The release of Louise Osmond’s biographical film about the director Ken Loach, who turns 80 on 17 June, has been timed to perfection. Twelve days ago, Loach’s I, Daniel Blake won him his second Palme d’Or. He came out of retirement to make it after the Conservatives won the General Election last year. “Bastards,” he calls them, with a schoolboy-ish smile, at the beginning and end of the documentary.
film reviews
Matt Wolf
If you're disabled, it certainly helps to be as indecently rich as you are handsome while you make plans to end your life: that, in short, is the preposterous take-away message from Me Before You, the film version of the Jojo Moyes bestseller which Moyes herself has adapted for the screen. I haven't read the book and would imagine that the material's multiple irritations, both large-scale and small, might be somewhat more tolerable not blown up into celluloid dimensions.
Jasper Rees
“A porno film where the point was the plot?!” The Nice Guys asks you to make quite a few imaginative leaps: to find Russell Crowe endearing and Ryan Gosling funny and to believe that anyone in 1977 would set out to shoot a skin flick with a storyline. Implausibly, but delightfully, all of the above come to pass in a buddy caper in which Crowe and Gosling partner up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 1970s Los Angeles.
Gosling plays Holland March, a widowed private investigator of low morals and lower ability who exploits confused old ladies for an easy living. He’s hired by one such to locate her missing niece Amelia, until a burly enforcer comes round to his house and encourages him to drop the case by breaking his nose and his arm. The next time March meets Jackson Healy (Crowe) the tables have turned and he’s offering to go into business. Amelia’s mother (Kim Basinger), a bigwig in the justice department, is eager to bring her rebellious daughter in out of harm’s way.
Their odyssey takes them into the neon den of Californian hedonism as Amelia’s activities, it becomes clear, involved participation in a blue movie called How Do You Like My Car, Big Boy? Its star, a buxom pin-up called Misty Mountains, has already died in a spectacular crash at the start of the movie, and the corpses continue to form a disorderly pile, first when the trail takes the two partners to a high-rise hotel from which bodies can be seen tumbling, then at an orgiastic pool party in the Hollywood hills.
The plot may be the point of How Do You Like My Car, Big Boy? but, while it keeps the characters on the move, it’s not exactly central to The Nice Guys. It involves, for the record, the criminal involvement of the car industry in a secret plan to thwart the green lobby. The pleasures are mostly to do with the rambunctious, knockabout antics of the two improvising male leads as they variously flirt and threaten their way through the immoral maze of the case. Crowe channels his drizabone inner Ocker to punch first and reflect later, and makes a lovely foil for Gosling’s hyperactive mugging. One delicious little sequence finds him ambushed in the john, attempting to keep his dignity with a girlie magazine over his privates. Somehow Gosling, hitherto the most straight-faced Hollywood lead of his generation, manages to make it extraordinarily funny.
There’s the added joy of Angourie Rice (pictured above with Gosling) as March’s wise-beyond-her-years 12-year-old daughter Holly, who tags along resourcefully even when the bullets fly, which in the final third of the film they do with a certain stylised relentlessness. Happily, scriptwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Shane Black, who also directs with a florid eye for killer sight gags, are far more interested in the winning flaws of their heroes and even their villains. Their script taps into a spirit of exuberant cynicism. “Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate,” says Crowe. Plenty of zingers where that came from. The Nice Guys is one of the most pleasurable lessons in screen chemistry since Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin crossed America in Midnight Run.
RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY
Blue Valentine (2010). A controversial break-up melodrama sees things from the male point of view
Drive (2011). Ryan Gosling's brilliant, bruising ride into LA darkness (pictured)
Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). Ryan Gosling teaches Steve Carell how to score in a film that doesn't
The Ides of March (2011). George Clooney's star-packed morality tale superbly anatomises political chicanery
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013). Derek Cianfrance and Ryan Gosling follow Blue Valentine with an epic tale of cops and robbers
Gangster Squad (2013). Ruben Fleischer swaps zombies for gangsters with mixed results
Only God Forgives (2013). Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling follow Drive with a simmering tale of vengeance
The Big Short (2015). Director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Nice Guys (2016). Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling buddy up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 70s LA
La La Land (2017). Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (pictured above) will have you floating out of the cinema on a cloud
Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Nice Guys
Ed Owen
With the Olympic Games starting in three months, it’s time to cash in with those inspiring stories of competition. Jesse Owens embodies the Olympic spirit, winning four track golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, comprehensively refuting Hitler’s message of race hate. Owens’s track medal tally remained unmatched until Carl Lewis, 48 years later. It’s difficult to think of a more perfect Olympian.
Ed Owen
How much you enjoy this new version of Alice Through The Looking Glass will be directly proportional to how much you revere Lewis Carroll’s original text. If you love the original you will be perplexed, wondering if you have come into the correct screening. But if you don’t mind some liberties taken with the story or, more than liberties, if you don’t mind the original story kidnapped, wrapped in chains and thrown into a well, or if you just don’t know the book, then you might actually enjoy what’s on offer.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was an early experiment with modern 3D, taking more than $1 billion in box office, one of the 30 highest-grossing films of all time. Such tremendous, unexpected success demands a sequel. Six years later. Burton’s film veered away from the Lewis Carroll story, including the classic elements (Cheshire Cat, etc) but with an odd, some might say unnecessary, slant. Alice (Mia Wasikowska, pictured below) was 19, returning to her youthful fantasies, not the much younger girl exploring her current fantasies as in the original.
The new film begins with the same cast and atmosphere or the Burton original, set several years after the first. Alice, now a swashbuckling sea captain, deals spiritedly with pirates before returning home to stuffy Victorian Britain. The chinless Hamish (Leo Bill), snubbed by Alice in the first film, humiliates her by taking away her ship away. Distraught, Alice finds the butterfly Absolom (voiced by Alan Rickman in one of his final roles) who leads her through a mirror - a looking glass - and into Wonderland, where things are also glum.
The Hatter (a spectacularly creepy Johnny Depp, pictured below) pines for his family, presumed dead. Alice, inspired to help the Hatter, must steal the Chronosphere, a Tardis-cum-motorbike time machine from Sasha Baron Cohen’s clockwork Time who sports a strong German (or possibly Swiss) accent. Now Alice can get to the bottom of The Hatter’s misery and also discover why the Queen of Hearts, a wonderfully brattish Helena Bonham Carter, is such a stinker.
This all bears as much resemblance to the original text as quantum computing does to Pokemon. But it does make for a sequel to the first film. Burton is not at the helm, passing on to James Bobin, who has a long association with Baron Cohen from the Ali G days, and directing both of the recent Muppets films. As co-producer, Burton’s fingerprints are all over the first-class steampunk set design, costumes and beautiful art direction. But without him driving the boat, the film lacks some of the weirdness he brings. Alice Through the Looking Glass has a far more conventional story as a result: a quest.
While the story meanders far from the original, some of Carroll’s distinctive dialogue creeps in at places, notably the nonsense jokes about time and the perception of time. Talking of time, six years is a long wait in Hollywood, and the timing of this sequel is curious. Those aged 10 for the original would be 16 now, too old to be interested in this. Anyone now the perfect age for the sequel would have been too young to see the original. This means that the film needs to stand on its own, but it barely does. If you don’t know the characters or the slants of Carroll's original story then the story is perplexing at best.
Some scenes are scary, the Victorian design dark and menacing, and may be a bit much for younger viewers. But if you can see past the problems, Alice Through the Looking Glassis enjoyable, visually spectacular and finally satisfying.
ALICE'S ADVENTURES ON STAGE AND SCREEN
Alice, Scottish Ballet. It should be a capital crime to attempt an Alice ballet - off with their heads
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet. Even the best butter would not help this plot-less evening
Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Barbican. Gerald Barry's crazy velocity berserks both Alice books in rude style
Alice in Wonderland. Tim Burton takes on the fantasy classic
Alice in Wonderland, BBCSO, Brönnimann, Barbican. A curious tale gets a riotous operatic telling from composer Unsuk Chin
Jan Švankmajer's Alice. The great Czech animator's remarkable first full-length film
wonder.land, National Theatre. Damon Albarn’s Alice musical has fun graphics, but a banal and didactic storyline
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Alice Through the Looking Glass
Saskia Baron
This is one of those films where it really is better not to have seen the trailer first. Much of the pleasure is in the narrative twists and the developing characters, and the publicity gives too much away. Nevertheless, Money Monster is an enjoyable soft-liberal satire on American TV shows and the wickedness of Wall Street.
Thomas H. Green
Berlin are, misleadingly, an arts unit from Antwerp, Belgium. They’ve been around for well over a decade and major in artily constructed documentaries that are presented in the manner of experiential installations. Their focus is usually the slow, commentary-free dissection of a geographical quirk or circumstance, hence past films have been about and titled Jerusalem, Moscow, Iqaluit (Canadian Inuit capital), and Bonanza (a tiny Rocky Mountains community).
alexandra.coghlan
Jane Austen’s early novel-in-letters Lady Susan has more in common with Vanity Fair or even Les Liaisons Dangereuses than it does with the author’s mature works. Austen’s familiar wit is there, certainly, but sharpened from embroidery needle to dagger. Her eye for social foibles and failings is similarly keen, but lacking the tempering generosity of her later novels.
Tom Birchenough
The 30th anniversary of the death of Andrei Tarkovsky – the great Russian director died just before the end of 1986, on December 29, in Paris – will surely guarantee that his remarkable body of work receives new attention, and this month distributor Artificial Eye launches a programme, Sculpting Time, which will see new digitally restored versions of his seven films being re-released around the country.
Jasper Rees
Tom Hanks is reaching world treasure status, like some third-century heritage site protected by UNESCO. His everyman allure makes him today’s only equivalent to James Stewart. Stewart shocked fans when he played a vengeful man-hunter in Winchester '73, and maybe it’s time Hanks defibrillated us all by playing a cold-blooded killer. In the meantime, here’s A Hologram for the King in which Hanks is very much Hanks and the main reason to pay up.
The source material is the much praised 2012 novel by Dave Eggers. Eggers, author of the super-ludic memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and creator of McSweeney’s magazine, is not the type of writer whose prose personality just leaps onto the screen. But in his wonderfully alive opening sequence (see clip overleaf) scriptwriter/director Tom Tykwer seems determined to lassoo lightning. To the backing of Talking Heads, Boston salaryman Alan Clay (Hanks) karaokes “Once in a Lifetime” in a harum-scarum nightmare sequence featuring cartoon SFX and a juddering rollercoastcam. In barely a minute it’s established that Alan, divorced and broke and with a horrible ex-wife, is heading to Saudi Arabia to secure a deal to supply the tech for a new city in the desert. For him it’s an alcohol-free last-chance saloon to pay for his daughter to go back to college. “I need you strong and bright here, Alan,” his boss tells him.
While Alan makes no professional headway, he is troubled by a lump in his back which is only worsened by emergency self-surgery and contraband moonshine. He ends up in hospital where he encounters an enigmatic and sultry female doctor called Zahra (Sarita Choudhury, pictured below).
While Tykwer’s dancing narrative style includes savvy nods to Groundhog Day, A Hologram for the King doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It briefly reports on the hellish conditions suffered by Filipino guest workers and flirts with the difficulty of being a woman in a phallocratic society. But is it in fact an intercultural romance and plea for international understanding, or a soft-centred picaresque adventure about second chances in midlife? It's also that extreme rarity, a Saudi comedy whisked into a shrewd commentary on US impotence as globalisation steals American jobs.
And yet it’s not quite any of the above. Tykwer, who made his name with Run, Lola, Run, has taken on unmanageable novels before in the shape of Cloud Atlas and Perfume. This visit to the Middle East is never quite as flawed as Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, whose quirky charms shrivelled up on screen. DoP Alexander Berner has a fine time pointing his camera at the desert. But it feels like a missed opportunity. Attending a Danish embassy rave, Alan meets Sidse Babett Knudsen’s expat worker (a mostly pointless cameo for Borgen’s statsminister) who attempts to rip his kecks off. “Would you like to hear a really good joke?” he suggests as an alternative to sex. A Hologram to the King seems to know only quite good ones. What’s left is the pleasure of Hanks, the same as he ever was, in an inconsequential shaggy dog tale.
TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)
Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks (pictured below) and Mark Rylance
Captain Phillips. Piracy drama prompts bravura all-action display from director Paul Greengrass and captain Hanks
Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic
Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson as PL Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney track the journey of Mary Poppins from page to screen
Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism
Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission
PLUS ONE TURKEY
Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie
Overleaf: watch the opening sequence of A Hologram to the King