ALSO SHOWING
The Equalizer 2 (15)
Given that Denzel Washington has never made a sequel before, it’s too bad he’s chosen to end his careerlong pursuit of new material with The
Equalizer 2, a film of such frustrating ineptitude it doesn’t even deserve the “Sequelizer” pun some critics have been applying to it.
A follow-up to 2014’s already dire reboot of the barely remembered 1980s TV show, it denies Washington a satisfying opportunity to unleash his inner bad-ass as former government agent turned peoples’ vigilante Robert Mccall. This is despite Washington having the charisma, gravitas and action movie chops to pull off the film’s rebranding of Mccall – who was played in the TV show by the late Edward Woodward – as a sort of bookish Travis Bickle (he’s even working as an Uber-style taxi driver this time out).
Still ploughing his way through his list of the 100 greatest books of all time, Mccall is the sort of shadowy figure who dispenses eyewatering justice to drug dealers, kidnappers and coked-up bankers with reprehensible attitudes to women, then tempers his sociopathic impulses by reading a rare copy of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and imploring the wayward teen graffiti artist (Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders) he’s trying to keep on the straightand-narrow to read Ta-nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me. Such idiosyncratic character details should make The Equalizer movies as distinctive and satisfying as Keanu Reeves’ sublime outings as the puppymourning John Wick, but the film – once again directed by Washington’s frequent collaborator Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Magnificent Seven remake) – is an absolute slog, unable to decide whether it wants to be a straight-up revenge thriller or a Bourne-style espionage movie about a former agent trying to escape a dark past. What a waste.
The Eyes Of Orson Welles (12A)
Mark Cousins takes a pleasingly abstract approach to his eponymous subject by using a recently uncovered box of Welles’ sketches and paintings to explore his life, work and politics. Building on the artful cine essay format he’s used to personalise his explorations of film history and culture in projects such as The Story
of Film and I Am Belfast, he provides an illuminating insight into Welles’ creative process speculating on how his love of drawing informed the innovative and sometimes confrontational way he made films, and how it drew him closer to people as he travelled the globe as a precocious child and itinerant adolescent, fuelling an interest in the voiceless and the exploited that would soon inspire some of his most famous theatre work, not to mention his later obsession with power in films such as Citizen Kane, The Trial and Macbeth.
The Guardians (15)
Xavier Beauvois’s first film since 2010’s Of Gods And Men explores the ravages of the First World War far from the chaos of the front line. Set on a farm in some rustic, nevernamed French valley, the film slowly takes shape around Francine (Iris Bry), a young maid hired by family matriarch Hortense (Nathalie Baye) to help her and daughter Solange (Laura Smet) with the annual harvest. She’s a hard worker, but when she falls for Hortense’s youngest son, Georges (Cyril Descours), her presence starts to complicate life on the farm as other secrets, scandals and misunderstandings come to the fore. What follows becomes increasingly melodramatic and yet Beauvois does succeed in making subtler points about the fragility of alliances designed to protect moribund value systems.