SHORTCUTS

ON CIRCUIT

Legend: Legend is a biopic on a lavish scale. The lead characters, the Kray twins, legendary gangster twins (both played by Tom Hardy) are British, the setting is London in the 1960s, but the film has the feel of an American gangster epic. It takes a mythologising and, at times, absurdly romantic, approach to its low-life heroes. In spite of the bloodletting and violence, it is a very glossy film, beautifully shot in luxuriant widescreen colour by cinematographer Dick Pope and with plenty of Burt Bacharach on the soundtrack. ★★★★ Goosebumps: Upset about moving from a big city to a small town, teenager Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette) finds a silver lining when he meets the beautiful girl, Hannah (Odeya Rush), living right next door. But every silver lining has a cloud, and Zach’s comes when he learns that Hannah has a mysterious dad who is revealed to be RL Stine (Jack Black), the author of the best-selling Goosebumps series. It turns out that there is a reason why Stine is so strange: he is a prisoner of his own imagination – the monsters that his books made famous are real and Stine protects his readers by keeping them locked up in their books. When Zach unintentionally unleashes the monsters from their manuscripts, it’s up to Stine, Zach, and Hannah to get all of them back in the books where they belong. The film is occasionally funny and some-times suspenseful, but it isn’t particularly imaginative. Then again, neither are RL Stine’s popular novellas. ★★★ Crimson Peak: Like the blood-red clay that lends the eponymous setting of Crimson Peak its name, the movie is a visually striking but sticky thing. Set in 19th-century England in a decrepit but picturesque manor home and starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain, the film by the stylish fantasist Guillermo del Toro looks marvellous, but has a vein of narrative muck at its core. ★★★ Knock Knock: Two nubile, stranded women (Ana de Armas, Lorenza Izzo) reveal a sinister agenda after they spend the night with a married architect (Keanu Reeves). ★★★ Diary of a Teenage Girl: Film-maker Marielle Heller and actress Bel Powley deliver an artful and politically potent tale, a sexual coming-of-age story. Set in 1970s San Francisco, it’s the story of a 15-year-old artist, Minnie, who enters into an affair with her mother’s boyfriend. The story of how Minnie happened to have her first sexual experience, and the lengths she winds up going to in order to test the boundaries of her own hunger, ambition and curiosity, is no doubt the stuff of most parents’ nightmares. But one needn’t have first-person experience with, or even approve of, the extremes Minnie pursues to appreciate the honest, forthright way Heller and Powley present a journey that, stripped to its most basic emotional elements, is timeless. ★★★★★ Dis Ek Anna: Based on Anchien Troskie’s two top-selling novels, Dis ek, Anna and Die Staat Teen Anna Bruwer. The film is about the sexual abuse of Anna Bruwer by her stepfather over a period of eight years. The viewer becomes intimately involved in the child’s world of shame, threats and silence. ★★★★ The Walk: Twelve people have walked on the moon, but only one man has ever, or will ever, walk in the void between the old World Trade Centre towers. Guided by his real-life mentor, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his gang overcome long odds, betrayals, dissension and countless close calls to conceive and execute their mad plan. ★★★★ Mississippi Grind: Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn play a couple of lovable losers, but in the eyes of the film’s directing team, they’re born winners. Anna Boden and her fellow writer-director Ryan Fleck have brought a brand of humanism and compassion to their projects since their debut in 2006, when they introduced Ryan Gosling to the world in Half Nelson. ★★★ Black Mass: Johnny Depp delivers a frigid, dead-eyed performance as ruthless South Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger in a sombre-toned dramatisation of Bulger’s manipulation of the local FBI. Director Scott Cooper does an admirable job of devalorising the kinds of characters that Martin Scorsese has made a career of colourfully mythologising. ★★★