is on release in the USA, UK, Bahrain, Croatia, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Malaysia, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Indonesia, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Mexico, Romania and Sweden. It opens next weekend in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Brazil and Estonia. It opens on January 14th in Argentina, Greece, Spain, and Turkey. It opens on January 22nd in Finland; on January 28th in Germany and Switzerland; on February 3rd in France and on March 12th in Japan.