Category: movie-reviews

I’m gonna just say this, Toy Story 4 is a terrible idea. 3 ended on a near-perfect note and the short films on Sky Movies (now Sky Cinema) that have come out showing what happened after that ending are fine, but I just don’t care enough to watch another movie that will almost certainly disappoint.

In other news, Finding Dory is the sequel to the classic Pixar film Finding Nemo. It has been a year since little Nemo was found by his father (spoilers) and now the attention switches to Dory, the Blue Tang fish suffering from short-term memory loss. She wants to find her family, a hard thing to do with her condition.

Dory has to be one of the top two characters of all time to suffer from short-term memory loss. Ellen Degeneres plays her and she exhibits some genuinely great voice acting. She conveys so much love, comedy and pain from her condition. Dory never feels sorry for herself, she is always upbeat and funny. In the first movie, she was treated entirely for laughs, now though, despite a lot of the comedy is still there, the audience feels a great deal of sympathy toward her. Her song “Just Keep Swimming” never felt so poignant.

It’s good news that Dory is able to carry a film so well as that is always a difficulty when making a sequel to a film following a side-character from the original. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but for every The Simpsons there’s an Even Almighty.

This good starting point gives way to a truly excellent Pixar film. Pixar have a trick of putting you through the entire spectrum of emotion while you’re under there spell and that’s by design. You get there because Pixar at their best make truly special and brilliant movies.

The side-characters are delightful too. Of course we have Marlin, Nemo’s Dad and Nemo himself (who sounds like he’s the fish equivalent of a teenager though how these fish survive so long is a mystery to me) back and while their relationship is not as dynamic as it once was due to their big emotional arc being solved in the previous film, they do get some nice scenes together.

On top of that we continue to get a great cast of supporting players who are all utterly hilarious. I won’t spoil who they are or what they’re up to, but they are awesome.

What I think makes this film feel like an organic continuation to the Finding franchise is that it isn’t really a road movie like the last one was. Granted the previous movie involved swimming rather than driving, but the structure was that of a central character going a considerable distance to achieve a certain goal and the meeting of several brilliantly done characters

It’s at this point where I make a confession to you guys. I never loved Finding Nemo. I liked it, definitely. I couldn’t think of anything wrong with it, I just didn’t connect with it as a kid the way I did other films. Upon reflection though, it was technically a perfect story. And this film is an excellent follow-up.

Recommended Scenario: If you want a good Pixar Sequel that isn’t anything about Toys.

Spielberg and Dahl? Surely this should be wholesome.

The BFG is based on Roald Dahl’s children’s classic involves a girl as she is taken by big friendly giant to magical place where dreams literally grow on trees.

Steven Spielberg directed this film, teaming up once again with bridges by supporting player Mark requirements, who plays the BFG here. His role is brought to us through motion capture and astonishing visual effect, is bodily proportions stretched out to perfectly resemble the illustrations of the source Tory.

The best effect regarding the scatter is Rose himself. Here he is charming, silly, funny and just adorable all at once.

Yup this is what people will remember most about this film, but the girl I mentioned earlier, named Sophie (played by Ruby Barnhill) is a real fight to. She has all the marks for a child an adventure story. She’s wide-eyed and charming, but is able to do stuff herself. A good little performance.

Story -wise this film is properly stripped down. This no other kids no hiding from grownups storyline. It knows exactly what it is and 60 is a story of a lonely girl befriends a belief giant the narrative is how they stop those things.

In this way is very reminiscent of stupidly film. Once again to act to, things just start happening. Moments of character, fart jokes, humanity. It is all rather sporadic, but it works thanks to the strength of the characters.

The film also looks fabulous. The fantasy locations remind me of the better parts of Tim Burton and Peter Jackson’s worlds under real-world setting is satisfyingly like Harry Potter.

This movie was so lovely and wholesome, timely grades I have in their inconsequentiality, are need of highlighting.

In act three certain things that are stripped back would have benefited from remaining there. Untidiness would be a bit more intimidating if we saw all the evil things they do. However, that may be part of the big joke.

That’s what I can put some of this movies issues down to. A bit of a joke on the pathetic villains of this piece. Who cares that the final conflict is short? The baddies are morons!

So is this a kids film with which does all the right things, no more and no less? Yes. Yes, it is.

Can properly say that my recommended scenario.

Recommended Scenario: See my penultimate paragraph.

Interesting trivia, this is the first time ever Spielberg has worked for the Disney Corporation!

You thought he was gone forever, but you can’t keep the writer of Good Will Hunting down!

Jason Bourne follows the titular amnesiac assassin from the first three Bourne films as he is wrong to get into the world of cartridges running and fistfights as the people he once worked for come after yet again.

I have to be honest, I have not seen The Bourne Legacy. I didn’t want to waste my time with a film I’ve been told is bad and I heard has all sorts of nonsense about gene manipulation or something.

It doesn’t matter though as this film has literally nothing to do with that fourthquel. This is a follow-up to the Bourne trilogy. If you not seen those, don’t watch this one.

Matt Damon is back as Jason and once again he’s awesome. Not awesome in a particularly layered sort of performance, but also in that he is totally settled into his role and he plays it simply but effectively.

in this film there are a couple of changes to the Bourne formula. There’s a lot more hacking than there was in the previous movies before Snowden. It has open some new ideas for storytelling which is cool and is handled well for a hacker movie. However, a character does say “Use SQL to hack the database”, which made me laugh or weep it as a computing student.

Also new is Bourne’s motive and arc. In previous outings, his motives were fear, love, vengeance and the pursuit of answers for a spouse. Here we have a new motive, possibly doing some good. Possibly stopping the government from doing something bad.

Is arc from “leave me alone” to “I’m here to do something” is possibly not complete by the end, but it is organic enough, thanks to the writing partially done by Paul Greengrass.

Greengrass is in the director’s chair again and the film is gloriously handle under his lead. Action scenes are shot shakily but coherently and each of the excellent set pieces develop a character.

So to good Bourne film.

There are problems, though.

Firstly, a couple elements feel cut and paste from the previous films. I will say what they are but let’s just say that no matter how well they’re done, it reminds me too much of what came before.

Secondly, the title. It’s so boring. I can think of three better ones right now. The Bourne Totality, The Bourne Boogaloo, The Bourne Again.

Thirdly, and this is the big one, you can have the feeling this film should not exist. Ultimatum was a perfect action movie, amongst the very best that he will has given us so far. A rounded off Bourne stories so well.

At least with the latest Star Wars film, the story is an unexpected continuation with new characters and ideas. Here, the ideas are cool, but a little unnecessary and the new characters are duplicates of all ones.

This series will only work if Damon does two more Bourne films and dies at the end doing something heroic, which so far, he’s barely done.

That would be a proper conclusion.

Recommended Scenario: If you’ve seen the Bourne trilogy and one more, but I don’t demand you see this.

Let me just say before beginning this review that my condolences are to the friends, colleagues and family of Anton Yelchin who died at the age of 27 on the 19^th of June this year. He played Chekov in the three most recent Star Trek movies (2009, 2013 and this one) and with great ability. His performance in this movie was similarly excellent.

Star Trek Beyond is the third movie in the Star Trek “Reboot Series” began in 2009 when a parallel timeline made it possible for young actors to play the iconic roles of the series. In Beyond we meet Kirk (played again by Chris Pine), Spock (played again by Zachary Quinto) and the crew of the USS Enterprise three years into their journey “to boldly go” when they are suddenly attacked and left stranded on a strange planet, led by a mysterious alien being.

2016 marks the 50^th anniversary of Star Trek. Understandably, the producers of this film handed the writing pen for such a momentous moment in the series’ history to a big sci-fi nerd and brilliant writer. That man is Simon Pegg who along with co-writing this script with Doug Jung has played Scotty for the past two films.

Pegg and Jung’s writing is tight and rather good. We get a tremendous understanding of every character. And I mean every character. I don’t know how they did it, but all members of the main cast get their moments to shine either in comedic or dramatic scenes.

What is surprising though is that the film is altogether not quite as funny as I would have thought, coming from one half of the Cornetto Trilogy writing team. I feel that there were certain points in the runtime where you could have had a one-liner or something.

The argument against this might be that we are currently in a filmmaking landscape where we are now remembering how to make fun summer movies which don’t take themselves too seriously. The Marvel Movies, the most recent Star Wars movie, we are now getting ourselves out of the funk of dark and broody that we fell in after The Dark Knight was so brilliant and filmmakers copied all the wrong things from it. You could say that Star Trek Beyond is being careful not to go too far in the opposite direction.

Careful is probably the operative word as this story does feel kind of careful in many ways. It’s a stand-alone film. This is not the concluding chapter or the start of a new series of adventures, it’s just an adventure. One that explores the characters and their purpose in the overarching narrative of Star Trek, but one that can be seen if you have never seen any of the other films or TV shows.

The director of this film is not J.J Abrams, who was of course busy in another Star franchise. Justin Lin is our auteur for the evening. I’m not familiar with this man’s other work, but I’ve pieced together some pros and cons of his style.

Pro, no more lens flares which were cool in small doses, but the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard in some of J.J’s films.
Con, not quite the same dynamic style that J.J has built up in his relatively brief film directing career.
Pro, he’s good at big set pieces when there’s lots of light around and he can handle drama.
Con, when he shoots certain scenes particularly dark ones, they are often dark and shaky making me genuinely lost at certain points.

I understand that the cons are not all on Lin, but they are things that I found distracting when watching this film.

There’s no real big change that comes about to the whole mythos of Trek as the film goes on. The characters do go through various arcs, but we know from the outset that they will end up in the same place as they always were.

This is not a flaw in the film by any means. It is simply a tribute to the T.V style of storytelling where “everything goes back to the way it was”. Like in the best of T.V episodes, we actually understand why the characters would like to change and why they decide to stay the way they are.

We also get an understanding of what Star Trek is truly about. It’s about hope. It’s about the bridging of different peoples through science and enlightenment. For all the sci-fi out there that talks about man destroying itself, Trek is an optimist. Because the frontier is never truly final. You can always go Beyond.

Recommended Scenario: If you want to go on a pretty fun adventure with some fun characters in a cool universe.

The Secret Life of Pets

I feel deeply betrayed. I went to this movie in perfectly good faith. I trusted Illumination Entertainment. I thought that surely, they wouldn’t sink so low. But they did. This film begins with a short film from The Minions.

Illumination Entertainment have a genuine bubble of a problem that will eventually burst. Their main source of income is little cylindrical banana loving morons which speak gibberish. Even when those in their company attempt to branch out and make a film which DOESN’T contain those precious little yellow gits, their hands are forced into adding a short film containing them. Because screw trying to hold your audience with new ideas. Here’s something you know! Please buy our stuff!

What if every studio did this? What if Disney had Mickey Mouse appear in every movie they ever made? Because that’s pretty much what it is. Granted, Mickey would be even more annoying, but at least he doesn’t scream his company’s logo and then giggle for no reason. (Seriously, once the little film ends and the studio logos appear, a Minion appears and says “Illumination! Illumination! ILLUMINATION!!!”) This is not your movie!

OK, where was I? Oh yeah, The Secret Life of Pets.

The Secret Life of Pets is an animated film about pets and what they do after the owners go away. The main story follows Max, a little dog, as he adjusts to a big dog whom his owner has just adopted.

That first sentence in the previous paragraph would have made a logline for a really interesting movie. One that has been kind of done at least on TV and in our minds a few times, but one that has the opportunity for great comedy. What if we could peek behind the curtain and see what our pets do behind our backs? It’s a great idea and in a way does not even need a tying plot. We could have something like a series of vignettes into the lives of these creatures, borrowing from Pulp Fiction or 22 Short Stories of Springfield (one of the best TV comedy episodes ever made).

However, we have that pesky second sentence adding something as boring and conventional as plot to our fun little premise. Ah well. At least its harmless.

The story is pretty generic. A new guy moves into the place where a guy is already very happy and they have to learn to get along through a series of adventures and misadventures. It’s a tale so often told that Garfield did it. On top of that, The Simpsons did it in that episode looking back on the early days of Lisa’s life where Bart has to get used to her, another classic.

The best part of this movie are the jokes they pull out of these animals actually acting like animals. That stuff is a 1000 times more interesting than when they act more human for more dialogue based humour. Which is why this film just would have been better if they had gone with my idea. Hate to take credit, but it’s true.

There isn’t too much wrong with this movie apart from its general blandness and pop soundtrack which is needed to keep every kid’s attention. It’s funny at times and that comes in part from the voice cast which includes Louis C.K and Kevin Hart (the latter I have been too unkind to in the past).

I didn’t love this film, but it’s fine. If you can stomach Minions at the start.

Recommended Scenario: If you want a version of Toy Story with pets instead of toys.

A question for the cinephiles out there. At what point does a comedic homage to a genre become a spoof? Airplane is unanimously considered a spoof of the aeroplane related disaster films of the 1970s. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is generally seen as a comedic homage to the film noir. So what about this film?

The Nice Guys is a comedy directed and co-written by Shane Black of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang fame. It stars Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling as two private investigators in 1977 Los Angeles. They are forced to work together to investigate a mystery involving car companies, porn stars, murder and seventies style.

Right off the bat, this movie is already winning. Shane Black is an excellent writer of dialogue and caster of double-acts. Crowe and Gosling should be in their own T.V show, their chemistry is so palpably good and the writing easily supports them.

Another strong presence in this film is Gosling’s character’s daughter, Holly (played by Angourie Rice). She is a badass who not only is the smartest of the three (a common trope in this kind of film) but also contributes greatly to the comedy.

I’d actually go so far as to say that this film is altogether better than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Both films are very similar, both being set in L.A, containing very obvious noir traits and a good double act. I do like KKBB and it’s definitely the more original film in terms of its execution, which I give it props for. However, it does feel a little full of itself at times and only provides a strong character arc for Robert Downey Jr’s character. This film, though, has both parts of our central duo transform over the film and overall I found it funnier.

The whole plot revolves around some pointed satire of American business culture in the late 70s. It actually goes further than most films which do so. Those films just say “those in power and with lots of money are bad”. This film also mocks them for the fact that their own greed leads and will end up leading to their own downfall. Gosling already showed us this in The Big Short. This is not really anything to do with the overall quality of the film, just a nice part I’m glad they gave thought to.

I can’t actually think of much not to recommend in this film. It’s funny, cool and huge fun.

‘Nuff said.

Recommended Scenario: If you like a good laugh and 70s stuff.

If you are a frequenter of the internet, you will have heard of a Japanese Animation Studio with almost unanimous critical praise, more popular amongst those familiar with them than even Disney and Pixar. Their films include films which are often sited as some of the greatest movies ever made. Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, The Grave of the Fireflies are among their most praised works. Their name is Studio Ghibli. This might be their final film.

When Marnie Was There, written and directed Hiromasa Yonebayashi and based on the novel by Joan G. Robinson tells the story of Anna Sasaki, an orphan teenage girl who is suffering from repeated asthma attacks. To help her deal with this, her guardian sends her to the countryside to live with her aunt and uncle. There she finds a mysterious looking marsh-house and a blond girl called Marnie.

It is interesting to see a Japanese adaptation of a Western source material since, with the exception of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptations, the trend often goes the other way. The result in this film is a kind of film I don’t think I’ve seen from Ghibli before.

The whole feel of this movie is decidedly more contemporary than other Ghibli films. Not only is there little in the way of the magical creatures and daemons we are used to in their more “Japanese” films, this feels like it comes from a western angle in its style of storytelling. This is a young adult film. This is a coming of age story.

With that comes the tropes that we’re used to in young adult films. A loner kid finds a weird kid and they find they have lots in common and they have to help one another and while doing so they find out who they both are.

I have never seen this particular style of story portrayed with quite as much beauty, not only in its presentation but in its story’s execution. I connected with and dare I say loved Anna and Marnie (played by Hailee Steinfeld and Kiernan Shipka in the English dub I saw) in a profound way.

Does the film have clichés? Yes. The asthma, the free-spirited teens, the possible ties to learning about one’s sexuality. I could complain about these, but I won’t because these are as old as the very genre itself. A cliché is not necessarily an evil if it is executed as well as this film is.

This is a film which made me laugh and cry and at the end feel even more passionately in love with Ghibli. I desperately hope that this amazing group of creatives don’t leave us, but if they do this is a terrific, small movie to leave as a parting gift.

Recommended Scenario: Please watch this. It’s just lovely.

Six years after Tim Burton brought us the remake/sequel to Alice in Wonderland (I’m still confused as to which it was) and added a billion and a bit dollars in gross for Disney, the inevitable and apparently eagerly anticipated sequel to that is now upon us.

Alice Through the Looking Glass follows Alice some time after the events of the previous film, having in the meantime explored some of the wonders of our world and grown somewhat. She is forced by circumstance to come back to wonderland (or “Underland” as the movie insists it is called) to save the Mad Hatter from a mysterious affliction.

Events transpire meaning that in order to save the Mad fellow, Alice must use a device called the chromosphere to travel back in time.

I love time-travel in movies & TV, myself being quite the Whovian. The way it is used here is pretty typical of some sci-fi temporal shifting movies. In order to save the day, the past must be altered, while the universe protests to it.

This is a solid and well-tried plot for any film of this type and I don’t hold anything against the screenwriters for using it to fill this adaptation of relatively plotless source material. It does enough clever things, like having Time be personified in his own little world as a German-sounding man played by Sacha Baron-Cohen. There are some plot-holes as you would expect from this, but it is kind of fun to see how all the characters from Lewis Carroll’s stories came to be the way they are.

It rarely feels forced or out of place in the strange world in which it is all set. This is an improvement on the previous film which was forced into a Harry Potter/Narnia “chosen one” narrative which culminated in one of the flattest and most boring climaxes I have ever seen in a big movie.

Another difference to the “original” 2010 film of note is the aesthetic. Burton only produced this film so some of the gothic edge has gone in favour of brighter colours and less gruesome violence. While I am very fond of visual originality (even if it’s the same originality we’ve seen from Tim for around 30 years), especially in a family film, it has to be backed up by us caring for the characters which, as I shall explain, did not happen in 2010. In this regard Looking Glass gets another point.

The biggest change in this movie is in the characters. Helena Bonham Carter and the brilliant Paul Whitehouse where always great as the Red Queen and the March Hare, respectively. All the other players in this story who had opportunity to do so in the original irritated me no end. Especially Alice.

The whole moody, independent teen shtick she had which ran through the whole of the 2010 film along with that nonsense about her thinking that “Underland” is a dream the whole time in a sort of backwards Wizard of Oz making her disconnected and dull is gone, thank God. In its place is a relatively normal, but kind person who I actually liked and gave a damn about. I was invested here in whether she succeeded or failed. Even if her goal is to save Johnny Depp’s Hatter who acts like all the worst parts of his Willy Wonka performance. Stick to apologising to other governments Mr Depp.

People seem split between these two recent Wonder/Underland movies. Both have flaws and take themselves way too seriously, but this film, to me is a far superior experience.

Unfortunately, this film may prove less memorable in its modest yet admirable successes than its predecessor in its abject failures. Shame.

Recommended Scenario: If you want a solid time-travel movie. Just watch the original Disney Cartoon first, the 2010 version is rubbish.

P.S Dear Filmmakers,

Make sure the song you have over the end of your film fits the movie. This one had some poppy crap about time which otherwise had no place here. Just because the movie is over and the credits are rolling does not mean that this rule should not be followed:

“All elements of a movie, including music, must match said movie either through harmony or an acceptable form of discordance.”

Thank you.

P.P.S It is nice to hear the late Alan Rickman’s voice as Absolem the Caterpillar/Butterfly. His voice was timeless and excellent we as cinephiles shall continue to miss him.

To prepare himself for the crime against cinema that is the possibility of another Dan Brown adaptation, Tom Hanks has gone to find himself in an indie dramedy in Saudi Arabia.

Hanks plays a salesman called Alan Clay who is tasked with selling holographic projector technology to a Saudi king. All the while he is trying to deal with the fact that past decisions he has made have hurt him and those he cares about.

The best way to describe this movie would be that it is Lost in Translation, but it exclusively focuses on Bill Murray’s character and he has considerably more practical reasons to moan.

While Murray’s excellent performance in that masterpiece certainly dealt some severe existential issues that he faced, he had it pretty easy in the moment in Japan. Hanks in Saudi Arabia has to deal with the heat, unhelpful hosts, a divorce and most importantly (to the mind of a 1990’s baby like myself) intermittently active Wi-Fi.

Through the course of the film, Clay has to deal with the problems he finds there while also dealing with the ones he brings with him.

There is one thing I would like to say out the gate about this film, Tom Hanks is still one of the very best Hollywood actors around. Here he puts forward a side which, like George Clooney’s performance in Money Monster, we don’t often associate with him. Here he is a sceptic who must put on a face of smiley go-lucky charm we like to associate with the actor to perform his job. There is a spectacular transformation shot of him putting on said face as he meets his co-workers in Saudi for the first time. It is a very good performance.

Tom Tykwer, the director of this film (formerly one of the three behind the underrated Cloud Atlas), also does a pretty good job as a visual storyteller. He, his editing and cinematography team capture the beauty of this desert land in which our hero finds himself.

The thing I really love about this film is how it never strays into full on pretention as it could so easily have done. In movies striving for this tone and theme of self-discovery, like the 2013 romantic-sci-fi-drama Her, one could so easily lose focus at points and end up taking up a lot of the dialogue with discussions exclusively on the film’s theme and not a natural interaction between the characters and that theme*.

There is a balance held between the visuals, the dialogue and Hanks’ performance which is very well held throughout the runtime of the movie.

This is a pretty darn good film. It is moving, funny and very satisfying.

Recommended Scenario: If you want to have a double-bill with the still superior Lost in Translation.

*Please note, I do really like Her, though I must point out this criticism of its otherwise very clever script.

Jodie Foster gives us a film about capitalist greed. Will it be as ferocious as The Wolf of Wall Street or will it fall short of The Big Short.

George Clooney plays the host of a TV show which covers the ups and downs of Wall Street in a modern, hip sort of way (think Bloomberg meets TMZ whilst keeping the purpose of information sharing). One day a man enters the studio with a gun and places Clooney in a bomb vest which he says will go off if those responsible for a Wall Street hiccough are not identified and penalised.

From the first few minutes of this film, it was clear the direction of the most important character arc would fly. Clooney’s character, Lee, will go from a jaded profiteer of the arguably broken system of capitalism and go to the side of the angel that has come to spread the news while holding a gun.

What I admire most about this film are the little details that go against the grain of how you’d expect this film to go.

For one, Lee is a bit of a scumbag. He’s not necessarily evil, but he puts the audience in mind of some of the less good parts of the elite. The closest comparison is obvious in that it is the same slight change in character you see when he plays roles written by the Coen brothers, particularly his recent role in Hail Caesar. His traditional Clooney charm is there, but it gives way to very human reactions to being threatened by a maniac with a gun.

Speaking of that maniac, Jack O’Connell is our hostage taker of the day and he does a very good job in the role. It was a rather smart casting decision to get O’Connell in this role since it is only his third major Hollywood role, allowing us to see him as even more of the everyman that his character is.

What’s also quite clever about this character is that he is not a prophet come to save us from the machine. He’s a guy and not the smartest at that. He comes into the studio guns literally blazing and holds up a building of people to spread his message which in the end is extremely vague. Even he doesn’t really know what it is that he wants. All he wants is accountability for those who deserve it. As noble a goal as that is, he does take questionable methods to achieve it. What I like about this movie’s writing is that it acknowledges this fact.

Much of the rest of this film is pretty by the numbers thriller stuff, with some decent humour and dialogue thrown in occasionally. The bad guy is who you think the bad guy is. We’ve heard the underlying message of good journalism and making the powerful accountable.

What’s more is that the end result is a pretty elaborate plot that I’m sure CinemaSins would have a field day on it.

Jodie Foster doesn’t add much style to this film, preferring to allow the action to unfold in the lens of a more typical Hollywood thriller. In a way that is actually entirely appropriate. To spread the bloomin’ obvious message she and the screenwriter’s were trying to convey, she takes the Roland Emmerich approach to spreading themes. By making the film seem as typical as possible, more people might be able to connect with it.

Either that or it’s a pretty standard thriller.

Recommended Scenario: If you enjoyed The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009). In essence it is actually quite similar.