Year: 2016 Director: Michael Bay

Two and a quarter hours long, about two of which is real-time combat, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi is one for all those who found Black Hawk Down a little bit slow and lacking in action.

Canny enough to namecheck Black Hawk Down as an obvious antecedent, 13 Hours is similarly based on a real-life incident, in this case the 2012 ‘Battle Of Benghazi’, with our plucky, outnumbered grunts facing down wave upon wave of marauding jihadists rather than Somali militia. Real life serves the makers well, shifting the action from a consulate location, where the film’s skill at evoking the sheer noise and confusion of war leaves you wondering, like the grunts, what the fuck is going on, to a second setting where, without wanting to give anything away, things settle down a bit, though with no let-up in the action. There’s a car chase scene which is just wow. More gunfire, night vision, sniper scope and RPG action than you can shake a stick at.

Director Bay, returning to the kind of form he first showed in The Rock, consistently finds new ways of framing the action, producing startling » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Gareth Edwards

Christmas Eve, the BJB clan are staying at my mum’s. Usually we go to the theatre, but since Mary Poppins was booked up months ago we decided on a visit to The Pictures.

None of us are real Star Wars nuts. My daughters were more into Harry Potter. I was a little too old to surf the first Star Wars wave. In fact, Mrs BJB is the biggest fan in the family as she took her youngest brother to see Episode IV on its original release. Anyway after a bit of to-and-froing, the family decided to see Rogue One while it was still on a big screen.

I had caught up with Gareth Edward’s first film Monsters a year or two after its release. I enjoyed its noirish atmosphere but wasn’t entirely bowled over. So I wasn’t expecting too much from another chip off the old franchise. Hence, being bowled over by R1 was a real surprise to me.

First off, the cast are all proper quality actors and although most of the characters are off the shelf action stereotypes – the seemingly cynical soldier who hides his principles, amoral hustlers who » Continue Reading.

Year: 2014 Director: Greg McLean

The original ‘Wolf Creek’ in 2005 ruled my world with its slow, stealthy build-up, brilliant use of environment, brutal kills and none-more-nihilistic outlook. The story of backpackers meeting grisly ends at the hands of an Outback serial killer, it didn’t do much that was new, but did it with a brio, cynicism and nastiness rarely seen since ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’.

Fast-forward to 2014, when I was among those curling my lip at the very idea of ‘Wolf Creek 2’. It had been a long time. And after all, ‘Wolf Creek’ didn’t need a sequel. It is what it is. Reviews decrying it as a workaday retread lacking those very things that made the original unique served only to reinforce my ‘Wolf Creek 2’ prejudice, and I waved it off the boat.

Click forward two more years to October 2016, when among a treasure trove of birthday gifts was a box set of the ‘Wolf Creek’ TV show, something I didn’t even know existed until that moment. The idea of a series treatment of ‘Wolf Creek’ intrigued me way more than a straight-up sequel, particularly since the cover shows a kick-ass chick with a » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Makoto Shinkai

I went to see this with my 13 year old daughter who decided she would rather see the subtitled, rather than the dubbed version. It’s only had a limited release in the UK so we had to travel to Southampton to see it. The fantasy story revolves around two strangers, Mitsuha, a high school girl living in the rural town of Itomori and Taki, a high school boy living in Tokyo. Mitsuha is bored of life in the country and longs to live in the city. One day, Taki wakes up and finds himself in Mitsuha’s body while Mitsuha has been transported to Tokyo and is inhabiting Taki’s body. Taki and Mitsuha wake the next day, returned to their own bodies and lives, having to deal with the fallout from the understandably strange behaviour that went on the day before. As these random body swaps continue, the pair, realizing what is happening, start to communicate by notes and then by messages on their phones until the swaps suddenly stop. Taki discovers that the Mitsuha’s village had been destroyed by a comet three years earlier, Mitsuha and most of the village had been killed and their » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: John Lee Hancock

When it comes to screenplays, Hollywood sure does love its BOATS – based on a true story. It’s the first letter of the acronym that Tinseltown deal-makers appreciate the most of course, since ‘basing’ the story on factual information invariably give them carte blanche to change everything else about it, for reasons of easy audience understanding and hopefully, maximised profit. Usually, this process involves a heavy use of exaggeration, highlighting the good (or even better, outrageously bad) actions of the protagonist, given that flagrant shock value puts bums on seats more successfully than Madchester pop combo James. Therefore, you’d expect The Founder screenwriter Robert D. Siegel to do such a number on Ray Kroc, the man who ‘found’ (as opposed to founded) McDonald’s. By his own admission, as documented in his autobiography, ‘Grinding it Out’, Kroc was a ruthless business opportunist whose idea of compassion and humanity was such that, if he ever came across a drowning competitor, he’d cheerfully attach a hosepipe to their mouth. Knowing this, it’d hardly be a stretch to depict Kroc – ‘like Crocodile but not spelt that way’ – as a classic pantomime villain since, in addition to » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Ken Loach

It’s sobering to think it’s nearly 50 years since ‘Poor Cow’ – featuring the dubious talents of one-time Led Zeppelin enforcer John ‘Biffo’ Bindon, a man so unpredictably violent even the notorious Peter Grant considered him a liability – introduced the unapologetically political filmmaker Ken Loach to the world. What’s even more astounding is the fact that after half a century and numerous films portraying life in Britain, Loach’s work continues to represent a view of the country which is resolutely unjust, inequitable and painful to watch. Such is the case with ‘I, Daniel Blake’, a movie which follows the plight of the titular character, a middle-aged carpenter who, after suffering a serious heart attack, is given the run around by a bureaucratic welfare system deliberately designed to discourage claimants through a combination of obtuse form filling and ritual humiliation. Unable to access the sickness payment his Doctor has recommended, due to not scoring enough ‘points’ in an interview with a so called health professional, Dan is forced to justify his Job Seekers Allowance application by proving he is actually looking for work, despite there being little employment available and no work he could realistically » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Louis Theroux

I’ve been bored with Louis Theroux in recent years. His goofy, mock-naive persona was starting to get a little shop-worn, and I thought his Saville documentary was a little misjudged and overly defensive.

But My Scientology Movie is meaty and thought-provoking. As an investigative journalist, Louis was never going to get anywhere near to penetrating this most secretive of (alleged!) cults, but I think he knew that from the start.

Instead, he does what he has always done best. He hovers round the periphery and disarms people with his affability, patiently feeding them enough rope to tie themselves in knots. In the end, they come to him, to an extent. So we get scenes like an ex-enforcer for the Church, berating them for their heavy handed bully techniques, while failing to face up to the fact that he was key to developing those techniques in the first place. And Church security teams trying to see Louis and his team off by following them around and filming them, which Louis diffuses by just remaining bewildered and curious rather than intimidated.

As it’s a cinematic release with a slightly larger budget, the production standards are much classier » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Jim Jarmusch

Sitting on a stately chair at the centre of this film about The Stooges is the most unlikely (almost) last man standing of the story is, as billed in the credits, James Osterberg as Iggy Pop – a battle scarred shit eating grinner that you could listen to all day long, Those deep honey mixed with gravel tones simply lay out the facts, m’am, with the other band members, managers and relatives filling in the blanks. Its thankfully free of irrelevant famous musician friend anecdotes or members of U2 telling you how their lives were changed.

Early footage of The Stooges is hard to come by and Jarmusch does a great job in eking it out over 2 hours, smearing it with clippings, sounds and grime. It’s a tale of more dumb luck than judgement as they attach themselves to the fertile Ann Arbor scene and the MC5 who help them get a record deal. Their first two albums are recorded in quick succession seemingly with Elektra having no idea what the hell to do with them. When they decide to drop them the guardian angel of David Bowie swoops down to save first » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Adam Curtis

I’m guessing that Adam Curtis is a familiar name to many here, to some not so much – particularly as his work is now mainly seen on the BBC iplayer which those abroad may not be able to access. He’s a journalist and film-maker, who for the last two decades has been crafting a singular approach to documentary making. Curtis’ films are collages of archive clips from primarily the BBC News that explore a particular topic, anchored by Curtis’ own narrative voice and a kicking selection of background music. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) argued with a techno-optimist view, suggesting instead that technology has simplified and distorted our view of the world. Bitter Lake (2015) looked at how many Islamist terrorist groups have their origins in the nature of the alliance between the USA and Saudi Arabia; and now we have Hpernormalizion.

Hypernormalization starts in 1975 in New York – where the politicians have bankrupted the city and the financiers take over the running of government; in Syria – where Assad’s father, the first dictator, is trying to create a pan-Arab settlement for the middle East. Frustrated by the Americans’ support » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Robert Eggers

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

It’s 92 minutes long so, for a start, it might appeal to people who enjoy films that aren’t tests of endurance. That said, if you’re looking for something to cheer you up, this might not be for you..

Year: 1961 Director: Val Guest

I recently got 4 Blu Rays for £20 in Fopp so thought I’d review them as they are almost all new views to me.

A fresh 4K transfer from the BFI of Quatermass director, Val Guest’s apocalyptic drama, ‘The Day The Earth Caught Fire’ set in a London after two recent nuclear tests by opposing sides of the Cold War have led to climatic changes and possibly signal the end of the world as we know it. The staff of the Daily Express attempt to discover what is going on with top class investigative journalism (did I mention it was a fantasy?) as the world starts to burn.

It bears all the hallmarks of 50s60s science fiction – nuclear paranoia, a mistrust of the ruling classes and government, a slightly polemic and grandstanding screenplay (a BAFTA winning collaboration by Guest and Wolf Mankowitz) and a feeling that these mad scientists will be the death of us. What raises it above the schlock of films of this type is a more intelligent and nuanced approach which instead of showing the aftermath of a cataclysmic event gives us a sense of the world slowly falling » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Ti West

In A Valley Of Violence has got 8 reviews on IMDB to date, four good and four bad. The bad ones criticise the story and the screenplay, comparing the story to the Keanu Reeves shoot-em-up revenge film John Wick (albeit as a Western). Which is fair enough. But the screenplay redeems it for me. It really turns the idea of classic tough guys on its head, showing them as people who really don’t want to get hurt, much less killed. The tough guys are Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, neither of whom fits the usual clearly delineated goodie/baddie stereotype. I was interested to see the baddest baddie is played by James Ransone, who I last saw having a fully explicit wank in the Larry Clark film Ken Park! Nice to see he’s gone on to have a proper career after such a courageously unselfconscious start. Also stars Doctor Who’s old assistant, Karen Gillan. Oh and the dog is brilliant.

Three stars.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

John Wick, Unforgiven.

Year: 2013 Director: Lukas Moodysson

Many of the films that convey the essence of making music aren’t actually biopics or documentaries. Joining The Commitments, Whiplash at the top of the tree is this Swedish film from Eurofilm bad boy Lukas Moodysson. Moodysson’s most famous for two extremely depressing films – Lilya 4 Ever and A Hole In My Heart. The latter, which I have seen, is deeply unpleasant and audience-baiting. The clue to the joy that is We Are The Best! lies in his earlier film Together, in which he looks at life in a commune in seventies Sweden with sympathy and humour. Music is well used, and there are some terrific unsentimental and natural performances in Together from the children who have to bear the consequences of their parents lifestyle choices. We Are The Best moves forward ten years to Stockholm of the early eighties. Two teenage girls, Bobo and Klara, take their boredom, their desire to wind up their parents, and political views and decide to mix all this together into forming a punk band. They’ve no idea how to play music – brilliant- and their one song is about how school sports lessons are no answer to » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Green Room is the third feature from Jeremy Saulnier who’s last movie was the fabulous revenge thriller Blue Ruin. This is a thriller/horror which grips from the off and doesn’t let go. It follows punk band The Ain’t Rights slepping around the bars and dives earning next to nothing when they get a gig in the backwoods playing to a load of Right wing skinheads. At this point we get a rather good cover of the Dead Kennedy’s Nazi Punks Fuck Off but after that a shocking discovery ups the ante. From then on the band are in a fight for survival with limited weapons and no way out.

We really enjoyed this in a gruesome watching through your fingers way. The violence is ultra realistic and shocking when it happens. But there is a dark wit running through the film which is very well played. The performances are excellent with the nervous bassist played by the late Anton Yelchin and the cold calculating club owner Patrick Stewart standing out

A great horror that has been pared to the bone and well worth the 90 odd minutes.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

Last House » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Colm McCarthy

Of late the world has been overrun with so many zombie films that we assume that creatively the horror genre is pretty well braindead but it helps that ‘The Girl With All The Gifts’ starts from a curious unique scenario and pretty much follows through to its conclusion. MR Carey’s novel was a gripping page turner and the film script which he adapted maintains that tension aided by a superb sound design and clanging industrial music that makes the viewer uneasy. The girl of the title, Melanie, relative unknown Sennia Nanua lives in a military installation, together with several other children who are wheeled to a makeshift classroom each day strapped to their chairs. Reprising her role as Cruella De Ville, Glenn Close’s Dr Caldwell stalks their cells at night often leading to an empty desk the next morning. It’s best you know as little as possible before seeing this film so I’ll try and keep it vague.

The only ray of light in this tomblike existence for Melanie is Gemma Arterton as teacher, Miss Justineau, the only inhabitant to show anything but fear and contempt for the inmates. The authorities want the children to » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Paul Elliott & Sean Lambeth

Martin Glover, aka Youth – a man of many parts – founder of and bassist with Killing Joke, poet, songwriter, artist, remixer, producer….the list goes on.

This intriguing documentary follows the man over an eighteen-month period, travelling with him in his trusty VW camper van, working in the recording stidio and pursuing his interest in painting.

It gives a very interesting insight into the man and his methods through extensive interviews with him and with the likes of Paul McCartney, Dave Gilmour, Jaz Coleman, Alex Paterson and Boy George to name but a few.

Studio sessions, smoke filled rooms and a steady stream of anecdotes keep the film moving along, as Youth recounts tales from his earliest days through to working with some of the biggest names in rock.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

This is a really interesting watch if you’re a fan of Youth or of rock documentaries in general – and as a bonus it has a fantastic soundtrack from Killing Joke and also features a treasure trove of unreleased material from Youth himself.

Year: 2016 Director: Steve Read and Rob Alexander

This isn’t a ‘career-by-numbers’ fluff piece.

It follows Gary Numan and his wife as they leave the UK and try to settle in LA with their young family. By the looks of it, the crew was given more or less unlimited access to the Numan household, with the result that Read and Alexander have produced an amazingly candid piece. There’s no sense here that we’re being presented with anything that has been particularly dressed up for public edification. Gary and his amusingly bonkers missus Gemma come across as a lovably eccentric middle-aged couple, a less annoying version of The Osbournes.

The narrative tension focuses on the fact that, having hit a creative brick wall and suffered a serious bout of depression, Gary is under pressure to produce a special ‘comeback’ album. It’s going to be his first new work for about seven years and –as the family acclimatises to their new surroundings- we get the impression that their future depends upon the success (or otherwise) of Poppa Numan’s new record. He talks frankly about his Asperger’s syndrome and about how it has informed his creative process (and imposed limits on » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Created by Michelle & Robert King

In two months time the United States will have to choose its president from the two most disliked candidates ever to run for the office. In the past year the tone and themes of the discourse have ranged from the nonsensical to the nonsensical and scary. A campaign which has placed front and centre conspiracy theories about Ted Cruz’s father’s involvement in the JFK assassination, Hillary Clinton spending most of her time off camera in a wheelchair because of Parkinson’s Disease and the incumbent President – a closet Muslim – being involved in the machinations of ISIS, is almost beyond satire. The nuttiness of these interesting times might explain why the creators of acclaimed Emmy-magnet The Good Wife have written a show about the consequence of a government takeover by mind controlling extraterrestrial insects. What sounds like The Thick Of It meets Invasion Of The Body Snatchers – a political satire/ sci fi hybrid – largely retains a lot of the soapy character interest for which its creators are known; it’s about as satirical as the film “Eat The Rich” and about as sci fi as Holmes And YoYo. In fact, » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Andrew Dominik

This is movie puts in the spotlight Nick Cave, a man who is struggling in every sense of the word. Shot in black and white in shaky 3D the movie reminds me a lot of Eat the Document and Don’t Look Back. Ramshackle editing (was there any editing) in and out of focus it pretty much records anything and everything over a period. Footage of Nick and Warren Ellis trying to eke out or resurrect fragments of songs,in a cab, in his house. Stuff with his wife Susie and their surviving son,Earl.

The director is a friend and they worked on the Assassination of Jesse James movie. He asks some direct questions and Nick responds far less abruptly than I’d have expected. But then,as he says, I woke up a different person. The world is the same but my place in it has changed”. Later he says that he used to know how he will respond to certain stimuli/situations but now he has no idea. The early close-up shots , black and white and 3D on this hollow face with big dark bags under his eyes..”what happened to my face”… “those big bags weren’t » Continue Reading.

Year: 1975 Director: Stanley Kubrick

There are many films vying for the title of lost masterpiece. Barry Lyndon, if not that, is certainly the odd one out of the Kubrick oeuvre, passed even by Eyes Wide Shut until this year’s new print and re-release, which we were fortunate enough to see on a big cinema screen. And if you can get to a screening you should. The description of the cinematography used most frequently is like a Constable painting come to life. And this is true, but one could also think of Joseph Wright of Derby and even Caravaggio in the candlelit interior scenes. Every shot is framed like a painting, and the exterior scenes achieve a naturalism I’ve seen in very few other historical dramas. It’s georgeous throughout, from the early scenes in rural Ireland to the stately home of Lyndon’s final rise (and fall). Kubrick brings the same extra-ordinary visual flair to the costume drama as he does to sci-fi – a clarity that makes one feel that one is watching a documentary even though the head is marvelling at the artifice. The story is derived from an nineteenth-century novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon and as with » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais can do no wrong. (I’m well aware when making that comment, that for many, he can do no right, since he polarises opinion to the extent there’s hardly anyone who says; ‘he’s okay, I suppose.’) Where Ricky is supreme however is among the movers and shakers, the big noises in Hollywood and London; not only the stars (and Keith Chegwin) apparently delighted to be humiliated in ‘Extras’, but producers and business corporations, investors prepared to back up Gervais’s various comedy productions with hard cash, despite the fact that not everything RG’s made has hit pay dirt. The biggest reason for this, is The Office’, his breakthrough piece, the magnificently conceived, observed and acted series which gave the world David Brent, chilled-out entertainer, friend as well as boss, self-obsessed philosopher, twat. On the back of Brent’s status as genuine comedy icon, Gervais has been given what looks like a blank cheque – and quite possibly a blank sheet of paper – to resurrect the Slough dilettante, who continues to follow his self-stated philosophy of ‘live fast, die old’. Since last seen Brent has suffered a nervous breakdown, been on prozac, undergone a weight gain » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Jean-François Richet

Though Mad Mel Gibson’s forthcoming ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ heralds a return to the kind of directorial event film-making for which he’s famed, he’s been prepping the ground with a series of smaller, mea culpa acting turns, ‘The Beaver’, ‘Get The Gringo’ and now this.

Ergo, ‘Blood Father’ opens with Med Mel – I mean, his character, John Link – confessing all at an AA meeting. He’s done bad stuff. He’s sorry. He wants to begin again. Whether or not you forgive him is irrelevant. The question is whether you want to watch him, and the fact remains that from ‘Mad Max’ to ‘Apocalypto’, whether in front of the camera or behind it, Gibbo’s always turned out fascinating work. Not necessarily good work, mind you, but always with a welcome dollop of ‘what the fuck?’

Here he seems to be channelling his most commercial character, Riggs of ‘Lethal Weapon’. In fact, if you can imagine that Riggs has retired, grown an awesome beard and now works out of a caravan as a tattoo artist, only to be dragged into a violent feud involving his daughter, you’ve got the measure of ‘Blood Father’, both in terms of plot » Continue Reading.