Call Me by Your Name review

Call Me by Your Name is a drama about a 17 year old living in his parents' house during the summer in northern Italy, and the relationship he develops with the man staying in their guest room.

Given all the awards, nominations, and praise thrown towards this film, I decided to go to a screening the week after the BAFTAs. I understand why it's getting all the love it's getting, but, personally, there are other types of films I just enjoy more.

I can't deny all the positive aspects of the film that have already been pointed out by many before me. I also can't deny that I enjoyed the film and I don't regret watching it. What I can't say is that I plan on buying the blu-ray any time soon. It is a good film, but romances in general are films I don't tend to watch in my spare time; unless it's a genre crossover like Groundhog Day or Warm Bodies.

In short: I get it.

Mute review

Mute is directed by Duncan Jones, and is set in a future Berlin, as a mute bartender searches for his missing girlfriend.

This film has really divided people. On the one hand, the critics destroyed it, calling it terrible. Many people share this view. On the other hand, there is a large number of people on twitter who have come out in support of it. Of these two camps, I'm much closer to the second than the first.

I thought it was a solid cyberpunk neo-noir movie that wore its influences on its sleeve. I thought it set up its concept well, and executed the story well. What I found to be the problem was that the film was focused on the wrong person.

The main character is Alexander Skarsgård, a mute, amish bartender who searches for his missing girlfriend. An amish man in a technologically advanced world is interesting, but he isn't. Much more interesting is Paul Rudd, who plays an American military deserter trying to get himself and his daughter back home. His character's story and motivations I found to be much more interesting than Skarsgård's.

There is also a few plot lines and pieces of dialogue which I feel don't go where they should.

In short: I enjoyed it, but with a few reservations.

Thoroughbreds review

Now onto my favourite film of the festival...

Thoroughbreds is about two teenage girls, who used to be friends and recently reunited, who decide that they should end the life of the step-father of one of them.

This is a nihilist, dark comedy with some excellent characters and sharp dialogue.

The two leads are Amanda (Olivia Cooke), who doesn't feel anything and can often be seen faking emotions, and Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy), who strives for success no matter the method and hates her step dad. After Amanda notices a few things about him that Amanda can't stand, she proposes the idea the off him.

Part of the greatness of the film is the question of whether we should be rooting for these girls or not. Because the film is told from their perspective, you assume that they are right. But when you think about their motives, their fairly minor. Lily's stepdad never does anything evil, nor does he ever try to harm her. Sure, he acts a bit full of himself at times, but no more than the protagonists. There is also the instability of the protagonists to consider. At first, Lily seems fairly well adjusted. She tutors Amanda, she goes to parties, you see that she generally gets on well with other people. But as the film goes on, you find out she, like Amanda, is damaged.

There is also a running theme of your future being defined by your image. Amanda has a violent past, and brings up the point that this would make her too obvious a suspect in the murder. The drug dealer (Anton Yelchin) they consider for the murder often goes on about how he's working various jobs to support himself until he moves up in the world. And yet, his status stays the same until the end.

It's fair to say there's a fair amount of on screen talent here. Cooke and Taylor-Joy are both on track to becoming recognised as great actors. And before his unfortunate death, Anton Yelchin was establishing himself well by picking a variety of interesting projects. But, the talent off screen is equally impressive. The film is written by Cory Finley, a playwright who never stepped onto a film set before making Thoroughbreds. If he had been working in theatre for a long time, his success here would be less surprising. But the fact that he's under 30 and has less experience, makes the style of the film making and dialogue even more incredible.

In short: Thoroughbreds, is a darkly comic tale of vengeance that could get a strong following if it finds its audience.

You Were Never Really Here review

You Were Never Really Here follows Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, a hitman hired to save the daughter of a senator from the child sex trade.

Of the films I saw at the festival, this was easily the darkest and most demanding one to watch.

Due to being set within a place as vile as the child sex trade, there is little levity. It is a dark, disturbing and violent film. Once the film starts, there is no end to the uneasy feeling the film has until the credits start to roll. This is due to a tight script and masterful direction by Lynne Ramsey, an excellent score by Johnny Greenwood, and one of Joaquin Phoenix's best performances.

If I say too much, I feel as though I may ruin the experience of watching it. So, if you can and want to, do see it.

In short: Read the last line.

Wonderstruck review

Wonderstruck tells of two stories set over two different time periods, both about a child who travels to New York in search of someone important to them.

This was the second film I saw at the Glasgow Film Festival, and I didn't like it as much as the first.

It is a concept that works: the story of two deaf children travelling to New York to find someone important to them, separated by several decades. For a good chunk of the film I was wondering how the two stories were going to connect. I had an idea, but it wasn't a solid one. Then, a certain character appeared and I had it figured out. The problem with this is that there was still a bit left to go in the film. Being made by Todd Haynes, this is a film which will attract cinephiles, but I don't think that they are the target audience. This is clearly aimed at families (it is based on a children's book) and how some of the events transpire within the film, it is one that I think will be best enjoyed by children. That's not to say it can't be effective for anyone else, it's just that it's not getting targeted to and seen by the right people. It can be a good introduction to more complex story telling, but only if it got marketed correctly.

In short: It's alright.

Isle of Dogs review

Isle of Dogs is the latest film by Wes Anderson, and envisions an island where dogs are condemned to, after illness and disease spreads rapidly across the Japanese dog population.

This was the first of five films I saw at the Glasgow Film Festival this year, so I'd like to start by thanking the festival programmers for putting on the festival.

As a casual fan of Wes Anderson's films, so I was quite looking forward to this film. Unlike his previous stop motion animated film, this is a completely original idea. While Anderson was able to add his usual style and quirk to the story of Fantastic Mr Fox, he had to loosely follow the original story. This resulted in a film I greatly enjoyed, but Roald Dahl would have hated. By not working with any source material he is able to shape the story however he likes to.

This is probably his most political film. There is a decent amount of commentary within a story which is slightly non conventional. That said, it isn't the focal point of the film. It really is a story about a boy and his dog; following 12 year old Atari Kobayashi as he travels to Trash Island (the titular Isle of Dogs) to rescue his dog Spots. Once he arrives, he is welcomed by a pack of dogs who decide - through a democratic vote - to help the boy. This pack of alpha dogs is without a leader, as they are all the leader. Every time a decision must be made, Edward Norton's Duke always suggests putting it to a vote. Also in the pack is Jeff Goldblum's gossip, Bob Balaban's ex-advert star, Bill Murray's sports mascot, and Bryan Cranston's stray dog - Chief.

The majority of the English dialogue comes from these, and other, dogs. Anderson has taken the decision to keep all the Japanese dialogue in Japanese, occasionally having an interpreter present to translate what they are saying, while any English speaking characters also speak in English. The dogs barks have been rendered into English. It was a bold move that payed off to not have any subtitles with the Japanese spoken scenes. The non televised scenes with no interpreters actually work well at conveying what is being said by using visuals and body language. Although, I do wonder how it plays in Japanese.

In short: I really enjoyed it.

I realise that I'm so far behind that all the films I saw at the festival are now on general release. So, sorry about that to the one person who reads my reviews.

Black Panther review

Black Panther is the latest Marvel film, and follows T'challa as he takes the position as king of Wakanda, and continues to protect his kingdom as the Black Panther.

As Marvel films become more monotonous, Black Panther was a breath of fresh air. The majority of recent Marvel films all follow the formula of; quippy hero, sidekick to bounce quips off of, underdeveloped villain, original music that doesn't add or detract to the scenes, the ugly colour correction that drains vibrancy from the colours, end the film with a big cgi fight sequence where there are no stakes as to whether the hero will live or die (because you saw them in the trailer for the next movie 2 hours ago). I still enjoy these films, but the formula has gotten more noticeable recently. Which is why I was glad that Black Panther wasn't what I had expected it to be.

To be fair Thor: Ragnarok had taken steps in the right direction (decent villain, some good music), bit still suffered from the other problems, ignoring the humorous nature of the film of course.

Basically, Black Panther solves most of these problems. The only one it really doesn't is the lack of personal stakes. There is a moment over an hour in where a thing happens, and I knew that within 20 minutes it would somehow be reversed. And, Killmonger's basic plan is too similar to Hela's. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if Ragnarok were not the last Marvel movie, and if Hela had not been a step in the right direction.

In short: It's good.

The 15:17 to Paris review

Badly written. The dialogue and structure doesn't work at all. Clint Eastwood needs to stop basing full movies off of short events if he wants to make better films.

That said, the sequence on the train was very good.

I, Tonya review

I, Tonya tells the story of Tonya Harding, the figure skater who came from a rough background to become one of the best figure skaters of her time, only to have her career derailed by an incident involving fellow figure skater, Nancy Kerrigan.

Before I saw I, Tonya I knew very little about Tonya Harding. Now I feel like I know more about her, her family, the people she surrounded herself with, her home life and her ex-husband, but the actual events involving all this are still up in the air. I will give credit to the film by stating at the beginning that the events in the film are based on "wildly contradictory" statements, so the true story wasn't ever going to be able to be told. But what is shown is interesting.

The film has several really good performances. Margot Robbie and Alison Janney are being recognised everywhere. But I'd like to give credit to Sebastian Stan and, especially, Paul Walter Hauser. Hauser really steels the show as a man who is convinced that he is doing some sort of national security job, when really he is just a man who doesn't appear to have a job and lives with his parents. His absolute oblivious nature to his real life brings the film its best comedic moments.

Overall, the film goes for a comedic tone. Even its structure is comedic (a mockumentary framing about a true story). However, this tone becomes problematic whenever domestic abuse is brought into the story. It is shown that throughout her life, Tonya Harding was a victim of domestic violence, from both her mother and her first husband. These scenes of domestic abuse usually follow, and are followed by comedic scenes. So whenever these scenes, which should be tense and dramatic, occur, there was a feeling of unease as though they were being played for humour. This wasn't just a feeling, as I heard laughs, some uncomfortable, from other people. I really did think that the handling of domestic abuse was poor and took away from how much I liked the film.

In short: I, Tonya is a well constructed, solid, tonally confused look into an athlete's path in life.

The Cloverfield Paradox review

The Cloverfield Paradox is a colossal disappointment.

I am a fan of the Cloverfield franchise. The original is an excellent deconstruction of a genre which takes a unique, grounded viewpoint on an event which would usually be portrayed as huge, epic, and bombastic. Then 10 Cloverfield Lane expanded the franchise into interesting territory by making an indirect, barely connected sequel that stands on its own as an excellent claustrophobic thriller. It set up the franchise as a loosely connected anthology series which could explore completely different areas of sci-fi with a few similar themes and visual ideas. But, then The Cloverfield Paradox was released to the world...

Before I get onto the actual film, I have to give props to Netflix, and a hard stare to Paramount. Firstly, it was a bold decision by Netflix to just drop this film a few hours after the trailer was revealed. And, it was an extremely smart move to release the trailer during the Super Bowl. To my knowledge, Netflix have never done this sort of thing before (their original release plan for The Punisher was to do a surprise drop after the New York Comic Con panel had finished, but due to unforeseen events, they had to cancel that) and are truly industry trailblazers for pulling it off as well as they did.

But Paramount are a bunch of cotten-headed ninny muggins. They had a film which was part of a successful, proven franchise. But saw that it didn't quite work, and instead of giving notes to the director and requesting (more) reshoots, they decided that because franchise spearheader JJ Abrams wasn't available, they would accept mediocrity in the film and dump it in Netflix's hands for instant profit. I didn't have this viewpoint before I watched the film, it was only after I viewed the finished product and did some reading that I gained this perspective.

Before I watched the film, I presumed that Paramount had sold the distribution rights to Netflix as part of their attack on original sci-fi. I say "attack", but that's hyperbole. Recently, Netflix acquired the distribution rights to Annihilation, the new film by Alex Garland, for everywhere apart from USA, Canada and China. Because apparently, the head of Paramount thought the ending was too smart for audiences, and would have to be changed if his company were going to release it. Garland and a producer objected and fought back, eventually agreeing to have the film go straight to streaming services in every country which isn't a major North American country. I personally don't understand this decision; as hard sci-fi has not done well in USA in recent years, while it has performed better in other countries, such as the UK.

And I've not even got onto the insulting part to streaming services. After the divisive responses to mother! and Downsizing - mixed with disappointing box office returns - Paramount has seemingly decided that having their name attached to good, safe projects is better than continuing to release challenging films. And they relegate those underwhelming or potentially divisive films to Netflix, essentially using it as a dumping ground for their unwanted content. To be fair, Paramount aren't the first studio to do this. After shuffling around the release for a while, Universal gave Netflix distribution rights to Spectral (which I can't comment on the quality of) and have recently done something similar with Extinction. The problem is not just with Paramount, but they're who I'm angry with right now.

Anyway, onto the actual film. I watched it as soon as I possibly could, and by the time it was finished, I was extremely disappointed.

The first of my problems comes from how much of a mess the structure of the film is. There are so many ideas which are thrown out there, forgotten about, then briefly brought back up again later. And some of these ideas are very ill thought out and make little to no sense within the story. And they keep using the excuse of "alternate realities" as a scapegoat.

One of these ideas that actually plays a part in the story has to do with Chris O'Dowd's arm. I suspect this was concieved as being slightly humorous, but I found the execution to be so poor, that everything involving his arm I found unintentially hilarious. There is also a fairly major plot point involving his arm that shouldn't have happened logically. And I still don't understand how his arm operated.

There are many things like that, where they are novel ideas, but are executed without thought.

Den of Thieves review

Den of Thieves is about an LA cop trying to take down a group of men he knows are bank robbers. Despite this simple premise, don't worry; the rest of the film isn't just Heat.

Going into a Gerard Butler film, I expect it to be one of two things: complete rubbish, or enjoyable rubbish. With this mindset, I was pleasantly surprised.

Now, there are a few similarities to Heat in the execution of some scenes, but the overall story that is told is different. For example; the opening reminded me a bit of Heat, and there are interactions between Gerard Butler's cop and Pablo Schreider's criminal that are quite reminiscent of those between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. And there are parts of the film which try to show everyone's personal lives, but, unlike Heat, they don't play any actual part to the story, and are just single scenes to show that the characters have personal lives.

In short: It's alright.

Downsizing review

Downsizing follows Paul (Matt Damon) as he decides to improve his life by downsizing, a process by which people are shrunken to around five inches.

I really liked the first half of the film. They set up the world, the characters, the concept, the environmental message and the themes extremely well. But then... the second half completely disregards all of that.

I don't think I've ever seen such a drastic change in quality within a film before. The first half of the film does everything right: it creates a world where you believe that downsizing exists and is common, and sets up the characters motivations and thoughts on the process through great acting and excellent writing. So it's a real shame that they throw it all away in the second half.

Instead of continuing to be a film about the world adjusting to tiny people and how their lives differ from everyone else, it does a u-turn and becomes about Matt Damon wanting to improve himself after his wife leaves him. This whole part of the plot (which is almost all of the second half of the film) would have been no different if they had been regular sized. The greatest disappointment in the second half is that they do nothing with the concept. There is the occasional visual gag, but they are few and far between.

And then, as it approaches the end, the environmental message is hastily re-introduced and the film suddenly becomes depressing and all hippy like. The only thing that kept me watching was that I kept thinking it looked like Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier were having a lot of fun together. And that wasn't enough fun to keep me entertained.

In short: The rubbish second half completely betrays the great first half.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure review

The Death Cure is the finale of The Maze Runner trilogy, and sees the Gladers join the rebellion against WCKD.

A few years ago, I read the trilogy, and now u barely remember The Death Cure. So, I assume that the changes they made are part of the reason I enjoyed the film.

I thought that the first film was quite good and that the second was really bad. This one is somewhere in between the two.

It is an enjoyable action film, but with many stupid moments.

In short: It's alright, and a decent ending.

Early Man review

Early Man is the latest Aardman animation, about a group of cavemen trying to win back their valley from the Bronze Age.

I, like everyone else, am a big fan of Aardman. I think all their films (minus Flushed Away) are hilarious and wonderfully creative. The work by Nick Park is especially so. Therefore, I think it's fair to say I was quite excited to see this film. Even if I was afraid of how many jokes the trailers had shown.

I laughed a lot. There are many good jokes, and I'm sure there are plenty I won't notice until I see it again. I highly recommend seeing Early Man to have a good laugh.

However, I don't recommend seeing it if you want a great story. About halfway through I realised it has an extremely similar plot to Dodgeball. It is the same story, but set in a different time period and with football instead of dodgeball. That's not to say that if you've seen Dodgeball you shouldn't see Early Man. I think that Dodgeball is a hilarious film, but I can recognise that they are two completely different styles of comedies. So if you've seen one, don't let it stop you from watching the other.

In short: Early Man is another successful, if familiar, Aardman comedy.

A Futile and Stupid Gesture review

A Futile and Stupid Gesture is a film about National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney, and his struggles with the success of the magazine.

As someone who knows very little about National Lampoon (I've seen parts of Christmas Vacation, and I've seen the dog magazine cover), I found this film quite interesting and enjoyable.

Part of that must be attributed to David Wain. I like his style of humour, the Wet Hot American Summer trilogy is hilarious, and Role Models is pretty good. Luckily, his style of humour is prevalent here, and there are many good jokes. There is, of course, jokes about the biopic nature, narrative structure, and narrative devices of the film. Although, I found one of the narrative devices problematic and confusing towards the end.

In between the jokes are the usual biopic parts. They are mostly fine up until towards the end; where it quickly goes from dramatic comedy to pure drama. If David Wain had done drama before, then this might have worked better. But, since he has worked almost exclusively in comedy until now, it feels a bit jarring.

Although, this part does really show off how good Will Forte is in the role of Doug Kenney. He is good throughout the whole film, but in the last 15-20 minutes he really excels as a depressed addict.

In addition to Forte, there are a lot of really good actors in the film. Domhnall Gleeson is great (as usual) as the National Lampoon's co-founder. Jon Daly does a particularly impressive impression of Bill Murray. And Joel McHale is surprisingly brutal in how dark his portrayal of Chevy Chase is.

In short: This is a solid and effective comic drama about a man whose success ultimately betrays him.