J Edgar (15) - review

In 1964, Andy Warhol made a film called Empire that consisted of nothing more than a dusk-til-dawn shot of the Empire State Building. With a running time of just over eight hours, it’s widely considered the most boring movie ever made. Competition arrives, however, in the shape of this deathly-dull biopic of J Edgar Hoover.

Given that the man is among the most controversial figures of recent US history, making a film this tedious really takes some doing. Heck, even those with only a passing knowledge of Hoover’s life and times will come away little the wiser.

Leonardo DiCaprio (plus a whole lot of latex) plays the FBI chief in his seventies as he dictates his memoirs, prompting a series of flashbacks to key moments in his life, starting with his attempts to capture Communist radicals who were bombing DC in 1919. When his dedication is noted by his superiors at the Justice Department, young Hoover is promoted to the bureau where he establishes the county’s first national fingerprint database and recruits the brightest talents to help nail gangsters such as John Dillinger.

But, inevitably corrupted by power, he starts spying and building files on the great and the good – in fact, anyone who represents a threat to his power base.

A repressed and chaste homosexual, Hoover’s only confidantes are his ever-loyal secretary (Naomi Watts), his number two (Armie Hammer) and his beloved but icy mother (Judi Dench) who tells him she’d rather have a dead son than one who was gay.

Not helping matters are some confusing flashbacks within flashbacks, plus a twist ending that, after Shutter Island, feels both gimmicky and old hat.

It’s a shame DiCaprio’s committed performance and some attempts to get under Hoover’s skin are overwhelmed by an absolute lullaby of a script that’s unfocused and has nothing new to say. One for historians – and insomniacs.

Radiohead - The King Of Limbs Live From The Basement review

Filmed last summer in the intimate, velvet curtain-lined, setting of long-time producer Nigel Godrich’s studio, this performance shows Oxford’s cerebral rockers very much in their element.

The casual asides, tension-breaking chat, instrumental doodling and grinning between songs all add to the impression that this is a fly-on-the-wall insight to their inner world.

Charismatic Thom Yorke is the centre of gravity as he flounces at the mic with maracas in a head-shaking trance dance or presides magisterially at the piano. A complex often elusive work, Limbs is a challenging beast to recreate live and the claustrophobic nature of Feral and Bloom are underlined as an army of extra horn players who give considerable heft and colour where required.

Of the two new songs added to the original album, The Daily Mail proves to be a riveting stand out. The intensity of the interchange between the band increases, accentuated by some spectacularly attuned film editing, as they hit the home straight and reach a mesmerising peak on the accelerated Morning Mister Magpie.

A sharp contrast is provided by baleful but beautiful acoustic Give Up The Ghost while hidden track Supercollider lives up to its title, uniting both the internal dreaminess and questing attack that are the extremes of the Radiohead sound. From the basement all the way up to the stars.

W.E. (15) - review

A spoilt American girl falls for a well-known Brit and worries about her reputation. Yep, it’s Madonna, recently divorced from film-making royalty Guy Ritchie, directing the story of Wallace Simpson’s romance with Edward VIII. Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

Andrea Riseborough and Tom D’Arcy play the star-crossed lovers as they meet, marry and go into exile in France. Meanwhile, there’s a parallel narrative where the unhappily married Wally (Abbie Cornish) falls for a security guard (Oscar Isaac) at a New York museum.

Apart from some nice period detail, Her Madgesty’s second attempt to direct a film is an abysmal failure. The dialogue is wooden at best and the performances risible.

Worst of all is a moment where – and I’m not making this up – Edward and Wallace get down to The Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant.

50/50 review: Diagnosis is surprisingly uplifting for cancer movie

50/50 is a surprisingly uplifting romantic comedy about a likeable young radio journalist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who discovers he has cancer — an affliction that changes his relationships with his self-absorbed girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), overbearing mother (Anjelica Huston) and oafish best buddy (Seth Rogen).

The diagnosis also brings him into contact with a cute if inexperienced doctor (Anna Kendrick). She wants to help him psychologically, and in other ways, too.

Levitt and Kendrick are subtle, sweet and intelligent enough to compensate for the faint misogyny of the script and the crassness of Rogen’s contribution, which is blatantly an attempt to play to opening-weekend teenagers.

Will Reiser’s semi-autobiographical script leans over backwards and in every other direction to find the positive aspects of cancer, and discovers a few truths that offset the usual cliches of cancer weepies.

It’s no masterpiece, and Jonathan Levine’s direction has the flatness of TV. All the same, it’s cute, even for people who are well; and to those unfortunate enough to have a potentially terminal illness, it could be inspirational.

Hugo film review: Martin Scorsese's first family movie is pure 3D magic

The man responsible for Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and GoodFellas has tackled his first family film. Not only that: it’s in 3-D, and a must-see for anyone who loves cinema.

From the absurdly flamboyant opening shot onwards, it shows Martin Scorsese in his prime, making a movie he cares about passionately.

Though aspects of the film are evocative of Tim Burton (especially the love of old-fashioned machinery) and Terry Gilliam (notably an affection for the ramshackle side of showbiz), this is recognisably a Scorsese film, and one of his best.

The film, written by John Logan and based on a Carnegie prize-winning novel by Brian Selznick, is ostensibly a child’s adventure about a young orphan called Hugo (Asa Butterfield, from The Boy With Striped Pyjamas) struggling to survive within a French railway station, where he’s been dragged as child labour by his uncle (Ray Winstone) after the untimely death of Hugo’s dad (Jude Law).

Abandoned by his uncle to live – literally – inside a gigantic clock beneath an ominously large pendulum, Hugo steals in order to survive, which brings him into conflict with one of the station’s stallholders, bad-tempered toymaker Georges (Ben Kingsley), though Hugo manages to make friends with Georges’ orphaned niece (Chloe Grace Moretz).

The station is awash with talented British character actors including Sacha Baron Cohen as an officious but comically inept railway inspector, Emily Mortimer as the florist he fancies, Christopher Lee cast against type as a friendly bookseller, and an unlikely pair of tentative lovers in Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour.

Unlike most 3D movies, Hugo was shot using 3D not as a money-making gimmick but as a storytelling device, to add height, depth, humour and intensity.

Another virtue is that the picture shows a fascination with early cinema that’s joyful and infectious.

And it has a worthwhile lesson about the importance of preserving old film for future generations, that I know is close to Scorsese’s heart.

Hugo has a magic that’s rare in modern movies. This is a real Christmas charmer, and easily the most gorgeous live-action movie ever made in 3D.

Justice film review: A slick and competent thriller

Who would have guessed that the best picture of the week would star Nicolas Cage? Certainly not me.

Director Roger Donaldson has made some entertaining movies in the past, notably Thirteen Days and No Way Out, but a good deal of his output has been Hollywood hackwork.

His latest exercise is typically well-crafted, and stars a subdued Cage as Will, a New Orleans teacher who becomes distraught when his much-loved wife (January Jones) is raped.

 Slick, competent thriller: Nicolas Cage stars as Will Gerard in the thriller Justice

A mystery man (Guy Pearce) turns up at the hospital and offers to help bring summary justice to the assailant. Will agrees. 

But then the mystery man demands favours in return, and Will finds himself the target of a sinister group of vigilantes.

There’s an interesting idea behind the film, which is how far the breakdown of law and order after Hurricane Katrina may have prejudiced ordinary people against the authorities; but the tone is kept so light, and the characters so under-developed, that social issues are never explored.

There’s so little attempt to analyse the rights and wrongs of vigilantism, that it makes Michael Winner’s Death Wish look like a thinkpiece.

Donaldson’s thriller is nowhere near the quality of the last film to feature Cage in New Orleans, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant, but it may fit the bill if you’re looking for a modestly entertaining chase thriller.

Donaldson’s skilful at orchestrating the action sequences, and there are two plot twists that should take you by surprise. At least you won’t be bored.

Even better news is that Cage doesn’t have to pretend to fall in love with a baby.

My Week With Marilyn review: Oscar-winning performance from Michelle Williams

My Week With Marilyn is a high-quality British film that doesn’t have the depth of last year’s The King’s Speech, but should have a similar appeal to discerning grown-ups.

It’s an enchanting tragi-comedy, a hugely enjoyable trifle, and may prove an eye-opener to generations too young to remember the allure of Marilyn Monroe.

It is based on Colin Clark’s memoir of a week as third assistant director, or dogsbody, on an indifferent British film comedy, The Prince And The Showgirl (1957).

The reason that movie is remembered today is that it marked a clash between superstars from either side of the Atlantic, and two completely different styles of acting.

The actress playing the showgirl was Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), newly married to intellectual playwright Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) and already having doubts about  the relationship.

Williams has given exquisite performances before in Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine and the little-seen Incendiary, but here she’s at her most magical, brilliantly capturing Marilyn’s voice and physical mannerisms.

Never content to play her as a victim, she captures her emotional neediness and her power to entrance, on and off screen.

Williams must surely be nominated again for an Academy Award as Best Actress (the real Marilyn, of course, never won an Oscar).

I suspect she will be joined in the Best Supporting Actor category by Kenneth Branagh, always a superb character actor, here presenting a delightfully accurate take on Laurence Olivier: theatrical, endlessly exasperated by Marilyn’s lack of professionalism and uneasily aware that she looks better on screen than he does.

Eddie Redmayne also excels in the challenging task of playing Clark, an intelligent but inexperienced 23-year-old Old Etonian who has to toss up between a relationship with a pretty wardrobe mistress (Emma Watson, excellent in her first big-screen role since Harry Potter) and a chance of love with the most famous woman on Earth.

All-star cast: Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh in the film

The film is worth seeing for its marvellous array of British acting talent. I especially enjoyed Judi Dench as the kindly Dame Sybil Thorndike, Jim Carter as a star-struck barman and Philip Jackson as Marilyn’s down-to-earth bodyguard.

This is a bittersweet story of first love. Perhaps Adrian Hodges’s script could have been sharper and a little less eager to spell out what is happening and why, but it’s elegantly directed in his big-screen debut by TV veteran Simon Curtis: delightful, classy entertainment.

Take Shelter review: No disaster movie can be as depressing as this

A hysterical over-reaction to climate change or possibly a despairing response to the current economic crisis, Take Shelter is the story of a latterday Noah trying to warn mankind of imminent catastrophe.

Or it could be a study of  a paranoid schizophrenic falling apart. It’s up to the audience to choose, up until the final shot.

Hysterical overreaction: Michael Shannon and Tova Stewart in climate change disaster movie Take Shelter

Michael Shannon (above) does an eye-catching job of impersonating a present-day Cassandra, even if he does bear an unfortunate physical resemblance to Herman Munster.

His big scenes must give him an outside chance of an Oscar nomination as Best Actor. Jessica Chastain is nearly as impressive as his anxious,  but supportive wife.

However, writer-director Jeff Nichols has nothing positive to say, and spends more than two hours saying it. It’s a superficial movie pretending to be deep.

Taking Shelter would make a daunting double-bill with Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world melodrama Melancholia, even for depressives. Miserable, slow and over-long, it’s not a barrel of laughs for anyone else.

Getting LOUD with RiRi! - Rihanna Gig Review!

We love Gigs and when we tweeted for for our followers to send in gig reviews, we were inundated!

One we liked was from Yasmin and here is her review!

Rihanna has been getting rowdy up and down the country over the last 2 weeks,

on her Loud tour that kicked off in the UK at the start of October.

With a set that lasted just under 2 hours, several ridiculously hot outfit changes,

S&M style whips and chains, piano’s suspended in the air, pink canon tanks and

Calvin Harris to warm up, RiRi put on a show and a half.

She stormed out on stage in a short neon blue trench coat and launched straight

into Only Girl In The World looking the every bit the personification of the song.

Without stopping she flung off her coat to reveal the sexiest jewel studded bikini

outfit and went straight into Disturbia. She then reeled off song after song to the

point where you actually had to stop and think jeez how many hits has this girl

had?! Even then she didn’t have time for them all!

She put on a spectacle with many entertaining sets, particularly the set she

used for Hard; sat on the top of a pink tank with her and her female dancers in

matching camo outfits, they oozed female empowerment. The party vibe was

slowed down for a short set where she came out in a gorgeous yellow floor-

length gown, with a daring side split up the skirt to reveal thigh high tan boots –

she looked simply stunning. She did let herself down here however (*ducks for

cover*) as her entire “performance” of Take A Bow was sang by the crowd whilst

she lazily conducted them along and she avoided all the high notes in Hate That

I Love You – in fact she avoided the high notes in most of the songs in general.

She did however restore faith later coming out in a metallic gold dress sat on top

of a piano that was suspended in the air and gave a storming performance of

Love The Way You Lie Part Two, with a brilliant vocal.

Despite her lack of emotional engagement with songs (or the audience) she

did put on a great show – it was like one big party and she looked absolutely

amazing. Her routines, outfits and set changes were every bit of what you’d

expect from the Barbadian beaut and if you missed out this time round she will

be back to entertain the U.K. from mid November so you can see her in a month!

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn review

Steven Spielberg’s affection for the comic-strip universe created by Herge shines through his latest offering.

The visuals are often spectacular, from the cartoon opening titles through to complex action sequences that are as inventive as anything Spielberg attempted in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

The film makes the most sophisticated use yet of motion capture — the same technique used in Beowulf and The Polar Express — to create a world that’s somewhere between live action and cartoon.

Crucial elements missing (L-R): Inspectors Thompson and Thomson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) and Tintin (Jamie Bell)

Sad and ghostly: Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock in the film

There’s a breathtaking chase through a Moroccan market-place, a powerful duel between dockyard cranes and an imaginative fantasy sequence in which a galleon seems to sail through the Sahara desert.

So why do I reckon it’s worth only three stars? That’s partly down to the script.

Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish have done a merely workmanlike job of amalgamating three Tintin stories — The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret Of The Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure.

They have left out elements crucial to a first-rate adventure.
Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a personality-free hero who never develops during the film. His only memorable characteristic is his quiff. It’s like watching an entire movie built around Jedward.

Void characters: There's something spooky about these not-quite-humans' blank, Botoxed features, their not fully-focused gaze

Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) comes out with his much-loved ejaculations — ‘Billions of blue blistering barnacles!’ — but there’s something sad, almost ghostly, about him.

He never seems fully alive, or comes up with anything to make us love him. His only character traits are alcoholism and love of the sea. They’re never enough.

For all its technical brilliance, Tintin is a disappointment. Spielberg has captured the look of Herge, but not the zest and emotion.

The characters are voids and the motion capture technique still hasn’t been perfected.

There’s something spooky about these not-quite-humans’ blank, Botoxed features, their not fully-focused gaze.

I was hoping to be thrilled, and I wasn’t. All the film delivers is a somewhat inhuman pastiche.

The Deep Blue Sea review: Rachel Weisz is all at sea in this dreary drama

From the BFI Film Festival
This was a bafflingly downbeat film with which to end the BFI London Film Festival. It’s well acted and beautiful to look at — but as drama, it’s dreary.
Director Terence Davies’s take on Terence Rattigan’s play involves a romantic triangle circa 1950, with Lady Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) walking out of a respectable but sexless marriage to judge Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale).
 'Gorgeous, privileged woman's whingeing': Rachel Weisz's character was hard to empathise with
 Tragedy not that deep: You feel these agonies belong on a magazine's problem page rather than the big screen
She shacks up with former RAF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). Freddie’s dashing, but nowhere near as much in love with Hester as she is with him. Therein lies the tragedy.
The trouble is, the tragedy really isn’t that deep. You feel these agonies belong on a magazine’s problem page rather than the big screen.
Davis sets a snail’s pace. Russell Beale turns Sir William into a decent enough cove, but he’s a bore, under the thumb of his mother (a delightfully poisonous Barbara Jefford).
Hiddlestone fails to make Freddie even slightly likeable, which makes Weisz’s performance — though her most luminous since The Constant Gardener — hard to empathise with. By the end, I was fed up with this gorgeous, privileged woman’s whingeing.
 A bafflingly downbeat film with which to end the BFI London Film Festival: The Deep Blue Sea is well acted and beautiful to look at - but as drama, it's dreary

The Help review: The story of racism that could clean up at the Oscars

White author Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel about racism in the American Deep South was turned down by 60 publishers in the U.S. before it sold well over three million copies.
This movie shows both why the book became a hit and why publishers turned it down. I admired aspects of the film a great deal, but there were still moments when, had it been a book, I might have launched it across the room.

The film’s heroine is Caucasian college graduate Skeeter (Emma Stone), who returns to her roots in 1962 after four years away, and sees Southern society with newly judgmental eyes.
 Hells belles: Maid Aibleen (Viola Davis) is invisible to the white women in The Help
She notices that the privileged white women of Mississippi are happy to allow their children to be brought up by black maids, but don’t regard the ‘help’ as fit to use an indoor bathroom.
Skeeter decides to write a book about racism, but there’s a catch: she’ll need the help of the maids, who will have to become whistle-blowers, and they’re reluctant to step out of line — especially with racist employers such as Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard).
Stockett’s novel was written from three perspectives: Skeeter’s and two maids, the stoical Aibileen (Viola Davis) and the sharp-tongued Minny (Octavia Spencer).
In the film, Aibileen’s viewpoint carries the biggest emotional punch, thanks to fine acting by Davis as the middle-aged maid who first spills the beans, at a risk to her livelihood and, indeed, her life.
It is Davis’s performance that gives this movie a chance of winning an Oscar.
For her part, the talented Stone gracefully allows the black characters to take over the movie, as they should. It’s not her fault her romantic sub-plot is insultingly perfunctory, or that she isn’t even allowed a climactic show-down with the villainess. By that time, we’re more interested in the black characters.
However, it’s a major flaw in a film supposedly giving a voice to black maids that so much of it is seen from the perspective of a white woman with little to lose.
The picture comes across as a too simplified, sanitised study of the civil rights movement. The Help is hobbled by a dogged reluctance to address the grimmer realities of life for black people in the South.
Writer-director Tate Taylor, who is white, allows his affection for old civilities to give the film a nostalgic glow, a cosiness, that takes alarming precedence over the black characters’ stories.
Far too much of The Help resembles a po-faced version of Hairspray, a comedy that parodied the self-congratulatory smugness of movies like this, in which white people ‘discover’ racism and decide to cure everyone of it.
Still, a lot of people are going to like The Help enough to ignore its crudities and unfulfilled potential. The proof of that is that it has already made over $150?million at the box office.

ANONYMOUS review: Pretentious, preposterous - it's a Tudor turkey!

Historians and experts in English literature will hate the film Anonymous — and they won’t be alone.
For it offers a ludicrously reductionist view of England’s greatest writer, William Shakespeare, and a grotesquely offensive portrait of its most celebrated monarch, Elizabeth I.

The film is German director Roland Emmerich’s first non-action movie and he never lets the facts get in the way of a good story nor, indeed, a bad one.

 Royal ruse: German director Roland Emmerich's new project attempts to show that Shakespeare did not write the plays credited to him
 Controversial: The plot centres on the fact that it would have been a disgrace for an earl to be associated with writing or the stage
In his earlier film The Patriot, he depicted the British during the American War of Independence as sneering psychotics.
His new project attempts to show that Shakespeare (played by Rafe Spall as an illiterate buffoon) did not write the plays credited to him and that they were the work of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, played by two actors (one of whom is Rhys Ifans, who has a remarkable lack of aristocratic finesse).
The plot centres on the fact that it would have been a disgrace for an earl to be associated with writing or the stage and so he used Shakespeare as his stooge.
However, this hardly holds water, for the real Earl of Oxford, in fact, held the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre in the mid-1580s, sponsored various theatrical companies and produced entertainments at court.
He also published mediocre poems under his own name, which bear little similarity  to Shakespeare’s.
 Star: Actress Joely Richardson attends the after party for Anonymous, in which she plays Elizabeth I
In Anonymous, it is claimed that De Vere wrote the part of busybody Polonius in Hamlet as an insult to his former guardian, Sir William Cecil, and Richard III was a satire on the ambitions of Sir William’s son, Robert. Yet there is no historical evidence for this.
There are too many inaccuracies to name them all. It is horribly apparent that the film-makers have less knowledge of Shakespeare’s verse and Elizabethan history than many literate 13-year-olds.
Far-fetched conspiracy theories come thick and fast, all based on the notion that Elizabeth I (played first by Joely Richardson and in her senility by her real-life mother Vanessa Redgrave) was an incestuous slut who bore the first of many illegitimate children at the age of 15. So much for the Virgin Queen!
Here is a classic example of propaganda being paraded as truth. Heaven knows if there are any more sinister intentions behind it than to make money out of the gullible.
You don’t need A-levels in history and English to recognise that Anonymous is preposterous.

Ides Of March review: The most persuasive account yet of working inside politics

For my money, The Ides Of March — with its dark view of human nature and satisfyingly twisty plot — is one of the most entertaining films ever made about the political process.
George Clooney has directed four films so far, and The Ides Of March is by far his best. That’s not to say it will be his most critically acclaimed or commercially successful.
Most reviewers admired his Good Night, And Good Luck more than I did, and took at face value his reverential portrait of liberal broadcaster Edward R. Murrow.
 'Splendid': George Clooney (pictured) is terrific at keeping his emotions hidden behind a friendly facade
The Ides Of March is a more world-weary, fearlessly realistic film, and the most persuasive account yet of working inside politics.
The anti-hero is Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), idealistic 30-year-old press secretary to an attractive, Left-wing Democrat Presidential hopeful, Pennysylvania governor Mike Morris (Clooney).
Stephen is second-in-command in the campaign to likeable, paunchy, chain-smoking veteran Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
Stephen’s on the way up, and that attracts a beautiful young intern (Evan Rachel Wood), for whom power is evidently an aphrodisiac.
A different kind of temptation arrives in the seedy form of rival campaign manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), who offers Stephen a job in the team of the other Democrat candidate, Senator Pullman (Michael Mantell). Pullman’s more conservative politics don’t appeal to Stephen, and he tells his boss, Paul, about the approach.
Somehow news of the offer reaches a New York Times journalist (Marisa Tomei). Suddenly, Stephen’s future doesn’t look so bright. Paul lectures him on disloyalty and fires him. The job offer that seemed so certain fails to materialise. Has this na?ve young man been outwitted?
It would be unfair to reveal the bargaining card that could save Stephen’s career, though anyone familiar with the history of Democrat candidates Bill Clinton and John Edwards could hazard a guess.
The film is based on a stage play, Farragut North by Beau Willimon, but you’d never know it. Clooney and his co-writers Grant Heslov and Willimon (who spent part of his 20s working for Hillary Clinton) have cleverly opened it up and made flesh a character who was offstage in the play but here plays a pivotal role: the candidate, played by Clooney himself.
Clooney, like Gosling, is terrific at keeping his emotions hidden behind a friendly facade. Their confrontation at the end is more effective for being understated. Both are splendid.
The showiest performance is Hoffman’s — though Giamatti’s memorable demonstration of ratlike cunning means he steals every scene he’s in.
The film has plenty to say about the dirty compromises of politics, and it’s applicable to any political party on either side of the Atlantic. Every aspiring politician should see it, if only as a warning.