Review Category: Movie

WICKED

The eagerly awaited movie adaptation of the Broadway behemoth is finally upon us… or at least, half of it is. Director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) ambitiously adapts all of the pre-interval bits of the monster musical, telling the tale of how the Wicked Witch of the West broke bad.

Cynthia Erivo plays green-skinned outcast Elphaba, finding herself enrolled at Shiz University in the Land of Oz after accidentally impressing with an impromptu show of her mystic powers. There she meets and clashes with fellow student Galinda/Glinda (Ariana Grande), quickly becoming the best of frenemies. What follows is a relatively faithful adaptation of the Popular stage show, featuring energetic versions of such songs as The Wizard and I, What is this Feeling? and, of course, Defying Gravity.

Stars Erivo and Grande are well-paired as the future Wicked and Good Witch, demonstrating palpable chemistry in their scenes together – whether that be unadulterated loathing or strange exhilaration. Both women have the pipes for it, but Grande is a revelation as the eventual Royal Sorceress of Oz, clearly relishing the role of a lifetime. Meanwhile, Boss Baby: Back in Action star Erivo capably delivers in the role of the awkward, much-hated outsider, quietly breaking hearts for the Carrie-esque nightclub sequence and bringing a powerful sense of catharsis to the show-stopping (and ending) Defying Gravity.

Elsewhere, Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang elevates his background role to quietly steal every scene, while Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum reliably recycle their usual screen personas. FrightFest regular Andy Nyman brings texture to the all-star supporting cast paying Elphaba’s dad, while Bridgerton hunk Jonathan Bailey charms as dashing dimwit and love interest Fiyero. Little sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) tends to fade into the background more than she perhaps should, but there’s still plenty to come once the curtain rises on the show’s second half next year.

Between the muggier VFX shots and uncanny valley animal creations, it’s very much the modern fantasy blockbuster (The Wizard of Oz still looks better, and they made that in 1939), but is grounded by its heartfelt performances and more practical set pieces. A successful vein of humour runs through its first half (think Mean Girls meets Harry Potter), while the second coasts by in the introduction of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its build-up to that pre-interval number.

Whether next year’s sequel can carry on the momentum remains to be seen, but Wicked is a dazzling re-staging of the Broadway classic – successfully adapting its epic story for the big screen, while keeping every bit of the magic intact.

WICKED is out now in UK cinemas.

ADVENT

Hayley (Rasina Pavlova) is a vlogger who, the year following her mother’s horrific death, buys into an online trend that involves a supposedly cursed calendar purchased from the dark web. Each day, the owner is prompted to follow specific instructions. They range from the mundane, such as walking around a Christmas tree a few times, to staying up for 24 hours. However, the directions get more serious. It’s believed that on the final day, Krampus will appear and make the owner commit suicide. Hayley believes she can burst the myths of the calendar, but her friend and camera operator, Charlie (Cian Lorcan), is more concerned.

Narrated on-screen by the silky-voiced Nicholas Vince (I Am Monsters!), who plays a professor who used to teach Hayley. Vince gives the tale a sense of gravitas as he recites the goings-on before a Yule-friendly roaring fire. We see Hayley’s activities thanks to the continuous live streaming, both by her friend and her self-shot moments (including a cruel moment involving Charlie’s hamster), and the footage gradually gives us a sense of how her mind is deteriorating. We’re left to make up our minds as to whether this was from the calendar or the girl’s personal circumstances. The professor’s monologue grows further into despair as he recounts the story. There’s also a parallel to watching a gruesome horror movie in that she becomes desensitised to the mounting challenges set for her.

Written and directed by Airell Anthony Hayles (They’re Outside), Advent is a low-budget and low-key gem. Getting under the skin of the viewer thanks to Vince’s convincing delivery and the histrionics of the online presentation of the tasks, it’s a seasonal shocker that doesn’t deserve to go under the radar.

ADVENT is released on digital platforms on November 25th.

YOUR MONSTER

This indie updating of the Beauty and the Beast story twists the narrative to emphasise the real monsters in society.

Actor Laura (Melissa Barrera) is recuperating from cancer surgery when unceremoniously dumped by her theatrical director boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan). As she returns to her childhood house to recover from the double blow, she discovers that the monster she used think lived under her bed has now set up home in her closet. If things couldn’t get worse, Monster (Tommy Dewey) has given her a fortnight to leave the house (well, he has settled in nicely in the years she left him) and her former partner is staging a musical she developed with him – with a different starlet, Jackie (Meghann Fahy) in the role she was promised. Taking pity on the despairing Laura, Monster convinces her to audition for the show. Sensing the awkwardness, Jacob gives her the part of understudy to Jackie.

The debut feature for writer/director Caroline Lindy, Your Monster balances the tone of the story perfectly. It moves from romantic screwball comedy to dark psychological drama and horror with ease. With an added large, hairy monster. The genuine chemistry between Barrera and Dewey is what carries the film. Dewey’s Monster portrays his sinister and sensitive sides beautifully, a cross between Disney’s Beast and a curmudgeonly roommate. Barrera’s softening and affection for what she initially thinks of as a horrid creature is handled perfectly. The film takes the traditional ‘opposites who realise their commonality’ trope and runs with it. The backdrop of the staging of the musical adds the bitchy drama and Donovan’s Jacob is the villain of the piece being suitably obnoxious and self-centred.

Lindy’s script and natural dialogue allows Laura to confront her inner demons. Illness, trauma, bad relationships, and duplicity all come to a head with a spectacular on-stage song. As a conventional story wrapped in an unconventional manner, Your Monster hits all the marks.

GLADIATOR II

Nearly 25 years after Gladiator pulled in an impressive $465m at the Box office from a budget of just over $100m, Ridley Scott finally unveils his much-anticipated sequel. Gladiator 2 – in one form or another – has been languishing in Development Hell for years, and various ideas have been tossed around, but eventually, it clearly became obvious that the best way to make a sequel was just to cut and paste the first film and tell pretty much the same story all over again but with some weird CGI baboons and a random shark attack sequence thrown in to appeal to an audience that likes its fantasy films – even ones with one foot in historical accuracy – with a bit more oomph. Surprisingly, it works rather well, possibly because it all seems quite familiar. If the script and storyline are a bit on the anaemic side, there’s plenty of decapitation, limb removal and general slicing and dicing and blood-letting to keep up the interest when the pseudo-historical histrionics threaten to become a bit wearing.

24 years after the events of Gladiator and old Maximus Decimus Meridious’s son Lucius (Paul Mescal), is trying to live a quiet life in Numidia under the name Hanno with his wife Arishat. When the Roman Army invades the city led by General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal, inevitably), Lucius finds himself taken into slavery and forced to fight CGI baboons. This feat earns him the attention and approval of arms dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who passes him over to his assistant Viggo so he can be trained to become…wait for it…a gladiator! Macrinus quickly promises Lucius revenge against Acacius, but Macrinus has his own plans and ambitions and over the film’s generous yet rather sprightly running time, we’re treated to a number of eye-popping battle sequences and extended fights all wound around a circuitous but easily navigable plotline involving corruption, betrayal, duplicity, agonised familial relationships and every other Roman era cliché you can imagine.

Gladiator 2 isn’t as stately as its predecessor, mainly because it’s very much more of the same. It’s a film best seen on the biggest possible screen because the spectacle is genuinely stunning – even in these CGI-doused days – and if Paul Mescal is rather bland as Lucius (and he is), then at least we’ve got Denzel Washington to revel in as he chews up and spits out every scene as the scheming, Machiavellian Macrinus, a sly and spry Roman bad guy with distinctly 21st-century sensibilities. Gladiator 2 is great fun, a treat for the eyes and ears with no readily discernible intellectual aspirations, and that’s as it should be. Ridley Scott is well into his 80s now, and it’s frankly astonishing that he’s still able to pull together a film of this scale and deliver it with such gusto and on-screen fire and energy. It’s bonkers, but in a very good way, indeed.

GLADIATOR II is in UK cinemas now and is released in the US on November 22nd.

HIPPO

Set in the late ‘90s, this monochrome nightmare is bizarre, disturbing, and amusingly outlandish.

Adam (co-writer Kimball Farley), an obsessive gamer whose nickname comes from his stuffed hippopotamus, lives a cloistered life with his previously institutionalised mother Ethel (Eliza Roberts) and adopted Hungarian sister Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger). Although there are a few years between the siblings, they are both discovering themselves and sex, although neither knows exactly what that means. Being home-schooled, the nearest discussion they get from their mother on that subject is hilariously handled and completely unhelpful. As Buttercup attempts to find a man via Craigslist on the primitive internet (complete with Netscape browser), things turn darker when her ‘suitor’ arrives.

The family dynamic and interactions have an Eraserhead vibe, but the surreal aspects of Mark H. Rapaport’s film are not as outlandish but are as equally peculiar. Farley is superb as the off-kilter teen, lashing out at things he doesn’t understand while trying to find his place in the world (we do pity that poor stuffed hippo!) and crafting himself after his only male role model, who happens to be a character in a violent video game. Rapaport makes the most of the family’s isolation, only occasionally bringing in outsiders. Buttercup’s would-be father of the child she longs for (Jesse Pimentel) is a predator on another level, but he certainly meets his match with Hippo’s family. The black and white presentation, wonderfully realised by cinematographer William Babcock, will likely draw more comparisons to the claustrophobic nature of David Lynch’s abstract masterpiece, but Hippo is very much its own beast. Farley’s titular character seems to regress rather than blossom as he grows older and must take the lead in his home.

The oddness is topped off by the chirpy narration from Eric Roberts (whose wife plays the mother, making this a true family affair). It’s delivered in a manner that complements the colourless images. Rapaport has crafted a movie that would sit well in a double bill with Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998). It’s as funny as it is uncomfortable, and all the better because of it.

HIPPO is available in the US.

BLACK CAB

The usually affable and genial Nick Frost plays chillingly – and refreshingly – against type in this new psychological horror thriller directed by Bruce Goodison. Frost plays Ian, an initially pleasant black cab driver who picks up warring couple Anne (Synnve Karlson) and Patrick (Luke Norris) at the end of a night out with friends that has turned sour. The couple have been living apart for a while, but Patrick has decided to move back in with Anne – she doesn’t seem hugely excited at the prospect – and it transpires that Anne is pregnant and hasn‘t yet told the controlling, brutish Patrick. Ian, meanwhile, quickly turns from a standard long-suffering cabbie into something a little more threatening. He won’t put up with any of Patrick’s nonsense – he zaps him with a taser sourced from Bulgaria on the Dark Web – and it becomes APPARENT that he has no intention of taking them where they want to go. Instead, he’s heading for the gloomy and remote Maybell Hill, the scene of a tragic accident which killed a young mother and her newborn son. It’s said that the mother still haunts the mist-shrouded road, and as the cab plunges deeper into the night, things take a turn for the extremely weird and twisted…

Black Cab’s USP is, without a doubt, Nick Frost. His performance here is chilling, worlds away from the Cornetto trilogy. He uses his unique physicality to create a terrifying and compelling figure who seems absolutely in control and utterly single-minded for reasons that become evident as the film progresses. In places, Frost seems to be channelling his inner Jack Nicholson from The Shining. The film cleverly positions its initial “terrorising psychopath” premise against its more traditional “restless ghost” theme, and the results, if occasionally slightly jarring, are generally pretty effective and affecting. Karlson and Norris provide strong support – especially the former, whose terror is almost palpable – and Goodison exploits the full potential of his misty, middle-of-nowhere locations. But this is resolutely Frost’s film, and he’s clearly having a whale of time here delivering the sort of performance few would have thought him capable of. Black Cab provides a surprisingly tense ride… but in future, we’ll probably stick to Ubers.

BLACK CAB is streaming now on Shudder

DON’T MOVE

Despite the fact that Can’t Move seems to be a more appropriate title, Netflix’s Don’t Move is a decent, unassuming and utterly unpretentious little thriller perfect for those nights when you really can’t be bothered to engage your brain and just fancy something that will keep you entertained for 90 minutes or so. Iris (Kelsey Asbille) is grieving for her young son Mateo, who died during a family hiking trip. Inconsolable and unable to come to terms with her loss, she decides to take her own life. She visits the site of his death, sets up a memorial to him and prepares to jump over a cliff edge. Before she can do so, Richard (Finn Wittrock) arrives, and whilst he doesn’t try to explicitly talk her out of her course of action, she reconsiders and steps away from the cliff. She heads back to where they have both parked their cars and suddenly Richard attacks her with a stun device. He then ties her up and bundles her into the back of his car. Following a failed escape attempt by Iris, Richard tells her that he’s injected her with a fast-acting paralysing agent, and within twenty minutes, she will be utterly helpless. She will be unable to move!

You probably don’t need us to tell you what happens during the rest of the film’s taut, tight 92-minute running time (bearing in mind that running is actually one of the things Iris is unable to do). Suffice it to say that Don’t Move does pretty much exactly what you might expect of it; Iris escapes, meets up with someone who can help her and discovers that a bit like M Night Shyamalan’s Trap earlier this year, Richard is a serial killer hiding in plain sight, and then starts to fight back in a desperate attempt to save her life.

Don’t Move has fun with an interesting idea even if Iris’ levels of incapacitation tend to vary depending on what the story suddenly requires of her, and it rattles along agreeably thanks to energetic performances by its unknown cast and confident direction from Adam Schindler and Brian Netto who deftly crank up the tension. You probably won’t remember much about the film a couple of weeks on, but you’re guaranteed… er… not to move from your couch while you’re watching it. Sorry.

DON’T MOVE is currently streaming on Netflix.

HERETIC

Hugh Grant has been working hard over the last few years to shake off the remains of his ‘golly gosh’ floppy-haired young romantic lead persona. Turns as the pantomime villain in the underrated Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves, a family-friendly baddie in Paddington 2 and… er… an Oompa Loompa in Wonka have gone a long way towards rehabilitating or transforming his professional reputation. Heretic should put the final nails in the coffin of an image that has frustrated him for decades as he delivers quite possibly the performance of his career to date.

Two young female Mormon missionaries – Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), their youthful naivety and innocence nicely established in the film’s opening scene – are spreading the word in their local community. They call upon the rather forbidding home of Mr Reed (Grant), an affable, reclusive Englishman who invites them into his home, assuring them that his wife is inside baking a pie. Pie is not forthcoming – neither is Mr Reed’s wife – but he does engage them in a long, rather well-considered theological discussion, and before long, not unnaturally, the girls become more than a little uneasy. Having delivered his own arguments with conviction and erudition, he presents the girls with two options by which they can leave his achingly sepia-toned home, two doors upon which he chalks ‘belief’ and ‘disbelief’. The girls must make a final decision about where their loyalties and their beliefs lie… and here their nightmare really begins.

Heretic is an intelligent, thought-provoking and refreshingly unshowy horror film. Largely unconcerned with cheap jump scares, the film hinges largely on Grant’s mesmerisingly convincing performance as a man who has devoted a considerable portion of life to his obsession with religion and its place in the modern world and who will, apparently, stop at nothing to reinforce his own particular viewpoint. Unfortunately, the film can’t resist toppling into more traditional modern horror conventions in its third act, where it loses some of its articulate bite, and its ambiguous ending tends to frustrate. But ultimately, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ film is gripping, mainly thanks to Hugh Grant’s magnificently steely and edgy performance.

HERETIC is in UK cinemas now.

THE RADLEYS

Matt Haig’s popular, high-energy 2010 vampire novel comes to the screen with most of its humour and pace drained away as the witty, irreverent book is turned into a dreary, lifeless coming-of-age story that wastes a great cast and, indeed, a great story. The Radleys are a middle-class family living a standard 21st-century existence of barbecues and birthday parties in Whitby. Peter Radley (Damien Lewis) and his wife Helen (Kelly Macdonald) have been (somehow) keeping a secret from their two moody teenage kids, Rowan (Harry Baxendale) and Clara (Bo Bragason) – they’re a family of vampires. When a local youth pushes his luck and tries to assault Clara on the way home from a party, Clara’s vampire nature displays itself, and she tears her attacker’s throat open. Peter and Helen have no choice but to come clean to Clara and Rowan after they’ve removed the evidence of the killing, but their two kids, now aware of their true nature, are suddenly a little harder to keep under the radar. Will enlists the only other “person” who can help him keep his family together – his rakish, louche twin brother and fellow vampire Will. Meanwhile, their neighbour Jared Copleigh (Shaun Parkes), whose son Evan (Jay Lycurgo) is Rowan’s secret crush, is keeping a close eye on the Radleys because there’s something just not right with them…

Unfortunately, there are many things that are just not right with The Radleys. It’s billed as a “horror comedy” – a description that fits the book – but the film version is a largely laugh-free affair. Focussing on Rowan’s obsession with Evan (new to the film) and the fracturing relationship between Peter and Helen turns the film into a rather drab and uninvolving relationship drama. Will’s vampire twin Peter (also Damien Lewis, obviously) is a manic and uncontrollable whirlwind in the book; here, he’s largely just Damien Lewis in a different shirt. Director Euros Lyn, whose TV work (Doctor Who, Sherlock, Black Mirror, Daredevil, amongst many others) is usually fast, vibrant and lively, doesn’t seem to be able to get a handle On this at all, but he’s not helped by an anaemic, joyless script that’s managed to suck all the life out of Matt Haig’s sprightly novel. Not even a bit of last-minute blood-letting is enough to animate this disappointing cadaver of a vampire film.

THE RADLEYS is available now on Sky Cinema in the UK

THE FRONT ROOM

The Front Room is a gross-out ‘mother-in-law from hell’ flick based on a short story from Susan Hill.

It’s directed by the Eggers brothers, Max and Sam Eggers, siblings of Robert, known for The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman. Whilst this film also has a ‘The’, sadly, the comparisons end there. Their feature film debut lacks the atmosphere and tension of their brother’s films, but it does have its moments.

We’re introduced to pregnant professor Belinda (Brandy Norwood; there’s a blast from the past), who isn’t getting the respect she deserves at work, so she hastily quits. Her husband Norman (Andrew Burnap)’s father suddenly dies, and he is forced to confront his Christian fundamentalist stepmother Solange (an unrecognisable Kathryn Hunter).

She offers to leave everything to them in exchange for letting her move in ‘to be with family’. Financially hard up, Belinda accepts despite Norman’s reservations. His hesitance becomes obvious as strange things start happening around the house alongside Solange’s aggressive and unpredictable behaviour. Expect scenes to make you go ‘eeeew, brother, eeeew’.

The film takes its time to get going, and you wait for something to build up. Unfortunately, it does not quite reach its potential, and the ending is somewhat anti-climatic and unsatisfying. Expected twists never quite materialise, and decent turns from Brandy and Hunter can’t quite save a forgettable horror. Still, it might make you appreciate your mother-in-law.