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Film round-up: November 15, 2018

MARIA DUARTE and ALAN FRANK review Siberia, The Workshop, The Price of Everything, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Dead in a Week (Or Your Money Back), and Hell Fest

The Workshop
Directed by Laurent Cantet
★★★★★

LAURENT CANTET, writer-director of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or-winner Entre les Murs, returns in powerful form with an increasingly gripping and cliche-free story that keeps you guessing to the end.

Co-written by Canet with regular collaborator Robin Campillo, The Workshop is set in the port town of La Ciotat near Marseilles, whose a once prosperous shipbuilding industry is now stagnant.

There, celebrated novelist Olivia Dejazet (Marina Fois) holds a summer writing class (“A murder isn’t always at the start”) for a socially, intellectually and racially mixed group of young students who are charged with writing a crime thriller that eventually connects with the town’s industrial past.

Initially, the drama has echoes of Cantet’s The Class, about a teacher and his young pupils in a poorer part of Paris, but, centring on Dejazet's increasingly aggressive pupil Antoine (a riveting performance by Matthieu Lucci), it soon grips in its own right. Antoine, who enjoys taunting his fellow pupils and Dejazet during lessons, informs her that she writes stories “to escape your shit life.”

Lucci delivers a fascinating portrait of a disturbed, radicalised youngster in a film that grabbed me and held me from start to startling finish.

Alan Frank

The Price of Everything (15)
Directed by Nathaniel Kahn
★★★★

FILM-MAKER Nathaniel Kahn lifts the lid on the correlation between art and money and its role in today's consumerist society in this fascinating and visually arresting exposé. He had unprecedented access to a range of renowned artists, including Jeff Coons and Larry Poons, as well as collectors, auction houses and art experts.

The documentary shows how works of art are valued, inflated and collected as the rich are now investing their cash in this new-found commodity.

One German collector, who has 200 works by 40 artists, reveals how in 1991 he paid more than $900,000 for a Jeff Coons sculpture which is now worth $65 million.

The obscene amounts paintings and sculptures change hands for at this time of austerity — as well as what is considered to be art — will raise your blood pressure.

An eye-opener, whether you're an art-lover or not.

Maria Duarte

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Directed by Peter Yates
★★★★

JK ROWLING’S magical movie money machine returns with Hogwarts head Dumbledore enlisting ex-student Newt Salamander (Eddie Redmayne again, excellent) to bring down the powerful dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, somewhat overplayed by an albino-complexioned Johnny Depp with white hair and one eye of a different colour.

Director Peter Yates, impeccably complemented by Oscar-worthy special effects conjurors, creates a memorable visual feast packed with dragons, dastardly demons, seriously strange creatures and eye-boggling magical sequences.

Key players are well cast, but, when it comes to the story, Yates is stuck with far too much plot.

Rowling, shyly taking two credits for screenplay and creating the characters, delivers enough plot lines to fill a couple of novels, leaving director and cast fighting hard to make the overstuffed story work on screen.

That said, fans will be ecstatic.

AF

Siberia (15)
Directed by Matthew Ross
★★

THIS slow-burning thriller in which a US diamond trader travels to Russia for a deal that starts falling apart is as cold and unappealing as its Siberian setting.

Keanu Reeves plays the merchant who goes to St Petersburg to discover his partner has done a runner and then falls for Katya (Ana Ularu), a cafe owner in Siberia. He also falls foul of the local mafia boss he is trying to sell diamonds to.

It's a drama that fails to hot up despite Reeves's best efforts and it also features a wasted Molly Ringwald as Reeves's wife back home.

In the wake of John Wick, Reeves is too good for this film and deserves better than this.

Wait for the DVD or download.

MD

Dead in a Week (Or Your Money Back)
Director: Tom Edmunds
★★★★

TOM EDMUNDS’S feature film debut as writer and director is a deliciously dark black comedy whose unexpected warmth, given murder is the subject, makes it both funny and finally moving.

“Could I watch you?” asks Leslie (Tom Wilkinson), as deeply depressed young writer William (Aneurin Barnard) prepares to jump off a bridge on his seventh suicide attempt.

William survives and hires professional assassin Leslie (“I’ve killed more people than you’ve had hot baths”) to kill him, but he fights to stay alive when he falls for editor Ellie (Taylor Mavor), who wants his book published.

In what follows, every performance is spot-on in a film which proves that bad taste can be genuinely appetising.

Wilkinson is glorious, Barnard and Mayo convince and Christopher Eccleston is good fun as Wilkinson’s homicidal boss.

Result.

AF

Hell Fest (18)
Directed by Gregory Plotkin
★★

IN HELL FEST, a masked killer stalks a horror theme park on Halloween night, using it as his personal hunting ground to increase his annual count of murder victims.

Unfortunately for Natalie (Amy Forsyth), Brooke (Reign Edwards) and their four young male pals, they choose to attend the eponymous ghoulish travelling carnival, where all hell breaks out and the body count rises as the serial killer enjoys another night of bloody carnage.

You can probably guess the rest in what's a largely unpleasant offering by director Gregory Plotkin and his three screenwriters which features slice-and-dice ad nauseam, a vicious nun, a killer guillotine, fleeing females, a thudding score and the information that “fear is an aphrodisiac.”

Were this so, then this corny collection of genre cliches could well lead to mankind dying out.

“We came here to be terrified!” says one character. Not by this disappointing shocker.

AF

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