At The Flix with @Timmy666
Hello one and all. Welcome to this week’s At The Flix. Let’s get right to it shall we!
Blade Runner: The Final Cut (15)
Out on wide release this Friday, Blade Runner returns to the big screen, where it fully deserves to exist. This is the still the zenith in Ridley Scott’s filmography and I see the joy in all versions but generally ascribe to the darker endings which allude more bluntly to Deckard’s awareness of who he is.
Fewer sci-fi films garner quite as much debate as this one and rightly so. Taking the original voiceover away, which some prefer, the Final Cut is superior to the original. It is both bleaker and a far more convincing tale of dehumanisation and the near future…
… And all in the knowledge that 2019 is just around the corner.
Fast & Furious 7 (12A)
This franchise knows exactly what it is doing. To get to a seventh film is complete credit to its stars who have grown into a unit, and as this film alludes, a family.
Plot lines are irrelevant. The franchise has the confidence of its convictions to both deliver on the action front but be brave enough to deliver as well.
Critics over the pond have been more praiseworthy about this latest instalment than many that he preceded it. I think that’s high praise because it’s credit to a franchise when it has essentially become so successful it is critic proof. If you’re a fan, you’re gonna probably love it.
Water Diviner, The (15)
Russell Crowe directs and stars in this, his first feature set in 1919, as an Australian farmer Joshua Connor goes in search of his three missing sons, last known to have fought against the Turks in the bloody Battle of Gallipoli.
Clearly as all publicity and promotion for this film, this is all about Crowe, his conviction and determination seeing through a melodramatic and old fashioned tale for the mainstream.
While We’re Young (15)
Getting a whole raft of four and five star reviews, Noah Baumbach’s latest feature stars Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as two hipsters approaching middle age and not wanting to grow up just yet. As is typical of Baumbach when at his best, he delivers the subject with candour, satire and characters that audiences can hopefully relate to.
Elsewhere, showing at the mac, Dukhtar (PG) is set in the mountains of Pakistan, the story of a mother and her ten-year-old daughter who flee their home on the eve of the girl’s marriage to a tribal leader. The film follows that tale and the deadly hunt for them.
At the Electric is a myriad of one off showings of such random films as True Romance (18), Spice World (PG) (yes, really!) and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (PG), no doubt a tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy. Also showing is Wild Tales (15) which was Argentina’s entry for Best Film in a Foreign Language at the Oscars, six darkly comic stories of apocalyptic revenge on what it means to lose control.
Anyhow that’s it from me. As always, if you have any quibbles, please get in touch on twitter @timmy666. Till next week.
