08 Friday Feb 2013
Director: Zal Batmanglij
Stars: Ellen Page, Alexander Skarsgård, Patricia Clarkson
Plot: An operative for an elite private intelligence firm finds her priorities irrevocably changed after she is tasked with infiltrating an anarchist group known for executing covert attacks upon major corporations.
Release Dates: 31st May (USA), TBC (UK)
25 Friday Jan 2013
Director: Ruba Nadda
Stars: Alexander Siddig, Joshua Jackson, Marisa Tomei
Plot: A father desperately searches for his missing daughter amid the chaos of the Middle East he left behind.
Release Dates: TBC (USA, UK)
25 Thursday Oct 2012
Director: Jacques Audiard
Stars: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Armand Verdure
Plot: Put in charge of his young son, Ali leaves Belgium for Antibes to live with his sister and her husband as a family. Ali’s bond with Stephanie, a killer whale trainer, grows deeper after Stephanie suffers a horrible accident.
Release Dates: 2nd November (UK), 23rd November (USA)
16 Thursday Aug 2012
Director: Tony Gilroy
Stars: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton
Plot: Jason Bourne is revealed to be only the tip of the iceberg, as another operative finds himself on the run from his employers who wish to kill him.
Agent on the run. Check. Suits in Washington bickering about what to do. Check. Random woman joins said agent on the run. Check. Glamorous locations. Check. All the obligatory ingredients for a Bourne film are here, except on this occasion, neither star Matt Damon nor director Paul Greengrass are present. So, is this fourth instalment, which is essentially a spin-off from the original trilogy, a rip-roaring success or a damp squib?
Aaron Cross (Renner) aka Number Five, is a black ops agent working under a program named Operation Outcome, which provides its subjects with green pills to enhance their physical abilities and blue pills to maximise their mental agility. He is deployed to Alaska to train in the wilderness during which he pretends to lose his pills in order to obtain more. He meets a fellow operative called Number Three (Oscar Isaac), with whom he stays in a log cabin while a blizzard blows itself out before they can head back to the nearest town. Meanwhile, Jason Bourne exposes Operation Blackbriar and the Treadstone Project, which in turn leads to CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) and Blackbriar supervisor Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) coming under investigation by the FBI. Eric Byer (Norton) is called in to remedy the situation. Byer decides to eliminate all assets around the world, deploying a Predator drone to kill both Three and Five in their Alaskan cabin. Cross escapes in time and manages to shoot down the first drone and take out the tracking device in his leg, forcing an attacking wolf to swallow so that it would be his decoy and make Byer believe he had been killed.
Byer continues his operation and instructs that all of the other operatives have their green and blue pills replaced by deadly yellow ones that they unwittingly take. The team of scientists who carry out medicals on the assets and hand out the drugs are compromised when Byer abducts Dr. Donald Foite (Željko Ivanek), who is brainwashed into shooting his colleagues to make it look like a psychotic breakdown. One of those scientists, Dr. Marta Shearing (Weisz), manages to survive while Foite commits suicide to evade being questioned. Shearing is later attacked in her home by CIA agents ordered to kill her, but is saved by Cross who persuades her to help him. Shearing reveals that Cross was genetically modified to retain the advantages of taking the green pills without taking them – a process known as ‘viralling off’. Cross and Shearing decide they must travel to Manila where the pills are manufactured, so that Cross can be ‘viralled off’ successfully. With Byer on their tail along with the Filipino operative, the battle for survival has only just begun.
The Bourne Legacy, as a stand-alone film is actually not bad, but it is severely hamstrung from the get-go, purely by the fact that it is supposed to be a continuation of the excellent final third of the original trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum. There are, in the first half an hour or so, frequent allusions to the events of the previous film, mainly through news reports about Jason Bourne and the subsequent investigations. This is an uncomfortable reminder that what we are watching just isn’t on the same par as Matt Damon’s best film to date. Even with the odd action scene that thrills, such as the highway chase in Manila, there is an inescapable shadow looming over everything from the decidedly unoriginal script to the wishy-washy feel of our main protagonist. What made the trilogy work extremely well, was a central character who instantly grabbed our attention – we wanted to know his back story and felt compelled to go along with him. In Legacy, the empathy is very limited, although the screenwriters have a tough act to follow, the end result is a haphazard attempt to cash in on the success of the Bourne box-office vehicle.
Jeremy Renner’s Aaron Cross is a character you will have seen countless times in other action films and is emphatically a pale imitation of Matt Damon’s Bourne. To be fair to Renner, he can only go through the motions as per the script, but there is something missing in his performance that made his predecessor such a success – this might have something to do with the lack of emotion, as we only get to see his ‘serious’ face and little else. Rachel Weisz is as gorgeous as ever, but even she can’t lift the gloom, only screaming in various scenes whenever a gun appears but at least she doesn’t undergo an unlikely Linda Hamilton-style transformation from wet blanket to soldier in a matter of minutes. Edward Norton takes on the mantle of sneering-CIA-suit-without-a-conscience, but his Byer is little more than Strathairn’s understudy – not quite as ruthless or quick-witted. Director Tony Gilroy tries and fails to ignite adrenaline into the vast majority of action scenes, although the Manila bike chase is the only real high point.
The Bourne Legacy has nowhere near the required amount of gusto and empathy required for us to invest heavily in the characters or the story. At times, there is a decidedly TV-style feel to the whole thing, as if it would have looked better serialised on a smaller screen. Despite all the hype, Legacy has done for the Bourne film series what Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did for Indiana Jones. If the trilogy ain’t broke, don’t bother making another one.
Rating: 
12 Sunday Aug 2012
Director: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page
Plot: A thief who specialises in ‘extraction’ via dreams, is given the task of ‘inception’, but the journey is fraught with dangerous memories that threaten to de-rail the entire operation.
There are some films that need at least two viewings before you can understand just what exactly happened. Mulholland Drive, Open Your Eyes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Synecdoche, New York and Memento are all classic head-scratchers, that have confused and befuddled audiences alike. Christopher Nolan directed the latter of these and was at the helm of Inception, a high-concept film which demands intense concentration for its entire running time, but with a magnificent reward as a result.
Dominick ‘Dom’ Cobb (DiCaprio) and his business associate Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) commit corporate espionage using a machine developed by the military to enabler them to infiltrate the dreams of their targets and steal information for their clients. Their latest subject is a powerful Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe), whose subconscious they enter using a strategy of dream within a dream, in order to confuse Saito and persuade him into giving them the information they require whilst still believing he is asleep. However, the operation fails due to the fact that Cobb’s deceased wife, Mallorie ‘Mal’ Cobb (Marion Cotillard) appears in the dream as a memory projection and sabotages their progress. Saito reveals that he is in fact testing Cobb’s team to see if they are able to perform a particularly tricky procedure known as ‘inception’ – implanting an idea into the mind of a target while they are dreaming. Saito intends to break up a conglomerate that threatens his own interests, that of Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite) who is nearing death and is due to hand over the business to his son, Robert (Cillian Murphy).
Cobb assembles his team: Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who supplies the strong sedative required to go into a multi-layered dream state; Ariadne (Page), a student architect who is enlisted to design the complex dreamscapes; and Arthur. Saito insists on accompanying them on the mission and claims that if the operation is successful, he will pull strings to enable Cobb to enter the US to see his estranged children (the authorities believe he was somehow responsible for Mal’s death which was a suicide). When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney and his body is flown back to Los Angeles, the team engineer themselves onto the flight with Robert and sedate him for the gruelling task ahead. At each dream level, the team member to whom the dream belongs stays behind to initiate the ‘kick’ that will wake everyone up at the required time. However, it isn’t long before Cobb and the others realise that the operation will be difficult, as they discover that Fischer has been trained to defend his subconscious by physically attacking intruders. Numerous changes to the original plan are going to be needed if Cobb is to succeed and exorcise the memory of Mal, who continues to haunt his dreams.
There are only two words that can possibly describe Inception: absolutely stunning. True, you will have to keep up, because this is no ordinary action film with its über-complicated storyline and subplots pinging around from all directions, but underneath the apparently impossible labyrinth of ideas is a film full of beauty and richness that may very well need more than one watch. The vast majority of the film is taken up by breathtaking action sequences and these are punctuated by the necessary talkie scenes, but these drive the plot forward instead of being irrelevant as they are in many films of the same genre. The CGI could have overwhelmed the production, but Nolan employed many techniques in order to keep the virtual world a necessity instead of an obligation. At the beginning of the climax where a corridor revolves during a fight and Cobb’s team float as they dream, there is a great deal of mechanics involved rather than your usual effects done on a computer – you can easily see on-screen how this benefits the visuals immeasurably.
Leonardo DiCaprio gives his best performance to date, by far. Finally throwing off the shackles of Jack in Titanic and many subsequent roles where his leading man tag just didn’t really fit, DiCaprio’s Cobb is convincing, believable, sincere and mature – proof at last that he can lead a film from the front and not have to rely on his co-stars. Speaking of which, his fellow cast members are equally proficient in turning in fantastic performances. Apparently to Nolan as Paul Rudd is to Judd Apatow (i.e. no audition required), Joseph Gordon-Levitt once again delivers, showing his versatility as an actor in both the action and rom-com genres. Ellen Page shows she can do more than lacklustre, overrated films such as Juno as the audience’s proxy, Ariadne. Tom Hardy, the flavour of the year who is currently appearing in at least three films at a local cinema near you, proves he is no slouch with comic timing and a role featuring plenty of action scenes for him to get his teeth into. Christopher Nolan’s direction is flawless and is a clear example of a director who is not only top of his game, but is also willing to try an array of techniques to maximise the impact of his films.
If you’ve seen Inception once but decided it wasn’t for you, then you’re missing a treat. Nolan puts a great deal of faith in his audience to take everything in, but you’ll hopefully realise how much of an achievement the film really is – he has most certainly raised the bar as far as combining entertainment with thought-provoking drama is concerned.
Rating: 
10 Friday Aug 2012
Tags
2012, Andy Wachowski, Cloud Atlas, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Lana Wachowski, Tom Hanks, Tom Tykwer
Directors: Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
Stars: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant
Plot: An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.
Release Dates: 26th October (USA) TBC (UK)
23 Monday Jul 2012
Director: Stephen Daldry
Stars: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock
Plot: A nine-year-old searches New York for a mysterious key that his father left behind when he died during the 9/11.
Over a decade after the September 11th terrorist attacks, there remains a definite air of sensitivity about making films based on the events of that fateful day. The most famous of the releases in the guise of World Trade Center, Flight 93 and Fahrenheit 9/11 mostly looked at the human stories which emerged, but of course Michael Moore isn’t one for sentiment and went for the hard, cold criticism of the American government in its aftermath. Extremely Loud takes an opposite approach – that of weaving a fictional story about a family torn apart by the atrocity and a boy’s search for answers amid the fallout.
Thomas Schell (Hanks) plays a scavenger game with his son Oskar (Horn) to find an elusive sixth borough of New York. The game requires communication with people and isn’t easy – this is Thomas’ way of teaching Oskar how to look after himself and relate to others. Their relationship is very close and nothing can prepare Oskar for the events on what he calls “the worst day”. On the morning of September 11th 2001, Oskar is let out of school early without realising exactly why. When he returns home, he finds that his father and mother Linda (Bullock) are both at work. Upon turning on the television, he sees live coverage of the World Trade Center ablaze and notices five answering machine message from Thomas, saying that he is in one of the twin towers. When the phone rings again, Oskar is too scared to answer and his father leaves another distressed message which ends abruptly as the tower falls. He hides the answering machine in the closet and replaces it with a similar one so that his mother doesn’t find out.
A few weeks later, Oskar grows closer to his paternal grandmother (Zoe Caldwell), but his relationship with his grief-stricken mother worsens when she cannot explain to Oskar why his father died. He tells her that he wished that she was in the World Trade Center instead and she agrees, but then Oskar says that he didn’t mean it. One year later, Oskar finds a blue vase containing a key in an envelope with the word ‘Black’ on it. He resolves to find the lock which the key fits and sets about looking in the telephone directory for anyone with the surname ‘Black’ to see if they knew his father, even though there are 472 of them. Firstly, he meets Abby Black (Viola Davis), who is in the process of moving home following her divorce – after an initially hopeful conversation, Abby tells Oskar that she didn’t know Thomas. Oskar continues his search and finds that a mysterious man (Max Von Sydow) has moved in with his grandmother, but as they slowly befriend eachother, Oskar realises that he can’t speak due to an incident during World War II and only communicates by writing on a pad. The two set out to find the lock for the key or at least the owner, so that the mystery can finally be solved.
Adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel of the same name, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close has a very touching premise and should have absolutely no problem in grabbing our attention and really feeling for the character of Oskar as he goes on a journey of self-discovery. Unfortunately, at the very centre of the film is a massive fault line that permeates every single scene – Oskar himself. His personality is the most repulsive, bratty, irritating little wretch you could ever wish to meet. You know, the kind of sugar-high child you meet at the supermarket that forces you to move a few aisles away to save your ears from unnecessary damage. Given that he has lost his father in such a horrific way would surely compel you to feel a great deal of empathy for him, but it isn’t long before patience is tested to breaking point and at times the TV ‘off’ button feels like a tempting proposition. There are some touching moments here and there, but Thomas Horn’s portrayal matches the tone of the book and makes the film adaptation a very difficult watch, especially considering the long running time. It is hard to comprehend why Safran Foer and indeed screenwriter Eric Roth didn’t realise that having such an unlikeable central character would be a problem, given the emotive theme.
The acting you could say, is actually pretty good. Horn’s Oskar matches that of the book and he has therefore done what is required. Considering that this is his first ever acting job (he was plucked from obscurity after winning the kids’ version of Jeopardy), it remains to be seen how Horn will fair in future roles – his next films Space Warriors and Joe’s Mountain are due for release next year. Tom Hanks, who features quite briefly, is good as the charismatic father in the flashback scenes and Sandra Bullock plays Linda with restraint although the screenplay doesn’t appear to reveal why she is quite content for her young son to wander the streets of New York with a virtual stranger – this is partly explained at the end, but perhaps adoption may be the answer for all concerned. Max Von Sydow was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar (among others), for what is a performance of no real note. Maybe the Academy should have looked a little closer at some of his other roles that were far more deserving. Stephen Daldry’s direction is adequate, as long as you’re prepared for a rather indulgent shot of Tom Hanks flying down towards the screen.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close could well have been a triumph had Oskar not been, well, a git. There are some flashes (literally) of brilliance, but nothing to suggest that a recommendation is called for. This is not a film that you should rush to see, but if you do – don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Rating:
17 Tuesday Jul 2012
Director: Rob Cohen
Stars: Tyler Perry, Matthew Fox, Rachel Nichols
Plot: After Washington DC detective Alex Cross is told that a family member has been murdered, he vows to track down the killer. He soon discovers that she was not his first victim and that things are not what they seem.
Release Dates: 19th October (USA), 30th November (UK)
13 Wednesday Jun 2012
Director: Jim Sheridan
Stars: Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts
Plot: A family moves into their seemingly idyllic new home, but discover that a brutal murder took place involving the previous occupants.
We all love a fantastic plot twist in a film. Being led down the garden path into completely believing that one particular scenario exists, only for the rug to be pulled from underneath us at the end is supremely masochistically fascinating, if done correctly. Such classics as The Planet of the Apes (1968), The Usual Suspects (1995) and The Others (2001) all give subtle clues as to their denouement, but only reveal their hand in the most shocking ways possible. Dream House has a secret of its own, but actually dumps its revelation around halfway through, but can such a film maintain its suspense thereafter by expecting us to swallow another twist towards the end?
Will Atenton (Craig) moves into a new house with his wife Libby (Weisz) and their two daughters Trish (Taylor Geare) and Dee Dee (Claire Geare), giving up his job as an editor to spend more time with his family. For a time, they live quite happily there until the children start seeing a mysterious man watching them from the front yard. Will and Libby learn that something terrible happened to the previous owners – the father, Peter Ward, went mad and murdered his family but was eventually let off through lack of evidence. Will comes to the conclusion that Peter has returned to the area and is now stalking his family for whatever reason. Meanwhile his neighbour Ann Patterson (Watts) is locked in a custody battle with her ex husband Jack (Marton Csokas) over their daughter Chloe (Rachel Fox). Will goes to see Ann to discover more about Peter Ward but is given a frosty reception – when he visits the local psychiatric hospital to find him, his whole world is turned upside-down.
The plot of Dream House then delivers its coup de grâce all too early and it would be impossible to describe the storyline any further without spoilers. Suffice to say it is so ridiculous, that it would be a waste of time even giving it column inches here. The premise and the movie poster make this look for all the world like a horror film, but as the plot is unravelled, it becomes clear that there is more TV movie-style drama than anything else. There has been a great deal of controversy over film trailers giving everything away, with Cabin in the Woods (2012) being a primary case in point. The trailer for Dream House reveals so much that you may as well not bother watching it, lest you are intrigued by what the actual finale has to offer – not much by the way, in case you were wondering. The promotional interviews given by Daniel Craig and Naomi Watts in particular just illustrate how difficult it is to convey the far-fetched plot – you must sympathise with Craig who can only go over the film’s first half an hour again and again.
On the plus side, there is good chemistry between Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz as Will and Libby – the two became a real-life couple on set and show Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart how it’s done. Naomi Watts provides great support and there’s also a good performance from Rachel Fox as her on-screen daughter. Sadly, these are the only positives from what is a decidedly drab affair. David Loucka will probably find it difficult getting work in Hollywood after his pretty awful screenplay, which is supposed to emulate a certain Martin Scorsese film, but is instead a very pale imitation. To his credit though, before we learn the awful truth, the tension is built up well, even if it all suddenly comes crashing down around our ears. Morgan Creek should be also held accountable – pairing aesthetically crowd-pleasing Craig and Weisz together in a film does not a dream movie make.
Dream House might have given Daniel Craig a break from playing 007 and an excuse to grow out his blonde fop (obligatory for his family man characters), but you wonder if the pay cheque was worth this blot on his CV. Weisz and Watts should also know better – when you’re sent a script, it’s always a good idea to ask for a second opinion.
Rating:
03 Thursday May 2012
Director: David Ayer
Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick
Plot: A drama centered on the long-term friendship and partnership between two cops.
Release Dates: 28th September (USA), TBC (UK)
