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Film: Weekly Round-Up

Locke, The Sea, We Are the Best!, The Love Punch

Locke (15)
Directed by Steven Knight
5/5

IVAN LOCKE is an ordinary man. He’s happily married with a dream job as a construction director of one of the biggest building projects in Europe.

Tomorrow should be the crowning moment of his career. But one phone call forces him to make a decision that will put it all on the line.

Something he did months earlier returns to haunt him and he is forced to make a serious decision that will utterly transform his life and the lives of those he loves. It will also threaten the construction of a multimillion-dollar building.

Pretty much set in real time, the film’s almost entirely confined to a car on the motorway. While driving, Locke is on the phone try to sort out his problems, his face the only one we see as we eavesdrop his conversations which veer between angry, comic and moving.

Tom Hardy gives a career-best performance as Locke, a man attempting to do the right thing and not repeat the mistakes of his father.

The backdrop is a hypnotic vista of the motorway lights, illuminating the protagonist’s face as he battles with the choices he has to make. Knight, Oscar-nominated for his screenplay for Dirty Pretty

Things bravely challenges the conventional way of making films once more in this stunning, mesmeric feature.

Rita Di Santo

The Sea (12A)
Directed by Stephen Brown
3/5

Based on John Banville’s novel, this is a compelling story about love and death.

When Max loses his wife to cancer, he decides to return to the seaside where he spent summers as a child. There in the idyllic summer of 1955, he encounters the Grace family. Befriending the young twins Chloe and Myles, he is bewitched by their parents Carlo and Connie — unlike any adults he met before, they are nonchalant, bohemian and filled with worldly grace and candour, as indeed this film is.

It’s an admirable directorial debut by Stephen Brown which builds a magic tension between seeing, wishing and imagining.

Rita Di Santo

We Are the Best! (15)
Directed by Lukas Moodysson
5/5

Set in Stockholm, We Are the Best! follows the lives of 13-year-old best friends Bobo, Klara and Hedvig, girls who have to take care of themselves way too early.

Brave yet confused, they have alternative tastes in music and they’re special in other ways too. Politically aware and anti-Establishment, they’re rebellious, funny and spontaneous and  determined to follow their own path.

Yet though they want to save the world, they spend hours on the phone, chatting about their rock band and the songs they want to play, the boys that they fancy and their “silly” parents’ behaviour.

Set in the early ’80s, the film recalls a teenage world free from social media and iPads, when vinyl records and books were special.

It’s a cheerful and uplifting feature which tells us that life isn’t entirely impossible and it’s one of the best coming-of-age teenage films that have been made in my view.

Rita Di Santo

The Love Punch (12A)
Directed by Joel Hopkins
2/5

I have not seen an A-list cast work this hard for laughs and to save a half-baked comedy caper since Michael Hoffman’s Gambit two years ago.

Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan, glorious together, play a divorced couple who pursue a French financier who stole their retirement nest egg along with that of their employees. They hatch a plot to gatecrash his wedding in the south of France and steal the $10 million diamond — their stolen pension — he has given to his bride-to-be.

The financial backdrop is very topical but the film’s early-’60s-style execution feels outdated despite its Parisian and French Riviera setting.

The other problem lies in that writer-director Joel Hopkins (Last Chance Harvey) couldn’t decide if this is a rom com, a heist caper or a screwball comedy so the result is an unholy mess.

Yet it is Thompson and Brosnan’s  extraordinary chemistry together, full of dynamism and charm, that keeps you engaged. Add Celia Imrie and Timothy Spall’s delightful comic double act, as the friends they rope in, into the mix and you have a hugely entertaining and uplifting if daft comedy.

Maria Duarte

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