Here is my usual round up of new films seen at home this month.
It has been a thin month on Amazon Prime so we have just one movie this month, the much anticipated, by me at least, Greenland 2: Migration.
Director Ric Roman Waugh and writer Chris Sparling, with Mitchell LaFortune, return for a sequel to 2020’s Greenland. Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin are also back as John and Allison Garrity, survivors of the Clarke Comet impact. At the end of the first film, they made it to the Thule Air Base in Greenland but when it is destroyed by an earthquake, they have to evacuate and fight for survival again. I thoroughly enjoyed the original film, it was a treat for disaster movie fans. This is more in the survival thriller genre but large parts of it work well, particularly the early scenes in the shelter and a hazardous trek across the dried up English channel. However, the effects are less impressive and the maudlin ending did nothing for me.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10
On Netflix:
Apex
A rock climber, Sasha (Charlize Theron), finds herself being tracked by a hunter (Taron Egerton) in the wild. Now she must work to outwit the him. Baltasar Kormákur’s survival thriller gets off to a rough start with, with a sequence on a Norwegian mountain that boasts some appalling CGI. Once the action moves to Australia, things improve and we are presented with a decent two hander as Sasha has to use all her skills and ingenuity to survive. Nothing ground breaking, but diverting enough.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Director Olivia Newman and John Whittington have adapted this adaptation of the novel of the same name by Shelby Van Pelt. Sally Field stars as a widow who works at a local aquarium and finds joy again when she forms an unlikely bond with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, and a wayward young man who comes to town in search of family. With an extended voice over from Marcellus in the first few minutes, I thought I was in for something incredibly twee and hard to watch.
Thankfully, he is sidelined for large parts of the film, and I would argue that it would have been better without that aquatic bond. Field, with her first lead role in a decade, is fantastic, nailing both her funny and dramatic scenes. She also has great chemistry with both Pullman and Colm Meaney, a shop owner who takes a shine to her. It does get a little too slushy towards the end though.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Ladies First
This loose remake of 2018 French film I Am Not an Easy Man stars Sacha Baron Cohen as a male chauvinist who finds his life of money, power and casual flings upended when he wakes up in a parallel world dominated by women. I find Cohen about as funny as genital warts and he is awful in this lumpen, obvious comedy that wastes a talented supporting cast. Makes Mel Gibson’s similarly themed What Women Want seem like a masterpiece.
Rating: 3 out of 10
Finally this month on Netflix are two documentaries. The site is awash with loving docs about people in the entertainment industry, inevitably using clips, fresh and archive interviews and never before seen home movies. Marty, Life Is Short falls firmly into that category. He comes across as a warm and well liked person which makes this a pleasant watch but there is nothing really noteworthy in Lawrence Kasdan’s film.
The Bus: A French Football Mutiny was more promising as it looks back at the France football team’s notorious implosion at the 2010 World Cup. Both the players who ended up refusing to train and the management team, who heaped lie upon lie to cover up their gross incompetence get to put their side of the story, but manager Raymond Domenech still looks like a clown all these years later. It is a great story, well told, though the quality of the team is overstated in an attempt to make their downfall more dramatic. They had already flopped horribly at the previous Euros and tournament winners Spain were on a completely different level.
Ratings out of 10:
Marty, Life Is Short: 6
The Bus: A French Football Mutiny: 7.5
Over on Sky, subscribers can see a film that was a box office hit earlier in the year, “Wuthering Heights“.
The burning question going into Emerald Fennell’s retelling of Emily Brontë’s only novel, published in 1847, was do we need yet another version of this very well known story? A cursory glance at IMBD revealed at least nine films in English as well as a number of foreign language tellings and TV shows. This latest version of the torrid love story set on the Yorkshire moors, stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff.
After Andrea Arnold’s version in 2011, I thought we had seen the last of white actors playing Heathcliff, though Elordi’s miscasting is the least of this film’s problems. Robbie is too old for her role and Charlotte Mellington is awful as the younger Cathy. But it is Fennell who is mostly to blame for this fiasco. Her overwrought visual style, full of sexual references, is so absurd I felt I was watching a Mel Brooks or Zucker Brothers parody. Only Martun Clunes, as Cathy’s father, emerges with any credit.
Rating: 1.5 out of 10
The following can be bought or rented on the usual services:
The President’s Cake
In 1990s Iraq, 9-year-old Lamia is selected to bake a cake for her class to celebrate Saddam Hussein’s birthday. She travels with her gran from her humble rural home to the city to get the ingredients, but when they get separated and she has no money, Lamia scrambles to find those ingredients for the compulsory task, fearing punishment if she fails. A simple tale in many ways from Hasan Hadi, but it is a brilliant snapshot of life under the authoritarian regime, with the blind loyalty of so many of the citizens and Lamia encountering a range of people on her quest, some kindly and some evil. It is elevated further by a startlingly great performance by Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as the young girl.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Hamlet
This adaptation of Shakespeare’s most celebrated play, directed by Aneil Karia and starring Riz Ahmed, reimagines the classic tragedy in a contemporary London setting. Bringing the bard up to date, rarely works, with the most notable exception being the great Christine Edzard’s As You Like It in 1992. Also, any version of Hamlet is likely to pale in comparison to Kenneth Branagh’s majestic full text version in 1996. However, this is a decent effort with a compelling lead performance, great support from Timothy Spall as Polonius and Michael Leslie does a good job in adapting the sizeable play.
Rating: 7 out of 10
The Last Spy
This documentary looks at the life of 100-year-old CIA spymaster Peter Sichel. From escaping Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee to becoming the first CIA Station chief in post-war Berlin and a key player in Cold War espionage. There are no bells and whistles here. It is mostly Sichel telling his own story with the occasional other contributor and a little bit of archive footage. So, your enjoyment will depend on whether you inherently find the subject interesting. After a pedestrian start covering the war years, I thought it got better and more relevant.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10
Jimpa
Hannah (Olivia Colman), along with her nonbinary teenager, Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), travels to Amsterdam to visit her gay father Jimpa (John Lithgow). When Frances wishes to stay with their grandfather for a year, Hannah is forced to re-examine her parenting and her past. Colman is excellent, bringing a warmth and providing the only fully fleshed out character, but Lithgow throws himself into his role impressively. But much of the film feels more like a debate on gender identity and sexual preference rather than a living, breathing drama.
Rating: 5.5 out of 10
Killer Whale
Cellist Maddie (Virginia Gardner), a talented cellist, is struggling to recover from a tragedy. To help her heal, her best friend Trish (Mel Jarnson), surprises her with a luxury vacation to Thailand. They meet up with an expat, Josh (Mitchell Hope) and go to explore a secluded atoll lagoon but are ambushed by an Orca. This felt like a mash up of The Shallows and Fall but was no where near as good as either. Trish is incredibly annoying and there is a lot of woeful green screen. But a whale makes a change from a shark and Gardner is decent.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Paramount Plus is a freebie from Sky and it is not a service I would pay for.
That is exemplified by two films I watched on it this month. In Violent Ends, Lucas Frost (Billy Magnussen) was born into a violent crime family. His attempts to live a peaceful life in the Ozark Mountains with his fiancée, Emma (Alexandra Shipp) are put in jeopardy when his cousin, Eli (Jared Bankens), perpetrates an armed robbery with brutal consequences. John-Michael Powell’s thriller is somehow both simplistic and over complicated. Not terrible but no better than hundreds of streaming movies.
Stone Cold Fox is a slight improvement as it has more energy and originality. Kiernan Shipka stars as Fox, a young woman who breaks out of an abusive commune, but when the queenpin kidnaps her younger sister and sends a crooked cop after her, she has no choice but to infiltrate the very place she escaped from. The main problem is that it takes too long to establish all the characters and to slip into gear. But Shipka and Kiefer Sutherland, as the cop, are pretty good.
Ratings out of 10:
Violent Ends: 4.5
Stone Cold Fox: 5.5
Movies 24 continues to show the latest offerings from Hallmark.
After a good-ish start to the year, we are now being served up dross with increasingly bizarre storylines, as exemplified by two films this month. In The Stars Between Us, a reporter and an astronomy professor who had a memorable passing encounter during a solar eclipse seven years previously are thrown together by chance when the planets align once more. Michael Robison’s romantic drama really scrapes the bottom of the Hallmark barrel. It gets off to a bad start with the professor defending astrology and it flatlines from there.
A greenhouse worker and the son of a CEO form an unlikely pair in Kentucky Roses. They come together to save the Kentucky Derby rose blanket. No, I had no idea what that was either. Turns out it is a rose garland given to the winner of the race. That sounds like incredibly low stakes to me, but for the first part of this film, I thought they might pull it off because of how well the leads, Andrew W. Walker and Odette Annable, worked together. But then a very dull plot kicks in and my worst fears were realised.
Ratings out of 10:
The Stars Between Us: 2
Kentucky Roses: 4