Before Focus went in front of the cameras there was huge amount of interest in it in Hollywood, with the likes of Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Ben Affleck and Kristen Stewart all being attached at one time or another. However, in the end it went to Will Smith and Margot Robbie as the two leads.

After watching it, I kind of wondered why so many people were so keen on it, as while fairly fun and decently entertaining, there’s very little to set it appear from a hundred other con-artist thrillers.

Will Smith plays Nicky, a veteran con-man who uses a mix of sleight of hand and psychological trickery to get cash out of his marks. He comes across small-scale hustler Jess (Margot Robbie), and reluctantly takes her under his wing, teaching her the con-artist ropes and pulling her into a sting with a massive pay-off.

Three years later they bump into each other again, this time when she is the girlfriend of racing car team owner Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro), and Nicky has been hired by that owner to con other teams into using a computer algorithm that’s supposed to make their cars go faster but will actually ensure Garriga’s cars have the edge. With each side having their own secrets and a romantic edge between Nicky and Jess, things begin to get complicated.

I said earlier I wasn’t sure why so many stars flirted with Focus, but actually I kind of do. It’s the sort of movie where on the page you can sell it as being The Sting crossed with Ocean’s 11, but with a modern, psychological-trickery edge (one of the characters even appears to be an American version of mental illusionist Derren Brown). However, while it’s always fun and fairly cool – even if when you think about it these are all terrible people who shamelessly steal for a living, with the film having a completely amoral attitude to that – the cons themselves and the way they’re presented aren’t really clever enough to raise this above being fairly standard fare.

Indeed, it would have been a rather tedious film at times if it weren’t for the charms of Will Smith and the excellent Margot Robbie, and it’ll be great to see them back together in next year’s Suicide Squad. Other characters unfortunately are a bit flat or don’t make a huge amount of sense, and there are also more than a few plot holes that don’t help things at all.

It certainly looks good though and there is an undeniable edge of cool the movie possesses, but ultimately it doesn’t add up to as much as it perhaps ought to. While I may have sounded down on the film, the fact is that it is fairly fun, it just perhaps ought to be more than it is.

Overall Verdict: It may ooze style and have cool leads, but Focus needed to concentrate more on the cons if it were really going to be great.

Special Features:
‘Masters of Misdirection: The Players in a Con’ Featurette
‘Will Smith: Gentleman Thief’ Featurette
‘Margot Robbie: Stealing Hearts’ Featurette
Deleted Scenes
Alternate Opening

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

I have always wanted to see A Letter To Three Wives, but I’m almost ashamed to say I’d never watched it before. The reason I was keen to see it is that All About Eve is one of my favourite movies ever, and this is the other film for which Joseph L. Mankiewicz won both a Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscar.

I’m glad to say I wasn’t completely disappointed by the film, although I can see why the movie has fallen out of favour compared to much of Mankiewicz’s other work, such as Cleopatra and The Barefoot Contessa. While not that many younger people have seen the 1949 Oscar winner, they may find the plot oddly familiar, as more recently it served as the basis for an episode of The Simpsons.

Deborah (Jeanne Crain), Lora Mae (Linda Darnell) and Rita (Ann Sothern) are heading off on a boat for the day to look after a group of children, when they receive a letter from their ‘friend’, Addie Ross, who says she has abruptly left town and has taken one of their husbands with her.

Initially the women brush it off as one of Addie’s games, but as the day goes on they all start to wonder whether their hubby may have left them and they each reminisce about their lives and relationships. Deborah loves the idea of living a posh, middle-class, Country Club life, but feels that she will never quite fit in due to her farm girl background. Lora Mae grew up poor and knew exactly what she was doing when trying to reel in older, divorced Porter, but after genuinely falling for him she fears they will never escape the almost transactional nature of their early relationship. Rita meanwhile is a successful radio writer, who has a tendency to put the needs of her boss over those of her husband (played by a young Kirk Douglas), which leaves him feeling rather emasculated.

All the husbands like Addie (who we never actually see, although she provides the narration) and see her as a kind of perfect woman, but has any of them actually run off with her?

Fairly early on it becomes apparent why A Letter To Three Wives has not stayed the well-loved classic it might have been, and that’s to do with its rather old-fashioned attitude towards women. Deborah seems almost desperate to feel like she’s given up her individuality and become an adjunct to her husband, while Rita must learn that the man is in charge and that if she’s going to be a career woman, she can’t expect to be an independent one. But that’s the problem with women – they will insist on thinking they’re people in their own right!

It is incredibly old-fashioned in its attitudes, but it’s also one of the many older films which is now seen as sexist, but which was actually thought as being quite progressive at the time, in this case particularly how it dealt with the issues left behind after World War II, when women had been allowed out of the house but were suddenly meant to go back inside again when the men returned home. Things have moved on massively since the 1940s though (thank goodness), leaving A Letter To Three Wives far behind and with a view on sexual politics that would be actively offensive if anyone made the same movie today.

If you look past that though it is a very entertaining film. It’s smartly written (attitudes aside), and cleverly plotted as it looks into the lives of the three women and the situation they now find themselves in, all with a great hook of the audience waiting to discover who may have run off with Addie. Even the sexist side is worth watching, as it’s an interesting document on women’s position at the time and what was seen as the way to be happy.

The movie looks extremely good on Blu-ray. In fact it’s looking better than any film from 1949 has a right to, helped by the great classic Hollywood visuals and a restoration that’s done an excellent job of removing grain and other problems. You also get a choice of 5.1 sound or the original mono audio and a couple of decent special features, including radio versions of A Letter To Three Wives and newsreel footage of the Academy Awards where Mankiewicz won his Oscar for the film.

Overall Verdict: This is the sort of film – of which there are quite a few – which would be classed as a bona fide classic if it weren’t for the fact times have moved on and its attitudes, in this case about women’s place in society, are positively prehistoric. Outside its ‘little women should stop having thoughts of their own’ views it is an extremely well made and entertaining film, but it certainly gets no points for modern feminism values.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

When Jupiter Ascending was moved from a prime Summer 2014 cinema release to early 2015, it didn’t auger well. And when the reviews finally rolled in, it looked like people were right to be suspicious of the Wachowskis’ $175 million space opera. However, while it’s far from being a masterpiece, there is just about enough fun peeking through the nonsense.

Mila Kunis is Jupiter Jones, a seemingly normal girl from a Russian immigrant family, who is working as a cleaner and unsure what to do with her life (or even if she should bother to do anything). However, it turns out she is the genetic reincarnation of a murdered space queen, and because of that, she should be able to inherit the queen’s vast wealth.

There is a problem though, which is that the queen’s children – played by Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth and Tuppence Middleton – are vying for power over the Abraxas family’s vast estates and massive business empire (which includes Earth), and the emergence of Jupiter threatens all of that.

While one of the children sends out squads to kill Jupiter, another hires ex-military, genetic-splice wolf-man Caine (Channing Tatum) to protect her. Unsurprisingly Jupiter is rather shocked about all this and has no idea what to do once she is suddenly thrust into the middle of this interplanetary power struggle.

For the past decade the Wachowskis haven’t ever quite managed to recapture the magic of the first Matrix movie, and while Jupiter Ascending is an attempt to create something both entertaining and grandiose, it doesn’t quite work, although it is minorly entertaining.

The main problem is its overly operatic tone, which ends up highlighting quite how silly a lot of it is. This is immensely dumb popcorn entertainment dressed up in far grander clothes, but its mix of influences never really comes together. The story is very deliberately reminiscent of a fairy tale, and there are shades of everything from Dune to Brazil (Terry Gilliam even shows up at one point). But rather than effective world-building and creation of an idiosyncratic part sci-fi, part fantasy universe, it’s all a bit of a mess.

The story itself is essentially a series of damsel in distress scenarios, where Jupiter gets into trouble and then Caine saves her in all sorts of improbable ways, while causing as much explosive carnage as possible. Around that is a lot of nonsense and actors wandering around looking slightly uncertain about what they’re doing. At least Eddie Redmayne gives it his all, but his choice of playing Balem Abraxas in such a camp, hammy, moustache-twirling way is so farcical someone should go and take his Best Actor Oscar back (in fact he should have probably followed in Sandra Bullock’s footsteps and won an Oscar and a Razzie in the same year).

It is partially difficult to blame him though, as many of the characters are so vapid you can understand the impetus to turn them into over the top cartoons. Channing Tatum meanwhile goes the other direction and decides mumbling will help ground his brooding part-man, part-wolf (who to be honest looks more like a cyber-elf), but while far more effective than Redmayne, it still can’t hide that there’s little heft to Caine.

There is a major plus side though, which is that it looks exceedingly cool. There is some beautiful imagery, both in space and on Earth, and the action is certainly explosive, kinetic and fun to watch. In fact, if the movie had toned down the Dune-esque space-operatics and the dubious logic of its themes, and instead just sold itself as action, sci-fi fun, it would have probably been a lot more successful. As you’d expect from the Wachowskis, they attempt to make social and philosophical points, but what they say is either obvious or not particularly well thought out – and also revisits many themes they already handled better in The Matrix – so they become more tedious than interesting.

I am starting to think the Wachowskis need to stop writing their own films. As directors they are good, with a fine visual style and good instincts for keeping a film moving, but following The Matrix their writing has been baggy, lacking in logic, far too interested in ideas it thinks are profound but are actually fairly basic, and generally messy. You have to appreciate here their attempts to create a slice of sci-fi that is grand, pansexual and visually opulent, but in the end most of that feels like baggage around what would otherwise have been a fairly simple and fun fairy-tale – complete with a commoner becoming a princess/queen. The fun is still there in fits and starts, but the rest may raise a few eyebrows.

Overall Verdict: The visuals and action is entertaining, and the basics of the plot are okay (although it won’t exactly win any feminism awards), but everything surrounding that is so over the top it almost ruins the fun.

Special Features:
Jupiter Jones: Destiny Is Within Us
Jupiter Ascending: Genetically Spliced Caine Wise: Interplanetary Warrior
The Wachowskis: Minds Over Matter
Worlds Within Worlds Within Worlds
Bullet Time Evolved
From Earth to Jupiter (And Everywhere in Between)

Reviewer: Tim Isaac