Barking or charming? A bit of both
Dog is not exactly a subtle film, as the monosyllabic title clearly suggests. Not only does it star Channing Tatum, an actor of chiselled features but distinctly limited range, but it’s co-directed by him too and is essentially a roadtrip movie in which a brain-injured, medically discharged former Army Ranger is charged with taking a dangerous military dog suffering from combat stress to the funeral of its former handler.
‘Don’t take her out in public,’ warns a guard, as Briggs (Tatum) arrives to pick up his muzzled canine companion in the hope that if he does a favour for the army, the army will do a favour for him. By letting him rejoin.
But from the moment he leaves Lulu – a Belgian malinois appartaking ently suffering from ‘every combat trigger there is’ – locked in his pick-up outside a shooting range while he noisily fires off a few rounds, you do find yourself wondering whether this Briggs really is the brightest button in the Army Ranger button box.
Slowly, however, it becomes obvious that we’re not supposed to be this too seriously. The screenplay is co-written by Reid Carolin, who wrote both the hugely popular Magic Mike films and codirects with Tatum here. And it’s clear the pair are going for something similar in tone, maybe with a touch of Clint Eastwood’s Every Which Way But Loose, which famously paired Clint with an orangutan called Clyde, thrown in.
There are still misjudgments – difficult to smile much at Lulu’s habit of attacking anyone in Arab dress – and the challenge of mixing comedy with the inevitable sombre patriotic sincerity is a big one. It’s no masterpiece, but better than I expected, and it has an undeniable watchability. Parents, however, be warned: despite the tail-wagging title, it’s not for small children.
Most films with Andrea Riseborough in are worth catching, and Here Before is no exception. Set in Northern Ireland, it’s a slowburning psychological drama that begins when a new family move into the house next door to longmarried Laura (Riseborough) and Brendan (Jonjo O’Neill).
Megan, their new neighbours’ outgoing young daughter, seems to take a shine to Laura, and she to her, which starts to make sense as we learn that Laura has lost a daughter of her own. Almost from the outset, Megan says or does things that remind Laura of her own daughter, which she initially puts down to coincidence or imagination. But when these coincidences start mounting…
Experienced writer Stacey Gregg makes her directorial debut here and does an impressive job of creating an absorbingly unsettling atmosphere, helped by a quietly outstanding performance from Riseborough that captures Laura’s grief, hope and confusion.
Ultimately, it doesn’t quite deliver on the considerable initial promise, but its style and impact definitely linger.
The Real Charlie Chaplin is a new documentary about the most instantly
recognisable comedian the world has ever known. But it’s heavily dependent on old footage and dramatised re-creations and is definitely a headline or two short of revelations that it could call its own. There’s no doubt that it retells the familiar story of Chaplin’s life pretty well – from his desperately impoverished beginnings in Lambeth to his joining the
Fred Karno music hall company as a teenager and sailing to America, where he was discovered by the great silent movie mogul Mack Sennett.
The origins of his world-famous ‘Tramp’ persona and costume are undeniably well explored too.
But somewhere along the line a sense of punches being pulled sets in, particularly when it comes to Chaplin’s well-documented fondness for very young women and girls. He married his first wife when she was 16, met his second when she was only 12 and, while his third wife was a positively middle-aged 21, his fourth, Oona, was only 18. Chaplin was 54 when he married her.
To be fair, all this is there in Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s film, but when the moment comes to dig deeper, they look away instead.
Disappointing.