Film Review of the Week


Drama

The Fabelmans (12A)




Review: In his most unabashedly personal film, Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg continues to venerate the power of the family unit to overcome adversity while reflecting on his wonder years in 1950s New Jersey and Arizona. The first flushes of his love affair with cinema are traced back to January 10 1952, when Spielberg’s six-year-old alter ego, Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord), stands nervously in front of his first cinema marquee – Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show On Earth – with parents Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams).

The bespectacled, electrical engineer father unintentionally deepens young Sammy’s trepidation and fear by spouting technical jargon about persistence of vision, the trick of the mind that creates the illusion of moving pictures when 24 photographs are projected on to a screen every second. His concert pianist mother, an undimmable force of nature, salvages the defining moment. “Movies are dreams that you never forget,” she coos soothingly.

Spielberg never forgets his dreams in The Fabelmans, weaving narrative threads between personal recollections and his subsequent works of big screen fiction including Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Saving Private Ryan. He works closely with regular collaborators including Polish cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar, composer John Williams and Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter Tony Kushner, who polishes the script’s dramatic licence to a beguiling lustre.

Inspired by the train crash sequence in The Greatest Show On Earth, teenage Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) answers his creative calling with a film camera gifted by his parents and words of wisdom from his granduncle Boris (Judd Hirsch). “We are junkies and art is our drug,” he enthusiastically counsels the boy. Sammy’s home movie of a family vacation with his parents, three sisters Reggie (Julia Butters), Natalie (Keeley Karsten) and Lisa (Sophia Kopera) and surrogate uncle Bennie (Seth Rogen) exposes deep fissures in grown-up relationships.

The fallout serves as a painful first lesson about the enduring power of cinema. When Sammy tries to apologise, insisting that he never intended to hurt anyone, Mitzi again delivers perfect words of comfort: “Guilt is a wasted emotion.” The teenager applies that learning to woo his classmate Monica (Chloe East) and cleverly undermine the fraternal bond between antisemitic high school bullies Logan (Sam Rechner) and Chad (Oakes Fegley).

The Fabelmans is a bittersweet portrait of a post-war family in crisis, anchored by a mesmerising performance from Williams as an emotionally brittle free spirit who won’t allow her children to relinquish their dreams. Key motifs from Spielberg’s impressive back catalogue proliferate, often laced with gentle humour like when young Sammy gets a crash course in camera placement from director John Ford (David Lynch). Persistence of vision isn’t required to see the sincerity that twinkles in every lovingly crafted frame.



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Action

Plane (15)




Review: You won’t need to fasten seatbelts during director Jean-Francois Richet’s lacklustre action thriller, which pits the crew and passengers of a downed commercial flight against a sadistic militia leader on an island in the Sulu Sea. Dramatic turbulence fails to materialise when Gerard Butler proudly retains his Scottish burr as the grizzled pilot, who risks life and limb to protect his passenger manifest of two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs including an obnoxious businessman and giggling gal pals. The in-flight entertainment of a mid-air lightning strike quickens the pulse more than myriad gun fights or hand-to-hand fisticuffs in the jungle including a slickly choreographed one-on-one brawl between Butler and a nameless thug shot in sweat-drenched close-up.

Spurts of graphic violence (predominantly gunshot wounds to heads) guarantee a steadily increasing body count without any emotional investment in the stricken characters apart from Butler’s RAF veteran, who lost his wife three years ago and is still navigating the grieving process. Director Richet previously helmed a tepid 2005 remake of John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 and his comfort zone is evidently bullet-riddled stand-offs. A climactic shootout leaks suspense and screenwriters Charles Cumming and JP Davis neglect to give one key protagonist a fitting send-off.

On New Year’s Eve, Trailblazer Air pilot Brodie Torrance (Butler) arrives in the nick of time to captain a routine flight from Singapore to Tokyo that should allow him to hop time zones and usher in the new year in Hawaii with his daughter Daniela (Haleigh Hekking). Those plans are derailed when stern-faced FBI agent Knight (Otis Winston) escorts Louis Gaspare (Colter) onto the flight. The handcuffed prisoner is being extradited to face murder charges from 15 years ago.

A severe weather front unnerves boarding passengers – “These planes are pretty much indestructible,” quips the captain – and a direct lightning strike to Flight 199 forces Torrance and co-pilot Dele (Yoson An) to improvise an emergency landing on a remote island close to the Philippines under the control of sadistic Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor). His gun-toting disciples take the crew and passengers hostage except for Torrance and Gaspare, who reluctantly join forces to stage a daring rescue. Meanwhile at Trailblazer Air HQ in New York, crisis management expert Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn) activates mercenary for hire Shellback (Remi Adeleke) to parachute onto the island and neutralise Junmar’s army.

Plane adopts the brace position then neglects to make any impact with routine action sequences and perfunctory scenes of self-sacrifice. Butler is on autopilot as a reluctant saviour while Colter plays hide and seek with his enigmatic character’s back story. Please turn off all personal electronic devices, including mobile phones, and switch your brain to flight mode.



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Horror

Unwelcome (15)




Review: An escape to the country transplants creeping dread from concrete tower blocks to a tumbledown house in an otherworldly thriller written by Mark Stay and directed by Jon Wright. Steeped in Anglo-Scottish folklore, Unwelcome teases murderous, pointy-teethed goblins at large in the ancient wood, which surrounds a close-knit Irish community that upholds tradition to placate “the little people”. Two English interlopers to this bucolic idyll dismiss fanciful talk of leprechauns and magical creatures until the one-hour mark when make-up effects artist Shaune Harrison, creature designer Paul Catling and visual effects supervisor Paddy Eason collectively realise diminutive denizens of the dark.

Screenwriter Stay glosses over the most interesting facet of the lead characters’ narrative arcs – the post-traumatic stress of a home invasion – to crudely shepherd most of the cast into one location for a bloodthirsty night-time showdown with the grotesque beasties. Douglas Booth and Hannah John-Kamen gel nicely as embattled lovebirds, who pledge to support each other through thick and thin (“It’s always been you and me versus the rest of the world”) but are ill-prepared to fend off monsters torn from the pages of Grimms’ fairy tales. Telegraphed scares are far milder than the film’s 15 certificate promises and a protracted denouement is anticlimactic.

Expectant mother Maya (John-Kamen) and husband Jamie (Booth) are brutally attacked in their London flat by three knife-wielding thugs, who flee when they hear approaching police sirens. Several months later, the traumatised couple gladly move to rural Ireland to take ownership of a ramshackle property, bequeathed to Jamie by his late aunt Maeve, who firmly believed in the fairies and goblins from folklore. Local publican Niamh (Niamh Cusack) explains to Jamie and heavily pregnant Maya that Maeve left a blood offering – a plate of raw liver – on a stone altar every evening before sunset to placate the voracious redcaps that lurk in the shadows of a surrounding wood.

“She dedicated her life to keeping those monsters on the other side of the wall,” confides the landlady, who implores Maya to uphold tradition. When Maya neglects to heed sage words, something wicked this way comes. Meanwhile, builder Daddy Whelan (Colm Meaney) and his three reprobate offspring (Chris Walley, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Kristian Nairn) carry out urgent repairs to the house so Jamie and Maya feel safe in their new family home.

Unwelcome is a dawdling mish-mash of genre tropes and cultural stereotypes that loses any sense of urgency after Jamie and Maya flee their urban nightmare for a supposedly tranquil life in the country. Booth and John-Kamen are largely reactive to the chaos swirling around them, drenched in viscous, freshly spilt crimson and viscera. Vicious goblins, realised through prosthetics and make-up effects, animatronics and digital trickery, are impressive and enliven an increasingly silly second act.



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