Red State review

Red State (18/R, 88 mins)
Director: Kevin Smith
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Burned by the subpar box office and critical mauling of his Bruce Willis-starring action comedy from last year, Cop Out, Kevin Smith has gone back to his edgy, low budget roots with his latest, Red State, which is being actively marketed as something unexpected from the director.

To say it’s his best film in years might be damning with faint praise, like calling each new Woody Allen film a return to form, but the fact remains Smith hasn’t made something this interesting since Dogma over a decade ago.

But though ambitious and bold, it ultimately tries to be too many things. It achieves a fair level of success in its early stages as a backwoods horror, the kind we’ve seen a thousand times, where a bunch of unsuspecting teens get lost in a remote area and are preyed upon by nasty types.

The remote area in question here is Cooper’s Dell, home to the Five Points, a fundamentalist church group given to staging protests at the funerals of gay teenagers, and who are so right wing that even the neo-Nazis distance themselves from them.

Three high school friends have driven to Cooper’s Dell, seemingly by the lure of a girl on the internet. But this was a setup by the Five Points, and the boys end up drugged and held captive, possibly to be sacrificed for their wickedness.

By the time John Goodman turns up as the FBI agent in charge of what has become a hostage situation, some of the good work gets undone when events take a turn into a lengthy gun battle, lacking the sense of space and geography necessary to make a decent action film work.

The boys’ dialogue is foulmouthed and perfunctory, making it difficult for us to warm to them, though the three young actors are fine. But as Abin Cooper, the sect leader, Tarantino regular Michael Parks is sensational, leading his outwardly happy family in prayer as they declare their hatred for sinners and revel in their biblical literalism.

It’s paced at a lick and skilfully constructed, and Smith knows how to create suspense through visual storytelling and uncomfortably oppressive violence. He’s adept at pushing the right buttons, mercilessly lampooning the gun-toting Christian far right, piling on the anger and rage for the audience, albeit with a very easy target and no hint of subtlety.

Which takes us on to the next object of Smith’s ire, and what really drags the film out in its disappointing later stages. As well as having a pop at the real-life events in Waco, the Patriot Act comes under detailed scrutiny, so that what could have a tight and effective horror becomes a political diatribe full of indignation that might have been better saved for another day.

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What’s Your Number? review

What’s Your Number? (15/R, 106 mins)
Director: Mark Mylod
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Recently fired Ally (Anna Faris) doesn’t have a boyfriend, but has no trouble finding someone to spend the night with. After reading a magazine article, she becomes concerned about the number of guys she’s slept with, and vows to marry the next one so that her number of sexual partners doesn’t go above 20. But to achieve this, she needs to find a husband from one of her exes, and enlists the help of her neighbour (Chris Evans) to track them down. It’s a dopey and arbitrary setup, initially a wasteland, so that a couple of reels in we’re still none the wiser as to what it’s actually about, and it’s further held back by a black-hole subplot that takes in Ally’s sister’s wedding. It warms up to an extent when the stars share screen-time, and Faris is game while Evans encroaches on Ryan Reynolds’ charming cad territory to reasonable effect, but they're mostly working with dregs here. Out of nowhere it pulls a couple of silly laughs out of the bag, such as Ally flashing back to some of her exes, particularly when she pretended she was British to impress Martin Freeman, but like most recent comedies, it prefers to deal in crudity in lieu of wit.

Tomboy review

Tomboy (U, 82 mins)
Director: Celine Sciamma
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Young Michael has just moved to a new Paris neighbourhood, and he quickly goes about making a bunch of new friends. But Michael is really Laure, and the longer she goes without revealing the truth, the more difficult it will be for them to accept her as a girl. It’s a simple setup for a wafer-thin but endearing drama, during which not a great deal actually happens, as the kids play and fight and do all the things that children do. But every one of them is a fully realised and very well drawn character, and it’s held together by the naturalistic work of all the fine young cast, though special mention should go to the quite wonderful film debut performance of Zoé Héran as Michael/Laure.

You Instead review

You Instead (15, 80 mins)

Director: David Mackenzie

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Filmed entirely at the T in the Park festival in 2010, this underwhelming drama breaks into a story of sorts when a member of an American band ends up handcuffed to a British girl for a night of incidents and arguments that follows rom-com conventions. It’s a plot device you might see on a children’s TV drama, and one that lends itself to little of interest. The sheer scale of the endeavour makes it visually arresting, and it has a certain grungy charm and a couple of moments of spontaneous fun, but mostly it’s just a bunch of annoying people in the mud and rain. It’s not a film, it’s a companion piece for festivalgoers, an experiment to see if a movie can be shot in a couple of days. In that regard, at least it’s been proven that it can’t.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy review

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (15, 127 mins)

Director: Tomas Alfredson 

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ 

John Le Carre’s 1974 espionage novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, set among the big players in the British Intelligence Service, met with great success when it was made into a 1979 television adaptation starring Alec Guinness.

Retaining the 70s setting, this big screen updating begins with Mark Strong’s spy sent to Budapest by John Hurt’s controller to meet the person who knows the identity of the double agent working for the Russians who holds a powerful position within British intelligence.

But he gets himself shot, and in flashback the blanks are filled in as George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is brought out of retirement to find, as Hurt says, the mole right at the top of the circus. He’s known to be one of several high ranking agents, among them Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds and Toby Jones, who have been designated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and so on.

When this is good it can be very good, and it’s such an overwhelmingly strong group of actors that the attention is held even when events on screen are, shall we say, minimalist. And what’s best about it are the performances, none more so than Oldman, who for the first 15 minutes or so of the film, doesn’t say a word.

Everything is in his body language, his gestures and glances, and though when he does finally speak there’s a hint that he’s doing a Guinness impression, it’s certainly not a distraction from a riveting portrayal.

Subtlety is the key in everything here, but as a consequence it suffers as a thriller, lacking the flair and cinematic pizzazz that may have been expected from the director of Let the Right One In. It’s full of interesting conversations and enigmatic phrases, but so deliberately paced that patience can be tested, and as far removed from a typical spy caper as you can get.

It’s more of a museum piece than a thriller, a stuffy parade of dull, shabby little men in grey suits, dedicated to paperwork and one-upmanship, largely focussing on how empty and pathetic their lives have become. But as the layers of the puzzle are added, it does gain traction and grips steadily without ever coming close to actually providing any excitement.

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Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

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Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

The Inbetweeners Movie review

The Inbetweeners Movie (15, 97 mins)
Director: Ben Palmer
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

With the television series having come to an end, one of the best British comedies of recent years makes the journey from small screen to big, a leap that has historically proved disastrous for most. Taking the route beloved by many, from Are You Being Served to Sex and the City, it sends its four late-teen leads (sensible but odd Will, pining Simon, dopey Neil, and deluded Jay), who are somewhere between leaving school and adulthood, on a roustabout holiday to Greece. There’s no plot as such, as the boys bumble from one humiliating experience to the next, chasing girls but finding themselves seriously out of their depth. It’s uncontrollably crude, but extremely funny, thanks to an endless supply of first rate lines and terrific performances, and for all their faults and idiocy, they’re tremendously likeable lads who might even have grown up a little bit by the end.

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This competition is now closed.











Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.