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They Shall Not Grow Old: There has never been a more vivid representation of Ebert's 'empathy machine'

I am very fond of Roger Ebert's quote about films being empathy machines (I used it just the other day in fact). So much so that it's worth posting here with a bit more of the context.

Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else's life for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

Peter Jackson's revolutionary They Shall Not Grow Old is a film made for that quote. Taking archival footage from the First World War, Jackson and his team have stitched together a compelling Documentary artifact, a technical marvel and maybe the best example yet of an empathy machine.

Another quote, this time from Batman: 'People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy'. This is what They Shall Not Grow Old provides. It is a dramatic depiction of war, perhaps the most dramatic available. Jackson presents the grainy, almost experimental, footage of World War One, but corrects the timing and frame rate so that the participants move smoothly across the screen. He goes further by adding colour and sound. The sound is incredible. Sometimes it is merely contextual and other times these people - ghosts from history; your father or grandfather or his father - speak to you. Their lips read by experts and their lines delivered by actors, the effect is the emotional apex of war on film.

Whilst the technical skill of what's involved here is unquestionable, Jackson's choices of what to include, from the BBC's archive, also bear mention. There is a deliberate attempt here to both unearth the reality of war in colour, moving pictures and also to show scenes which typify it as well. We see jovial training and arriving at the front, before that gives way to rat-infested pits, the latrines and the remains of the dead. Jackson doesn't flinch, as he might; colour and sound is reserved not only for camaraderie and shared mealtimes, but for death and explosions.

It has been easy to knock Jackson over the last few years, but history is written by a series of people who looked at something accepted as 'how things are' and questioned whether that was really true. Jackson has done nothing less than change the image in our heads of the First World War. In doing so he has recreated empathy with people who could previously perhaps best have been seen in the inside of a text book and are now, once again, as human as you or I. A nagging feeling says to me that They Shall Not Grow Old is not eligible for many year end awards, because most of its footage was not shot specially for the documentary. Don't be fooled by the results of such ceremonies. There is unlikely to be a more important film this year.

By Sam Turner. Sam is editor of Film Intel, and can usually be found behind a keyboard with a cup of tea. He likes entertaining films and dislikes the other kind. He's on Google+, Twitter and several places even he doesn't yet know about.

Widows: the battle between plot and film

It feels too easy to reduce Widows down to the unusual battle between mainstream writer Gillian Flynn's script and director Steve McQueen's fine art background being mashed together into a heist film. And yet, sometimes, the easy answers are the right ones. The pairing of Flynn and McQueen looked slightly odd from the start and, post-screening, it still feels like a match that has struggled to gel. There are scenes here that look like early Tarantino; but Flynn does not have the genre nous of Tarantino the writer and McQueen is not as interested in probing genre visuals as Tarantino the director. The result can sometimes end up feeling like a post-Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs film that has not seen Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs.

You can see how the two key behind-the-camera talents here have collaborated to good effect on occasion. Without McQueen, Flynn's script may not have escaped the lure of Gerard Butler as the leading man. Without Flynn you can imagine a scenario where McQueen might have abandoned established heist movie conventions altogether. When the balancing works Widows is impressive. There are a number of scenes where something happens in the background; a chasing car; a passing runner. McQueen foregrounds characters and ups tension in one swoop.

Each one of the three leads (Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki and Michelle Rodriguez) have clear, if perhaps obvious, motivation. Davis is being chased by mobsters. Debicki pines (or does she?) for her previous life where everything was provided for her. Rodriguez has kids to think of but, more than that, wants to get on and succeed; an early scene where her shop is taken off her because of her husband's debts sets the tone.

The tension in the film boils down to the battle between the plotting and everything else; character, social comment, visuals and more. The plot cannot keep up. Time and time again obstructions are raised for characters to overcome. Then they just disappear. The crew need a driver. Then they have one. 'We need to move like men', Davis says, after Rodriguez has struggled to carry a big pack. The problem is never mentioned again. The group need to understand what some blueprints represent. Then Debicki gets a 'boyfriend' who happens to be able to explain it all. Perhaps, when you come down to it, you could boil most films down into that sort of description, but Widows blatant plot conceits are the sort that grate. If you can't spot who the group are going to need to steal from from very early on then you aren't trying.

McQueen sometimes helps and sometimes hinders. There are tender character moments and quiet scenes that stop the point-by-point movement. But then there's a scene where Davis inadvertently discovers a key reveal, which harks back to something we saw earlier in the film. Not only is the reveal palm-to-face obvious, but McQueen then cuts back to the same scenes we saw earlier in the film, just in case we hadn't got it. It's paint-by-numbers, make-sure-the-audience-is-keeping-up, directing, a world away from Shame or 12 Years A Slave.

The troubles of the film boil down to another late reveal regarding Veronica (Davis) and Rawlings' (Liam Neeson) son. Depicted another way, this could have linked several threads in the film, commenting on social justice and disenfranchisement, the destruction of family (which, admittedly, you can read the film as explicitly being about) and more, as well as providing vital background as to why several characters behave the way they do. Instead it feels throwaway; completely detached from the narrative being told; it does not seem to have huge place here or impact on what we see in the two hour runtime. It summarises an uneven film that is not without vision and emotional character moments - that scene has both - but equally never ties all that it offers together into rounded entertainment or genre-as-comment.

Colette: French sexiness, by British people

Colette is a pretty and often engaging look at Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, the French author active mainly during the early 20th Century and nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1948.

What it is not is a 'French drama'.

Shot in Hungary and at various UK locations, produced by Brit Stephen Woolley and directed by Brit Wash Westmoreland, with two British stars, Colette never nails the feeling of 1900s Paris, nor embraces the sensuality and sexuality the subject matter lends itself towards. It feels like a free-spirited French topic, as seen through the eyes of us over the channel and the repressed up-tightness we are so famous for.

This leads, inevitably, to the unfortunate guessing game where you wonder what might have been. Were Colette's story to be put into the hands of Pedro Almodóvar or Desiree Akhavan or Olivier Assayas, to name just three tantalising possibilities, then you wonder if something all the more daring, more lascivious and in-touch with its material might have been produced.

As it is, Westmoreland (who co-wrote the script with husband Richard Glatzer, who sadly passed away in 2015) organises what is here adroitly, if not with any great spunk. The leads, Keira Knightley and Dominic West, crackle with some level of significant spark and, given that they are surrounded by a fairly thin supporting cast, Westmoreland does well to rarely let them off screen. Indeed; no-one develops significantly beyond the central pairing and it is difficult to think of a scene that does not feature at least one of the couple.

West's Willy is genius, particularly placed in our modern context, #MeToo and our muddy sexual politics. Willy is resolutely not as a monster would normally be painted, but monster he is. He controls his throng of ghost writers by ransoming their work with his name and squandering the proceeds on lavish luncheons. But Westmoreland never presents it as such. There is never the wink or the nudge that what Willy is doing is evil. He just does it. On at least two occasions he explains to Colette that his affairs are 'just what men do'. A late significant action he takes as part of the act of saving himself is so blasé that he could well simply be quaffing the copious amounts of wine he consumes in restaurants. Here is your monster of today as this film sees it; unhidden, preening, presenting what he does as perfectly natural.

Knightley is much more subtle, but her character stands up to Willy in the moments where the drama demands it. Otherwise, hers is a journey of somewhat quiet awakening, punctuated by moments that show the film's strengths and where it falls short. A passionate, physical affair at about the half way point is given the lace curtain effect and fumbled even more once West gets involved. Its resolution is punctual, without any European flinging of tables and chairs; heightened emotion made British. A later love of Colette though gets much better shrift, though it is still short. Colette, by now exploring her sexuality more fully, embraces love rather than lust and the film finds something of a comfort point; walks in French (English) countryside with meaningful conversations on gender roles and the monster in the sitting room.

Quick awards season takes: Three Billboards, The Post, Molly's Game

There is plenty of talk at the moment around a The Post ‘backlash’, which I must admit to me seems like a misnomer. Was it a film that garnered a massive amount of support to begin with? It sits with just a 6.6 average on IMDb and a 65% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The critic Rotten Tomato score is admittedly better at 86%.

Still, it’s not as if there have been unequivocal raves for it and I’m on board with not unequivocally raving for it. Spielberg’s recent cinema has, for me, lagged behind his contemporaries, lacked dynamic plotting and visual flourish and, most surprisingly of all for this director, followed some fairly turgid pacing.

The Post is the apex of that trend. It plays as if Spielberg hasn’t seen the newsroom covered on film before. There’s none of the tension or drive of Spotlight, none of the thrill of Zodiac. And that’s before we get on to the All The President’s Men references, which raised The Post for me from dull and flaccid to downright irritating.

The film covers the period immediately before All The President’s Men and is therefore almost obligated to touch on it. But the way that this happens, placing itself in the All The President’s Men continuum, has a smack of arrogance about it. Does Spielberg deserve licence to give himself such a lofty perch? On balance, yes, probably; but his film does not. We are a whisker away from Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) meeting a young journalist who introduces himself as either Woodward or Bernstein, prompting a double-take of James Bond-pigeon proportions. It’s unsophisticated, plain of message and lacking in thrills.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was a brighter watch, although not to the point where I felt it troubling my top 10 of the year (constantly in progress here).

This is the first Martin McDonagh film I’ve felt mixed on, rather than at one end of the spectrum or the other. I admire the morals of the film and the attack on the ills of the world, the intricacies of being human and making mistakes and the plain wrong.

That said, in doing all of that, McDonagh comes across a little like a highly strung film student; someone who knows right from wrong and is going to lay all of that out over a couple of hours, so that we do too.

In doing so he leaves himself a lot to resolve and only manages a portion of it. One character turns into an omnipotent controller of the plot and the other characters within it. Another goes through an about turn that chimes as much with his previous roles as it grates against his initial casting against type. The victim in the central murder is lost somewhere in everything else that is going on. Perhaps that’s a fair reflection of the familial chaos that follows such an event.

The performances stick with you above anything else. Lucas Hedges shows Manchester By The Sea was no fluke. Woody Harrelson does his thing and can continue to do it until the end of time. Sam Rockwell is impressive. Frances McDormand is a titan and deserves awards recognition. Abbie Cornish bizarrely fails to mask her Australian accent on a regular basis. Caleb Landry Jones’ drawl is, for probably the first time ever, not completely distracting.

Giving much more trouble to my top 10 consideration was Molly’s Game, during which Jessica Chastain gets to take on a series of moronic powerful men and Idris Elba acts as the audience’s moral guide. Elba’s character is at once impressed by Chastain’s Molly and uncertain of her aims and values. As he attempts to unpick them so do we.

There are two missteps that belie the fact that Aaron Sorkin is a longtime writer but first time director. A scene where Molly is assaulted is shot with horrible fades and generally gives the impression that Sorkin has never directed a piece of very physical ‘action’ before, nor asked anyone how he should do it. Late on, he manufactures two characters together in a way that doesn’t make sense and could surely have been solved in the script.

That script though is impressive and Sorkin proves that he can keep up with himself. He has described the film as his typical mid-budget adult Thriller; the only things he knows how to write and now, demonstrably, direct. If screenplay is everything and this is by one of our greatest living screenwriters then, hey, it must be good to a degree. The real skill is in that negotiating of Molly's morals. Sorkin has spoken of how he was never in doubt of where Molly lay on a spectrum of good and evil, but the film paints in enough shades of grey to both keep you guessing and keep the character sympathetic.

Elba, released from the mumbling shackles of his iconic Bell and Luther roles, really impresses. His future is more intelligent and more cerebral than Bond; interestingly a similar arc that Chastain continues to tread.

Cartoon Saloon's The Breadwinner: just how bleak do you like your animation?

I've recently rewatched Cartoon Saloon's Song Of The Sea with my nineteen-month old, albeit in three thirty-minute stints. Whilst every nuance of the plot might not quite have been absorbed, it is fair to say that it had an effect. There were sections watched in complete stillness, mouth agape. When Ben, the protagonist of the film, comes to an emotional realisation late on, and sheds a tear, there was a rubbing of eyes from the small one on my own sofa. During the climax, Cú, an old English sheepdog, spurred on by two spirit dogs, races home, with Ben and his sister Saoirse on his back, as the music stirs a crescendo. Most of that section was absorbed whilst bouncing around the sofa, shouting at the screen in two minutes of pure joy. It's the first time anything on film has produced that sort of reaction.

It's with mixed emotions then that I watched Cartoon Saloon's latest, The Breadwinner, alone. Directed by Nora Twomey, who co-directed The Secret Of Kells with Song Of The Sea's director, Tomm Moore, the film tells the story of Parvana (Saara Chaudry), an eleven year-old girl growing up in Afghanistan. When her father is arrested and taken away by the Taliban, Parvana disguises herself as a boy so that she can support her older sister, mother and younger brother.

From very early on, The Breadwinner created an uneasy feeling in my stomach, which I never shook off until the end credits. There is genuine and repeated heartache here, not just in the reveals and the developments of the plot, but in the very fabric of the film. Mark Kermode often quotes Roger Ebert's assertion that films are 'empathy machines' and never is that more true than here. The Breadwinner confronts the hardships of the world - and the very specific hardship of this time and location - in such a matter of fact manner that it is impossible not to be moved by what it has to show. There will be guilt too. The idea that the events of the story happen in a world to which we all share citizenship seems preposterous. How can we allow it? How did we allow it?

Twomey's film shows Cartoon Saloon refining their animation style to new heights. The content matter is belied by the gorgeous and fluid animation and sound design. Like Song Of The Sea, there are diversions to slightly different animation styles throughout, mainly to a story Parvana tells in segments throughout the film about a young boy from a village challenging an evil force which has taken the village's supplies. 'Is it a happy story, or a sad story?', Parvana's friend asks at one point. 'Just you wait and see', comes the reply.

Both the film within the film and The Breadwinner itself take a similar approach. By the conclusions, you can read happiness or sadness, or maybe just life. That's about as a bold a message from a 'children's' animation as you're likely to receive. If you or your children found Inside Out too emotional or cerebral then be warned: this is another level entirely.

Which leaves me in something of a quandary. This is 'notable' in the truest sense of the word. It's a western animation that deals with major social questions in a mature, considered and gorgeous way. It is currently in my top ten of the year list and I suspect that it will stay there. It is also, I would suggest, too bleak for most children under thirteen (it has a PG-13 rating in the US), which means that it will be some time before I can sit down with my son and enjoy Cartoon Saloon's latest. That feels a little like a missed opportunity. If some of this story could have been balanced by a little more lightness then the message of the film could have made it beyond the thirteen-and-above audience and to Cartoon Saloon's core crowd. Perhaps that's being too harsh on a film that dares to tell a story many would have rejected and, because of that, creates something of true significance.

Another opinion on the seven Dunkirk 'things', about which everyone else has an opinion

'Look ma! It's Justin Timberlake!'

Harry Styles

No matter how good or how bad Harry Styles is, he is still Harry Styles. The idea of casting largely unknowns for the band of British squaddies works... until you stick an exceptionally recognisable pop star in the middle of them. Even your Grandad has a chance of pointing out 'that bloke off of TV. Not Simon Cowell. The other one'.

Mrs Film Intel made a solid point on this on the way out of the cinema. Yes, it had distracted her too, but Styles' acting seemed OK and Justin Timberlake eventually overcame this sort of objection didn't he? Yes, he did, arguably when he got to The Social Network in 2010, having started with a few cameos, a few straight-to-video offerings and Alpha Dog in 2006. Did Dunkirk really need to provide Styles' Alpha Dog moment? Would it not have been better for Nolan to provide his Social Network moment in a few years time? The film would lose nothing from losing him.

'It's a suspense film'

Nolan has talked at length about the fact that he approached Dunkirk as a suspense film, in the mould of Hitchcock, rather than a War movie. He is successful in one of the three sections. Tom Hardy’s fighter pilot, early on, clocks his fuel gauge and checks his levels against those of Jack Lowden. With the inevitability of a loud Hans Zimmer score (we’ll get to that) the fuel gauge is soon broken and Hardy’s pilot has to make decisions not only on destination but on how involved he can get in the skirmishes below. It’s a simple and effective bit of plotting.

The 'Nolaness' of everything

Nolan is now such a looming figure in cinema that he is a having an almost meta impact on how I perceive his films. His decision not to use digital enhancements, for example, made it difficult to fully suspend disbelief during Dunkirk; the opposite effect the director aims for. Instead of thinking ‘oh look at those boats rescuing the sailors’, I found myself thinking ‘wow, those boats were all really there’. Nolan shouts so loudly about his lack of artifice that he creates this second layer of in-camera artifice for himself. ‘This is so real!’, you can almost hear him saying, as he presents something to you which is entirely fake.

One hour, one day, one week

The decision to split the timeline worked for me... apart from at the points where the three stories converged. Again, as with Nolan’s ardent claims of reality, these moments operated like Blofeld’s reveal in Spectre; tricks the film thinks are extremely clever, but in actuality are base expressions of coherence. Nolan is praised for treating his audience as intelligent beings, but these moments invite viewers to proclaim simple recognition and treat it as professorial revelation. They don’t recognise intelligence, or even require it; they’re cheap blockbuster tricks.

Private Ryan's guts

The cries of ‘where’s the blood’ are the Dunkirk criticism I understand the least. If you saw the soldiers drowning in upturned boats, those on the beach being thrown into the air by the neatly plotted line of bombs, the soldier walking into the sea to attempt to swim the channel and thought ‘this needs more blood!’ then my feeling is that the film isn't the main problem here. Yes, it eschews gore where others have pursued it and yes, I'm sure part of that was to earn a 12A rating. Is that a problem? Not one bit.

Zimmer's toy set

Shiny-headed music maestro Moby once said that as the music got faster and louder the quiet bits got more important. Apparently Moby and Hans Zimmer don't hang out much, to the surprise of nobody and disappointment of me. Zimmer's score, like a comedy tumbling dumpster that won't stop falling, occasionally finds a moment of music in a soundscape of drones, whines and tinkles. It's as much sound design as score and it does work in part. But it also relentlessly preaches at you to a degree that's distracting. Like the 'Nolaness' of the film, the 'Zimmerness' takes that incessant Inception drone and ups the ante. In Nolan's next, Zimmer is reportedly just going to shout at you for two hours.

Rylance and Hardy

Back to the youngsters on the beach. Whether it's Harry Styles or the 'unknowns', none of them are as good as Mark Rylance or Tom Hardy. Any time on the beach, particularly after a few people prove themselves to be a little unsavoury, is time away from the stiff upper lip of the more experienced hands, around which I would have liked to have seen this film built even more.

The role of doubt in My Cousin Rachel

The central question in My Cousin Rachel, which is less gothically intense than its promotional material would have you believe, is whether the titular character (Rachel Weisz) has killed her husband Ambrose and is in the process of murdering Philip (Sam Claflin), or whether happenstance is at play.

In recent episodes of Kermode and Mayo's film review podcast, the hosts have detailed how Weisz made a decision early in the creative process on whether or not Rachel was guilty and stuck with that assumption throughout filming. The actor did not tell the director, Roger Michell, which side she had come down on.

This suggests a fascinating dichotomy. Michell, unaware of whether his star thought her character evil or not, must have made his own decisions. Claflin his own also. And the rest of the cast. All the way back to Daphne Du Maurier, whose work this adaptation is based upon.

Where does that leave us, the audience, left to interpret a maelstrom of competing agendas, some of which were likely conceived at odds with others?

At first, it is tempting to conclude that the mixed messages of Michell's narrative have gotten the better of him. There seems very little actual doubt in My Cousin Rachel. A plant that may be poisonous and which Rachel may have had access to in both Ambrose and Philip's cases. The scribbled letters of Ambrose, clearly wracked by some illness. It's hardly a weight of evidence and you wonder whether there's really enough there to drive the doubt on offer, which in turn drives the narrative.

But maybe that's the point. We're offered scant little during the film and yet, at points, we must find ourselves siding with Philip and his suspicions. After all, we see things from his perspective. Rachel does not even get the right of reply until perhaps a third of the way into the film.

The doubt on offer, really, is towards Philip's muddled and ill-evidenced interpretation of events. The perspective though confuses this. We're invited to believe Philip, drawn into his assertions and growing abuse of Rachel. A scene of love-making in the wood near to Philip's house is a tough watch.

And so it should be. Philip is not, in any discernible way, a character to be liked or trusted, believed or followed. But Michell shows us what perspective can do. The discomfort come the conclusion of My Cousin Rachel is not because sufficient doubt has not been offered. It's internal doubt. Doubt around how we ever could have sympathised with Philip in the first place.

Notes from Doc/Fest 2017: Whitney: Can I Be Me

Ben Booth writes from Sheffield Doc/Fest, the UK's premier Documentary festival, taking place this year from 9th-14th June.

Nick Broomfield's new Documentary, Whitney: Can I Be Me had its first UK screening at Doc/Fest in Sheffield.

The film follows Whitney Houston's highs and lows over her 20-something year career as a pop artist and is one of Nick Broomfield's first steps away from the 'sound boom' style. The film follows her progress, downfalls and other problems as she begins to become famous, using mainly archive footage and archive recordings, along with much never-before-seen 1999 World Tour footage.

Broomfield's usual style of following people around with a camera is out and in comes interviews with Houston's close friends and mother. The narrative mainly centres around her relationship with Bobby Brown and the impact it had on her career and her personal life. As the film progresses, we learn more about her relationship with her close confident Robyn and how she influenced her tour and her life, to apparently try to keep her safe.

The film opens with an emotional drone shot of the Beverly Hilton, as the 911 call from security is played to the audience. After the opening we are led through Houston’s life with many of her close friends and family, but we also get to meet the people who moulded her career to how they apparently wanted her to be. We hear from her drummer and musical director as he explains how he had to sit on stage night after night and watch Houston’s back muscles move back and forth like a body builder as she quite literally had to strain herself to sing. The camera cuts to footage of her rolling her eyes as she winds up to sing the chorus from I Will Always Love You.

The film is a big step for Broomfield. It feels a lot more like a film that's made for the big screen, which is a move away from the handheld, DIY, feel of his early films such as Kurt And Courtney (1998) and Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer (2003). In these early films Broomfield uses just a cameraman and himself on the boom mic; one of many reasons people were inspired by him to make documentaries, including myself. If you are looking for that, or the controversial nature of films such as Fetishes (1996) or Sex: My British Job (2013) then this may feel like a step in a different direction. If you want an informative, intimate feel as to how Houston lived her life and how it ultimately led to her death, then this offers many positives.

As the film progresses you start to feel more connected to Houston as an artist. As her career begins to grow, the groups of hangers on start to grow. We hear from her bodyguard who stated he submitted a report on the 1999 World Tour stating that she was beginning to quite literally kill herself and the people who were providing her with drugs and other vices needed to be removed from her life.

The little facts are also there, as you would expect. One of the makers of the 1992 film The Bodyguard explained how the acapella beginning of I Will Always Love You came to be. Kevin Costner takes credit for that one. Apparently he approached the filmmaker and said that the song would be better if there was no music during the opening, a decision which has since become iconic.

Dogwoof are on board as distributors, and as I know from previous Doc/Fests they often bring out the heavy hitters here, which go on to big things at the winter's Oscars.

The Founder - Cinema Review

'The moments in the script which allow Keaton to truly bring Kroc's indomitable ruthlessness to life are too few, but when they arrive the actor makes the most of them'.

In successfully bringing the lives of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs to the big screen in The Social Network and, er, Steve Jobs respectively, both David Fincher and Danny Boyle did what many considered nigh on impossible: they made the stories behind Facebook and Apple not only interesting, but thrilling. As a film focused on how another of the most recognisable corporate brands of the last hundred years took the first steps to becoming the burger-peddling behemoth it is today, comparisons between Fincher and Boyle's films and John Lee Hancock's McDonald's origin story The Founder are both entirely appropriate and utterly inevitable.

It's a shame then that Hancock not only fails to achieve the same level of tension and engagement throughout the majority of his film, but seems relatively unaware of The Founder's position amongst the recent spate of big business biopics. The Social Network and Steve Jobs worked because the directors recognised that attempting to put the whole of these stories on screen simply wasn't viable. Hancock in fact has form for taking just this approach to the relationship between Walt Disney and P. L. Travers in the excellent Saving Mr. Banks.

The bulk of The Founder takes place over seven years during the 1950s and 1960s, but the length of time covered isn't the issue. Steve Jobs covered more than twice that period, but did so in a way which captured the essence of its subject through focusing on a handful of key moments in intensive detail. Hancock too achieved the same level of precision in his handling of Disney and Travers, but falls dispiritingly short of that high mark here. The director's routine and linear execution is his critical failing: a number of characters and elements are left regrettably underdeveloped - not least Ray Kroc's (Michael Keaton) relationship with his wife Ethel (Laura Dern), a subplot all but forgotten about come the halfway point and which gives Dern criminally little to do.

Whilst Keaton never delivers the post-Birdman and Spotlight powerhouse turn many will have expected, he portrays Kroc compellingly, believably and - perhaps most importantly - without the need to ever turn the entrepreneur into a pantomime villain. The moments in the script which allow Keaton to truly bring Kroc's indomitable ruthlessness to life are too few, but when they arrive the actor makes the most of them. Of equal importance here are John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman as McDonald brothers Mac and Dick respectively, deftly providing the understated old-world honesty as a counterpoint to Kroc's modern and unashamedly devious approach to both business and life in general.

By Ben Broadribb. Ben is a contributing editor at Film Intel. He is normally seen in the wild wearing t-shirts containing obscure film references. When he's not writing about films here, Ben is usually writing about films - mostly Shakespeare adaptations - for his MA by Research. He's also on Google+ and Twitter.

Yes, Logan has romance, but it's a romance that strangles its emotional core

SPOILER WARNING. The below article spoils significant plot points which occur late on in Logan.

Logan, at time of writing, is the forty-sixth best film in existence, according to the IMDb's Top 250 list. Though an impressive superhero offering, it is difficult to craft an academically sound argument which supports that lofty placing.

For a start, much of the impressive nature of Logan is due to its reverence for film form past, rather than invention of film future. James Mangold's offering is indelibly linked to George Stevens' 1953 Western Shane (not on the Top 250), directly so, in a scene where Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Laura (Dafne Keen) watch the film in a hotel room.

The scene and the characters pine not necessarily for the time the film depicts, but certainly for the time in which it was produced and so, by extension, do Logan and Mangold. The story goes that Logan exists because Hugh Jackman would only agree to a final outing as the iconic X-Man Wolverine if he and Mangold were granted the right to make an R-rated version of the character. Jackman, it has been suggested, took a pay cut to enable the film to exist, presumably from many millions of dollars to just a few handfuls of million. There was an undoubted desire here to make a film with old-fashioned values, an adult version of the superhero yarn.

There is romance in all of that. Who can deny that the dust-pocked imagery throughout Logan calls to mind the Western. That Boyd Holbrook's black-clad, moustache-twirling villain is an accurate avatar of evil ranchers past. There is even a scene in which some general no-goods manage to turn off the water supply. Yes, that's right: they've poisoned the well Tommy.

Logan succeeds in what it sets out to do. It's a farewell to the Wolverine character from Jackman, posted in the style of film clearly he and the director are interested in and which Wolverine marries well to.

But for all of that romance, Logan is a film which lacks heart, confusing the Wolverine character's conflict in the process.

The repeated line from Shane throughout Logan deals with the status of being a killer. 'Joey, there's no living with... with a killing', Shane famously tells the obligatory young boy, with a name ending in 'y'. 'There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks.'

The idea transposed to Logan is that he is struggling morally with the wars fought, the battles won, the scars gained. Again, without a doubt, that appears to be true of the character, who is struggling to heal properly, possibly out of a lack of will as much as a lack of physical ability. There is reference to something poisoning Logan throughout the film and it is possible that that something is as much mental as physical.

But for all of the success of that arc and the exploration of the same, Logan misses the boat on something more significant. Throughout the X-Men series, Logan has pined for connection. Sometimes he has said that he doesn't want it. Other times he has followed that through with actions. But the surrogate family of Professor X and his school has remained and Logan has remained within it; sometime 'father' to Rogue, want-to-be-'husband' to Jean Gray.

Logan gives Logan the closest glimpse yet of what true family looks like, with the reveal that Laura is his daughter. It should be a jumping off place for Logan's inner desires realised, a glimpse at his true self.

And yet, Mangold keeps Laura at a distance. The character is used to explore the violence at the heart of Logan, rather than the warmth. At the film's conclusion, where Logan sacrifices himself to save Laura and her friends, the younger character addressing the older for the final time is meant to signal the waterworks, but she has been kept so removed from him throughout that the link just isn't there. The 'bonding' exercise for these two characters has involved stabbing multiple bad guys in the head, rather than anything more emotionally significant.

And that, really, is the film's problem. It is satisfyingly gritty, peddling a lovely line in Western-influenced violence. But it is also a cold and removed send off, for a character we have always known has hidden emotional depths. The depths remain untouched, whilst his violent nature gets a full airing. The film wants you to believe that it is braver and more adult than its contemporaries, but it pursues only the obvious; the crowd-pleasing and the viscerally satisfying. It has romance for all of these things but not, it seems for the character's heart.

In the film's other emotional apex, Charles gives a speech about how much he cares about Logan and their time together. But Logan isn't there, even though Charles thinks he is. It's a metaphor for the film's exploration of the character. There's something here, but it's not quite the real Logan, the Logan that really would have been a revelation on screen.

Moonlight - Cinema Review

'Yes, this is a portrait of a homosexual African-American man, but at its core Moonlight is about a human being struggling to find his place amongst other human beings'.

After its success at this year's Oscars, Moonlight's importance in cinema history is now unquestionably set in stone. In winning Best Picture, Barry Jenkins' film became the first with an entirely black cast to do so. Earlier on in the night, Mahershala Ali received the award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film, becoming the first ever Muslim winner of an acting Oscar. Nonetheless, it should perhaps go without saying that the qualities of being 'important' and of being 'good' do not necessarily go hand in hand in the world of film. A flawed and only partially successful film can still be considered historic in what it attempts, just as a film that is both entertaining and expertly made might offer little of significance beneath this craft. Truly exceptional films excel in both of these areas; Moonlight is one of these films.

Much has been made - and rightly so - of Jenkins' nuanced depiction of both the black and gay communities in America, and in particular of where these two circles overlap. But what elevates Moonlight further still is the universality it achieves. Race and sexuality are undeniably pivotal, but Jenkins effortlessly avoids making his film solely a platform for addressing issues. Yes, this is a portrait of a homosexual African-American man, but at its core Moonlight is about a human being struggling to find his place amongst other human beings. This is a love story and a realist drama and a family saga and more told through carefully selected chapters, and Jenkins succeeds in crafting each in soaring, emotional fashion.

Jenkins' film might more accurately be described as a triptych than a portrait, offering three distinct episodes in the life of Chiron with three different actors (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes) playing the character across the film. Spending the entire running time in any of the three periods would surely have proven to be a pleasure, so it initially seems a shame that Jenkins decides to lift us out of one to move to another. But with each third as strong as it proves to be, Moonlight's whole satisfyingly becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

The abrupt disappearance of a key early character sits uncomfortably at first, until you realise that this is exactly the sensation Jenkins wants you to feel, because that's exactly how Chiron feels about their absence too. The characterisation of Chiron in the final third also jars initially, feeling as though Rhodes could be playing a different role altogether; but once again, Jenkins justifies his fearless decision-making at precisely the right time and it pays off infinitely. Even when it appears to take potential missteps, Moonlight not only overcomes these but transforms them into undeniable strengths.

T2 Trainspotting - Cinema Review

'Whilst Boyle has managed to get the band back together, you can't shake the nagging feeling that you'd rather be revisiting them going hell for leather at their greatest hits from twenty-odd years ago'.

The soundtrack of T2 Trainspotting includes a remix by The Prodigy of Iggy Pop's 'Lust For Life', the 1977 track given a whole new lease of life nearly two decades later when Danny Boyle used it during the opening sequence of Trainspotting. A musical outfit at their most popular at the same time as the original film's release, The Prodigy's more recent output, whilst still entertaining, struggles to recapture their past glories. Their remix of 'Lust For Life' is a prime example: perfectly enjoyable but nothing special - a sentiment which can equally be applied to Boyle's belated sequel to a film which transcended cinema in 1996 to become a defining cultural moment.

In fact, in many ways T2 might be more accurately regarded as a remix of Trainspotting than a straightforward sequel. All the key elements are here - the characters, the settings, the Edinburgh-accented expletives regularly turning the air Saltire blue. But whilst Boyle has managed to get the band back together, you can't shake the nagging feeling that you'd rather be revisiting them going hell for leather at their greatest hits from twenty-odd years ago.

Perhaps surprisingly, it's not the film's many nods back to the original film that create this effect. Trainspotting is referenced explicitly through sounds, settings and flashbacks incorporating footage taken from the older film. It's a bold move by Boyle, as if he's actively offering up T2 for comparison to its forebear now held in mythic reverence by many; whilst the nostalgic overtones work more often than not, they also frequently remind you that what you're watching rarely lives up to the original.

Whilst it meandered through the various figures within his life, Trainspotting was ultimately the story of Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), the juxtaposition of his eloquent narration and deplorable actions for much of the story positioning him as the ultimate '90s antihero. It's a focal point T2 lacks to its detriment; but, whilst I couldn't tell whose story is being told here, I certainly know whose I wish it had been. Ewen Bremner's return to the role of Spud makes the character's journey through the film consistently affecting, amusing and authentic, but too often he's pushed into the background.

The spotlight is instead given to Mark's enjoyable but less interesting rekindled bromance with Sick Boy (Johnny Lee Miller) and, more frustratingly, Begbie's (Robert Carlyle) relentless pursuit of Mark following his actions at the end of the first film. For me, Trainspotting's weakest section is its final act where Begbie moves from being an occasional extreme presence in Mark's life to a key player, and his increased prominence in T2 has a similar effect. Whilst Carlyle's performance in the role is excellent once again, the film would be stronger with less of Begbie's cartoon villainy and more of Spud's subtle and satisfying character journey in its place.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and why the Star Wars franchise needs to focus on looking forwards not backwards

SPOILER WARNING: The below article contains significant spoilers for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. We therefore recommend reading this post only if you have already seen the film.

Central amongst the many, many well-documented problems within George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy was the writer and director's treatment of Anakin Skywalker as he progressed towards becoming one of the most iconic cinematic villains of all time. Simply put, it was difficult at any point to actually imagine that either Jake Lloyd's pint-sized pod racer or Hayden Christensen's juvenile Jedi-in-training would actually grow up to be the ruthless Sith Lord seen in the original films. It wasn't just a question of dodgy casting either: even if you were on board that Anakin's journey to the dark side was a story which needed to be told, it's fairly likely that the version of that story related through Episodes I to III wouldn't be the one you'd choose.

In choosing to fill in the blanks in Darth Vader's origins, however, Lucas manacled the Star Wars franchise to a restrictive and unsatisfying approach from which J. J. Abrams successfully managed to break it free in Episode VII. Whilst The Force Awakens was undoubtedly nostalgic about the series' past in many ways, that nostalgia was never the driving force behind the narrative. The focus was on new characters continuing the story, with the familiar faces largely there to help them do that rather than steal the limelight.

All of which leaves Rogue One: A Star Wars Story awkwardly caught between Lucas' prequels and Abrams' continuation. The first in what Lucasfilm is describing as the Star Wars Anthology series, Rogue One is by definition a prequel, but as it sits outside the Skywalker saga you might think that it would escape the constraints Lucas brought upon himself during Episodes I to III. In practice, that's frustratingly not the case. This might not be an 'Episode', but it is a lengthy direct prelude to the events of Episode IV, the final scenes of Rogue One taking place literally seconds before the opening moments of A New Hope.

Whilst director Gareth Edwards does his best to create a story which can stand apart from this status, he's ultimately fighting a losing battle. The appearances by key characters from A New Hope vary wildly in their success. Ironically, the scenes involving Darth Vader (voiced once again by James Earl Jones) are not only the best nostalgic moments but also two of the best sequences in the whole film. Princess Leia's brief digitally recreated appearance at the end of Rogue One only works because it's so fleeting - any longer on screen and the illusion would most likely have fallen apart.

Which leads to the technological resurrection of the late Peter Cushing for the role of Grand Moff Tarkin, a decision that sits far less comfortably. Questions of taste and dignity aside, from a purely aesthetic point of view it simply doesn't work. Tarkin's CGI appearance is so distracting that it jolts you out of the film experience every time he appears, to the point where you'll start to question why Guy Henry (who provides the motion capture performance) wasn't simply allowed to play the part on screen: if he looks and sounds enough like Cushing to be digitally transformed into him, surely a better, more natural job could have been done with prosthetics? The only other option would have been to find some way of artificially writing Tarkin out of the story, or perhaps alluding to his presence without putting him on screen; but, as Rogue One's plot revolves around the construction of the Death Star, it's likely that his absence would have felt just as jarring as his presence in the finished film.

However, the characters who aren't in A New Hope end up casting a far greater shadow over Rogue One than those who are, as it's here that the film's prequel status comes back to bite it most significantly. By definition, none of the new faces can make it to Episode IV, which leads to an awful lot of death in the final act. That in itself wouldn't necessarily be a problem if Edwards managed to make his characters' demises feel warranted. Instead, the majority Rogue One's cast meets their end because logic dictates that they have to, rather than because it fits the arc they've followed, leaving the high body count amongst the film's key players seriously lacking the emotional weight that it should undoubtedly carry.

Rogue One is never a bad film; in fact, it's regularly quite an enjoyable one. But unlike The Force Awakens, which managed to both echo and build upon the characters and stories that precede it, Rogue One is undoubtedly a film continually held back by its inescapable obligation to the legacy of the Star Wars franchise. If those in charge at Lucasfilm wants the iconic sci-fi series to avoid the embarrassing and frustrating lows of Lucas' prequel trilogy as it continues, they need to ensure that both they and the films look forwards far more often than they look back.

Denial - Cinema Review

'This isn't a biopic. This is history in action and on trial. The filmmakers clearly understand that too, so it's something of an anomaly that their film then doesn't recognise that feeling.'

Denial suggests a new rule for exposition. According to director Mick Jackson, it is acceptable if it happens within a cafe. The fault is with David Hare's on-the-nose script of course, but Jackson does little to correct it and in fact rather embraces it on at least two occasions. It's not just the 'this is what is going to happen next'-style of exposition, it's the full on 'this is what has happened in the film so far and now this is what we're going to do next and why'.

The lack of refinement is a real shame for such a weighty subject. Historian Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) discovers she is being sued for libel for confronting holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall). Forced to defend herself or admit he is right, Lipstadt hires star solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) and barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) for a trial that will inevitably see the validity of history put to the test.

With a cast like that it's unsurprising to find that the performances are the reason to turn up here. Disgusted with Irving, Rampton refuses to look at him during questioning in court. It's a difficult trick, for Wilkinson to perform without eye contact, but it is effective. The real Deborah Lipstadt has been appearing to promote Denial and Weisz's performance is a brilliant cross between impression and mannered style. The real revelation is Scott. Whilst his Moriarty in TV's Sherlock is an occasionally irritating extrovert, here Julius is played as a clever, repressed introvert. The scenes of him fussily directing his team or arguing with Lipstadt in a very individual way show a real transformation from how we've seen Scott previously.

The fact that half of the film is taken up with those one-on-one arguments though is the major misstep here. Clearly, Denial recognises that the case was about more than Irving vs Lipstadt. But having made that recognition, Hare's script returns again and again to Lipstadt's discomfort at being sidelined. She discusses it with Julius, with Rampton and then with Julius again, before what you suspect is intended to be a pivotal scene where she finally gives Rampton control.

The thing is: we don't care. We understand that what's going on here is a discussion and a trial more important than Julius or Rampton or Lipstadt. This isn't a biopic. This is history in action and on trial. The filmmakers clearly understand that too, so it's something of an anomaly that their film then doesn't recognise that feeling. Do what I infer, not what I show you over 110-odd minutes. The performances and the court scenes are enough to recommend it but, really, there's some surprisingly amateurish filmmaking at work here.

Jackie - Cinema Review

'By tackling his subject at a low ebb, Larraín forces himself to ask new questions and find new answers. In doing so he produces a film that muses on big themes and subjects; our ability to know ourselves, grief, legacy and mortality.'

You could easily argue that the approach director Pablo Larraín takes in Jackie is a tad unfair. Whilst other Biopic subjects get their moment of glory depicted on screen, here Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) gets what you presume were the worst weeks of her life. This is a film about a notable first lady and yet Larraín's decision to focus on this period guarantees that much of her life and work is ignored. Jackie only concerns itself with Mrs Kennedy's reaction to her husband's assassination.

That choice, though potentially a problem for some, is precisely why Jackie works and why several critics have described it as 'unconventional' and unlike your standard Biopic. By tackling his subject at a low ebb, Larraín forces himself to ask new questions and find new answers. In doing so he produces a film that muses on big themes and subjects; our ability to know ourselves, grief, legacy and mortality.

Those ideas are perhaps most fully realised in the scenes that make up the framing device; a conversation between Jackie and an unnamed reporter (Billy Crudup). These scenes not only anchor the story (Jackie is giving her first interview, some weeks after JFK's death), but can also be read as the battle between storyteller and subject; director and story. Jackie and the reporter often talk at cross purposes. Crudup often says the wrong thing, stumbling through questions. At the beginning of their meeting, Jackie tells him that she will vet the story: this will be 'her version' of what happened, a description that works on many levels. The scenes work without reservation. Crudup understands his supporting place and Portman shines. Larraín gets what he was after: an uncertain probing of someone that we cannot hope to know in one-hundred minutes (yes, this is also unconventional in Biopic terms due to its merciful brevity).

Larraín does all this with an unsentimental air towards Jackie and her husband, though by the end this has perhaps thawed a little. Jackie is arguably a difficult, spiky character for much of the film, particularly in her conversations with the journalist but then, why shouldn't she be? Though the director is unsentimental, that doesn't mean that there is no room for tenderness or sympathy. You can though explore those feelings in ways other than melodrama; a genre this is about as far away from as it could ever hope to get.

The bravura scene in the film, Jackie's choosing of JFK's burial plot in Arlington, doesn't depict pristine white gravestones in neat rows. The location is shot on a wet, misty morning; stains rub the stones and Jackie finishes it with mud covering her famously pristine fashion choice. She is on a mission of exploration, not a journey of reverence. 'It cannot be a normal plot', she exclaims, as she sets out. The internal fears around legacy are externalised and turned into a wading traipse through the graveyard. There's irony too, come the finale. For all Jackie's battles throughout the film to secure the legacy of her husband, what will she be remembered for? Her moment of realisation could perhaps be considered a touch tragic, but Portman plays it as though the character has few regrets. The character says at one point that she has been selfish, but that scene suggests that she has never paused to consider how she will be remembered, only her husband.

The sole scenes where Larraín's exploration goes awry are in the conversations between Jackie and another unnamed character: the priest (John Hurt). Whilst the story's big themes are kept as subtext for the most part, here they become text. Noah Oppenheim's script forgets its naturalistic care and goes all explicit. The priest even gets to a point where he tells Jackie a parable and then bothers to explain that the parable relates directly to her. The scenes feel like bad Terrence Malick and Larraín seems to know it. His cuts become sudden and non sequitur and the tempo of the film is lost for a moment.

It only ever disappears in these sections though. For the whole this is simultaneously controlled and free-wheeling. In accepting that he has no hope of finding the 'true' Jackie, Larraín frees himself to investigate why that might be and postulate as to how close he can get. Perhaps he doesn't get anywhere near. But when your film is this successful at examining such large ideas in such a sophisticated way, does it matter that much?

Jackie is released in UK cinemas on Friday 20th January.

Bad Santa 2 - Cinema Review

'Where Bad Santa emerged as an unexpected pleasure for many, Bad Santa 2 is firmly one of the guilty variety from the very start'.

Bad Santa 2 is essentially the film everyone expected Bad Santa to be. The original had the influence of the Coen Brothers at its core, offering a surprising tale of redemption beneath the dark humour and expletive-laden dialogue; the sequel, however, more often takes influence from another pair of fraternal filmmakers - the Farrellys - parading its sex jokes and brazenly un-PC humour without troubling itself too much with attempts at replicating the hidden charms of the original. Where Bad Santa emerged as an unexpected pleasure for many, Bad Santa 2 is firmly one of the guilty variety from the very start.

Simply put, your opinion of Mark Waters' belated sequel will rest solely on how much it makes you laugh. If you weren't a fan of Willie Soke (Billy Bob Thornton) in 2003, then you'll almost certainly despise him thirteen years later. Those who enjoyed the original because of its lewd and unabashed comedy may discover less to love here, but will nonetheless find themselves letting out enough genuine guffaws at Willie's far from triumphant return to enjoy what Bad Santa 2 has to offer.

Plot is never Waters' primary concern, coming up with enough of a reason for Willie and his former partner in crime Marcus (Tony Cox) to reunite, embark on a new festive heist and of course don the Santa and elf get-ups respectively once again. The addition of Willie's estranged mother Sunny (Kathy Bates) initially feels unnecessary; but the misanthropic chemistry between Thornton and Bates makes it work, allowing Sunny to fit comfortably into the exaggerated and amoral Bad Santa universe.

The choice to bring back the now 21-year-old Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly) from the first film initially works well, although the character struggles to find his place for much of the middle section and is largely sidelined as a result. Waters' late attempt to recreate the emotional elements of the original's climax is decidedly rushed, but thanks to the relationship developed over two films between Willie and Thurman it works far better than it has any right to.

What makes Bad Santa 2 work more than anything else is Thornton's return to the title role. Willie Soke is never likely to be the actor's most critically admired role, but it deserves to go down as one of his most entertaining. Waters' film is always at its best when putting Willie front and centre: a public run-in with an upbeat and well-meaning fellow St. Nick is a particular highlight, as is a shamelessly contrived sequence of Willie interacting with a string of youngsters telling him what they want for Christmas. In fact, had Waters opted to focus solely on inventing opportunities to showcase Thornton at his deplorable hilarious best, he might have been able to break away a little more from the lingering sense of his film being an inferior if enjoyable copy of the original.