REBECCA

Daphne Du Maurier's nasty little thriller, Rebecca, is both iconic as a short story and as its film adaptation by Hitchcock. It's a grim tale about a banal simpering middle class spinster who falls for an unattainable rich aristocratic widower.  Which is not to say she doesn't attain him. For reasons that are still murky to me, he marries her, maybe to protect himself from the ghosts of his first and titular wife.  But the new, unnamed wife will never really possess her husband because he remains obsessed by the cynical and manipulative Rebecca - a woman beloved by all including her obsessive and diabolical housekeeper Mrs Danvers.  At the end of the novel, there is no happy ending. The couple are trapped overseas in a loveless and frigid marriage. The only triumph is that the second Mrs De Winter realises her husband never loved his first wife. At the end of the Hitchcock version we get a slightly soupier Hollywood ending. Joan Fontaine's second wife has gathered some courage and supported Laurence Olivier through his trial. He clings to her like a parasite. But it's no marriage of equals. Nonetheless, both original novel and film are of a tone - sinister, nasty, dark, cynical, blighted, thwarted and corrupt. It is Rebecca who sets the tone.

In this new adaptation by a director I very much admire, Ben Wheatley, the tone is altogether different. The south of France is lush and sunlit and Mr De Winter and his second wife (Armie Hammer and Lily James) seem young, healthy, vibrant and jarringly contemporary despite the period setting.  He takes her home to a lavish mansion but instead of the gothic gloom of the original we have Kristen Scott Thomas chomping through the scenery in a high camp version of Mrs Danvers that made me laugh at it rather than shudder from it. I had to question whether I was watching a Ryan Murphy film. And so it goes on, bad casting and bad direction. Sam Riley is utterly toothless as Rebecca's nasty cousin. The thriller/drama utterly uninteresting. It winds on to its ending which is about as cynical and Hollywood happy as anything I've ever seen. All is happy and sexy and fruitful. Rebecca has truly been vanquished. Along with any credibility Ben Wheatley ever had.

REBECCA has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film was released on Netflix on October 21st. 

KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

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What exactly is it that Michael Vaughn wants to do with KINGSMAN?  Is he trying to make a didactic film about class and style?  Is he trying to remake the vintage bonds for a new audience? Or is he spoofing them?  The difficulty of working out what's going on makes KINGSMAN sporadically entertaining but ultimately dis-satisfying and occasionally baffling.

The conceit of the movie is that the Kingsman are an elite spy organisation run in the interests of the public good, above and beyond corrupt governments. A Kingsman agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) sponsors a young kid called Eggsy (Taron Egerton) into a competitive entry test to become a Kingsman.  He isn't as posh as the other entrants, but Harry reassures him that to be a gentleman is about manners rather than breeding.  In the process, Eggsy becomes an active spy trying to bring down the evil super villain slash internet billionaire Valentine (Samuel L Jackson) with the help of the Kingsman's tech specialist Merlin (Mark Strong).

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is a long and convoluted film. That it remains engaging says something for the quality of the cast it has assembled, the ballsiness of its premise and the elegance of its action scenes.

The movie sees Wolverine sent back in time to the 1970s by Kitty Pryde to persuade Professor X and Magneto to come together and prevent Mystique from being captured by an evil inventor called Trask.  He will create robots called Sentinels who use Mystique's own mutated blood to become the ultimate Mutant killing machines.  If she isn't stopped Mystique will unleash a future in which Mutants are all but extinct.  But the mission isn't an easy one. Wolverine has to persuade a disillusioned, drugged up Professor X to help; he has to bust Magneto out of prison for killing JFK; and that's before he even gets to Trask.

The cast is impeccable. Fassbender vs McAvoy as Magneto vs Professor X is just the ultimate buddy movie with consequences.  You need actors will real heft to pull of a man scarred by the Holocaust and another who has to go back into his wheelchair for the good of humanity.  Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman on the brink of a massive ethical decision. The new additions are Peter Dinklage as the bad guy, Trask, fine but nothing spectacular, and Evan Peters as Quicksilver. (Yes, you're right - a different Pietro Maximoff to the one in AVENGERS....)  Peters doesn't have much to do, but he does star in the most awesome action sequence of any X-MEN movie to date, in which he goes so fast the reality around him slows down and he literally re-arranges bullets in the air.  Amazing scoring for that scene too. As for Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, well, he's played Wolverine so many times by now I almost don't think of him as acting anymore.

The heart of the film is the relationship between Mystique and Magneto.  Is he going to stay good or go bad?  And between Charles Xavier and, well, the world. Is he going to give in to depression or grasp the future, the future he can create?  It's this more than anything else that keeps us coming back to the franchise.  It's not just ever bigger and bolder action sequences but that these are grown up, complex, scarred characters that wrestle with their doubts and dissatisfactions. There are no easy choices. Everything carries weight. Everything matters.  That's what elevates X-MEN, and this instalment in particular, to something very special indeed.

X-MEN DAYS OF FUTURE PAST has a running time of 131 minutes and is rated PG-13. The movie is on global release.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

A few years ago, James Watkins made a brilliant little British horror film that was genuinely petrifying, and politically interesting, given its use of feral chav kids to hunt down a nice middle-class couple. Sadly, Watkins' latest film, an adaptation of Susan Hill's massively successful THE WOMAN IN BLACK, is about as banal, boring and benign as a horror movie can get. There are three problems - the direction, the script and the casting.  And given that there isn't much left of a movie if you get these three wrong, you can see why I've tagged this review "piss-poor".  

The story is a classic Victorian haunted house horror (though penned in the early 80s).  Arthur Kipps is a young solicitor sent to go through the documents at the deceased Mrs Drablow's imposing and isolated mansion.  The villagers prove hostile and reluctant to take him there - all but the rationalist squire Daily.  Soon, Kipps is seeing a mysterious woman in black; young children in the village are dying in brutal circumstances; and the house is acting against him...  The documents and Daily help Kipps understand the reason for the deaths, and together they try to appease the ghost.....

Apparently the horror afficionado and superb screenwriter Mark Gatiss (BBC's recent SHERLOCK) was asked to write the script. One can only dream of what might have been. Instead we get a screenplay from Jane Goldman (KICK-ASS) that uses every horror cliché without understanding or breathing life into them.  Similarly, James Watkins' workmanlike direction uses every horror trick - malevolent toys, spooky children, diagonal camera-angles - to no real effect.  It's like he read a "Polanski for Dummies" book.  But the biggest problem is the casting. Daniel Radcliffe just isn't old enough to convincingly play a grieving widower and father of a toddler. And he comes across as curiously inert and unexpressive, especially when playing across from the marvellous Ciaran Hinds and Janet McTeer (squire Daily and his mentally disturbed wife). It's going to be curious to see how many of the HARRY POTTER kids have a career beyond the franchise, but this movie, so reliant on Radcliffe alone in a haunted house, does not bode well.

The reason you see so few horror reviews on this site is that I am a complete girl when it comes to horror - I get scared by the smallest things. But I sat through this flick unscared and uninterested. Doubleplus not good.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK is released this weekend in the USA, Canada and Argentina. It opens on February 10th in the UK, Denmark, Greece and Portugal. It opens on February 17th in Spain; on February 24th in the Netherlands, Brazil and Poland; on March 2nd in Italy; on March 7th in Belgium; on March 9th in Turkey; on March 15th in France, Russia and Singapore and on March 29th in Germany, Hungary and Sweden.