We first see Lucy (Emily Browning) as a receptacle, letting a medical tube snake painfully deep down her throat. Australian novelist Julia Leigh characterises such behaviour as “radical passivity”, and her Jane Campion-mentored debut as director makes Lucy find its degrading limit.
This is the kind of film you would very much like to like. It’s a low-budget British effort with a perfectly decent cast who are all easy on the eye. It makes the most of the windswept Isle of Man, where so many films just take advantage of tax breaks while pretending they’re in Barbados. You would like to like it. Unfortunately, as with so many low-budget British films, it just doesn’t come up to the mark.
A movie about advertising and product placement entirely paid for by advertising and product placement? It's a Koh-i-Noor diamond of a concept, and zealous documentarian Morgan Spurlock has applied himself to his task with the efficiency of a Dyson vacuum cleaner and the tenacity of a corporate Salesman of the Month.
If you can judge a man by his friends then the volatile Joseph would be something of a contradiction. His best mate is looking death in the eye, riddled with sickness and regret (and by all accounts left that way by the lifestyle they both shared). Then there’s the wheeler-dealer prone to racist tirades. On the redemptive side is the charming, if porcelain-fragile friendship that he strikes up with dedicated Christian Hannah. It’s this friendship - and that which he also forms with a young, isolated boy on his estate – on which the film pivots.
Waiting for Woody Allen to turn in a half-decent movie is bit like inching through a recession. The green shoots of recovery are constantly hoped for, but slow to show. Now and then the new one will come along and seem marginally less dire, but prove all too chimerical. How many of the films in the last decade does anyone remember for the right reasons? And don't say Vicky Cristina Barcelona with its atrocious voiceover and pervy lesbo snog.
Saying that seven-year-old Sally Hurst (Bailee Madison) is experiencing a nightmare childhood would be a whopping understatement. An anxious child, medicated into submission by her mother, she’s been sent to live with her father in a spooky mansion where tiny teeth-snatchers call to her from the shadows.
"Barclaycard? This man's in no state to go shopping!" Thus we remember the credit card commercials which formed the "origin story" of blundering secret agent Johnny English, then known as Richard Latham. Better name in fact, but no matter. Eight years after his big-screen debut, English is back, older and even more stupid.
Lars von Trier wants us to see the big picture. When Terrence Malick similarly returned cinema to the cosmic with The Tree of Life, he tried to make us feel the terrifying wonder of creation as much as death. The prelude to Von Trier’s new film instead sees Earth smashing into an indifferent planet 10 times its size. What’s more, when that planet, Melancholia, hoves into view from its hiding place behind the sun, the famously depressive director has suggested the catastrophe is a symptom, even affirmation, of his heroine Justine’s malaise.
John Madden's mainstream remake of Israeli thriller Ha-Hov – The Debt – features three Mossad operatives despatched to Sixties Berlin on an Eichmann-style mission to kidnap a former Nazi and escort him to Israel for trial.