Film reviews: Insidious | Cold Weather | The Veteran | Farewell | Upside Down: The Creation Records Story

Published on Thursday 28 April 2011 19:41

Our film critic reviews the best and worst of this week's new releases...

Insidious (15) ****

Directed by: James Wan

Starring: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye, Barbara Hershey

HERE'S a surprisingly slick and creepy little number from Saw creators James Wan (director) and Leigh Whannell (writer) that, true to its title, makes a virtue of gradually building up unnerving tension before unleashing a torrent of ghosts and ghouls. Like producer Oren Peli's similarly spooky Paranormal Activity and the masterful Spanish language chiller The Orphanage, Insidious initially locates its scares in the everyday, as stressed-out parents Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) move into a new home only to find things going bump in the night after their little boy has a freak accident that lands him in a coma.

The film keeps its cards close to its chest for the first 45 minutes or so, playing out as much as a relationship drama as it does a horror film. Byrne and Wilson do a particularly good job of making their characters seem convincing; their perfect suburban set-up belying a marriage fracturing under the sleep-deprived strain that comes from raising a young family and not communicating properly. After this lengthy set up, the jump to more outr ghost-train-style horror is perhaps a tad blunt, but it remains scary enough to make it easy to buy into the supernatural ride it's intent on taking you on.

Cold Weather (15) ***

Directed by: Aaron Katz

Starring: Cris Lankenau, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Ral Castillo

THE malleability of the detective story is proven once again in Cold Weather, an inaction film from lo-fi indie filmmaker Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA) about an inert twentysomething college drop-out whose life gains a modicum of traction when he gradually becomes embroiled in a missing persons mystery. This is Doug (Cris Lankenau), a Sherlock Holmes fan who has moved back to his hometown of Portland, Oregon after dropping out of a forensic science course. Taking a job in an ice factory, he doesn't do much apart from hang out with his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn), his new work colleague Carlos (Ral Castillo), and his ex-girlfriend Rachel (Robyn Rikoon), who has turned up unexpectedly and promptly disappears. In a conventional film, this would be the point at which the tightly wound plot mechanics kick in – and there's a somewhat sinister undercurrent to Rachel's disappearance – but Cold Weather is, purposefully, as reluctant as Doug to get involved with in any kind of amateur sleuthing. Instead Katz is content to hang back with his easily relatable characters, dipping his toe into genre tropes as a way of examining the mystery of their general twentysomething malaise.

The Veteran (15) ***

Directed by: Matthew Hope

Starring: Toby Kebbell, Tony Curran, Brian Cox, Adi Bielski

DESPITE the air of social realism surrounding this modestly produced British drama, The Veteran is, at heart, an entertainingly deranged action film, the enjoyment of which is only hampered if you try to take seriously the heightened Spooks-esque terrorist conspiracy plot that tries to link Afghanistan with council-estate gun crime and a government plan to keep us in a state of perpetual fear. Instead it's best to view this as the glue that holds together a reasonably well-made urban thriller, one that boasts some enjoyably brutal close-quarter fight sequences, not to mention a ludicrously over-the-top finale in which Toby Kebbel goes all Rambo on gangs of tower block-dwelling neds.

Kebbel plays Robert Miller, an ex-soldier returning from Afghanistan and recruited by a black-ops division of the Home Office (run by Tony Curran and Brian Cox) to infiltrate a terrorist cell. How this is linked to the war zone-like estate on which he lives is too preposterous and convoluted to be at all credible. But Kebble is engaging enough, and director Matthew Hope's more elaborate flights of action fantasy prevent The Veteran becoming another self-righteous state of the nation address – even if the resolution is a bit corny.

Farewell (12A) ***

Directed by: Christian Carion

Starring: Guillaume Canet, Emir Kusturica, Fred Ward, Willem Dafoe

SAID by Ronald Reagan to be "one of the most important espionage cases of the 20th century," the true story upon which Farewell is based certainly makes for an intriguingly low-key Cold War thriller. Set in the early 1980s, it's the story of how an expat French engineer living in Moscow unwittingly became a major player in the collapse of the Soviet Union by acting as a contact for a KGB double agent. The former is Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet), a nervous and somewhat dull father of two who nevertheless gets off on the thrill of his new-found espionage activities. The latter, whose codename supplies the film's title, is Sergei Gregoriev (played by Serbian director Emir Kusturica).

He's a family man too, one grown disenchanted with Communist life and longing for a better future for his rebellious Queen-obsessed son, Igor (Evgeniy Kharlanov). The film quietly builds tension as the increasing seriousness of their situation becomes ever more apparent, yet it's the mundanity of their respective lives that, ironically, gives Christian Carion's film its kick as it evokes the drabness of the era and shows how their occasionally bumbling actions, which often play like bad spy movie clichs (minus the super-agent skills), facilitated a major government operation.

Upside Down: The Creation Records Story (15) ***

Directed by: Danny O'Connor

THERE'S a running joke in this amusing documentary about Creation Records that one of the reasons the label became so distinctive was because nobody could really understand what its Glasgwegian founder Alan McGee was saying half the time; the music he put out therefore had to do most of the talking. It's not really true, of course. Though his bands – and he launched the careers of The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream and, most famously, Oasis – certainly made plenty of noise, McGee was never a shadowy background figure. His passion for music and his determination to put out only the bands that he liked (even when the bands that he liked included The Telescopes) was matched by a determination to lead the same kind of debauched rock'n'roll lifestyle as his acts.

The film celebrates all this in gleeful fashion, running through Creation's punky Scottish origins to its bloated, Tony Blair-endorsed, champagne soaked end-point. Lots of rare archival footage and new interviews with the likes of Noel Gallagher and the now clean-and-sober McGee ensure that it's entertainingly riotous, though as a film, its print-the-legend approach could have used a few dissenting voices to balance out the rampant mythmaking.