OzoFriendly Reviews

Eric (2024)

6 for one and 5 for the other

[6/10 · 20 June 2024]

What a mess.

Perhaps Abi Morgan pitched a longer series but Netflix only gave her 6 eps to try to shoehorn her vision into.

So I can't be alone in being reminded of how The Wire brilliantly wove the fabric of Baltimore's social underbelly over five seasons.

But The Wire was a consistently gritty, believable and detailed show, while Eric, reaching for the same complexity, lands wearily on a preposterous and disappointingly mawkish end to one thread, and a trite and undignified end to the other.

Make a film about a father with a history of mental ill-health losing his child in the chaos, yes. But lose the imaginary frenemy and ridiculous Fight Club finale.

Make a film about systemic corruption and the vulnerability of disadvantaged and persecuted minorities. Yes, absolutely. But keep the clichés at arms' length for gawd's sake.

It honestly felt like Morgan was sitting in front of a bingo card of social issues, earnestly stamping every box with each turn of the plot.

And it's a shame that it fell so short, because the show was very well made. Acting across the board was very good, with a couple of exceptions; I thought Gabby Hoffman and Wade Allain-Marcus in particular were both excellent.

Unlike many folk, I'm rarely as impressed with Cumberbatch as I'd like to be. It's not that he's not a very good actor - he is - but there's something self-conscious about his performances that I sometimes find very distracting. This role and its brief, dismal trajectory, coupled with an accent that didn't seem to quite fit, brought out the worst in Cumberbatch for me, which was a shame. It didn't help that Vincent was an incredibly unsympathetic character.

So two busted flushes for the price of one.

6/10 for Ledroit's story and 5/10 for Vincent's.

No Hard Feelings (2023)

So you started with the title...

[3/10 · 16 January 2024]

...and this is the best you could manage, Stupinsky?

I don't think I've felt this disappointed by a film since Highlander II.

The film starts well enough, with J-Law's Maddie having her car repossessed in a sparkling opening scene featuring the excellent Ebon Moss-Bachrach as her ex, followed by some quippy banter with the always-reliable Natalie Morales as they set up the premise for what I hoped would be more of the same.

Er, no. And that's pretty much it for the comedy.

After that, we're treated to Maddie's increasingly desperate and aggressive attempts to seduce an immature 19 year-old boy, including perhaps one of the most bizarre fight scenes ever filmed. In fact, pretty much every valley felt uncanny from that point on. The nuanced, central idea: of Maddie's compunction to let go of her anger with the father that abandoned her, and therefore her mother's house, was lost in a litany of puerile contrivances, peppered with less-than-half-baked cliches and tokenism. I don't know what Stupinsky's problem is, but shame certainly seems to loom large in his sense of humour. Perhaps he was picked on at boarding school.

The direction and editing were pretty bad: weird angles, poorly timed cuts, and some scenes seemed like afterthoughts thrown in to pad out the run-time. In fact the movie effectively ends at the 80 minute mark more or less, with nothing convincing to show for the previous hour of nonsense, but then there's an inexplicable montage during which "Everyone Grows Up" and time for one horribly chaotic and perilous drive across a crowded beach, (ticking the box for inexcusably bad CGI). Then a banal, by-the-numbers reconciliation with one final, excruciating turn by Matthew Broderick before quite possibly the worst closing credits of all time.

The only relief to be had comes whenever Maddie's history unexpectedly intrudes upon the farce, when Lawrence's talent finds a gap through which to gleam. Again, I just wish this whole movie had been about the adults. There could still have been awkward sex, surprise celebrity nudity (or was it?) and angry Ubering, just less vag-punching and bonnet-surfing.

And more Ebon, dammit!

A bewilderingly bad 3/10.

Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023)

A Colossal Waste of Space

[2/10 · 24 December 2023]

I have always like Snyder's style. His Justice League cut was epic, I loved Watchmen and 300 and I even hold a smallish candle for SuckerPunch.

Unfortunately, either Snyder was on some crazy class-A narcotics the whole time he wrote and directed this infinitely derivative gruel, or he's spending way too much time with Uwe Boll. Eitherway, Rebel Moon was as lazy and disrespectful to the Sci-Fi movie genre as it gets outside of the Marvelous Disney Wars Cinematic Universe.

There is almost nothing to recommend this movie, especially if you've seen any retelling of the Seven Samurai or any half-decent good guys fight bad guys in space movies. I mean, it might have been better if Snyder simply admitted he was remaking Battle Beyond the Stars and stuck to that script at least.

Without being too spoilery, here's a random handful of the most bilious bile Rebel Moon prettily projectile vomits at you:

• The noble native-North American spirit warrior, who must remain mostly naked at all times, who is one with the cryptonatural world and, undeterred (and unscratched) after being smashed repeatedly into rocks, obviously knows how to whisper to the fantastic beasts of far Pandora. It's unclear how this is going to help in part 2, but he really is very pretty.

• Charlie Hunman's Northern Irish accent, presumably lending an air of humorous roguishness to his "is-he-an-ex-terrorist-then?" character, is uncomically out of place, especially at the Mos Eisley cantina where he hooks up with would-be rebels for laughs and fun times.

• The giant shampoo attack-bottle, apparently piloted from a goldfish bowl stuck to the side, whose space-hardened armour can be pierced only by the pointiest of sticks, which has rockets firing from beneath it that don't appear to serve any purpose except to look like rockets. (Remember kids: science is for losers).

• The noble, native-East Asian spirit warrior, who must wear her signature Chinese witch-hat at all times, and whose swords are only light sabres for *slow-motion* fights. OK?

• The apparently indispensable harvest of a tiny Viking settlement on a moon the size of Earth, whose seasonal 12000 bushels of wheat are apparently all planted using definitely-not-shire-horses and hand-ploughs. Quite what the Empire intends to do with 12000 bushels of wheat on board its dreadnought is not explained, but you'd have to imagine there's some kind of spacemill, right?

The most disappointing aspect to Rebel Without a Clue is its character development; everyone is introduced with such carelessness that of course, it's impossible to care about them. The only back-story is Rey's... sorry, Gamora's... sorry, Korra's... sorry, Kora's, and even that had all the depth and emotional history of a used sheet of toilet paper. No-one is likeable, except Westworld's Sir Lord Dame Anthony Hopkins the robot, which is ironic, don'tchathink?

Actually, I hope C3PO winds up killing every human on the Moon in Rebel Moon Part II: The Unscargiven, because they're clearly not actually worth saving.

The Black Demon (2023)

Not too trashy as trailers go

[8/10 · 17 December 2023]

Don't listen to the critics!, The Black Demo is a tour de farce that thrills, educates and tugs at the heartstrings in very brief equal measure.

The Blank Denon, far from being 'just another giant, vengeful, murderous shark movie' stands head and shoulders with trailers for the likes of The Happening and Battlefield Earth, providing us with that perfectly misleading sense of the quality and quantity of a full-length megalodon-flavoured family holiday & environmental disaster drama.

At 1 min and 5 seconds, The Backdoor Man certainly doesn't overstay its welcome: stereotypes pop reassuringly between the relaxing fades to black, character arcs are fully resolved and the exquisitely fleeting action sequences manage to satisfy any desire to see a moment more of the actors or the mysteriously indistinct mind-altering monster of the deep.

The Bleak Pokemon isn't without its faults of course. For example, too much time was wasted on veteran actor Josh Lucas' reaction shots. The ageing star was clearly overqualified and too symmetrical for this trailer, where more could have been made of his plainer, largely talentless and unconvincing co-appearers. In fairness to Lucas though, his obvious desperation to appear as relevant as Sir Lord Jason of Statham does go some way to diminishing his already atrophied acting abilities.

Overall, I felt that this was a little over a minute well spent and wouldn't hesitate to recommend this trailer to the nice people who change my clothes.

8/10.

Fair Play (2023)

Engage Emotional Brain

[8/10 · 20 October 2023]

Emily and Luke are both ambitious hedge-fund analysts, hiding their happy but illicit relationship from HR, then a sudden shift in their fortunes ruptures their precarious sexual dynamic, and their relationship begins to fall apart.

Eddie Marsan is brilliant as their implacable CEO, an almost literally dispassionate god-like figure, running a boiler-room where all that matters is winning the market. Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich are both excellent in their lead roles with able support from Richard Sommer et al.

Fair Play, a teasing title in itself, is a savage take on sexual politics and the weakness of entitled men whose latent chauvinism has never been seriously challenged.

When it is, as Luke discovers, some men fall apart. In fact, if I could level any criticism at the narrative, it's that the stages of Luke's existential crisis - his increasingly desperate and destructive attempts to recover his masculine identity - play out a little too like the stages of grief.

It's true that Chloe Domont's (highly intelligent) screenplay has an almost unbelievably cataclysmic ending, which many - men especially - may decry as off-putting or too overtly feminist. However, Emily is never portrayed as powerless or blameless - their relationship is marked from the outset by her complicity with his male-dominant role - and the denouement, in contrast to Promising Young Woman say, was actually quite restrained, all things considered.

I tend to think of Fair Play as a modern fable, and as such I reckon Domont nailed it.

The Burial (II) (2023)

Fell Short For Me

[6/10 · 14 October 2023]

The Burial is based on the true story of an embattled funeral-home underdog taking on Big "Death Care". So no-one can honestly complain that they were disappointed by a predictable outcome.

Unfortunately, the story of Willie Gary's impassioned prosecution of the unscrupulous and discriminatory practices of the Loewen Group, (owned by a suitably reptilian Bill Camp), *was* disappointing. Where it should have been clarion and incisive, instead it felt disjointed and superficial.

With surer-handed screenwriting and less indulgent direction, the Burial might have been as inspirational and moving as Dark Water, but the script was never really convincing in the courtroom, and was either too frivolous or awkwardly misty-eyed out of it. It didn't help that - the "Black American Dream" aside - Gary's own ostentation was so antithetically conspicuous. That his wealth got more screentime than the very victims the Loewen group exploited struck me as counterproductive at best, and cynical at worst.

That said, Jamie Foxx and Tommy-lee Jones were both excellent, with a solid supporting cast, (especially Mamoudou Athie), and the actual story was still compelling, even if I felt it could have been better told.

Tully (2018)

The first rule of motherhood...

[6/10 · 9 October 2023]

...is, we don't talk about motherhood.

It's rare for a movie or TV show to get real about the effects of parenthood on your self-regard, world-view, relationships and physical health. It's usually either a hyperbolised drama that focuses on some extraordinary difficulty, or it's just superficial and quiptastic.

Reality - as most parents know all too well - is messy and ugly and relentless and I really applaud Theron, Cody and Reitman for their sympathetic, honest and unflinching portrayal of that routine act of stalwart heroism that is: being a new mum.

Unfortunately, almost every other characterisation is trite, insubstantial or tokenistic. Critical plot holes and distracting whimsy could have been avoided, and as other have said, more substance given to Marlo's all-important backstory.

One pervasive and awkwardly written thread of the story could, for example, have been ditched altogether, seeming only to encourage a less empathetic audience to better accept Marlo's utter exhaustion.

I think Cody should have doubled down and reached for a little more of that new-mum grit. The central idea of Tully, while excusably derivative, remains very compelling and well told. It's only a shame it was still covered in concealer by the end.

Eternals (2021)

Very glad I finally gave this a spin...

[8/10 · 1 October 2023]

I consider myself a fair movie critic, and I was expecting a mediocre effort for my 2+ hours if the balance of reviews was to be believed, however, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the film.

Contrary to its harshest critics' opinions, I thought the narrative was consistent, interesting and engaging. Each of the Eternals was well-drawn, their dialogue was witty and intelligent and the acting was very good across the board, with particular credit to Jolie, Chan and and the dependably entertaining Nanjiani and Keoghan. Even Madden, who sometimes comes across as a bit stiff, found some good range, especially in the final act.

And I'm not sure how its detractors measure spectacle and special effects; I thought they were amazing myself, certainly no less impressive than any of the better MCU fare, and much better than most of Disney's recent Marvel and Star Wars fan-fodder.

Those Celestials!

If I had to nit-pick, it would only be that Ikarus and Sersi's relationship, while it served the narrative well, nonetheless developed at an unconvincing pace over the aeon they were together. Likewise, Sprite's involvement, which seemed a bit contrived.

In the end, there was a lot more to love about the Eternals than there was to dislike and I really hope they make the sequel, if only to give Kit's story some legs.

7.5/10 bumped up with a grin.

Air (I) (2023)

It's still a shoe

[5/10 · 13 June 2023]

Watched Air last night.

Air. The fascinating story of a brilliant Nike sales executive who sees an opportunity to revive Nike's declining share dividends by persuading Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to tell the story of how Nike first struck their historic deal with Michael Jordan, beating out their (omg!) ridiculous competition, and creating a marketing juggernaut that helped Nike make billions in profit.

Yay shareholders! (But also, yay athletes, right?)

Let's focus on Phil's spiritual creds and Nike's dubious affirmations.

1. "Our business is change". Except that it obviously hadn't been until Sonny persuaded Phil to throw caution to the wind.

2. "We're on offense. All the time". Except that they were emphatically on the defensive until Sonny ran forward on his own.

The other 8 mission statements are just as vacuous, but whatever. Show them in an authentic typewriter font and they'll be deeply meaningful. Somehow.

Oh! And let's make sure MLK Jr.'s speech gets a solid drop, implying - but certainly not implying - that "I have a Dream" is equivalent in some way to the social ambitions of the fledgling hoopball megagod.

But casting any actor to play the petulant, materialistic MJ is like dissing King himself, so make sure you NEVER show his face.

That won't be weird at all.

We should probably mention that our shoes are made in Korea, too.

Or Taiwan.

Definitely not Indonesia. By children. For less than a pittance.

Nope.

When the final whistle buzzes, though, Nike have definitely aced a home-in-one run with their feature-length advert and Amazon warehouse drones can look forward to throwing Air Jordan shoes onto trucks in their thousands. Matt Damon was his paunchy, good-humoured best, Ben Affleck was his chiselled, good-humoured second best, and Jason Bateman, Matt Maher, Chris Tucker and the lovely Chris Messina were all their reasonably appealing, good-humoured runners-up. Viola Davis played cartoon business mom brilliantly, of course; only her make-up thicker than her character's outline.

I give it 5 out of 10. 3 points for Matt who carried the entire film, 1 point for all the reassuring 80's cultural references and 1 point for that gorgeous purple Porsche.

Let the Right One In (2022)

Fantastic Variation on a Theme

[8/10 · 10 December 2022]

Just finished this season, and while I could quibble the pacing in the middle and a slightly awkward meeting of timelines, I won't.

I loved this show. The cast, especially the kids, were all excellent and the finale was a terrific, suspenseful pay-off.

It made the relationships between vampire and keeper really matter in a way that even the movies couldn't quite manage. The violence was restrained and all-the more impacting for it, especially one particular scene in the New York sewers.

Gotta say, I loved seeing the talented and very beautiful Anika Noni Rose back on my screen; she was great in Maid.

Well done all. Really looking forward to Season 2.

Stowaway (I) (2021)

Gratuitous drama is a thing then

[4/10 · 7 May 2021]

Excusing the preposterous idea that a person could, what? Get knocked out? Fall asleep? Materialize? In a cramped component bay behind a locked hatch, to be discovered only after the protracted bone-shaking departure from terra firma, we have to allow that *the only* CO2 scrubber is tucked in with our eponymous anti-villain. That is quite the single point of failure.

So we embark on a bemusing and technically absurd journey of ethical conundra.

Anna Kendrick and Daniel Dae Kim are both pretty easy on the eye and did a fair job early on with the only chapter all-too-briefly worth-a-damn focussed on the decision to gently murder their unwelcome guest.

Unfortunately, the contrivances come thick and fast after that and the film utterly collapses under the artificial gravity of their predicament. Toni Colette's Dick Van Dyke-level Aussie accent certainly didn't help.

After the lunacy of the cable climb and its litany of non-events, Anna's herculean arms yet delicate hands and the villainous solar storm emerging from stage-right, the film ends so abruptly, we hardly have time to say wtf just happened before the credits roll.

What a dud. I'd rather watch a movie about a breakdown on the M25 that has it's climax in a daring attempt, during a bout of heavy drizzle, to siphon petrol from a Ford Mondeo abandoned on the far side of the carriageway, wearing only a Topman polo shirt and an undersized pair of stonewashed jeans.

Bloodshot (2020)

Surprisingly Decent

[7/10 · 19 March 2021]

I watched the first 5 minutes of this movie and turned it off. It was that corny.

Then I forgot that I'd done that and, stuck for something dumb to watch on a a day off sick, I spun this up again.

The movie resumed at the five minute mark and I thought what the hell. At least I don't have to watch the start again, and settled in as i was bathed in cheesy screenwriting and even sketchier acting.

Then came the reveal and I've gotta say I was delighted. The kinetic set pieces were tight and engaging and the CGI was on point. Guy Pierce pitched his bad guy perfectly against Ray's would-be villains. Ray and his supporting characters weren't deep, but they certainly weren't flat and decent acting and direction of the main cast more than made up for some of the peripheral duds.

This movie is straight-up comic-book fare, so if you come to this movie hoping for a sophisticated narrative, you'll just wind up annoying those of your friends who pegged it from the start for the lurid action-fest it is. It's certainly no Bourne Identity, but it punches way higher than the most of the critics would boorishly suggest.

Would watch again. 7/10

Polar (I) (2019)

Bipolar

[4/10 · 10 February 2019]

I love comics and i've enjoyed a lot of blood-drenched and sexually outrageous series. While I'll commend any effort to translate the better comics to film (Saga, Transmetropolitan, 100 Bullets anyone?), I think you have to be careful to restrain the urge to render every frame as vividly and as viscerally as they appear in the comic.

My problem with 'Polar' is that translating the characters and story worked well enough: Mads and Vanessa did a pretty good job and the screenplay wasn't too shabby.

Unfortunately, the lurid cinematography, OTT violence and discomforting, exploitative sexuality broke too far from the source material and quickly became an unpleasant distraction from the narrative.

After Chan-wook Park's brilliant 'Old Boy', Hollywood evidently rediscovered its taste for ageing superdudes. From the 'Book of Eli' and the 'Expendables'.x to 'John Wick' and the 'Equalizer', there's a lot of fun to be had watching veterans kick disrespectful yoof squarely and mercilessly in the nads.

Maybe Mads, who also EP'd the movie, thought he'd look as good as Denzel and Keanu with an implacable glower and bazillion scars. Unfortunately his stony gravitas, such as it is, is shot to bits by Åkerlund's misfiring attempt to follow in Matt Vaughn's somewhat softer footsteps.

'Polar' is really quite a bad movie, but if you've a thirst for gratuitous violence, arbitrary execution and white girls with big boobs and a phat asses who serve no purpose other than to show you said boobs and asses, then you'll probably enjoy it quite a bit.

For everyone else, I'd recommend giving it a miss.

Under the Skin (I) (2013)

Cold, Beguiling and Brilliant

[8/10 · 3 December 2018]

Under the Skin may not be the most accessible of movies, but it's by no means pretentious or even particularly inscrutable.

The story takes its time to illustrate the role of the antagonist and her sinister familiars as they go about their grim routine. We need that time, because the perspective we share - Laura's perspective - is most definitely not a human one. Scarlett Johansson proves again, that she is far from just a pretty - well - everything, giving a brave and brilliantly nuanced performance as Laura, an otherworldly siren, ultimately succumbing to her quarry's infectious, bestial nature.

What I liked most about Glazer's storytelling, was the way humanity is necessarily portrayed as intoxicatingly, terrifyingly alien, in juxtaposed scenes of revelry and violence, of kindness and savagery, made all the more tumultuous for us by thick Scottish accents and Levi's seductive, dissonant score.

If I have one small criticism - and this might be hard to believe for those who didn't enjoy it - it's that it wasn't long enough. Though the ending was very well done, it felt a little rushed to me: almost as though an important chapter linking the last two had been edited out.

Under the Skin reaffirms my high opinion of Jonathan Glazer and I very much look forward to his next project.

War Horse (2011)

An excellent screen adaptation of an excellent book.

[8/10 · 25 August 2017]

First off, I will say that I am perfectly happy to spend a couple of hours every once in a while having my emotional buttons pushed, and I'd suggest that no one can do that more reliably than Spielberg. I mention this only because no one should be in any doubt that, settling down to watch War Horse, that is precisely what will happen.

I've read a couple of Morpurgo's books - he's very popular with my two girls - so I also know that the story would frame discomforting, even distressing, aspects of humanity in the context of an exciting and engaging story pitched at a young audience. I've no idea how much Sewell's Black Beauty influenced Morpurgo, but War Horse portrays the terrible ordeals animals suffered during WW1 with the same unflinching veracity.

Spielberg (with John Williams very much in tow) takes it's audience from the mundane preamble to war in England, through the unspoiled fields of the first shocking skirmishes in France, to the appalling, desperate, deadly struggle between the trenches. There is no jingoism, no great heroism and no judgement. There is, as Kipling lamented, "but to do or die" and while War Horse is occasionally violent, it is neither gratuitously so, nor graphic.

Unlike the book, which is told from the perspective of the horse, the movie focuses necessarily on the characters whose lives are touched by the horses and how profoundly they are affected by the war. These stories are poignant vignettes and the acting is generally excellent; I thought Tom Hiddleston and Niels Arestrup were particularly good. As protagonists, the horses of the story are granted a measure of anthropomorphism, and this quality is reassuringly restrained; I really liked how naturally the horses behaved in comprehensibly human ways without succumbing to uncanny-valley CGI.

I am saddened that so many reviewers seem incensed that they have been manipulated watching this movie; I thought that was the idea. If and when I sit my girls down to watch War Horse, I certainly hope they are. As long as you can forgive the few minutes of excessive schmaltz Spielberg seems to think his audience demands at the end of his movies, War Horse is a very enjoyable and rewarding button-pusher.

High Tension (2003)

High tension for the producers?

[3/10 · 20 March 2015]

I'm all for giving a young, promising director a break, but I suspect expectations were way too high for this film. Luc Besson co- producing? Better make some waves with this one Mr Aja.

So what began as a pretty reasonable, by-the-numbers slasher that could simply have showcased some genuine directorial flair, not to mention De France's acting ability, instead jack-knifed horribly when someone evidently decide to add a 'twist'.

The twist was so utterly ill-considered and impossible that the movie simply crashed at the exact moment it was revealed, instantaneously rendering everything up to that moment meaningless and valueless and everything that followed pointless noise.

I can't quite bring myself to hate the movie - I thought the editing was pretty good - but neither could I recommend it except as yet another object lesson in directorial 'don'ts'. Twist aside, there were just too many clichés, De France was given too much rein and the lazy use of lighting was a distraction.

Are You Here (2013)

Yet another busted flush...

[6/10 · 5 December 2014]

Let me start by saying that had the film ended with Steve's final reunion with Ben, I would probably have bumped my rating to a 7, feeling it might even have deserved an 8.

Sadly, it seems as though the writers were forced to obviate pretty much all the clever characterisation of the first 100 minutes by contriving an ending that might keep the gum-chewing knuckle-draggers happy as they left the cinema chuckling over the treatment of trees and chickens.

And just in case you were at all uncomfortable with the serious undertones on which these moments were predicated, here's some cheap 'comedy' music to accompany the 'funny' bits.

On a positive note, I found the writing - where it seemed true to the spirit of the story - to be intelligent, witty and occasionally very moving.

Zach Galifianakis and Amy Poehler were both excellent, Laura Ramsay was angelic, and while Owen Wilson was inanely typecast as Steve Dallas, he had the odd moment of depth, too.

In the end though, I suspect "Are You Here?" was first written for a smart audience but ultimately needed to sell to a dumb one, then failed to entirely satisfy either.

The Descendants (2011)

Come to Hawaii! Come to Hawaii!

[7/10 · 2 March 2014]

Nice Hawaii ad.

As entertaining as Clooney's portrayal of a man struggling with his failure as a husband and father often is in The Descendants, the narrative often seems to founder in a confusion of half-baked dramatic tropes. Shailene Woodley is excellent as Alex, but her character, like Scottie's is introduced with much pathos and promise, but quickly devolves, as though Payne thought he'd done all the work he needed to do in the characters' first scenes.

The mandatory, extended tourism shots to indigenous music just underscored this impression of lazy screen writing and I felt pretty frustrated by the end.

I'm sure the book is baked a little better, but I don't think I'd enjoy it if the movie is anything to go by. Perhaps Payne, Faxon and Rash should stick to dramedy.

...now where did I leave my ukulele.

The Longest Yard (2005)

Jaihouse Crock

[3/10 · 10 December 2005]

I rate Adam Sandler pretty highly as an actor: Punch Drunk Love and Spanglish are among my favourite films and he is excellent in both. Sadly, The Longest Yard utterly stifles this talent - and the talents of his co-stars, including Chris Rock, James Cromwell and William Fichtner - by entrusting the direction and script to witless cretins. I probably wouldn't have minded the litany of movie clichés if they hadn't been so wilfully and ineptly used. To make matters irredeemably worse, just about every ethnic and social male stereotype is kicked out onto the field for the delectation of their young white target audience. I haven't seen the original, but I'm willing to bet Burt came away from this remake ruing the direction popular cinema has taken since 1974.

A Knight's Tale (2001)

Wonderful Entertainment!

[8/10 · 19 August 2002]

I'd overlooked this film at the cinemas, largely because the trailers were all aimed squarely and rather too accurately at a teen audience, of which I may consider myself - sadly - long excluded from. Neither was I likely to be seduced by what seemed to me to be another horrible re-write of european history by an American screenwriter bent on portraying the world in its own lugubrious, self-glorifying image.

Brian Helgeland, fortunately, cannot be described as the typical American screenwriter. Discounting the somewhat dismal 'The Postman', which he co-wrote in any case, Helgeland has proved himself equal to accomplished and entertaining screenplays in 'Payback', 'Conspiracy Theory and his adaptation of the Ellroy classic, 'LA Confidential'.

So I finally get around to watching 'A Knight's Tale'. What a treat! Although it runs a little longer than it should for the genre, every scene is satisfying. Evocative of the lurid colours of every medieval romp from the 50's MGM stable, but brought cleverly up to date by carefully placed anachronism, this is a superb family film. The story is a kind of 'Ivanhoe' meets 'Working Girl' adventure-romance and whilst inevitably formulaic, never fails to tickle the right buttons.

The screenplay is handled comfortably and without the slightest campness that its predecessors revelled in, by a great cast of highly watchable actors. I couldn't say who I thought was the best, because everyone was right for their role. But without a doubt, the best lines got the best treatment in the hands of a dastardly Rufus Sewell, a flamboyant Paul Bettany and a volcanic Alan Tudyk. Heath Ledger, (who I loved in 'Monster's Ball' and the undervalued 'Two Hands'), was the perfect gentleman and Shannyn Sossamon, the perfectly formed lady.

I could recommend this film just on the strength of the story and the characterisation, but that would be to neglect the great editing, photography and - though subtle - the excellent special effects.

A suspension of disbelief isn't required for this film, just like it wasn't required for 'Moulin Rouge'. Authenticity is only used to set the scene. The rest is just contemporary and hugely entertaining fantasy, from the costumes, to the music and dance.

I give an 8. Go on treat yourself.

Amores Perros (2000)

Tough Love

[8/10 · 15 April 2002]

While I think I see where Liddle is coming from on one or two points, I think she takes herself way too seriously and overstates the case for political commentary. Seems to me that just about every artist coming out of South America has been raised on a shield on the grounds that their art was the voicebox for their generation's political angst. I prefer to believe that in parts of the world that are hotbeds for activism - and specifically where there is a dense population with a marked class divide, all those qualities that are picked out as deliberate efforts to make a political statement are actually just part of the social geography. We might wonder at the abjection during the first story and rue its contrast to the affluence of the second, but at the end of it all, the characters were all caught in circumstances that had little to do with politics and almost everything to do with emotional consequences. Amores Perros wasn't making a point, in my opinion, it was just telling three different stories about tough love in Mexico and linking them and telling them very cleverly.

Loved It.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Reel! (or not?)

[9/10 · 23 January 2002]

I can honestly say this is the first film in a very long time that I have been completely mesmerised by; this film sucked me in whole from the opening credits - not only because Lynch's direction is so nourishing, but because the leading actors, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring - neither of whom I'd heard of before - were utterly captivating. If either acting or direction had been lacking then the film - more specifically, the narrative - might well have been disappointing. Not taking anything away from Laura Harring (or indeed the rest of a very fine cast), I think Naomi Watts deserves the highest praise for a brilliant performance in an incredibly tough role.

Having said that, her role depended on an complete understanding of the emotional turmoil her character undergoes in the latter third of the film. With this understanding not only would Naomi have found her various styles easier to wear, but those in the audience with me who were prepared to spend a little time making sense of the story didn't leave the cinema dismissing the film as pretentious rubbish - as many volubly did.

For those of you unsure whether or not you can stomach another film in the 'Lost Highway' mould, remember that the last film Lynch made was 'The Straight Story' and some of its narrative sensibility and honesty seem to have flowed into 'Mulholland Drive' because I found it a lot less oppressive and a lot more accessible than 'Lost Highway'. Rest assured though, you're still in for an exhilarating cinematic ride.

9/10 and the best film of my year so far