SECOND SCREEN
Festive family audiences will be rushing to Moana (PG) HHH desperate to discover whether the latest animated Disney offering is another Frozen. Alas, it isn’t quite, despite gorgeous animation, a story anchored in the creation myths of Polynesia and at least one decent song.
Newcomer Auli’i Cravalho, a 16year-old from Hawaii, voices Moana (pronounced Mo-an-a), the feisty daughter of an island chief whose once idyllic kingdom is now in trouble – the coconut crop is failing and fish are disappearing from its coral-ringed lagoon.
But should the islanders just sit tight or should Moana follow her voyaging instincts and sail in search of mischievous demigods, missing hearts and the island-creating goddess, Te Fiti? Hmm, tough call.
After a sluggish start, things do improve but there are obvious structural echoes of Frozen and the incidental comedy is clumsy. Good but not great.
In The Edge Of Seventeen (15) HHHH Hailee Steinfeld (below) lifts this likeable offering from first-time writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig towards the higher slopes of the high-school, rite-of-passage genre pile. She plays Nadine – socially awkward, lacking in confidence and, in her opinion, not as good-looking as her heart-throb older brother, Darian. So when her only friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) starts going out with Darian (Blake Jenner), Nadine goes into adolescent meltdown.
Chi-Raq (15) sees Spike Lee taking HHH the plot of Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata and using it to examine the modern-day violence in south Chicago. I love the anger, the comedy and the use of music but untangling the moral rights and wrongs is a nightmare, with Lysistrata’s story of female empowerment – the women go on a sex strike until the men stop killing each other – sitting uncomfortably with the casual misogyny and sexism. Bleed For This (15) is a biopic HH of the fighter Vinny Pazienza who, having just won the world super-middleweight title in 1991, broke his neck in a crash. Despite a decent central turn from Miles Teller, the film is predictable and has a healthy relationship with genre cliché.