White Girl, Suicide Squad, and The Shallows: Your Week In Film (December 5-11)

Gone Girl: The excellent Morgan Saylor plays naïve and privileged Leah

Perhaps I'm becoming a prude in my old age but the first thing to strike me about White Girl (Netflix, available now) WWW was the startling regularity and seeming gratuitousness of its sex scenes. Morgan Saylor - the very promising young actress who plays Leah, the film's sort-of protagonist - seems to spend most of her time 'on the job' or at least partially naked (that's when she isn't snorting industrial amounts of cocaine). Leah reveals her breasts like the rest of us scratch our noses or fiddle with our hair - frequently. It's all very 'male-gazey', too, which is a surprise because White Girl is actually written and directed by a woman, Elizabeth Wood.

I'm going to give Wood the benefit of the doubt, though, because her movie is very deliberately one in which everything is permanently turned up to 11 and hyper-intense. An innocent bit of kissing and canoodling, or under-the-blankets fumbling, simply wouldn't fit White Girl's hedonistic 'have a good time, all the time and screw the consequences' ethos.

Based on Wood's real-life experiences, the film sees pretty, entitled New York college student Leah getting in well over her head when she begins a relationship with Blue (Brian Marc), the small-time Puerto Rican coke dealer who hangs out with his mates on the street where she lives. Interning at some awful hipster magazine over the summer, Leah discovers she can hook up Blue with a more affluent clientele for his produce but, when he is busted by an undercover cop and faces a long-stretch in prison, she resolves to do whatever it takes to free him.

Check your hedonism: White Girl turns it up to 11

White Girl is a raw, breathless piece of work that doesn't stop still for a moment, Wood's wandering camera perfectly capturing the scuzziness of big city life and the euphoric mania of the NYC club scene. The movie belongs to Saylor, though, and hers is a brave performance - not just because she spends a lot of it in various states of undress but because Leah often isn't terribly sympathetic. Her philosophy is simple: there's no problem that can't be solved by sex, drugs or cold, hard cash. As a result she's reckless, manipulative and frequently downright foolish.

Wood invites you to dislike her protagonist pretty much from the get-go (even White Girl's title carries a hint of contempt). Leah is someone from the American Midwest who has clearly led a fairly cossetted life (her mum still sends her care packages) and just dives headfirst into every bit of craziness on offer once she reaches New York - fucking and drugging like there's no tomorrow. Unfortunately, being young, silly and privileged, she doesn't realise her actions can have dire consequences for those around her (consequences far worse than she would ever have to suffer). There are times when you can't help but feel sorry for her and you'd have to be incredibly cruel or an arch misogynist to believe Leah is entirely the architect of her own troubles. But Wood never lets her character off the hook, even when you think maybe she should, just for a little bit.

The stuff I liked about Suicide Squad (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) W½ can be dealt with in short order: Margot Robbie, Will Smith, Viola Davis and Jared Leto, the latter adding much needed danger and unpredictability to proceedings every time his Joker (Sid Vicious channelling Al Capone) put in an appearance. The problem with the rest of David Ayer's film is that it's a bog-standard s̶u̶p̶e̶r̶h̶e̶r̶o̶ super-villain flick when its trailers promised something spikier and cooler. I expected punk rock and got a pantomime.

Girl v Shark thriller The Shallows (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WW isn't a whole lot better. Blake Lively is depressed medical-student-cum-surfer Nancy, catching some waves at a secret beach in Mexico, following the death of her beloved mother. A few hundred yards from shore she's attacked by a great white shark (it's never a hammerhead or one of those ones with the really big mouths, is it?) and not only badly injured but stranded too. Can she make it back to dry land? Can she summon help? It's a smart and simple set-up and everything initially goes rather swimmingly (boom-tish!).

Unfortunately, the entire enterprise gets rather soggy and starts to sink when we come face to fin with the shark itself, an unconvincing CGI creation that you never believe is real, even for a moment. Still, at least it wasn't in a tornado or possessed by the devil.

Lacks bite: Blake Lively in The Shallows

Pete's Dragon (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WWW sees an altogether more life-affirming coming together of human and beast. This charming remake of Disney's 1977 live action/animation adventure sees five-year-old Pete adopted by a ruddy great dragon – who he names Elliot – after his parents die in a car crash and he, the wreck's only survivor, gets lost in the woods. Kid and creature remain undiscovered within the forest's dense canopy for six years until a logging operation brings them into contact with humanity – some kind (Bryce Dallas Howard's forest ranger, and her dad Robert Redford, who'd encountered the dragon many years before), some with a villainous glint in their eye (ruthless logger Karl Urban).

The plot's ebbs and flows are fairly predictable (boy gets dragon, boy loses dragon, rinse and repeat) but David Lowery's film is a real treat despite that. It's sweet and sentimental but never cloyingly so – simple, straightforward, and refreshingly old fashioned too. Despite the presence of a colossal mythical beast and a seat-of-your-pants final act, this is a small story – one that's really about family, friendship and imagination.

Mud glorious mud: Aleksey German's Hard To Be A God 

In my round-up of 2015, I named Hard To Be A God (MUBI, from today) WWW as the maddest film of the year and I not only stand fully behind that assessment but am happy to extend it into this year too. Late Russian director Aleksey German's magnum opus is set on an alien planet stuck literally in the Dark Ages. A group of Earth scientists are present to study the natives but are clearly becoming slowly but surely assimilated. Cue three hours of sex, mud, brutality, spit, mud, blood, shit, mud and piss. It's an extraordinary film in many ways and a real cinematic experience (even on the small screen), but it's also an exercise in endurance. Did I mention the mud?

Finally, there's Midnight Special (Sky Cinema Premiere, 14:15 and 20:00, from Friday) WW, Jeff Nichols' Spielbergian sci-fi about a young boy with superhuman powers. The film starts strongly enough but rather falls apart in its final act. Michael Shannon's as watchable as ever though and, in the spirit of the season, I'm happy to forgive its flaws and give it another go.  

Ratings

WWWW - Wonderful

WWW - Worthwhile

WW - Watchable

W - Woeful

The Last 5 Films I've Seen

Wild, wild west: the excellent Meek's Cutoff

There's no Your Week In Film column this time, please accept some reviews in its place. Normal service should be resumed next week...

Every week I watch a bunch of movies then write about five of them here. Some are films I've never seen before, some are old favourites I'm watching for the umpteenth time, others are pictures I've maybe seen once but haven't been entirely convinced by. From Buñuel to Bay, I'm happy to give anything a chance...

1. Meek's Cutoff (2010): The BBC's recent Top 100 films of the 21st Century poll was fascinating and mostly on the money, I think, but there were of course a few omissions that genuinely had me tearing out my hair. If Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive was the most egregious oversight, Kelly Reichardt's fantastic alt-western wasn't far behind. Set in 1845 and based on a real incident, it follows three families as they journey across a vast desert on the notoriously arduous Oregon Trail. Their guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a self-aggrandising frontiersman full of tall stories, gets them hopelessly lost and a trek which should have taken a fortnight suddenly becomes five weeks with no end in sight. The group, which also includes characters played by Michelle Williams, Shirley Henderson and Paul Dano, soon become more desperate – hungry, thirsty, exhausted, dirty, depressed and frightened for their lives. They capture a Native American, with whom they can barely communicate, and hope he'll lead them to water rather than into a trap. Meek's Cutoff is one of those films that takes a while to bring you under its spell but, keep watching, and it will utterly beguile you. Reichardt's a terrific storyteller and she really takes her time laying out her characters' predicament here in painstaking detail. There's little melodrama – it just concentrates on the slow but ceaseless erosion of the families' hope: the incessant sun on their backs, coupled with the trudge across pitiless terrain, doesn't just drain their energy, it takes their personality and humanity from them too. They bicker about whether to kill the Native American, discuss whether Meek has deliberately led them astray and start taking foolish risks. Filmed in the old square academy ratio to really emphasise the nature of their dilemma (trapped in a wide-open space – oh, the irony!), this is a masterful slow-burn affair which shows you the dirt under its protagonists' fingernails and the sweat on their brows. The old west has rarely seemed so alien or unforgiving. Rating: WWWW

All is lost: Reichardt's old west is an unforgiving place

2. Dheepan (2015): Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust And Bone) returns with an odd but effective tale of three Sri Lankan immigrants fleeing the country's civil war to France. The trio (including former Tamil Tiger soldier Dheepan) pose as a family – despite barely knowing each other – but quickly discover their past isn't so easy to forget and discard. The film starts off as a serious arthouse drama keen to explore the impact of war and dislocation on our trio as they struggle to make ends meet in their new adopted country. But, late on, it morphs into something only a hop, skip and a jump away from Taken or Death Wish. The sudden gear change – provoked when Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) clashes with drug dealers on the rundown estate where he lives and works – is jarring, disorienting and I was unsure of its message: the all-pervasiveness of violence and conflict perhaps or, more simply, never mess with a pissed-off Tamil Tiger. However, the most baffling thing about Audiard's enjoyable but flawed work remains how it ever won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes over the far superior Son Of Saul. Rating: WWW

A history of violence: Dheepan boasts a brutal final act

3. The Commune (2016): With his fellow Dane, Lars Von Trier, director Thomas Vinterberg founded the influential and gratifyingly punk-rock Dogme 95 movement, which gave the world the likes of Festen and The Idiots. Since then Vinterberg has struck out for more commercial waters, culminating in last year's solid but by-the-numbers adaptation of Far From The Madding Crowd. The Commune sees him on slightly less mainstream ground in a melodramatic tale of communal living and romantic betrayal. Set in 1970s Copenhagen, it sees stick-in-the-mud Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) inherit a huge house and, after a little prodding from his wife Anna (Trine Dyrholm), invite friends and strangers alike to move in with them. Matters soon become fraught, however, when the lecturer commences an affair with one of his students; a woman who could comfortably pass for Anna's daughter or far younger self. The rest of the film deals with the impact on the couple, their actual daughter and their house-mates, but most of all Anna herself, who soon falls into a destructive spiral of booze and self-loathing. It's all about selfishness and personal desire versus community and collectivism, and Vinterberg – who lived in a commune as a child  – is even-handed in his appraisal. Communal living can offer people enormous love and support, but such social experiments are also fraught with danger, especially when the needs of the group come into conflict with those of one or more of its individual members. Dyrholm is raw, compelling and utterly sympathetic as poor cast-aside Trine, a beautiful, successful woman suddenly made to feel old and undesirable. No one does unreasonable bastard quite like Thomsen (as evidenced in trashy US TV show Banshee, in which he played an Amish gangster), while Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen is also terrific as daughter Freya, a young woman who clearly adores her parents and fellow house-mates, but is quietly perplexed and appalled by them too. Rating: WWW

Stronger together: Vinterberg's The Commune

4. Pete's Dragon (2016): Young orphan boys being found in the wild by CGI animals has been a bit of a theme in films this year. There was Mowgli (discovered by wolves) in The Jungle Book, Tarzan (stumbled across by apes in The Legend Of Tarzan) and now here's five-year-old Pete being adopted by a ruddy great dragon in Disney's charming remake of their 1977 live action/animation adventure. How come this stuff never happens to girls? Pete is found by the dragon – who he names Elliot – after his parents die in a car crash and he, the wreck's only survivor, gets lost in the woods. Boy and beast remain undiscovered within the forest's dense canopy for six years until a logging operation brings them into contact with humanity – some kind (Bryce Dallas Howard's forest ranger, and her dad Robert Redford, who'd encountered the dragon many years before), some with a villainous glint in their eye (ruthless logger Karl Urban). The plot's ebbs and flows are fairly predictable (boy gets dragon, boy loses dragon, rinse and repeat) but David Lowery's film is a real treat despite that. It's sweet and sentimental but never cloyingly so – simple, straightforward, and refreshingly old fashioned too. Despite the presence of a colossal mythical beast and a seat-of-your-pants final act, this is a small story – one that's really about family, friendship and imagination. To call it lovely might sound like I'm damning it with faint praise but that's really not my intention. That said, Howard, Redford and Urban – all fine actors – are only permitted one character trait each (nice, eccentric and nasty, respectively), and it certainly won't be challenging The BFG or The Jungle Book in the Best Visual Effects category come Oscar time. But, when you have the jaw-dropping beauty of New Zealand's Redwoods Forest (doubling for the US) as your backdrop, who needs artifice? Rating: WWW

Hit and myth: Pete's Dragon is simple and lovely

5. Bait (2012): Silly B-movie about a pair of great white sharks running (swimming) amok in a flooded supermarket after a tsunami leaves an Australian seaside town under several feet of water. The premise is as intriguing as it is ridiculous but the film is scuppered by risible dialogue, poor pacing, wooden acting and bargain-basement CGI. Those survivors of the disaster fighting for their lives in the flooded store and its underground car park are the usual cardboard cutouts these films seem to thrive upon – the bad girl and her disapproving cop dad, the star-crossed lovers, the bickering couple, the geek, the misunderstood villain (Julian McMahon, the only actor I recognised in the entire thing). There are far too many characters and not nearly enough of them are gorily despatched before the end credits, while the charm that usually gets this type of caper over the line is in very short supply. In fact, the only thing that made me smile was the fact its ending is practically identical to the one in last year's San Andreas, right down to the final line of dialogue. Rating: W

Great white dopes: Bait failed to entice me in 

Ratings
WWWW - Wonderful
WWW - Worthwhile
WW - Watchable
W - Woeful