Eve is on song in quirky, feel-good Dublin fairytale
F‘WILL LOVE BLOSSOM? NOT AS LONG AS HER TEEN SON IS AROUND TO MAKE HER LIFE HELL’
rom Once to Begin Again to Sing Street, I love the films of John Carney, a man who clearly believes that there are few problems in the world, particularly of the broken-heart variety, that can’t be put right by a well-written song and a nicely strummed guitar.
And he’s done it again with Flora And Son, which sees Eve Hewson – yes, daughter of Bono and so good recently in Bad Sisters – playing a feisty Dublin single mum who rescues a broken old guitar from a skip and starts online lessons with a handsomely crumpled singersongwriter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who’s based in Los Angeles.
Might long-distance love blossom? Not as long as her truculent teenage son, who dreams of becoming a rapper, is around to swear at her and make her life a living hell.
Yes, what ensues is a bit of a Dublin-based fairy tale but Hewson is a joy as the tough-as-nails Flora, who brushes up a treat, and we all need a bit of cheering up sometimes.
The opening premise for The Creator, Gareth Edwards’ first new film since the highly lauded Star Wars prequel, Rogue One, is a nuclear attack on Los Angeles that kills a million people and reduces the city centre to radioactive rubble. But the attack has not been launched by the Russians or the North Koreans but by America’s own defence systems, now controlled by artificial intelligence.
So far, so Terminator, many will be thinking, and that won’t be the last time the thought crosses your mind. But as The Creator rolls forward, first to 2065 and then on again to a 2070 that sees very human US military might hunting down the humanoid robots of New Asia, you may also find yourself thinking… hmm, it’s a bit Blade Runner, a bit Avatar, with a generous chunk of AI thrown in, along with some of the production design of 2015’s Chappie.
Original, therefore, it is not, but it’s stunning to see on the big screen, with some of the best visual effects you’ll see all year. Edwards famously constructed most of the effects for his first feature, Monsters, on his home laptop. Now, with the blockbusters Godzilla and Rogue One to his name, he has the creative powerhouses of Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Workshop to play with, and he doesn’t waste a pixel. From the massive flying US battle station that is Nomad to the hollow neck-joint of the warrior-robot played by Ken Watanabe, this feels as close to digital perfection as it’s currently possible to be.
I was less convinced by the shouty central performance of John David Washington, and by a screenplay that Edwards wrote with Chris Weitz that initially sees several highly trained soldiers doing idiotic things and fails to address a really nasty moral muddle that’s there from the outset.
Still, it’s a well-paced and entertaining watch and does, at least, have the courage to ask one big, if unfashionable question: in the battle between humankind and AI, who exactly are the good guys?
The Old Oak, the latest and possibly last motion picture from veteran film-maker Ken Loach, is set in a former mining village in England’s northeast, where jobs are scarce, poverty widespread and house prices tumbling. So when a busload of Syrian refugees suddenly arrives, resentment soon starts to grow… particularly in the bar of the village’s last remaining and fast-crumbling pub, The Old Oak, much to the dismay of its essentially decent landlord, TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner).
Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty have always worn their liberal, left-wing politics on their film-making sleeves, and it’s no different here in a film that feels like a companion piece to the Bafta-winning I, Daniel Blake. But an underlying warmth and humanity is ultimately difficult to resist, despite the overlong running time and occasional lapses into pathos.
Reptile turns out to be a slick, menacing thriller that stars Benicio Del Toro as a police detective-hoping to find professional redemption by catching the killer of a beautiful estate agent.
The initially welcome likes of Justin Timberlake, Alicia Silverstone and Frances Fisher all grace the supporting cast but ultimately lead to a tangle of subplots and sidebars that delay a dénouement already threatening to befuddle and mildly disappoint.