DISCLOSURE DAY**

Bless his heart! Steven Spielberg still thinks that network news is relevant. Steven Spielberg still thinks that if people watch something on network news that they'll believe it. Steven Spielbering still thinks that Roswell is cool. Steven Spielberg is still obsessed with midwest middle-class childhood Americana. Steven Spielberg still believes that, in the words of Woody Allen's MANHATTAN, "you have to have a little faith in people". FFS. Have you not seen the past decade? In the words of Peep Show's Super Hans, "People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people, Jeremy." Which is not to say that Spielberg hasn't made a simultaneously schmaltzy AND cyncal film. How else to explain the very deliberate care to tell ticket-buyers in Red States that the existence of aliens is compatible with the Book of Genesis?

Okay so what's the plot? Super intelligent aliens have been making contact with man since Roswell, and man - or at least American men - have been hushing it up and exploiting them ever since. A bunch of rebels (Colman Domingo, Josh O'Connor) steal the video proof and rather than just uploading it to TikTok they partner up with Emily Blunt's TV weather girl to put it out on local TV. That's it.

Now there are a bunch of MacGuffins and side hustles involving Blunt's character being able to suddenly speak a bunch of languages, and O'Connor's character being a maths savant, and Eve Hewson's character having a crisis of faith, but it's all just bollocks really. Colin Firth occasionally turns up in a turtleneck as a cross between Dr Evil and Basil Exposition and almost every line reading of a deeply hackneyed script (David Koepp and Spielberg) prompts unintended mirth.

And my enjoyment is not helped by the fact that Emily Blunt now falls into that category of actor (Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Nicole Kidman) whose plastic surgery and over-filled face is a distraction. I spent the entire movie wanting to give her an antihistamine. 

Oh yes, this being Spielberg there's also a weird-ass interlude featuring a Hansel and Gretel house and some poor kid has gone through CGI. I was wondering if Emily Blunt's face is now so waxy and unreal that they were forced to CGI a real kid to make her look like Blunt's younger facsimile.  The CGI is really bad by the way. The CGI animals are rubbish. I have seen a more convincing and emotionally affecting fox on Lego Masters Australia.

It's sad to see an old man stuck in 1987 and churning out sci-fi as if the past thirty years of film-making (or politics for that matter) didn't happen. Has he not watched any Gareth Edwards or Denis Villeneuve? Are we meant to be impressed by car chases that look like the Dukes of Hazzard when we just saw Paul Thomas Anderson break cinematic ground not once but twice in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER? 

Retire, mate. Retire.

DISCLOSURE DAY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 145 minutes. It is on global release.

MICKEY 17*****

MICKEY 17 is Korean writer-director Bong Joon Ho's much anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-winning political satire, PARASITE. Once again, his concerns are with economic inequality and political hypocrisy, and as with PARASITE, MICKEY 17 contains moments of trenchant laughter.  But the mood here is lighter, zanier, looser, and altogether more.... gonzo than PARASITE.  The political satire is broad and crude, the violence is ultra, but at heart this is a gorgeous love story and a plea for humanity.

Robert Pattinson continues to make astonishingly good career choices and stars as the eponymous Mickey.  He's basically a harmless but feckless and aimless man in a near-future dystopia.  On the run from mafia loansharks, abetted by his supposed best mate Timo (Steven Yeun), Mickey stupidly signs up to be an Expendable.  He is basically an indentured slave to an exploitative space colonisation mission, put in harms way, killed again and again, and then just reprinted out.  As the film opens, we are on the seventeenth iteration.

Joy of joys! Feckless Mickey somehow falls in love and lust with Naomie Ackie's kickass space-cop Nasha and she loves him back! In fact, I would read this film as a love story most of all.  Improbable, hilarious, sexy, weird, but a love story nonetheless. But things get weird when Mickey 17 is somehow alive at the same time as his sassier, more mischievous reprint Mickey 18.  And both set out to rise up against the kleptocratic rule of a character clearly based on Trump, with a Macchiavellian wife modelled on Imelda Marcos.  Mark Ruffalo seems to be reprising his role in POOR THINGS here, but it's a no less fun turn for that.   But the star of the show is clearly Pattinson.  And the the Creepers. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the plot but I would pay a LOT of money for a plushy that looks like a baby creeper.

MICKEY 17 has a running time of 137 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

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. 

POOR THINGS***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 11

Iconic director of scabrous black comedies, Yorgos Lanthimos (THE FAVOURITE) returns to our screens with a steam-punk set, sexually charged satire so dark and strange that is left me gasping for breath.  Along with ZONE OF INTEREST, this film is doing something so audacious, so compelling and so far removed from the ordinary run of films that it deserves all the awards.  Whether it proves too strange, disturbing and provocative to appeal to a mainstream jury remains to be seen.

Emma Stone gives an astoundingly brave and career defining performance as Bella Baxter, a Frankenstein creation of adult woman and childlike brain.  We watch her rapid acquisition of language and intellectual ideas and sexual desires. Better explained in the source novel by Alasdair Gray, as she only knows her adult body, she has no shame or internalised misogyny. Bella is as free with her body as her thoughts.

Bella was brought to life by her guardian, Godwin (Willem Dafoe) and lives in an elaborate steampunk world of Lanthimos' vivid imagination. In Lanthimos' conception "God" is himself a victim of his surgeon-father's experiments.  Bella finds herself falling for the harmless, earnest Dr McCandless (Rami Youssef) but elopes with the charming, rogueish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn. It is here that her adventures, and ours, really begin, thanks to an uproariously funny and award worthy performance from Mark Ruffalo - apparently having the time of his life - and Lanthimos' beautifully reimagined  Mediterranean cities and Victorian hotel rooms. A shout out too for casting the iconic Hanna Shygulla as a wise old woman called Martha and Kathryn Hunter as a jaded Parisian madam. 

I cannot begin to describe the delights of a film that gives full flower to Lanthimos' dark gothic imagination - whether the production design of Baxter's house and successive interiors, to the wildly transgressive costumes that Bella wears, to the jarring, disturbingly brilliant score from Jerskin Fendrix. It is as if every element of the crew comes together in to deliver a heightened, sensual experience that frames and enables Stone's outlandish but also deeply moving performance. This is complete film-making of an extra-ordinary level of skill and accomplishment.  This is not to be missed, and on a big screen if possible.

POOR THINGS has a running time of 141 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London 2023. It will be released in the USA on December 8th.

FOE** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 8

Another day, another festival film that is well-acted and directed but where the story isn’t really worth the candle.  Because make no mistake, whatever the advertised description, FOE isn’t really a sci-fi film about a dystopian climate-ravaged near-future:  it’s actually a relationship drama about a bad marriage.  Which is not to say that you can’t make a compelling film about a bad marriage - just look at Noah Baumbach’s 2019 festival favourite MARRIAGE STORY, or pretty much the entire oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman. But FOE, and PRISCILLA, and MAESTRO, and FINGERNAILS, are all basically bad marriage dramas and none of them are compelling.

So let’s start with the sci-fi conceit. Writer-director Garth Davis (LION) has no track record in writing sci-fi, and maybe no interest in writing sci-fi, and it shows. He is, however, adapting a book by Iain Reid which may get into this in more depth. What we get on screen is the story of a woman, Hen, who has fallen out of love with her husband Junior, then falls in love with his AI Cylon replacement instead.  This is a tale an old as time, or at least as old as Martin Guerre (better known to western audiences as that Richard Gere film SOMMERSBY).  If you want to get into the nuances of how this might play out with AI alternates, then I would once again urge you to watch Ronald D Moore’s Battlestar Galactica remake.  By contrast, FOE isn’t really interested in mining those nuances.

Okay, so grant the movie the grace of parking the sci-fi conceit to one side.  How does it play as straightforward relationship drama?  We are on stronger ground here thanks to strong lead performances from two very talented actors: Saoirse Ronan (LITTLE WOMEN) as Hen and Paul Mescal (ALL OF US STRANGERS) as Junior.  But when two people drift apart simply through over-familiarity and isolation - when there is no actual dramatic event that brings them into free-fall (not even in this sci-if conceit) then what are we left with? Two hours of mild bickering and mild make-up sex.  It just ain’t enough to fill a near two-hour running time.

This is all a tremendous shame as the crew is as impressive as the cast. I loved cinematographer Matyas Erdely’s sepia-toned interiors and drought-scape exteriors.   I really loved the score by Oliver Coates, Park Jiha and Agnes Obel. In fact, it’s the score more than anything in the writing that reminds us we are in a sinister, dystopian sci-fi film.  I also really loved some of Garth Davis’ visual flourishes, when they sporadically occur. There’s a great scene near the end which, without spoiling it, involves a vacuum and plastic, that was absolutely visually arresting. It just wasn’t enough to save me from boredom.

FOE has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R. It opens in the USA on October 6th and in the UK on October 20th.

FINGERNAILS** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Official Competition - Day 6

FINGERNAILS is a social satire that reads like LOBSTER-lite in a retconned 1980s America - sort of like Lanthimos meets Gondry but with a gentler more sporadic sense of humour.  I suspect that inside Christos Nikou's two hour film there's an absolutely cracking one hour episode of Black Mirror waiting to be edited out on Final Cut Pro. 

The high concept of the film is that couples can check if they are really in love by allowing scientists to yank off a fingernail each and run some kind of cockamamie test. The problem is that most couples, who might have been quite happy, discover that the computer says they are not compatible. Similarly, our protagonist Anna (Jessie Buckley) has tested positive, but is actually running through the motions with her boyfriend Ryan (The Bear's Jeremy Allen White).  The person she's actually attracted to is her colleague at the Love Institute, played by ROGUE ONE's Riz Ahmed. 

I guess there's some interesting stuff here about the social pressures of the wellness industry making you second guess your own instincts. But we've seen this done better, darker, nastier and frankly funnier before. The only real saving grace of this version is Riz Ahmed, who is really very funny indeed.

FINGERNAILS is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It played Toronto, San Sebastian and London 2023. It goes on limited release in the USA on October 27th before being released on streaming on Apple TV a week later globally.

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.

MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE**** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Preview

MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE is an absolutely charming, funny, inventive romantic comedy for aficionados of the genre. Modelled on WHEN HARRY MET SALLY with a side-order of screwball comedy, this is the film for those of us who tried to forge relationships in the era of tinder and insta celebrity culture, against the backdrop of populist politics and the pandemic. The film may well be set in the future but it very much speaks to our times, and even our nostalgia for those janky 1980s video games.  The aesthetic is deliberately lo-fi, day-glo coloured, and square aspect ratio'd.  It's like playing with a first gen Nintendo, but with the quick-witted dialogue of the best Woody Allen movie. Massive kudos to writer-director Michael Lull Lutwak. I can't believe this is his debut feature: it's so assured and despite its heavy references, genuinely unique. But also kudos to the lead actors, Zosia Mamet (Girls) and Aristotle Athari (SNL), who have real chemistry.  I actually believed in their multi-year friendship / romance and was rooting for them to win.  But most of all, kudos to Erin Darke who absolutely steals scenes as the 1940s wise-cracking screwball heroine AI/mech Mar14 who seems to be channelling Barbara Stanwick. 

MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE has a running time of 93 minutes. It played SXSW 2023 and does not yet have a commercial release date.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE*

I first tried to watch this film last year and gave up after 20 minutes. When it won a bunch of Golden Globes I tried again and it made it through an hour twenty.  I wasn't going to go back but a friend said there was this amazing speech by Ke Huy Quan that was SO moving so I watched again to the end. Alls I can say is that I'm really happy Ke Huy Quan is finally getting work again and that Michelle Yeoh is finally getting recognition as a serious actress. And I'm super glad the "two Dans" - who directed and wrote this movie really love sci-fi and meta verse films and Kubrick. But this film is a mess. A really boring, bullshit mess and I do NOT get the hype.  

Somewhere in it's bloated running time there is  touching story about a middle-aged woman who runs a laundrette and is trying to file her taxes. She is trying to reconcile herself to her life choices, and trying to rescue her daughter from depression, and trying to rediscover her love for her husband, and indeed herself.  THAT would be a worthwhile film. We rarely see such stories of middle-aged women, let alone Asian women.  But this film is so crowded with juvenile humour and what-if scenarios in alternative universes that the actual deep emotion is undercut.  I can't FEEL if I'm being distracted by Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis with hot dog fingers. Maybe that's on me. 

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated R. It played SXSW 2022 and is on release globally.

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.

THE MIDNIGHT SKY

THE MIDNIGHT SKY is a deeply derivative, mediocre sci-fi movie that will be utterly predictable and unsatisfying to anyone even half decent with the canon. It stars and is directed by George Clooney. He plays a scientist on a future earth ravished by some kind of non-specific disaster. Naturally he's also dying because Pathos. As is the way with these sorts of film, scientific geniuses are self-involved dicks, so earlier in his life he has turned his back on the love of his life and his daughter. So when in old age this dying scientist starts seeing a young girl called Iris in his arctic base, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he's hallucinating his little abandoned girl. Together they travel to a different arctic base to send a signal to some astronauts not to come home, but to go back to a moon that is capable of sustaining life. Why does George need to travel to another base? So that he can turn in one of those Man vs Nature performances (think Leonardo di Caprio in THE REVENANT or Tom Hanks in CAST AWAY) that Oscar voters love. Except Clooney's performance is mediocre at best and the stakes really don't seem as grave as in THE REVENANT. There is no doubt he'll survive if only to connect with the astronauts. Also it really pissed me off that Clooney as director doesn't obey the rules of hallucinated little girls. If Clooney's character can't see her, we shouldn't be able to see her. Come on Clooney you should know this - you did star in that piss awful remake of SOLARIS!

By far the more interesting part of the film takes place on the spaceship that has discovered the new life-sustaining moon, per Clooney's predictions. It's staffed by David Oyelowo and Felicity Jones as a pregnant husband and wife research team as well as sidekicks like Kyle Chandler. His character exists to show the dilemma the scientists face upon hearing Clooney's news. Do you return home to try and find and admittedly die with your family? Or do you go to the new moon and try to "do better this time"? But even in this strand it all feels like stuff we've seen before, and the way in which space and moonwalks are photographed just cannot compete with superior films like GRAVITY and FIRST MAN.

The bottom line is that you would be better off watching any of the other movies that I have referenced in this review. 

THE MIDNIGHT SKY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 118 minutes.

FRIENDSHIPS DEATH (1987) - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 9

FRIENDSHIP'S DEATH was originally released in 1987 but has since been lovingly restored by the BFI and is playing in this year's London Film Festival. 

It stars a very young Tilda Swinton as woman who seemingly just shows up in Jordan in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian war of 1970, and is befriended by a journalist played by Big Paterson.  The rest of the movie plays as a two-hander and takes place almost entirely within the confines of a hotel room in Amman. We hear the bullets and bombs firing and very occasionally see archive news footage but essentially this feels like a filmed stage play, albeit with some rather funky camera angles and some deeply cool outfits for Swinton.

The conceit of the film is that Swinton is actually an alien from a more advanced planet where the biological beings have long since died out and been superseded by cylons. She has been sent to Earth to make contact with the academic community and give them an axiomatic ethical system that can ensure humanity's peaceful survival.  She ends up in Amman by mistake, and seeing the brutality of war gives up on her mission, rather accurately predicting that if she did make it to MIT she'd just be turned over to the FBI for endless testing and exploitation - and that - in the funniest line of the film - if she went to England the authorities there would do the same but just more slowly.

Those looking for a sci-fi film will be disappointed.  This is actually a rather more philosophical film where two smart people - well one person and one robot -  debate the Singularity and ethics. The wonder of the film is that despite its short running time, we really believe in the friendship that has built up between the pair, and indeed delight in Tilda Swinton's delight at the absurdity of shaving, or at building things with Lego! This is - then - a beautifully acted chamber piece, remarkably prescient in its ideas and understanding of technology.

FRIENDSHIP'S DEATH originally played Toronto 1987 and Berlin 1988. It is playing in the BFI London Film Festival 2020 in a new restored version from the BFI National Archive.

HOTEL ARTEMIS

In which Jodie Foster plays an old lady with a thick Noo Yawk accent who runs a secret hospital for the criminal underworld. In heavy make-up, with a shuffling gait, trying to keep the peace among warring thugs, she impresses with a truly immersive performance - her toughness matched by genuine melancholy at the death of her son.  The delicate equilibrium in which she lives is disturbed when Zachary Quinto (STAR TREK) brings in his mortally wounded father, Jeff Goldblum, violating the Nurse's strict code and dredging up painful events from her past. It also unleashes nastiness among her guests, including Sofia Boutela and THIS IS US' Sterling K Brown.

HOTEL ARTEMIS is the first directorial feature from Drew Pierce - the guy who wrote IRON MAN 3 - and as one would expect from that it's witty and high concept. The production design of the antiquated hotel is really beautiful and the cinematography from Chung-Hoon Chung gives it a suitably ominous claustrophobic feel.  I love the near future setting and delicate hints at sci-fi, but this film is best viewed as a nasty little drama of claustrophobic conflict, with the real suspense around who'll be the last man or woman standing.   It's a clever, captivating film - to be sure by the end I didn't really care who was left alive - but I really want to see what Drew Pierce does next. 

HOTEL ARTEMIS is rated R and has a running time of 94 minutes. The movie is available to rent and own.

FAHRENHEIT 451 (2018)

HBO's new adaptation of Ray Bradbury's iconic sci-fi dystopian novel is a strange and bloodless beast, differing wildly from the source material, handsomely designed, yet lacking in real punch. The film stars the wildly talented Michael B Jordan (BLACK PANTHER's antagonist) as Montag, a Fireman whose job is to burn books. Not just seditious books. All books. Because in this dystopian future books are scene as sowing chaos and frustration - giving people too many ideas - ideas that confuse or offend.  As the film progresses two important character developments occur that felt unearned and unexplored to me.  The first is that Montag steals a book - in shock that a woman would love them so much she would commit suicide rather than survive them.  This leads him to speak to Clarisse (Sofia Boutella), an "eel" who subversively reads books, leading him to a spiritual awakening.  Boutella is wasted here in a thin role that's basically a plot advancer.  The second thing is that we learn that Montag's supposedly dogmatically rigid boss Beatty is actually a secret reader too. And yet Montag never looks intellectually enquiring and Michael Shannon gives his standard 2-D performance as snarling baddie.

The plot motors on and we get to a finale that is meant to be profoundly moving but left me unaffected, as did the entirety of this film. I am deeply disappointed by Ramin Bahrani (MAN PUSH CART)'s direction and actually his failure to get better performances out of Jordan and Shannon - two actors I love. I suspect that this has something to do with a rather thin screenplay by Amir Nedari, that strips Montag of his wife, his home life, and makes Clarisse a much thinner character.  The only thing that I found really interesting was the production design and the way in which book burning is now a kind of reality TV show. But how much more powerful it could've been to show flashbacks to the world that slipped into illiteracy - to show our world - in which long form reading has given way to headlines and click bait - and fake news.....

FAHRENHEIT 451 has a running time of 100 minutes, premiered at Cannes 2018, and was released on HBO this week.

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (Spoilers)

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI is the second instalment in the new trilogy of films, that sees the aftermath of the Rebellion's defeat of The Empire in the original trilogy.  In THE FORCE AWAKENS we saw a weakened Republic under attack by the newly resurgent remains of the old Empire, named The First Order.   The Emperor was replaced by Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), with General Hux (Domnhall Gleeson) as his military leader, Starkiller Base as his Death Star, Coruscant as its target, and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) aka Ben Solo as his Vader.  

In response, Republican Senator Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) was running a covert militarised Resistance starring a dashing pilot called Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and his droid BB8.  The droid happened upon a young girl called Rey (Daisy Ridley), abandoned on the desert planet Jakku, waiting for her parents, and an instinctive force user. They in turn happened upon a stormtrooper defector called Finn (John Boyega) who seemed to exist mostly for comic effect, but also to have an antagonistic relationship with his former boss Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie). A largely redundant but popular side character was cantina owner Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyongo) who served to give Rey Luke Skywalker's old lightsaber.

The main questions set up by the film were whether Ben Solo would or could be turned by Rey to the Light Side of the Force having killed his father Han (Harrison Ford) in a test of loyalty to Snoke; who Rey's parents were, thus explaining her exceptional Force strength; and whether Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), living as a hermit, would be willing to train Rey to that task having failed in training Ben. Ancillary questions were how the First Order has amassed such tech and power so quickly (largely answered in the EU); and who Snoke was (which wasn't.)

And so we get to The Last Jedi, familiar with the grammar of Star Wars movies and the role of the middle chapter in a trilogy as a bridge of sorts, and eager to see if director Rian Johnson (BRICK, LOOPER) could move beyond the excessive fan service that was the only serious flaw that JJ Abrams (STAR TREK) made in his otherwise flawless and joyous The Force Awakens. Additionally, if we read the EU, we might have thought we would see some serious character development for Phasma (given the standalone book).

DOWNSIZING - BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Day 10

DOWNSIZING is a deeply patronising movie that pulls of the remarkable feat of being both annoying liberal and socially conscious AND offensively racist. There's probably a decent 45 minute episode of Black Mirror in there somewhere, but the surrounding 90 minutes of meandering, indulgent padding renders the whole work frustrating and meaningless.

The big concept of the film is that a bunch of Norwegian scientists have invented a way to miniaturise humans to 5 inches tall. And if humans can do this, they can leave a much lighter environmental impact, as well as use their current net wealth to live a deeply luxurious life. After all, you may not be able to afford a 10,000 sq ft mansion but you can probably afford one the size of a shoebox. This range of motives for "downsizing" reflects a parody of the cultures that DOWNSIZING deals with. So the liberal touchy feely hippie Scandies downsize to save the world and their mini-colony looks like The Shire. By contrast, Americans downsize to afford a luxury retirement in Disney like gated communities. 

Of course, this being (a piss-poor attempt at) sci-fi, none of the actual world-building makes sense. The downsized wouldn't survive rain or insects and there's an irony in the amount of energy being created in the downsizing probably making climate change worse. None of this would matter if the story was captivating and you cared about the characters. But the story is all over the place. Is this about an everyman recreating his life once his wife leaves him? Is it about finding yourself on a gap year trip to Norway? It is a piece of propaganda about climate change? Or is an undercover expose about illegal immigrant working conditions? It's like writer-director Alexander Payne through Big Ideas in the air like so much confetti and the result is a baggy, poorly scripted and edited mess that outstays its welcome. Worst of all, much of its comedy in the latter half of the film lies in taking the piss out of a Vietnamese woman's strong accent. In 2017. This is just flabbergastingly offensive on a Jar Jar Binks level. 

DOWNSIZING has a running time of 135 minutes. The film is rated 15 for strong language, drug misuse and sex references.  The movie played Venice, Toronto and London 2017 and will go on release in Spain and the USA on Dec 22nd, in Australia, New Zealand and France on Dec 26th, in Norway and Turkey on Jan 5th, in Argentina and Bulgaria on Jan 11th, and in the UK, Germany and Sweden on Jan 18th.

9 FINGERS - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

9 FINGERS is a stylish, self-conscious and fascinating movie but one that ultimately fails to cohere.  It's a fun idea but stretched too far.  As the film opens, our protagonist Magloire (Paul Hamy) is standing in a moodily lit train station. The mood is one of film noir meets Indiana Jones. Shot in black and white, 9 FINGERS features a lot of men smoking, wearing macs, with pencil moustaches.  It's like the bad guys in Tin Tin got a movie.   The action kicks off as Magloire is chased from the station by the police, is given a bunch of money by a mysterious stranger, and then gets taken up by a gang of criminals led by the charismatic leader Kurtz (Damien Bonnard - DUNKIRK).  There's a hold up and a MacGuffin like plan to somehow get some polonium, and before we know it we're stuck in a claustrophobic freighter with Pascal Greggory's philosophising gang member, discussing the disappearance of Kurtz, the mysterious "9 Fingers" and a never-ending journey to Nowhereland. 

How much you enjoy this film will depend on how far you are willing to let yourself be enveloped by Simon Roca's beautiful cinematography and the darkly comic existential non sequiturs.  I could easily see how the entire exercise could grate on viewers impatient for an actual point to the film.  I found myself oscillating between the two, at once admiring the film's beauty, it's love of genre cinema, and it's wit while also become more and more frustrated about where if anywhere it was going. This is clearly a film for people with a sense of mischief and a tolerance for meandering subversive homage. 

9 FINGERS has a running time of 99 minutes.  The film played Locarno 2017 where FJ Ossang won Best Director.  It is playing the BFI London Film Festival 2017 and there are still tickets available for all three screenings. 

MARJORIE PRIME

I liked the ideas in MARJORIE PRIME far more than the film itself.  The ideas surround the nature of memory and AI.  In a near future, AI has developed to the point that grieving people can buy a "prime" - a lifelike robot who can learn to remember your family memories. As the film opens, we have an old lady called Marjorie (Lois Smith) who interacts with a younger avatar of her dead husband (Jon Hamm).  What's fascinating is that she is teaching him their shared memories but chooses to alter some of them - making his proposal more romantic so that that becomes his version of events. And then, as her memory fades and he becomes her factual record, it's the fake memory that becomes the shared history.  Marjorie's daughter (Geena Davis) is initially horrified by the concept of her mother having a relationship with a Prime, while her husband (Tim Robbins) sees it as a boon.  But as the film develops, we see the two of them have their own relationships with Primes and the position shifts as they too start to re-interpret history through shared but altered memories.  Most impressively, in the final scene of the film, we see the Primes themselves interact and share those memories, moving further away from the truth.  The film, then, raises important and nuanced questions about the nature of shared memory and the ethics of altering it. Should the truth be privileged or is it better to tell white lies that comfort people?

The problem with the film is that it reads like a didactic treatise rather than a living and breathing drama. Matters aren't helped by the fact that director Michael Almereyda largely keeps the action in the closed confines of the family home, paces the film slowly, and does little with his camera. To that end, the movie feels like a filmed stage play, and it is indeed based on a play by Jordan Harrison. I found myself admiring its ideas and some of its performances but deeply deeply bored.  

MARJORIE PRIME has a running time of 98 minutes and is not yet rated and does not yet have a commercial release date.  It played Berlin, Sundance and San Francisco. 

ARRIVAL - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 7

ARRIVAL is a handsome, intelligent sci-film with stunning visual and aural design and great performances. It's a little bit lit down by thematic and plot similarities to some other recent sci-fi films, but remains a superb film.

The film stars Amy Adams as a linguist called in by the US government to interact with aliens that have landed 12 spaceships all over Earth.  As the movie opens, each host country is co-operating with the other and sharing research - learning that the Heptapods communicate visually and slowly translating their non-linear speech.   But pressure is on - the Chinese is leading a group of nations who interpret their messages as threatening - withdraw from co-operation and are potentially about to launch a first strike.  This leaves Adams' character in a race against time to have the spirit of scientific co-operation trump that of nationalistic belligerence. 

This straightforward plot is complicated by a thesis about the nature and power of language itself.  In an early scene, Adams' character hypothesises that the specific language that we learn affects not just the way in which we think, but the actual neural wiring of our brains.  And so, by extension, to learn a new language could be to rewire the brain.  Accordingly, we have an intellectual idea being explored here - one that posits that by learning the aliens' non-linear language - one that exists outside of conventional time - that Adams' character might herself learn to think, behave and experience life in a non-linear fashion.

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

Writer-director Jeff Nichols (TAKE SHELTER, MUD) is the purveyor of deeply felt, beautifully acted low budget independent films. He returns to our screens with MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, a similarly lo-fi sci-fi flick.  The movie starts off strong - perhaps the strongest opening of a movie I've seen this year. It's dark, a weird kid wearing swimming goggles in abducted by two men and hidden in the back of an old battered car. The TV news flashes images of the kidnapper.  We realise its a father (Michael Shannon) and his son (Jaeden Lieberher), who's reading superhero comics by torchlight.  But the other guy (Joel Edgerton) is freaking us out. He asks the dad to reach into the glove compartment. Is it for a gun? No, night vision goggles. He's going to drive at high speed through the night to get this kid to wherever he needs to be.   Meanwhile, a local bunch of religious nutters led by Sam Shepard are being interrogated by the Feds and NSA analyst Kylo Ren.  The cult think he's going to lead them to paradise when the apocalypse comes in three days time.  The army thinks he can be weaponised. But we still don't know what he is.