For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office                 
for the weekend of February 21-23, 2014: 
                                 
1 (1) The Lego Movie (U) **** 
2 (4) Mr. Peabody & Sherman (U)
3 (6) Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy (U) **
4 (2) The Monuments Men (12A) **
5 (3) RoboCop (12A)
6 (5) The Wolf of Wall Street (18) **
7 (10) 12 Years a Slave (15) ****
8 (9) Dallas Buyers Club (15) ***
9 (7) Cuban Fury (15)
10 (re) Frozen (PG) **
 
(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:                
1. Funny Face
2. The Godfather Part II  
3. BAFTA Shorts 2014
4. Nymphomaniac: Volume 1  
5. The Lego Movie        
   

Top Ten DVD rentals: 
                                 
1 (new) Captain Phillips (12) ****
2 (new) Turbo (U)
3 (7) Rush (15) **
4 (new) About Time (12) **
5 (new) Filth (18) ***
6 (new) Prisoners (15) 
7 (new) White House Down (12)
8 (new) The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (12) **
9 (new) The Croods (U)
10 (1) The World's End (15) ****               

(source: moviemistakes.com/charts)
                                 
My top five:                                
1. Gravity [above]
2. How to Survive a Plague    
3. Gloria      
4. Prince Avalanche      
5. Ain't Them Bodies Saints                                  
   

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:                                  
1. The Lady Vanishes (Saturday, BBC2, 1.10pm)
2. Grease (Sunday, C4, 4.25pm)
3. Vertigo (Sunday, BBC2, 1.55pm)
4. Beetlejuice (Sunday, five, 2.50pm)
5. The Fountain (Sunday, C4, 1am)

"Unforgiven" (The Guardian 28/02/14)

Unforgiven ***

Dir: Lee Sang-il. With: Ken Watanabe, Akira Emoto, Shiori Kutsuna. 135 mins. Cert: 15

The symmetry is irresistible. 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars, a remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, made an international star of Clint Eastwood; now Eastwood’s valedictory 1992 Western has been remade by Korean-Japanese director Lee Sang-il. The tale of an ageing warrior (here Letters from Iwo Jima’s Ken Watanabe) who returns to the saddle to avenge a vicious attack on a prostitute translates fluently to the late samurai era, allowing Lee to refresh the action in pitting rusting swords against the emergent pistol. Narratively, it’s limited by a certain lack of surprises: if the territory’s new-ish, the characters are ported over unaltered from David Webb Peoples’ screenplay, and their interplay doesn’t yield any insights on the grim business of killing that Clint hadn’t already spat out. Still, it’s an enduring yarn, well told: a rare remake that functions independently, even as it reminds you – vividly, in places – of the original’s elegiac pleasures. 

Unforgiven opens in selected cinemas from today.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office               
for the weekend of February 14-16, 2014: 
                               
1 (new) The Lego Movie (U) [above] ****
2 (new) The Monuments Men (12A) **
3 (2) RoboCop (12A)
4 (1) Mr. Peabody & Sherman (U)
5 (3) The Wolf of Wall Street (18) **
6 (new) Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy (U) **
7 (new) Cuban Fury (15)
8 (new) Endless Love (12A) **
9 (4) Dallas Buyers Club (15) ***
10 (5) 12 Years a Slave (15) ****     

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:              
1. The Godfather Part II
2. Nymphomaniac: Volume 1
3. The Lego Movie  
4. The Armstrong Lie     
5. Nymphomaniac: Volume 2
     
 
Top Ten DVD rentals: 
                               
1 (new) The World's End (15) ****      
2 (2) The Wolverine (12)      
3 (1) The Great Gatsby (12) ***      
4 (new) The Heat (15) ***        
5 (8) Elysium (12) ***      
6 (3) Pacific Rim (12) **      
7 (new) Rush (15) **      
8 (new) Despicable Me 2 (U) ***       
9 (5) The Internship (12)      
10 (6) The Frozen Ground (15) ** 
       
(source: lovefilm.com)
                               
My top five:                              
1. How to Survive a Plague  
2. Gloria    
3. Prince Avalanche    
4. Ain't Them Bodies Saints    
5. Captain Phillips
                            
 
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:                                
1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Friday, BBC2, 11.05pm)
2. There Will Be Blood (Saturday, BBC2, 10.45pm)
3. Cop Land (Saturday, C4, 11.55pm)
4. Borat (Friday, C4, 12.20am)
5. Of Time and the City (Sunday, BBC2, 11.30pm)

"Stalingrad" (The Guardian 21/02/14)

Stalingrad **

Dir: Fyodor Bondarchuk. With: Mariya Smolnikova, Yanina Studilina, Pyotr Fedorov, Thomas Kretschmann. 131 mins. Cert: 15

This long-haul, Russian-language WW2 drama deploys a curious bookending device – involving Russian rescue workers hauling Germans from the rubble of Fukushima – to frame an equally bizarre main event: a part-recreation of the grimness of the siege of Stalingrad using the same 3D we're more accustomed to from the likes of, say, The Lego Movie. The perverse spectacle (child-torching, prostitute-stripping, endless flying ash) offered as compensation for some indistinct characterisation gets muffled by this format’s limited light capacity: those few scenes not choked with self-importance instead succumb to a greyly macho fug of war. The subtext – Russia endures, flexes muscles anew – doubtless makes it President Putin’s pick of the week, but someone should really take him to see the Lego film. 

Stalingrad opens in selected cinemas from today.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office             
for the weekend of February 7-9, 2014: 
                             
1 (new) Mr. Peabody & Sherman (U)
2 (new) RoboCop (12A)
3 (1) The Wolf of Wall Street (18) **
4 (new) Dallas Buyers Club (15) ***
5 (2) 12 Years a Slave (15) ****
6 (5) Frozen (PG) **
7 (3) That Awkward Moment (15)
8 (6) Lone Survivor (15) ***  
9 (8) American Hustle (15) ****
10 (new) Rusalka: Met Opera (uncertificated)
   
(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:            
1. The Lego Movie
2. Journal de France    
3. The Armstrong Lie    
4. Her
5. Dallas Buyers Club
     

Top Ten DVD rentals: 
                             
1 (new) The World's End (15) ****    
2 (2) The Wolverine (12)    
3 (1) The Great Gatsby (12) ***    
4 (new) The Heat (15) ***      
5 (8) Elysium (12) ***    
6 (3) Pacific Rim (12) **    
7 (new) Rush (15) **    
8 (new) Despicable Me 2 (U) ***     
9 (5) The Internship (12)    
10 (6) The Frozen Ground (15) ** 
     
(source: lovefilm.com)
                             
My top five:                            
1. How to Survive a Plague
2. Gloria  
3. Prince Avalanche  
4. Ain't Them Bodies Saints  
5. Captain Phillips
                            

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:                              
1. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead [above] (Saturday, C4, 12.55am)
2. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (Friday, C4, 11.20pm)
3. The Color of Money (Thursday, BBC1, 11.35pm)
4. The Notorious Bettie Page (Saturday, BBC2, 11.30pm)
5. Synecdoche, New York (Friday, BBC2, 11.05pm)

"The Lego Movie" (The Guardian 14/02/14)

The Lego Movie ****

Dirs: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller. With the voices of: Will Arnett, Elizabeth Banks, Charlie Day. 100 mins. Cert: U

An unexpected joy. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the nutty professors behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, have picked up the pieces that might have made for a throwaway brand-expansion exercise – hey, Smurfs movies – and instead fashioned a work of unbridled imagination, apt to delight sociologists, stoners and six-year-olds alike. Lego logic has been respected in the assembling of its meticulous yet changeable and spontaneous-seeming universes; our humble everyman hero progresses from guileless construction drone to revolutionary Master Builder (very Joseph Campbell) in cherishably jerky motions. Countless pauseworthy flourishes should send DVD presales rocketing, yet the zappiness generates as many drolly satirical gags, finessed by the voice cast’s sitcom-sharpened timing. It doesn’t think outside the box so much as operate on another astral plain entirely, yet even at its craziest, the film retains a tactile, DIY-ish charm: it may be the closest any American animation has come to emulating the ludic spirit of Aardman or Adam & Joe. 

The Lego Movie is in cinemas nationwide.

"Endless Love" (The Guardian 14/02/14)

Endless Love **

Dir: Shana Feste. With: Alex Pettyfer, Gabriella Wilde, Bruce Greenwood. 103 min. Cert: 12A

Scott Spencer’s 1979 novel first inspired a downbeat Brooke Shields vehicle, remembered solely for its sappy Lionel Richie/Diana Ross title song; it’s now been redressed by Gossip Girl’s producers as a glossy, Nicholas Sparks-ish wallow. Scruffy, bum-chinned plank Alex Pettyfer is its improbably noble blue-collar dreamboat; Gabriella Wilde the uptown girl he woos, to her overprotective pop’s chagrin. A certain doofy sincerity – all fairylights and lakeside kisses – and Wilde’s nervy, natural responses keep matters semi-watchable. As a romance, though, it’s literally by-the-book, poring at needless length over pages liberally flecked with bullshit, and thereby giving another generation of sleepover guests some very skewed ideas about their male contemporaries.

Endless Love is in cinemas nationwide.

"Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy" (The Guardian 14/02/14)

Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy **

Dir: Peggy Holmes. With the voices of: Tom Hiddleston, Christina Hendricks, Lucy Liu, Mae Whitman. 78 mins. Cert: U

This latest in the series that began as euphemistically termed “DVD exclusives” before 3D made it theatrically profitable strives to merge Neverland with another Disney franchise by pitting Tinker Bell against a flying Jacqueline Sparrow. The girl-power swashbuckling that follows might be cheering if it went beyond sixty minutes, or could offer anything more than smoothly indifferent animation and a new Natasha Bedingfield song. Business concerns sit close to the surface throughout, unmasked by much in the way of artistry: one image of its heroines hovering around a conveyor belt, stuffing pixie dust into jars, encapsulates something of the series entire, and Disney’s apparently ceaseless ability to industrialise magic.

Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy is in cinemas nationwide.