Probably the most overlooked aspect of a film during its review period is its legacy. What, if any, impact will the film have on projects that have not even reached a script stage yet? Obviously this shouldn’t be applied to every movie that graces our screens – nobody has likely sat down and discussed the lasting impact on the industry of Baby’s Day Out, for example – but certain pieces, through critical or commercial success or failure do leave lasting marks on the filmmaking landscape as a whole.

Regardless of what you think of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, it was an astonishing success, both critically and commercially. Five-star reviews and a long run in the box-office chart are what every film aims for, but Inception’s success had more far-reaching implications. Before then, the general consensus was that sci-fi films could be action-packed special effects bonanzas or slower-paces brain stimulators, but not both. Nolan proved with Inception that this wasn’t the case, and that you could successfully marry intelligently layered narrative with sweeping action set-pieces and it is now, with films like Looper, that we are seeing the results of this legacy.

In Rian Johnson’s Looper, the dreams of Inception are substituted for good old fashioned time-travel, although with plenty of twists and turns along the way. In the near-future Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a Looper, a very special kind of assassin. Thirty years ahead from his time, time-travel is real but illegal, used only by criminal operations to dispose of unwanted individuals. The out-of-favour are sent back to a specific time and place where a Looper is waiting to blow them away with a futuristic blunderbuss, apparently specifically designed to look awesome. On an apparently routine contract, Joe finds himself face-to-face with his future-self (Bruce Willis), who promptly escapes, leaving the timeline more than a little wobbly.

That synopsis and the film’s accompanying trailers and posters would leave you believing that this amounts to little more than a standard chase movie, albeit with the bells and whistles of time-travel attached, but Looper is so much more than that. It asks of the audience one of the most fundamental moral questions about time travel and delivers harsh but cutting truths about how far we, as humans, are willing to go in the pursuit of that question.

Looper’s main strength lies in its unpredictability. Having fooled us into believing that it he’s merely made a sci-fi version of the Fugitive, Johnson pulls the rug from under our feet and flings us into territory not normally covered by your standard mainstream movie. Indeed, there is a moment around the halfway point that lets the viewer know, in no uncertain terms, that all bets are off and that we as an audience came to the wrong movie if we were looking to stay inside our comfort zone. The story never loosens its grip for a second, and by the end the audience I was in was left visibly shaken but heartily satisfied.

From a performance perspective, we are in elite company. Willis manages to retain moral ambiguity whilst simultaneously kicking more ass than he has since the mid-90s. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is razor sharp as Joe, the fact that he’s been made up to look more like Willis’ younger self is noticeable, but not enough to be off putting, and actually contributes nicely to the overall feel of the character. Special praise however, must go to Emily Blunt & youngster Pierce Gagnon as a mother/son combo caught in the middle of this time clash. Blunt has proved her versatility before and here again, she proves impossible to typecast as a sassy all-American farm girl. Gagnon however, is a force. Both terrified and terrifying in equal measure, the incredibly mature performance produced by the boy is the standout feature of the movie.

There has been comparison from other reviewers to everything from Inception and Terminator to Bruce Willis’ other time-travelling mind-bender, 12 Monkeys, and to be sure, there are elements of all in there, but in terms of style and aesthetics, this holds more resemblance to Joss Whedon’s 2005 cult piece Serenity. This is thinking man’s sci-fi. Sure there are plenty of whizzes and bangs, but underneath it all is a fundamental dissection of how we, as groups, as communities, as individuals, shape the future with our actions, both big and small. Serenity focussed on the power of the people to beat corruption in organisation, but here, the mirror is turned on us. What kind of world are our choices creating and, should it go badly, who will bear the consequences?

Looper is an exciting film for so many reasons; razor sharp direction, fantastic performances and plenty of good ideas combine to build something very, very special indeed.

Overall Verdict: Fit to be considered alongside Blade Runner, Alien and 2001 in the pantheon of all-time great sci-fi, Rian Johnson has produced that rarest of things, an intelligent, layered future-world that can be appreciated philosophically or just for being hella cool. And yes, the ball is most definitely back in Christopher Nolan’s court.

Reviewer: Alex Hall

About halfway through this tale it was shaping up to be this year’s King’s Speech. Handsomely mounted, superbly acted, with immaculate period details and a fascinating central idea, it really held the attention. Then, tragically, it decides to veer off into a drippy love story which is as predictable as it is dull, and the momentum is totally lost. Sad, as this could have been a real stayer.

Just like the King’s Speech it takes a footnote in history and opens it out into a quite fascinating story. In this case it’s the accidental invention of the vibrator. Set in 1880, Doctor Mortimer Granville (Dancy) is a forward-thinking medical man battling against old prejudices and quacks – his opening encounter sees him do battle with a doctor who still believes leeches hold the cure for everything and thinks germs are an invention.

Granville keeps getting sacked and eventually ends up getting a job as the assistant to Doctor Dalrymple (Pryce), who is treating the female condition of ‘hysteria’ by, erm, massaging their pelvic region.

Handsome Granville soon has the appointment book full, as middle-class women have their frustrations released by his dextrous fingers. Dalrymple is so impressed he wants Granville to be his partner – perhaps his son in law, as he has two daughters. Emily (Felicity Jones) seems the perfect fit – pretty, demure and sensible – while Charlotte (Gyllenhaal) seems far too much of a firebrand, running a local centre for the poor and campaigning for the Suffragettes.

However Granville’s world falls apart when he gets RSI in his hand, and is no longer able to help his patients. Also he seems more interested in Charlotte even though he has now proposed to Emily. His old room-mate, Smythe (Everett), comes to the rescue by putting him up, and what are those toys Smythe keeps playing with using this new-fangled electricity nonsense?

It’s a great set-up, with themes such as just how useless the medical profession was in the 1880s and how the world – and women’s place in it – was changing so rapidly. It’s therefore so tantalising that the film shifts tone so dramatically halfway through, and it becomes more about Granville’s romance with the fiery Charlotte. She is a totally cardboard character, the argumentative Suffragette with sleeves rolled up helping out grubby-faced London urchins, but if that wasn’t tame enough Maggie Gyllenhaal’s performance writes if off completely. Surrounded by top British talent – Jonathan Pryce is especially good as the bonkers Dalrymple – she seems to be acting in a different film, almost as if intimidated by the talent surrounding her.

Even Sheridan Smith and Ashley Jensen make much more of an impact in tiny roles, and Gyllenhaal’s trial at the end is pure soap opera. A shame, as it could have been so much more than this.

Overall verdict: Handsomely mounted period costume drama about a fascinating moment in history, spoiled by a drippy second half and Gyllenhaal’s mannered performance.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Inbred bits UK cinemas on September 21st, and arrives on DVD/Blu-ray on October 15th

Inbred seems to be aiming to do for the English North/South divide what The Innocence of Muslims has done for American/Middle East relations. It tells the story of a bunch of Southern teenage delinquents sent to perform community service in an isolated Yorkshire community that definitely doesn’t want to be serviced. Its slack-jawed, snaggle-toothed inhabitants prefer to spend their time burning live goats, sticking ferrets down their trousers and singing a merry tune the chorus of which is, I kid you not, “Ee-by-gum”. Oh, and they also like publicly slaughtering outsiders.

Offensive stereotypes aside, Inbred is a queasy mix of grotesque humour that’s clearly been inspired by The League of Gentlemen (but isn’t nearly as funny or clever), and sadistically nasty torture porn. It seems to want to make you believe in and care about its protagonists before killing them off in insanely over-the-top and unbelievable ways. It’s tonally all over the place and it also seems like the actors playing the murderous locals are having a hell of a lot more fun than the kids who have to take it all seriously and pretend to be genuinely scared of actors mugging in bad wigs and false teeth.

This split personality also applies to the photography; it feels like you’re watching an old exploitation slasher movie, but it’s filmed on shiny digital and sometimes looks like a cheap tourism advert, albeit one for somewhere no one in their right mind would want to visit. Inbred would make a lot more sense as a movie if it was shot on grainy 16mm, in the 70s.

Writer/director Alex Chandon cut his teeth directing music videos for the likes of Cradle of Filth and you get the impression he probably didn’t have a lot of friends as a child and spent a lot of time watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It also becomes clear towards the end that he’s on the side of the psychotic hillbillies rather than the punk kids and it’s at this point the film drops all pretence of trying to be scary and starts concentrating on the twisted humour. It starts to become so deranged and, to use an expression I absolutely hate, “random”, that it’s hard not to start enjoying yourself. It’s the kind of movie you’d be happy to stumble upon at 3am on the Horror Channel after you’ve had a few drinks.

There’ve been a lot of low-budget British horror comedies in the last few years. Some like Doghouse and The Cottage manage to balance the laughs with the gore a lot more successfully than Inbred. That said, the gore, which is a mix of digital and practical effects, is very impressively done and if you’ve ever wanted to see what happens when a man has the nozzle of a muck spreader forced down his throat then you’re in luck and you’re also very strange.

Overall Verdict: A stupid, nasty and not very funny horror comedy that is also somehow quite enjoyable.

Special Features On DVD Release:
Director’s Diary
Making of Inbred
Michaels Clips – Behind the scenes footage shot by the owner of the land on which Inbred was filmed.
Neil’s Highlights – Behind the scenes footage shot by the film’s composer.
2 Deleted scenes

Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon

Untouchable hits the UK after having extraordinary success across the rest of the globe. It’s now by far the highest-grossing French-language movie ever, taking an extraordinary $365 million around the world (although only $8 million of that is from the US, which still remains particularly resistant to foreign-language fare). It’s particularly impressive as not only does the world generally ignore the output of the French film industry, but it’s about a subject that many would usually see as something to shy away from – as it’s about a man who’s completely paralysed below the neck.

Philippe (a wonderful performance from Francois Cluzet) has no movement or feeling below his fourth vertebrae, but he’s very rich, so with massages, physiotherapy and medication, he can expect to live to 70. Despite his wealth, it’s not a desperately fulfilling existence, so when he needs a new assistant/carer, he looks for something a bit different. Fresh from prison, Driss (Omar Sy) applies for the job only so he can get the signature and polite refusal that will allow him to qualify for benefits, but is shocked when he gets hired, particularly as he has no real experience with disabled people, and comes from a very different world to the privileged, grandiose surroundings Philippe lives in.

While Driss is less than impressed with some of his new duties – from having to put on Philippe’s support stockings to dealing with his charge’s poop – the two men soon begin to bond. Driss’ lack of pretension, direct manner and refusal to treat Philippe either with cotton wool or as a rich man he should doff his cap to, helps bring a freshness, humour and vitality to Philippe’s life. However, while Driss helps give Philippe a new lease on life – as well as a real friend – issues in Driss’ family threaten to take him away.

One of the reasons modern French films often get short shrift is because (while there are exceptions) they have a tendency to treat emotion as an intellectual exercise. Untouchable meanwhile has few such pretensions and instead reaches out to the audience’s heartstrings and tugs on them unabashedly. It should be noted that it doesn’t do this by pitying Philippe but by trying to understand him and building empathy for the joy of friendship between the two men.

Untouchable is charming, inspiring, sweet, occasionally exciting and most of all funny. The movie finds huge amounts of humour in its stories and has numerous scenes and situations that will get the audience laughing, and best of all it’s never at the expense of the characters. We laugh with them, not at them. Indeed much of it has an oddly British sense of humour, and you could easily have imagined this coming out of the Working Title factory of British comedy.

At the beginning of this week Untouchable was chosen as France’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Although some wish that honour went to Jacques Audiard’s Rust & Bone, the fact is Untouchable has a good chance of winning, as it has just the right measure of heart to tick the Academy voter’s fancy. It’s undoubtedly the sort of film that many will automatically shy away from watching – it’s in French and about a disabled man – but in this case they’d really be missing out. Hopefully the combination of the wave of success the movie’s already had, as well as a new awareness of disability following the Paralympics, will ensure Untouchable gets the audience it deserves.

Overall Verdict: Moving, entertaining and most of all very funny, this is one of those movies that’s never dull, will leave you beaming and with your heart lifted.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

 

Queen enjoyed a long and generally glorious rock career, yet they were perhaps at the peak in 1986 when this digitally re-mastered footage of their Budapest Concert was filmed.

With their acclaimed 1985 Live Aid performance just behind them, 1986 saw the band’s perhaps slightly excessive musical contribution to the Christopher Lambert/Sean Connery sci-fi romp Highlander – a film set in a world where decapitation is apparently commonplace and no other music than Queen’s appears to exist. The year also saw the band do their bit to end the Cold War. While Rocky Marciano beat up Dolph Lundgren and Superman fought off Nuclear Man, in the real world Queen ventured behind the Iron Curtain to play before 80,000 fans in Budapest, then in the Eastern Bloc (the ominously large red bit which then dominated a large section of the world map).

Of course, nobody’s claiming Queen were trying to bring down the USSR with this gig, least of all the band themselves. But it’s undeniably a cracking show, with most of the band’s big hits making an appearance, notably: A Kind of Magic (used famously in the aforementioned Highlander), I Want To Break Free, We Are The Champions, a David Bowie free version of Under Pressure, We Will Rock You, Bohemian Rhapsody and Who Wants To Live Forever?.

This last song is given added poignancy, of course, by our knowledge that the hugely charismatic and apparently healthy Freddie Mercury, in fact had only five years left before his death from AIDS. In fact, the most surprising thing is just how much more at ease Mercury was on the stage than anywhere else. In interviews, he comes across as quite posh and geeky, although not actually particularly camp. One wonders to what degree Sacha Baron Cohen, who’s scheduled to play him in the forthcoming Mercury, will be able to capture the essence of the man. It’s odd and sad to reflect that Mercury was probably already HIV Positive when this was filmed.

The film could be smoother. Although there are some nice shots of Budapest in the scenes linking the songs, much of it is quite awkward, in particular some shots of Brian May posing reluctantly with US tourists. May also contributes some frankly appalling self indulgent masturbatory guitar solos during Freddie’s costume changes.

But overall this is a fitting tribute to both Mercury and the band and a worthy reminder of the days when Queen really did rule the waves.

Overall Verdict: They were the champions: a reminder of just how good Queen were and also of why no heterosexual men in Britain felt able to wear a moustache after about 1990.

Reviewer: Chris Hallam 

Woody Allen again proves he’s the master of inconsistency with this disappointing follow-up to the wonderful Midnight In Paris. Just when he had managed to erase the ghastly memory of his truly awful London trilogy of Match point, Cassandra’s Dream and Scoop, he moves the action to Rome, but with only partial successs.

The underlying idea of the film is based on The Decameron, a medieval collection of stories, and Allen’s film is similarly a sprawling, multi-storied thing that wanders about, coming to no great conclusions.

At its most successful From Rome With Love is on familiar Allen territory. Jesse Eisenberg is a young architecture student living – in a gorgeous flat, of course – with a lovely girlfriend, the under-written Greta Gerwig. Her best friend Ellen Page, a flightly, neurotic sex kitten, arrives for a visit and Gerwig is terrified that she and her boyfriend will get together – which of course they do. After a week of walking around the ruins of Rome and discussing higher arts – Page sees herself as Stindberg’s Miss Julie – they decide to elope.

Here Allen inserts a commentator on the action, Alec Baldwin’s architect who follows Eisenberg around making acidic comments on Page’s attempts to seduce him – ‘here comes the bullshit’. It’s an old technique and not entirely successful, despite Baldwin’s undeniable charm and wit.

Allen himself stars as the parent of an American girl (Alison Pill) who has fallen for a Roman lawyer. He and wife Judy Davis (also underwritten) fly to Rome to meet the parents, and Allen, a retired and bored music industry expert, discovers his new brother-in-law is a fantastic opera singer – but only in the shower. He is determined to make a star of the man whatever it takes.

So far so Woody Allen – note the professions are all lawyers and architects, living in fantastic flats in beautiful parts of the city – and there are some chuckles amongst the angst. One thing Allen rarely does is social commentary, and here he has a go, with frankly embarrassing results. Roberto Benigni is a Joe Average, who suddenly finds himself a star when the media decide he is the most interesting man in Rome. He finds himself on breakfast TV telling the world he had toast with jam for breakfast, and wears white boxers. He is invited to film premieres and parties, and is at the centre of a media storm – until the media decide to find someone else to fixate upon. It’s clearly a commentary on today’s consumerist celebrity-obsessed society, but it’s cloying and very, very unfunny.

The final story involves an Italian couple arriving from a small village to make their mark in Rome. She gets lost, finds herself on a film set and is seduced by the leading man, he has a hooker sent to his room, the great Penelope Cruz, who has to pretend to be his wife at a party full of stuffy businessman. Cruz gives it her all, relishing the part of a force of nature blowing away the cobwebs off the world’s most boring uncle and auntie.

Like the film as a whole, it’s engaging enough but never really goes anywhere, and the sun-drenched architecture and snappy one-liners start to pall over two hours.

Allen’s European tour has been patchy, with flashes of his old brilliance but, apart from the utterly charming Midnight In Paris, never really captured his old magic. From Rome With Love is almost a footnote to that set of projects, as he seems to have moved back to the US for his next project, also starring the excellent Baldwin. Perhaps its just as well – although surely he has a film based in Vienna inside him?

Overall verdict: Inconsistent, patchy comedy with Allen at his best and worst, but with a great cast giving it their all, some lovely tourist photography and lots of references to opera, food and wine. It could almost have been sponsored by Alitalia.

Reviewer: Mike Martin