Movie Review Round-Up - The New Releases

Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan are back together in cinemas this weekend.

Jumanji: The Next Level ***1/2

Jumanji: The Next Level does what it says on the tin by upping the ante while keeping the charm and humour from 2017's reboot.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle had a lot to prove as a reboot from the much-loved 1995 adventure, but following its success, the third Jumanji film now has an awful lot to live up to - and for the most part, it really does.

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This time around our four teen characters - played by Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan - are not the only ones drawn into the game with Spencer's grandfather (Danny DeVito) and his friend (Danny Glover) genius additions to this adventure. Read our full review here.

The Kingmaker ****

Lauren Greenfield's latest documentary shows how the Marcos legacy endures and is linked with current President Duterte's regime as family scion Ferdinand 'Bong Bong' Marcos campaigns in the Philippines' Vice-Presidential elections in 2016.

Greenfield is expert by now in showing the folding green on film - money to you and I. She got intimate with people basking at the dizzy extremes of wealth in The Queen of Versailles (2012) and Generation Wealth (2018).

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In The Kingmaker, she brings us Imelda Marcos, who is aged 86 in 2014, the year Greenfield started shooting her film. Born in 1929, Mrs Marcos was First Lady of the Philippines from 1965 until 1986, the formidable wife of the President Ferdinand Marcos, who died in 1989. For 21 years the nation was held in the grip of the two of them and their minions, under the rule of what was called "a conjugal dictatorship". Read our full review here.

Still Showing:

Ordinary Love ****1/2

Directing duo Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn's (interviewed below and pictured with star Lesley Manville) third feature is far from ordinary.

Armed with an incandescent screenplay and unforgettable performances, Ordinary Love is affecting in its own quiet way, as it showcases a deeply moving portrait of a marriage tested after a cancer diagnosis.

A powerfully understated performance by Lesley Manville elevates a story we think we've seen before into a truly touching, poignant drama, while Liam Neeson's unforced charm brings a surprisingly buoyant and profoundly moving edge to what could have been a mawkish character study. We root for their happiness even though we know only heartache and challenges lie ahead. Read our full review here.

Motherless Brooklyn **1/2

Motherless Brooklyn has all the elements to make a great crime drama, but it meanders its way into the meh.

The film was a passion project for writer, director, producer and star Edward Norton and he takes the lead role of private investigator Lionel Essrog, a man who becomes set on getting to the bottom of the suspicious killing of his friend and mentor. Whether it's a passion or vanity project, is up for debate.

Set in 1950s New York, but based on a novel of the same name set in the 1990s, Norton goes noir and though the storyline itself, and the look and feel of the film, promise something great, the execution doesn't hit the mark. Read our full review here.

Honey Boy ***1/2

Shia LaBeouf buffs his crown as one of Hollywood's trickiest mavericks (not that there are too many of those anymore) in his new, close-to-home, semi-autobiographical movie. He takes the lead role of James, a washed-up rodeo clown, former felon and full time fantasist, a character based on LaBeouf's own wayward father.

This unsavoury figure, who looks like he's just stepped off the set of Easy Rider, is "managing" the career of his child actor son, 12-year-old Otis (a truly superb Noah Jupe). It's another parallel with LaBeouf’s former life as a child star who went on to blockbuster success and then rejected it all and entered the freefall that has fed his recent creative energies. Read our full review here.

So Long, My Son *****

So Long, My Son, whose original title in Mandarin is Di Jiu Tian Chang, is an easily accessible, beautifully-wrought work of cinema whose universal human story of heartbreak and tragedy is spellbinding.

This remarkable film explores the consequences, in a thirty-year span, of China's population measure, the One-Child Policy, which prevailed from 1979 to 2013. Two young couples, who are such firm friends that they consider themselves brothers and sisters, drift apart following two episodes which fracture the relationship. Each of the couples has boys who are as close as twins.

All is relatively hunky dory until one of the boys is drowned while the boys are swimming with pals at a local reservoir. Such is director and co-screen-writer Wang Xiaoshuai's narrative guile, that the details of how the drowning occurred are withheld until the film's moving coda. Yet the details prove crucial to the resolution of the saga, which at certain moments has the impact of an epic tale. Read our full review here.

The Last Right ** 1/2

The Irish and death. Death and the Irish. It's a mix of reverence and gallows humour that needs to tread a fine line and one which writer-director Aoife Crehan tackles in her likeable but misfiring debut feature.

A case of mistaken identity sees the corpse of an old man transported across the length of Ireland, from Clonakilty to Rathlin Island, in a biodegradable coffin festooned with a painting of budgies in flight (chortle) by a mismatched trio thrown together by circumstance.

Taking the cadaver to its appointed burial ground are the motley crew of returning prodigal son Padraig (Michiel Huisman), who's made it big as a lawyer in New York; his autistic younger brother Louis (Samuel Bottomley), and Mary (Niamh Algar), a free-spirited young trainee mortician who seems to be going along for the ride. Read our full review here.

Movie Review Round-Up - The New Releases

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