One-sentence reviews – Page 6

Dracula Untold (Gary Shore 2014)

and so anyway it turn out that the best thing about Dracula Untold (2014) is not that, despite its title, it begins with extensive voiceover narration, nor that it promptly sets you up to expect a queer vampire western when the first named location is Broketooth Mountain, nor that Luke Evans dies right at the start so that his big brother Jason Statham can take over (mainly because that doesn’t actually happen), nor the Taransylvaniarantula spiders lurking in the ancient vampire’s cave, but the moment when Vlad, his kingdom about to be overrun by Turks (well, they’re Turk-ish), as a last resort goes to implore the ancient vampire master, ‘Save my people – you’re Charles Dance, you’ll do any old shit for money’…

Divergent (Neil Burger 2014)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Divergent (2014) is not its role in the mysterious rise of Jai Courtney, easily the very worst of all the very bad actors in the much-loved Spartacus, nor is it the way that it makes you want to watch the much-loved and incredibly silly Equilibrium (Wimmer 2002) again, but the bold formal experiment it conducts by taking the training montage sequence as the basis for its narrative structure but then including two hours of all the tedious stuff you would normally cut out…

Jack Reacher (Christopher McQuarrie 2012)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Jack Reacher (2012) – especially since diminutive star and producer Tom Cruise either can’t or won’t follow the rather sage advice hidden in the title of the currently-filming sequel Jack Reacher: Don’t Go Back – is not the clattering sub-Bourne car chase in which our tiny hero careens off cars and kerbs because he is not tall enough to simultaneously reach the pedals and see over the dashboard, but the look on the bantam face of the literally pocket-sized Cruise, so tiny you really can pick him up and carry him around in your breast pocket like a half-smoked Panatela or flashlight pen, when, on what was obviously the first day of shooting, it suddenly dawned on him that he had bought the rights to a series of rather ordinary thrillers featuring a six foot five, 220+ pound Aryan wet-dream of a man, rather than the heart-warming (and, to iddy-biddy Tom, profoundly resonant) triumph-over-adversity tale of a small boy who, like the Lilliputian star, would stretch and stretch and stretch but still not be able to get onto the sofa without being lifted…

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about multi-Oscar-winning Whiplash (2014) is not that – thanks mainly to the music, the editing and Supergirl’s chin, which once you have seen you will never unsee – it manages to combine being quite enjoyable with being a big pile of totally reprehensible tosh, nor that it got Babylon 5‘s Garibaldi back in shape and won him an Oscar, but that it showed me exactly where I have been going wrong pedagogically for the last 22 years, putting all that effort into not being a complete and utter dick, and made me look forward to turning over a new, abusive leaf when I get back to classes in the new year…

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (JJ Abrams 2015)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2014) is not the way tumbleweed blows across the Tatooine desert when Simon Pegg makes his desperately unfunny ‘Rey gun’ joke, nor is it the revelation that the ‘home’ Han is so glad to be back at is the one in which his grandkids have dumped him, where he rooms with Bruce Campbell’s Elvis and Ossie Davis’s JFK, no, the best thing about the new Star Wars movie is the eighteen months of misdirection during which Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill straight-up straightface lied about the next Jump Street movie cross-over being with the Men in Black franchise…

Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Foxcatcher (2014) is not the way it expresses its breathtakingly realist commitment to capturing not only the look of the real people it depicts but also the spirit of a resurgent Reaganite America through the medium of ridiculous but biographically accurate nasal prostheses, but the way in which it enables Mark Ruffalo to again demonstrate his astonishing range as an actor and the Paul Muni-like way he disappears so far into the role he is playing so that we barely even see him any longer…

Lucy (Luc Besson 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Lucy (2014) is the way in which Luc ‘the death of cinema’ Besson takes everything French cinema has ever learned from the Cinéma du look to Gaspar Noé, even down to borrowing the latter’s borrowings from Kubrick, and in a profoundly contemporary innovation uses it all to produce the most luridly hyperreal kinetic and yet astonishingly dull – not to mention hilariously literalist and just plain silly – powerpoint presentation imaginable, and yet thanks to the existence of Her (Jonze 2013) still fails to make the worst sf movie starring Scarlett Johansson…

The Connection (Cédric Jimenez 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about the French crime epic The Connection (2014) is not that after days spent jokingly calling it the French Connection you sit down to watch it and it turns out to be about the Marseille end of the investigation into the French ‘connection’ of The French Connection (Friedkin 1971) – indeed, its French title turns out to be La French – nor is it the stunning ability of a 135-minute film to have about 133 minutes of middle, no, the very best thing about The Connection is that by awarding Jean Dujardin – who you may know from The Artist (Hazanavicius 2011) and the OSS 117 films (Hazanavicius 2006, 2009) – such amazing 70s sideburns it manages to demonstrate my long-standing conviction of just how brilliant Leonard Rossiter would have been as Wolverine…

Tusk (Kevin Smith 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Tusk (2014), a film in which an erstwhile mariner turned mad surgeon/serial killer abducts asshole shock-podcaster Justin Long in order to transform him into a walrus fit for gladiatorial combat, is not the spot-on depiction of Canadians in all their native variety, but that moment (and every subsequent moment) that comes several tens of minutes into the film when you go from staring at the screen wondering what you are staring at to staring at the screen wondering whether you are staring at the most expensive movie Frank Henenlotter never made or at a god’s-honest-truth work of genius such as has never actually been made by Wes Anderson…

Interstellar (Christopher Nolan 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Interstellar (2014), a film in which Matthew McConaughey both keeps his shirt on and plays a magical bookcase from a galaxy far, far away, is not that they gave the bloke responsible for Clippy, the annoying Word for Windows Office Assistant, a second chance – this time to design robots – but that, even without a credited science advisor, Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan managed to grasp relativistic time-dilation effects with such precise and unrelenting hard-sf rigour that for every hour spent on the sofa watching the movie an eternity seemed to pass…