MACBETH

(Justin Kurzel, 2015)

Macbeth is - by something like common consent - the most cinematic of Shakespeare's plays. It is noirish in its dramatic setting, dark actions and darker characters, its blood and witchcraft and murder and seduction. It is also uncommonly tight for Shakespeare; taut and relatively pacy. It has a tortured anti-hero, a femme fatale, a few rich supporting roles.
And yet: so many of the screen adaptations of the Scottish play mess it up. Too slow, too literal, too gothic, too stagey, too handsome, too cheap, too silly. Always off somehow. Only Roman Polanski really made a decent fist of turning it into a movie (Orson Welles' seems the least of his Shakespeare adaptations to me) and even that bloody, energetic iteration is a little stiff and awkward.
Well: Justin Kurzel seems to have been commendably focused on making his Macbeth work as a movie. He and his three writers throw out material that doesn't work, and recontextualise whole other scenes, sharpening some themes, abandoning others. His movie is ravishing; an every-frame-a-painting piece of cinema with brutally fine acting from a great cast.
Director of photography Adam Arkapaw films medieval Scotland with pin-sharp precision as if it was a post-Apocalyptic wasteland. There is life here, but somehow the landscape seems desolate, either battered by rain or baking under the sun. The early battle scene is an orgy of slow-motion blood and spittle in the air, intercut with the clamour of the carnage and Macbeth, still on the battlefield, hypnotised by the sight of the Wyrd Sisters.
The boldness of Kurzel's version is in making some definitive decisions about how Shakespeare's ambiguities should be read. So here, Michael Fassbender's Macbeth is firmly a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; hallucinating corpses (the dagger which appears to him is in the hand of a dead youth from that opening battle) and unable to control his seesawing emotions, he is easily swayed by his wife. For her part, Marion Cotillard's Lady Macbeth is mourning the loss of her own child. The film's opening shot is of the body of the Macbeth child, lying upon a funeral pyre. Both Cotillard and Fassbender play it as naturalistically as they can, mumbling and whispering much of the dialogue. There is no declaiming, little attempt at iambic pentameter. Some lines vanish in an attempt to make scenes more believable and flowing. Fassbender is best in the early stages; numbed and hollow. Later he gets a little more mannered and hammy, but he is never less than magnetic. Cotillard is beautifully vulnerable and emotional.
The rest of a terrific cast match them, especially an (as usual) intense Sean Harris as MacDuff. All contribute to the sense of mounting dread throughout, as does the score by Jed Kurzel and Arkapaw's immense work, which make Macbeth work as a movie in a way that too few Shakeseare adaptations can match. It is beautiful, emotional, visceral and exhilarating.
It is also confirmation that Kurzel is a great talent.

THE WORLD'S END

(Edgar Wright, 2013)

As befits the final film in the "Cornetto" trilogy, The World's End is a genre mash-up with a thematic focus on friendship and extended adolescence. Just like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, its distinctively English comic approach to genre works brilliantly throughout. But it adds a little something - it is darker, deeper, more resonant and moving.

Written by leads Simon Pegg and Nick Frost alongside director Edgar Wright, the story follows five late thirtysomething friends from the Southern English town of Newton Haven as they return home for another go at the "Golden Mile", the legendary pub crawl they last attempted as teenagers. The whole thing is the idea of Gary King (Pegg, better than he has ever been), who still dresses, talks and thinks as he did back then. He rounds up the old gang, all of them having moved on with their lives - Oliver (Martin Freeman) a slick estate agent, Peter (Eddie Marsan) a car salesman, Stephen (Paddy Considine) a building contractor and Andy (Frost) a solicitor. They are reluctant, but out of a mixture of sentimental nostalgia and pity for Gary, they agree to return. Old tensions rise to the surface during their  awkward crawl, however, before everything gets a lot weirder - Newton Haven seems to have undergone some sort of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers type of episode, and soon the five are fighting and running for their lives.

With an entire cast populated with excellent British comic actors, The World's End is strongly characterised throughout; this is crucial when the comedy subsides somewhat in the last act and the science fiction comes to the forefront. The five principals create a nice and believable group dynamic, each tension sensitively traced and nuanced, their shared memories perfectly judged in their mix of self-mythologising and rueful embarrassment. 

But this is never a drama - it is always funny. There is a level of satire here, in the portrayal of a globalised world (cleverly referenced in the climax), loads of running gags and some brilliantly witty dialogue. The climax comes down to a very Douglas Adams argument between drunken men and a logical alien, and Wright knows how to put together an impressive action sequence on a relatively modest budget. Perhaps the only real disappointment here is that his direction feels somewhat muted after the tour-de-force of Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, but his storytelling is as seamless and powerfully simple as ever.

And any minor complaints should be balanced against how much more emotional and painful this film feels than the other "Cornetto" instalments. Gary King is a great comic creation, but there is a genuine melancholy to him too, and the other four "Musketeers" bring this out with delicacy and even some universality. The ending is dark too, but it feels earned and right somehow, without ever sacrificing laughs.

BLITZ

(Elliott Lester, 2011) It is perhaps a little surprising that films as utterly generic as Blitz still get made. That may be unfair. While the main plot thread here is unbelievably familiar and dull in genre terms - a gruff, uncompromisingly violent Detective hunts a maniacal serial killer on a cop-killing spree - the proliferation of sub-plots suggest an entirely different, more interesting film. Unfortunately, all they do is suggest. Set in a London captured by director Lester as a grimy, coldly magnificent concrete metropolis - he shoots architecture far more sensitively than he does people - it initially seems like a Jason Statham vehicle-by-numbers. The first scene finds Statham's Detective Brant witness some teen thugs attempting to break into a car outside his flat in the middle of the night. Of course he picks up a hurl - an excuse for the screenplay to pay some tribute to the source novel, by Irish crime author Ken Bruen, as Brant lectures the criminals on hurling being an Irish game mixing "hockey and murder" - and ventures out to inflict some punishment. But Statham, while undoubtedly the lead character, is only given a shade more screen time than the others who crowd the narrative here; Paddy Considine's Detective Nash, who wins Brant's grudging respect as a cop despite being "a poofter", Zawe Ashton's crackhead young PC Falls, Mark Rylance as a newly widowed Police Commander, and of course Aidan Gillen, never less than utterly over the top as the killer, Weiss. Then there are name actors in even smaller parts; Luke Evans as a Detective who gets involved with Falls and David Morrissey as a tabloid hack contacted by the killer. That all makes the film - a snappy 97 minutes - a thoroughly overstuffed bird, struggling to finish it's story lines and sacrificing any depth in, well, all of them. The cop vs killer plotline gets more time than anything else, but even then it feels thin, lacking the emotional weight or even narrative hook which might make it interesting. As it is, Gillen's charismatic hamming and Statham's reliable action-lead brooding make it merely watchable as we wait fortheir ultimate showdown. Considine, one fine monologue aside, is largely wasted along with everybody else. The action scenes are few - this is a thriller, not an action film - but nicely handled, and the whole thing is reassuringly slick and expensive-looking. What it reminded me of was Danny Cannon's forgotten Young Americans; an audition piece, awkwardly grafting American genre cliches onto a British base with questionable results.

SUBMARINE

(Richard Aoyade, 2010)

The first act is excellent; whipping by in an ostentatiously-directed blur of title cards, freeze frames, montages and jump-cuts, it feels very much like a debutant filmmaker indulging himself, and it's done with such brio and enthusiasm it can't help but charm. The debts to the Nouvelle Vague (L' enfance Nue and The 400 Blows in particular) are pronounced, as is the influence of a certain brand of quirkily deadpan American indie cinema (most obviously and damagingly Wes Anderson's superb Rushmore). All of this is suited to a coming of age tale of a young man in South Wales falling in love with a strange girl, and Aoyade has a fine eye and establishes a terrifically pungent sense of place early on.
But then the plot kicks in, involving parental marital difficulties and the New Age Guru who moves in next door, and despite fine comic turns from Noah Taylor and Paddy Considine, sporting an immortal combination of mullet and Mohawk, it all runs somewhat out of steam as that early energy dissipates. The Alex Turner songs on the soundtrack, while splendid in their own right, are a little too on the nose and trite in the context of the film, but the biggest problem here is that it's the kind of comedy which makes you smile but rarely laugh. Still, Aoyade conjures up some moments of genuine visual poetry, and is clearly a young filmmaker worth keeping an eye on.