Too much for a boy to bear
playing Milne as dead-eyed and vaguely sinister, more like the local serial killer than an anxious father. It is a role that seems tailor-made for a young Colin Firth and doesn’t fit Gleeson at all. (Cert 15; 105mins) A TYPICALLY commanding performance from Christopher Plummer is the best thing about The Exception, a slice of wartime history served up as hokey melodrama.
In May 1940, German captain Stefan Brandt (Jai Courtney) is assigned to Holland to protect exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II (Plummer) and his wife (Janet McTeer).
Brandt has barely presented his credentials before he is rolling around in bed with maid Mieke (Lily James) who might as well carry a placard declaring to the world she is a spy.
Once her true motives are revealed, the film moves into cloak-and-dagger intrigue where Brandt and the Kaiser embody good, decent Germans and Hitler’s regime is represented by a visit from Himmler, played by a creepy Eddie Marsan.
Oscar-winning veteran Plummer plays the elderly Kaiser with a mixture of arrogance, roguish wit and vulnerability and completely steals the show. (Cert 18; 149mins) IF the point of Brimstone is to show that 19th-century frontier life was a brutal, misogynistic hell, then it succeeds beyond all expectations. More horror than western, this portrait of the evil men do is unrelentingly grim and sadistic.
The tale begins with mute midwife Liz (Dakota Fanning) terrified by the arrival of a Dutch preacher called Reverend (Guy Pearce) in her remote community. The ugly history that entwines them unfolds in flashbacks filled with violence and suffering.
Fanning is good as a woman struggling to rise above the hand that life has dealt to her and there is a good role for Game Of Thrones’ Kit Harington as the one decent man she encounters along the way. The film looks beautiful but is deeply unpleasant to watch. (Cert 15; 86mins) DIRECTOR Peter Mackie Burns makes an auspicious feature debut with Daphne, an intensely focused character study carried by a striking performance from Emily Beecham.
Daphne is a cook in a London restaurant. She is prickly, tough talking and fiercely independent and has a tense relationship with her mother Rita (Geraldine James).
But when she witnesses a stabbing, her tough facade crumbles as she is forced to examine what she wants from life. A modest but intriguing film. (Cert 12A; 97mins) REESE Witherspoon must have her pick of all the best scripts so why did she choose Home Again? It’s an inoffensive film but feels more like a TV sitcom.
Alice Kinney (Witherspoon) is set for fresh challenges and new beginnings when she and her two daughters leave New York and move into the family home in Los Angeles.
An uncharacteristically boozy night celebrating her 40th birthday brings her into contact with dashing 27-year-old aspiring director Harry (Pico Alexander).
The morning after the night before, Harry and cronies George (Jon Rudnitsky) and Teddy (Nat Wolff) flatter Alice’s movie star mother Lillian (Candice Bergen) and are invited to move into the guest house. They are the sweetest, most considerate trio who provide moral support, therapy, cooking and in-house babysitting. There are romantic difficulties too, complicated by the arrival of Alice’s estranged husband Austin (Michael Sheen).
Witherspoon once triumphed with Legally Blonde but this is lethally bland. (Cert PG; 88mins) HIGHLY entertaining New Zealand documentary Pecking Order follows all the bitter rivalry and tense drama surrounding the 2015 National Poultry Show as members of the Christchurch Poultry, Bantam and Pigeon Club follow their dream of breeding the perfect specimen.
Do their birds have the “Eggs Factor”? This pun-filled film unfolds with affection and features a gallery of quirky characters from veteran chairman Doug to 12-year-old novice Rhys. A real delight.