“I just need another hit, just one more,†maintains Ethan Hawke’s true-crime author, Ellison, who has hauled his sweet little family to a house containing a horrifying secret.
Woody Allen’s latest very much feels like a bunch of half-baked ideas the auteur has been working on since he started out: a mortician who can only sing opera sublimely in the shower, an ordinary man (Roberto Benigni) who is thrust into the spotlight for no good reason.
After a first hour every bit as dreary as Quantum of Solace, this wildly successful slice of Bond (above) is rescued by Ben Whishaw’s amiable Q and by a bonkers turn (Brando in The Missouri Breaks springs to mind) from Javier Bardem as the vengeful former 00-agent hell-bent on offing M (Judi Dench).
“You’re an activist not a supplicant,†maintains Alessandro Nivola’s sleazy intellectual, Roland, to his idealistic teen daughter, Ginger (Elle Fanning, convincing), in Sally Potter’s disjointed but good-looking portrait of teenage hormones and family dysfunction in early 1960s London.
It’s bad enough that the lifts don’t work, but now an unknown sniper is picking off the occupants of a bleak tower block.
“If you’re bigger and more stupid you’d be a bully too, it’s called survival of the thickest,†explains the rotund Neil to Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), a boy who can see ghosts.
“This time-travel crap, just fries your brain like a egg…†maintains Jeff Daniels’s cerebral thug, and the first hour of this mind-bending sci-fi is a little too mind-frying.
Katharine Isabelle convinces as Mary, a budding surgeon who stumbles into body modification to make ends meet in this grisly horror from the Soska twins, aka the Twisted Sisters.
A bold, atypical thriller from Ealing, scripted by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and starring Maggie Smith in her first film role.
Will Ferrell plays Cam Brady, a sleazebag congressman who is a shoo-in for a fifth straight term until Zach Galifianakis’s klutz (he’s incapable of opening doors) Marty comes along, backed by two unctuous industrialists (John Lithgow and Dan Ackroyd, both wasted here).