The Dark Tower trailer is here

The Dark Tower trailer is here

In a world full of superheroes, there’s only one Gunslinger. From the epic best-selling novels from Stephen King, comes #DarkTowerMovie - watch the brand-new trailer now. Only in cinemas.

The Dark Tower is due in cinemas August 4th

Handsome Devil: Film Review

Handsome Devil: Film Review

Cast: Fionn O'Shea, Nicholas Galitzine, Andrew Scott, Moe Dunford
Director: John Butler

Whilst it may be steeped in coming-of-age familiarity, writer / director John Butler's Handsome Devil packs a certain degree of charm into its story.

The tale centres around Fionn O'Shea's red-headed Ned who's sent to an Irish boarding school by his family. Bullied for not being into rugby and not getting behind the school's push to win a trophy for the first time in years, Ned forms a friendship with his roommate Conor (Galitzine), the star hopeful of the team, who's been shipped in from another school.

The two boys find themselves growing closer, and with the tutelage of Andrew Scott's English teacher Dan Sherry, they find their desire to be themselves blossoming.

But in a rugby mad school, homophobia's never far away...

Handsome Devil has elements of Dead Poets Society, Sing Street and great 80s music to set it apart.

While its familiarity of themes feels a little stale and predictable in parts (a macho school coach who's appalled at the burgeoning friendship between his star player and the teacher), there's a degree of warmth in the short run time to justify its existence.

It helps that it's sensitively acted and handled by a strong cast, with Scott's Sherry easily the early charismatic stand-out of the piece, recalling elements of Robin Williams' Captain, My Captain.

It's also helpful that both Galitzine and O'Shea play their characters with affable warmth and underpin their journey with a degree of plausibility that's engaging.

And that certainly helps given the film's denouement and conflict can be seen coming a mile off, its desire to be uplifting and feel-good almost crippling its intentions.

Handsome Devil won't spark a major renaissance in these types of films, but it can hold its head up high that this boarding school tale and its push for individuality does enough to bring its audience along for the ride, and leave them feeling slightly more uplifted than any cynical viewer has a right to have.

A United Kingdom: DVD Review

A United Kingdom: DVD Review

The director of Belle returns with another piece that looks at the strife caused by interracial relations in this period piece about King Seretse Khama (Oyelowo), who caused a stir and a division of nations in the late 40s when he fell for - and married - a white woman.

Seretse is a law student, whose life is about to change as his uncle recalls him to take his rightful place as the heir of Bechaunaland (aka Botswana). But within days of departing London, he meets and falls for Rosamund Pike's Ruth.

Determined to marry and despite protestations from their homeland, and British government concerns, the duo's relationship creates divides at home and abroad. As the political storms threaten to engulf the pair and Seretse's land, they find their Apartheid naivete coming to the fore - and hoping their love can save the day.

A United Kingdom is a slice of prime prestige picture, served largely up by BBC Films.

It's centred by an earnestness and two leads who gel (though, arguably, a more stoic Oyelowo is the stronger of the pair) while the political machinations whirl around them.

The film's attention to period detail is beyond stunning and the cinematography early on of London is beyond eye-catching. But for the necessity of the narrative, the England side of events is matter of factly dismissed and dispatched so the action, such as it is, can relocate to Bechauanaland. It's here the film anchors itself and the colonial sneery machinations of Jack Davenport and Tom Felton's characters come to the fore, promising barrier after barrier to this relationship.

Pike, who's initially a bit of a blank sheet of paper, rises in the second half as the compassion for the power of her new people infects her - and an impassioned Oyelowo really raises the bar when the exile of Seretse kicks in.

But while the parts are all there, and the pieces all assembled correctly, there's a distinct lack of anything really making the film soar. Its earnestness is obvious in the way the nicely told story unfolds, but the political drama crushes the emotional edges that should hit harder than they do.

There's a clarity of story to A United Kingdom, and it's a story which is worth expounding on; Oyelowo and Pike remain the reasons to view this tale - but you may feel that it never quite hits the heights it was aiming for and should have fully achieved. 

Table 19: Film Review

Table 19: Film Review

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Lisa Kudrow, Craig Robinson, Stephen Merchant, Margo Martindale, Tony Revolori, June Squibb
Director: Jeffrey Blitz

Stretching it as thinly as its premise will allow, Table 19 invites you to a bittersweet tale that has elements of Tales of The Unexpected.

Centring around Anna Kendrick's Eloise, who's invited to a wedding and finds herself at the aforementioned Table 19 with a group of randoms, this bittersweet sitcom-cum-drama has the trappings of something solid.

Dumped as maid of honour and now a guest at the table that's closer to the bathrooms than the bridal party, Eloise regrets attending.
But as the group begins to question each other, they find a common bond as the night goes on.

With an instantly recognisable and relatable premise (After all, who hasn't dreaded the seating arrangements of a wedding and the necessity to make endless small talk?), Blitz's film trades on the awkwardness and unease of randoms at a table with fine gusto at the start.

Throwing in some sitcom elements and some more farcical edges, the majority of the heavy lifting is left to Stephen Merchant's usual deadpan delivery, gangliness and odd-looks and Kendrick's sweetly downbeat affability to convey the tone.

But once the "action" moves away from the table and the group re-locate from the wedding itself, the narrative loses a little of its steam and the uneven edges of the tone come to the fore.

Whilst there are some bittersweet truth bombs dropped throughout (largely courtesy of Lisa Kudrow and Craig Robinson, who play a bickering married couple) and some recurring gags, the pay-off for portions of Table 19 don't feel earned.

Primarily for Kendrick's character Eloise, the revelations, at times, feel a little obvious and with conclusions that can be seen from a mile off. And while there's a universality to parts of what transpires that the Duplass brothers, along with Blitz, have tapped into, there's simply a feeling that a lot of it has been saved from some great one-liners throughout.

The film can't resist a happy ending and it's here that perhaps the realities of life and authenticities of the issues raised through the film feel slightly betrayed. Life isn't always so easily resolved, but Table 19, having thrown up all the idiosyncracies of relationships for examination, neatly folds them back together at the end and serves up something as sickly sweet as a third piece of wedding cake.

While it's just a pinch under 90 minutes long, and quite bearable, it's a shame that Table 19 betrays its initial focus and premise for something that feels predictable and unnecessarily overly saccharine and sentimental.

Assassins Creed: Blu Ray Review

Assassins Creed: Blu Ray Review

Re-teaming with MacBeth director Justin Kurzel for their second outing together, not even the star power of Fassbender and Cotillard can save the Assassin's Creed movie from being a muddled mess that's slavish to the phenomenally popular Ubisoft computer game series.

Fassbender is criminal Cal Lynch, who's summarily executed via lethal injection as the movie begins.

When he awakes, he finds himself in a room inside a shadowy cabal who are hunting for the Apple of Eden as they desperately try to wipe out violence in the world. The Abstergo group of Templars believes that holds the secret to unlocking the DNA of all life and could change the face of the Earth for the better.

Leading Cal into a machine to regress him is scientist Sofia (Cotillard in severe wig and saddled with obligatory exposition) and soon Cal finds himself back in 15th Century Spain in the body of his own ancestor, a trained Assassin.

But the further Cal goes into this world, the more the truth appears out of the shadows - is Abstergo doing the right thing?

Assassin's Creed does little to break the chain of unsuccessful video games committed to the big screen.

While the game's trademark aesthetics and nods are wrapped up in a swathe of moments that fans of the games will recognise with ease (the Leap of Faith, the building top scrabbling, the parkour and the posing post fights), non-fans may feel the cursory solid action sequences are muddied and unspectacular.

Both Fassbender and Cotillard deliver video game dialogue and explanation with little to no emotion, and Rampling, Irons and Gleeson are completely wasted in their supporting roles.

With a bombastic OST, an eagle soaring high above used repeatedly to segue between scenes, there are plenty of nods to the video game series and the centuries old fight between the Assassins and the Templars, but there's never any scope or depth delivered to the weight of the fight, other than through rote explanatory dialogue.

If anything's successful in Assassin's Creed, it's the action sequences which stop the surge of sci-fi mumbo jumbo being clinically delivered, but the more they are rolled out, the more it's a diminishing return.

Ultimately, Assassin's Creed is a C-movie with A-listers - it fails to deliver on anything in terms of spectacle and a muddied plot doesn't help things. While the Spanish setting may have delivered more depth if it had been built up more, the chop and change aesthetics and flat denouement mark it out as the first major flop of 2017. Despite its insistence on using the Leap of Faith from the games, it seems unlikely many in the audience will take the Leap of Faith needed.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter: DVD Review

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter: DVD Review

Much like the Underworld series, the Resident Evil movie franchise staggers on with no sign of abating, thanks largely to industrial sized box office returns.

As the sixth film in the Resident Evil series, The Final Chapter at least dangles the prospect of closure in audiences' faces by way of its title. (But this turns out to be a lie.)

However, in providing a generic awfully muddy and dark action zombie set film, The Final Chapter ends up feeling like a bridge too far.
Picking up right after events from Retribution, Milla Jovovich's Alice is forced into taking a chance to wipe out the T virus that mutated the world  once and for all.

The twist is she has only 48 hours to do it and needs to race across a Mad Max style landscape to head back into Raccoon City to get the antidote.

But standing in her way once again is Game of Thrones' Iain Glen's villainous religious zealot Dr Isaacs, who chews as much scenery as the undead do flesh. (However, he gets points for inadvertently invoking one of the great lines about the Winchester and a pint in one laughably cheesy shot toward the end)...

So with the clock racing and the fate of all humanity in her hands, Alice faces her last great battle...

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is a muddied mess of a video game film that feels limp in comparison to the rest of its series. Thanks to a dark aesthetic and a continual desire to visually soak everything in a blackness, it's hard to remotely care about proceedings - nowhere more so than when fight sequences happen and characters are picked off.

There's no emotional gut punch to this film where there should be; and there's no feeling of closure or an epic end when there should be either. It's just a mesh of video game stylings (big boss battle atop a tank, rescue the colleagues from traps, escape the bad guys) and some awfully frenetic editing in the action sequences which mar proceedings.

Anderson's desire to put in repeated rapid cuts during fight sections leads to a feeling of choppiness and robs them of the fluidity needed to give admiration to the work going on. In this aspect, he's his own worst enemy of the film - a director with clear signs of ADD desiring nothing more than yet another angle on the same section.

Jovovich is convincing enough as Alice, and there's a certain weariness to her outlook that's endearing as the film and its fight against an evil mega-conglomerate go on. There are answers coming in this "last" part but they're not worth the investment to be frank.

However, not nearly enough has been done to flesh out the characters around her and it shows, lending no sense of suspense or tension to various quandaries and no feelings at all when they're dispatched.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is not quite in stinker territory, but it dangerously dips its toes into the water.

3D adds nothing to it, making the action murky as the talk of clones, zombies and shooting gets underway after the starting recap. There aren't enough nods to the creatures of the iconic series and while some of the earlier action sequences pack a punch, there's no freshness in this as it trudges wearily on.

To make matters worse, the ending makes it patently clear that this is not a franchise the box office wants to die and you can't help but feel cheated as it ends. But that said, there's also a palpable sense of relief it's over, because Resident Evil: The Final Chapter squanders a lot of its promise and brings you nothing you've not seen before. 

Sing: Blu Ray Review

Sing: Blu Ray Review

With a note saying Sing contains 85 songs during its 110 minute duration, you could be forgiven for feigning apathy after doing the maths of how often they'd appear.

(Maths purists - it's about 1 every 1 minute or so)

But Illumination's latest animated foray manages to pack in some zaniness around the music and the relatively 2 dimensional characters in this thinly veiled tribute to vaudeville and music audition shows.

Matthew McConaughey plays Buster Moon, a koala theatre impresario whose love of the boards has seen him put on several less than successful shows. With the bank about to foreclose on his theatre and with ideas running out, Moon decides to put on a singing audition competition to attract some interest. But things go further than planned when his lizard secretary accidentally puts onto the fliers that there's a $100K at stake...

It's easy to see why Sing's crammed its run time with classic songs - it's simply because there's nothing more than a terribly basic plot to flesh proceedings out. But that's not to take away from the fun moments that permeate the screen - from auditions with endlessly familiar pop songs blasting out to wacky sight gags, there's enough to keep the younger end happy and enough to ensure the adults recognise the music.

However, it's not quite enough.

Given Zootopia made real its anthropomorphic world with depth and insight, this tale feels lacking in anything other than a simple bubblegum formulaic animation that ticks the boxes and does little else as it zips between what feels like episodic moments stuck loosely together.

It's a shame as the vocal talent is more than sensational - McConaughey's laid back drawl makes Moon an affable and perky presence, MacFarlane's parlance is perfectly suited to a jazz playing mouse, whose rat-pack pretensions and sass are on display from the beginning and John C Reilly's perfectly cast as the slacker mate of Moon.

But it all feels so by the numbers, a medley of melodies being its only real saving grace. And to be frank, the idea of putting one last show on with a menagerie of oddballs has repeatedly been done to death by The Muppet Show.

There are no messages here other than a little self-belief and a hastily bolting on bonding between a father and son gorilla - but Sing is perfectly happy to carry on regardless.

Where it wins is once again indulging the wackiness of the Illumination brand, pioneered by Despicable Me and expanded by Minions. Simple wacky moments add a levity to the film but also serve to highlight the weaknesses in the overall story and lack of real personality.

When Moon announces his intention to put on a singing audition, there's a meta moment where one character intones "Who wants to see another one of those?"

It's a prescient moment, and if the world-weary and slightly cynical among us nod our heads in agreement, there's an almost tacit acknowledgement that younger audiences will lap up the unabashed feel-good simplicity of it all and its formulaic edges, because it all comes wrapped in a perfectly dayglo blast of music and well-visualised fluffy characters.

Sing may aspire to hit the high notes, but in truth, it actually manages to solidly hit a mid-range, never quite veering into essential territory but never quite making itself feel unwanted.