MATERIALISTS*

Writer-director Celine Song's follow-up to her wildly, and rightly, praised debut feature PAST LIVES is a dud.  I just don't get it. It wasn't funny, it wasn't romantic, it didn't have a lot of dramatic tension, and it tried to balance wry commentary on modern dating with a very serious assault storyline that jarred tonally and was handled too lightly and peripherally for my liking. I don't think you get to use a plot device like that to further your protagonist's emotional arc.

Dakota Johnson stars as a modern day matchmaker dealing with New Yorkers' unrealistic expectations.  She values her clients according to material aspects - age, wealth, height - and given her childhood marred by parental fights over money - seeks a rich husband herself.  At a client's wedding she seemingly gets everything she wants in "unicorn" rich handsome Pedro Pascal.  But she also runs into her old boyfriend, a poor and shambolic wannabe actor played by Chris Evans. There is zero dramatic tension as to who the matchmaker will end up with.  This story is one of her journey to accepting actual real love as opposed to material comfort.  Even worse, there is none of that intimate, deeply felt, perceptive storytelling that we got in PAST LIVES.  There's only one scene that even approximates it, when Johnson and Evans' characters are observing a wedding from a distance, just as the couple created imaginary stories for diners at the start of PAST LIVES. What a tremendous let down.

MATERIALISTS is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes. It was released in the USA in June and will be released in the UK on August 15th.

KNIVES OUT - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Eight

KNIVES OUT isn't a bad movie. The luscious production design, the all-star cast, the three, count 'em, three laugh-out-loud moments are truly funny.  But I had expected so much more from writer-director Rian Johnson than just a straightforward old-fashioned slow-paced closed-house murder-mystery. I had expected some of the subversion of his debut modern high-school noir BRICK. I had expected at least some of the piquancy of a Wes Anderson movie, whose production design (THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS anyone?!) he so clearly apes.  But no. Oh no. What I got was a murder mystery along the lines of Agatha Christie but less well penned.  I guessed the first hour twist in the first five minutes, and the second hour twist in the first ten minutes of that hour. At least the second hour was more pacy. The first hour was so slow and dull that if I hadn't been trapped in the middle of the row I might've left.  I didn't understand the resounding laughter of the audience who were clearly having a good time. Maybe they just read less murder mysteries than I do and so were genuinely surprised at the ending?  I also really didn't like the heavy-handed political point that the film was trying to make. Ooooh look at all those exploitative rich white dick-heads bested by a warm-hearted immigrant.   What a waste of Christopher Plummer, of Michael Shannon, of so many others.  What a pain to sit through Daniel Craig's piss-poor Poirot pastiche and his Southern drawl.  The only real interest was seeing relative newcomer Ana de Armas do a great job as the "help" and protagonist of the film.  As a closing comment, it's interesting that I love detective fiction and thought Rian Johnson did a mediocre job with this. And I really liked LOOPER, but my husband who actually does life sci-fi, thought THAT was mediocre.  Maybe Rian Johnson just makes mediocre sci-fi movies that anyone who really loves the genre sees right through?

KNIVES OUT has a running time of 130 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2019. It is released in the USA on November 27th and in the UK on November 29th.

ANT-MAN

ANT-MAN.  Gotta admit, not a massive comic book fan, never heard of him.  But, seeing how great Marvel have been in reviving properties and having loved GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY despite no prior knowledge of the characters, I had high hopes. And with Paul Rudd cast in the lead role, I was expecting a similarly fun-filled, effects heavy action movie. But no. While ANT-MAN is certainly full of special effects and enhances and extends the Marvel Universe, it's the most unmemorable entry in the franchise. This is actually quite an achievement given that it stars Michael Douglas who retains his charisma.  But the problem is that the movie just isn't funny  - and in not being funny it wastes Paul Rudd. Worse still, the movie isn't interesting. It feels like it's being played exactly by the book with nothing new, nothing subversive, no real chemistry between any of the characters.  All of this made sense when I recalled that ANT-MAN was originally meant to be written and directed by Edgar Wright - a script that Joss Whedon called the best Marvel movie ever.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER 3D brought to you by proud sponsor, Edward Snowden

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER is an utterly satisfying comic-book summer blockbuster but I wonder how certain members of the audience will view its earnest liberal political agenda.  Which is to say that I agree with absolutely everything this movie says about the trade-off between freedom and security, but even I found the messaging rather heavy-handed. So much so that this movie could've been sponsored by Wikileaks or the Edward Snowden defence fund.  That said, it's the most politically engaged, elegantly written Marvel movie, so I'm really not complaining.

As the movie opens we see the formerly cryogenically frozen super soldier Captain America unfrozen and working for SHIELD  As well as catching up on fifty years worth of pop culture, he's also struggling to reconcile his earnest no-nonsense good guy values with his current job enacting secret missions in a world without clear-cut enemies. His boss, Nick Fury, isn't helping by being all paranoid and on the verge of launching three super-fighters capable of taking out terrorist threats before they happen, with the co-operation of World Security Council chief Alexander Pierce.  But soon Fury is the subject of an assassination attempt, Captain America himself is under attack, and Hydra is rearing its many-heads once again.  His only allies are the newly contemplative Natasha Romanoff aka The Black Widow and the similarly earnest Sam Wilson aka The Falcon.

There's a lot to love here without the politics. The dialogue is smart, if not as constantly wise-cracking as an IRON MAN movie.  I love the genuine chemistry between Chris Evans' Steve Rogers and Scarlett Johansson's Natasha.  I love the elegant way in which the scriptwriters (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) give us the prequel backstory by way of a museum exhibit.   The plot has a pleasing complexity without seeming wilfully obscure, and it allows minor characters a chance to shine - not least Sebastian Stan in what could've been a thankless cameo role as The Winter Soldier but drips with melancholy.  I even love the behind the scenes stuff - particularly the subtle ageing make-up on Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter, the gorgeous hand to hand combat choreography, and the cinematography from Trent Opaloch (DISTRICT 9) that's less than the motion sickness of Bourne but still engrossing enough to keep us on the edge of our seats. So kudos to the unlikely directors, the Russo brothers, for pulling it all together.

But this movie ultimately stands or falls on how you feel about its politics because, believe you me, this kind of earnest engagement with a highly contemporary issue is bold and brave, not least because of its ramifications for SHIELD within the real-life complex commercial universe that Marvel has established.  I love that beyond all the fighting this is ultimately a thoughtful, provocative and bold film - one that, like Captain America himself, has the courage of its convictions and a kind of audacity that is rare in a summer blockbuster.  That audacity caps itself off in the anti-casting of arch-liberal Robert Redford as a hawk, and the wonderfully subversive final scene involving Jenny Agutter.  We've come a long way from THE RAILWAY CHILDREN!

CAPTAIN AMERICA was a great summer blockbuster.  Its sequel is something more than that.  A great entertaining movie but one that also has the courage to pose serious questions about our world and doesn't patronise the audience with easy answers.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLIDER has a running time of 136 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA and 12A in the UK for infrequent moderate violence.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER is released this week in the USA, France, the UK, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, South Korea, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Argentina, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore and Spain. It is released on April 3rd in the UAE, Australia, Greece, Hong Kong, Macedonia, New Zealand, Russia and Thailand; on April 4th in Bulgaria, Canada, China, Estonia, India, Iceland, Lithuania, Mexico, Peru, Romania, the USA (wide release) and Vietnam; on April 9th in Serbia; on April 10th in Brazil, Hungary and Cambodia; on April 11th in Turkey; on April 19th in Japan.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

Once THE WIRE re-up was over, life seemed pretty empty. So empty that I submitted to a Buffy Re-Up, courtesy of two friends of mine who are super-fans of all things Joss Whedon. I was intially sceptical. Vampires? Teen angst? Lo-rent make-up effects? Seriously? However, I'm half way through series 2 and I have to say I'm really starting to enjoy Joss Whedon's wonderfully witty use of the English language - the energy and plasticity of it. I got that same sense of playfulness as I watched CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER. What gave it away? Characters uttering dead-pan cool witticisms rather than screaming when a big bad man blows up shit. The tone was anachronistically, inappropriately US-teen-cool for a movie supposedly set during World War Two. 

And then it all clicked! Joss Whedon had been given the script penned by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (the NARNIA movies). According to IMDBpro he is meant to have done a light re-write to tie it in to the wider Marvel universe, and in particular THE AVENGERS movie that he's directing. But I suspect that Whedon did more than just tie up some narrative threads. Because when this movie is at its most entertaining, and its most emotionally real, it simply DRIPS Joss Whedon.  You can see the impact of Whedon on the success of the final film. It works best in the first two thirds, where it really is all about character and relationships. It works least in the final third when it descends into a pretty much super-hero-movie-by-numbers final battle scene....

But anyway, enough of my current Whedon-kick and on with the normal review. CAPTAIN AMERICA is the latest feature-length incarnation of the comic book hero created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in the 1940s - a deliberately patriotic and wholesome character designed to boost morale during World War Two. The superhero is really Steve Rogers - a physically un-prepossessing but morally upstanding young man desperate to enlist and fight the Nazis. Dr Abraham Erskine, a German-Jewish refugee and Papa Stark use a serum and some Vita-Rays (TM) - to turn Rogers into a buff super-soldier. 

Interestingly, rather than kicking Nazi ass immediately, the lone super-soldier takes a side-turn, and is consigned to marketing war bonds - a parody of his future super-hero status, and highly reminiscent of the subtlety and post-modernity of Alan Moore's WATCHMEN. After this false start, Captain America start to fight in earnest, under the direction of Colonel Chester Phillips and his attractive protégée, Peggy Carter, not to mention Papa Stark. Captain America also has a bunch of mere mortal side-kicks, including his best friend Bucky, but rounded out with a Japanese-American, an African-American, an Irish-American, a Frenchman and a Brit. This isn't so much tub-thumping jingoism, then, as the United Nations. I would love to know from anyone who has read the comics whether this rainbow-nation of do-gooders is, as I suspect, a highly modern and politically correct re-write.

Steve Rogers' journey to becoming Captain America makes for a fascinating origins story. Chris Evans (FANTASTIC FOUR) gives a fine and convincing performance as the sensitive young man fiercely opposed to bullies, and he is ably supported by Tommy Lee Jones, Stanley Tucci, Haley Atwell and Dominic Cooper as Phillips, Erskine, Carter and Stark respectively. Stanley Tucci's Erskine has a wonderful comic interchange early on with Rogers over a bottle of schnapps that quickly and efficiently establishes a bond that pays off a few scenes later. It's a shame no comparable emotional bond was created between Rogers and best friend Bucky (Gossip Girl's Sebastian Stan). 

I loved the sepia-tinted 1940s production design, the costumes, the hair, and the sheer atmosphere of it all. And whoever CGI-morphed Chris Evans head onto a short, weedy body deserves much credit because the work is utterly seamless. I also loved the make-up that transforms Hugo Weaving's mad Nazi into the evil head of Hydra, Red Skull - intent on using the power of the Norse Gods to unleash war on the entire earth. In fact, just for the nostalgic look of the film - half Indiana Jones - half Watchmen flashback - this is probably my favourite superhero film of the summer, alongside the X-MEN movie. It turned out to be, rather to my surprise, a wonderfully well-made, beautifully-imagined, and Whedon-witty movie.

That said, the movie does have its faults. The Bucky storyline doesn't pay off in the way it should. The final third is dull. Peggy Carter has the beginnings of a great character - a feisty, bright woman. But what's she there fore apart from to look good? Stark builds shit; Phillips commands shit; everyone else fights shit; but Carter just pouts. I mean, what is this agent really meant to be doing? Is she a scientist? A military mind? What? Poor writing.  Similarly, the politically correct side-kicks are fine, but where is the moral clarity that should come with a fight against the Nazis. Oh but I forget. We're not really fighting the Nazis are we - but some weird ambiguous generally evil guy, who's harder to get a grip on, or care about. Speaking of which, I really do wonder at director Joe Johnston's (THE WOLFMAN, JURASSIC PARK III) indulgence in allowing Hugo Weabing to do the entire film with a German accent that sounds uncannily like Werner Herzog. It was so pitch perfect that is seriously took me out of the movie in every scene - undercutting the serious subject-matter and high emotional stakes.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER is on release in Canada, Italy, Poland, the US, Iceland, the Philippines, Argentina, Australia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, Armenia, Brazil, Colombia, Estonia, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Taiwan and the UK. It opens next weekend in Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Portugal and Spain. It opens on August 12th in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It opens on August 17th in Belgium, France, Germany and Finland. It opens on September 1st in Greece, the UAE and Turkey. It opens in Japan on October 15th.

SCOTT PILGRIM vs. THE WORLD - Heart-stripped Part Deux

So, I want to state that I DO think I have a sense of humour and I'm not some kind of kill-joy. It's not that I hate all things comic book or gamer or hipster, although lately Michael Cera has started to annoy me with his one-note, "hey I'm so geeky, but in a sort of superior way to you", schtick. I think what gets me with these hipsters is the fact that they're all making so much damn mainstream money out of trying to be counter-cultural. Like you can be counter-culture when your interviewed in Interview magazine. Anyways, despite my hipster-fatigue, I was REALLY looking forward to SCOTT PILGRIM vs THE WORLD for the simple fact that I think its director and co-adapter, Edgar Wright, is some kind of comedy genius. This is the man who, with SHAUN OF THE DEAD and the absolutely amazing HOT FUZZ made movies that combined a post-modern, slippery playfulness take on genre-cinema with real heart. And, boys and girls, you gotta have heart. Without heart - without characters that we emotionally engage with - no movie, no matter how clever and witty and inventive, is worth my time. And SCOTT PILGRIM really wasn't worth my time.

This is the concept. Scott Pilgrim is a loser, hipster, geek who plays in a band. He has no money but he can still afford cool trainers. (See video above.) He's dating a psycho-stalker high school chick called Knives Chau who is NOT as cool as her name would suggest and definitely needs to get to a SLAA meeting. But he really wants to be dating a hipster chick called Ramona Flowers, who has outlandishly coloured hair and Seven Evil Ex-es. I have yet to fathom why either girl would want to date Scott - let alone his ex-es, band-mate Kim, and now-successful rock-star, Natalie/Envy. He's a scrawny, incompetent, infantile guy who looks pre-pubescent. I mean, I know some girls like unthreatening, but this is unreal. Anyway, back to the movie. By quasi-dating Ramona, Scott unleashes the Seven Evil Ex-es who he has to fight, video-game stylee, in order to be with her; or gain self-respect; or discover who he really wants to be with; or something. Honestly, by about fight number three I was seriously losing interest. A mock video-game fight HAS NO STAKES. If you lose you don't die - you just click for your second life. If you win, there's just another stupid fight around the corner. And who cares who these characters end up with anyways? Yes the visual tricks are fun - the little knowing comments editorialising the action - and yes, it IS funny to take the piss out of Vegans and pretentious record producers but COME ON! This movie is a one-trick pony. Clever for the first ten minutes, but then repetitive, trite and superficial. I want and expect more from Edgar Wright. I want to see real friendship on screen - friendship like that shared between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in SHAUN and HOT FUZZ. Not this heart-stripped clever-clever nonsense.

Additional tags: Michael Bacall, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Kieran Culkin, Anna Kendrick, Ben Lewis, Aubrey Plaza, Nigel Godrich

SCOTT PILGRIM vs. THE WORLD is currently on release in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ireland, the UK and Iceland. It opens in late September in Croatia, Estonia, Sweden and Israel. It opens in October in Finland, Norway, Turkey, Greece, Brazil, Argentina and Singapore. It opens in November in Malaysia and Italy and in December in Greece and Spain. It opens in January 2011 in Germany and the Netherlands.

PUSH - Soporific sci-fi chase flick

PUSH is an incoherent, derivative sci-fi flick from the team behind stylish noir comedy, LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN. SLEVIN was guilty of using its convoluted plot as a mere clothes rail for quirky characters and lavish set pieces. PUSH is guiltier still. Basically it's just a chase movie set in Hong Kong. Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning and Camilla Belle are psychically gifted ex-pats on the lam from the a clandestine government agency that wants to exploit them for military purposes. It plays like a mixture of HEROES and JUMPER, and starts of as a tolerably well-made, if over-familiar, sci-fi flick. About half way through the script breakds down completely, with yawn-inducing results.

PUSH is on release in the US, France, Romania, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in Greece. It opens in March in Belgium, Singapore, Argentina and Turkey. It opens in April in Estonia, Italy, New Zealand and Poland. It opens on May 1st in Brazil and on August 13th in Germany.

STREET KINGS - once a patsy....

STREET KINGS is a dull, predictable, mis-cast, dirty-cop-thriller from the director of HARSH TIMES and writer of TRAINING DAY. The movie features Keanu Reeves as a meat-head, bent-out-of-shape, vigilante cop. Forest Whitaker is the corrupt police chief pulling his strings. The Reeves character has an attack of morality and goes after the gang-land killers of another cop who was actually snitching on him. It's a cute little Catch 22 situation. If he finds the killers, they could implicate him (wrongly, for once) in the hit. Should he take the fall but do the right thing? In a town so corrupt, what's the right thing anyways?

After LA CONFIDENTIAL and TRAINING DAY, I need to see something pretty special from a dirty cop film to justify its existence, and this film just doesn't have it. The script is derivative, paced too slow, and the plot twists will be obvious to anyone familiar with the genre. The casting is an even bigger problem. Keanu Reeves is plain unconvincing as a grizzled, hard-as-nails cop. He's about as hard as my grandmother. Hugh Laurie is similarly unconvincing as a foul-mouthed, intimidating Internal Affairs cop. Forest Whitaker hams it up as the Chief - it's like watching one of those grim Al Pacino performances where he randomly shouts things and pastiches himself. In fact, pretty much the only actors who do a good job are two young, relatively inexperienced cast members - Naomie Harris as a grieving widow and Chris Evans as a rookie cop.

STREET KINGS is on release in the Philippines, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Indonesia, Turkey, USA, Oman, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and the UK. It opens next week in Argentina, Denmark, Iceland, Spain and Sweden and the following week in Norway. It opens in May in Belgium, Hong Kong and in June in Australia, France, Italy and Poland.

Justifiably overlooked DVD of the month - THE NANNY DIARIES

United Airlines is how airlines used to be: no flat beds in business class and no handheld video on demand IFEs. Still, needs must, and I ended up watching THE NANNY DIARIES over my inedible vegetable ravioli.

The movie plays like the anoemic younger cousin of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. A young girl stumbles into becoming a high society nanny and is shocked to discover how ill-treated domestic servants are. Bizarrely, she sticks around to take the abuse, but doesn't stop whining about it. Finally the nanny tells the employer she's a bad mum and, this being Hollywood, it all ends happily ever after. Nanny gets a book deal and a boyfriend; mum gets a soul. Everybody Finds Themselves.

The movie doesn't seem all that concerned with satirising the upper classes in the way that DEVIL merrily took the piss out of narcissistic fashionistas. Instead, it's a pretty mean-spirited look at some rather tragic people. Scarlett Johansson plays the nanny as a bored victim and does nothing to gain my sympathy. Laura Linney tries her best with the role of the malicious employee, but it's not a big enough performance to gain the iconic status of Streep's Miranda Priestley. Elsewhere, Paul Giamatti is utterly unconvincing as the lecherous husband and Alicia Keys is wasted as the spunky best friend.

The real problem with the film is that the satire is diluted with schmaltz at every step. I'd expected better from joint directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who were responsible for the bleakly funny cult indie movie AMERICAN SPLENDOR. I also fear that Scarlett Johansson is becoming a contra-indicator. She was fine in GHOST WORLD and she had the perfect look for LOST IN TRANSLATION and GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING. But she's never particularly impressed me with her acting talent and she's made some godawful choices of late. BLACK DAHLIA anyone? She wasn't even the most memorable feature of MATCH POINT. One can only hope her latest Woody Allen movie resurrects her career.

THE NANNY DIARIES was released last year in the US, Canada, Russia, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Lithuania, South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, Estonia, the UK, Slovenia, Greece, Romania, the Philippines, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Poland, Turkey and Norway. It was released earlier in 2008 in Iceland, the Netherlands, Brazil, Finland and Kuwait. It opens in France on May 14th and in Belgium on July 2nd. It is also widely available on DVD.

FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER - refreshingly simple

The new FANTASTIC FOUR movie is unpretentious, kind-hearted and fun. It won't win any awards, but after the bloated, god-awful summer blockbusters I've been subjected to this year, RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER is arguably the best summer movie I've seen this year.

You know the MO. The Fantastic Four are like a love-able family who happen to have super-powers. There's none of that secret identity, inner turmoil crap. The nearest we get to an emotional crisis is that Dr Fantastic (Ioan Gruffud) and The Invisible Girl (Jessica Alba) keep having their wedding interrupted by super-villains! And as for political allegory or delusions of grandeur, the only charge is a faint whiff of Gitmo in the interrogation of the Surfer, but this passes very quickly. Frankly, no-one's taking this moving too seriously. Chris Evans is clearly having a blast, Ioan Gruffud is making rain and the talentless Jessica Alba is proving that Hollywood really is an equal opportunities employer.

In this episode of the franchise, the apparent villain is The Silver Surfer. He's silver, he surfs, he has the voice of Larry Fishburne and the body of Doug Jones. More importantly, he's not really a bad guy but the herald for the truly horrific Galactos. The plot arc sees the FF persuading the Surfer to help them battle Galactos and their old nemesis Victor Von Doom.*

Like I said, FANTASTIC FOUR 2 is not a great comic-book movie in the vein of the first Sam Raimi's SPIDERMAN movie. But neither is it an embarassment in the manner of SPIDERMAN 3. So if you want a good old-fashioned mediocre comic-book flick: this is the movie for you!

FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER is on release.

*Minor criticism and spoiler: Bear in mind that I have never read a comic in my life.....But if the Surfer could destroy the Galactos all along, why didn't he do it in the first place? Surely that would have alleviated the threat to his home planet, his beloved, and left him free from being complicit in genocide?! Another unrelated questions for fanboys: does Von Doom look like the Emperor from Jedi in the comics too?

TMNT - the franchise that dare not speak its name

One of the occupational hazzards of being the person in the family who is known to watch a bunch of films, is that you find yourself volunteered to chaperone a bunch of ankle-biters to movies that you would, in all prejudice, rather bite off your own ankle than watch. I can just about deal with the idea of a short cartoon about teenage mutant ninja turtles eating pizza, shouting "cowabunga" and prancing about on skyscrapers, but a full length movie was always going to be too long and too ridiculous even for me.

But TMNT - the franchise so eager to rebrand it's not even using its full name - is not a bad film. Director Kevin Munroe has deftly traversed the problem that grown men in latex suits look stupid by cunningly CGI-animating all the characters so that they all look stupid. Oh yes! in TMNT, not only are the turtles more buff, but the human characters are eerily elongated and distorted like a pastiche of manga. Fans will be happy, though, to see April, the turtles and Splinter back, although the villains are different. The plot, such as it is, involves the turtles being reunited to round up some evil beasties that are wandering the city causing havoc. Turns out an immortal Aztec warrior turned wall street tycoon (figures!) needs them to unlock a portal to another world and unleash hell on earth, Ghostbusters-stylee.....

The movie skips along at a furious pace, with not so much "cowabunga" as of old and a lot of fighting. Indeed, the whole movie is basically one loud, long, CGI fight scene with various armies of ninja-people, ninja-turtles, ninja-friends, April's house-mate in a hockey-mask, robo-ninjas, stone-ninjas, and a wolf-ninja for fun. I can't say it did much for me, but it was over soon enough and the kids seemed to get an adrenaline-rush and the desire to swing sticks at things. Which I gather is a good thing.

TMNT is on release in on release in Australia, Israel, Russia, Canada, Singapore, Turkey, the UK and the US. It opens in Belgium, the Philippines, Argentina, Greece, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Iceland, Norway, Spain and Venezuala next week. It opens in France, Germany and Austria on April 12th and in the Netherlands, Latvia and South Korea later in April. It opens in Finland on June 22nd.

SUNSHINE - Utilitarianism 101

SUNSHINE is for the most part a beautifully designed but predictable sci-fi movie. Some time in a future imagined by Alex Garland (THE BEACH), mankind is about to freeze to death as the Sun burns out. A small crew of astronauts is sent to deliver a nuclear payload that will somehow cause the Sun to be reborn (there goes the Science!), thus saving all of mankind. But the Icharus never made it. And so, seven years later (biblical?!) another eight man crew is sent to nuke the sun in Icharus II. They comprise: Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis (WHALE RIDER), Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans (FANTASTIC FOUR), Troy Garrity (MILWAUKEE, MINNESOTA), Hiroyuki Sanada (THE WHITE COUNTESS), Benedict Wong (A COCK AND BULL STORY) and Michelle Yeoh (MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA). And yes, Icharus II has a nice soothing HAL-like voice.

Director, Danny Boyle (TRAINSPOTTING, 28 DAYS LATER), and cinematographer Alwin H Kuchler combine to create some stunning visuals of space stations, passing planets and solar glare. And as things start to go wrong with the mission, they successfully ratchet up the tension. Of course, as the ethical questions and risk-return trade-offs are argued over by the crew, you feel like you're back in Ethics prelims. Heck, that's half the fun of sci-fi! And yes, it is marginally annoying that you can tell who'll last longest by who's the most beautiful and/or bank-able. And I must also admit that not once, not twice, but three times, at least half of the full-house at the National Film Theatre were tittering at unintentionally funny lines.

But for all that, SUNSHINE was a really great sci-fi movie (nicely acted, imagined and realised) until about half an hour into the end, when it turned into another sort of film entirely. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland seriously dropped the ball, and the fact that it still looked stunning and was edited in an innovative way couldn't stop me thinking they'd miscalculated badly. Shame.

SUNSHINE goes on release in Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Jamaica, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore and Taiwan on April 5th; in Iceland, Latvia, Mexico and the UK on April 6th; in Belgium and France on April 11th; in Argentina, Australia and Italy on April 12th; in Brazil, Norway and Poland on April 13th; in Japan on April 19th; in Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Slovakia on April 19th; in Finland, Spain, and Sweden on April 20th and in Estonia on April 27th. It does not open in the US until September 14th.