Director: John Watts
Writers: Jonathan Goldstein (screenplay), John Francis Daley (screenplay)
Stars: Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau

Synopsis: Several months after the events of Captain America: Civil War, Peter Parker, with the help of his mentor Tony Stark, tries to balance his life as an ordinary high school student in Queens, New York City while fighting crime as his superhero alter ego Spider-Man as a new threat, the Vulture, emerges.

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Peter Parker, plucked from obscurity in Queens to assist ‘Team Stark’ in the Captain America: Civil War, finds himself sidelined after the battle of Frankfurt airport by Stark. Told to stand up for the little guy, our erstwhile superhero finds himself directing lost old ladies and beating up muggers, all the while feeling that he could do more. Overconfident as a superhero, he is the polar opposite at high school where he is the champion of the quiz team and shyly attracted to Liz, a popular girl on the same team and member of the Homecoming committee.

Spider-Man foils a bank robbery, which is performed with some slightly outlandish weaponry leading to the destruction of a local bodega, our hero begins to track the source of said weapons, leading him back to Adrian Toomes, a contractor who was kicked off the Chitari cleanup contracts and lost a lot of money. Toomes now uses an elaborate flying suit and Chitari technology to steal Chitari technology from Stark’s organization and continue his highly profitable weapon development and sales operation.

Tom Holland as Peter Parker is the core of the film and I am delighted to say he is quite excellent in the role. For the first time in any Spider-Man film, we have a teenage Spider-Man and the film does very well in making us feel that this guy is just a kid, and a somewhat weedy one at that. Looking small and uncomfortable whenever he is at school (yet curiously buff when stripping in and out of his outfit), he is frequently shown in long shot or against massive backdrops to highlight just how out of his depth he is in this world of superheroes. Charming, enthusiastic, hubristic, and flawed, Holland’s Spider-Man is a triumph of characterization, character and actor all combining to produce a winning cinematic creation. In a Marvel films so often there is little to no sense of peril, but this is different; we become genuinely concerned for Peter. We will him not to make some of the decisions he does and fear for his safety several times. It’s great.

As a foil to Spider-Man, we are blessed to have the ever-wonderful Michael Keaton as Adrian Toomes, aka Vulture. A disaffected American worker some of his speeches ring true in our own world as spoken from re-energized coal miners and laid-off US auto workers. He’s the embodiment of the American Dream, to set up your own business and grow it, laid low by big corporations stealing the lifeblood of small contractors, the contracts themselves. At one point Keaton growls that “the guys who created this mess now get paid to clean it up”. It’s hard not to sympathize with the character, and Keaton’s effortless charisma and superb performance really sell this villain as a believable creation. So long a weak-point in Marvel movies, Toombs is one of the best villains the franchise has created; threatening, charming, understandable, sympathetic, psychotic, driven, motivated. He is a fantastic character.

The rest of the cast are capable and fine in their roles, though the constant reappearances of Tony Stark starts to grate. I found myself yearning for a charismatic older actor playing the Uncle Ben/father figure role – one of the highlights of Sam Raimi’s film was Cliff Robertson’s performance. Stark is a blowhard, and it is hard to see him giving life-lessons to a kid when he basically created the whole situation in the first place. In fact Keaton mentions this discrepancy at one point.

You’ll be pleased to know that the action sequences are all very good indeed, a sequence on the Washington Monument being a standout (and in 3D this really delivers). Whenever Spider-Man is taking on three or four opponents in a medley of web shots, punches, kicks, flips, wall hangs and constant sarcastic commentary from the snarky kid in red and blue it is brilliantly entertaining.

So with all this positivity, why the less than top score? Well there are a couple of things.
Firstly the film overall feels quite flat. Despite the great work from the actors, the moments that are clearly meant to be humorous don’t always deliver – for example every scene with Jon Favreau’s Happy. Likewise some of the action sequences seem a bit, well, rote. They felt like TV sequences, something you’d see in Agents of SHIELD rather than a mega-budget movie. The worst offender being an elongated van chase. There is also un-neccessary sub-scenes and nods that didn’t quite fit with the characters or the story (or indeed the tone of the film), the final scene with Aunt May and the f-bomb I found really jarring. While I bring up Aunt May, I would have welcomed more scenes with Tomei and Holland, they had an easy chemistry, but we didn’t see enough of their relationship.

The other major problem with the film is the existence of Kick-Ass. Michael Vaughan’s uber-violent F-you to the superhero film clearly owes a great debt to Lee and Ditko’s creation, but it is hard to get the green-suited loser out of your head, especially when you see Spider-Man walking around the neighborhood using his powers on low-level muggers. The same sense of ‘don’t do this’ rattles through my brain in both films, both place their convincing teenagers into positions of great peril, and both deal with balancing school-life with superhero -life.

Unfortunately, due to the flat direction mentioned above, Kick-Ass is a superior film. The slight dips that Homecoming suffers from (the nerdy best friend is irritating, the love interest is a bit bland, all the humor falls flat, some of the action feels cheap, any plot twists are visible a mile away) Kick-Ass doesn’t.

However I fully understand that this is the film that Spider-Man fans have been waiting for, and it is as slick and enjoyable a film as Marvel has ever made. It is the first time Spider-Man is seen as he should be: as a kid. The film is very good indeed, the best Marvel film of the year, but this reviewer enjoyed Wonder Woman more. Don’t get me wrong, DC’s film cannot avoid some of the dunderheaded plotting that marred their other movies, a pothole Homecoming avoids admirably, but it was also energetic, propulsive, colorful, lively and, in one outstanding scene, tear-jerkingly heroic. Homecoming doesn’t quite engage the same emotions in this reviewer.

I’m really nitpicking though: Homecoming is a polished piece of entertainment, and well worth your money. It is particularly strong on its lead characters and the villain is the best I’ve yet seen in a Marvel film. If you are a Spider-Man fan, feel free to add a whole grade to the score above because this IS the definitive cinematic version of your beloved character.

Overall Grade: B+

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Hear our podcast review on Episode 229, coming soon.

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Director: Jonathan Teplitzky
Writers: Alex von Tunzelmann
Stars: Brian Cox, Miranda Richardson, John Slattery

Synopsis: 96 hours before the World War II invasion of Normandy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill struggles with his severe reservations with Operation Overlord and his increasingly marginalized role in the war effort.

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Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill follows the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Brian Cox) in the days leading up to the D-Day Normandy landings, painting a picture of a man haunted by the First World War who is anxious not to repeat its military mistakes.

Churchill’s hat becomes a symbol for the man throughout the film, with images of his hat rolling across the British shores that face the channel and, beyond, the French coast onto which thousands of men will soon arrive by ship to invade Nazi-occupied France. The moments in which Churchill dons his famous hat, wears it to the beach and even raises it to the sky whilst facing the French coast may be a little on the nose but it is a visually striking cinematic device to illustrate not only the iconic image of the man himself but his desperate desire to lead from the front and show his troops the support of the nation.

Churchill speaks for “the ordinary fighting man” and tries desperately and ultimately in vain to show his support through his physical presence on board one of the ships headed to Normandy when he is unable to change the plans for Operation Overlord altogether. Brian Cox delivers a very strong performance as this much-played historical figure and is compelling to watch in his struggle against plans for the D-Day landings with their alarming similarities to the British military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915. Unfortunately, however, the script requires that all of his – and indeed, the other characters’ – struggles play out through their dialogue and not in the nuances of their physical performances, leaving its talented cast to air every concern and thought to one another or, indeed, to God.

Low-angle shots highlight Churchill’s double chin buried into his high, broad shoulders; Cox’s physical performance has this great Briton down to a tee but it is a shame that the physicality and expressions of this talented actor are not relied on more greatly to project his inner turmoil. In one particular scene, the distraught Churchill lies on his bed motionless having been given the devastating news that Operation Overlord will go ahead as planned. Rather than letting the silence speak for itself, Churchill instead unleashes another speech in which he describes the shortcomings of First World War tactics to the audience, ahem, sorry, to a room of people who know in detail what happened because they were either there or reading the newspapers at the time. It can feel at times like “Let’s Recap World War One and the start of World War Two with Brian Cox” who, alas, is the victim of a script that has no faith in its audience’s basic knowledge or its ability to pick up on any form of subtlety.

The talented Miranda Richardson does her very best with the same hindrance, portraying Clementine Churchill’s concern and dejection in a nuanced performance that is frequently interrupted by the need to say what we can already see she is experiencing. There is also, amongst the film’s fear-fuelled final scenes, a touching relationship that plays out between Churchill and his secretary Helen Garrett (Ella Purnell) which, if a bit contrived, adds a human perspective to the men headed for the front. In other moments of the film, the focus each actor is placing on accurately depicting an historical figure hinders the ability to interact in a realist manner. When Churchill and Eisenhower (played ably by John Slattery) converse it feels less like a discussion and more two performances of famous people happening opposite one another; yet another moment when the clunky, explanatory and repetitive script does not assist its cast.

Credit where it is due, the cinematography in Churchill is wonderful, with numerous shots featuring the silhouettes of characters and striking architecture stood against the bright British sky. There are moments on the beaches of England that are visually reminiscent of the First World War, not only in the yellow and muddied filter that screams of the misery of the trenches but in the film’s opening scene in which Churchill envisions barbed wire and bodies littered across the coast.

A review of this film is not complete without crediting James Purefoy for a fantastic performance as King George VI, managing to accurately portray the King whilst sharing a moving moment with the Prime Minister in a scene that, blissfully, is not another refrain on Churchill’s ‘this is not a good idea’ or ‘I’m trying to win a war’ speech. Churchill’s famous speech on the day of the D-Day landings, too, is a highlight of the film; a rousing moment with an evidently scrupulously studied performance from Brian Cox.

The film certainly has its inspired moments and at no point was I tempted to give up on it, but you have to brace yourself through a slow start and a lot of grating dialogue to appreciate some really skilful performances from the cast.

Overall Grade: C

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Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Edgar Wright (screenplay)
Stars: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jon Bernthal, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx

Synopsis: After being coerced into working for a crime boss, a young getaway driver finds himself taking part in a heist doomed to fail.

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Completely sober thought here, but the best concert to attend this week is the one with no musician and instrument. Not the conventional kind, anyway, when the headliner is a filmmaker and automobiles are the tools of the band. Disparities aside, this zippy and roaring caper from Edgar Wright (of Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy fame) can still prompt audiences to behave when a show reaches its zenith: stand up and rock out.

Getaway maestro Baby (Ansel Elgort) has tinnitus when young, after a car accident that orphaned him, and the only way to soothe the ringing is with tunes. Any will do, though he has exceptional taste in music. Since they would power Baby through every roadblock and cook up neat maneuvers, cunning heist orchestrator Doc (Kevin Spacey) is absolutely proud of his wheelman. New-age Bonnie and Clyde, mischievous Darling (Eiza Gonzalez) and rugged Buddy (Jon Hamm), also agree. Only one unimpressed is the obnoxious gangster Bats (Jamie Foxx), who always has “How can I be the crew’s top dog?” on full-blast in his head.

Wright made a musical before, the rock-oriented Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but 2010’s questionable taste in movies (The Expendables won the box-office crown) and music (hello, Justin Bieber) have effectively – and unfortunately – kept the homemade band where they are. For good. The U.S. fanfare was absent to recognize the director’s distinct blending of styles, crafting of golden banter and sculpting of characters – rotten and otherwise – into shades of cool. Rejecting a made-by-Wright film is turning down an invite to live a dream life, one where planning with the guts is preferred, Wright-speak is the language to learn, every moment has a great-and-above soundtrack and a pro d.o.p. (Bill Pope, in this case) is never off-duty. With all these items at their sharpest in Baby Driver, easy to realize is how much craftsmanship and energy has been poured into making riding shotgun with Atlanta’s finest driver akin to watching New Year’s Eve fireworks in the front row.

Besides the flair factor, also inherent when Wright is at the helm is love. After a fleeting glimpse at radiant waitress Deborah (Lily James) while on an astounding Ryan Heffington-choreographed coffee run, Baby finds himself in the diner where she works and has her gentle crooning of Carla Thomas’ B-A-B-Y on tape. Talks of songs and laundromats evolve into a way out for each and a life with both in the picture. Elgort and James’ instant compatibility in looks and click in chemistry make them a couple worth rooting for, or feel sorry for when the criminal life keeps separating the two, at one point to Sam and Dave’s When Something is Wrong with My Baby. Acclaimed composer Steven Price and the soundtrack crew’s knack to match song to scene is used more properly here than Suicide Squad, serving the “driven by music” vision in a manner more collaborative to the story, more harmonious with the footage and less insulting to audiences’ musical knowledge. No Slim Shady to hammer home the team’s off-kilter nature, thankfully.

Baby has two other important relationships as well, all familial – one with a deaf surrogate father, Joseph (CJ Jones), and the other with Doc (his personal Miyagi). The former’s story is better-developed, thanks to a kindness visible in Jones’ eyes, but Spacey’s intensity helps prevent his plot device of a character from becoming extraneous. Since Hot Fuzz, characters have become a weaker gear in Wright’s works, still a colorful bunch that check the terms of entertainment but little reason to be noteworthy.

Luckily, Baby Driver has the best material to repair any pothole it has: focus. While high-profile releases vault right off the drawing board with fantasy of multiverses, Wright’s fifth outing aims to perfect itself as a one-off experience first. Where vehicle-involved actioners escalate the carnage while setting ablaze their rulebooks (isn’t that right, late-phase Fast & Furious or xXx?), this film stays humble in scale yet astounds in execution. When rapid-fire editing is to be in vogue, its purpose here is to build Baby either as a crewman with skill or lover in jeopardy.

Baby Driver has a confined climax that deprives the film – a chase film – a coup de grace. Color what Wright has done in this respect similar to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, but the cramped nature of it all brings the personal stakes forward, majorly. And without forgetting it is a part of an “audio-prioritized” experience, this ultimate set piece is the most ear-ringing, literally and figuratively, and spotlights the most killer track in Baby’s playlist.

There is a sadness when the film, like any song, welcomes the fade out after the crescendo. The thing about a newly discovered favorite track, however, is that the brain will play it at the most unexpected of times, a prompt to smile usually in tow. Personally, Baby Driver has been doing that since the press screening on Wednesday.

Have to tone down the subsequent elation a bit, still, or else people will think that alcohol is in the system.

Overall Grade: A

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Hear our podcast review on Episode 228, coming soon.

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Director: Michael Bay
Writers: Art Marcum (screenplay), Matt Holloway (screenplay), Ken Nolan (screenplay)
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel

Synopsis: Humans and Transformers are at war, Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth.

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Recall the images of wealthy whippersnappers writhing after a musical event they attended – one with a name that rhymes with “liar” – got everything off-key. Harrowing photos and anecdotes popped up like daisies; the advertised “two transformative weekends” were exactly that by way of exposing people to (debatably) their first scam. Michael Bay must have read this news, translating the media from the Exumas to renowned mayhem and notions of enlightenment to a signature absence of them. Indeed, no mind enters Bay’s world to receive an expansion, but at least it is safe from shrinkage. That won’t happen with The Last Knight, though, a film that drains brains the same way Billy McFarland siphoned wallets back in April.

The advertising model is even the same to Fyre Festival, here and there some compelling plot beats and characters that all turn up in a lesser form. After Age of Extinction, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) leaves Earth to find the Creators, an alien race that always has Earth in its hostile sights. He finds one, the wraith-like sorceress Quintessa (Gemma Chan), after crash-landed onto a Cybertron now under her reign. Human-sized, she may be, but a lightning bolt from her can get Transformers on their knees or just a slight caress will get Prime to reveal his nemesis persona. Powerful (and beautifully rendered, too), but ultimately non-threatening since she carries out apocalyptic deeds by being stationary a la Suicide Squad‘s Enchantress. This is not the only time The Last Knight  will borrow DCEU’s all-villain affair, a subplot – golly, another one – involves Megatron (Frank Welker) has him assembled a team where each obnoxious member is introduced with a title card.

Meanwhile, Earth has its fair share of events. Still having flashbacks to the Chicago attack, the government establishes the TRF (Transformers Reaction Force), led by Santos (Santiago Cabrera) and Lenox (Josh Duhamel), to shoot down robots with extreme prejudice. Never one to align with what society thinks, 14-year-old Izabella (Isabella Moner) finds more purpose being Rey to her BB-8 – a rackety Vespa Autobot called Squeaks – and repairing other robots. Texas-based Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) has also become more salvager than inventor, keeping himself busy daily so the familial loneliness doesn’t creep into his muscles. Down in Cuba, a disgraced and sweat-drenched Simmons is angrily sipping iceless mojito, turning down soccer games with his NASCAR Autobots buddies and researching the appearance of oversized mechanical horns around the globe.

To link all of the above to Quintessa’s presence, the franchise’s new set of screenwriters – Art Marcum, Matt Holloway and Ken Nolan – introduces even more characters, in their triptych wisdom. See, Quintessa is missing one thing, namely a Transformers-built magical staff once wielded by Merlin (Stanley Tucci), and Arthurian expert Sir Edmund (Anthony Hopkins) and Oxford professor Viviane (Laura Haddock) know how to find it (what is it with part five and staff as the MacGuffin in 2017?). While there is much preaching about unity, segmentation is the fuel that operates the story; characters who have been around for a considerable amount time are dropped suddenly and brought back when they are least necessary. There is an irksome see-if-it-sticks mindset to the progression and shoehorning of immaturity into every moment possible. “If it blows, it works; if there’s a mess, care for it less” has got to be the writers’ room mantra.

All Marcum, Holloway and Nolan have done is confirming that today Bay is no longer a maker of films but of moments – recently those of inadequate quality more often than the other.

Exotic cars screech, people fly, robotic parts littered the landscape and blinding pyrotechnics – these are the reasons we go and see (or endure) Bay, but try and do that in The Last Knight. With six (six!) editors on board, all required to be caffeinated before entering the suite, stunts become blurs and certain happenings do some jarring teleporting, both telltale signs of directorial boredom. There was much hope when the franchise injects new blood in the photography front by introducing John Wick’s Jonathan Sela, but other than moments of Bay-isms – slow-motion, high-tech squad emerging from water and revolving hero shot – every editorial decision smears the camerawork. Also, what is aspect ratio, anyway? – the film asks.

The most consistent element here, which is also the most consistent thing in Bay’s filmography, is that if a character does not pass for “American,” “white,” “male,” or sometimes in that order, they shall be recipients of juvenile insults. A French robot (Omar Sy)? He sounds funny. A British butler android (Jim Carter)? You are a sociopath. Over the human side, there is a need to see the next acting luminary whom Bay will direct to insult Asian characters in Transformers 6.

It seems like anything of quality is The Last Knight’s Kryptonite. Moner’s vibrancy to her sassy Izabella is all extraneous when the script made her a false-protagonist. Haddock is the Mikaela we need (her make-up at one point has her identical to Megan Fox), but is reduced to the typical Bay-girl whose existence alone can court derogatives and whose eyes ogled at Wahlberg’s physique. The Bostonian actor, ever the opportunist, flexes his biceps hard at this moment. The oddly delightful King Arthur sequence that starts the film is a moment that turns out to be to elongate the film, a sneaky seed to what comes after this Transformers series – prequels and spin-offs unbound by time or characters.

Perhaps all this, the entirety of The Last Knight and its eventual spawns, is solid entertainment in an alternate universe. Still inhabiting 10 Downing Street in the film is a David Cameron look-alike, so safe to assume how in that dimension Blink-182 is currently performing in the Bahamas.

Overall Grade: F

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Hear our podcast review on Episode 227, coming soon.

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