Review Category: Movie

THE POPE’S EXORCIST

by Joel Harley

Drawn from the case files of real-life figure Father Gabriele Amorth, The Pope’s Exorcist stars Russell Crowe as the titular demon buster, officially endorsed by the Pope himself. To be clear, if the title led you astray, the Pope isn’t the one getting exorcised here.

Father Amorth’s services are required as the Vatican’s top man when a troubled family unit moves into a grand mansion in Spain, also located above a portal to Hell. When traumatised pre-teen Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) suddenly starts spouting obscenities in the voice of Finchy from The Office, Father Amorth pops on his Vespa (all the way from the Vatican to rural Spain!) to investigate.

The exorcist movie tropes come thick and fast – running the gamut from swearing children to priests with dark secrets. Then, when all of that gets tired, director Julius Avery and the three credited writers dip into the haunted house playbook too, terrorising stressed single mum Julia (Alex Essoe) and sulky teenage daughter Amy (Laurel Masden) with night terrors and disembodied hairy arms. Daniel Zovatto has the unenviable task of playing straight man to all of this as Father Esquibel, Amorth’s rookie right-hand man.

Meanwhile, Crowe gives the film its much-needed novelty element, hamming it up as the hip flask-chugging, scooter-riding priest. If the prospect of Russell Crowe doing his Italian accent for ninety minutes wasn’t motivation enough (surprisingly similar to his Thor: Love and Thunder Greek one), there’s also Franco Nero as the Pope (!) and Ralph Ineson as the voice of the demon. All of these eccentricities go some way to disguise the flimsy story beneath – at least up until the ridiculous finale and irritating franchise setup which follows.

The Pope’s Exorcist is never particularly scary or thrilling, but it does manage to coast by on star power, thanks to a generously bonkers performance from Crowe, hip flask, scooter, and all.

THE POPE’S EXORCIST is out in cinemas now.

LOLA

By Joel Harley

A high-concept time travel film that doesn’t actually travel anywhere, Andrew Legge’s Lola takes found footage back to the Second World War. After creating a kind of television set which can intercept TV and radio broadcasts from the future, two sisters use it to alter the course of World War II, for better and worse. It’s The Butterfly Effect meets Gogglebox.

In 1940s England, genius inventor Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and sister Martha (Stefanie Martin) leak war-winning intel to the military effort by listening in on the radio relays of tomorrow. Unfortunately, best intentions go awry when the ladies inadvertently change the future…. In the very worst way. What The Man in the Iron Castle couldn’t have predicted – Neil Hannon (yes, Neil Hannon, of The Divine Comedy fame) – ruling the airwaves with bootlicking fascist anthems.

Beautifully soundtracked (including Bowie, the Who, and great new tunes from Hannon) and well shot (using, in part, period accurate cameras), Lola is a clever and charming sci-fi comedy. Appleton and Martin both impress as the sisters, drawing a believable portrait of sisterly love, camaraderie and vastly different expressions of what Doing The Right Thing looks like.

Offbeat as it may be, the stakes are real, and Lola conjures a number of classic time travel dilemmas and paradoxes, ultimately tying into the found footage form itself. Offbeat and unexpected, a truly unique utilisation of the medium and, uh, Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy.

LOLA is released in cinemas on April 7th.

RIDE ON

by Jacob Walker

As Jackie Chan reaches his 69th birthday, what else is left to explore in over six decades of filmmaking, apart from the relationship between a man and a horse. The resulting film is more of a homage to stunt work and Jackie’s career. It’s not a disaster but rather a forgettable anomaly.

Jackie plays Lao Luo, a washed-up stunt performer who lives on a studio lot with his horse, Red Hare. Lao is stuck performing for tourists before a fight with some debt collectors, led by Andy On, goes viral. As a result, he’s offered stunt work alongside his trusty steed. Some generic suits are trying to reclaim Red Hare, so he asks his estranged daughter and law student (Liu Haocun) to help him with the case alongside her newly qualified boyfriend (Guo Qilin).

The film parallels Chan’s own life, a stuntman who refuses to retire, an offspring he can’t connect with, and constant callbacks to his own career (too many to name here). These are fun for the fans, but it feels like they are in the wrong film; a clear swansong would have been more satisfying. We do get a trio of fights between Lao and the debt collectors, which are well performed as always, even though 90% of Chan’s movements are performed by a stuntman.

The film’s strongest aspect is Jackie’s performance – he cries a lot, firstly over his daughter and then his horse. It reminds you of his emotional range, last seen affectively in The Foreigner. If anything, Ride On is a harmless curiosity; in a few years’ time, your friend will say – ‘do you remember that strange film about Jackie and a horse?’ and you will reply, ‘no’.

THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE

by HAYDEN MEARS

On its face, Nintendo’s Super Mario games seem ripe for adaptation: recognisable characters, colourful locales, wacky plot devices – all of that could have translated to something special. Unfortunately, The Super Mario Bros. Movie amounts to little more than a well-meaning video game adaptation that forgets it’s supposed to be a movie.

It’s sometimes unclear who The Super Mario Bros. Movie is for. Thin writing, coupled with a heavy reliance on unimaginative slapstick, suggests a target age of about nine, which would be less confounding if the script didn’t stake so much of its story on cheap nostalgia. When directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic aren’t inundating us with obscure references, they’re smashing Mario against blocks, breaking his fall on giant (gorgeously textured, admittedly!) mushrooms, and finding other generic ways to coax mirth out of younger viewers.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn’t particularly fun or funny, and any attempt to tell a coherent story is lost in a flurry of callbacks. The film’s back half plays like a misguided game of “Catch that Mario reference!” It really just skirts meatier approaches, entertains better ideas without taking them seriously enough to consider them. Jack Black’s Bowser stealing the show from his costars with a Tenacious D-inspired piano solo? Where the hell is that movie? More of that, please.

The movie tries too hard to capitalise on the games’ vibrant whimsy without ever exploring that whimsy. It’s a walkthrough, a speed-run, an insipid adaptation that can’t overcome its impulse to play by video game rules. There are only so many power-up blocks, training montages, and disjointed world-building a script can support before it just feels like a game we can’t play. Sadly, The Super Mario Bros. Movie reaches that threshold quite early in its 90-minute runtime.

It’s not that it’s not having fun. It’s that it misunderstands what it needs to be.

THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE is in cinemas now.

TETRIS

by Paul Mount

When rumours surfaced of a forthcoming feature film based on Tetris, the popular puzzle video game created in 1984 by Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov, the mind boggled at the prospect of a two-hour movie in which various lines of square boxes tumble slowly from the top of the screen to the bottom. The Tetris movie has finally arrived, courtesy of Apple TV+, and mercifully it’s not based on the Tetris game itself but on the convoluted and often (according to the movie) hair-raising covert negotiations between various interested parties – including notorious and discredited business mogul Robert Maxwell and his odious son Kevin – to secure the rights to the game across various territories and on various playing platforms. It sounds like a dry and rather uninvolving story of boardroom manoeuvring, honey traps, double-dealing and duplicity, but Stan and Ollie director Jon S Baird’s film, from a first-time script by Noah Pink, turns it into a gripping – if sometimes a little bit fanciful – Cold War thriller.

Taron Egerton lights up the screen as Henk Rogers, the ferociously-determined Dutch video game designer who discovers Tetris at a 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He quickly becomes obsessed not only with the game but also its commercial potential – if only he can sort out the frustrating tangle of worldwide ownership rights that has seen various rights promised to a number of licensees and with the formidable Maxwell lurking in the background determined to secure the rights for the use of the game on Nintendo’s new Game Boy handheld device. Tetris stretches the truth of its story a little for dramatic effect – a hair-raising car chase across Moscow in the last act adds some excitement, but it certainly never happened. Still, there’s enough high-stakes drama here involving KGB agents, dodgy business deals and Communist-era conniving for half-a-dozen traditional Cold War adventures. The film broadly follows the line of the true story, but if Rogers can excuse the slight Hollywoodisation of his exploits (and he has), then it would be churlish of us to complain about historical inaccuracy. Tetris is a clever and often witty film punctuated by wry computer game-style screen graphics and Lorne Balfe’s early computer games-era electronic score and enlivened by sturdy performances from Roger Allam under a wodge of prosthetics as Robert Maxwell and Toby Jones as the hapless Robert Stein from Andromeda Software. But the film’s not afraid to get sinister, too, as Henk is beaten up in Moscow, his wife and family in Japan, and Tetris creator Pajitnov is threatened by KGB heavies. It’s the dying days of the Communist era, and ‘the old Russia’ isn’t going down without a fight. But despite its moments of darkness, Tetris is a lively and engrossing piece that, out of necessity, turns what might have been a dry and dusty exploration of corporate greed and espionage into a fizzing and fascinating look back at the growing pains of one of the most famous video game titles of all time.

Tetrisis streaming now on Apple TV+.

IP MAN: THE AWAKENING

By Ed Fortune

Ip Man: The Awakening is a sort of prequel to the beloved IP Man martial arts action movies. Focusing on the legendary Ip Man (who in the real world was the Wing Chun master who taught Bruce Lee), this new movie feels like a pale imitation of a beloved movie.

Prequels can be tricky things. On the one hand, you want the whole thing to be its own original movie, and on the other hand, you want it to reflect the vibe and strength of the movie, so it feels like part of the series. It can be a tricky balance, made even more difficult in the case of action movies because it’s difficult to replicate good action sequences without feeling repetitive.

Ip Man: The Awakening avoids these issues by being set far enough back from the original movie that it barely registers and only shadows the broad emotional beats of 2008’s Ip Man. To call this a prequel is a little dishonest; it draws upon the same real-life inspirations as other Ip Man movies but has no real connection beyond sharing a name.

Set in early 1900s Hong Kong, the movie introduces us to the young Master Ip Man, a nice enough chap with legendary martial arts prowess. After a rather fine action sequence on an old-timey tram cart (which feels like we’ve seen it before), we are introduced to a broadcast of thugs and allies who aid Ip Man in ousting some fiendish British criminals from Hong Kong. This feels like a martial arts classic at points but is let down by being too slow.

There are some nice touches here; it’s fun that the English baddies bang on about Bartitsu, the precursor to mixed martial arts that was invented by Victorian gentleman EW Barton-Wright. That style stole many ideas from both boxing and Japanese martial arts and fits this story of Chinese martial arts in British Empire occupied Hong Kong very well. It also lets the movie have some fun action scenes (with a variety of props) but a lack of budget squanders this potential. The talented Tse Miu feels almost criminally underused as the titular Ip Man as the direction fails to focus on his natural talents. There is little charm or humour to the action scenes, alas.

It’s a perfect introduction to Hong Kong action movies in the sense that it has a gentle pace and plenty of action scenes, but if you’re familiar with the genre, you will find this a little bit boring. An unworthy pretender to a fine legacy of films.

Ip Man: The Awakening premieres on the Icon Film Channel on April 3rd and released in selected UK cinemas from May 5th.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES

by Ed Fortune

Tabletop Roleplaying games like Dungeon & Dragons are a unique sort of entertainment. Part game and part collaborative storytelling exercise, trying to convert the silly and intimate fun of a bunch of adventurers exploring dungeons and fighting dragons into a movie has been something that has stumped many. Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves captures the sheer fun of immersing oneself in a wildly imaginative fantasy world and having an adventure.

Like any good tabletop game, this movie doesn’t take itself too seriously and yet brings the viewer into the living, breathing world of the Forgotten Realms. At its heart, this is a heist movie along the lines of the Ocean’s or Fast & Furious franchises, so much so that it opens in a prison, albeit one in a frozen northern hellscape. Here we meet Chris Pine’s bard, Edgin, a man who just wants to right some wrongs and get his family back together. He’s assisted by Michelle Rodriguez’s Holga, who is as strong as an ox. Venturing forth into the adventure zone, we learn about their tragic and compelling backstory through the power of flashback.

Elgin and Holga’s reunion with the kid is cut short due to the machinations of Hugh Grant’s criminal creep, Forge. Grant has the most critical role of any popcorn-munching fantasy adventure movie; he’s the scenery-chewing bad guy and is gloriously shifty throughout. Forge is, of course, assisted by sinister wizards and a variety of horrors.

One refreshing note is that the central motivation here is family. Cliched as that is (and boy, does this movie like its tropes), Chris Pine’s hero strives to reconnect with his daughter but is thwarted by the over-the-top machinations of Forge, so at times, it’s more dungeons and daddies than it is Dungeons and Dragons. On that note, the dragons themselves are fab as are all the many, many monsters. The effects are just on the right side of stunning without making the movie just about the spectacle (a lesson Hasbro has seemingly learned from the Transformers movies). This really is intended to be big-screen fun for everyone, and you really want to be front and centre when the fireballs and magic spells fill the cinema.

Of course, our heroes hatch a plan to humiliate Forge, steal a lot of money, and win back the affection of Elgin’s daughter. Conveniently, Forge has invited some high rollers for a spot of gambling, and thus the planning of the heist begins. We hook up with Simon, a sorcerer, played by Justice Smith, who portrays the underdog magic user in a fun and compelling way. Sophia Lillis is also stunning and charming as the Druid Doric.

Because this is a D&D movie, that plan spirals rapidly out of control as the characters keep running into problems. For the heist to work, they need a MacGuffin, so after a few false starts, it’s questing time again. Enter Regé-Jean Page’s mysterious Xenk, who somehow plays into both heist movie tropes and the classic D&D cliches of the Dungeon Master’s favourite NPC. He’s brilliantly funny, stunning in all the right ways, and simply a joy throughout.

As you’d expect for a movie based on a hugely popular game, there’s a pretty high level of self-promotion/reference to the wider world of D&D (and all its marketable spin-off products), but Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves takes this to another dimension. Twenty per cent of the feature seems dedicated to blending all the cool-sounding places, monsters, people, and things seamlessly into the narrative. This works because the story is character driven and focused, and the cast shines all the way. It feels like the movie was a joy to make, and every moment of laughter and excitement has been captured for our viewing pleasure.

The attention to detail in this very light and fun movie is remarkable. From the set locations (including some of the prettiest parts of the UK and Northern Ireland), to the casting, to the little touches and name drops, this a movie made with love for the worlds of D&D.

If you’re a D&D fan, you must see this film; and even if you aren’t, this is an incredible big-screen experience for everyone (except maybe folk who take life a little too seriously). It’s filled with a dragon’s hoard of easter eggs for the fans, but this is done in such a way that if you’ve never heard of Dungeons and Dragons, you’ll still get drawn into this action movie spectacular. If you’ve never gotten why people find Dungeons and Dragons so much fun, this movie might finally convince you to grab some dice and some friends. It’s dumb fun throughout, and we sincerely believe that this is the start of a gloriously fun franchise!

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES rolls into cinemas on March 31st

THE UNHEARD

BY RICH CROSS

A solitary young woman returns to her empty lakeside family home while she undergoes groundbreaking medical treatment that might restore the hearing she lost to meningitis as a child. Chloe prefers her own company and, after what might be a life-changing operation, spends her time alone recuperating. Finding a battered video player and some sketchy VHS tapes, she watches home movies from her childhood, memories of a happier time when her mother was still alive. But as she starts to pick up sounds, Chloe is increasingly unnerved: worried that the house is being watched and that she’s hearing voices seemingly inside her head.

For the first half of its two-hour run-time, The Unheard impresses. Lachlan Watson is excellent as the self-possessed but brittle Chloe, carrying large parts of the film alone. The cinematography by Owen Levelle expertly teases out the unsettling in everyday settings, delivering some excellent visuals, while director Jeffrey A. Brown allows time for an atmosphere of growing unease to permeate proceedings. Music by Roly Porter and sound design by Colin Alexander provides a powerful but unobtrusive soundscape. It’s to the credit of co-writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen that the audience is left wondering where the film might turn next at the halfway point.

Unfortunately, that’s when things start to unravel. The pacing slows before some jarring plot developments skew the tone. Brown picks up the momentum as the finale builds, but at quite some cost. The premise’s intriguing aspects are bulldozed by a derivative slasher-in-the-house showdown. It’s not the ending that the film deserves, and it ignores everything that makes Chloe a recognisable and relatable character.

THE UNHEARD is available on Shudder.

ADALYNN

By RICH CROSS

An intimate, domestic horror with a focus on maternal angst and mental health, Adalynn depicts the pressure cooker that builds around the first bewildering days of motherhood. It can be a daunting challenge for any parent, and in this case, it’s made worse by the reverberations of agonising personal trauma. The result is an intense narrative which leaves the viewer experiencing the same sense of dislocation and doubt that overwhelms this fragile family.

Young mum Adalynn has brought her newborn home from the hospital. Her husband has to attend a work conference, leaving her to care for the new infant alone. Sydney Carvill delivers a spirited performance as Adalynn, carrying large sections of the film alone as her character wrestles with postpartum depression, poor impulse control, immersive delusions and the fear that her child has been targeted by a mysterious unseen menace. She’s put through an emotional wringer as Adalynn’s grip on reality comes unstuck, and the jump scares multiply. The bold musical score by Vahid Jahandari ratchets up the sense of peril, particularly in the second act – the most impressive section.

The plot resets itself many times, as whole sequences are revealed as dreams or disturbing hallucinations. It’s an effective conceit for any dramatist, but when overused (as it is here), it risks leaving the impression that on-screen events are arbitrary and without consequence. The script by Jerrod D. Brito does have valid things to say about resilience and the costs of aspiring to perfect parenthood, and director Jacob Byrd keeps things up close and on edge throughout. But the film’s final reveal is robbed of impact by something self-evident from the opening scene.

ADALYNN is available now on DVD and through streaming services in the US.

SWALLOWED

By Robert Martin

You’ve gotta love Jena Malone. Hers is a career that’s included huge franchises like The Hunger Games, working with the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson and Zack Snyder, and a brilliant turn in The Neon Demon. However, she’s also no stranger to more edgy, independent work and in much of that, she’s shown she isn’t afraid to take a risk. In those terms, Swallowed might just be her riskiest and most fucked-up film yet.

Reunited with writer-director Carter Smith, who made The Ruins with her back in 2006, Malone plays a drug runner who recruits two friends on their last night together before one of them goes to the big city to star in gay porn. Things soon go badly wrong, however, because the drugs they must swallow to get over the border aren’t what they seem… they’re alive.

Picture if Lucy were crossed with Deliverance and directed by indie queer filmmaker Greg Araki – Swallowed is shocking in ways you won’t expect. That’s because it isn’t the horror elements that make it so unsettling, but the queer ones. The sexuality on display is refreshingly normalised, and it’s great to see a camp, old evil queen as the sadistic villain, though all of the performances are wonderfully convincing.

Swallowed will make you squirm, not because of what’s been swallowed – but because what goes in must come out. How that’s achieved is something surely only a queer filmmaker could have come up with. Swallowed may not be an overt horror film, but it certainly has some horrific stuff going on.

Swallowed is out now on digital in the US and Blue Finch Film Releasing will release the film on digital download in the UK on April 24th.