A Royal Night Out (2015)

We've seen royal daughters or the daughters of American Presidents going incognito to experience 'normal life', from Roman Holiday to Disney's Aladdin, and the twist here is that this movie tells of an actual example from history in which Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret embarked one night out of the palace to celebrate the end of the war, which may well have happened but almost certainly not as it is presented in this easy-enough-to-watch but heavily, heavily fictionalised comedy romance. 

★★★☆☆

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American Ultra (2015)

This is a charmless blend of stoner comedy and one of those "dormant sleeper-agent wakes up" action movies of the Jason Bourne and The Long Kiss Goodnight sort, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart as an uncharismatic Bill-and-Ted pair of small-town America stoners who one day find themselves thrust headlong into a CIA conspiracy inspired by the MKUltra experiments of the 50s and 60s.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Beach Of The Drowned (La Playa De Los Ahogados) (2015)

This murder mystery is about as complex and cinematic as an episode of Murder, She Wrote but Cabot Cove is the spectacular coastline of Galicia, Spain - the real star of the show - where anchored Spanish fishing boats jostle on the wind-swept Atlantic, where more and more vinos españoles is sloshed into wineglasses on sun-bleached cafe terraces, and where the fish markets reverberate with the calls of auctioneers, all adding to a richly-detailed backdrop of what is unfortunately a very pedestrian mystery - Inspector Leo Caldes (of the Domingo Villar books) investigates when the body of a fisherman washes up on shore.  

★★☆☆☆

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Disorder ('Maryland') (2015)

It's The Bodyguard but Whitney Houston's songstress is Diane Kruger playing the wife of a shady arms dealer, her bodyguard is an ex-soldier who shows signs of post-traumatic stress, and this is muted, French, and sophisticated, not a crowdpleasing Hollywood blockbuster - and it is engaging for the most part except that it ends up not having much to say about Matthais Schoenaert's security guard whose vigilance and over-suspicion seem warranted in his line of work, leaving him a sufferer of mere dizzy spells and sweats, perhaps just in need of a hug?

★★★☆☆

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What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

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Survivor (2015)

I like Milla Jovovich on screen but her clenched jaw and steely look here as government security specialist Kate Abbott - constantly dashing through gunfire, thrown back three times by explosions that she simply shrugs off, and appearing in new scenes by rising from behind alleyway garbage bins as if that is all we need to know since we last saw her - leaves the strong impression each scene of this wafer-thin action thriller was designed to segue into first-person shooter gameplay, a feeling amplified by Jovovich's long run as Resident Evil heroine Alice and by Survivor's superficial game logic, where action trumps story as Abbott is ludicrously accused of a bombing, hunted by a terrorist called The Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan) and then, in a laughable end-title flourish, held up as relevant to actual post-September 11 US security concerns.

★★☆☆☆

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Regression (2015)

Wanting on one hand to be a horror thriller full of red-eyed demon cat jump scares, rattling barn doors and Rosemary's Baby gothicism but on the other hand wanting to provide journalistic insight into satanic ritual abuse allegations (starting and finishing intertitles, scant on concrete detail, recall the embarrassing "Michelle Remembers" literary hoax of the 1980s that Oprah made into something once), this dopey movie has the "Michelle", Emma Watson acting like she's a character in a hard-hitting historical exposé of the Spotlight variety (her raised eyebrow and clenched jaw suggest she finds satanic ritual abuse about as exciting as a game of quidditch) while Ethan Hawke as the detective on her case carries on like he's still on the set of Sinister.

★☆☆☆☆

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Solace (2015)

Law & Order repeats were playing back-to-back on the other channel and what a far superior viewing experience those police procedurals would have been compared to this heavy-handed claptrap also about a police investigation but one headed by a psychic (Anthony Hopkins) whose heavy metal film-clip visions, in ponderous slow motion, of coffee cups breaking and of eyes bleeding and of drips breaking the surface of some water, help serial killer investigators by telling them minutes in advance of their own human senses which bin to search at a crime scene, what the name of a news kiosk in a train station is, which of five taxis to follow in a traffic jam, and what kind of tattoo a bystander has at yet another of this film's dreary candelabra-decorated, rose-petal-strewn murder scenes. 

★☆☆☆☆

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The Clan (El Clan) (2015)

This true crime drama about the Puccio family, an outwardly respectable Buenos Aires family revealed soon after the end of Argentina's Dirty War in the mid-80s to be responsible for a series of shocking kidnappings and murders, ends with intertitles that tell the fate of each family member and reading them I found I still had no idea who was who, suggesting I should have paid more attention or that the movie, full of shots that linger unhelpfully over sex or offer clinical detail about who was doing what where and when, was made to revel in the horrific details, not to provide insights about the perpetrators and their motives, and was made primarily for viewers already familiar with the story.

★★★☆☆

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Golden Kingdom (2015)

In director Brian Perkins' perfectly imperfect narrative film populated with only first time actors, the abbot of a monastery in remote Myanmar is called away from his temple, leaving his very young charges, four novice monks, alone for they don't know how long, trying to keep on with their peaceful, ordered lives.

★★★★★

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Secret In Their Eyes (2015)

This is a thriller about a 13-year-old murder case reopened by a retired FBI agent but the plot of the superior 2009 Argentinian original has been convoluted with some stuff about terrorism probably meant to add contemporary richness but which in fact just muddies the main story, and while Chwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts are fine, the movie is not the same without Ricardo Darin's shrewd face and sparkling eyes adding some humanness to the grim subject matter.

★★★☆☆

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True Story (2015)

Even a cursory knowledge of the true story of Christian Longo and his murdered wife and children is enough to know this bad taste exercise is the fruit of Truman Capote-wannabe Michael Finkel's wish to write his own In Cold Blood, but this nebulous "true crime" thriller about Finkel's friendship with Longo, adapted here for the screen with stretched-beyond-their-dramatic-acting-limits Jonah "punch a wall to show you are angry" Hill and James "just try to look enigmatic" Franco, ends at the conclusion of the opening scene depicting Longo's arrest in Mexico - the rest (shared handwriting, winks, feigned internal turmoil, double negatives and passionate jailhouse speeches) reeks of two self-interested men, both not very good at their jobs, trying to spin the four murders into positive personal outcomes.

★★☆☆☆

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The Beauty Inside (뷰티 인사이드) (2015)

The central character, Woo-jin, a furniture maker, wakes each morning in a different body (sometimes an old one, sometimes a very young one, sometimes a female or a male one, and - at odds with the title and ostensible theme of this South Korean romantic drama - very often a twentysomething and gorgeous one) but forget gender politics or a Benjamin Button study in ageism or anything very interesting at all - the constant Orlando transformations are a mere inconvenience for Woo-jin, who looks forlorn but still manages to clear customs and travel internationally, and are just a hurdle for his new girlfriend to get over as her and Woo-jin's relationship slowly (S - - L - - O - - W - - L - - Y) blossoms.

★★☆☆☆

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The Walk (2015)

Phillipe Petit's wirewalk between the World Trade Towers is something I knew about but never thought much about and in fact I tended to dismiss whatever he did as the work of a serial pest like a streaker at a football game, but to watch him here progress his idea from fanciful notion in a dentist's waiting room to a death-defying feat high above an awe-struck America, is - even after so much maudlin, cringeworthy faux-Frenchness - extremely moving...and especially moving given the way the film juxtaposes Petit's contribution to history with the contributions of certain others.

★★★☆☆

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Circle (2015)

You'd imagine you'd woken up in the studio of a new reality tv gameshow - wouldn't you? - when you found yourself among a group of strangers standing in a circle voting each other 'off the island' by way of electric zaps from a central pop-o-matic dice bubble, but time is short - individuals are being killed off one by one every ninety seconds - so everyone readily commits to the idea they've been abducted by aliens like it's a body and voice warm-up exercise requiring complete commitment in an actors' studio, and so with the absurdity of the premise put aside, things become a waiting game to see who will be the last standing and to see how this quirky low-budget Cube-like sci-fi fantasy will make its "who are your draft picks for your super NFL team" negotiations worthwhile viewing to the end..

★★★☆☆

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The Wolfpack (2015)

Six boys and a girl raised in the confines of a NYC apartment - the eldest for fourteen of his eighteen years, apparently - are the subjects of this documentary that, at the cost of exploring myriad other fascinating lines of inquiry (criminal neglect, criminal neglect-by-proxy, urban fear, cultural isolation, personality disorder, spectrum disorder, controlling relationships, movie morality, dvd-shopping) instead focuses on the fact the boys played movie dress-ups to fill their time.

★☆☆☆☆

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Office (오피스) (2015)

A detective investigating the "Hammer Killer" serial killer case finds inexplicable things going on in the workplace of an office worker who has disappeared after bludgeoning his family to death, in this creepy, horribly violent, peculiarly edited, sloppily-told mystery thriller from South Korea.

★★☆☆☆

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Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

I'm not alarmed by stories of intergalactic wars, nor do I 100% accept that this is in fact the genesis story of the Scientology faith - could it possibly be? - and the abuses of power alleged here and in every other Scientology documentary ever made are concerning and warrant investigation but until proven do not induce in me the level of outrage and dismay that, say, the abuses of another secretive, closed church regularly in the media have caused me - no, the thing that most shocks me about this documentary, one a lot more illuminating, a lot more interesting than many especially given the gormless Louis Theroux hasn't thrust himself smack in the middle of it, is so many people's readiness to believe and their willingness to commit wholeheartedly and whole-financially to the thinnest, flimsiest of premises or promises - I must be too stingy with my time and money.

★★★☆☆

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Self/Less (2015)

An unscrupulous mind-transplant company gets its comeuppance when it makes the mistake of transplanting a rich old dying man's mind into the body of a self-conscious, adorable pupp-- I mean, into the body of Ryan Reynolds, a military-trained husband and father, in this high concept, low-budget action thriller that after a convincing opening, flags and ends up feeling as interesting as a tv episode of The Pretender.

★★☆☆☆

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Ted 2 (2015)

We know from Ted (the original) that Seth MacFarlane's brand of humour - crude - isn't any funnier from the mouth of a teddy bear, even one with such carefully constructed hair, and this amusing bemusing sequel, which is all about Ted going to the Supreme Court to win the right to be considered human (and so have the right to marry the wife he mistreats), leaves you wondering why he isn't just that - a person - and why not Seth MacFarlane with his carefully constructed hair?

★☆☆☆☆

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