Deep in the bowels of the Warner Brothers’ “serververse” lives an evil, all-powerful algorithm, Al G Rhythm (brought to life by Don Cheadle, frequently dressed in sequins). This might be the best joke in Space Jam: A New Legacy, the largely unfunny sequel to the 1996 live action-animated movie, which saw NBA superstar Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes characters playing basketball against a...
Anew age? Not really, but this sequel does feel like a rung up on the evolutionary ladder from 2013’s The Croods. It delivers more of the same Flintstones-meets-Ice Age family animation, with just as much headachy slapstick action. But what it’s got over the original is the addition to the voice cast of Peter Dinklage and Leslie Mann, playing husband and wife cave-couple Phil and Hope Betterman...
With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine. Actor, rapper, comedian and one-time porn performer Simon Rex gives an amusing performance as a washed-up adult movie actor with the unsubtle professional name of Mikey Saber. Mikey’s career in LA has gone...
With this documentary, Andrea Arnold has created a kind of agribusiness pastoral about the daily life of cows on a working dairy farm. Her camera simply gets up close and personal with cows as they moo and trot around and give birth and stare with mysterious placidity into the camera – sometimes thumping up against her sound mic with an almighty bang.Arnold immerses herself in the bovine world as...
With a touch of the relentlessly gung-ho, alien-splattering wallop of Starship Troopers, and a cursory nod to the father-daughter connection mined in Interstellar, the Amazon Original production The Tomorrow War is not charting much in the way of new sci-fi territory. It is, however, a solid and at times spectacular action picture, starring Chris Pratt as an ex-soldier turned science teacher who...
Initial high hopes are dashed at the third-act stage of this disappointing cabin-in-the-woods horror-mystery in which actor Dave Franco (brother of James) makes his directorial debut, co-writing with mumblecore film-maker Joe Swanberg. Two couples rent an ocean-front beach house for a luxury weekend getaway: tech entrepreneur Charlie (Dan Stevens) and his partner Michelle (Alison Brie), with...
The very talented actor and musician Johnny Flynn here makes a perfectly game attempt to impersonate the young David Bowie in this ironised and fictionalised account of Bowie’s 1971 US publicity tour which – partly – inspired his Ziggy Stardust persona. Flynn carries off Bowie’s clothes and delicate mannerisms plausibly enough and, impressively, he does his own singing. But, all too often, this...
The cinematic language of The Reason I Jump, an ambitious documentary which attempts to simulate the sensory experience of non-verbal autism, is elemental, building up one isolated detail at a time. A living room, for example, emerges from the cascading, metallic tide of an electric fan, from the frisson of sizzling oil in a frying pan, from the wafting glow of sunlight refracted through a...
Tanya Roberts, who has died aged 65 of sepsis, was already a film and television star when she was cast as a “Bond girl”, Stacey Sutton, opposite Roger Moore in A View to a Kill (1985). Moore was 58 at the time, and looking somewhat creaky as he scaled the Golden Gate bridge during his final outing in the role of James Bond, while Roberts was 30 and having the time of her life commandeering a...
By age 19, the singer Billie Eilish has reached heights of fame and success that feel both otherworldly and familiar, carried by the same tides of generational mega-popularity that have buoyed such teen music idols as Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus before her, but with a Gen Z twist. It’s Eilish publicity canon that the then-15-year-old rocketed to social media fame after her older brother and co...