Film Review – The Children Act (12A)

Life is more important than dignity.

Writer Ian McEwan appears to be on a bit of a mission. The Children Actis the second of his novels to be adapted for the screen this year (On Chesil Beach was the other one) and in both cases he has carried out the adapting himself. He has a knack for it too. His stories delve too deep into the mental processes of key characters to make screen-writing simple, but in both films he provides enough clues to suggest why these individuals behave as they do. Of course it helps to have an accomplished actress filling the lead role – and in this case it’s Emma Thompson doing the heavy lifting.

Her character, Fiona Maye, is a High Court judge who makes rulings on ethically convoluted and emotionally charged situations involving children. The demands of the job are fierce, taking a grim toll on her marriage to Jack (Stanley Tucci). Their relationship hits crisis point in the form of a startling ultimatum from the husband, just as Fiona is about to preside over a characteristically fraught courtroom drama. The case involves Adam Henry, a dangerously ill teenage lad, who along with his Jehovah’s Witness parents is refusing the blood transfusion that might save his life on grounds of religious faith. With the boy some months shy of his eighteenth birthday, the final decision falls to the judge. This confluence of events has repercussions in Fiona’s life that she could never have foreseen.

One of the things that The Children Act does best is to balance points of view along with audience sympathies. There’s no one person wholly to blame for the Mayes’ marriage woes; even with Jack’s radical statement of intent, it’s difficult to take one partner’s side over the other. Likewise the frustration of the medical professionals wanting to treat Adam may be tangible, but the parents’ religious convictions (sympathetically expressed by Ben Chaplin as the dad) are allowed to make sense in their own terms. Even in the unexpected developments of the film’s final act, the motivations behind certain questionable actions are fuelled by an undeniable kind of logic. At all points this is a story of conflicting ideas, impulses and duties.

At the heart of it all is Thompson’s superb performance, arguably the high-point of her career to date. She balances tough-mindedness with empathy, exhibiting hints of vulnerability that become more pronounced as the story progresses. It’s the best kind of acting – the type that suggests far more emotion than is openly expressed, feelings that lurk under the surface even in Fiona’s most professionally reserved moments. Tucci radiates a complimentary sense of depth in his supporting role, while Fionn Whitehead (the closest thing to a protagonist in Dunkirk) is a genuine revelation. As young Adam he is innocent and impassioned, naive yet wise beyond his years. His scenes with Thompson have a strange emotional charge to them that intensifies to a near-extraordinary level.

The Children Act is classic McEwan storytelling – polished and undeniably middle-class-professional, but full of deep-seated and believable angst. There’s raw emotion in the movie’s gut, however intellectual its spine. There’s also an irrefutable logic to the direction in which the story goes, and yet you’ll be hard-pushed to guess exactly where that will be. All you can do is watch and hope, as these very real and fallible humans struggle with the unexpected twists in their lives. There are no good guys and bad guys here, just tough situations where the head ends up battling with the heart. And that makes for one powerful viewing experience.

Gut Reaction: Absorbed from the start, and riveted every time Emma and Fionn shared the screen. Oh, and genuinely concerned about where it was all going.

Where Are the Women?: Aside from Thompson’s cerebral but empathetic main character, Nikki Amuku-Bird is very good as the Henry family solicitor.

Ed’s Verdict: 8/10. The Children Act is the kind of intelligent and emotionally complex drama we simply don’t see enough of on the big screen. Terrific stuff.

Film Review – The Nun (15)

What’s the opposite of a miracle, Father?

Hear my confession – I was possessed by high hopes when I went to seeThe Nun. These were born of two sources. Firstly I’d heard good things about the Conjuring films and knew that this new movie served as a kind of prequel to those Amityville-style tales of the paranormal. Secondly I’d seen the trailer on four occasions (it’s a film-reviewing hazard) and been launched out of my seat by the same jump-scare every damn time. Surely these were all signs – divine or otherwise – of the dark delights in store… Alas my faith went sadly unrewarded.

The nun in question haunts a grim, secluded convent in 1950s Romania – a cursed location (isn’t it ironic?), or so local villagers would have it. When one of the sisters takes her own life, the papal authorities send in Father Burke, expert on occult manifestations, to investigate. He is accompanied by Sister Irene, a young noviciate nun, whose childhood visions have uniquely prepared her for this kind of spiritual inquiry. On arrival they find – well – all kinds of mad Satanic shenanigans going on, including one nasty-habited apparition with malign intentions and terrifying powers. And that’s only their first night there…

My disappointment with The Nun stemmed from very specific expectations. I was hoping for a Woman in Black-style slice of Gothic – heavy on atmosphere, but sparing with its moments of explicit horror. A movie that has the patience to create a something genuinely haunting. The locations are authentic enough, particularly the austere, mist-shrouded convent, and there are moments of promise where the camera lingers on some unsettling image, dread seeping into the audience’s pores. The dread never gets bone-deep though. All too soon the movie bursts into fully-fledged monster horror, at which point the mood is shattered, never to be recovered again.

The underlying problem is the premise’s sheer flimsiness – a ghost of an idea lifted from the Conjuring universe and provided with no narrative guts or even its own internal logic. In the absence of coherent plot a potentially chilling tale is turned into a cheap scare-fest, each outlandishly ghoulish moment having to be topped by the next in an effort to sustain interest. It torpedoes the suspense – repeatedly so. Exposition is crowbarred in via Father Burke’s mutterings as he leafs through an arcane occult book, or by an ancillary character popping up to tell us stuff. It’s never allowed to unfold organically. Once a ‘portal’ into some other supernatural realm is mentioned, you know we’ve left the relatable world behind, waving bye-bye to anything remotely frightening as we go.

Oh, and the tone is all over the place too. We don’t need to know that Irene is a progressively modern, feisty kind of novice who loves kids and believes that dinosaurs were real, nor do we require a comic relief character in the form of delivery guy Frenchie, with his misplaced one-liners and their knack of draining tension from the most fraught situation. What we do need is for both characters and situation to be as authentic as the setting, so that the scares (including the artfully constructed shock-moment from the trailer) carry real impact.

If you like your demonic horror grounded in a chilling reality The Exorcist still provides the template. Having said that, I’m going to check out both Conjuring instalments based on that good word of mouth. I’m just sorry its ecclesiastical offshoot turned out to be such an irredeemable mess.

Gut Reaction: A few early frissons, replaced by a gradual sad realisation that this was not the film I’d anticipated – or anything close.

Where Are the Women?: Taissa Farmiga (younger sister of The Conjuring‘s Vera) is a winning lead deprived of anything worthwhile to do. Same old story…

Ed’s Verdict: 3/10. A half-baked hotchpotch, although in fairness it has a few effectively creepy moments. I scored Winchesterhigher, but this was no worse. I won’t make this a habit, but considerWinchester downgraded.

Film Review – Searching (12A)

I didn’t know her. I didn’t know my daughter.

Searching tells a well-worn story, but in a vital new way – one that gives it sharp contemporary relevance. Like the recent Unfriended: Dark Web it uses a ‘laptop screen’ format – a tale told through and about modern electronic media. Whereas the Unfriended horror franchise keeps tightly within the bounds of real-time online experience, Searching expands the technique using a variety of screens (chiefly but not exclusively home computers) to create a taut suspense thriller. It also gets under its central character’s skin as effectively as most conventional dramas.

John Cho plays David Kim, a widowed father, whose teenage daughter Margot fails to return from school. As panic incrementally mounts, he begins to quiz Margot’s acquaintances and to scour her social media for clues as to where and why she might have gone. Working alongside police detective Rosemary Vick (Will and Grace‘s Debra Messing), he realises – maybe too late – how far he has drifted from understanding his own child and what is going on in her life.

On one level this is a classic missing-persons thriller of the type TV drama Without a Trace told week-to-week. There’s the build of ticking-clock urgency, the plot mis-direction, the head-butting between desperate parent and police professional. What sets it apart is the consistently inventive filtering of events through numerous visual media; face-timing, instant messaging, Youtube videos and news footage all play a role in the unfolding drama. It’s tightly edited and coherent at all points, shaped into something both unique and genuinely cinematic. And the issues at its heart turn the movie’s style into more than just a gimmick.

Searching deals with the phenomenon of lives recorded online; its introductory montage (reminiscent of the opening to Pixar’s Up) establishes the entire Kim family history. The computer record proves utterly familiar, a startling reminder of how tightly our lives are interwoven with new media. And that’s before events take a dark turn. Margot’s inner teen-life finds its natural outlet online so that when she goes missing, the clues to her disappearance lie mostly there, rather than at any real-world location. As with Unfriended: Dark Web, this is an examination of virtual interactions resulting in real-life consequences. It’s only natural then that the story’s intriguing detective element takes place via computer. Add to that some smirk-inducing satire of broader online culture and you have a perfect fusion of style with substance.

Particular credit goes to Cho (Mr Sulu from the Star Trek cinema reboot); his performance as the baffled and despairing father convinces, even under computer face-time’s unforgiving scrutiny. That camera gets up close and uncomfortably personal, so there’s no room for faking. One of the film’s key strengths, in fact, is its characters’ believability as observed through multiple digital formats – as when Detective Vick blearily takes a middle-of-the-night Skype call. It’s a factor reinforced by the accuracy with which everything on-screen is conveyed. The story persuades with its attention to detail, selling the narrative’s most extravagant twists.

There’ll be an inevitable moment during Searching, when you’ll become aware of how much time you spend in front of computer screens and that you’re effectively passing your evening by staring at a super-sized version. That the writing-directing team make the experience both authentic and a riveting piece of suspense cinema is impressive. If you end up fixating on a cinema-screen-sized cursor, whispering ‘He’s not going to close the window, is he? Is he?‘, then this experiment in tension is doing something very right.

Gut Reaction: Not just feeling tension (though the film provokes and sustains that expertly). Moved as well by the poignant family story behind the suspense.

Where Are the Women?: Messing finds depth in her cop character, while Michelle La makes a nicely-judged film debut as troubled daughter Margot.

Ed’s Verdict: 7.5/10. First-time feature-director Aneesh Chaganty makes a great entrance with this wrong-footing tech thriller, where every scrap of e-info counts. It’s innovative storytelling, that will have parents wondering what the hell their kids are really getting up to online.

Film Review – The Happytime Murders (15)

Dust to dust, fluff to fluff, man.

If you were to think that The Happytime Murders was the first movie featuring fuzzy puppets behaving badly, you’d be wrong. In 1989 Peter Jackson (that’s The Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson) gave us an unholy R-rated comedy called Meet the Feebles, introducing a cast of stuffed characters ridden with drug addiction and venereal disease, several of whom got slaughtered in squelchy fashion. It was a thoroughly unpleasant and demented watch, and it makes this new muppets-gone-wrong comedy seem a bit tame in comparison. But does that make Happytime, created by Brian Henson (son of muppet impresario Jim), the better film? Not necessarily.

Its story is set in a Los Angeles, where humans and puppets uneasily co-exist, and where puppet ex-cop Phil Philips (voiced and operated by longtime muppeteer Bill Barretta) makes a living as a private investigator. When a ruthless killer starts targeting the cast of classic puppet TV show ‘The Happytime Gang’, Phil is drawn into the investigation. He’s teamed with his ex-partner Detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy), with whom he had a major falling out over an incident that disgraced him and prevented any other puppets being hired by the LAPD. Meanwhile puppetfemme fatale Sandra is calling on his services to investigate the blackmail threats she has been receiving…

Henson’s film suffers from a basic and predictable problem – its dependency on gross-out puppet humour to carry the day. While there’s undeniable fun to be had watching normally child-friendly characters behave like messed-up adults (ask most audience members of theAvenue Q stage show if you doubt it), it’s not a sufficiently strong or original conceit to sustain laughter throughout. To keep an audience chuckling – no great surprise – you need a well-crafted and witty script that’s about more than trying to shock. The set-up is in place here for something better – the film noir detective drama and buddy-cop elements could both have been used to good effect, had they been effectively mined. Instead the writing is way too baggy and uninspired to capitalise. It’s not a question of having substituted crude for clever – the two can comfortably co-exist. But if the former is denied the oxygen of the latter, it’ll die rapidly and begin to smell bad.

That’s not to say the film didn’t have its moments of salacious inspiration. I can’t deny I found a first-act sex-shop puppet massacre entertaining, or that a spectacularly rude sequence culminating in creative use of silly-string had me laughing uproariously. (I’m not proud, okay?) However this is predominantly a story of waste – in terms of both the adult muppet crime-story premise and the acting/puppeteering talent. McCarthy may have salvaged Life of the Party from ignominy earlier this year, but there’s nothing she can do with the uninspiring character she’s given here. And any interesting social allegory surrounding Phil and his maligned fellow-fuzzies ends up being squandered by the lazy storytelling.

Good screen-writing is the bedrock of any film, never more so than in comedy. And no amount of inappropriate muppet shenanigans can compensate for its absence. I don’t recommend you hunt out Meet the Feebles, but at least Jackson’s movie had the courage of its nasty convictions. This one just turned out bland.

Gut Reaction: Yes, the visual humour cracked me up on more than one occasion (the part with the silly-string still makes me smile any time I picture it). But this was largely an experience of waiting for something truly amusing to happen.

Where Are the Women?: Melissa Mac, Maya Rudolph, Elizabeth Banks. They’re all here, they’re all proven comedians. Dear God, give them something to work with.

Ed’s Verdict: 5/10. It made me laugh out loud twice, so I have to score it higher than The Spy Who Dumped Me. But this was still a missed comic opportunity, hollow and disappointing at heart. Good puppetry though.

Film Review – The Spy Who Dumped Me (15)

Abort! Abort mission! Go!

Sometimes, as I’ve said before, it pays dividends for the cinema-goer to keep his expectations low. Mine were genuinely modest this time around. Both leads had a track record in being funny, the trailer made me smile a few times and it seemed like I was in for a daft, entertaining romp. That’s all I was asking. Sadly The Spy Who Dumped Me didn’t even scale those moderate heights.

As per the film’s title, there’s a promising set-up. Mila Kunis plays Audrey, a Los Angeles girl coming to terms with a break-up, helped all the way by her BFF Morgan (Kate McKinnon). Then her ex crashes back into her life pursued by a clutch of assassins and the truth comes shockingly to light – Audrey had unwittingly been dating a guy up to his ears in global espionage. Without warning she and Morgan are plunged into that same world, trying to deliver a crucial whatsit into the right hands, while being pursued all across Europe by murderous assailants. And of course they’re able to trust no one except each other.

It’s the kind of premise I’ve been championing here at Filmic Forays. Two ‘sisters’ doin’ it for themselves, the way Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox described in the song. Taking no crap from anyone else and covering each other’s back, while at every turn being witty, irreverent and hilarious. Both these gals can be all of the above – see Kunis in the Bad Moms movies and McKinnon in numerous Saturday Night Live skits – and there are scattered moments of realised potential here. But it’s largely a case of squandered opportunity in a film that’s messy on several fronts.

It’s tonally all over the shop for starters. The story is crammed with action sequences as brutal (and five times as freaking loud) as anything in last year’s Atomic Blonde, while still trying to be a wacky screwball comedy. It’s a massively jarring combination – one the movie might have survived, if only the screenplay had been funnier; Melissa McCarthy’s Spy made the same tonal error, but got away with it by providing a regular stream of laughs. Here the dialogue is rapid-fire with the girls giving it their best, but to little avail. Too many gags fall flat, and McKinnon in particular ends up mugging like fury to make up for the script’s deficiencies. As for the plot – there’s definitely one in there somewhere. But when I stopped laughing, I stopped caring.

Ultimately The Spy Who Dumped Me is a real good news/bad news scenario – one that’s starting to frustrate me. It’s good that films are being made with comic actresses of this calibre in mind. And it’s bad – painfully so – that they’re often as lame as this one.

Gut Reaction: The kind of laughter that dies in your throat after ten minutes of trying, plus actual wincing at the volume. Lots of wishing it was better.

Where Are the Women?: High-profile – both behind the camera and in front – but there’s no glory here for anyone. Even Gillian Anderson is wasted in a thankless extended cameo.

Ed’s Verdict: 4/10. It’s not loathsome like last year’s The Hitman’s Bodyguard, but it is still rubbish. And there’s enough spark between Kunis and McKinnon to show what this misguided project shouldhave been.

Film Review – BlacKkKlansman (15)

I’m happy to be talking to a true white American.

Troubled times produce creative responses. Steven Spielberg’s reaction to Trump era claims of fake news was The Post, a story of the free press holding the government to account when it misinformed the public. Now in BlacKkKlansman director Spike Lee tackles America’s racist upsurge under its current political administration. And in doing so he crafts one of the most accessible, compelling and provocative films of his career. Did I mention entertaining and funny? I’ll get to that.

BlacKkKlansman, though heavy with contemporary relevance, is based in recent US history; like The Post it’s set during the upheaval of the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War. Its inspiration is the unfeasible but true story of Ron Stallworth, the first black officer in the Colorado Police Department. Acting on his own initiative, Stallworth established contact with a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, with a view to infiltrating them. Unable to show up in person (for obvious reasons), he asked a white fellow-detective to act as a surrogate. Hence there were two Rons – the one who sustained phone contact, and his partner who played him at Klan meetings.

Spike Lee takes this factual basis and uses it to forge a taut police thriller that also draws on the tumultuous racial politics of 1970s America. Stallworth is played by John David Washington, son of Denzel, in a performance to make his dad proud. Equipped with smarts, panache and one of the best afros in the history of cinema, he’s a magnetic protagonist, reminiscent of iconic Blaxploitation hero John Shaft. His teammate on the force is Jewish detective Flip Zimmerman, Star Wars‘ Adam Driver supplying equal dramatic weight, as a guy who till now has more easily been able to ignore the prejudice levelled against him. The rapport established between the two of them and their colleagues is easy, natural and a consistent source of laugh-out-loud moments.

It’s a relief in a story with a core of darkness. If humour is one side of this coin, horror is the other – not the blood-and-guts kind, but rather the stink of naked racism. The Klan scenes are claustrophobic enough to make your skin crawl; heavy with bile and vicious racial insults, they’re also nuanced enough in the characters they portray to feel scarily real. And having an undercover Jewish cop relaxing in their fetid company heightens our response. Enter David Duke, one-time Grand Wizard of the KKK (portrayed here by Topher Grace as the suave and articulate public face of intolerance), and the creep-factor only intensifies.

Spike Lee has made politically confrontational films over three decades and he pulls no punches here – whether referencing dubious racial stereotypes from Hollywood’s past or echoing recent Trumpian rhetoric in the dialogue. The early ’70s setting also enables him to explore tensions over how best to combat racism; Stallworth’s ‘change the system from within’ stance is pitted against the more radical sympathies of the girl he’s dating (Spiderman: Homecoming‘s Laura Harrier with a ‘fro to match her attitude). The most heartening aspect of the movie, however, is Lee’s respect for Stallworth’s approach – something emphasised in the film’s searing conclusion.

BlacKkKlansman is an ambitious brew of funky ’70s style (its soundtrack is glorious), tense police procedure and toxic racial politics. It’s a magnificently realised period piece and a bitingly contemporary satire – one fuelled by the fire that recent events have lit under the director’s ass. While it will undoubtedly stick around as a high-point in Lee’s career, the time to see it is now.

Gut Reaction: Much laughter – some hearty, some uneasy. Cringing discomfort, particularly at one moment of grim racist iconography. Oh, and I was pummelled into silence by the footage with which the film closes. Goddamn.

Where Are the Women?: Harrier is great as student activist Patrice, while Ashlie Atkinson brings a sad-sack humanity to bitter Klan wife Connie.

Ed’s Verdict: 9/10. Make no mistake, this is first and foremost a great story, with gutsy and sometimes hilarious central performances. But it also punches like a heavyweight. The most important film I’m seen so far this year, and one of the best.

Film Review – Christopher Robin (PG)

It’s not stress. It’s Pooh.

Disney’s new Winnie the Pooh film is a fascinating hybrid beast full of talking stuffed ones. While last year’s Goodbye Christopher Robin was a biographical tale of Pooh-writer A. A. Milne’s relationship with his real-life son, this new movie takes the fictionalised version of the boy from Milne’s stories and explores what happens when he grows up. It’s not dissimilar to what Steven Spielberg did in Hook for the character of Peter Pan. The result is a story more about male mid-life crisis than talking animals, one that’s a genuine oddity but worth your exploration along with Hundred Acre Wood.

The story begins as young Christopher Robin has one final rambunctious party with Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore, etc, before leaving that idyllic world and entering one called ‘growing up’. Decades later Christopher is struggling in a frugal post-WW2 London, the pressures of work in a luggage company having turned him into a stuffy adult with insufficient time for his loving wife and daughter. Then Pooh pops miraculously via tree-trunk into his life, as if conjured from the recesses of his tired mind. The bear’s mission (as much as his fuzzy brain understands it) is to help Christopher rediscover both the animal companions of his childhood and his joy in living.

There’s a lot that I loved about this film, not least the way it brings Pooh back to his archetypally English roots. (The Americanised version never felt entirely right to me.) Jim Cummings returns with his iconic voices from the Disney antimations – a husky Pooh and a spluttering Tigger – but these are blended with the likes of Toby Jones and Sophie Okonedo (Owl and Kanga respectively). The settings are muted in colour but gorgeous, whether the untamed parts of rural England or austere late ’40s London. It all has a restrained British feel to it, with a smattering of references – including one memorably bouncy Tigger song – to the primary-coloured cartoon features. A very canny compromise.

The toy animals are a saggy, threadbare bunch, but brought to vivid life and interacting often hilariously with the real-life setting. Much of the film’s joy is watching these clumsy anarchic toys engage with the stuffiness of the adult human world. (Having said that, I enjoyed Eeyore’s depressive donkey musings on life even more than Tigger’s ADHD.) Ewan McGregor is meanwhile perfect as the middle-aged curmudgeon with a boyish spirit lurking beneath. His philosophical chats with Pooh are touching as well as funny, while his revelations regarding the type of grown-up he has become provide real pause for thought.

And that is, perhaps, my main reservation regarding the film. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but have no idea how a child audience would react to the plight of this male 40-something protagonist. True there’s plenty of mayhem involving honey-spillages and getting stuck halfway through tree-trunks, and spirited young Bronte Carmichael is given quite a lot to do as Christopher’s daughter Madeline. But ultimately this is centred on the dad and his own quest for self-understanding. (So was Mary Poppins admittedly, but that movie was all through the children’s eyes; this one is largely not.)

Is this a family film that will have more profundity for adults, or one for grown-ups that might additionally engage the children in the audience? Additionally, if it’s all a metaphor for what’s going on in older Christopher Robin’s mind, then how come other people can see the talking toys as well? That’s just weird! Alright, I’m probably overthinking it – because this film is witty and creative, funny and moving. And if you like well-crafted and imaginative storytelling set in a nostalgic world, that’s maybe enough to make it work. Now – who’s for a game of Pooh Sticks?

Gut Reaction: Charmed and consistently taken by surprise at where this film went. Plus Pooh and Eeyore made me laugh a lot.

Where Are the Women?: Hayley Atwell makes the most of what she’s given as wife Evelyn, and Carmichael is pleasingly non-bratty as Madeline.

Ed’s Verdict: 7.5/10. While not achieving the perfect family balance of Paddington 2, Christopher Robin is still worth your time for its sheer artistry. And for parents – it has a message your young kids will want you to embrace.

Film Review – The Equalizer 2 (15)

They’re going to war with me.

2014’s The Equalizer was a big-screen adaptation of the ’80s TV show starring Edward Woodward as private detective Robert McCall. A major presence is required to fill the Woodward shoes and Denzel Washington proved a perfect fit with his natural compassion and air of contained ruthlessness. His McCall was a retired government operative with a dark and violent past, content to work a regular job and relax reading Hemingway in his favourite diner – until a threat to someone he cared about drew him into a new role as righter-of-wrongs. Now when the innocent and vulnerable are threatened, he restores balance (or ‘equalises’).

The first film was a pacy, workmanlike thriller that made good use of its star. In this rather meandering sequel McCall is working as a Boston cabbie, a job that fits around his new calling as a benevolent vigilante. He’s blending into his blue-collar community, trying to keep a young would-be artist (Moonlight‘s Ashton Sanders) on the straight and narrow and travelling far and wide to sort out business for his oppressed clients. But elsewhere crack assassins are plying a lethal trade, with his ex-senator pal (Melissa Leo) and one-time special ops partner (Game of Thrones‘ Pedro Pascal) both taking an interest. McCall lends his detective skills from afar, before brutal developments drag him in deep.

If the movie has deficiencies (and it does), it’s not the fault of its star. Even in a standard genre movie like this Washington exhibits the same degree of intensity as he did in Glory or Malcolm X, never more so than in the quiet moments. There’s depth of friendship with the few buddies he has, a touching paternal quality with artist Miles and an utterly convincing switch into lethal mode – where you sense he could break all your bones without breaking a sweat. The best scenes are those he shares with the lad, whether cajoling him to pursue his gift or taking him grimly to task over the lure of a criminal lifestyle. It’s utterly believable stuff – coming straight from the gut and showing itself in those transfixing eyes.

The issues lie elsewhere in both plotting and pacing. This follow-up delves into McCall’s past, but does so in a way that mimics too many story beats of the first film; it even leads to a showdown that for all its evocative setting seems way too familiar. Twists are signposted and there’s little is in the way of genuine surprise for a seasoned thriller fan. Various subplots stall the momentum to the point of sluggishness, with a resultant watering down of the drama. Yes there are a few sequences where the stakes register, but not enough for the story to prove compelling overall.

Sharing the original movie’s writer and director, The Equalizer 2 is intermittently entertaining, but wastes opportunity to fully explore the ambiguities in McCall’s character. He’s attempting to redeem himself for unspecified crimes of the past, but doing so by subverting the law; it’s an irony ripe for exploration but one that’s largely bypassed. So if you’re not going to wrestle with those issues, the least you can do is keep things whizzing along. Otherwise, despite your leading man’s finest efforts, it all ends up a little bit dull and grey.

Gut Reaction: Touching father-surrogate-son stuff and a few white-knuckle moments. But too much sitting and waiting for predictable things to happen.

Where Are the Women?: A few cameos, Leo’s tough not-quite-retired politician being the most memorable.

Ed’s Verdict: 6/10. Denzel never disappoints, and his rapport with Sanders would make for a great movie in itself. But ultimately this is a lacklustre sequel that doesn’t attain the modest heights of the original.

Film Review – Unfriended: Dark Web (15)

Hold on… You stole someone’s computer?

I’ve yet to see 2014’s horror-thriller Unfriended, so I came to this follow-up with no possible risk of ‘same old, same old’. Unfriended: Dark Webuses an identical conceit to its predecessor – a scary story playing out entirely on the screen of one character’s laptop. (A very now kind of storytelling.) The first film was a tale of literal computer haunting, where a ghostly victim of online bullying wreaked cyber-revenge on a smug group of friends. With no clear supernatural element Dark Web taps into something more terrifying – the sinister illegalities we all know are lurking somewhere beneath the web’s comforting surface.

Colin Woodell plays Matias, a 20-something guy embarking on an online game night with his old college friends. This he’s doing on a second-hand laptop supposedly bought on Craig’s List. But when Matias goes exploring, he discovers a mysterious cache of files that seem to be taking up most of the space on the hard-drive. His choice to click and investigate uncovers something deeply sinister, putting himself and those closest to him at grave risk.

Adjusting to this radical storytelling format might take a while for an Unfriended newbie. There’s a lot of on-screen information to absorb – Matias’ group Skype chat with his in-jokey fellow Millennials, his Facebooking with an angry girlfriend and his detective work. You become oriented quickly, however, most of the online activity being disarmingly familiar. Which is why it’s disturbing when Matias’ experience takes a turn for the darker: cryptic communications via an account he should never have accessed, unnerving revelations, a gnawing sense that he’s tangled with something very wrong indeed. The film’s industrial soundscape heightens the sense of dread, as do some creepy visuals, before the horror become scarily explicit. By the time this laptop-user’s nightmare gets real, we’re hooked – horribly so.

The movie’s young actors sell this mounting paranoia and are sketched out sufficiently through the group-babble for us to care about their fates. Matias’ relationship with his deaf girlfriend is dealt with sympathetically, as are the issues between two characters in a same-sex relationship. All of which ultimately makes for a tougher watch. When horror protagonists are halfway likeable, their misfortunes hit home – especially when their plans are as innocuous and everyday as a gaming session.

Inevitably there are some dubious horror-movie choices to facilitate the story. Also the movie overplays its hand in the final act, each outrageous plot twist outdoing the previous one, until it all gets too preposterous for words. (I mean this really stretches credibility to snapping point.) But by that stage the sense of fear is so tangible that it doesn’t awfully matter. The story delves into subject matter so dark, and from such a mundane starting point, that its later excesses do little to undermine the cumulative sense of dread.

Unfriended: Dark Web is technically smart and constantly inventive. It may be reliant on well-worn horror tropes, but the ingenious narrative form recycles them to gripping effect. The film also serves as a macabre cautionary tale. Jaws kept people out of the water, while The Exorcist put them off messing with ouija boards. Well next time I stumble on a second-hand laptop of unspecified origin, I’ll probably take a hammer to it or simply run. Now that’s how you know a scary movie has done its job.

Gut Reaction: Vaguely unsettled, followed by finger-gnawingly tense, leading to pretty damn harrowed. Horror-cinema fear levels are subjective of course. But this is the first scary movie in a while that’s genuinely creeped me out.

Where Are the Women?: You can say what you like about horror as a film genre, but it’s quite the equal opportunities employer. Betty Gabriel (the weirdo housemaid in Get Out) and Rebecca Rittenhouse are particularly good.

Ed’s Verdict: 7/10. Its plot logic mightn’t bear much scrutiny, but Unfriended: Dark Web is intense, efficient and ruthless. Some horror you shake off on leaving the cinema. This is the kind that lingers…

Film Review – The Bookshop (PG)

She can’t do that. It’s my bookshop. It’s my home.

The Bookshop sneaked into UK cinemas and out again, or so it seems, at the beginning of summer 2018. I caught it at a one-off screening at my local Odeon, having seen the photo of a friend meeting actor Bill Nighy on set in my native Northern Ireland. (The Ulster countryside stood in very effectively for England’s south-east.) I’m glad Odeon found room for it in their schedule – this is a beautiful and poignant story that acts as welcome cleanser after the recent CGI shenanigans of The Meg and its rival blockbusters.

Adapted by Spanish director Isabel Coixet from Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel, The Bookshop is an outsider’s perspective on a very English confrontation. Emily Mortimer (you might know her best from TV’s The Newsroom) plays Florence Green, a World War Two widow whose ambition it is to open a bookshop in the coastal East Anglian town of Hardborough. This seemingly inoffensive project finds opposition in the form of local socialite Violet Gamart (a sweetly vitriolic Patricia Clarkson). The grand lady has vague plans for the same damp property that Florence is renovating, backed up by a fierce sense of entitlement. But moral support is at hand in the form of literature-loving recluse and kindred spirit Edmund Brundish (Nighy)…

This is a small-scale but painstakingly observed tale, a metaphor for establishment efforts to stamp out an individual’s dreams. Mortimer is an unassuming but nuanced heroine, her performance conveying the inner life of a woman stricken by tragedy but buoyed up by literary passion. Her life-affirming character is hemmed in by apathy and antipathy in the form of reluctant bank-managers, unhelpful solicitors and one particularly vapid local TV executive (James Lance in a fine display of condescension masquerading as friendship). And as her main antagonist Clarkson turns in a masterclass in passive aggression – all acid-smiling insincerity. The film has a seam of bitter humour throughout, where ruthless intentions wear a mask of politeness. But there’s good-heartedness too; Nighy is both wryly funny and touching as Brundish, while Honor Kneafsey is open-faced and winning as Florence’s young bookshop employee Christine.

Director Croixet provides a more austere view rural England than you find in most period films, the starkly beautiful cinematography warming into rich colour as Florence’s bookshop vision is brought to life. This is a leisurely-paced piece of storytelling, most interested in its characters and what may (or in some cases simply may not) be going on within them. And when you have performances as finely judged and complex as in Mortimer and Nighy’s first face-to-face encounter, it’s good to have a camera unafraid to linger. The whole film has a stillness to it that brims with unspoken feelings, all of them plaintively underscored by Alfonso de Viallonga’s orchestral soundtrack. Some will call it slow – I call it beautifully observed, on both visual and emotional levels.

There’s a poignancy to The Bookshop that stems from the disappearance of such gorgeous independent establishments from the high-streets of modern Britain. But this film also has much to say about grief, friendship, worthy ambition and the power of great literature to ennoble people’s lives, even when others’ pettiness and small-minded outlooks are marshalled against them. While its geographical boundaries are limited, this story is about nothing less than how books can open minds and revolutionise the human soul. All of which turns the unlikely figure of Florence into a genuinely courageous heroine. One for our time as much as her own.

Gut Reaction: No towering emotions, but a sense of Florence’s joy as she opens her first ledger and of her frustration as the forces of small-town darkness mass against her. The ending brought a tear…

Where Are the Women?: Emily Mortimer is wonderful – generally speaking and here specifically. And Patricia Clarkson provides proof, were it needed, of her greatness as a character actor.

Ed’s Verdict: 8/10. Any film that has Bill Nighy’s face lighting up as he reads his first Ray Bradbury novel is worth my time. Understated, painful and tender, The Bookshop is definitely one to browse.