Playing an elegant, erudite Columbia professor gradually losing her well-appointed existence to Alzheimer’s disease, Julianne Moore didn’t need to be half as good as she is in Still Alice (Curzon, 12) merely to win an Oscar. The role is a gift-wrapped one for any skilled actor with an IOU from the academy. Moore, however, goes for extra credit with the piercing specificity of her character’s slide into the abyss: subtly shifting the set of her jaw from scene to scene, she articulates newly evasive words with a determination that soon snaps achingly into defeat.
She’s a marvel, whom directors Wash Westmoreland and the late Richard Glatzer possibly don’t trust enough to carry the emotional charge of their tender, tactful-to-a-fault film. A maudlin piano score, seemingly plucked from a life-insurance ad, blankets Alice’s deterioration as the script glides over the most desolate practicalities and potential outcomes of her condition, while secondary characters convey little inner life beyond their sympathetic response to hers.
The gleaming exception is Kristen Stewart, quietly but openly riven as the misfit daughter who winds up with a more intuitive understanding of her mother than more mollifying family members; in her brittle, lovingly pained scenes with Moore, Still Alice approaches the heart-scorching territory of Michael Haneke’s Amour; elsewhere, it’s as shy as it is beautifully acted.
Not the worst compromise, especially lined up against Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie (Sony, 15), the worthiest performance in which can legitimately be attributed to South African comedy rap duo Die Antwoord. They aren’t terribly good, but with their ingenuous, bugged-out foolery, they alone have identified the correct register in which to play Blomkamp’s peculiar techno-morality tale. Returning to District 9’s dystopian vision of Johannesburg, Blomkamp attempts to reconfigure his breakthrough hit’s neatly drawn social allegory – minus the apartheid allegory and classical romantic backstory that made it so effective.
What we get instead is a wide-eyed Robocop knock-off, its eponymous android plaintively decrying human misconduct even as it commits industrial-scale destruction; whatever opaque point the film is making, it belabours it in earnest denial of its own Dinky Toy absurdity.
Chappie’s failings are singular: it doesn’t appear to have actually been made by robots, which is more than can be said for Focus (Warner, 15), an attractively produced, proficiently plotted but oddly characterless caper thriller with none of the sparky intangibles that distinguish the best in its genre. Starring Will Smith as a suave con artist mentoring Margot Robbie’s less seasoned trickster, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s film falls most crucially short on the star chemistry that has elevated far more rickety cinematic con jobs than this one. Smith, usually so comfily personable, walks stiffly in shoes fit for George Clooney; he and Robbie spar like polite seat neighbours on a business-class flight.
While I’ll never watch Focus again, the eminently less capable The Boy Next Door (Universal, 18), looks to be a renewable trash treasure for years to come. From its lurid look-behind-you suspense to its questionable grasp of old-time publishing (“It’s a first edition!” a classics teacher coos over a garage-sale copy of The Iliad), every plot point in this gleefully witless mashup of Fatal Attraction and Notes on a Scandal is its own hearty punchline.
Starring a spirited Jennifer Lopez as said educator, driven to glossily conditioned distraction by a teenage student turned stalker, this is bad movie nirvana, free from the arch irony that kills the fun in more calculated Hollywood camp. With this around, there’s no need for thrillers such as Return to Sender (Arrow, 18), joyless rape-revenge nonsense starring a slumming Rosamund Pike, nor Two Men in Town (Signature, 15), a convict-redemption tale as dry and indistinct as its title, starring Forest Whitaker as a murderer freshly out of the clink and Harvey Keitel as the wary border-town sheriff on his case. Director Rachid Bouchareb, sorely off form here, at least earns creativity points for casting Brenda Blethyn as a New Mexico parole officer.
Arthouse thrill-seekers would be better off with last year’s Berlin Golden Bear winner, Black Coal, Thin Ice (Studiocanal, 15), a sleet-slippery Chinese noir set in an ambient factory wasteland. Tracing a former detective’s complicated quest to solve a very cold case indeed, its narrative eventually freezes into impenetrability, but it’s an alluring void. Similarly strong on atmospherics is Gerard Johnson’s British bent-cop drama, Hyena (Metrodome, 18), a sordid London hopscotch course of substance abuse and human trafficking, though it’s less illuminating than it is immersive.
The capital earns a moderate glimmer of light in Debbie Tucker Green’s promising, piquantly observed kitchen-sink drama Second Coming (Kaleidoscope, 15), in which the possibility of ethereal intervention elevates and complicates familiar domestic frictions.
The recently heightened popular focus on transgender psychology lends unexpected currency to a delicious, 107-year-old curio in Mubi’s streaming menu. Made years before his flight to Hollywood, German farcemeister Ernst Lubitsch’s 40-minute silent comedy I Don’t Want to Be a Man is a sprightly examination of an adventurous young woman posing as a man for a day. Precociously challenging social and sexual status-quo politics that don’t seem all that alien today, it’s a revitalised artefact that functions just as well as a saucy romp.
