TITLE & REVIEW
Physics Professor Timothy Hutton will be murdered.
Five days earlier, he discovers the police investigation file.
He must pre-solve the murder (like in classic film Noir D.O.A.).
Suspects include Police Detective Randy Quaid, GF Kari Matchett and Publisher Giancarlo Esposito. Nikki DeBoer is the protagonist's sister, but her husband is a suspect! At least she wears flimsy silk.
This is divided into five chapters, each covering a one-hour segment.
In Part Two, gangster Hamish Linklater (Angus McFadyen - Braveheart and the Skeet Ulrich TV show Miracles ) appears.
This is narrated by the protagonist, Franklin (Josh Hutcherson -
Hunger Games
), a blogger who specialises in health topics.
It starts with him on a plane about to crash,
then flips back to how the story started.
Franklin wanted an interview with Burrell (Morgan Freeman - Now You See Me ), a tech giant whose patented wrist-band technology can scan the wearer for all illnesses. Yes, like a cross between Elon Musk and the woman who got busted for defrauding her investors.
Franklin accidentally comes into possession of the next-generation product, a magical ring that allows the wearer to travel back in time by 57 seconds. This is great for giving tiny do-overs, but is theoretically not long enough to risk damaging the timeline. The blogger uses it to cheat at a casino, because he is not keep a low profile.
Franklin gets a job offer from Sig Thorensen (Greg Germann - Eureka ), the head of a mega-pharmaceutical corporation. It turns out that Franklin's sister died of an opioid overdose, so he pretends to accept the offer in order to dig up dirt on Thorensen.
This is billed as Jason Bourne meets
Inception
, though it is nowhere near as action-packed as either.
It's a romance with supernatural overtones, based on a story by
Philip K. Dick
.
Matt Damon ( True Grit ) is a US Politician who meets Emily Blunt , an English ex-pat ballerina in NYC. But a group of supernatural entities (angels in all but name) who can alter reality have been ordered to manipulate his destiny and keep him apart from the woman. They call in Archangel Terence Stamp ( Phantom Menace ), who isn't afraid of using extreme methods.
A cryptographer (Kyle Gallner -
Veronica Mars
) is hired by some MIBs led by
Mary McCormack
. His job is to decode something to do with time travel.
Afterwards, he is forced to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement
and then injected with a sedative.
This seems a bit like a low-budget version of
Paycheck
.
Our hero decides to investigate what his employers were up to. He tracks down the previous person on the job - Azura Sky . They also get help from a conspiracy theorist (Richard Schiff - Sarah Connor Chronicles ).
Judy Greer
is a grieving widow because her husband (Edi Gathegi -
) was killed in a car crash.
Luckily the husband's best friend has a way to bring the dead man back.
They constructed a time machine of sorts.
It does not allow humans to travel back,
but they can send enough energy to kill someone.
If they kill the drunk driver who caused the crash,
the new timeline will be one in which the husband never died.
The problem is that the power to change the world for the better is addictive. Worse, every time they change the timeline, there are unforseen consequences.
This is a movie from the mid-1980s
about a man who lives in New York City,
occasionally has sparks of static electricity from his skin,
and then flashes back to a different place and time.
Also, there is a soft rock soundtrack.
Yes, sounds a lot like
Highlander (1985)
. A pity that this film falls far short of that bar.
Ferguson (Alex Hyde-White - Buck Rogers: Season 2 ) is the New Yorker. His company, bankrolled by the obnoxious Chuck (William Hootkins - Star Wars: ANH ), is expanding into the production of TV dinners. More excitingly, our hero is stalked by a creepy old man (Peter Cushing - Dracula (1958) ).
Ferguson magically teleports back in time to the First World War, where he rescues Biggles (Neil Dickson - ) from a burning airplane. This is the first of several time-jumps, including one where he meets Biggles' love-interest Marie ( Francesca Gonshaw ). She does not have any lines, which is a terrible waste of a great actress and ensures this film falls far short of passing the Bechdel test.
The hero, upon whom the plot hinges and the climax depends, is of course the title character of Biggles. The main character, Ferguson, is not technically the protagonist - he is merely an observer. This means that the audience have no real emotional investment in the actual hero. In other words, we do not really care about him or his fate. No wonder this movie flopped and the sequel was never made.
A pair of stoners from the 1990s
go on a journey that resembles the one that made them famous twenty-odd years ago.
Meanwhile, their tweenage daughters get the real job done.
If this sounds familiar, that is because this synopsis also covers
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
.
Bill and Ted have to bring about the greatest song in the world, so they can heal the universe with their music. Since they have failed to do it in the last few decades, the timeline is now about to collapse. They travel into the future, to ask their future selves how they managed it. Unfortunately their future selves are jerks.
Eventually, everyone ends up in Hell. Luckily Death (Bill Sadler - ) is still in charge there, although he is not on speaking terms with Bill and Ted.
The duo have teenage daughters who idolize their fathers. Yes, this is typical of the movie content of 2020: white hetero males are worthless, and they need females to save the day for them.
Every morning, Roy Pulver (Frank Grillo -
Captain America: Winter Soldier
) wakes up in a time loop.
The good news is that he is in bed with a bimbo named Alice (
Annabelle Wallis
). The bad news is that there is a gang of freelance assassins
intent on killing him.
In a flashback, we learn that Roy's ex-wife Jemma Wells ( Naomi Watts ) was a scientist building a time portal. Her boss, creepy Colonel Clive Ventor (Mel Gibson - ) and his henchman Brett (Will Sasso - ), may have something to do with everything that happened to Roy and Jemma.
Roy is a former Captain in Delta Force, but this is not enough. He calls on allies, like a female sword-fighter named Dai Feng ( Michelle Yeoh ).
Roy also develops as a person, since he finally gets a chance to spend time with his son. This adds an extra dimension to the movie, making it something more than an action-comedy.
If the assortment of assassins seems familiar, as with the name-drop of Liam Neeson ( The Grey ), that is because it was directed by Joe Carnahan . However, unlike the Carnahan/Neeson movie there is no after-credits sequence that gives a clue to the cliffhanger ending's outcome.
This movie, adapted from a novel,
follows a handful of people through six reincarnations
as they weave interlocking stories across multiple time zones.
Since the film runs for three hours
there is no point in trying to summarise it all in a few paragraphs,
so here are the basic outlines:
Each segment is told in a different fashion - melodrama, comedy, action-adventure and so on. The SPFX are incredible, and the make-up (which allows the cast to play different age groups, and even different races) is awesome.
The Cast themselves are incredible. Halle Berry is her Oscar-worthy awesomeness, as always - but the real knockout is Tom Hanks ( Green Mile ). He conveys a series of different characters (or different takes on the same character) that are entirely convincing, and show his incredibly diverse range.
Gabriel (Rufus Sewell -
A Knight's Tale
) is a physics professor, happily married to Marika (
Gillian Anderson
). One day he goes to a science conference in Princeton,
and never returns.
This leaves their son Erol to grow up without a father.
A dozen years later, the son has grown up to become Haley Joel Osment ( Sixth Sense ). He is a gifted Physics student, and his maternal grandfather Sal (Victor Garber - Alias ) is the professor. Together they discover that Gabriel may have discovered time-travel, and something went wrong on his trip back to meet Einstein.
Erol decides to travel back and meet his own father, hopefully resetting the timeline. However, there is no guarantee this will work. Erol's girlfriend Grace does not want to sacrifice the current timeline, in which they have a relative amount of happiness together, and risk that a different timeline would be better. As a melodrama, this movie has its fair share of tragedy.
This is based on a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald,
updated for the 21st Century and brought to life by
David Fincher
.
The title character is born with a strange medical defect - he ages backwards. Eventually he looks like Brad Pitt ( Fight Club ), and falls in love with ballerina Cate Blanchett . In real life the actors are about the same age, but here thanks to make-up they age in opposite directions. As time passes in New Orleans and Benjamin is seemingly unchanging, one is reminded of Interview with the Vampire .
Typical of Fitzgerald's work, this is a slow and tedious drama. UK Comic 2000AD covered this idea in a three-page Future-shock This is dragged out to over two hours, in an era when ninety minutes is about average for a film.
The supporting cast includes Linda Hamilton . She does not have much to do, so it is evidently stunt casting as a fan-service reference to classic time-travel movie The Terminator (1984) .
Urban terrorist Jim Caviezel (
Passion of the Christ
) sets off a bomb.
Local police detective Denzel Washington investigates.
Val Kilmer (
Willow
) borrows Detective Denzel for foot-work in a project,
to solve the crime using Time travel.
Denzel is a dreadful cop. He is so keen on following a suspect that he charges off alone to do what is obviously a two-man job. The result is that he causes multiple traffic pile-ups, involving god knows how many civilian casualties.
Dylan O'Brien (
American Assassin (2017)
) is a twenty-something at a major turning-point in his life.
He remembers his time in High School,
when some of the kids started to experiment with an experimental drug.
One of them,
Maika Monroe
, disappeared mysteriously.
Now the protagonist must go back into his past in order to find her.
This is a Hollywood time-travel thriller.
Through the power of magic realism, Jim Caviezel (
Passion of the Christ
in 1999 talks on the CB radio to his dad (Dennis Quaid -
Dragonheart
) in 1969.
There is some great father-son bonding.
But they must team up to catch a serial killer.
Unfortunately, as with all dramatic Time Travel stories,
they change things for the worse.
This was directed by
Christopher Nolan
, and (much like the heist itself) works on a number of different levels.
Unfortunately, the dense plotting means
that many viewers may be out of their depth.
Leo DeCaprio ( Titanic ) and Joseph Gordon Levitt ( Looper ) are hi-tech thieves who steal secrets from their victim's head. To do this, they have to enter the person's subconscious and interact with their dreams - a dream within a dream, as Edgar Allen Poe put it.
Our heroes are hired to do the impossible - to plant an idea in a man's mind. Their target is Cillian Murphy ( Batman Begins ). They recruit a team that includes Tom Hardy ( Star Trek: Nemesis ) and Ellen Page (the girl from Juno).
As an added distraction, Leo has the same subplot he did in Shutter Island - he is haunted by the death of his suicidal wife. This time she is played by the French actress who (like Tom Hardy and Gordon Levitt) appeared in Nolan's next Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises ).
A young scientist named James meets his future self (Daniel Stern -
), who has time-travelled back to help him.
It turns out that future James is an asshole,
so James must try to outsmart his older persona.
A bisexual college boy (Thomas Dekker -
Sarah Connor Chronicles
) stumbles across a murderous conspiracy.
Or was he just really high, and imagined the whole thing?
As things get more and more convoluted, it becomes obvious how much the writer/director owes to Twin Peaks . Other good news is that this Indie film actually has the courage to let the female cast show their breasts in the sex scenes - unlike The Roommate , a recent dire mainstream Hollywood effort.
This is basically science fiction for people who do not like sci-fi.
It is a romance story about two people who communicate by letters
not through distance, but through time.
Naturally, everyone who knows about time travel stories (you know, sci-fi fans)
knows all the cliches and problems that can arise - paradoxes and so on.
But since this is a romance for a mainstream audience, the little things are ignored.
Keanu Reeves ( Bill and Ted - another time travel story!) and Sandra Bullock are the happy couple. It is actually quite a touching tale, if you like that kind of thing.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (
Inception
) is a Looper, a hitman in the year 2044.
He and his compadres wipe out a steady stream of victims sent back from thirty years in the future.
Apparently the far future's technology means that destroying a body is impossible.
However, this has not prevented a psycho named The Rainmaker
from slaughtering dozens of people and taking over the Five Syndicates.
This Gang War is the source of the Loopers' victims,
but they are now assigned to take out their future selves.
As with all good Film Noirs, something goes wrong and our protagonist must go on the run. His future self (Bruce Willis, who already did this in Twelve Monkeys ) comes back, on a Terminator -like rampage to kill The Rainmaker and save the future.
The problem with this story is the number of shocking coincidences. Our hero blunders into the families of TWO suspects, both within handy walking distance for him.
Another Time Travel veteran, Garret Dillahunt ( Sarah Connor Chronicles ) pops up as a hitman. And Emily Blunt seems to be in everything these days, as she tries an American accent as a farm-girl.
The result is a contrived mess full of temporal paradoxes. Unfortunately Time Travel in fiction only works in ways that the writer feels benefit the plot. Nobody cares about getting it to make sense any more. If reading this paragraph gives you a sense of deja-vu, either you are a time traveller or else the facts in it are true of so many Time Travel stories that it tends to get repeated a lot.
This is a
David Lynch
Film, and the structure certainly shows that.
It is reminiscent of
Mulholland Drive
in more than one way.
Bill Pullman ( Independence day ) is married to Patricia Arquette . But all is not well ...
The middle section centres around Balthazar Getty ( ), a young man who gets seduced by a femme fatale (also played by Patricia Arquette ). She is the moll of gangster Robert Loggia (best known from a similar role in Scarface).
The problem with this as a film noir is the surreal undertones that confuse matters.
A
TimeCop
is hunting for a terrorist known as the Fizzle Bomber.
The protagonist gets his face burned off,
and ends up looking like Ethan Hawke (
Sinister
). Once healed up he is sent back on the case,
and goes undercover as a bar-tender in New York City, 1970.
He meets a bar-fly who looks like Eddie Furlong (
Terminator 2
), but who turns out to be a trans-man who used to look like
Emma Stone
.
The bar-fly tells her life-story. Back when she was a woman, a NASA recruiter (Noah Taylor - Powers ) headhunted her for the space program. However, a medical check-up discovered an anomaly. This is the first sign that her story is a lot more convoluted than it seems.
The cast, selected for talent instead of big-star names, is impressive.
Sandra Bullock
is kinda-happily married to Julian McMahon (
Fantastic Four
). She wakes up one morning and discovers she has skipped almost a week,
and that her husband has been killed in a car crash.
The next morning, she wakes up
and it is still several days before the accident ...
This lacks the romantic interest of Bullock's previous time travel film, The Lake House , or the thriller aspect of most other Time Travel films. It is basically a slow-moving drama, a time travel film for people who do not like sci-fi.
Casper (Rhys Darby -
Our Flag Means Death
), a man from the future,
arrives at what looks like the USA
in what he thinks is the end of the Twentieth Century.
He befriends a black lesbian named Holly (
Gabrielle Graham
), because she digs his weird vibe,
and they use his knowledge of the future to cheat at gambling
and win a good supply of cash.
Percy Sullivan (Julian Richings - Supernatural ), a waiter at the local greasy spoon diner, has a secret hobby as a cartoonist. Casper is a big fan of his, since after Percy's death his work will be discovered and celebrated. Of course, Casper's interference is bound to mess the timeline up.
Doris ( Janine Theriault ) is also from the future. She is not an explorer, she is a TimeCop whose job is to disentigrate explorers in order to preserve the timeline. Her involvement in the story makes the tone shift away from comedy and towards something slightly more serious.
Darius (
Aubrey Plaza
) is a twenty-something intern at a Seattle magazine.
One of the reporters (Jake Johnston -
The Mummy (2017)
), who takes her on a mission to investigate a man who claims to be a time traveller.
Darius grows ever closer to the subject of her story. He wants to go back in time to save his ex-girlfriend ( Kristen Bell ) from certain and untimely death. However, there is a complication. Darius discovers that the ex is still alive.
Someone else is keeping the wannabe time-traveller under surveillance. Are they time-cops or Government MIBs?
Jake Gyllenhall (
Donnie Darko
) wakes up aboard a train.
He has amnesia ...
and once he orientates himself in his new surroundings,
a bomb goes off and kills everyone.
It turns out that our hero is a time-traveller, sent back by Dr Jeffrey Rush ( Casino Royale ) to Quantum Leap into a dead man's body and find out who the bomber is.
When our hero is not reliving the eight-minute time loop, he is trapped in a capsule - like Ryan Reynolds in Buried, communicating with an Erin Grey lookalike in full military dress uniform via a computer interface.
This is a nice take on time travel - it has some interesting limitations (reminiscent of 7 Days ) and works on a number of levels. There is a love story, a 24-style anti-terrorist plot, and a scifi setting where the science is actually part of the plot. The excellent script is topped off with a competent director and a great cast - there is no weak link.
Zach Snyder
delivers something with the comic-book visuals of
Watchmen
and the neo-Gothic anachronistic stle of Tim Burton's
Batman
. The intro is a music video to a re-mixed Annie Lennox song,
where our heroine (a petite 20-year-old
Buffy
type) gets put into an asylum.
She meets up with girls of her own age (
Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens
). but that is where the similarities to
John Carpenter
's recent disappointment
The Ward
end.
The girls fantasise that the drafty old Victorian Asylum is a more comfortable prison - a Moulin Rouge-style bordello where they are unjustly imprisoned, and our heroine only has five days to escape. And when she dances ...
The heroine goes into a deeper fantasy, a dream within a dream - like Inception ! This is a World War One analogy, there the girls dress like Japanese school-girls embracing girl-power (think Kill Bill meets DOA: Dead Or Alive ) must slaughter armies of steampunk zombies, and stray orcs left over from Lord of the Rings ... Like 300 , but with girl-power.
But is it anti-Feminist? Every female character is powerful and positive - the only dangers are fantasies, remember? (or are they?) The male characters are negative - with the exception of the mentor (Scott Glenn - Silence of the Lambs ) and a cop at the end (Ian Tracey). But the males are supporting characters, functionaries. This movie more than passes the infamous Bechdel test. But it shows that female empowerment is a male fantasy. And that seems to have created a negative backlash.
In short, this is a love-it-or-hate-it film. In this reviewer's opinion ... watch it yourself, make your own mind up!
This is a
Christopher Nolan
effort, similar in many ways to his
Inception (2010)
. But while that movie was about a heist inside a mind,
this is a James Bond movie with time-travel.
Protagonist (John David Washington - ) is a CIA Agent on a mission to Kiev in the Ukraine. The bad news is that his mission gets over-complicated, but the good news is he gets recruited by a new Agency. He gets briefed by Barbara ( Clemence Poesy ), a cross between Q and Moneypenny, who explains that someone has managed to invert time. This is a great excuse for amazing special effects and impressively convoluted action scenes.
Protagonist and his new partner, Neil (Robert Pattinson - Twilight ), follow a lead to an art dealer named Kat ( Elizabeth Debicki ). It turns out that the arch-villain is her husband, the corrupt Russian oligarch Sator (Kenneth Branagh - Dead Again ).
The casting is quite inspired. Pattinson is intended as the new Batman, and he certainly seems a promising choice based on this performance. Debicki and Brannagh are in familiar territory, since she previously faced off against The Man from UNCLE while he was a corrupt Russian oligarch in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit .
Jack the Ripper (David Warner -
Time Bandits
) steals a time machine from Bookish pacifist nerd HG Wells (Malcolm McDowell -
Clockwork Orange, Tank Girl
). The novelist follows the serial killer,
and finds himself a fish out of water in 1979 San Francisco!
Luckily,
Mary Steenburgen
helps our hero.
This starts in familiar Film Noir territory,
with a man chased through the nighttime streets and shot in the back.
Then it switches to an investigation story.
Not about the police, although they are involved.
The protagonist is a journalist,
with a female photographer as his tag-along love-interest.
The victim survived the shooting, and recovers in the local hospital. He is able to talk, but his sentences seem out of context. This is more than a little reminiscent of Darmok in Star Trek: TNG .
Photos of the victim have a strange aura on them, and his symptoms seem reminiscent of radiation poisoning. He is also an identical lookalike for a famous scientist who specialises in nuclear isotopes. However, the scientist is in his workplace - albeit a bit bandaged from a recent car crash. Is this coincidence? Or something more sinister?
Three scientists and an engineer create a time portal.
They wander through, but get trapped.
They meet Native American savages and hi-tech humans.
They are in 2071, after a nuclear war.
The survivors plan to go to Alpha Centauri.
They have a teleporter beam.
So why not just send the teleporter to Alpha Centauri,
avoiding the necessity to build a colony ship?
This film evokes memories of movies like Genesis II and The Langoliers . The Melrose scene is unconvincing, but the colony scenes are best. However, the ending is original.
Eric Bana has a genetic abnormality which manifests itself when he gets stressed.
He finds himself naked, usually in the woods.
Yes, he's reliving his time as the
Hulk
- only this time he time-jumps (without a time machine).
That said, he usually only does it within his own lifetime.
Rachel McAdams is the title character, wife to Mr Bana. She sticks with him through a dozen miscarriages, because his offspring time-jump in the womb. Can they successfully carry a child to term?
The other problem is, because she can see flashes of his life in a non-chronological sequence, she sees him bleeding from a lethal-looking gunshot. But he cannot change his fate, so he is doomed to live out the inevitable.
Chris Pratt (
Guardians of the Galaxy
) is happily married to
Betty Gilpin
. Unfortunately he is drafted to serve in a war thirty years in the future.
The alien invaders are massive man-eating monsters, without clothing or weapons - like the Death Angels in A Quiet Place , or like the mimics in Edge of Tomorrow . This may be something of a cliche these days, but at least in this film there is a logical reason.
Pratt has been specifically requested by the Colonel ( Yvonne Strahovski ). She is working on a toxin that can kill the aliens. It will do no use in her time, but if Pratt takes it back to before the aliens attack ...
Back in the modern day, Pratt plans to defeat the aliens when they eventually arrive. Things get a bit more complicated, although despite being a somewhat right-wing movie it does actually acknowledge climate change and the melting of the polar icecaps. The new plan means he must make peace with his estranged father (JK Simmons - Terminator Genesys ).
This is a thriller that has a number of predictable twists,
it is the new film by the guy behind
Creep
and
Severance
so you should know to expect a speculative fiction story with a certain new take on things.
Melissa George is a housewife with an autistic son. She goes sailing on a yacht with a bunch of people she barely knows. The yacht is capsized in a freak storm, and the survivors board a seemingly derelict passenger liner. The protagonist gets a strange feeling of deja vu ...
A masked figure starts killing the survivors. Then the day starts to repeat itself, in an inescapable time loop. This has been done many times before, it is not exactly original, but it is a decently done piece of work.
The protagonist, a low-life with limited powers of precognition,
earns a living by helping the local gangster.
The good news is that he meets a love interest (
Magda Apanowicz
). The bad news is that he gets framed for robbing his boss,
so he and the girl have to go on the run together.
Like a lot of time-travel stories, it turns into a horrendously convoluted mess.
Jack Malik (
Avenue 5
) is a small-time singer-songwriter whose greatest success is at performing cover versions of famous songs.
He lives with his parents, and his only fan is his manager (
Lily James
).
One night, Jack is hospitalised during a worldwide blackout. When he recovers from his injuries he discovers that certain aspects of culture have been removed from the timeline. Coca-Cola and the band Oasis are both among the missing items. But as a singer-songwriter, the only thing that Jack cares about is that the Beatles no longer exist. This allows him to do what Garry Sparrow did in Goodnight, Sweetheart ... claim them as his own work!
Jack's news-found success brings him to the attention of Ed Sheeran ( Game of Thrones ). He even gets a deal with Ed's manager ( Kate McKinnon ).
Jack becomes conflicted about stealing credit for the work. He even makes a trip to visit John Lennon (Robert Carlisle - Once Upon A Time ), who never became famous and instead lived to a happy old age.
Directed by Danny Boyle , this has many of the hallmarks of the bog-standard British movie. If it had been made in the 1980s it would have been produced by Handmade Films, run by George Harrison (one of the Beatles).
Marty McFly (Michael J Fox -
Teen Wolf
) is a typical 1980s Californian teenager.
He plays guitar, hangs out with a mad scientist,
and skateboards to school every day with a Huey Lewis soundtrack.
Mad Scientist? Yes, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd -
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
) invents a time-machine and installs it in a DeLorean car.
Thanks to the intervention of some Libyan terrorists (stereotypical 1980s bad guys)
Marty ends up driving that DeLorean back thirty years to 1955.
The first twenty minutes of the story is spent setting everything up for the 1950s. Conveniently for Marty, every middle-aged person spent the entire day telling him what they did in the EXACT WEEK he gets sent back to. All he has to do is not interfere with the timeline. Can he do that? Well, he ends up having to play matchmaker with his own parents ( Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover - Charlie’s Angels ) or he will disappear from history, and can never go Back to the Future.
This is a wonderful piece of film-making that works well on every level. Yes, the exposition-filled First Act seems clunky - but this is a comedy-drama, it should not be taken too seriously. What seems amazing is that the 1980s Marty would fit in so well almost thirty years later, while by travelling thirty years into the past he is completely a fish out of water. The 1950s is as foreign to him as it would be to us. In all fairness, Life on Mars did that with the 1970s. But it still makes the mind boggle.
This takes up where the previous film left off.
Marty was abandoned in 1955,
but Doc Brown sent him a letter on how to find the time machine.
The Doc is in 1885,
but Marty discovers that Mad Dog Tannen will murder him.
Marty goes back to 1885, instead of forward to 1985 ...
Once Marty and Doc are together again, the duo must re-enact the events of the first film, but in the wild west instead of the 1950s. Also, instead of Marty trying to discourage his own mother's romantic attentions, Dr Brown starts a burgeoning romance with schoolteacher Mary Steenburgen .
There are plenty of references to the previous films. Marty meets his ancestor, who looks just like him - and for some strange reason his wife looks like Lea Thompson ... meaning Marty's parents were cousins! Marty poses as Clint Eastwood, and re-enacts one of the most famous scenes from the spaghetti Western series.
There is an element of character development in this installment. Marty always gets riled when bullies insult him or challenge him - will he mellow out into a more Nineties type, and prevent the terrible personal future that awaits him in Back to the Future II ?
This was made in the early days of the Second World War.
Vaudeville comedian Tommy Trinder and a couple of his friends
have enlisted in the Royal Navy.
Their ship is assigned to an important mission,
hunting down a German warship that has been raiding British commerce vessels.
This is clearly a reference to the hunt for the Graf Spee,
which was pursued across the South Atlantic
until it found shelter in a neutral port.
One night the boys get shore leave in a neutral port. They get drunk, get on the wrong shuttle-boat back, and wake up aboard the German ship they are hunting. Unfortunately the German crew are more professional sailors than the three Brits, so it is only a matter of time before something goes wrong.
The trio plan to hijack the German warship. Well, this is a comedy and not a documentary. They are assisted by some British civilians, survivors from a passenger ship the Germans sank.
This is a black-and-white morale-boosting movie from World War Two.
The closest comparison would be with
Time Flies
, a similar movie which came out the same year.
A couple of male sailors, Tommy Trinder and his friend, are cycling back to base when they save a Wren (a female naval person) from being molested by a spiv (a salesman with criminal connections). The trio take shelter at stonehenge during a rainstorm, but the stones are struck by lightning and the trio inadvertently time-travel back to Ancient Roman times.
The modern-day folks are apprehended by a Roman Centurion (James Robertson Justice - ), who has them transported to Rome. They meet the Emperor Nero, who is famous for fiddling while Rome burned.
It turns out that the magical time-travel is not dependent on close proximity to Stonehenge. Just as well, because the time-travellers would have a hell of a job traveling home.
A pair of music hall entertainers are performing in New York City,
as part of an Anglo-American troupe.
Their old friend Tommy Handley is in town,
and wants them to invest their life-savings in his new scheme.
A scientist has invented a time machine,
and Handley has appointed himself the business manager.
He invites his to visit the workshop.
Unfortunately the NYPD are after Handley,
because he is an inveterate con-man,
and when he makes his escape his friends must accompany him
on his first trip back in time.
The travellers arrive back in the Elizabethan period. Unfortunately the scientist is a Scotsman, so he is arrested as a spy and imprisoned in the Tower. The others need him in order to get home. They attend court incognito, at the same time as Captain John Smith delivered Pocahontas for an audience with the Queen. Not exactly historically accurate - Jamestown was named after King James, and this movie goes out of its way to remind us that James is still considered a foreigner. But this is not the kind of movie that obsesses on such details.
The movie has been built around Tommy Handley, and presumably he was the biggest name in the cast at the time. He certainly seems at home in the role. However, the outstanding performance seems to be from the female lead. While her conversation with Queen Elizabeth may not pass the Bechdel test, because she is posing pantomime-style as Captain John Smith, it certainly gets a lot closer than one would expect from a film shot during the Second World War.
This is a classic tale of how loneliness and social isolation can dead to mental illness and despair.
Just the sort of thing to watch by yourself on St Valentine's day!
This is the story of Swan Lake, adapted in the traditional manner of showing the process of adaptation itself. Naturally, the protagonist becomes emeshed in the story, and begins to live it out.
Nina the Ballerina ( Natalie Portman ) finds herself turning into a swan (like Jeff Goldblum in the David Cronenberg version of The Fly ). She is trapped in a stiffling relationship with her control-freak mother ( Barbara Hershey ), which accounts for her immaturity and anal retentive behaviour. Her director (Vincent Cassell - Brotherhood of the Wolf ) and a friendly rival ( Mila Kunis ) try to get her to loosen up and unleash her dark side ...
This, of course, leads to the predictable halucinations and tragic decline into insanity that we have seen in so many other films. Darren Aronofsky may have seemed original when he delivered Requiem for a Dream a decade ago, but there is nothing new here.
Ewan McGregor (
Star Wars: Phantom Menace
) is a wannabe War Correspondent who teams up with George Clooney (
Solaris
), a seemingly deranged war veteran
who claims to be a member of the elite US Army Special Forces First Earth Army unit.
Of course, Clooney makes the necessary cultural reference by calling his unit Jedi Warriors -
quite ironic, considering who his co-star is!
As they journey into the heart of darkness in Iraq, their lives get hilariously complicated. Kevin Spacey ( A Bug's life ) is a villainous counterpart to Clooney.
Directed by Grant Heslov (token Arab good guy in True Lies ), this is a hilarious comedy-adventure with an all-star cast, a great soundtrack ... And Goats!
Julianne Moore
is a psychologist who debunks multiple personality syndrome.
She is presented with a patient (Jonathan Rhys Myers -
The Tudors
) who seems to have multiple personalities.
As she investigates, she discovers a supernatural origin to his condition.
This is a typical Hollywood example of the supernatural suspense thriller, delivered by the producers of The Ring and the writer of Identity . They evidently wished to emulate the success of their earlier, far superior films. The Director is as much to blame as anyone, relying on the typical array of camera tricks in order to artificially generate suspense.
Leonardo DiCaprio (
Man in the Iron Mask
) and Mark Ruffalo (
13 Going On 30
) are a pair of US Federal Marshals sent to assist in the recapture of
an inmate who escaped from a mental asylum.
Psychiatrists Ben Kingsley ( Sound of Thunder ) and Max Von Sydow ( Flash Gordon, Judge Dredd ) run the place, which creates an element of suspicion and suspense throughout the film.
Martin Scorsese delivers an above-average suspense thriller based on a novel by best-selling writer Denis Lehane. However, despite the mainstream critics saying how good the twist is ... it's pretty predictable. Been done better a lot of times, in fact.
