Review Category: Movie

DIRECTOR: TODD PHILLIPS | SCREENPLAY: TODD PHILLIPS, SCOTT SILVER | STARRING: JOAQUIN PHOENIX, ROBERT DE NIRO, ZAZIE BEETZ, MARC MARON, FRANCES CONROY | RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 4TH

Todd Phillips’ Joker is deeply unsettling. It’s a film which follows you home at night, insidious and nightmarish. Such is the origin story of one of pop culture’s most recognisable villains. 

It’s 1981 and Gotham is on the knife’s edge: garbage piles at every corner, streets are overrun by rats, and the rich blame the poor as public funding is cut and unemployment climbs. The world is falling apart, and Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) slowly paints his clown face, grimacing as a tear streaks down his cheek – this won’t be the story of the Joker you know, the film announces, but that of who came before.

If Joker opts for a polite nod to DC lore, it nonetheless refuses to be limited by existing mythology, shaping itself into a standalone, deranged, neo-noir character study. This, without devaluing the role of others involved, is Phoenix’s film. The actor dropped a significant amount of weight for the role, the lost pounds serving to hollow out his face and darken his eyes, transforming his body into a disturbingly insect-like figure. When he moves, dances, runs, his body contorts and unfurls with pain. Arthur never feels truly human, but rather an imitation of a man.

Take, for example, laughter; a very human trait. Yet in Phoenix’s hands, Arthur’s laughs are wrong, delirious, uncomfortable, painful. “Forgive my laughter. I have a condition” says the worn card he carries around with him – his laughter isn’t even laughter, but the sign of a man on the edge. Phillips dares the viewer to try and sympathise with his protagonist, placing him as a victim to beatings, to his mother’s needs, to a broken medical system that can no longer provide him his meds. 

The director and co-writer presents situations that ought to stir pity for Arthur, perhaps even a level of understanding for his slow yet inevitable descent into violence, then interspaces them with reminders that this is a man who is not just empty and angry, but who is dishonest. Joker’s narrator is unreliable, showing us one thing only have it revealed these are just manifestations of his imagination. This builds a feeling of paranoia and distrust where, even when Arthur Fleck presents as a sad victim, you can’t help but question whether any of it is true. 

And the further the film unravels, the further away Arthur feels. As his brutal murders evolve from being the result of a provocation, to revenge, to spite and finally enjoyment, the character comes into his own. Editor Jeff Groth builds tension to unbearable levels, climaxing in moments of catharsis for both the character and the audience. The former is soothed by the violence, enlivened by it, while the latter is relieved by the confirmation that no, this is not someone for whom to feel compassion. Gone are the pretences of humanity, freed is the Joker. 

The film speaks to the rage of the disenfranchised, who in Gotham find their hero in the unknown killer clown, to no-hope politics, to social alienation. Where Heath Ledger’s Joker can be viewed as a reflection of 9/11, a terrorist who seemed to come out of nowhere strictly to cause pain and destruction, today’s Joker is the man who was there all along, on the outskirts of society, and who finds identity and meaning in violence. Joker is enthralling, stylish, smart, chaotic, and fundamentally disturbing; it’s a film which consumes you as you struggle to claw your way out.

 

DIRECTOR: JAMES GRAY| SCREENPLAY: JAMES GRAY, ETHAN GROSS | STARRING: BRAD PITT, TOMMY LEE JONES, LIV TYLER, RUTH NEGGA, DONALD SUTHERLAND | RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 18TH

Ad Astra has a lot in common with space epics that precede it; it’s grandiose, oppressive in its vastness, and beautiful. Brad Pitt gives a wonderfully solemn performance. It’s not very original.

Writer-director James Gray’s gorgeous drama stars Pitt as Roy McBride, an emotionally closed-off space veteran sent on a secret mission to find his father, national hero Clifford McBride (Jones) who went missing in deep space fourteen years prior. Now, mysterious power surges are destroying Earth’s equipment – and threatening life itself, because, stakes – and seem to originate from the Neptune region, which is McBride Sr.’s last known location.

The powers that be, worried their man has gone rogue, enlist Roy to make contact with his old man. And so begins a two-hour journey across the stars to reunite an absent, possibly unhinged father and his damaged, definitely very sad, son.

Pitt gives an incredibly understated performance, anger and grief roiling beneath his manicured, collected exterior. Close-ups are used to great effect to chart even the smallest fractures in Roy’s composure. It’s a shame then that, despite Pitt’s sensitive portrayal, the voice-over barges through all that. It isn’t clear whether it’s the audience or the actor whom Gray does not trust, but he seems to believe every single moment needs to be spelled out. “I’ve been trained to compartmentalise,” Pitt’s voice declares, because that wasn’t at all clear.

That’s not to say every instance of narrative musing is unnecessary, but moments like these throw the tone off balance enough to prove distracting, and maybe even a little insulting. Maybe the studio was just scared of such a quiet film.

It’s also quiet in the sense that, by the end, not much is being said thematically. Ad Astra believes it’s asking big questions about existential loneliness, anchored in a more personal place. Yet where Interstellar and Gravity work both these planes in tandem, Gray’s film loses its mythic elements to an old-fashioned story about a son afraid of becoming his father. The grander themes end up sounding sadly hollow.

However, none of this detracts from the fact that the cinematography is magnificent. Radiant shots of Neptune’s rings are contrasted by endlessly black voids, monuments to human achievement are set against the unromantic banality of extra-terrestrial colonies. No surprise given Hoyte van Hoytema was also the cinematographer on Interstellar and Dunkirk. The visual artistry is matched by Max Richter’s slow and minimalist score, contributing to the meditative state Ad Astra sustains.

At the end of the day, Ad Astra is beautiful but lacks any lasting impact. The premise is stale, and Gray doesn’t make much effort to go beyond genre archetypes, particularly when it comes to its thematic explorations. Ad Astra stays far too close to Earth, and that’s to its detriment.

 

DIRECTOR: RIC ROMAN WAUGH | SCREENPLAY: ROBERT MARK KAMEN | STARRING: GERARD BUTLER, DANNY HUSTON, FREDERICK SCHMIDT, PIPER PERABO, MORGAN FREEMAN | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

While people may gravitate towards action movies for a little bit of escapism, this third entry in Gerard Butler’s ‘Dumb Hard’ series is a film we recommend they run from.

Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Butler) is framed by his friend, Wade Jennings (Huston) for an assassination attempt on President Trumbull (Freeman), one which caused the deaths of eighteen fellow agents and injured the Commander In Chief. Banning is arrested, escapes, and seeks help from his father (Nolte), who here looks like Rambo McSanta, while also being pursued by FBI agent Helen Thompson (Smith). Banning makes his way to rescue the president from the hospital as the ICU unit explodes courtesy of the bad guys, and the chase is on ala an episode of The Fugitive. One expects to see Detective Girrard to show up any minute and give the FBI a hand with a cameo by The One-Armed Man.

It’s a formulaic plot that we’ve seen repeated ad infinitum, one that seems to be the Hollywood status quo, though it’s no fault of the actors as they deliver solid performances considering what they have to work with. Ric Roman Waugh’s direction however is like taking a spinning ride in an upright washing machine after swallowing a dozen ping-pong balls. Enough with the ‘shaky-cam’ and blurred camera shots already! As General Mapache said in The Wild Bunch… “put it on the tripod.”

Avoid.

 

NIGHT HUNTER / CERT: UNRATED / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: DAVID RAYMOND / STARRING: HENRY CAVILL, BEN KINGSLEY, ALEXANDRA DADDARIO, STANLEY TUCCI / RELEASE DATE: 13TH SEPTEMBER

For years now, mainstream cinema has tried to copy the Scandi-Noir blueprint. It falls short more often than not, most notably in the borderline incomprehensible The Snowman. It took a filmmaker of the caliber of David Fincher to pull it off and even his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo failed to bring anything new to the table.

While an original screenplay, Night Hunter borrows freely from the Scandi-Noir toolbox: tundra-like environment, heroes with messy personal lives and personality disorders and eccentric serial killers. The setup is not terrible, but the execution is reminiscent of a car crash. One can only imagine what was going through Henry Cavill, Stanley Tucci and Ben Kingsley’s minds while shooting this movie in the midst of the unforgiving Manitoba winter. “I hope the cheque doesn’t bounce,” maybe?

The plot: The Minnesota police is hot on the trail of a serial kidnapper who targets teenage girls and deafens them no good reason. Leading the investigation is Detective Marshall (Cavill), a taciturn policeman whose skill at tackling psychopaths has distanced him from his family (we see no indication he is good at his job, by the way). The investigation forces him to partner with Cooper (Kingsley), a retired judge turned vigilante who seems to have better tech than the police to deal with sex offenders.

Night Hunter throws a lot of plot at you, hoping that something sticks. Little does. The film mistakenly focuses on the dullest character while the far more interesting Judge Cooper spends most of the movie off-screen. Ever the pro, Sir Ben creates a character out of a pile of tropes – an ability not shared by Henry Cavill, whose idea of portraying a weathered detective is not combing his hair. If there was an award for recognisable actors stuck in pointless roles, Nathan Fillion and Minka Kelly would be way ahead in the running as tech cop and long-suffering ex-wife respectively.

However, the movie’s biggest sin is how senseless the investigation turns out. Witness cross-examination and fingerprint analysis could have solved the case fairly early. Instead, the police go with hunches and questionable psychological assessments. Director David Raymond’s inability to make sense of his own script is something else – the single interesting aspect of the film, predators targeting underage girls in social media, is dumped very early on in favour of a sub-par serial killer procedural.

The best thing about Night Hunter is the length. At 97 minutes, the nonsensical plot moves fast enough for some of the obvious shortcomings to go unnoticed. The real mystery here is not the identity of the killer, but who greenlit this movie. Also, who knew there was so many Brits working in Minnesota law enforcement?

A jock, a geeky voyeur (and his mate), a goth, and a straight-edged metaller accidentally summon a sex demon to the cinema. What can possibly go wrong before they’ve had heart-to-hearts and lost (bits of) body parts? Director Keola Racela’s Porno happily dispenses with the truly arcane and the serious to give us balls to the wall, honest-to-Christ, Scooby-Doo hilarity.

The basic premise of the film sees the oddball bunch working in a cinema run by their prayer-toting proprietor. After hours, if they pass muster, they are allowed the (upstanding) film of their choosing on the big screen. One day, a chance encounter leads to the discovery of a raucous reel that then leads them to question their lifestyles and moral choices. Well yes, it does, and there are a few quiet moments of reflection that (bizarrely) are still nice to see in 2019, but don’t kid yourself. Porno, as the snappy title would suggest, is more about facing up to your peccadillos with a giggle and accepting them as being really quite normal when thought of rationally, or moving on with a clearing of the throat and rubbing of the eyes (what did you think we were going to say?).

The feature’s success falls equally between Matt Black and Laurence Vanicelli’s script and the cast themselves. The words are often so ‘first serious drunken party’ daft that they almost shouldn’t work, but with actors such as Robbie Tann as Heavy Metal Jeff and the geeky double act of Abe (Evan Daves) and Todd (Larry Saperstein) at the helm, they become genuinely priceless. Tann and Glenn Scott (as sporty Ricky) in particular then stop the film flying away with itself by bringing true emotion the quiet scenes. Of course, the whole gang are aided and abetted by Katelyn Pearce as Lilith, the appearing beastie. She manages a truly inspiring sense of magneticism that makes the odd bits of the action believable (over and above the deliciously cheesy video sequences), so much so that when things threaten to go pear-shaped, you actually root for the heroes. The only arguable downside is the final third, which is either an OTT tension loser a B-movie beater depending on your point of view. Word to the wise: do not take your mum to see this movie unless she is Very Liberal because she will get several in the eye.

Porno smooshes sweet hey-shucks fun with a well-judged under current concerning the real religious tension surrounding our obsession with sex. It chucks it together with the Scooby Gang and adds decent dick jokes for good measure. It’s good clean fun for the terminally filthy!

A snarky little goth (with fabulous lipstick) meets her maker on a mountain road courtesy of a drunk driver. Her mum, a smoke and mirrors medium amidst a mass of weatherworn dark curls, makes it her business to find out what’s happened. The Deeper You Dig mixes a realistic aesthetic with trippy techno surrealism in this daringly inventive film that questions whether love is the key to accessing the secrets of the universe, or if hoping is just the way to madness. That writer-directors John Adams and Toby Poser also star convincingly as the two leads (the drunk and the mother respectively) is astounding.

The glorious aspect of The Deeper You Dig is its willingness to stylistically ping-pong through the psyche as the story shifts ground. The medium’s hokey early act is painted with the floating heads of any dodgy old horror, but with self-referential camera angles that make it clear it’s not exactly clear who is being conned by the supernatural. Later sequences when the local cops investigate the murder are believably low-key, down to repeated close-ups on scabby fingernails. The best work however is on the incorporation of the pop-occultism, which shifts from bug-eyed trance sequences to physical evocations of grief and a great turn from a medium who’s been there and back. All of this is emphasised by a cracking score that manages to make digital manipulation emphatic and considered. What’s more, while there are a few jump scares, they serve to add atmosphere and increase empathy rather than simply startle. That the film indulges in a brief game of ‘spin the tail on the ending’ is to be forgiven because of these daring touches.

The cast don’t hurt either. Poser’s grieving mother hopscotches between being believably downtrodden in losing her faith that a good outcome will happen and bug-eyed enough for you to believe she’s desperate enough to try anything. The freewheeling sense she lends is counteracted by Zelda Adams as young Echo, who has gothic gravitas down to a tee (even when appearing in rather peculiar places). John Adams is suitably convincing as the loner trying to keep his head. Even the landscape becomes a character, with the snow-covered hillsides and house itself mirroring the desperate return to normality.

The Deeper You Dig weaves tricksy imagery with grounded performances to create a tale in which you might just find you’re rooting for the wrong person… and play the fool enough to love it regardless.

DIRECTOR: CHRISTIAN ALVART | SCREENPLAY: CHRISTIAN ALVART, SEBASTIAN FITZEK | STARRING: MORITZ BLEIBTREU, JASNA FRITZI BAUER, LARS EIDINGER, FAHRI YARDIM

Linda (Bauer) is an artist trying to free herself from an abusive ex and unwanted attentions of some new fools when she discovers a bodying laying on the beach. Paul Herzfeld (Bleibtrue) is a pathologist failing to retain a relationship with his increasingly cut off daughter after a marital break-up. When his silver table’s bodies start to incorporate cryptic messages, the dissector and the creator join forces to stop a serial killer and save their own sanity in Antibodies’ director Christian Alvart’s new feature, Cut Off.

Adapted by Alvart from a novel by Sebastian Fitzek and Michael Tsokos, while there is the ongoing murder-mystery come race-against-time, there is also a more ponderous plot about accepting responsibility for our actions versus the freedom of the body. This is where the film really excels because while it does contain some don’t-eat-your-dinner-while-watching mortuary sequences, the harshest scenes are where characters evaluate how to cope with trauma; as a “buyer beware”, there is a truly horrid (though justified) assault sequence. The whole thing is then refracted through the idea of technological and psychological control. A courtroom sequence does a swift but devastating job of showing how one seemingly unfair decision can cause us to change our entire outlooks, with Jakub Bejnarowicz’s cinematography succeeding in providing a grubby tone that evokes the depersonalised nature of the law rather than simply seeming seedy. The pacing, in general, moves the story along nicely, while some slinky editing periodically pulls the rug on previously accepted character portraits.

Luckily, the cast are incredibly strong. Bleibtrue excels as the dogged father trying to right his wrongs, while Bauer as artist Linda is believable despite the physically able way she switches pens for knives. Dissection is not something you’d think you could be talked through in a phone call.  Enno Hesse leavens the tone as an earnest intern, though quite how anyone could be as dozy as his character is is by the by. Lars Eidinger is a by-the-numbers gurning sadist, but he is good at it and his manic turns inject vim that causes this crime drama to turn action thriller at key moments.

Cut Off mixes some improbable elements with a great cast and a keen eye for the cinematic. It’s a cracking crime caper that will leave you considering some unsettling questions in quiet moments afterwards.