Postingan

Menampilkan postingan dari Maret, 2019

Review: Five Feet Apart

Gambar
Cystic fibrosis sufferer seventeen-year-old Stella Grant (Haley Lu Richardson) is in hospital for her latest round of treatment when she spots brooding new patient Wil Newman (Cole Sprouse). He’s everything she’s not: she obsessively follows the rules and he’s the original bad boy of cystic fibrosis, right down to having an infection that means he no longer qualifies for the lung transplant that's a CF sufferer's big chance at a regular life.  Thanks to the risks of cross-infection, all CF patients have to stay at least six feet apart from each other (yes, that’s not what the title says; yes, the film explains it), which obviously will never be a problem for these two. After all, they have almost nothing in common and no reason to spend time together, let alone fall in love, right? Right? It's not like opposites attract or anything... Anyone who's owned a mobile phone for more than five minutes will spend much of this film wondering why the teens are so angsty about tou...

Review: Fighting with my Family

Gambar
As part of a tight-knit but low-rent wrestling family, siblings Paige (Florence Pugh) and Zak (Jack Lowden) fight in the ring and look out for each other outside of it. Zak’s dream is to wrestle in the WWE: Paige might have the moves, but she isn’t quite as committed. Still, when they’re both offered the chance to try out when the WWE hits London, neither wants to pass it up – but only one (okay, it’s Paige) makes it in.  Based on the true story of WWE wrestler Paige, director Stephen Merchant focuses as much on her scrappy family (Nick Frost and Lena Headey play her rough but loving parents) as on her journey to the top. It's a strange mix of working class family comedy and sports aspirational movie, one half jokes about her parents sordid past and wrestling in pubs, one half glossy training montages on Florida beaches. It's not surprising then that some stretches of this drift a little, especially in the second half. But Vince Vaughn as the head scout / trainer is excellent (...

Review: Sometimes Always Never

Gambar
Scrabble and tailoring: this is most definitely a very English take on grief. Bill Nighy is Alan, a father who hasn't so much buried his grief over his missing-possibly-dead son as he's dropped it in an impeccably cut jacket pocket where his hand occasionally brushes up against it. We meet him waiting on a windswept seaside foreshore passing the time by chatting happily to an extremely disinterested ice cream man. If Alan was played by just about anybody else, it'd feel like a parody of a certain kind of adrift English gentleman, and what follows would crumble in a heap. Nighy brings two essential things to this occasionally twee but never sentimental film - heart and a tough of ruthlessness. The heart takes time to develop: the ruthlessness we see when he and his son Peter (Sam Reily) - who assumed they were going on a day trip but now finds himself staying the night in a antiquated hotel - encounter a man and wife also staying at the hotel. Alan suggests a game of scrabbl...

Review: Captain Marvel

Gambar
It's tempting to say Captain Marvel has arrived just a little too late. Marvel's strange reluctance to put a female character front and center in one of their films went on too long for them to score any brownie points now, but better late than never; the real problem is that this 90s-set movie feels like a superhero film that would have wowed audiences in 2009, and we've all changed a lot since Iron Man . Like just about every Marvel movie of the last few years, the story (and character) feels like one step forward, one step back. There's the retro soundtrack and space strangeness of Guardians of the Galaxy , only now with the comedy double act of Thor: Ragnarok . Carol Danvers AKA Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) has both kinds of Marvel superhero powers: she can physically fight, and she can also shoot energy beams (and eventually, fly). The story seems straightforward, but there's just enough in the way of twists to keep things interesting until the action sequence...