Joy
★★★☆☆
Joy is struggling to combine motherhood and work, living in the family home with her invalid mother Carrie (Virginia Madsen) and grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd), who is the only one who remembers how talented and creative Joy was as a little girl. In her basement lives Joy’s deadbeat ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez) and also her hopeless divorced dad Rudy (Robert De Niro), to whom the film awards a rather perfunctory “rage” scene at the start, smashing a few vases, before relapsing into shrugging placidity. Enraged by all this mediocrity and mess, and inspired by the fiasco of having to mop up wine on a boat belonging to Rudy’s new girlfriend Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), Joy is inspired to invent her new mop, and effectively to re-invent herself – as a success.
Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw: “David O Russell’s Joy is an intriguing but weirdly subdued and stylised film starring Jennifer Lawrence – who incidentally achieves new heights of imperious beauty. If Lawrence carries on like this, Angelina Jolie’s projected new Cleopatra movie will have to be recast.”
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Suffragette
★★★★☆
Carey Mulligan plays Maud Watts, a laundry worker in pre-first world war London whose loyalties to her husband and son keep her on the outside of the growing women’s rights movement. But when too-neat fate forces Maud to testify about her tough work/life conditions, she finds herself at the epicentre of a struggle that is met with violence, imprisonment and worse. Pursued by Brendan Gleeson’s Inspector Steed, who brings experience dealing with “the Fenians” to combating the “filthy Panks”, Maud and her sisters in arms take explosive measures to get their voices heard, the battle for voting rights as hard fought as any struggle for independence.
Guardian film critic, Mark Kermode: “A nuanced central performance by Carey Mulligan and strong support from Anne-Marie Duff and Helena Bonham Carter lend brio to this somewhat formally conservative account of a revolutionary moment in history.”
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The Good Dinosaur
★★★☆☆
A role-reversed rites-of-passage tale in which an evolved apatosaurus named Arlo teams up with less-evolved human dog-boy Spot as both search for home – and, inevitably, something more.
Guardian film critic, Mark Kermode: “Pixar’s second feature release of 2015 bears the scars of its troubled production. Having struggled to solve fundamental story problems, original director Bob Peterson was removed and extensive rewriting, restructuring and rerecording ensued, with most of the original cast (including John Lithgow and Bill Hader) being replaced. Now the long delayed film finally arrives on the coat tails of Inside Out, arguably Pixar’s most perfectly realised production, a juxtaposition that merely accentuates its story shortcomings.”
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Trumbo
★★★☆☆
Bryan Cranston gives a game, gummy turn as the remarkably brave Trumbo, a man of such prestigious wit that even his friends wish he would tone it down a bit. “Stop talking as if everything you say is going to be chiselled into stone,” says his fellow blacklister Arlen Hird (Louis CK). Trumbo, having just signed a deal with MGM making him the world’s highest paid screenwriter, risked everything to protect his first amendment rights. A member of the Communist party since 1943, he refused, along with 10 other industry players, to give information to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Hollywood Ten were held in contempt of Congress and Trumbo was given 11 months jail time. On his release he couldn’t get work, so he resorted to churning out anonymous trash, before persuading friends who weren’t listed to publish his writing in their name. One of those scripts, for the Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn comedy Roman Holiday, won the best original screenplay Oscar.
Guardian film critic, Henry Barnes: “If there’s one subject that Hollywood finds infinitely fascinating, it’s Hollywood. In the past five years, three of the best picture Oscars have gone to films about how the industry sees itself: as a place of heroism (Argo), integrity (Birdman) and nostalgia (The Artist). Rarely do two of these qualities have much bearing on what movies get made. But Trumbo, a biopic about Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter shunned by the industry during the blacklist, is a rare thing: a film that calls Hollywood on its crap, while ladling on a little bit more in the form of misty-eyed romanticism.”
Read the full review and watch our interview with Bryan Cranston and John Goodman:
Youth
★★★☆☆
Michael Caine plays retired British composer Fred Ballinger, currently fending off requests from the Palace to conduct a special Royal Command performance of his early masterpiece Simple Songs. (Fred is supposed to have been an intimate of Stravinsky’s — but this music sounds more like Britten pastiche.) He is undergoing a health check-up at this luxurious state-of-the-art sanatorium, although as he says: “At my age, getting in shape is a waste of time.” Fred is there with his best buddy Mick (Harvey Keitel) an ageing movie director, here with his production team, brainstorming a new film set to star his old diva friend, played by Jane Fonda. Mick’s son is married to Fred’s daughter and assistant Leda (Rachel Weisz) who actually shares her dad’s bedroom.
Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw: “Paolo Sorrentino’s new movie set in a Swiss sanatorium is a diverting, minor work, tweaked up with funny ideas and images and visually as stylish as ever. There are brilliant flourishes here that could only have come from Sorrentino: superb swooping camera moves, grotesque faces and angular perspectives, and it always watchable. But it’s beset with Sorrentino’s occasional fanboy weakness for pop-star cameos — Paloma Faith appears here, playing herself and not earning her keep.”
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip
★★★☆☆
As the title suggests, our three rambunctious talking sciuridae are traveling cross-country. In this case it’s from Los Angeles, where they live with their record producer Dave (Jason Lee), to Miami, where he’s about to launch the new album by Ashley (Bella Thorne). Our gang is determined to prevent Dave from proposing to his new girlfriend Samantha (Kimberly Williams-Paisley), a heart surgeon who absentmindedly goes everywhere with a stethoscope around her neck so the kids in the audience don’t forget she’s a positive role model. Her son Miles (Josh Green) is at first mean to the three chipmunks, but they join forces on the quest to prevent the union. Big jerk Miles, still reeling from the departure of his biological father, has convinced the Chipmunks that with a new marriage, Dave will just dump the three singing rodents back into the forest.
Guardian film critic, Jordan Hoffman: “If you can get past the fart jokes, the poop jokes, the hashtag Twitter jokes and all the furious product placement (and this is just the first 10 minutes) there is, I swear, a slightly charming, old fashioned, vaudeville-inspired romp at the heart of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip. While this kiddie pic never reaches the self-aware levels of cheeseball entertainment found in Raja Gosnell’s first Smurfs movie, The Road Chip shares a similar worship of 70s/80s Muppets, meaning what drives it is that spark to dim the lights and put on a show.”
Daddy’s Home
★★☆☆☆
Will Ferrell is Brad, smooth jazz-loving, cookie-baking, lunchbox-packing stalwart of the PTA. He is also the doting stepdad of a pair of poppets who are just beginning to accept him as part of their life. Then their biological dad re-enters the picture. Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) rocks up on a motorbike, a slipstream of testosterone and reckless excitement drifting behind him. He’s the lawless, leather-clad opposite to Brad’s beige, homespun cosiness. Naturally, the kids adore him.
Guardian film critic, Wendy Ide: “A sporadically funny but wholly formulaic tussle for primary-dad status. Grown men humiliate themselves and lose their self respect, but all is redeemed in a big cathartic dance number at the end. It’s by-numbers filmmaking that rarely adds up to anything worth the price of admission.”
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict
★★★★☆
The career of socialite, collector, patron and salonnière Peggy Guggenheim must be the most mind-bogglingly eventful in the history of 20th-century art. The wealthy daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim (who went down with the Titanic) and niece of Solomon Guggenheim (founder of the famous New York museum), Peggy became a passionate collector of art and artists; she founded galleries in London, New York and finally Venice where her museum still stands. The origin of her work was a brilliant early coup, buying up dozens of great works by Picasso and others in Paris at the outbreak of war, when prices were at their lowest. And she had, as people used to say, a string of lovers, including Samuel Beckett and Max Ernst, but also a deeply unhappy family life, an odd, introverted manner and in her latter years a botched nose job.
Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw: “Lisa Vreeland’s documentary does full justice to [Guggenheim’s career], interviewing art critics and historians and rattling through her star-studded life story – the term ‘name dropping’ hardly covers it – using some fascinating audio interviews with Guggenheim herself, who with authentically patrician understatement casually alludes to her acquaintance with some of the biggest names in art.”
The Belier Family
★★★☆☆
A post-Glee tale of a musically gifted teenager (Louane Emera) torn between duty to her deaf dairy-farmer parents (Karin Viard and François Damiens) and the show choir that might liberate her from agricultural drudgery.
Guardian film critic, Mike McCahill: “A canny cast earn any final-reel tears honestly: the ever-ebullient Viard proves even more expressive without spoken dialogue, and Eric Elmosnino lends wry support as the choirmaster. It wouldn’t work, though, without the Julia Stiles-ish Emera’s solid-gold knockout performance: both singing and signing, while describing a young woman overcoming understandable reservations about allowing her voice to be heard.”
