Film digest
THE WAR WITH GRANDPA (PG)
Battle lines are drawn between feuding generations in director Tim Hill’s slapdash family-oriented comedy.
Based on Robert Kimmel Smith’s children’s book, The War With Grandpa contrives a ridiculous conflict between a petulant six grader (Oakes Fegley) and the oldest member of the clan (Robert De Niro), who agree to resolve differences with Home Alonestyle booby traps and pranks that predictably spiral out of control.
Tom J Astle and Matt Ember’s simplistic script conceals a couple of decent chuckles between swathes of broad slapstick, which includes an airborne Santa Claus and a barelyrunning gag involving a traffic cop who is repeatedly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Generous drizzles of sticky sentiment sweeten a predictable second half.
Make familial love not war.
CREATION STORIES (15)
A quarter of a century after Ewan McGregor pounded the streets of Edinburgh to the beat of Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life, the anarchic spirit of Trainspotting lives on in director Nick Moran’s kaleidoscopic biopic of Scottish music mogul Alan McGee.
Danny Boyle, Trainspotting’s fearless director, is credited as an executive producer here while author Irving Welsh co-wrote the script with Dean Cavanagh, feeding a profanityladen stream of voiceover consciousness to Ewen Bremner, so memorable 25 years ago as hapless Spud.
Even the opening image of a man flailing underwater seems to reference Renton’s fleetingly beautiful deep dive into a filthy toilet.
Imitation flatters Moran’s picture because for all its energy and frenetic editing, Creation Stories lacks a strong narrative focus, flitting excitedly from one vignette to the next without sufficient time to allow emotional beats to land, including a funeral reception.
Protracted scenes devoted to McGee’s involvement with New Labour under Alastair Campbell (Ed Byrne) and Peter Mandelson (Joseph Millson) suck the air out of the film’s wheezing second half.
JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (15)
Anchored by scintillating performances from Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield, Judas And The Black Messiah is a gripping dramatisation of an FBI counterintelligence operation to infiltrate the Black Panther Party in 1960s Chicago.
Themes of racial injustice, betrayal and collusion, which run deep in a muscular script co-written by director Shaka King and Will Berson, strike discomfiting chords in the current climate and underline the short distance travelled since the shooting of 21-year-old party chairman Fred Hampton during a pre-dawn raid.
Production designer Sam Lisenco and costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones steep the powerhouse cast in impressive period detail as Hampton rouses his disenfranchised brothers and sisters with the defiant battle cry “I am a revolutionary!”
London-born actor Kaluuya scorches every pixel of the screen as he delivers Hampton’s ferocious oratory.
Black and white stock footage of clashes between white police officers and black citizens lights a fuse on tension between the two communities, which detonates with full force in the film’s suspenseful second act.
LOCKED DOWN (15)
Crime pays for a feuding couple in Doug Liman’s light-fingered comedy drama, which was hastily written and filmed in London during the second lockdown of the Covid pandemic.
The rewards for us, however, are less bountiful.
Screenwriter Steven Knight’s ability to edit verbose dialogue evidently went into quarantine because his lead characters – a longterm couple who split just as England enforces social distancing – are incapable of communicating succinctly or realistically.
Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor share inert screen chemistry and their characters’ best moments are when they are apart, furiously banging saucepans to honour NHS heroes or dancing wildly to the beat of Stand And Deliver by Adam & The Ants.
The heist is reserved for the final half-hour and won’t be earning the begrudging admiration of Danny Ocean and his associates.