Here is this part two of the month’s round up of films to view at home, starting with Amazon Prime
One of the biggest disappointments of 2022 arrives right at the end of the year. Nanny was a major hit at Sundance garnering the top award and his received much critical praise since then. The impressive Anna Diop stars as Aisha who takes a job as a nanny to 5 year old Rose in order to save up enough money to bring her son over from Senegal to live with her in New York. It is a very slow burn with Aisha bonding with the child but her relationship with Rose’s parents, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector) becomes fractured. This may have worked well as a drama about Aisha’s life but the added supernatural level did not work at all for me.
Rating: 5 out of 10
In 2004, director Oliver Marchal released his superb cop thriller 36 Quai des Orfevres. Since then, the former policeman has worked steadily in the genre without any of his films having a similar impact. Overdose, though not reaching the heights of his masterwork deserves some more recognition. It is densely plotted, based on a novel by Pierre Pouchairet, telling the story of two detectives initially working on separate crimes coming together as the cases merge. Sara Bellaiche (Sofia Essaidi) is investigating a drug smuggling operation and Richard Cross (Assaad Bouab) is looking into the murders of two teenage boys. It is a little disorientating at first but once the plotlines become clear, it is gripping and gritty stuff.
Rating: 8 out of 10
The other main recommendation on Amazon Prime this month is About Fate. The plot is very familiar, as just dumped Margot (Emma Roberts) manages to persuade a man she has just met, recently engaged Griffin (Thomas Mann) to pretend to be her boyfriend at her sister’s wedding. If you can believe that Emma Roberts is struggling to find a partner then there is so much to enjoy. The leads have good chemistry and the supporting cast that includes Madelaine Petsch and Cheryl Hines are all good.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Also on Amazon Prime…
Spoof movies can be absolutely hilarious, think Airplane! or the Naked Gun trilogy. Or they can be embarrassingly bad, such as Disaster Movie or the string of similarly named films that came out in the early part of this century. Exorcism at 60000 Feet falls firmly into the latter camp. Horror and aeroplane disaster movies are the targets for this cheap looking comedy. Gag after gag falls flat and the over the top performances do not help.
In Meet Cute, Sheila (Kaley Cuoco) finds she can travel back in time in order to fix her boyfriend’s problems. Even fans of Cuoco will find that this takes an awfully long time to get going. Plodding romantic comedy Something From Tiffany’s has little to offer other than Zoey Deutch in the lead role as a woman who accidentally obtains someone else’s engagement ring and finds love as a result. Very corny. In The Honeymoon a newly married man persuades his wife to allow his recently sacked best friend to go on honeymoon with them. Crude and embarrassing to watch.
Ratings out of 10:
Exorcism at 60000 Feet: 2
Meet Cute: 3.5
Something From Tiffany’s: 3
The Honeymoon: 1.5
On Sky Movies, The Amazing Maurice is an animated depiction of a Terry Pratchett book. Maurice is a ginger cat who can not only talk but also has befriended a group of talking rats. They are running a scam together where the rats pretend to infest a town and Maurice charges the residents to rid them of the pests. When they turn up at a new town though, they may have met their match. This is mostly a pleasant enough family film and the characters of the individual rats are particularly well defined. Also, Emilia Clarke is great as a young woman who befriends Maurice’s gang. However, the villain is particularly underwhelming, and frankly ridiculous, and whilst Maurice is billed as the main character, he is side-lined from a lot of the story.
Hounded has quite an impressive British cast, including Samantha Bond, James Lance and Larry Lamb. But this take The Most Dangerous Game feels pretty tired and cheap looking. A few months ago, we had the cheesy Roberto Baggio biopic and Der Kaiser, chronicling the career of Franz Beckenbauer has the same issues. Both the attempts to insert the actors into actual match footage and the attempts at period detail is pretty unconvincing.
Ratings out of 10:
The Amazing Maurice: 5.5
Hounded: 4.5
Der Kaiser: 4
The good people at Sky have given me 6 months free access to AppleTV, so I have caught up with a few 2022 movies on that service. In The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Zac Efron stars as Chickie Donohue who is living an unfulfilled life in New York in 1967. Believing the troops in Vietnam, including a few of his friends, are getting a raw deal with the war being wrongly portrayed as unjust, he decides he will go to the country and deliver them beers. This adaptation of a bizarre true story is pretty uneven. It starts in a very pedestrian way and is much too long, with at least four endings. However, the core of the story is much more entertaining, with both Efron and Russell Crowe, who plays a reporter he befriends, excellent.
Causeway is a brilliant lowkey and touching drama from newcomer Lila Neugebauer. Soldier Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) has suffered a brain injury whilst serving in Afghanistan. She returns to her home town in Louisiana to recuperate though she is initially eager to go back to her army job. She also befriends James (Brian Tyree Henry) when she takes her van to him to be repaired. What follows is a few weeks in Lynsey’s life as she tries to learn to live a civilian life. There are no dramatic speeches, grandstanding moments or revelatory scenes and the film is all the better for it. Lawrence has never been better and Henry is truly outstanding, as is Jayne Houdyshell who briefly appears as Lynsey’s carer. A beautifully made, moving movie.
Spirited is a lacklustre kids musical take on A Christmas Carol. Will Ferrell does not recapture the charm of Elf and a subdued Ryan Reynolds is wasted. There are also no memorable tunes. I bet when Emancipation went into development, Apple could smell the Oscars it would generate. The trials of a runaway slave in 1860’s Louisiana is the sort of thing The Academy lap-up. However, star and producer Will Smith’s slap has probably put paid to most awards recognition. It is earnestly told and director Antoine Fuqua adds some visual flair, but it all feels very familiar.
Ratings out of 10:
The Greatest Beer Run Ever: 6
Causeway: 9
Spirited: 3
Emancipation: 5.5
Over on Netflix, we have another new festive movie in the shape of A Not So Merry Christmas. It is a Mexican remake of a recent Brazilian film, and that just about sums up its originality. A man is forced to live Christmas Eve over and over again in this forced and tiresome comedy.
It is, though, better than another ‘comedy’, this time from Turkey, Private Lesson. A student poses as a tutor, coaching others to achieve their life and love girls. It is horribly acted and completely unfunny with the year’s most annoying score from Alp Yenier. In The Marriage App, a couple who are having issues in their marriage try a new app that initially works but ultimately causes them more problems. I had high hopes after a fun opening scene, but the rest of the film did not live up to that.
Away from the misfiring comedies, My Name is Vendetta is a nuts and bolts thriller that works pretty well. Alessandro Gassmann stars as Santo, an ex-mafia hitman who is now living a peaceful life with his wife and daughter Sofia (Ginevra Francesconi). Sofia is oblivious to her Dad’s past but when the father of a man killed by Santo tracks him down and murders his wife, the pair go on the run. This is a straightforward revenge tale, but it is economically told with some decent action sequences.
I feared that Norwegian movie Troll would feature too much fairy-tale mumbo-jumbo. However, it is a pleasingly straightforward creature feature. There is nothing startlingly new but the effects are fine and it moves at a good pace.
In 7 Women and a Murder, five family members, a maid and a neighbour are stuck in a remote house during a snowy Christmas Eve with just the corpse of one of the women’s murdered husband. This is a well set up whodunnit, though some of the acting is over the top.
White Noise had some good reviews on its brief cinema release. With Adam Driver in the lead role and Noah Baumbach directing his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s celebrated book, I had high hopes. This was, therefore, desperately disappointing. All of the characters talk in the same, annoying manner with Don Cheadle giving a stunningly smug performance as a professor. Pretentious claptrap.
Ratings out of 10:
A Not So Merry Christmas: 2.5
Private Lesson: 1
The Marriage App: 3
My Name is Vendetta: 6.5
Troll: 6.5
7 Women and a Murder: 6.5
White Noise: 2
Finally, to a film I rented on Amazon but will also be available on most other rental services. I am not as big a fan of Park Chan-wook as many others are, and Decision To Leave will not change that. A cop investigates a mysterious death of a rock climber and becomes involved with his widow. Overlong and over complicated.
Rating: 5 out of 10