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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...

Review: King of Thieves

Gambar
A crime film where the characters actually ask - on more than one occasion - which one of their group is the "king of thieves" (or words to that effect) is a crime film with too much time on its hands. Maybe they should have pulled out a league table with everyone ranked according to crime skills; it arguably would have been more fun than this dour adventure. But hey, look - it’s Michael Caine heading up a bunch of old school UK actors all playing criminals who pulled off a recent real-life big time diamond heist – this has got to be a must-see for fans of crime capers, right? Sadly, no; rather than being a thrilling romp – or even a tense tale of high-stakes criminality – this combines a remarkably un-thrilling heist with a collection of universally unlikable characters to create a film that takes an all-star cast (Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone, Michael Gambon, and Charlie Cox, to name a few) and drains all the charm out of them.  It's almost tempting to recommend this on ...

Review: Stan & Ollie

Gambar
It’s the early 50s, which means it's been a long time since Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C Reilly) were at their Hollywood peak. But Stan - the brains and drive behind the team - has a plan: a series of live performances across the UK to build interest in a film version of Robin Hood with them as the leads. That’s fine with the easy-going Oliver, even though his health isn't exactly at its best. The tour gets off to a shaky start.  Shabby hotels, tiny venues, small crowds: this isn't exactly what either of them signed up for. So they start doing a bit of self-promotion, and it turns out their fanbase isn't quite dead yet. But as sales increase, so does the pressure. Their partnership has some not-so-hidden fault lines from a betrayal (Ollie did a movie without Stan) at the height of their fame; are they even going to reach the end of their final tour?  The story is fine but forgettable; it’s the performances that stand out. Nina Arianda and Shirley ...

Review: Happy Death Day 2U

Gambar
College student Tree (Jessica Rothe) thought she was done with being murdered. But it turns out the Groundhog Day -like time loop she was trapped in on her birthday – one that forced her to relive being murdered over and over again until she figured out how to survive – wasn’t some supernatural coincidence, but a science experiment gone wrong. And now? How do parallel timelines sound? And this time there's a whole new killer; guess we're doing the time warp again. The first Happy Death Day did a decent job of combining slasher thrills with a murder mystery, but it was Rothe's charming and increasingly quirky performance that made it work. After an opening that threatens an ensemble approach - and it's legitimately impressive the way they managed to get everyone from the first film to return - the focus returns to Tree, and it's clear this consistently entertaining sequel is steering into her strong points. That means the slasher side of things is kept to a bare min...