Author: Craig Andrew Robertson

CONTAINS NO SPOILERS FOR “ENDGAME”, BUT THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR “INFINITY WAR”… OBVIOUSLY…

So what have I missed? Oh yeah, about 80% of the largest and most important film franchise of all time! Let’s see what I can give you in this pointless review.

Avengers Endgame picks up after the events of Infinity War with half the universe having been killed after purple meanie Thanos snapped his fingers while wearing the infinity gauntlet after finally getting all the infinity stones. With all that infinity, you can tell this is going to be a big one.

My personal relationship with the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been an intermittent one at best. I’ve only seen the odd film in this colossal series totalling out at twenty-two films featuring countless characters and a beautifully crafted in-universe continuity. If this were an American tv show, we would have just finished the first season and I would have seen at most a third of the aired episodes.

I watch these films and am forever impressed for their incredible scale which is balanced with a truly human touch. This is particularly true of The Guardians of the Galaxy, a soon-to-be trilogy of movies which deliver a truly epic space-opera with a greater depth of humanity than pretty much any other movie of their kind.

What’s even more fascinating than the movies themselves, however, is their impact on the film industry as a whole and how that has evolved.

It was not long ago that the common “wisdom” gained from the enormous success of the MCU was that everything had to have a Universe. The Dark Universe, the DC Extended Universe, the Star Wars universe, blah blah blah. Soon though, the penny dropped that interconnected continuity, as interesting as it is on a surface level, is not the keystone by which the MCU earns its achievements. It wins, because it works.

It works because it is the cumulative effort of an army of extremely talented filmmakers of all kinds with a real passion and understanding of what the audience needs.

Steven Spielberg suggested that superhero films will go the way of the Western. I believe that he is more right than even he realises. Westerns were the ubiquitous movie art-form for decades, showcasing a particular legendary form of the America we all wished there was. Superhero films have dominated the film landscape for the past ten years because they do the same on a truly global scale, showcasing a particular legendary form of the Human we all wished there was.

Like the Western, the Superhero film will fade away while a new breed of rebel filmmakers take what they teach us about this artform and fight against the dying of the light in this late stage capitalist society. They will fail in their fight and there will be a new uber franchise of some form unimaginable. Those underground soldiers for independent filmmaking will either go underground into this excitingly democratic and impossible industry or they will say “if you can’t beat em, join em” and try to continue the revolution from the inside.

In the meantime, let’s not be so angry about what entertainment makes people happy. What’s so beautiful about this period in film history is that there is no infinity gauntlet. Disney’s recent artistic achievements and acts of terrorism upon art and civilisation itself, brilliant and horrifying in equal measure will NOT turn us painlessly into dust. Let’s just enjoy a damn superhero film or not.

Wait a minute, I’ve gone nearly 600 words without telling you how I feel about the film I’m reviewing!

It’s really good! Lots of laughs, teary moments, very impressive character and plot balancing and a massive scale. Some niggles over filmic choices, but overall I can’t complain cause the badass moments are too badass!

Recommended Scenario: If you’ve seen a bunch of these films already and would like to see something pretty awesome!

Everything becomes awesome when there’s a new Lego Movie!

Lego Movie 2 picks up immediately after the end of the first outing of Emmet, Wildstyle and friends as they are forced to battle hordes from the planet Duplo. Years later, the constant brick-on-brick warring has left the world of Lego in a dystopian state. Wildstyle and the rest of Emmet’s friends are all kidnapped by an emissary of the Sistar system and Emmet has to go get them back.

The Lego Movies are excuses to sell toys. They are enormous adverts designed in a laboratory to convince children to scream at their parents to buy an overpriced piece of plastic manufactured in a sweat shop to line the pockets of the incredibly wealthy people at the top of Lego.

In spite of this, I have to concede that they are darn fine films.

The first Lego Movie was a delightful, funny and original piece (pardon the pun). Everytime it’s on TV I have to watch it to the end and for the next few days “Everything Is Awesome” is stuck in my head.

What followed was a spin-off film following that film’s brilliant version of Batman portrayed by the incredible voice of Will Arnett. That movie had a bit of Act Three blues and didn’t reach the heights of thematic weight that the original film had but was still pretty entertaining.

I will admit to having missed the Lego Ninjago movie. I’m sure it was fine…

Now it’s time for the first true sequel to the Lego Movie to compare itself to its lofty history.

Lego Movie 2’s main story is the conflict between the boy who played with the toys in the first film against his little sister. This is portrayed in the Lego world as a war between the characters from the first film with a bunch of new girly characters.

For the first act, I was laughing or smiling pretty much constantly. Then second act blues hit and my attention began to drift away and while I can say that overall, this is an entertaining film with some cool ideas at times, it does not hit the heights of the first movie.

There was one little niggle that kept me from fully appreciating this film. It was way too meta.

By their very nature these films have been meta, but there was always a sweet spot were things didn’t become too referential. At some point, Lego Movie 2 decided to just start calling out the fact that it’s a film and that the characters all know how this world works and then the script wouldn’t stop trying to be superficially clever by referencing something.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are very talented filmmakers. They took a back seat for this project, choosing to write, but not direct. The filmmaker they did get did a very fine job. It’s just a shame that the material he had to work with was not of the perfectly balanced calibre the Lego Movies have peaked at.

I look forward to what happens with this franchise, it has so far delivered fun, engaging and smart films. Here’s hoping the next one doesn’t get too clever again.

Recommended Scenario: If you love the first Lego Movie, you’ll at least like this one.

The strange nature of being a film critic in Scotland is that all the films the Oscars are interested in come out in January as do the films of the Glasgow Film Festival. This means that most of the films I’m most excited about from the previous year are the first films I get to review in a given year. This is either super lucky, or it means it’s all downhill from here.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest bizarre creation is The Favourite (and yes that is the spelling of both the director’s name and the title), a costume drama from hell set in the early eighteenth century. Two ladies of the court, played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, compete for the favour of the long-suffering Queen Anne, played by Olivia Colman.

I can’t consider myself to be a true Lanthimosian, partly because that’s a word made up by critics only a couple of months ago. It’s also because I’ve only seen one other film by Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos and that was 2014’s The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell as a lonely man who might be turned into a lobster if he didn’t find love. That’s not necessarily relevant to the review for this movie, beyond the point that he seems to have a knack for the darkly comic and weird.

This knack has transferred itself into his latest work, which is a truly subversive and transgressive period piece from its first frame to its last.

At the same time this film doesn’t do a Marie Antoinette by screaming “You’ve never seen a costume drama like this before!” It feels very much earned. The wit and energy of the characters and dialogue feel like they’re straight out of an eighteenth-century comedy. There’s a twinkle in the eye of the filmmakers as they make riot in this palace.

Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are on top of their game right now. Both have received immense acclaim and attention for recent performances. It is here that they summit with a dry and hypnotic acting duet that goes from childish glee to the most cutting adult remarks.

Neither quite touch the brilliance of Olivia Colman, for my money the finest actress currently working, whose finally getting the attention she deserves after years of being the brilliant supporting performance in pretty much anything worth watching on British Television.

She plays Queen Anne with a tremendous sadness, which she somehow tinges with an unstable happiness. Anne has gone through some unimaginable suffering, the effects of which make her entirely unsuited for her responsibilities as Queen. It’s a piece of acting which does exactly what great acting should. It pulls you into the headspace of a woman we can never truly comprehend.

It is a performance which lies at the heart of this film which acts as a hilarious history lesson and a stylish fable of power and sex in beautiful palaces.

Recommended Scenario: When you want something a bit weird, but also just awesome!

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it. It’s been a long time since I’ve written a review. A long time since I’ve stepped into a cinema. I can only apologise for my negligence. Let’s get started again.

Stan & Ollie follows Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy on what’s supposed to be something of a comeback stage tour of the UK in 1953 in order to pay for an upcoming feature. Stan is played by Steve Coogan and Ollie by John C. Reilly.

Films like this come by every so often with the intent of making you feel all nostalgic for the Hollywood of yesteryear. When entertainment was pure and good and geniuses, like Stan and Ollie, were on our screens.

There is a lot of that in this film and admittedly it goes into a little schmaltz, but I believe that there is something about this film that makes its showing of affection for these comedy giants much less cynical than its contemporaries.

For one thing, at no point does the film seem to suggest that since Laurel & Hardy stopped being big stars that the art or indeed the world is worse for it. There’s a very important, subtext-laden shot in the film where a despondent Laurel looks up at a poster for Abbott & Costello Go to Mars. Now one could argue that that kind of film is not the best use of the talents of Abbott and Costello, but their very existence proves that there is great comedy after Stan.

Stan & Ollie is a celebratory and whistful film, not a defeatist one. Laurel & Hardy know they can’t do what they do forever. They don’t wallow in hatred for an audience which doesn’t seem to want them. They just try hard to put on a great show. Films like The Artist seem angry at the public and film studios and technology and culture for the fact that silent films are no longer popular. This film says “Oh well, onto the next chapter”. That’s a much more mature way of handling it.

Of course, when you’re making the film to capture the greatness of Laurel & Hardy, you’d better get the right Laurel & Hardy. Here we have two of the finest actors working today.

Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly are just outstanding, capturing everything from the face to the feet to the voices of the people they imitate. This is obviously helped by incredible hair and make up which has been inexplicably not been nominated for an Oscar.

When you see the two of them performing classic routines by L & H, you still find them funny. It’s always a mistake to make a film which makes you rather watch the thing the film is pretending to be (if you get what I mean). I admit I came out of the cinema wanting to immediately watch some Laurel & Hardy, but I didn’t feel like that while watching. I was too busy enjoying myself.

The rest of the film shows the pair interacting with one another and one can feel an intense love connecting them like an old married couple.

This is an incredibly heartfelt and humble tribute to a friendship that gave us some of the greatest comedy of all time.

Recommended Scenario: If you want to see a tribute to classic Hollywood which does not pander or patronise.

I am a complete idiot. I forgot to include my review for Solo: A Star Wars Story in my review catch up post last time. To make it fun, let’s see if I can do it as a haiku!

Pretty good Star Wars film
Got issues with fan service.
Guardians, better.

O.K, caught up. Now for the main thing.

Mission Impossible: Fallout is the sixth film in the series, again starring genuinely gifted and suicidal actor Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, IMF agent. This time Hunt has to stop a terrorist plot to kill millions.

The plot is never the point of these films. It’s not even the characters or the story. They’re fine and all, but the real reason people come to these things are the set-pieces. Fallout has them in droves. I won’t spoil them for you, but there is stuff in this movie which rivals the very best of any other western action movie I’ve ever seen!

Let this fact sit in your mind. Tom Cruise is 56 years old, but he still runs around like he’s made of steel.

People have psycho-analysed him through and through, but beyond all the postulation, I do think Tom cares about movies. I think he is, in actuality, crazy about making the action films he’s in as entertaining as possible. Maybe he has something to prove to himself or to his friends or his critics, but Cruise’s love for this stuff is on screen for us to see.

Here the series goes darker than it’s ever gone before. No, it does not have the intensity of Part Three which contained the forever missed Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the baddy. It’s dark within the story itself.

What’s even cooler is that this is the first film in the series, as far as I can remember, that uses Hunt’s team effectively all the way to the end. It’s so perfectly balanced.

I have a feeling that everyone has their big blowing up things franchise that they know isn’t perfect but they still love. And not love in a so bad it’s good way, but love with a sincerity from the qualities that series possesses. I think Mission Impossible is that franchise for me. It’s dumb, it’s big, but it’s also got a beating heart to it that never comes across as cynical.

This is the best film in the series so far. If this was the last one Cruise did before returning to dramatic affair again, I’d be more than happy.

Recommended Scenario: If you like the other ones and the way they were going, other than that, probably avoid.

It’s been a while hasn’t it?! That’s what your final year of your undergrad will do to you.

Well I’m back with a vengeance. I’ve seen 18 films so far in 2018, and I’m going to go through all of them. Yes! I’m going to review 18 films. Each in 50 words or less. I couldn’t think of a logical order for these, so I’m just going to go alphabetically.

Ready? Go!

A Quiet Place	This is not a horror with any groundbreaking existential themes, but what it does have is an incredibly cool premise and a well-executed follow-through. John Krasinski has a real future as a filmmaker and he pulls together something both moving and entertaining. Highly recommended.
Avengers: Infinity War	Once again I was unprepared. I’m still scratching the surface of the MCU, but even I was able to that this is simply awesome. Josh Brolin is the best supervillain in years as Thanos. Not seen something this BIG, but so tightly managed since The Return of the King!
Coco	I watched Coco on the day my Great Uncle died. I really appreciated a film like this that day. This might not be Pixar’s greatest achievement, but it’s another demonstration of their power. Great songs. You’ll tear up.
Darkest Hour	So many Churchill things these days. It’s like we’re trying to remind ourselves what a great politician looks like. Bit cheesy, though well-directed. Oldman’s very good, but I still prefer Tinker. The Crown is more interesting.
Deadpool 2	It’s not shocking anymore, but it’s still pretty funny. I think the first film was better, though I understand why some like how big this film gets. I can’t wait for Deadpool to go further. Get super duper dark!
Hotel Artemis	The pieces are here. This really could be a great film. It just doesn’t get there. It’s just a bit forgettable. Which is unfortunate, because the Jodie Foster is so cool here! Also, Goldblum wakes you up half way through!
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom	On a technical level, the best JP since Spielberg. Good first half. Crap second. Interesting ideas, though none committed to. Bad, but not fun-bad like that film where a velociraptor says “Alan”.
Lady Bird	I love the relationship between mother and daughter in film. This is one of the most tight examples of it, ever! I love the way Saoirse Ronan brings this girl to life. She is still my favourite young working actress.
Love, Simon	Yes it’s got a kind of made-for-TV high school drama feel that I generally don’t like, but boy does it work with it. This is a film so many people will connect with. It’s not perfect, but I think it will be a classic in its own way.
Pacific Rim: Uprising	Everything is a downgrade from the original. Except for one or two cool new Jager moves and John Boyega who is a charisma machine. Thank you China for letting this become a franchise.
Phantom Thread	P.T.A is my favourite living filmmaker. His latest is as delicately put together as the dresses of the protagonist. Containing three central performances as brilliant as any from this century, this unconventional love story is simply astounding.
Red Sparrow	All sorts of spy conspiracy stuff going on. You’d think that this was a Cold War film, but then “what an iPhone?!” Lawrence goes all out in showing the other side of the Bond girl myth. The irony of that name containing the word “bond” becomes quite clear.
The Divine Order	A lesser known Swiss production about the woman’s suffrage movement in a village left behind by the times. Funny, tender and empowering. It shows the fundamental truth that the patriarchy hurts both men and women. Leaps ahead of that Suffragette film from a year or so ago.
The Incredibles 2	The subtle brilliance of the first movie was that it took its time to establish the status quo. That’s missing here and we get a film with plenty of heart and action, but with less substance. Still incredibly enjoyable.
The Post	Watched it once, liked it. Watched it twice, loved it. Spielberg’s unofficial prequel to All the President’s Men is another demonstration that he is not only one of the best filmmakers ever, but also one of the most in touch with the times.
The Shape of Water	Saw this on the plane back from Canada. Not the best situation, but the power of this modern fairy-tale shines through. A better and more visceral Beauty and the Beast. Guillermo Del Toro should have free reign to make anything he wants now.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri	I feel that the anger felt by some critics over the portrayal of the racist characters in this film is misguided. Billboards is a tale of the possibilities of forgiveness and redemption how painful that can be. Brilliant performances, writing and directing makes it well worth discussion.
You Were Never Really Here	In interviews, Lynne Ramsay comes across more like a school teacher than one of the world’s most essential film artists. You Were Never Really Here latches onto your underprepared brain and doesn’t let go, in 90 minutes, conveying more depth of feeling than in the entire filmographies of some filmmakers.

Now we are all caught up. I hope to get back to regular reviews now.

In the meantime, keep watching.

Oh, I am super late with this one. I saw this film as part of the midnight double-bill of Episodes VII and VIII. That was well over a week ago now. I’ve seen it again since then. Now I feel ready to deliver my review. I am ready to get eviscerated by the internet.

The story starts not long after The Force Awakens finishes off. The First Order has found the Resistance base and tries to blast them into oblivion as they try to flee. Meanwhile, Ray is on Luke Skywalker’s beautiful island trying to convince the old Jedi Master to join the fight again.

How do you even review a Star Wars film? The baggage of this franchise is so heavy that people will make petitions to make entries’ canonical status nullified if they don’t like it, or a petition to replace the director with a retired one they despise. Star Wars belongs to all mankind.

So Rian Johnson’s decision to auteur one of these pictures almost like it’s an indie flick is, in my opinion, commendable madness. His flairs of style are all over this movie.

Episode VIII, is the second part in this sequel trilogy. In the traditional screenplay structure, this is the collective “all is lost” moment. So much of the discussion between players is about failure and so many of their actions result in failure. It’s exactly the tone required for a middle part of a trilogy.

As such, the best parts of this whole thing concern the central conflict, i.e the goodies and the baddies.

Ray and Skywalker’s scenes have a haunting brilliance to them. They spend their time on their island having some of the most well-written and truly meaningful dialogue and character-driven sequences in this series.

On the baddie’s side, Kylo Ren is back and proves himself to be, if not the scariest villain in the franchise, certainly the most interesting. He evolves from Vadar clone to something far more revealing of character.

This also has the most interesting directing style in all of Star Wars. It’s not outlandishly stylish, but there are directional choices which you can tell were thought about. It’s like when you see a Spielberg film. It’s subtle most of the time, but these moments of cinematic cool are peppered here and there and make a film nerd like me blush with excitement.

Now onto the stuff I’m not so hot on. The half of the film focussed on the Resistance is not bad, per say. It is simply the connective tissue that is a little weak. Small things could have been changed to iron it all out.

They introduce new characters in this film and, while they do their jobs well, introducing cool new concepts and complexities to the world, I feel it sidelines pre-existing ones a little much. I love Laura Dern, she’s one of the most underrated actresses around (check out anything she does with David Lynch for evidence), but her character, though she is serviceable and has her moments, is superfluous.

Benecio Del Toro appears in a great little role as part of a plotline which allows for some lovely nuance in the canon of Star Wars. However, that line of plot comes and goes in a way that should fill the characters with a sense of true failure by the end. Instead the internal consequences are spread too thin and leave too little impact.

So that’s The Last Jedi. It’s utterly gorgeous. It’s stuffed with too many pointless characters. It’s well-written and original. It’s filled with gratuitous humour. It’s challenging and thought-provoking. It’s structure called for way too many conveniences (just count how many times someone should have been killed in an explosion).

People try to put this into the bad category or the great category. They try to put it into the “heretical to what it means to be Star Wars” box or “breaking new ground” box.

This film, and remember that this comes from a liker of Star Wars and not a lover, is a Star Wars Film.

It’s a little messy, there are things I wish weren’t there, but I can say the same thing about ALL of this weird space opera. I love the things I love in it, I wince at what irritates. I’m still going to be humming the music for the next few weeks.

Recommended Scenario: It’s Star Wars, you’ll watch it anyway.

For once in my philistine life, I read the book first. That is, after watching the bizarre film without which the book would not exist.

The Disaster Artist, based on the autobiographical book of the same name follows Dave Franco as Greg Sestero, a young actor with big dreams who bumps into a strange man called Tommy Wiseau, played by James Franco. Wiseau shares the same dreams ofstardom and so decides to make a movie with his best friend, Greg. That movie was The Room. This is a true story.

The Room materialised in 2003. It starred and was written, produced and directed by Tommy Wiseau. It was a bad film. The incalculable ineptitude of this $6 million drama has captured the hearts of millions around the world. It is the Citizen Kane of bad movies.

 

Just as Citizen Kane had Orson Welles, an eccentric, once in a generation genius whose brain we’d all like to pick, The Room has Tommy Wiseau, a man clearly eccentric, but with a more mysterious and debatable form of genius. Until the release of Greg Sestero’s masterful book The Disaster Artist which chronicles his weird and touching friendship with Tommy, much of the genesis of The Room has remained an enigma.

James Franco, who has stated that he has an artistic kinship with Wiseau, has directed an adaptation of that book that treats him, Sestero and the production with genuine respect.

If the story had been nothing but bizarre behind the scenes antics from Tommy, the film would not be much more than a visual recreation of The Room’s Wikipedia page.

Instead we see the story through the lens of the relationship between Greg and Tommy. The result is way more endearing.

The film is also much more focused on the comedy and lighter aspects of that tale than the book was. The book had these elements, but partly due to literature’s inherit shifts in perspective, there’s a deeper, darker level to Tommy that we get to see and I personally miss when watching the film. I suppose this is the 60% supposed inaccuracy that the real Tommy says the book had. The film he described as being 99% accurate. Take that as you will.

I hate it when a review simply states that the book is better, but in this case I feel that for the purposes of the meta-narrative of The Room and Tommy and Greg and now the Franco brothers who have joined this legend, this film was inevitable and necessary.

The filmmaking in all areas of The Disaster Artist, from the writing to the directing to the acting is excellent in all the ways The Room was not. It even follows the central theme of betrayal and friendship better.

That simple irony, for me, is probably the most beautiful thing to come out of the complicated mess that The Room and its creators were.

I miss some of the darkness that Sestero had mentioned in his book, but as Tommy says now when describing his work that was originally meant to be taken seriously; “It’s a comedy”.

Recommended Scenario: If you’re familiar with The Room. You may still enjoy it, but some of it might go over your head otherwise.

This is it. This is what all those calamitous DC movies were leading up to in their DCEU. A big team-up of the most powerful superheroes in all of fiction. What did this all add up to?

Justice League follows Batman and Wonder Woman’s attempts to bring together a group of “meta-humans” to fight a possibly unstoppable alien force. This team includes the super-speedy Flash, the underwater dude Aquaman and a half-robot called Cyborg.

This genuinely is a piece of cinema history. This Justice League film has been one of the hardest properties in the history of film to get made. The number of false starts and bad decisions along the way beggars belief. How do you make a film about a bunch of demi gods only about 3 or 4 of whom people have heard of?

Then Marvel happened and DC played catch up with some travesties which all did things which ranged from admirable risks to basically summarising what is wrong with modern cinema in just over two and a half hours.

Even when this film was being made there were issues. Focus groups and social media demanded that the script be changed and scenes be reshot to make the tone lighter. Sequels prematurely planned were aborted. People were shocked by the fact that the most likable, marketable and best property under the JL umbrella turned out to be the GIRL of the team.

Then all these issues paled into comparison with the real-life tragedy suffered by director Zach Snyder. Joss Whedon took over his duties, though he is credited as a screenwriter in the film. I’m going to do the common reviewing thing and state upfront that regardless of my feelings on the film, I have nothing but sympathy for Zach Snyder and his family during this horrible time in their lives.

I’ve made movies before and trust me, every one of them felt like a disaster while I was making it. Every film follows murphy’s law. And out of the madness, some beauty can appear.

Did Justice League come out of this series of unfortunate events unscathed?

In a word, no.

The tone is all over the place, you can see where they struggled to cut the length to the point of genuine confusion. Scenes are so totally not in the right order. And overall this is a calamitous mess.

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it though.

I hope that this is not like when I gave a moderately positive review to Batman vs Superman out of denial the first time I watched it. I really did enjoy some parts of this movie, buried underneath a tonne of nonsense.

Maybe I’ve been fooled by the superficial cool that the film has in spades. Snyder has finally ditched the Instagram filters that made his well composed images look like vomit, in favour of brighter more beautiful colours. Characters are now telling jokes and being more than brooding, boring garbage. It’s still bad, and when put into context with the first three DCEU films it makes no sense, but at least I’m relatively engaged.

Never before have I seen a film try so hard to make up for the sins of previous entries in a franchise. Tired of us forcibly setting up sequels to a franchise you haven’t decided you like yet? We give you only ONE reference to Darkseid! Tired of brooding idiots instead of heroes? We have 90% less brooding! Tired of characters you don’t care about? Two of the new League members you like within minutes of meeting!

Sometimes the sins of the father come to haunt the son, however. The fixes they pull are for errors so inbuilt into what made the previous films so insufferable that it’s actually kind of laughable that they could try to sort them out here.

When Bruce Wayne says “Superman was a beacon”, I nearly burst out laughing. Maybe the Christopher Reeve one, mate, not the guy who LEVELLED THE CITY HE WAS TRYING TO SAVE and MOPED AND DOPED ABOUT INSTEAD OF SAVING PEOPLE! Then he has in one scene the gall, the freaking cheek, to go after Wonder Woman for not doing her bit. Mate, seriously, back off!

One of the most egregious moments of the film I cannot mention due to their spoilery nature. Once you see it you’ll know what I mean.

My favourite element of the film is the League’s balance. As much as the tone shifts every other scene and the editing is a bit odd and the beginning is in the wrong place, every hero feels like they contribute to the team. They all feel instrumental.

Finally I’m actually excited to see where the hodgepodge of the DCEU is going. We finally have a ground on which we can take off into more of these weird films. Wobbly ground, but at least it’s not quicksand made of skulls.

Recommended Scenario: If you can put up with some stupid stuff in order to see the full potential of this project.

As much as it shames me, to the best of my knowledge I have not seen an episode of David Suchet’s version of Poirot. I know, burn me at the stake of classic murder mystery television.

Murder on the Orient Express is the latest adaptation of the eponymous thriller story by Agatha Christie, this time directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring him as Hercules Poirot and pretty much every major star in the world right now as the guests upon the Orient Express. Of course, because Poirot is on the train, during the night, one of the passengers is murdered and it is up to the great Belgian sleuth to discover the culprit.

The trailer for this film got me more excited than I have been for other thrillers recently. It was one of the few times in which I was excited due to the people in front of the camera rather than the people behind.

Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Olivia Coleman, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Leslie Odom Jr, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley and (doing a performance that can be described as at least trying) Johnny Depp are among the passengers.

Ensemble films I can get behind. The danger though is the possibility that these famous faces might distract from the rest of the film. This fortunately is not as much of an issue as might have happened, due to the relatively balanced nature of the cast of characters. I say relatively as Olivia Coleman, for my money the greatest actress of our age, is woefully underutilised, though she does shine in the few moments she is permitted to do something.

Kenneth Branagh does like to make his films like the theatre from which he was born. The performances he brings out are pretty over-the-top at times and there is a flair for the dramatic in whatever he does. This is not by any means a bad thing. His own acting here is utterly sublime as a new, enormously moustached Poirot that I would love to see more from.

The problem that really bugged me through the beginning of the movie is the tremendous clip at which everything moves. Characters and situations are set up way too fast. Moments don’t get a chance to sink in. There were times when I genuinely couldn’t tell what was happening as the camera swirled around and around.

Once we were on the train, the elements come together and Kenneth becomes a great director again, always finding the right places to place a scene within this tight space and pulling out the best from his cast.

This is a mystery I would be hard-pressed to say people will not enjoy.

Recommended Scenario: If you want a classic mystery with a modern thriller sensibility.