Film - showing at a cinema near you
Step Brothers
Not so very long ago, the union of Judd Apatow and Jimmy Miller brought us Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky and Bobby starring Will Ferrell and John C Reilly. It was not only a magnificent movie, but also a rip-roaring success. So, they must have figured, why not do it all over again? Step Brothers reunites not only Apatow and Miller behind the scenes, but Ferrell and Reilly up on the screen as well, this time playing a pair of Apatow-trademark drop-outs who become brothers when their parents wed - an event that only seems to sustain their perpetual state of adolescence. The problem is that the jokes just aren't as funny the second time around - or the third, fourth, fifth. All those penis quips and Freudian yearnings are starting to wear a little thin. So, guys, it might just be time to grow up.
15, 98 mins
Angel
Francois Ozon's adaptation of Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 novel looks rather spiffing (in a flouncy, gaily coloured kind of way), but the drama itself is awfully flat and lifeless. The story of Edwardian novelist Angel Deverell (Romola Garai) rising from humble beginnings as the fame-hungry daughter of a grocer to become a celebrated author and the toast of the novel-reading public really ought to make for a terrific movie. Not least because Taylor's original work was a satire rather than a heartstring-pulling, rags-to-riches tale, and her heroine - while wooing the great British public and earning enough cash to buy a country pile and spend her days making eyes at brooding painter Esme (Michael Fassbender) - is in truth the most god-awful writer. Alas, the cast here never seems to gel, all the irony is lost and the dialogue is terribly creaky, in the manner of those Friday Film Specials that used to appear on children's television many moons ago. Sadly disappointing stuff.
15, 134 mins
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Surely it's scientifically impossible to find a more charming film than Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. For starters, we have the source material: Winifred Watson's bright, winsome novel of the same name, set in 1930s London. Then we have Amy Adams playing Delysia Lafosse, an American starlet trying to make it on the London stage, who in one light is utterly unbearable, but in another, quite ditzily adorable. And, of course, we have Frances McDormand as the put-upon Guinevere Pettigrew, an out-of-work governess who interlopes her way into a job as Delysia's social secretary. And Delysia certainly does require some assistance with her diary appointments - she has three lovers and a burgeoning career to juggle after all. What follows is a French farce meets screwball comedy, spread over a single day in which Miss Pettigrew, for the first time in her life, begins to have a jolly good time. Everything you could possibly want in such a movie is here: the Cinderella-esque transformation, the simmering cat-fights, the wonderful costumes, the fabulous music... light and airy and sweet, it's a perfect little souffle of a movie.
PG, 92 mins
The Dark Knight
When Christopher Nolan gave us Batman Begins back in 2005, he brought a certain dourness to the previously brash world of cinematic comic book heroes. Here, he takes the director's chair again, and seems to bring the series to an even darker, moodier place. Christian Bale is back as the caped crusader, still chased by those demons, still looking one half chiselled superhero, one half American Psycho, but now also thoroughly unsettled when into Gotham City springs his nemesis, The Joker (a creepy, nerve-jangling and masterful performance by the late Heath Ledger), intent on wreaking havoc. It's the same old fight, the same old opponents, the same old love interest (here given a fresh twist by Maggie Gyllenhaal), but somehow The Dark Knight feels different. Gotham City itself is all glass and steel, more fragile-looking, while Batman is even more troubled, more elusive and more dragged down, it seems, by a sense of inevitable doom. The screens are crowded with superheroes this summer, but there are few as hauntingly impressive as this new, unsettling Batman.
12A, 152 mins
Times and Winds
Adolescence in a small mountain town in North West Turkey is strikingly different to that portrayed in the butts 'n' barfing American movies that we're used to (ably illustrated by this week's Step Brothers). Here, best friends Omer (Ozkan Ozen) and Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali), along with solitary girl Yildiz (Elit Iscan), are edging out of their childhood years - a process that offers a series of rude awakenings: the sight of animals mating; falling in love with the village schoolteacher; and (in the case of Omer) fervently wishing one's father dead. Alongside their daily calls to prayer, the children are learning about the forces of nature in the classroom - the water cycle, the Earth's rotation - and it is these two powers (religion and the natural world) that come to dominate both their lives and the passage of the film. It makes for strangely unsentimental yet beautiful viewing; an unflinching, unsaccharined view of the start of teenage life.
TBC, 111 mins
The Rocker
As the drummer for a 1980s hair-metal band named Vesuvius, Robert 'Fish' Fishmann (Rainn Wilson) is in the throes of his rock'n'roll fantasy when he's unceremoniously dropped from the band, just before they find fame. Imagine his delight, then, when 20 ropey years later he hears that his nephew's high school rock band is in search of a drummer. Fish - regarding this as his dreamed-of second chance at rock greatness - leads his young protegees on a great rock odyssey (or rather, a short tour) and kindles a romance with the chaperone Mom (Christina Applegate). The Rocker feeds off the same source as This is Spinal Tap and Jack Black's School of Rock - namely the rich comic ground that is the ageing rocker, complete with faded T-shirts, long hair and a full-throttle, devil-horned refusal to grow old gracefully. While it does not, therefore, deliver anything particularly new, it is still pretty darned funny and at times tender.
12A, 102 mins
You Don't Mess With the Zohan
One might feel a little tired at the mere prospect of You Don't Mess with the Zohan. It's the latest gross-out flick that comes complete with an ensemble cast of Hollywood's male comedians (plus Mariah Carey and John McEnroe), a script part-written by Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler (who also stars, naturally), jokes about semen and hummus and a plot that hinges on the Israel-Palestine conflict. But I do advise you to muster the energy to see it: Zohan (Sandler) is a Jewish counter-terrorism operative who spends his days battling his nemesis The Phantom (John Turturro) and his nights dreaming of becoming a hairdresser like his hero, Paul Mitchell. So he flees to New York where he finds employment in a salon run by inevitable romantic partner Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui) - who just happens to be Palestinian. Of course it's irreverent, disrespectful and makes light of a dreadfully serious situation, but it takes no sides, mocks everyone equally and is also terribly funny.
12A, 113 mins
The Wackness
We are in New York in 1994 - a fact hammered home in Jonathan Levine's movie with the considerable force of hip-hop parlance, nods to Rudolph Giuliani and Nirvana. Our focus on is the life of Luke (Josh Peck), a surly, introverted teen who hails from a relatively poor background and earns his pocket money by selling pot. One of his customers is a psychiatrist named Dr Squires (Ben Kingsley) who pays Luke not in hard cash but in therapy. Squires, though, is himself a little bit wayward, struggling to maintain his marriage while making out with a young stoner (Mary-Kate Olsen). Luke, meanwhile, is falling in love with Squires's daughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby) - a contrastingly carefree, optimistic and thoroughly popular young woman. The familiar territory of the coming-of-age drama is given new life here, largely due to a sweet, soft gentleness that permeates The Wackness. In mood and inconsequentialness, but also in sure-fire charmingness, it recalls Reality Bites - another movie that deals with growing up, falling in love, and just happened to be released in 1994.
15, 99 mins
Get Smart
I'm a bit on the young side to be acquainted with Maxwell Smart - a television spy hero of yesteryear who forms the basis for this objectionably unobjectionable Steve Carrell vehicle. The basic gist is that Smart, aka Agent 86, is a kind of buffoonish American operative who, despite his cackhandedness, always gets the job done, aided and abetted by a bevy of one-liners and a foxy female sidekick (here played by Anne Hathaway). The plot is not especially important - it's the usual swashbuckle of foreign spies, raging bosses and a dumbo President (plus a lot of pepped-up action sequences and special effects). Carrell fills his role nicely, and Hathaway certainly fits the bill. In short, there's nothing really wrong with Get Smart, beyond the fact, of course, that it is so thoroughly formulaic and so tediously predictable that it feels like one long motorway drive of a movie.
12A, 110 mins
The Fox and the Child
There will undoubtedly be many who do not warm to this film, who will find it too precious, or perhaps too slow. But in the fizzbombing world of children's entertainment, The Fox and the Child offers something cool, calm and rich. The first feature film from the team who gave us the March of the Penguins documentary, it is similarly preoccupied with the natural world. It's the story of a young girl (Bertille Noel-Bruneau) who follows some fox tracks into the forest surrounding her home in eastern France and begins to explore its magnificent, rambling beauty. Through the seasons (and with some set-backs) the fox and the little girl form a strong bond, only threatened by danger when the little girl attempts to domesticate her fox-friend. Narrated in gentle, measured tones by Kate Winslet, The Fox and the Child is aimed more deliberately at children than Penguins was, and as such, some adults may lose patience with it along the way. For the young, though, this is a delightful, eye-opening film that has all the wonder of a Hans Christian Andersen tale.
U, 92 mins
Wild Child
The plot of Wild Child - though undoubtedly updated for the i-Blackberrying-Nano generation - feels awfully familiar: LA brat, spoiled to within an inch of her life, one day pushes the parental boundaries so far that her widowed father (Aidan Quinn) parcels her off to one of those strict English boarding schools that smell of floor polish and crumpets and are overseen by an unceasingly upright headmistress (here played by Natasha Richardson who also, we must understand, has a heart of gold). The said brat (here named Poppy and played with conventional ease by Emma Roberts) learns the error of her horrid little poolside ways, warms to lacrosse and the headmistress's son (Alex Pettyfer) and starts to be something of a lady, while still retaining enough mischief to be charming. Yes, we've seen it all before, and Wild Child offers little illumination of the human condition, but it is nonetheless great, feel-good fun.
12A, 98 mins
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
There is a mind-boggling amount of stuff crammed into the 110 minutes of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II (the follow-up to his first adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic-book heroics, Hellboy). For a start, we have Hellboy himself: exiled from the underworld, he stands a devilish red, and - though his horns have been lopped off - he's still enticingly demonic. At the paranormal research lab where he is gainfully employed, Hellboy is dealing with the fall-out of a resurgent war between elves and humans, the arrival at the lab of new agent Dr Johann Kraus (Seth MacFarlane), and the return of his partner in heroics, Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) - not to mention a love story between our curiously seductive hero and the melancholic Liz (Selma Blair). Where most comic adaptations focus on the kapow and splat of special effects, del Toro chooses to evoke an atmosphere which is more old-fashioned and chivalrous - part pulp fiction, part film noir. It's all told in such high-res, lurching splendidness that it's hard not to fall a little bit in love with Hellboy II. Fabulous stuff.
12A, 110 mins
Somers Town
Shane Meadows has really cornered the market in scruffy modern Britishness in recent times. His films carry a sensuality that the swishy confections of Richard Curtis cannot rival. His last film, This is England, for instance, brought out the tastes and textures of 1980s Britain with astonishing accuracy. Here, Meadows is recounting the story of a young runaway from Nottingham, Tomo (This is England's Thomas Turgoose), who heads to London and encounters a Polish boy, Marek (Piotr Jagiello), with whom he strikes up a firm friendship. Together they run amok in the great sprawl of London, falling in love with a French waitress, doing odd jobs to fund the presents they buy her and getting legless when she returns home to Paris. Told mostly in black and white, with occasional Polish subtitles, it is an infinitely touching tale - a love story of sorts between the boys and their waitress, between Tomo and Marek, between Meadows and his country. More than anything, though, this is a portrait of a living, breathing, multicultural Britain.
12A, 75 mins
Man on Wire
High up above Manhattan on a late-summer day in 1974, a Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped into the air between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Petit (an experienced funambulist) proceeded to spend 45 minutes balancing on a wire stretched between the towers in a spectacular display of illegal tightrope walking. In his riveting film, director James Marsh recounts the feat itself and the events leading up to it, interviews Petit and his co-conspirators, onlookers and police chiefs - all in a considered documentary style that draws largely on Petit's own book, To Reach the Clouds. Not once does Marsh reference the events of September 11th and the loss of those towers from the New York skyline - a decision that appears gently respectful. This is, after all, a story about both mortality and the life-affirming effect that such a ludicrous gamble can have. It's a triumph of quiet simplicity.
PG, 90 mins
Reviews by Laura Barton
FIRST POSTED
AUGUST 28, 2008
