film reviews
London Road
Matt Wolf

So many plays and musicals are adapted from films (Bend it Like Beckham is up next) that it comes as something of a throwback to find a film that takes as its source an acclaimed musical play. The sheer fact that there is a movie of London Road is doubly extraordinary when one considers that the widely acclaimed theatre production from 2011 was anomalous even as a stage show, let alone transposed to the screen. A piece of verbatim theatre conceived very much without take-home numbers but scored to the jagged, often discordant music of the composer Adam Cork, London Road seemed to want to shift the landscape of what the musical theatre could look and sound like. So the happy surprise, from this corner at least, is that the film version is even better. 

The writer Alecky Blythe took her tape recorder into the homes of the inhabitants of the Ipswich street that has given the show and now the film its title and was at the epicentre of the shock waves sent out nationally in 2006 when a forklift truck-driver by the name of Steve Wright and from that very road was found guilty of the murder of five prostitutes.

Weaving a skilfully layered mosaic of reaction and response that ranges from sorrow to outrage, paranoia through to something approaching glee (one chap derides the murdered women as "foul-mouthed slags"), Blythe along with Cork and under the ever-watchful eye of Norris offer a portrait of a community under siege that is seen by the end to begin to heal: hanging baskets full of flowers are co-opted for their full metaphoric weight and then some. 

Onstage, in fact, the symbolic heft of the floral abundance was itself a bit, um, florid, and there was scant escaping the impression that we were watching a well-drilled team of actors pretending to be characters and a community that they were not. The performances, however technically accomplished, felt as if they were on the outside looking in, and it was difficult not to detect a whiff of condescension surrounding the enterprise, however inadvertent that surely was. (I remember pondering what Mike Leigh might have done with much the same material.) 

Well, what a difference a shift in genres can make. Making full use of the panoramic possibilities that film allows, Norris has widened out his perspective to up the emotional stakes while also deepening one's sense of an enclave that risks erosion from within faced with the prospect of a murderer in your midst. Norris's prowling camera teases us from the start with the repeated sight of an apparently solitary man, Dodge (Paul Thornley), who acts as a lightning rod for the gathering alarm that is seen to take over the citizenry as a whole. As before, our way into the narrative is via chatty single mum Julie (Olivia Colman, pictured above), whose gradually evident lack of empathy leads to the single most startling line in the piece – a remark, present as well onstage, that is best discovered for oneself. 

Colman is one of several starry additions to the ensemble that performed the play at the National, who have themselves been retained for the movie but sometimes in a smaller role. Lending putative box office wattage is Tom Hardy (pictured left) in a sturdy seven-minute turn as a know-all cabbie quick to emphasise that just because he has made a study of serial killers doesn't mean he is one. And, in an intriguing demotion of sorts that nonetheless plays to her strengths, the Olivier-nominated stage Julie, Kate Fleetwood, here is seen as the hooded representative of the working girls whose lives have been put at risk, her ever-furtive gaze of a piece with the suspicion that looks to be growing far more quickly (at least at first) than any of those necessarily symbolic baskets.

Working with an A-list cinematographer in Danny Cohen (Les Misérables), Norris lends a desaturated visual cool to proceedings whose holiday-time occurrences make for some chilling vignettes all their own: the eerie plastic Santa seen in the stage production reappears here, and there's a startling moment – mordantly funny in tone – during "It Could be Him" (one of the song titles) when mannequins in a men's clothing store become objects of suspicion and scorn. 

This director's confidence behind the camera exponentially amplified since his wildly OTT debut film Broken three years ago, London Road could be subtitled Restored or Made Whole in its climactic implication that those involved find a way forward, albeit at a grievous price: "it took [the prostitutes'] lives for them to help us," as is made clear. And through it all is Cork's insistent, sometimes jarring, always-arresting soundscape that trades in conventional musical theatre uplift for something more quietly forensic, Cork glimpsed near the end as a pianist who catches the Fleetwood character's eye some while after he and his colleagues have caught us in this rewarding film's grip.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for London Road

Jurassic World
Jasper Rees

Jurassic World opens on a close-up. The smooth creamy surface of an egg is shattered by a claw attacking it vexatiously from within. In no time at all a scaly little critter is peeping out at us. It took a mite longer for the latest in the Jurassic Park franchise to hatch. The last film was 14 years ago and this fourth instalment seems to have been on the development slate almost ever since. Now that it's here at last, what’s new?

The Damned: Don't You Wish That We Were Dead
Thomas H. Green

What Wes Orshoski’s new documentary points out, above everything, is how much pop success relies on an ordered narrative and an easily understood package. First-wave British punk band The Damned, on the other hand, wrote as many great songs as their peers, but their career has been a mess of random creativity, changing line-ups and dreadful business decisions. There is a telling moment where Rat Scabies, the original drummer, weeps as he recalls the one occasion the band had all their ducks in a line. With a major label deal, solid American management, and 1985’s chart-friendly Phantasmagoria album under their belt, they had returned to a plush studio to record the follow-up. “But we didn’t have the will to play,” he says, wiping tears from his eyes. It is almost as if chaos is what they thrived on.

Orshoski’s previous documentary was the likeable and subtly revealing Lemmy, about Motorhead’s perma-rock’n’roll frontman. With Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead he has taken on a much more convoluted tale, riddled with interweaving details and alternate versions that must have been nigh-on-impossible to marshal. He acquits himself admirably. Not least, there’s the fact that Rat Scabies, kicked out in 1995, and Captain Sensible, who remains in the band, have bitterly fallen out, something both return to uncomfortably throughout, especially a scene in which the former, wandering through an open market, falls into a bitter, vitriolic ramble, marinated in self-pity.

The Damned’s original line-up coalesced around the guitar skills and songwriting of Brian James. They were the first UK punk band to release a single (“New Rose”, October 1976), the first to have an album out (Damned Damned Damned, February 1977) and the first to tour the US (giving birth to the West Coast's version of punk). What’s made clear, however, is that while the Sex Pistols and The Clash were busy defining themselves to the wider public, The Damned were on one long juvenile bender, crawling along hotel balcony ledges to shit in each other’s beds, and the like. This line-up was the first of many to implode but a host of talking heads, from minor punk figures such as TV Smith (The Adverts) and Charlie Harper (UK Subs) to bigger fish, such as Duff McKagan (Guns’n’Roses) and Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders), make clear that The Damned offered jokey levity at a time when all was nihilism and year zero militancy. The film zings with their snappy, irrevererent humour, especially Sensible's. “You’re never going to have a good political discussion with Jerry Lee Lewis,” is the comparison Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra uses to explain their appeal.

It’s a convoluted biography, grounded in old footage alongside film of the band performing around the world in recent years, from Tokyo to Reading, eating endless pizzas backstage. Sensible comes over as a sharply intelligent, naïf mischief-maker while singer Dave Vanian is an enigma, very private, dryly humorous and intriguingly unknowable. Both of them look far younger than they have any right to. Their music blossomed in the late Seventies and early Eighties, exploring psychedelia – more on their Syd Barrett/LSD obsession would have been interesting. They even had proper chart hits, but the film gives a sense that everyone involved in The Damned is awaiting recognition, as well as financial recompense for an ongoing career full of great music. In that sense this is an unfinished story, made just as The Damned’s 40th anniversary approaches. Where many music documentaries have a similar dynamic arc – rise, fall, rise again – Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead is a fascinating, rambling saga that emanates a rich, sometimes morose, sense of what it's really like to have a whole life defined by the oh-so-brief explosion that was punk rock.

Overleaf: Watch the trailer for The Damned: Don't You Wish That We Were Dead

The Look of Silence
Kieron Tyler

Any suggestion that the companion piece to director Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, his disturbing documentary on the state-supported mass killings undertaken for Indonesia’s Suharto regime, could actually be a more troubling film might seem surprising. The Act of Killing was extremely unnerving. The Look of Silence is even more distressing, even more frightening. Inong, a death-squad leader interviewed in the new film, chillingly says, “if we didn’t drink human blood, we would go crazy.”

West
Tom Birchenough

As its title might suggest, Christian Schwochow’s West (Westen) takes us back to the time of Germany divided. It's almost a chamber piece, catching the very particular experiences of a woman and her young son who leave East Berlin and end up in a refugee centre in the city’s American sector, where they’re forced to reappraise their expectations of what their new life in the West will be.

Black Coal, Thin Ice
Tom Birchenough

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Winston Churchill’s famous words on Russia serve as a very apt verdict on Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo), the third film from Chinese director Diao Yinan. Its noir detective style pays homage to classic Hollywood tropes, but this is an unapologetically arthouse piece that impresses most for its gloriously dark visuals: it certainly captivated last year’s Berlinale jury, winning the Golden Bear there over Richard Linklater's Boyhood and other more approachable fare.

Queen & Country
Adam Sweeting

In Hope and Glory, John Boorman revisited the Blitz-battered London of his childhood, and managed to find infectious humour and optimism among the wreckage. Now, 28 years later, he travels back to the early Fifties for this belated sequel, depicting a Britain still exhausted from the European war while the conflict in Korea hinted at a different and scary new world.

Listen Up Philip
Nick Hasted

Artists can be selfish bastards. Yoko Ono didn’t pay her babysitters; Bob Dylan has frozen out nearly all his friends; Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, and William Burroughs shot his. Philp (Jason Schwartzman), the young novelist who sociopathically meanders through Alex Ross Perry’s new film, causes no fatalities. Which is where his positive qualities peter out. Whether contemplating his navel to Ph.D level, or harbouring petty grudges and explosive rages which would shame a two-year-old, Philip may be cinema’s most rampantly temperamental artist.

San Andreas
Matt Wolf

Time gets called on California in San Andreas, a bone-headed disaster movie that sends huge swathes of the West Coast toppling to its doom even as one particular family not only makes it through intact but is even enriched in the process. Who'd have thought that the demise of several cities full of unnamed people would act as a perverse sort of marriage counselling for a couple in nuptial distress?

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