Film reviews round-up: A Ghost Story, Annabelle: Creation, Atomic Blonde, Step, The Nut Job 2

★★★☆☆

David Leitch, 115 mins, starring: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Sofia Boutella, Bill Skarsgård, John Goodman, Toby Jones

“Sampling – is it art or is it plagiarism,” a TV presenter asks in new thriller, Atomic Blonde. This is as flashy a piece of filmmaking as you will see all year, a movie which plays like a feature-length pop promo and in which 1980s hits (New Order, The Clash, David Bowie) are heard at full blast at the most climactic moments. Its storytelling is shamelessly derivative.

The filmmakers borrow (predictably) from Bourne and Bond but also contrive a plot about defecting double agents that’s so convoluted and confusing that it would have George Smiley rubbing his glasses in bewilderment. The film is extraordinarily violent but its bloodiest scenes tend to be the most inventive ones.

Depending on your vantage point, the film can be seen as an adolescent male’s wish-fulfilment fantasy or as a feminist riposte to all those testosterone-driven spy movies which have come before it.

Whatever its absurdities, at least Atomic Blonde is never dull. Carrying on from Mad Max: Fury Road, Charlize Theron again shows her credentials as the toughest, most indomitable action heroine of her era. Here, she is battered and bruised almost from the very first moment but never loses her poise or glamour.

The film is largely set in Berlin in 1989, just before the Wall came down. As in recent TV series Deutschland 83 (which uses some of the same music), the filmmakers’ interest is less in Cold War politics than in 1980s aesthetics. They are fascinated by this pre-digital world in which youngsters have Sinead O’Connor-like haircuts and love their vinyl. Both East and West Berlin are depicted as grey and mysterious but alongside the Wall and the Stasi agents, there is plenty of hedonism, rebellion and skateboarding.

Theron, who plays MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, is first seen naked in an ice bath, drinking vodka. Her body is scarred and bruised, as if she has just gone 15 rounds of a world heavyweight bout. Only gradually, as she undergoes interrogation from her handlers at MI6 and the CIA (Toby Jones and John Goodman) do we learn just how she ended up in this condition.

Less than a fortnight before, a fellow MI6 agent was murdered in Berlin. He had in his possession a list containing names of all the field agents behind the Iron Curtain. Lorraine had been dispatched to get it back. She is as politely spoken as Honor Blackman in The Avengers but is ready to fight very dirty indeed when necessary. She’ll use anything to hand as a weapon, whether it’s the crockery or her own stiletto heels.

Director David Leitch is a former stunt coordinator who made his feature debut with the similarly harum-scarum John Wick. He is much more interested in action than he is in characterisation. The shootouts, chases and fight sequences tend to go on far longer than any of Lorraine’s debriefings or even the scenes of her short-lived lesbian affair with a beautiful French secret agent (Sofia Boutella).

There are some inventive Hitchcock-style touches here. These include the use of umbrellas to foil assassins at a high window and a tremendous hand-to-hand battle scene between Theron and an enemy agent who stubbornly refuses to die. The scene, which goes on for several minutes, is filmed in a single shot.

The camera prowls around the couple as we hear the usual mini-symphony of whacks, smashes and groans on the soundtrack. This isn’t one of those movies in which the hero or heroine can fell an opponent with a single blow. Killing off KGB and East German opponents is very heavy work indeed.

By the same token, there is something cartoonish about the indestructibility of both Theron and her opponents. You can try to drown, stab or garrotte them but they always come back for more. The violence is extreme but highly stylised and self-conscious. In one especially grim scene, blood even splatters onto the camera lens.

As Percival, the British station chief in Berlin, James McAvoy acts in the same manic, gimlet-eyed fashion that he did as the corrupt Edinburgh cop in Filth or as the madman with multiple personalities in Split. He drinks malt whisky by the gallon, keeps a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince on his shelf and goes around double crossing anyone he comes in contact with.

It’s an enjoyable performance but one that hints at the film’s underlying problem. It teeters throughout on the edge of pastiche. It is based on a graphic novel (The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart). Like other graphic novel adaptations such as Sin City and Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, it exists in a no man’s land between live action and animation.

When the relationships between the leading characters are all so superficial and everyone is deceiving everyone else, it is very hard to engage emotionally with the movie.

Director Leitch has recruited some fine character actors (among them Eddie Marsan in shifty, weasel-like form as an East German who wants to defect, John Goodman as the cynical CIA boss, exuding false bonhomie, and Toby Jones as the exasperated British spy chief.)

Nonetheless, Atomic Blonde is all surface. One of its own characters acknowledges as much late on when he asks forlornly: “Who won and what was the fucking game anyway?”

★★★★☆

David F Sandberg, 108 mins, starring: Miranda Otto, Philippa Coulthard, Stephanie Sigman, Alicia Vela-Bailey, Anthony LaPaglia, Talitha Bateman

The silences are what you dread in Annabelle: Creation. Whenever there is a lull in the storytelling, you always know that the next jolt is about to be felt. The film is very effective in giving its audience the collywobbles, which is precisely what they want from a story like this. They know that they’re being strung along and grossly manipulated but that is part of the pleasure.

This is the prequel to 2014’s Annabelle. It deliberately takes its time in cranking up. The early scenes portray a family living an idyllic life in dusty, Midwestern 1940s America. Doll maker Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia) dotes on his beautiful young daughter. They play hide and seek together. “Find me,” she writes on little scraps of paper as they track one another round the big, draughty old house.

Gary Dauberman’s script plays with our expectations, preparing us for shocks that (at first) don’t always come. The film is also surprisingly picturesque. The filmmakers pay exhaustive attention to period detail. We may be in post-war America but Mullins’ home, with all its dolls, its wooden floors and high ceilings, has a Victorian feel.

After the slow and tasteful build-up, it’s only a matter of time until the bloodletting begins in earnest. Even then, the supernatural elements are initially kept in check. Who needs an evil doll when you can splatter characters onto the road in freak car accidents?

The film’s plot doesn’t bear much scrutiny. For reasons that no one even begins to explain, 12 years after Mullins and his sickly wife (Miranda Otto) suffer a grievous bereavement, a bus full of Catholic orphan girls and a Romanian nun, Sister Charlotte (the improbably glamorous Stephanie Sigman), turns up on their doorstep.

The girls are delighted with their new home, even if they are a bit suspicious of a door that remains locked and of a dumb waiter that has a nasty habit of shooting up and down of its own accord.

As if to make up for the relative subtlety of the early scenes, director David F Sandberg soon moves into full Grand Guignol mode. It’s no longer a matter of creaking doors as he cheerily veers off in an Exorcist-like direction. The little girl most likely to become possessed is Janice (played with plenty of gumption and intelligence by Talitha Bateman).

She is a precocious young teenager who has her leg in a brace. Physically, at least, she is the weakest of the orphans. “She mustn’t go near that doll,” she is warned… advice which, of course, she completely ignores.

Once the doll is out of the cupboard and up to its murderous misdeeds, any meaningful efforts at telling a coherent story are abandoned. The only intention of the film from this point onwards is to scare us rotten. The devil doll has such powers that not even crucifixes or ancient prayers can keep it in check.

“What do you need,” one orphan naively asks. “Your soul,” comes the inevitable hissed rejoinder. Nor is the evil-doing confined to night time. Some of the eeriest scenes here take place in full daylight.

The filmmakers are very inventive in the way they use everything they can find in the old house and the farmyard, whether scarecrows, Punch and Judy figures or axes, to induce terror. Whenever matters are at their most fraught, we’ll hear the deceptively reassuring sound of country song “You are my sunshine” on the ancient record player. The film is very democratic in its bloodletting. There is no compunction about killing off even the most major characters.

Annabelle: Creation is a prequel. A little confusingly, at the end of the story, we are suddenly whisked forward to Charles Manson-era Los Angeles (the setting of the original Annabelle film). The doll is as potent in its murderous mischief in the final reel as at the beginning – so she is bound to be back. There will be plenty who will take a masochistic pleasure in seeing her return as soon as possible.

★★★☆☆

David Lowery, 92 mins, starring: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Tayla Solomon

A Ghost Story is as far away from a conventional horror film as can be imagined. Nor is it one of those romantic afterlife films like Truly Madly Deeply or Ghost in which Patrick Swayze or Alan Rickman console their beloved from beyond the grave.

It’s a supernatural story but one with a very New Age feel. It is more soothing and reflective than it is frightening. The ghost is dressed in best Casper fashion in a white sheet with space for eyes cut in it.

Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play C and M, young lovers living in a one-storey suburban home. He dies in a car accident. (It’s typical of writer-director David Lowery’s pared down style that the accident is conveyed in a single shot of Affleck slumped in the driver’s seat seen through a cracked windscreen.) C comes back from the dead. We see him rise in his white sheet and wander unseen by humans through the hospital. He then takes up guard at his old home.

One of the stranger scenes involves the grief-wracked M sitting on the kitchen floor and eating a pie. Lowery holds the shot of her for a small eternity. The ghost is standing in the corner watching. Having demolished the entire pie, M rushes off to throw up.

There are occasional flashbacks to C and M’s life together. He was a musician. We see her with her headphones on, listening to his compositions. We have to take it on trust that it actually is Casey Affleck beneath the sheet.

In dryly comic scenes, the ghost communicates with another lost soul in the neighbouring house, also dressed Casper-style, who is waiting for someone without knowing whether he/she will ever arrive. When M brings a man to the house, the ghost gets jealous and uses his poltergeist-like powers to make the electricity flicker and the books fall off the shelves.

The film was made on a very small budget and shot in old fashioned academy ratio. This gives the action a boxed-in quality. The ghost stands guard in the house, seemingly without the ability ever to leave or to accept his plight. Years pass. Different occupants move into the house. Still, he stays there, unseen by anyone.

The key moment here is a speech delivered impromptu at a party by a guest (played by musician Will Oldham). He treats everyone to his thoughts on life, time and the universe, what Beethoven was striving for in his Ninth Symphony and why we all “do what we can to endure”.

Director Lowery also made Pete’s Dragon for Disney but A Ghost Story is in a very different register. Its oblique storytelling style takes quite some getting used to. Very little overtly dramatic happens here at all.

The film, though, gradually works its spell. Lowery has an eye for a lyrical image of a ghost walking across the fields – and for a surrealistic one of the white ghoul haunting the corridors of a high rise office block.

He throws in flashbacks and flash forwards. There’s one bizarre scene featuring settlers who look like they’re from Little House on the Prairie who once set up their campfire on the site of the ghost’s old home.

At first, A Ghost Story seems very affected. The stillness and quietness of the filmmaking style is jarring but becomes increasingly beguiling. This is a film with its own gentle logic. It’s a quiet meditation on life, love, bereavement and the difficulty of letting go – a supernatural story that wouldn’t even frighten a mouse.

★★★☆☆

Amanda Lipitz, 84 mins, featuring: Blessin Giraldo, Cori Grainger

The newsreel footage used at the beginning of Amanda Lipitz’s documentary Step is harrowing. In Baltimore, at the time in which the film is set, relations between the police and the black community have broken down after the death of the 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody.

Lipitz’s subject is an all girls’ high-school “step” team. Its members are students at Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women. If they can fulfil the school’s ambitions for them and make it to college, these teenage dancers will be able to build careers for themselves. They’re nearly all from impoverished backgrounds. Their families have endured racism and lack of opportunity.

The young women, nicknamed the “lethal ladies of Baltimore”, regard step dancing as a perfect means for expressing themselves while venting their frustrations. It is “empowering” and a way of “making music with their bodies”. The dancing, though, is only a small part of the story here.

Lipitz’s real focus is on how the women, who are coming of age, are coping with the academic demands of the school. If their grade point averages fall or they fail their exams, they won’t get second chances. For some of them, it is not just a case of there being no food in the refrigerator – they don’t even have a refrigerator.

This is a rousing affair, albeit one whose storytelling is just a little manipulative. Lipitz shoots much of the film in fly-on-the-wall fashion. Somehow, she always seems to be on hand at the most climactic moments, as the women argue with their boyfriends or their mothers or are told off by senior school staff when their academic results fall.

The most charismatic figure here, the Step captain Blessin Giraldo, is also the most troubled and rebellious. There are days that she hasn’t even turned up at school. She risks throwing everything away.

The dancers are preparing for the Bowie State step competition, an event at which the school has previously had a lamentable record. Their coach Gari becomes increasingly frustrated that they’re missing rehearsals, arguing among themselves and not reaching the standards they need to have any chance of winning.

Step may be a documentary but it has the same trajectory as countless feelgood fiction films. We hope that the women will overcome adversity and that they’ll succeed not only at Bowie but in life in general. It’s startling just how expensive college education is in America. These women don’t have the means to pay for it. They need scholarships, support and loans.

Lipitz is helped by the liveliness, intelligence and humour of her protagonists. They all have very different personalities. They argue. They form cliques. Nonetheless, they’re all very open on camera. One of the most impressive aspects here is the sensitive and tactful manner in which the director interacts with the dancers’ families. The dancers’ mothers are desperate for their daughters to benefit from the opportunities they themselves were never given. Several had children at a very young age. They have had to cope with depression and poverty. Lipitz never patronises them and manages to get them to speak very frankly about their own problems as well as their ambitions for their kids.

With her instincts as a storyteller, Lipitz emphasises the grimmer elements so that the pay-off, when the women overcome the obstacles in front of them, is all the more gratifying. It’s hard not to be a little sceptical about just how conveniently everything finally seems to fall into place but Step is an immensely likeable and optimistic film – one in which you can’t help but root for the dancers as they defy everyone who expects them to fail.

★☆☆☆☆

Cal Brunker, 91 mins, voiced by: Will Arnett, Katherine Heigl, Maya Rudolph, Bobby Moynihan, Gabriel Iglesias, Jeff Dunham

The pests are back in this none too ingratiating sequel to the 2014 animated feature. The purple-coated Surly (voiced by Will Arnett) is still leading the squirrels but they’ve become lazy, spoilt and fat. Rather than gathering nuts in the park and storing them for winter, they’ve been relying on supplies they’ve found in an abandoned “Nut Shop”.

The obese and creepy mayor (Bobby Moynihan) has plans to turn their park into a gigantic fairground. When the “Nut Shop” explodes, the little bushy-tailed rodents are faced with starvation. Sully’s attempts to find popcorn and doughnuts come to nothing and he makes enemies with Mr Feng (Jackie Chan), the cute looking but very vicious leader of the city’s Kung-Fu-kicking street mice. When Feng and his army go on the warpath, the filmmakers throw in the predictable (terrible) puns about “weapons of mouse destruction”.

As any summary of the plot might suggest, The Nut Job 2 is flimsy in the extreme. Its best characters are its most grotesque ones. The corpulent mayor has his moments, basking in his own venality and corruption. His even fatter, pigtailed, catapult-wielding daughter Isabella is enjoyably brattish.

It’s hard not to feel at least a measure of sympathy for the mayor’s slobbering bulldog Frankie (Bobby Cannavale) as he is tormented by Isabella. Frankie falls in love with little pug Precious (Maya Rudolph) and tries to express his affection for her in the only way he knows, namely by regurgitating food for her to eat.

It’s not at all clear why we need another Nut Job. The filmmakers didn’t crack it first time round and haven’t done any better on the second attempt. Surely it’s time now to knock these animated rodents on the head.