"Amar Akbar & Tony" (Reader's Digest 17/04/15)

Three West London wideboys gain a new-found responsibility in the process of doing up an Indian restaurant in this laddish low-budget caper from writer-director Atul Malhotra.

Growing up on the mean streets of Hounslow, childhood friends Amar, Akbar and Tony have long looked out for one another through thick and thin. Lately, however, there’s been more of the latter: after seeing his promising legal career torpedoed in the wake of a nightclub brawl, the brooding Amar (Rez Kempton) gets a second chance when estate agent Akbar (Sam Vincenti) spies an Indian restaurant in need of fixing up. As for white boy Tony (Martin Delaney), forever along for the ride, he’s just interested in hooking up with someone. Anyone.

If something here sounds familiar, it’s because Malhotra’s riffing on 1977’s Amar Akbar Anthony, a beloved Bollywood masala that found a defining role for the legendary Amitabh Bachchan. Malhotra replicates the original’s scattershot plotting while playing down its religious aspect, and dropping any pretensions to class: Brit-Asian figureheads Nina Wadia and Meera Syal see their honed timing squandered in demeaning bit-parts, while an early cameo from Maggot of Welsh rappers Goldie Lookin’ Chain as a toilet attendant more or less sets the level.

In his feature debut, Malhotra displays a curious mix of good intentions and lousy instincts: he hides his potentially heartwarming material behind an hour of leering. This roguish triumvirate are meant to learn maturity and responsibility, but there’s a lot of lamentable banter and cutaways to strippers’ bums, and the film scarcely knows what to do with sincere turns from Dev Sagoo (as Amar’s dad) and Karen David (as an abused bride): the latter’s attempted suicide is one of several moments where Malhotra can only offer a clueless shrug.

Of the leads, Kempton negotiates these berserk tonal shifts with a calm gravitas that suggests better scripts might eventually come his way, but it’s simply very hard to like Vincenti’s flash Foxtonite or Delaney’s thoroughly unreconstructed bloke, which makes long stretches of lairy girl-chasing pretty excruciating to behold. It may still pass muster or perhaps even strike chords with a less-than-demanding post-pub crowd, but any grandparents heading to the multiplex with fond memories of the wholesome original are going to be in for a terrible shock.

Amar Akbar & Tony opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Glassland" (Telegraph 17/04/15)

Glassland ****

Dir: Gerard Barrett. With: Toni Collette, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter, Michael Smiley, Joe Mullins, Harry Nagle, Gary O’Nuallain. 15 cert, 93 min

The Irish drama Glassland establishes its kitchen-sink credentials from its opening frames. When twentysomething taxi driver John (Jack Reynor) sets about making breakfast after a long shift, he has first to retrieve a bowl from crockery stacked precariously under dripping taps. As with much else in Gerard Barrett’s film, it’s the tiniest of vignettes, but one that conveys multitudes – in this instance, about the ways in which this household does and doesn’t function. There are, it transpires, reasons nothing gets cleaned up around here: John is out working every hour to support a mother mired deep in alcoholism.

Though far from the chestbeating of 1997’s Nil by Mouth, Barrett is comparably alert to the rhythms and routines of his particular working-class milieu. By night, John ferries migrant girls to the cabs of lonely truckers; each morning, he bags up the empties and checks to ensure mum Jean (Toni Collette) hasn’t choked on her own vomit. Ways out would appear limited, although Barrett provides a leavening, even touching counterpoint in the form of John’s best (only?) friend Shane (Will Poulter), a gobby tearaway who has the option of taking his own mother for granted, and the opportunity to escape.

The umbilical cord connecting Jean to John stretches only so far, however. That John hasn’t room for other women is established during an especially lucid sequence that finds ma and son attempting a conventional night in. The dancing montage that follows looks suspiciously like the doing of a far glossier film than Glassland has been up to this point – until a sobering cut and stark lighting change reveals we may just have been inhabiting Jean’s wobbly headspace. The reality: a tired-looking middle-aged woman swaying uncertainly in a drab little flat. The song: “Tainted Love”, of course.

The performers commit entirely. Reynor extends his fine, thoughtful work in 2012’s What Richard Did as a lad operating under the heaviest of burdens. Colette’s jolting mid-film monologue makes one realise how often her formidable presence has been squandered recently – and a single smile of hers late on, as these characters move out of the fragile state suggested by its title, is all the illumination Barrett requires. It’s a film of few frills or flourishes, which never tries to dress up its subject or soften its blows. Yet in its rage and its pain, in the wire-brush scrub it gives to the movies’ woozily romantic notions of alcoholism, Glassland feels wholly honest and true.

Glassland opens in selected cinemas from today.

"The Last Five Years" (Telegraph 17/04/15)

The Last Five Years ***

Dir: Richard LaGravenese. With: Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan. 12A cert, 94 min

Maybe we have Glee to thank, or blame; maybe it’s iPods putting music inside our heads 24/7. Either way, the elevating transgression of having characters burst into song has become normalised: everybody’s doing it nowadays, and with no more self-consciousness than one might display whistling outdoors. The Last Five Years sounds like a vocal warm-up for the incoming Pitch Perfect sequel: it’s Anna Kendrick, again, and showtunes. Yet the numbers in Jason Robert Brown’s off-Broadway musical were arranged around an overtly emotional core; its post-mortem of a formative fling considered why we first start singing – and what happens when the melody abates.

Brown’s show preceded (500) Days of Summer, which shuffled in this direction, but the movie adaptation, written and directed by Richard LaGravenese, bears its marked influence. Here are similarly scattered episodes from the coupling of two creatively minded New York twentysomethings: boy-wonder novelist Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) and Cathy (Kendrick), an aspirant actress flunking one audition after another. When they aren’t expressing themselves on stage or at the typewriter, they can be found trilling at one another: first around their boho apartment, then over Skype, finally in tear-stained letters. Scant surprise they feel a need to take a break.

Might we, too, want to call the whole thing off? Around 95% of LaGravenese’s film is sung-through, and that relentlessness feels a potential stumbling block. By expending as much energy on book as on score, studio-era musicals afforded their audience breathing space; these latter-day, Louie Spence-age musicals can seem awfully needy in their incessant jazz-handing. Brown’s non-stop razzle-dazzle may intend to obscure how he hasn’t much plot here beyond preppy skylarking, but matters occasionally get manically tinny: you recoil from Cathy’s proposal acceptance – “I’ll be your wife! I want to bear your child!” – as you would from anybody else yelping out their innermost thoughts.

Still, while never as lived-in as those of, say, Once, these tunes prove oddly more memorable than the Disneyfied Sondheim of Into the Woods: a songsmith who thinks to rhyme “batty” with “Cincinnati”, Brown is equally clever in modulating pitch towards characterisation. Where Jordan’s Jamie finds his voice early, Kendrick/Cathy does but belatedly; their outpourings poignantly record the ways success alters this couple’s trajectory. Your resistance will increase the further you are from the protagonists in age, yet LaGravenese’s direction remains appreciably intimate, ensuring this project ends up close to where it began: not one for the ages, perhaps, but a pretty good night out nevertheless.

The Last Five Years opens in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release on May 4.

"Stones for the Rampart: Battle of Warsaw" (Guardian 17/04/15)

Stones for the Rampart: Battle for Warsaw ***

Dir: Robert Glinski. With: Tomasz Zietek, Marcel Sabat, Kamil Szeptycki, Magdalena Kolesnik. 111 mins. Cert: 15

The global repository of WW2 stories continues to replenish itself, and Polish director Robert Glinski’s new drama, charging around after a pair of youthful saboteurs undermining the German occupation, initially appears one of the more sexed-up. Yet this adaptation of Aleksander Kaminski’s on-the-spot 1943 novel uses the strained friendship between headstrong Janek (Tomasz Zietek) and practical Tadeusz (Marcel Sabat), and the latter’s fraught relationship with the group’s handlers, to work up questioning perspectives on the act of sabotage; for all the flashy thrills and spills initiated by what’s effectively a paramilitary scout troop, Glinski presents wartime heroism as a shifting, complex concept. That English-language title feels grandiose for what boils down to a contained, vaguely pulpy rescue-and-revenge mission, but – thanks in part to Krzysztof Szpetmanski’s razor-sharp cutting – it remains a sleek and watchable history, possessed of a bristling energy lacking in, say, Suite Française or Woman in Gold. 

 

Stones for the Rampart: Battle for Warsaw opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends" (Guardian 17/04/15)

Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends **

Dir: Keishi Ohtomo. With: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Takeru Sato, Emi Takei, Yu Aoi. 134 mins. Cert: 15

Like Peter Jackson’s hobbling Hobbitry, this live-action samurai panto could conceivably have been resolved during its second instalment, which boasted a pretty piffling ratio ofplot-to-production design. Part Three has the ingredients of a rousing third-act fightback, as our never-more-androgynous hero is retrained to overcome a nemesis now hiding out in a battleship. Again, though, its momentum is stalled by byzantine sidebars involving shrieking, still-superfluous supporting characters. Handsome choreography, but it’s mostly been a demonstration of the modern movie business’s absurd gigantism: seven hours of set-trashing for a story that needed two tops. They’ll likely reboot it in a decade, too. 

Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Amar Akbar & Tony" (Guardian 17/04/15)

Amar Akbar & Tony **

Dir: Atul Malhotra. With: Rez Kempton, Sam Vincenti, Martin Delaney, Karen David. 96 mins. Cert: 15

Atul Malhotra’s slapdash ladcom opportunistically piggybacks on 1978’s much-loved Amitabh Bachchan masala Amar Akbar Anthony. While elements of that film’s characterisation persist into this tale of three Hounslow chancers doing up a restaurant, it hasn’t comparable charm, and suffers from disastrous tonal shifts: in one nightclub loo sequence, we veer from a sniggering Goldie Lookin Chain cameo into a heads-against-porcelain bloodbath. Sunny location work helps West London’s dual carriageways appear more appealing; elsewhere, the relentless bants and tail-chasing suggest Malhotra’s none too ambitiously pursuing the post-pub Dapper Laughs crowd. Sample dialogue: “What about your dinky? Is it feeling kinky?” 

Amar Akbar & Tony opens in selected cinemas from today.

Heaven's catflap: "The Salvation"

When the Western broke free from the studio backlot and took up residence in Italy in the 1960s, it became known as the spaghetti Western: loopy, lavish, operatic. The Scandinavian production The Salvation might, then, qualify as a smörgåsbord Western: a term that covers the wide-ranging cast as much as it does the artfully arranged if finally unsatisfying genre cold cuts writer-director Kristian Levring sets before us. Levring's been in the wilderness since his Dogme item The King is Alive, back in 2000; the new film is a self-contained genre proposition intended to be circulated in international markets - and even before you or I saw it, it had succeeded in its aims, by becoming the first Zentropa production to be picked up for overseas distribution by Warner Bros.

You can see why the executives responded to it: Levring's film takes the backdrop of a Heaven's Gate, but puts up front the kind of brisk, 95-minute runaround the United Artists topbrass presumably wanted Michael Cimino to deliver back in the day. Migrant farmer Jon (Mads Mikkelsen) has barely welcomed his wife and child to the New World when they're snatched away, and dispatched, by leering ne'er-do-wells. Jon's quest for vengeance leads him to the frontier town of Black Creek, and the trail of ruthless capitalist (and celebrated Injun-slayer) Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), but he soon finds himself hung out as a sacrificial lamb by the weak-willed pillars of this community: blustering mayor Jonathan Pryce and meek sheriff Douglas Henshall.

From the secondhand title down to the brothers who wind up missing an eye apiece, there's a strong Biblical influence, and Levring has indeed gone at this material like a scholar: self-conscious tracking shots through doorways seek to summon the spirit of John Ford, while the soundtrack's plangent guitar strums and twangs offers a pointed tip of the hat to Signor Morricone. Still, all of this fanboyism has been lacquered onto a scenario that first proves knottily intriguing, then rather too complicated for a 95-minute feature's good: a subplot about this community's oil supply only surfaces in the closing frames, having gone singularly underdeveloped in this edit, and too many of the characters are left to circle around with only rudimentary purpose.

It remains semi-watchable, in a "oh look, someone's done a Western" way, although after Age of Uprising and this, I'm coming to believe the pallid, placid Mikkelsen is better cast in colourful supporting parts, and Morgan makes a third- or fourth-choice villain. (It's possible people said similar things about Jack Elam and Lee van Cleef back in the day.) Their eventual duel in the sun is undermined by the fact The Salvation's most compelling presences are left muddling round on the sidelines, waiting mostly in vain for the opportunity to express themselves: Eric Cantona as the heavy who gives our hero respect for fighting against the Germans in the Danish-Prussian Wars before socking him in the gut, and Eva Green as a mute widow, working harder with those gigantic peepers than Levring did on the script.

The Salvation opens in selected cinemas from Friday.