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

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 8:39 AM on 25th November 2011

Take Shelter (15)

Verdict: Run Away

Rating:

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.

Resistance review: 'What if' Nazi movie that is entirely resistible

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 8:41 AM on 25th November 2011

Resistance (PG)

Verdict: Resistible

Rating:

There have been several ‘what if’ movies about what Britain might have been like had the Nazis occupied us. This is one of the worst.

It’s a sluggish love story about a Welsh farmer’s wife (an underpowered Andrea Riseborough) who discovers in 1944 that her husband has left, presumably to join the anti-Nazi resistance along with most other men of the valley, leaving the women to cope with a German patrol under the leadership of a polite, English-speaking captain (Tom Wlaschiha).

Sluggish love story: A farmer's wife discovers that her husband has left, presumably to join the anti-Nazi resistance

Bit part: The trailer implies Michael Sheen has a starring role in the film, but he makes a cameo appearance

The only star name, Michael Sheen, has a cameo role, though — naughtily — the trailer implies he’s a lead.

Amit Gupta’s flaccid direction leaves plenty of pauses to be filled by actors gazing opaquely into space.

The script, by Gupta and Owen Sheers, based on the latter’s novel, leaves so much unspoken it never begins to work as a cross-cultural love story or tackles its theme of how far collaboration can ever be justified.

All in all, it’s too minor and dull to be worth screening in a cinema.

Too much left unspoken: The film is too minor and to dull to be worth screening in a cinema

Justice film review: A slick and competent thriller

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 9:16 PM on 17th November 2011

Justice (15)

Verdict: Slick, competent thriller

Rating:

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.

SCROLL DOWN FOR TRAILER

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.

All-star cast: Guy Pearce (left) stars alongside Nicolas Cage (right) in the film

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.

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

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 9:53 AM on 25th November 2011

50/50 (15)

Verdict: Uplifting cancer movie

Rating:

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.

Life-affirming: Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bryce Dallas Howard in 50/50

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.

Deep Blue Sea review: Just a shallow romance

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 8:40 AM on 25th November 2011

The Deep Blue Sea (12a)

Verdict: Too dry and too wet

Rating:

The Deep Blue Sea is an achievement in two areas — it’s well acted and beautiful to look at. But as a drama, director Terence Davies has teamed up with the late playwright Terence Rattigan, and it’s not a match made in heaven. Where Rattigan was glam, Davies is glum.

Previously shot in 1955 with  Vivien Leigh, this is the story of a romantic triangle circa 1950, with a beautiful young wife, Lady Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), walking out of a sexless marriage with judge Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale).

She shacks up in seedy lodgings with former RAF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). Freddie’s a dashing, handsome young chap but nowhere near as much in love with Lady Hester as she is with him.

Damp squib of a love affair: Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz

And therein lies the tragedy: this really isn’t that deep. Despite the emotional hurt on display, there’s not much grandeur. You feel these agonies belong on an agony aunt’s problem page rather than on the big screen.

Davies tries through his camerawork and a couple of musical interludes to link the angst of his characters to the aftermath of wartime destruction, but the parallel  isn’t convincing.

These characters could exist at any time, at any place.

The tone is downbeat. Rattigan’s instinct was to undercut melodrama with humour. That doesn’t happen enough here. Rattigan’s smart, pacy dialogue is slowed to a standstill by Davies’s fancy camerawork and let-it-all-hang-out acting.

There’s more cigarette smoke in the air and Vaseline on the lens than in any picture since the Forties, but most films of that era bustled on at a good clip.

Nostalgic: There's more cigarette smoke in the air and Vaseline on the lens than in any picture since the Forties, but these characters could exist at any time, at any place

The performances will be widely praised and work on a scene-by-scene basis, but too many confrontations are played in a leisurely fashion, with every line given the greatest possible weight, as actors tend to if given slack direction.

The cumulative effect is of far too solemn treatment being given to trivial material.

Hiddleston fails to make Freddie likeable, and that makes Weisz’s performance — her most luminous since The Constant Gardener, and a likely Oscar nominee — increasingly hard to empathise with.

By the end, it’s hard not to feel fed up with her whingeing.

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

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 9:53 AM on 25th November 2011

My Week With Marilyn (15)

Verdict: A magical 100 minutes

Rating:

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).

Screen goddess: In playing Marilyn, Michelle Williams might just achieve what the actress did not - win an Oscar

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.

Critical acclaim: Eddie Redmayne playing Clark with Emma Watson's wardrobe mistress

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.

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

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 9:53 AM on 25th November 2011

50/50 (15)

Verdict: Uplifting cancer movie

Rating:

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.

Life-affirming: Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bryce Dallas Howard in 50/50

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.

Deep Blue Sea review: Just a shallow romance

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 8:40 AM on 25th November 2011

The Deep Blue Sea (12a)

Verdict: Too dry and too wet

Rating:

The Deep Blue Sea is an achievement in two areas — it’s well acted and beautiful to look at. But as a drama, director Terence Davies has teamed up with the late playwright Terence Rattigan, and it’s not a match made in heaven. Where Rattigan was glam, Davies is glum.

Previously shot in 1955 with  Vivien Leigh, this is the story of a romantic triangle circa 1950, with a beautiful young wife, Lady Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), walking out of a sexless marriage with judge Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale).

She shacks up in seedy lodgings with former RAF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). Freddie’s a dashing, handsome young chap but nowhere near as much in love with Lady Hester as she is with him.

Damp squib of a love affair: Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz

And therein lies the tragedy: this really isn’t that deep. Despite the emotional hurt on display, there’s not much grandeur. You feel these agonies belong on an agony aunt’s problem page rather than on the big screen.

Davies tries through his camerawork and a couple of musical interludes to link the angst of his characters to the aftermath of wartime destruction, but the parallel  isn’t convincing.

These characters could exist at any time, at any place.

The tone is downbeat. Rattigan’s instinct was to undercut melodrama with humour. That doesn’t happen enough here. Rattigan’s smart, pacy dialogue is slowed to a standstill by Davies’s fancy camerawork and let-it-all-hang-out acting.

There’s more cigarette smoke in the air and Vaseline on the lens than in any picture since the Forties, but most films of that era bustled on at a good clip.

Nostalgic: There's more cigarette smoke in the air and Vaseline on the lens than in any picture since the Forties, but these characters could exist at any time, at any place

The performances will be widely praised and work on a scene-by-scene basis, but too many confrontations are played in a leisurely fashion, with every line given the greatest possible weight, as actors tend to if given slack direction.

The cumulative effect is of far too solemn treatment being given to trivial material.

Hiddleston fails to make Freddie likeable, and that makes Weisz’s performance — her most luminous since The Constant Gardener, and a likely Oscar nominee — increasingly hard to empathise with.

By the end, it’s hard not to feel fed up with her whingeing.

Resistance review: 'What if' Nazi movie that is entirely resistible

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 8:41 AM on 25th November 2011

Resistance (PG)

Verdict: Resistible

Rating:

There have been several ‘what if’ movies about what Britain might have been like had the Nazis occupied us. This is one of the worst.

It’s a sluggish love story about a Welsh farmer’s wife (an underpowered Andrea Riseborough) who discovers in 1944 that her husband has left, presumably to join the anti-Nazi resistance along with most other men of the valley, leaving the women to cope with a German patrol under the leadership of a polite, English-speaking captain (Tom Wlaschiha).

Sluggish love story: A farmer's wife discovers that her husband has left, presumably to join the anti-Nazi resistance

Bit part: The trailer implies Michael Sheen has a starring role in the film, but he makes a cameo appearance

The only star name, Michael Sheen, has a cameo role, though — naughtily — the trailer implies he’s a lead.

Amit Gupta’s flaccid direction leaves plenty of pauses to be filled by actors gazing opaquely into space.

The script, by Gupta and Owen Sheers, based on the latter’s novel, leaves so much unspoken it never begins to work as a cross-cultural love story or tackles its theme of how far collaboration can ever be justified.

All in all, it’s too minor and dull to be worth screening in a cinema.

Too much left unspoken: The film is too minor and to dull to be worth screening in a cinema

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

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 8:39 AM on 25th November 2011

Take Shelter (15)

Verdict: Run Away

Rating:

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.

Justice film review: A slick and competent thriller

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 9:16 PM on 17th November 2011

Justice (15)

Verdict: Slick, competent thriller

Rating:

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.

SCROLL DOWN FOR TRAILER

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.

All-star cast: Guy Pearce (left) stars alongside Nicolas Cage (right) in the film

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

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 9:53 AM on 25th November 2011

My Week With Marilyn (15)

Verdict: A magical 100 minutes

Rating:

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).

Screen goddess: In playing Marilyn, Michelle Williams might just achieve what the actress did not - win an Oscar

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.

Critical acclaim: Eddie Redmayne playing Clark with Emma Watson's wardrobe mistress

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.