One of the great tourist attractions of the Westside BID area is the Black Sabbath Bench on Broad Street. And this week you can hear Sabbath in one of the new movies that has just opened at both Cineworld Broad Street and Odeon Luxe Broadway Plaza.
Kraven The Hunter (15, 127 minutes). Sony’s sixth Spider-Man Universe film explores the complex relationship between gangster Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe) and his son Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
Following an attack by a lion, Sergei is given a potion which not only saves his life but turns him into a great hunter… of criminals.
The verdict: ☆ ☆
A brutal Marvel movie that’s a world away from standard comic book adaptations. The Fall Guy / Bullet Train star Johnson looks every inch a lithe, muscular anti-hero who won’t take any nonsense. Watch out Keanu Reeves!
Crowe is a long way from his career highlights of The Insider (1999) and Gladiator (2000) but handles his supporting character’s Russian accent with sufficient enthusiasm to suggest he wouldn’t say ‘No’ to being a Bond villain.
Directed by JC Chandor (Margin Call, 2011), Kraven’s fractured chronology doesn’t help the momentum any more than the repetitive nature of the digitised wildlife shots of big beasts. But hey, it’s less annoying than Venom and it also features Ozzy Osbourne singing one of Black Sabbath’s most underrated tracks.
The expensive film’s production qualities and Johnson’s energy mean that Kraven isn’t all bad, especially in IMAX. Certainly it’s not the pre-Christmas turkey one might have feared judging by some early, withering reviews.
Johnson will return in Eggers’ new movie, Nosferatu, which opens in Westside’s multiplexes from January 1.
Queer (18, 137 mins). Former James Bond star Daniel Craig (Skyfall)) plays against type as William Lee, a constantly smoking, hard-drinking, gun-carrying, drug-taking, solitary gay man looking for new partners in 1950s Mexico City.
The verdict: ☆ ☆
Luca Guadagnino (Challengers) is a rare, modern director – happy to tell convention-breaking stories and unafraid to shock.
Craig’s performance as Lee is top drawer and deserves an Oscar nomination, displaying the kind of vast range that too many superhero stars deny themselves.
Though restricted by its old-fashioned shoot on an Italian studio lot, Queer is at its best as a character driven study of Lee trying to work out how to connect with strangers.
Some viewers at Cineworld Broad Street might find the sex too explicit and the amount of smoking might prompt a cough. But the lack of plot for the excessive running length is the biggest sin of all.
Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (12A / 134 mins). Set two centuries before his own live action films with Gandalf and co, New Zealander Peter Jackson returns to the legacy of former Birmingham schoolboy JRR Tolkien by co-producing this US/Japanese animation about the fate of the House of Helm Hammerhand.
Following an attack by Wulf, Helm’s daughter Héra must lead the resistance in what will become known as Helm’s Deep.
Meeting Jackson at the London launch of The Fellowship of the Ring, I asked if he’d ever been to Moseley and he said ‘No’, but I congratulated him for capturing the spirit of Moseley Bog. Three years later, his trilogy, shot over 400 days, had bagged an incredible 17 Oscars from 30 nominations.
The Hobbit trilogy a decade later was less successful and now we have a full-blown animation almost 50 years after earlier unrelated animations of The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978) and The Return of the King (1980).
Verdict: ☆☆☆
The landscapes are fabulous and the music stirring enough to compensate for the character’s lips rarely matching any words or even finishing in sync.
Pixar’s animations can be too precise and soulless around the eyes. This LOTR is a bit rough and ready by comparison, but none the worse for that once you are into the spirit, which inevitably includes characters being strangled, slashed and stabbed.
Next up for Tolkien fans, Andy Serkis is set to direct a new adventure called The Hunt For Gollum for 2026.
● Your reviewer: Graham Young has been reviewing films for the media in Birmingham for the last 35 years, serving the Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury, BirminghamLive and BBC WM. He was the 1996 Regional Film Journalist of the Year.
