A deadly house of horrors
LIZZIE ★★★ (Cert 15, 103mins)
IT SEEMS Disney and Pixar haven’t quite exhausted all the nursery rhymes. This beautifully performed drama is based on a famous 1892 double-murder trial immortalised in a grisly playground ditty.
If you haven’t heard it, the case for the prosecution was summarised like this: “Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.”
Director Craig William Macneill places the aftermath of that gruesome scene at the beginning of the film then rewinds six months to imagine how it may have come to pass.
The Borden home is one of the wealthiest in New England but life isn’t easy for the ladies of the house. For 32-year-old spinster Lizzie (Chloë Sevigny), it’s a well-appointed prison. She’s too old and too wilful to attract suitors so her violent father (Jamey Sheridan) sees little point in allowing her out.
Lizzie also hates her meanspirited stepmother (Fiona Shaw) whom she suspects married her father for his money.
She also suspects that she and her unmarried younger sister (Kim Dickens) are about to be written out of her father’s will. Threatening letters have been arriving at house, stating, “No one will save you from what is to come.”
When her sinister uncle (Denis O’Hare) offers to take over the home and to take responsibility for the two Borden spinsters in the event of her father’s death, we begin to suspect that he penned the letters or may even be behind the eventual murders.
But then a shaft of light appears in the gloomy house when Lizzie meets new maid Bridget (Kristen Stewart) who, like all Irish servants, is renamed Maggie by her employers. Lizzie calls her by her real name, teaches her to read and passion begins to bubble up between the two women. Sevigny and Stewart are fine actors and as their relationship becomes defined by stolen glances, secret smiles and illicit letters, their tightly coiled performances keep us watching.
But it can feel like the passion has been corseted by the demands of the guessing game. In the end, their convincing relationship is just one cog that leads us towards a very gruesome finale.
★★ (Cert 12A, 143mins)
DC Comics’ first solo adventure for Jason Momoa’s hulking man from Atlantis feels closer in tone to Marvel’s knockabout Thor movies than DC’s dour Batman V Superman. This was probably the right move but horror director James Wan wasn’t the man to pull it off.
Aquaman is born Arthur Curry, the half-man, half-Atlantean child of Nicole Kidman’s Atlantean queen and Temuera Morrison’s lighthouse keeper. He is raised on land by his dad after fishy stormtroopers force his mum to return to her underwater kingdom.
When we jump forward by a couple of decades, Arthur has become pirate-fighting superhero Aquaman. Then Atlantean princess Mera (Amber Heard) surfaces to persuade him to take the Atlantean throne from his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) who has just declared war on the land-dwellers.
As a civil war rages under the sea, Arthur heads to the desert to claim the Lost Trident of Atlan while being pursued by Black Manta (Yahya AbdulMateen II), a human mercenary in a high-tech suit who is in cahoots with Orm.
The sections on land are part Indiana Jones-lite and part half-baked screwball comedy. The battles under the sea are a different kettle of fish.
Instead of taking a tip from the successful 2015 Star Wars reboot and using old-fashioned
physical sets, Aquaman’s huge battles are staged on elaborate computer-generated backdrops. But nothing looks real so it’s difficult to connect with Wan’s huge cast.
At times, it’s hard to tell whether he is being intentionally funny. At key moments in the fight scenes, Momoa tosses his hair in slow-motion like he’s in an aftershave commercial. Is this knowingly naff or just naff?
A large proportion of the £200million budget must have been wasted on plonking Willem Dafoe and Dolph Lundgren on armoured sharks and seahorses.
The climactic battle is suitably epic but it feels like you’re watching a cut scene from a video game.
MORTAL ENGINES ★★ (Cert 12A, 128mins)
PETER Jackson gets top billing on the poster of this “Young Adult” sci-fi, a big-budget adaptation of the first instalment of Philip Reeve’s four-novel series. It is set in a future Earth where mobile cities mounted on huge caterpillar tracks roam across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
But if you read the small print, you’ll discover that the director of the Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies only served as producer and one of four co-writers.
The man in charge was the first-time director Christian Rivers, Jackson’s long-serving storyboard artist. This muddled movie suggests Rivers is an accomplished stylist but still has a lot to learn about constructing a story. The film opens 1,000 years since the “Sixty Second War” ushered in a new dark age. We’re now in a period of “Municipal Darwinism” and London is a predatory city that survives by capturing smaller wheeled settlements and plundering their resources.
We open with the motorised metropolis tearing through mainland Europe with St Paul’s Cathedral and Big Ben perched on top. After it spots a small German mining town, it gives chase, captures it in a mesh of harpoons and gobbles it up in its Union Jack-painted maw.
It is an impressive opening even if it is very reminiscent of Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s also the film’s best scene. When we meet the characters, it becomes clear this adventure is running on fumes.
The first potential lead is young historian Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan) who specialises in ancient artefacts from the “screen age”.
He seems a bit dull to be the hero so it is something of a relief when he teams up with a masked girl called Hester (Hera Hilmar) to take down London’s evil ruler Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving).
Stephen Lang takes over the middle stretch as a half zombie/half Terminator character before passing the baton to an outlaw called Anna Fang (Jihae) who is dressed as at least three different characters from The Matrix. By the final battle, it’s hard to remember who everyone is and almost impossible to care.
DANISH director Lars von Trier loves to shock. Sadly, the most shocking thing about this nasty serial killer movie is how tedious it is.
The film opens in pitch darkness as psychopath Jack (Matt Dillon) talks to an unidentified man (Bruno Ganz) in way that suggests he’s taking a journey to the underworld. As he reminisces about five gruesome “incidents”, Von Trier subjects us to scenes of bodies being mutilated and children shot in the head.
It turns out Jack is trying to justify his existence before meeting his maker. If Von Trier is trying to justify his own, he has failed miserably.
Von Trier’s enfant terrible persona hasn’t aged terribly well. The provocateur is now a crashing bore.