film reviews
Man Up
Katherine McLaughlin

American actress Lake Bell turns in a rather charming performance in a romcom written by newcomer Tess Morris, who handles the insecurities of a thirty-something woman looking for love in a funny and energetic way.

There's a manic screwball edge to the comedy and some witty one-liners but also present are some of the worst pitfalls of this genre. The Inbetweeners director, Ben Palmer, takes the reins in a film which dashes across famous London landmarks and the back roads of suburban England with verve. When Nancy (Lake Bell) is gifted a romantic self-help book by a woman on a train who’s due to meet a blind date at Waterloo station she becomes embroiled in a case of mistaken identity. She takes a chance, steals her blind date, a forty-something man named Jack (Simon Pegg) and ends up having a wonderful time.

There's some Richard Curtis-style surface level humour in the supporting characters who fill the desperate weirdo quota

That is, until he finds out she's not who she says she is and they wind up on an incredibly awkward double date with his ex. Morris and Palmer inject the first half of the date with a spontaneity that superbly captures the excitement of meeting a potential suitor who could end up to being the one. Morris also does a fantastic job of making her lead characters as fully rounded as possible within the constraints of the romantic comedy formula. Though there's some Richard Curtis-style surface level humour in the supporting characters who fill the desperate weirdo quota, her two leads are brilliantly sketched.

Jack is suffering from a broken heart, his bitter ways and head-in-the-clouds attitude threatening to ruin his chances of finding a new partner. We first meet Nancy in a hotel psyching herself up to attend a wedding reception: she's working on her self-esteem and confidence via a handy to-do list which includes getting stronger thighs. Morris makes Nancy a wholly relatable character and nicely balances her cynicism with a healthy dose of sincere positivity. Olivia Williams appears as Jack’s soon to be ex-wife in a role that doesn't really offer much other than a stereotype. Considering Morris makes fun of the fact that Jack is initially set up with a 24-year-old it's a bit odd that he eventually finds a romantic connection with someone 10 years his junior and younger than his ex.

Still, it's better than the alternative and backs up the idea within the film that there is no special recipe in the quest for a partner. It's all about the spark. Lake Bell’s British accent is spot on and her ability to switch between cracking jokes and emotionally wrought is impressive indeed. Simon Pegg is finely tuned to the everyman character and his performance recalls his endearing early work from Shaun of the Dead. They make for an amiable pairing in a hugely enjoyable and fast-paced comedy.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Man Up

Timbuktu
emma.simmonds

The imposition of a brutal jihadist regime is relayed with formidable articulacy and a surprising lightness of touch in this gut-wrenching drama from Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako. Although its narrative events are as horrifying as those of any thriller Timbuktu avoids the manipulative tricks of genre cinema.

Danny Collins
Matt Wolf

Al Pacino gives it his barnstorming all as Danny Collins, an ageing, coke-rattled rocker who calls it quits in order to reconnect with his family and recharge his life. Sentimental (but not brazenly so) and buttressed by an ace supporting cast, the film finds Pacino hurtling through his 70s in irresistibly energiser bunny mode. Whereas such contemporaries as Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson have pretty well faded from view, there's plenty of life in this celluloid mainstay yet.   

The New Girlfriend
Nick Hasted

François Ozon’s sly fascination with radical family units takes another, surprisingly gentle twist here. Based on a Ruth Rendell story but equally inspired by French protests against gay marriage, this is an affecting romcom starring a secret male transvestite and a woman, brought together by their love for the same dead person.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Kieron Tyler

A skateboarding female vampire in a striped Brêton top. A James Dean look-alike with a junkie father. A prostitute as confessor. Spaghetti western-influenced music. The black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing elements brought together in what is being promoted as the “first Iranian vampire Western”.

The accuracy of the geographic tagging will be returned to in a few paragraphs, but one thing is clear about the self-consciously quirky A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: it’s a unique proposition.

Only Angels Have Wings
Demetrios Matheou

Howard Hawks and Cary Grant made five films together. Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was A Male War Bride and Monkey Business were all screwball comedies, made by two of the genre’s leading exponents. As an adventure film, Only Angels Have Wings was the odd one out, but certainly no ugly duckling.

Mad Max: Fury Road
Adam Sweeting

There is still much to be said for George Miller's original 1979 Mad Max, a cheap but ferocious tale of rape, murder and vengeance in a gang-infested dystopia. However, only two sequels later, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) found the franchise blimping out into a steroidal freak-show. After a 30-year intermission, Fury Road is much more of the latter, now saturated with digital enhancements while almost dispensing with plot entirely.

Clouds of Sils Maria
Demetrios Matheou

When Hollywood characters revisit their youth it tends to be through the school reunion, with generally trite results; how typical of a French filmmaker, and of the cerebral, cinephile Olivier Assayas in particular, that his character should be an actress, who is pushed towards midlife crisis by a role.

A Fuller Life
Graham Fuller

A master of visceral cinema, Samuel Fuller (1912-97) directed 23 features during his exemplary career, writing 21 of them and an unquantifiable number of others. Clips from many appear in A Fuller Life, an affectionate documentary conceived, co-produced, directed, and introduced by Samantha Fuller, his proud daughter, and culled, word for word, from Fuller’s posthumous autobiography, which was co-authored by his wife Christa Lang Fuller (the documentary’s executive producer) and Jerome Henry Rudes. Oddly, those clips weren’t really needed.

A Royal Night Out
Matt Wolf

The ongoing penchant for all things royal reaches a momentary impasse with A Royal Night Out, an eye-rollingly silly imagining of what the young Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth might have got up to on VE Day. Its release timed to coincide with the pro-monarchy rush of feeling that the latest royal birth has only intensified, Julian Jarrold's film will please those who want to feel as if they're vaguely au fait with the House of Windsor while getting to glimpse some rather grand houses in the process.