Star-studded heist flick full of sparkle
Ocean’s 8 (Cert 12A, 110mins)
THE gender of the criminals has changed but it is pretty much business as usual for the latest spin-off from Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean franchise.
Sandra Bullock plays Debbie Ocean, the younger sister of George Clooney’s Danny who may or may not be dead. She has been behind bars for five years, eight months and 12 days.
Debbie tells the parole board that she is a reformed character who now wants to lead the “simple life”. But as soon as she is out of the door, she starts pulling confidence tricks to blag DREAM TEAM: The all-star cast of the comedy heist caper Ocean’s 8 free hotel rooms and expensive cosmetics. It turns out she is giving her criminal brain a quick workout. Her eye is on a much bigger prize: a $150million Cartier necklace.
The first part of her plan is to hang the jewellery around the neck of preening actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) when she hosts the glitzy Met gala. To achieve this she needs to sign up struggling fashion designer Rose (Helena Bonham Carter) who is tasked with persuading Daphne that the necklace is the perfect accessory for her big night.
Then she needs to recruit a crew of criminals for an enjoyably convoluted heist. Debbie assembles a team including her former partner Lou (Cate Blanchett), jeweller Amita (Mindy Kaling), hacker Nine Ball (Rihanna), fence Tammy (Sarah Paulson), and pickpocket Constance (rapper Awkwafina).
The heist involves lots of quirky details such as a spiked bowl of soup and a clever switch with a convincing fake necklace in a toilet cubicle.
But the genius of Soderbergh’s original was the way the preposterous twists just kept stacking up. Here director Gary Ross shows his hand early and devotes too much time to the aftermath when an English insurance inspector is tasked with retrieving the necklace.
This could have been a perfect role for a veteran character actor. But instead of Bill Nighy or Jim Broadbent, Ross goes for current flavour of the month (on US TV at least) James Corden. Fans of the chat show host will probably appreciate seeing his cheeky shtick transferred to the big screen but a drier delivery would have been more effective.
Ocean’s 8 is an entertaining yarn but Ross plays it too safe for the film to really sparkle.
IN THE FADE (Cert 18, 106mins)
GRIT and cheese make for a surprisingly tasty combination in this unusual German thriller.
As the film opens, Katja (Diane Kruger) is dropping off her son Rocco (Rafael Santana) at the office of her Kurdish husband Nuri (Numan Acar), a reformed drug dealer who is now working as a tax consultant.
She returns from enjoying a Turkish bath with her pregnant sister to discover there has been an explosion and her husband and son are dead.
She suspects this is the work of local Nazis but police believe the bomber was either one of Nuri’s Kurdish associates or a drug-dealing rival. From here the drama turns into a murder mystery and a courtroom drama.
Then after the verdict, it goes off the rails and morphs into a wildly implausible action movie.
Despite the tonal shifts and some sizeable storyline holes, the twisty plot and Kruger’s powerful performance should keep you hooked.
In The Fade is so outlandish that you never know what will happen next.
BOOM FOR REAL: THE LATE TEENAGE YEARS OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (Cert 15, 78mins)
THIS well-researched documentary provides a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man.
Director Sara Driver, herself part of the New York art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, locates Basquiat’s rise in a DIY movement that gave us hip-hop, New York punk and graffiti art.
Friends, lovers and her partner Jim Jarmusch relate how a homeless 18-year-old harnessed these influences to become one of the most important painters of the 20th century.
The film assumes we understand the importance of his work and does not cover the period between the sale of his first painting in 1981 and his death by heroin overdose aged 27 in 1988. But this is an engrossing study of a young artist and a vibrant period in American cultural history.
FREAK SHOW (Cert 12A, 91mins)
“BE a little less fabulous” is the advice given to the flamboyant hero of Trudie Styler’s clunky coming-of-age drama.
Waspish cross-dresser Billy Bloom (Alex Lawther) has been beaten into a coma by some of his classmates so we can see where his devoted best friend Flip (Ian Nelson) is coming from.
But Styler could have done with being a little less fabulous too. The costumes in her debut movie are eye-popping, the cinematography is gorgeous and supporting actors include Bette Midler and John McEnroe.
But she is so obsessed with the way her film looks that she forgets to craft a believable story.
Billy is a rich, Oscar Wildequoting teenager whose mother has gone into rehab, meaning he has to live with his father and spend a semester at a new school with an assortment of high school movie clichés.
He is ridiculously intelligent, astonishingly confident and an unbelievably accomplished designer of self-made costumes. And the more he is ridiculed, the more outrageously he dresses.
His ensembles become so elaborate that they look like they were created by Hollywood costume designers rather than a teenage boy. Which is part of the problem. And only after an hour spent watching Lawther strut down the school corridor in slow motion does a plot present itself when Billy decides to run for homecoming queen.
Freak Show is a well-meaning story but the characters don’t behave like teenagers. Billy’s nemesis is a Biblethumping homophobe (Abigail Breslin) and his instantly devoted best pal Flip is a handsome, straight quarterback who dreams of becoming the new Jackson Pollock. Unlike Flip’s idol, Styler paints with the broadest of strokes.