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PICK OF THIS WEEK’S FILMS
THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING (PG)
The legend of King Arthur has been inspiring mediocrity on the big screen for decades. Alas, writer-director Joe Cornish’s family-friendly spin on the sword in the stone tale continues the dispiriting trend, messily combining medieval magic with present-day growing pains for a quartet of underwritten adolescents. Action setpieces lack variety and eye-popping thrills, repeatedly pitting children against flaming-eyed skeletal warriors on horseback, who are easily stopped with a swift blow from a sword to decaying bones. The Kid Who Would Be King maintains a sluggish pace as the cast collectively bears the burden of leaden dialogue. Humour is skewed towards the youngest members of the audience, who might giggle with glee at comic buttock nudity or thrill to scenes of kids wielding traffic signs as shields. But not at Camelot.
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (15)
Writer-director Barry Jenkins proves that Moonlight’s memorable Oscar win was no fluke with his sublime adaptation of the novel by James Baldwin, which charts a love story against the turbulent backdrop of racial injustice in 1970s Harlem. Masterfully constructed in fluid and visually arresting takes that make the heart swell, If Beale Street Could Talk conceals its devastating narrative blows behind impeccable production design and Nicholas Britell’s swooning orchestral score. KiKi Layne and Stephan James are a handsome pairing and they catalyse molten screen chemistry in an artfully staged sex scene that culminates in him whispering, “Just remember that I belong to you” as their naked bodies shudder together. Jenkins engineers one of the year’s most unforgettable scenes in the living room of a cramped apartment, where two mothers trade withering verbal blows about an unplanned pregnancy. The punctuation mark is a shocking act of violence that floors us with one of the characters.
ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (12A)
Adapted from Yukito Kishiro’s acclaimed manga series, Alita: Battle Angel is a futuristic action adventure directed by Robert Rodriguez, which sacrifices emotional storytelling at the altar of dizzying special effects. The title character, a female cyborg with fractured memories of her shadowy past, is realised in haphazard strokes by state-of-the-art performance capture and digital effects. The fingerprints of producer James Cameron are on every Avatar-lite frame of this otherworldly origin story. His script, co-written by Laeta Kalogridis, is half-baked to familiar recipes, which tasted far sweeter when Ridley Scott was in the Blade Runner kitchen and Gary Ross was cooking up the original Hunger Games. The tug of war between spectacle and substance threatens to tear apart Rodriguez’s uneven picture, which punctuates Alita’s personal odyssey with turbocharged sequences of a futuristic contact sport called Motorball, which combines a roller derby with the slam-bang destruction of Robot Wars.
THE LEGO MOVIE 2 (U)
A lightning bolt fashioned from coloured plastic construction bricks almost strikes twice in The Lego Movie 2. Set five years after the award-winning first film, Mike Mitchell’s briskly paced, uproarious and imaginative sequel is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that Mad Max might begrudgingly call home, where plastic characters from the Lego and Duplo universes live in perpetual conflict. Scriptwriters Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, masterminds of the award-winning 2014 computer-animated odyssey, show a delightful disregard for convention as they lampoon the Marvel and DC Comics universes and swathes of pop culture. Digitally rendered visuals, which mimic the imperfect movements of stop-motion animation, are laden with in-jokes that demand a second viewing. Everything Is Awesome, the infectious song that temporarily supplanted Let it Go from Frozen as the earworm of despairing parents everywhere, gets another airing alongside a new ditty, Catchy Song. I can confirm that resistance is futile.
ALL IS TRUE (12A)
On stage and screen, Sir Kenneth Branagh has devoted a considerable amount of blood, sweat and iambic pentameter to ensuring Shakespeare’s plays are widely accessible. It should come as no surprise that he juggles duties behind and in front of the camera for this intimate drama set in 1613, the year the Globe Theatre in London burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII. Scripted by Ben Elton, All is True dramatises a twilight year in the bard’s life, when ghosts of the past literally and figuratively haunt the playwright in Stratford-upon-Avon as he contends with rivalry between his daughters and his shortcomings as a husband. Branagh’s film doesn’t let facts get in the way of spinning a melancholic yarn and historical rigour is tossed out of the window with a hey nonny nonny when it comes to casting. Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway was eight years older than her husband, but here she is portrayed with warmth by Dame Judi Dench.
BOY ERASED (15)
In 2004, 19-year-old Baptist preacher’s son Garrard Conley willingly entered a Love In Action facility in Tennessee to purge the homosexuality that put him at odds with his family’s religious zeal. His nightmarish experiences of conversion therapy informed a bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, and writer-director Joel Edgerton sensitively plunders this heartfelt text for a deeply moving and unsentimental dramatisation. The filmmaker casts himself as the pious counsellor in charge of malleable minds, who are encouraged to chant: “I am using sexual sin and homosexuality to fill a God-shaped void in my life”. Words cut to the bone and Lucas Hedges is heartbreaking as the teenage witness to controversial practices, which some might call mental and physical torture, including one harrowing scene of a family striking their terrified son with a Bible to drive out Satan from his body. Edgerton’s script comes down firmly on one side of the conversion therapy argument and preaches quietly yet powerfully to the outraged.
ESCAPE ROOM (15)
Director Adam Robitel and scriptwriters Bragi F Schut and Maria Melnik tap into the craze for immersive and interactive entertainment for the warped premise of a predictable horror thriller. Escape Room is engineered with many of the same parts as the Saw franchise, albeit without the relentless gore and entrails.
Set in Chicago, the film throws together six hastily sketched strangers and compels them to play for their lives in a series of diabolically designed rooms where one wrong move could prove fatal. Only three characters are blessed with flimsy back stories, which tips the wink about who is likely to perish first.
Playing an escape room in person is far more thrilling and intellectually stimulating than anything Robitel conjures on screen but he elicits solid performances from an ensemble cast, who are meat for the cinematic grinder.
GREEN BOOK (12A)
Inspired by a real-life friendship, Green Book is a life-affirming comedy drama which follows the tyre prints of Driving Miss Daisy to spark mutual appreciation between a chauffeur and his back-seat employer. In the case of Peter Farrelly’s charming picture, the lead characters – an Italian-American bouncer (Viggo Mortensen) and a black pianist (Mahershala Ali) – stand on opposite sides of a racial divide at a time when American motels and restaurants could segregate or exclude clientele based on the colour of their skin. The script by Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga and Brian Currie fine-tunes conflict between the two men during an eight-week pre-Christmas concert tour, which screeches from the bright lights of New York to the Mississippi Delta. Mortensen and Ali are a delightful double act and Linda Cardellini offers compelling support as the bouncer’s proud spouse, who makes her embarrassed husband promise to “write me a letter every chance you get”. Farrelly’s picture writes its own love letter to the endurance of the embattled human spirit that we savour with tears of contentment in our eyes.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD (PG)
The third time’s a bittersweet, crowd-pleasing charm for the computer-animated adventures based on the books by Cressida Cowell.
Directed at a brisk pace by Dean DeBlois, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World soars in the slipstream of earlier films, which tenderly sketched the friendship between a Viking boy called Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and a Night Fury dragon named Toothless. That unshakeable bond between man and beast is tested to (heart)breaking point in DeBlois’ script, which recycles themes of selflessness and devotion to their natural conclusion without sacrificing the tenderness, raw emotion or uproarious humour which have become the series’ trademarks. Admittedly there are scorch marks of deja vu on a plot that pits Hiccup and his Viking brethren against a sadistic villain, who has hunted Night Furies – the alphas of the dragon world – to the brink of extinction. However, if this is the final time Hiccup and co take flight, it is a sweetly satisfying and soaring swansong.