2012 (USA/12A/158mins)
Directed by Roland Emmerich. Starring John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Amanda Peet.
THE PLOT: On the plus side, the plot does involve Tinseltown finally being brought to its knees by a dirty great big earthquake - Bill Hicks' Arizona Bay looming tantalisingly just over the new horizon.
Amongst all the traditional crash, bang and wailing, we find John Cusack's everyman, Jackson Curtis, who - in accordance with Apocalyptic Movie Casting Rule #1 - is a divorced father with a hot ex-wife (Peet) who's currently shacked up with a shiny new boyfriend. With doomsday looming, the world begins bracing itself for the impact - big arks ready to roll at the Himalayan mountains, mass suicides in the Mayan jungles, and a trip for father and his two young brats to Yellowstone. Where our hero learns that it might just be the end of the world. And, despite reassurances from the government that everything's a-ok, Jackson doesn't feel fine. Or believe them.
THE VERDICT:
From there, Emmerich lets all hell break loose. Or just enough of it to give Jackson and co. a good run to China for their money. Once a director with something of an edge to his multiplex monsters - Independence Day is, ultimately, a far more satisfying, and funny, movie than Tim Burton's 'cooler' 1996 rival, Mars Attacks! - Roland Emmerich follows up the flat and humourless 10,000 BC with yet another glee-free, character-actor-studded apocalyptic tale.
As a token nod to credibility, Emmerich tries the Bruckheimer trick of casting his Big Dumb Blockbuster with credible actors - in this case, John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson and Oliver Platt. Not even Daniel Day Lewis though could save this from being a very ordinary, very loud and extremely pointless crock of special effects. That clocks in at a mind-numbing, buttock-torturing two and a half hours. I spent the entire movie praying for the sky to fall on each and everyone here, both in front of or behind the camera. RATING: **
TAKING WOODSTOCK (Universal/USA/16/110mins)
Directed by Ang Lee. Starring Demetri Martin, Imelda Staunton, Liev Schreiber, Paul Dano.
THE PLOT: Based on a fascinating true story that saw a ramshackle and rundown Catskills town become the centre of the rock'n'roll universe for a few weeks back in 1969 - when the townsfolk offered the suddenly homeless Woodstock festival a large lump of land and that all-important permit - Taking Woodstock had the potential to take its audience on an affectionate, comedic, kaleidoscopic trip. But this is one artificial high that never quite gets off the ground. And a large part of that annoying gravitational pull is down to leading man Demetri Martin's stilted, unnatural performance.
He plays good son Elliot Tiber (real name, Elliot Teichberg, on whose 2007 memoir this is based), beginning to feel that he could no longer save his parents' struggling motel, and desperate to find a way of attracting customers. With a permit already granted for a new yearly cultural town festival, Elliot sees his chance to turn everything around when Woodstock gets booted off its original site. Offering up the El Monaco Motel as operations HQ, and helping secure a nearby 600-acre farm as the venue for the festival, Elliot and the rest of the sleepy White Lake community - including the tightfisted Ma Tiber (Staunton, verging on panto Jewish mum) - quickly have to adapt to the peace and love generation. And all their lovely, lovely moolah.
THE VERDICT: Like Orlando Bloom sleepwalking through Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, the casting of stand-up comedian-turned-non-actor Demetri Martin as the main protagonist in Taking Woodstock sucks all the light and goodwill out of what might otherwise have been a sweet, reefer-scented trip down memory lane.
Aiming for something approaching a mood piece, director Ang Lee only occasionally captures the heady atmosphere that would have surrounded the 1960s most momentous melding of love-ins and freakouts. It's down to Liev Schreiber's crossdressing ex-Marine heavy to provide one of Taking Woodstock's few inspired moments. Bummer, man. RATING: **
HARRY BROWN (UK/18/103mins)
Directed by Daniel Barber. Starring Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Liam Cunningham, Iain Glen, Ben Drew, Sean Harris.
THE PLOT: Caine's happily retired soldier is a man of simple means and even simpler pleasures, content with having a quiet game of chess down the local with his good friend, Leonard (David Bradley, best known as the janitor in the Harry Potter series). It's where he goes for solace after we witness early on the passing of Harry's hospitalized wife.
All that peace and goodwill to all men quickly evaporates though when Leonard is brutally murdered by the thugs on Harry's rundown estate. And that's when he decides to go on a non-roaring rampage of revenge, picking off the thugs in question one-by-one as he searches for the truth surrounding his late friend's death. Hovering around looking for clues is Emily Mortimer's sensitive detective, Frampton...
THE VERDICT: Just as watching Clint Eastwood's cantankerous old Polish pensioner point the barrel of his finger at a passing street gang in Gran Torino had you thinking of Police Inspector Harry Callahan, the sight of Michael Caine as an old London geezer taking on the violent hoodies blotting the landscape of his East London high-rise council estate here makes you think of Harry Palmer. Or Jack Carter. Or simply that Michael Caine who seemed to say so much with just a flicker of one eyelash. Or with the trigger of a gun.
All pretty good echoes to have in a film, and, thankfully, Harry Brown is a pretty good film. As solid as Caine is though, it's Sean Harris' quietly terrifying drug dealer, Stretch, that just about steals the show here in a scene that will kinda linger. RATING: ***
AMELIA (USA/Canada/PG/111mins)
Directed by Mira Nair. Starring Hilary Swank, Richard Gere, Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston.
THE PLOT: Charting the years from Amelia Earhart's initial claim to fame in 1928 - when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic - to her disappearance in 1937 over the South Pacific, we see New York publisher George Putnam (Gere) orchestrate the same kind of publicity campaign for our heroine that saw made a best-selling star out of Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic. Hovering around this rising star in the hope of some mile high action is Gene Vidal (McGregor), father of the young Gore (Cuddy), but he's got competition in George.
THE VERDICT: The Oscar bells started ringing when it was announced that two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank had signed up to play the world's most famous femme flyer, but, hey, Amelia, it was just a false alarm. This is one film that, ironically, very much fails to get off the ground. To quote just about every other lukewarm reviews bestowed upon this laconic iconic aviatrix biopic.
A large part of the problem is Swank herself, an actress who has offered up a blueprint in how to ruin a glittering career not once, but twice. Her choices have long been suspect, and now Swank has taken on that Nicole Kidman smell. Just seeing her big, smiling face swing into view is enough to tell you, on some very instinctive, sense-memory level, that you're in for one very mediocre movie. And so it proves. RATING: **
COLD SOULS (USA/France/12A/101mins)
Directed by Sophie Barthes. Starring Paul Giamatti, Emily Watson, David Strathairn, Lauren Ambrose.
THE PLOT:
In one of the Kaufmanesque plots that always threatens to eat itself, Paul Giamatti here gets to experience a little of that Being John Malkovich existential action by playing an actor called Paul who's decided to deep freeze his soul. Only to find it being trafficked to St. Petersburg by mistake. And that's when things get a little twisted.
THE VERDICT:
Making her feature debut, writer/director Sophie Barthes has explained her inspiration for this darkly comic tale as having come to her in a dream. Finding herself in a futuristic doctor's office - alongside, amongst others, Woody Allen - Sophie and her fellow patients are informed that each has a box wherein lay their souls.
Barthes got to see Woody Allen's soul, but woke before getting a look at her own, the strange dream proving enough to inspire a script. And Woody Allen's presence was enough to inspire the character of Paul here.
It's a neat, if slightly bonkers, idea, and Giamatti is well cast. Perhaps a little too well cast, his Eyeore sensibilities perfectly suited to a film that's just a little too slow, and a tad too droll, for its own good. It's as though Barthes didn't want to be flashy. So, instead, she was steady. Very, very steady. Boring, in fact. RATING: ***
THE WHITE RIBBON (Austria/15A/144mins)
Directed by Michael Haneke. Starring Christian Friedel, Burghart Klaussner, Rainer Bock, Leonie Benesch.
THE PLOT: Shot in glorious black'n'white, the story is set amongst puritanical, sexually-repressed Protestants in a small northern German hamlet circa 1913, just before the outbreak of World War 1. The film's narrator (Jacobi) - who we see in younger days as the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) - introduces the story, stating that it might "clarify things that happened later in our country". What unfolds is a series of malicious, largely anonymous attacks, some simple acts of revenge, others bizarre, ritualistic acts of torture with no clear motivation. Each act leaves the stony-faced inhabitants of this town that should have been called Malice, well, stony-faced. And tight-lipped.
Not that there isn't seething anger behind those picket fences, especially amongst the children of the ferociously strict pastor (Klaussner), and the young, sexually-abused daughter of the town's doctor (Bock). The latter, a widower, dismisses his neighbouring midwife as his lover of some years with enough contempt and vitriol to fuel a thousand ritual murders.
THE VERDICT: It's all presented calmly by Haneke's sharply cold eye, the viewer left to come to his or her own conclusions about the motivations and the individuals responsible for the sordid crimes being committed amidst this isolated community. Think Twin Peaks meets The Village, as directed by Ingmar Bergman. With a little help from a young, wide-eyed Leni Riefenstahl. That your initial curiousity slowly turns to fascination is testament to Haneke's skills as a storyteller, but, as with his 2005 offering, Cache, there will be those who will walk out with an itch this filmmaker simply won't let them scratch. RATING: ****
TULPAN (Kazakh/Russia/12A/100mins)
Directed by Sergei Dvortsevoy. Starring Askhat Kuchinchirekov, Samal Yeslyamova, Ondasyn Besikbasov.
THE PLOT: It's a simple enough tale, our protagonist, Asa (Kuchinchirekov) returning from his service in the Pacific Fleet to live with his sister, Samal (Yeslyamova), and her shepherd husband, Ondas (Besikbasov), the latter none too impressed with by his brother-in-law. And therefore keen to have him married off to the only eligible girl in the area - only the girl in question, Tulpan, is none too impressed by Asa's stick-out ears, and therefore refusing to even grant her would-be suitor an audience. As time gets tough for Ondas, he gets even tougher on Asa...
THE VERDICT: A road movie where there isn't much of a road, festival favourite is a breezy, highly enjoyable affair. And will no doubt help Kazakhstan win some ground back after their Borat insult onslaught.
Director Sergey Dvortsevoy first made his name with documentary-like films that charted the hard struggles of everyday people living in the remote parts of his country, and Tulpan is a natural progression from the likes of Paradise (1995) and Bread Day (1998). Life against the odds has rarely seemed so sweetly forlorn and comically tragic as it does here. RATING: ****