Oh Ridley. You’ve gone and done it again. Why oh why do you have to be so darn inconsistent? You’re like that Katy Perry song – hot then cold, yes then no. For every Alien there is a Prometheus. For every Blade Runner there is a GI Jane. For every Gladiator there is an Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Actually that’s perhaps a little unfair. After all, Kingdom of Heaven was a mess in its shorter cut, but the three hour version transformed it into a near masterpiece. Perhaps that will be true of the rumoured full four hour version of this film, but I have my doubts. In the meantime, this pared down cut is wildly uneven, to say the least.

Let’s start with what’s good. Obviously, this being a Ridley Scott film everything looks amazing. Sweeping vistas of Egyptian cities, slave pits, deserts, parting seas, thundering skies and so on are a joy to the retina. But stunning cinematography, art direction, production design and visual effects alone do not make a great film.

The story of Moses freeing the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt with a little help from the Almighty has been filmed many times. It’s an immense undertaking for any screenwriter or director, but because it is one of the greatest stories of all time, completely screwing it up is actually something that requires skill. At times it does feel like someone has had a good try at just that – certainly in the edit suite, given how lumpy and rushed the film often feels. Then again the screenplay is to blame too, with its misguided attempt at painting Moses as someone whose beliefs might just be the delusional product of a knock on the head. The resultant recurring visions of God manifested as a boy didn’t bother me in terms of departing from the text, but it does mean the subsequent plagues and miracles, although undeniably impressive, have a nagging sense of could-be-a-coincidence to them. Denying God a proper, unambiguous place in this story means it lacks catharsis, and above all makes it dramatically unsatisfying. Nowhere is this more evident than the Red Sea sequence, in which Ridley seems to be – if you’ll forgive me – all at sea. He doesn’t seem to know quite how to play the sequence. One minute he’s pulling out the stops to make it spectacular, then he appears to gets cold feet and almost feels as though he’s apologising for how spectacular it is, in spite of the more ridiculous extra-Biblical moments. What’s more, there is no pillar of fire stopping the Egyptian army – one of my favourite parts of the entire story.

Don’t misunderstand me – as a Christian I have no problem with challenging or controversial artistic licence. Unlike some of my fellow believers I completely get that a film is not a theological position or a sermon. But messing with any source text, Biblical or otherwise, is only permissible if the result works as a film. Where I admired Darren Aronofsky’s agreeably bonkers take on Noah, Ridley Scott’s take on Moses is nowhere near as fun as the theatrics of Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, or better still The Prince of Egypt, my favourite screen version of this story.

There is some A-list acting talent on show here, but rarely A-list acting. Best of the bunch is Joel Edgerton as Ramses, who injects a good dose of hubris into proceedings with his delusional ranting about being a god. In spite of Ramses’ monstrous oppression, Edgerton makes it impossible not to feel sorry for him when the plague on the firstborn strikes. Elsewhere, Christian Bale provides a Biblical variation of his routine growl, Ben Kingsley contributes an occasional blip of dramatic fire, but Sigourney Weaver and Tara Fitzgerald are completely wasted. Ben Mendelsohn’s corrupt Viceroy provides the only brief moment of light relief in a terribly, terribly sombre and serious film.

In the end, Exodus: Gods and Kings rarely catches fire either as spectacle or as a gripping dramatic narrative. A well-meaning but misguided attempt at making God ambiguous dampens what should be a cracking tale of divine intervention. Sorry Ridley, but once again you blew it.

Simon Dillon, December 2014.

2014 has proved an exceptionally difficult year to select just ten best films from. I considered a more gimmicky list to expand the field (eg 14 best films of 2014), but in the end decided to limit myself to only my absolute favourites. But I must make honourable mention of a few – The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ida, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Belle, The Wind Rises, The Lego Movie, The Imitation Game, Night Will Fall, Two Days, One Night and Captain America: The Winter Soldier – that narrowly missed out.

Also – and I don’t know if this says something about my current state of mind or the kind of year I’ve had – this list contains more dark entries than usual. Don’t worry too much though, as there are also one or two family friendly choices.

Here then, is the countdown:

10. Inside Llewyn Davis – The latest from the Coen Brothers was cruelly overlooked during awards season. A real shame, as Oscar Isaac delivers a superb, darkly comic performance as a down-on-his-luck folk singer with the fortunes of Sisyphus.

Best Bit – The “Please Mr Kennedy” music recording session. Hilarious.

9. 12 Years a Slave – Gruelling, brutal and unrelenting, Steven McQueen’s Oscar winning slave drama proved an essential, hugely powerful experience. Tremendous performances all round but especially from Lupita Nyong’o.

Best bit – “Best” is an unfortunate term to use here, but for sheer unflinching nerve in depicting what slaves actually had to endure in the Deep South, I’ve got to go with the excruciating near lynching, where Chiwetel Ejiofor dangles whilst other slaves continue their work in the background desensitised and powerless.

8. Boyhood – Richard Linklater’s bold experimental drama might be entitled Boyhood, but it’s just as much about motherhood, fatherhood, siblings, friendships and early romantic relationships. Ellar Coltrane is a revelation as the young Mason in a leading performance filmed over several summers.

Best Bit – Patricia Arquette’s powerhouse “I just thought there would be more” speech, directly followed by the montage of Mason leaving for college to the strains of Hero by Family of the Year. A highly emotional one-two punch.

7. Calvary – Michael McDonaugh follows The Guard with a superb, thought-provoking drama shot through with a similar dark humour. Brendan Gleeson is absolutely superb in the lead as a Catholic priest threatened with death by a sexually abused parishioner.

Best Bit – That opening confession. I don’t think I’ve ever heard quite such a shocked intake of breath from an audience at an opening line.

6. Paddington – The best all-round family film of the year adapts Michael Bond’s beloved books with wit, whimsy, slapstick, thrills and tears with a just dash of social satire (a swipe at anti-immigration nastiness). Ben Whishaw gives a brilliant vocal performance alongside a superb supporting cast.

Best Bit – The chase with the pickpocket; a fantastic, laugh-out-loud slapstick set piece.

5. Interstellar – Christopher Nolan’s flawed, mind-bending but beautiful and brilliant science fiction epic, chronicling the search for a new planet for the human race to settle following an ecological disaster.

Best Bit – Matthew McConaughey views over 20 years of missed video messages after a brief spot of planetary explanation. A genuine emotional sucker punch.

4. Nightcrawler – Jake Gyllenhaal excels as a Travis Bickle-esque purveyor of lurid news footage. A blackly comic, brilliantly scathing satire of both a fearmongering US news media and modern corporate culture.

Best Bit – Gyllenhaal lectures his hapless assistant on key skills and performance reviews whilst tampering with the scene of an accident to get a better shot. Dark but hilarious.

3. Gone Girl – David Fincher’s superb thriller features a potentially Oscar winning, career best performance from Rosamund Pike. Adapting her own novel, Gillian Flynn delivers an incisive, darkly comic dissection of a marriage in meltdown.

Best Bit – The mid-point revelation, including the infamous “cool girl” speech. Very uncomfortable viewing, for all the right reasons.

2. The Babadook – Debut director Jennifer Kent helms the best horror film of the decade to date, crafting a movie that manages to be both deeply terrifying and deeply moving. No mean feat.

Best Bit – Two words: the ceiling. Nightmares for weeks guaranteed.

1. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies – Once again Middle-earth proves as irresistible as the One Ring. I know some viewers didn’t respond as well to Peter Jackson’s second Middle-earth adaptation, but I have enjoyed them immensely – enough to put this at the number one spot for the third year running.

Best Bit – Thorin’s farewell to Bilbo, which proved every bit as poignant and heartbreaking as it is in the book.

So that’s it for another year, although as ever one could argue this list is a little premature as I have yet to see Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, Exodus: Gods and Kings (Ridley, don’t let me down again – I’m still reeling from Prometheus), and Tim Burton’s new film, Big Eyes, all of which are out on Boxing Day. If any of these merits a place on the above list, I will update it.

2015 could be a potentially cracking year for big budget movies, with the long awaited Jupiter Ascending finally hitting screens this February. From then one mega-blockbuster will follow another, as Avengers: Age of Ultron, Antman, Jurassic World, Pan, Pixar’s Inside Out, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, the new James Bond film Spectre, Terminator: Genisys and Star Wars: The Force Awakens all compete for our attention.

Before that plenty of heavyweight potential awards fare is still to be released, including The Theory of Everything, Foxcatcher, A Most Violent Year and Inherent Vice. In fact, 2015’s best films roster could prove an even tougher exercise than this year’s proved. And with that thought, it only remains for me to wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

Simon Dillon, December 2014.

I know there has been criticism in certain quarters regarding Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit. Yes, it could be argued that the films need not have been split into three. Yet I have not had the same problem with the Hobbit films as I had with, say, the last Hunger Games film. To me at least, each of the three has felt like a complete movie, even though each has also been part of an ongoing saga. At a comparatively trim 144 minutes, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the shortest in the series, and for me the best.

The film opens exactly where the last left off, with the dragon Smaug’s spectacular assault on Laketown. Those familiar with the book will know what follows, with Bard’s heroics leading to a tense feud with Elves, Dwarfs and Men, over exactly who has a claim on the treasure of the Lonely Mountain. Meanwhile, a huge army of orcs, giant bats, trolls and other infernal creatures are secretly marching on the mountain. In the middle of all this, Bilbo Baggins finds himself faced with a difficult choice in the face of Thorin’s descent into greed and madness.

Thorin here is the key character, and Richard Armitage plays him brilliantly. Even more brilliant is Martin Freeman, who simply owns the part of Bilbo despite the fact that at times he appears sidelined in his own story. The rest of the cast – Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, Luke Evans’s Bard, Lee Pace’s Thranduil, Evangeline Lilly’s Tauriel and so on – are all very good. Even Billy Connolly turns up, playing Thorin’s cousin Dain, but also kind of playing himself. And yes, Orlando Bloom’s Legolas performs a series of even more ridiculous stunts. Incidentally, Christopher Lee’s whirling dervish duel with the Ringwraiths at Dol Guldur is another bonus, and Cate Blanchett gets to do scary Galadriel once again, as (SPOILER WARNING) the White Council face down the Necromancer aka Sauron (Benedict Cumberbatch, who also voices Smaug), banishing him to Mordor and thus setting up The Lord of the Rings.

Everything one has come to expect from Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth epics is present and correct, including spectacular New Zealand locations and astonishing special effects by the bucketload. Howard Shore’s music is tremendous, and Billy Boyd song The Last Goodbye, which plays over the end credits, brings the whole saga to an appropriately bittersweet close.

There is plenty of good dramatic meat to chew on too, with Tolkien’s study of the corrupting power of greed an ever present theme. Even more important from a moral/spiritual perspective is the central relationship between Bilbo and Thorin. SPOILER WARNING: Bilbo acts as a true friend by trying to save Thorin from what he has become blinded to, and like the novel this provides the film with it’s most powerful, tragic and moving scene. Essentially the moral of The Hobbit can be summed up in Thorin’s final words: “If more people valued home over gold the world would be a merrier place”.

I must confess I am intrigued to see an extended cut, since a number of shots and sequences glimpsed in the trailer were not present. But that isn’t to say the film feels as if anything is missing. All the main elements from The Hobbit are covered, and indeed this film sticks closer to Tolkien’s original text than the previous two. In short, The Battle of the Five Armies is a fully satisfying conclusion to a series of films that – for me at least – are every bit as funny, thrilling, relevant and ultimately heartbreaking as the book.

If you fancy a spare, grim slab of stark monochrome minimalism to cut through the impending Christmas cheer, look no further than Ida, the new film from Polish director Pawel Pawlikoswki.

Actually, I’m not sure if it’s still playing everywhere as I’ve only just caught up with it at our local arts centre, but in any event, Ida is the superbly acted and directed story of the eponymous Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), a novitiate in 1960s Poland. Having been brought up by nuns, Ida is informed by the Mother Superior that she must visit her only living relative, her aunt Anna (Agata Kulesza), before taking her vows. Anna then reveals that Ida is in fact Jewish, and was secretly taken in by the nuns as a baby during World War II.

What follows is something of an odd couple journey for aunt and niece to discover the truth about Ida’s family, and to locate where her parents lie buried. Locals are questioned, and in turn casual anti-Semitism manifests itself – the same anti-Semitism that no doubt caused some Poles to betray their Jewish neighbours to the Nazis. Amid this quest Ida slowly, subtly begins to question her desire to become a nun, though she can barely even admit as much to herself. At the same time, Anna has her own private and deeply tragic reason for wanting answers about Ida’s past.

This is a quiet, thoughtful and staggeringly beautiful film. The film is shot in unfussy black and white 1:33 Academy aspect ratio, and as such Pawlikowski makes tremendous use of height as well as width. He also frames several close-ups with the heads in the lower part of the frame, creating a profound sense of isolation and loneliness. Such deliberately paced, understated miserablism will not appeal to all but I really, really liked this film, which, at a mere 80 minutes, certainly doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

On a wider scale, behind the tragedy of Ida’s family looms the greater tragedy of a nation decimated by one dictatorship (the Nazis), only to end up in the grip of another (Soviet Communism), before finally emerging in more recent years to an increasingly uncertain future. Ultimately however, what lingers in the consciousness even more than the bigger political picture, or even the magnificent cinematography, are the performances – particularly from Agata Trzebuchowska. As Ida she is subtle but completely brilliant, conveying every emotion with phenomenal nuance and realism. It is her haunting face you will remember long after the end credits roll.

The shadow of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre looms heavily over Black Sea – a fine piece of genre filmmaking that makes an efficient fist of the whole heist-crew-seek-gold-then-turn-on-each-other routine. There are other influences obviously, but Sierra Madre remains the key text director Kevin Macdonald’s film borrows from. Yet Macdonald also brings enough of his own fresh spin on the well-worn tale to engage and grip the viewer, delivering a relevant and timely morality tale with plenty of suspense and thrills.

Recently laid off salvage captain Robinson (Jude Law with a slightly questionable Scottish accent), puts together a crew to try and locate a sunken Nazi U-boat laden with gold bullion deep in the Caspian Sea. His crew include various stock characters; for instance wet-behind-the-ears Tobin (Bobby Schofield) and the obligatory psycho Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn). Out of necessity, Robinson is forced to charter a very old, rusty Russian submarine, which complicates matters because of the need for (mostly) non-English speaking Russians amongst the crew. The Russians are immediately targets of hostility from the Brits who begin to grumble over Robinson’s insistence on equal shares of the loot.

It doesn’t take long for disgruntlement to escalate into greed, sabotage and murder, and Robinson adopts an increasingly Ahab/William Bligh attitude to proceedings. Tension, twists and turns ensue, and claustrophobic viewers in particular will find their pulses racing at some of the nerve-shredding set pieces.

In spite of the clichés this is terrific stuff – largely thanks to committed performances, Macdonald’s deft helming and Dennis Kelly’s screenplay, which takes the time to add a modicum of social comment on recent economic times. Yet although Robinson and his crew are victims of the recession, modernisation and heartless corporate management (the opening scene where the seasoned Robinson is laid off by some early twenty-something corporate lackey is particularly telling), ultimately Robinson only has himself to blame for neglecting what is really important in life. The film provides a suitably sobering reminder to value spouses, children and family above one’s career, before it is too late.