"Museum Hours" (The Guardian 06/09/13)

Museum Hours (12A) 107 mins ****

Jem Cohen’s quiet, strange and increasingly compelling hybrid-film uses a brief encounter between wisened souls – Johann (Bobby Sommer), a genial guard at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, and Anne (singer Mary Margaret O’Hara), a Canadian tourist – to frame an inquiry into art history and the pleasures of looking. Inspired by Brueghel’s busy tableaux, Cohen is drawn to museum minutiae: a canvas’s unnoticed details, yawning schoolchildren, cigarette butts gathering outside the entrance. As the relationship progresses, he ends up cataloguing Vienna itself, transforming even its banal or throwaway features into a kind of art. It sounds impossibly rarefied, but the leads map out something unforced and charming between them, and Cohen’s left-of-centre perspectives, juxtapositions and sight gags really do grow on you. Like José Luis Guerín’s brilliant 2007 curio In the City of Sylvia, this is one of those rare films that may change the way you view the world. 

Museum Hours opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Any Day Now" (The Guardian 06/09/13)

Any Day Now (15) 98 mins ***

It sounds like something from Channel 5’s afternoon schedule – gay couple in 1970s L.A. battle for custody of a neglective neighbour’s Down syndrome son – but Travis Fine’s drama digs considerably deeper into its every scene and character. Alan Cumming is Rudy, a drag artist railing against the insistence good dads don’t wear blusher; Garret Dillahunt his boyfriend Paul, a divorced lawyer who has an in with the system, if uncomfortable ties to the macho world of the bar. Fine never rushes his plot points, instead painting a picture of this generally unfabulous moment in muted brown production design, and allowing his actors to unpick this case’s nuances: he’s fostered a credibly guarded turn from Dillahunt, and Cumming’s most modulated and affecting screen performance yet. It’s fighting a small fight, honestly and with commendable integrity; the kid – young Isaac Leyva – is a real heartbreaker, too. 

Any Day Now opens in selected cinemas from today.

"The Great Hip Hop Hoax" (The Guardian 06/09/13)

The Great Hip Hop Hoax (18) 93 mins ***

Documentarist Jeanie Finlay here follows 2011’s sweetly inquisitive record-store survey Sound It Out with another tale from the music industry’s fringes. In 2004, white rappers Silibil ‘n’ Brains seized the post-Eminem moment to land lucrative Sony contracts and significant airplay. They claimed to be Californian skater boys; in fact, they were Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain, two chancers from Arbroath. Their method rapping was more youthful prank than Imposter-like deception; Finlay benefits from the larky footage her subjects shot to document their upward trajectory, while charting the growing desperation of giddy kids obliged not just to live but sell a lie. Darker notes prevail as the gap between image and reality grows too wide for the boys to reconcile, but it’s mostly a poppy, funny anecdote, if no advert for the music biz: Daniel Bedingfield emerges as one of its savvier souls.

The Great Hip Hop Hoax opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Jadoo" (The Guardian 06/09/13)

Jadoo (12A) 89 mins **

The multicultural foodie flick is becoming a staple at the lower-budget end of the British industry: where April’s Papadopoulos & Sons had Greeks reviving North London chipshops, this enlists almost every Anglo-Asian actor working for its tale of estranged brothers running rival Leicester curry houses. Amit Gupta, pursuing the centre ground after 2011’s Resistance, lays on tasty catering and performances, but his script’s too busy being good-natured to be funny or dramatic: the King of Curries showdown proves less explosive than the average Ready, Steady, Cook, while the lavish wedding we’re expecting never materialises. Not bad, just terribly mild.

Jadoo is in selected cinemas from today.

"No One Lives" (The Guardian 06/09/13)

No One Lives (18) 86 mins **

Taken with last week’s superior You’re Next, this dreary slasher would suggest we’re in for a raft of horror runarounds pitting representatives of the 1% against the murderously aggrieved remainder. Here, it’s a psychopath wrestling a set of backwoods ne’er-do-wells for possession of the brittle blonde heiress he’d previously kidnapped. Director Ryuhei Kitamura ladles on the entrails like a ghoulish dinnerlady, but his three-way narrative strategies lead nowhere: the film’s switching between the fictional equivalents of Ted Bundy, the Manson family and Paris Hilton, without realising this gives us no-one we might remotely give a hoot about.

No One Lives is in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release on September 23.

"Riddick" (Metro 06/09/13)

Riddick (15) 119 mins *

The Fast & Furious series has become such a money-spinner that it’s resurrecting its stars’ defunct franchises. Riddick, you’ll half-recall, was the growling ex-con played by Vin Diesel in 2000’s nicely pulpy Pitch Black – and who was then confined to the bargain bin in the sky after partnering Judi Dench (!) as the hero of 2004’s needless Chronicles of Riddick. “I committed the worst crime of all: I got civilised,” thunders Big Vin at the beginning of this ideas-free reboot, which restores Riddick’s anti-hero status, dumping him into a sulphur-hued wilderness to battle bickering, blundering bounty hunters.

As a character, Riddick remains no more than a rumble in Diesel’s throat, and after the I Am Legend-ish prologue, in which he wrestles naff CG beasties, he’s off-screen for so long you could call the Trades Description people to complain someone’s made a Riddick movie without any Riddick in it. When he reappears, it’s only to turn girl’s-girl Katee Sackhoff straight during a finale that shruggingly replays Pitch Black’s grunts-versus-bugs scenario. After the promising Dredd’s box-office bellyflop, we could have done with a properly bad-ass action franchise – but this dull, ugly and nonsensical game of Riddick hide-and-seek sure ain’t launching it.

Riddick is in cinemas nationwide.

Bee-havioural science: "More Than Honey"

The issue of colony collapse disorder shouldn't be a new one on cinema audiences - it was given an urgent laying out in 2009's explanatorily titled The Vanishing of the Bees - but the German doc More Than Honey lends it a more personal slant. Director Markus Imhoof (whose narration has been dubbed into English, with just the right level of curiosity, by John Hurt) is the grandson of a beekeeper, and he's here set out on an idiosyncratic, at times downright eccentric quest to track down the opinions of all those professionals doing their darnedest to keep our apian friends alive.

They are an eclectic bunch, to say the least: academics using tiny MRI machines to generate bee brainscans, through which they attempt to explain the insects' suddenly suicidal behavioural patterns; old dears who, in the bees' absence, have been obliged to undertake the painstaking business of pollination by hand; migratory beekeepers whose job involves trucking swarms from one coast of the US to the other, following the harvest. The crowd favourite seems likely to be Fred, an Alpine bee-shepherd who does all of his hive-handling with no greater protection than a lit cigar, and routinely squashes his queen bees in order to maintain the racial purity of his hives.

Historians and feminist theorists could have a field day with this, of course, and the film actively encourages contributions from all parties, an acknowledgement that this is one of those issues that will affect everybody if left unresolved. Inevitably, it gets scattered, buzzing from one field to the next in the hope its diverse strands will cross-pollinate and produce a grand unifying theory - and I'm not so sure that the one Imhoof settles on (that killer bees are the way forward) isn't as eccentric as anything else here. Its strongest suit is some fascinating, microcosmic photography, which takes us inside both functioning and collapsing hives, and provides urgent, up-close evidence of the kind of swarming industry we're set to lose if we can't fix this problem.

More Than Honey opens in selected cinemas from Friday.