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!