Hello, and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we run through the biggest new cinema releases and why you should be excited for them. This week: monsters, ghosts, criminals and angels…
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
Frankenstein
Everyone knows the story of Frankenstein – brilliant scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) decides to play God by building a creature (Jacob Elordi) from exhumed corpse parts and bringing it to life with a bolt of lightning. But when the world turns on the creature, and Frankenstein himself mistreats him, he starts to become the monster everyone fears him to be. But who is the real monster: the creature, or his creator?
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often heralded as the pinnacle of Gothic literature, and nobody brings Gothic to the big screen like Guillermo Del Toro. The director has famously been itching to adapt this story forever, with the novel having been a major influence on his work to date. It’s hard to think of a better combination of filmmaker and source material. And just before Halloween is the perfect time to bring a classic monster back to the cinema.
GDT has assembled a great cast. As well as Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, there’s Mia Goth in the Oedipal dual role of Frankenstein’s mother Caroline and his love interest Elizabeth; Charles Dance as Frankenstein’s father, and Christoph Waltz as a new character for the film, Harlander. Plus there are minor appearances from David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen, Ralph Ineson and Burn Gorman. It’s a great mix of well established actors like Dance and Waltz, with big up-and-comers like Goth and Elordi.
Like all of Del Toro’s work, this looks absolutely beautiful. The lighting, costume design and general atmosphere are all breathtaking, as is the Alexandre Desplat score. It’s financed by Netflix so expect a quick release onto the streaming service, but this absolutely must be seen on a big screen first.
- Frankenstein on IMDB
- Frankenstein on Rotten Tomatoes
Black Phone 2
The first Black Phone (spoiler alert) was a fun little standalone movie, in which a young boy (Mason Thames) who was kidnapped by a serial killer (Ethan Hawke) managed to overcome his captor with the help of the ghosts of the killer’s earlier victims, who communicated with him via a disconnected phone in his cell. It was as much a thriller as a horror, with the spooky ghosts ultimately being good guys and the real monster being devoid of any supernatural threat. It also finished quite neatly with the very undeniable death of Hawke’s masked antagonist (known as the Grabber), so it looked like the story would end there.
But it was obviously successful enough to spawn a sequel, and if you’ve established a world in which the ghosts of the dead can come back and interact with the living, death really isn’t an excuse to keep a good character down. And so, in Black Phone 2, the Grabber returns in spirit form, seeking revenge on Thames’s Finney. When Finney’s sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) starts having nightmares about missing kids at a lakeside youth camp, the siblings take a trip to confront their old enemy.
There are elements of lots of classic horrors here – since the last movie, the Grabber’s apparently been taking ghostly murder lessons from Freddy Krueger and holiday tips from Jason Voorhees. It feels like a very different threat to the human psychopath of the original. But Ethan Hawke’s a fantastic actor, even hidden behind a creepy mask and some gruesome prosthetic burn scars, so he should still make for a compelling villain. This is getting some solid reviews and should be a good scary addition to the Halloween cinema season.
- Black Phone 2 on IMDB
- Black Phone 2 on Rotten Tomatoes
Having been stuck working later than I’d intended, it is now quarter to midnight and I still have four films to cover, so the rest of this Roundup will be a little rushed!
Roofman
Based on a true story, Roofman is about a convicted criminal (Channing Tatum) who escapes from prison and hides out in a Toys ‘R’ Us. While there, he falls in love with Kirsten Dunst and starts to find a better life for himself – but how long will it be before his past catches up with him? Also starring Peter Dinklage, LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Ben Mendelsohn and Tony Revolori, this looks like it could be fun if perhaps a little forgettable.
- Roofman on IMDB
- Roofman on Rotten Tomatoes
Good Fortune
Good Fortune stars Keanu Reeves as a guardian angel – but not one of the big ones. He just helps people avoid getting into accidents by texting and driving. But when he meets Arj (Aziz Ansari), a struggling gig worker wishing for a better life, and Jeff (Seth Rogen), a venture capitalist with an outwardly perfect life but who’s lost touch with reality, he sees an opportunity to help them by swapping their lives around. Everything about this comedy looks wonderfully silly, from the characterisation of Reeves’s Gabriel as essentially just Keanu Reeves with some magical powers, to the obviously fake angel wings. Ansari wrote and directed as well as taking one of the lead roles. The excellent cast is fleshed out by Sandra Oh and Keke Palmer.
- Good Fortune on IMDB
- Good Fortune on Rotten Tomatoes
After the Hunt
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, After the Hunt follows three characters – Julia Roberts’ brilliant college professor Alma, Andrew Garfield’s button-pressing professor Hank, and Ayo Edebiri as Maggie, a student who idolises Alma. The power dynamic between the three shifts when Maggie confides in Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her, which Hank then denies, claiming that Maggie was cheating in her studies and wanted to get him in trouble to help get herself out of it. How does Alma decide who to side with, and what secrets of her own are threatening to bubble to the surface? It sounds like Guadagnino is playing with some provocative ideas here around the merits and pitfalls of cancel culture, and not all the reviews have been looking favourably on that choice or where he lands with the messaging. But the performances all look great – Roberts is getting a lot of praise, and Garfield and Edebiri are always a sign of something good.
- After the Hunt on IMDB
- After the Hunt on Rotten Tomatoes
Ballad of a Small Player
From Edward Berger, the Oscar winning director behind All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, Ballad of a Small Player follows Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), a gambler whose debts are finally starting to catch up with him. As he hides from the loan sharks out to get him, he encounters a woman who might be able to rescue him from his situation. Berger and Farrell have both had a lot of success recently so this is an intriguing prospect, made more intriguing by how little the trailer gives away about the plot of the film. It looks quite stylishly shot, with intense colours and shadows. The reviews haven’t been amazing though – it currently has a pretty average 55% on Rotten Tomatoes. There are still enough talented people involved that it should be worth a watch (and it’s another Netflix release so will probably be on streaming before long too).
- Ballad of a Small Player on IMDB
- Ballad of a Small Player on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
The perfect mix of director and subject – Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- One Battle After Another
- I Swear
- Good Boy – Not the scariest horror film, but I defy anyone to show me a horror that makes you care so much about its protagonist. Indy the dog is instantly appealing and gives a great performance, with no noticeable CGI enhancements that I spotted. He only needs to gently whimper and you feel more sympathy for him than you do for Laurie Strode across the entire Halloween franchise.
Trailer of the Week
Slightly cheating here as it’s an uncensored version of a trailer that was released last week, but as it ties in nicely with my One Geek Thing in our latest podcast episode I’m picking the new trailer for The Mighty Nein – the upcoming new animated show based on a DnD campaign by Critical Role. I have a lot of love for their existing series The Legend of Vox Machina. This looks like it has a slightly darker tone but retains the memorable characters and offbeat humour. And just look at that list of guest stars at the end – Nathan Fillion, Mark Strong, Lucy Liu, Anjelica Huston, Alan Cumming, Jonathan Frakes, and no less than three former Disney princesses. They join the usual Critical Role/ Vox Machina crew of professional voice actors including Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Travis Willingham and Matthew Mercer who once again reprise their lead roles from their DnD campaign. The Mighty Nein will be descending on Amazon Prime on 19 November.
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