One-sentence reviews – Page 7

Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Gone Girl (2014) is not the monomaniacal lengths to which Gillian Flynn went, first as novelist and then as screenwriter, just to play an elaborate unfunny homage to Kevin Smith by once more getting Ben Affleck to chase Amy, nor is it the film’s astonishing commitment to demonstrating that, regardless of the PC-gone-madness of SJWs everywhere, women, especially blonde ones, are at the very core of their DNA betrayers, no, the very best thing about the film – all about love, performativity, duplicity, mendacity, treachery, revenge and psychosis – is the way it captures the raw truth of the relationship between Ben Affleck and Matt Damon when they were cowriting Good Will Hunting (1997), except with Rosamund Pike playing Affleck…

SPECTRE (Sam Mendes 2015)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about SPECTRE (2015) is not that with Sam Mendes’s sprightly directorial style they have found a helmsman as precisely geriatric as this leaden, self-important iteration of the franchise, nor that the atrocious dialogue actually succeeds in making you miss Roger Moore, nor that it spectacularly misrepresents North African rail services so as to set the benchmark for what we should expect from Prime Minister-to-be Jeremy Corbyn’s thankfully renationalised rail service (every carriage first class, with a bar, boutiques and tailors), nor that its title sequence manages to do tentacle hentai as insipidly as it does theme tune, no, the very best thing about SPECTRE is the hidden-in-plain-sight Marcel Proust allusion that is there for no reason other than to remind you of things past, when Bond used to be fun and misogynist rather than just dull and misogynist…

Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Nightcrawler (2014) is not that it turns out not to be an X-Men spin-off, though that is a relief, nor is it the always amusing irony of one medium using a slickly seedy story to criticise another medium for being slick and seedy (and to berate the other medium’s audience for their complicity while expecting its own audience not to notice their complicity in watching the film in the first place), no, the best thing about Nightcrawler is Jake Gyllenhaal’s really quite astonishing performance, as if they were after Patrick Bateman but ended up with Sheldon Cooper…

Hummingbird aka Redemption (Steven Knight 2013)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Hummingbird (2013) is not the hilarious heavy-handedness of the whole endeavour but the moment when Jason Statham – playing a traumatised Afghanistan veteran on the run from a court martial for the revenge-atrocities he committed and now living among London’s homeless who, through a series of utterly probable twists, emerges from the stupor in which he keeps himself, becomes a strong-arm man for Chinese gangsters and falls in love with a nun – asks his criminal boss to identify the killer of a homeless female friend who was forced into prostitution, and they agree to help provided he ‘does the thing no-one else is willing to do’, and the next shot is of him driving across the Severn Bridge into Wales…

The Drop (Michaël R. Roskam 2014)

and so anyway it turn out that the best thing about The Drop (2014) is not that we get to see James Gandolfini in action one last time, nor is it the reminder of quite how good a writer Dennis Lehane is, nor is it the way that it confirms that the sole motivation left to men in contemporary cinema is protecting or revenging their dogs, as in Equilibrium, I Am Legend, The Rover, John Wick (and presumably John Wick 2) and the Fast and Furious franchise (let’s face it, Paul Walker was basically Vin Diesel’s adorable little stray), as well as Human Target on the telly, no, the best thing about The Drop is every single scene in which Tom Hardy picks up young Rocco (or Mike, as he would have preferred to call him) and it becomes impossible to decide which is the cutest puppy of all…

The Beachcomber (Muriel Box 1954)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Beachcomber (1954) is not the bare-faced audacity with which it has a crocodile grab hold of an elephant’s trunk so that the always lovely Glynis Johns can nurse the pachyderm back to health so that later, when the unlikely natives improbably stake her out onto the ground to be executed by elephant-stamping, she can be saved not by nicking the lunar eclipse bit from Haggard but by going all Androcles, nor is it the brown-face performances by Donald Pleasance and Michael ‘the true voice of Paddington’ Hordern, but the moment when drunken beachbum Robert Newton is told about an outbreak of cholera and responds: people who drink water deserve all they get….

Ant-Man (Peyton Reed 2015)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Ant-Man ( 2015) is not that it lays bare the ways in which all the MCU movies, from phase meh through to phase yawn, are extremely ordinary if intermittently entertaining films, nor is it the inclusion of a Russian (?) in the trio of comedy ethnic sidekicks as if this somehow eliminates the problem of casting actors of colour in comedy sidekick roles, nor is it the casting of Yanis Varoufakis Mark Strong Corey Stoll as the Hood, thus revealing Disney’s plans for an MCU/Thunderbirds crossover, nor is it the fact that every so often you can hear in Paul Rudd’s lines the rhythms of Edgar Wright’s dialogue, thus enabling you to make your own entertainment by recasting Simon Pegg in the lead, no, the best thing about Ant-Man, which is a little weird but also helps to lay bare a bunch of the creepy-ass stuff that often goes on behind that whole parent-child rift/reconciliation screenplay 101 bullshit, is the decision to confuse Michael Douglas by cutting Evangeline Lilly’s hair so as to make Hank Pym’s daughter look as much like Douglas’s wife as possible…

The Ice Storm (Ang Lee 1997)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Ice Storm (1997) – based on Rick Moody’s 1994 novel of the same name, which I didn’t much like – is not the sheer craft and dedication James Schamus brings to his screenplay so as to ensure that Moody’s multiple perspectives and layered temporalities are reduced into such banality that producers elsewhere thought greenlighting American Beauty would be a good idea, but rather the fact that, whatever the film is, it is neither American Beauty nor Revolutionary Road….

Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes 2008)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Revolutionary Road (2008) is not all the fucking endless acting cluttering up the scenes in which DiCaprio and Winslet, reunited at last, make you root for the iceberg all over again, but the way in which Sam Mendes takes Richard Yates’s novel – which is, whether by accident or design, neatly poised between a sympathetic portrait of white suburbanites turning on each other as they confront the emptiness of their lives and a devastating satire on these awful, self-deluded pricks who should just hurry up and die horribly – and in the adaptation process to so clearly aim for the former but achieve the latter … well, apart from the bit about devastating satire…

American Beauty (Sam Mendes 1999)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about American Beauty (1999) is not (to my surprise) watching it through a low-level but persistent hangover and half-closed eyes which enable you to pretend you are drifting off to sleep rather than watching the film, nor is it Sam Mendes’s cunning bait-and-switch, where the film starts off being less terrible than you have spent the last decade and a half assuming it is but then becomes far more terrible than the darkest nightmares about it which have plagued you for the last decade and a half, no, the best thing about American Beauty is that it is now in my past (I don’t have to finally bring myself to watch it, because I have done that now, unlike Revolutionary Road (2008), the other Sam Mendes movie I have to get through today for work reasons…