film reviews
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Ed Owen

How much you enjoy this new version of Alice Through The Looking Glass will be directly proportional to how much you revere Lewis Carroll’s original text. If you love the original you will be perplexed, wondering if you have come into the correct screening. But if you don’t mind some liberties taken with the story or, more than liberties, if you don’t mind the original story kidnapped, wrapped in chains and thrown into a well, or if you just don’t know the book, then you might actually enjoy what’s on offer.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was an early experiment with modern 3D, taking more than $1 billion in box office, one of the 30 highest-grossing films of all time. Such tremendous, unexpected success demands a sequel. Six years later. Burton’s film veered away from the Lewis Carroll story, including the classic elements (Cheshire Cat, etc) but with an odd, some might say unnecessary, slant. Alice (Mia Wasikowska, pictured below) was 19, returning to her youthful fantasies, not the much younger girl exploring her current fantasies as in the original.

The new film begins with the same cast and atmosphere or the Burton original, set several years after the first. Alice, now a swashbuckling sea captain, deals spiritedly with pirates before returning home to stuffy Victorian Britain. The chinless Hamish (Leo Bill), snubbed by Alice in the first film, humiliates her by taking away her ship away. Distraught, Alice finds the butterfly Absolom (voiced by Alan Rickman in one of his final roles) who leads her through a mirror - a looking glass - and into Wonderland, where things are also glum.

The Hatter (a spectacularly creepy Johnny Depp, pictured below) pines for his family, presumed dead. Alice, inspired to help the Hatter, must steal the Chronosphere, a Tardis-cum-motorbike time machine from Sasha Baron Cohen’s clockwork Time who sports a strong German (or possibly Swiss) accent. Now Alice can get to the bottom of The Hatter’s misery and also discover why the Queen of Hearts, a wonderfully brattish Helena Bonham Carter, is such a stinker.

This all bears as much resemblance to the original text as quantum computing does to Pokemon. But it does make for a sequel to the first film. Burton is not at the helm, passing on to James Bobin, who has a long association with Baron Cohen from the Ali G days, and directing both of the recent Muppets films. As co-producer, Burton’s fingerprints are all over the first-class steampunk set design, costumes and beautiful art direction. But without him driving the boat, the film lacks some of the weirdness he brings. Alice Through the Looking Glass has a far more conventional story as a result: a quest.

While the story meanders far from the original, some of Carroll’s distinctive dialogue creeps in at places, notably the nonsense jokes about time and the perception of time. Talking of time, six years is a long wait in Hollywood, and the timing of this sequel is curious. Those aged 10 for the original would be 16 now, too old to be interested in this. Anyone now the perfect age for the sequel would have been too young to see the original. This means that the film needs to stand on its own, but it barely does. If you don’t know the characters or the slants of Carroll's original story then the story is perplexing at best.

Some scenes are scary, the Victorian design dark and menacing, and may be a bit much for younger viewers. But if you can see past the problems, Alice Through the Looking Glassis enjoyable, visually spectacular and finally satisfying.


ALICE'S ADVENTURES ON STAGE AND SCREEN

Alice, Scottish Ballet. It should be a capital crime to attempt an Alice ballet - off with their heads

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet. Even the best butter would not help this plot-less evening

Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Barbican. Gerald Barry's crazy velocity berserks both Alice books in rude style

Alice in Wonderland. Tim Burton takes on the fantasy classic

Alice in Wonderland, BBCSO, Brönnimann, Barbican. A curious tale gets a riotous operatic telling from composer Unsuk Chin

Jan Švankmajer's Alice. The great Czech animator's remarkable first full-length film

wonder.land, National Theatre. Damon Albarn’s Alice musical has fun graphics, but a banal and didactic storyline


Overleaf: watch the trailer to Alice Through the Looking Glass

Money Monster
Saskia Baron

This is one of those films where it really is better not to have seen the trailer first. Much of the pleasure is in the narrative twists and the developing characters, and the publicity gives too much away. Nevertheless, Money Monster is an enjoyable soft-liberal satire on American TV shows and the wickedness of Wall Street.

Brighton Festival: Zvizdal, Corn Exchange
Thomas H. Green

Berlin are, misleadingly, an arts unit from Antwerp, Belgium. They’ve been around for well over a decade and major in artily constructed documentaries that are presented in the manner of experiential installations. Their focus is usually the slow, commentary-free dissection of a geographical quirk or circumstance, hence past films have been about and titled Jerusalem, Moscow, Iqaluit (Canadian Inuit capital), and Bonanza (a tiny Rocky Mountains community).

Love & Friendship
alexandra.coghlan

Jane Austen’s early novel-in-letters Lady Susan has more in common with Vanity Fair or even Les Liaisons Dangereuses than it does with the author’s mature works. Austen’s familiar wit is there, certainly, but sharpened from embroidery needle to dagger. Her eye for social foibles and failings is similarly keen, but lacking the tempering generosity of her later novels.

Ivan’s Childhood
Tom Birchenough

The 30th anniversary of the death of Andrei Tarkovsky – the great Russian director died just before the end of 1986, on December 29, in Paris – will surely guarantee that his remarkable body of work receives new attention, and this month distributor Artificial Eye launches a programme, Sculpting Time, which will see new digitally restored versions of his seven films being re-released around the country.

A Hologram for the King
Jasper Rees

Tom Hanks is reaching world treasure status, like some third-century heritage site protected by UNESCO. His everyman allure makes him today’s only equivalent to James Stewart. Stewart shocked fans when he played a vengeful man-hunter in Winchester '73, and maybe it’s time Hanks defibrillated us all by playing a cold-blooded killer. In the meantime, here’s A Hologram for the King in which Hanks is very much Hanks and the main reason to pay up.

The source material is the much praised 2012 novel by Dave Eggers. Eggers, author of the super-ludic memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and creator of McSweeney’s magazine, is not the type of writer whose prose personality just leaps onto the screen. But in his wonderfully alive opening sequence (see clip overleaf) scriptwriter/director Tom Tykwer seems determined to lassoo lightning. To the backing of Talking Heads, Boston salaryman Alan Clay (Hanks) karaokes “Once in a Lifetime” in a harum-scarum nightmare sequence featuring cartoon SFX and a juddering rollercoastcam. In barely a minute it’s established that Alan, divorced and broke and with a horrible ex-wife, is heading to Saudi Arabia to secure a deal to supply the tech for a new city in the desert. For him it’s an alcohol-free last-chance saloon to pay for his daughter to go back to college. “I need you strong and bright here, Alan,” his boss tells him.What he finds in the Middle East is a different way of doing business. His junior colleagues (who have never heard of Lawrence of Arabia) prepping the presentation to the king are set up in a tent with no wi-fi, while over the way in the shiny office everyone lies to him about the whereabouts of the people he’s scheduled to meet. Day follows upon day, and each morning he lethargically sleeps through his alarm and has to be driven out to the desert development by Yousef (Alexander Black, pictured above with Hanks), a calamitous cab driver who nonetheless slowly inducts Alan in Saudi ways. They take an illicit trip into Mecca, and spend a night in the desert hunting wolves - though Alan's crisis of masculinity means that he'd prefer not to pull the trigger.

While Alan makes no professional headway, he is troubled by a lump in his back which is only worsened by emergency self-surgery and contraband moonshine. He ends up in hospital where he encounters an enigmatic and sultry female doctor called Zahra (Sarita Choudhury, pictured below).While Tykwer’s dancing narrative style includes savvy nods to Groundhog Day, A Hologram for the King doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It briefly reports on the hellish conditions suffered by Filipino guest workers and flirts with the difficulty of being a woman in a phallocratic society. But is it in fact an intercultural romance and plea for international understanding, or a soft-centred picaresque adventure about second chances in midlife? It's also that extreme rarity, a Saudi comedy whisked into a shrewd commentary on US impotence as globalisation steals American jobs.

And yet it’s not quite any of the above. Tykwer, who made his name with Run, Lola, Run, has taken on unmanageable novels before in the shape of Cloud Atlas and Perfume. This visit to the Middle East is never quite as flawed as Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, whose quirky charms shrivelled up on screen. DoP Alexander Berner has a fine time pointing his camera at the desert. But it feels like a missed opportunity. Attending a Danish embassy rave, Alan meets Sidse Babett Knudsen’s expat worker (a mostly pointless cameo for Borgen’s statsminister) who attempts to rip his kecks off. “Would you like to hear a really good joke?” he suggests as an alternative to sex. A Hologram to the King seems to know only quite good ones. What’s left is the pleasure of Hanks, the same as he ever was, in an inconsequential shaggy dog tale. 

 

TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)

Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks (pictured below) and Mark Rylance

Captain Phillips. Piracy drama prompts bravura all-action display from director Paul Greengrass and captain Hanks

Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic

Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson as PL Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney track the journey of Mary Poppins from page to screen

Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism

Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission

PLUS ONE TURKEY

Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie

 

Overleaf: watch the opening sequence of A Hologram to the King

X-Men: Apocalypse
Adam Sweeting

It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.

Sing Street
Matthew Wright

He did it Once. He did it with Begin Again. Sing Street is Irish writer and director John Carney’s third hymn to music’s inspiring power for his characters to find themselves. Almost too cute for its own good, it’s targeted at the feel-good market with the precision of one of those cruise missiles that can navigate up a jihadi’s u-bend. If you don’t see it on a date, you might just as easily watch it with children, grandparents, or your long-lost step-sister from Patagonia.

Mustang
Graham Fuller

Teenage girls in the West who routinely abuse their parents for imposing midnight curfews, cancelling suspicious sleepovers, and insisting bra straps be concealed should hope that they are not suddenly dragged along to see Mustang. 

Green Room
Nick Hasted

Adding the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to their set-list when they find themselves playing an Oregon roadhouse filled with neo-Nazis isn’t where The Ain’t Rights’ trouble starts. It’s when this hardcore, hard-up punk band stumble on a woman’s murder by a fellow neo-Nazi afterwards, then get bundled and locked into their dressing-room with her knife-stuck corpse, that their nightmare begins.