Review: The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

The Looney Tunes characters aren't quite as moribund as (ducks aside) Disney's stable of animated stars, but they definitely have the vibe of big name stars waiting for a big project that's never going to come. Which The Day The Earth Blew Up seems very much aware of: it's just an old fashioned movie, not an event (*cough Space Jam 2 cough*) and is all the better for it.

Focusing firmly on the Porky Pig - Daffy Duck relationship - though it's a slightly earlier version of the double act than you might remember, with Porky in the lead and Daffy just that little bit too daffy to be trusted - our loveable duo are forced to deal with a bubble gum related alien invasion when all they want to do is fix up their family farm.

This isn't quite as manic as you might expect. A feature length film needs a very different tempo than an eight minute short (though one segment of the duo's adventures is basically presented as such), so for every frantic battle with body-horror alien goo there's a slightly more sedate scene to let everyone catch their breath.

Unfortunately the material isn't always strong enough to ride out the quiet patches, creating a few moments where kids (and adults) might start fidgeting. They're brief - this does a surprisingly good job of piling on the twists and turns, with the plot still throwing up surprises right to the end - but it does mean this doesn't quite hit the high energy high notes associated with the Looney Tunes brand.

As the voice of both Daffy and Porky, Eric Bauza does a first class job of capturing the personalities of both, which goes a long way towards making this feel like a real movie complete with character development and emotional ups and downs. Also there's evil bubblegum, so it all evens out.

For a relatively low budget effort this looks great; a solid gag early on has Daffy and Porky's adoptive dad only ever appearing as a painted background (trust me, you'll know the difference when you see it), and there's plenty of life and movement in every scene. It may not be right up there with the classics, but what is?

This isn't an updating of the characters (it's a 1950s style alien invasion at best), and it's not the kind of film that'll have you leaving the cinema shouting "the Looney Tunes are back!". It's decent kids entertainment with plenty of charm and wit, the kind of thing that Warners should be punching out at least once a year and making a tidy return both financially while boosting the visibility of these still viable characters.

 Oh wait, they just took all the Looney Tunes shorts off streaming. Guess that's all, folks.

- Anthony Morris

 

 

Review: A Working Man

It's not strictly true that the fashion is the most interesting thing about A Working Man. But it is noticeable that while Jason Statham's Levon Cade and his friends all consistently wear solid workman gear, all his enemies both personal and professional are constantly putting on outlandish and flamboyant outfits when they're not just straight-up hosting costume parties where everyone is dressed like it's pre-revolutionary France.

This kind of blatant signalling - seems bad guys are rich and decadent, who knew - is something this film could have done with a lot more of. It's not like Statham is any stranger to going over the top: his best films and most memorable roles have usually backed right up to being silly, if not gleefully danced on top of it.

Sadly this particular film seems to have taken all the wrong lessons from Statham's recent surprise hit The Beekeeper, an often deeply strange film that audiences gleefully took to because for once the righteous vengeance these action films deal in was focused on a real world villain (online scammers preying on the vulnerable). Turned out people really enjoyed seeing specific dirtbags being punished rather than the usual vague arms dealers and human traffickers and Russian mobsters.

Surprise! Here Cade is tracking down human traffickers, though at least they're home grown and not the evil foreigners from Taken. Though they are weirdly incompetent: their scheme seems to involve kidnapping young women to order and then just keeping them in a basement for a week or so to give Cade time to get on their trail. 

A slightly more thought-out movie would have had someone - possibly Cade's police friend, who gets one scene to contribute almost nothing to the plot - say something like "these guys fly a plane full of girls to Dubai once a week, you've got five days" and hey presto, ticking clock.

Instead, this film (based on a novel by former Punisher comic book writer Chuck Dixon, with a script co-written by Sylvester Stallone) uses the traditional and somewhat plodding structure where Cade, once set on the trail of his bosses' missing daughter, murders his way up the food chain until he runs out of people to kill. Only here, because the kidnappers are actually minor thugs, Cade ends up wiping out half the Russian mob because the movie has almost two hours to fill.

The problems with this structure - which is basically a detective story, only the detective can't go back to re-question anyone because he's killed them and there's no mystery to solve - is that you either get a string of forgettable goons or you get a decent bad guy but he only gets two scenes before he's killed and oh look, there's Jason Flemyng as a Russian mobster turning up far too early in the story to stick around for long.

Despite the obvious flaws, director David Ayers knows what he's doing and everything here is solidly competent in a way that, say, some of the more recent Liam Neeson films can't quite manage. The action is decent, the story doesn't dawdle, and there's just enough colour in Cade's numerous antagonists to make them noticeable (highlights include a Russian goon seemingly toting around an anti-aircraft gun and a couple of corrupt cops who are constantly apologising for handing people over to murderous thugs).

The result feels at times like an attempt to tap into the Jack Reacher audience, which might make sense if you've never actually watched Statham act. Statham's big strength as an actor is his sense of humor; the more a film tries to make him into a bland generic thug pummeling bad guys, the less impressive the result. In his best films he brings a touch of levity to taking out the trash, whether it's through implausible action, some decent quips, or just being in a film that doesn't take itself too seriously. 

Which brings us back to the fashion. The Beekeeper hit big by having real-world bad guys; this turns the dial the other way and works hard to make Cade, a down-home construction worker and vet trying to hold his family together, a blue collar hero for today. And yet, the one scene where Statham really stands out is the one where he has to go to a business meeting in a suit. Turns out looking good works for him.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: The Alto Knights

Nominally based on the true story of New York gangsters Frank Costello (Robert De Niro) and Vito Genovese (Robert De Niro again) as they waged war for control of the mob in the 1950s, what The Alto Knights mostly resembles is some kind of half-remembered dream. 

Things happen, then they didn't happen or didn't happen the way they were meant to happen and the whole thing is named after a club that plays no real role in the story anyway; best to sit back and enjoy the old familiar cliches washing over you.

Opening with the brutal murder of Costello by a gunman working for Genovese, only to have it revealed that Costello didn't actually die as the bullet bounced off his skull, the story then bounces around in similar fashion filling in the backstory in piecemeal fashion, at times narrated by an older Costello years after the fact. 

The pair grew up as friends despite their markedly different worldviews - Costello was a dealmaker who flourished during Prohibition, while Genovese was a thug who was only interested in collecting, not investing - so when Genovese fled the country to avoid a murder rap he left Costello in charge as the boss of bosses. 

Bad move: WWII broke out, Genovese was stuck in Italy for the duration, and by the time he came back there'd been fifteen good years under Costello's rule and a lot of the mob didn't want Genovese back in the top job. Costello tried to fob him off with a piece of the pie, Genovese wasn't happy with that, then when his whirlwind marriage went sour Vito's wife (Katherine Narducci) named names in a divorce court and suddenly a big fat spotlight was on Costello. 

If there's a theme here it's that sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the more the media and government focuses on the mob the tougher things get for them. You're damned if you plead the fifth, you're damned if you don't.

Running parallel to that is Costello's constant efforts to placate the volatile Genovese even after he tried to kill him, making this feel like a gangster movie where one of the leads thinks and acts like he's in a different kind of film entirely. Rational thinking? From a mobster? Forgettaboutit.

The result is a story that (probably rightly) assumes we know all the gangster cliches and tropes so well there's no real need to tie things together when we all know what we really came to see: a double dose of De Niro playing mobsters who are constantly having circular conversations around topics whether they be deadly serious or wondering if the Mormons were stupid enough to only dig up one gold bible before moving directly to Utah.

De Niro himself does a good job of differentiating his two roles (helped by some relatively subdued prosthetics - Costello has the nose, Genovese has the top lip), but he's not given a lot to work with aside from Costello rarely being angry while Genovese almost always is. His characters only get a couple of scenes together; as an acting partner, De Niro makes sure to never overshadow himself.

But look, you don't care about any of this. You're here to see De Niro play gangsters one more time, and it's just as much fun now as it ever was. Sure, it'd be nice if it was in a film that added up to something, but his performance is worth the ticket price on its own - and during the final act, when this finally finds its feet and gives us both a solid barber shop wacking and a big scene where mobsters flail about like clowns, it even manages to become a solid mob film in its own right.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Black Bag

In Black Bag a personally restrained, glasses-wearing British spy named George whose private life is a matter of public conjecture is secretly tasked with the job of uncovering a high-level mole in his organization; hang on a second, John Le Carre's lawyers are on line two. 

Here Steven Soderberg (in only his second film so far this year) is both riffing on and borrowing from Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, in a way that updates the otherwise familiar material (spy satellites!) while answering a question hardly anyone's been asking: what if this particular George had a wife who was also a spy?

To get the obvious out of the way, Soderbergh's many, many skills as a director are perfectly suited to a spy thriller, and this is one of the most polished installments of the time-worn genre in years. Working from a script by David Koepp, the result provides all of the expected thrills with just enough of a fresh spin to make the whole thing worthwhile.

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) works for an unnamed branch of British Intelligence, where his job largely seems to consist of making sure everyone around him in their fancy office stays in line. His wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), seems closer to the core businesses of doing what it is they do - she's the friendly face, he's lurking in the shadows.

Yes, the mole: after being tipped off that nobody's to be trusted - including his wife - George starts sniffing around. The rest of the staff are rapidly revealed to be flawed in one way or another after a Woodhouse-hosted dinner party in which he's secretly dosed everyone with an inhibition-lowering chemical that makes them increasingly unhinged. Relationships break up and make up, though not the ones you might expect. 

The usual mystery pleasures are once again on offer, as everyone turns out to be a plausible suspect. Salt-of-the-earth Freddie (Tom Burke) is a bit frayed around the edges, while his (much younger) partner Clarissa (Marisa Abela) seems to like pushing things. Colonel Stokes (Rege-Jean Page) acts like he's on the ball, but his relationship with the more emotionally open team shrink Dr Vaughn (Naomie Harris) seems like a weak link. And what about Kathryn?

The element that promises to blow this collection of genre cliches wide open is the leads' commitment to each other. George's love for Kathryn (and hers for him) is so strong - we're told more than once - that it overrides everything, even loyalty to their country. The reason why George is running this investigation so hard is because he needs to know if his wife has gone rogue so he can protect her; much of the tension here comes from the threat that at any moment this could turn into a far more unpredictable film.

Suffice to say that whether your expectations are met or shattered, you'll enjoy the ride. This is a solidly satisfying spy thriller that ticks all the boxes with panache, anchored by a range of memorable supporting performances - including, in yet another slice of meta-fun, Pierce Brosnan as the unit's cranky chief.

Fassbender is the main course here, perfectly playing a man who's all icy restraint on the surface and seething passion underneath as he - and to a lesser extent, his wife - prove to be more interesting characters than the story they find themselves in. Usually that'd be a call for sequels; in this case, those wanting the further adventures of a slightly uptight and buttoned-down spy-catcher named George don't have far to look.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Mickey 17

Mickey (Robert Patterson) has the kind of problem that sounds like it'd be a good one to have: he can't be killed. Well, to be accurate, he can be killed - and often is - but he's then promptly restored from backup into a freshly printed new body. You'd think this form of immortality would be restricted to the elite of society; in Mickey 17, it's reserved only for the dregs.

On the run from gleefully murderous loan sharks on a pretty crappy future Earth, Mickey signed onto a colony mission as an "expendable" - someone who could be sent to do extremely dangerous jobs "safe" in the knowledge that after he died a new copy would be printed out. Most of these jobs involve being a lab rat of some kind; the death that opens the film has him alive but at the bottom of a frozen crevice where retrieving him falls into the category of "eh, why bother".

Shock twist: that version of Mickey survives, and makes it back to the colony - which is now firmly established on a frozen planet - only to find another version's been printed out. Good news for his security officer girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) who's into the idea of two lovers, bad news for the Mickeys as the existence of two copies makes him a "multiple" who will have all copies (and his backup) destroyed on sight.

There's a lot more going on, in, and around the fairly straightforward plot; at times it feels like this might have worked better as an episodic series. There's Mickey's grim existence on the journey to the planet, the Trump-esque hucksterism of the colony's dictatorial leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his sauce-obsessed wife (Toni Collette), a possible love triangle between Mickey, Nasha, and Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), a dinner party that involves a lot of vomiting and a possible mercy killing, the loan sharks haven't given up on collecting (they'll take a bespoke snuff movie over cash) and there's an alien life form out there the colonists have dubbed "creepers" which may or may not be a threat to every human on the planet. 

Writer-director Bong Joon-ho (working from the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Aston) is not taking any of this seriously: mostly it's a romp, though the comedy can get a little dark at times. It's following in the tradition of any number of frantic, over-the-top science fiction tales, and like most of them it's a bit hit and miss. 

Seemingly promising directions are skimmed over or ignored, supporting characters vanish (then later reappear, or don't), long stretches are given over to sidebars that don't really pay off, occasionally it's time to dip into some pretty blunt satire (Marshall hosts his own tonight show) and the general texture is of one long shaggy dog story where the point never quite comes into focus. Don't go in expecting to love everything you see.

That said, the performances are largely kept in check. Even Patterson strikes the right note of goofy charm, while Ruffalo - who does get to go very big - is at least playing the kind of grandiose buffoon that history manages to serve up on a semi-regular basis. The events are larger-than-life, but the characters mostly stay human, which is probably the right note to strike.

Mickey 17 is a film that spends a hefty chunk of its run time exploring the horrors of being a clone that can't die, and then loses interest in all of that once there's two identical (or are they?) people running around arguing with each other. Maybe a bit more soul would have made it something more than just an unevenly entertaining SF comedy - but then, after 17 times through the printer anyone's soul would be a bit tattered.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Bird

It's been a few years since Andrea Arnold made a fiction film, but documentary's loss is pretty much everyone else's gain. Bird is both a return to social realism and an embrace of the magical - two things that really should go together a lot more often than they do. We all contain both (and more) inside us: any realistic film that ignores that is falling down when it should be soaring.

Twelve year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is having a bit of a rough go of it. Living in a squat in a housing estate in Kent, her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) is barely an adult himself, running around with the kind of wild get-rich-quick schemes a teenager would come up with (becoming a father as a teen seems to have arrested his development).

Her mother, who lives across town, isn't much help either. Peyton (Jasmine Jobson) has a violent partner and three kids, living in the kind of knife-edge situation where anything can happen and whatever it is, it's going to be bad. Bug's crazy plan to sell toad juice to finance his wedding to a woman he met three months ago doesn't seem so bad by comparison.

So Bailey is largely left to her own devices. Sometimes she's spending time with her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and the gang he's put together to "protect" the neighbourhood. Other times she's on her own, which is when she meets the mysterious Bird (Franz Rogowski).

At first she's wary of this stranger who seems lost and searching for something. It doesn't take long for a bond to develop, but this is the kind of coming-of-age film where tragedy is just as likely as anything else - or at least, it is until a big shift in what kind of film we're actually watching makes itself known towards the end.

The result is something that isn't going to click with everyone. Consistency in entertainment is generally a virtue; any major gear changes are required to exist within the borders of plot and character, not by adding entirely new elements previously unsuspected. So this is a big swerve, but if you can go with adding "magical" to "realism", the pay off is worth it.

And even if you feel the ending does derail things, there's a lot to enjoy. The performances, often from newcomers, are frequently astonishing and consistently enthralling, while Arnold has lost none of her skill when it comes to steeping her audience in a world where struggle and deprivation don't automatically mean a bleak existence.

It's a swirling film, full of joy and grinding poverty, despair and the beauty of nature pushing through ruins. Whether it's fully successful or not we need more films like this, heartfelt and striving.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

Long running fictional characters can grow old, or not. Presumably Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt is getting older, it just has absolutely no relevance to his life. Bridget Jones has taken the opposite path, awkwardly passing numerous milestones since she hit the big screen in 2001. Back then she was a quirky take on a young woman living in a world where being under 35 was a complex and nuanced mix of challenges and opportunities. Now in her world young people either look after your kids or shag you.

Aging with your fanbase locks them in: it also locks you into tackling certain issues that inevitably come up, which is to say this is the Bridget Jones movie about death. This mortality, somewhat surprisingly, works to the film's advantage, providing useful contrast to the numerous entertaining moments where Jones (Renee Zellweger) does something awkward then awkwardly realises someone she would like to impress just saw her.

The big death, of course, is Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who it is revealed in the first few minutes died four years ago, being exploded as part of his work as a human rights lawyer. It is time, all her friends agree, for her to move on. But how? And where? And will the big pants be required?

Pretty much everyone you remember from the previous films makes a return here - the dead characters are either wordless ghosts or get a final scene in flashback - but the script makes the onslaught of familiar characters seem natural, as Jones first checks in with pretty much everyone before her first love interest, the youthful aspiring garbologist Roxster (Leo Woodall) pulls her down out of a tree. Awkward!

Meanwhile, the local school her children attend has a new science teacher, the whistle-blowing Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Will he get much of a look in around the jokes about having to bring snacks for school functions and dealing with other snobby "perfect" mums?  Wait and see.

Jones also returns to work as a TV producer, bringing in a few new characters (Jones gets a nanny!) and some old ones - and of course, more opportunity for embarrassment. In the whirlwind of friends that makes up her life (and having such a packed social life despite being a single mum to two kids is just one of the more fantastical elements here) only unrepentant sleaze Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) gets anything like a character arc. And deservedly so, as he remains a delight.

The jokes are uneven but enough land to make it work. It's also a bit sad in parts, though at this stage of life anything less would be a let-down. Having Jones back looking for love is just enough of a spine to keep this from being a pointless greatest hits tour; having the grim specter of death lingering over a number of the scenes (the kids haven't yet moved on) is just enough weight to keep this from drifting away.

Put another way, the film has a high mortality rate (there's more than one scene where a much-loved character comes face to face with their mortality in a hospital), while Jones does pretty well when it comes to sexy and/or romantic clinches. Maybe they should have titled this one Bridget Jones: Body Count.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Presence

Does a ghost story have to be scary? On one level, probably not: it's not hard to think of numerous supernatural stories that (intentionally or not) failed to deliver spine-related chills. But the basic premise of a ghost story - conclusive proof that there is a form of existence beyond the physical world - does tend towards the unsettling. So a heads-up: Presence may be about a haunted house, but it's the living residents who'll give you the creeps.

Director Steven Soderberg's gimmick here is that the camera is the ghost's POV - we see what the ghost sees, and (as we later learn) the ghost doesn't know why they're haunting this particular suburban house. So they tend to just wander around watching the new residents, the Payne family.

It doesn't take long to see the family haven't exactly created a happy home. Father Chris (Chris Sullivan) is fiercely protective of daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who is on edge after having recently lost a friend to a drug overdose. Older brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) is cruelly dismissive, focused more on his sporting and social success. Overly controlling mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu) is firmly on Tyler's side, though she's distracted by shady goings-on at work - the kind of things that have Chris thinking of bailing on the marriage.

All this unfolds in a series of long takes filmed in ghost-o-vision as the "presence" observes the family. Gradually Chloe starts to sense something supernatural; the presence can and does move small objects around, sometimes in a seemingly helpful manner, other times more destructively. A psychic (Natalie Woolams-Torres) is brought in, with mixed results. Tyler's new friend Ryan (West Mullholland) starts hitting on Chloe. The family is freaking out, but what can they do?

With big scares off the table, what's left is an interesting up-close look at a family under stress, with a low-key mystery wrapped around it. What exactly does the presence want? It's the kind of story that in other hands would cry out for a second viewing, but Soderberg plays fair with the audience and the ending is more of a "oh, that's why that happened" than a "wait, I need to go over this again".

The family's fault lines are fairly bluntly laid out; the point is to see which ways things are going to fracture. Everyone here turns out to be capable of a surprise or two, though most of the big moves are in character. Reliable types step up, people on edge make risky choices. The performances are all good, though it's Liang who ends up holding the film together. 

So it's a satisfying watch, if operating largely in a minor key. Possibly the most interesting thing going on is the way the demands of the story require one central character to be both a jerk and heroic. It makes sense - these are members of a family after all - but it's rare to see a character contain multitudes in recent cinema. Most ghost stories require the living to be one thing, then nothing; it's this character's out-of-character choice that will haunt their family.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Companion

Companion is one of those movies with a big, story-changing twist at the end of act one, and you can tell that while the film makers thought it would be a big mind-blowing shock, the publicity department went "yeah, this is how we're going to get people in to see this movie".

You can't blame them - there's no point in your movie having a great twist if nobody is going to go see it, and without knowing the twist there's not a lot obviously going on you can sell Companion with. But it does mean that talking about the movie in any kind of detail is going to require spoilers, which is a shame because the reveal is a pretty good one (even if wikipedia does give it away).

Without spoiling anything then, here's what you need to know: Josh (Jack Quaid) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher) are heading out to a fancy cabin in the woods for a getaway weekend with friends. Kat (Megan Suri) is friends with Josh, not a fan of Iris, and is the mistress of Sergey (Rupert Friend) a dodgy Russian businessman who owns the house (and everything around it, including a lake). 

Also staying are Patrick (Lucas Gage) and Eli (Harvey Guillen), who get to watch on as Sergey hits on Iris and generally sleazes up the place. Kat doesn't seem to be having all that much fun either. The vibes are bad; it doesn't take long to realise there's a good reason for that.

Last paragraph without spoilers, so: what follows is more of a "crime scheme gone wrong" thriller than a "cabin in the woods" slasher, though there are a few gory moments. Some characters turn out to be arseholes, some are more decent than they seem, some don't stick around long enough to go either way. It's fun rather than edge-of-your-seat gripping, though there are a number of good twists and once it gets going it doesn't slow down: it's like a lightweight Fargo where you cheer on the character you'd least suspect.

.

Okay: Iris is a robot, and she's been jailbreaked to do something she's not meant to (not sex, she's all good in that department) so Josh can get something he wants. Once she's done what he wants, she's disposable: the rest of the film is about her trying to protect her off switch, only because she's a robot there are ways to hit that switch beyond just shooting her - and in fact, because Josh needs the whole thing to look like an accident, he has to shut her down like you would any other malfunctioning item. No suspicious bullet holes or tire marks.

It's a smart tweak to an otherwise familiar genre, and it allows the story to go all-in on Josh's barely concealed misogyny. It's not robo-shaming - there are other plot elements that make it clear that robot-human love is just fine so long as you're not an abusive whiny creep - and it makes for a nice explanation as to why Kat dislikes Iris. Gold-digging girlfriends are going to have a tough time competing with sexbots, after all.

Writer / director Drew Hancock has come up with a solid noir thriller that's also a smart science fiction story (though don't expect any examination of how sexbots have changed wider society - the action here stays very close to home) with a touch of horror mixed in. It's a tight, exciting ninety minutes, but what really lifts it over the top are the performances.

Quaid artfully walks the line between caring boyfriend and thoughtless creep at first, then goes all in when the extent of his boorish selfishness is revealed; Thatcher all but carries the film as she goes from loving partner to scared victim to determined survivor. She makes every step of Iris' wild emotional (yes, really) journey seem plausible - which is in no way reassuring for anyone watching who might be in the market for a sexbot in a few years time.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Brutalist

Epic both in scope and run time, The Brutalist is one of those rare recent films that gets bigger the more you think about it. It's taking on territory largely ceded to television drama: it's often expected that they'll take the time to attempt to suggest a world beyond their immediate events, while movies are now required to zoom in and burrow down. Which this also does, though perhaps not in the most obvious ways.

The story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a former and future architect who flees Europe in the wake of World War II for a new life in America, a big part of what makes The Brutalist work so well (aside from its many obvious virtues) is the way it picks and chooses which questions to pose and which ones to answer. The two groups do not always overlap.

Initially staying with relatives, Toth has a wife (Felicity Jones) he left behind but cannot bring over. American capitalism has no use for his skills, and he slides from furniture design to manual labour. It's not entirely luck that brings him to the attention of wealthy businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), but he soon finds himself with a major commission: to build a massive, possibly unwanted, community center (no to a pool, yes to a church) as a memorial to Van Buren's very much loved mother.

The stage is set for a seemingly predictable clash between art and commerce, but director Brady Corbet is working with characters, not types; Toth has a vision but also a temper, and while he knows that working with clients is a vital part of his job he doesn't suffer fools. Van Buren knows enough to stay out of Toth's way - at least some of the time - but it gradually becomes clear that as far as he's concerned he is the real genius for being canny enough to hire Toth, and respect should flow accordingly. 

Things develop in ways both surprising and inevitable. Toth's family is reunited, a drug problem he developed during tough times continues to lurk, cost-cutting is an on-going threat to Toth's vision and Van Buren's veneer of genial civility is at times only loosely attached. 

An intermission (the film flies by, despite the three and a half hour run time) provides the opportunity for a time-jump; reality continues to grind away at dreams. Building to an ending that's both satisfying and haunting - and then with a coda that recontextualizes much of what we've seen, even as it raises new questions of its own - this is as soundly constructed a film as one of Toth's own creations. 

The visuals are constantly striking; the barren hilltop that's the site of Van Buren's memorial speaks volumes, while even smaller locations evoke mid-century America in all its grime and bustle. The performances are uniformly excellent, though while Brody is the constant focus it's Pearce's 90% charming Van Buren that lingers, a man solidly built around a pinprick of rot.

Art and capitalism turn out to be entwined, but so is everything else. You can make your mark, but need someone else to explain it to the world. Hopefully they'll be sympathetic to your vision.

- Anthony Morris

Review: We Live in Time

Falling in love is enough to build a movie on, but if you want to talk about an actual relationship you need something more. We Live in Time brings two extras to the table: the story jumps around in time so we don't get to see things unfold in a linear fashion, and someone gets cancer. So a main character dies halfway through the film Pulp Fiction-style? Not quite.

Tobias (Andrew Garfield) is a wet sock of a man, a soft-spoken mid-level nobody at the Weetabix company whose wife has left him (mutual? yeah, right) but fortunately he looks like Andrew Garfield so there's still some hope.

Enter Almut (Florence Pugh), who is so firmly full of life that in another film she'd come close to be a manic pixie dream girl. Here she's one of the UK's top chefs - seriously, at one stage she's recruited to competitively cook for Britain - who knows what she wants and how to get it. Will that be Tobias? Let's wait and see.

This film's strengths are all the obvious ones. It looks like a slick coffee commercial - everyone lives in various forms of amazing homes and is impeccably dressed even when they're meant to be slumming it - and with Pugh and Garfield it has a main cast whose performances overwhelm the average material they're given. You'd watch them together in anything; unfortunately you're stuck watching them in this.

(if all you're after is attractive people in a slightly complicated relationship drifting through well-designed locations while events build to a bittersweet ending, you can stop reading now: We Live in Time delivers all those things in a pleasingly competent fashion)

Narratively the shuffling of scenes adds little to the storytelling. There's no point where the time jumps lead us astray, or provide a contrast that illuminates an aspect of the characters or their relationship. You'd assume it's happening to prevent this from being a traditional romance, only all the big moments - breakup, childbirth, serious news - come at the expected points in the film, so there's never any problem keeping track of things.

This kind of story is usually skewed towards one character or another (they can't both be right all the time), but this largely forgets to give Tobias any positive characteristics beyond being pitiable, while Almut is always right about everything (she dumps him for asking if their relationship has a future, and it's up to him to win her back) and is also so amazingly talented it's revealed towards the end she also had another secret world-class competitive skill only she gave it up because of a family tragedy and if she didn't have video proof you'd have to assume she was some kind of demented fantasist.

Just to make matters worse, the one thing Tobias does want out of the relationship, and that Almut comes around to agreeing to (ok, it's having children), also turns out to be the reason why there's a mention of cancer in the opening paragraph. It's literally the case that a doctor tells her if she doesn't have a procedure she'll almost certainly get cancer, but she knows if she does have the procedure Tobias will be very sad, and there's only so much of Garfield's hangdog expression one movie can stand.

Her storyline is messy in a way that's meant to suggest a strong personality but often just feels muddled, like she's a character that refuses to think anything through. He's little more than a prop, as soggy and shapeless as the products his company manufactures, a background character in his own life. It's not impossible to see them getting together - in a way it makes sense - but it results in a relationship it's hard to get invested in.

Put another way, they both deserve better. They might live in time, but despite a pair of charismatic performances, they're wasting it with each other.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Wolf Man

Leigh Whannell first made his name as co-creator of the Saw films, but in recent years his run of surprisingly effective small scale thrillers has threatened to overshadow his horror roots. 

Upgrade was pure science fiction; his creepy take on The Invisible Man was firmly grounded in technology. Wolf Man might continue his run with the classic Universal horror monsters, but it's also - a brief mention of a virus aside - a return to pure horror.

Blake (Christopher Abbott) grew up in the woods with an overprotective father, a man who, considering what might have been lurking in those woods, possibly had a good reason for his hair-trigger temper. But that was long ago: Blake's living in the city and he's a father himself now. He's trying to do better by his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), even if his marriage to Charlotte (Julia Garner) is going through a bit of a rough patch.

The news that his long-missing father is now officially considered dead brings with it the chance for the whole family to head back into the woods and revisit the family farmhouse. Which of course is an extremely bad idea as they promptly get lost, pick up a creepy local, then get run off the road thanks to an encounter with a very strange creature that probably wasn't a bear.

Now the local's splattered, Blake is injured, and the family are trying to make it to the farm house before whatever it is that's lurking in the woods gets its teeth into them. But even if they do make it inside and lock the doors behind them, are they locking the evil out... or trapping it in with them?

There's a few minor twists and turns along the way, but for the most part this is the kind of horror movie where the horror comes from knowing exactly what's to come (and it's all bad). There are some very effective, very creepy sequences, and some strong monster action moments as well, but the horror lies mostly in the story of a man uncontrollably changing into something that's not really human.

In his recent films Whannell has shown his strength is in embracing the pulpy aspects of his subjects, thinking deeply about their core concepts and coming up with twists that make sense while still being surprising and thoughtful.  

The big innovation here is to drag out the transformation and show parts of it from the transformed's point of view. This is more a story about infection than it is about traditional werewolf tropes like the thrill of unleashing the beast or the shock of waking up from a violent bender, and the scenes where a character can feel their humanity being drained from them are amongst the film's strongest.

Otherwise, Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck stick to the basics - this is a film that's largely about three people trapped in a house for one night - which means pretty much everything has to be firing to make it work. The body horror, the gore, and the big action moments largely deliver the goods.

If there's a weakness here it's that the family stuff, which really needs to be the film's solid emotional core, doesn't stand out quite like it needs to. The basics are conveyed effectively enough, and the horror of being taken away from your family by a disease is definitely effective, but the family here is more of a sketch than a deeply felt portrait.

There's also a distinct lack of howling at the moon. That's the real tragedy right there.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Conclave

Conclave is a reminder that there's a good reason why the Best Picture award at the Oscars is given to the film's producers. This is a very good film, verging on excellent: it's also a film that was clearly put together, a puzzle the likes of which Hollywood seems to have largely forgotten how to complete.

Based on a (short, pacy, punchy) novel by Robert Harris (Fatherland), it's the story of what happens after a Pope dies - the cardinals get together, they have a vote and keep on voting until they have a new Pope. Once the election has begun, no-one gets in or out (technically), so the pressure's on.

While the former Pope's right hand man, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) works to keep everything above board, various power blocs emerge. The forces looking to head back to the past - an Italian Pope, masses in Latin, social attitudes out of some previous century - are unified and strong, while those looking to keep moving forward are divided, their votes sloshing behind one candidate then another. 

Lawrence's duty is to the church, though he sides with the progressives. Scandals must be investigated; better to lose a weak candidate than elect a fatally flawed Pope. But all the scandals seem to dog those on his side of the vote; as one after the other drops out, is there anyone who can unite the Church in its time of need?

Harris has been writing thrillers for decades now, and Conclave touches on issues both modern and eternal via a twisty plot featuring a number of memorable characters. The people here are almost all creatures of politics, their words and expressions always looking to shore up their positions - and as in real life, the most powerful players are the ones who don't seem to be playing at all. 

The setting is a mix of vast opulent rooms where people make speeches about charity and piety, and utilitarian stairwells and corridors where the real moving and shaking gets done. Even when the rooms are bland and functional, they're telling us something about the mechanisms of power - and seeing a Cardinal in full costume in a room with modern office equipment is always good for a chuckle.

The credits are full of names (Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati, Isabella Rossellini) who have been perfectly cast, the kind of actors who are subservient to their roles and work within a film rather than trying to go big and be a breakout star. If they're in a bad film, they're rarely the cause or the cure; here, in a good film, they each play their part to perfection without trying to attract attention with over-the-top performances. Except, of course, for those cardinals for whom "over the top" is a power play.

Not everything here is perfect, especially if your attitude to the Catholic Church is a skeptical one. This is a story that admits the Church has flaws, but also sees it as an organisation still capable of good. Within the confines of the film, it works; thinking about it afterwards is another matter.

But the pleasures here are mostly small and nuanced, even at those times when the characters go big. The plot is a well-(holy) oiled machine, carefully laying the groundwork for the next big twist even as the current one is playing out. All the main characters get one big scene, and all the actors take full advantage, a string of Oscar clips that all fit perfectly into the wider story.

It all comes together in a satisfyingly mature fashion, entertainment for grown-ups. It's serious but light on its feet, a good time for an audience that doesn't need everything explained to them but likes everything to be wrapped up tidily. In the current cinematic climate, it's a blessing.

- Anthony Morris