Review: Last Night in Soho

As a director, Edgar Wright is good at holding an audience's attention. Whatever his movies' flaws - and you could argue his Hollywood films (Scott Pilgrim and Baby Driver) have their issues - he never forgets to make his films entertaining. But sometimes being an entertainer works against you. Some stories need a bit of a edge if they're going to have an impact.

Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) - Ellie to her friends, of whom she seemingly has none as she lives in a small town 60's timewarp with her gran - has just been accepted into the London College of Fashion. It's a dream come true... though no sooner has she arrived than she begins to realise she has been living in a dream, as the youth of today are brash, noisy, and consider her 60s affectations somewhat naff. 

Fortunately she discovers a surprisingly cheap bedsit apartment in the heart of Soho, promptly moves in, and suddenly starts having nightly dreams in which she's transported back to the actual 60s, where she haunts wannabe singer Sandie Collins (Anya Taylor-Joy). It's everything she hoped London would be, and a marked contrast to the dour real world around her - until things start to go wrong.

Writer-director Wright establishes early on that Ellie is either psychic or nuts (she sees her dead mother, who killed herself after the stress of London life became too much - uh oh). The main thrust of the story is Ellie's rapid unraveling once Sandie's swinging 60s life turns grim under the "guidance" of her "manager" (Matt Smith). Wright has the visual skills to pull off a psychological thriller-slash-urban fantasy-slash-horror film with ease and this is never less than fun, but the story he's telling stumbles more than once.

This is the kind of film where there's plenty of careful foreshadowing to answer the audience's questions once the (many) twists play out, but little effort put in to creating a realistic protagonist we can care about. Even for an isolated country teen, Ellie's remarkably uninterested in asking basic questions, let alone using google to get answers about what's going on around her; her shock at the realisation that Soho in the 60s was actually a grimy den of sleaze leaves her seeming fatally naive (especially as "nostalgia is bad" is the closest thing to a theme this has), while her extended real-world breakdown features at least one public freak-out too many.

Wright's always been a director interested in style over substance - when there's been substance - but here his drive to keep the twists coming actively undermines the story going on underneath the shocks. The message in 2021 that men are abusive sex pests is both predictable and impossible to argue against; Wright tries to use that to blindside the audience, but whatever he gains in surprise he loses in impact.

Fortunately, the cast are entertaining throughout, with McKenzie's performance going a long way towards making Ellie seem like someone who might actually exist. Wright's visual skills create a series of always entertaining scenes, especially early on in his recreated 60s Soho, and while there's never any real suspense on offer it's still a gripping roller coaster ride. Twists and turns this has; heart, not so much.

-Anthony Morris

Review: The Many Saints of Newark

Don’t be fooled by the trailer; while this does feature a young Tony Soprano (played convincingly by James Gandolfini’s son Michael), he’s a minor player in this Sopranos prequel. The real focus here is the trials and tribulations of Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), mid-level player in the New Jersey mob during the late 60s and early 70s; Tony's a looming background presence, slowly drawn into the mob life.

 

While there’s plenty of Sopranos characters lurking around the in the background – some vividly re-created, others verging on parody – it's Dickie who's the star, both of the film and on the streets of Newark. But his troubles with his mobbed-up father "Hollywood Dick" Moltisanti (Ray Liotta), who’s just returned from Italy with new wife Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi), hint at deeper issues.

 

Over the course of the next five years or so Dickie is seen by those around him as a stand-up guy – an image that is far from accurate in his private life - while a series of race riots and social unrest provide an opportunity for black crime figure Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.) to move out from under Dickie’s shadow and start up a rival syndicate. If you've never seen a mob movie before, rest assured that this is not the kind of thing the Mafia is going to just let happen.

 

Written by Sopranos’ creator David Chase, this is a solid but rarely spectacular film that probably would have worked better if it had been turned into a miniseries (or lost a few supporting characters). Individual scenes often stand out and Dickie’s character arc is a strong central theme, but multiple callbacks to events mentioned in the original series leave the film feeling more aimless than it needs to be.

 

Director Alan Taylor and his team do a vivid job of recreating the feel of 60s and early 70s New Jersey, giving this a historical veneer that really makes the turmoil of the era pop. Coupled with a range of spot-on musical choices, the setting feels almost too real for the occasionally cartoony mobsters strutting through it - though this contrast only highlights the brutal fates of some of them.

 

For those interested in this purely as a prequel the film's excesses will be easier to take, though even there some of the big moments feel a little rushed. Tony’s scenes, especially with his mother (vividly played by Vera Farmiga) are excellent and yet still feel like they belong in another project entirely; this a film where you leave the cinema excited about the prospect of checking out the deleted scenes.

 

 

 

- Anthony Morris 

Review: The Last Duel

The trouble with Ridley Scott's new movie The Last Duel is that in 2021 the story it's telling can only end one way. I'm not talking about the results of the actual duel - no spoilers here for a real-life 600 year old event - but trying to tell a "there's more than one side to the story" tale about a woman who says she was raped isn't going to fly today.

To be fair, The Last Duel doesn't attempt to have it any other way. There are three chapters in this 150-minute film about the last legal duel to the death in France, each titled "The Truth according to..." depending on which one of the three leads is the focus. The first is Matt Damon's Jean De Carrouges, an old plodder who's good at surviving battles and not a whole lot else, which is a problem because his local ruler, Count Pierre d'Alençon (Ben Affleck) likes winners and partying. 

His version of events presents De Carrouges as basically a decent guy in a rough-hewn fashion who gets in a bunch of battles but finds himself slowly pushed to the outer because of a lack of social skills. Unfortunately for him, his friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) has the social skills to pay the bills - literally, as he becomes the Count's tax collector and close confidant.

The once close friends become estranged, which it's easy to imagine adding a layer of tragedy to proceedings if it was about literally anything else but a woman being raped. Said woman being De Carrouges' wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer), who is easily the most interesting character in this film - but we have a way to go to get her yet.

Le Gris' version of events paints himself in a better light, as you'd expect. It also gives us a lot more of The Count swanning around in a 14th century gold tracksuit while hosting orgies (easily the best part of the film), while making it clear that De Carrouges is a brute with no class. There's also plenty of Le Gris going on about how he's in love with Marguerite and can't live without her, which almost certainly would have landed very differently in a version of this film made 20 years ago.

Both men's versions have Marguerite first privately then publicly claiming she was raped by Le Gris, which eventually leads to the duel that opens and closes this film. De Carrouges's take has him believing her out of his love; Le Gris's version is that she wanted it and all her protests were merely to save her dignity. When we finally get her version - her chapter opens the same as the others, only when the other words fade from the screen "the truth" lingers - neither version is shown to be correct.

This kind of film is usually designed to send audiences out of the cinema arguing amongst themselves about which characters they believe and whether justice was served. The Last Duel makes it clear:  Marguerite's version is the truth. So why bother with the others? Who cares what a rapist and a brutish, disengaged husband thinks?

Obviously everyone in 14th century France for starters, but Ridley Scott fails to bring to the screen any real sense or understanding of medieval life beyond the superficial. The reason for three versions of the one story is to give us three versions of medieval life, but for all Scott's skill at presenting the surface trappings there's rarely much of a sense here of what life was actually like - a fatal flaw in a film that's a social drama that hinges on highlighting both the differences and similarities between that time and ours. 

This window into the past is murky at best, full of modern language and cliches (the King is a giggling fool, priests are sinister, women are gossipy backstabbers, mothers-in-law are nasty, etc), only rarely hinting at just how different the world of 600-odd years ago was. The point is clearly to make a medieval #metoo movie to show how little has changed - many of the court details and references to abusive priests leading up to the duel could come from a film set today - but without first establishing how different things also were, the similarities just seem obvious and lazy.

Unwilling to make this a clear-cut tale of good versus evil, and unable to present the central events with any real level of ambiguity, all that's left is a repetitive study of an ugly, petty time where thugs and fools ruled and love was just an excuse for crime. Which might have worked if there was any kind of animating spirit underneath it all: while all three leads give decent performances, they rarely connect with each other, giving only glimpses of the grand passions that supposedly are driving them.

On the plus side, the duel itself is thrilling film making and brutal viewing, especially if you don't already know who's going to win. Scott remains a vivid, powerful director - just so long as nobody has to speak.

 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Superhero movies, at least under the Disney / Marvel regime, are largely about taking other genres and putting a Marvel logo up front. It's largely the other studios (including Sony using Marvel characters) that are making "traditional" superhero movies about crazy villains and reality-shattering plots; Marvel's superhero model is to find another popular action genre, drop some superheroes in, make some wise-cracks, and tie it all into the MCU after the credits roll.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings works not because superheroes and martial arts are a logical fit (most superhero fights have at least some martial arts thrown in there somewhere), but because the super-heroic stuff is kept to a bare minimum. It's a Disney martial arts movie that occasionally makes off-hand references to the rest of the Marvel universe, and it's all the better for it.

Shaun (Simu Liu) spends his days parking cars at a hotel in San Francisco with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) and his nights singing karaoke, again with his best friend Katy. Her family thinks they're wasting their lives; his family... isn't mentioned. Then a mysterious band of thugs attack them on a bus looking to steal the jade pendant his mother gave him, it turns out his previously unmentioned martial arts skills are irrepressible, and one demolished bus later Shaun / Shang is off to Macau with Katy in tow to find his sister Xialing (Meng'er Zhang) in an illegal superpowered fight club.

Turns out their father is Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), possessor of the legendary Ten Rings (though what kind of legend are they when everyone knows he has them?) and chief of a thousand year-old crime society. Any resemblance to characters like Fu Manchu are deliberate - in the original comics, Manchu was Shang's father - but this goes out of its way to avoid the yellow peril cliches.

Wenwu put his crime life into hibernation when he fell in love with their mother (Fala Chen), who was the guardian of Ta Lo, a mysterious supernatural village. She's been dead for over a decade - only their father, now back on the evil side of the street, thinks he has a way to bring her back...

A run of decent fights early on and some fun chemistry between the two leads provides some strong bedrock for what turns out to be a fairly solid, if only moderately spectacular, Marvel origin story. Putting some effort into developing the character of the main villain (a definite rarity for a Marvel film) pays off big time as well, though the rest of the supporting cast - with the exception of Michelle Yeoh - largely fade into the background.

Like a lot of recent Marvel movies, there's two axis of comparison here. As a superhero movie it's a lot of fun, a done-in-one package that provides all the required thrills - and a few surprises - while hitting all the required notes with impressive force. As a martial arts movie it's a little flat; the fights are good and generally well framed (so we can tell what's actually going on) but the CGI required for the superhero effects detracts from the feel of seeing real people doing real stunts that makes the best fights so thrilling.

That's possibly why the final act, which swerves into all-out fantasy, works so well. It brings something fresh to the MCU, and provides yet another twist on the usual superheroics. One day Marvel's going to run out of genres to drop superheroes into; for now, it's a formula that keeps on serving up winners.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Don't Breathe 2

Don't Breathe 2 is an odd sequel in a number of ways. For one, it's late: the original Don't Breathe was released in 2016 and slotted into the then-current trend for "elevated horror" (see also: It Follows) despite mostly being a fairly grungy high concept horror where a trio of would-be thieves broke into an old blind guys house only to discover it's full of traps, he's basically Daredevil as far as hearing goes, and there's a twist with a turkey baster nobody in their right mind saw coming.

It's also a sequel where we're supposed to forget all that - or at least, the turkey baster stuff - because this time the bad guy, Norman Nordstrom, AKA "The Blind Man" (Stephen Lang) is... okay, he's not the good guy, but he's more of a badass than a bad dude. 

The real lead is eleven year old Phoenix (Madelyn Grace), who lives with Norman, doesn't get to go out much and spends her days being taught survival tactics because they live in Detroit 2021. Watch out for the roving gangs of murderers hanging around the shelter full of surplus orphans!

On an extremely rare trip to the outside world, Phoenix and Hernandez (Stephanie Arcila), Norman's only link to humanity so let's not get too attached here, encounter a scuzzy group of van-dwelling dirtbags while a TV in the background runs a news story about a missing Doctor wanted for organ-legging. Could these things be connected? Yes, but not in the way you're probably thinking.

The middle chunk of the film is basically a retread of the first film - criminals turn up at Norman's house looking to grab something, only to realise they've bitten off more than they can chew - though because we're meant to be (somewhat) on Norman's side he's not quite the supernatural killing machine he was first time around. He's still a blind man taking out the trash, but he's struggling with it and not all the trash gets taken all the way out to the bin.

Home invasion films (and even just sequences in a film) are pretty much sure-fire as far as tension goes. They're basically filmed games of hide and seek, and Phoenix's survival skills come in handy as she's got to creep around the house trying to avoid the stalker squad. One nice touch is she never runs, just walks quickly and firmly when she has to, which is the kind of minor moment of competency that makes a film seem like it knows what it's doing.

Because this isn't quite a horror film, and the bad guys have an agenda that isn't quite "murder murder murder", it's able to pull off a few minor gear changes during the home invasion scenes that keep things slightly more interesting than the usual "find them and kill them". The small attempts to give the cartoon thugs some character and motivation, combined with a hero who's both blind and on the back foot in any direct physical confrontation (while also still implausibly effective) makes this just a little more suspenseful than it should be.

A big test for a film where an immovable object runs up against a force that only seems unstoppable for the first hour or so is how well it can delay the point where it goes from "aw shit, how's he going to survive this?"  to "hell yeah, the bad guys are screwed now". This manages to delay it a lot longer than you might expect for a sequel, as the third act throws in a few twists (including a location change) that may not be entirely plausible for a crime film but work just fine as this slides a little further down towards the horror end of the scale. Everything here is nuts if you think about it, but it's all equally nuts so it evens out.

To be fair, all this is qualified praise: it's still a trashy, over the top home invasion thriller largely held together by Lang's imposing physical presence and a script that barrels forward at a rate designed to prevent reflection. It's a relatively standard, if competently crafted, thrill-ride - until you remember what Nordstrom was doing in the first film, which makes this sequel's (relatively effective) attempts to turn him into a good guy one of the craziest plot twists in recent cinematic history. 

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Summer of Soul

The big question with this kind of documentary is: just how much of a documentary does this need to be? If the selling point is the footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, featuring a cavalcade of the best and most important Black musicians in America across six Sundays, how much explaining and context do we need - especially when every minute of talking heads or historical background is a minute less of the music?

There will always be people dissatisfied no matter what the approach. Personally, fingers crossed that eventually there's a way to release the whole series of concerts (or as much as feasible) as stand alone performances; short of that, Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised) is the best result we could ask for.

Presented by director Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson from footage originally shot by Hal Tulchin (and then "lost" for half a century), Summer of Soul does a near-perfect job of putting the event in context while still giving the performances room to breathe. It's a thrilling ride, a backstage pass combined with front row seats to a festival of artists working at their peak.

It doesn't hurt that the backdrop itself is so interesting: the changes in Black America, and Harlem in particular, the social tensions of the time, the shifts in fashion (trad suits popular in week one were in the trash by week six), and the various political and economic balls that had to be juggled just to make the event happen are all intriguing.

But it's the acts themselves that are the real draw here, ranging from gospel groups and all but forgotten one-hit wonders to icons of the hippie era (the mixed race performers in Sly and the Family Stone set some audience members aback) and icons like Nina Simone and a (surprisingly confronting) Stevie Wonder - make sure to sit through the end credits to see Wonder verbally take down an assistant on stage in brutal fashion.

On their own, the performances are always interesting and often outstanding. Taken together, they make up an essential guide to the ins and outs of Black music and culture, reaching back into the past while pointing the way to the future. Talking head interviews with many of the surviving musicians only adds to the insights. Some were thrilled, others nervous; careers were on the cusp of greatness, starting a downwards slide, or just happy to be there.

Summer of Soul stands out as a reflection of an exhilarating moment in history, a record of an outstanding series of concerts, and a chance to see some of the funkiest fashions 1969 could serve up. It's a toe-tapping, feel-good triumph.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Candyman

Right from the start, Candyman has always been about looking at a monster, and not because of all the mirrors. The first Candyman film established that "The Candyman" wasn't just a slasher like Jason or Freddy Kruger; he was a legend, a creature that worked (and the first film worked very well indeed) because of the setting and backstory and what he symbolised at least as much as he did because he looked cool and murdered people. It was a slasher story with things to say; the problem with this sequel (not a reboot) is that at times it has so much to say it struggles to get any of it out clearly.

Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is an artist who's lost his drive artistically and with it his already precarious place in the Chicago arts scene. His girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris) is an art gallery director who's going places, and his failure to keep up is causing friction. Looking for inspiration in his community - well, not his actual community, because his community isn't interesting to white buyers, but in the increasingly gentrified former slum known as Cabrini Green - he hears about the legend of Candyman.

Candyman's angle - his hook, if you will - is that after you say his name five times in a mirror he turns up and kills you. You'd think would rapidly thin out the number of people stupid enough to do that and surprise! This film is (in part) directly about that. It's also about gentrification, black culture and where it's situated in America, cycles of social unrest and abuse, myth-making, and why both cops and art critics deserve to die. 

That's a lot, and the dreamy, almost aimless storytelling early on that enables it to touch on so many different angles is one of this film's biggest strengths. For much of the film the story almost drifts along, scene following scene propelled more by dream logic than anything else. There's two main threads - Anthony's increasingly unstable state both physically and mentally, and the growing bodycount racked up by Candyman as Anthony's Candyman-themed exhibit at a local arts show spreads the word around - each increasingly surrounded by a buzzing cloud of dread.

Eventually it's time to tie everything together, and that's where this stumbles. It turns out there is a reason of sorts behind all this, but it's too little, too late, and too muddled to really pay off on all the creepy promise of the earlier scenes. This version of Candyman is covering a lot of ground culturally, and even a hook-handed killer swarming with bees can't do everything.

(one thing this film does do? Brings back Tony Todd in the role, though he's not the only Candyman we see)

It's ironic that this is a story about a slasher icon that survives across time as a legend, as Candyman creator Clive Barker (Bernard Rose co-wrote and directed the original film) has gone from being the hottest thing in horror when the first film was made to barely a footnote in the credits. This time around Jordan Peele is the big name on the poster, though it's the often striking visuals from up-and-coming director Nia DeCosta (who's already been tapped for a Marvel movie) that make this work.

The opening scene (re-interpreted throughout the film) where a hook handed man comes out of a hole in a wall to offer candy to a child is pure nightmare fodder. Most other horror movies wish they had an opening that strong; if this never quite lives up to that, it doesn't let it down either.

- Anthony Morris