Warlords Of Atlantis

Warlords Of Atlantis rather spoils the mood by being halfway-decent (and therefore slightly dull), thanks to evocative location filming in Malta and a solid cast including a pre-Cheers John Ratzenberger. In fact, it’s not officially an Amicus production, but why be pedantic when McClure is dodging flying piranhas and a giant octopus? Warlords Of Atlantis News and Features

They Came From Beyond Space

They Came From Beyond Space, a 1967 Body Snatchers knockoff lacks depth, tension or decent baddies (this being British, the aliens’ targets include civil servants and bankers). Cinematographer turned- director Freddie Francis conjures up groovy compositions to compensate for the paucity of storytelling. Sadly, any hope of a Summer Of Love B-movie is squandered by wooden, middle-aged American star Robert Hutton, the definition of square. They Came From Beyond Space News and Features

The Land That Time Forgot

Doug McClure’s Amicus debut was Kevin Connor’s The Land That Time Forgot, a faithful adap of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ yarn about an island where evolution has taken a nap while dinosaurs and cavemen duke it out. The film retains intrigue in its WW1 setting – it’s as much U-boat adventure as creature feature – but soon becomes exactly what you expect from Z-grade matinee fluff. The dinosaurs are puppets (or polystyrene pterodactyls on wires), the lost world is a quarry, and McClure is every schoolboy’s idea of a lantern-jawed hero. The Land That Time Forgot News and Features

At the Earth's Core

At The Earth’s Core pairs Doug McClure with Amicus mainstay Peter Cushing as adventurers imprisoned underground by telepathic bird monsters. Director Kevin Connor’s insane man-in-suit monsters make Land’s puppets look like natural history: the fire-breathing toad is a highlight. It’s the silliest of films, which of course means it’s the most fun. At The Earth's Core News and Features

Shadow Dancer

In a year that has seen the Queen of England press flesh with a former IRA commander, a thriller recreating the bad old days of the Troubles seems ill-timed at best. Yet though the political backdrop is integral to James Marsh’s engrossing study of a female mole spying from within a paramilitary family, the story suits any conflict where loyalties are divided and betrayal is rife. After a ’70s prologue that explains how Colette McVeigh (Andrea Riseborough) came to be radicalised, Shadow Dancer zips forward to 1993 to find her attempting to plant a bomb on the London Underground. When the operation is thwarted and Colette arrested, this single mother is offered a stark choice – 25 years behind bars or a return to Belfast as an MI5 informant. Her contact is Mac (Clive Owen), a case officer who co mes to feel and care for his reluctant field agent. Yet when another IRA op is foiled the finger of suspicion begins to point in Colette’s direction, something Mac’s ruthless superior (Gillian Anderson) has no problem with at all, due to shadowy reasons of her own. With Tombstone Features Owen on one hand and the no less readable Riseborough on the other, getting a handle on the two leads is an initially tricky proposition. But without actively courting our empathy the latter ends up winning it anyway, via a canny combo of grace, guts and guile. Given his experience in documentary, it’s no surprise Marsh makes the universe Colette inhabits appear chillingly authentic. The Man On Wire man negotiates the various levels of subterfuge with a forensic eye for telling detail. That eye extends to the visual palette, muted hues and murky browns pa inting a dourly forbidding landscape against which Colette’s crimson raincoat stands out like blood on snow. Result? An expertly calibrated drama confirming Marsh’s status as one of Britain’s most formidable filmmakers. Somebody give him a Bond.   Shadow Dancer News and Features

Berberian Sound Studio

Timid and priggish, English sound technician Gilderoy (Toby Jones, excellent) arrives in Rome to apply his fastidious craft to low-budget horror movie The Equestrian Vortex. Once there, he finds himself trapped in a maze of cramped, windowless rooms, confronted by insurmountable language barriers, a tyrannical producer (Cosimo Fusco), a beautiful, hostile secretary (Tonia Sotiropoulou), a Kafka-esque expense- claims system and reels of overwrought images. Viewers are spared the ungodly sight of witches persecuted with red-hot pokers to genitalia. But Gilderoy certainly isn’t, his contamination quickened by his own twitching hand as he sets about making all this violence sound as bad as it looks... The sophomore feature of Berkshire- born writer-director Peter Strickland, Berberian Sound Studio, like Katalin Varga before, inhabits a twilight world between horror and art movie. But whereas Varga was a rape-revenge film reimagined via Andrei Tarkovsky, Berberian is love letter to, and deconstruction of, the lurid Italian horrors of the ’60s-’80s. Without so much as a slash of (visual) violence, it unnerves even as it reveals the tricks of the trade: the droll sight of Gilderoy stabbing melons and wrenching the tops off carrots does little to alleviate the sense of dread slicking Gilderoy’s descent into mental disintegration. A head-aching third-act shift, meanwhile, is pure David Lynch, sure to befuddle but thickening the nightmarish illogicality of the whole damn thing. Naturally those familiar with their Argentos, Martinos and Deodatos will glean additional enjoyment, while the thriftiness and shiftiness encountered by Gilderoy evokes the mien of Rome’s Incir De Paolis Studios, where many a genre masterpiece was shot. But Strickland’s nuanced, atmospheric, ambiguous movie transcends genre. Not familiar with the ornate death-dances of Mario Bava’s Mask Of The Demon or Dario Argento’s Suspiria? No matter – Berberian Sound Studio also recalls the claustrophobia of early Polanski and the crippling isolation of tech-twiddle thrillers such as Coppola’s The Conversation and De Palma’s Blow Out. Crammed with detailed craft, its appeal is further widened by dealing in universal fears: homesickness, identity , mental health. If you love movies, you’ll love this – oddly, it makes a perfect companion piece to The Artist, doing for sound what that did for silence. Berberian Sound Studio News and Features

The Imposter

The Imposter has the concept of disappearance deep in its DNA. First there are disembodied voices, fading credits, the pounding, purifying Spanish rain. Later, witness testimonies trail away in horror, and departing figures bleach themselves into the oblivion of sudden sunlight. Bart Layton’s beautifully crafted documentary begins with the vanishing of Nicholas Barclay, a 13-year-old Texan boy, in June 1994. But its central character is Frédéric Bourdin, an extremely damaged young Frenchman longing to lose himself in the illusion of another identity. “As long as I can remember,” he says, “I wanted to be someone else, someone who was acceptable.” He chooses Nicholas. Despite not looking or sounding like Barc lay, and being discovered by police three years later and 5,000 miles away, in Spain, Frédéric disguises himself – terribly – as the boy, now grown-up, and is welcomed with open arms by his grieving family. A compelling liar, Frédéric confesses his pathological Pinocchio-ing straight to camera, with Nicholas’ sister Carey and mother Beverly chipping in separately as credibly heart-sick witnesses. The reason neither of them questioned the inconsistencies in his tale is painfully simple: they needed to believe him. Layton is just as skilled a storyteller as his subject, fleshing out these incredible, often conflicting accounts with whatever comes to hand: talking-head interviews with family members and state officials; home-video footage (some shot by Nicholas himself) that crackles with static; snatches of conversations. Sometimes he intercuts police phone calls with clips from &rsquo ;70s detective shows such as Kojak. Elsewhere, he dramatises moments with stunning (if very subjective) neo-noir reconstructions benefitting from the contributions of cinematographer Erik Wilson (Submarine) and editor Andrew Hulme (Control). In lesser hands, such technique might feel like a cheat. After all, documentaries are about establishing the truth, however ugly, not colluding in a fantasist’s beautiful cruelties. But this is a documentary about fabricating stories, the allure of deception and how quickly the facts can vanish into the ether. The effect of Layton’s efforts is to give credence to each of the claimants, so it’s possible to feel sorry for Frédéric even as the horrendous weight of his actions hits home. One glimpse of Carey’ s traumatised eyes says it all – not everything can be washed away, no matter how much we pretend it can. The Imposter News and Features

Brave

Poor Brenda Chapman.  For a while she held the significant distinction of being the first female director to be admitted into Pixar’s hitherto all-male cadre of feature filmmakers. Not only that, but the film she was charged with bringing into being was Pixar’s first to have a female protagonist, and a princess to boot. The sound of glass ceilings shattering in Tinseltown might not have been audible, but it was hard to miss all the same. Until, that is, Chapman was abruptly ousted and replaced by Mark Andrews, second-unit director on Mouse House mega-flop John Carter. Feminist breakthrough? Yeah, not so much. “Creative differences” was the catch-all reason given for Chapman’s departure from the project. Yet when one harks back to how this slice of Celtic cod-folklore was initially pitched, it’s clear John Lasseter and the rest of Pixar’s top brass lost faith in her initial conception - then called The Bear And The Bow - and re-moulded it into something a little less serious, a little more cartoonish and a lot less… well, princess-y. In many ways the result resembles nothing so much as Tangled, or 2010 pic How To Train Your Dragon, another medieval caper set in a world of chieftains, warriors and Arthurian accessories. Given that critically acclaimed release represents one of DreamWorks’ better toon forays, the parallel would appear to do Brave proud. Yet Pixar’s history has always been one of pack-leading innovation, not familiar (if unintentional) imitation. Coming off the back of that spluttering jalopy Cars 2, the newest vehicle off the Emeryville production line had been looked upon as a film to steady the Pixar ship. Instead it bears all the hallmarks of a studio treading water, as if waiting for a new generation of custodians to propel it into its next evolutionary stage. Which is not to say that Brave isn’t technically ambitious, fabulous to look at and fun to be around, mostly thanks to a spirited and feisty heroine whose explosion of reddish curls is a triumph in itself. OK, so tomboy Merida (nimbly voiced by Kelly Macdonald) does feel something of an amalgam, saddled as she is with Mulan’s independent streak, Jessie the Cowgirl’s pluck and the archery prowess of Katniss Everdeen. Boldly though, this is one Disney princess who refuses to be defined by a Prince Charming, for all her mother’s attempts to set her up with one in the interests of Highland tribal harmony. Voiced by Emma Thompson, the stately Queen Elinor fills much the same role as Marlin in Finding Nemo: namely, overprotective parental buzz-kill forever trying to keep their mischievous offspring in check. (As well as Merida, she and the burly King Fergus - the easiest of paydays for Billy Connolly - have a trio of unruly boy triplets wreaking havoc in their castle.) It’s evident from the off, then, that much of Brave’s drama will be driven by its stern mother/headstrong daughter dynamic, and the friction therein. But how this dynamic develops hangs on a bonkers plot twist that’s so off the wall and out of left field it almost capsizes the entire movie. We won’t reveal more, apart from saying that it involves a spell cast by a mad witch that in turn maintains a tradition of literal transformation that&rsqu o;s been part of the Disney ethos since as far back as Pinocchio. The problem is that the Pixar USP is rooted in the fantastical rather than the magical. Their movies, by and large, involve one key idea – talking toys, culinary rodents, suburban superheroes – treated as a fanciful embellishment of an otherwise authentic milieu. Throw witchcraft into the mix and suddenly anything goes, undermining the strict internal logic on which the Pixar universe depends. Brave begins strongly, has some fine comic moments and builds to a majestic finale involving a demon bear named Mor’du who once robbed Fergus of a leg and won’t stop until it gets the rest of him. (There’s also a terrific traditional score from Patrick Doyle.) Yet its weak points (Julie Walters’ eccentric enchantress, the gaseous Will o’ the Wisps that entice Merida to her cottage and the consequences of the fate-changing pastry she coaxes out of her) all spring from a tinkering with the Pixar fabric that is false, forced and ultimately foolhardy. Speaking of fabric, a symbolically torn tapestry comes to play a crucial role in proceedings. Here’s hoping John Lasseter has a needle and thread capable of stitching his animation power-house across its current creative blip. Brave News and Features