Comedy
Cold Storage (15)
Review: Listen to your gut, before it explodes. In director Jonny Campbell’s splattery comedy horror, adapted by Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp from his own novel, a night guard at a self-storage warehouse prophetically surmises that investigating the source of a persistent beeping behind a wall might be unwise: “Maybe it’s something terrible?” Something terrible is an understatement: the piercing pings are an alarm triggered by a deadly green fungus from outer space, which infects human hosts and induces a suicidal stupor before the carrier combusts and spreads the contagion. This doomsday scenario unfolds at breakneck speed with whiplash-inducing changes of tone and pace.
Government agents Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville) arrive in Western Australia to assist Nasa biochemist Dr Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon). She is investigating a report of contamination from a fallen piece of the Skylab space station. Safely cocooned in hazmat suits, the trio identify a deadly green parasite with tendrils. A sample of the invasive fungus is placed in cold storage in a top-secret facility in Atchison, Kansas. The US government sells off the site and 18 years later, the vault sits beneath a self-storage warehouse managed by Griffin (Gavin Spokes), who peddles dodgy electronics from the premises.
Night guards Travis (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) are in charge when the vault’s temperature control fails, producing a persistent beeping that sounds like a smoke alarm. They break through a wall and descend into the bowels of their workplace, blissfully unaware of the threat that lurks in the subterranean gloom. Meanwhile, Robert receives news that the otherworldly invader has escaped confinement and he joins forces with low-level military command operator Abigail (Ellora Torchia) to stop the clock on Armageddon.
Inspired by actual events, Cold Storage quick establishes a motley crew of characters ripe for stomach-churning detonation, including a throwaway supporting role for Vanessa Redgrave as a warehouse customer in the wrong place at the wrong time. Koepp’s screenplay is a curious conflation that delights in one breath and disgusts in the next (a clumsy bystander slip-sliding comically into a pool of infected innards).
Neeson perfectly exemplifies the awkward push-pull between serious and stupid, grizzling with gusto as he spearheads the crusade to protect humanity… until a bad back threatens to scupper the operation. Keery and Campbell are an instantly likeable double-act in dire straits. Fanning flames of sexual attraction between their characters is an unnecessary distraction with so much else going on, including a menagerie of digitally rendered critters in the grip of fungal intoxication that don’t gel seamlessly with photorealistic elements. Campbell’s assured direction maintains a comfortable temperature on the fringes of the hot zone.
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Sci-Fi
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (15)
Review: History repeats with calamitous and occasionally hilarious consequences in a blissfully bonkers sci-fi comedy, which consigns Sam Rockwell’s hapless time traveller to an Edge Of Tomorrow-style infinity loop until he can assemble a dream team capable of saving mankind from an emerging threat. Director Gore Verbinski, who captained the first three Pirates Of The Caribbean films, embraces the wild excesses of Matthew Robinson’s technology-averse script and pinballs between narrative arcs and timeframes with a fervour that serves to ramp up the discombobulation and delirium. Good luck, have fun, don’t lose the plot.
At precisely 10.10pm, a shabbily dressed man (Sam Rockwell), claiming to be a time traveller from the future, bursts into a busy Los Angeles diner and holds staff and customers hostage with a bomb strapped to his chest. As police cars with flashing lights swarm, the intruder explains that he needs to recruit a crack squad to save the world from a rogue artificial intelligence that will achieve consciousness that night. He has attempted this daredevil escapade 116 times before, with tragic outcomes, and must repeat his actions until he chances upon a perfect combination of courageous customers, who can pull together in outlandish adversity and snatch victory from the slavering jaws of defeat.
For his 117th suicide mission, the man selects Bob (Daniel Barnett), Marie (Georgia Goodman), teachers and co-workers Mark (Michael Pena) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), Scott (Asim Chaudhry), grief-stricken mother Susan (Juno Temple), and fairy tale princess party hostess Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who suffers from a debilitating allergy to electronic devices and wifi. The motley crew of misfits navigates a haphazard night that the traveller has witnessed countless times before, but this time, something feels different…
Taking its title from words of encouragement uttered to the would-be heroes, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a rip-roaring, high-concept caper that relishes the elasticity of time. Robinson’s screenplay bunny hops between flashbacks that fill in some of the characters’ sombre back stories and crudely determines chances of survival based on relative screen time. Verbinski’s directorial brio comes to the fore in action-orientated set pieces including a rooftop chase and a deadly game of hide and seek with masked assailants, but the film seesaws too sharply in the direction of stylised madness with some wild ejaculations of glitter in the closing 30 minutes.
Rockwell’s garrulous grandstanding elevates the film’s opening sequence inside the diner and convinces us to buckle up for an increasingly bumpy ride that taps into pressing concerns about social media, digital manipulation and virtual realities. The future is imperfect and that’s part of the fun.
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Comedy
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (15)
Review: Laughter is the bitterest medicine in writer-director Mary Bronstein’s unflinching comedy drama. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You left me feeling battered and bruised, clamouring to escape the emotional pressure-cooker of contemporary motherhood depicted on screen. It’s an intensely visceral experience, transferring the weight bearing down on the central character to us in the audience.
Beleaguered psychotherapist Linda (Rose Byrne) shoulders the burden of caring for her sickly seven-year-old daughter (Delaney Quinn), while her husband Charles (Christian Slater), a ship’s captain, is away at sea. The child’s mystery illness requires feeding by tube and the beeping of medical equipment keeps Linda awake at night. The pressure on Linda as sole decision-maker intensifies when a burst pipe in the family home causes the master bedroom ceiling to collapse and renders certain spaces uninhabitable. Mother and daughter hastily relocate to a nearby motel while workmen carry out repairs.
The motel’s superintendent, James (A$AP Rocky), lives in the unit next to Linda and offers to help her acquire marijuana and mood-boosting narcotics to take the edge off her stressful days as a perfect accompaniment to the bottles of wine she purchases from the front desk. In her addled and sleep-deprived state, Linda fails to provide adequate support to one of her neediest patients (Danielle Macdonald), who arrives for sessions with a baby carrier in tow. As Linda unravels, she rages against her situation to her therapist (Conan O’Brien). “I am one of those people who’s not supposed to be a mom,” she blurts. “This isn’t supposed to be what it’s like. This isn’t it, this can’t be it!”
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an unrelenting and, ultimately, suffocating portrait of parenthood. Byrne is deservedly Oscar-nominated as best actress in a leading role for her powerhouse performance. It’s a scintillating and utterly fearless portrayal of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, delivered without any semblance of self-consciousness or vanity. For almost the entire film, Linda’s daughter is heard but never fully seen – a hand glimpsed on the edge of a frame or a palpable presence in the back seat of a car – and this deliberate physical absence profoundly isolates the central character so her tirades could almost be her caterwauling into the void.
When she does deliver a primal scream into a pillow pressed tightly to her face, we empathise with the spiralling frustration. Small infractions – an argument with the motel’s front desk clerk (Ivy Wolk) about licensing laws – magnify into cataclysmic meltdowns. After nearly two hours of torment, I felt genuine relief to leave the cinema and draw breath.
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Thriller
The Secret Agent (15)
Review: From the uncomfortably tense opening scene of a random police check at a rural petrol station, where the fly-swarmed corpse of an oil can thief lies beneath a sheet of weighted cardboard on the sun-baked forecourt, writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Oscar-nominated political thriller exerts a sustained chokehold on our attention. The swirling stench from that bloated cadaver hangs in the air almost as palpably as the threat of violence towards the title character, embodied with quiet resolve by Wagner Moura against a backdrop of political suppression overseen by a brutal military dictatorship in 1970s Brazil.
Former university researcher and dissident Armando Solimoes (Moura) adopts the name of Marcelo Alves to escape retribution at the hands of the dictatorship, and powerful figures like power company board member Henrique Castro Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), who clashed with Armando when both men became entangled in a deadly conspiracy in the state of Pernambuco. Ghirotti hires former military officer Augusto Borba (Roney Villela) and his stepson Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) to kill Armando. The hit men slowly gravitate towards the state capital, Recife, where their target is living under the roof of Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria) alongside fellow dissidents Anisio (Buda Lira), Antonio (Licinio Januario), Claudia (Hermila Guedes) and Haroldo (Joao Vitor Silva).
The Borbas subcontract the kill to a local man, Vilmar (Kaiony Venancio), who uses an old photograph of Armando to track him down to his place of employment in the city’s identity card office. Meanwhile, Armando shares his story with resistance movement leader Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido) and police chief Euclides (Roberio Diogenes) and his sons Arlindo (Italo Martins) and Sergio (Igor de Araujo) graze greedily on the wrong side of the law.
The Secret Agent is a slow-burning and handsomely crafted thriller that wrings droplets of suspense from the political and social turbulence of the era. The protracted opening at the petrol station beautifully illustrates the deeply ingrained corruption of a police force that is permitted to bully and intimidate citizens. Nerves are set on edge for the rest of the picture and Mendonca Filho ratchets up unease with sporadic explosions of graphic violence, including a series of shootings that depict the devastation of a bullet impacting the human body in queasy close-up.
Set and costume design beautifully capture the unsettling period and cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova conjures striking tableaux, swathed in golden sunlight. Moura’s measured performance provides a rock-solid foundation for eye-catching supporting turns – Maria’s raspy mother hen illuminates her scenes – but the running time feels bloated to accommodate so many intertwined characters, including a coda set in the present day that hammers home the expendability of human life.
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Thriller
Wasteman (18)
Review: Survival behind bars requires brutal sacrifices in a gritty Bafta-nominated prison drama directed by Cal McMau, which opens with jittery mobile phone footage of a group of inmates bursting into a cell to punish a thief. Once the culprit has been identified, aggrieved parties dole out a wince-inducing beating and a ringleader slams a TV set onto the head of the accused, eliciting a cackle of delight from his accomplice. Welcome to the nerve-jangling hell of Wasteman.
Shy and softly spoken inmate Taylor (David Jonsson) has languished behind bars for years. He has learned to keep his head down to avoid a beating from top dog Paul (Alex Hassell) and right-hand man Gaz (Corin Silva), who supply him with the tablets of synthetic opioid Subutex that he crushes up and snorts as an escape from screams on the cellblock. A prisoner officer discloses that sentences handed down to inmates like Taylor are being reviewed nationwide to ease the pressure on the service. He is eligible for parole and could taste life on the outside earlier than anticipated. “It’s really easy. All you have to do is fill out the worksheet and stay out of trouble,” explains the officer.
The arrival of cocksure new cellmate Dee (Tom Blyth) throws those plans into disarray. Setting himself up as a small-scale rival to Paul, Dee begins to make a name for himself on the block and urges Taylor to reconnect with Adam (Cole Martin), the 14-year-old son he has never met, by direct messaging the boy’s Instagram account. Dee’s grand ambition to become “top boy” risks Taylor’s parole and both their lives. Taylor becomes a hapless pawn in his cellmate’s vengeful plan, lighting a fuse on open warfare between gangs that culminates in bloodshed and snarling retribution.
Wasteman is an uncompromising depiction of the modern British justice system, which trades in the same brand of disquieting hyperrealism as Alan Clarke’s nightmarish 1979 Borstal drama Scum. Working closely with Switchback, a charity that supports young people in the justice system, director McMau punctuates the macho posturing with chillingly matter-of-fact demonstrates of violence with improvised weapons. Jonsson’s painfully shy loner lowers his eyes to avoid drawing unwanted attention from fellow inmates and feels painfully vulnerable in every testosterone-soaked scene. His character’s drug addiction is an Achilles heel that screenwriters Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran mercilessly exploit to set plot wheels in motion.
He contrasts sharply with Blyth’s sociopathic peacock, who struts into the prison in full voice and strips off for a brief flash of full-frontal nudity to assert authority over his new domain. Every act of generosity or kindness has unspoken strings attached, and some of them can be used to strangle.
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