Finding Fela
15, 119 mins
Alex Gibney’s documentary about the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, the main inventor of Afrobeat, works just fine as a standard biography, with lots of good footage and useful interviews. Less interesting are segments showing preparations for the 2009 Broadway musical Fela! This strand needn’t be seen as just a plug for the show — Gibney seems alert to how Kuti’s life and work are being edited and repurposed — but it still dilutes the film.
Life of Crime
15, 99 mins
Adapted from Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch, Daniel Schechter’s film is a comic thriller about a pair of semi-competent crooks (John Hawkes and Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def) who kidnap a rich man’s wife (Jennifer Aniston), only to find that her ratfink of a husband (Tim Robbins) doesn’t want her back. The characters are tangy and the 1970s suburban setting provides an enjoyable ambience — lots of naff aspirational furnishings and soft-rock tunes — but there’s a shortage of tension. It’s hard to stay interested in the plot’s twists when nobody in the movie seems too agitated by them.
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The Guest
15, 100 mins
Perhaps as a calculated means of escaping post-Downton Abbey typecasting, or perhaps just for a laugh, Dan Stevens has taken the lead role in this small-budget and slightly tongue-in-cheek action movie directed by Adam Wingard. Playing an American ex-soldier whose initially polite visit to a fallen comrade’s family soon turns nasty, the former Matthew Crawley is surprisingly convincing: his “Yes, ma’am” drawl sounds right, and his blue-eyed gaze is that of a proper psycho baddie. He’s the best thing in a film that, when it comes to the violent crunch, doesn’t have quite enough flair.
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They Came Together
15, 81 mins
Starring Amy Poehler as an adorable klutz and Paul Rudd as a nice guy who’s “vaguely but not overtly Jewish”, David Wain’s film is a flat-out parody of modern Hollywood romcoms, so you can’t blame it for targeting the rigid predictability of that genre’s plotting. The trouble is, this tactic renders it almost as predictable as the movies it is gunning for. Still, it has a few fine jokes and is otherwise chucklesome, and it’s already available to download.
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Attila Marcel
12A, 106 mins
Some of the charm of Sylvain Chomet’s animated features, Belleville Rendez-vous and The Illusionist, is missing in his first live-action film, the story of an anxious piano-playing mute (Guillaume Gouix) who explores the roots of his neuroses with the help of an eccentric neighbour (Anne Le Ny). Flights of whimsy that might have been agreeable if rendered in the director’s willowy cartooning are here doomed to resemble the excesses of those other dealers in French kookiness, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Michel Gondry. There are still times, however, when Chomet’s appreciation of Jacques Tati serves him well.
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The Hundred-Foot Journey
PG, 122 mins
Combining the faux-French hokum of his own Chocolat with the pseudo-Indian flavour of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Lasse Hallstrom presents a gloopy film about an Indian family (led by Om Puri) who open a restaurant in a quaint French town where the locals are supposedly unwelcoming, yet are always happy to speak English. (Their established restaurateur is played by Helen Mirren.) While there’s plainly an audience for this kind of food-worshipping schmaltz, even they might feel anaesthetised by the dearth of pace and drama here.
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