THE GENTLEMEN (TV)****

Guy Ritchie comes to our TV screens with a series that is a highly satisfying greatest hits mash-up of his mockney gangster films, like LOCK, STOCK to SNATCH. All the classic Ritchie tropes are here. Colourful East End gangsters in well-cut tweed. Thick as mince posh boys snorting coke getting rinsed by aforementioned gangsters. A cool, smart, stunning woman at the  centre of it all. Vinnie Jones in a cameo role. Illegal boxing. Travellers. Ganga farms on country estates. And a handsome protagonist who spends most of his time sorting out other people's bullshit. Oh and let's not forget the plotting - so complex, so full of double-crosses - and yet all resolving beautifully in the final act.

The good news is that while this show is set in the same world as Ritchie's feature film of the same name, you don't have to have watched that to enjoy the TV show. It opens cold establishing the bona fides of our hero, Eddie Horniman. He's a British soldier serving with UN Peacekeepers - and his skill for refined violence and defraying anger are going to come in handy. Eddie is played with suave cool by Theo James, of White Lotus season two fame. James treats this is a James Bond audition and is highly convincing in the role. 

The action begins when Eddie's father dies, leaving his title and estate to Eddie rather than his feckless big brother Freddy. Turns out daddy was leasing out the estate to Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) to grow industrial quantities of ganga, managed by Bobby's daughter Suzy (Kaya Scodelario). Oh, and Freddy is in hock to some mean Liverpudlian cocaine-dealers who funded his drug-induced gambling binge.  Meanwhile, Giancarlo Esposito plays a mega rich American dealer who is keen to take over the business, and Eddie just wants to clear his brother's debts and get his estate back.  The series arc is effectively the process of Eddie discovering that as much as he says he wants out, he's actually pretty good at being a gangster. 

I really enjoyed this show. The lavish country house settings are beautifully filmed. The characters are compelling, the costumes stunning and the music propels the action scenes. Ritchie knows exactly what he's doing with this material, and while the the tropes are familiar, it still felt fresh and I was genuinely struggling to figure out how it would all resolve. I absolutely loved the final final final twist and really hope we get a second season.

Of the performances, Daniel Ings is the break-out star, with an instantly iconic chicken scene - you'll know what I mean when you see it - at the end of the first episode. I was also pleasantly surprised to see Vinnie Jones deliver a modulated performance, rather than just playing a pastiche of his bad boy football persona. I can't believe I am saying this, but it's Jones who delivers the one genuinely emotional scene in the whole series. Kudos to him.

THE GENTLEMEN is an eight episode miniseries available on Netflix.

EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE

Zac Efron is absolutely perfect as US serial killer Ted Bundy - a man who appeared kinda ordinary looking on photos but whom so many women described as charismatic and handsome. That charisma and handsomeness lured them into a false sense of comfort, and at least 30, to death and dismemberment.  Not that we see much of that in a film that is superb in its period detail and at showing the charming side of Bundy, but shies away from showing what the judge in this case calls his utter lack of humanity. The result is a lopsided film that does a disservice to his victims and (of course, this matters far far far less) to the audience.  Yes, we DO need to see his charm, but we also need to see the horror. Perhaps the problem is that the film is based on the memoirs of his fiancée, so she wouldn't have known that stuff, but my goodness, the director Joe Berlinger sure does having directed the multi-part Netflix doc on Bundy. So why not work with Michael Werwie, the adaptor of those memoirs, to show the parallel story of Bundy's interiority.  Otherwise, the movie as it stands, feels odd, and the final scene confrontation between Bundy and his long-time fiancee feels unearned and fake. Similarly, director Berlinger could easily have contrasted the sunny, warm-toned courtroom scenes, presided over by an avuncular and wry John Malkovich with a more gritty, nasty reality - a reality that contrasts with and interrogates Bundy's psychopathic charm.  Sadly, all we're left with are some good performances in a misguided film.

EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK. It is on release in Netflix worldwide except the UK where it is available on Sky Cinema On Demand and in cinemas.  It played Sundance and Tribeca 2019. 

THE MAZE RUNNER

THE MAZE RUNNER is the latest in a series of dystopian action films aimed at the teenage market and adapted from successful Young Adult fiction franchises.  As with HUNGER GAMES and DIVERGENT we find ourselves in a post apocalyptic America where teenagers are pitted against each other in a kind of mad game, society riven by factions and controlled by some kind of overlord.  In this case, the protagonist isn't a girl but a boy, Thomas (Teen Wolf's Dylan O'Brien) who wakes up to find himself inside a Glade enclosed by the Maze.  A society of Lost Boys explains the rules to him - each person has a role in society, and the runners get to go inside the Maze and find food, although to be trapped overnight is to be killed by the Grievers.  A girl called Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) is sent into the mix with two vials of anti-venom and a jolting Big Reveal in the final 30 minutes of the film.  Be assured that if you're familiar with the genre, it won't be a big surprise.

What the plot lacks in originality or genuine scares, it makes up for in good acting. The mostly British lead cast sport know how to sell the complex emotions of abandonment, brute cruelty, camaraderie and mistrust.  Thomas Brodie Sangster (GAME OF THRONES) is very sympathetic as one of the Glade's leaders, and Will Poulter is, as ever, the most captivating of the actors in a tricky unsympathetic role. The movie has a far lower budget than HUNGER GAMES or DIVERGENT but this isn't a problem. It is beautifully designed and the lack of big show piece effects focusses the audience's attention on the characters. 

Overall the familiarity of the set-up is a bit of a problem, as is the occasionally hammy dialogue. But I'm sufficiently interested to see what's next to welcome the inevitable sequel.

THE MAZE RUNNER has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The movie is on global release.

SOUTHCLIFE EPISODE FOUR: ALL SOULS

In the fourth of Channel 4's event drama, SOUTHCLIFFE, it is a year after Stephen Morton went on a mass shooting in the seaside town, and we see the devastating impact of those events on its victims' families.  The parents of the teenage girl, Anna Salter (Kaya Scodelario) take up most of the screen time.  Disturbed mother Claire (Shirley Henderson) becomes obsessed with an immigrant woman that she is believes has been forced into prostitution and takes desperate measures to infiltrate the so-called brothel and free her.  Her husband Andrew (Eddie Marsan) is supportive but uncomprehending and lost in his own grief.  The other major story is that of journalist David Whitehead (Rory Kinnear)  who returns to Southcliffe having received a mysterious note, ostensibly to investigate whether Stephen Morton is still alive, but really it's to pick at his old grudge against the town that covers up its own scandals.  

The final episode of SOUTHCLIFFE peters out and merely comes to an end without any kind of resolution. Maybe that's the point that writer Tony Grisoni wants to make - that a town never really recovers or moves on or gets closure from such events. The wounds are deep and fester and even decades later the grudges are still there. The problem is that this makes for a drama that is alternately hysterical and melodramatic (Claire Salter) or almost numbingly dull (David Whitehead.) I am not sure what, at the end of this series, has been achieved, other than four hours of unrelentingly grim, dour and depressing drama.  It was not engaging, it did not reveal any great emotional insight, and certainly wasn't entertaining. 

THE THIRD EPISODE OF SOUTHCLIFFE ORIGINALLY AIRED IN THE UK ON AUGUST 18TH. 

SOUTHCLIFFE EPISODE 2: LIGHT FALLS

Rory Kinnear as the journalist David Whitehead returning to SOUTHCLIFFE.

In the second episode of Channel 4's brooding, despairing, SOUTHCLIFFE, the narrative switches to the events just before and after the mass shooting in the sleepy British town. We see more of Rory Kinnear's buttoned up but traumatised journalist, David Whitehead, forced to return to his hometown as the body count increases, and learn a little about why he is so dismissive of the "nice small town" image.  And we see more of the killer Stephen Morton (Sean Harris) struggling to care for his ailing mother.  But the real focus of the episode are two of the families that are victims of the shooting. The first is depicted as a typical suburban loving young family, but almost predictably we learn that the father is cheating on his wife.  The second is the family of the social worker (Shirley Henderson) caring for Stephen's mum. They seem genuinely caring, worried for their teenage daughter (Kaya Scodelario) who wants to go travelling, and trying IVF for another baby. 

As in the first episode, Sean Durkin's direction is carefully paced and elliptically edited. The tone is grey and dark green - oppressive and depressing.  Rory Kinnear is superb as the stiff upper-lip journalist, stating the horrible with a matter of fact air and a repressed anger.  He's the only character where I am genuinely interested in seeing where he goes.  The first family is a cliché, but there's one single scene that redeems the plotline - when the lads are drunk, singing to Oasis in a pub, and the father starts to break down.  It's for visual images like this that we watch high class TV. The second family is better acted though - Eddie Marsan and Shirley Henderson always masterful and utterly sympathetic.   The way in which writer Tony Grisoni shows each member of that family coming to an understanding of what is happening - the sound design - the panicked voicemails - is the second piece of exceptional film-making in this otherwise rather banal episode. 

SOUTHCLIFFE EPISODE 2: LIGHT FALLS was originally broadcast in the UK on August 5th.

SOUTHCLIFFE EPISODE 1: THE HOLLOW SHORE

Sean Harris as ex-squaddie Stephen

SOUTHCLIFFE is the latest event television, which is basically a posh word for a highbrow mini-series. It follows in the steps of the Sundance Channel's TOP OF THE LAKE and ITV's hugely successful BROADCHURCH - combining an all-star cast with auteur cinema production values and gritty realism and psychological heft.   The series centres on the traumatised war veteran Stephen, played by Sean Harris (Micheletto, THE BORGIAS), and the events that lead him to go on a killing spree in his sleepy British sea-side town.  That isn't a spoiler.  Because in Tony Grisoni's intelligent and empathetic script, Stephen's actions are revealed up front. The series then becomes about why the killer did what he did, and even more, the impact on the town.

In the first episode, THE HOLLOW SHORE, we focus on the events and indignities that lead Stephen to kill.  We see Stephen frustrated with caring for his ailing mother, pissed about by friends who owe him cash, mocked by the villagers who saw through his delusions of being in the SAS, and generally despairing that nobody understands him, or the war that he has seen.  He strikes up a friendship with Chris (Joe Dempsie - Gendry in GAME OF THRONES).  A naive kid who's friend has just died in a crash and needs some structure and perhaps the adrenaline rush of war. Meanwhile, journalist and Southcliffe native David Whitehead (Rory Kinnear - Tanner in SKYFALL) is remembering his bullied childhood and drinking heavily in his adulthood.

There's a lot to admire in SOUTHCLIFFE.  It's patient, tense, beautifully shot, well-acted, and has a daring approach to narrative, folding memory into contemporary events, and challenging the concept of with-holding the killer's identity.  Director, Sean Durkin, most famous for his Sundance Festival smash, MARTHA, MARCY, MAY, MARLENE presents us a vision of the English seaside town that's muddy-grey and brown, oppressive, claustrophobic and dead-end depressing.  

But I couldn't help but think I'd seen this all before.  The traumatised ex-squaddie is a totem of post-Gulf War cinema and TV - as is the beaten down carer of the invalid parent.  Similarly, we're very familiar with the Lynchian idea that there's brutality and sadism behind the white picket fences not least from writer Tony Grisoni's most recent foray into TV, RED RIDING. SOUTHCLIFFE's going to have to provide something more radical and ground-breaking if it isn't going to be "just another" well-acted, earnest British drama. 

SOUTHCLIFFE EPISODE 1: THE HOLLOW SHORE was first broadcast in the UK on August 4th 2013.

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 2 - EMANUEL AND THE TRUTH ABOUT FISHES

Up until now, Francesca Gregorini was probably famous, if at all, for making the movie, TANNER HALL, in which Rooney Mara took her new first name from the character she was playing.  But that's about to change. Her new film, EMANUEL AND THE TRUTH ABOUT FISHES, is absolutely wonderful - a slippery, deeply affecting psychological drama that strikes a delicate balance between profound emotion and flashes of laugh-out-loud dark comedy. 

The film centres around the relationship between two women - single mother Linda (Jessica Biel) and teenager Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario).  Emanuel is still grieving for the death of her mother in childbirth, and resents her relentlessly upbeat stepmother Janice (Frances O'Connor).  She is, however, drawn to a boy she meets on a train, Claude (Aneurin Barnard), in a situation that could be a sick-making meet-cute but which actually works.  And she is, fatefully, drawn to Linda.  In a first-act twist which most will see coming, we see the two women bound together in a deep secret, and its desperately pathetic (literally) to see Emanuel strive so hard to keep it, while soaking up the crypto-maternal love from Linda.  All the more sad, we see Emanuel's stepmother shut out of just the kind of mother-daughter relationship she craves.  If all this sounds rather emo and downbeat then believe me when I say that there are moments of the darkest, most wicked humour that counter-balance the deep longing.  There's also a rich seam of visual metaphor that comes together in a wonderfully moving and affecting dénouement.

That the movie works at all is testament to Gregorini's delicately balanced script, that matches explicit verbal wit with scenes of desperate grief.  In the hands of a less accomplished director, or worse actors, the movie could easily have fallen into B-movie melodrama, or worse still, a movie we laugh at rather than with.  And here we come to the biggest surprise of all.  I'd only previously seen Kaya Scodelario in Andrea Arnold's gorgeous WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and to my mind, Scodelario was by far the weakest link. By contrast, in this movie she utterly convinces as the clever, sensitive and deeply empathetic teenager who consciously chooses to involve herself in an ambiguous and emotionally treacherous situation.  But the real star of the piece is Jessica Biel.  Of course, I think this is Biel's best performance to date, and some might say that's a backhanded complement given the questionable quality of her back catalogue.  Well, now we know that that reflects the paucity of material offered to her, rather than her talent, because in this film she takes a role that could have become a bad joke and lends it gravity and dignity. I dearly hope that this performance brings her greater opportunities because I can't wait to see what she does with them.

EMANUEL AND THE TRUTH ABOUT FISHES played Sundance and Sundance London 2013. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 14 - WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011)

Andrea Arnold (RED ROAD, FISHTANK) is an exceptional British director - a woman whose films take us under the skin of the characters she is portraying. She isn't a director of dialogue but a director of sensory perception. We hear the wind; dogs scuffling; kisses. We can almost feel the texture of worn clothes; curled hair; ruffled blankets; the mist on our face. We feel the relationship between two people from the way they are in each other's presence, not from the dialogue. And every emotion felt by the characters is mirrored in nature, brought to us with startling clarity by Robbie Ryan's award-winning cinematography. In short, Andrea Arnold echoes the authenticity and heightened sense-perception of Terrence Malick - high praise indeed - but justified. All these qualities make Andrea Arnold the perfect director to take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - a movie whose characters are so much embedded in the wild beauty of the Yorkshire Moors. Working in collaboration with screenwriter Olivia Hetreed (GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING), Arnold has taken a bold approach to the source novel. She only portrays the first half of the novel, takes away the framing device of Nelly recounting the story to a traveller, as well as the gothic vision that opens the novel.  What this does is allow her to take her time over establishing the central characters and conflicts.  

The Earnshaw family live in a ramshackle farmhouse on the Moors in the early nineteenth century.  The puritanical father brings home a poor young black boy, later baptised as Heathcliff, throwing the elder son, Hindley into brutally violent jealousy and contempt and the young daughter Catherine into a kind of selfish, selfless profound love.  When the father dies, Hindley brutalises Heathcliff; and his poor, rough person stands in sharp contrast with the smooth refined Linton family.  And so, when Edgar Linton proposes, Cathy accepts, though feeling she is betraying both herself and Heathcliff, who overhearing, runs away. So ends the first hour of the film.  In the second hour, Heathcliff has returned a rich man, and Cathy is now married to Edgar.  Their love is hemmed in by Edgar sending his sister, Isabella, as chaperone, and when Heathcliff learns Cathy is pregnant, he returns this apparent "betrayal" by seducing Isabella, so setting off a nervous reaction in Cathy.

The story is, then, powerful, passionate, violent - filled with supposed and real slights, revenge, and a love so painful to bear it results in self-destructive behaviour.  For it to work on screen, we have to feel that visceral connection between Cathy and Heathcliff - we have to believe that their every breath and decision is coloured by the connection.  In the first half of the film, I absolutely believe that thanks to some exceptional casting, the portrayal of young Cathy and young Heathcliff sets a new benchmark among the tens of film adaptations. Shannon Beer and Solomon Gave quietly, powerfully, portray a real and charismatic connection - they are quite simply magnetic. Sadly, the movie is let down by indifferent casting in the later scenes, with Kaya Scodelario (Effy in TV's "Skins") and James Howson.  I didn't buy into their relationship - Howson was too milksop, too little darkly enjoying his revenge on Hindley, not malicious enough with Isabella - and Scodelario simply didn't have the look of a wild bird tamed, caged - she looked to Isabella-ish!   Also, I know we are meant to suspend our disbelief, but the two Cathy's look utterly dissimilar. One feels that better casting would've provided the continuity seen in the Young and Teen Kevins in Lynne Ramsay's WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS played Venice (where Robbie Ryan won Best Cinematographer) and Toronto 2011. It opens in the UK on November 11th; in Spain on November 25th; in Slovenia on January 26th; and in Poland on March 23rd.

MOON - the first sci-fi flick to make it to my Best Of list

MOON is the assured debut feature from writer-director Duncan Jones, featuring a stand-out performance from Sam Rockwell as an astronaut suffering from acute loneliness.

Jones wastes no time in establishing the conceit with a pitch-perfect faux-TV-spot. In some indeterminate future, Earth has solved all its energy problems by mining Helium-3 from the dark side of the moon. The operation is mostly automated, but there's a poor schmuck overseer on a three-year contract (Rockwell). In the final weeks before returning to his wife and daughter he suffers an accident and starts, apparently, hallucinating an alternative, clean-cut super-functional Sam. Is his sub-conscious creating a play-mate? Or is their something more sinister afoot?

Showing just how much you can do with a limited budget and some miniature models, Jones perfectly evokes the shabby-futuristic lunar base, complete with HAL-like omniscient robot Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). I particularly liked the naff touch of having him show emotions through emoticons! But this is truly Rockwell's movie, with assured performances in two very different characters - Sam at the start of the mission - a neat, ambitious, temperamental man: and Sam at the end of the mission - mellowed, messy, apathetic. And while this is, basically, a serious, ideas-based movie, there are moments of humour, or perhaps better put, weirdness, as the two characters face off over a ping-pong table on the road to friendship. The real trick is that by the end of the film, I felt completely emotionally invested in the fate of Sam Bell, and was on the edge of my seat for the final twenty minutes.

I am not a big sci-fi fan, and I can imagine some purists getting cheesed off at the lack of zero-gravity and whatnot. But I think you can take a more high-level view that this movie is sci-fi at its purest. Rather than getting bogged down in super-impressive CGI shots and action sequences, you have sci-fi as it was meant to be - exploring ideas. You also get a film that is steeped in the sci-fi classics and has subtle nods to them while also creating something new and interesting. I can't wait to see what Jones does next, and I'm hoping that the movie's indie status and limited release doesn't bar Rockwell from some acting gongs.

MOON played Sundance, Tribeca and Edinburgh 2009. It opened earlier this summer in the US and Canada. It is currently on release in the UK. It opens in Russia on September 17th; in Australia on October 8th; in the Netherlands on October 15th and in Spain on October 23rd.