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WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN – Zbigniew Preisner
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When a Man Loves a Woman is a romantic drama about alcoholism. Directed by Mexican filmmaker Luis Mandoki from a screenplay by comedian Al Franken and Rain Man writer Ronald Bass, it stars Meg Ryan as Alice Green, a school counselor, who is married to Michael (Andy Garcia), an airline pilot, and whose outward persona masks the fact that she has a serious drinking problem. Alice is often reckless when drunk, and when one incident results in her endangering her children – nine-year-old Jess (Tina Majorino) and four-year-old Casey (Mae Whitman) – she finally agrees to enter a rehabilitation program. While Alice recovers, Michael must take on more responsibility at home and learn to cope with the challenges of supporting his wife through recovery. As such, the film portrays the complexities of their relationship, highlighting both the strain caused by Alice’s addiction, and the depth of Michael’s love and commitment. Read more…
THE CREATOR – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Creator is a science fiction epic from writer/director Gareth Edwards, set in a world where artificial intelligence has become wholly integrated into society, in the form of both robots and human/A.I. hybrids known as ‘sims’. However, after the A.I. detonates a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles, essentially destroying the city, the world descends into war and chaos. Years later, US army special forces agent Joshua is recruited to hunt down and kill ‘the creator,’ the elusive architect of a mysterious new type of advanced A.I. weapon that has the power to end the war and destroy humanity. However, things change for Joshua when he discovers that this ‘super weapon’ is actually a genetically modified child, who just wants humans and sims to live in peace. The film stars John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Alison Janney, and newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles as the mysterious child, and it’s mostly good. It has been marketed as a cerebral, ambitious new science fiction story, and while it is certainly visually and technically impressive, I found it to be a weird conceptual mishmash derivative of other, better films: one part Blade Runner, one part Apocalypse Now, with some other Vietnam allegory thrown in for good measure. Unusually, the central relationship between Joshua and the mystical child actually kept reminding me of the one between Eddie Murphy and The Golden Child from the 1986 film of the same name, which I’m sure is not what the filmmakers envisioned. I liked it, but I wanted to like it more than I did. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING, PART ONE – Lorne Balfe
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There aren’t many bonafide movie stars these days; actors or actresses who can will a film into production, attract top notch support, and get audiences flowing into cinemas, purely on the strength of their charisma and appeal. Tom Cruise is one of the few who can still do that in Hollywood, and his latest film – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One – is an action blockbuster tailored to his unique blend of movie-making. Cruise returns for the seventh time as IMF Special Agent Ethan Hunt, the all-action leader of a team of spies saving the world from clandestine threats and evil super-villains. In this latest film, the threat is a piece of rogue artificial intelligence nicknamed ‘The Entity,’ which was designed to sabotage digital systems, but has since achieved sentience and ‘gone rogue’ with the capability to infiltrate all of the world’s major defense, military, and intelligence networks. Control of the Entity is obtained by way of a specific type of key, which various powers attempt to obtain, while Hunt and his team try to stop the key from falling into the wrong hands – one of whom is a shadowy figure from Hunt’s own past. Read more…
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT – Volker Bertelmann
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The 1929 German-language novel Im Westen Nichts Neues – known in English as All Quiet on the Western Front – by Erich Maria Remarque is one of the most important anti-war novels ever written. It tells the semi-autobiographical story of Remarque’s own experiences fighting in the trenches of western Europe during World War I, and follows a young soldier named Paul Bäumer, who over the course of the book is transformed from an eager and enthusiastic patriot fighting for the glory of the vaterland, into a bitter, broken shell of a man, utterly devastated by the physical and mental anguish of war. It touches on several important themes, ranging from explorations of nationalism and blind patriotism, to the futility of war itself, especially the trench warfare of WWI where literally millions of soldiers, on both sides of the conflict, were slaughtered while trying to gain little more than a few yards of ground. The book was banned and burned in Nazi Germany, naturally, but has since become regarded as a modern classic, and is now one of the most revered pieces of German-language literature. Read more…
NO TIME TO DIE – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
After what feels like an eternity, wherein the film suffered delay after delay after delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 25th James Bond film No Time To Die has finally reached cinemas. It marks the end of the journey for Daniel Craig as 007 – he will be replaced by a new actor before the next film is released, whenever that may be – and also marks the climax to the arc of a series of films that began with Casino Royale in 2006 and which actually presents a fairly linear narrative across multiple films, something the Bond franchise had never attempted to do before. The film picks up the story almost immediately after the events shown in Spectre, and sees Bond travelling in Italy with Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the psychiatrist who helped him capture his arch-nemesis Blofeld (Christoph Waltz). However, an apparent betrayal sends Bond into a tailspin and into retirement – he’s leaving MI6 and the spy game for good. Years later, Bond is coaxed out of retirement by his old CIA colleague Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) after a top secret scientist goes missing, and before long Bond is facing off against a new adversary in the shape of terrorist Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), while teaming up with a new Double-0 agent (Lashana Lynch) who views Bond as a broken, misogynistic relic from the past. The film is directed by Cary Fukunaga, and was written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Fukunaga, and the great Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who was brought in to give the screenplay a contemporary edge. Read more…
THE BOSS BABY: FAMILY BUSINESS – Hans Zimmer and Steve Mazzaro
Original Review by Christopher Garner
Dreamworks’ The Boss Baby: Family Business takes place after Tim and Ted Templeton (the characters from the first Boss Baby) have grown up and grown apart. Older brother Tim has had two children of his own, Tabitha and Tina. Younger brother Ted has become a successful businessman, but work keeps him from having any personal connections with his brother’s family or anyone else. It turns out that baby Tina is a boss baby like her uncle Ted was, and has been tasked with bringing the brothers back together again and stopping evil Dr. Armstrong who runs Tabitha’s school, and who is bent on enslaving all parents so that children can be free. Tom McGrath returned to direct the sequel. Alec Baldwin reprises his role from the first film, and James Marsden, Amy Sedaris, Ariana Greenblatt, and Jeff Goldblum join the cast as grown-up Tim, Tim’s children, and the villainous Armstrong respectively. The film has had mixed reviews from critics. It’s not exactly intellectual cinema, and the whole idea of a sequel kind of undercuts the frame of the first film, but it has a lot of laughs for parents and kids, and Baldwin, Marsden, and Goldblum (at his Goldblummiest) are clearly having a great time. Read more…
CRUELLA – Nicholas Britell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The latest film to examine the origin stories of famous Disney villains, after Maleficent in 2014, is Cruella, which tells the history of Cruella De Vil, the antagonist of both the 1961 Disney animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and the original novel by Dodie Smith. There has already been a live-action adaptation of the story in 1996, with Glenn Close playing Cruella, but this prequel sees Emma Stone donning the famous black-and-white hairstyle wig. She plays Estella De Vil, an aspiring fashion designer in 1960s London, who takes a job working for the brilliant but difficult Baroness von Hellman, the head of a prestigious fashion house, played by Emma Thompson. The intense rivalry that develops between the two slowly eats away at De Vil’s sanity, and she eventually transforms herself into ‘Cruella’ and becomes a notorious and dangerous criminal obsessed with dalmatian dog furs. The film co-stars Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser as Cruella’s henchmen Jasper and Horace, and is directed by Craig Gillespie, whose last film was the Oscar-winning drama I, Tonya. Read more…
WONDER WOMAN 1984 – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE FILM, YOU MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER WAITING UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE DONE SO TO READ IT.
Perhaps the biggest casualty of the COVID-19 cinema apocalypse was Wonder Woman 1984, director Patty Jenkins’s sequel to her massively popular 2017 super hero-smash charting the origins of the titular warrior hero. Wonder Woman 1984 was supposed to be Warner’s summer blockbuster tentpole, and was originally going to be released in theaters in June, then August, then October of 2020, before it mostly bypassed cinemas altogether and debuted on HBO Max on Christmas Day. But, even without the full-blown big-screen release, Wonder Woman 1984 is still a huge dose of unpretentious, action-packed fun. The film is set in the early 1980s and sees Gal Gadot returning in the title role, masquerading as museum curator Diana Prince by day, while continuing to fight crime as Wonder Woman. When Diana’s museum comes into possession of a mysterious ‘dreamstone’ that apparently grants wishes, things quickly spiral out of control, first when Diana wishes for her deceased lover from WWI Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) to be reincarnated, and then when her mousy colleague Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) wishes to be like Diana. Eventually ambitious businessman Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) – who has coveted the dreamstone for years – manipulates Barbara into getting it from the museum for him, and with it he initiates a megalomaniacal plot to take over the world. Read more…
FANNY LYE DELIVER’D – Thomas Clay
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the most obscure independent films to receive a ‘major’ soundtrack release in 2020 is Fanny Lye Deliver’d. Written and directed by the independent British filmmaker Thomas Clay, the film is described in press material as a ‘Puritan western,’ and is set in a bleak and isolated farm in rural Shropshire in the mid-1600s. Maxine Peake stars as Fanny, the young wife of the dour, humorless, but fanatically religious John Lye , played by Charles Dance. Their world is thrown into chaos following the unexpected arrival at the Lye home of two strangers, a young couple who are being doggedly pursued by a ruthless sheriff and his deputy. The chaste and virginal Fanny finds herself attracted to Thomas (Freddie Fox), the male half of the couple, and thus begins a personal and sexual awakening in Fanny, who starts to question her life, her relationship with her husband, and her devotion to God. The film was shot in 2017 and was fraught with problems from the start, including having their producer unexpectedly die, having their meticulous period-accurate sets washed away by a flood, and then by languishing for almost three years in post-production hell. Then, when the film was finally set to be released commercially after going through the festival circuit, the whole thing was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it finally staggered into release on streaming platforms in June 2020. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT – Lorne Balfe
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When actor/producer Tom Cruise got together with director Brian De Palma in 1996 to make a brand new big-screen version of the classic 1960s spy TV series Mission: Impossible, I doubt that even he expected that he would still be playing the role of action hero Ethan Hunt 22 years later – yet, here we are. We’ve gone through multiple director changes in the intervening two decades – John Woo, J. J. Abrams, Brad Bird – but for the time being the series appears to have settled on Christopher McQuarrie, who with this film becomes the first director to make two Mission: Impossible films. Fallout is, in many ways, a continuation of the story established during Rogue Nation in 2015, as it sees Hunt and his IMF compatriots again locking horns with the shadowy villain Solomon Lane, whose sinister Syndicate organization continues to be a threat to the stability of the world. The globetrotting adventure sees the action moving from Berlin to Paris to London to the foothills of the Himalayas – and what action it is! The staggering set-pieces in the film include a HALO jump over Paris which Cruise did for real, a brutal three-way fight sequence in a bathroom, a high-speed motorbike chase around the Arc de Triomphe and beyond, an epic foot chase through the streets of Britain’s capital that contains a scene where Cruise smashed his ankle – for real – jumping from one building to another, and an exhilarating helicopter dogfight weaving between the towering peaks of the Kashmir. The film co-stars Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, and Alec Baldwin, and has been widely acclaimed as one of the best action movies in recent years. Read more…
MARY MAGDALENE – Hildur Guðnadóttir and Jóhann Jóhannsson
Original Review by Anže Grčar
The unfortunate and unexpected passing of Jóhann Jóhannsson in early February, sent shockwaves through the film community, and lovers of modernist music at large. Not only was he flourishing and enjoying a fruitful career highlight since the indie world took his scores for mainly Denis Villeneuve-helmed films to the heart, but the death of any person at barely 48 years of age is a sad reminder of how fragile our existence can be. Jóhannsson is leaving behind a stunning body of work, ranging from independent studio albums in his native Iceland, that gained a loyal following due to their experimental sonic blends of traditional orchestration with contemporary electronic elements, to his recent film scores, which exposed so many traditional scoring aficionados to variety of post-modernist styles – all coming from an artist who always managed to encapsulate life from a different, more introverted angle that was singular only to him. Read more…
ONLY THE BRAVE – Joseph Trapanese
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Since I moved to the United States in 2005 I’ve developed a deep admiration for firefighters, especially the ones who deal with brushfires. I’ve seen first hand here in California how devastating wildfires can be; bone dry vegetation, coupled with strong winds, and difficult terrain, can lead to terrifyingly enormous fires that can march across miles and miles of ground, turning entire communities into ash. Just last week more than 6,000 homes were lost and dozens of people were killed in a wildfire north of San Francisco – and it’s not just California. Recent fires in Spain and Portugal, and in Australia, have shown us how deadly nature can be. Director Joseph Kosinski’s film Only the Brave honors the men and women on these front lines by telling the largely true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of elite firefighters who in 2003 risked everything to protect a town in Arizona from a historic wildfire. The film stars Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, and Jennifer Connelly, and has an original score by composer Joseph Trapanese. Read more…
DUNKIRK – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A lot of people today don’t realize just how close the Allies came to losing World War II. During the latter half of 1939 and the early months of 1940 Adolf Hitler and his troops swept across Western Europe, overwhelming the Netherlands, Belgium, and much of France. By May, the only real opposition to his Nazi aggression was the army of the British Empire – the United States had not yet joined the war; Pearl Harbor would not be attacked until December 1941. But, to be frank, the British were losing. Hitler’s troops pushed them back to the small town of Dunkerque on the coast of Normandy and surrounded them; cut off from the rest of Europe, and with the English Channel separating them from home, more than 300,000 men were stuck on the beaches there, sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe. However, what transpired next proved to be the literal turning point of the war. For disputed reasons which are still debated today, Hitler accepted the suggestion of his commanders in the area that they should not move in for the kill and instead wait on the outskirts of the city and regroup; this brief respite allowed newly-elected Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his military commanders to organize an evacuation. Over the course of a week the men were ferried off the beaches to waiting Royal Navy ships by a flotilla of literally hundreds of volunteer civilian craft – lifeboats and fishing boats and pleasure cruisers – while the Spitfires of the Royal Air Force protected them from the air. Read more…
THE BOSS BABY – Hans Zimmer and Steve Mazzaro
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Boss Baby is a raucous new animated comedy film from Dreamworks directed by Tom McGrath, based on the popular 2010 picture book by Marla Frazee, about the wildly imaginative adventures of a 7-year-old boy named Tim. One day a taxi arrives at Tim’s home, inside of which is a baby wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Tim’s parents introduce the infant as a new brother, and there is an instant sibling rivalry between Tim and the pint-sized interloper. However, much to his surprise, Tim discovers that the baby can talk like an adult, and is actually a spy on a secret mission to thwart a dastardly plot that involves puppies taking over from babies as the cutest things in the world. The film, which features the voice talent of Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Jimmy Kimmel, Lisa Kudrow, and Tobey Maguire, was a popular success at the box office over the spring of 2017, despite reviews criticizing it for its flimsy plotting and over-reliance on potty humor (although – it’s a film about a talking baby; potty humor is almost mandatory). Read more…
NOCTURNAL ANIMALS – Abel Korzeniowski
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Nocturnal Animals is a film about violence, but not in the way you might expect. Amy Adams stars as Susan, the impossibly rich owner of an elite Los Angeles art gallery, who is trapped in an increasingly loveless marriage to the handsome but disinterested Hutton (Armie Hammer). One day her world is rocked when the manuscript of a soon-to-be-published novel is delivered to her home; the manuscript is from her first husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), and as Hutton is away on business, Susan decides to read it. The manuscript – which is titled ‘Nocturnal Animals’ and is dedicated ‘for Susan’ – tells the story of Tony Hastings (also Gyllenhaal), who is driving through west Texas with his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber), and who is forced to undergo an experience of unimaginable horror when they are menaced on the highway by a gang of shit-kicking rednecks led by Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). As Susan reads, she begins to interpret the story as a metaphor for her failed marriage to Edward, and is forced to come to terms with the consequences of her actions in the past. Read more…
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