Movie Review: Back To Black (2024)

Genre: Musical Biography  

Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson  
Starring: Marisa Abela, Jack O'Connell, Eddie Marsan, Lesley Manville  

Running Time: 122 minutes  

Synopsis: In London, teenager Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) comes from a modest working class family and is blessed with a throwback singing voice. She has a close relationship with her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), while her taxi driver father Mitch (Eddie Marsan) fancies himself a crooner. Amy is more into jazz and writes emotional songs inspired by her addictions to men, booze, weed, and bulimia. On the cusp of success, Amy takes a break from music and falls into a turbulent relationship with bad boy Blake (Jack O'Connell), providing the inspiration to write songs for her next album, Back To Black. 

What Works Well: This impressionistic portrait of a troubled artist succeeds in capturing the fountain of artistry at the intersection of talent, passion, environment, and character. Writer Matt Greenhalgh and director Sam Taylor-Johnson maintain an intense focus on Amy, allowing her to own her success as an uncompromising anachronistic revivalist of jazz music and 1960s glamour, and just as fully embrace all the fault lines of her tragedy: attraction to bad boys, substance abuse, and a wicked temper. With the musical highlights seamlessly weaving through the narrative, Marisa Abela does her own singing and embodies Amy in a hauntingly honest performance punctuated by searing line deliveries. The recreation of early 2000s London fashions adds organic texture.

What Does Not Work As Well: Some of the jumps in time and place are uncoordinated, leaving a few side characters (including Amy's mother and a roommate) stranded. The running time is slightly padded, but the origins of Amy's demonic addictions deserved more attention. 

Key Quote:

Amy: I need to live, my songs.

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Movie Review: Fair Play (2023)

Genre: Drama

Director: Chloe Domont

Starring: Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Eddie Marsan

Running Time: 113 minutes

Synopsis: In New York City, Emily and Luke (Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich) are analysts at a prestigious but cut-throat stock trading firm. Against company policy, they are also secret lovers and planning to get married. When Emily is unexpectedly promoted and becomes Luke's boss, he struggles with jealousy and self-esteem issues. In addition to managing Luke's emotions, Emily has to prove herself to company owner Campbell (Eddie Marsan) and navigate a male-dominated office culture.

What Works Well: Director and writer Chloe Domont embraces a detached corporate aesthetic and strides into a complicated knot of shark-infested office politics, illicit romance, bro culture, career ambitions, a fragile male ego, impostor syndrome, and the interface between power and sex, all in an erotically charged milieu. The twisty drama is always searching for the less expected and more emotionally challenging path, and the don't-hold-back attitude is propelled by a fearless Phoebe Dynevor performance.

What Does Not Work As Well: The writing often lacks wit and subtlety, vulgarity used as an obvious crutch. Some of the more emotional scenes reach for excessive levels of loud theatricality.

Conclusion: The messes usually confined to bedrooms and bathrooms...here spill all over the office.



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Movie Review: Wrath Of Man (2021)

A heist thriller, Wrath Of Man bolsters basic macho action with a sharp attitude and an engaging if unnecessarily convoluted plot.

In Los Angeles, a heavily armed gang violently robs a Fortico armoured truck full of cash. The two guards and one civilian are killed. The company, managed by Terry Rossi (Eddie Marsan), beefs up resources and training to try and discourage similar incidents. Experienced guard Patrick "H" Hill (Jason Statham) is one of the new recruits, and veteran Fortico employee Haiden "Bullet" Blaire (Holt McCallany) introduces him to the company's protocols. Another guard, "Boy Sweat" Dave Hancock (Josh Hartnett), resents H's aloof attitude.

H has an investigative agenda and wastes no time imposing his aura and seducing the only female guard Dana (Niamh Algar). He impresses everyone by single-handedly thwarting an attempted heist, then gains legendary status when his sheer presence scares off yet another gang. In flashbacks, his backstory is revealed: he has murky connections to both the underworld and enforcement agencies through the FBI's Agent King (Andy Garcia), and a very personal score to settle. Meanwhile, a gang of ex-military veterans led by Jackson (Jeffrey Donovan) and including the bloodthirsty Jan (Scott Eastwood) plots an audacious job.

Director and co-writer Guy Ritchie re-teams with star Jason Statham to create a high energy yet brooding adaptation of the novel Cash Truck by Nicolas Boukhrief. The four cinematic chapters titled A Dark Spirit, Scorched Earth, Bad Animals, Bad and Lungs, Liver, Spleen, Heart complement Wrath Of Man's titular mood and hint at the playful rage within. The movie rises above stock revenge cliches thanks to high production values, a clever flashback structure, a threatening music score, stylish action scene staging, and Statham's enduring charisma.

An inside mole, gangland wars, revenge most cold, and a half-baked enforcement operation combine for a thick plot featuring four separate groups competing for screen time. The armoured truck guards, Hill's core underworld colleagues, the FBI, and Jackson's crew create too many men (and just one woman) without enough screen time to properly connect them. The Scorched Earth chapter particularly suffers, violence layered upon violence while the dynamic between the Hill and Jackson factions fails to properly latch.

The crucial heist resulting in three deaths kicks-off the drama in the opening scene (filmed in one take and mostly from inside the truck), and is a worthwhile centrepiece. Ritchie returns to the event twice more from different perspectives to fill in the main character's roles. Several other action scenes inject regular doses of excitement, none better than Hill finally revealing his shooting skills and cool temperament by foiling a robbery in progress. The final climactic heist runs ragged and gets close to chaos, but with Statham in command, Wrath Of Man is in good hands.



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Movie Review: 7 Days In Entebbe (2018)

A recreation of an infamous airline hijacking and subsequent rescue operation, 7 Days In Entebbe (also known as simply Entebbe) takes time and care to cover all perspectives despite traversing well-known terrain.

In June of 1976, four German and Palestinian terrorists seize command of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris during a stop-over in Athens. Close to 250 passengers and crew-members, including more than 80 Israelis, are held hostage. The two German hijackers are Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike) and Wilfried Böse (Daniel Brühl), members of the Revolutionary Cells. She is fiery and committed, while he is more of an intellectual idealist. 

The plane eventually lands at Uganda's Entebbe Airport, where the hijackers receive reinforcements. The hostages are crammed into the old terminal building and Uganda's eccentric President Idi Amin (Nonso Anozie) milks the event for publicity. The terrorists demand the release of prisoners and set a deadline to start killing the hostages. As the tense hours and days tick by, Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and Defence Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) have to decide whether to break a policy of non-negotiation, or mount a daring rescue operation.

Soon after the actual events at Entebbe, the rescue codenamed Operation Thunderbolt was portrayed in several breathlessly produced movies funded by US television networks and starring the likes of Charles Bronson and Burt Lancaster. Benefitting from the passage of time and more than 40 years of subsequent history, here writer Gregory Burke takes a deep breath and adopts a more cerebral approach. 

With director José Padilha at the helm, 7 Days In Entebbe laments the lack of meaningful progress in advancing peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and draws a jagged line between fallen heroes and obstinacy. Within the 1970s ambience bathed in brown/orange colours plus corduroy and polyester, Burke also injects a pointy cultural streak through the story of Israeli soldier Zeev Hirsch (Ben Schnetzer), part of the commando team, and his dancer girlfriend Sarah (Zina Zinchenko). She is the star performer rehearsing an interpretive modern dance set to a traditional Hebrew song, and Padilha builds to a quite brilliant juxtaposition of art and war.

Elsewhere the focus among the hostage takers is on the two German terrorists, Brigitte and Wilfried covering the spectrum from ruthless pragmatist to rudderless theoretician, and both grappling with how the world will perceive Germans threatening or killing Jews, no matter the cause. The debate around the Israeli cabinet table is a candid portrayal of political opportunism and careerist calculus clashing with a real-time crisis. The Palestinian voice is relatively underrepresented, although on a couple of occasions the Palestinian hijackers do provide stark reminders to their German comrades about the difference between ideology and sober reality. As for the hostages, the flight engineer of the Air France crew carries the load of grounded courage.

As the rescue team takes flight into the turbulent winds of a never ending conflict, 7 Days In Entebbe earns the right to theatrically celebrate audacious heroism while simultaneously unleashing a cry for a long overdue peace.

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