MISTRESS AMERICA - FILM - NETFLIX

Featuring actors and directors that had a hand in Marriage Story, Ladybird and Mozart in the Jungle, this movie fits well into this little cultural slot of urbane, educated, restless, slightly unhappy creative people in modern America.

“I'm pretty sure college is supposed to be more fun than I'm having,” says central character Tracy, played by the luminous Lola Kirke from Mozart in the Jungle. This is Tracy’s central experience; she has come to New York to go to university and expected it to be ground breaking and magical. Instead it is isolating, scary and full of pretentiousness.

Everything changes when she meets Brooke (played by Little Women director Greta Gerwig), who is about to become her step-sister. Brooke is older, ambitious, self-invented, untethered by convention and routine. She says things like; “he’s one of those people that I hate, except that I am in love with him.” Tracy and Brooke’s conversations are full of the following kind of exchanges….

Brooke: “I’m an auto-didact, do you know what that means?”

Tracy: “Yes”.

Brooke: “That word is one of the things I self-taught myself.”

At times the quirkiness overwhelms the cleverness, yet the wit, sharpness and sheer effortless brilliance of the dialogue are undeniable.

Tracy is the central character and a kind of narrator, but it is Brooke (Greta Gerwig) who is by turns horrible, hilarious and profound, and who gets all the best lines. 

Brooke: "I think I'm sick and I don't know if my ailment has a name. It's just me sitting and staring at the Internet or the television, interspersed with trying not to do that, then lying about what I've been doing. And I will get so excited about something that the excitement overwhelms me. And I can't sleep or do anything and I just am in love with everything, but can't figure out how to make myself work in the world."

It also features the weird, haunting, beautiful Souvenir, a song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, resurrected from the depths of the Eighties and given new life as a backdrop to a tale of Gen Z kids from the teens. Somehow, it fits perfectly.

In these days when the streets of New York are largely empty, it is moving and nostalgic to see the city full of people, buzzing, the bars heaving.

Despite the occasional lapse into hipster excess, this is an unexpected, unacknowledged delight. A sweet slice of escapism and romance, for those in need of it.

MOONLIGHT. FILM.

Moonlight will now always be famous as the film that won the Oscar for Best Picture, at the second attempt. The calamity of the Oscars is now well-known; La La Land was mistakenly announced as the winner, the error was noticed while the wrong producers were giving their speeches, and the cast and crew of Moonlight came to the stage to accept their prize.

In fact, it is interesting to note that the disastrous Oscar mix-up contained far more narrative tension, plot and surprise than the whole of the winning film – Moonlight – itself!

It is a story set in an African-American community in Florida, and is divided into three parts, covering events in the childhood, adolescence and adulthood of the main character, Chiron. Chiron is a skinny, quiet kid, and an equally skinny, withdrawn teenager. He is bullied in school, and has a drug addict for a mother.

Things change when we see him in his twenties; Chiron now looks like Fifty Cent, and is selling drugs to make ends meet. He reconnects with a childhood friend of his, who he had his first gay experience with as a teenager.

And that is basically the plot. The film is not designed to have a lot of twists and turns, or to provide plot points and surprises. It is a character study, an examination of a gay man in an environment that does not accept this identity.

Yet, if a film lacks plot, it has to have something else to make up for it. And Moonlight does not have that something. The scenes of bullying have been done many times in a thousand high-school movies and TV series. The drug addict mother has been seen many times before too, and done much better in shows like Friday Night Lights.

It is intensely slow, but it seems to mistake slowness for profundity. It is also intensely miserable, unremittingly so in the first two sections, and begins to feel a little manipulative. Look, the film is saying, look how terrible it was for him, how awful. Feel bad, feel bad! At times the story seems to revel in all of the misery, bullying, sadness.

It is the kind of independent film that you might see in a Film Club or in the Irish Film Institute; slow, low-budget, no explosions or car chases or crimes of passion. And there is a place for this type of film, and they can often work. But this one does not. It seems to believe that it is giving a powerful, unique message to the word, when in fact it is full of clichés and stuff we have seen before. It mistakes misery for meaning, slowness for intensity. It is, in fact, quite tedious to watch.

It is no surprise that the Best Picture Oscar would go to a mediocre film; there have been plenty of dud winners in the past. The reviews for this movie have been almost universally positive, so my opinion is something of an outlier, but in this case, I think, the emperor definitely has no clothes. Give me La La Land any day.

OSCAR FILMS 1 - THE REVENANT and ROOM

THE REVENANT

In this film Leo di Caprio plays Hugh Glass, the man who will not die.

The film is set in the American West, in the 1820s. Glass is a guide in the wilderness, charged with leading a group of trackers around the brutal landscape of Montana.

He is attacked by a bear, gravely injured, and eventually left for dead by the people charged with taking care of him. He spends the rest of the film simply staying alive, kept that way by thoughts of revenge.

In fact, pretty much all Glass does throughout the film is not die. There is no real substantive story, apart from that. He finds many ways to avoid dying, has adventures and meets people along the way, but in essence this is a story of bare survival.

The landscape is another character in the tale, the brutal, snow-battered country in the mountains of the American West is the backdrop for Glass’s feats of staying alive. It was apparently filmed in all natural light, and does look impressive, at times breathtaking.

And yet, the film is a tale of a superhuman feat of survival, a story of an ordeal. And at times watching the film itself is a bit of an ordeal, it is intense, bloody and violent, and after a while a little tedious. The unremitting misery and danger that Di Caprio’s character goes through is impressive at first, but soon becomes repetitive. One near-death experience runs into the next, until it all seems a little samey.

Makes an impression, but all the snow and ice and not dying gets old quickly.

ROOM

Room, on the other hand, is remarkable. It is a gruesome story too, a tale of horror and fear and survival. But it is so much more than that.

A young woman is kidnapped by a man when she is seventeen, and imprisoned in the shed in his garden. He has a security system set up so that only he can get in and out.

After two years she is impregnated by her captor (who she calls Old Nick), and has a son. And this son, Jack, grows into a little boy, whose whole world is Room.

The first half of the film is set in Room, and is as claustrophobic and anxiety-producing as you would imagine. Ma (Brie Larson) and Jack’s whole world is in that five metre by five metre space, they have no contact with the outside world. The sense of threat and imminent violence builds with each visit by Old Nick to their room, and Ma is on the verge of cracking.

And then, through small acts of heroism by both of Ma and Jack, things change. And when they change they change utterly. The captured girl who Jack knows as Ma now has her identity returned to her, and is called Joy again by parents and friends. And this is where the movie expands and grows, just as Joy and Jack’s world expands

The whole experience of watching this film is extremely powerful, just as the experiences portrayed are so profound and effecting. It is impossible to be unengaged watching these two people dealing with massive trauma and then the world opening up.

The story itself is extraordinary, but the treatment of it, by Irish director Lenny Abrahamson, is careful and subtle and, in the end, massively powerful. An engrossing, overwhelming film.

The Revanant will win Best Picture at the Oscars, there is nothing more predictable than the Academy recognising something as grandiose as Iñarritu’s film. But Room is the movie of the year, streets ahead of Di Caprio and his stubborn insistence on staying alive.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT. FILM.

Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, comic creation of journalist Paul Howard, has a son who has been involved in various nefarious dealings. The son, Ronan, has a friend from the Dublin underworld known only as “Buckets o’ Blood”.

“Buckets o’ Blood” could easily be Quentin Tarantino’s nom-de-plume. Inevitably towards the end of his latest film, The Hateful Eight, the set and all the characters are bathed in spurts, floods, puddles, marshes and swathes of the stuff.

It is a pity that he seems to think that now has to stick to some kind of formula. Lots of talk, shady characters with dark pasts, more talk, some action, more talk, insults, conflict, action, then gunfire, stabbings, poisonings, blood, gore, blood and more blood, and then some more blood.

It was shocking and thrilling twenty years ago with Reservoir Dogs, now it’s just predictable and tedious. And it is a pity, because Tarantino is a masterful filmmaker in so many ways, and The Hateful Eight is intriguing and compelling and impossible to ignore until the scarlet denouement.

It is a number of years after the American Civil War and bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russel) is taking his prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh, fantastic in this, just nominated for an Oscar) back to Red Rock to collect his bounty. On the way he picks up a couple of strays, including Tarantino regular, Samuel L. Jackson, as Major Warren, also a bounty hunter.

They all end up lodging in Minnie’s haberdashery, an inn in the Wyoming wildlands. A blizzard starts up and they are shut in to the inn, along with another four suspect characters, including one who claims to be the hangman of Red Rock, the one charged with the execution of the bounty hunter’s prisoner.

And this is where the film really gets going, as Samuel L. Jackson’s former Yankee Major confronts a Confederate General who was responsible for the massacre of a battalion of black troops during the war. We soon see that pretty much all of the characters, as the film’s title suggests, are violent and suspect in their own way, all with their own brand of dark secrets.

The action develops, and picks up speed as a poisoner gets to work. From then on it is death and mayhem, double-crossing and quick-drawing, until there is almost no-one untouched by the bloodletting.

What Tarantino writes well above all are these long scenes full of tension and suspense, dialogues that go on and on and on, well past where most other directors would cut. He is not afraid to let a scene develop, to build the intrigue and then let the tension rise, subside, and then finally reach a crescendo. Much of the film is masterful, fascinating, impossible to look away from.

But inevitably, he gives in to his instincts, and turns the massacre dial up to 11. The subtleties of the previous two hours are mostly forgotten in the barrage of gunfire and gore.

It is worth imagining what kind of movie Tarantino could make if his budget for fake blood was slashed, and he was forced to work out his plots without resorting to killing practically all of his characters. It could be something really special, like Pulp Fiction was. But right now, there doesn’t seem to be anyone willing to tell him that less is more when it comes to spraying the set with crimson. It is a pity.

Yet despite this, The Hateful Eight is worth seeing, like everything Tarantino does is worth seeing. No-one else makes films like him, his is a particular kind of bloody genius. 

WINTER FILMS.. WHIPLASH, BIRDMAN, INHERENT VICE, EX-MACHINA.

Whiplash is a fairly simple story. A young man, Andrew Neiman, goes to a New York music academy as a jazz drummer, with dreams of becoming the best. There, he is confronted with Terrance Fletcher (J.K. Simmons, who has won a string of awards for his role here), a ruthless, sometimes abusive teacher who claims he is simply demanding excellence, despite his bullying, excessive approach.

The key to Whiplash is that Fletcher and the central character, Andrew, are driven by the same motivations, both willing to do what it takes to be the best, or to bring the best out in others, even if this results in personal loss or the destruction of those people not strong enough to live up to expectations. They are two sides of the same coin, we gradually come to realize.

The final scene is key to the story, a powerful, thrilling piece of the action based around a concert that both central characters play a role in. The film itself is slight enough, but intense for all that, though this final scene does, strangely, seem to suggest that Fletcher's tactics are in some way justified. A curious ending to a fine, compelling story.

Birdman is a curious mix. Michael Keaton plays Riggan, (ironically) a washed up actor who is known only for playing a superhero in a series of blockbuster movies. Once the franchise runs its course, he decides to get his career back on track by writing, directing and starring in a theatre adaptation of Raymond Carver's short stories.

The film is centred on the production, in the lead up to the play's first night. This is the strongest part of the movie, Keaton's interaction with the other actors, and with his daughter who acts as his personal assistant, are funny and touching and at times calamitous. This is especially true of Edward Norton's character, Mike Shiner, who is method personified, a difficult yet inspiring actor whose professional star is on the rise and yet whose personal life is falling apart. Norton takes over the film for the all too brief time he is on screen.

Riggan's struggles with the cast, with the script and the production of his play are what works in this film. Unfortunately it constantly descends into flights of fancy, where Keaton's character imagines the fictional Birdman talking to him, and giving him the powers of a superhero. The film doesn't need all of this fantasy element, it is an extra, unwieldy layer on something that was working just fine, and distracts from something that could have been a fine film.

In the end it just feels like a missed opportunity. Edward Norton is way underused, and in fact all of the ancillary characters quickly become sidelined as Riggan's alter-ego takes over. Just as it is getting interesting, the film drifts off into fantasy land, and loses its way.

Inherent Vice is a Paul Thomas Anderson film of a Thomas Pynchon novel. That in itself is enough to suggest something quirky, strange and unique, and that's what this film is.

Joaquin Phoenix does his best Dude (from The Big Lebowski) impression as the central charater, Doc Sportello, a Private investigator and dopehead in 1970s LA.

Doc gets mixed up in the shady dealings of the Golden Fang cartel, and in between getting stoned he gets sucked into a world of drug-dealing and drug-rehab. Josh Brolin's unstable police detective, Bigfoot Bjornsen, is both ally and enemy, and Luke Wilson also turns up as a snitch and ex-druggie who just wants to go home.

It is really not worth trying to follow the convoluted, twisting plot too closely. People go missing, turn up, change their names, get stoned, betray each other, and somehow the tangles unravel and we reach some sort of conclusion.

The pleasure in the film is in the attention to detail of the setting of early seventies, California, in the fine cast, that also includes Benicio Del Toro and Reese Witherspoon, and in Joaquin Phoenix's performance as the dopey, resourceful, humane, idealistic hippie Doc.

There is a dreamy quality to the narrative, and a voiceover that adds to this dreaminess, by musician Joanna Newsom, and all the weirdness draws you in if you are prepared to abandon a demand for a rational, logical plot. At its best Inherent Vice has a hypnotic quality to it, like a gentle trip on a sunny, strange, crowded beach.

Ex-Machina stars Domnhaill Gleason as an employee in an IT company, sometime in the near future, who wins a lottery to go and visit his boss's secret hideaway, somewhere in the American wilderness.

There, Gleason's character, Caleb, discovers that his boss, Nathan, has brought him there to perform a test on his creation. Caleb is to interact with a humanoid robot that Nathan has designed and created, to see if the robot has true artificial intelligence.

The film is curious and intensely suspenseful. Naturally, Nathan is soon revealed as not being everything that he seems, but what exactly is going on and what his intentions and motivations are we are kept in the dark about for most of the movie. Ava, too, Nathan's artificial human creation, is quickly shown to be much more than she first appears.

There is a debate in the background here about what is consciousness, awareness, personhood, about how a true AI should be treated by us if such a thing were to be created. Coupled with the tension and the uncertainty built up by the narrative, this adds a nice layer of complexity to an already fascinating film.

ST. VINCENT. FILM.

If you want to know what Bill Murray's character - Vin - is like in this film, think Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets, or Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. Or in fact any one of a whole host of irascible, curmudgeonly, alcoholic, bad-tempered old-guys that turn out to be big softies in the end, in scores of films in the past forty years.

There is really nothing new in this movie. Just as Vincent is a variation on the pattern of lovable codger, so we have a varied but predictable cast of odd-balls. There is the obligatory scrawny but smart little kid living next door who Vincent teaches to defend himself, his vulnerable, stressed mother who entrusts her son, Oliver, to Vincent's care after school, and Daga, a pregnant Russian prostitute, again the obligatory hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold.

Even Chris O'Dowd turns up here as a Catholic brother who teaches the children in the local school about saints. Of course O'Dowd is as far from the stern Christian brother of Angela's Ashes as you could get, his is Catholicism lite, he curses and is inclusive of all faiths and none, and his vision of sainthood is a little wider than the Vatican's.

The movie follows a predictable pattern, and almost never surprises. Even the ending, which is obviously supposed to be some kind of climax to which the previous hour and a half has been building, can be seen from an hour away, and is played for every piece of sentimentality that can be wrung out of it.

At its best St Vincent is pleasant and mildly entertaining, though there are few actual laughs in a movie that is purporting to be a comedy. At its worst it is too sugar-sweet and corny and cliched to take seriously, a missed opportunity with a cast that could have done so much more. 

INTERSTELLAR. FILM.

Interstellar is, I think the technical term is, bonkers.

That doesn't mean that it isn't curious and fascinating and thought-provoking in parts, but the story completely collapses under the enormous weight of the grand ideas and speculative science-fiction that it attempts to incorporate.

Matthew McConaghey is Cooper, an ex-NASA pilot who lives with his family on a future Earth that is slowly dying. Crops are failing, the environment is slowly turning against human beings.

He and his daughter, Murphy (yes, that is her first name, after Murphy's Law) come across the remnants of the old NASA, run by Professor Brand, (Michael Caine).

The Professor has a plan to save mankind, and enlists Cooper to pilot a mission to the stars. Brand's daughter, played by Anne Hathaway, and two other scientists, go with him.

There is a subplot about Murphy being contacted by ghosts, or extra-terrestrials, and messages left for her in the movement of books in her bedroom. This is returned to later on, though never at any stage becomes anything that makes sense, and in fact only adds to the nonsensical feeling of the whole.

Matt Damon turns up for a while, in a pointless cameo, just to add to the intrigue. There is a wormhole, and a black hole, and talk of event horizons and gravity and time travel.

The film soon becomes a bizarre melange of adventure story, disaster epic and family drama, with a large dose of sci-fi (heavy on the "fiction", light on the "science") mixed in.

Things get progressively more preposterous as the film goes on. The ending is open for debate, as it isn't completely clear exactly what happens. The film skimps on detail, and tends to skip over any of the inconvenient elements that are simply too complex or ill-thought-out to explain.

But the Black Hole scenes towards the end are mostly ludicrous, and the half-hearted attempt at explaining what and how it happens is just that, half-hearted, there is little real sense in the way things wrap up, and almost no attempt at being consistent or meaningful. The part played by a watch in the denouement is particularly silly.

There is also a cringe-worthy theme running through the film, that Love is the only thing that can defeat time, gravity and whatever else gets in its way. It is hard not to laugh out loud at parts of this ridiculous script.

Still, it does have cool robots. They are probably the only successful innovation in the movie, the only thing that hasn't been seen before that actually impresses. At first glance they just look like giant metal Kit-Kats, unwieldy and clumsy, but are in fact flexible and smart, heroic and even tell jokes, and are possibly the only light relief in a movie that takes itself, and its ludicrous plot, a little too seriously.  

NIGHTCRAWLER. FILM.

Jake Gyllenhaal is Nightcrawler. He is the nightcrawler of the title, but he is also Nightcrawler, the film. He utterly dominates the movie, he is in every scene, the whole enterprise revolves around him and his character, Lou Bloom.

It is just as well, then, that he is mesmerizing in this, utterly believable. Lou Bloom is a petty thief with higher aspirations, he thinks nothing of mugging people and robbing bicycles, but he wants more, he wants a job, a purpose, he wants more.

One night while driving around Los Angeles he comes across a car accident, which is being filmed by an independent film crew which then sells the footage on to TV stations for their morning news. These are the nightcrawlers of the title. Lou gets himself a video camera, and starts trawling the streets of LA at night, searching for something to film and sell.

Lou's utter lack of compassion and empathy, it turns out, makes him very good at his new profession. He thinks nothing of getting to an accident scene before the emergency services, and then dragging a dead body into a more convenient location so that it is easier to film and gives a better shot.

He begins selling his videos to Renee Russo's character, Nina, who works as news director in a TV news station that is struggling with ratings. She sees in Lou a kind of kindred spirit, someone who is indifferent to questions of morality and ethics, someone who, like her, is only interested in appealing to the baser elements of human nature.

At first we are at least partly pulling for Lou. He appears enthusiastic and only wants to better himself. He has ambition and a project, and just wants a chance. But his sociopathic tendencies emerge as the film goes on, and this sympathy slowly wanes.

One weakness the movie has is that it has a Message. And this Message slowly becomes apparent through the characters of Lou and Nina. It is clear that it is at least partly a social commentary on sensationalist media, on TV news that is happy to exploit human misery for its own ends.

At one stage Nina asks her assistant if they can show a particularly gruesome piece of footage of a murder. The assistant asks "You mean legally?" Nina replies, sarcastically, contemptuously, "No, morally. Of course I mean legally." The implication is that morality plays no part in their decisions, the bottom line is whether it will shock, whether it will attract viewers. The bodies they film and show are pieces of meat, the wrecked lives are an irrelevance in their quest to draw in as many viewers as possible.

And this Message is a little heavy-handed, at times. There are parts of the movie that make it seem like the characters are simply vehicles for this message, those, like Lou and Nina, who put ratings above all else, and other minor characters, such as Rick, Lou's employee, and the voice of reason, who raise objections to his ever-more extreme tactics.

Yet for all that, it is a powerful, compelling piece of film-making. The visual power of Los Angeles at night is a key element in the feeling of the movie, and the whole thing is atmospheric and tense, with a hypnotic central performance from Jake Gyllenhaal.  

DAVID MITCHELL - THE BONE CLOCKS. NOVEL.

This book is shockingly bad.

'Shockingly', because David Mitchell is the author of some of the most imaginative, perfectly written, innovative novels of this century.

Cloud Atlas, in particular, is unique in its range of settings and styles and the way that it combines stories spread over centuries or millennia into a coherent narrative. The scope and breadth of imaginative power in this book is like nothing else ever written.

The Bone Clocks is, at times, similar in structure to previous Mitchell novels. The story is told in sections, spread over decades from the seventies to a dystopian 2032. The sections are all narrated from a different point of view, and so the voice and style changes from section to section.

Holly Sykes is the central character, a rebellious teenager in the first section growing up in nineteen seventies Kent, with an Irish mother and an English father. She hears voices, what she calls her 'radio people', that give her some insight into what will happen in the future.

Holly is a constant in the other narratives, though she is often a marginal character in the stories told by other characters, who are a brief lover of hers, a writer that eventually becomes her friend, and also her eventual husband.

The thing binding the stories together - apart from Holly - is a narrative about a great, centuries-long war between a group of 'carnivores', - The Anchorites - who eat people's souls in order to prolong their immortality, and another group of immortals - the Horologists - who are reincarnated into another body every time they die.

This is where the novel goes completely off the rails. Firstly the simplistic nature of the conflict - Good Horologists v Bad Carnivores - makes it read like a book for children. There is no moral ambiguity, no complexity at all.

Secondly, the whole story of this great war is unceasingly silly. All of the ideas are stolen from various sources, TV shows like Doctor Who and Charmed and Star Trek, from religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, from comics and sci-fi and a thousand books and films and programmes.

Yet the way Mitchell uses them leaches all of the wonder and fascination from the fantasy and sci-fi genres and reduces the whole concept to bland, random, silly ideas.

He invents a whole vocabulary to explain the phenomena he describes,  psychosoteric voltage, suasion, subsaying, an Act of hiatus, as if what he was talking about was unique, innovative, clever. The truth is that all he describes are simple fantasy tropes - such as telepathy, one person taking over another's mind, ESP, or psychic abilities - familiar to anyone who has ever watched Buffy or read science fiction or seen Game of Thrones in the last twenty years.

There are parts in the second last section, narrated by a Horologist called Marinus, that are frankly laughable. Where he describes the origin of the dark side of the immortals, and then the battle that takes place, it would have been rejected by Doctor Who as over-complicated, derivative and insipid.

As an example of the verbose nonsense that the writer comes up with in this section we read Marinus explaining why it is a bad idea to follow a particular course of psychosoteric action..

 “One, it’s against the Codex. Two, she is chakra-latent, so she may react badly to scansion and redact her own memories,”

The book is most disappointing because of who wrote it. David Mitchell has shown such a powerful imagination in the past that the failure of this book is a big letdown. His strength is his originality, and yet The Bone Clocks is a rattlebag of borrowed and stolen ideas, with all of the fascination wrung out. 

THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU. FILM.

The first thing to be said about this film is that it has a fantastic cast.

Jane Fonda plays the matriarch of the Altman family, the centre of the story. The rest of the cast is a list of many of the best American TV actors of their generation.

Jason Bateman (from Arrested Development) plays the middle brother in a family of four siblings whose father has just died, Tina Fey (30 Rock) is his sister, while Corey Stoller (House of Cards) and Adam Driver (Girls) are the other brothers.

Then there is Rose Byrne (Damages), Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Justify), Kathryn Hahn (Suburgatory), Abigail Spencer (Rectify), Connie Britton (Nashville), Ben Schwartz (Parks and Rec) who play a variety of characters connected in some way to the central Altman family.

The litany of recognisable faces is almost distracting, and in some ways the quality of the cast overwhelms what is a relatively slight film.

Nevertheless, This is where I leave you is enjoyable. It centres around the seven days after the death of Mort Altman, where the family sit Shiva, the traditional Jewish way of marking the dead where the relatives of the deceased do not leave the house and receive visitors for a week.

The interplay between the siblings is the strongest part of the story. There are jealousies, fights, betrayals, secrets revealed, nostalgia, much of which will be recognised by anyone from a family of more than one.

However, the movie constantly struggles against a tide of sentimentality that threatens to overwhelm it. Conflicts are resolved a little too easily, the film assumes everyone has only good intentions and people's flaws are mostly just used as vehicles for comedy. The score, too, lays on the shmaltz, signposting when you are supposed to be moved by a particular scene.  

Yet for all that, the film just about manages to avoid over sugaring the pill. The performances carry the story, Bateman is subtle and conflicted, Tina Fey is funny and wry and genuine, Jane Fonda is just this side of bonkers, and the movie retains a charm and an energy that is hard to resist.

A MOST WANTED MAN, SIN CITY - A DAME TO KILL FOR. FILMS BOTH.

A MOST WANTED MAN

A Most Wanted Man is Philip Seymour Hoffman's final film, and really doesn't have much more to recommend it than that.

Based on a John Le Carré novel, PSH's character is Gunther Bachmann, a German spy who runs a small, covert team in the northern city of Hamburg that are attempting to track the funding of Muslim extremism in Germany.

Isa Karpov, a Chechen tortured by the Russians, turns up in the city, with a desire to make up for his Russian father's crimes, and a hope to be allowed to stay in Germany. He is helped by Rachel McAdams, who plays an idealistic lawyer Annabel Richter, involved in a human rights organisation.

And then a lot of nothing happens. There are long, slow shots of PSH drinking or smoking, quick meetings on ferry boats, the occasional conversation that attempts to move the thin plot along, and all the time you are waiting for something like a story to develop. And it never really does.

The action meanders over and back between meeting rooms, safe houses and the street. The other German security agencies are simplistically portrayed as brutal and dumb, and we are somehow supposed to see Gunther and his team as sympathetic characters, the best of a bad lot.

Yet the whole thing is so limp and lacking in insight, energy or any real explanation. We only get to see the surface of things and characters, none of their true motivations are revealed, in fact there are no real revelations of any significance at all. There is almost no drama, and for a spy film, little real tension. A sad way for a great actor to go out.

SIN CITY

This, the second Sin City movie, follows on from the first film in the series, and is more of the same.

Jessica Alba, Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke are all back in the same roles, playing their damaged, violent, brooding characters. The movie is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, and retains the visual style of the original, the action is semi-animated and semi-live action, giving the whole film a curious, dream-like quality.

Apart from the visuals, though, there is really nothing else to recommend in this film. It is filled with pointless, stupid, stylized violence.  Practically everyone in the film dies or is mutilated. There are lakes of blood, and piles of bodies.

The violence becomes so commonplace that you don't even notice all the death and blood and mutilation.

The various bad guys (and gals) in the story have the usual array of goons protecting their residences, but these muscled cutthroats get murdered in their hundreds by the collected stars of Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba and Josh Brolin.

It attempts to ape the style of film noir, and achieves this, but there is no subtlety, no light relief, nothing beyond the stylized visuals and the choreographed mayhem.

This second Sin City movie is a triumph of style over substance. Utterly lacking in humour, it takes itself way too seriously.

BOYHOOD. FILM

Richard Linklater is one of the great filmmakers of his generation, and Boyhood might just be his greatest achievement.

The film was shot over a period of twelve years with the same actors playing the same roles. The "boy" of the title is Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, who is seven when we first meet him and his family, living in Houston, Texas.

Linklater and the cast then shot a small number of scenes every year, building on the story, watching the lives of the characters change, charting the progress of the children in the family.

Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter, plays Samantha, Mason's sister, and for the first part of the film her story is equally as prominent as the boy's.

As the years go by the characters grow and change. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke play the kids' estranged parents, and as the film goes on we see them get heavier, gain wrinkles, age before our eyes.

The kids' change is the most obvious, of course. Samantha starts off as a chubby, cheeky little girl, and we see her lose her puppy fat, get braces, and become a young woman. Mason slowly grows up too, he loses the soft features of a little boy, his voice breaks and he grows facial hair. And because of the natural passage of time, this is all without makeup or special effects.

There is little conventional plot in the movie, beyond the normal changes and developments of the people's lives. There is a lot of talking, Linklater loves to have his characters just shoot the breeze, talk about life and love and how to live.

What is noticeable is that the parents look back when they talk, and the kids look forward. The parents are nostalgic about their past, the kids excited and anxious about their future.

In the film the passage of time is marked by the changing appearances of the characters, but also by real events happening at the time of filming. We see the Iraq invasion, the first Harry Potter movie, the rise of Lady Gaga, Obama's first election win.

The music too charts our move through the noughties, from Coldplay to Flaming Lips and on to Arcade Fire and the Black Keys.

The film is so replete with ideas and emotions, is so full of layers and themes, that it is probably worth seeing a second and a third time.

Boyhood is an extraordinary, innovative, compelling, at times jaw dropping piece of cinema. A film like no other, and one that will probably never be emulated, in its scope and its examination of youth and growing up.

SUMMER FILMS - CHEF, BEGIN AGAIN, COLD IN JULY.

Chef is a film about the two Fs - Fatherhood and Food.

Eighteen years ago Jon Favreau wrote and directed - along with his buddy Vince Vaughan - his breakout film Swingers. In his latest movie, which he also writes, directs and stars in, he is almost unrecognisable. He is twice the size, for one thing, now with a beard, tattoos, glasses, a receding hairline.

His voice, though, is still distinctive, that almost-whine, the New York vowels still evident even after decades in LA.

He is also surrounded by one of the best casts in a film this year. Scarlett Johannson, Dustin Hoffman, John Leguizamo, Sofia Vergara, Robert Downey Jr, all show up at one time or another, yet it is certainly Favreau's film from start to finish.

He plays the chef of the title, who becomes disillusioned with his job and who realises that he is stuck in a rut. He ends up walking out of his restaurant after a food critic trashes him in an online review.

Favreau's character, Carl, ends up in Miami, with his son and ex-wife, and the chef gets back to basics, opening up a food truck and going back to his Miami Cuban food roots.

Naturally, food has a central role in the movie. The film luxuriates in the joy of food, it is easy to see where Favreaus' extra pounds have come from, he is obviously fond of his nosh, and it shows. Every dish is lovingly prepared and filmed, the camera lingers on the tasty flesh of meat as if it were human bodies writhing in pleasure, pure food-porn. It is impossible to come out after the film and not feel massively hungry.

The fatherhood theme is explored through Favreau's character, Carl Casper who, with his new food truck, manages to reconnect with his ten year old son who he had neglected after his divorce.

It is this son, Perry, who documents the chef's new project, and drums up business for the food truck using social media. In fact, it is really a film of its time, central to the plot are blogs, videos taken on cell phones and posted on-line, twitter wars, Facebook pages and Vine videos.

The relationship between father and son is one of the strongest parts of the story. The film manages to avoid an overdose of sentiment, yet the developing relationship between Carl and Perry, quickly becomes central.

It is Carl's relationships - with his son, with his best friend, played by John Leguizamo, and even with his ex wife - that make this film warm and funny and really impossible to dislike. It is a feel-good film for the decade, a real pleasure.

Similar to Chef in many ways, is Irish director John Carney's new film, Begin Again.

Mark Ruffalo plays washed up music producer, Dan, who - like Favreau's character in Chef - is unfulfilled by his job, divorced, and with a child, this time a teenage daughter, who he has lost touch with.

And like Chef, it is about a new project that takes him back to his roots, and which awakens in him the passion he once felt for his profession. For Dan, his

passion is music.

This new project is Greta, played by Keira Knightley, a singer-songwriter who he discovers in an open mike night. They decide to make an album, though they use the open spaces of the city, New York, as their studio, recording in alleys, on roof-tops, on the street.

And also like Favreau's film, Dan reconnects with his daughter, Violet, though this new venture. She plays guitar on some tracks, father and daughter join together like they have never done before.

Begin Again is a feel-good movie, the tone is light, the music scenes are joyous and celebratory, nothing dark lasts for too long. There is some pain, Greta gets cheated on by her boyfriend, Dan has a drinking problem, but there is never any sense that anything bad is really going to happen.

Keira Knightley really sings on Greta's tracks, which have a certain charm, but which are essentially forgettable. A little like the film itself, likeable but light, pleasing but insubstantial.

Cold in July is a different kettle of fish entirely. It too has a great cast, with Michael C Hall (Dexter), Sam Shepherd and Don Johnson in the central roles.

The film suffers from not really knowing what it is. There are elements of thriller, of horror, of suspense, and also a revenge plot towards the end, as well as family drama and social commentary.

The action takes place in 1989. Michael C Hall plays Richard, who hears noises one night in his family home, and discovers a burglar in his living room. Richard shoots him dead.

This one act, which turns out to have been an accident - Richard's finger slipped on the trigger - itself sets in motion another series of events that are connected to the mob, corrupt policemen and the murders of young vulnerable women.

The film is unpredictable, this is a strong point of the plot, it sets out red herrings and does not conform to expectations. The tension hardly relents from the first scene, Richard is in almost constant danger of one kind or another from beginning to end.

Yet it is also a little too slow paced, you never feel like you are really inside the story, it never feels like the film has really got going. It is at times intriguing, but in the end it resorts to the conventional, and is lacking a heart and could do with more depth.

ANNA KARENINA - NOVEL. ANNA KARENINA - FILM.

Anna Karenina is actually two stories in one.

The first is about the eponymous heroine - the tragic heroine - Anna, who is married to the staid, solid Alexei Karenin. Anna doesn't really realise how small and unfulfilling her life is until she meets Count Vronsky, a dashing officer in the army.

There is a parallel narrative, one that involves Constantine Levin, an aristocrat who lives on his country estate.

Levin is an intense, serious man who lives in the country and dislikes the life of the city. He falls in love with Kitty, who is Anna's sister-in-law, is rejected at first by her, as she is in love with Vronsky. Eventually, Kitty accepts Levin, and they find a way to make their marriage work, despite their differences, and Levin's taciturn nature.

And yet there is so much more in this novel of practically a thousand pages. In fact, there is too much. There are pages worth of descriptions of grouse hunts, or grass cutting, and other parts that deal with the local politics of the 1870s Russia.

Much of it is hard to be interested in from the perspective of the twenty first century. The novel takes too many detours, contains too many digressions, is overweight and sprawling.

In many ways it has almost more historical value than literary. The reader learns a great deal about the lives of the Russian aristocracy, their obsession with all things French - they even speak French among themselves so their servants can't understand - and their lives of idleness and decadence.

Yet, when it comes down to it, it is Anna's story that gives the novel its value. In ways it is almost a feminist novel, we see that when Anna finally leaves her husband for Vronsky, he, Vronsky, is hardly effected by the scandal, but it is Anna who suffers, who is rejected by society, who is prevented from seeing her son.

Anna and Vronsky get what they wanted, and yet learn that this does not necessarily make them happy. Again, it is Anna who feels the brunt of society's disapproval, and it is she who falls into a deep depression, and it is her ending that is especially tragic.

In the other narrative, Levin is a vehicle for many of Tolstoy's own ruminations and doubts, his own questions about his estate and how it should be managed, and for his own philosophical questions, about goodness and God and love. Again, these can get a little repetitive, and Levin's intensity and seriousness make him a character that is hard to love.

All in all this is a flawed book. It is rich and detailed and fascinating in parts, but drags all too often, and could have done with a good editor.

The 2012 film of the novel, is a strange version. The screenplay was written by Tom Stoppard, a playwright, and this is apparent quite quickly.

The urban scenes that are set in St Petersburg and in Moscow contain action that looks like it is taking place on a stage. In many scenes the actors simply walk off stage, through a door and into another set. There is little attempt at realism, it is at times dream-like, at others very mannered and artificial.

For example, in a central scene at the racecourse, Vronsky is taking part in a horse race, watched by the accumulated Moscow aristocracy. Yet the horses are shown to be racing on a stage, and the race-goers are all sitting in a theatre, watching the race and reacting to it as if it were a play.

On the other hand, the scenes that take place in Levin's country estate are much more realistic, there is no playing around with the setting. There is a sense that the film is heightening Tolstoy's own country bias, and commenting on the unnaturalness of aristocratic city life, in contrast with the pure, real existence of the country.

To its credit, the film looks wonderful. The sets, the costumes, the landscapes, are all epic and luscious and grand, in keeping with the lives of the Russian aristocracy.

Many scenes are composed like a paintings, the colours are rich and deep, the stark white of the winter snow contrasting with the darkness of the buildings, and the shapes of the people. The various social gatherings are carefully constructed and choreographed, with all of the luxury of the time.

Yet after reading the novel, the actors chosen to portray the characters don't really fit. Keira Knightley is too slight and slim to portray Anna, who is described as full-figured and imposing. Vronsky too is a much more impressive figure in the novel than Aaron Taylor-Johnson, better known for starring in Kick Ass.

Least convincing of all is Domhnall Gleason as Levin, another character who is described as solid, well-built and stocky. Gleason is exactly the opposite, skinny and slim and not at all physically impressive.

The playing around with the urban scenes is alienating, and makes it difficult to engage with characters than inhabit such a strange, artificial world. The visual pleasures of the film almost make up for this flaw, but not quite. Though at least we don't have to hear about the intricacies of nineteenth century Russian politics!

THE GOLDFINCH - DONNA TARTT. NOVEL.

"Every shrink, every career counsellor, every Disney princess knows the answer: 'Be yourself'. 'Follow your heart.'

What if the heart, .....leads one....straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?" (p.761)

The central question of this book is, What if you cannot trust yourself? How do you live, if - because of damage, because of trauma - every instinct you have is self destructive?

The book's central character and narrator is Theo, a child of fourteen when we first meet him. He is caught up in an explosion in an art museum, where he is injured and his mother dies.

The Goldfinch of the title is the name of a painting that Theo takes with him when he staggers out of the smoky remnants of the blown up building. It is priceless, the work of a Dutch master of the sixteenth century.

Theo's tale, after the death of his mother, is one of a series of disasters, or near disasters. There is the bomb, which is the originator of all of the other problems of his life. He then goes to live with his neglectful, addict father in Las Vegas, falls in with Boris, who is even more damaged than Theo. His father dies, Theo returns to New York, and soon becomes an addict himself, reduced to fraud to fund his lifestyle.

Through it all is the painting, The Goldfinch. Theo keeps it through all of his travails, brings it to Las Vegas and then back to New York where he stores it in an anonymous storage facility. Though he goes years without looking at it, it is important for him just to have it.

The painting is a symbol of something, it an object from the last day that he saw his mother alive, it is something beautiful, an object from his childhood. It becomes something, the only thing, that Theo has to hold on to in his chaotic world.

In truth the book is too long, there are many scenes and parts that could have been shortened or cut completely. It gets a bit repetitive, when we learn about Boris and Theo's life in Las Vegas, and then about his dissolute, aimless, addict's existence in New York. Scenes are repeated, or almost so, there are details that are unnecessary, it needs a good editor.

Still, it is a compelling read. The first third is a bit slow, but once Boris, Theo's eccentric Ukranian friend, enters the picture, the book attains a richer texture, and a fascinating, intriguing character.

Boris is a year older than Theo - who he constantly calls "Potter", after Harry - and is a kind of orphan who moves around with his alcoholic, hopeless, violent father from city to city with his father's job.

Boris too is a drinker, and a druggie, but he and Theo form this airtight, all-encompassing friendship that is the best thing in the book. They are both damaged, neglected, practically parent-less, and so become each other's family, two inseparable halves of the one unit.

Boris disappears for years in the middle of the narrative, and it is only when he reappears that the story picks up again, gains some kind of momentum and vibrancy.

His character is the beating heart at the centre of the story. Though he and Theo are so inseparable for so long, Boris is really the counterpoint to Theo and his melancholy, he is energy and vitality and invention, and brings his own particular kind of entertaining chaos to the novel.

The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize this year. Whether it deserves this is an open question, but it is a book that is worth reading, if only for the sprawl of its narrative, and power of the storytelling, and the mischievous, charismatic, vibrant portrayal of its secondary characters.