The Last Jedi ****

The eighth instalment in the Star Wars saga is a force of nature.

Picking up from where The Force Awakens left off; The Resistance are on the run from the First Order, while Daisy Ridley’s Rey encounters a reclusive Luke Skywalker on a far off planet, discovering that the forces of good and evil may not be as black and white as they seem…

JJ Abrams had the more thankless job of laying the groundwork for the new series, confidently dealing with the hard graft of setting up new characters, developing older ones and augmenting an already expansive universe. For better and worse, Force Awakens adhered very closely to the '77 Star Wars plot structure, veering a little too closely to the side of familiarity in some respects, and in others, conveying a pleasant poetic repetition - an echoing of ideas - carried from the past directly into the future. The Last Jedi is not a familiar experience at all. It's a film of bold, controversial and daring choices that turn almost every idea in The Force Awakens on its head.

The Star Wars universe has always hinged on the clear-cut portrayals of light and dark. In The Empire Strikes Back (the high watermark of all Star Wars movies), the sparse lines of dialogue outlining the cerebral, passive qualities of the Jedi against the ‘easy and more seductive’ elements of the dark side are expressed with such clarity and precision, it seems almost heretical to tamper with the purity of those ideas. But The Last Jedi chooses to look at good and evil through a different lens, challenging the thematic foundations of the series, proposing that the world we live in is neither black nor white, but grey.

On a visual level, Rian Johnson dresses our central characters accordingly to archetype - heroes look like heroes and villians like villians - but instead makes their arcs murkier, while introducing new characters that are more mercurial and ambiguous than we’ve seen before. The film also plays with the idea of truth as perception, showing us different versions of the same memory, with the effect of deepening the subtext of the more well-known characters in the series – all of which is very impressive.

While dealing in darkness and moral ambiguity, Johnson's direction cleverly offsets the heavier moments with an equal balance of humour – switching seamlessly between contrasting tones. The playful Porgs and other Monty Python-esque creatures we encounter on Skywalker’s secluded planet Ahch-To provide much of the comic relief, along with a smattering of other gags - ranging from laugh-out-loud to eye-rolling-ly cheesy.

The Last Jedi also has some of the most visually arresting moments of any Star Wars film to date – lightsabre set pieces have never looked so lavishly staged and the visual effects are put together with a sense of drama, physicality, and even the abstract and surreal.

There are a number of issues – what Rian Johnson gains in bold blockbuster fair he loses in nuance. Pivotal moments for major characters seem rushed, diminishing the emotional impact in crucial moments, and the outcome of some character arcs are a little too schmaltzy for their own good. But in terms of throwing everything at the screen while developing an interesting and intelligent subtext, The Last Jedi delivers.

John Wick

***

Keanu Reeves carries off the titular hitman convincingly despite a brittle script and daft dialogue in this stylish and bloodthirsty tale of vengeance.

Chad Stahelski (Reeves’ stunt double on The Matrix Trilogy and The Crow) and co-director David Leitch offer up a lot of style and very little substance in this tale of a notorious former hitman called John Wick. Mourning the recent death of his wife, Russian gangsters target Wick and follow him to his home where they steal his car and kill his puppy – bought by his wife shortly before she died to help him cope with the grief. As he prepares to take revenge, mob boss Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) warns the gangsters that he once saw Wick “kill three men in a bar… with a pencil” – one of several deadpan lines in the script that provokes more amusement than menace.

There are a smattering of stylishly shot action set-pieces enhanced greatly by an atmospheric electronic/industrial rock soundtrack - with songs from Marilyn Manson and M86 - creating the illusion of depth around the hollow story. Most memorably there’s a beautifully staged shoot-out in a nightclub hot tub to the backdrop of pulsing electropop outfit Kaleida which conflates elegance and violence in a striking way that clearly owes an aesthetic debt to Nicholas Winding Refn’s superior and oneiric Drive and nightmarish Only God Forgives.

The result is a desperately schlocky and clichéd guilty pleasure. It’s a sleazy 80s style revenge movie dressed up in modern tailoring, with Keanu Reeves carrying off the central character far more convincingly than his recent spate of hit-and-miss roles. A hackneyed story effectively concealed under a glossy shell.

Hush ***

This thrilling home-invasion horror stars Kate Siegel as Maddie, a deaf writer living in an isolated woodland cottage. It’s evening – she is attempting to finish the ending to her novel while interacting with her friends online and avoiding calls from her ex-boyfriend – but she is tormented by a masked intruder who lurks outside armed with a crossbow and knives. Now trapped inside her home, Maddie has to outsmart her pursuer in order to survive. 

Mike Flanagan –whose previous credits include Oculus and Absentia – directs with a mean efficiency, evoking a genuinely chilling atmosphere and building an authentic sense of tension. The balance between suspense and violence is effectively orchestrated and disciplined – it is nasty when it needs to be – but the drama also plays out as a psychological battle of wits where Maddie, in facing her intruder, has to figure out how to overcome her physical impediments while using them to her unique advantage.

As stripped-down and well put together as it is, it doesn’t have quite the bite or the subtext of Adam Wingard’s You’re Next(2011) which was a similar home-invasion film that did something surprising and subversive with its central female character – twisting slasher conventions and playing around with genre ideas in an interesting way.

Released on Netflix, the impact of Hush may be as ephemeral and muted as its title, but it is a solid and satisfying enough low-budget horror – occasionally going beyond generic conventions and offering moments of freshness and intrigue.

Southpaw ***

The hype surrounding Antoine Fuqua’s boxing movie has been extraordinary ever since publicity shots of Jake Gyllenhaal’s drastic physical transformation were released earlier this year.

The result is somewhat less impressive; it’s an unoriginal redemption story; pumped-up, flashy and overly sentimental.

Gyllenhaal plays Billy Hope, the world light-heavyweight champion – a dedicated boxer and committed husband and father. After attending a charity event with his wife(Rachel McAdams) Billy is taunted by an upstart fighter which leads to a brawl and an accidental shoot-out in the hotel lobby. Things get worse and after turning to drink and drugs, his life spirals out of control until he joins a gym run by Titus Willis (Forest Whitaker) – Billy tries to convince Whitaker’s wise-mentor character to train him and turn his life around.

The narrative arc of a boxing or fighting movie is very well-worn and it’s not just that Fuqua is aware of the genre conventions, he actively doesn’t want to do anything adventurous with them. It's strikingly shot - the frame glimmers with blood,sweat and dazzling floodlights - and occasionally the film approaches an interesting thematic idea - the idea being that Hope is a man without any emotional control, he is full of rage and pathos but the only way he can beat his nemesis is to transcend this pain and loss. But the film always seems to circumvent any depth in favor of a nonsensical 'revenge without vengeance' subtext.

The problem is largely due to the empty melodrama that surrounds the fight sequences. In Raging Bull it seemed as though the drama was in a state of permanent tension and aggression whether Ray LaMotta was in the ring or at home. Southpaw has an unsatisfyingly soft and mawkish centre partly mitigated by its central performances – all of which are strong.

Self/Less(2015)**

Self/Less, or more appropriately, Wit/Less is an identity switching sci-fi drama starring Ben Kingsley as an ailing billionaire property tycoon called Damien Hale. In need of a solution to save his dying body and preserve his brilliant mind, Hale seeks out a futuristic treatment whereby his consciousness is implanted into a younger, fitter body – this being Ryan Reynolds – but is the body just a hollow vessel grown in a lab or does it have memories of its own?

Mistaken identity and conspiracy are well-worn science fiction ideas drawn most notably from Philip K. Dick’s venerable canon of work, but Tarsem Singh’s picture instead seems to be reworking riffs from already rehashed movies such as The Island(2005), The Butterfly Effect(2004) and Unknown(2011) as opposed to something like John Woo’s superior identity thriller Face/Off(1997) or Spielberg's Minority Report(2002). What begins with an enjoyable body-shock premise – which initially sees Hale using his newly acquired health and physical allure to party and attract girls – after the first reel loses any sense of ingenuity in favour of a bland sub-Bourne chase narrative. Ben Kingsley adds presence and gravitas to the surrounding emptiness of the drama and Ryan Reynolds tries hard with the material he is given, but the end result is an unnecessarily long and ludicrous one.

Testament of Youth(2015) ***

Based on the memoirs of writer and feminist Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth was a highly acclaimed, important and tragic account of the impact of The First World War. While much of the war literature at the time was dominated by male voices – such as war poets; Sassoon, Graves, Kipling and Edward Thomas – Vera Brittian’s powerful memoirs, published in 1933, provided a revolutionary female perspective that would become the most essential and radical piece of feminist war literature for years to come.

In James Kent’s film, Alicia Vikander plays Vera Brittain, a young woman determined to pursue education and overcome the social limitations of being female at the time. Studying for her entrance exam, she plans to read English at Somerville College at Oxford – to the reluctance of her father who is troubled by the expense, but ironically, and frivolously, buys her a piano with the intent that she simply stays at home and plays it. Vera has other plans, and her parents perhaps underestimate her drive, intelligence and ability to succeed. 

The drama centres around Brittain, her brother Edward(Taron Egerton), Roland Leighton(Kit Harrington) and Victor, played by Colin Morgan – all giving engrossing and sensitive performances. Vikander in particular is excellent; playing Brittain with fragility but also understated strength and self-belief – it’s a performance that truly draws you in. 

However, her time at Oxford does not go smoothly; after a complicated relationship develops between Vera and Roland, war breaks out and all three men are called up to serve on the front lines in France. Vera subsequently becomes more and more exposed to the horrors of war and subsequently abandons her education to volunteer as a nurse.

James Kent’s film is emotionally charged, but the most nuanced moments are the most affecting. There’s a scene in which Vera’s father, played well if used only peripherally within in the drama by Dominic West, sees his son Edward off on the train as he leaves for the western front. Vera thinks she sees her father looking at a train timetable, but realises that he’s trying to mask the fact that he is overwhelmed with emotion – it’s an incidental scene that illustrates more about the tragedy, torment and loss in war than many of the more obviously overwrought sections of the film try to accomplish.

In many ways it’s hard to fault Testament of Youth because it is so clearly made with good intentions – it’s directed with consideration and precision, detail and care – but it’s all too well-mannered; a little too respectful, a little too polite and safe. Kent knows how to compose a striking image on-screen and gets strong performances from his actors, but it’s all too polished, too refined and occasionally, too sanitised.  

Gone Girl(2014)

****

In the late eighties and nighties, Michael Douglas was the go-to star for portraying the victimised man.  Both Fatal Attraction(1987) and Disclosure(1994) explored a subversion of traditional gender roles – the central male characters at the mercy of powerful, intelligent and manipulative women; masculine impulses, both sexual and professional, are punished by the cunning femme-fatal antagonists.  

David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a thriller of mind games and manipulation. Drawing interestingly from his own canon of work, there are echoes of the procedural style of Zodiac(2007) and the twisted game-playing narrative of Se7en(1995), but his trademark acuity and attention to detail seems more precise and glacial than ever before. Rosmand Pike plays Amy, the inspiration for “Amazing Amy” – the central character in her parent’s successful line of children’s books; married to Nick Dunne,(Ben Affleck) a generic, if sleazy, American husband who runs a bar with significant financial support from his wife. Then Amy goes missing from the family home under strange circumstances – furniture knocked over, traces of blood in the kitchen – police speculation points to homicide. At the same time another narrative thread plays out involving Amy’s diary entries which run parallel with the central story.

The film proceeds to set up an investigation plot into what actually happened to “Amazing Amy” but what initially appears to be a dark, hard-edged thriller becomes increasingly bizarre and satirical.

Gone Girl explores the distinction between fiction and reality, but more importantly, the fear of marriage; the pressure of expectation and the pursuit for the appearance of perfection.  Flynn’s screenplay meticulously presents these ideas but the significant focus is upon the roles played in married life - it is this idea which is most interesting. Amy is initially perceived as the victim and Nick the perpetrator but these roles are constantly reversed and transformed throughout the drama, and running through it, is an intelligent satire on TV news that sets up Nick as a symbol for man-hate and abusive husbands. Rosmand Pike gives her strongest performance to date; capturing Amy’s complexly mercurial, calculating, deranged character with an icy execution. 

The film then takes an unusual generic shift from serious crime thriller into overcooked, erotic thriller-cum-exploitation potboiler. In one scene Fincher not only nods towards Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas and recreates an explosively violent moment that could have been drawn almost directly from Basic Instinct(1992). In the end Gone Girl becomes less of an intense thematic exploration into marital dysfunction and dishonesty and instead lurches into the realms of enjoyable exploitation film-making – it is an intensely riveting and atmospheric drama.