Cats on film. There are plenty of them. Elsewhere on the web you will find loads of listicles featuring top cats, boss pussies, big mogs, killer kitties, whiskers galore and other such. Cats get their biggest billing of all in the wonderful if anthropomorphic world of Walt Disney. It’s rare for a cat to be played by a cat in a film about a cat. Cat people will be purring, therefore, at A Street Cat Named Bob.
film reviews
Matt Wolf
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander fell in love in real life while making The Light Between Oceans, which lends an extra dimension to a morose period weepie that needs every bit of excitement it can get. Reminiscent of the laboured celluloid romances of a bygone era that could once have starred Robert Taylor, the film is as vacuous as it is pretty, and if director Derek Cianfrance cut some of his stars' lingering glances, it would have the added virtue of being short.
As it is, 132 minutes is a long time for a movie whose narrative more or less demands that the audience is several steps ahead of the game. Adapted from the 2012 book of the same name by the London-based Australian novelist M.L. Stedman, the film might benefit from a bit of self-awareness as to its hoarier aspects: one can imagine Todd Haynes having a high old time with it.
But in a break from the bristling intelligence of his career-making Blue Valentine, this latest effort finds Cianfrance going all po-faced on us. Only the belated entrance into the action of Rachel Weisz (pictured below), playing the real mother of the child whom Vikander's luckless spouse and parent has brought up as her own, brings the much-needed juice - not to mention respite from lines like "you still have a light inside of you". 
The narrative - ripe for parody - finds Fassbender playing a battle-scarred survivor of World War One who finds the calm he has been looking for in a job as a lighthouse keeper in a rural Australian outpost. Any thoughts of him idling the decades away humming "Waltzing Matilda" to the gulls are soon routed by the appearance of Isabel (Vikander), who knows a thing or two about war's ravages, having lost two brothers to combat.
Several lingering glances over a prolonged lunch lead to - well, you know - and before long Tom and isabel are man and wife, only for fate to deal her a cruel blow via not one but two miscarriages. And yet, just when Isabel seems destined to succumb to despair, a boat washes up on the shore, bringing with it a dead man and a very much alive, squawling infant girl. Suddenly there's God so quickly, as Blanche DuBois might have said, except for the emergence of Hannah (Weisz), the child's real mum, whose arrival on the scene recasts the movie as a study in morality: Tom and Isabel don't see eye to eye as what to do with Lucy once her actual mother forces a day of reckoning.
Weisz's energy seems to belong to a different film. Elsewhere, one thinks for instance of what the Mike Leigh who gave us Secrets and Lies might have done with the ensuing moral maze and the primal emotions that get unleashed. Instead, Fassbender retreats inward - the performance is recessive to a fault - while Vikander aims for the jugular, the two rarely suggesting on screen the passion that was reportedly aborning off it. We are treated to the requisite picturesque longshots and dewy close-ups, and yet the thing never connects. Instead of reaching for a tissue, I was checking my watch.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Light Between Oceans
Kieron Tyler
The original 1961 poster for Paris Blues trumpeted it as “a love-spectacular so personally exciting you feel it’s happening to you”. Would it were actually thus. Instead, it’s ponderous and features a cast so obviously “acting” that any verve implied by being filmed in Paris and set in the world of jazz is missing in action. Paris Blues is worth seeing, but don’t expect the pulse to quicken.
Saskia Baron
Aiming for the trippy qualities of The Matrix and Inception, Doctor Strange is possibly the most enjoyable Marvel foundation story since the first Iron Man, mixing wit with visual pyrotechnics. Benedict Cumberbatch plays supercilious neurosurgeon Stephen Strange (wholly unrelated to the New Romantic singer responsible for “Fade to Grey”). A virtuoso of the scalpel, Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange has shades of Robert Downey Jr’s over-achieving Tony Stark – this is cinema art directed from the fantasy lifestyle of men’s glossy magazines.
Dr Strange has the requisite underappreciated on/off girlfriend (Rachel McAdams) who works alongside him, admiring his precision brain repairs while despairing of his heart. He lives in an icy Manhattan apartment, seemingly no walls and all windows that look onto the night-time city. Outside is his Lamborghini Huracan which really should not be driven while inspecting neurology scans. His self-inflicted fall from grace renders him incapable of operating, and sets him on a quest to find a cure for his shaking hands. Cue Cumberbatch with messy hair, a terrible beard, and a journey to the Mysterious Orient in search of mystical enlightenment (pictured below).
Redemption comes in the shape of a bald Tilda Swinton, playing the Ancient One who knows all the secrets of sorcery and inner powers which can make the crippled walk. There’s a touch of The Karate Kid in the two British thespians’ on-screen relationship that borders on ridiculous. It’s hard not to be cynical about the Ancient One intoning lines such as “Forget everything you think you knew”, while the repetitive scenes of gruelling physical training and humiliation on the road to transcendence wear thin.
Mads Mikkelsen plays Kaecilius, a former student of the Ancient One who has turned evil and provides Strange with his key opponent. It’s difficult to take Mikkelsen too seriously as the villain if you end up wondering how much time he had to spend in make-up every day, having his eyes slathered with kohl and red sparkles to make them look like a pair of volcanoes getting ready to rumble.
Doctor Strange could descend into a clutch of clichés, but director/writer Scott Derrickson has injected plenty of wit. The visuals, especially in the modern-world sequences, are stunning. Vast cityscapes roll up like three-dimensional chess sets; dizzying fight scenes among ever-shifting skyscrapers are what one would imagine MC Escher would have designed if he’d been working with powerful digital software rather than a pencil.
Stan Lee’s obligatory cameo is worth watching out for - chuckling over Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception. Sitting through the endless credits with the diehard fans is rewarded by not just one but two teasers. These taster scenes also hopefully make sense of why Chiwetel Ejiofor is so underused in Doctor Strange as the Ancient One’s protégé Mordor, and hint that there may be more interesting conflicts to come in the sequels.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Doctor Strange
Nick Hasted
Most of the crime Ken Loach investigates with compassion and humour happens off-screen right at the start. As the opening credits roll, a woman’s voice with sing-song affability perhaps appropriate to a child, if not for its bureaucratic, box-tick chill, asks Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) a sequence of questions wholly irrelevant to his problem. He can lift his arms, he can walk on his legs. So never mind the heart attack which almost made him tumble off a ladder at his work as a carpenter.
Adam Sweeting
A prequel to Ouija (2014), Ouija: Origin of Evil zooms back to a mid-Sixties Los Angeles that's all miniskirts, white PVC boots, splendid chromed-up Chevrolets and Studebakers and clangy garage-band pop music. Our hosts are widowed mom Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser, of Twilight fame) and her daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson).
Adam Sweeting
Four years on from Tom Cruise's debut as Jack Reacher in Jack Reacher, here he is doing it again. Not a lot has changed. Cruise eerily continues not to age (does the Scientology robotics division know something we don't?), Jack Reacher is still the man from nowhere who mystically materialises when he's needed, and bad guys obligingly queue up to get their asses kicked and their noses broken.
Adam Sweeting
Among the myriad global offerings at the LFF, the resoundingly British Their Finest ★★★★★ , about a group of film-makers working for the Ministry of Information in London in 1940, is surely among the most sheerly enjoyable.
Jasper Rees
Dan Brown is famed for calamitous language massacres that sell by the kerchillion to tone-deaf Renaissance cryptogram junkies. His sentences hurt eyes and his plots numb skulls. But one thing you can say for Brown is he checks facts like an obsessive-compulsive über-nerd. When the books are transplanted to the big screen, he gets less control over this stuff. The result, in Inferno, is unintentionally comical to anyone (which means pretty much everyone) who knows Florence.
Markie Robson-Scott
“It’s a business opportunity,” explains Jake (Shia LaBoeuf) to dreadlocked, wild-child Star (Sasha Lane). She’s eyeing him up in the aisles of a Midwestern Walmart while he dances around with a rag-tag, stoned young crew to Rihanna’s “We Found Love”. “We go door to door. We sell magazines. Come with us.” Sounds an unlikely proposition.