The Young Offenders
15, 83 mins
★★★
Another of those japey comedies about tearaway youngsters pursuing reckless schemes, the Irish director Peter Foott’s film concerns two lads from Cork, Jock (Chris Walley) and Conor (Alex Murphy), the latter providing the obligatory first-person narration that tells us how mad and frantic everything is. It’s not funny enough to rise above its clumsy story, but it has something rare in movies of its type: a good heart, which it demonstrates in surprisingly sweet scenes between Conor and his mum (Hilary Rose).
Live by Night
15, 128 mins
★★
In his fourth feature as a director, Ben Affleck is stuck with an inert screenplay and a bland leading man — by which I mean, of course, that he wrote the thing and he’s the star. Based on a Dennis Lehane novel, the movie is a Prohibition-era gangster saga about a Boston hoodlum who is driven by faintly noble motives and can’t trust his conscience not to trip him at inconvenient times. Just as Affleck’s heavy-jawed face looks right for a 1920s bruiser, so his lack of sparkle is — technically speaking — plausible in the stolid, unimaginative man he’s playing. But this is just a mark of how boring the character is as a dramatic creation. Sienna Miller and Elle Fanning are great in their small roles, but generally the film is lifeless and overdecorated, a gangster flick that might have come from Merchant Ivory.
Underworld: Blood Wars
15, 91 mins
★
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“There is no end,” muses Kate Beckinsale’s vampire warrior at the conclusion of the fifth Underworld movie (directed by Anna Foerster), and that’s indeed how things seem to stand with this franchise. It’s been going since 2003, yet there is apparently nothing to prevent it continuing in an infinite stream of dull action movies about vampires fighting werewolves. This new episode’s story has no more colour than the film’s teen-goth design scheme, which could just as well have been shot in black-and-white.