Review: Crawl

This horror thriller snuck into cinemas without much fanfare, and threatens to leave much the same way. That’d be a real shame; at a time when talking loud and saying nothing seems to be the way to go when it comes to thrillers, this manages to be one of the more effective thrill-rides of the year largely thanks to twists that feel earned and scary scenarios that (largely) make sense.

(also people get chomped on a lot)

When her father (Barry Pepper) won’t answer his phone as a hurricane bears down on his Florida home, university swim team struggler Haley (Kaya Scodelario) drives down to check out what’s up. Turns out, quite a bit: the streets are flooded, there’s no sign of dad in the old family home but a radio’s playing down in the rapidly flooding basement, and you know what else is down there? Alligators. 

At barely 90 minutes and with pretty much all the action taking place in a grand total of one real location (the house - even when you think you're out, it pulls you back in), this still manages to come up with a string of tense scenarios based on the idea that getting eaten by an alligator is a very bad thing – as demonstrated via a range of supporting characters who’re lucky to get a complete sentence out before being chomped.

The story feels smart because the characters aren't railroaded into set-pieces; once the basic set up is in place there are a number of times where the characters try something logical to escape and while it doesn't work, it doesn't lead to an obvious pay-off (like a jump scare) either. It makes the nutty scenario feel more natural and more stressful - not every bad move has to lead to sudden death when the overall situation will kill you if you can't find a way out.

She doesn’t get much to work with character-wise, but Scodelario radiates a drive and determination that makes for an effective heroine up against a string of circumstances that would test pretty much anyone. It doesn’t hurt that a smart script doesn’t require her to do anything stupid to get in danger – the combination of rising waters and rising numbers of gators has that covered just fine. It’s gripping, occasionally gory, teeth-gnashing fun.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Apollo 11

In case you've been living under a (moon) rock lately, it’s now fifty years since the first moon landing. Surely this should be a dark period of grim introspection as we look back on decades wasted and opportunities lost? Ha ha, of course not: it's time to celebrate the fact that 50 years ago we could put a man on the moon using basically a garbage can, some fireworks and a pocket calculator while today we can't even [insert common complaint here].

But if you can only see one movie about the first men on the moon, this is the one to see; put together entirely from archival footage (including sequences shot on 70mm film that have never before been seen) and with period voice-over from news broadcasts and voice recordings from Mission Control, this goes step-by-step through the mission from the hours leading up to the launch through the journey to the moon and the recovery afterwards. 

While the trajectory of the story is never in doubt, this is still a remarkably suspenseful film in parts – the moon landing itself is nail-biting stuff, as a tiny fuel gauge ticks down in the corner of the screen while we see the surface of the moon scroll by under the lander as they look for a suitable landing site – and much of the footage is stunning to look at whether you’re seeing it as a historical record or a reminder that much of the equipment used to go to the moon was shockingly rough by today’s standards. 

There's a lot to take in here, right down to the outfits of the invited dignitaries and sightseers - Apollo 11 took place when the bright colours of the 70s were just starting to bloom but the styles themselves were still the straight-laced 60s. But even if you're not here for the fashions, there's so much to look at in every frame, this demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible (yes, it's available IMAX) It's a reminder of a stunning achievement, and a stunning achievement in its own right.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Booksmart

Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) are high school outcasts and that suits them just fine. They’ve worked hard, looked like pretentious nerds to their peers, and now they’re about to reap the rewards by getting into fancy universities where presumably they can finally let their hair down and finally be themselves surrounded by actual peers instead of bonehead losers.

Then Molly discovers that their hard-partying classmates are about to reap those exact same rewards (they're not even losers!). Turns out the duo have been doing high school all wrong; now Molly only has tonight to drag Amy out and cram in all the partying they missed. The good news is there’s a big party happening. The bad news? They don’t know where it is. 

The “one crazy night” genre is well worn (remember Project X?). And by "well worn" I mean "totally played out" - seriously, it's been the basic template for so many teen movies this century when reviewers compare this solely to Superbad they're just being lazy. That's not to say it's a bad template in any way; having a big night is both a near-universal teen experience and a great way to stitch together a bunch of comedy sketch ideas into a coherent whole. But the big selling point here isn't originality of plot, it's originality of tone.

Director Olivia Wilde hits just the right tone for these goofy but earnest teens, giving their big night an inclusive vibe that doesn’t dampen the laughs. There's no winners or losers here, no good guys or bad, and while that may not be a completely accurate depiction of high school life, it's definitely tapping into today's mood in the same way that the crass teens of films like Project X did in their day. These kind of films work best when they're at least half fantasy (most actual big nights involve a lot of walking and standing around), and here the fantasy has at least as much to do with the idea that all teens are deep down decent and thoughtful as it does a wacky (accidental) drug trip where our heroes turn into dolls.

All the best intentions in the world wouldn't work out if the two leads werren't as charming as hell. Dever and Feldstein are a great comedy duo with great chemistry; while the stakes couldn’t be much lower with their adventures, they’re so likable and funny together that it’s impossible not to hope they find the good time they’re chasing.

- Anthony Morris

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Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home

The only real problem with Tom Holland’s first solo film as Spider-Man was that there wasn’t enough of Peter Parker hanging out with his classmates being a regular teen. So what does Spider-Man: Far From Home do? Cut back even further on that stuff – though for a while there it doesn’t look like it, as Holland’s Parker and his classmates first deal with the Thanos-caused five years of being dead (which everyone is calling “The Blip”), then head off to Europe for a class trip.

Obviously all of Parker’s close buddies (and Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May) have also spent the last five years dead so they can remain age-appropriate, but there is a decent joke about one former dweeb who’s now grown into a stud (and yet still comes with them on the class trip). Will Parker finally make it work with MJ (Zendaya)? Will the rest of his class learn anything? Probably not, as their first stop (Venice) is promptly attacked by a giant elemental being that only a mysterious as-yet unnamed superhero (Jake Gyllenhaal) can battle now that the world has no Avengers to rely on. Maybe Parker shouldn’t have been ducking Nick Fury’s phone calls all this time…

There’s a lot of stuff here about “a world without Iron Man” – guess Captain America doesn’t count, though he’s a much more obvious symbol for people to latch onto – and positioning Parker as his successor is one of those weird story beats that feels driven much more by the demands of the MCU than anything that actually suits either character. It’s hardly a deal-breaker and it was probably necessary to differentiate this version from the other two Spider-Men we’ve had on the big screen this century, but giving Peter Parker’s super-hero side regular spider-powers plus a bunch of Iron Man abilities leaves him awfully over-powered for a character who works best as an underdog.

(especially as the MCU can now solve any serious problem with Captain Marvel – they have to bring her up here just to explain why she doesn’t handle things, and presumably they’ll be needing to do that a lot in future)

Everything here fits together just fine, but it probably wouldn’t have hurt to ditch one of the plot threads. Parker’s school stuff works so well that you really only need one extra element and this has two; the Iron Man stuff, and Gyllenhaal’s Quentin Beck, super-powered man from an alternate reality who takes on the name Mysterio (how he gets that name is a decent joke), and comic book fans will have a pretty good idea where things go from there.

This isn’t the first superhero movie where you might end up wishing all the characters hung out a lot more and fought monsters a lot less; Beck is a great father figure for Parker (he’s basically a less snarky Tony Stark), Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury is played for laughs just enough to fit in, and even the slightly creepy subplot where former Stark sidekick Happy Hogan is hitting on Aunt May is intentionally creepy for laughs. Also, the fight scenes are merely good, not great (there’s a lot of swirling around in the sky), and even a later twist that forces Spider-Man to rely on his Spider-Sense (also known as his “Peter Tingle”) is never quite as effective as it should be.

All this results in a film that’s charming and fun without ever being fully satisfying, a solid successor to Spider-Man: Homecoming that doesn’t really manage to build on what made that film so refreshing. It does just about everything it goes for right, but it’s trying to do too much; Spider-Man is probably the most straightforward and pure superhero character in the MCU, and he’d work twice as well with half the baggage they’re laying on him.

- Anthony Morris