Emma: Film Review

Emma: Film Review

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Miranda Hart, Bill Nighy, Mia Goth
Director: Autumn de Wilde

The latest take on Jane Austen's Emma is an admittedly starched and almost military execution of the overly familiar tale.

The VVitch star Anya Taylor-Joy delivers an initially icy take on Emma Woodhouse, the meddling socialite who dabbles in others' lives before realising she's hopelessly out of her own depth.

Guiding Mia Goth's Harriet Smith, Emma tries her best to matchmake for a local vicar. But she fails to notice the attentions of a neighbour (Flynn) until it's too late.

The overly-mannered Emma, delivered by Kiwi Eleanor Catton, is a prissy and primped affair, that teeters dangerously close to boredom levels early on.

Despite some truly sumptuous costuming and some vividly executed moments  such as red-caped women recalling The Handmaid's Tale (it's clear director de Wilde comes from a promo background), the film's warmth is severely lacking early on, despite the comedy of Woodhouse Sr (the ever-wonderful Bill Nighy).

It unfortunately leads to a detachment early in proceedings, which nearly proves fatal when the moments of heart are due to overtake matters, and Catton's writing really does make it difficult to sympathise for the precocious Emma when she realises she's gone too far. (The interaction with Miranda Hart proving to be the only breath-taking moment and deeply upsetting one of the entire film.)

While it skirts around social mores and hints at class divides, there's an aloofness to this Emma that robs it of its charm (Alicia Silverstone's Clueless still remains a market leader in terms of spiky adaptations) and deprives it of an enduring appeal.

Sure, this version of Emma has some stunning visuals, and despite Taylor-Joy coming to life toward the end of the film, it's a hard journey to go on - and one that sadly offers limited rewards when considered among the pantheon of other adaptations of Austen's work.

Queen & Slim: Film Review

Queen & Slim: Film Review 

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya,  Jodie Turner Smith 
Director: Melina Matsoukas

Queen and Slim desperately wants to be a classic, a "black Bonnie and Clyde" as they even refer to themselves but in truth the rambling drama feels more like a missed opportunity than a gritty timely social commentary.Kaluuya and Smith are strong enough as the two leads and the film early on has a kind of intimacy that a good relationship drama requires as we first meet the pair on a first date.

Soon after that, their date takes a disastrous turn when they're pulled over by a police car....

However, the film's leaps of logic and suspensions of disbelief prove almost fatal after the initial horror of the police assault takes place. 

Shot in an almost verite style the unfolding drama grips as the duo are caught in an all too familiar scenario, and one that would provide a rich source for drama.

Yet once they set out on the run, the detours prove to be more of a distraction and threads of the two being the touch paper for a societal revolution jar more than cohesively gel.

Though the divisions between the community over whether to support or condemn are a worthwhile thread, they’re always secondary to the proceedings with the film's style being the sole raison d’être as it plays out amid moody shots, music-video stylings and intriguing camera angles.

There’s an easy charm and charisma to Kaluuya's character as he negotiates his way through the maelstrom; equally Smith goes from spiky to soft and back again with speed and the emotional whiplash is giddying, but finally satsifying.

Ultimately though Queen & Slim is more about style than great substance; sure, there's some commentary going on under the hood, but this is far from the classic it could be - despite the work of the talented cast, thanks to a messy approach and a need to fine tune the script.

Color Out of Space: Film Review

Color Out of Space: Film Review

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson
Director: Richard Stanley

Nicolas Cage goes uncaged in Richard Stanley's adaptation of HP Lovecraft's short story.

Cage is Nathan Gardener, who moves his entire family to a rural farm after his wife's breast cancer treatment. His two children are slowly and begrudgingly adjusting, his wife is fighting to stay in business and he's invested in a herd of alpacas.

One night, a mysterious noise in the sky bathes everything in purple, and the Gardeners' lives are changed forever as what dwells within the meteorite starts to poison their world.

Color Out Of Space may be rich in atmosphere, but it's light on character and coherence.

Certainly Stanley puts together a film that uses its colours to otherworldly effect, and its temperament to ethereal. The blurring of the visual lines and the use of colour cues is trippy to endure - but what goes on within the confines of the characters is what detracts.

Underwriting for the Gardeners doesn't help - and certainly when Cage starts to go unhinged, it draws attention away from the film and seems to simply exist to service fan desires. Sure, there's an undercurrent of the rot infecting the family as much as the out-of-space rot infecting the land, but it's barely expanded upon.

Extraneous characters pop up simply to drop exposition and then move out; there's a distinct lack of narrative coherence here that flounders parts of Color Out Of Space and ground it sorely in frustrating territory.

However, the atmospherics help ease out the unevenness that exists within - and while the film's certainly flawed, it brings on the feeling of dread with both competence and the sensation of dropping LSD.

Bloodshot: Film Review

Bloodshot: Film Review

Cast: Vin Diesel, Guy Pearce, Eiza Gonzalez, Sam Heughan, Lamorne Norris
Director: David Whilson

With Vin Diesel packing his usual charisma, Bloodshot's super-soldier manipulation story is more about freeze-frame action and slow mo than superhero sense and sensibilities.

Diesel is hotshot soldier Ray Garrison, whose life is changed when he's captured and his wife killed in front of him. Left for dead, Garrison wakes up in an Avengers-style building and hi-tech facility where Pearce's Dr Emil Harting says they've rebuilt him with nanites.

However, when Garrison has flashbacks, he sets out on a revenge mission.

It'd be good to report that Bloodshot lives up to the premise and promise of the smartly edited trailer.

But disappointingly, Bloodshot falls into the category of anaemic formulaic sci-fi thriller that you've seen way back when Universal Soldier first arrived on the scene.

Whilson has a formative background in VFX and it shows in his limited direction.

Everything is geared towards either a cool tech scene (the early reveal of the nanites is deftly executed) or to moody murky action sequences where Diesel's Terminator style stalker comes out of the dark and kills.

It's blandly familiar, and disappointingly dull - a film that sets up its premise well before falling into deja vu territory and cliched tropes to get it over the finish line. A final battle sequence feels like a redo of Spider-man versus Doc Ock, and the CGI creaks a little in the frenetic scenes.

Quick cut edits mar fights, and some action sequences are soaked in blood-red flares, simply because it looks cool once and Whilson decides to overuse.

While Diesel appears on auto-pilot, and Morris' Cockney hacker has jokes which fall flat, Gonzalez brings a humanity to proceedings that's desperately needed, and enlivens scenes with Diesel, lifting him out of the simply here to get a paycheck that gifts his performance with ennui.

Ultimately, Bloodshot needs a transfusion of sorts - it had the promise to launch a franchise, but now it's simply left exposed on the celluloid floor, bleeding out.

PlayStation Back Button: Tech review

PlayStation Back Button: Tech review

PlayStation’s back button is a smart piece of kit.

Sure, with a few months to go until the launch of the PS5, you could argue if it’s necessary or ponder if this is going to be built into any new controller and we are being conditioned early on.

Regardless of that, it’s testament to how easy it is to handle and set up that it fits and sits so easily in the hands just moments after you’ve opened the package.

Clipping into the headphone jack of the handheld, the back button sits tightly and snugly into the controller’s form without feeling chunky.

A LCD display in the back helps you set up the controller to how you want it to be. Jumping around in platformers or blasting the X button in shooters, you can configure one of the back paddles to how you want it.

The problem with the set up display is that if you miss your desired coordinate, you have to scroll all the way back through, rather than simply rolling it back. It’s a minor flaw in a relatively smooth set up but it’s one that niggles rather than majorly irritates.

And that’s really it - after hours of playing, the ergonomics make sense and probably will help long term with RSI.

But for a reasonable price, the back button is a nice to have, rather than a need to have immediately- it’s not exactly a game changer, but it does add up to something that long term will be useful rather than consigned to the back of the gaming cupboard.

Dark Waters: Film Review

Dark Waters: Film Review

Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Bill Camp, Tim Robbins
Director: Todd Haynes

Todd Haynes' safe and formulaic legal chiller Dark Waters is a solidly told tale, albeit one that never quite finds a way to rise into the upper echelons of drama, despite the presence of Mark Ruffalo.

Ruffalo is Robert Bilott, a newly-minted partner of a US legal firm that defends industrial companies.

When a farmer (Camp, in one of the more lively and complex roles of the film) shows up on his doorstep wanting to fight those who he believes have poisoned his land and his cows, Bilott finds himself torn between duty and a light familial connection to what's going on.

But as Bilott begins to investigate the malfeasance of local industrial giant Dupont (with Alias' Victor Gerber as their figurehead), he discovers the case has much more horrific wider consequences.

Dark Water is a solidly told film, anchored by the mutedly dogged performance of Ruffalo and supported by the growing outrage of Camp.

Yet, in telling it in a non-showy way, and scattering it across the timeline (A narrative necessity given how long Bilott's case has been going against Dupont), the film occasionally stutters to raise some real drama. It prefers a more quiet outrage that boils under as the reality of Dupont's shenanigans are gradually exposed.

There are moments that chill, and revelations that abhor, but Haynes' delivery of them is more restrained than perhaps it could be, as the effects on communities and even the world comes to light.

There are also times when the exposition floods some of the legal proceedings and montages of lawyering - and certainly Hathaway feels wasted after early promises threaten to expose the sexism within the boys' club industry.

Yet for all its dialled down touches, Dark Water does present a compelling story - albeit one that is good, rather than great.

Knives Out: DVD Review

Knives Out: DVD Review

Director Rian Johnson is no newcomer to the mystery genre.

His earliest Brick dabbled in similar territory, but for this latest, a slickly produced and polished piece of Poirot-esque fare, he heads to subvert some of the conventions while following others of the murder mystery.

When renowned crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Plummer) is found dead the day after his 85th birthday, there's a house full of family suspects. Enter southern fried detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) who was given an anonymous envelope stuffed with cash to solve the case, and who always gets his man.

Knives Out comes out the door firing on all cylinders, like most murder mysteries do.

Flash editing, quick cuts, a series of suspects given a moment in the glare of the spotlight and a whodunnit to relish all pull you in to the whimsical world Johnson's set up.

Yet within moments Johnson plays a trump card, swiftly pulling the rug from under your cinematic feet, giving the film its heart and its emotional in, and signalling his intentions to subvert everything. To say more is to derail the film, but suffice to say the commitment to the story while playing with the genre tropes, and plying it with laugh-out-loud one liners makes a big difference. (An early Murder She Wrote moment is guffawable).

Slickly edited, exquisitely shot and reminiscent of Agatha Christie, Jonathan Creek and most other crime series, Johnson knows a quirky detective is the glue to hold the story together. On this charge, Daniel Craig makes for a watchable lead, a dogged investigator with a drawl.

Sure, there's the usual let's-get-everyone-together-in-one-room-to-reveal-it moment, and the multi-talented cast are too many and too sidelined in the back half of the movie, but for the large part Knives Out is a good time at the movies, a film that's not as clever as it initially thinks it is, but which commits to its premise and carries you along on a rollicking good ride.