Review: Gladiator II

In an era of remakes and reboots, Gladiator II is a good old-fashioned sequel. Which is to say, it's a step down from the first film while still having enough going on to make it watchable. In fact, its big problem is that in some ways it has too much going on: someone should have said "this Rome isn't big enough for the both of us".

The story we've come to see is the tale of Lucius (Paul Mescal), who, after his African home town is conquered and his arrow-shooting wife killed by a Roman army led by Marcus Acaius (Pedro Pascal), is enslaved, becomes a gladiator, and starts stabbing his way through Rome on a mission of revenge.

Complicating matters somewhat is the fact - known to us but not him - that Marcus is sick of Rome's endless lust for conquest, and together with his wife Lucilla (Connie Nielsen from the first film) is plotting to overthrow the creepy twins currently ruling the place and restore some semblance of good governance, aka "the dream of Rome" that everyone in the first film was going on about.

And just to add another layer to proceedings, Lucius' owner is Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave turned wheeler-dealer who clearly has plans of his own. He's promised Lucius that, if he plays along, he'll have all the vengeance he thirsts for and more. But if Marcus is secretly a good guy, then that means vengeance is... bad?

It's not hard to see how Lucius's character arc is meant to play out: revenge against one man becomes revenge against the system becomes trying to restore the system. Unfortunately the script is too busy with everything else going on to give Mescal (who does a very good job with the whole "leader of men" side of things) time to work through his character's multiple changes of heart.

Usually what would happen in this situation is that other subplots would be whittled down to provide that room. But when you have Denzel tearing up the place, you'd be a fool to limit his screen time - and whatever his many flaws, director Ridley Scott is no fool. Washington lights up the screen every time he's strutting around, and while he's technically a bad guy (what with not being on board with the whole "dream of Rome" deal) all that bad ain't nothing but good for the film.

And the film needs it, because while there's plenty of very impressive surface spectacle here, there's rarely much of anything to sink your teeth into. It's telling that the opening battle - which is the only one where anything is actually at stake - is also the most impressive and compelling. 

We're told that Rome is rotting from within but the sleazy decadence is barely on show, the fights are competent but rarely brutal, and the big coliseum spectaculars lack narrative heft. They don't move the story forward, they're just Lucius's day job. He doesn't even make any gladiator friends we can be worried will be killed off.

The other solution to Lucius' lack of agency - his role for much of the middle of the film is to slowly have his real status revealed to him - would be to present his arrival as a wild card, a rogue element tossed into an already complicated situation. There are traces of that, but this is so intent on looking back to the first film and presenting his arrival as a continuation rather than a new story that the longer this story goes on the less of his own man Lucius becomes. 

By the end his own motivations have been forgotten entirely, replaced by those of long dead characters whose story ended in the distant past. Even for a tale of ancient Rome, that's a bit on the nose.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Here

Robert Zemeckis' movie Here is based on Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here, and you only have to be familiar with the work of one of them to wonder how the heck this is going to work. Shock twist: it doesn't, and sad to say the blame lies pretty much entirely on the Zemeckis side of the ledger, because on the rare occasions when he seems to realise he can use the substance and not just the surface of McGuire's work there are glimmers of a worthwhile experience.

Here (the novel) uses the grammar of the comic book - panels on a page - to unfold an experience that remains fixed in space while roaming freely in time. Each page shows the exact same view onto the world, presented randomly from the dawn of time to the distant future as it goes from wilderness to wasteland to jungle to a suburban lounge room and back. Smaller inset panels show other points in time - a person in the 1950's is seemingly handing a drink to someone there decades later while around them a primeval forest thrives, and so on as all of time is layered before us.

How does this work as a movie? Not well; Zemeckis does use the device of panels as windows into different times, but mostly just as a way to transition from scene to scene. The real power of McGuire's book is the way events and situations echo across time, revealing patterns and interactions even as the human scale shrinks down to nothing. Here (the movie) isn't interested in that.

Instead, we're mostly shown moments in the lives of the people living in the house. Or the time before it: there's a bit of dinosaur versus meteor action early on, and both a Native American couple and the residents (Ben Franklin's son!) of the colonial-era mansion across the road get a few scenes as they travel to and fro. But the main focus is on two generations of the one family, led by WWII veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and then his son Richard (Tom Hanks) and wife Margaret (Robin Wright).

Aside from folksy sayings like "time flies" and "there's no place like home", there's not a lot of substance in their stories (suburban life is tough, especially when you're a cliche), and the smaller lives around them don't add much. It seems the house was once owned by the inventor of the La-Z-Boy Recliner Chair, but said chairs play no part in future events (though a new couch and a fold-out bed do).

The rare moment where something does echo across time - the pandemics of 1919 and 2020, for one - provide a brief window into a much more memorable film. Emphasis on brief: it seems much more likely that the driving force for Zemeckis here was the requirement to digitally de-age his cast to cover their decades of puttering around the lounge. The technology used is competent.

Here (the movie) is surprisingly busy - that lounge room sees strokes, funerals, bedridden invalids, sex scenes and a lot more - and yet resoundingly hollow. It tells a handful of cloying, uninspired stories using a conceit that constantly hammers home the small and inconsequential nature of our lives. 

It wants to be a warm look at connection over the years. Instead, its centuries-spanning gaze into a structure that outlasts and erases all who dwell within tells us the opposite: trying to slap a feel good ending onto the march of time is both futile and pointless. 

Sadly for Here, that's not just a matter of perspective.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Saturday Night

There's plenty of interesting and exciting facts about the early days of Saturday Night Live. The problem with Saturday Night is that it packs them all into the 90 minutes before the first episode went to air. It's not that it all becomes a bit much, it's that when you put them all right next to each other... well, maybe being a bit much really is the problem.

It's 90 minutes before the first ever episode of Saturday Night (the Live was added later) and Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) the man behind it all, is flailing. Scripts are being worked on, sets are being built, the crew aren't exactly helping, the cast are all over the place, and management - which may very well have only said yes as part of a wider power play - are wandering around considering whether they should pull the plug. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

There's a lot to like here. Director Jason Reitman (who co-wrote the script with Gil Kenan) keeps things moving at a snappy pace, shifting seamlessly from character to character, subplot to subplot in a way that suggests bedlam but never lets the viewer get (too) lost.

The cast are pretty much all note-perfect. Stand-outs include Rachel Sennott as Michaels' wife Rosie, who's having an open affair with Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), and Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, who feels his theatre background (and race) makes him an outcast (he's right). Everyone else either looks enough like their characters to keep things feeling authentic without getting into CGI creepiness, or is chief writer Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), who it's nice to see making many of his notoriously offensive one-liners.

Reitman also gets many of the smaller details right. Most of the characters (and the conflicts) are accurately, if briefly, sketched - though John Belushi (Matt Wood) attacked Bill Murray (not in this film), not Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith). Weaving in various rehearsals and sound checks allows for most of the first episode's classic moments to make an appearance, even if they're also a reminder that comedy has changed a lot since 1975 (don't worry, there's plenty of cutaways to people laughing hysterically at these bits).  

But even if you know nothing at all about Saturday Night Live, it's not hard to see that something's off. The bad guys here are a): manual workers who don't want to work outside of their positions, b): Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, c): NBC's David Tibet (Willem Dafoe), who looks at this obvious train wreck and is like "yeah, we need a backup plan here", d) host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), who also suspects the wheels are coming off, and e): Milton Berle's penis. Reitman's swimming against the tide of history on all counts.

And while LaBelle gives an excellent performance, making Lorne Michaels the hero of your story is definitely, as they say, a choice. After all, SNL was the end of a comedic era, not the beginning: pretty much everyone involved already had solid track records (the writers on National Lampoon; most of the cast had worked together on The National Lampoon Radio Hour). 

Saturday Night ends up being a salute to Michaels' drive and vision as he overcomes a wide range of obstacles that the film created to make things seem more dramatic. It wants to applaud a comedic visionary who blazed a trail people still follow today; it ends up being a high five to middle management, a man whose real skill lies in getting everyone else to think he's irreplaceable. 

Looks like he's still got it.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Hellboy: The Crooked Man

As a comic, Hellboy has been running for 30-odd years now under the guidance of his creator, Mike Mignola. Things have changed a lot for the demon fated to destroy the world, and his adventures have grown creepier and closer to folklore than they were back when he was punching out Nazis and giant monsters.

The year is 1959 (well before any of the previous Hellboy films) and the chain smoking, tough talking good guy demon (Jack Kesy ) and a couple of government sidekicks are taking a demonically possessed funnelweb spider back to the lab via train. Thinks go wrong, not all the sidekicks survive, and it's left to Hellboy and rookie agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) to track down the giant spider through the Appalachian mountains. That's not all they find.

Supposedly a big part of the reason why Guillermo del Toro (director of the first two Hellboy films) didn't get to make his idea of a third was because Mignola wanted to take the character back to his roots; that's definitely one way to look at Hellboy: The Crooked Man (which is specifically based on a three-issue run of the comic).

While Hellboy himself remains the same character here, this is a pretty big pivot to small scale horror for the big screen version, in ways that those looking for pulp action might find off-putting. There's no evil end-of-the-world cult or giant monsters or Nazi hold-outs to punch here: ok, there are a few zombies at one point. But this is much more about a creeping sense of dread, of people stumbling into a place that's gone rotten with bad magic.

A lot of the small moments are memorably creepy. There's a witch who leaves her skin behind to roam the woods as a raccoon; another witch rides a horse that turns out to be someone's enslaved father. The main evil haunting the mountain is called The Crooked Man, a walking hanged corpse who sells souls to the Devil for a cent apiece in an attempt to rebuild his long gone fortune.

The main plot is straightforward: Hellboy and Song team up with newly returned local Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White) to purge the area of evil, which involves battling the local population (now basically all witches) and defeating The Crooked Man. But for long stretches, it's the kind of story where unsettling things just happen. 

There's asides explaining how to make witchballs and summon up a demon, hints of portals and Lovecraftian monsters, a number of dream sequences featuring Hellboy's mother, a grim joke or two, and at least one character dies for (again, memorably creepy) reasons that are never quite explained... which is kind of the point. They've stumbled into a place where bad things just happen, and a certain dream-like quality is to be expected.

Still, there are also points where this doesn't quite work, rough edges that feel more the result of an uneven script (co-written by Mignola himself) and low budget than firm intentions. Director Brian Taylor (the Crank films, the second, more demented Ghost Rider movie) does a decent job of balancing the unsettling mood with some high energy weirdness (there's the occasional Evil Dead vibe to proceedings), but the whole thing never fully comes together like it should.

If this film manages to chart a new direction for Hellboy, smaller in scope but bigger in strangeness, that wouldn't be such a bad thing. As the film handling the pivot, this struggles to straddle two worlds; it's those memorable moments that stand out, like pennies scattered on an old floor.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Subservience

If you're the kind of person who watches a lot of direct-to-streaming movies, you'll have noticed that Megan Fox is slowly becoming a name you can trust when it comes to halfway decent trash viewing. Not everything she's in is gold standard, but if she can make a decent film out of a story about a sexy nanny who sleeps with the boss then tries to replace the wife - only here the nanny is a robot - then she's doing something right.

Nick (Michele Morrone) is a construction foreman who must be making a decent living, because when his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) has a pre-sexy times heart attack he's quickly off down to the robot department store to purchase a helper. Fortunately for him, his younger daughter takes a liking to Alice (Fox) and not one of the many non-hot models that are no doubt flying off the showroom floor.

Horror movies about AI tend to fall into two categories. The first is "oh no, our house is possessed", where an AI assistant or app or doll uses the power of AI to do a bunch of evil murdery stuff - basically, the AI is non human. The second is "oh no, our maid / butler / sexbot is possessed", where a human is playing the murdery AI. And so it goes with Subservience.

Those films are usually less interesting because it's basically just an evil person and we know the kinds of things they can do, but Subservience pulls out a few tricks to keep the interest levels up. Alice isn't intrinsically evil, for one: Nick's poor programming leaves her fixated on him (bad move when there are other family members) and enables her to fully commit to her forbidden love. Also, Nick? Bit of a dick.

Not only does he have sex with Alice, he then does the whole "it was a mistake, we can never do that again" thing, turning this for maybe fifteen minutes or so into the robot version of Fatal Attraction. Also, unlike most movies of this stripe, having home robots is not a brand new thing. As the movie goes on we see more and more how they're reshaping the world.

For one, "construction worker" isn't really a viable career when your boss can just rent some super strong robots. Suddenly Nick's loyalties are torn between his workmates on the chopping block and bringing in a steady income (again, he's kind of a dick). 

Somewhat surprisingly, this is not one of the many, many recent films where having to pay medical bills forces our lead into a morally dubious corner. This is surprising because for the first 20 minutes or so you'd be forgiven for thinking Maggie (who is nowhere to be seen) was dead, and then when Nick (the dick) does finally visit her we discover she's in dire need of a transplant. Presumably hospital costs are down because yes, robots are doing all the heavy lifting there too. 

While the focus remains on Alice's descent into murderous evil, all these background details gradually build up, creating a wider sense of unease. If robots are all around us doing all the work - as you'd expect they would - and they can turn nasty like Alice, then everyone is in a lot of trouble.

So while this does deliver the usual "I'm doing this insane murdery thing for your own good" thrills, there's just enough going on around the edges - plus decent performances from Fox and Zima - to keep it from feeling like it's just going through the motions. 

In the end it's still more of the same, and how much you get out of this will depend a lot on a): your interest in sexy robots and b): your interest in evil robots. But within those parameters, this does manage a few memorable moments: is letting robots take care of humans ever going to be a good idea?

- Anthony Morris

Review: My Old Ass

Stories where younger and older versions of someone meet are usually focused on the older person. They're the ones with wisdom (and stock tips) to impart; young folks are usually too busy living for today to want to leap into the future and meet their older selves. My Old Ass says "too bad, here's your older self, deal with it"; thankfully the rest of the movie is not someone yelling "you're not my real future self" and slamming their bedroom door.

Elliot (Maisy Stella) is all set for college and looking forward to the bright future (and college girls) that awaits. But first there's a painful summer to be spent on the family farm being annoyed by pretty much everything that isn't hanging out with her friends. Then one night after taking a lot of mushrooms with her buddies, the usual group hang now includes a 39 year old (Aubrey Plaza) who announces "I'm you dude".

Turns out she hasn't been sent back in time to save her younger self from a killer robot, but instead to hand out some basic wisdom: appreciate her family, and stay away from a boy named Chad. It's not a long visit, but she does leave behind a contact in Elliot's phone: My Old Ass.

No surprise then that when Chad (Percy Hynes White) does show up, there's an instant connection. Which is a bit confusing for Elliot, who's only been into women before now. Also, her older self is not one for giving out any big details about the future (aside from the fact she clearly has some regrets), so exactly why he's to be avoided is a mystery. Which is kind of the point.

This is a tightly packed (at barely 90 minutes) coming-of-age story that's not afraid to keep the stakes low. Having her older self lurking around - and seemingly still figuring stuff out - makes it clear that growing up is an ongoing condition. Whatever choices she makes, right or wrong, there's going to be a lot more choices after that.

The performances are a delight, with newcomer Stella and Plaza sharing an energy that makes their connection totally convincing. Writer / director Megan Park really nails the "last summer before everything changed" vibe of waiting to ditch small town life and head off to higher education (though the farm and local lake look gorgeous), and Stella is totally convincing as a bubbly teen having fun living a low-stakes life.

My Old Ass is pretty slight, but the film's lightweight nature is the point. Time does go by fast, and small decisions can linger. Appreciating what you have? That might not be a bad thing.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Uglies

Is Uglies a real movie? At barely 90 minutes (before credits), it scrapes in time-wise; director McG used to make real movies, but that was a while ago. It's available on Netflix, which features things that are definitely movies, and also a lot of things that are definitely not movies. Let's put it another way then: is Uglies a serious movie worthy of serious consideration, or just an excuse for some cool hoverboard action?

The central premise of Uglies is that a few hundred years into the future, a series of disasters have driven humanity's survivors to embrace the idea that the only way to avoid conflict is to make everyone roughly as hot as the best-looking person on some sexy sex-based reality show. If this seems stupid to you, don't worry: there's an actual in-movie reason why humanity has (mostly) fallen for this, which largely boils down to "we only have to convince people this silly idea works until they're 16".

Tally Youngblood (Joey King) has bought into the system 100%. The only drawback as far as she can see is that her platonic bestie Peris (Chase Stokes) gets to have an extreme makeover and go live in the party city across the river a few months before her. But when he doesn't get in touch after his touch-up like he promised, she sneaks over to see how the other half live - and realises that maybe partying all night is the kind of thing only vapid airheads are totally into.

Fortunately her new bestie Shay (Brianne Tju) lets her know about the outdoor rebels led by David (Keith Powers), and while Tally isn't really up for the camping lifestyle she does enjoy learning about the exciting world of hoverboards. There is a lot of hoverboard action in this film, which is a big plus, especially as "hoverboard" pretty much equals "skateboard" here. Skateboarding is not a crime, unless you use it to smash the state.

After a few twists and turns Tally finds herself denied her makeover, but only because she has a secret mission: she's the only one who can track down David and infiltrate his organisation before they can unleash their "weapon" which will destroy party central and make everyone's eyeliner run. Will she be unable to resist the allure of his message, which is basically "touch grass"? Will party central turn out to have a dark secret? Will part of the big action climax be a direct steal from one of the most iconic moments in The Matrix?

Anyone who has ever watched a single movie in their lives can spot the problem here. In a Young Adult novel you can get away with having a lead who's meant to be tough to look at: in a YA movie, no. Everyone pre-makeover here is still very easy on the eyes, which you can either go along with or complain about - luckily enough, both responses work as far as the message of the movie is concerned.

Otherwise the great ideological divide here is between vapid high-tech partying and getting back to nature and doing something real, which is as good a conflict as any for a YA movie. The bad guys are bad but have just enough justification behind their actions to be plausible, the good guys are romanticised but are clearly on the right side of history, and the whole thing only has to work as a metaphor for a bunch of teenage life choices anyway.

What this is really about is Netflix (and by extension, Hollywood in general) wanting to see if audiences are ready for the return of the good old days when Harry Potter led to The Hunger Games and YA ruled both the page and the screen. The trouble with this kind of trial balloon is that it's for a genre that really needs some serious money spent on it to make it work: Uglies does pretty well with its special effects for what it is, but it's just not on the same scale as the YA classics of yore.

So is Uglies a real movie? Well, it's not a serious one; neither is it an epic tale of overwrought emotional angst like the best YA films. But King makes for a solid heroine who sells her character's journey even when the film is fast-forwarding through it, everyone else looks good even when they shouldn't, and it makes up for its lack of an emotional rollercoaster by having Tully hoverboard down a real one. 

Plus, this pushes the ending just far enough past the (very effective) conclusion of the first novel to make sure we don't need a sequel that we know will never come. Tidying up loose ends: Hollywood should do more of it.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Speak No Evil

There's a certain kind of story that really pulls you in but can't really sustain a full-length movie all on its own. Comedies have this problem all the time; it's a very high bar to come up with something that's hilarious from start to finish, so they're always slipping in a bit of regular drama to drag things over the line. There's not a lot of laughs in Speak No Evil, but there is a lot of awkward, unsettling family interactions - and when the story moves on from them it's hard not to feel a little let down.

Ben Dalton (Scoot McNairy), wife Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) are holidaying in Italy when they run into semi-retired doctor Paddy (James McAvoy) and his family, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and speechless youngster Ant (Dan Hough). Paddy is a force of nature, fun and welcoming; Ben is cautious, careful, and something of a wet blanket. But eventually he's worn down and forced to enjoy the company of their new found friends. When they part, they promise to catch up again back in the UK.

Everyone in the Dalton family (even their daughter, who's getting a little too old to be so emotionally attached to her stuffed rabbit) knows that seeing Paddy and the rest is probably not a great idea. But being stuck in London, where Ben's failing attempts to find a job add to Louise's growing annoyance with his passive ways, isn't helping them either. Maybe a trip out into the countryside to stay at Paddy's isolated farm for a few days is just what they need?

No it isn't.

The best part of the film is the lengthy middle stretch where it's screamingly obvious that something isn't quite right on Paddy's farm (their parenting methods, for one, leave a lot to be desired), but the Daltons can't quite put their finger on what. As a host Paddy is so forceful and seemingly reasonable - even when he's being nosy or using the importance of truth-telling to stir things up - that it's hard to say no to him, especially if you don't want to look insensitive or ungrateful. And that's the last thing the Daltons want, even when it feels like every conversation ends up in an awkward, uncomfortable place.

With so much of this reliant on vibes, good casting is essential. McNairy is spot on as a man with a wet noodle for a spine, a sad sack whose commitment to meaning well and wanting to do the right thing has been enough to get him through life (until now). Davis is strong as a character who should be trusting her instinct but being halfway out the door relationship-wise has worn her down, while Franciosi remains consistently convincing as someone who has to sell at least two contradictory stories.

Based on a 2022 Danish film, this ditches the grim inevitability of euro-horror for a more predictable fight-and-flight third act. It's not a fatal flaw, but delivering the familiar thrills does let a lot of the tension out of the room. Once all the cards are on the table it's pretty easy to see how things will play out, even if exactly when and how characters will meet their grisly end is up in the air (and then flat on the concrete).

It's McAvoy who carries this through, putting out enough energy to power a small town as in the space of a minute or two Paddy goes from your best mate to that guy who's always trying to test your limits to someone just having a laugh. He's a memorable villain in a film that can barely hold him, an always entertaining dinner party guest you'd be happy to have over - just so long as you were able to get him out the door before things turned sour.

- Anthony Morris

Review: It Ends With Us

Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) is home for her father's funeral, only she doesn't seem all that sad. Is she eager to get back to opening her Boston flower store? Or is there a dark secret that will hang over her okay her dad used to beat up her mother. Forget about that for now: she's just had a meet-cute, almost kiss with handsome neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directs) and - actually, forget about that too, it's time to renovate the store with the help of random passer-by turned shop assistant Allysa (Jenny Slate). Fingers crossed they get around to these dangling plot threads soon.

Fortunately it turns out that Allysa is Ryle's sister - what are the odds? - and while Ryle doesn't do relationships, Lily doesn't do casual, so obviously they'll never get together oh hang on. Meanwhile, there's all these flashbacks to when Young Lily (Isabela Ferrer) befriended a (literally) smelly homeless yet extremely hot guy named Atlas Corrigan (Alex Neustaedter), who seems like a decent candidate for the love of her life. 

So where is he now? And what exactly is this film about, beyond a bunch of good-looking people who are amazingly rich but still wear onesies to the local bar to get free beer? The answer will surprise you - unless you remember Lily's abusive father, in which case you'll have spent the entire movie waiting for Ryle to follow up on the aggressive chair kick he delivered during his first five seconds of screen time.

Based on the best-seller by Colleen Hoover, this kind of story is built around a balancing act. Our lead needs to be smart and on the ball. She's the audience surrogate, so she has to be someone we'd like to be (or be friends with), which means no silly mistakes. But the entire story is built around her making a bad decision. Just to make things more difficult, Ryle's fatal flaw has to be present right from the start: if he suddenly out-of-nowhere turned bad, then why couldn't he just as suddenly turn good?

That means that much of the drama in this film comes not from the actual situations, but in seeing how the story is going to thread the needle. He needs to be decent enough to be worthy of her love, but bad enough to make the plot work; she needs to be someone we can admire, but also someone who would fall for an (somewhat) obviously flawed man.

It Ends With Us manages to pull it off, but it's a close thing. Once he goes bad, everyone - no exceptions - understands that a line's been crossed; once Lily calls out his behaviour for what it is, there's no half-baked justifications or explanations. Which leaves that behaviour weirdly rootless, an aberration (that nevertheless cannot be excused) that stands alone. He's not a controlling violent freak, he just acts like one on those rare occasions when he gets jealous.

The big loser in all this is modern-day Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), who when he finally does show up just gets to glower and be aggressively supportive at a time when everyone involved realises romance of any kind is off the table. It doesn't help that Sklenar and his younger self don't look all that much alike (Ferrer, on the other hand, is spot-on as young Lily), which tends to defuse any real connection between their current day counterparts.

Wanting to tackle serious issues yet still keep that rom-com / female empowerment vibe strong, often this kind of film has so many contradictions it tears itself apart. There's plenty of stress fractures here (can Allysa manage to be a good friend and a loyal sister?), but there's decent chemistry between Lively and Baldoni and that makes up for a lot. She fell for him because he's hot and rich; what more do we need to know?

Well, maybe a bit more, which is where Lively steps up. This is her film and she carries it well, selling the few comedy moments as strongly as the drama. Despite the wobbly mix of the lightweight (the film makes a joke of it, but still: did this flower-obsessed woman really need to be named Lily Bloom?) and the extremely serious, Lively keeps Lily's feet firmly on the ground. You may not leave wanting to know what happens next, but this ending feels earned.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Deadpool & Wolverine

The most outrageous moments in Deadpool & Wolverine come when we're expected to believe Wade Wilson, AKA Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is a character with serious thoughts and heartfelt emotions. Fortunately those moments are few and far between, because they don't make any sense. Deadpool is a gleefully amoral pansexual shit-talker for whom nothing is off-limits (unless you're looking for a joke about why TJ Miller was dumped from the series); why should we care about his feelings when he doesn't give a crap about anyone else's?

Instead, this makes a massive withdrawal from the bank of goodwill that the previous films made (meager) deposits into, by briefly re-introducing pretty much the entire supporting casts from those last two films (sorry, no sign of Zazie Beetz' Domino) and then telling us "these are the people whose lives are at stake" from a universe-shattering plot while never showing them again. 

To make matters worse, this comes after a scene where Wilson tries to join the Avengers (hey look, it's a John Favreau cameo) because after two movies worth of making jokes about everything, he's decided he wants his life to mean something. Yeah, right. Spoiler: he does not get the gig, his life falls apart, he retires from being Deadpool, and then-

Well, before all that there's a joyously violent opening sequence in which Deadpool, having dug up the corpse of Logan, AKA Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) - who died in Logan, which was meant to be Jackman's swan song playing the character, and which fans were reassured was a death this film would respect - uses various parts of the corpse to kill dozens of disposable goons in increasingly gory fashion. Now this is what we came to see.

It probably wouldn't have been possible to make a film that was 100% smutty jokes, brutal (if clearly CGI) violence, deep cut in-jokes (there are a lot of as-seen-in-the-comics versions of Wolverine here) and fan service, but this particular creative team should have tried a little bit harder because that's the best stuff here. The plot is a garbled mess that's also a send-off of some of the Fox versions of Marvel characters (oh look, more cameos) while making Deadpool firmly part of the MCU even has it once again reminds audiences that having a multiverse means nothing really matters.

The story is basically kicked off by having the MCU, in the form of Time Variance Authority flunky Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), recruit Deadpool while tossing the rest of his universe in the trash. Needing a new Wolverine to keep his universe alive, Deadpool eventually finds a version that won't murder him on sight, just in time for the pair of them to be dumped in "The Void", a garbage dump dimension where the TVA puts surplus characters and hey, even more cameos. They also find chief villain and Professor X's secret sister Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), who is surprisingly good as a bad guy and probably deserves to turn up again in a film that has actual stakes.

What tiny emotional core all this has comes from the buddy act between Deadpool (annoying) and Wolverine (annoyed), which is basically the same dynamic as Deadpool and (mentioned but not seen) Cable in the last film, only here Wolverine gets his name in the title. It's a fun double act that would have been even better in a film that just focused on them; then again, now that they're both in the MCU - and as we're told multiple times, Marvel won't let anyone retire forever - nothing's ever off the table.

While it makes a kind of sense to have Deadpool push the whole multiverse thing to the point of absurdity and beyond, that doesn't really make this hang together as much of a movie. Whatever its flaws as a story, it's still an entertaining experience; the rapid-fire gags often hit the target (especially the ones about the actors and production), the action is solid if rarely memorable, and the cameos are... well, they're there for the fans, but they're a decent mix of the obvious and the in-joke. You could make a decent sketch show out of all this stuff: Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Longlegs

Longlegs is a movie that works in the moment. Scenes are soaked in dread; the whole point is that what you're watching is scary right now. Some horror movies get bigger as you consider their implications. This one is happy to provide 90-odd minutes of skin-crawling tension.

Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is the kind of hyper-focused, socially awkward detective familiar from decades of film and television. New to the FBI, her instincts (psychic or not) during a door-to-door search prove sharp enough to get her bumped up to assisting veteran agent Carter (Blair Underwood) on a very cold case that just might be heating up. Her partner on the search ended up dead; her instincts might not be coming from a mutually beneficial place. 

The case involves a string of family murder-suicides seemingly sparked by strange coded letters sent by a figure known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). Nothing in the case seems to add up. Harker cracks the code but the messages are just the usual taunts, Longlegs himself is a creepy freak but his role seems less clear as events progress, the sole survivor (Kiernan Shipka) is fresh out of her coma but less than helpful and each new clue (what's going on with the giant dolls?) only muddies the waters.

This is clearly riffing on a number of classic serial killer films - Seven and Silence of the Lambs come to mind - though this eventually slips sideways into a slightly different genre. It's all retro-stylings (the film is set in the 90s), chilly rural landscapes, dingy houses and big winter coats. The weather forecast says "ominous foreboding".

Monroe's earnest but slightly distant performance only adds to the tension, playing the kind of character you know will keep going past the point where someone more easily unsettled (that is, most of humanity) would be running like a maniac. Maybe blame her mother (Alicia Witt), who, it's increasingly clear, has issues of her own.

As the story progresses the bad vibes grow. The FBI, it becomes clear, is an unsafe space; even when they get the job done, nobody's sure it's the right job. Writer-director Oz Perkins isn't telling a story where all the pieces fall into place. They just fall on the floor in a pattern that's unsettling without ever being fully satisfying.

Cage is only in the film for a handful of scenes, though they're memorable ones. It's surprising to realise his brand of off-kilter performance hasn't been harnessed for straight-out horror earlier. He's often left audiences thinking "what the hell am I watching?". This time hell might be the answer as well as the question.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Fly Me to the Moon

There's a lot going on in Fly Me to the Moon, possibly too much for one movie. Part romantic comedy, part caper movie, part vague gesture towards a rare part of history people still feel good about, it's largely held together by good old fashioned movie magic. Or in layman's terms, here's two good looking people, hopefully you'll want to watch at least one of them.

Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is wowing them in the sexist world of 60s advertising, but her ability to effortlessly con her clients suggests something a little darker. Which is exactly what the Nixon White House - in the form of Moe Burkus (Woody Harrelson) - likes about her. So here's the gig: head south to Florida, show up at NASA, and help turn a PR mess into a political asset just in time for man to land on the moon.

Meanwhile, heading up NASA's efforts is square-jawed former fighter pilot Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), who you'd think would be great publicity but after the tragic deaths of three astronauts on a mission he was in charge of, he's all about keeping his head down and getting the job done. 

He has a meet-cute with Kelly before he knows who she is, so his loathing of publicity is tempered by his attraction to her. She, on the other hand, knows exactly who he is and likes what she sees. What could possibly get in the way of this romance, especially once Cole realises that her people skills can help smooth the bumpy political road ahead? Guess he better not find out that Burkus has secretly ordered her to create a fake moon landing in case Cole screws the real one up.

At times it's hard to know if this is a romance with a caper movie mixed in, or a caper movie with a romantic subplot. The various political and PR hijinxs are never less than entertaining, but they don't always feel essential; as fictional backstory for an actual event, the stakes couldn't be lower - unless what's really on the line is Kelly and Cole's relationship, which this takes a little too long to focus on.

Still, the tone is enjoyably light, the Mad Men-era 60s vibe remains both stylish and smart, and Johansson is having a lot of fun as a fast-talking career gal constantly charming all and sundry. Tatum is playing the kind of stiff who everyone likes because he gets flustered rather than mad; he's the passive partner, his wound over his past the main obstacle to be overcome.

The final third brings it all together as the traditional rom-com dynamic is revealed (the couple comes together, but one has a secret that will tear them apart) and then woven into the caper (how do our heroes show the world the real moon landing?). The gags speed up, the tension builds, and some real stakes come into play.

This could have lost half an hour, but a slow start's to blame. Much like the moon landing itself, it's the end of the journey that makes the long trip worthwhile.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Twisters

Twisters is basically the platonic ideal of a sequel. It's the same film all over again, only now it's the film you remember rather than the actual first film which, after all, did have its faults. Light on the story but heavy on the destruction, it knows you're not here to think about actual science - unless it's the kind of science you can do in your mom's barn.

Five years ago, Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) saw her college buddies dragged up into the sky when an experiment requiring them to get too close to a tornado went wrong. Now a shadow of her former self, she works in weather in tornado-free (for now) New York - but when old buddy Javi (Anthony Ramos) shows up needing the best ever tornado predictor ever, how can she say no?

Once back out in the field (literally) she soon discovers that Javi and his slick corporate team are, well, a slick corporate team. Their main rivals are Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his YouTube crew of "tornado wranglers" who race around setting off fireworks inside twisters and sell t-shirts with his face on them. They're loud and crude, but Kate soon finds herself falling for their charms... which is handy, because who's that sinister-looking real estate mogul financing Javi's data-gathering efforts?

The whole film is so lightweight it feels like it could fly away in a slight breeze, which is a big part of its appeal. Aside from the opening - which comes very close to an "a tornado killed my family, now I want revenge" kind of set-up - nothing involving the characters risks cranking up any serious tension. There's slightly more than hints of a love triangle (in a heavier film you'd have Javi marked for death as a loser in both love and staying alive), the "we've got to help these people, not exploit them" subplot is mostly just shades of light grey, and everyone aside from a few obvious jerks just... gets along.

That's because all the real drama comes from the killer tornadoes wreaking havoc across the USA, and this repeatedly and effectively points out that being anywhere near one of these things is a very bad idea. There's nothing quite as memorable as the first film's flying cow (RIP) and even the firenado is something we've seen before, but these sequences are always effective whether they're going for awe-inspiring or terrifying.

At times a bit more drama might not have gone astray. We're introduced to a group of orange rain-poncho-wearing "tourists" who you'd expect to get torn apart at some stage, but nope. By the time Maura Tierney turns up as Kate's warm-hearted, no-nonsense mom, it's clear the real appeal here is just hanging out with a collection of likable all-action nerds who get their kicks looking at clouds and weather maps.

Oh, and seeing a lot of middle America get ripped asunder and hurled into the sky. At one point we see a star-spangled woman rising around a rodeo carrying a giant American flag; it feels like the film-makers missed a trick not having her soar off into the heavens with it as an (inadvertent) sail.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Exorcism

Heading into The Exorcism, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was a follow-up to Russell Crowe's recent The Pope's Exorcist. There Crowe played a real-life priest and occasional exorcist; here he's playing an actor who's just been cast as an exorcist in a remake of an iconic movie involving priests and demonic possession. The movie's real title is never mentioned. Guess these days there's a fair few of them to choose from.

Anthony Miller (Crowe) flushed his career and his family down the toilet years ago. Now he's sober and he's trying to get both back. His career through a comeback role as an exorcist, his daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins) by having her stay with him after she was kicked out of boarding school.

Miller is a troubled man, and his childhood experiences as an altar boy have left him skittish around the church. But he needs the gig, and despite a lot of reluctance from the money men, the director (Adam Goldberg) signs him for the role - though his motivational methods might be a little too effective in stirring up Miller's past.

Oh yeah, and the main reason why Miller got the role was because the big name they previously cast died. On set. While going through his lines for a scene where he confronts a demonic force. 

Now Miller's sleepwalking, lights are falling from the ceiling, his performance is bad in an increasingly unsettling way, and the whole situation is giving off a very creepy vibe. Is it merely Miller's personal demons brought back by the pressures of work, or will Lee and the film's religious advisor Father Conor (David Hyde Pierce) have to face down a demon of the more literal kind?

We all know how exorcism movies work, and while this (which was filmed back in late 2019) is initially a slow burn, it does eventually get around to delivering the sudden soundtrack stings and casual blasphemy. A more interesting development here is having Miller be the source of a few of the better jump scares; one of Crowe's big strengths in this stage of his career is that he can just as easily be the good guy or the bad, and this makes good use of that ambivalence.

Director and co-writer John Joshua Miller is the son of Jason Miller, who played the priest who goes out the window in the original Exorcist. He brings a satisfying level of dread to a number of individual scenes, which helps gloss over the way the overall story doesn't really hold together. Presumably "I was possessed by a demon" is a legitimate defense when it comes to being charged with murder in the US justice system.

There's next to nothing new here (somewhat intentionally, considering the classic its riffing on), but Crowe drags the whole thing over the line through sheer force of will. It's the kind of film where it feels like everyone else turned up just because they knew he'd be there; Sam Worthington, who basically has an extended cameo as Miller's adoring co-star, almost certainly signed on just to spend time across from Crowe. And who could blame him? Even when Crowe's deliberately acting badly, he's still good.

So yes, the story loses focus here and there, and a few scenes stretch credibility beyond breaking point - like the time when someone goes full Satanic crabwalk during filming and the entire crew doesn't quit on the spot. And yet: the power of Crowe compels you. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Just look how far the Bad Boys have come. When they first burst onto our screens in a wave of legally dubious carnage, the buddy cop dynamic between Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) was your typical loose cannon vs anxious guy with something to lose. Now, well over 25 years later, they're both just too old for this shit. And in Bad Boys:Ride or Die, the shit has once again hit the fan.

Even a franchise this free-wheeling knows action doesn't mean much when there's nothing at stake. So first, some character development: Mike's settling down and getting married to Christine (Melanie Liburd), so he's finally got something to lose. Marcus just had a heart attack on the dance floor where a vision of their cranky dead boss Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) told him it's not his time to die, so now he thinks he's invulnerable. As role reversals go it's no Freaky Friday, but it'll do.

Speaking of the late Captain Howard, he's the big plot driver this time around. Seems he's been framed by the evil cartel from the last film, angering his devoted US Marshall daughter (Rhea Seehorn) who doesn't want to believe it. In reality, he was secretly investigating corruption inside his department. It turns out the only way to clear his name is for the Boys to go on the run, team-up with Mike's son and cartel killer Armando (Jacob Scipio) and trash half of Florida.

Returning directors Adil & Bilall (they took over the franchise from Michael Bay with Bad Boys For Life, maintaining his hyperbolic style in a near-seamless fashion) know that too much is never enough when you're dealing with the Bad Boys. It's probably not humanly possible for someone to enjoy everything going on here, but with so much going on you're bound to find something you like.

Probably not the comedy though, which rarely gets above painful until the second half and even then relies an awful lot on the goodwill Lawrence and Smith bring to their characters. And while it's tempting to consider this a last chance for Smith to redeem himself after his Oscar antics, his laying low since then has largely done the hard work for him - and here he's often surprisingly subdued, while Lawrence takes full advantage of Marcus's fearlessness to crank things up.

And making some noise is probably a good idea, because this is so over-stuffed (old characters are back! New characters are important! The action is dizzying!) eventually it starts to take on the relentless feel of the engine drone from one of the often-present helicopters - but like a trip on one of those copters, it's always a wild ride.

The big crowd-pleasing twist here is that Marcus' son-in-law Reggie (played by Dennis McDonald), who's been a one-minor-note-joke since Bad Boys II, finally gets to take out some trash on his own. If Mike and Marcus are getting too old to be boys, at least the next generation now get to be (equally lethal) men.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Mad Max movies falter when they slow down. It's a series built on speed; characters might talk about what they've lost, but the past is the past and they're hurtling through a future that's crumbling around them. Furiosa doesn't exactly slam on the brakes, but as a companion piece to 2015's Fury Road - which restarted the Mad Max franchise after close to three decades dormant - it's largely taking us to places we've already been.

Fury Road sketched in Furiosa's backstory. Taken from the Green Place of Many Mothers as a child, she grew up in the Wasteland, rising to a position of power in the brutal Citadel run by Immortan Joe. This fills in the gaps, sometimes in ways that honor the franchise's tradition of full throttle storytelling, other times in ways more familiar to prequel fans.

The opening sequence where Furiosa (played as a child by Alyla Browne) is snatched, raced across the desert to the camp of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, hamming it up) then almost saved by her pursuing mother is a breathless, thrilling beginning. Things slow down when Dementus' horde stumble upon the Citadel and discover Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his familiar henchmen are no easy mark; warring tribes are slower and more crushing than speeding individuals, and while the violence we expect in the Wasteland continues, the storytelling shifts into epic mode, with alliances and sieges and betrayals.

Through this Furiosa (now played by Anna Taylor-Joy) comes of age, dodges one fate and embraces another. Hiding as a mechanic, she plans her escape; War Rig driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) becomes her mentor and her guide. Meanwhile, Dementus is proving an unstable element in the fragile ecosystem that sustains the Citadel. War is coming, and Furiosa's plans for escape will be overtaken by her desire for revenge.

Director George Miller hasn't slowed down with age. There's a number of good action sequences here, and one excellent one. But the breathless pace of the best of the Mad Max series is absent, and revisiting familar settings and characters means this often lacks the confronting weirdness the franchise is so good at. A fleeting static cameo from a familiar Road Warrior got a cheer; someone being dragged down into a desert sinkhole was a nice call back to the deadly sand dunes of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

But the limited settings also limits the film's horizons. At times the Wasteland almost threatens to become safe, a well worn path - though the physical setting for the hooning around (this was filmed in the Australian outback, whereas Fury Road was filmed in Africa) is more varied and striking than in the previous film, and used to better effect.

Taylor-Joy is more fevered and feral than Charlize Theron's Furiosa, a woman desperate to regain what she's lost. Burke plays a guide to what she'll become, a rare character with his head on straight; everyone else is ruthless or insane, preferably both if they want to survive, and Miller's retained his eye for uniquely Australian faces (a dusty musician Tim Rogers turns up early).

Fury Road was a relentless onslaught of escalating and outlandish action. This can't reach those heights; it's probably wise that it takes another path. At close to two and a half hours, it's an epic striving for a different kind of overload. If it doesn't fully succeed, it still goes hard enough to skid over the line.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Fremont

Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is having trouble sleeping. She's an Afghan refugee - she was a translator for the US Army - who now lives in Fremont, California. She works in a fortune cookie factory, lives in a building with other refugees, eats alone at a restaurant where soap operas constantly play, and doesn't think she has PTSD. 

The rhythms of Donya's life are small ones, and Iranian-American director Babak Jalali's film takes its time immersing the viewer in them. The men around her are usually older and keep their distance, while her workmate and friend Joanna (Hilda Schmelling) has a lot going on. Donya's fine with keeping people at a remove.

The she pushes her way into the practice of Dr Anthony (Gregg Turkington) because she wants sleeping tablets. When he asks about her past and her situation, her facade doesn't exactly crack - and it isn't really a facade - but she does start to realise that she may need more out of life than the bare bones she's been gnawing on.

Meanwhile at the cookie factory, a major upheaval. The person writing the fortunes has died (as the boss says, "she was too old to be thinking about the future") and Donya takes on the job. Dr Anthony thinks this might be a way for her to express her thoughts and feelings, though she'll have to make them "cookie friendly". Taking his advice maybe a little too close to heart, she puts her phone number on a fortune and sends it out into the world.

Deceptively deadpan and shot in often striking black and white, it's a story both intimate and wide-ranging. Told in a minor key, there's big feelings and high stakes here if you look. Donya's blind shot at connection puts her job in jeopardy, while also bringing her in contact with Daniel (The Bear's Jeremy Allen White) and a world - or maybe just a slightly ajar door - of passion and romance.

Despite it's at times placid tone, the brutal mechanisms of our world grind away just out of sight. Donya doesn't explain her past, but the outline alone suggests horrors. Looked at one way, her job is repetitive and crushing, her life outside it threadbare. 

But there's solace and comfort there too, as sorting and packing cookies creates a soothing repetition. When she's offered the chance to be creative, she grabs it with both hands and uses it for her own gain. The company's too; who better to write cookie fortunes than a dreamer?

- Anthony Morris

Review: Civil War

Alex Garland's Civil War isn't titled Civil War 2 - which is what it technically depicts - or The Second American Civil War or anything like that, because it's not meant to be a prediction of a reality to come. In fact, it strenuously avoids anything in the big picture that could be mistaken for realism. The main military force is an alliance between Texas and California which okay, might happen. As for the actual causes of this civil war, they're never mentioned.

While some have praised the film's commitment to just dropping the viewer into the conflict and letting them figure it out, Garland doesn't really give the viewer enough information to figure anything out - which is a little ironic, considering all the main characters are journalists and at least one of the themes in this murky film is "how far should you go in your commitment to document the truth?" Turns out these guys will do pretty much anything to get the story, they just can't be bothered telling it to anyone.

So while the President (Nick Offerman, seen only briefly at the beginning and end of the film) is presented as a babbler disconnected from reality, well, name a recent President who wasn't. All we know of his political achievements is that he disbanded the FBI, messed around with the rules as far as drone strikes on American citizens, and had a third term. Sure, maybe he's a fascist dictator; maybe he disbanded the FBI because of its long history of abusing civil rights and ran for a third term because the country was already at war with itself. We don't know.

Not only do we have a conflict with no cause, we have a conflict that's clearly not designed to reflect current warfare. There are no drones; the US Navy must have decided to sit it out because one aircraft carrier parked outside Washington DC would have ended the war in about half an hour. Military technology is roughly on the level of the Vietnam War, or maybe Gulf War One: tanks, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, humvees.

The scenes of war we're shown are also generic. There are gun battles and refugee camps, armed guards at stores and looters hung and tortured. There's a mass grave, a sniper who seems to be shooting indiscriminately, a suicide bomber. These scenes are always effective and often chilling, but for a generation of viewers used to zombie movies and The Walking Dead, or just who've seen Spielberg's War of the Worlds, it's all pretty much what you'd expect.

Likewise, our lead characters are the kind of war correspondents that are familiar from wars gone by. These are photojournalists who still shoot on film; while there's one mention of an upload, and we're told there's no phone service, digital cameras don't seem to be a thing. Characters work for Reuters or "what's left of the New York Times"; nobody's posting pictures of war crimes on social media.

So the war is a metaphor; we have to look elsewhere for meaning. It's tempting to look at the characters: Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a war-weary photographer, Joel (Wagner Moura) is her slightly more enthusiastic journalist buddy. They're planning to go to Washington DC to interview the President before his regime falls. Tagging along is fresh-faced newcomer Jesse (Cailee Spaney), who is just starting out as a photojournalist and who idolises Lee, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a senior writer who is tagging along on what might be the last big story of his career.

There are some obvious moves here. Jessie is going to learn what it takes to make it, Lee is going to have to figure out if this is still what she wants to do with her life. Garland sketches all this stuff in off-handedly, though the performances are strong. It's tempting to suggest this is a film about the cost of being detached and the price you pay as an individual for journalistic detachment.

These are people able to dispassionately observe their own country tear itself apart, working the shutter of their cameras as their homeland dies in front of them. There's a cost to that, and as we get to the climax of the film some characters embrace that cost and others question it. But the film is barely interested in its characters as people; much of the film simply requires them to be observers, their own stories largely kept in the background.

What the film is more interested in is the end of the USA. The opening is the President getting ready to give a speech about how the separatists have been crushed, and the system as we know it is set to be restored. It's not until a few scenes later that we realise he's full of shit. The US government has lost the war, and everyone expects the President to be dead within weeks.

That conversation between journalists also sketches in the basic state of play across the nation; there's at least three separate factions out there, and only their hatred of the President and his forces is keeping them united. While the film as it progresses seems to be driving towards a firm conclusion, we've already been told that no end is in sight.

Everything we see in the film - constant lethal violence, rampant mistrust, an unending sense of threat behind every action - is now and for the foreseeable future the status quo in America. This explains why the war is so basic, so hand-to-hand: it's not about forces fighting for territory or resources, it's about a country where neighbour wants nothing more than to murder their neighbour.

What gives Civil War it's power - and despite its many flaws and flat patches, it does end up a powerful film - is that it ends up gleefully reveling in the disaster it portrays, a zombie movie that says we deserve to be eaten. The state of the nation is a nightmare, the film says, where friend has turned against friend, brother against brother. And the solution is to find someone to blame.

The final act of the film involves the storming of Washington and the White House, and it's easily the high point of the film. Garland kicks things into pure action mode as we follow a military unit (and our tag-along leads) as they fight their way into the war torn city, complete with monuments coming under fire. Civil War is seemingly about the importance of a media committed to objectivity, but the film itself only comes to life when it's reveling in the fruits of bias and division.

Going by the current state of US political discourse no doubt there's a large audience out there right now keen to see either their current or the previous head of state gunned down like a dog. The President here is kept so vague he could be from either party or neither; he's politically a blank slate, simply "The President".

Civil War says the desire for this kind of thing is a poison that will tear the country apart, and then it serves that poison right on up.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Late Night with the Devil

It's proof of the strength of its concept that Late Night with the Devil works as well as it does. Recreating antique television is a tricky job, and this often manages to be a weird mix of on-the-money and slapdash at the very exact same time. Without a note-perfect performance from David Dastmalchian at its heart, this would be little more than an interesting (and creepy) experiment; he's what makes this movie soar even as the talk show within it goes wildly off the rails.

That winning concept is a episode of a late-70s late night talk show, supposedly taken direct from recently discovered master tapes, in which a very special theme night goes horribly wrong. But first there's a documentary-style prologue to get us up to speed on both the era's Satanic Panic and the path to not-quite-success taken by host Jack Delroy, quickly bringing us to the point where a Halloween special featuring psychics, debunkers, and a young girl raised to be a demonic sacrifice who just might be possessed herself seems like a ratings winner.

Australian directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes do a great job with the look of the talk show. It's the kind of thing where you know there are probably flaws there somewhere, but it captures the overall vibe so well that you can forgive some dubious camera angles. But during the ad breaks we cut to "behind-the-scenes" black and white footage that doesn't make (technical) sense at all. It provides useful backstory and fills in some gaps, but it's basically shot like a modern film, the kind of footage they couldn't have taken at the time.

While these scenes are technically jarring, they do make sense (and work pretty well) if you forget all the "this was an actual event that happened" stuff and see this as a horror movie that just happens to take place in a television studio. Which is a reasonable way to look at things, even if it does impose a different set of limitations on the material. If you're not going to pretend it's a real episode of a real show, why bother filming 2/3rds of the film like it is?

Some of the other flaws are more understandable. Events come to a boil early on, followed by a stretch where not a lot overtly happens to further crank up the tension; the whole idea of putting in a big moment early on then letting the (boring) story play out for another half hour or more is so ingrained in current script writing that it's not so much a flaw as just another example of a trend.

But horror, more than any other genre in cinema today, remains one where film makers are encouraged to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks (before slowly sliding down, leaving a bloody trail behind). Audiences expect horror films to be an uneven collection of moments that work and scenes that fail; even slow-burn classics of the genre often have a couple of missteps we forgive them for.

Fortunately here, the good outweighs the bad. The fake show is convincing enough to provide a decent backdrop for the slow descent into nightmare, with just enough reversals to explain why people don't get the hell out of there (plus, as we're told multiple times, this is showbiz, and it's all part of the act). There's a nice variety of horror on display here as well, ranging from the creepy to the gory to the nastily brutal to a few surreal moments - though again, the enemy of terror is over-explanation, and this often spells things out that we already grasped through earlier insinuation.

There's one moment towards the end where the film shifts gears and a character finds themselves in a very different situation from everything that's come before. That "oh shit, they're really going there" realisation threatens to turn this from being merely pretty good into something truly special.

... and then they use that shift to fill in backstory rather than pile on the surreal horror. So close.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Monkey Man

 

Dev Patel's directorial debut Monkey Man was heading for a straight-to-streaming Netflix slot before Jordan Peele saw it and decided it was too good to bypass cinemas. It's not hard to see why. Directed with style and energy, it's the kind of full-bore experience that works best on the big screen. But too good for streaming? That depends what kind of streaming you're talking about.

In recent years it's become obvious that while at-home isn't the best venue for every film, there are certain genres that can thrive in the streaming environment. Romantic comedies might be having a comeback on the big screen, but that's building on years of re-introducing viewers to their charms via countless direct-to-streaming features. And action films, the kind of bruising, no holds-barred, relentless onslaughts of crippling violence that fans love to see? Streaming is where it's at.

Which is why it's for the best that Monkey Man has gone to cinemas first, because as far as action goes this is good - but not great. Some fights are effectively nasty; others threaten to bring back the much-loathed shaky-cam approach where "action" equals "keeping the camera moving so you can't tell what's going on". There are strong moments here, but there's just not enough of them for a film based around violent vengeance.

So what else does this have to offer? What initially seems like your traditional tale of roaring revenge as the Kid (Patel) inflitrates a luxury hotel built on drugs and prostitution then takes a swerve into the (slightly) mystical as the Kid finds himself rescued by a outcast group of local trans women and realises that the corruption and religious exploitation he's fighting against stretches far beyond his own personal suffering.

The Indian setting (the film was shot in Indonesia) is never quite as distinctive as it promises to be, but the often pointed political commentary provides some useful depth to the cartoony plot. Most recent action films seem eager to avoid having anything to say; this at least says something, and is a better film for it.

Patel himself makes for a strong lead. His tall, wiry physicality is used to good effect, especially early on when his desire for revenge is burning him up from the inside; later scenes, where he's a much more focused character, aren't as threatening as they should be.

As a mix of comic-book plotting (where the hero's first attempt at defeating the bad guys fails, so he has to go and regroup before trying again) and offbeat moments (the Kid's training montage is scored by a local musician while the trans women cheer on his sweaty shirtless antics), it's a good backbone for an action thriller. But once you look past the often flashy style, the thrills aren't quite there.

Patel stages some sequences effectively, but others rely more on energy generated with the camera than what we're seeing in front of it. There's a brief John Wick reference early on, which makes for a nice joke; it's also a reminder that those films were all about showcasing the physical skill of the performers by filming the action clearly and simply. It's a lesson Patel might want to take to heart next time he gets behind the camera.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Road House

 

The original Road House is not a great movie. But it is a weird, silly, and very entertaining movie, which is why it's exactly the kind of movie that deserves a remake. Sure, you can complain that the 2024 version is desecrating the good name of a Hollywood classic; you can also enjoy this version for what it is - another weird, silly and very entertaining movie.

Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the kind of man who, when he turns up to shady winner-takes-all fights in the middle of nowhere, the other guy just gives up rather than face him. The other guy is played by Post Malone, so maybe it's not as big an achievement as it seems, but it is a nice twist to start off the film with Dalton not fighting someone. 

It's easy money, so it's hardly surprising when Dalton knocks back an offer from Frankie (Jessica Williams) to come work at her roadhouse for a month beating up the endless supply of thugs who are trashing the place. But aimless drifting isn't for everyone, so before long he turns up in the Florida Keys all ready to demolish the thugs - only to discover that the thugs aren't just random bullies, and he's got himself into a situation he might not be able to resolve with his fists.

Or maybe he can, because despite the occasional gesture towards being a traditional movie, this version (directed by Doug Liman) isn't really interested in anything beyond figuring out ways to get Dalton cracking skulls. Dalton's supporting cast are introduced then ignored, while the mechanics of the evil scheme barely seem to matter - which, to be fair, they don't.

Instead, the tension builds from within. Dalton is supernaturally laid back for an ultimate killing machine, casually dismantling goon squads then personally driving them to the hospital. Even as things escalate around him, he remains an easy come, easy go kind of dude - because, as is eventually sketched in, when he does get angry, bad things happen. Will the bad guys find a way to piss him off? Is this movie titled Peaceful Resolution?

While mainstream humanity is all but superfluous here, chief bad guy and perpetual failson Ben Brant (Billy Magnussen) is an enjoyably overmatched chump, and as the most bungling of his bungling goons Arturo Castro gets a few good laughs. The real threat shows up half way through in the form of Knox (Conor McGregor), and while the film semi-successfully sells him as both a loose cannon and a comedy loon in every scene, McGregor himself comes away as a performer you don't really need to see ever again. 

Much, much more importantly, there are numerous brutal and aggressively filmed fights, organised in such a way so as to ensure the pummelings steadily escalate from the aborted underground fight at the opening to a climax involving a murderous and physics-defying clash of near-naked godlings in the ruins of civilisation itself. 

While Liman has been complaining that his film didn't get a cinema release, it's much more in tune with the current wave of ultra-bruising direct-to-streaming actioners - and seen as such, this road house is well worth a visit.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Color Purple

The film to stage musical to musical film pipeline has been going strong for a while now, with results best described as "mixed". Even great musicals can become average films, and with a perfectly good film version already in place a musical take has even more obstacles to overcome.

So it's a relief that that the new musical version of The Color Purple - featuring songs from the 2005 musical, which in turn built on both the 1985 Spielberg film and the 1982 novel by Alice Walker - feels like a natural extension of what went before. Directed by Beyonce collaborator Blitz Bazawule, it's in turn riotously energetic and sombre, music thrumming through the Georgia of a century ago like a heartbeat.

Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) has it rough from the start. Pregnant at 14 with her second child to her father Alfonso (Deon Cole) raising her, it's only her younger sister Nettie (Halle Bailey) that provides her with any joy. After Alfonso gives away her newborn (delivered by a midwife played, in a nice cameo, by Whoopi Goldberg, who made her screen debut in the 1985 film), he marries her off to the superficially charming "Mister" (Colman Domingo). 

It is not a happy marriage. When Nettie flees Alfonso's clutches, she finds safety with her sister - for a time, as Mister is no better. Resisting his advances as well, she's thrown out, leaving Celie alone in a loveless house. 

Years pass and other women come into her life. There's force of nature Sofia (Danielle Brooks), who won't accept the violence and abuse Celie (now played by Fantasia Barrino) sees as her lot in life. And Shug Avery (Taraji P Henson) local girl made good singing the blues and love of Mister's life, rolls back into town stinking drunk. She's looking for a place to dry out; what she finds helps rekindle her passion for performing and her love of... well, her relationship with Celie is largely a matter of suggestion here.

There's a lot of heartbreak and pain here, and no shortage of brutality either. A big part of what makes the musical numbers work is the way they tap into the inner lives of Celie and those around her, the sorrow that fills their lives and the strength they find to keep going. Occasionally shading into the fantastic, the big group numbers underline the sense of community that runs throughout the story, while the solo songs driving home the sadness and isolation the characters struggle with.

As with all musicals, different songs will connect with different people; for mine, the earlier, more blues-influenced songs hit harder, and Shug's big numbers are always a stand-out. But across the board, the songs are strong enough to justify this film all on their own.

That's not to take away from the performances, or from Bazawule's direction. Swerving between authentically lived-in and woozy fantasy, this first and foremost feels like it's coming from the heart. It's a powerful, all-encompassing experience, one that - to use an over-used phrase - takes audiences on a journey. 

The feel-good ending (even for some of the nastier characters) is both joyous and earned; it's a hard road to travel, and everyone on it deserves a shot at redemption.

- Anthony Morris

 

 

 

*

Review: Priscilla

There's a lot of index cards that make up the Elvis story, and Priscilla Presley is usually shuffled a fair way down the pack. She doesn't have much of an impact on the music side of things; you'd think being his wife would make her central to his personal life, but it seems most of the good stuff - the drugs, the affairs, the trip to visit President Nixon - took place without her.

Sophia Coppola's take on Priscilla's biography is one that fits her own filmography like a glove: Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) was a young woman trapped in a gilded cage. Pretty much from the moment the fourteen year-old was introduced to the 24 year-old Elvis (Jacob Elordi) on an US Army base in Germany she was kept from maturing, stuck living a life that seemed ideal yet increasingly failed to give her what she wanted and needed.

It's the early courting scenes that (intentionally) have the most life here, with Elvis as a good ol' boy with pure intentions and a lot of heartbreak and loneliness after the death of his mother. Priscilla is a young woman on the verge of something she can't name, only to make the one choice that erases any chance of her finding out.

The issue of the creepy age gap is largely defused - seems Elvis wasn't all that interested in her sexually no matter what her age. But the question of exactly what Elvis did want from her remains up in the air, even as he woos both her and her parents, getting them to agree to her staying (chaperoned) at Graceland.

Elvis clearly has firm opinions about her behaviour and dress that he's not afraid to impress upon her - if it'd give her an external life it was ruled out, though considering his massive fame keeping her close wasn't entirely unjustified. But the result was that much of her life with him was one of benign neglect, leaving her at home or out of things while he was busy being Elvis outside of Graceland. 

Best guess is she represented an ideal of womanhood Presley felt he needed in his life, even as he was popping pills, sleeping with Ann-Margaret and partying with the Memphis Mafia. Priscilla seemingly has everything she could want, only nobody ever asks her what she needs.

Priscilla is on the fringe of big things, but Coppola never leaves us feeling that we're missing out. Elvis' life is big but bland and unexamined - it's Priscilla's growth, her realisation that she's never going to be anything more than an object in her marriage, that's the real action here.

Not that "action" is quite the right word. The usual biopic list-checking of big events shows up from time to time, but the insights into The King are limited (there isn't a single Elvis song on the soundtrack) and stakes are rarely all that high. Priscilla is frustrated and stifled, Elvis is more neglectful than anything else, and when she finally decides she wants out Elvis knows it's time to let her go.

Still, both lead performances are spot-on, and the hazy vibe of life in Graceland is evocative and effective. It's a story in a minor key; if it feels like bigger things are just out of sight - for both Elvis and Priscilla - that's kind of the point.

- Anthony Morris