Aubrey Malone
The poor, they say, we will always have with us. And it seems we’ll always have Rocky Balboa with us as well. How many incarnations has Sylvester Stallone’s ever-resilient pugilist had since his first appearance on our screens in 1976? In Creed he plays the mentor of a boxer called Apollo Creed whose father died in the ring. Will his son do better under Sly’s no-nonsense tutelage? Failure, we feel, is not an option.
Emma Donoghue’s coruscating novel Room had the critics scratching their heads for new superlatives a few years ago and now it’s been brought to the screen by Lenny (What Richard Did) Abrahamson. It’s the startling story of a woman (Brie Larson) and her five-year-old son Jack (Jakob Tremblay) who are imprisoned in a tiny windowless room. Larson is a sexual prisoner of a man called Nick (Sean Bridgers).
She does her best to make her horrific circumstances bearable for herself and Jack, who comes to accept his hermetically-sealed universe as the norm over time. Can the pair of them ever escape their captivity? If they did, would this be a different type of challenge? Many people will find this film disturbing. Many will also find it captivating.
Tobias Lindholm’s A War concerns a Danish squad commander (Pilov Asbaek) who’s fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. One day under fire he makes a snap decision that results in the death of 11 civilians. Was it justifiable? The resulting court case forms the second part of this thought-provoking drama.
Those of us who imagined the world of ballet to be strife-free had our eyes collectively opened by Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan a few years back. Bolshoi Babylon adds further fuel to the balletic flame by concentrating on a 2013 incident where a disgruntled dancer threw acid in the face of the artistic director of the time, Sergei Filin, leaving him with third degree burns and partial blindness.
Ramin Bahrani’s At Any Price was made three years ago but has only been released now. It deals with the relationship between an ambitious farmer (Dennis Quaid) whose son (Zac Efron) is more interested in being a stock car racer than taking over the farm. An investigation into Quaid’s business dealings causes a further crisis in both their lives.
Another film that was made ages ago and is now getting a cinema release is Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 offering, Le Mepris. It has Michel Piccoli as an insignificant screenwriter and Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance as the most unlikely married couple in screen history. I watched this on DVD last month and found it monumentally boring. Actually, this is my reaction to most of Godard’s films. I didn’t like them when they came out first and I find them even duller – and more dated – now. He’s just one of those directors I never ‘got’ – a view that isn’t shared by the cognoscenti who go into ecstasies every time his name is mentioned.
Is this The Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome?
