Review: Oblivion, Warm Bodies, Barbara, Performance, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and The Croods

Last time we saw Tom Cruise he was known as Jack Reacher. Now, in Oblivion, his name is Jack Harper. What range! What diversity! You’d hardly recog­nise him. Harper is a main­ten­ance guy, repair­ing the drones that pro­tect giant machines that suck Earth’s oceans up to an enorm­ous space sta­tion orbit­ing above us, a space sta­tion that is going to take the few remain­ing sur­viv­ors of our pyrrhic vic­tory over invad­ing ali­ens on a final jour­ney away from a dev­ast­ated plan­et to a new life on Titan.

Assisting Mr. Cruise with his mech­an­ic­al defence duties is Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), life and work part­ner, keep­ing him in con­tact with the super­visors float­ing above them and keep­ing an eye on the strag­gling rem­nants of the ali­ens who tried to con­quer us. Traditional gender roles are very much still intact in the future – even though the Moon isn’t – and Ms. Riseborough’s char­ac­ter seems con­tent to nev­er leave the spot­less mod­ern kit­chen while Cruise gets his hands dirty on the sur­face. Neither of them seem too bothered by the fact that they had their memor­ies wiped six years pre­vi­ously, although he has been hav­ing some strange dreams recently.

Oblivion has sev­er­al strengths, not­ably Joseph (Tron) Kosinski’s exe­cu­tion of the post-apocalyptic look of the thing – try as I might I nev­er got the sense that all of this was being per­formed in front of giant green screens. Morgan Freeman is always good value – though you can almost see him count­ing his pay pack­et behind his mir­ror shades – and Riseborough is a prop­er act­or as we know from little British films like Brighton Rock and Shadow Dancer.

For film­go­ers of a cer­tain age, though, the main weak­nesses of Oblivion are that we have seen it all before. Imagine if you took some blank index cards, wrote a mem­or­able sci-fi ele­ment on each one – “open the pod bay door HAL”; ruined NYC land­marks bur­ied in sand; lone main­ten­ance guy col­lect­ing mem­or­ab­il­ia of a past epoch; big black ali­en creatures with what look like dread­locks; canyon dog­fights – and threw them all in the air, the ones that land face up might make you a cool film. When they all land face up, you get Oblivion.

But, as I’ve said before in a dif­fer­ent con­text, every gen­er­a­tion needs its own Jane Eyre. You can’t make the kids watch clas­sic old movies but you can tempt them to a glossy rehash like this. It’s the eco­nomy, stu­pid. It’s just not very interesting.

Big les­son from this weekend’s movie-going is that FM-friendly 70s rock vinyl will make a big comeback after the apo­ca­lypse. Cruise’s col­lec­tion fea­tures A Whiter Shade of Pale (1967) and teen­age zom­bie “R” (Nicholas Hoult) in Warm Bodies grooves to scav­enged Dylan and Springsteen LPs. If Mr. Bieber and Ms. Perry really want some longev­ity in their careers, vinyl would appear to be the way to go.

I’m quite a fan of the ori­gin­al nov­el that Warm Bodies is based on and can report that the film main­tains the off­beat voice of the nar­rat­or. Also, thank­fully, it returns the zom­bie movie to the world of allegory and meta­phor and the anti­cip­ated viol­ence and gore is toned down so far it might as well be switched off entirely. Hoult’s long dead “R” dis­cov­ers some flick­er­ings of a heart­beat when he meets – and then res­cues – pretty Julie (Teresa Palmer) but not before he devours her boy­friend. Is it pos­sible that a hint of romance might get his curse reversed? It’s a sat­is­fy­ing film that shows writer/director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness, 50/50) to be a name worth look­ing out for.

Christian Petzold’s Barbara is oft-compared with anoth­er great film about life in East Germany, The Lives of Others, but deserves to stand on its own two feet. Nina Hoss plays the title char­ac­ter, a doc­tor sent to the provinces as pun­ish­ment for mix­ing with the wrong crowd. Wary of inform­ers every­where, she keeps her­self to her­self but can’t help being drawn in to the human dra­mas around her – risk­ing her own free­dom and the res­ist­ance she sup­ports. As a show­case for the bril­liant Hoss, it can’t be faulted.

Several years ago I went to a string quar­tet con­cert fea­tur­ing the legendary Pinchas Zukerman. A‑maz-ing. New favour­ite thing. After I raved for a bit, the pub­li­cist said to me, “it’s not all as good as that, you know.” And I haven’t been back. Performance (aka A Late Quartet) reminded me of that gig – the strange­ness and form­al­ity of the envir­on­ment, the con­cen­tra­tion, the detail.

In Yaron Zilberman’s film, novices like myself can get a sense of the focus and ded­ic­a­tion required to main­tain a clas­sic­al music career at the highest level as the fic­tion­al Fugue Quartet deals with the impend­ing retire­ment of cel­list Christopher Walken and the rela­tion­ship dif­fi­culties of the 2^nd viol­in­ist and cel­list – played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener respectively.

This is a film about how dif­fi­cult it is to remain in har­mony, even when har­mony is your pro­fes­sion. The strands of love that bind us togeth­er – par­ents and chil­dren, hus­bands and wives, teach­ers and stu­dents – are con­tinu­ally knot­ting and unrav­el­ling, trip­ping us up. It’s also nice to be reminded how beau­ti­ful a man Walken is when he’s not play­ing kooks and weirdos.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger isn’t so much a ser­i­ous Woody Allen film as a funny one without any jokes. An ensemble of fine act­ors (includ­ing Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts and Antonio Banderas) stumble through a series of scenes with only a tenu­ous con­nec­tion to each oth­er. The greatest achieve­ment from all of this amaz­ing tal­ent is that – for the most part – they remem­ber all the words. Better that we nev­er talk of it again, pre­tend you don’t see it when you’re brows­ing IMDb.

I’ve almost imme­di­ately erased Scary Movie 5 from my own memory so those scars should heal reas­on­ably well, but when the worst movie fran­chise in the world is par­od­ied by the second worst, where can I hide? Desperately unfunny from begin­ning to end – and chooses oddly antique films to par­ody like Inception and Black Swan – SM5 made me nos­tal­gic for Identity Thief. That bad.

It looks like The Croods will have the school hol­i­day anim­ated fam­ily movie slot to itself and should do good busi­ness. It’s from the Kung Fu Panda/Madagascar stable rather than Pixar but none the worse for that. Nicolas Cage is a neander­th­al fath­er try­ing to pro­tect his brood from the dangers of a stone age world. Daughter Emma Stone wants inde­pend­ence and finds it when she meets Ryan Reynolds’ Guy on an unli­censed exped­i­tion out of the cave. In evol­u­tion­ary terms he’s the next big thing and he intro­duces the whole fam­ily to the dangers and excite­ment of “out­side”.

I’ve chosen to men­tion the cast by act­or rather than char­ac­ter name as their work through­out is exem­plary. The Croods deliv­ers fun to all audi­ence seg­ments and kept the mob I was with enter­tained through­out – no mat­ter what age they star­ted out as.