Thanks to a brief stay in a country that doesn't believe in copyright...
Bourne Legacy: Jeremy Renner IS Grumpycat (TM), scowling his way through an entirely forgettable plot except that he's also running out of the right CIA/NSA/WTF drugs to keep his ruthless superhuman killingmaching abilities in top nick. There's some good fighting (are you surprised?). Um, it's fun, is diverting enough - and briskly directed - but somehow lacks satirical/subversive edge of some of the earlier ones.
Dredd: speaking of Grumpycat: Karl Urban has the lipline to do the business in the lead role here and I sort of admire him for never ever taking the helmet off and sporting fuck-you shaving stubble throughout. I'm not a hardcore enough 2000AD fan for my opinion to have any weight here, but I thought it wasn't too bad really; nice art direction and some goodish fx and didn't take itself too seriously. Anything that keeps Wood Harris ("Avon Barksdale") and Lena Headey in work is also to be recommended. Trashy and fun.
End of Watch: Interestingly 'indie' and low-rent in style, with some agreeably cynical and sparky moments about love, marraige, the cult of copdom etc, and with some really good spontaneous buddy-buddy acting and dialogue/imrpov from Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena, but totally runs out of steam in the final section (which makes no sense at all). It's an OK addition to the corpus of 'corrupt LA cops' films and TV (Rampart, Training Day, The Shield Etc etc) without really bringing much new to the party.
Lawless : Absolutely beautifully artdirected and the sort of thing (1930s period detail, blood, feuding, rednecks) I would go for, even the presence of new Head Prefect and All Around Wondergirl Jessica Chastain didn't grate on me as much as usual, but overall the standard of the acting just isn't high enough to sustain the interest in a ropy script. Guy Pearce does OK at being evil (so much so he even looks like he's had a skull transplant) and Mia Wasikowska is great at being a preacher's daughter in trouble... however, Tom Hardy can't do a backwoods Appalachian accent to save his musclebound life and Shia LeBoeuf is as limp as ever. Any film set in the heart of the Prohibition-era bootlegging, and featuring much graphic violence as this one, really ought to be a bit more gripping.
La Pelicula de Ana: Amusing and gently biting farce from Cuba about an actress masquerading as a prostitute (not the usual turn of events) in order to prop up her financially failing family and swindle some bucks out of a dubious visiting Austrian feature film crew. Some lovely performances and some surprisingly barbed and postmodern thoughts about what foreign visitors to Cuba actually fall in love with ... but it's a bit of dog's breakfast overall and the denouement falls completely flat.
Flight: I admit to nodding off several times during this and perhaps percisely because it couldn't stop me nodding off several times) I really couldn't see what the fuss is about here, except for just maybe a newly nuanced approach to addicts & users in Hollywood films... Denzel Washington is believably spiky and all tormented as genius-but-cokeheaded-drunk superpilot yet the mood of the whole film is a downer and all of the religiose tinging around the edges of the script put me right off (cf The Grey, where the same thing happened)
The Four Mindless, classless and pointless 'historical' martial-arts nonsense with almost nothing to recommend it, although the conceit of setting a zombie army to work via acupuncturizing criminals' corpses has some novelty appeal. Plus points also for a very beautiful lead actress with a great big bump on her nose playing a character called "Emotionless". And I wonder whether the plot (negligible, but focusing largely on turf wars between various corrupt Imperial law&order forces) might have some veiled relevance to China today. (The martial arts sequences themselves are v poor , btw - it's not a case of 'bad movie, great action' here.)
Lincoln: Eerily brilliant acting from Daniel Day Lewis; um, not so much for direction (it's an entirely conventional and middlebrow effort); and intriguing rather than riveting script (interesting to me because it does manage to sidestep most of the 'let's make him a plaster saint' pitfalls and concentrate on the dirty process and compromises of politics rather than the sweeping rhetoric about Amurrica's Freeedoms bla bla bla). It's unjust but I can't stand Sally Field in anything, which works a treat in this as her character is meant to be unbearably annoying anyway. As for everyone else it's so crammed with great American character actors that it's actually a bit distracting: rather than thinking "hey, that's JUST how I always imagined William Seward" you're constantly thinking "ooh look! it's her off ER! it's Paul Giamatti! it's John Hawkes!" etc etc etc. However, +1000 points for another magnificently sleazy role for James Spader.
The Possession: bog standard semi-supernatural pap, basically yet another low-rent reboot of The Exorcist only this time supposedly rooted in Jewish rather than Catholic hokum, as the evil being motivating a child to misbehave is a dybbuk rather than a demon. Which means lots of moody shots of all those Orthodox Jewish blokes in their creepy oldfashioned clothes and big sinister fur hats and the main characters having to call in Matisyahu to do the exorcising. Bit of a subterranean "men's rights movement" agenda going on there as well (oh, the horrors of divorce, or ungovernable women and children who just make stuff up about their dad hitting them...
) . Not worth your time.
. It does contain the usual elements in a Wachowski siblings film; rebellion/individuality/love/oppression/a promised land and subtle hints at something bigger than all of us...
, so ill look for another copy somewhere.
