Author: Craig Andrew Robertson

I saw this movie when I was 20 years old. I am now 21. My apologies for the delay.

Loving Vincent is an animated film centred around a young man, a former subject of one of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, discovering details about the great artist’s death and life.

There are times in film criticism where you cannot help but make objective statements. This is one of those moments. The way this film was made is legitimately astonishing.

Every single one of the over 60,000 frames used in the making of this 90-minute film was oil-painted by an army of artists from around the world, trained to emulate the style of Van Gogh. This effort took 5 years and its results are simply mesmerising.

You really must pinch yourself sometimes while watching Loving Vincent. You are literally watching a moving painting and a moving painting that could have been painted by Vincent himself!

It is truly amazing, and I cannot recommend it enough based on the technical prowess alone.

Technical prowess alone is not all that makes a film though, so we have to look at the story.

In the broad strokes, this is a genuinely moving tale of an imperfect man trying to find his way to the heart of a dead and equally imperfect artist. As the film began I genuinely disliked our protagonist for his attitude and for the way the actor portraying him worked.

Yet as we go along with him, his arc made true sense and I am grateful that the writers decided to give this man the flaws he had so we can relate him to the artist whose life he is studying.

In the tighter strokes, I must admit, there are some flaws.

The structure is a little flawed and the dialogue can go from poetic to simply banal. The actors are generally doing a good job, but when we see them in their painted forms, there is a moment where I go “I’ve seen him before”. One could argue that this is true in any film, but it is more pronounced here when you are supposed to believe that this is a world from the mind of the great Dutch artist.

The ending has some problems also. At the very end, like in many films with a true story as its basis, there is an epilogue describing the fates of the characters involved. This comes in the form of a booklet on screen that I had difficulty reading quickly enough to get every detail.

My advice to filmmakers who want to do these epilogues is summation. Let the audience have a chance to pull out their phones on the way home and check out Wikipedia for further information.

You may think I am being harsh to a film that is objectively a marvel, but to not notice the imperfections in the canvas would be a disservice to you.

Recommended Scenario: If you want to see a film quite unlike any other, and can put up with some annoyances.

Blade Runner, the 1982 science-fiction film directed by Ridley Scot, is one of the most perfect while also bizarrely flawed films of the 20^th Century.

The tings it had to do well were, be pretty, be spiritual, be like a noir film and feel authentic. It did that and more, becoming a true cult classic and a movie to point to when you wonder why Sir Ridley still gets work. Not to mention it had Rutger Hauer giving one of the great cinema performances.

I say that it was bizarrely flawed because one has t oadmit certain things have not been nearly as timeless. Its portrayal of women is troublesome, particularly in the relationship between Harrison Ford and the replicant Rachel. Smaller things get to me like the dove in the otherwise perfect “Tears in Rain” scene and Roy Battey’s confusing stigmata earlier on.

No movie is perfet. I still really like the ol’ Blade Runner, it’s a moving cinematic film htat tries for higher things, but I don’t see as pretentious.

CUT TO:

INT. BELMONT FILMHOUSE, ABERDEEN – 35 YEARS LATER

Craig and members of his University Film Society take a seat in Screen 1 and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 plays.

I have been cautiously optimistic for a good while about a sequel to Blade Runner. Ridley Scott’s taking a back seat as Executive Producer, a move I feel was to the film’s advantage. Denis Villeneuve is fresh off of a stream of original hits so he has the street-cred to work on something more ambitious.

Blade Runner 2049 picks up 30 years after the original and follows Ryan Gosling as a new Blade Runner trying to solve a mystery. That’s how far I’m going with a plot summation since so much of this film is spoiler sensitive.

Blade Runner as a franchise, it turns out, is amongst other things about feminism. This sequel does something with this interpretation and uses it to not only make it better, but retroactively improve the original film. I waited a week to review this film so I could come to this conclusion. The underlying misogyny present in both these films is a deliberate commentary on the misogyny itself.

I adore the character of Gosling’s girlfriend. She is a very beautifully rendered hologram. Essays will be written on how her character is not an active participant in the story and is basically Gosling’s property. This was on purpose. A negative is a positive, creating an arc which I have a feeling a third Blade Runner film will complete.

Sorry, I had to start by making that point clear, at least to myself.

Onto the unambiguously positive. Everything else.

To start, Roger Deakins will win an Oscar for Best Cinematography in 2018 as an apology for all the disgraceful times he was denied one. Luckily, this is also some of his finest work. Rare is there a big budget film with such gorgeous photography.

Rare too is a blockbuster with this level of commitment to a difficult to grasp, but awe-inspiring tone and world. Villeneuve knows intellectual sci-fi. This is him taking real chances with a 2017 audience and it pays off.

Ryan Gosling has made a living as an emotionless beefcake and here he is perfect as an android android-killer. The stand-out performance, however, comes from Harrison Ford in a considerably smaller reprise of his character from the first film, Deckard. This may be his best work to date in a long career.

This is an odd time to be alive. Sequesl are really good lately. Blade Runner 2049 is in every “measurable” way better than the original, Denis has done a crazy good job.

However, much like The Godfather the original, despite it being improved somehow by its follow-up, is forever going to occupy a special place in the history of film despite a superior sequel. It is of its very particular time. 2019.

Recommended Scenario: If you love to experience some pretty powerfully executed sci-fi.

If you’re going to have someone be Queen Victoria, it might as well be Judi Dench.

Victoria & Abdul focusses on the unexpected friendship between Queen Victoria and one of her Indian servants in her later years and the problems this caused within the royal court.

I feel like Victoria & Abdul is something of a detox for me. I saw it two days after my, let’s say, experience with mother! so I was in need of something a little light and a little silly.

Enter a charming little film about a royal interacting with a servant. Those are always a load of fun.

There are a few things to like about this movie. Judi Dench is of course made to be Queen Vic, having played her, among many other historical monarchs, before. Her interactions with Abdul, played by Ali Fazal, are quite sweet. She allows him to exuberantly explain his culture while serving her and this change in her life rejuvenates the old Empress.

The whole film is quite sweet and quite funny, if a bit by the numbers.

There are of course the people who don’t understand how a Muslim can be a friend to the Queen. There are of course scenes with some pretty awkward comedy that doesn’t quite work. You might as well be watching a period version of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

I can’t say there’s much wrong with Victoria & Abdul, it just happens to do exactly what it says on the tin and no more. Sorry, this review isn’t quite as mad as my one for mother! but then that’s an entirely different film!

Recommended Scenario: When you want a perfectly safe little film about bridging the gap between two people from very different backgrounds.

This is going to be the easiest and hardest review I’ve ever had to write. I find it difficult to express what this film really is without spoiling it and I find it difficult to recommend it to people because it is one of the most intense cinema experiences I’ve ever gone through. However, I do enjoy gushing over a film I absolutely love!

Let’s start with the basics. mother! is the latest film from confrontational director Darren Aronofsky. It stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as a married couple living in an old house in the middle of a field. One night a stranger, played by Ed Harris, comes over and stays the night with them. Then things start to get really weird.

A particular flaw I find in my own way of writing reviews is in my compartmentalisation of the different things that make a movie good or bad. The acting, the writing, the direction etc, and then how they come together to form a whole. This is an efficient, but I find boring way to construct criticism.

I will, therefore, be brief in my appraisal of the different pieces in this whole. The acting across the board is very good. Jennifer Lawrence was brave for taking on this role, but I won’t go so far as to say her performance is mesmerising. The stealer of the acting show is Javier Bardem as he falls deeper into what can either be interpreted as love of humanity or madness. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Aronofsky has always had a controversial streak to him. His films even at their tamest have a furious nature. The camera shakes, the characters framed a bit too close, the disgusting details not hidden. He makes sure that your reaction is fierce in whatever direction. Jared Leto’s arm was black with the effects of his character’s substance abuse at the end of Requiem for a Dream, Noah felt compelled to do God’s will even if it meant killing his grandchild. This director really tries to push your buttons.

Here he constructs a little world which may make up his vision of what it means to be an artist in love or possibly his vision of the Christian God in his acts of creation and love. My friend Ruaridhri and I watched this film and came up with those different, but equally valid interpretations.

I’ve had to try to calm down after watching this film over the past few days. My brain caught fire. My hands were shaking. My throat was bone-dry. Like Roy Batty in Blade Runner “I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe”. The audacity of this movie which apparently took 5 days to write is astounding. This has to be one of the most shocking things I have ever watched.

With that said, it never feels forced. I’ve seen A Serbian Film and I was not shocked by it. That movie was an exercise in the excess of shocking material. mother! shocks with a genuine purpose.

I haven’t even talked about the incredible sound mixing, or the atmosphere of dread that builds so much before the explosion of insanity in the final act.

This movie has shaken up the sand at the bottom of my mind. It’ll take a while for it to fall back.

Recommended Scenario: If you think you can handle some truly horrific, but amazing stuff.

That other Steven something-burg is back in his full-on comfort zone. Comedy crime capers!

Logan Lucky is Steven Soderbergh’s latest offering, following Jimmy Logan, a West Virginian blue-collar worker who, when let go from his job decides to rob Charlotte Motor Speedway with his brother and sister along with an explosives expert and his two brothers.

Soderbergh is one of those artists I’d describe as a chameleon. He always something a little different and interesting and hard to define. Even when he fails you can’t tell me it’s not at least cool to witness.

Here we get a film drastically different from its trailer which demonstrated wacky hijinks and slapstick. While we do get helpings of those elements, we also get a soberly executed heist film. It calls this the Inherent Vice effect. Go back and watch the trailer for Inherent Vice and tell me that was not a misleading piece of advertising.

Ol’ Steve’s audacity has its moments in Logan Lucky. For one thing, he really cuts the fat off the runtime efficiently without ever skimping on the provision of motives or set-up. It tried to do this but ended up confusing me.

By the end of Logan Lucky, I was confused, but that’s par for the course of a good heist film upon first viewing.

Some experimentation really doesn’t pay off, however. Some humour feels a bit forced and the film makes a couple of bizarre tangents which I didn’t get. I think the filmmakers were going for a Coen Bros vibe, but it didn’t gel with the rest of the movie.

Channing Tatum and Adam Driver are the Logan Brothers. They are endlessly charming in their hill-billy smarts.

Seth Macfarlane is surprisingly not that annoying as an idiotic Nascar driver, though his role is kind of odd in the narrative.

The stealer of the show is Daniel Craig as their explosive expert convict. His performance reminds us of the man’s range as an actor, giving us an intimidating redneck you’d forget was British.

I kinda like Logan Lucky. It made me laugh, left me a little confused and reminded me that films are a playground.

Recommended Scenario: If you want a cool heist film and Baby Driver is not available.

Stephen King time folks! That means unrivalled brilliance total insanity or both!

It is an adaptation of King’s novel following a group of kids as they take on a shape-shifting clown who is hungry for their fear and for them.

It is so much better than it had to be. This could so easily have been some watered down 12A garbage to capitalise on the recognisability of it being another telling of that clown horror story.

We have a tonne of jump-scares and there’s a bit of a standard cheap 21^st Century horror feeling sometimes. What really sells it though is the film’s authenticity to what it is.

We get properly DARK, imagery and just because our characters are kids, don’t expect it to be held back. Swearing and violence and blood galore.

The kids are great too. I don’t know how it happened, but this current generation of child actors has produced some real gems.

Our evil clown of the day is <INSERT ACTOR>. While he ain’t no Tim Curry, I do love how creepy he gets. I forget there’s a human present when he’s on-screen, which is exactly what you need.

There are some annoying parts too, however. While I love the creepy imagery, I wish they could have gone just a little bit further into David Lynch territory and not explained as much.

There’s also some really weird quick shifts in tone between horror and 80’s comedy. This isn’t helped by a pace that is way too fast and loose, particularly in the first act. Whole characters go missing for a good half-hour before the film remembers they exist.

The thing that really pissed me off though was the ending. Not to spoil it, but we leave at a “To be continued” as the book is only half-adapted here. That’s not what I dislike really, because it would be cool to come back for part two a few years from now with the same group of actors grown up a bit. I won’t spoil what I really hate about the ending, but it involves a kiss. It really annoys me.

Either way, this is a surprisingly solid horror remake. You might not sleep well afterwards!

Recommended Scenario: Go for a spooky 1980s time!

I’m writing this review very late, but in the end nobody wanted to see this film anyway so I don’t feel too bad. What I have to say wouldn’t have improved its chances. 

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a great big sci-fi film based on a supposedly popular comic book series directed by master of mediocre good-looking films, Luc Besson. 

The opening sequence of this film is the best part of it. We start with space agencies from around the world coming together to work on a space station similar to the ISS. Overtime the space station gets bigger and eventually aliens show up. Not to invade, but so they can work with us. Then another species shows up, then another and another and so on. The space station then leaves on a journey through the stars. 

All this is done in silence, summing up the underlying themes of collaboration regardless of background in a beautiful way. Unfortunately this is the last time I was truly wowed by this film. 

The visuals are spectacular, this is an even better use of full-on CGI world-building than Avatar, but nothing else is all that good. 

Sequences that have no business being so long go on for what feel like hours, characters come and go without requirement (including a bizarre Rihanna and Ethan Hawke double cameo). And that’s before we come to the problem with the main characters. 

These leads are Valerian, played by Dane Dehann and something something, played by Cara Delavine. 

Their dynamic has potential as a will-they-won’t-they romantic couple, but they’re so utterly annoying that I just don’t care if the will is even there. 

The dialogue is so cliched and dull that I wanted to write the next line on the seat in front of me with blood. That way I could at least pass out by the end of the film. 

Visually, this is a really cool film. Otherwise, it’s just a load of distracting, predictable nonsense. 

Recommended Scenario: Just don’t bother. A film this good-looking should be must substantive. 

Listening to Kasabian while writing this review just feels so right.

Atomic Blonde (coolest title ever by the way) is an action flick featuring Charlize Theron as a spy sent to Berlin in late 1989 to recover some intel which could lead to the Cold War heating up.

This is one of those films with a very definite style about it. Everything has a washed out electric sort of feel. There’s some Guy Ritchie here and Tarantino there.

I don’t feel that it is particularly alienating to the audience, it certainly onnets well to the story and the characters. My only fear is that we get a thousand imitators that don’t get it, down the line.

Theron is all kinds of badass as an actress. While I would like to see her extend her range beyond her particular no-bull taking type, she hasn’t got the nuisance factor I’ve seen in other action ladies (looking at you Michelle Rodriguez).

Here she is in top ass-kicking form. She is definitely action heroine of the decade after this.

He fights and other action sequences are utterly extraordinary. Not only are they exquisitely filmed and choreographed, but they look like they hurt. Our lead bleeds for her goals.

One segment in particular transcends this to near action movie history.

Kind of a non-spoiler, but Theron at one point does get into some girl-on-girl relations.

There is a criticism I have in this and no, it’s not that it happens. It is in that the lady she becomes intimate with is inexcusably idiotic. I suppose she is supposed to be naïve, but she comes across as a moron.

The ending is also a bit convoluted. Blame me for not being smart enough, maybe.

The other thing I’d like to point out is that we need a bisexual spy film for the boys! Come on Hollywood!

Anyway this is a pretty damn good actioner with a kick-ass feel and some superb performances. Keep an eye on James McAvoy!

Recommended Scenario: If you’re in the need of electro-pop, eye-popping action.