Preposterous. Overblown. Completely unbelievable. But incredibly entertaining.

Bob Odenkirk stars as Hutch Mansell, an everyday loser who always forgets to put the garbage out, sleeps with his back to his wife and goes to a crummy job. In Edgar Wright fashion we get to witness his monotonous routine; we’re fed quick snippets of each part of his day, repeated again and again. This is a man sleepwalking through life.

Until one day a couple of armed burglars break into his house. In this type of scenario most people would hide and curl up into a little ball. But after grabbing a golf club, Hutch has an opportunity to turn the tables. But upon noticing that the burglars don’t actually have any bullets in their firearm, he stops himself from taking a swing. His family are mad and even the cops make snide comments, but something inside him begins to stir. A previous self that has been asleep for a long time.

Hutch tracks the burglars down but when he discovers that they have a sick baby, he leaves. But as he returns home on the bus, a group of Russian thugs get on board, harassing everyone. Rather than run away, Hutch uses this as an opportunity to vent his frustration. Hutch beats, bludgeons and stabs them. He beats one guy so badly that he performs an emergency tracheotomy on him with a soda straw just so that he doesn’t choke to death. It’s a ludicrous scene; a middle aged man against a large group of young guys, but it’s performed with such gusto and with such grisly detail that it works. It’s cartoonish but it’s still hard hitting enough to give it weight.

It’s also wonderful to live vicariously through Hutch in this scene. I’m sure that anyone who’s lived in a large city and has had to take public transport every day, has experienced multiple occasions where they’ve encountered the dregs of humanity. Who hasn’t dreamed of throwing someone headfirst into a pole or choking them out with a stop request cord?

Unbeknownst to Hutch, one of the men that he hospitalizes is the younger brother of a Russian crime lord. So rather predictably, the Russian mafioso swears revenge. However, what the Russians don’t know is that Hutch is a former government assassin. Hence why Hutch was able to take out a whole crew by himself.

So what we kind of have here is True Lies meets Falling Down meets A History of Violence meets John WIck. It doesn’t have the same quality of action as True Lies, nor is it as funny, and it’s certainly not a character study like Falling Down, but it does have lots of colour and lots of excitement.

It also helps that the film has a very lean running time of 92 minutes. The film never gets a chance to outstay its welcome.

One of the most amusing elements in the film is Christopher Lloyd, who plays Hutch’s father. Living in a retirement home and barely speaking, he, like Hutch, seems like a shell of a human being. He’s so vulnerable and helpless that when the shit hits the fan with Hutch and the Russians, they send a couple of guys over to kill the old man. To the strains of ‘What a Wonderful World’, they turn up to the nursing home to put a bullet in his head. He’s asleep like a baby, an old Western playing on the television, but when one of the Russians cocks the hammer on his gun, he wakes up and sticks his finger between the hammer and the primer, preventing the gun from firing. He then pulls out a sawn off shotgun from under his blanket and blows the Russians away. An orderly comes running in but Christopher Lloyd has the volume on the TV turned up and he mistakenly thinks the commotion was from the Western. It’s complete hokum. It makes no sense at all. There'd be blood everywhere. There’d be bodies. The sound of a shotgun going off could never be confused with a movie gun even if it was turned up loud. The old man would never get away with it. But it’s just such a funny scene that you go with it.

The only time that the film gets a bit too ridiculous is during the car chase when Hutch's car gets riddled with thousands of bullets and he somehow doesn’t get shot. But then the film redeems itself during the bonkers final action scene by having Hutch, his dad and his brother kill what seems like hundreds of Russians in a vast array of inventive ways. Explosives are detonated, steel rods are fired and refrigerated guns are used. And then to make it even better, in the climatic moments, they play Gerry and the Pacemaker’s version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ as the family stand together shoulder to shoulder, massacring their enemy. As a massive Liverpool fan, I couldn’t help but love this moment.

Apparently this could be the start of a franchise. Whether that’s a good idea or not, I don’t know. Where else is there to go? Is it just going to be bigger and louder with even more people getting killed? Most of the film’s charm is how modest it is. I’m not confident that sequels will see any improvement but at least there’ll always be this; a small, grungy, funny action film with tons of blood and with the smarts to know to punch hard and get out while the going is good.

Pieces of a Woman is what happens when rich, entitled white folk have bad shit happen to them. Do they take responsibility for their bad decisions? Ha! Of course they don’t. They blame anything, everything and everyone they can.

The film begins with a technically virtuosic sequence where the lead character Martha (Vanessa Kirby) goes into labour. She’s got an awesome apartment, has a studly boyfriend played by the trainwreck of a human being that is Shia LaBeouf and has decided to give birth at home. Fair enough. That’s a perfectly reasonable decision. However, it’s also a risky decision. If you give birth at home, you’re exposing yourself to danger. You’re like a tightrope walker without a safety net. If something bad happens, you’re in trouble.

Anyone who’s made this decision should be completely honest with themselves. They should know that the potential for tragedy is far greater. But of course these assholes just want to have a beautiful home birth, listen to some shitty music on Spotify and stay out of that icky hospital where people can actually help them.

The opening sequence is well choreographed but is ruined by the acting of Vanessa Kirby. She doesn’t look like she’s in labour; she looks like she’s high. Or that she’s chugged a couple of bottles of wine. I’ve seen so many labour sequences in movies and television shows over the years and the acting from her is one of the worst. The smoke and mirrors of the shooting can’t disguise shitty acting.

The best acting comes from Molly Parker as the poor midwife who has to deal with these pampered douchebags. The creeping dread of this complicated labour is very subtly conveyed ,and she does her absolute best in difficult circumstances, but you can tell that she’s shitting bricks.

Despite some difficulties, the baby is born. All seems well. Shia LaBeouf even cracks out an old film camera and begins snapping away. Who the fuck does this? His baby is two seconds old and his first thought is to grab a camera. He doesn’t take a minute to enjoy the moment. He doesn’t hug his wife. He doesn’t use his eyes to gaze upon the wonder of his newborn baby. No, he snaps away with an old film camera. I don’t know why, but the film camera part of it makes it worse for me. I absolutely love film, but are you telling me that this roughneck is into film photography? Get the fuck out of here.

Five seconds later the baby begins to struggle to breath and turns blue. The assholes don’t notice this but the poor midwife does and tries her best to intervene. An ambulance soon arrives but it’s too late. Bet you this wouldn’t have happened in a hospital.

Is that too blunt of a statement? Is that too reductive? Is it too insensitive? But for the whole movie I was waiting for someone to mention this. Martha’s mother kind of broaches the subject, but it’s only in the final sequence that the question is explicitly asked. And it’s asked by the midwife’s lawyer. But the subject is quickly dismissed.

Instead Martha, upset by the questioning, gets to have a break. When she comes back, she asks if she can address the court directly. ‘This is highly unusual’ everyone mutters, which is movie code for ‘what’s about to follow is implausible BS’. So Martha addresses the court and makes a little speech. She says that what happened wasn’t the midwife’s fault. Everyone watching is meant to cry rivers of fat tears. I, however, was fuming. So this rich asshole gets to pardon the poor peasant? The person who was trying to act responsibly and do their best in difficult circumstances? How wonderful. How heartwarming. Yes, you’ve only put this woman through hell. You’ve only put her through months of stress and agony. You’ve only potentially taken her freedom away from her because things didn’t go perfectly. How dare you. And how dare this fucking film. The midwife doesn’t even get to say anything. She just gets to look worried and sad and then grateful. In reality she would despise Martha. The shit that Martha has put her through. Surely her professional reputation is in the toilet because of this. Who would hire her now?

So no, the ending didn’t warm the cockles of my heart. In fact, my rage only intensified during the final coda.

The ending has a child walking through a vast field and then climbing a tree. A woman calls the child and of course it’s Martha. They then walk hand in hand back to a large house. Does it make me a bad person that my sympathy is vastly eroded when the characters are disgustingly wealthy? Try losing a child when you don’t have a rich mother to bail you out. Try losing a child when you have to deal with bullshit from insurance companies. Try losing a child when your boyfriend isn’t a coked up manchild and yet you still separate anyway because the grief is too great.

The depiction here of Martha’s boyfriend Sean, played by Shia LaBeouf, is remarkably simplistic and one note. He cries a little bit but he’s mostly filled with blind rage. In one scene, not long after the incident at the beginning, he bullies his girlfriend into trying to have sex. They’re sitting on the couch and he grabs her hand and puts it on his penis. And then even though she isn’t physically or emotionally ready, forces himself on her. It’s essentially a rape scene.

As well as being a rapist asshole, Sean is also a complete moron. In one scene he spews the following toe-curling line: ‘Why are you trying to disappear my child?’ This is in response to his girlfriend trying to take apart the baby’s room. Who talks like this? Did he suddenly turn into Yoda? And Sean then goes on to say that he ‘misses’ his child? You mean the child that was alive for about ten seconds and the child that you loved so much you had to crack out your film camera for? You might be sad that your child didn’t get to live. You might wonder what kind of amazing future your child might have had if circumstances had been different. But you miss them? It’s like what someone would say if they’re trying to convince themselves they have emotions.

After this nonsense, Sean begins an affair with Martha’s cousin, who, would you believe it, is a lawyer who’s going to represent Martha in court. Why are Sean and Martha’s cousin doing this? Couples fall apart after trauma for a variety of reasons. Why reduce it to some soap opera level bullshit? Him and the cousin even start doing some coke after they have sex in her office, which is tacky as fuck.

I also find the depiction of the cousin completely unbelievable. She’s dowdy and shy looking and yet she’s supposed to be some fearsome lawyer. She also keeps on spouting disgusting shit about how the midwife must pay.

But back to Sean’s character. There was one scene of domestic abuse that was so over the top and ripe with student-level symbolism that I couldn’t help but laugh. Martha has gone out to a club and flirted with a man to communicate her intense suffering. Because this is what always has to happen in films of this ilk. It’s not enough to just suffer. People have to suffer beautifully while flirting with other beautiful people because they’re so damn sad. And then she comes home to her boyfriend and they get into an argument. She’s smoking on the couch and he throws a yoga ball in her face. She doesn’t say a thing. She doesn’t even look mad. She just stubs out the cigarette on the sofa (to communicate her smouldering rage) while her feet rest on the deflating yoga ball (to communicate that she’s sinking) as withered plants and flowers surround her (to communicate the death of their relationship). We then cut to a shot of an unfinished bridge (to communicate the gulf that exists between them). All of this happens in about twenty seconds. You couldn’t lay it on thicker if you tried.

But Sean isn’t even the most heinous character in this movie. That dubious distinction would go to Martha’s mother played by Ellen Burstyn. At first she seems like a harmless rich old lady. She even buys Martha and Sean a new car. But as the film develops we see what a bitter, twisted old fuck she is. Everything that has happened is the fault of the midwife, and the midwife must pay for her mistakes. Because isn’t that what rich people do? Rather than look at things from every perspective; rather than accept the complexity of life, there always has to be someone to blame when things don’t go the way they want. Because they’re rich. Nothing bad is meant to happen to rich people. Infant deaths and things of that nature only exist in the realm of the poor. So it must be the midwife’s fault. And she must go to jail because I don’t get to hold MY granddaughter.

In one scene Martha’s mother relates her strength of character. She says how she was born during the Second World War and how her mother would have to scrounge for food in order to survive. She barely had enough food to produce milk. In fact, people told her to get rid of the baby; that the baby wasn’t going to make it. But then to prove her strength, she held the baby upside down and the baby raised her head. Martha’s mother tells this story as a pep talk. What? So if I was an underfed baby and I still had the strength to raise my head, you should be able to get over your grief? That’s bonkers.

And Martha’s mother relates this story like she can personally remember it. Like she can remember being that baby. She doesn’t tell it like ‘my mother told me I raised my head’. No, it’s like she can remember being a few weeks old, which of course is complete and utter horseshit. It also speaks to a deeper, most insidious attitude in general. Well, if I can overcome malnutrition why can’t all those starving children in Ethiopia too? Well, if I can become stinking rich why can’t all these poor people as well? If only people would pull themselves up by their bootstraps like me.

To further illustrate this woman’s character, or lack thereof, she solves the problem of Martha’s boyfriend Sean by throwing money at him. Sean has a pretty good job so how much money would it cost to make him disappear? $10,000? $50,000? $200,000? I’m guessing it’s a bonkers amount, seeing as the check does the intended job. But again, how disgusting is this person? People are just objects or problems to be dealt with and disposed of.

Despite this, once the trial is over, we’re again meant to feel warm and fuzzy when Martha has dinner with her mother at some fancy restaurant. Martha’s mother is becoming forgetful but Martha sympathetically holds her hand. Am I meant to give a shit? I hope her mother forgets everything. I hope she forgets about her daughter. I hope she forgets herself. I hope she forgets every fond memory in her head. But most of all, I hope she doesn’t get to enjoy her granddaughter.

When it was announced that Paul Greengrass was making a movie called News of the World, I legitimately thought he was making a gritty, documentary-style expose of the demise of the British tabloid of the same name; a probe into the phone hacking scandal. Instead it turned out that he was making a Tom Hanks western. I was intrigued.

I really shouldn’t have been. News of the World is hamstrung by a dull, stodgy, cliche-ridden screenplay and pantomime villains. It also features the worst action sequences of any Paul Greengrass movie and is devoid of any excitement or tension. At best, it feels half-hearted; at worst it’s completely inept.

The story centers on Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, played by Tom Hanks, who goes from town to town with a handful of newspapers and tells the locals what’s going on in the world. He has all the showmanship of a blind, wet dog. If I went to one of these readings, I’d want my money back, such is the excruciating boredom of him relating local news in a tortuously slow and important manner.

Things pick up when Kidd stumbles upon a bloodbath in a forest. There he finds a young girl named Johana who only speaks Kiowa and German. He tries his best to arrange a safe passage home for her but no one can help. So it falls to him to take her home.

You can immediately guess what’s going to happen. They don’t speak the same language and the old man and the kid don’t like each other. He resents her and she’s scared and angry. So something terrible is going to happen, right? He’s going to abandon her in the desert or she’s going to slit his throat while he sleeps? Who am I kidding? Of course they’re not. They’re going to slowly bond and develop a long, lasting affection for one another and share each other’s cultures and become friends on Facebook and... Sorry, I’ve nodded off.

It might be an incredibly predictable trajectory for the movie, but the relationship between Kidd and Johana is actually by far the best thing in the movie. Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel are both excellent. Yes, this movie hardly stretches Hanks’s acting range but he’s still a marvelous actor. It’s just a crying shame that he has so little to work with.

The point at which I knew that this film was going to be a crushing failure was when Kidd and Johana encounter a gang of outlaws who want to buy the girl. The thought alone is terrible. We all know what the leering criminals want out of her and what they’ll do. So when Kidd and Johana skip town and a chase ensues, a tense, white knuckle thriller of a scene should follow, shouldn’t it?

It should, but it doesn’t. This paedo posse is populated by complete blithering morons. They trap Kidd and Johana atop a rocky hill and begin the most boring shoot out in modern times. There’s zero tension, zero excitement and zero intensity. The dialogue basically amounts to ‘Oooh, I’m gonna get you!’ And then we begin with the whole nonsense of ‘You can join us!’ Oh, will Kidd betray Johana and join the paedo posse? What do you think, dear reader?

The hilltop shootout also suffers the ignominy of having the worst effects shot since Legolas Greenleaf mounted a horse by levitating like a jerky clusterfuck of pixels in The Two Towers. Kidd crushes one of his foes by pushing a massive boulder down the hill. Pretty simple, eh? Shouldn’t be too difficult for the practical effects department. Instead, for some reason only known to the filmmakers, they decide to use a CGI boulder, and by god it looks terrible. Like Legolas it looks like it comes from a bad video game.

So this garbage shot takes place and then we still have to suffer the most boring game of cat and mouse in decades. Of course Kidd manages to kill the dunderhead but not before we’ve had a nap or two.

What makes this scene all the more bewildering is that we know that Greengrass is an excellent action director. The Bourne movies, United 93, Captain Phillips and 22 July are all evidence of that. It’s like he’s consciously tried to get away from the ‘shaky cam’ tag but has failed to successfully adapt to a new style.

Once this sequence is over we almost immediately stumble upon more stupidity. Our heroes are riding along a path when some ne'er-do-wells emerge from the bushes. Apparently they’re a militia group who are looking to keep the area clear of outsiders. In reality, they just want to enslave the local population and amass wealth.

The leader of this group is so overwhelmingly narcissistic that he’s produced his own newspaper. This paper includes drawings of the leader doing all kinds of important things that he’s obviously never done, like curing leprosy and feeding orphans. They’re so cheesy that I half expected that one of the pictures would be of The Last Supper with the leader standing in for Jesus Christ.

The leader of this group gets Kidd to read this self-published rag to the local townsfolk. Kidd refuses and instead reads from another paper. The story he recounts is of a group of coal miners who turn against their harsh leader. Oh, I wonder what Captain Kidd is up to here?

The writing in this scene is so clunky and awkward that I felt sorry for Tom Hanks having to spew this claptrap. That this story could so quickly and effectively rile up this group of people is just preposterous. And would you believe it, but Kidd and Johanna use the commotion to escape from the militia, until of course the leader shows up as they try to mount their wagon. But after taking an age to shoot Captain Kidd (of course), the leader gets shot by Johanna. And then when another bad guy turns up to shoot Johanna, a kid shows up at the last second to save the day. It’s all so cliched and predictable that it almost makes you want to weep.

The kid who saves the day is a young man, and the actor who plays him is just awful. He has a weird, creepy vibe that makes you hope that he disappears quickly. And thankfully, he does.

Eventually Captain Kidd returns Johanna to her extended family. Her uncle, who is a complete asshole, is immediately whining and complaining and saying that she needs to work (get a job!). He’s only known her for ten seconds!

Of course the extended family treat Johanna like shit and of course Captain Kidd, after a tearful excursion to his wife's grave, eventually adopts her. And they go around reading the newspaper to everyone, and have an awesome time doing it. But the film is so poorly written and poorly constructed that I couldn’t give a crap. Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel do their best but no one could make this crap work. It’s such a disappointing film given the talent behind and in front of the camera.

For all intents and purposes, Dressed to Kill is a remake of Psycho. Both films have a lusty female lead who gets horribly murdered at the end of the first act. Both films have a killer who has conflicting personalities. Both films have men dressing up as women. And both films are obsessed with showers.

However, the quality of the films are vastly different. For the most part, besides the final dialogue with the doctor and the bland lead characters, Psycho is a masterpiece. Dressed to Kill, on the other hand, is not. It’s silly, trashy and very hard to take seriously. It’s great fun, but sometimes in spite of itself.

Another way that Dressed to Kill differs from Psycho is that Psycho has an amazing beginning but then kind of runs out of steam towards the end. Dressed to Kill, though, has an atrocious first act but then picks up once our heroine is murdered.

It’s kind of hard to put into words just how terrible the first 30-40 minutes are. I haven’t cackled so much at a movie in a long time.

The film opens with Angie Dickinson having a long, steamy, luxurious shower while watching her husband shave. The sheer rugged masculinity of this old geezer scraping hairs off his face with a kickass macho cut throat razor turns her on. She can’t help but fondle herself with a bar of soap as we’re shown many close-ups of her tits. It’s filmed in the same kind of soft-focus nonsense way that De Palma films the shower scene in Carrie. Like that scene, everything is achingly romantic as bullshit twinkly music plays.

The twist in the Carrie shower scene is that Carrie gets her period. The twist here is that a second man appears from within the steam to rape Angie. Is it a nightmare? Or is it a fantasy? We immediately cut to Angie having unsatisying sex with her husband. Once he comes, he gives her the most hilarious, patronising, ‘You did a good job’ slap in the face. No wonder she wants sexy steam guy to rape her.

The sequence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is much lauded in certain critical circles, but I find it profoundly silly. It may have all the typical De Palma elements - long takes, split screens, lack of dialogue, great visuals - but the actual story that it tells is laughable.

Angie hangs out in the museum, watching the world go by, when she notices a guy taking an interest in her. He looks like complete Eurotrash (although we later find out that he has a very American name). He’s got huge sunglasses, jet black hair that looks like it’s been sandblasted on his head and he has a habit of thoughtfully sucking on his pen. He looks like he should be selling turtlenecks on the Cote d’Azur. Roger Moore would be envious of him.

Angie and the man give each other eyes and then eventually he sits down next to her, sucking on his pen like he’s oh so thoughtfully contemplating the artwork and totally not inviting her to suck on something else. They sit there for a while like a pair of idiots until she removes her glove, accidentally revealing a huge ring. In a hilarious moment, like Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville turning their backs on Kelly Cates, he gets up and runs off. Much nonsense follows. Where’s the guy? Where’s my glove? The guy has my glove and has terrified me with it! I must run off! Oh, now I’m outside and only have one glove. I must throw it on the floor and litter! Oh, now the guy is in a taxi outside the Met and is beckoning me by waving the other glove out of the window! Yeah, that’s totally not creepy and disrespectful. I’ll totally get into the cab with him.

Once they’re in the cab, they begin making out. And before you know it, in almost a magic trick, the man has Angie’s panties off and is going down on her. The music in the scene is hilarious. It’s very sweet and romantic, because, you know, there’s nothing more romantic than getting on the floor of a dirty, disgusting New York taxi and having someone perform oral sex on you; a complete stranger who beckoned you like you were a dog or a cat. And also having a slobbering cabbie watch it.

The next scene is my favourite. After an afternoon of rigorous, Olympic-level sex, Angie decides to sneak out of bed and back to her husband. She thinks for a moment, and in split screen, remembers her panties falling to the floor. No shit, we have a split screen of her smiling and her knickers falling off. She then decides to write a note to her one night stand, saying how much she enjoyed herself. She goes through a couple of drafts and then decides to look at something in the man’s desk drawer. She comes upon a medical report. For a moment, you think that the man might be crazy. That he’s a lunatic killer. But the reveal is so, so much better. The letter says that the man has venereal disease. By this point I was beyond myself. I was laughing like a maniac. You see what happens when you have the audacity to sleep with someone else? You see what happens when you betray your poor, condescending, selfish husband? You get the clap. As Sully in Commando would say, ‘You fuckin’ whore.’

Angie rushes away from her diseased lover but then realises that she’s forgotten her wedding ring. This is after she suffers a withering, dirty look from a small child in an elevator. The child obviously knows that she’s in the presence of a clap-ridden trollop. So Angie presses the elevator button about a million times before going back up to the man’s apartment. But before she can get there, she gets slashed up by a burly woman with a cut-throat razor. You know, because she’s a fucking whore and this is the price of a good time.

The killing, as per usual for De Palma, is a bloodbath. And then in a direct reference to Psycho, we have a shot of a blood-stained Angie Dickinson reaching out as the elevator doors open. It’s exactly the same as Janet Leigh reaching for the shower curtain.

Normally this sort of sequence should bring out the best of De Palma, but the musical score is terrible (I can’t fully explain just how horrible it is) and the reactions from the characters are unintentionally hilarious. Karen Allen’s escort girl witnesses the aftermath of the killing but then a hysterical woman sees Allen holding the weapon and screams like a banshee, thinking she’s the killer. The timing, the acting and the staging are ridiculous.

Once Angie Dickinson is killed, the film improves somewhat. Much like the vastly superior Blow Out, it develops elements of technological, surveillance thriller. Angie’s tech savvy teenage son becomes involved in the case and begins eavesdropping on cops and staking out Michael Caine’s shrink character. All of this stuff is great.

There’s also a fantastic sequence on the New York Subway. But even this is peppered with nonsense. Nancy Allen inadvertently gains the attention of a group of black men who immediately begin intimidating her. They say charming things like, ‘I’m gonna break her fucking ass.’ They’ve obviously become violently aroused at the sight of this prostitute and stalk her like a pack of wild animals. It’s the most cliched depiction of street thugs you’re likely to see. And the scene is made even more strangely amusing by the sight of a terrified Nancy Allen being stalked from one side of the train by a group of angry black men and by being stalked on the other side by a murderous transsexual.

Despite the dubious stereotypes, the scene has a lot of tension and there’s some fantastic deep focus photography. At one point we see Nancy Allen talking to a belligerent cop while the murderer sneaks onto the subway car in the background. And earlier on in the scene there’s a wonderful shot where both the murderer and Nancy Allen turn their head at the same time, both of them a distance apart but both of them perfectly in focus.

There’s a ridiculous but enjoyable scene where Nancy Allen comes onto Michael Caine’s shrink character. She needs info on one of his patients so she plans to seduce him so that she can get a look in his appointment book. It’s incredibly silly, what with the very conceit of the scene and the fact that it’s filmed with lightning and thunder (there’s a conflict within Caine...in his pants!). But despite how hokey it is, it works. And then we get the reveal that the murderer is...Michael Caine dressed as a woman!

Again, like Psycho, we have a terrible scene where a doctor conveniently explains everything that has been going on. Apparently Caine’s character has been looking to transition into becoming a woman. But inside Caine’s body there was a fight between the two sexes (!!). The female part didn’t want the masculine part to become dominant, so whenever Caine got aroused by a woman, the female side would come out and kill whoever gave him a boner.

Okay then...

But even though in the current climate that idea sounds offensive, the film is so silly and over the top that it’s hard to take offence. This film isn’t about sexuality or transsexuals. It’s about cinema. It’s a movie about movies. It’s a blatant attempt to remake Psycho and dress it up in different clothes. It’s not a disaster but it’s also not a success. There’s a lot to appreciate in the filmmaking craft and the visual storytelling, but the screenplay is appalling; lots of it is laughable. It even has the really annoying fake out ending, where it seems that the lead character has been brutally murdered but it turns out to be a paranoid dream. Thankfully lots of these ideas would coalesce into the much superior Blow Out.

There’s a scene in American Sniper where Bradley Cooper’s character, with complete sincerity, says that America is the greatest country in the world. As if the worth of countries can be quantified and as if America would be anywhere near the top if they could.

I feel that there’s a complete lack of objectivity in American Sniper. Clint Eastwood obviously feels that Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a great guy when his actions constantly suggest he’s anything but. From kicking down the doors of Iraqis, intimidating men, women and children, and beating up people in their own homes, he’s a reprehensible human being whose cowboy instincts are never used to help the Iraqi people but to perpetuate this mistaken idea of American exceptionalism.

In numerous scenes the American soldiers refer to the idigenous population as ‘savages’. I fully believe that soldiers talk this way, but I never felt that Eastwood was being objective. I feel that he, like the American characters in the movie, feel that they are somehow above the native population. Here the Americans are, rolling into Iraq to save everyone from themselves and their fucked up country, and what gratitude do they show? They don’t evacuate their homes when they’re supposed to and they even try and arm themselves against the invaders. What ingrates.

There’s no attempt here at any complexity. Chris Kyle is portrayed as a serious, committed soldier and the Iraqis are just cannon fodder. They even create a shadowy Syrian sniper counterpart called ‘The Butcher’ who slays people in cold blood and who is just generally filled with misplaced rage. He must be stopped of course by our heroic white hat.

One of the opening scenes has our hero hunting deer with his daddy as a child. Nevermind that Chris has taken his first life, his daddy chides him for not looking after his gun properly. Contrast this to an equivalent scene in Last of the Mohicans where the Native American characters hunt a deer and then give thanks to it after they kill it. They realize the enormity of what they’ve done and the sacrifice that has been made. Chris Kyle’s daddy is just concerned that Chris isn’t looking after his penis extension.

The end of the movie is basically a fantastical ‘my gun is better than your gun’ and ‘my dick is bigger than your dick’ showdown between Chris Kyle and the dastardly Butcher. Of course our hero triumphs with an impossible shot from about a mile away because he’s an American with a massive gun/penis and the other guy is just a little savage with a limp noodle.

The film makes an attempt to acknowledge the difficulties that Chris Kyle had adjusting to civilian life. He can’t concentrate at home when he has to hold his baby (which uncannily resembles a lifeless doll) and a BBQ turns into a nightmare when he almost beats a dog to death. Even in his PTSD he’s a complete asshole.

But then he discovers the joys of helping veterans. By talking to them, you say? Of course not. He helps them by shooting big guns at target ranges.

One of the most risible scenes is when Chris Kyle, who has now got his mojo back, sneaks up on his wife in full cowboy attire and draws a gun on her and makes out like he’s going to force himself on her. So sexy. You get it? The big, shiny six-shooter is his penis. Get it? Nevermind that he’s killed men, women and children with his rifle, isn’t it so sexy to fetishise guns?

The most jarring thing about the movie is how it ends. Kyle is happy and smiley and fully recovered and helping veterans and trying to pretend to rape his wife as a sexy cowboy when he gives a lift to a shifty looking fellow. A title then appears on the screen saying that the man murdered Chris Kyle. No attempt at all to depict this event or explain it. Our white hat just gets murdered.

And then you have the titles. Good Lord Almighty, you’d think that Oskar Schindler had died. American flags flutter and thousands of people line the streets to salute the paid murderer. It just goes to show that America is still deeply, painfully, worryingly and unabashedly in love with their frontier bullshit, their cowboy mythology and that most American of symbols: the gun.

I’m pretty sure that the backlash has already begun. Joker arrived on a wave of critical praise, even managing to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. But even now there are rumblings that it isn’t very good. Blah blah incels. Blah blah Scorsese rip-off. Blah blah Joaquim’s a ham.

First of all, as regards the incel stuff. Thank fucking Christ this isn’t some pro-incel nonsense. Well, for the most part. For the majority of the movie this is just a sad, sorry tale of a mentally ill man steadily losing the plot. There’s no outrage that women aren’t throwing themselves at him. He’s just losing his mind.

The only reason that I say that it mostly avoids incel-type nonsense is that there’s a scene near the end where the Joker/Arthur Fleck becomes a bit whinny. He goes on a late night TV show with Robert De Niro’s talk show host and complains about how people aren’t nice. He also confesses to some earlier murders. It’s a terribly written scene; easily the worst in the movie. Which is kind of a big deal when this is the Joker’s first big scene.

Everything about it feels wrong. De Niro’s character hardly bats an eyelid when the Joker confesses to murder, the TV show stays on the air for way too long while De Niro pompously lectures a killer and the Joker doesn’t sound like the Joker at all. It’s like it’s still Arthur Fleck talking but in drag. Which I suppose could kind of be the point. But the dialogue is still awful and self-pitying, something which the Joker usually isn't. I kind of wish that the Joker would have come on the TV show and not spoken a word; just sat there for a while and then shot De Niro’s character in the head before laughing hysterically like it’s the funniest joke in the world.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the movie’s best scene is when we first get a glimpse of what’s to become the Joker. Arthur has lost his job as a clown for hire and attracts the attention of some Wall Street-type douchebags while riding home on the Subway. He’s still in his clown gear and they taunt him, beat him and humiliate him until, like Death Wish’s Paul Kersey, he blows two of them away with a concealed weapon. The last guy, like The French Connection, he chases off the train and shoots in the back. Arthur then flees the scene and disappears into a men’s bathroom. Here, wearing full clown make-up, he outstretches his arms and gazes at himself in the mirror, finding liberation in his violent madness. It’s a beautifully poetic scene; a lunatic finally finding himself.

Another great scene is when a couple of ex-colleagues come to visit Arthur in his apartment. They’ve found out that his mother has died. One of his former colleagues is a man who gave him a gun; an action which inadvertently led to Arthur losing his job. The other guy is a little person. They find Arthur in ghostly white face (he’s dyed his hair green and is playing with his face paint). After a brief chat, Arthur brutally and hideously attacks the man who gave him the gun, stabbing him repeatedly and smashing his head into the wall. The little person can only look on in disbelief. Eventually the man asks to leave, not knowing if he’s going to be murdered in turn. The scene is dripping with tension. Arthur then says that he can go. With great relief, the little person goes to exit the apartment. However, there are chains on the door and he can’t reach. He then has to ask Arthur to help him out. You’re never quite sure what’s going to happen and it’s darkly comic to see the dwarf squirm so much in the face of madness.

Perhaps the most chilling scene, though, is when Arthur lets himself into a neighbour’s flat. It isn’t clear yet (although it’s pretty obvious if you’re paying attention) but Arthur has been imagining that he’s in a relationship with a woman named Sophie that he encounters in his apartment building’s elevator. They have a brief exchange and then we see them spending time together. Only they aren’t. It’s all in Arthur’s head. It’s very sad and pathetic but it feels like an incredibly real delusion. The fantasies that he has are exactly the kind of thing that lonely men come up with. After killing the Wall Street guys, and still in full make-up and covered in blood, he imagines knocking on Sophie’s door and making out with her. What woman would do that? And the mother of a small child, no less. As always with these types of things, Arthur casts himself as the hero of his own nightmare.

So when Arthur turns up in Sophie’s flat, after having killed his mother (of course), there’s a palpable sense of dread. The casual way that he sits down and waits for her is rife with menace. And adding tension to the scene is the fact that, when he arrives, Sophie is putting her little daughter to bed.

What I liked so much about the film is that it’s more of a mood piece than anything else. The photography and music are fantastic. Some of the visuals are breathtaking - the Joker running through the tunnel, the lighting as the Joker waits to come through the curtain on the TV show and even Arthur simply trudging through his neighbourhood. This is lightyears ahead of the bland, moribund stuff that Marvel are feeding us. Just watching Arthur get fired and then smash his head into a phone booth window had more pathos and gravity than the whole of Black Panther.

Which isn’t to say that this is a great movie. There are some glaring faults. Robert De Niro doesn’t quite convince as the TV host, Thomas Wayne is merely a Donald Trump-style douchebag and the movie fetishes the Joker character. Once his face is painted, he seems to move in nothing but slow motion and is constantly filmed leaning back, smoking a cigarette. The Joker is meant to be a fascinating character but he isn’t meant to be the epitome of cool. I get that the confidence, the smoking and the dancing is Arthur finally finding himself but there’s so little actual Joker in the movie and so much of it is filmed in slow-mo that it feels that the film loses a little perspective. Heath Ledger’s Joker was always fascinating and endlessly watchable but you didn’t feel that Nolan was identifying with him or trying to turn him into a symbol of cool.

Another fault I had with the film is that the Joker never really feels like the Joker. I always thought that the Joker was fiercely intelligent. Evil yes, but super smart. Arthur Fleck is a bit of a dolt. As he’s presented here, he wouldn’t be capable of planning anything. Perhaps that’s the point though? Todd Phillips has said that he didn’t want to make it certain whether Arthur is the true Joker or not. Perhaps Arthur inspires someone else to take on the mantle.

That being said, there’s a great scene where the Joker is ‘liberated’ from the police by a hoard of anti-capitalist protesters. They’ve picked him as their symbol, their representative. He has no fucking clue what’s going on but finds that he finally has an appreciative audience. Earlier on in the film he bombs horribly at a stand-up club and is then publicly mocked for it on De Niro’s TV show. But now everyone is cheering him. With blood on his face, he smears it over himself to make an even bigger smile. After all the false starts in the movie, is this his birth as the Joker?

I’m not sure how successful this film will be with audiences. When I went to see it, everyone seemed to trudge out in a stupor. But even though it has some serious flaws, I’m glad that a filmmaker and a studio has finally tried to do something different with a comic book movie. The Marvel films have become cinematic NyQuil, regularly putting me in a coma. Here we have a movie with an amazing central performance from Joaquin Phoenix that takes lots of lots of risks. Not everything pays off, and yes the movie is highly reminiscent of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, but give me this over The Avengers any day.

For someone who led such a colourful life as Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody is a remarkably coy film. Everything is kind of kept at arm’s length - Mercury’s sexuality, his famous parties and his complicated love life. The stuff is there, on the surface at least, but we never delve into details. The film is much more interested in the band’s performances than it is in the mindsets of the members.

To be fair, the musical scenes are great. They’re superbly filmed and they’re full of energy. And we even get treated to the full Live Aid set. But it’s a beautiful decoration on a deeply unsatisfying cake. If I want to watch the Live Aid performance, I can just watch the original on You Tube. What I wanted here was to get into Freddie Mercury’s head, but I don’t think the film does a good job of that at all.

Also, it plays hard and fast with the truth. The film makes it seem like this is Freddie’s last hurrah. He gets diagnosed with HIV, has a tearful hug with his band members and then turns in the best performance of his life. The only problem is that, in reality, he was diagnosed with HIV two years after Live Aid. The cynical manipulation here is staggering. You even have the band members almost crying while they perform. ‘Oh look at brave Fred, giving it his all even though he’s on his last legs’ they say with their eyes.

Therefore this tremendous performance becomes like something out of Rocky. Freddie gets diagnosed with HIV two years early, struggles to perform in band practice and then trains his arse off. Everyone is shitting bricks on the day of, but when it comes to nut-cutting time, he sings like a mustachioed angel. Crowd goes wild. Credits roll. And then we get a brief bit of text saying that he died in the early nineties. However, we never actually see him ill (besides coughing up blood once or twice) because seeing that would be too painful and too complicated and would not sit well with this Disneyfied version of the man.

I also resent the subtext of the movie. Freddie Mercury here is portrayed as a sad loser pining after his ex-fiance. This is the reason that he decides to start having lavish parties. From what I’ve read he was indeed something of a lonely man. However, he also just liked having fun and seemed to have a good sense of humour. But this joy is never present. And it gets worryingly close to waving a moralistic finger:

‘See what I told you! If only you were sensible you wouldn’t have got the HIV! You had to go out and have ‘fun’. You had to have a ‘good time’. You couldn’t be happy with a girl. You had to have sex with a man [mouth puke]. There are consequences for that. AIDS! Having a good time got you AIDS!’

It gets dangerously close to Forrest Gump territory where the free-spirited liberal Jenny gets HIV because she won’t do what’s she’s fucking told. It can’t be that Freddie Mercury just had a hedonistic lifestyle with all the good things and bad things that go with that, and that HIV was just a horrible stroke of bad luck that nobody deserved and which no one had coming. No, he has to be fucking miserable and all the fun has to be drained out of his life.

It’s also just fucking weird how this film manages to erase all the sex and drugs out of Mercury’s life. Do we even see him kiss another man? I can’t seem to remember it. If it happens, it’s fleeting. It’s like the film thinks that I’m Mercury’s mother and it doesn’t want to show me the reality of his existence because I’d have a conniption. And the only drugs it seems to show him take are a few pills. He was doing more blow than Scarface! Is this to protect the wee little children who love that song where the guy sings and the people clap their hands and stomp their feet? Fuck those people! This film could have been more engaging, more moving, more uplifting and much funnier if we got all the gory details. Oh no, your dad’s favourite singer liked to snort coke and rim other men? Get over yourself.

These inaccuracies and omissions make me question the truth of pretty much everything in the film. Was Queen’s manager (played by the Irish driver out of Downton Abbey) really that villainous? Was the head of EMI really that much of a dunderhead (the comic stupidity of this character is really over the top)? Did Freddie Mercury really reconcile with his estranged father on the day of Live Aid and bring over a male ‘friend’? And was he even estranged from him in the first place? And did a bunch of fucking chickens really inspire the writing of Bohemian Rhapsody? Honestly, the production of Bohemian Rhapsody is a fucking travesty. Here the film makes Queen seem Spinal Tap. Everything about that sequence is just goofy as hell.

I also hate the opening section of the film. It’s woefully facile. In about ten minutes Freddie Mercury has an argument with his family, watches a student band, joins the band as the lead singer and embarks on a successful tour with them. For a film that’s so long, it’s in such an awful rush to say nothing.

So, besides the musical scenes, is there anything good about the film? Remi Malek gives a strong performance as Mercury, but that’s about it. The slick camerawork and weirdly perfect costumes that look like no one has even worn them, make the movie look like a waxwork museum. It’s a pretty miserable exercise. My suspicion, seeing as the band seemed to have so much control over this project, is that they have strangled all the life out of it; that any controversy has been swept under the rug to protect their ‘legacy’. This is the same band that were so concerned about their image and respecting Queen’s legacy that they hooked up with both Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert to squeeze every penny out of its dead carcass. Bohemian Rhapsody seems like yet another cynical ploy to make even more money and mythologise the band - to turn them into something they never were. And baffling enough, they’re trying to turn them into a simpler, less interesting version of themselves.

If your fiance was murdered in front of you in a brutal terrorist attack, what would be a reasonable reaction? You’d certainly experience a prolonged period of grief. You’d probably suffer some serious PTSD. You might even abuse alcohol or drugs or even try and kill yourself.

But would you turn into a James Bond figure and try and take out entire terrorist cells single-handed? Yeah, that might be a stretch.

American Assassin could possibly work as some sort of incredibly over the top fantasy fulfillment flick. But instead it’s a boring, cliched, utterly joyless piece of sludge. People smash each other in the face and blood splatters all over the lens, but it’s neither hard hitting nor exhilarating.

I knew this film was in for a rough ride when Michael Keaton turned up and started being all...Michael Keaton. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a fine actor, but he can very easily descend into some lazy, annoying ticks. He has a default crazy mode that he can switch into if he’s not feeling very inspired, and he’s certainly lacking inspiration here.

Keaton’s character has the less than enviable task of turning some milk toast pissant, Jason Bourne wannabe into, er, Jason Bourne. Cue yelling, beating and various boot camp shenanigans. But Keaton’s character is neither Gunnery Sergeant Hartman nor Obi-Wan Kenobi. He just seems to be in a bit of a bad mood all the time, but for no real discernible reason. Maybe he can’t get decent coffee or maybe he rewatched Jack Frost. But no sooner has he started yelling at Baby Bourne than they’re traipsing over Europe.

The plot plays like Donald Trump’s wet dream. Some Iranians, pissed off with their government’s nuclear deal with the US, decide to secretly build their own nuclear bomb so that they can attack Israel. You see, Trump told us that it was a bad deal! Fucking Obama trying to stabilize shit. We should have preemptively nuked those fuckers in case they tried some shit later on down the line.

Complicating matters is the fact is that the building of the nuclear bomb is coordinated by another American assassin. And would you believe it, he’s an ex pupil of Michael Keaton.

This American assassin gone bad is made out to be like the fucking Darth Vader of assassins. He’s just too good but he’s evil as shit. But then he turns up and he’s just an annoying kid with daddy issues. Apparently Keaton’s character acted like this kid was the second coming or something. He bigged him up and inflated his ego. Somewhere along the line, though, things went bad and zzzzzzz....

Oh no, was it a hard job killing people for a living? Was it not quite as easy as it seemed? Now that’s a surprise. But yes, take all of your bitterness and help to create a nuclear bomb. Oh, and then betray your Iranian colleagues and steal the nuclear bomb and attack the American Navy because you have issues with your surrogate daddy! Seriously, what complete and utter garbage this movie is.

The final action scene, I shit you not, involves the new baby Bourne assassin fighting baby Darth Vader in a speedboat as a nuclear bomb ticks down. The tension! The drama! It’s like the end of Face/Off except completely devoid of entertainment.

There’s a hilarious moment, after baby Bourne kills baby Vader, where the kid is alone in a speedboat with the nuclear bomb. ‘What do I do? What do I do?’ It’s like the modern equivalent of those silent movies with the big, round bombs and the fuse burning down. ‘Where do I throw it? Who can I give it to?’ Except it’s a nuke.

Before I go any further, I should mention the fact that there’s a scene where Michael Keaton gets tortured. He has his fingernails ripped off, he gets electrocuted and he gets sliced. And yet he tells baby Vader how much he likes it. Baby Vader almost looks like he’s about to start crying. How am I supposed to take this kid seriously as a threat when he can’t even torture someone properly? And Michael Keaton just Michael Keaton’s his arse off. There he is with no fingernails and yet he looks like he’s having the time of his life. He even manages to sucker the stupid ex pupil and bites piece of his ear off. And yet baby Vader doesn’t kill him. He wants Keaton to witness his master plan. His attack on the US Navy. He’s doing all of this so that he can make Keaton feel bad! It’s the stupidest motivation I’ve seen in a long time. ‘I’m going to torture you...but not kill you. And I’ll going to nuke the US Navy and kill myself...and you’ll feel really bad. Fuck you dad!!!’

And it’s in this post torture state that Keaton begins dangling out the side of a helicopter, yelling at his protege to drop the nuke in the ocean. Which at least stops the absolute ridiculousness of the kid trying to find a place to put the bomb. ‘Maybe if I shove it in the toilet and close the door, everything will be okay!’

So the kid gets airlifted out of the blast radius and the bomb explodes underwater which makes the CGI US Navy wobble a lot. But just when you think it’s all over, there’s the hint that the filmmakers are fishing for a sequel and an inevitable franchise. Quick, let me do a Michael Keaton like in the above screencap.

George Clooney’s directing career is following a depressing downward trajectory. After the early promise of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck, he’s produced a steady stream of mildly entertaining but ultimately disappointing movies (The Ides of March being the most notable example). But with Surburbicon he produces his first outright dud.

Based on a Coen brothers script, this ill-conceived, mean-spirited, nonsensical movie doesn’t really work on any level. It looks great, but the characters are universally repugnant and stupid, and the storytelling is atrocious. Most of the movie makes very little sense.

It’s probably the character’s overwhelming stupidity that bothered me the most (much more so than how despicable everyone is). The central character, Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon), hires a bunch of criminals to murder his wife so that he can cash in her life insurance. However, he seems completely ill-prepared for the investigation that is bound to follow. You’d think, given the nature of the crime, that he’d have his story worked out. And seeing as he also has a partner in crime, you’d think that person would be prepared as well. But no, they act like imbeciles and immediately rouse suspicion. Someone might know, or think they know, that you’ve done something, but being able to prove it is everything.

In one scene the insurance investigator says that he knows that Gardner murdered his wife. Now the investigator might think he knows this or he might simply be fishing. A stupid person will fall for this tactic and immediately give themselves away, which is what Gardner does. Amazingly, he admits to the murder. You’ve immediately painted yourself into a corner. You’re either going to jail or you’ve got to kill someone else. Gardner decides on the latter. Again, the stupidity here is too much. You’re now going to kill an insurance investigator? You’ve immediately made sure you’re going to jail.

The murder of Oscar Isaac’s insurance investigator tries to straddle that familiar funny/disturbing Coen brothers line, but Clooney is incapable of performing this high wire act. The yowling from Isaac as he realises he’s been poisoned is ridiculous in the extreme - it’s like it’s from a Looney Tunes cartoon. And then the sound effects as Garnder tries to remove a poker from the investigator’s head - there’s lots of crunching and swishing - are just confusing. Is this supposed to be a funny moment? A disturbing moment? I get the grim detail of having the poker get stuck in the guy’s head - in the world of movies, deaths are usually very clean - but I just don’t get the swishing noise. It suggests to me that Clooney is trying to make this darkly funny, when instead it should have been the moment when the gravity of events finally hits home.

Oh, did I mention that the murder of the insurance investigator happens in the middle of the street? Yes, it’s at night, but still. Lots of running and yelling and yowling and bashing and swishing in the middle of the street? I don’t know about you, but my mother would have sniffed that out like a rat and shot to the window like a dart. And what about all the blood that would have been all over the road? Ah, whatever.

I guess one of the reasons that a heinous crime like this can go undetected is because a large portion of the town is distracted by racially abusing a black family in the house next to Matt Damon’s character. The narrative worth of this side story is non-existent because the family is given no screen time and hardly any lines. It’s one of the weirdest frames for a movie I’ve seen. If you’re not going to invest anything in these characters, what’s the point? What, you’re trying to make a point that suburbia is rotten to the core? That behind the civilised exterior lies greed and barbarity? Yeah, you’re already illustrating that with the main story.

Or do you have this frame because you want to indulge in some cute bookending? At the start of the movie there’s a town meeting where incensed locals say that they don’t want a black family in their community. They’re not ready to integrate, they argue, and it’ll lead to the ruin of the town. And then at the end an old lady, talking to some reporters, says that everything used to be normal before the black family moved in.

I can feel the poker hitting me in the head. ‘You see what I’m saying?’ Clooney yells. ‘It wasn’t the family. Everything has been screwed up from the beginning.’ Yes, yes, George. I get it.

The Girl on the Train was a terrible book and now it’s been made into a terrible film. Now don’t get me wrong, there was always the kernel of a good idea within Paula Hawkins’ turd of a novel. A voyeur on a train gets embroiled in a murder mystery (it’s like Rear Window...with wheels!). But the story is so melodramatic, the characters so annoying and unlikeable, and the twists and turns so predictable and mundane, that it’s a wasted exercise. Had the filmmakers been serious about making a decent film they should have thrown the book out of a moving train. Just take the basic premise and do your own thing.

The changes that have been made are cosmetic and end up hurting the movie. The book is set in and around suburban London. The movie is set in and around suburban New York. The filmmakers have instantly made things harder for themselves. The idea is that a woman on a train becomes obsessed with a couple she sees out of the window. In the London area this is just about plausible. On my old commuter line it would seem like you were going through people’s back gardens. But in upstate New York the houses are much farther away. There’s much more space. You’d need binocular vision to be able to see anything going on.

So I was immediately calling bullshit on the whole thing. There’s no way this woman could see what was going on inside these houses. Especially when she’s pissed out of her head most of the time. In one particularly egregious moment, she even sees a couple taking a selfie while they were inside their house. It was completely laughable.

The casting too is all wrong. In the book Rachel is worn out and overweight because of years of drinking. In the movie she’s played by Emily Blunt, who, like most young actresses, is thin as a rake. She tries her best to look haggard and shitty, but she doesn’t look like she’s had a hard life. She just looks tired.

Another poor piece of casting is the girl who plays Megan Hipwell. Megan is supposed to be this super sexy young woman that all of the women are jealous of and all the men want to fuck. But the actress here looks like she’s about 15. She pouts and she sulks, but she’s not remotely interesting. And it’s not like she’s super curvaceous to make up for the complete lack of personality. She’s an average blonde girl, the likes of which are two a penny in New York. So the fact that three different men go bananas over this woman boggles the mind.

Megan even manages to bewitch her therapist. At one point, like something out of a telenovela, he starts screaming in Spanish about her driving him out of his mind while she does some dopey shit like squinting in the sunlight and rubbing herself.

I also found it hilarious that they cast a Venezuelan actor in the therapist role. The therapist’s name is Kamal Abdic. I was kind of expecting a Middle Eastern actor, not a Spanish speaker. Seriously, it you really wanted this actor playing the role, why not change the name? It’s just too jarring. I kept thinking to myself, ‘How is this guy named Kamal?’ Now I’m sure that some fans of the book (poor, sad people) would bristle at the idea of changing Kamal’s name, but this is hardly Dickens, is it? Change whatever you like.

Now because Megan is oversexed and because this is a thriller, she dies a horrible, violent death. You see, not only is she married to a jealous beefcake who has skin so red that he must constantly be slapping himself, and not only is she fucking her therapist, but she also has something going on with Rachel’s ex-husband. They fuck in the woods up against the poor humiliated trees and everything is oh so hot and sexy...until he bashes her brains in with a rock. The murder is actually pretty tough to watch but, really...who cares? All of these people are irremediably shallow and annoying.

My least favourite character is Anna. She’s married to Rachel’s ex-husband and lives in Rachel’s old house. She’s also Megan’s employer, as Megan has a job there as a nanny. At the beginning Anna says that being a mother is the most important job in the world. This despite the fact that she has a full-time nanny to look after her kid while she goes to the Farmer’s Market. Apparently the wee little kid, like any good suburban baby, has allergies and can’t subsist on peasant food. She needs the good stuff. The natural stuff. And apparently she’s too good to get in a car with her mother or on a bus. Fucking suburban assholes who have the luxury of dumping their kid on paid staff. Anyone else would have to drag their kid along everywhere or give them to granny or grandpa.

Sudden brainwave. Why doesn’t Anna just order all of this fancy food online? That way she could spend more time worrying about vaccines and researching delicious cake recipes that don’t have sugar or flour amongst the ingredients.

At least Megan has the right idea and says that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life changing diapers or doing laundry. What she wants is cock. Lots and lots of cock. Which is why she has to die and drive the plot of this idiotic film.

In the book, when Rachel finally gets embroiled in the murder mystery, you at least get the sense that she’s on some kind of mission. There’s some sort of purpose and some sort of narrative drive. But here the film just drags its way to the feeble, Hallmark-level conclusion.

I kind of feel like there’s an excellent Shannon Tweed movie hiding here. But as a big budget thriller, it’s an embarrassment. The direction, in particular, is dreadful and makes it seem like the filmmaker is barely sentient. Every single choice is the wrong one. Somewhere Hitchcock is laughing his ass off.

What was it with the Oscars last year? First Mad Max and now this. Was there a massive shortfall in quality in 2015?

Like Mad Max, The Martian is an entertaining film, but it’s pure fluff. It deserves to make money but it doesn’t deserve to win awards. It’s likeable, it’s well made but it’s completely shallow.

It also suffers terribly in comparison to the recently nominated Gravity. Gravity was also a tale of survival in space, but it had more weight to it. It was more visceral, it had more imagination and a lot more emotion. This, in comparison, is a trifle, even if the fate of the central character is potentially a lot worse than that of Sandra Bullock.

Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is one of a group of astronauts exploring Mars. The expedition’s base is hit by a massive dust storm and the commander gives the order to evacuate. During the evacuation Watney is hit by debris and presumed dead.

Only, he’s not.

Watney is now stranded alone on Mars. With his crew beginning the long voyage back to Earth and with another crew not arriving on Mars for another four years, he has to find a way to survive for almost half a decade with a limited amount of supplies. As he says. he’s going to have to ‘science the shit out of it’.

There’s a lot of joy to be had in Watney’s simple, mundane day-to-day routines. The rationing of food, trips outside to gaze at the Martian landscape and the recording of his video diary. But once the movie begins to open up and expands beyond the narrow focus of Watney’s isolation, it becomes less interesting. The struggles of NASA to get their man/men back home safely was much more effectively depicted in Apollo 13.

I don’t think the casting helps that much. Kristen Wiig is completely out of place and Sean Bean stands out like a sore thumb. Why is a man with strong Northern English accent the mission controller at NASA? Plus, every time I see him now I’m waiting for his inevitable death scene.

Jeff Daniels, too, as the NASA administrator fails to convince. But maybe that’s my fault. For me he’ll always be Harry from Dumb and Dumber.

There’s also a serious issue with the tone of this film. One of the running gags is that Mark gets stuck on Mars with nothing but crappy disco tunes to listen to. It’s meant to add levity to the movie but for me it completely robs it of dramatic weight. Fucking ‘Hot Stuff’, ‘Love Boat’ and ‘Rock the Boat’ all make an appearance. Still, it could be worse. It could be Kanye West he gets stuck with.

But I feel that this movie should have been stripped back completely. I’d want to remove the rescue mission entirely. I’d want to see everything from Watney’s perspective. His isolation should be palpable and absolute. We should only be relieved of his loneliness when he is. We should see the rescue mission when he sees the rescue mission. For a film where there’s so much at stake, there’s very little sense of jeopardy.

Even when Watney blows up his base and destroys his crop of potatoes, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. And it should. It should be utterly crushing. It should be like that scene in Touching the Void when he falls into the crevasse and is positive that he’s going to die. It’s emotional armageddon. But here it’s a blip. It’s an inconvenience. Because you know that the NASA guys are going to speed up their rescue mission and they’re going to save him at the last moment.

And the actual rescue is preposterous. The movie does a decent job of building up the tension for Watney’s take off from Mars. He has to strip the take off vehicle of all its weight, which includes removing the windows and replacing it with a tarp, but then the final rescue just involves too much action movie nonsense.

Watney’s vehicle and the rescue vehicle are moving at completely different velocities, so a bomb is rigged and exploded, the Captain goes out on a teether to ‘catch’ Watney and he has to stab his spacesuit to provide propulsion so that he can bridge the gap between him and her. It’s really silly and not at all believable.

Kind of like the film itself. It might have a NASA advisor making sure that everything is kind of possibly, just about feasible, but we all know it’s bullshit. Entertaining bullshit. But bullshit. And certainly too facile to be remembered in the long run. There’s more weight and more gravitas in ten seconds of Alien than there is in this.

It seems like every major film in the last year or two stars either Oscar Isaac or Domhnall Gleeson. So of course, it was inevitable that they would eventually be cast in a film together. (And then, later in the year, they both starred in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as well, thus furthering their quest for world domination.)

Both are good actors, but I have to question Domhnall Gleeson’s casting in this. Why do big budget films continually keep casting either British or Irish actors in American roles? If you want an American, hire a fucking American. There are plenty of them around. I can see very few instances where you’d be better off hiring a British or Irish actor in an American role. Maybe you’re making a film about a famous figure and an Irish guy bears an uncanny resemblance to the person in question. Okay, go and hire them. Or maybe a British actor is such a huge mega star that it just doesn’t fucking matter that he’s not an American. But for god’s sake, this is Domhnall Gleeson we’re talking about.

And if you really want to hire Domhnall Gleeson in your film, wouldn’t it just make more sense to make the character Irish? Eventually I forgot about the accent, but it distracted me for the first ten minutes or so; the American accent makes him seem more bland that he really is.

Miscasting aside, Ex Machina is a massively successful directorial debut from Alex Garland (writer of The Beach, 28 Days Later and Sunshine). It’s talky and almost devoid of action, but it’s all the better for it.

In a weird way, Ex Machina is almost like an old-fashioned film noir. Film noir often involves some schmucky guy getting hired by a mysterious man who isn’t all that he seems before being manipulated and misled by some femme fatale.

Ex Machina definitely follows this path. Our hero, Caleb (Gleeson), ‘wins’ a competition to spend a week with billionaire software genius Nathan (Isaac). Nathan then reveals that he has a humanoid robot that he wants Caleb to perform a Turing Test on. He wants Caleb to test whether the robot exhibits artificial intelligence that is indistinguishable from our own.

Before you know it, Caleb is hearing sweet nothings from the robot and is ready to drop everything for her (including his pants...probably). She seems sweet and innocent, so he’s horrified to hear that Nathan is mistreating her. Caleb’s conversations are observed by Nathan, but the robot, named Ava, can trigger temporary power cuts so the two can talk privately.

The strength of the film is that, much like Caleb, you feel sorry for Ava. She seems like such a sweet, harmless little thing that you too want to break her out of her ‘cell’. Her body looks half finished so she covers herself in wigs and clothes to appear more human. It’s a little sad and pathetic and certainly earns your sympathy.

But like a true femme fatale, she’s playing everyone. She tells Caleb that she wants to be with him, but once she’s free, she forgets all about him. She kills Nathan and then, without a master key for this high tech palace, Caleb is trapped in a room. Caleb bangs on the window and Ava can easily free him, but she’s totally oblivious to his plight. She doesn’t seem to be acting in a vindictive way. Instead she acts like a child. She’s completely narcissistic and self-absorbed. She’s so drunk with her newfound freedom that she leaves poor Caleb standing there, screaming like a lunatic. With Nathan dead and with no key, he gets to look forward to eating his own fist to survive.

But again, what a schmuck Caleb is. He think he’s going to ride into the sun with this robot and live happily ever after? Yeah, right.

I also feel that the film borrows subtly from Blade Runner (which, funnily enough, also borrows heavily from film noir). In Blade Runner, Dr Tyrell creates Replicants with AI. Much like an iPhone, they have a built- in obsolescence. After a few years, they die. They become furious with their creator and kill him. They want 'more life'. In Ex Machina, a similar fate awaits Nathan. His creation, tired of being imprisoned, wants to experience life and turns against him, stabbing him in the chest.

It’s actually kind of weird the way that Nathan is killed. He’s stabbed in the chest, but he’s stabbed in such a slow, clean way that it makes it seem like he’s made of butter. It’s a little bit odd.

But also in a nod to Blade Runner, Nathan has other ‘toys’. In Blade Runner, genetic designer J. F. Sebastian has a bunch of humanoid toys that keep him company in his apartment. Nathan meanwhile has a personal assistant who doesn’t speak a word of English. She’s very attractive and Nathan is fucking her. It’s then later revealed that she too is a robot. Which kind of figures for someone like Nathan who has a massive god complex. Why get sexually involved with a human being with real feelings and real emotions and who has real imperfections? You can just create a perfect copy who doesn’t speak a lick of your language and who picks up after you and you can then fuck them whenever you feel the need.

Of course, seeing as Nathan is a computer nerd, it goes without saying that the fuck-bot is Asian.

But the ending of the movie is fantastic because it’s truly chilling. This isn’t a robot that’s running around, killing people with laser eyes. She’s just like a child that has absolutely no moral compass. She might speak like a human and act like one, but it’s all an impersonation. She doesn’t feel bad for people. She can’t empathize. In one scene, she cannibalises Isaac’s other creations for parts. There’s no malice there but there’s also no feeling. It’s cold and logical. Which is why she leaves Caleb alone in that room to die. She can’t put someone else’s needs or feelings before her own. The only thing that matters is her. Over time we’ve evolved so that we care about other people. This helps us to thrive as a species. Anyone who acts selfishly is threatening the group. But a robot hasn’t had that. Which is why it would be so dangerous to do something like this. Intelligence without compassion and morality is a terrifying thing.

One part of me is thoroughly delighted at the success of Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s a completely bonkers movie. It doesn’t fit into the blockbuster norm at all. Plus George Miller has been trying to make another Mad Max for ages. So it’s a nice comeback story - a man who has been lumbered making Happy Feet and Babe sequels scores a massive commercial and critical success.

But then there’s another part of me. The unsentimental side, who says, are you fucking kidding me? All of the critics are going bonkers over this? This is the movie that is appearing in critics’ top ten lists? Because this is not a great movie. It has loads of imagination and energy, but it’s also crass, monotonous and it’s lumbered with an incredibly dull central character.

Tom Hardy as Mad Max is Tom Hardy on autopilot. He scowls, he mutters and he looks ‘intense’. But he doesn’t look like he’s having any fun. Nor does his character or his performance contain any depth. He’s just a series of tics. It’s a lazy kind of performance. Tom Hardy sort of reminds me of Christian Bale. They burst into life at the beginning of their careers and then they plateau a little and trade off their ‘intensity’. Mumbling and grimacing with wild eyes is nothing if there’s no meat in the script or if there are no internal twists and turns within the character’s journey. Because, yes, Max is constantly being pulled this way and that way, but it’s entirely physical. As a person he just is who he is. Nothing more, nothing less. And he’s not a particularly fun, interesting or engaging character.

More effort is invested in the character of Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. She has the vulnerability, conflict and complexity that Max lacks. As the driver of an armoured truck called the ‘War Rig’, she liberates the wives of the local warlord, Immortan Joe. And so all hell breaks loose.

But despite the feminist, eco-warrior pretext of the movie, character development is at the bottom of the agenda. And there’s zero emotional connection to anything that’s happening. So although women are in jeopardy and dastardly individuals are trying to recapture a pregnant girl, the human struggle behind the movie is a secondary consideration to blowing shit up.

Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s really good action. It’s always entertaining. But we don’t have a feminist masterpiece in the vein of Aliens. Nor is it a treatise on the Middle East conflict or environmental devastation. It’s a loud action movie that occasionally leans in interesting directions but never settles for long enough to make any interesting points or metaphors.

Part of the thing that makes Fury Road entertaining is also the thing that holds it back. Its constant forward momentum. There’s no room to breathe. No room for silence or contemplation. It’s very Australian. What do I mean by that? There’s a tendency for Australian films to be very loud and very brash. Of course there are exceptions to that stereotype, but Fury Road falls into the Baz Luhrmann mould of more is more is more is more.

But it’s not. Excess is exhausting.

The overacting is also sometimes hard to take. Nicholas Hoult, who played the kid with the bowl haircut in About a Boy, overacts like crazy. And yeah, I get it, he’s supposed to be taking drugs to enter a state of suicidal rapture, but the performance is far too theatrical.

The main villain, also, is completely ridiculous. He’s some fragile, crotchety old geezer who wears an oxygen mask in the shape of a skull. The mask looks pretty cool but he looks like he should be getting his nappies changed in an old people’s home. Also, the idea of this hideous little Oompa Loompa mounting all those women is appalling. But then again, I think it’s supposed to be.

However, all of these negatives can be countered by the fact that among Immortan Joe’s war party is a guitarist with a double-necked guitar. Like some fucking god, he hangs from a wall of amplifiers and churns out heavy metal riffs while his guitar belches fire. Seriously, it’s the most hilarious, most fucking awesome thing I’ve seen in a film for years. And in a weird way, it makes complete sense. Military drums have been used for centuries to demoralize the enemy (big bastard drums also feature here), so why not have some heavy metal?

Of course, you have to consider if this is an appropriate use of your resources. You know, you’re living in a post apocalyptic wasteland, and you’re using your precious gasoline to billow fire from a steampunk guitar. And you’re using electricity for all the amps in the world. But you know what, fuck that. Immortan Joe is obviously some Saddam Hussain, Kim-Jong-il, Nicolae Ceausecu, cult of personality type mentalist who wants to constantly show off his wealth and abundant resources, so yeah, he’d totally do this.

And those guitar riffs fucking rock! And it’s hilarious that he changes his speed of playing to how quickly the war party is going. When they’re going really fast, he shreds like a motherfucker, but when they slow down he methodically hacks some chunky chords. And at one point he even gets involved in a fight. So even if the film as a whole is just too excessive for my taste, this one bit of insanity does a hell of a lot to make the film more enjoyable.

It’s also got to be said that the stunts are excellent and that the photography is consistently amazing. I also got a kick of the retrograde fight scenes that were speeded up like this was filmed in the 70s or 80s. It’s just the characters and the script which aren’t up to much.

I think the film is also a victim of raised expectations. This is a film that is now nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. I’m all for genre films getting nominated for the big prize...but only if they’re good enough. And this film isn’t. There are some great sequences, but the movie doesn’t really add up to much. Not that it has to make some grand statement or anything, but you’ve got to feel something more than ‘oh, that was cool’ if you’re going to get all these plaudits. Aliens, The Fellowship of the Ring and Raiders of the Lost Ark, as three of the best examples of the action/adventure genre, succeed because of the human heart beating within them. They have really cool sequences, but they also have people you’re invested in. Mad Max: Fury Road is just a bunch of occasionally cool shit that should get nowhere near an awards ceremony.

The build-up is over. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is now a living, breathing reality. It’s already sitting there in movie theaters, making (probably) billions of dollars in box office receipts. But is it any good? I guess it depends on how you’re measuring it.

Compared to the disastrous, soul-sucking prequels, it stands up very favourably. But against the originals it falls way short. Way, way short. For every good thing in this movie, there are a couple of bad things to counter it.

The biggest problem is that the central villain, Kylo Ren, is emo as shit. Darth Vader was a cool, clinical psychopath who would quietly dispatch his subordinates whenever they did something that wasn’t to his liking. Our Kylo, on the other hand, is a pouting drama queen. When he doesn’t get his own way, he destroys shit like a toddler having a tantrum. It’s not scary and it’s fairly ridiculous to watch. Plus Kylo is played by Adam Driver, whom I last saw in HBO’s Girls. So basically you have a millenial hipster trying to rule the galaxy while not ruffling his floppy hair. How far we’ve fallen as a society.

Another problem is the larger villain of the piece, the ‘Supreme Leader’. This is the guy that Kylo Ren answers to, much like Darth Vader answered to The Emperor. But while The Emperor was an amusingly withered old guy, who cackled like some terrifying man-witch as he made a catty remark, the Supreme Leader is a horrible CGI creation. A big deal has been made that these films are going to use more practical effects, but this thing is an abomination. It looks like something you’d expect to see in the upcoming World of Warcraft movie, not Star Wars.

And what was with his hologram being about thirty feet tall? Is he that tall in real life? Or does he just have a tiny penis and therefore demanded a fucking huge hologram when the tech guys were installing all the telecommunications? ‘Oooh. Supreme Leader. How terribly big you are.’

And why is this film basically a less satisfactory rehash of the original Star Wars? It’s almost the same plot, just far less engaging. So the The Empire (or the First Order as they’re called here) are searching for a droid which has some secret information inside it. A lonely, idealistic daydreamer then intercepts said droid. However, while in Star Wars this individual had an aunt and an uncle, and there was some character development, in The Force Awakens the daydreamer has no parents or guardians and is very quickly swept up in the galactical drama that ensues.

But again, just as in Star Wars, the greenhorn encounters an old, wise hero from a bygone era. In the previous series, it was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Here it’s Han Solo. Then there’s a Death Star rip off that’s actually a planet with a massive weapon in it. Except this new weapon is far worse than the Death Star. While the Death Star was a space station that could go wherever it wanted, this thing is a fucking planet and can go nowhere. Why the downgrade? But then there’s a plan to shut down the weapon and attack it with spacecraft. It’s the exact same fucking film! It’s just more sloppily written and directed.

Don’t get me wrong, though, there are good things about the movie. Rey, the surrogate Luke Skywalker character, is excellent. She’s not the wet blanket that Luke Skywalker was in the first film and she has plenty of charm and strength. It’s also good to see that the male hero in this film is black. It’s sad that even in this day and age it feels brave that a blockbuster has a woman and a black man as the heroes of their movie, but it does.

It’s also great to see Han Solo back. It’s quite amazing how much the film improved when he finally turned up. Maybe it’s partly nostalgia, but nostalgia only lasts so long. The film genuinely became much better once he made he finally made his appearance. It’s a pity that they decided to kill him off and that that emo bastard was the one to do him in, but it was a pretty good scene.

The action scenes were also pretty decent, but even these were riddled with problems. So we eventually find out that Rey is strong with The Force. There’s a fantastic scene where Rey resists Kylo’s attempts to interrogate her. She shows her strength of will and it’s wonderful. But then at the end she’s having a very involved lightsaber duel with Kylo. Here it just becomes silly. Rey has never picked up a lightsaber before but here she is, holding her own with a guy who’s probably been in training for years. Just because you’re strong with The Force, doesn’t mean that you know how to fight yet - that takes training. So even though you have this pretty decent action scene taking place, it’s ruined by the fact that the logic behind it is totally fucked.

Compare this with the original trilogy. Luke doesn’t get to use his lightsaber until the second film and then he loses his hand in a fight to Darth Vader. So yeah, The Force is strong with Luke, but he needs training and experience. He can’t just go into a fight with someone and hold his own.

I also feel that the film left far too many things unexplained. Why does Finn suddenly decide that he doesn’t want to fight anymore? He begins the movie as a Stormtrooper but then he has a crisis of conscience and flees. This is a great idea for a beginning but the reasons and the emotions aren’t really explored, which makes Finn’s journey half-baked and unsatisfying. And even though Han’s appearance is extremely welcome, he seems to appear out of nowhere and then instigates a fun action scene with some space monsters. The machinations behind it are explained so quickly and so poorly that I couldn’t help but ask myself what the fuck was going on, so even though I’m enjoying the action, I don’t really know for sure why it’s happening. And what the fuck happened with Poe? How did he survive that crash? I’m sure it got explained, but I’m also sure that the explanation lasted 0.7 seconds and was probably mumbled under all the Dolby Surround sound.

But then the whole script is muddy. You get the feeling that JJ Abrams just couldn’t give a shit about telling a decent story. He just wants to move onto the next thing. And I have to say, I never thought that JJ was a good choice for this. He’s never convinced me as a filmmaker. And again he’s produced another superficial movie. It looks pretty good and everything feels like it should work, but it doesn’t.

The ending with Luke promises that there will be something to look forward to in the future, but I’m not going to get my hopes up. I haven’t seen enough to warrant getting excited. And I haven’t even mentioned a couple of really little things that bugged the hell out of me. Number one - why is a TIE Fighter on a tether? So you have all this enhanced technology and someone steals your spacecraft but the way you’re going to get around that is with a chain? What the fuck? The sight of Finn and Poe trying to escape in a TIE Fighter that’s tied to the wall is one of the saddest sights in recent cinema.

Number two - did you only hire the most weasly of British actors? The first trilogy had loads of English actors, but the weasel factor was nowhere near this high. The sight of Domhnall Gleeson (yes, yes, I know, he’s actually Irish) trying to give a rousing speech while squinting and grimacing like Vole was a little embarrassing.

Oh, and Captain Phasma is a fucking terrible villain. She’s not quite General Grievous terrible (multiple lightsaber attack!), but she’s about as tough as a sponge. A couple of kids hold a blaster to her head and she does everything they say. Fuck. Me.

Despite this, I feel that The Force Awakens is going to get an easy ride because it’s not The Phantom Menace, or Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith. But I do have to wonder whether this is going to prove a worthwhile endeavour after all.