Dead exciting
Zack Snyder takes a more is more approach to Vegas-set zombieheist movie Army of the Dead
Army of the Dead
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(15)
The Woman in the Window (15) ✪
Rare Beasts (15) ✪✪✪
My New York Year (15) ✪✪
Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In (12A)
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Having recently been vindicated for his approach to DC’S big screen comic book universe with his new cut of Justice League, director Zack Snyder returns to the world of zombies with Army of the Dead, a sort of spiritual sequel to the divisive Dawn of the Dead remake with which he began his career back in 2004. Taking a typically maximalist approach to the genre, it’s essentially a zombie apocalypse Ocean’s Eleven (or more accurately, a zombie apocalypse Kelly’s Heroes), with former war hero Dave Batista charged with putting a team of suicidal roughnecks together to liberate $200m from a Las Vegas casino three days before the quarantined city is due to be nuked.
The film is at its best in its goofy opening scenes depicting the fall of America’s playground following a nearby military accident. As with Snyder’s opening credit sequences in Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen it condenses a lot of set-up and backstory into a bravura slow-motion prologue, this time soundtracked by a loungecore version of Viva Las Vegas and featuring zombie Elvises, zombie showgirls and even a zombie tiger (“One of Siegfried and Roy’s” a character later informs us). Thenceforth we get a very protracted first act that, ironically, takes an age to set up its mercenaries-on-mission/ heist-movie plot, which wouldn’t be so bad if the more nefarious twists being seeded hadn’t already been done before in Aliens. Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for Snyder’s more-is-more approach, particularly when it comes to the Grand Guignol gore of zombie hoards on the rampage.
Plagued by re-shoots and behindthe-scenes controversy before being dumped on Netflix, The Woman in the Window is an example of how even the most prestigious projects can curdle on their way to the screen. Directed by Atonement’s Joe Wright, written by Pulitzer prizewinner Tracy Letts, and starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the film’s blue-chip production exposes rather than elevates the pedestrian potboiler narrative of AJ Finn’s best-selling source novel about an agoraphobic child psychologist (Adams) who becomes convinced her new neighbour (Oldman) has killed his wife.
The book’s mundane plot twists are rendered even more flatly on film, with Wright taking the story’s overt references to Hollywood’s Golden Age as a licence to craft an overly-stylised riff on Hitchcock that plays more like a bad pastiche than a smart update. The resulting tonal weirdness tips the already hammy performances into the realm of melodramatic hysteria.
Sadly, melodramatic hysteria is also where Billie Piper’s otherwise promising directorial debut Rare Beasts ends up. A raw and erratic relationship drama built around a bunch of volubly vicious characters incapable of preventing their various neuroses from bleeding into their personal lives, it follows Piper’s emotionally damaged single mother as she begins a relationship with an openly misogynistic colleague (Leo Bill). They work alongside each other at a TV production company that seems intent on capturing the zeitgeist by developing awfulsounding projects about the gender wars – a satirical meta-flourish that might have landed with more force if the film itself didn’t also scream its every observation about men and women with an intensity that becomes wearying. Nevertheless, there are individual scenes that showcase Piper’s skills as both a writer of entertainingly lacerating dialogue and a director with a strong visual style.
Based on Joanna Rakoff ’s memoir about the year she spent as an assistant to JD Salinger’s agent,
My New York Year tries to force the relationship between Rakoff (Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood’s Margaret Qualley) and her oldfashioned boss (played by Sigourney Weaver) to conform to the the sort of semi-abusive, tough-love dynamic familiar from The Devil Wears Prada. That this doesn’t feel appropriate for the characters or the story is perhaps why writer/director Philippe Flardeau gives up on it in order to focus more on Rakoff ’s interactions with the obsessive Salinger fans whose letters she has to read as part of her job to protect the Catcher in the Rye author’s privacy. Alas, whatever charm Quelley and Weaver bring is further squandered by the film’s inability to either recreate the dawnof-the-digital-age mid-1990s setting or evoke the requisite nostalgia for the disappearing world Rakoff ’s employer and its most famous client represented.
The latest documentary to explore the life of a mega successful Scottish football manager, Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In uses the former Manchester United boss’s recent brush with death (he suffered a near-fatal brain haemorrhage in 2018) as both a framing device and a motivation for this intimate look back at his life and career. Directed by his son, Jason Ferguson, what emerges is more revealing as a reflective portrait of Ferguson’s fiery tenure as football’s greatest gaffer than an exploration of the toll his drive for success may have had on his family. Still, it's a wellmade and compulsively watchable doc, even for football agnostics.
Army of the Dead and The Woman in the Window are out on Netflix; Rare Beasts is in cinemas and on digital platforms; My New York Year is on general release; Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In, selected cinemas on 27 May and Amazon Prime from 29 May
Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In is a well-made and compulsively watchable doc, even for football agnostics