A HAUNTING IN VENICE**

We are trapped in a cycle of diminishing returns when it comes to Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot films.  ORIENT EXPRESS was a beautifully done, subtly updated, but largely respectful adaptation of the Agatha Christie source material. NILE was also lavish and earnest in its attempts to update the material, but by changing an intricate plot, Branagh utterly ruined the story.  And now we have A HAUNTING IN VENICE, incredibly losely adapted from A Halloween Story. It works neither as detective fiction nor as a ghost story.

Branagh stars as Poirot, now retired and reclusive, in post World War Two Venice.  He is tempted out of his mansion by his old friend, detective author Ariadne Oliver, played by Tina Fey as if she's in a Screwball Comedy.  It's a great performance but one wonders which film it actually belongs to.  They are not trying to investigate a murder but to debunk a medium called Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who Oliver and Poirot feel is exploiting the grief of opera singer Rowena Drake (Yellowstone's Kelly Reilly). Rowena recently lost her daughter and gathers a motley crew in her spooky Venetian house to make contact with her. There's the daughter's fiancé Maxime, the family doctor and his precocious son, her housekeeper, and Joyce's assistant.  When a storm sets in, we find ourselves in a locked-house mystery.

Writer Michael Green does not have form in creating his own murder-mystery plot and this one barely hangs together. Worse still, he lazily uses the Holocaust as character short-hand device.  This seems crude, especially in a film where Tina Fey is then trying to be a wise-cracking broad.  Pick a lane! I also didn't find the jump scares and obscure angles particularly frightening or effective. What a waste of a great cast and location!

A HAUNTING IN VENICE was released in cinemas in September and is now available on Hulu or other PVOD streaming services. It is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 103 minutes.

TROLLS WORLD TOUR

TROLLS WORLD TOUR is yet another film that should've been released in cinemas but is now available for you to stream at home. And I'm pleased to report that it's a delightful movie - and a worthy successor to the 2016 original.  

In this sequel, Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and her best friend Branch (Justin Timberlake) are living happily in their world of pop-music loving happy trolls. That is until they realise that the world is full of all different kinds of troll - and shock horror! not all of them like pop music! Some are into rock, or reggaeton, K-Pop, classical music or country.  Back in the day, their troll ancestors decided that the differences between the trolls were to great for them to live (and sing!) in harmony, so they all went to live in their isolated communities.  In the present day, a rock music loving troll called Barb wants to reunite all these trolls, and restore harmony by playing a magical power chord that makes them all love rock music. At first Poppy also buys into the idea that they should all be united, although for her this means loving pop music.  And so begins a short film about learning that people are better off doing what they love, and that true harmony comes from respecting difference rather than enforcing unity.

What I love about these films is how wonderfully imagined they are - the characters are so adorable - the colours so bright - the songs so infectious. The designers clearly had fun creating characters to embody the spirit of the different music styles - with a particular shout out to whoever came up with the look for Kelly Clarkson's country singer, complete with piled up Dolly Parton hair. This isn't a film with the knowing cynicism of SHREK. It's just genuine heart-felt heart-warming earnest fun.  And I think that's truly what we need right now.

TROLLS WORLD TOUR has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated PG. It is available on streaming services. 

ROBIN HOOD (2018)

Otto Bathurst's remake of the Robin Hood myth is a dismal effort. His directorial style is sub Guy Ritchie - all mockney bovver without any of Ritchie's kinetic energy or wit. The resulting film is a CGI heavy mess, full of dull action scenes and bad performances acting out a worse script.  Lead actor Taron Egerton has none of the charm or glee of his KINGSMAN role playing "Rob".  Eve Hewson is very pretty as his working class girlfriend Marion, but she has to also play a woman who thinks her boyfriend died in the crusades, only to find him inconveniently alive while she's shacked up with Jamie Dornan's Will Scarlett. Neither she nor the script betray the requisite emotional depth or range to pull off that storyline.  And WTF is Dornan doing here? Recent turns on UK TV show he's actually a very good actor.  He's definitely playing well below himself here. The same can be said of Ben Mendelsohn doing that evil villain thing he's done countless times before, not least in ROGUE ONE. He looks bored doing it, so it's no surprise we're bored seeing it. As for F Murray Abraham - magisterial in AMADEUS - he's utterly anonymous here.  Avoid at all costs.  

ROBIN HOOD is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 116 minutes. It was released last year and is now available to rent and own.

A PRIVATE WAR

Documentary Matthew Heineman (CARTEL LAND) returns to our screens with a fictionalised account of the final years of war journalist Marie Colvin - a story told recently in the superb doc UNDER THE WIRE [link]. His film opens with Marie in Sri Lanka, covering the civil war, being shot in the eye and acquiring her trademark eye-patch. The movie ends 11 years later, inevitably, with Colvin's death, the victim of a targeted bombing in Homs. In between these two events, we see Marie move between war zones and metropolitan dinner parties, carrying with her her trauma, drinking heavily to forget, blaming her editors for sending her out, daring her colleagues to face their face, or overlook it, to return to the war zone, unable to allow herself to quit. She was truly a superb woman, committed to exposing the impact of war on ordinary people, and her cussedness and intelligence one her the access to figures such as Gaddafi, and the respect of her peers and readers. But questions must be asked about the risks she took, whether it was worth it, and the men she led in her wake, not least her photographer Paul Conroy. There's also some tough questions to be asked about why Marie, of all the dead war reporters, gets docs and films.  Because she was so good? Yes, maybe. But maybe also because she was the iconic woman with the eyepatch?

This fictionalised account is well-enough made, with Rosamund Pike doing a superb impression of Colvin. A gritty script doesn't shy aware from her private fears and trauma, the contradictions in her predicament, and the grim reality of being a war reporter.  There's a superb set piece argument with her editor, played by Tom Hollander, that captures the questions at the heart of her story.  But I couldn't help but feeling that this version of events didn't add anything to the experience of watching UNDER THE WIRE, and that rather than being mediated by a fictionalised retelling, I'd rather just here this story from Paul, and from old footage of Marie, and from her friends, editors, colleagues.  This didn't seem to add any greater insight, and because the direction here is workmanlike, it just didn't seem to add anything. 

A PRIVATE WAR is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes.  The film played Toronto and London 2018 and was released last year in the USA. It will be released in the UK on February 15th 2019. 

ANTHROPOID

Writer-director-cinematographer Sean Ellis (CASHBACK) returns to our screens with a period thriller based on the true story of the assassination of the SS officer Reinhard Heydrich during World War Two.  Operation Anthropoid had Czech soldier parachuted back into the country by the British, collaborating with what was left of the Czech Resistance, scouting out Heydrich's typical route out of Prague Castle, to gun him down. History tells us that the initial attack was thought a failure, but that Heydrich did indeed die of his wounds.  The men responsible for the assassination - the only successful high-ranking assassination of a Nazi - were betrayed and after a courageous 6 hour gunfight in a church - killed. The SS razed villages and killed thousands of Czechs in reprisal. But Czecho was, as a result, seen as an ally and the Munich Agreement nullified.

It's testament to the film that despite knowing the history of Anthropoid, I was genuinely gripped by it.  The tension of planning and executing the attack was painful and the final shoot-out in the Church exquisitely choreographed and genuinely emotionally affecting. Most of all, the brutal scenes of torture were truly unforgettable and a final moral confrontation haunting.  I also love the fact that Ellis chooses to shoot the film in Prague, using many Czech actors to lend the film authenticity, and indeed show the source material respect. The problem is, however, that it forces his British lead actors into adopting what I am sure they must think are Czech accents. The film survives because of the force of Cillian Murphy's lead performance, which more than offsets Jaime Dornan's weaker contribution.

ANTHROPOID is rated R and has a running time of 120 minutes. The film is on release in the USA and UK.

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

The lead actors & director at the Berlin Film Festival.

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

So if you've read the middle-class middle-aged woman soft-porn fanfic that is FIFTY SHADES OF GREY your expectations for the movie are probably not high. Especially when you realise that the novelist, E L James, was very controlling (!) as to the adaptation, insisting on things like banal little email exchanges being kept verbatim.  And once you note that it has an R rating, which means that the studio has effectively cut the balls off the already fairly mild sex scenes, one wonders what's left to play for.