Film reviews: Tomboy | The Change-up | 30 Minutes or Less | You Instead | I Don’t Know How She Does It

Tomboy (U)

Directed by: Céline Sciamma

Starring: Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana, Jeanne Disson

HHHHH

Like her debut film Water Lilies, French writer/director Céline Sciamma’s latest is another beautifully acted coming-of-age drama that touches on the complex issue of sexual identity in a sensitive, non-prurient way. Where that film dealt with teenagers, this one focuses on pre-teens and explores the way in which ideas about gender can complicate even the most idyllic seeming childhoods. Set over a balmy summer before the new school term starts, it revolves around Laure (Zoé Héran, below), a ten-year-old girl newly arrived in a lush Parisian suburb with her parents and adorable little sister. Mistaken for a boy thanks to her cropped hair and a gangly disposition, she decides to encourage the misunderstanding by introducing herself as Michael to the neighbourhood kids. Here Sciamma gently shows how Laura’s lie results in her digging an ever bigger hole for herself as her male alter-ego not only finds ready acceptance among the football-playing boys, but inspires puppy dog-like longing in local tween Lisa. All of which sounds like a set-up for a Boys Don’t Cry-esque suburban tragedy, but the film chooses instead to subtly probe at possible reasons for Laura’s pretence without getting too psychoanalytical. about it. Ultimately, it’s a lyrical reminder of how confounding childhood can be.

The Change-Up (15) Directed by: David Dobkin

Starring: Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde

HHHHH

Giving the body-swap movie the raunch-com treatment, the writers of The Hangover and the director of The Wedding Crashers pile on foul-mouthed dialogue, graphic sex and poo jokes and an abundance of weird looking CGI nudity in an attempt to give the stale premise of The Change-Up some life. Thanks to the innate likeability of Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, they score some laughs from the sketched-on-the-back-of-match-book plot that finds Bateman’s hard-working family man Dave switching bodies and lives with his carefree best friend Mitch (Reynolds) following a drunken night out that ends with them urinating in a magic, wish-granting fountain. With Dave suddenly free to enjoy the life of a “toxic bachelor” and Mitch confronted with the possibility of sleeping with his friend’s attractive but frustrated wife (played by Leslie Mann), the moral dilemmas raised by the conceit largely boil down to whether or not having sex while hiding out in someone else’s body constitutes cheating. What could have made for a provocative black comedy is sabotaged by scatological humour and a nasty strain of misogyny.

30 Minutes or Less (15)

Directed by: Rubin Fleischer

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari

HHHHH

Titular grammatical error aside (surely it should be 30 Minutes or Fewer?), this sophomore effort from Zombieland director Rubin Fleischer delivers a similarly wry, sly comedic take on genre conventions. Trading horror for action, Fleischer once again puts Jesse Eisenberg front-and-centre as the unlikely protagonist in a high stakes, life-or-death situation. Eisenberg plays Nick, a slacker whose job as a pizza delivery driver is the only thing in his life with any momentum. That changes when he’s kidnapped by a pair of dimwitted rednecks (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) and finds himself with a bomb strapped to his body. The reason? They want him to rob a bank in order to raise funds for another ill-conceived plan. What they don’t count on is Nick getting a kick out of the action movie-style theatrics and taking them on with the aid of his best friend (Aziz Ansari). Although it takes more than 30 minutes to warm up, the frantic, tightly plotted film that follows strikes the right blend of humour and violence, with Esienberg – making sly nods to his role in The Social Network – mixing it up too as a not always likeable hero.

You Instead (15)

Directed by: David Mackenzie

Starring: Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena, Alastair McKenzie, Mathew Baynton

HHHHH

There’s a great concept at the heart of You Instead, David Mackenzie’s “T in the Park” movie. Shot in four-and-a-half days against the backdrop of one of the UK’s biggest music festivals, it aims to harness the energy of 85,000 music fans congregating in a muddy, rain-soaked field and inject it into the kind of blissed-out all-or-nothing love story that inspires great pop. Instead it tells a rather dull tale about a couple of unlikeable characters forced to spend the weekend together. Adam (Luke Treadaway, with a grating American accent) is the frontman of a globally successful MGMT-style electro pop duo called The Make. Morello (Natalia Tena) plays keyboards in a going-nowhere-fast riot girl band called The Dirty Pinks. For reasons that are two spurious to go into, they’re handcuffed together while their respective partners – a just-out-of-rehab supermodel and a banker – mill about on the fringes, witnessing their significant others forge “a telepathic connection”. The script is full of howlers and any spontaneity supplied by the backdrop is killed by the cast’s inability to interact in a convincing fashion with real punters on site.

ALISTAIR HARKNESS

I Don’t Know How She Does It (12A)

Directed by: Douglas McGrath

Starring: Sarah Jessica Parker, Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear

HHHHH

The heroine of Allison Pearson’s bestseller is here forcibly relocated to a USA of bake sales, playdates and dismal mainstream entertainments. Über-mother Kate (Parker) juggles childcare and career with the bizarre pursuit of mom-ranking. She surpasses single mum Christina Hendricks, because she has both hubby Kinnear and alpha-male banker Brosnan hot for her; she obviously has her childless careerist colleagues beat; and she outdoes any gym-toned “momster”, because she looks naturally fabulous, and isn’t, allegedly, a total bee-yotch. To the age-old question of what women want, the film bluntly responds: a medal, dammit.

Slick direction establishes the now-standard overlit universe in which a heroine might contrive to send risqué IMs to unintended recipients, or have to postpone building her daughter a snowman just to imbue a project bereft of drama with another phony crisis. Pearson’s nuances have long been processed out; what remains is undermined by the way Parker, struggling to recapture her pre-Carrie warmth, holds her on-screen offspring as though expecting somebody to switch in a Prada clutch at any second. Even with mother-and-baby screenings, I don’t know why you’d bother.

MIKE MCCAHILL