SHORTCUTS

NEW RELEASES

Bridge of Spies: Steven Spielberg’s first venture into Cold War espionage movie territory is co-scripted by the Coen brothers and British writer Matt Charman. It is a consummately crafted, richly layered affair, with fine performances from Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance. ★★★★ A Walk in the Woods: Robert Redford and Nick Nolte star in this adaptation of Bill Bryson’s memoir about an epic walk along the Appalachian trail. The film is as slow-moving as its two curmudgeonly leads and is unabashedly sentimental, but it has a redemptive charm. ★★★★ Big Stone Gap: In a small town, spinster Ave Maria Mulligan finds her life shaken up when she learns a longburied family secret. The film has an ending that’s rather implausible, but in a lot of ways this is a Chicken Soup for the Soul sort of movie and sometimes, that’s exactly what one needs. ★★★ Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Three Scouts join forces with a tough cocktail waitress to become the world’s most unlikely team of heroes. When their town is ravaged by a zombie invasion, they put their scouting skills to the test to save mankind from the undead hordes. ★★★ War Room: Clumsily written faithbased drama is a soap opera-style tale which sees a struggling couple challenged to establish a ‘war room’ and a battle plan of prayer for their family. ★★

ON CIRCUIT

Legend: Legend is a biopic on a lavish scale. The lead characters, the Krays, 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 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 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 isn’t particularly imaginative. ★★★ Crimson Peak: 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). ★★★ 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 Center towers. Guided by his real-life mentor, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his gang overcome long odds, betrayals and countless close calls to conceive and execute their mad plan. ★★★★ Black Mass: Johnny Depp delivers a frigid, dead-eyed performance as ruthless 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. ★★★