Venom (2018, Ruben Fleischer)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

There may be sidekicks, romantic interests and allies, but superhero movies tend to focus on a solitary lead character: Batman, Iron Man, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Howard the Duck, et al. The 2018 film Venom continues this trend as we follow disgraced journalist Eddie Brock, played by Tom Hardy, taking on the might of a nefarious Elon Musk-type businessman.

But there’s a twist. This is also a buddy movie akin to Lethal Weapon or Die Hard with a Vengeance, which features a bickering pair of polar-opposite characters. Eddie, you see, ends up sharing his body with a talkative, arrogant, pushy alien parasite – and what plays out is, essentially, a split-personality allegory as the two consciousnesses compete for control.

It’s a neat reversal of the trope. Instead of a standard superhero with two personas (Superman and Clark Kent, for example), here are two personalities in one body. And the fun comes from watching them clash… then ultimately find a way to work together. Perhaps aptly, the movie itself has a duality too. The central narrative focused on Eddie is an intriguing and entertaining X-Files episode, a sci-fi concept played with a light touch, but sadly this is woven into a rote and highlight-free plot that comes from a thousand B-movies.

Eddie Brock is a motorbike-riding, charm-bracelet-wearing investigative journalist in the 24-hour-news era. As well as exposing corruption in hyper-edited social-media clips, he has the everyman touch and forms easygoing bonds with security guards, shopkeepers and homeless people. In his private life, there’s also a romantic subplot going on with lawyer Anne (Michelle Williams).

Eddie’s latest scoop is an exclusive interview with Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a youthful billionaire tech-genius who we’ve earlier seen snapping arrogantly at white-coated employees. Drake runs a bio-research lab called Life Foundation and is secretly pushing through scientific work based on some samples found on a comet. The samples contain sentient alien organisms that can leap from human to human, possessing each person in turn (an idea that won’t mentally stimulate anyone who’s ever seen *any* science fiction before). But Brock’s interview turns sour when he asks some pointed questions about Drake’s questionable ethics, and Drake responds by arranging to have him fired.

Sadly for Eddie, despite all his fame and notoriety, he can’t find any other job in the industry and six months later we find him unemployed, depressed and single. He restarts his investigation, however, when Drake’s lead research scientist turns whistleblower. Sneaking into the lab, Eddie encounters one of the alien samples – and is, predictably, infected. This is where the film, after a rather low-key first act, starts to come alive.

Unlike other infectees seen earlier, Eddie still retains awareness of what’s happening to him – and sometimes he’s in control. But Venom often takes over at will, morphing limbs and at times Eddie’s entire body into a creature made of a gelatinous black goo and who can bite the head off a henchmen. (Probably best not to think through this played-for-laughs moment. Does Eddie have to shit the head out later?!) The alien also talks to him in a bass-deep growl, which no other characters can hear. This stuff brings to mind another sci-fi film: 1987’s Innerspace, in which Dennis Quaid’s test pilot is shrunk down to the size of a flea and injected into Martin Short’s bloodstream. In both movies, the two characters clash like petulant schoolkids as the invader makes contact and attempts to explain to the bemused host what’s going on. The initial scenes of possession in Venom are fun, especially a chaotic run of gags in a fancy restaurant as Eddie embarrasses Anne and her new partner by climbing into a fish tank and eating live lobsters.

The voice of Venom is performed by Tom Hardy, who had form for playing two roles in the same film, having starred as both of the Kray twins in the 2015 gangster movie Legend. He’s terrific here – jittery, funny, committed, adding danger to otherwise formulaic scenes – and we can be thankful he is. At its heart, this movie has a really daft gimmick, but Hardy absolutely sells the madness. He’s almost Jack Nicholson-ish in his ability to undercut his good looks and action-movie physique with a wild-eyed craziness and sensitivity.

Elsewhere, things are not so enjoyable. The film is set in San Francisco (yup, the Golden Gate Bridge is seen in an early establishing shot) and the city’s famously up/down/up-again geography is used for several action sequences, as well as a couple of dramatic scenes played with actors standing on a road that is more or less at a 45-degree angle. However, this only means your mind wanders to other, better, movies that were made here (Vertigo, Bullitt, The Dead Pool, Sneakers, Mrs Doubtfire… coincidentally enough, Innerspace too).

Speaking of 45-degree angles, the film is amazingly off-balance and lopsided. Various elements don’t really work, as if the filmmakers hoped Hardy would be enough to keep things level on his own. The character of Anne is a scant, occasional presence and played by a talented actress going through the motions; it’s a third of the way into the story before Brock and Venom really interact; a rival alien parasite takes *literally months* to actually do anything (he eventually possesses Drake); the action tends towards generic CG nonsense (not helped by actors’ faces hardly ever appearing); and the human villain, Drake, is cartoon thin. This is a film with the stabilisers on: never allowed to be too scary, too funny, too film noir, too superhero-y.

But it must also be said that there’s an endearing sense of whimsy behind the blockbuster facade – a feeling that the film isn’t taking itself too seriously – and this is provided in large part by Hardy and his ability to lift the character of Eddie off the page. Maybe this movie-star charisma explains why the movie was such a success at the box office. It took a staggering $856 million, convincing studio Sony to continue with plans for both a sequel and a new shared-universe series of superhero movies.

Seven armless, legless, faceless things, going down the street like a turd in the wind out of 10

Deadpool 2 (2018, David Leitch)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Hello and welcome. You’re reading the 800-and-something-th blog on this website (if you’ve read them all, well done). My usual practice when reviewing a film is to watch it, make loads of notes, do some background reading (NOT JUST WIKIPEDIA, HONEST), agonise over the final draft to such a degree that I miss an obvious typo, and hopefully come up with a few hundred words that a) reflect what I thought, b) contain a bit of fun here and there, and c) keep the ridiculously long, multi-clause sentences to a minimum.

This time I’m appraising 2018’s Deadpool 2. For those of you slow on the uptake, this is a sequel to 2016’s Deadpool, which was a flamboyantly cheeky spin on a character who had earlier appeared in the X-Men film Origins: Wolverine. It’s been – *checks notes* – five years since I did any X-Men-related reviews on this site, and looking back at the previous ones I’m reminded that I used to write them in a specific format with lots of categories.

Well, fuck that for a game of superheroes. Just like the first Deadpool film, Deadpool 2 is riddled with postmodern comedy, meta references and self-aware gags. Within the first few minutes, Ryan Reynolds (who stars as the scarred, sarcastic superhero) is pointing out a background extra who’s on fire (‘That’s not CGI, folks, he’s actually on fire’) and poking fun at the terrible writing in rival movie Batman v Superman. So why can’t I do the same? Why can’t I break the convention and refer to the act of reviewing while reviewing?

The bitch of the thing when doing blogs like this is that you fear just repeating what other people have said. (No, actually the biggest banana skin is being boring and/or pretentious and having friends who say they like them actually think they’re shit. Using the cliche ‘and/or’ probably doesn’t help.) Anyway, I’m not aware of many other reviews of Deadpool 2, aside from Empire magazine’s which I remember reading at the time of the film’s release.

They liked it. I do too. How could you not? Whether it’s the general silliness, or Ryan Reynolds’ infectious charm, or the James Bond-spoofing title sequence (‘Directed by one of the guys who killed the dog in John Wick’), or all the fuck-knuckles swearing, or the mid-credits scene that ridicules the misjudged X-Men Origins: Wolverine, or the sly celebrity cameos, or Zazie Beetz as an eternally lucky superhero sidekick called Domino, or any number of other moments, this film is a hoot. (Yes, I used the word hoot. I’m in that kind of mood.)

I’m writing this as I watch the film, by the way. I’m typing on my phone and am under a duvet cos it’s February and Storm Eunice (remember that?!) is raging outside. Don’t worry, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen Deadpool 2. I always pay full attention when watching a film for the first time. (Aside from this exception.) By the way, did you know that the revered film critic Pauline Kael was once spotted in a screening room with a notepad on her lap, writing her review as she half-watched a movie? I think it was Peter Bogdanovich who saw her. He said she missed loads of things cos she was so busy writing. What a dingbat.

Anyway, enough self-indulgent waffle. Back to Deadpool 2. Wade Wilson – that’s Deadpool’s real name – loses the love of his life. Early in the story, Vanessa is accidentally killed by a gangster. This is a shame for Wade (cue scenes about grief) and for us because we get precious little Morena Baccarin off of Firefly in the movie. But the sadness soon gives way as Wade hooks up with some minor X-Men characters and they set off to help a young mutant lad with a New Zealand accent… (Oh look, if you want a proper synopsis just Google for one).

Meanwhile, the film’s bad guy is gearing up by killing a pair of hillbillies played by Alan Tudyk (another Firefly alumnus, coincidentally) and an unrecognisable Matt Damon. It’s that kind of film. The time-travelling Cable wants revenge on the boy, Russell (Julian Dennison), for something he will do in the future. And Cable is played by Josh Brolin, aka the Marvel Cinematic Universe‘s Thanos. (Yup, Wade calls him Thanos at one point.) Later, needing to rescue Russell, Wade hires some other heroes and forms a strike team called X Force… But most of the new gang are killed off in comical ways within minutes of their mission starting. (It’s that kind of film. One of the members is played by Brad Pitt who appears on screen for about one and a half seconds.)

When I reviewed the original Deadpool on this website, I gave it nine out of 10 – and I stand by that. But looking back, I see I flagged up that the movie contains some ‘genuine emotion’ alongside its clever-clever comedy. Well, sadly, I think that means we’ll have to knock a mark off for Deadpool 2, because this sequel – while fun and funny and some other relevant adjectives that begin with F, which I’ll try to add in before publishing this blog post – is pretty shallow on that score. I don’t have anything else to say so that’s the end of the review.  

Eight lines of dialogue from the film that I use as a scoring system (sometimes by scanning through the Quotes section of IMDB) out of 10

The Hunt for Vlad the Impaler (2018, Osman Kaya)

NOTE: When originally released in Turkey, this film was called Deliler.

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Setting: It’s the era of the Ottoman Empire (‘the middle of the 15th century’) in Wallachia, which is now part of Romania. Emperor Mehmed II dispatches a group of seven agents known as Deliler to find and kill a tyrannical local leader, Vlad III, who is persecuting the population.

Faithful to the novel? This film has precious little to do with Dracula. But we review it here as a justification for discussing Vlad the Impaler, who many people believe was the direct inspiration for pop culture’s most famous vampire. Some go further, arguing that Count Dracula *is* Vlad the Impaler made immortal. The connection is not quite that straight-forward, however…

The Irish writer Bram Stoker visited Whitby, a beautiful fishing town on the North Yorkshire coast, in the summer of 1890. His day job was as the manager of a London theatre company, but he’d also become a moderately successful writer in his spare time. With a week to himself before being joined by his wife, Stoker did some research for a new horror story he was working on. He visited Whitby Library, where he consulted a book called An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820). It was in this book that Stoker saw the name Dracula for the first time.

Vlad II, a 15th-century voivode (warlord) of Wallachia, had gained the nickname Vlad the Dragon – or in the local language, Vlad Dracul. His second son, also called Vlad, became ruler from 1436 and continued to defend his Christian nation against the invading Muslims from Turkey. In his lifetime Vlad III was called Vlad Dracula – his father’s title Dracul plus an A in the way Western surnames might use the suffix ‘son’. But he acquired a murderous reputation due to his habit of impaling defeated foes on pikes through their rectums. Because of this barbarism, history often uses a different name: Vlad the Impaler.

As well as ‘dragon’, the word Dracul can also mean ‘devil’, and it was the latter definition that excited Stoker. Seizing on the potential, he made the momentous decision to rename the villain of his new story, a vampire character from eastern European who plans to feed on the innocents of England. An undated sheet in Stoker’s private papers records the change. His initial idea for a name, Count Wampyr, has been crossed out and replaced with simply… ‘Dracula’. (An interesting side note: Stoker was a member of the London Library in St James Square, Westminster. In 2018, its director of development, Philip Sledding, noticed that their copy of An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia had the corner of a page turned down – the page that mentions Vlad Dracula. Perhaps it had been dogeared by Stoker while following up his Whitby research…)

But does the fact that Bram Stoker reused the name of a then-obscure medieval dictator mean that his vampire character was intended to be a dramatised version of the historical figure? Or, even if we ignore Stoker’s aims, are there firm reasons for us to interpret the published novel in this way?

The argument for the answer yes was first made surprisingly early – and it seems it was made in Turkey. In 1928, a writer called Ali Rıza Seyfioğlu published the bootleg Dracula novel Kazikli Voyvoda. Long thought to be simply a Turkish-language version of Stoker’s text, it was actually heavily rewritten. Kazikli Voyvoda was set in the modern day, recast the heroes as Turkish characters, and replaced the word vampire with the term ‘hortlak’ (fearsome ghost). But it was the book’s title that’s most relevant here – an English translation would be The Impaler Prince, so a supposed connection between the vampire and Vlad III was being made. In 1953, Kazikli Voyvoda was adapted into a film, Drakula Istanbul’da directed by Mehmet Muhtar, and this became the first work of cinema to tie Count Dracula to Vlad the Impaler: in the movie, the vampire claims to be Vlad’s descendent.

The Drac-is-Vlad notion took longer to gather momentum in the West. Six decades after Stoker’s novel had been published, in 1958, an academic named Bacil Kirtley published an article that pounced on a passage in Stoker’s text (‘[Count Dracula] must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk’) and argued that Vlad III and his vampiric equivalent have a shared history and are therefore the same person. The actor Christopher Lee, who began a 20-year association with the role of Count Dracula in the same year as Kirtley’s essay, was an early champion of the theory. According to Jenny Hanley, who starred with Lee in 1970’s Scars of Dracula, he could wax lyrical on his character’s link to Vlad the Impaler.

Things then stepped up a gear in 1972 thanks to a pair of Boston University academics, Radu R Florescu and Raymond T McNally. They had been researching Vlad III in Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum when an archivist there told them that they also possessed Bram Stoker’s papers. Florescu and McNally’s subsequent book, In Search of Dracula, asserted with an air of authority that Stoker’s character is intended to be the historical warlord – and it was a big success, despite several academics suggesting that the writers had leapt from speculation to conclusion with unfounded speed. (Kirtley also accused them of copying others’ work without credit.)

For many, the idea was far too seductive to allow any room for doubt and various film and TV adaptations quickly merged the two men into one. The 1974 TV movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, explicitly says that its Dracula is Vlad III turned into a vampire. The BBC’s 1977 serial Count Dracula, which didn’t involve the theory in its storytelling, nevertheless used iconography of people being impaled on stakes in a Gothic title sequence. Twenty years later, another production called Bram Stoker’s Dracula – this one directed by Francis Ford Coppola – built an entire emotional core on the idea that Dracula was Vlad the Impaler. In the public consciousness, the real-life ruler was now inextricably intertwined with the fictional vampire.

Many people have been convinced by the connection because they assume the movies are based on fact; others simply think it’s a neat idea, whether true or not. Look online and you’ll soon find plenty of people – some surprisingly dogmatic and angry – who are unswerving in their conviction that Count Dracula is Vlad the Impaler.

But as a theory it’s rather problematic.

There’s no evidence that Bram Stoker did any research into Vlad III beyond the name Dracula catching his eye in An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. All of the relevant historical information in his finished novel was taken from An Account…, and the author’s surviving notes – so extensive on plots, characters, ideas and structure – make no mention of either the historic Vlad or his practise of impaling victims on stakes. In fact, neither the name Vlad nor the act of impaling appears in the published novel – a striking oddity if we’re supposed to believe that the vampire is the warlord. Also, in his usage of the word Dracula, Stoker seems to have interpreted it as a catch-all term for a whole dynasty rather than a specific person’s title.

And there’s more. Although the real Vlad III may have been born in the area that is now Transylvania (the historical record is hazy), Stoker probably didn’t know this. The information doesn’t appear in any of the sources we know he consulted. It’s more likely that he placed Castle Dracula in that region simply because he’d read an essay on Transylvanian folklore by the British author Emily Gerard. In any event, Vlad III rarely if ever visited Transylvania as an adult and never owned a residence there.

Until Bram Stoker invented his character in the 1890s, the real Vlad Dracula also had no connection to vampire folklore. Some sources claim that he had a penchant for drinking the blood of his vanquished victims, but this is based on a mistranslation of a poem by Michael Beheim, the court poet for the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, who in the 15th century actually wrote that Vlad *washed his hands* in their blood. Meanwhile, the similarity of impaling people on pikes and the standard way of killing a vampire – a stake through the heart – seems to be a coincidence. There’s no suggestion at all that Stoker ever learnt about Vlad’s cruel habit.

There are convergences, to be sure. Count Dracula is roughly the same age as Vlad Dracula, while some of the vampire’s backstory is the same as the real history – specifically, both men were voivodes who fought the invading Turks and had ‘unworthy’ brothers. But Stoker also cherry-picked traits from other sources and some flatly contradict Vlad’s biography. For example, Stoker’s Dracula is a Szekely (ethnically Hungarian) and a descendent of Attila the Hun; the real Vlad was neither. In the novel, the Count actually makes rather a lot of references to Hungarian history – a surprising thing for Vlad III to do. This is because, frankly, Bram Stoker was not writing a thinly veiled avatar of Vlad the Impaler. He was creating a unique fictional character and simply appropriated historical details from various places to add colour to his backstory.

All this means we’re a very long way from claiming that Stoker meant for us to read Count Dracula as a real person. The novel doesn’t support the theory, unless you’re willing to do some selective squinting. The academics Florescu and McNally, whose 1972 book had propelled the concept into the public consciousness, even backtracked later in life, admitting that they’d allowed their imaginations to run away from them.

Anyway, back to The Hunt for Vlad the Impaler…

Best performance: The version of the film used for this review replaced the original Turkish dialogue with overdubbed English performed by a new cast. Irritatingly, almost every new voice sounds too young for the relevant character, and all are neutral American accents. This robs the dialogue of any texture or passion there may have been when first released and also makes judging the actors difficult. Going by visuals alone, Nur Fettahoğlu – playing a woman called Alaca who is rescued after being persecuted by Prince Vlad’s heavies – seems to be generating some emotion.

Best bit: Although the storyline is heavily fictionalised, there are occasional historical details scattered here or there. In reality, Vlad III was visited by two ambassadors from the Sultan who refused to remove their turbans while addressing him – so he ordered his men to nail the turbans to their heads. Vlad is said to have watched on while they screamed as the nails were driven into their skulls. In the film, there’s only one visiting Muslim… and Vlad himself does the hammering.

Review: The dubbing into English, and the subsequent disparity between lip movement and sound, is not the only reminder here of the Spaghetti Western genre. Like those 60s movies, The Hunt for Vlad the Impaler has an emphasis on landscape – the film features many wide open spaces, and of course land is essentially what everyone’s fighting over. It’s often a beautiful film and uses many striking locations. There are lots of very good visuals, in fact, both compositionally and in terms of the physical design of the film. For example, the leader of the Deliler gang, Gokkurt (Cem Uçan), wears large bird’s wings on his armour. They make him look like some kind of avenging angel – impractical but impressive. What the movie lacks compared to the best of the Italian Westerns, however, is wit. There’s no sense of fun, no irony, no playfulness. The clear jingoism also grates at times. But as a down-and-dirty men-on-a-mission movie, you could see worse.

Six scorpions out of 10

Acknowledgements: I drew from many sources for the information in this blog post, but worth mentioning specifically are Hollywood Gothic (2004 revised edition) by David J Skal; A Dracula Handbook (2005) by Elizabeth Miller; and Maud Ellman’s introduction to 1998 Oxford World Classics edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker.

Dracula in Love (2018, Izidore Musallam)

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Setting: A warehouse in an unspecified part of North America. The modern day.

Faithful to novel? When a young slacker called Nash (Eyal Simko) is asked by his drunkard uncle to cover a nightwatchman shift at a warehouse, he sees it as an opportunity to party. He calls his fellow spliff-loving pal David (Josh Malton), who shows up with his girlfriend, Nancy (Amy Cruickshank), and another woman called Leila (Cailey Muise), who’s mysterious and a bit goth. After some tame hedonism (drugs, loud music, couples having sex in parts of the warehouse where they’re clearly going to be seen by others), things take a dark turn. One of the idiotic lads messes about with a forklift and knocks a crate but doesn’t notice that it contains a creature (Youssef Abed-Alnour). At first, the creature – he’s only identified as Dracula in the film’s title and end credits – is just a voice or a shadow, then we catch glimpse of a bald, hunchbacked, old man; half Nosferatu‘s Count Orlok, half The Addams Family’s Uncle Fester. The only one to discover his presence is Leila. The creature seems to recognise her and says he loves her, which spooks Leila (well, according to the writing – the actress’s performance doesn’t change much). He also tells us that he’s been in his crate for 200 years. When the two male friends both begin to get rapey (whether it’s because of the supernatural effect of Dracula being close by or because they’re just pricks is unclear), Leila runs to the creature for help. He says he will protect her if she helps him drink her friends’ blood…

Best performance: None.

Best bit: The violence in this film mostly happens off screen. It’s framed out or the screen fades to black. This may have been done to save the expense of special effects and stunt performers, but the consequence is a creepy tone. By not seeing the blood and gore and deaths, we imagine something more extreme than could be shown in a film like this. Then, when we do see a horrific image – a victim hung upside down so blood drains into a jar – it’s more effective.

Review: Watch a lot of Dracula films, and you quickly realise that there’s a spectrum of quality as wide as a vampire’s lifespan. For every classy TV adaptation or Hollywood movie, there are several cheapo films with barely professional actors dredging through a script lacking any ideas other than ‘How can we get the word Dracula in the title?’ Bram Stoker’s creation fell out of copyright many decades ago, so anyone with a digi-cam is free to add to the oeuvre and the 2018 film Dracula in Love is nowhere near the top of the rankings. The characters are mostly objectionable morons, the cast is very poor indeed and the ‘drama’ tends to be stilted dialogue spelling out how people are feeling. The story is also exceedingly slight and doesn’t amount to anything interesting. But what rescues it from the dirge pit containing the likes of Dracula’s Guest and Dracula Reborn is its thoughtful shooting style. This is a single-location movie, taking place entirely inside a nondescript and oddly clean warehouse. Eerie shots of boxes create a bit of tension, while the slowly shifting camera often feels like a stalker’s POV. ‘Cinema is dead,’ says Leila during one of the film’s tedious conversations. ‘I hate all those fast, mindless camera moves.’ Dracula in Love agrees with the critique. There’s a stillness to this horror. Moves feel motivated and editing is sparse. The trance-like effect, however, is sometimes spoiled by a dance-flavoured score and occasional trippy sequences with crazy editing. And the appalling script and cast, of course.

Five conversion seating development rooms out of 10

My 75 favourite films of the 2010s

To commemorate the end of the decade 2010-2019 (any word yet on what we’re calling it?!), here is a list of my favourite movies from the last 10 years.

It’s a very personal selection, based on gut instinct and emotional reactions. There are undoubtedly plenty of fine films that haven’t made the cut, but these are the 75 that have given me – subjectively speaking – the most amount of pleasure and have impressed me the most. (Why 75? That’s just how many I jotted down on a shortlist.)

I’ve listed them alphabetically, but I’ve also picked out a top 10. Have I missed off your favourite?

TOP 10 CHOICE: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011, Steven Spielberg)

The finest animated film there’s ever been. A complete artificial world is created in CGI, and repeated viewings are a treat because you continually spot new things in the background of each shot. But, crucially, there’s real heart behind this movie too. You soon forget about the technology and instead get swept up in the story and charmed by the sheer talent behind it. The plot is simple but smart, with clearly defined characters. There’s wit, whimsy, danger, plenty of visual gags and madcap action – in other words, it’s very Steven Spielberg.

TOP 10 CHOICE: The Aeronauts (2019, Tom Harper)

A late entry, as I only saw this film a few weeks ago – but it was a magical experience. Watching it on my own on a cold Tuesday evening in an Everyman cinema in Crystal Palace, I was so enraptured that I felt like a child. The screen seemed enormous, I had a perfect view – level, central, not too close, not too far away – and I was totally caught up in the spectacle and the drama and the joy of a great movie. It’s a fictionalised account of a real-life scientific balloon accent in the 1860s, so this a story about reaching for the heavens in more ways than one. It’s stirring and sentimental and touching and full of wonder, while there’s a very good cast, tremendous incidental music, and a beautiful combination of cinematography and visual effects.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013, Declan Lowney)

Attack the Block (2011, Joe Cornish)

Avengers: Endgame (2019, Anthony & Joe Russo)

Avengers: Infinity War (2018, Anthony & Joe Russo)

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018, Drew Goddard)

Baby Driver (2017, Edgar Wright)

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro González Iñárritu)

TOP 10 CHOICE: Blade Runner 2049 (2017, Denis Villeneuve)

Producing a sequel to a classic 35 years after the fact was something of a risk. Ridley Scott, the director of the first Blade Runner, had himself recently made two follow-ups to his other sci-fi masterpiece, Alien (1979), and both fell a very long way short of that movie’s seductive terror. Thankfully, Blade Runner 2049 is *at least* the equal of the 1982 antecedent. Made with an understanding of the original’s power but also with a distinct voice by director Denis Villeneuve, it’s a big film, a difficult film at times, but an engrossing and hugely rewarding experience.

Bone Tomahawk (2015, S Craig Zahler)

Bridge of Spies (2015, Steven Spielberg)

The Cabin in the Woods (2012, Drew Goddard)

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011, Joe Johnston)

TOP 10 CHOICE: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014, Anthony & Joe Russo)

The decade’s finest superhero movie – and this has been a decade with a lot of superhero movies. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo make sure each element of the film is as sharp as it can be: it’s often funny, it’s often exciting, the story has a bit of substance, tension is built effectively, the incidental music is terrific, and the action scenes are sensational. There’s intrigue, espionage and mistrust. There’s wit, pathos and drama. There’s action, fun and Christopher Nolan-style theatricality.

Creed (2015, Ryan Coogler)

Crimson Peak (2015, Guillermo del Toro)

The Dark Knight Rises (2012, Christopher Nolan)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014, Matt Reeves)

Deadpool (2016, Tim Miller)

Deadpool 2 (2018, David Leitch)

The Death of Stalin (2018, Armando Iannucci)

Django Unchained (2012, Quentin Tarantino)

Drive (2011, Nicolas Winding Refn)

Dunkirk (2017, Christopher Nolan)

TOP 10 CHOICE: Easy A (2010, Will Gluck)

A loving homage to the kind of teen comedies made by John Hughes in the 1980s, this drily funny and very smart film stars a terrific Emma Stone as a schoolgirl who becomes notorious after a rumour circulates about her sexual appetite. Made with both a real affection for those great old 80s movies and a modern freshness, Easy A also has two of the greatest ‘movie parents’ you could ever hope for: Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci’s open-minded and carefree Rosemary and Dill. (No, honestly, those are their names.)

Evil Dead (2013, Fede Álvarez)

Ex Machina (2015, Alex Garland)

Fast & Furious 5 (2011, Justin Jin)

The Final Girls (2015, Todd Strauss-Schulson)

Gravity (2013, Alfonso Cuarón)

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014, James Gunn)

Halloween (2018. David Gordon Green)

Happy Death Day (2017, Christopher Landon)

The Hateful Eight (2015, Quentin Tarantino)

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013, Peter Jackson)

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012, Peter Jackson)

The Hunger Games (2012, Gary Ross)

Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan)

Interstellar (2014, Christopher Nolan)

Iron Man 3 (2013, Shane Black)

Joker (2019, Todd Philips)

La La Land (2016, Damien Chazelle)

The Lego Movie (2014, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller)

Logan (2017, James Mangold)

The Lone Ranger (2013, Gore Verbinski)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, George Miller)

The Martian (2015, Ridley Scott)

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011, Brad Bird)

Mr Holmes (2015, Bill Condon)

The Nice Guys (2016, Shane Black)

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, Quentin Tarantino)

The Post (2017, Steven Spielberg)

TOP 10 CHOICE: Robin Hood (2010, Ridley Scott)

Arguably (and I’m going to argue it) the most underrated film of the last 10 years, this kind of passed by without many people getting all that excited. The most newsworthy aspect of its release was lead actor Russell Crowe throwing a tantrum in a publicity interview because it was suggested that his ‘Nottinghamshire’ accent was perhaps not 100-per-cent authentic. (In truth, it’s not even *one*-per-cent authentic.) But that’s just a blemish. Essentially Robin Hood: The Origin Story, this movie ticks the usual boxes – the Crusades, King John, Marian, the sidekicks – but also weaves Robin’s story into a tapestry that involves palace intrigue, civil rights and a coming war. Beautiful to look at, well cast, exciting, funny, and with a fascinating backstory informing everything, this deserves to be much more liked.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, Gareth Edwards)

Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010, Edgar Wright)

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011, Guy Ritchie)

TOP 10 CHOICE: Skyfall (2012, Sam Mendes)

The best James Bond film of the decade (regrettably there have only been two) is tremendous entertainment, full of vim and zip and energy. It’s also an engaging character story that weaves Bond’s past with that of his boss, M. “Where are we going?” asks M at one point. “Back in time,” replies Bond… After the clean slate of Casino Royale and the po-faced Quantum of Solace, this movie gives us a new Moneypenny, a new Q, the return of an Aston Martin DB5, and even a belting title song sung by a large-lunged diva. It’s stylish and confident and slick and a lot of fun.

TOP 10 CHOICE: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018, Ron Howard)

This was a huge ask. Huge. To take such a famous and beloved character as Han Solo and *recast* him could have gone catastrophically wrong. Thankfully, both lead actor Alden Ehrenreich and the film as a whole are wonderfully vibrant and entertaining. Being a prequel, simply filling out the spaces between established facts could of course become boring very quickly. Solo, however, has more than enough panache and humour to sidestep the issue. It’s full of vivid characters, exiting sequences, romance and adventure.

Spectre (2015, Sam Mendes)

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017, Jon Watts)

Stan & Ollie (2019, Jon S Baird)

Star Trek Beyond (2016, Justin Lin)

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013, JJ Abrams)

TOP 10 CHOICE: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015, JJ Abrams)

This movie looks like Star Wars, it sounds like Star Wars, and it feels like Star Wars. The new generation of characters – courageous Rey, headstrong Finn, dashing Poe, adorable BB-8, villainous Kylo – are charismatic, fun, interesting and worthy successors to Luke, Leia, Han and co. Speaking of those icons, they’re not just meaningless cameos. They’re integral to the story, and are found in instantly interesting situations. The Force Awakens might be a love letter to the first three movies, but it’s still a compelling drama. On a technical level, the film is even more impressive. For a start, it’s just so wonderfully *there*. It feels physical, palpable, with heft and weight and a sense of reality. After the cartoony artifice of the prequels, this makes a geek’s heart sing. It’s my favourite film of the whole decade.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017, Rian Johnson)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019, JJ Abrams)

Super 8 (2011, JJ Abrams)

T2 Trainspotting (2017, Danny Boyle)

The Theory of Everything (2014, James Marsh)

True Grit (2010, Joel and Ethan Coen)

21 Jump Street (2012, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller)

Unstoppable (2010, Tony Scott)

TOP 10 CHOICE: The World’s End (2013, Edgar Wright)

This top-10 choice can be seen as standing in for all of director Edgar Wright’s classy and endlessly enjoyable work this decade; I could easily have chosen Scott Pilgrim or Baby Driver. The World’s End has the usual Wrightian tropes – great cast, huge smarts, laugh-out-loud comedy, a thrilling awareness of popular culture, first-rank cinematography and editing – but it edges the others because of two factors. It’s the finale of a thematic trilogy begun in 2004’s Shaun of the Dead and continued in 2007’s Hot Fuzz, and it caps off the series so superbly. Also, its exploration of nostalgia, for better and worse, really socks home.

X-Men: First Class (2011, Matthew Vaughn)

In summary…

It turns out that 2015 is my favourite year of the decade with 12 films on this list. 2011 and 2017 have nine entries each; 2013 is on eight; 2012 and 2014 are on seven; 2010, 2018 and 2019 on six; and poor 2016 is the weakest showing with just five.

Two directors share the accolade of most films: JJ Abrams and Christopher Nolan, each with four. Anthony & Joe Russo, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright have three each; while the following directors appear on the list twice: Shane Black, Drew Goddard, Justin Lin, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, Peter Jackson, Ridley Scott and Sam Mendes.

In terms of multiple films from the same series, we have seven Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. The next best-represented franchise is Star Wars with five; then there are four X-Men films and two each from Star Trek, James Bond and the Hobbit series.

Creed II (2018, Steven Caple Jr)

A series of reviews looking at Sylvester Stallone’s two most famous characters, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, film by film…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Adonis Creed climbs to the top of the boxing world, but then is challenged by the son of the man who killed his father…

What does Stallone do? He co-wrote the script and plays Rocky Balboa for an eighth time. Sly was 29 years old when he wrote the original Rocky and he’s now in his early 70s: this character has been a lifelong project… When we rejoin the story a few years after the events of the previous movie, Rocky – grey-haired after his cancer battle – is still the trainer of boxer Adonis Creed. The two men part ways, however, when Adonis is offered the chance to fight Viktor Drago – the son of the boxer who killed Adonis’s father during an exhibition fight in 1985. Rocky advises against it, saying Adonis has everything to lose while Viktor has nothing to lose, but Adonis ignores him and promptly comes off second best in the bout. Lonely Rocky is reduced to watching the fight on television in the restaurant he’s been running for the last three films, then is shunned when he tries to visit Adonis in the hospital. Later, after a rapprochement, Rocky takes the younger man into the desert to train for a second bout with Drago…

Other main characters:
* Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) has had a bad 33 years since he was defeated by Rocky (as seen in Rocky IV). His wife left him to raise their son alone, and the Russian people sneer at him because he lost a fight that was intended as Soviet propaganda. When he sees that the son of his former foe Apollo Creed is now a champion boxer himself, Ivan flies to Philadelphia and seeks out Rocky. He wants Adonis to fight his son, Viktor… Lundgren barely speaks in the film, which is probably for the best.
* Viktor Drago (Florian ‘Big Nasty’ Munteanu) is a bruiser of a heavyweight. When not beating people to a pulp in the ring, he works in a loading yard. He has the upper hand during his first fight with Adonis, but is disqualified for hitting his opponent when down.
* Adonis’s girlfriend, Bianca Taylor (Tessa Thompson, very good), is now suffering from hearing loss and wears a hearing aid. She says her time is running out; she knows she will eventually become fully deaf. After Adonis proposes and they get engaged, the pair leave Philly for LA and have a daughter together, who has to undergo tests to see if she’s inherited her mother’s heading issues.
* Early in the film, Adonis Creed (Michael B Jordan) becomes world heavyweight boxing champion and can hardly believe it. Then he learns that Russian boxer Viktor Drago – the son of the man who killed Adonis’s father during a fight in Moscow in 1985 – wants a shot at the title. Adonis can’t resist the temptation, seeing it as a way of exorcising some ghosts: ‘I can’t let that slide,’ he tells Rocky, who refuses to train him for the event. However, during the resulting fight, Adonis is badly beaten up and knocked unconscious; he only retains his belt on a technicality. He then faces a long recovery period – and pressure to fight Viktor again. At least he makes amends with Rocky, just in time for Rocky to accompany Adonis to the hospital to attend the birth of his daughter. He then gears up for a rematch with Viktor Drago, which takes place in Moscow and is a brutal brawl with both men struggling to stay upright.
* Buddy Marcelle (Russell Hornsby) is the promoter who puts on the first Drago/Creed showdown. He goes public with the challenge before speaking to Adonis, then later offers a hollow apology for the theatrical tactic: ‘That’s just what the sport has become.’
* Mary Anne Creed (Phylicia Rashad) – Adonis’s stepmother, in effect – is pleased to see him and Bianca when they arrive in LA. She even correctly guesses that Bianca is pregnant. But she’s furious that Adonis has decided to fight Drago. She fears he’ll end up like his father.
* Ludmilla Drago (Brigitte Nielsen) is Viktor’s mother. She appears at a posh dinner Ivan and Viktor attend, but the latter is angry with her because she abandoned him and his father years previously. It’s a rather pointless cameo.

Key scene: When they arrive in America, Ivan and Viktor visit the steps outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art – a key location that has featured in several Rocky movies. It’s always been a symbol of Rocky Balboa’s success: he ran up the steps while training for title fights in the 1970s, then a statue was put there to commemorate him winning the championship. Now, however, these two outsiders have come to scope the place out: they’re ready to invade Rocky’s world, to knock him and his protégé off their perch.

Review: One of the successes of Creed II is the way the backstory (ie, the events of Rocky IV) feels like backstory rather than fan-pleasing continuity. We only glimpse occasional clips of the 1985 footage, so the events are mostly talked about, and in that context they’re always meaningful for the characters. For example, the fact Rocky could have – indeed, should have – thrown in the towel during Apollo Creed’s fight with Ivan Drago creates conflict 33 years later between Adonis and Rocky. There’s a weight to what’s going on and that makes the film engaging. It’s generally well directed, in fact: drama scenes sock home; there’s a good central cast; it’s occasionally funny and often tender. All this helps distract us from how stunningly predictable the storyline is and how the middle third grows so slow it begins to test your patience.

Seven broken ribs out of 10

Next: Rambo: Last Blood

 

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018, Ron Howard)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Ten years before his encounter with Luke Skywalker in a cantina, Han Solo becomes embroiled in a job to steal a valuable fuel source for a gangster…

WHICH VERSION? There’s only one.

GOOD GUYS:

* When we first meet him, Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is hot-wiring a land-speeder in a rusty, rundown city on his home planet of Corellia. It’s a place dominated by crime lords, even though the fascistic Empire are technically in command. Han – a young man in his late 20s – is scratching out a living for himself and girlfriend Qi’ra. He’s accumulated enough cash to buy their way out of the ‘control zone’, but while attempting to escape the planet Qi’ra is arrested by the authorities. Needing to hide, Han hits upon the idea of joining the Imperial military. When the recruiting officer asks his name, Han admits he doesn’t have a family and therefore no surname, so the officer plucks one out of the air: ‘Han… Solo.’ Three years later, Han is an unhappy grunt in the Imperial infantry. However, backchat to superior officers leads to him being thrown into a punishment pit with a ‘beast’. The monster actually turns out to be a sympathetic creature called Chewbacca, and rather than fight to the death the pair collude to escape their prison. (Handily, Han speaks a bit Chewy’s language.) Fleeing the army, Han and his new pal hook up with a criminal called Beckett, whose crew are planning to steal some valuable fuel from a speeding train. This opportunity pleases Han because his long-term goal is to earn enough money to get home to Corellia and save Qi’ra. However, despite Han getting to show off his piloting skills, the heist goes wrong: Beckett’s lieutenants are killed and the loot is snatched by a third party. So Beckett and Han must go cap in hand to Drydon Vos, the crime lord who hired them and the leader of a terrorist organisation called Crimson Dawn. On board Vos’s palatial Art Deco yacht, Han is stunned to bump into Qi’ra – she escaped Corellia on her own, and now works for Crimson Dawn. He then cuts a deal with Vos to steal the loot from somewhere else. This involves travelling down a dangerous space route known as the Kessel Run (take a gulp if you’re playing the drinking game), but for this they need a fast ship. Luckily Qi’ra knows a guy who has one. At first, Han attempts to win the craft in a card game – but the cad with the transport, a slick fella called Lando, beats him and insists on a cut of the take for the use of his ship. When Han then sees Lando’s vehicle – the Millennium Falcon, a disc-shaped Corellian YT-1300 – he goes all misty-eyed and mentions that his father helped build this brand of spaceship. The gang travel to the planet Kessel, where they steal the coaxium Vos wants, then flee via the Kessel Run. Lando’s pilot was killed during the job, though, so Han must take the controls of the Millennium Falcon – he actually completes the run faster than anyone ever before. Meeting up with Vos, Han is betrayed by both Beckett – who attempts to steal the loot for himself – and Qi’ra, who chooses a dark path. So as the film winds down, Han and Chewy seek out Lando again, and Han wins the Falcon from him in a rigged card game. They then head for the planet Tatooine, where they’ve heard a crime lord is putting together a new job… Charged with the task of taking over such a venerated character, Ehrenreich is absolutely terrific. He brilliantly evokes Harrison Ford’s smirky charisma but never resorts to a hollow impression. Actor and script capture the tone of the Han Solo we know – the swashbuckling heroics, the playful cheek, the romantic streak, the hubris and failure – but as this is a younger Han, he’s also more optimistic and idealistic. (Fun fact: Alden Ehrenreich was given his first name in honour of family friend Phil Alden Robinson, the director of Sneakers and Field of Dreams.)

* Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) seems initially to be an infantry officer in the Imperial Army, but soldier Han quickly deduces that he’s an imposter: a thief for hire who pulls off jobs with a couple of cohorts. After allowing him to join his crew, Beckett becomes a kind of father-figure type for Han – offering advise, encouraging him, all that. This doesn’t stop him betraying his protégé, however, when he steals the coaxium for himself. Han gives chase and, before Beckett can talk his way out of it, shoots him dead. (Han shoots first, you see.) Harrelson is typically watchable.

* Rio Durant (voiced by Jon Favreau) is Beckett’s pilot: a small, monkey-sized, multi-armed Ardenian with a sarcastic manner and a New York accent. The character is *in no way* a blatant rip-off of Bradley Cooper’s Rocket from the Guardians of the Galaxy series. He dies during the train heist.

* Val (Thandie Newton) is Beckett’s partner, both professionally and personally. A spiky, entertainingly rude character, she also dies attempting to steal the fuel – which is a real shame, as Newton is a fun presence while she lasts.

* Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) is a 190-year-old Wookie – a seven-foot-tall, furry alien – and has been locked up by the Empire, who are treating him like a savage animal. When we first see him, his fur is matted and he’s in an understandably bad mood. Han soon wins him round, though, especially by speaking to him in his own language, and the pair not only escape the Empire but become quick pals. During the Kessel Run, Chewy jumps into the Millennium Falcon’s co-pilot seat, establishing a spaceship-flying partnership with Han. At one point, we also learn that Chewbacca is searching for his lost family. Presumably, he’s referring to the Wookies seen in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. (A sad side note: I was doing a final pass on this blog when I heard the news that Peter Mayhew had died at the age of 74. He played Chewbacca in five Star Wars movies from 1977 until 2015 before passing the baton on to Suotamo.)

* Enfys Nest (Erin Kellyman) initially seems to be the leader of a gang of pirates. She and her pals – one of whom is Warwick Davis’s Weazel, a character who first appeared in 1999’s The Phantom Menace – beat Beckett and co to the loot during the train heist. They must be crims, then? No, when Nest shows up near the end of the story we discover that she’s actually the leader of a nascent rebellion against the evil Empire. She asks Han to join their cause, but he declines. Kellyman, who only appears without a facemask in the final third of the film, is a bit earnest.

* Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) is said to be the best smuggler around, and is a dashing, louche, cape-wearing smoothie who enjoys cheating at card games and being economical with the truth. He signs up to Beckett’s mission to steal some coaxium, but wants 25 per cent of the take. However, after completing the job and running into more trouble, Lando leaves his new comrades behind and sneaks away with his ship. Later, Han tracks him down and suggests another game of Sabaac… Glover is tremendous value, echoing original actor Billy Dee Williams but bringing his own brand of swagger. (He also pronounces Han’s name with a short A, to match Williams in The Empire Strikes Back.)

* Droid L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) is Lando’s first mate. She’s a vaguely human-shaped robot with an oversized head (all the better for containing, as Lando points out, the best navigational database in the galaxy). She’s also a fierce defender of ‘droid rights’, and is first seen pleading with other mechanical life to stand up for themselves. Despite being in a permanent bad mood, she has a thing for Lando (‘How would that work?’ asks a dubious Qi’ra) and maybe he has one for her too… On Kessel, she’s movingly upset by the sight of droids being held as slaves so incites a revolution – but then is fatally shot during the ensuing combat. Lando is *distraught*. (So are we.) L3’s navigational database is then uploaded into the Millennium Falcon’s computer… She might be a CGI creation, but you wouldn’t know that from the absolutely seamless way the character interacts with the actors and the physical sets. (Technology has moved on A LOT since Jar-Jar Binks, hasn’t it?) Waller-Bridge’s voice work is really brilliant: very funny and full of sass.

BAD GUYS:

* When Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) returns to the story on Crimson Dawn’s luxury yacht, she’s clearly a changed woman. She’s harsher, colder, and now a gangster’s moll-cum-advisor. But she’s also genuinely pleased to see Han again, and when the old flames travel to Kessel together they actually share a kiss in Lando’s cape room. (Yes, Lando has an entire room to store his capes. He’s *that* cool.) ‘Am I interrupting something?’ says a cockblocking Beckett, who’s not sure his new protégé should be cosying up to Drydon Vos’s aide. Qi’ra helps on the Kessel Run scam, pretending to be an Imperial official with Han as her shackled prisoner – then late in the film she turns into a samurai-sword-wielding badass, kills her boss and takes over his criminal empire. She then contacts his shadowy benefactor… This is a tough role for Clarke, who filmed Solo in-between seasons of Game of Thrones. Qi’ra may as well have a neon sign above her exceedingly pretty head that reads ‘I’m not who Han thinks I am’, but the actress disguises it as much as she can by using natural charm.

* Lady Promixa (voiced by Linda Hunt) is a giant slug-type creature who rules the underworld of Corellia with an iron tentacle. Early in the film, Han is taken to see her when it becomes clear he’s been ripping her off. The character is a nice reminder that the original Star Wars movies were no strangers to bizarre and even risible aliens. Nevertheless, it’s quite a relief that she doesn’t last very long in the story. To escape her oily clutches, Han pretends to have a thermal detonator (a grenade, essentially). Proxima is not fooled: ‘That’s a rock!’ she says. ‘And you just made a clinking sound with your mouth.’ (More than a decade of story time later, Princess Leia will use the same gag in an attempt to save Han from a different alien gangster.)

* One of the Imperial officers in the warzone scenes looks suspiciously like the late actor Don Henderson. Presumably he’s meant to be a younger version of Henderson’s character in the original Star Wars film.

* Drydon Vos (Paul Bettany) is the leader of Crimson Dawn, so therefore is the man Qi’ra now works for. He’s an arrogant, maniacal loon with a violent streak, a love of pithy threats and a scarred face. He also makes an obscure reference to having a sinister boss… After Beckett and co have brought him the coaxium he wants, Vos suffers a double-cross as Qi’ra kills him and takes over his organisation… Michael K Williams was cast in the role, but was then unavailable for some reshoots so Bettany took over. At the same time, the character went through a rethink: he was originally a CG creation resembling a humanoid lion. Whatever the visuals, he’s a bit of a rent-a-bad-guy.

* In a shock twist held back from all the publicity and trailers, Darth Maul (Ray Park; voiced by Sam Witwer) appears late on. He’s the real power behind Crimson Dawn – oh no! We only see Maul as a hologram when he FaceTimes Qi’ra, but we can tell he has robotic legs (in his last appearance, remember, he was cut in half by Obi-Wan Kenobi). Maul summons Qi’ra to come and see him and tells her they’ll be working more closely from now on… This is just a cameo, meant to set the character up for a sequel that will now probably never happen because Solo “only” took $392 million at the box office (ie, the smallest gross of any live-action Star Wars film). Peter Serafinowicz was originally hired to reprise the voice of Maul from The Phantom Menace, but then the strange decision was made to use someone else.

BEST ACTION SEQUENCE: The action is uniformly great in this movie, whether it’s the chaotic trench warfare scenes, or the slick, wind-machined train heist, or the multi-character punch-up on the planet Kessel. Especially impressive is the dieselpunk chase sequence on Corellia with Han and Qi’ra in a land-speeder, a kind of floating car. Unlike most CG-heavy action scenes, this one feels totally real and heavy and locked into gravity. Solid, metallic vehicles career round corners and skirt past palpable obstacles. You feel the speed and the thrill and the danger. It’s like something from a Mad Max film.

BEST COMEDY MOMENT: Solo’s original directors were Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the team behind the far-better-than-you-think-it’s-going-to-be comedy 21 Jump Street and the everything-is-awesome Lego Movie. But they were fired during production – reportedly for trying to make the film too much of a comedy. Nevertheless, even with the more serious-minded Ron Howard taking over, Solo is still often very funny. L3 is a hoot (‘Is there anything you need?’ ‘Equal rights?’), meaning this is the second Star Wars spin-off running with a comedic droid (cf Alan Tudyk’s K-2SO in Rogue One). Lando as played by Donald Glover is so watchable he *needs* a film all of his own (check out the throwaway moment when we glimpse him recording a vainglorious diary entry). Geeks all over the world will have smirked when the infamous Imperial March music cue is used in-story, as the Empire’s army-recruitment theme tune.

MUSIC: The score is utterly superb, feeling thoroughly and joyfully Star Wars-esque but having a life of its own too. Whether the scene is action or romance or melancholy or humour, John Powell’s incidental music adds a huge amount. Old John Williams themes are quoted if appropriate, such as a 1977 motif when Han first sits behind the controls of the Falcon, but the new stuff is always memorable and engaging. (Williams made a contribution too. He wrote a new theme called The Adventures of Han, which Powell then incorporated into his work.)

PERSONAL CONNECTION: I first saw this film on 6 June 2018 at the Everyman Canary Wharf in London with my old pal Fraser Dickson. Unlike the December releases of the previous three Star Wars films, Solo came out in the UK on 24 May. WHY NOT MAY THE 4TH?!

REVIEW: This was a huge ask. Huge. To take such a famous and beloved character and *recast* him could have gone catastrophically wrong. Thankfully, both lead actor and the film as a whole are wonderful, vibrant and entertaining. Not that anyone’s going to claim Solo is rewriting the rules of cinema. Being a prequel, for example, it goes down the predictable route of ticking narrative boxes – we learn how Han gained his surname, how he met Chewbacca, how he met Lando Calrissian, how he first encountered the Millennium Falcon, how he gained his gun, why he claims in the original Star Wars that he did the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, even how long he’s owned a pair of gold dice that featured beyond fleetingly in the 1977 film then became a plot point in 2017’s The Last Jedi. This kind of dramatised backstory – simply filling out the spaces between established facts – could of course become boring very quickly. Solo, however, has more than enough zip, panache and style to sidestep the issue. It’s full of vivid characters, exiting sequences, humour, romance and adventure. It’s a caper movie, a heist movie, a Western in disguise. It’s enormous fun. It’s Star Wars. 

Nine spice mines of Kessel out of 10

Aquaman (2018, James Wan)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Having joined Batman, Wonder Woman and others in saving the world, Aquaman is now a famous superhero, but he’d rather live a quiet life. Then a woman from the undersea realm of his ancestors arrives and asks for his help…

Good guys: After a cameo in Batman vs Superman (2016), Arthur Curry (aka Aquaman) was properly introduced in 2017’s superhero mash-up movie Justice League. (Was he called Arthur in that film?! Honestly can’t remember.) He’s played again by Jason Momoa, who enjoys highlighting the character’s flippancy, sarcasm and reluctance to be a superhero. All this lightness helps distract you from the fact that, aside from a minor subplot about his mother, Arthur has no journey or emotional resonance in this story at all. He drifts through the film, being reasonably entertaining but rarely trying to achieve or learn anything. The film begins with a 1980s-set prologue showing us how Arthur’s parents – a stranded mermaid-type called Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) and a laid-back lighthouse-keeper called Thomas (Temuera Morrison) – met, fell in love and had a child. It’s a lightly sketched sequence that isn’t too concerned with nuance or texture. In just a few minutes we race through a mini-episode that’s kinda reminiscent of 80s romcom Splash… if, you know, Splash had contained a 25-second shot showing its heroine beating up an invading force of mermen. The sequence then ends with Atlanna being taken away by some goons, back to her oceanic home of Atlantis… In the present day, Arthur is a grown man (a very grown man; seriously, check out his pecks!) but it seems he would rather forget his stint as a world-saving metahuman in the previous film. Then a hot, redheaded woman from Atlantis called Y’Mera Xebella Challa, mercifully aka Mera, shows up and he’s convinced to leap into superhero action again. She’s played by Amber Heard, who’s actually quite watchable despite bucketfuls of woeful dialogue and a character without much personality. Arthur’s help is needed in Atlantis, where Atlanna’s other son has taken control. He wants to combine the seven underwater kingdoms into one force, be ordained ‘ocean master’, become the commander of the greatest military might on the planet, and wage war on the land-based nations. But because Arthur is of royal blood and is Atlanna’s first-born he can challenge his half-brother to the throne. After Atlantean forces launch attacks on the countries of the world, using tsunami to fling battleships and garbage onto shorelines, Arthur and Mera head down into the depths, where Arthur challenges his brother to a ritualistic combat. The film then goes through several genre-movie clichés: fights and chases, cryptic messages and quests, MacGuffins and globetrotting locations, CGI environments and CGI monsters, a sibling rivalry between two men who have never met before and bullshit backstories explained with a straight face… While all this is going on, we also see flashbacks to Arthur’s childhood, where he was trained in the ways of the Atlanteans by a kind mentor type called Nuidis Vulko (a bored Willem Defoe), who also tells him that his mother was executed after she returned to Atlantis. Vulko is still around in the present-day scenes too.

Bad guys: The initial foe for Arthur is a high-tech pirate called David Kane (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who we meet while he’s attempting to steal a nuclear submarine. During the heist, though, Aquaman shows up, bests him, and cruelly refuses to save Kane’s father when he’s trapped under a heavy torpedo in a flooding room. So, now with a grudge against Arthur, Kane skulks off to the guy who’d hired him… who happens to be Arthur’s despotic half-brother, Orm Marius (Patrick Wilson, looking so rubbery under the post-production effect of being underwater all the time that he may as well be 100-per-cent CGI). He’s the boss of Atlantis and bobs around his undersea realm in a shiny suit of armour and Aryan hair. ‘The time has come to rise again!’ he says, movie-villain-generically. The culture he wants to dominate is one of those fictional worlds that makes such little sense that you question if *any* thought went into creating it. How can the Atlanteans talk underwater? Why do they speak English? Why do they wear clothes? Why can some people breathe oxygen and others can’t? How have they forged metal underwater? Why has evolution given them arms and legs? And hair? Where does all the light come from at the bottom of the ocean? It’s impossible to take  these scenes seriously. Anyway, Mera’s dad is often by Orm’s side – he’s called Nereus, is played by Dolph Lundgren (no, honestly), and mostly just stands– I mean, swims around saying doomladen things. Later, Kane returns to the story: he suits up in elaborate scuba gear that makes him look like a manta ray, so adopts the superhero-villain name of Black Manta and attempts to get revenge on Aquaman. 

Other guys: There are a host of forgettable characters around the coastline of the story – creatures from other undersea realms who presumably have detailed backstories and personalities that were worked out in story conferences and workshopped in rehearsals but then don’t translate at all into interesting on-screen storytelling. We won’t waste time cataloguing them here.

Best bits:
* Having been taken into Thomas’s home, Atlanna is spooked by a TV playing the title sequence to puppet show Stingray – so she chucks her trident at the screen.
* As a child, Arthur is threatened by some bullies at an aquarium – then they realise the shark in the nearby tank is attempting to smash the glass in order to protect Arthur. All the other life in the tank assembles behind him too, like a gang backing up its leader. (It hardly makes any sense, and the moment – like all moments of drama in this film – is rushed through as quickly as possible, but it’s a decent image.)
* David Kane is a fun bad guy. The sequence that introduces him – as he and his dad storm a submarine – is well shot and works nicely as a character introduction. ‘I’ll do you deal,’ he tells the captured captain of the sub. ‘I won’t tell you how to captain, and you don’t tell me how to pirate.’ There’s sadly then a really awful beat as – right in the middle of taking over a submarine! – Kane’s father decides to pause, give David a family heirloom and impart some parental homilies. It’s almost like he knows he’s not to survive much longer.
* Aquaman shows up! ‘Permission to come aboard,’ he says over his shoulder like he’s in a James Bond film. He then starts beating people up in gleefully cartoony ways.
* Aquaman has a drink in a bar with his dad. A huge, scary, tattooed man aggressively interrupts – ‘Are you that fish boy from the TV?’ – and it seems like a fight will ensue… But the guy just wants a selfie because Aquaman is famous! High-larious.
* The flashbacks to Arthur’s childhood training with Vulko feature an exceedingly irritating child actor giving a wide-eyed performance, but the film actually cuts between the past and the present with a bit of flair.
* It’s quite funny when, in the midst of all the pretentious portent of the Atlantean realm, Arthur is frustrated to learn that he must fight Orm in front of thousands of onlookers. ‘Shit,’ he says to himself.
* Arthur and Mera are in a sportscar-like submersible, being chased by Orm’s henchmen. ‘Heads up, we’ve got a bogey on our six!’ he says. Mera: ‘What does that even mean?!’ Arthur: ‘Bad guys behind us.’ Mera: ‘Well, just say that!’ Arthur, in a high-pitched voice because he’s worried: ‘Bad guys behind us!’ (Momoa and Heard are a pretty good double act. They deserve a much better script.)
* Kane gets an A-Team-style montage as he builds his Black Manta cybersuit, complete with a Depeche Mode song on the soundtrack.
* Needing water to kickstart an ancient hologram machine that they’ve found buried under the Sahara, Mera uses her magical powers to delicately extract a drop of moisture from Arthur’s forehead. ‘Could have just peed on it,’ he later says.
* Hanging out in a picturesque square in Sicily, Mera eats some flowers (because being an ocean-dwelling isolationist means she doesn’t know what they are, I guess).
* Black Manta’s armoured suit looks both cool and ridiculous at the same time.
* Some of the action sequence in Sicily is quite exciting: Mera running across slated rooftops, Manta crashing through walls, that kind of thing. (It’s such an action-movie cliché, though, isn’t it? Characters visit a Mediterranean country? Gotta run across the rooftops! See The Living Daylights, The Bourne Ultimatum, Quantum of Solace, Taken, Skyfall…)
* Mera smashes the facemask of a Atlantean bad guy’s helmet while they fight on dry land. As he can’t breath without the water that’s now drained away, he solves the problem by… plunging his face into a nearby toilet. (Aquaman is basically a kids’ film tarted up with a blockbuster budget.)
* Arthur’s mum is still alive! I did not see that coming when they cast a really famous actress for what seemed quite a small role! She’s been hiding out all alone for several years in an uncharted area of sea near the centre of the planet (I think), so is this film’s equivalent of Ant-Man and the Wasp‘s Michelle Pfeiffer.

Review: One of the most important elements of any film is its tone. Get your tone wrong or a bit off or inconsistent, and you’re sunk. While watching Aquaman – the sixth film in the extremely variable DC Extended Universe series – you start to feel like the filmmakers have approached this issue by attempting 17 different tones all at once. The movie is occasionally so portentously po-faced that you can’t help but giggle (‘You wield our mother’s trident. Powerful, but flawed. Like her. I wield my father’s and it has never known defeat!’). Other times, there’s actually a sweetness and a charm about the characters. Elsewhere, it’s a slapstick comedy, a bombastic action movie or a collection of filler scenes from a computer game. It’s a terrible film. It really is. And it’s not just that it can’t decide on a unified mood; other faults keep piling up too: the dialogue that’s so awful it could have been written by someone who’s never heard human beings speak, the drama scenes done as swiftly and perfunctorily as possible, the self-important characters impossible to find interesting, the fight scenes that lack any impact or consequence, the musical score than hammers home every single point imaginable, the over-reliance on sudden explosions as a way of ramping up the tension, the final third that just becomes white-noise of meaningless action… However… Because the film contains some attempts at humour, and because we get two half-decent actors in the main roles, it is more diverting and slightly more enjoyable than most of the previous movies in the DC series.

Five drumming octopuses out of 10

Ready Player One (2018, Steven Spielberg)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

In 2045, everyone spends their time in a massive virtual-reality game. But then teenager Wade Watts learns that a huge prize can be claimed by finding an Easter egg hidden within it…

Seen before? Once, before which I’d read the source novel.

Best performance: Wade’s love interest in the story is a fellow ‘gunter’ (ie, Easter egg hunter) known by the moniker Artemis, who we initially only see as a digital avatar – a kind of cartoony, anime-ish representation of herself. The character might be a CGI creation in these scenes, but the eyes sparkle and the smile is infectious; actress Olivia Cooke (The Limehouse Golem, TV show Bates Motel) radiantly pops through the mo-cap technology. There’s a subplot going on here about Artemis being ashamed of the way she looks; that’s why she doesn’t want to meet Wade outside the RPG fantasy of the virtual-reality game. Of course, seeing as we’re dealing with a Hollywood movie here, when Wade (Tye Sheridan) does finally encounter her in reality she is captivatingly pretty even with a minor birthmark.

Best scene/moment/sequence: The film is based on a terrific 2011 sci-fi novel, which is full of references to popular culture of the 1970s and 80s. Wade has a love for and a deep knowledge of the period and the book sings with a geeky passion and enthusiasm. The movie does too, and the nods soon begin to mount up: He-Man and The Wizard of Oz, Batman and Superman, Star Trek and Star Wars, Ferris Bueller and The Breakfast Club, a-Ha and New Order, King Kong and Godzilla, Alien and Silent Running, Back to the Future and Tron, The Buggles and Tears for Fears, Dark Crystal and The Iron Giant, Beetlejuice and Buckaroo Bonzai, Bill & Ted and Monty Python, RoboCop and Freddy Krueger, Last Action Hero and Dune, GoldenEye (the game) and Saturday Night Fever, and many, many, many more. When adapting Ernest Cline’s novel for the screen, however, one key section caused a problem. In the book, Wade’s quest takes him into a digital recreation of the futuristic LA seen in Blade Runner. However, a sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic was in production at the same time as Ready Player One, so Spielberg couldn’t get hold of the rights. As a replacement, the creative team instead used the setting of the 1980 horror movie The Shining. And the sequence is a wonder: a pixel-perfect recreation of the sets, lighting schemes and general mood of Stanley Kubrick’s best film. (Quite what it all means if you’ve never seen The Shining is another matter!)

Review: Ready Player One is certainly a visually dazzling film. Huge stretches of the story take place inside the virtual-reality world of a MMORPG called the Oasis – ‘a place where the limits of reality are your own imagination’. Near-flawless CGI is used to create a sleek, sweeping, 360-degree, photorealistic and immensely detailed environment. It’s a gamer’s wet dream, and there are hundreds of pop-culture references to spot and feel smug about spotting. But for all this razzmatazz and Spielbergian panache, the core of the movie is ultimately hollow. There’s a sense of a good adventure and some decent gags, but the longer the film goes on the more it gets bogged down with boring action scenes. Wade is a limp, uninteresting lead character who lacks the zip and charisma evident in the source novel’s first-person prose. An affected Mark Rylance is miscast the Oasis’s geeky creator. There are some weak young actors in secondary roles (a real rarity from the director who had strong juvenile performances in ET, Jurassic Park and A.I. Artificial Intelligence). And despite a typically watchable turn from Ben Mendelsohn, the story’s business-exec villain is as one-note as they come. It’s not a dreadful film – far from it – but all the fantasy could do with a bit more reality.

Seven corn-syrup droughts out of 10

The Predator (2018, Shane Black)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

When an alien crashes to earth, the authorities want to capture it for investigation – but then another alien creature arrives, hunting the first one…

The cast: Our lead is a rather underwhelming action hero. We’re told that army sniper Quinn McKenna (played by Logan bad guy Boyd Holbrook) has PTSD, but he generally seems unaffected and has no problem killing and running into danger and quipping like it’s the 1980s. After a surprise jungle encounter with an alien recently crashed on earth, Quinn is interrogated by his superiors then shuffled out of the way so he won’t blab. But he’s already posted some key alien tech to his family back home (as you do). His estranged wife is a nothing part played by Yvonne Strahovski, and they have a young, bullied, meek but very clever son called Rory (Jacob Tremblay); the latter accidentally ends up with a predator mask and uses it as a Halloween disguise. When it becomes clear that aliens have landed on earth again, the government calls in evolutionary biologist Dr Casey Becket (Olivia Munn), who has a look at a captured predator and realises its significance, but then must go on the run with Quinn and others when it escapes and goes on a rampage. In a less sexist world, Becket would be this film’s central character – she’s smart, sexy, sassy in the usual Olivia Munn style, and even goes all Sarah Connor when the plot requires. (Why a university professor is so proficient with machine guns and high-octane combat is not addressed in the finished film. A sequence showing her out jogging, which maybe would have implied her physical aptitude, was famously cut out after Munn learned that the other actor in the scene was a registered sex offender.) As the story develops, Quinn and Becket hook up with a group of prisoners being transferred by the army; all have psychological problems as a result of their service, and they’re one of the highlights of the film. Gaylord ‘Nebraska’ Williams (Trevante Rhodes) is a cool, laidback ex-Marine and the de facto leader of the team; Coyle (Keegan-Michael Key) is a course joker and another Marine vet; Baxley (Thomas Jane) has Tourette’s and, we eventually learn, is in a relationship with Coyle; Lynch (Alfie Allen) is a quiet Irishman who doesn’t make much impression on the film at all; and the sweet Jesus look-a-like Nettles (Augusto Aguilera) is a former chopper pilot who suffered a head injury in a crash. The collective are, for long stretches, being hunted by a human as well as the predator: Sterling K Brown’s constantly chewing Will Traeger, who runs the Stargazer Project, the secretive organisation that investigate aliens incursions. He’s a bit of a cartoon villain.

The best bit: Thirty-eight minutes into the film, Quinn, Nebraska, Coyle, Baxley and Nettles have escaped the army base, evaded the predator, and are holed up in a motel room. They’ve saved Becket from being killed for what she knows about the alien, but she’s out cold on the bed. What follows is a highly comedic scene. We see the guys nervous about how to wake Becket up; she then regains consciousness and immediately reaches for a discarded shotgun; and the guys howl with laughter because they’ve placed bets on how she’d react. The plot is discussed and moved forward, character detail is revealed for several people, and there are many genuine laughs. If only the whole film was as good as this.

Crossover: A weapon from Alien vs Predator is glimpsed in the lab sequence, and we get many subtle nods or explicit references to the first two Predator movies. (As it’s set on another planet, 2010’s Predators isn’t mentioned.) One of the most grin-inducing is the appearance of a scientist called Sean Keyes (the son of Predator 2‘s Peter Keyes) played by Jake Busey (the son of Gary Busey, who played Peter).

Review: Writer/director Shane Black has made so many wonderful films over the last 30 years that there were understandably high hopes for this relaunch of the Predator brand. His style of witty, cynical, pulling-the-rug-from-under-you storytelling works so well in an action-movie or thriller context, whether it’s in Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scount or Iron Man 3. He also had a pre-existing connection to the series: he played a small role in the 1987 original, cast essentially so he could be on set to do some dialogue punch-ups. However, we didn’t really get the film we were expecting… Things take quite a while to get going, for example. The opening third of the movie feels by-the-numbers – there’s little humour, little charm, and none of the Shane Black sparkle and fizz. It gets better, though, once Quinn hooks up with Casey and the ragbag group of prisoners, most of whom are distinctive, memorable and oddly likeable. The gag rate rises appreciably, the pace also picks up, and you even start to enjoy the movie’s weirdly flippant tone. All this helps distract from the unimaginative storyline, the hollow father/son subplot and some distastefully callous humour such as when Quinn murders someone in front of young Rory and then makes a joke about it. Fun at times but too often unsatisfying.

Six alien Whoopi Goldbergs out of 10