CRIMSON PEAK

(Guillermo Del Toro, 2015)

I have a problem with a group of filmmakers who often seem to put production design before storytelling. Oddly, all of them favour a sort of gothic "stylishness" in their work: elaborate sets, lush costumes and rich lighting combine with overripe narratives, bad dialogue and ostentatious camera motion. Tim Burton is perhaps the high priest of such cinema, joined on occasion by the likes of Terry Giliam. And sometimes Guillermo Del Toro.
Del Toro switches from the more action end of pulp (Hellboy I & II, Blade 2, Pacific Rim) to a more gothic, personal sensibility (The Devils Backbone, Pans Labyrinth) every few films, and in Crimson Peak he is - ever the synthesist - paying homage to Hammer and Mario Bava among others, with the story of a rich young woman, Edith (Mia Wasikowska, playing a dull character but still sympathetic) lured from her comfortable life in Buffalo NY by dashing, sensitive Sir Thomas Sharp (Tom Hiddleston). HE woos her against her suspicious father's wishes, and when her father is mysteriously murdered, she marries Thomas and leaves America only to arrive in a sort of Gothic Disneyland in the form of his crumbling, spooky mansion in 'Cumberland". This he shares with his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Of course there are strange goings-on at the mansion. Ghosts prowl the halls, the clay beneath is seeping up through the floor (the house itself seems to bleed), and Lucille and Thomas both act strangely.
Crimson Peak is not remotely the horror film it has been sold as. There are no real scares here; rather it is a gothic romance with some violence and thrills along the way. And while I find Del Toro's visual imagination pedestrian and predictable in this mode, this film is still ravishingly beautiful (credit to cinematographer Dan Lausten for that), and fun it its silly way.
The performers give it conviction. Charlie Hunnam (as the white knight set on rescuing Edith) and Hiddleston are both a little stiff and awkward but that suits the material. Chastain has a great time as Lucille, particularly in the last act, when truths are revealed and Del Toro can indulge himself.

THOR: THE DARK WORLD

(Alan Taylor, 2013)

The success of the Marvel project - a vast, overarching series of interlinked blockbusters starring the companies most famous characters (with the exception of the X-Men and Spider-Man, owned by rival studios) has begun to sink into the films themselves. The Avengers was such an enormous success that there is a winning feeling of confidence flowing through the two post-Avengers Marvel movies; Iron Man 3 and now Thor: The Dark World. If Kenneth Branagh's original film had the difficult job of introducing a fiddly concept to the general public, Taylor's film dives headlong into the complex mythology of the character and his world, presuming that they will already like and know the character enough to go with it.
So this film is a fast-paced romp through the sci-fi, fantasy and super-hero genres; tremendously assured in its world-building, layering detail onto our understanding of Asgard and the nine realms while awkwardly positioning a familiar plot involving the death of the universe due to an ultimate weapon into place. Christopher Eccleston, largely wasted, plays Dark Elf Malekith, very much a Star Trek villain in the wrong universe, seeking the Aether, an ancient substance that can transform matter into dark matter. This brings him into contact with his old enemies on Asgard, where Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his Warriors Three have been striving to bring peace to the nine realms after the actions of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in the first film and The Avengers. Then there is Thor's love interest from the first film, Jane Foster (Nathalie Portman) still lovesick for the Asgardian in London, where she stumbles across a strange red substance...
While the spectacle is a given, what works well in the two Thor films is the humour, twinkling away at the ridiculousness of the concepts, but never making fun of them. This is a big part of the appeal of Hemsworth's performance - he is charismatic, but funny about it, charmingly aware of himself - but also of the film itself. The way Foster is introduced - on an awkward date with Chris O'Dowd, asking about her "guy trouble" and nicely oblivious to the fact that the guy is a Demi-God - is a good example of this. Thor crumpling himself into a car and jealously asking about this rival (Fosters response: "Seriously?") extends the joke, and the lightly "realistic" response of many smaller characters to the outsized events occurring around them frames the action in a pleasingly ironic light.
Yet it still works very nicely as pulp. The fight scenes are plentiful and pleasurable, the design and effects making this version of Asgard even more expansive than the one we saw in the original film. The smaller Asgardian characters - Rene Russo's Frigga and Idris Elba's Heimdall, particularly - are given great action beats, while Hiddleston's Loki gets to strut his stuff. He and Hemsworth have great chemistry, and the decision to team them up is a solid one, giving the film a very different dynamic.
Of course it all comes down to the usual super-hero bullshit: destruction of property, a one vs one fight involving huge punches, and a final powerful effort. But it's always staged well, and that Marvel confidence sells it.

THE AVENGERS

(Joss Whedon, 2012)

I've long wondered how they could possibly make an Avengers movie work. How to contain all those big, mythic icons? How to give each character enough room and time to do them justice? How could any blockbuster possibly be Epic enough, huge enough to replicate the storylines the Avengers characters feature in in their Marvel comics adventures? And beyond that, how to stop it looking just a little bit silly when Thor, Captain America, the Hulk and Iron Man are all onscreen at the same time?
Joss Whedon has found answers to all those questions, and in doing so, he's fashioned one of the best summer blockbusters of the last few years, a massive spectacle shot through with wit, lots of action and the fun that should be present in any good Super-Hero film.
Part of the miracle of The Avengers is that it exists at all. Marvel Studios' ambitious long-range planning - using the Iron Man films, Thor, the Incredible Hulk and Captain America as prequels, each containing elements that linked in to the overall tapestry of the Marvel Universe - looked like folly from a distance, but it pays off handsomely here, as fans of those films will find deeper resonances in this one, with character arcs maintaining consistency with each of the stories of these heroes.
The plot involves Loki (Tom Hiddleston), vengeful brother of Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his plan to use the Tesseract (last seen in Captain America) an ancient energy source, to bring an Alien Army to Earth in order to take over the planet. Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) Director of Super Intelligence-Espionage organisation SHIELD, reactivates an old plan to gather together various super-powered "freaks" to form a Strike Force in defence. Only these heroes are a volatile mixture; from the tension between man-out-of-time Captain America (Chris Evans) and flippant playboy Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) to the very existence of Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Thor's links with Loki, they are, as Hulks human form Banner puts it, "A time bomb".
A film this big, with so many important characters and plot elements to line-up, needs a strong hand orchestrating it, and Whedon proves to be just that. He keeps the exposition short and snappy, sprinkles the first hour with solid action beats which also function as character development - the first meeting between Thor, Captain America and Iron Man establishes their differing approaches nicely - and gives everybody something to do. Nobody is lost in this ensemble. Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow may be the only two Avengers without powers, but they each get big scenes and moments to shine.
Hiddleston has a great time as Loki, playing him as a ripe old pantomime villain, fond of the sound of his own voice, in love with his own arrogance and so blinded by a vividly-suggested hatred he will stop at nothing to get what he thinks he wants. His explosions of brattish temper are nicely played.
Evans, Hemsworth and Downey Jr all have confident handles on their characters, giving their scenes - especially together - a pleasingly natural spark. Downey Jr gets most of the gags, and delivers them with aplomb, while Evans' Captain America is all about principal and old-fashioned heroism. He has one action beat at the climax which is beautifully done, giving some sense of what his character is meant to mean. Hemsworth's scenes play a little like scenes from Thor, but he communicates his character's bemused affection for humans and his horror at his brothers actions. Ruffalo is the only newcomer, and his Banner is subtly wary of everything, especially himself, but also dryly funny and fearful of nothing.
Team dynamics has long been a Whedon specialty, present in his work for tv on Buffy and Firefly, and that means that the scenes of all these characters standing around together, bickering and wise-cracking are justnas entertaining as the big action sequences. This may be the funniest action film vie seen in a while, with some beautifully timed one-liners to alleviate the mounting tension as the colossal finale looms.
And it is colossal; the final half hour or so shows alien army invading and their fight with the Avengers in the streets and skies and on the rooftops of Manhattan. This is everything a little boy or girl reading super-hero comics wants from a super-hero film. It is Epic, absolutely immense in scale and yet filled with character detail and brilliantly satisfying action beats. Super-hero films often struggle with endings, many devolving into vague, incoherent lightshows, others resorting to simple, brutal fisticuffs. Whedon seems to understand this, and his approach - treating this like a War film - really works. Seamus McGarvey's cinematography is key here; visceral and immersive, it ensures that this story is grittily human throughout, no matter how fantastic its treatment of gods and monsters may be. The sense of peril and involvement makes it more rousing than the climax of any other Marvel movie, and it contains so many rich geekbait moments it's dizzying. This is the Hulk done right, cutting loose in some awesome scenes of destruction while all the other heroes do too. The mix of tremendous spectacle and comedy - those gags never stop - is exhilarating.
There are weaknesses here; it is too long, the first hour slightly disjointed, the soundtrack is utterly forgettable, the cosmic stuff rings badly against the rest, and its all patently ludicrous. And yet, against all odds, it works. It really works.

WAR HORSE

(Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Steven Spielberg's gifts and his flaws are so bound up in one another, it can be hard to divine exactly why some of his films work, and why others do not. War Horse is a perfect example of that.
For the last few years Spielberg has seemingly been engaged in a project to make "old" films by modern means. War Horse, then, could very well have been made in the 1940s or 50s. That period entirely suits Spielberg in that it is entirely sexless, warmly, unashamedly sentimental, and founded on simple but extremely strong visual storytelling. It uses the horse of the title, named "Joey" by the boy who raises and trains him on Dartmoor in Devon, to string together an episodic series of vignettes along the front during the Great War. Joey is sold to a Cavalry Officer who rides him into battle, then used by the Germans as an ambulance horse and to pull Artillery, then found by a sickly French girl, then bonded over by an Englishman and a German in No Mans Land..this way we get a sort of panorama of the War.
The source material is a Childrens novel by Michael Morpurgo, and it has the simplicity and directness of the best material for children. But in some ways that brings out the worst in Spielberg. The characters are all cardboard cut-outs, the good guys all warmth and kindness, the bad guys all cruelty and pure meanness. The sentimentality is at times overwhelming, the world Spielberg creates idealised and as simplified as the characterisation. This is a First World War somewhat softened for a general audience, the true horror and gore suggested rather than shown, as Spielberg acknowledges the brutality and harsh reality of War but largely, and characteristically, chooses to focus on the essential decency of the people who populate his world.
And yet, he remains a singularly talented storyteller, and there are passages of effortless brilliance here, filled as it is with beautiful imagery, compulsively watchable, and, despite that wretched sentimentality, much that is extremely moving. The characters may be cartoonishly broad, but they are played by a brilliant cast of British actors with class and wit, and the nature of that episodic structure dictates that none of the stories drags on for too long. The horses, of course, are fabulous.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA

(Terence Davies, 2011)

Terence Davies seems one of those artists who only truly operates at full capacity when he is intimately, personally connected with his material. His early work, all of it nakedly autobiographical, is where he built his reputation, and is extraordinary. He arrived seemingly fully-formed; a confident style in place, his thematic obsessions obvious straightaway, and Still Voices, Distant Lives and The Long Day Closes are both fully realised and quite masterful in their mining of Davies' own boyhood experiences in Post-War Liverpool. Since then, his feature work - adapting Classic novels for The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth - has been stylish and powerful, in a muted, repressed fashion, but lacking the spark of greatness of his first films.
The same could be said of The Deep Blue Sea. An adaptation of a Terrence Ratigan play, it finds Davies back in his favourite era - "around 1950" - meaning that the period recreation is fastidious, beautiful and just a smidgen enbalmed. While his period films are all located in a precisely detailed world, it is the soulful quality to that world which makes it so warm and distinctive, and that is evident here too, in the impromptu singalongs in cosy pubs and a Tube platform turned Blitz bomb shelter, in the small kindnesses of strangers. Yet the beautifully darkened pallette and the finely arranged set design - all of it making Weisz's red coat seem to glow in the dark - are a trifle suffocating in their perfection.
The story is a study of a dying relationship. Weisz's character is trapped in a polite marriage with an older man (Simon Russell Beale, splendid), a Judge dominated by his spitefully puritan, wealthy mother. When she meets a dashing, emotionally immature ex-RAF pilot named Freddie (Tom Hiddleston) she discovers the pleasures of physical passion for the first time and her life is changed. She leaves her husband and moves in with Freddie but his limitations make them ultimately incompatible, and in the opening scene we see her attempt suicide.
Weisz is tremendous throughout, presenting a complex, intelligent woman, bewitched by sexual rapture and all too aware of how it is ruining her life, perceiving his flaws but not caring, ashamed of herself yet desperate for him still. Hiddleston plays Freddie as a big child, all sunshine and jokes in good times, but throwing tantrums and storming off when it gets difficult.
Though Davies does a good job opening out the play, chopping up the chronology, using a stunning and mostly wordless opening sequence to relay much of the backstory, the fact the the majority of the action occurs in two locations makes it hard to forget the theatrical origins of the piece. That means it's hard to know who is responsible for the slightly chilly emotional tone; Davies or Rattigan. This is a world with a generally calm, stiff upper lip surface, broken by Hester and Freddies passion, but mainly containing it's emotional storm deep within.
Somehow that translates into a film where we watch the characters struggle with strong feelings while feeling little ourselves.
That is a small sin in such a controlled and confident piece of cinema which frequently reaches sublime heights, but it is still a sin.

THOR

(Kenneth Branagh, 2011)

Thor seems a tricky Super-Hero property to adapt to cinema. The mix of cod-Shakespearean Epic Sci-fi and fantasy myth with more generic earthbound Super-Hero stories is an awkward one, and even Jack Kirby, the character's legendary creator, struggled with comfortably balancing both in his comics. Which is what makes Kenneth Branagh's Thor such a pleasant surprise.
It confidently addresses the Asgardian material straightaway, zipping through some dense but crucial exposition with the aid of a voiceover from Anthony Hopkins - who makes this messy mix of myth and various genres sound epic and suitably grandiose - and some strong, vividly imagined production design. The principal characters are established early on, the emotional conflicts that underpin the narrative clear and primally effective. The antagonists here are warring brothers, and Branagh never really loses sight of that. Such a strong dramatic through-line allows the film to take all sorts of tangents, introduce a few too many characters and even flirt with other genres - most obviously a decidedly 80s-style fish-out-of-water comedy - but maintain some emotional impact.
The scenes on Earth are nicely-grounded by limited ambition, all being set in or around a small New Mexico town, and play Thor's responses to his new circumstances and companions well, even if Natalie Portman is wasted here in a role that only demands she be beautiful.
Chris Hemsworth is a massive element of the film's success; funny and charismatic, he possesses a sort of twinkly old-school masculinity seemingly available only to Australian leading men right now. His work suggests a young Russell Crowe in that he is entirely credible in both the action and dramatic scenes, and Thor's journey from arrogance and hot-tempered impulsiveness to a more mature and considered feeling for his world and responsibilities is believable and effectively played. Hiddleston is just as good, making Loki a very modern villian, damaged, insecure and complex. They are supported by a host of capable - and mainly British, in the Asgard scenes - character actors.
The Super-Hero stuff, when it does come, is solidly done, although the best action scene comes when Thor is a mere mortal fighting his way through soldiers in the rain, shorn as it is of the inconsistent CGI which mars some of the rest of the film.
Reminiscent to some extent of both Richard Donner's Superman the Movie and Gary Goddard's dreadful 1987 Masters of the Universe, Thor is surprisingly warm and funny for such a big, anonymous Studio production. Its visuals - Branagh's seeming obsession with Dutch angles aside - are generally slick and occasionally impressive, its pacing superb, and above all it never forgets to be fun, as any movie about a man with a magic hammer must be.

ARCHIPELAGO

(Joanna Hogg, 2010)

Featuring no music, no camera movement and no plot, Hogg's second film is a quietly dazzling study in middle class English manners. Observing some members of a family - a fragile mother and her two grown up children - holidaying off-Season in the Isles of Scilly, the film traces a few overcast and windy days as they delicately dance around one another and the two outsiders who flit in and out; an attractive young cook they have hired to make their food for the duration of their stay and an artist, an old family friend painting island landscapes.
Tensions are evident from the first conversation, when Edward, the son, and his sister Cynthia play a passive-aggressive bargaining game over who sleeps in which room. Edward wins, filling the poky attic bedroom with his lanky frame and establishing himself as a self-conscious martyr from the off, a status underlined by his divisive plan to volunteer as an AIDS awareness worker in Africa.
Hogg finds a halting poetry in the pauses and non-sequiters employed by people with little to say to each other, as conversations peter out and silences swell into rooms. Tension bubbles up in a couple of clenched not-quite arguments and finally explodes in two overheard offscreen screaming matches during which Hogg, ever aware of the awkwardness in any given situation, shows us the reaction of people in other rooms, their strained grimaces and furrowed brows.
The most agonising scene, however, is Cynthia's painfully English complaint about an undercooked guinea fowl in an empty restaurant during which everyone else remains perfectly blank. The aftershocks are still felt at the end of the film, by which time nothing much has changed and yet we feel that everything may have.
Hogg's shooting style is precise and controlled. The majority of scenes take place indoors - the same rooms enjoy the same camera set-ups time and again - with muted, natural light, and the lowering skies occasionally make the exteriors feel just as claustrophobic. She avoids close-ups, so that her people are always shot in relation to each other, emphasising their conflicts and isolations (Edward's awkward flirtation with Rose, the cook, is illustrated primarily through their body language) and ensuring that two late close ups have a sizeable impact. She finds some lovely shots on this small stage, but the film's chief pleasure, aside from the excellent performances, is Hogg's surgical skewering of a certain kind of English middle class dysfunctionalism.
Here the key figure is the unseen father who has chosen (perhaps wisely, on reflection) to remain at home. Mocked by his son and criticised by his wife, his absence is crucial, telling and perhaps the most interesting silence in a film of silences.