For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of September 8-10, 2017:

1 (new) It: Chapter One (15) ***
2 (1) American Made (15) ***
3 (2) Dunkirk (12A) ***
4 (4) The Emoji Movie (U)
5 (3) The Hitman's Bodyguard (15) **
6 (new) Wind River (15)
7 (7) Despicable Me 3 (U)
8 (5) Logan Lucky (12A) ****
9 (9) The Limehouse Golem (15) ***
10 (8) Detroit (15) ***

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five: 
1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
2. Belle de Jour 
3. The Villainess
4. Centre of My World
5. Journey Through French Cinema


Top Ten DVD rentals: 

1 (1) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (12) **
2 (2) John Wick: Chapter 2 (15) ***
3 (3) Beauty and the Beast (PG) ***
4 (4) Fifty Shades Darker (18)
5 (5) Kong: Skull Island (12)
6 (7) Sing (U) ***
7 (8) Their Finest (12) ***
8 (6) Life (15) **
9 (9) Logan (12) ***
10 (10) The Lego Batman Movie (U) ***

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five: 
1. My Life as a Courgette
2. David Lynch: The Art Life
3. Suntan
4. Chicken
5. Whitney: "Can I Be Me?"


Top five films on terrestrial TV:
1. Renoir (Saturday, BBC2, 1.50am)
2. Drive Angry [above] (Monday, five, 11.05pm)
3. The Nutty Professor (Saturday, ITV1, 10.35pm)
4. Super 8 (Saturday, C4, 9pm)
5. The Uninvited (Saturday, BBC1, 12.25am)

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (Guardian 15/09/17)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind *****

Dir: Steven Spielberg. With: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon. 137 mins. Cert: PG

The lights in the sky have never appeared brighter. Beaming back into cinemas Monday to mark the film’s 40th anniversary, this digital restoration of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi touchstone reintroduces a genuine UFO: a bona-fide blockbuster that nevertheless operates with hushed stealth, expanding its sense of momentous events approaching from distant galaxies exponentially. No bolt-shooting pre-credits sequence here; for score, a carefully sequenced five-note motif; instead of screen-hogging CGI, a glimpse of something through a rear windscreen, then effects sculpted, more tangibly, from moulding clay and mashed potato. For some while, its noisiest locale is the Muncie, Indiana home of Richard Dreyfuss’s everyman Roy Neary, so convincingly overrun with kids, toys and media that it might drive anybody’s eyes heavenwards, or in search of escape.

That backdrop remains a significant part of Close Encounters’ genius: the depiction of Earth is so credible that we readily take the same extra-terrestrial leaps of faith as its protagonist. In a featurette playing before the rerelease, Arrival’s Denis Villeneuve argues it’s all deeply self-reflexive, a film about filmmaking (hence, perhaps, the presence of Truffaut) and the pressures of generating out-of-this-world spectacle – a line that holds if we approach Close Encounters as the tale of an obsessive struggling to preserve sanity and marriage while rallying others to share his unifying vision. Either way, the view from the mountaintop remains quite remarkable: grand celestial theatre, in which the greatest storyteller in modern movies invites us to set aside any scepticism, look up, and very simply believe. 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind returns to cinemas nationwide this Monday.

"Centre of My World" (Guardian 15/09/17)

Centre of My World ***

Dir: Jakob M. Erwa. With: Louis Hofmann, Sabine Timoteo, Jannik Schumann, Ada Philine Stappenbeck. 115 mins. Cert: 15

This delicate German coming-of-ager – adapted by director Jakob Erwa from an Andreas Steinhöfel novel – wobbles between genuinely cute and aggravatingly twee before finding its feet alongside its protagonist. Sensitive late-teen Phil (Louis Hofmann) returns from camp one summer to find the small town he’d previously thought a paradise irrevocably altered, if not altogether lost: a storm has rearranged his usual reference points, distancing beloved sister Dianne (Ada Philine Stappenbeck) and leaving free-spirit mother Glass (Sabine Timoteo) even more emotionally fragile than when he left. One ray of light presents in sporty new kid Nicholas (Jannik Schümann), enthusiastically leading our boy into the locker-room showers, but we’re set to wondering whether Phil’s tangled history will darken even this glimmer of promise.

Flashbacks to Phil and Dianne’s days as Teutonically blonde toddlers are proofs of baggage but feel like baggage, and Erwa is prone to occasional visual clichés, like the overhead shot of semi-clad bodies atop a jetty that seems to recur in every Mitteleuropan drama about first fumbling love. Yet he does right by Steinhöfel’s throughline, establishing an intriguing, complicated and capably performed relationship between a mother who’s known only hurt from the opposite sex, and a son palpably longing for male affection and affirmation. A vaguely educative, afterschool-special vibe may mean the certificate reflects its optimal viewer age – it’s partly couched as a primer in handling heartbreak – but Erwa’s emotional candour ensures it’ll likely strike resonant chords with anybody who spent their formative years extricating themselves from strangulating family ties.

Centre of My World opens in selected cinemas from today.

"American Assassin" (Guardian 15/09/17)

American Assassin *

Dir: Michael Cuesta. With: Dylan O’Brien, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Lathan, David Suchet. 111 mins. Cert: 18

The malfunctioning studio system has foisted many subprime ideas upon us recently, but this opportunistic, Trump-age hybrid of war-on-terror drama and YA fantasy numbers among the junkiest. Ex-Maze Runner Dylan O’Brien plays Mitch Rapp, an emotionally volatile sort picked up by the CIA after pursuing the sleeper cell who gunned down his holidaying fiancée in one early breach of basic cinematic decency. Thereafter he’s assigned Aviator-sporting ex-Navy SEAL mentor Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton, bent once more towards career self-sabotage), passed through whizzy VR training exercises, and dispatched to Europe alongside a babelicious colleague to recover a stray nuke while generally kicking ass for the US of A. As Hurley growls it: “Some bad people plan on doing some bad things, and it’s our job to stop ‘em.”

Director Michael Cuesta, formerly known for filigreed indies (L.I.E., Kill the Messenger), has perhaps concluded there’s more money in becoming a back-up Michael Bay, but his chosen moves here are blunt from overuse. Everything about American Assassin – Hurley’s jurisdictional squabbles, the actress roped in to bare breasts before perishing, unmourned, amid a hail of bullets – looks to have been copy-pasted from some Commie-bashing Chuck Norris opus of 1983, while the risible bomb-on-a-boat finale dates back beyond even Keaton to Adam West-era Batman. O’Brien demonstrates admirable deltoids and an ability to grow stubble as the character arc requires, but the attempt to rebrand counterterrorism manoeuvres as a heady extension of the Hunger Games falls somewhere between dim-witted and deeply cynical. Recruitment numbers can’t be this low, surely? 

American Assassin opens in cinemas nationwide today.

She's bad: "The Villainess"

For some while now, it's appeared as though Korean directors have been engaged in a game of bloody one-upmanship, as if fees were directly linked to body counts. The wholly brazen opening sequence of this week's The Villainess finds writer-director Byung-gil Jung topping his compatriot Chan-wook Park's much-celebrated/dissected corridor fight in 2003's OldBoy by shooting all his action in the first-person perspective. Once our fighter-in-chief has felled enough foes with gun, knife and handaxe to reach the end of the corridor, they're followed up to the next floor and a second corridor bristling with bodies; having taken all these out, the camera passes through a door into a gym stocked deep with even more ne'er-do-wells standing round just waiting to be eviscerated. But wait! By way of what we must now call a "Smack My Bitch Up" twist, our warrior passes before a wall-length mirror amid the brouhaha, whereupon it is revealed to us - ta-da! - that the individual responsible for this thunderously thrilling carnage is no hulking he-man, rather a tiny yet determined lady (Ok-bin Kim, the Thérèse Raquin of Park's 2009 film Thirst) in vengeful search of those responsible for her father's death. Hell hath no fury, and all that. 

The obvious peril would be that what follows fails to live up to such an electrifying first movement, but it transpires that Jung has many other tricks up his sleeve. For one thing, our heroine Sook-hee turns out to be an alumna of an elite finishing school - a Hogwarts with heavy artillery - where aspirant assassins are schooled not just in shooting and stabbing, but also the finer arts (acting, cooking) that might heighten reflexes, judgement, camouflage capabilities. As she passes into the wider world to continue her murderous quest, it becomes clear Jung intends to use his heavily storyboarded kill scenes as kinetic doodles, repositories of big, bold, unarguably cinematic, invariably winning ideas: strapping the camera to a blade during a swordfight (and doing so in such a way as not to obscure the physical geography of the sequence), setting motorbikes to duel with one another through traffic at high speed in seemingly unbroken takes, everything building towards a frankly insane final dust-up aboard a coach flying along the highway with its doors agape.

This exceptional fluidity of movement applies to the storytelling, too: Jung is loose and flexible about his exposition, running scenes from different timelines back to back without onscreen prompts in a manner that alerts us to a) the impact of the heroine's past on her present-day thoughts and deeds, and b) the possibility that these thoughts and deeds will themselves have an impact on future narrative events. Sook-hee finds one hit complicated when her target's young daughter walks into the room; this in turn sparks a flashback that reveals the details of her own childhood trauma. With the stakes of this game established, Jung can even turn his hand to something a shade calmer and more romantic in his middle act, as our heroine draws closer to the friendly neighbour (Jun Sung) who - unbeknownst to her - is actually the handler assigned to keep an eye on her. Thus does The Villainess broach that very contemporary concern, the double life. Our would-be lovers engage in at least one conversation about the matter of trust - probably a wise move, given that their shared alma mater offers classes in disguising one's accent to fit in when on assignment.

While composing dynamic, big-picture setpieces in his head, Jung doesn't overlook his performers, nor does he reduce them to crash-test dummies. Instead, he works closely with both Kim and Sung to shape and detail characters tentatively letting down the guards put up during those first bouts of carnage. Kim, all pinched cheeks and pursed lips, gives a notable performance-within-a-performance, evidently holding in some secret wrong that needs righting, yet the shock is no less explosive when it all comes out. (That opening eruption of violence assumes a deeper meaning when revisited through the prism of the following two hours: like almost all the action here, it's not as senseless as it might first seem.) If it's finally all manoeuvres - never quite matching the melancholy emotional charge Park wrung out of the vengeance of OldBoy - they're very skilfully executed: this, perhaps, is what the Kingsmen movies would look like if they had more than a couple of brain cells to rub together, and weren't exclusively interested in strongarming disposable income from gullible teenage boys.

The Villainess opens in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release on October 30. 

At the Cinémathèque: "Journey Through French Cinema"

Way back in the mists of time, back when cinema was celebrating its centenary and UK terrestrial channels actively bothered themselves with arts programming, Channel 4 commissioned a series of films in which noteworthy creatives were invited to hold forth on the history of their respective national film industries. The most prominent and enduring of these projects was Martin Scorsese's A Personal Journey Through American Movies, but there were equally entries on British cinema from Stephen Frears, and on Antipodean cinema from Sam Neill. The French entry was assigned to Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, who co-signed a not untypically inscrutable hour that played somewhat like a footnote to the former's expansive Histoire(s) du cinéma (and may well have required footnotes itself). It almost goes without saying that Bertrand Tavernier's new three-hour doc Journey Through French Cinema, which opens, as perhaps it must, with a Godard quote, is an altogether more accessible endeavour: here is the avuncular writer-director, talking us through extensive clips of the movies that have meant to most to him in life.

Born in 1941, Tavernier emerged into that golden age when French cinema was redefining itself as both a local and international force, and a young cinephile could sit for hours in grand picture palaces watching the same film on a loop, so as to memorise lines, gestures, faces; he is absolutely of that generation who fell into first criticism, then moviemaking, as if these were the most natural pursuits for anyone to devote themselves to. We should note that old auteurists die hard, trailing comfortingly familiar characteristics in their wake: Tavernier's history is primarily organised by director, starting with Jacques Becker (who made 1942's Dernier Atout, the first film our host remembers seeing), before moving through those stalwarts Renoir, Carné and Vigo to post-War touchstones like Edmond Gréville ("the prince of fringe directors") and Jean-Pierre Melville. There are, however, sidebars on such indispensable contributors as screenwriter Jacques Prévert (Le Jour se lève), composer Maurice Jaubert (L'Atalante) and New Wave godfather Georges de Beauregard. In passing, Tavernier does a fine job of explaining the appeal of Jean Gabin, claiming him as an auteur, too: a heavyweight star who used his bulk and savvy to organise his films around a vision of France French cinemagoers couldn't get enough of.

As with any history, there are ebbs and flows. I felt myself growing a shade restless during Tavernier's aside on the use of music in films he's already discussed, and starting to long for the Nouvelle Vague to sweep in. It's also very canon, offering nothing beyond the millennium: the elegant classicist Claude Sautet is as modern as Tavernier gets, although the end credits do promise a sequel. It is, however, a hell of a canon, and our curator isn't blind to the flaws of individual films or filmmakers - Renoir's apparent anti-Semitism, Melville's rote dialogue, stubbornness and onset bullying (documented in an entertainingly gossipy audioclip in which we hear Jean-Paul Belmondo pushing back) - which serves to throw Tavernier's evident affection for those works he cherishes in even sharper relief. Mostly, this Journey does exactly what you want a ready-made film studies module like this to do: it sends you running to track down those titles you haven't seen (if anybody wants to program a retrospective of Eddie Constantine's pre-Alphaville crime films, that'd be a help, ta) and to rewatch those you already have. One warning: I also suspect it's liable to set a certain percentage of its audience to craving a cigarette - a situation never explicitly addressed in these three hours, but alighted upon so often in the gathered extracts as to make one realise anew how the French have elevated even smoking to an artform.

Journey Through French Cinema opens in selected cinemas from today.

Rollin': "Kills on Wheels"

The offbeat Hungarian feature Kills on Wheels earns high marks for representation: of its three main roles, two are occupied by performers in wheelchairs, one by a performer with cerebral palsy. Full marks, too, to writer-director Attila Till for refusing to attach any undue sentimentality to his characters' movements: Zolika (Zoltán Fenyvesi) and Barba Papa (Ádám Fekete) are bored, horny, resentful teenagers wasting away in a care home and desperately seeking an outlet for their yahoo energies, while Rupaszov (Szabolcs Thuróczy), the older man whose wing they fall under, turns out to be a pissheaded ex-fireman who supplements his disability benefits by carrying out hits around parts of Budapest even Béla Tarr might have trudged away from on the grounds of being too grim. It is both amusing and amazing that the film ended up becoming Hungary's official submission for last year's Foreign Language Film Oscar longlist (and no surprise that it eventually failed to place among the final nominees): the brakes are, in a very real sense, off.

What ensues is a wild and occasionally bumpy ride, intended at least in part to shake off any squeamishness or preconceptions concerning what might be "done" on screen with disabled characters or performers. If Till isn't quite the devil-may-care Lars von Trier of The Idiots - his film's a 15, not an 18 - he and his cast are still mischievous enough to make a bleakly comic setpiece out of the palsied Barba Papa's hitting the wrong button on a rec-centre vending machine, or the grumpy Rupaszov upending both his charges into a boating lake after he grows weary of their wittering. The assassination sequences, amusing in their own way, are premised on the idea polite society wouldn't think to suspect someone wheeling slowly away from the scene of a crime, because they surely wouldn't be up to such a physically demanding task, yet Till also takes care to include scenes that stress the energy and effort required of his protagonists to make an escape up a steep drive and through a locked gate. They can get away with a lot, these guys, but it isn't always plain sailing.

Certain aspects are less well thought-through. We're headed towards rehabilitation of a sort, but the narrative flow carrying everybody there can be a bit stop-start. Bridging scenes - like the boys' boozy after-hours tryst with three female physical therapists - sputter out before anything has been achieved or revealed; plot points (such as a feud between two rival siblings in the Budapest underworld, or Rupaszov's strained relationship with his ex) are scattered to the wind; while a framing device, suggesting the more murderous activity is but nihilist teen fantasy, doesn't really come off, and thereby undermines the compellingly skeezy reality Till cultivates elsewhere. You could argue that this lurching quality is deliberate, however: a show of solidarity with marginalised antiheroes who themselves don't move as we might anticipate. Either way, Till's mix-and-match soundtrack, leftfield characterisations (I liked Peter Lorre-alike Dusán Vitanovics' crimeboss, briefly seen shopping at Tesco) and unexpected tonal shifts imbue the film with a rude and not unenjoyable energy: in its own way, it's as jaggedly and defiantly punk as Ian Dury belting out "Spasticus Autisticus".

Kills on Wheels opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.