Palm Springs: Amazon Prime Video Review

Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, JK Simmons

Director: Max Barbakow

The time travel loop trope is given a fresh spin in this relatively entertaining  once it gets going dramedy about Andy Samberg's Nyles.

Seemingly carefree, Nyles meets up with reluctant maid of honour Sarah (How I Met Your Mother's Milioti) at a Palm Springs wedding. Both sickened by the whole wedding, the pair head off to the desert for a hook-up. However, just as things are going in Nyles' favour, he's hit by an arrow, and stumbles into a cave, warning Sarah not to follow him.

She doesn't heed the warning and goes in as well - waking up later to the apparently same day only earlier...

Picking up a malaise from the line "Today, tomorrow, yesterday, it's all the same," uttered by Nyles, Palm Springs builds on its timeloop raison d'etre and cuts loose with it - even if the resultant montages are familiar to anyone who's got even an inkling of what the genre offers.

More than a Groundhog Day, the film builds from an early pastiche of similar movies to reveal itself as somewhat of an earnest look at the reality of being stuck in a rut (something likely to resonate with many in 2020) and trying to get out of it.

It helps the leads are extremely personable.

Samberg brings some of the goofier and sombre edges to his Nyles, as the layers peel away and the reality of being condemned to repeat the same 24 hours starts to grate. Equally, Milioti delivers a fresh-facedness and dogged determination that anyone stuck in the loop would have as they tried to escape. The pair work incredibly well together and sell the fact this is a very familiar concept, given a slightly fresher edge.

Extremely affable once you get past the initially rough start, Palm Springs is a destination well worth checking into and sticking with.

Palm Springs is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.

The Secrets We Keep: Film Review

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Chris Messina, Joel Kinnaman
Director: Yuval Adler

The Secrets We Keep could have been a tense chamber piece of claustrophobia and nagging doubt - a story of identity, trauma and unreliable memory that kept audiences guessing.

But instead what emerges - aside from a twitchy whirling Rapace - is a film that doesn't really offer much tension, or opportunity to make you wonder who is right and who is wrong.

Rapace is Romanian gypsy Maja, a woman rebuilding her life in post World War II America with new husband, doctor Lewis (Messina, in a relatively straight and thankless role). One day when out with her son, she hears a whistle and her bubble is burst.

Obsessed that the whistle is from one of her former tormentors from her days in a camp, Maja stalks the man, kidnapping him and plunging him into the family basement.

Despite his protestations that he's not the man she remembers, and with a loosening grip on her own sanity, Maja is put on a path with her past that could permanently derail her future.

The Secrets We Keep is a lesson in patience.

But the almost chamber piece nature of the film doesn't really lend itself to any lingering doubts over who is right, who is wrong, and what has happened unfortunately. 

While Rapace turns in a nervy, edgy performance of a woman on the verge of losing everything, the cat and mouse game isn't nearly as strong as it could be - and the psychological elements don't grip as bitingly as they could.

The period detail and the use of beige and green palettes suggest much provocatively during the film, but the overall tone is one of indifference.

Kinnaman delivers a strong and emotionally wrenching performance in the one scene he's gifted as the captive, and Messina is solid but never spectacular. This is Rapace's film, and while she steals every moment she can, the script doesn't do enough to service the kind of range she delivered in the Dragon Tattoo series.

A lack of real tension proves fatal to The Secrets We Keep and the lack of intensity proves deflating to the overall mystery. There may be secrets in this film, but in honesty, the knowing of them doesn't sadly prove worth the journey.

Fatman: Movie Review

Cast: Mel Gibson, Walton Goggins, Marianne Jean Baptiste

Directors: Eshom Nelms, Ian Nelms

Less Bad Santa, more BadAss Santa in its denouement, the weirdly odd Fatman tries to give the Christmas story a different spin, much like Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale pushed its own darker agenda.

A heavily bearded and dour Gibson plays Chris Cringle, whose Santa business is slowly falling apart. Forced into a financial partnership with the military, Cringle's world is further complicated when a precocious scorned kid hires a hitman (Goggins) after he's left a lump of coal in his stocking.

There's a kernel of a good story here, and an idea that could have blossomed wonderfully, if it were to have been fully indulged.

But as it is, Fatman feels tonally like several movies all squashed into one, with none intertwined with any of the joy of their raison d'etre. 

Goggins, a hamster-obsessed hitman, just about manages the right tone of murderous intent as the killer scorned by Santa when he was younger and all too happy to even the score. In fact, he's one of the best things about the film, delivering lines about the Fatman with a deadly glee that's just the right side of hammy.

However, he's offset by Gibson's Cringle, who's more a businessman thwarted than a booming jolly presence. The dour edge and demeanour works and gives scenes with his wife Ruth (Baptiste) a kind of earnestness that's compelling to watch as the film plays out.

But too much of Fatman sees differing narratives being forced to crash into each other with minimum impact. 

And when the gun-led finale rolls around, and blood spills as heavily on the snow as it did in moments of Fargo make you yearn for a killer Santa film of cat-and-mouse that never was.

As they say, it's not over till the Fatman sings - but in this tonally confused cinematic slice, you just walk away wishing that the Nelms brothers had sung from another songsheet and given you the kickass Santa film you can see hiding in the distance.

Knives Out: Neon NZ 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.

Just Mercy: Neon NZ Review

That Just Mercy follows a conventional, cliched path for its tale of wronged black man seeking redemption is not a bad thing, but it lends the film a feeling of a lack of subtlety.

That it does it with Michael B Jordan leading the way, lends the film the agency it desperately wants from its beginning sequences to its obvious end, complete with its these are the people from the true story photos.

And yet in this quietly dignified story of Jordan's innocent lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, who, despite the exhortations of his mother who fears for his life, heads to Alabama to try and save Jamie Foxx's Walter McMillian from death row, every cliche and every dramatic beat lies in wait and is deployed when thematically necessary.

This may sound like a damnation of the film, but in truth, Just Mercy's strength derives from knowing the journey it's on, and being determined to tell it well, wrapping the whole thing up in an unshowy bow that gives it the kind of prestige sheen that won't attract awards praise, but will render its audience distraught with parts of its power.

Nuance is the order of the day with Just Mercy, and while Foxx is reduced to a side player thanks to his character's incarceration, Jordan's evident star power shines through. Sure, his lawyer doesn't resort to showmanship or tricks and ticks to get his result, but the story gifts Jordan with enough to ensure the overriding feeling is one of dignity in the face of overwhelming odds.

You've seen films like Just Mercy before - depressingly, these stories have been around from the John Grisham days to the Netflix contemporary series, and they've been told to varying degrees of success through the years. And sure, there are montages which show researching and lawyering at work, but Just Mercy does more than enough to justify its cliches, and exposes the horror of the Alabama state to the depressing maximum.

However, Just Mercy packs a powerful punch when it's needed.

An execution sequence is utterly heart-in-mouth horrifically burned into the screen, one of the few truly memorable moments from Just Mercy's overly bloated 2 hour run time that resolutely stands out and is deeply affecting. And Blake Nelson's performance as a witness in the original case gives the film a boost as it threatens to sag in its second hour.

Ultimately, Just Mercy and its depressingly familiar material is another of those has to be told tales that Hollywood occasionally does so well. What makes this one stand out though is a nuanced lead, a determination to showcase the grit under extreme pressure and the desire to lead with its earnestness.

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon: Neon NZ Review

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon: Neon NZ Review

Director: Will Becher, Richard Phelan

It's hard to explain why A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon works so well.

From its sci-fi easter eggs to its general desire to encapsulate timeless British silliness with throwaway gags (a bull in a china shop being the best), there's something about Aardman's work that just feels iconically English, yet universally funny.

While this latest may lack the heart of the first Shaun The Sheep movie, it's lost none of the madcap charm as we return to Mossingham. With a UFO sighting in the village, the farmer decides to cash in to try and make some money to upgrade his harvester.

However, Shaun's already met the alien, and in true buddy movie mentality, sets out to get the little critter home before the shady government agencies capture him first....

From slapstick silliness to pratfalls, scifi gags that include ET, Doctor Who, a wonderful Hitchhiker's nod and a truly brilliant 2001: A Space Odyssey pastiche, A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon is family fare for everyone to enjoy.

Once again, Aardman's homed in what makes British humour so amusing, and shows once again this animation studio's spent more time than any other weaving in gags into every single frame.

Sure, under closer analysis, it does lacks the emotional edge of the 2015 debut, but it over-delivers the silliness and packs in more jokes than you can take in. A finale doesn't quite match up all the pieces, but all in all, Aardman's still delightful and determined to leave you grinning.

There's also an opening reminder of how Wallace and Gromit led the way with their Grand Day Out (even down to the robot's roots in Farmageddon), but while they may be benched due to the sad death of Peter Sallis, Shaun The Sheep has certainly got years to go - here's hoping we don't have to wait another 5 years for the next outing.

Reunion: Film Review

Cast: Julia Ormond, Emma Draper, Cohen Holloway, John Bach

Director: Jake Mahaffy

More a psychological chiller than an outright terror, Jake Mahaffy's Reunion is a tale of duality combined in a tale of the guilt of mothers and that relationship.

Emma Draper is Ellie, an abused mother-to-be, who returns to the family home and a strained relationship with her mother Ivy (an icy Ormond). As her mother readies the house for sale, Ellie's already fragile mental state takes a dive as she begins to see her dead sister...

Terrifically atmospheric and making great fist of its single location (an old, Gothically outfitted house), Reunion subverts the expectations of a horror film, and prefers instead to deal with the fact the greatest horrors are usually of the human variety, and more than often, part of the family dynamic.

Mahaffy, who wrote the film as well, goes for subtlety over overt use of tropes (until the last act where the visuals go into overload) to build the sense of creepiness and also dread. With a minimal soundtrack and some quick cuts overlayed, this chamber piece is more about the ideas within than what lies on the screen.

Early sequences make great use of the location, and imagery plays a lot into displaying two of everything (hinting at the dynamics ahead), giving an unsettling feel that builds to an upsetting crescendo as the tale of guilt unfolds.

The fractious two-hander between Ellie and Ivy is genuinely disturbing to watch, and flashbacks add another layer of claustrophobia that's hard to shake.

Essentially a tale of moving on (Ellie's struggling to let go of the past, accept the changes of her new life; Ivy refuses to move on from their relationship dynamic, despite trying to get rid of everything in the house) Reunion is a mature and excellently-executed entrant into the world of Kiwi horror. It does it differently, and for that, whole-heartedly deserves commendation.