FLOCKING WONDERFUL

I will likely never get over the grisly syntax of its title, but in all other ways, Shaun the Sheep Movie is a miraculous film. It is gripped by a gentleness in both tone and worldview that has been almost totally invisible in children's cinema in the English speaking world for years upon years - and this is, very much, a children's movie. There's no merit in claiming for it the merit of sophistication it does not possess; no complex metaphors for the structure and process of human consciousness here, nor filthy double entendres placed atop a rickety scaffold of self-aware pop culture references. It has the simplest (though this does not make them less rich or important or humane) of themes - do right by your friends, and clean up after your mistakes - and wordplay that anyone old enough to read words in English can understand.

It is also, by all means, enormously satisfying and pleasurable: the gentleness may be there to make a safe 85 minutes for little ones, but it makes a gratifying respite from the hectic large-scale nature of most animated features. Even when Shaun the Sheep Movie turns hectic - as it does during the de rigueur third act chase scene that represents the film's one indefensible commitment to the limited narrative imagination of mainstream animation - it remains breathtakingly little in its scope and in its miniaturised craftsmanship. We should expect no less of England's great Aardman Animations, a studio whose hand-crafted stop-motion animation has resulted in some of the most lovely, warm, and delectably tangible cartoons of modern cinema, and here returns to its roots: not since 2000's Chicken Run has one of Aardman's features so proudly foregrounded its clay-based construction and the dollhouse-like fineness of its sets, nor worn the smudgy fingerprints to appear in its character's bodies as such badges of honor.

Expanding from the Aardman TV series Shaun the Sheep, of which I have little firsthand knowledge, the movie starts at a sheep farm somewhere in the north of England, where the cleverest of all the sheep is a small fellow named Shaun (there's not a single line of recognisable speech in the movie, but Shaun's vocalisations are provided by Justin Fletcher). As we see in a sweet opening montage staged as old 8mm footage, Shaun and his flock were the pride and joy of a farmer (John Sparkes) when they were all much younger, but age and routine have gotten the best of everybody: the sheep, the farmer, the long-suffering sheepdog Bitzer (Sparkes also). And thus it is that Shaun decides, with the help of a serendipitous bus ad, that it's time for a day off. He and his fellows stage an elaborate trap to distract Bitzer and put the farmer to sleep with the ol' "counting sheep" trick, and prepare to goof off in a harmless way, but in so doing they manage to send a trailer with the farmer inside careening down a hill, all the way to The Big City down the road. Lost and alone and hungry, the sheep and Bitzer have no option other than to head to the city to find the farmer, in the process running afoul of the zealous animal control officer Trumper (Omid Djalili), who makes capturing Shaun his primary goal for the duration of however long it is that the animals hunt through downtown. The farmer, meanwhile, has received a nasty bump on the head and lost his memory, upon which his muscle memory of shearing sheep leads him down the path of becoming a great new celebrity barber.

That last point undoubtedly sounds like a bridge further past the bridge too far, but one of the joys of Shaun the Sheep Movie lies in its redemption of ideas that seem, on their face, to be just as awful as they could possibly be. For example, the film is eagerly full of crude jokes about bodily emissions of all sorts, the worst bane of contemporary family filmmaking if there can be only one, but these jokes are centered so carefully on the characters and the world they inhabit that they end up feeling... not clever, but certainly funnier than "he just farted!" humor has any rational right to be. Or a hoary, ancient gag about how it looks like someone is peeing in a fountain but it's actually something innocuous. This doesn't always happen: the soundtrack is ready and willing to launch into a pop music interlude at the drop of a hat, and while the original song "Feels Like Summer" is used well as an emotional tether throughout, most of the song breaks are jarring and only serve to break the delicate tone that the wordless animation works so hard to craft.

When that tone works, however, the film is an irresistible gem of sweetness and concision. The clay puppets that make up the cast are astoundingly expressive - with eight sheep to keep track of, the film not only gives them all sufficiently different designs all on the same basic model that we can readily tell them apart without ever wondering why none of them look like sheep. Better yet, they're all given specific personalities, all depicted solely through pantomime and facial expressions of deeply appealing flexibility and subtlety. I assume this is all held over from the series, and that it's long practice and familiarity with the characters that makes it work so terrifically - nor should we forget that this is the studio behind the timeless Gromit, maybe the most expressive and relatable of all nonspeaking characters in animation. Animals that act like humans without betraying their animal nature and have fully realised personalities are kind of what Aardman does best, and Shaun the Sheep Movie is a least in part a victory lap to show how they can sustain doing nothing else for nearly an hour and a half.

The characters, especially Shaun, the guileless lamb Timmy (Fletcher), and the new character of a hideous stray mutt named Slip (Tim Hands), give the film its heart and resonance, and they're also marvelous comic performers: while the humor is never less than predictable (it's hard to imagine it being anything else, given the target audience), this ends up being funnier than one would expect of something with the edges sanded off so vigorously. The timing that co-writers and -directors Richard Starzak & Mark Burton bring to bear is flawless: beats hold for just long enough, character reactions are just extreme enough, and once punchlines land the film moves by them without dawdling. But better even than the character-derived humor is the wit baked into the look of the film: as much as any Aardman film yet, as much as any animated film period, the world in which Shaun the Sheep Movie is crammed full of little grace notes that the film lingers on just long enough that you can tell it wants you to notice, and the staging at times invokes the visual punning of a Jacques Tati film.

It is a playful movie, all in all: drifting into an impromptu musical number during an early montage and a more steadily choreographed one later, building a satisfying nest of callbacks and repeated gags, giving all of its characters squashy, flexible ways of moving that complement their rounded designs. That plus the directness and emotional accessibility of it make it immensely pleasurable and reassuring cinema: a movie that's perfectly tailored for children but made with such command of its aesthetic and with such a sincere belief in what it's up to that not being a child is absolutely no obstacle to finding it a wholly rewarding experience.

8/10 (a galling rating, but its few flaws are glaring - taking out the poor song choices would get it up to a 9 without anything else changing. Don't be surprised if I retcon this when the year-end list happens)

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FANCY STARTING A WAR ON SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY

A review requested by James P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

If there exists a more pleasant, humane story of the constant horror of life during the London Blitz than John Boorman's Hope and Glory, of 1987, I am thoroughly unfamiliar with it and frankly don't know that I could even imagine it. This is the source of the film's charm, which is considerable, and also its rather distinct limitations as a drama, which are only a bit less considerable. It belongs to the same genre that Terence Davies would later mine so effectively, the one where British filmmakers direct pseudo-autobiographical snapshots of childhood over a period of a few months, linking scenes and events more along a thematic and emotional spine than a particularly narrative one. Done at its best, this can result in piercing, frightfully intelligent depictions of domestic behavior. At its worst, it can result in formless blobs of ideas that get dumped on the screen without any rhyme or reason. Hope and Glory is at neither of those poles, though it tends towards the side of the best; its strongest moments land like small explosions of human insight filtered through an amount of nostalgia that's not enough to discolor the truthfulness inherent to the moment. Its weakest moments, meanwhile, are easy to dismiss as "cute", which is still better than one can say for plenty of superficially similar movies.

One thing it doesn't have, though, is much in the way of a sustained plot. It begins in late 1939, when the United Kingdom officially declared war on Germany, though it smooshes time together; the opening scene involves the characters watching an air raid preparedness newsreel, war is declared in the second scene, and the Blitz of September, 1940, feels like it starts at most just a week or so later. The film's focal point in all of this is the Rohan family, with father Clive (David Hayman) leaving to fight early on and dropping all the responsibility for keeping things safe and stable to his wife Grace (Sarah Miles). And this she does, though it's beyond one woman's emotional and physical resources to control every moment in the lives of her three children in the middle of a literal, actual war zone, which means that teenge daughter Dawn (Sammi Davis), little Sue (Geraldine Muir), and middle child, 10-year-old Bill (Sebastian Rice-Edwards) spent a lot of time fucking around the bombed-out corners of London with the other young folks they can find who didn't make the trip to safety in the country. Our main entry point to this world is Bill, a surrogate for the writer-director though he's a few years older than Boorman was at the same point in time; but we're not necessarily limited to his understanding of things. In fact, one of the film's greatest achievements is to play the goofy insouciance of a boy who has no real context whatsoever for all the grave developments happening around him against the audience's blunter awareness of the inherent tension of the Blitz.

Even in that case, though, the film's more nuanced than just "kids are innocent, adults are terrified"; one of those charms I mentioned up top is that Hope and Glory spends a fair amount of time watching Grace and the other grown-ups she interacts with on a regular basis, and those interactions are frequently of a light-hearted, pragmatic register, with people acknowledging the basic seriousness of their situation but not forgetting to go about the business of everyday life. In part, we can assume, because this is their way of clinging to a basic foundational reality that can be built upon assuming the godforsaken war ever ends; but it's the film's good sense to allow, equally, the impression that it's because life does go on, even in wartime, and stiff-upper-lip sloganeering and weepily earnest homefront melodramas notwithstanding (we see one such melodrama when the family goes to the movies; Bill pantomimes his disinterest as baldly as his mother has a whole-body reaction to the sad tales of brave men leaving their women for the greater good), the petty details of normal life can't entirely turn themselves off just because of a little bit of bombing is happening across the street.

The intersection of utterly uneventful daily life with the chaos of war is exactly the heart of Hope and Glory, which depicts basically two kinds of events: ones in which the war happens, but the characters respond with basically quotidian feelings (my favorite such moment: "Drop it on Mrs Evans, she's a cow!" prays Dawn, when the bombs come too close to the Rowan house), and ones in which life plays out almost completely without reference to the war at all. It exists as a literal backdrop, scene in the distance and notable only for forming a ready-made playground of crumbling bricks and timber for the local kids to play at the very important business of having nothing in particular to do and doing it with grand intent, with all the fixed lack of continuity of childhood. Thus can a sequence in which Bill and his gang bribe a neighborhood girl to let them all look down her panties immediately transition into them goofing around like it never happened, the instant that they get bored with the mysteries of sex.

It would be inaccurate to charge Hope and Glory with being shapeless, though it comes awfully close. It has internal chronology, and in Dawn's sexual run-in with a handsome Canadian airman, it has a distinctive plot that spits echoes forwards and backwards. What it does not have, and probably couldn't have, is a particularly strong, clear spine: it is after all tightly yoked to Bill, who perceives something of an eternal present, and who doesn't actually know a great deal more at the end of the movie than he does at the beginning of it. Though he does have a broader range of experiences. It would be unfair in the extreme to call this a "flaw" within the movie, since it's virtually a requirement of the scenario. Still, it leaves the film awfully shaggy; Hope and Glory runs a bit less than two hours, but there's no clear reason it could end at 80 minutes, or stretch on to two and a half hours. It's just an accumulation of scenes, and the particular scenes involved don't build to any sort crescendo in and of themselves. The ending, in particular, has no sense of summary; it just hits a point where the movie runs out of variations on a theme and so excuses itself.

The overall feeling is one of indulgence; Boorman adopts the position of a man eagerly reeling off story after story about his youth, and it's not very long before you realise that the joy he takes in telling stories overwhelms any particular reason to tell those stories. As far as Boorman's indulgences as a director, it's far better to have this than his extraordinarily batty Zardoz of 1974, or the petulant childishness of his point-missing Exorcist II: The Heretic. Still, his best movies, which I think to be unambiguously if not objectively Point Blank and Deliverance, are the ones where he has the strictest framework to operate in, with clear and relentless momentum connecting scenes. Compared to those, Hope and Glory is shambling compared to those, and the obvious personal love the director has for his material doesn't inject it with any deeper urgency of purpose.

Still, obvious love justifies itself, to a certain degree, and the precision of the characters and the performances that Boorman draws out of his actors (most impressively the allegedly uncooperative Rice-Edwards) make Hope and Glory a pleasure even when when it's a bit pokey and aimless. Miles, in particular, is absolutely terrific in a low-key role that requires all of her best work to be done in the margins and between the lines. Her terror at being alone, her regret for the life that she didn't live, her feeling of simultaneous protection towards and alienation from her children, all make hers easily the most interesting performance of the most complex character in the movie. The kids are all a bit more elemental than she is, and a bit more naturalistically "there" than visibly acted; taken all as a whole, it's a warm, generous, and palpably accurate portrayal of people being people in the absence of any real narrative pressure. That is not anywhere near my favorite register for a movie to inhabit, but even I have to admit that this is a strong example of the form.

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OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

A review requested by Liz, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The body of work created by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (credited equally as writers, directors, and producers, though it's generally understood that Powell was more the director, while Pressburger was more the writer and producer) is arguably the high water mark of all British cinema, and their 1943 collaboration The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is maybe the most essentially, urgently British of the 21 films they made together. It is probably the most epic and ambitious in scale and intention: it's a World War II propaganda film with a real message on its mind other than the usual "We can do it if we stick together!" cheerleading typical of its generic bedfellows, that bases its analysis of what the people of the British isles could and should do to stave off the Nazi threat in a long-form study of military history spanning nearly half of a century. It does this in the body of one immaculately conservative soldier named Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey, flawlessly playing a brash youth and a puffed-up old man so distinctly that it's almost difficult to believe that they were both a 37-year-old actor), inspired in his personality and appearance by Colonel Blimp, the star of a satirical comic strip by David Low, but infinitely more expansive in personality; and it does this in the form of what must absolutely be the most excitingly shot British production I can personally name up to that point in history, the moment that Powell's directorial style snapped into focus and provided a visual means of expression that's neither exactly Hollywood nor exactly European. It would not, for my taste, remain the best production released under the banner of the Archers (Powell & Pressburger's independent company, through which they'd make all of their films until 1957), with their post-war efforts A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes eclipsing it in stylistic and structural complexity, and overall excellence, respectively. But it's more radical than they are, inventing out of thin air what they (and the rest of the Archers' output) would thereupon refine and build from.

The movie begins and ends in 1942, where Wynne-Candy is an old and slightly ridiculous ex-Army figure, spending his retirement advising and training the Home Guard. He's introduced as the butt of something halfway between a prank and a political demonstration: the evening afternoon before a war game is meant to start at midnight, brash young lieutenant "Spud" Wilson (James McKechnie) breaks into the Turkish bath where Wynne-Candy and many other old Army outcasts spend their hours, capturing the old man and winning the war game before it begins. This triggers a spirited argument between the two warriors, Wilson insisting that old, traditional conservative men like Wynne-Candy aren't merely out of touch, but acutely dangerous in this new sort of warfare. Chastened and annoyed, the old man finds himself drifting into an extended flashback that rewinds to that same Turkish bath, 41 years prior, when he was just Lieutenant Clive Candy, on leave from the Second Boer War - the flawlessly-executed trick by which a youthful body double substitutes for Livesey in his old age makeup while the camera manages to get slightly too far ahead of the character is the first of many coups du cinéma in the film, seamlessly blurring past and present into one discontinuous chronology that doubles as the first leg in the filmmakers' argument about the way that the past informs the present.

The remainder of the film is largely concerned with three movements, one during the Boer War, one in the days immediately following the First World War, and one in the early years of the Second World War, bringing us finally back to the morning of the day on which we met Candy. In each of these segments, we also see Candy's developing relationship with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), a German officer with whom Candy duels in 1901, while he's in Berlin on an unofficial mission to defuse an anti-British propaganda effort. And we see as well his encounters with three young women who all look exactly alike, for the good reason that they're all played by Deborah Kerr: Edith Hunter, an idealist who obviously loves Candy but ends up marrying Kretschmar-Schldorff; Barbara Wynne, a pragmatic nurse who marries Candy despite his being much older; and Angela "Johnny" Cannon, who serves as his sharp-tongued assistant and driver as he works with the Home Guard, and ends up helping to bridge the gulf between the honorably conservative Brit and the honorably conservative German while their countries prepare to go to war.

While each sequence is hung on a single driving narrative spine, the overall impression is of a movie that meanders its way through history over the course of two hours and 43 minutes (the film was cut twice before being restored to its full length in 1983; a more thorough clean-up job restoring the vivid colors was completed in 2011), and yet never feels like there's a single sagging moment or unnecessary layover. The script is thoughtful and decisive, crisply marking down character beats for the actors to later flesh in, and presenting symbolic conflicts which feel so personal in their execution that the degree to which this is all a metaphorical satire of British military etiquette hardly gets in the way of what a perfect study of individual lives it is as well. And I will give it this above even A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes and all the rest: it is very possible that this is the best-written of the Archers' film, structurally, psychologically, and thematically. As it cycles back into 1942 and presents its message that men of Candy's era, for all their dignity and experience and intelligence, aren't equipped to fight a war against the systemic evil represented by Nazi Germany, the film generates a fierce passion about its topic mixed with affection, deep and rich and abiding affection, for the characters it's consigning to history. For something with such a serious subject, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp moves forward with enormous generosity and a great deal of fresh, bubbly humor - indeed, it is as much a comedy as otherwise, growing gradually darker towards the end.

The beautiful writing goes hand in hand with exemplary filmmaking technique that draws it out and works it into the visual bones of the movie. It is supremely well made, and not always because it draws attention to itself: one of the most perfect sequences in the movie consists of a camera staring at Walbrook's face as he quietly delivers a deep, probing monologue, pushing into a close-up, and then backing away again. It's so simple as to be virtually anti-cinematic, but it's exactly what the movie needs, both for the integrity of the monologue, and the place it occupies near the very beginning of the 1939 sequence; it promises the seriousness and mournful intimacy that the rest of the film will largely concern itself with, in opposition to the more bright material of the first two-thirds.

Frequently, though, the style is so great precisely because it makes itself felt. There is the comic audacity of the first transition from the Boer War to the First World War, a montage of mounted animal heads representing Candy's somewhat bloodthirsty approach to leisure time until he can get back to business (ending with the nihilistic joke of a Germany army helmet with the descriptive plaque "Hun - Flanders, 1918"); there is the bleak poetry of the second transition from the First World War to the Second, with the Wynne-Candy family album skipping through blank page after blank page following the newspaper clipping of Barbara's death. And there is the richness and moral complexity of the individual images, shot in glowing Technicolor to accentuate the vibrancy of military uniforms and upper class splendor in sharp contrast to default setting of drab earth tones, suggesting throughout (but especially in the Boer War sequence) that the pageantry of the British military and the pride of men like Candy, however handsome and captivating, is also chintzy and surface-level, all glamor without soul. Or consider the way that Powell presents the duel that takes up a huge portion of the first act: the opening preparations are contained within a hollow wide shot of a gymnasium, like a dead cathedral of Continental honor; the actual duel starts during a high-angle crane shot that backs away as Allan Gray's jaunty score kicks in, suggesting a perverse ballet, all part of the theatricality of the lives it presents, before dissolving into a snowstorm.

The visuals are, throughout, sardonic and witty, detached with just enough ghostliness that they feel appropriately out of time and yet anchored by the superbly expressive faces of Livesey and Walbrook that the immediate feeling of the characters' lives is always front and center. The images are satiric while the script is utterly sincere, and the structure is moody and weary while the energy of each scene and each performance is fiery and urgent, communicating with an intensity that could only driven by enthusiastic and greatly concerned patriots in a time of war. Of course the film hasn't aged well: this is carbon-stamped to 1943 as firmly as a movie could possibly be. And yet its insights into how history moves and what role people occupy in it are utterly timeless. As a time capsule and as pure cinema, this is as as essential, enjoyable, and challenging as the movies can get.

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THE CREATION OF WOMAN

I wish Under the Skin wasn't so recent, because I'd love for the declarative statement "Ex Machina is the best science fiction film since Under the Skin" to mean something more profound and impressive than "Ex Machina is a better movie than Chappie".* But you plant flags in the soil you've been given, not the soil you daydream about. And whatever arbitrary comparatives we want to throw out there, the point is that Ex Machina is absolutely terrific - probably not so much a future genre classic as a future Gattaca-type deal that's remembered with furious passion by the very tiny number of people who ever think about it at all.

Speaking as one who plans to be part of that passionate furor just as soon as it becomes aggravatingly pretentious to do so, Ex Machina had its hooks into me before it even had the ghost of a plot. The first thing that happens is that Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), an employee at Bluebook, wins the company-wide lottery. What's the lottery for? What does Bluebook do? What kind of person is Caleb? All of these questions are answered, some of them more directly and sooner than others, but to begin with, Ex Machina simply drops us in between Caleb and his computer screen, letting us grab at bits of detail presented in the corner of the frame, without a drop of spoken dialogue until Caleb is flying over an arctic wilderness in a helicopter, on his way to "the estate". As grabby, mysterious beginnings go, they don't get much more deliciously elusive, or presented with such thoughtfully dense images. From the confidence on display just in the opening minutes, one would never suppose that Alex Garland was making his directorial debut, after some two decades as a novelist and screenwriter for some conceptually impressive genre efforts that don't always quite live up to their potential. And for the sizable contingent of people who regard Garland's 28 Days later screenplay with a mild "it's so good! ...till the ending", or his Sunshine with a muted "it could have been so good! ...but that ending", it's unfortunately the case that Ex Machina commits sins in the same broad wheelhouse (heady concepts giving way to violence and cruelty), though I'd have a hard time seeing my way to any argument that this isn't the best film writing of his career. And I'm pretty much an unapologetic Sunshine booster, anyway.

Caleb's journey to the north turns out to be a wonderful example to meet the reclusive and fantastically wealthy Nathan (Oscar Isaac), founder and leader of Bluebook, who has used the enormous riches provided by that never-quite-detailed corporation (it's more Google than Facebook, but those are obviously the two companies we're to have in mind) to build himself a hideaway from all of humanity, where can pursue his most ambitious dreams in secret. And while the lottery seems to have promised nothing but a chance to relax with the mercurial Nathan for a week of indescribable luxury, it's immediately clear that Nathan, underneath his disarming bro-ish desire for camaraderie and a drinking buddy to legitimise his immediately obvious alcohol problem, wants to have Caleb join him in the greatest tech exercise known to history: he's about this far away from having built a totally self-conscious and emotionally alive artificial intelligence, and it seems that a coder with Caleb's gifts will be the perfect assistant to perform the last human test necessary to determine just how self-conscious she actually is.

Because oh yes, it's a she: Ava (Alica Vikander), whose recognisable human features are, in what feels queasily like it can't be an accident, exactly the ones you'd focus on if you were a psychotic genius in the wild who wanted to build a sexy fembot to rape. Flawless skin on an innocent face and lithe hands, with a perfect ass and full, perky breasts, their shape defined by a greyish material, and the rest of her body is some kind of rigid transparent mesh revealing a whirring mess of gyros and unfathomably high-tech electronics. She looks like pornography after the Singularity, and we'd need no other evidence to assume seriously cracked is going on in Nathan's head. And if she's not a flawless A.I., she gives an extraordinarily good impression of it, and in hardly any time at all, the easily dazzled and overly romantic Caleb has decisively fallen in love with Ava, though he seems to think that if he says sciencey things hard enough, he can make Nathan believe that it's not true.

From almost ludicrously modest ingredients (only four characters worth the name - the last being Nathan's mute servant Kyoko, played by Sonoya Mizuno - a confined location with lots of repurposed sets, and an unyielding structure based on seven mostly similar days), Garland's script gins up an unfairly robust number of ideas to play with. It is a most giddily unpackable piece of science fiction writing of the best '50s sort - as much as anything, Ex Machina is a wonderful 21st Century version of one of Asimov's robot stories - and that's true even if we concede that however smartly it explores them, the film's themes about the inherent danger of A.I. to its creators and the way that a created intelligence might be more honorable and worthy of life than one that came about organically were already old hat a half of a century ago. That still leaves the film's terrific three-handed exploration of gender roles, the way that both assholes and decent fellas can fall into the trap of objectifying women in different ways; it is easily the best exploration of gender construction and gender performance centered around a nonhuman built into the shape of an extremely sexually desirable woman since... oh, fuck you Under the Skin, why'd you have to go and be so definitive? But still, it's a hell of a gnarled and rewarding social text, even if most of the reasons why are buried in a third act that I firmly refuse to spoil in even the smallest detail.

And here's the really amazing thing: it's possible to not care about any of that, and still think the film is a kind of masterpiece. It's a feverishly tight romantic thriller that plows through its 108-minute running time with a constant sense of doom provided from every source. The music by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury quietly hums along tunelessly, spiking into a disturbing drone just often enough that it feels like a constant threat; the sound design punches up the whirs and grinding sounds of Ava's mechanical body just to the point where it hits the point of low-grade body horror just to listen to her, no matter how sweetly she and Caleb appear to be connecting; and that's not including the absolutely splendid visual effects used to realise her half-formed, see-through body, one of the great triumphs of using CGI in strict service to story and emotional resonance in a long while. Rob Hardy's cinematography divides its time between being appallingly gorgeous, and casting the sleek interiors of Nathan's ultra-modern house in harsh, inhuman terms - the number of individual compositions that use glass as a shiny, glossy cage or barrier certainly runs into a couple of dozen, and all of them are excellent. And that's not even mentioning the three great performances in the film's center, all coiled-up energy and self-unawareness of people working hard to lie to themselves and destroy those around them (Isaac continues his run of being the most interesting actor you could possibly imagine, but I'm honestly more impressed by Gleeson and Vikander, neither of whom I've previously expected such depth from).

It's bleak and propulsive sci-fi noir, then, even without reference to its woozy intellectual depths, and Garland could not have hoped for a more promising or exciting debut. It's not totally flawless: there are too many insert shots of the Golden World of Nature that don't serve any real purpose (but there are also inserts that do), and the last few minutes seem to be more eager to score a few sucker punches than hew to the most rational plot logic; but then, they are exquisite sucker punches, and a great punctuation mark for a film that keeps throwing everything at us that it can come up with, without visibly breaking a sweat.

9/10

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CINDERELLAS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE: THIS LOVELY NIGHT WAS ONLY A FANTASY

The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella is, to begin with, an absurd anachronism. For anyone in the English-speaking world to try to put over an overlong spectacle-driven megamusical in 1976 was psychotic - the last hit film on that model was the five-year-old Fiddler on the Roof, and that was itself clearly already an aberration, two years after the very visible implosion of Paint Your Wagon and Hello, Dolly! - and The Slipper and the Rose didn't even have the advantage of being an adaptation of an established show. Though the cinematography is pure mid-'70s, everything else about the film is unreservedly old-fashioned. This is, in honesty, the primary locus of its charm: the clear sense, even some four decades after its creation, that this is all a bit hokey and warmly conservative, and it simply doesn't care what we think about that. It's too busy putting on a show in the most enormous, sloppy, ridiculous way. It is the movie version of a St. Bernard that just lumbers right on over and clambers up on your lap to lick your face.

The updated version of the classic fairy tale, written by brothers Robert M. Sherman and Richard B. Sherman, with some polishing done by Bryan Forbes - the former pair provided the film's soundtrack, the latter its direction - takes place in the 18th Century in a particularly British Ruritanian kingdom by the name of Euphrania. Here, the sturdy but easily rattled king (Michael Hordern) is busily trying to marry off his sole child, Prince Edward (Richard Chamberlain), but Edward has a rather snide disdain for the looks of the (presumably inbred) princesses his father has been sending him off to visit, and roughly declares that he'd rather marry for love than political convenience. This baffles or offends the whole court: his father and mother (Lally Bowers) have been tremendously happy in their arranged marriage, and, they, along with the Lord Chamberlain (Kenneth More) and the batty queen mother (Dame Edith Evans, in the last of her screen roles released during her life) loudly try to sing him down. The only person on his side is his valet and best friend, John (Christopher Gable), who knows the same pain: he's in love with a woman far above his station, whom he can never marry.

You know, the basic meat and potatoes of the Cinderella fairy tale.

After 19 minutes and two songs, we do finally meet Cinderella (Gemma Craven), returning from her father's funeral to learn that her stepmother (Margaret Lockwood, in her own final screen role, though she'd live another 14 years) and gorgeous but cruel stepsisters (Rosalind Ayres and Sherrie Hewson) are exploiting the letter of the dead man's will, though by no means the spirit, to rob Cinderella of her birthright and leave her at the status of unpaid housekeeper. This happens just before the king irritably announces a ball which is to find every woman of the nobility lining up to be thrown at the prince in a last-ditch effort to make him interested in anybody besides John. And the rest you know: Cinderella is aided by a curious woman (Annette Crosbie) who uses magic to help the girl in her chores, and eventually to attend the ball herself. She and the prince fall in love, she runs away, he hunts through the kingdom for her, we all leave happy.

Or, you know, not that. The film gave away the game by waiting so long to introduce its nominal protagonist: this version of the story is, weirdly, more interested with family-friendly court intrigue and the annoyances of dynastic politics than it is with fairy tale princesses. And so, after the ball is over, there's almost a solid hour of movie left that decides, inexplicably, to roll a whole theme of class bigotry into the story, and send Cinderella into willing exile so that Edward will marry for the best good of the kingdom. And all this realpolitik is, I want to point out, in the context of a story that also witnesses a magical woman turn ballet dancing mice into horses

It's different, anyway. And mostly, it's different in ways that demonstrate just how little actually happens in Charles Perrault's Cinderella that qualifies as drama. Even with its puffy opening sequence, the main part of The Slipper and the Rose still only gets us to about 80 minutes or so, out of an indefensibly indulgent 143 minute running time (the original U.S. release of this British production cut that down by 16 minutes: two songs - two of the better songs, actually - and some cute but largely irrelevant business for the fairy godmother). It's fascinatingly wrong-headed: this isn't a case of too much story stapled to a slender frame, it's a case of even the added story proving insufficient to hoist the running time up, so the filmmakers kept adding new wrinkles out of nowhere. It doesn't feel like a 143-minute film that got there through a lack of discipline and trimming; it feels like they wanted it to be 143 minutes, and kept adding acts till it got there.

That being said, for that first hour and twenty minutes, The Slipper and the Rose is a genuinely charming and likable variant on the well-told tale. The focus on the sullen prince and the desperate king is a weird shift, absolutely, but it draws attention away from how thoroughly dull Cinderella is in the source material and every traditional adaptation thereof. Some of the individual tweaks are even clever: e.g. the expanded role for the fairy godmother as a general helper sets up the mid-film twist that she's used up too much magic on Cinderella's behalf, and has to borrow more than her share to set up her goddaughter for the ball; hence the otherwise arbitrary midnight cutoff, which represents all the extra magic she was able to scrounge up. And any depiction in any Cinderella story of the stepsisters as attractive and fashionable helps to cushion the material's deeply broken notions of femininity.

Mostly, though, what works is the filmmaking itself, rather than the storytelling. Bryan Forbes was a better director than this project deserved, frankly, and he puts a lot more care into it than it needed. The film has an odd but totally effective addiction to wide shots: Forbes and cinematographer and Tony Imi use the full scale of the anamorphic frame to present crowd shots and big interior spaces, adding a distinct sense of grandeur and scale to the film; mixed with the '70s-style naturalism of the lighting and focus, it's physically present in a way that belies the general '60s superproduction tenor of most of what's going on otherwise. By stressing wide shots and using close-ups only as very conscious punction, the filmmakers emphasise the world of the story, rather like the script's attention to politicking over fairytale lovemaking. And the design team certainly built up a world worth emphasising: Raymond Simm's sets are plausible enough that the fantasy and fluffiness don't float away into the ether, but it's Julie Harris's costumes that really dominate the film. They rush right up to the edge of gaudy: the ball scenes resembling nothing as much as the carefully choreographed dancing of a display case of brightly-iced cupcakes. But that same sugar-sweet fanciness is entirely beguiling at the level of glossy fable; and this is, after all, Cinderella.

Beyond the look of the thing, the film enjoys a pretty terrific cast; with a blank role to play, Craven can't do much, but it's not her film. This movie belongs entirely to the grown-ups: the icy but still human Lockwood, the sputtering, lovable Hordern, the calm and stern Bowers, and chiefly and above all Evans, who plays the most generic role imaginable - the old lady has no idea what's going on, har har - but does so with the most infectious possible brio. It's caricature at it's absolute best, and Evans's performance is the most effortless kind of scene-stealing.

Really, the performances and style are so good that even with the leaden final hour, The Slipper and the Rose could still sparkle; the only thing holding it down to the level of generally charming trifle that's far more boring than it has any cause to be is, I hate to say, the songs by the Sherman brothers. So many delectable scores for Disney came out of those two minds! And yet the 12 songs here are pretty much just one banality after another: perfectly serviceable tunes matched to lyrics that are infinitely clever and proud of their twisty wordplay, without being actually funny; the love ballads are at least a touch more concrete than the prattle-heavy comic numbers, but they're also a bit treacly. Either way, the songs come off as a bit strained and brittle, and they're derivative in obvious ways from the Shermans' earlier, better-known, and just plain stronger songs: it doesn't help that the odd "well, let's go ahead and talk about the class struggle" tune "Position and Positioning" steals its choreography straight from "Step In Time" from Mary Poppins, in case anybody had made it that far into the film without flashing back to the Shermans' most iconic musical.

Snip out the songs, though, and The Slipper and the Rose is a cutely off-kilter riff on a familiar story, with just enough peculiar fascination with the unexplored ramifications of that story to feel like its own thing. Obviously, "snip out the songs" is about as bad a thing as anybody could say about a feature-length musical; but the vivid craftsmanship and thoroughly delightful character acting is enough to make a surprisingly enjoyable experience out of the film, even as it fails what theoretically ought to be its most basic test.

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TO CHAV AND CHAV NOT

There's a level on which Kingsman: The Secret Service is the movie director Matthew Vaughn has always been destined to make. In fact, that is perhaps true of all of its levels, both the good ones and the bad. On the good side of the ledger, Kingsman is one of the most smartly-crafted action films of recent years, even as it fully subscribes to the heightened aesthetic that has done so much to make action films of recent years noisy, visually incoherent messes. On the bad side, it has some grim, grim thoughts about human beings and society, and it doesn't even seem to be aware of them. And this is intensified by how consciously the film raises political and moral questions that it proceeds to explore with absolutely no depth whatsoever.

But we'll get back to all of that. Adapted by Vaughn and his longtime writing partner Jane Goldman from a 2012 comic miniseries written by Mark Millar (very loosely, I gather; but I do not make a habit of reading Millar's work), Kingsman is the story of a secret intelligence agency operating out of London but without the oversight of any world government, run by the best and brightest of White Male England's upper classes. When one of them dies while attempting to rescue a kidnapped climate scientist, the organisation starts a hunt for his replacement, and its most forward-thinking member, "Galahad", the code name for one Harry Hart (Colin Firth), looks outside of the usual suspects from Oxbridge to nominate a young tough kid, Gary "Eggsy" Unwin (Taron Egerton) from the grubbier places in the city. This is a bad habit of Harry's, we find; his last nominee when this happened 17 years ago was, in fact, Eggsy's dad, who died in the Middle East when Harry himself made a small but deadly blunder. Anyway, the quest to cull the nominees down to just one true Kingsman recruit is carried off with some intense urgency, for as this is all happening, American telecom genius Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) is executing an unclear but obviously devious plot to use free cellphone SIM cards against the entire population of the world.

There is a generous and an ungenerous way of looking at this. The generous one, the one that the film literally plops into the mouths of its characters, is that this is all a parody of the James Bond franchise, turning the posh world of British spies with tony accents and impressive educations upside down by throwing a class-shaped wrench into all of it, and holding up the sexism and violence porn of standard-issue spy cinema up for ridicule. In practice, I frankly don't think any of that works, in no small part because Matthew Vaughn doesn't have a good sense of humor. He's able to do jokes, sure: there is an almost non-stop litany of quips and snarky asides and absurdities scattered throughout Kingsman, and some of them are even funny. But it's not sustained enough for this count as parody, and it's damn sure not smart enough for it to count as satire. So really, it's just a particularly self-aware and sarcastic version of the exact thing it set out to comment upon.

Besides which, it's pretty clear that whatever surface-level interest the film has in exploring class (it has infinitely less interest in exploring race or gender, which is probably why the only two people of color in the film to open their mouths are also its villains), that interest doesn't ever last for more than a scene or two. Its central conceit is more based on letting poor urban thugs earn their way into the upper class than it is about providing any kind of dignity to those who aren't upper class, and its politics throughout are absolutely inconsistent, waddling around and cherry-picking what it wants from conservatism (Reagan's Star Wars program is approved of), libertarianism (the heroes are outside the government, the villains are part of it - including, for the briefest of cameos, President Barack Obama), labor (a joke about how awful Margaret Thatcher was), and a particularly unsavory form of American progressivism (the film kills off a bunch of civilians and expects us to laugh through it because they were "just" Westboro Church-style religious bigots). One might go so far as to say that, in fact, the film has no kind of coherent political outlook whatsoever, that its nods towards class-consciousness and the patriarchal mustiness of Bondian superspies are just a pose, and that it's really just a pretext for doing the actioney stuff Vaughn actually cares about. And I would say that one would be totally correct in saying that.

Considering how insistently and repetitively Kingsman articulates its themes, it doesn't actually have any: it's a big action spectacle that tries to pretend like it has any kind of depth at all without doing the things that would give it depth. But the spectacle! -oh the spectacle! I hate to admit it, because it's all so intellectually dishonest, but Kingsman has some unbelievably terrific action, and viewed strictly at a mechanical level, the film is just about flawless. It builds its scenes with clear, one-at-a-time purposes, introducing the characters and the world through punchy, humorous scenes that crank out exposition with just enough flair and wit that it's more entertaining than painful - and it is impossible to undervalue how much Firth is the keystone to all of this, with his effortless line deliveries and self-effacing sense of stuffy English propriety, and his impeccable impatience with everything. When the film eventually commits to making Egerton its solitary lead, as it clearly plans to do from very early on, it loses a great deal of personality and deftness of touch that keep it striding through even the most muddle-headed representational problems.

And having made that structurally wonderful screenplay, the film then lards it up with several absolutely perfect action scenes, that find Vaughn perfecting the style of action preferred by himself and Zack Snyder, as well as their copycats. It's manic, full of quick changes in the film speed, full of zooms and swooshes; and it is beautifully coherent. I am nearly tempted to call it the Rosetta Stone for an entire generation of action cinema: the chaotic, hyper editing that usually results in visual slurries where nothing can be followed suddenly works instead to accentuate the narrative clarity of the fights; the fetishisation of slow-motion, instead of pornishly drawing our attention to pain and blood, serves to punctuate and redirect the action choreography, and call our attention to the shifts in the rhythm of the fighting that drive that redirection. The film's best action setpiece is also its morally ugliest, which doesn't feel like a coincidence at all; it would, in fact, hardly be so ugly if the way it was shot wasn't so tremendously exciting and involving that it makes it impossible to care about all the bodies it's leaving in its wake. Far less problematic is the climax, where unambiguous bad guys are executed in a giddy, openly comic fashion, while the action cross-cuts across three totally different registers of tension (fight the computer, time a perfect shot, evade the armies with guns), serving each of them equally. It's cross-cutting that recalls the climax of Return of the Jedi, and I am not inclined to make that comparison idly.

So the question stands: does Kingsman's excellence as a work of craftsmanship outweigh its illiteracy and amorality as a drama of humans living in the world? Reader, I do not know the answer. I walked into it expecting to hate it, and I walked out having had a good time over a surprisingly fleet 129 minutes. That's enough to swing a positive recommendation, but I can't bring myself to be too enthusiastic about it.

6/10

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THE 2014 LIVE-ACTION OSCAR SHORTS

Oscar season means many things to many people, but one of the best is that, thanks to the folks at Shorts HD, it's the only time all year that most of us have even the smallest opportunity to see short films on the big screen And that is something I look forward to every year with enormous enthusiasm. So without further ado, allow me to dive right into the matter of the five films nominated for Best Live-Action Short, and now screening here and there throughout the country, in advance of a VOD run sometime soon.

"But Tim," you are undoubtedly about to ask (irrespective of the fact that I do not live in your computer & cannot hear you), "you're such an animation buff. Why aren't you reviewing the animated shorts?" Well, don't forget, while I'm merely a lusty, amateur animation buff over here, I'm actually a professional animation buff over at the Film Experience. And that's where you can find my thoughts on the other slate.

Aya (Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis, Israel / France)

If I have it right, this is the current frontrunner to win in the eyes of most pundits. And I won't claim that I feel unmixedly good about that - it's one of the weaker films of a generally strong slate. That's less because of anything specific it does wrong, and more because it's simply not very focused or thoughtful about how it wants to tell its story: at 40 minutes, it's not only the longest of the nominees, it's also brushing against the Academy's definition of "short film" rather recklessly. Nor are all 40 of those minutes used to equally good effect. There's a lot of time spent on conversations that are a bit more indulgent than they frankly need to be.

The titular Aya (Sarah Adler) is waiting to pick someone up at the airport when she's mistaken by a Danish scholar named Overby (Ulrich Thomsen) as his driver; she refuses to correct him until miles into their drive to Jerusalem, at which point he doesn't seem to care much. The film eventually reveals itself as a parable of dissatisfied people seeking new connections, but it relies an awful lot on a kind-of twist ending to make most of that clear, which leaves a lot of scenes of talking about nothing in particular, all set in the front seat of a car. There's goodness and insight within the film, though it needs to be ferreted out of the bloat, and the characters who always feel a bit more like screenwriting conceits than psychologies. 6/10

* * *

Boogaloo and Graham (Michael Lennox and Ronan Blaney, UK)

Can't have the Oscars without darling children getting into light scrapes while something serious burbles on unseen in the background. "Something serious", in this case, is the Troubles; the 1970s Belfast-set film manages to wedge in a late scene involving a political prisoner and the violence of the region that is all the more garish for how much the film otherwise has not the smallest interest in the political or social ramifications of its setting. And boy, was I ever ready to go harsh on it.

But then, as darling children movies go, Boogaloo and Graham - named for the pet chickens given to a pair of young brothers (Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch) by their father (Martin McCann) in a fit of poor judgment - has the benefit of actual darlings, with just enough snarky spike in their personalities that it's not just the cloying sitcom nonsense it so readily could have been. Its insights into human behavior are trite, and the punchline at the end - if that's the word for something so calm and subdued and philosophically Irish - suggests that the film doesn't really know what it's trying to be about, either. But as a snapshot of a quirky family, it has its pleasures, even if it is undoubtedly the weakest thing here. 6/10

* * *

Butter Lamp (Hu Wei and Julien Féret, France / China)

Okay, we're starting to get to the really good stuff. Once again, we have here a film that doesn't announce its meaning until the final moments of the final shot, but in this case, it's a much more effective strategy, allowing the film to build up a sense of mystery along with its rather effective charm. We find a rarely-seen, but constantly chatting photographer (Genden Punstock) positioning groups and individuals from a Tibetan village in front of his portable backdrops (the film camera adopts the perspective of his still camera throughout: nothing but static frames with people staring into the lens, and it gains a weird energy as a result as it goes along), creating touristy snapshots of these people in towns, at religious sites, standing atop the Great Wall of China, and at Hong Kong Disneyland.

The latter two examples specifically foreshadow the film's ideas about the forcible homogenization of the Tibetan people into whatever the Chinese government says they have to be, but the bulk of that work is done by the modestly ominous suggestions of the final shot, which lands with a thud in the silent space left by the chatting and laughter of the rest of the film. For it is awfully funny, looking with its unforced observational candor at people being uncontainable messes no matter how badly the photographer tries to choreograph them. In truth, the whole thing is a bit concepty and editorially heavy-handed in the last moments, but the implicit humanism of the whole thing is so affecting that I can't really complain. 8/10

* * *

Parvaneh (Talkhon Hamzavi and Stefan Eichenberger, Switzerland)

I have a suspicion that I should find this to be corny bullshit, and yet somehow, it really works. Teenager Parvaneh (Nissa Kashani) is an Afghan refugee living in Switzerland, and she needs to send some money back home. The trip to Zurich to find a place to wire the money is daunting, but it's the easy part - Parvaneh's papers and age mean that she can do no such thing, which means she must hunt around for a kind stranger. The only one she finds is a slightly older punk, Emely (Cheryl Graf), who agrees to help for a small fee, but the store is closed by the time the girls get back there. On the spot, Emely proposes that Parvaneh should pal around with her and they can go back in the morning. In the meantime, it's a night of music, clubs, flirting with boys, and finding out that the two have a lot in common.

Clichés don't come any mustier, but the Euro-realist style and incredibly laid-back naturalistic acting on display help enormously to make Parvaneh seem more insightful and raw than it sounds. There's no sweetie-pie fun going on; the whole time, Parvaneh seems slightly dazed and alarmed at the speed and danger of life in the urban West, compared to her safe, rural enclave of fellow refugees, and though the connection she makes with Emely is clearly important and unprecedented, the film doesn't pretend to have solved The Immigrant Problem. Bless it for that.

Anyway, the acting is sharp, Kashani especially, and while the style is a bit Dardennes-light, director Hamzavi wields it with canny discipline for when it can heighten the narrative vs. when it can serve to accentuate the moments in between narrative. I would never want to see this as a feature, but it's a pretty thoughtful 25 minutes. 8/10

* * *

The Phone Call (Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, UK)

The other frontrunner, and I rather think the best of the five (though Parvaneh comes close). It's a sterling example of something that could never work so well except as a snug, 20-minute short: set up a single situation, play it out, get the hell out of there. Heather (Sally Hawkins) works at a virtually empty crisis call center, and she picks up early one shift to hear a very sad man identifying himself as Stan (Jim Broadbent, never seen). At first trying simply to cheer Stan up, Heather teases out after a few minutes that he's just taken a lethal dose of pills, having wanted to kill himself ever since his wife died. And he's not calling for help, but simply to have company while he drifts off into death.

It's an acting showcase: director Kikby rather sensibly understands that a film which consists of almost nothing other than a phone conversation in which we never see one of the two participants needs to have an immovable rock on the visible end of the line. The Phone Call would wither and die without having somebody that Kirkby could point his camera at for minutes, confident that whatever is happening on her face is bound to be interesting, and Hawkins is that somebody. She has to build a character using hardly any backstory, and then communicate a desire to be sympathetic, a steely determination to save Stan from himself, and flustered panic that she is by no means equipped to deal with this situation, and she does all of this so well that it doesn't even register as acting; the film gets to skip right ahead to the part where it asks us to consider what it would be like to be Heather, tossed into this horrible situation; but also to be Stan, that sad and empty. It's a lovely portrait of mental states in turmoil, concise and streamlined and driven enough that the lack of flash doesn't register till it's all over. 8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: OPEN UP AND LET THE DEVIL IN

In the 2010s, one of the most interesting new directorial voices anywhere in the English-speaking world has been that of Great Britain’s Ben Wheatley. Without having produced any clear-cut unambiguous masterpieces in in the handful of features and short contribution to the horror anthology The ABCs of Death (one of the lonely few segments of that film that’s worth any damn at all - it is, in fact, my favorite) that make up his career since 2009, Wheatley has eked out a position as an extremely satisfying manipulator of genres and tones, finding pawky humor in the grotesque and maddeningly tense horror in the mundane and suburban. It’s a little premature to claim that I’d be willing to follow him anywhere, but I haven’t been let down yet.

So with all that in mind, it’s a little bit disappointing that the first of Wheatley’s films to put in an appearance on this blog, A Field in England, finds the director producing his first movie that I haven’t loved on the spot. Not because he seems to relaxed whatever internal pressure led to the creation of his first three, enormously idiosyncratic movies - the film, his fourth feature,his fourth, is arguably his most ambitious yet, artistically and narratively. If nothing else, the attempt to mount a period movie set during the Civil War (the 17th Century one in England, not the 19th Century one in America) with only six actors and costumes that look like the most talented mom in middle school put them together for the spring play - and to succeed so fully in that attempt that after the opening scene finishes instructing us how to watch the movie, there’s never another moment when it feels inauthentic or fake - would earn so many moxie points that it would be hard to entirely dislike the film.

The simple beginning to an obtuse, psychologically-driven narrative finds bullying military man Commander Trower (Julian Barratt) relying on an apprentice alchemist and diviner named Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) to find a missing outlaw. During battle, which he watches from the fringes (and if it feels like this is an excuse for us to hear the fighting without seeing it, sure, but it works at establishing the film’s off-kilter tone right at the start), Whitehead is able to escape, meeting up with a pair of deserters, Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and Friend (Richard Glover), and a freeman, Cutler (Ryan Pope), all leaving the field of battle; their attempt to find an ale house a little way back into the country leads them quickly astray, and right into the path of O’Neil (Michael Smiley), an Irish thief, and the exact same outlaw Whitehead had been assigned to hunt down. O’Neil has a much more intriguing possibility than ale and whores; he claims to know of a treasure hidden in a nearby field, and he’s not going to give up the chance to have a trained diviner help him find it.

It would be simple and clean to suggest that the film takes its turn when the group eats a stew made of wild mushrooms that prove to be hallucinogenic, and it’s certainly at this point that the film most fully reveals itself as a psychological drama with overtones of cosmic, religious terror. But that would be selling the opening act short. At all points, A Field in England delights in presenting the viewer with a world sufficiently disorienting, between the weird emptiness of its setting, the stylised mix of modernism and olde-tymey dialogue in Amy Jump’s script (Wheatley’s regular writer and thus the co-author of his distinctive, odd tones), and the metallic cinematography by Laurie Rose, in a full range of soft greys that never quite commit to full white and only rarely to black. The film looks and sounds like a dream in a rather more direct sense than most “this is a dream” films usually do: the images stubbornly refuse to link up properly even though there’s no obvious discontinuity in the cutting, and objects and concepts suddenly appear in the story as though they were already there and we were supposed to have noticed them before. It looks, and sounds, deeply uncanny, long before the magic mushrooms enter the picture.

The film's general direction, with its generally increasing pileup of suggestions that the field is a version of Hell or at least Purgatory, and the equivalence of O'Neil with the actual devil (first as a joke, increasingly not), rather neatly marries two kinds of content: that is, having unexpectedly chosen to dive into the 1640s, Wheatley and Jump proceed to tell a story with moral concerns that feel period-appropriate, and even with a certain period-correct lack of polish and convincing illusion. If 17th Century Englishmen had access to digital cameras, but nothing else of contemporary technology, A Field in England has the distinct feel of something they might have made, and that's exceptionally cool. Also, this is what helps the film to hang together as much as it does, for as long as it does. For in honesty, while all of the individual parts work terrifically, from the nervous, rough performances to the cinematography to everything, the unified whole feels vaguely aimless and less than totally satisfying. The impression one gets - I got, at least - is that Wheatley and dompany didn't really have a feature's worth of different ideas, and so A Field in England ends up being a somewhat drawn-out affair that is punctuated, whenever it starts to flag really badly, with one of its more aggressively outré gestures.

I won't quite go so far as to say it's boring or pointless, though those words do rear their heads. What A Field in England does offer, by the bucketload, is a pervasive sense of unease, an almost physical sense of things being entirely and perversely not right with the film, as you're watching it. The combination of costume drama, religious allegory, and psychological horror that largely go to making up the movie matches with that unease beautifully, and the increasing fragmentation of the narrative into events that barely make sense on their own and don't seem to flow naturally from what went before proves to be a well-motivated and totally effective choice, and not just aimless messiness. It works as an experience, whatever else it does. But it's the first Wheatley film which I left feeling no clear sense of why - of what that experience was meant to do besides unsettle me mightily. It succeeded, and that's no little thing, but compared to the suggestive themes and social insight of the director and writer's previous work, I'm a little bit annoyed that it's the only thing.

7/10

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GRIN AND BEAR IT

The word that primarily suggests itself in respect to Paddington, roughly muscling out all other possibilities, is "charming". A word which could certainly be employed with a certain level of condescension, sure, but not really in this case. For it is an earned charm, in Paddington; the screenplay by director Paul King, from a story he and Hamish McColl adapted from Michael Bond's series of children's books, reeks with lighthearted affection for its characters, its settings, and its gentle depiction of a colorful, warmhearted England that never was. Even in it hardest-edged details - a crisply sardonic sense of humor with a healthy level of family-friendly misery, and an unremittingly cruel villain - the film never moves very far into darkness. Unpleasant things happen, yes, and they are played for laughs; but the only reason those laughs work, in this form, is because we're never persuaded that the unpleasantness is actually going to stick, or that anything genuinely bad might ever really happen to the characters.

The film takes its first cues from Pixar's Up, setting its stage with an old newsreel of a British explorer, Montgomery Clyde (Tim Downie), leading the first-ever expedition to Darkest Peru (the best example I can give of where the film's sense of humor lies is to point out the unblinking way that no character ever, ever refers to the country as just "Peru", anywhere in the film). Here he finds an unknown species of hyper-intelligent bear, able to form human speech and use tools, and he's so impressed that he leaves them totally unmolested, along with an invitation to find him in London if they ever wish to cross the Atlantic. Many years later, those same bears, Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton) and Pastuzo (Michael Gambon) are raising their orphaned nephew (Ben Whishaw), enjoying peace, tranquility, and an endless supply of homemade marmalade. After a terrible storm destroys their home, the young bear finds it necessary to make his way in the world, hopping a boat to England, where he encounter the Brown family, who name him "Paddington" after the station where he's found. Two very basic plots play out after this: Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville), a risk analyst, is horrified at the thought of having a bear in the house, but Mrs. Brown (Sally Hawkins) is too kind and caring to throw Paddington out, and the bear's gentle, bumbling ways eventually bring a new kind of life to the stilted Brown household, with children Judy (Madeleine Harris) and Jonathan (Samuel Joslin), and housekeeper Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters), quickly coming over to Mrs. Brown's side, while her husband behaves obstinately British. That whole thing, the one that's been done several dozen times.

The other plot centers on deranged museum taxidermist Millicent (Nicole Kidman) learning of Paddington and setting her sights on taking the bear down to be the prize of her career, with the help of the crusty, unpleasant Mr. Curry (Peter Capaldi), the Browns' neighbor. Which in the abstract isn't terribly fresh either, though the taxidermy angle is appealingly morbid.

What makes Paddington lovely, then, surely isn't its creativity, unpredictability, or its insight into human behavior. It's simply that this ancient, well-worn form is done with such a light touch, enlivened by the absolutely terrific cast - Jim Broadbent is somewhere in there, too - assembled by producer David Heyman in a fine impression of his decade-long work making sure that every actor born in the British Isles found work somewhere in the Harry Potter octology. The role of a stuffy, overly-protective dad doesn't strain Bonneville any more than playing a warm-hearted soul with a steel spine exerts Hawkins, or the wise, tart-tongued housekeeper finds Walters rummaging around in the deepest recesses of her bag of acting tricks. But then, Paddington isn't an acting showcase: it's a sweet, low-impact script that needs a lot of rich but non-fussy performances to keep things steady and free from too much syrup on the one side, or insincerity on the other. And that's exactly what everybody provides, from the enthusiastically amazed Whishaw on down (all apologies to Colin Firth, but it's an obvious good that he ended up dropping out of the role).

The only exception is Kidman, whose performance actually does stand out as a bit of a virtuoso turn; it's a basic hammy bad guy performance, but it offers one of the rare chances for that actor to have any real apparent fun, biting into her part and gnawing on it, while the cinematography and costumes and hairstyling all pitch in to make her look as porcelain an bleached-out and harsh as possible. It's especially gratifying to see Kidman well-used as the merciless villain in a literary adaptation for children, seven years after The Golden Compass so frustratingly refused to capitalise on her visual presence, and what she's up to here makes her one of the finest kids' movie villains of recent years.

That's one of the obvious hooks the film has for an adult viewer (assuming that "it has a gentle, forgiving, and amiable soul" isn't a hook, which sadly, I imagine to be the case); another is that the film is rather snugly made and handsome to look at. Particularly the production design by Gary Williamson, which has the richly stuffed texture of a Wes Anderson film, only scaled back to a more cozily domestic sphere (the Brown house is imagined as a literal doll house at times, and the intricate detailing of every room plays that up well). One location calls to mind the elaborate, dazzling interiors of the Harry Potter films without feeling out of place or breaking things; the rest of the movie presents a comfortable and clean London, recalling the obviously set-bound Mary Poppins both in its stagey artifice and its appropriate softness.

Paddington's unending niceness is its best and defining characteristic, though it's not without some meat on its bones: without arguing so hard that it knocks things out of balance, it serves as a durable parable about how England is strengthened by diversity and immigration (which doesn't quite extend to offering nonwhite faces actual parts to play, but it's hard to imagine which role would specifically benefit from such a choice). And there's also that wry, snappish sense of humor to pull things back from being so soft and cushy that the whole thing is insubstantial. The whole package is simple and not very showy (the CGI Paddington is hardly a cutting-edge piece of effects work and animation, though it gets the job done), but the whole thing is satisfying enough that if it turned out to hang around as a minor classic of contemporary children's filmmaking, I'd not be bothered by that in the slightest.

7/10

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BIGGER & BLACKER

In the wide world of sequels that certainly don't have any actual reason to exist, one could do a lot worse, conceptually speaking, than The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death - though that title! There's absolutely nothing that mouthful achieves that wouldn't be more accurately and clearly covered by just plain The Woman in Black 2. But anyway, the sequel to the 2012 ghost story The Woman in Black has the good sense to leave that film's cast entirely alone, and with a perfectly fine Edwardian-era haunted house that nobody in the surrounding village wants to go near, it was as easy as pie to skip forward a few decades to find it still squatting there, grim and rotting, for a pair of London schoolteachers and band of refugee children to shelter there during the Blitz. This is, I am inclined to think, the most characteristically Hammer-esque touch in this latest production by the resurgent Hammer Films. It is also the only halfway decent idea to be found anywhere within Jon Croker's script, so there's that.

The glow of that one right choice does linger for a bit, though, and the opening sequence, in 1941 London, is a pretty terrific re-creation of the period in all its tightly-circumscribed panic, for a shlocky horror movie. Hell, given the movie this is, and given the people making up its target audience, I'm downright impressed by how unapologetically it throws us into the setting without bothering to explain the context or history. All we get are Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox), a young woman who teaches under the command of the strict headmistress Jean Hogg (Helen McCrory), and the two of them are in a hurry to get their seven charges off to the rural village of Crythin Gifford. Make that eight charges, since in the previous night's bombing, little Edward (Oaklee Pendergast) lost both of his parents, and is now joining Hogg's band, complete with a shellacked, post-traumatic lack of expression and refusal to speak. This is about the point where the movie uses up all its sense of place and war-era imagery, and no longer can pretend that it's any good in any way.

After arriving by train to Crythin Gifford late at night, the grumbling local do-gooder Dr. Rhodes (Adrian Rawlins, star of the 1989 Woman in Black telefilm) roughly informs the women that the only available lodging is the sprawling mansion on the outskirts of town, Eel Marsh House. Though to be honest, I'm not sure if it's named such. One thing that Angels of Death cannot be accused of is too much exposition on behalf of the viewers who might not have bothered with the first movie, and that goes from setting the stage - the important fact that Eel Marsh House is on the far side of a causeway that disappears during high tide is used during a tension-raising scene without have actually been established - all the way to the meat of its story, which uses the mythology of the titular woman (Leanne Best) that was explained the first time without really bothering to go over it all again, so a great deal of what happens is inexplicable far beyond the normal kind of cryptic events to be found in horror movies. And I cannot help but appreciate that economy of storytelling; but if a film is going to depend so completely on the viewer's knowledge of the first movie in order to make sense as a narrative object, it feels like a cheat to then have the content of the sequel be a re-hash of all the same setpieces from the last time around, in a slightly different order.

In fact, just about the only thing that The Woman in Black did that Angel of Death fails to repeat was to include a single protracted haunting sequence uninterrupted by plot or even dialogue. That was basically the only thing that hauled the first movie across the fine line dividing "derivative storytelling and tacky-looking ghosts on an absurdly over-designed set" from "derivative storytelling that has a really fucking kickass centerpiece that ends up making the whole movie a worthwhile experience". Absent that - and there really isn't even a feint in that direction - the sequel reveals just how threadbare the whole affair is, cobbling together ghost story clichés into a framework where it feels like a third of the scenes are missing: not just the ones explaining the backstory from the first movie, but more prosaic matters like, how does Eve go from riding into town with the hunky pilot (Jeremy Irvine) to poking around in a derelict basement all by herself? Meanwhile, the scenes that are present are trite muddles, doling out tragic backstories for two of the three adult characters with more than two scenes of screentime, and wandering away from the central action in a way that makes it clear that the filmmakers have no sense of what any of the characters are doing when they're not onscreen.

Tom Harper, the director, tries to keep this stitched together more or less by marching through reasonably well-timed jump scares at a steady pace, but even if it worked, that would feel like a cheap substitute for atmosphere and a real sense of the decaying dread that Eel Marsh House is meant to evoke. And for that, Harper and his cinematographer, George Steel, would need to abandon their weird hang-up about overlighting to make sure we can see everything clearly, even when story context - or just plain basic visual continuity - demand murkier blacks.

The film feels composed out of almost nothing but half-measures and recycled ideas, and the result is worse than terrible: it's astoundingly mediocre and plodding. The surprisingly good cast provides something that resembles life - Fox has a terrific sweet, plucky screen presence, and I'm very eager for her to get a better part in a more functional story - and I rather admire the way that the art team (the production designer is Jacqueline Abrahams, the supervising art director is Andrew Munro) aged the garish sets from the first movie into something still more ominous and rundown, but for the most part, Angel of Death is such a slack, by-the-numbers haunted hose story that it's not even up to the task of being bad.

4/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: IN A MINER KEY

Pride is, in the first place, an irresistibly nice movie. There's a question to be asked whether that is, in and of itself, its big problem. For it is also a movie set against an extremely non-nice pair of events: the miners' strike of 1984-'85 in Great Britain, and the expanding AIDS crisis. And while the film touches on both of these topics - the miners' strike is the engine driving the plot, after all - it does so awfully gingerly, as though it's terrified to ruin the audience's good time by reminding us of the stakes of its own story. A story this steeped in political activism that's so skittish about the actual stuff of politics can't help but be frustrating; but genial British comedies have been trivialising the causes and consequences of the strike for years now. So if nothing else, Pride is in good company.

More importantly, the film's a genuinely effective crowd-pleaser of a sort that the UK film industry used to crank out with great regularity back in the '90s and early '00s, and isn't really any more. And the crowd it's pleasing isn't one that wants a nuanced discussion of class issues under Thatcher, or would know what to do with one if it had been provided in this form. So judging the film according to its own goals, it's a pretty clear-cut success across the board: full of well-etched characters who feel like "types" but are also fully-realised as people with individual personalities and identities, able to deftly mix light comedy, bawdy jokes, and sobriety without giving the viewer tonal whiplash. And even in its rather cagey appropriation of only the bits of politics and history it feels comfortable engaging with, it does the admirable and necessary work of calling attention to a rather special and unique political alliance.

That alliance being between Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, the brainchild of Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), gay activist and Communist (the latter fact quietly removed from the movie), and the miners' union in Onllwyn, Wales. The film simplifies the history a bit in the interest of keeping things focused more on the characters involved, which is quite a range of humanity played by one of the best casts assembled in 2014. Among the LGBT activists, we find shy, closted 20-year-old virgin Joe (George McKay) - the one entirely fictional character in the cast - middle-aged couple Jonathan (Dominic West) and Gethin (Andrew Scott), and punk Steph (Faye Marsay); among the miners and the townsfolk, the ebullient Hefina (Imelda Staunton), enthusiastic Siân (Jessica Gunning), taciturn wiseman Cliff (Bill Nighy), and the delightfully awkward Dai, who ends up the bumbling but wholly well-meaning ambassador between LGSM and the miners, and is played to quiet, earnest perfection by Paddy Considine, who I'd just barely be willing to give best in show honors to, slightly edging out Schnetzer. But everybody's great, and I've really just cherry-picked some new and established names; in point of fact, Pride includes a solid two-dozen characters of greater or lesser importance who linger in the memory, fleshing out the village with people who make lasting impression with just a few minutes to sketch in a backstory and feelings about this unprecedented turn of events, and giving all of the activists individual histories within the general overlap that unites them all, that sneak out as we observe them rather than being baldly stated.

Writer Stephen Beresford and director Matthew Warchus collide their two groups with unexpected gentleness; other than a token bigot family, and some late-coming complications, there's very little "rural blue-collar men mistrust The Gays" drama that would seem to be a natural fit for a film like this, and cheers to that. It only deprives the film of easy jokes, and forces it instead to explore more delicate dynamics of how people behave in new situations, what choices they make as to how to present themselves, and the judgments they make (or don't) about other people's merits. This is sweetened by a predominately jokey, broad tone in the beginning, mostly carried by the ladies of the village and their blowsy fascination with this new breed of man that isn't sullen, grunting, and coated in coal dust; but for all that the selling point of Pride is it genial facility with quips, what sticks about it is the basic decency of all the people within it, and how happily it invites us to enjoy watching their decency unfold.

That's not all there is to it, I suppose. It's all that it really needs; it's more than a lot of the stand-issue working class Britcom, with its population of cartoon eccentrics, is able to claim. It's certainly what's most satisfying about the film; though I am sure that there's an audience, and not a small one, that finds its depiction of the mid-'80s evolution of gay political engagement in Britain to be bracing and smart rather than needlessly restrained (I doubt that there's an audience that could be entirely happy with the tossed-off treatment of the mining strike, but it's a big world). At any rate, the idea that basically good people can team up with other basically good people to make the world a basically better place is Pride's animating ethos, and it's given a lot of warm life by this treatment.

It's hardly a challenging or adventurous piece of filmmaking. The bright cinematography, by Tat Radcliffe, nimbly captures the colors and feeling of the film's re-creation of the 1980s (Charlotte Walter's costumes are splendid in this regard), and there are some terrific wide shots that depict Onllwyn with a grounded sense that keeps the film steady and true, but it's mostly a simple, conservative aesthetic. There are moments where Christopher Nightingale's score tries a bit too hard to tell us exactly what to feel, and they tend to come at the worst possible moments, but that's probably the film's biggest misstep (outside of a corny, hacky scene where the gays teach the straights how to Dance!!!!!). And for every mildly bad moment, there's a great moment to offset it: the coming to terms between a gay man and his long-estranged mother, done almost wordlessly; the nuances of staging and performance that let us know that one character learns he has AIDS without needing to stop the drama cold to clarify it; the giddy joy a bunch of old ladies feel upon finding gay porn.

The film could go deeper into its subject; the film could be more honest about the factual events it chooses to depict. These are givens, with mainstream film treatments of history. But within its limits, it's tremendously perceptive and warm and good-humored, and with a mix of genre and topic that seem tailor-maded for shtick, that's a pretty terrific achievement.

8/10

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