Introducing his latest film at a preview screening, the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn commented, "If Drive was like taking really good cocaine, Only God Forgives is like taking really good acid." It's an appropriate (and characteristically provocative) comparison - and if Only God Forgives is not quite the trip one might hope for, it's certainly hypnotising and alarming.
film reviews
Nick Hasted
Wolverine is a second-division, third-generation Marvel superhero, and for all the care devoted to his sixth cinema outing, he remains the problem here. First introduced in 1974, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby – comics’ Lennon and McCartney – were no longer on hand to conceive this metal-clawed lunk with the adolescently resonant weaknesses they gave Spider-man and the rest. Instead, Wolverine had over-wrought, tin-eared Chris Claremont to chronicle his key years as the star turn in the X-Men, a firm fan favourite who never touched the general public.
This second attempt at a solo film away from the X-Men franchise is based on a 1980s mini-series by Claremont and Frank Miller, which landed Wolverine in Japan, and Miller’s favoured milieu of samurai, ninjas, codes of honour and gut-opening swordplay. The capable, stylish director James Mangold exploits this setting for all its worth, aiming for a “fever dream” of modern Japan, mixing ancient warriors and industrialists, and bullet-training from Tokyo to the rustic, lazing south.
He opens with the Atom bomb blasting Nagasaki, where the immortal, indestructible Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) saves a young Japanese soldier. In the present day, that soldier has become dying industrialist Lord Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi, pictured right). Drawing a drifting Wolverine to his death-bed, he tells him that the immortality which has come to seem like a curse can be extracted and transferred to another. After a mass Yakuza assault on Yashida’s funeral, Wolverine rescues the industrialist’s grand-daughter and heir Mariko (Tao Okamoto, pictured below with Jackman), going on the run together across Japan. Finding his indestructibility has indeed been removed, our hero is bloodied, wounded, vulnerable: about as interesting as he’s ever been.
Mangold is responsible for surprising and entertaining turns in the careers of Sylvester Stallone (Cop Land), Angelina Jolie (Girl, Interrupted), Russell Crowe (3.10 to Yuma), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line) and John Cusack (Identity), and has worked with Hugh Jackman before, on the Meg Ryan romance Kate and Leopold. He brings out his star’s easy, straightforward decency and muscular charisma, and sets him to work in what for much of its more than two hours is a modern film noir, with a haunted knight errant as its hero. Okamoto is also excellent, woefully under-written but communicating great depth, as does Yamanouchi, fearsomely steely and calculating even as his character lies dying. There are some extraordinary images too, such as Wolverine’s harpooning by dozens of ninja arrows, straining but reeled in to a backdrop of mountain snow.
The moment when all this good work unravels is easy to spot: it’s when Wolverine regains his indestructibility. When a hero instantly heals after his opponent hits his heart fair and square with a sword, you start to side with the hapless bad guys. The final reel is schematic and battle-heavy, full of obvious revelations and the over-heated, unconvincing pulpiness of a typical 1970s Marvel comic. Basically, it becomes another Wolverine yarn, and the energy and talent expended to find something worthwhile in that falls exhausted to the floor. It’s enjoyable, even memorable. But comic-book lead can’t be turned into gold.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Wolverine
Kieron Tyler
Newly restored versions of old films in cinemas are commonplace. This revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is set apart due to it being in 3D, as it was originally intended to be seen. But unless you were able to catch it in the few American cinemas where it screened after its May 1954 New York premiere, the original has proved elusive, although 3D versions have surfaced intermittently.
Adam Sweeting
You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don't, as a rule, leave you in seizures of mirth, but the judicious selections from Allen's bottomless catalogue carried a sealed-in guarantee of hilarity despite being snatched from their original context.
Jasper Rees
Oddly, there is quite a cinematic sub-genre starring killer whales. The killer’s first (and worst) lead role was opposite a hammy Richard Harris in Orca, a shameless attempt by Dino De Laurentiis to ape the success of Jaws. Then came Free Willy, which in three icky instalments repositioned killers as essentially cuddly. That image took a dent in Rust & Bone after Marion Cotillard’s whale trainer spent much of the film without any legs courtesy of a captive orca.
emma.simmonds
"I'm so embarrassed, I'm not a real person yet," Frances apologetically tells her date after she's forced to make a calamitous cashpoint dash when they're asked to settle their restaurant bill. This is the seventh film from writer-director - and sometime Wes Anderson collaborator - Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, The Squid and the Whale). This time he co-writes with luminous star and indie-darling Greta Gerwig and it's a terrifically fruitful collaboration.
Jasper Rees
Just three Cornettos: the trilogy accidentally named after an ice cream concludes here. Previously in the imaginations of actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright, London has been invaded by zombies and a quiet English village by organised crime. In The World’s End, it’s the turn of a faceless Home Counties feeder town to fall under the influence of yet another B movie sub-genre. In this case the local population is replaced by robots (although what precisely constitutes a robot is one of the film’s fun running gags).
Karen Krizanovich
The Frozen Ground, the debut feature of New Zealand director Scott Walker, takes place in Alaska in the 1980s. Based on a true story, it tells of cop Jack Halcombe (Nicolas Cage), who teams up with prostitute Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens) to try and stop Jack Hansen (John Cusack) from killing again.
Tom Birchenough
In the independent cinema world, the question of where exactly a director hopes to find his or her audience never goes away. On home ground? Around the international festival circuit? Or in a lucky combination of the two, when a film resounds both locally and beyond its native land? It was always going to be a tricky issue for Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, the first full-length feature to come out of Saudi Arabia, where cinemas simply do not exist – they are banned.
Adam Sweeting
Based on Jens Lapidus's novel Snabba Cash (great title, even if it is meaningless to English-speakers), Easy Money is yet further evidence of the allure of the Scandi way of looking at the world. It's ostensibly a crime thriller, featuring healthy doses of violence and drug-dealing, but equally it's an examination of class warfare, divided loyalties and racial tension. It all adds up to a portrait of Stockholm and Swedish society which blows open comfortable assumptions about Scandinavia being some kind of benign social paradise.