Cinema

Finding Vivian Maier is a documentary about the American nanny who led a wholly secretive life as a photographer and who, posthumously, has been described as ‘one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century’. It’s a good story, which is well told here, and told breezily (83 minutes), which we like. But I’m not convinced the quote from Michael Moore on the poster — ‘Amazing...this should be seen with other people, in the dark, on a big screen’ — is necessarily true. Ms Maier has already been the subject of Alan Yentob’s Imagine strand on the BBC, and this film could just as happily be viewed on TV as in the cinema, I think.

Richard Linklater’s observational chronicle, Boyhood, was 12 years in the making and is 166 minutes long — that’s nearly three hours, in real money — and I wasn’t bored for a single moment. Isn’t that miraculous? Have you ever heard the like? Me, who is generally bored at the drop of a hat? Me, who is generally bored before the hat even hits the ground? But those 166 minutes (still nearly three hours, in real money) just flew by, as can happen, when you are utterly engrossed. Who knew? This is the story of a family, as told through the eyes of a boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who ages from six to 18, in real time.

As far as ‘jukebox films’ go, Mamma Mia! was a riot, Sunshine on Leith was tolerable, just about, while Walking on Sunshine is a step too far and brings the genre to its knees.It’s being billed as ‘the feel-good musical of the year’ although, bereft of a single original idea, ‘the feel-ennui musical of the year’ may be the better fit. Also, ‘I-feel-really-really-bored-and-quite-insulted-and-also-rather-repulsed-and-I-keep-checking-my-watch-in-the-hope-it-will-be-over-soon’ would cover it quite adequately. Set to 1980s hits (‘Holiday’; ‘Don’t You Want Me’; ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’, etc.

The Fault in Our Stars, which is based on the bestselling young-adult novel by John Green, is about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love and it’s a sort of Love Story for younger people, God help them, although unlike Love Story it’s not set to mislead an entire generation. (In my experience, love means having to say you’re sorry constantly, and at least three times before breakfast.) This is funnier — it’s funny about the Big C; that’s its USP — but it is still a weepie and yes, I did weep, as I’m not a cold-hearted monster (am I not still recovering from Marley & Me?

Belle is based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a sea captain and his African slave mistress, who was brought up as a free gentlewoman by her great uncle, Lord Mansfield, at Kenwood House, Hampstead, in the 18th century. How fascinating, you might think. You just can’t mess up with a story like this, you might also think. It has everything going for it; a costume drama fulfilling all our beloved Jane Austen tropes (class, gender, etc.) with the added charge of race. How could it go wrong? Alas, all too easily. This is disappointingly lifeless, and shallow, and the soundtrack! So many violins, you’ll leave feeling as if you’ve been quite violently smacked around the head with one. Repeatedly.

Grace of Monaco, the Grace Kelly biopic starring Nicole Kidman, is an absolute joy, and I highly recommend it. Unless you live under a rock, which I think I might envy (dark, quiet, peaceful, but maybe dank?), you’ll know it was savaged at Cannes, but don’t let that put you off, as this isn’t just some middling turkey; this is a big, glistening, strutting turkey. This is one of those turkeys so jaw-dropping it achieves grandeur of the kind I find quite irresistible. Also, as a reviewer, sensationally bad films are always a pleasure because they are easy to write about — I plan to knock this off in under ten minutes — and you can take any number of cheap shots.

If a gang of knife-wielding toddlers ever presses you for the name of the best Disney film, Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a pretty good answer. It has everything you expect from those features animated during Walt’s life: a simple story translated from a fairy tale; beautifully painted castle and forest scenes; a baddie that you can really root against, and all that. But it also has more: widescreen; a wild and luminous colour palette; and a score borrowed from some bloke called Tchaikovsky. Today’s animators are given to cooing about its invention and daring. I’d join them if I had a switchblade raised to my knees. Even if I didn’t. Which brings us bloodlessly to the latest film from Walt Disney: Maleficent.

When you see the latest corporate entertainment juggernaut hurtling at you, what are your options? When I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past (what?) hurtling at me, I thought: I can either jump aboard or I can swerve off-road. In this instance, I chose to swerve off-road — I’ve seen Godzilla; I’ve done my time — and although it could have ended in disaster, and I could have been hurled into a ditch or something, it actually worked out great, as I swerved off-road straight into Run & Jump, which is a lovely film, just lovely, and although nothing gets blown up, it does star Maxine Peake, whose performance may very well blow you away.

Godzilla is from the director Gareth Edwards, a Brit whose first film, Monsters, truly put him on the map, as it daringly played with the genre, and incorporated a plausible human love story, and the difference between that film and this may be summed up as follows: whereas Monsters was a clever and inventive film made for relatively little money ($500,000), this is a quite stupid film made for a lot of money ($160 million). Oh dear. It sounds like I’m wearing my disapproving hat again, although I don’t always. For example, I take it off for special occasions, and sometimes even in bed. (Sometimes yes, sometimes no; depends.) What’s it all about?

Frank is a music biopic, but only of sorts, as it is not at all like your average music biopic. It’s not that processional march we have come to expect; that chronological story of tough beginnings, the moment of discovery, tour montages, calendar dates flying, and finally making it big. In fact, this is about a musician for whom making it big would be the death of him, and very nearly is. Also, it stars Michael Fassbender wearing bad knitwear and a giant paper-mâché head. So it is not Walk the Line or Dreamgirls or The Karen Carpenter Story, is what I’m saying, and it is profoundly more interesting and affecting for it.

Blue Ruin is a low-budget yet highly accomplished revenge thriller although whether you have the stomach for it is another matter. I do not have a strong stomach, as we know, and as I braced myself for the next startlingly bloody burst of violence, having yet to recover from the last startlingly bloody burst of bloody violence, I was often just longing for it all to be over. I like excellent film-making as much as the next person but, ideally, I would also like to be able to watch it. Stuff you don’t need to know but might like to: this has been a huge festival hit, winning several prizes, and much acclaim for its writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, who had previously only made corporate videos and one small feature (Murder Party).

The Other Woman is not just an extremely bad film but also a wholly reprehensible one (she says, with her most disapproving hat on). It’s a comedy, although if you find any of it funny, that’s all I will ever need to know about you, but its unfunniness isn’t what upsets me so much. It’s the dishonesty. It’s being sold as a film that ‘celebrates female friendships’ and ‘is absolutely a feminist movie’ (Cameron Diaz) even though it is an insult to all women everywhere from beginning to end. Who doesn’t realise this? Do they expect us not to realise this?

Have you seen that pizza with a cheeseburger crust? If not, just imagine a normal pizza, except where the pizza ought to end — and civilised society begin — there’s a ring of about ten miniature burgers, all encased in dough. On top of each of those burgers is a greasy discharge of cheese. There’s also an option to add bacon. I mention this because the opening of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 feels much the same. It serves up pizza: a pre-credits flashback in which the parents of Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, struggle to upload data to YouTube, or wherever, while battling a gunman on board an exploding plane.

If the very first scene of Calvary doesn’t immediately draw you in there’s every chance there is something seriously wrong with you and I would urge you to book an appointment with your GP. It is a terrific opening and it takes place in Ireland, in a Catholic church, within the dark, intimacy of a confessional box, as Father James (Brendan Gleeson) listens to a voice from the other side of the partition recounting how he was repeatedly sexually abused by a priest when he was a child. This parishioner wants revenge, but as his abuser is now dead, he will kill Father James instead, in a week, on the beach. What better way, in fact, to get back at the Church than to murder a good priest, an innocent, and on a Sunday too?

I should warn you that if you go see The Double it is one of those films that will trouble you long after the event. It will trouble you at breakfast and it will trouble you at lunch and it will trouble you as you go about your business, whatever that might be. Yes, a pain — haven’t I got enough troubles of my own? Haven’t I got enough to think about as it is? — but it is so singular and compelling, there is every chance it is worth it. It’s directed by Richard Ayoade, his second feature after the terrific Submarine, who is known to TV viewers as Moss from The IT Crowd as well as being a regular guest on those comedy panel games that have been told to include more women, like we don’t have better things to do.

Have you ever looked at backing singers and thought: what is their story? Do they or have they ever prayed for their time to come? As they are going ‘ooh ooh, ooh ooh’ behind Kylie are they thinking, ‘I want to kill Kylie’? Do they mind that no one knows their name? Do they ever ponder why it’s so often white artists with black backing singers and never the other way round? I have often wondered about all this, and now realise if I’d stopped idling over such questions, got off the sofa and done some digging, I could now be in possession of an Oscar. I’m a fool to myself; I truly am.

A Long Way Down is about four would-be suicides who meet for the first time on the top of a tall London building, intending to jump, but instead of jumping they decide to hang around and annoy the hell out of us for the next 90 minutes. Had I known what I know now, and had I also been on top of that tall building, I might well have given them all a hefty nudge. Based on the Nick Hornby novel, which, in itself, may not be the most successful of Hornby’s novels, it opens on New Year’s Eve on top of that building as our suicidal quartet truck up. Firstly, it is Pierce Brosnan as Martin Sharp, a former breakfast television star whose fling with a 15-year-old — ‘I thought she was 25!’ — led to a spell in prison and the end of his career and marriage.

OK, Need for Speed, if we must, and we must because I sat through it (running time: 130 minutes) and do not see why you should be spared. Need for Speed is based on a video game and here is the plot synopsis: ‘Vroooooooooom! Vroooooooooom! Vrm, vrm, vrm...VROOOOOOOOOOM!’ And it’s the sort of ‘Vroooooooooom!’ which vibrates behind your forehead, making it feel as if it may blow it off, while also making it hard to doze or zone out mentally, which is a pain.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is the latest Wes Anderson film and it is beautiful to look at, scrumptious, luscious, such a delicious confection I would have marched up to the screen and licked it if only, at the screening I attended, Mark Kermode had not been occupying the seat in front, and it would have meant scrambling over him, and maybe ruining his hair. (A quiff like that doesn’t hairdress itself, you know.) So I stayed put, feasting with my eyes — on the film, not the quiff — so it was sensually satisfying, but emotionally satisfying? Not so much, alas. Divine pastries, divine clothes, divine period trappings, but, as with most of Anderson’s films, I was never moved or understood what mattered, if any of it mattered.