Hot on the heels of a raft of films using classic pop as their driver – Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Yesterday, Blinded by the Light – comes Last Christmas.

Directed by Paul Feig and co-written by Oscar-winner Emma Thompson, who also appears, Last Christmas features the music of Wham! and George Michael in its bid to usurp Richard Curtis’s copyright on all things London rom-com.

The story centres on Kate/Katarina (Emilia Clarke), the daughter of Croatian refugees (Thompson and Boris Isakovic), who works as a sales elf in a Covent Garden Christmas store. Recovering from life-saving surgery, her chaotic lifestyle leaves her dependent on the goodwill of friends for places to live. Unfortunately, her annoying habits soon dry up this goodwill and she is constantly moving on. Into her life comes the mysteriously benevolent Tom Webster (Henry Golding) who flits in and out seemingly arbitrarily.

Perhaps Emilia Clarke plays the irritating Kate too well as it’s difficult to have much sympathy with her homeless plight; she rather brings it on herself you feel. Henry Golding as Tom is expected to do little but smile and look winsome, as he did in Crazy Rich Asians, and he does this with consummate ease.

The script from Emma Thompson, her husband Greg Wise, and Byrony Kimmings is low on humour, preferring to take aim at what it perceives as a xenophobic strand of British society. Yet Emma Thompson herself goes for cheap laughs with her fractured English and misunderstanding of English idioms. This culminates in a penile joke, the like of which hasn’t been aired since Mr Humphries asked if he could have Spotted Dick in the Grace Bros staff canteen circa 1975.

The film’s use of George Michael’s pleasant pop also misfires through lack of imagination. In Rocketman, Elton John’s music was used extremely well as a compliment to the evolving storyline. Here, the songs simply strike up on random play adding nothing to the plot or purpose of the film.

Oh, and ‘the twist’ and its denouement was a carbon copy of a Hollywood classic from twenty years ago. This, and the obligatory shots of a gleamingly lit pre-Christmas London seen many times before, sum up the whole film as derivative and unoriginal. It was also unforgivably tiresome.

Is there anything good to say about Last Christmas? Well, after watching this you’ll probably think of Love Actually as being a seminal work of art.

As the whole film was a self-contained cliché, it seems quite appropriate to describe it as a Christmas turkey to be avoided like the plague.

Blinded by the Light has all the subtlety and finesse of a sexual advance from Harvey Weinstein.

It follows the well-worn story arc of a young man at odds with his cultural heritage, family values and expectations, while experiencing prejudice from a narrow-minded and racist society. It’s choc-full of caricatures and one-dimensional stereotypes.

Set in late 1980s Luton, a working class and ethnically diverse town outside London, it tells of an aspiring young writer from a Muslim Pakistani background who’s expected to subdue his artistic ambitions to study economics and make a living to support his family. Introduced to the unfashionable music of Bruce Springsteen, he relates to its lyrics which inspire him to write about his situation and surroundings.

It’s all very formulaic and laboured; its political statements and observations delivered with all the delicacy of a barrel of rancid mullet being poured over your head. The anachronisms are also impossible to overlook. Unemployment in the UK peaked in 1982 and by the time the film was set was falling fast. Yet we are supposed to believe it was on the opposite trajectory passing 3 million. Likewise, racial attitudes depicted were probably more relevant in the 1970s.

The film’s composition is random, an uneasy mix of drama, social commentary and comedy; a few Mamma Mia-style musical set pieces were half-hearted in choreography and execution.

If you’re in the market for a musical film which far better captures the zeitgeist of the late 1980s, I recommend strongly you look up the Irish film Sing Street from a couple of years ago. You won’t be disappointed.

Sometimes the story is all you need.

Apollo 11 is a 93 minute doco comprising almost entirely of original film with actual-time commentary from NASA officials and technicians, television coverage, and the astronauts themselves.

There are no talking heads, no gratuitous celebrity anecdotes, no retrospective ‘contextual analysis’. All these absences are to be lauded.

The film is very much a celebration of courage, technological advancement and history making. With much unfamiliar film footage, director Todd Douglas Miller simply and deftly tells the story of events over a one week period – the launch, landing, moon exploration and safe return of Apollo 11 and its crew. A brief reference to the Vietnam War is the only external event allowed to seamlessly intrude.

The whole film is absorbing, you live every moment. And within it, nothing quite matches the visceral thrill of the rocket’s launch. With close up camera shots and strong vibrations shaking the whole theatre, it was immersive cinema at its best. A soaring and portentous musical score from Matt Morton adds to the exhilaration.

Given the concept of the film, it’s something of a misnomer to describe Todd Douglas Miller as Director – Editor would seem far more appropriate. But his title is barely relevant. What’s far more important is his capture of the heady excitement and non-jingoistic pride that the Apollo Program brought, especially its eleventh mission. It is these emotions that Damien Chazelle’s moon landing drama, First Man, failed to deliver only last year. His flat film made the climax of Neil Armstrong taking that giant leap for Mankind about as exciting as ironing a nylon shirt. Apollo 11 leaves you in no doubt as to the magnitude of the event.

It was most pleasing to see that in a near sold-out large theatre, there were many young children brought to see this amazing achievement of human confidence. Let’s hope it rubs off on them.

On a final note, I’d recommend strongly that the film is seen on the biggest screen available, preferably an IMAX.

Despite pre-release Australian reviews for Danny Boyle’s Yesterday being decidedly underwhelming, it had a full house at the large theatre at which I saw it on a Sunday afternoon. Apart from a few young shavers, I was at the youthful end of the watching demographic – there were several blue-rinses.

Yesterday tells of The Beatles becoming wiped from history after a 12-second world power outage. A young and unsuccessful songwriter from a sleepy English seaside town, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), is seemingly the only person now alive who knows of the band and their catalogue, having received a concussion at the precise moment of the power cut. After realising he’s not victim to a large scale meta joke, that The Beatles really have been expunged from memory in this parallel universe, he starts ‘composing’ their songs, ultimately to be lauded as the world’s greatest songwriter. But does it bring him happiness and love?

The idea is great, the execution less so.

Screenplay is from Richard Curtis who seems to have been on auto-pilot during its writing. His CV in the last 30 years is beyond impressive, but we all have off days. Its well-worn and simple premise of guilt, greed and unacknowledged love ran very shallow, its jokes often laboured.

And too many of the support characters are plain annoying and irritating rather than endearing; sadly, the usually marvellous Sanjeev Bhaskar as Jack’s Dad is the chief culprit in this regard. An extended support performance from Ed Sheeran stretched his limited acting experience beyond credibility.

Likewise, in his first big screen outing, Himesh Patel as the film’s star had difficulty imposing himself. His delivery of the Lennon-McCartney and Harrison songs was, however, generally impressive, a lack of tone only occasionally showing.

Cinematography from Christopher Ross was first rate, the concert footage especially so. The mainly English locations showed that country in a good light – including a brief montage of Liverpool’s exceptional civic architecture.

The film is inoffensive, the soundtrack exceptional (does that need saying?), but ultimately extremely lightweight. But it’s always going to be worth seeing for the tunes.

For me, 2006 was the best year for cinema in the last two decades. There were three films so well made and enjoyable, Little Miss Sunshine, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Lives of Others, that in most other years they’d each have been runaway winner of my Film of the Year.

More than a decade on, the director of The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, has created a film which is as good as, possibly surpassing, his earlier work.

Never Look Away is a sweeping drama following the story of the young and talentedly artistic Kurt Barnert, and his nemesis, gynaecology Professor Carl Seeband. The film follows their intertwining stories from an oppressed pre-war Nazi Germany through to their lives in a prosperous, increasingly decadent, West Germany after their unrelated defections from the east.

Tom Schilling as the adult Kurt, and Sebastian Koch as Professor Seeband, both give strong, nuanced performances and are aided by a flawless and large supporting cast. The themes of love, war, betrayal and death are timeless.

Direction from von Donnersmark, as it was in The Lives of Others, is taut and focused, occasionally providing a deliberate false narrative.

Cinematography from Caleb Deschanel is excellent.

Incidental music from Max Richter, which would be overbearing in a lesser film, is totally in keeping with the scale of this magnificent story.

And the subtitling is so good, you’ll forget you’re reading a film.

It’s a recurring theme of mine to berate filmmakers for releasing films too long for their storyline. Not this time. Although Never Look Away comes in at over 3 hours, there is not a wasted scene, not a superfluous line of dialogue in the entire piece. The pace is consistently level and, if the large audience I saw the film with is typical, at all times captivating.

And another lesson for other filmmakers. One of Herr von Donnersmark’s greatest strengths is his ability to make political points for you to observe and work out by yourself, rather than the crass, sledgehammer ‘in your face’ method used by so many – Hollywood please take note. In Never Look Away he makes an historic case, showing Professor Seeband segueing seamlessly from committed arch-Nazi to committed apparatchik of Soviet-style Socialism, the difference between the two being infinitesimal.

One of the very best films, if not the best, I will see this year.

Too much of what passes as satire is merely crude abuse; there’s no wit in simply calling a politician or public figure a wanker. Likewise, a comedian airing their own political prejudices, often with more than a whiff of conceited sanctimony, also misses the point.
The great satirists are, without exception, brutally honest; not afraid to take on those of any hue or persuasion and skewer the absurdity or downright enormity of their targets. It’s why George Orwell remains so relevant 70 years after his death.

The Death of Stalin mocks mercilessly the actions of the Soviet politburo as Stalin lies mortally stricken after a stroke and the, mainly, Jewish doctors who’ve been banished for make-belief plots are returned to administer to this antisemitic ogre – an ogre of whom everyone remains terrified even when he’s comatose. The politburo’s jostling for control after his death brings to mind Bertrand Russell’s maxim that much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

The screenplay by Armando Iannucci and David Schneider is razor sharp, treating its audience with great respect. Unfortunately, Iannucci’s direction is rather ordinary – too often it has the feel of a filmed stage play. Fine comic acting from a mainly British cast is perfect for the film’s material, Jacob Isaacs standing out as the ruthless Field Marshal Zhukov, forcibly delivering his lines in a strong northern English accent. Indeed, it’s a good trait of the film that all actors speak in their normal accent, including New Yorker Steve Buscemi.

The Death of Stalin is political satire of the highest order. It spells out with excruciating exactness what happens when despots are treated as infallible Messiahs, when their every act of wickedness is excused away by sycophants who mistake mindless idolatry for loyalty. It’s a running joke in the film that these same sycophants assert ‘Long live Stalin’ as they’re about to be shot in the head on his orders for some perceived thought crime.

It’s always great to see satire delivered as sharply as it is here as it is so rarely done well. Enjoy it when you can.

Lion is the story is of a very young Indian street boy (Saroo) separated from his mother and brother and falling into destitution after an involuntary train journey of 1600km takes him to the Bengal area of India where a different language is spoken. His life turns around when he’s adopted by a loving and wealthy Tasmanian couple (Nicole Kidman, David Wenham) and flown to a new life in Australia.

The film skips 20 years and we find Saroo, now played by Dev Patel, a happy and well-educated young man on the brink of a promising adult life. But a minor incident causes a flashback and he becomes obsessed with finding his original family to the detriment of his career and Australian relationships.

The direction is solid and acting good – Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel particularly; the story rarely falters.

Most films are manipulative to some degree, and Director Garth Davis occasionally lays it on a bit thick. But when you leave the theatre and find you’re in a majority of the audience with swollen red eyes, who cares?

4.5 stars

Nearly all dud films fall into one of two categories.

Sometimes, you sit watching in open-mouthed disbelief that such a pile of rotting effluence ever got a green light – I still break into a cold sweat when I think of the talented Brendan Cowell’s clichéd cricket comedy, Save Your Legs.

And sometimes it’s easy to see what the film was envisaged as being but, somewhere along the way, it just failed to come together.

Robert Zemeckis’s Allied falls into the latter camp.

The story of spies, love and double agents with the backdrop of Casablanca and London in World War Two surely had the hallmarks of a winner. Add the directing pedigree of Mr Zemeckis and a strong, mainly British cast headed by international stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard and you’d probably bank on this one being a commercial and critical blockbuster.

Sadly, it just doesn’t work.

Screenwriter Steven Knight has enjoyed success and Oscar and BAFTA nominations for Dirty Pretty Things. But other work of his has been found wanting – The Hundred Foot Journey, Closed Circuit – were both decidedly mediocre. He has filled Allied with implausible plot devices, unconvincing characters and some pretty average dialogue.

The film starts with Brad Pitt, an intelligence officer with the Royal Canadian Air Force, teaming with French Resistance heroine, Marion Cotillard, in Casablanca to assassinate the German Ambassador. Their goal is achieved with too much ease, their escape far too easy as row upon row of German soldiers run into their path to be mowed down like hapless aliens in a computer game. How you longed for an ingenious escape route such as Ryan Gosling’s at the start of Drive.

Swiftly falling in love, the couple head to London for marriage, a child and domestic bliss. But this ideal is turned upside down when British Intelligence inform Pitt his wife is suspected as being a German agent. He must feed her false information and then kill her should it become clear she’s passed the bait to the Goons; should he fail to do so, he will be hanged for treason. It’s preposterous stuff, and following events and the film’s denouement are equally ludicrous.

Robert Zemeckis must take the blame for the film’s poor pacing. Events in the first third of the film in Casablanca whizz by too quickly, but when events move to England, it drags. Zemeckis also has no feel for a war-torn and blitzed London, seemingly unaware of rationing, shortages and severe austerity. The scene of Cockneys round a pub piano singing The White Cliffs of Dover was trying too hard.

Cinematography, production values and costumes were good; the actors did their best with the given script.  But it wasn’t enough to save a film which promised so much.

**