Film

Swimming With Men

11/07/18

The Full Monty has so much to answer for. Since its initial success in 1997, there have been innumerable films about groups of men banding together in order to perform in front of audiences, and the makers of Swimming With Men are clearly hoping to find similar success. Herethe chosen skill is male synchronised swimming and, while there’s definitely the germ of a good idea at the heart of this endeavour, the resulting film never really manages to make its way out of the shallow end.

Eric Scott (Rob Brydon) is an accountant, currently going through a mid-life crisis. Thoroughly bored and disgusted with his day job, he somehow convinces himself that his wife, newly elected town councillor, Heather (Jane Horrocks), is having an affair with her boss. He promptly storms out of the family home to live in a nearby hotel and spends most of his spare time at the local swimming baths, working off his feelings of discontent. It’s here that he encounters a group of disaffected men who are learning synchronised swimming routines. They include handsome leader, Luke (Rupert Graves), former youth team footballer, Colin (Daniel Mays), and dodgy delinquent, Tom (Thomas Turgoose). Eric’s abilities with mathematics apparently make him an ideal addition to the collective and, pretty soon, with the help of swimming bath attendant, Susan (Charlotte Riley), they are training to enter the Male Synchronised Swimming World Championships. (If this strikes you as an unlikely occurrence, the film makers are keen to point out that a team from Sweden – who actually have small roles in the film – did exactly that a few years ago.)

But really, Swimming With Men fails to convince on so many levels, this is the least of the problems I have with it. There’s undoubtedly a timely message here about male bonding and the need for men to find a place where they can open up and talk about their unhappiness, but this film is a missed opportunity to fully explore the idea. Instead, the lazy, underdeveloped screenplay prefers to deal with simpler issues, but even then it doesn’t get them right, throwing up too many questions for comfort. Why is Brydon’s character so deluded? We are shown very little motivation for his destructive behaviour. And what really changes by the end?

There are also some less pressing  – but nonetheless niggling – issues. Why are several really excellent character actors given very little to do but splash around in budgie smugglers? And why is there no visible change over time in the physiques of men who are supposedly training hard for a World Championship?

Ultimately though, what really defeats the film is the fact that the sport of synchronised swimming, as performed by a group of amateurs, just doesn’t look very spectacular on the big screen. I find myself in total sympathy with the bunch of kids at a birthday party who are given a performance as a special treat and watch the resulting antics in bemused silence. (No wonder one of them feels the need to liven things up by putting a turd in the pool.) Indeed, it really says something when the film’s most memorable scene has the swimming team performing a spirited routine… on dry land.

This is a potentially interesting idea that fails to stay afloat and seems destined to sink without trace.

2.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Leave No Trace

11/07/18

Debra Granik’s latest offering is Leave No Trace, a movie every bit as haunting and memorable as her 2010 Best Picture contender, Winter’s Bone. Based on Peter Rock’s novel, My Abandonment, this is a slow, thoughtful and affecting piece, a considered exploration of what it means to live outside society, how much pressure there is to conform, to opt in.

Ben Foster is Will, an army veteran with recurring nightmares and an aversion to bureaucracy. He lives with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), in the wilds of Oregon’s Forest Park, which – although not far from the state’s bustling capital of Portland – is a vast, unpopulated area, dense with trees, and far removed from the ‘civilisation’ embraced by the city-dwellers. Of course they have to venture into town sometimes – Will picks up his prescription drugs from the veterans’ clinic, then sells them so that he can buy supplies of rice and beans and chocolate. But essentially they are survivalists, sleeping in a small tent, cooking over open fires, foraging for much of what they eat. They read, they play chess, they fend for themselves. They also practise being invisible, enacting ‘drills’ where they try to trace one another, preparing for an inevitable attempt from the outside world to capture them and draw them in.

When that outside world does invade, however, it proves to be a strong adversary, with teams of police and tracker dogs; Will and Tom cannot escape. Reluctantly, they leave their camp, and undergo a series of psychological tests to determine where they should be placed. Everyone they meet is kindly and polite; they are treated well. But they are not allowed to live the life they choose, and must try to fit in, whatever they believe. A well-meaning farmer (Jeff Kober) reads about them in the press and offers them use of a small house on his land. In return, Will must work for him, pruning, chopping and packing Christmas trees, in a not-so-subtle metaphor for the way his own true nature is being curtailed. The serried ranks of fir are so very different from the dense, lush forest they have left behind, and Will is desperately miserable. Ben Foster’s quiet embodiment of misery is one of the best things about this film: on the surface, he is doing what he’s asked, drawing little attention to himself. But it’s no surprise when he packs his bags, when he tells Tom that they are moving on.

Tom, though, is less elated to be leaving. She’s a teenage girl; she loves her dad and enjoys her life with him, but she’s learning to appreciate other people’s company; she’s excited – if nervous – about starting school. Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie’s performance is remarkable, as understated as Ben Foster’s, and devastatingly engaging. She doesn’t say much about how she feels, but it shows in her eyes, in her trembling chin.

At its heart, this is a coming-of-age story: Tom is growing up, growing away. And the life Will needs has little place for compromise; even a rural trailer park in Washington, run by the kindly Dale (Dale Dickey) is too structured, too populated for him to endure. So Tom is faced with a heartbreaking choice.

This is a gentle but fiercely intelligent study of what it means to be human and how we interact within our world. Will has been profoundly affected by the war he has fought in; he is a product of the society he now rejects. It’s not hard to understand how the simple beauty of nature is balm to his soul, and the cinematography substantiates that sense of wellbeing, the lush greenery embracing him and Tom in a verdant hug, as intimate and knowable as it is boundless and strange.

A lovely film, and well worth seeking out.

4.6 stars

Susan Singfield

 

Whitney

10/07/18

Whitney Houston was the proverbial golden girl. Born into a talented family – her Mother was Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick – she was blessed with an almost incandescent beauty and a singing voice that was quite simply thrilling to listen to. Of course she was always going to be a star and it’s little wonder that her version of  Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You is still the biggest selling record by a female artist ever. But her career also followed a depressingly predictable trajectory. A meteoric rise to stardom, following by a rapid descent into drug-fuelled oblivion. Why is it that so many successful pop stars follow that route? Why does having so much inevitably lead them to the feeling that they actually have nothing worth living for?

Of course, the popular opinion is that Whitney was a saint, led astray by her marriage to bad boy singing car crash, Bobby Brown – but what quickly becomes clear from Kevin MacDonald’s astute documentary, Whitney, is that the seeds of her self-destruction were sewn years before her success as a pop star. It was there in the family that closed ranks around her and effectively became her employees, in the pushy mother who groomed her for success and the interfering father who stole vast sums of money from her and eventually ended up suing her to the tune of a hundred million dollars. It was in the two brothers who first introduced her to drugs when she was still just a teenager and it was in the ever-hungry public who demanded everything from her when she was successful and yet voyeuristically relished her dramatic fall from grace. And of course, it was in the tabloids, as ever, waiting in the wings to feed on the misery…

Whitney isn’t an easy watch. At times, it’s downright heartbreaking. MacDonald has opened the film up to be more than just the standard pop star biography. He pulls in found elements that reflect the world over the turbulent years of her fluctuating fortunes, contrasting her sweet girl image with the ugly reality of war and race riots. Unlike Nick Broomfield, who also filmed a Whitney biopic this year, MacDonald has the full cooperation of the singer’s family and what they have to say about her life is sometimes frustrating and more often downright chilling. Towards the end of the film, a shocking accusation is made about a member of the family, one that is quickly backed up by others in the clan, and you begin to appreciate that this particular rabbit hole goes very deep indeed.

But Whitney’s talent shines through like a beacon, her superb voice even managing to make her rendition of The Star Spangled Banner (at the1991 Super Bowl game) a profoundly moving event. It’s as though her voice encapsulates all the pain she’s been going through for years, making it part of the fabric of her talent. Whitney fans may find this gives them a little more than they actually want to know, but it’s a powerful and affecting film that tells some uncomfortable truths.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney

 

Mary Shelley

09/07/18

It’s one of the most fascinating stories in the history of literature – how an eighteen year old girl, albeit the daughter of two respected writers and the partner of an acclaimed poet, managed to create one of the most seminal novels of all time – a book that has never been out of print since its release in 1818, one that has been filmed and staged countless times… and a book, moreover, that is a brilliant metaphor for womankind’s lot in the male-dominated society of the period.

Here, Mary is played by Elle Fanning, doing that sleepy-eyed, sulky thing she does so perfectly, while the role of Percy Bysshe Shelley is played by Douglas Booth. Indeed, at times, it’s hard to decide which one of them is the most photogenic. When we first encounter Mary, she’s sixteen years old, living with her father, the bookseller William Godwin (Stephen Dillane), her argumentative stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont (Joanne Froggat), and her stepsister, Claire (Bel Powley). Mary is obsessed with reading Gothic horror stories and is already making her first tentative attempts at writing fiction but, as her father tells her, she needs to stop imitating others and ‘find her own voice.’

On a rare visit to one of her cousins in Scotland, she encounters the handsome Percy Shelley and there’s an instant attraction between them. Summoned back to London because of Claire’s fictional ‘illness’, Mary is astonished when Percy turns up at her father’s bookshop, having enlisted William as his patron. It’s only a matter of time before Mary and Percy are in the throes of a full-blown romance. It’s not all plain sailing though. For one thing, there’s the fact that Percy already has a wife and daughter, a little detail that he has completely neglected to mention. But Mary manages to put her doubts aside. She’s smitten.

And then, to the complete disgust of polite society, the two lovers decide to run away together, taking Claire along for the ride. The three of them live a dissolute existence, struggling to make money and frittering away whatever they earn on alcohol and extravagant parties. Percy believes in free love and it isn’t long before, much to Mary’s dismay,  he’s drawing Claire into his amorous clutches. Then, the trio find themselves invited by Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) to stay at his villa in Switzerland, where he and his personal physician, Dr John Polidori (Ben Hardy), are currently holidaying – and where all the elements are in place for the creation of a Gothic masterpiece.

Haifaa al Monsour’s film sticks fairly closely to the facts and, despite the odd contemporary-sounding phrase, Emma Jensen’s screenplay easily manages to hold the attention. If Shelley comes across as a privileged idiot, he’s totally eclipsed by Byron, who, as portrayed by Sturridge, is easily the most slappable person in nineteenth century Europe, prone to making vile utterances about the superiority of men and engaging in macho posturing. Indeed, amongst the young male characters, only Polidori emerges as genuinely decent, though the treatment he experiences at the hands of the two poets might give him good cause to be surly.

This is a good movie, handsomely staged and capably directed. It may be the first time that the extraordinary nature of Mary’s achievement has been fully realised onscreen. If the film is a little short on fireworks, it’s nonetheless offers a fascinating insight into the scandalous events that surrounded the creation of Frankenstein.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

The Happy Prince

 

25/06/18

Oscar Wilde has been portrayed on screen several times already, most notably by Peter Finch in 1960 and by Stephen Fry in 1997. Now it’s Rupert Everett’s turn to ‘step up if you think you’re Wilde enough.’ Here, he’s gone the full Orson Welles: writing, directing and starring in this rather doleful look at the author’s decline after his brutal imprisonment for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality.

When we first meet Wilde in The Happy Prince, he’s a bloated, shambling vestige of his former self, living in squalid digs in Paris, dependent on handouts from near-strangers and a meagre monthly allowance from his long-suffering wife, Constance (Emily Watson). The story then cuts back in time to his release from prison, where he’s met in France by faithful friends, Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) and Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas), both of whom are keen to encourage him to rekindle his writing career. They urge him to stay away from Alfred Bosie Dougas (Colin Morgan), his former lover, but Oscar simply cannot help himself and, pretty soon, he and ‘Bosie’ are sharing a rat-infested apartment in Naples, living far beyond their means and squandering what little goodwill remains for them.

This is most emphatically a ‘warts and all’ story. Bosie comes across as insufferably unpleasant and, to be honest, Wilde isn’t particularly likeable either, demonstrating a callous tendency to exploit those who care about him. It would have been nice, perhaps,  to see a few more flashbacks to his heyday, in order to make us fully appreciate the charm he must once have possessed, a charm that in his latter years is wearing somewhat thin. As it stands, this is unremittingly sad stuff, as we are witness to his inexorable slide towards ignominious death. Still, there’s little doubting the power of Everett’s performance, which has the kind of grandstanding appeal that often attracts Oscars (think Gary Oldman as Churchill). The era is convincingly evoked and the use of Wilde’s popular fairy tale to frame the film is a nice conceit. There’s plenty to admire, but not really an awful lot to enjoy.

Harrowing and desperately bleak, The Happy Prince serves to remind us of one of history’s greatest injustices and the principal characters who played a part in it. It’s nobody’s idea of a fun night at the cinema, but it’s nevertheless a story that needs telling.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

 

 

Barry Lyndon

24/06/18

It’s one of the hottest days of the year and we’re in the Cameo cinema watching a film. (Yeah, I know. What else is new?)

Mind you, this is no ordinary film, but Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, which I haven’t seen since its original release in 1975. In many ways, it’s both his masterpiece and his most under-appreciated movie. It’s being shown here as part of a Kubrick season, all three hours and five minutes of it – complete with an interval for those who need the opportunity to empty their bladders. It is a quite extraordinary accomplishment, epic in scale, with some of the most gorgeous cinematography I’ve ever seen – courtesy of the late John Alcott, for which he won a well-deserved Oscar. Individual frames look like oil paintings and the night-time interiors, lit only by diffused candlelight, really manage to capture the feel of the period.

In eighteenth century Ireland, young Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neil) falls for his cousin, Nora (Gay Hamilton), and feels extremely slighted when she starts a flirtation with wealthy English cavalry Officer, Captain Quinn (Leonard Rossiter), a union that is widely encouraged by Nora’s impecunious family. When an impending marriage is announced, Redmond recklessly challenges Captain Quinn to a duel, the result of which forces him to leave home and head for Dublin, in order to lie low.

On the way there, however, he is robbed of everything he owns by a highwayman. This obliges him to enlist in the English army – which is just the start of a long and eventful journey for him, as his fortunes rise by the force of sheer good luck, and he travels the world courtesy of the Seven Years War. Eventually, he ends up as a professional gambler in England, where he sets his sights on Lady Honoria Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), a beautiful but melancholic married woman with an ailing husband. Pretty soon, the husband is dead and Redmond and Lady Honoria are married, but his presence is not appreciated by everyone, particularly by Lady Honoria’s young son, Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali), who sees Barry Lyndon (as he now calls himself) as a usurper to his late father’s title…

Based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray – whose witty narrative descriptions, read by Michael Hordern, regularly punctuate proceedings – this is old style movie-making of the kind we’ll probably never see again. No CGI here, folks: everything, from those lush landscapes to the expansive battle scenes, has been done for real. It’s interesting to watch Vitali (recently the star of documentary Filmworker) beginning what was to become a long and arduous relationship with Kubrick, going on to abandon acting in favour of becoming the director’s right hand man. Fascinating, also, to witness a wealth of notable actors in smaller roles – Hardy Kruger, Murray Melvin, Andre Morrell, Steven Berkoff… the list goes on.

As you’ll have gathered, I’m a huge fan of Kubrick’s work and what I particularly like about him is his eclecticism. It’s hard to believe this was directed by the same man who made The Shining… or A Clockwork Orange… or 2001: A Space Odyssey. The love and attention to detail lavished upon Barry Lyndon is quite frankly staggering and, no matter how appealing the weather, this is one opportunity that no true film fan can afford to pass up.

After all, the sun will be back another day. Sadly, Stanley Kubrick won’t.

5 Stars

Philip Caveney

 

In the Fade

23/06/18

In the Fade is unquestionably Diane Kruger’s film. As Katja Sekerci, she is more than the centre of the story: she is the story. We see everything through her eyes – witnessing only what she does. The prologue shows her wedding to Nuri (Numan Acar), newly released from prison after serving a sentence for dealing drugs, and then we move on to the present day: we’re in Hamburg, Germany; Nuri is a reformed character, working as a travel agent and tax advisor for fellow Turkish immigrants. They have a son, Rocco (Rafael Santana); they clearly love him very much. Katja leaves Rocco with Nuri in his office and heads off to spend the afternoon in a spa with her friend, Birgit (Samia Muriel Chancrin). When she returns, it’s to utter devastation: Nuri and Rocco have been killed in a terrorist attack, the work of neo-Nazis. Katja’s world shrinks to an open wound. There’s nothing else for her to do but fight for justice for her family.

It’s a bravura performance from Kruger, who rightly won the best actress award at Cannes last year: she’s in every scene, treading the line between bold and nuanced with absolute élan. Her pain is palpable, and her desire for revenge is human-sized; I like that she doesn’t become a super-vigilante, that her plans are fallible and credible. The second act (the courtroom drama) is cleverly drawn, the niceties of the justice system shown to be as necessary as they are flawed. If there is reasonable doubt, then there shouldn’t be a conviction – this has to hold true. Equally, the desire for vengeance is a fact of life; of course Katja can’t accept a verdict that allows the guilty to go free.

This is a difficult film to watch, but well worth the effort; it’s painful, but it’s got real heart. I like the way that writer/director Fatih Akin neither lionises nor demonises the Turkish community; similarly the police, the courts, the family. Katja and Nuri are not angels, but they don’t have to be. They have a right to justice too.

4.4 stars

Susan Singfield

Ocean’s Eight

19/06/18

I like Ocean’s Eight. I like its exuberance, its stellar cast, its slick plotting and its silliness. It looks great: as polished and meticulously groomed as the A-listers at the Met Gala, where the eponymous Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock), sister of the franchise’s previous lead, masterminds an audacious jewellery robbery.

What’s not to like? Well, it’s just another heist movie, albeit a well-told one – a slice of polished nonsense, not particularly memorable. And it’s VERY American in its glorification of the maverick, a veritable celebration of outlaws and their crimes. Can you imagine a British film on a similar subject where everything runs so smoothly, where the thieves are as sympathetically presented, where no one bungles anything? Ocean and her team are almost super-human. All that talent – it’s a shame it’s wasted stealing sparkly stones. But still.

It’s great to see this fine group of actors given the chance to have some fun, playing roles that are strong, cool, funny and exciting. They don’t have to be seductive or damaged or any of the other limited options usually available to mainstream-movie women over thirty. (Of the eight, only Awkwafina is still – just in her twenties: Anne Hathaway, Rihanna and Mindy Kaling are all in their thirties; Cate Blanchett and Sarah Paulson in their forties, and – almost unbelievably – Sandra Bullock and Helena Bonham-Carter are over fifty now. How did that happen?) They all look like they’re having fun, especially Blanchett, razzing around on her motorbike, exuding charisma.

The plot’s a pretty simple one, even if the plan within is fiendishly complex. Debbie Ocean has been in prison for the past five years, and has spent her time conceiving every detail of this heist. She wants to pull off this crime, not just for the riches it will afford her, but for the kicks, and to live up to her family name. If she can exact revenge upon her ex at the same time, well, why wouldn’t she? So she looks up her old ally, Lou (Blanchett), currently engaged in watering down vodka at a nightclub she owns, and lays out her idea. They assemble a team and away they go.

It’s a shame there’s not much jeopardy: once the group has been established, the film is pretty much a series of daring steps, each one successful, building towards the climactic moment when the diamonds are snatched. The boldness is impressive, but there’s not much to feel other than admiration for their cunning; it’s pretty much a one-note film.

James Corden’s appearance in the final act is fun: he’s a much vilified man, but I’m never really sure why. He’s always been a good actor, and he’s very funny here, with some laugh-out-loud lines that help to puncture the smugness that’s in danger of creeping in.

All in all, this is an enjoyable way to spend a few hours; sadly though, that’s all it is.

3.8 stars

Susan Singfield

Filmworker

18/06/18

Behind every great film director stands a whole horde of underpaid, overworked minions, whose very raison d’etre is to enable said director to get his or her vision up onto the big screen, exactly as it has been envisioned. As great directors go, few are as legendary as the late, great Stanley Kubrick. But Filmworker is not so much his story as that of one of those underpaid, overworked minions, in this case a man by the name of  Leon Vitali.

Vitali’s story is unusual to say the very least. In 1967, he went to the pictures to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and casually remarked to his companion, ‘One day, I’m going to work for that director.’ Vitali went on to be a pretty successful actor, appearing in all manner of films and TV shows – weirdly, I vividly remember his appearances in the comedy series, Please, Sir, when I was just a kid. And then, in 1975, he did indeed get to work with Kubrick, playing a major role in his lavish (and under-appreciated ) historical drama, Barry Lyndon. But Vitali was much more interested in the nuts and bolts of film making than developing a career in acting and, against all advice, he gave it up to become Kubrick’s right hand man, a role he fulfilled until the director’s death in 1999, shortly after completing filming on Eyes Wide Shut. In all the tributes and ceremonies that followed Kubrick’s death, Vitali was pretty much ignored – he didn’t even receive an invitation to an exhibition based around the director’s film legacy – and yet his loyalty and love for his former employer is all too evident in this compelling documentary, which provides an intriguing look into the four features they worked on together and makes me appreciate the nuts and bolts that underlie every movie.

It must be said that the picture of Kubrick that emerges from this story is not a particularly salutary one, even if Vitali won’t hear a bad word said about him. Kubrick seems to have relished piling tons of work onto his ‘gopher,’ relentlessly making him go over and over every tiny detail – but of course, it was this very attention to detail that made Kubrick the unique director that he was and Vitali seems to have been happy to take the punishment. It’s sobering though, to see the evident toll that such a brutal schedule has taken on Vitali’s health, leaving him a shadow of his former self. More importantly, though, it does make you admire his tenacity and loyalty in doing everything he can to ensure that Kubrick’s cinematic heritage remains as pristine as he himself would have wanted. Hardly surprising then, that the story ends with the news that Vitali is currently working on a new digital transfer of 2001.

While this certainly won’t be for everyone – a working knowledge of Kubrick’s films is, I believe, a definite advantage – I find this an intriguing and curiously affecting story. It also means that whenever I rewatch a Kubrick film, I’ll be thinking of the unsung hero standing at his shoulder, helping the creative wheels to run smoothly.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

Hereditary

14/06/18

The advance buzz about this film has been powerful. There have been comparisons to The Exorcist – the movie that in 1973, caused me to write my first ever film review, a habit that has continued unbroken ever since. In its central theme, however,  Hereditary is much closer to another classic, Rosemary’s Baby, but – while it certainly has much to recommend it – it’s not really in the same league as either of those other horror milestones; moreover, it’s fatally compromised by an ending that’s so risible, it actually causes audience laughter in the screening I attend.

After the death of her estranged and secretive mother, Annie (Toni Collette), an artist who specialises in recreating scenes from her life in miniature, starts to unravel a series of clues from the odds and ends her mother left behind. Her 13 year old daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), has clearly been powerfully affected by her grandmother’s death, behaving in a strange and very disconcerting manner, while her older brother, Peter (Alex Wolff), is more interested in the popular teenage pursuits of getting stoned and laid. Annie’s accommodating husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), just tries to keep everything rubbing along as best he can. But when Peter is a key player in a tragic and accidental death, something evil seems to settle around the house like a shroud, exerting an increasingly powerful grip…

The first thing to say about Hereditary is that first time writer/director Ari Aster has forged a powerful and highly effective debut. Eschewing the fast-paced jump cuts of many contemporary horror films, this is a real slow burner, a simmering pressure cooker that only gradually comes to the boil and manages to instil in the viewer an overpowering sense of creeping horror. The cinematography eerily manages to mix Annie’s doll’s house imagery with the actual interiors from the rambling, family home, while Toni Collette puts in an extraordinarily accomplished performance in the lead role, managing to convince us that she is genuinely terrified.

But then there’s that awful ending, which – to my mind at least – manages to destroy all the accomplishments that have gone before. And while I appreciate there’s a necessity to tie up the loose ends of the plot, it helps if that plot makes some kind of narrative sense. It must be said that other reviewers seem to have had no problem with this, so perhaps I’m just difficult to please – but trust me, the audience reaction on the evening I view this is pretty unequivocal. However, in an attempt to ensure fairness, I’ve decided to star-rate this film rather differently from our other reviews.

(Most of the film) 4.4 stars

(Last 10 minutes) 1 star

Philip Caveney