This week’s lead film about the early success of Bob Dylan will make you pleased that Westside is home to two of the best screens in the West Midlands.
Crystal clear screenings with sound to match include IMAX at Cineworld Broad Street and Dolby at Odeon Luxe Broadway Plaza. Enjoy the difference!
A Complete Unknown (15, 140 mins)
Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan from the start of his career in 1961 – guitar case in hand, pack on his Minnesota back as litter swirls around New York’s streets. Rated a 15 for strong language.
The verdict: ☆☆☆☆☆
Music biopics are a modern trend, but given that Dylan ended up with a Nobel Prize for Literature, few feel as watchably-purposeful as this guitar and harmonica-powered flowering of a folk star.
In Dylan’s increasingly political, civil rights world his female distractions include the encouraging Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and his fellow performer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).
Fuelled by songs including The Times They Are a Changin’, you’ll quickly be drawn into a cinematic world where belief in the leading man is singularly important. Especially when he controversially turns to an electric guitar…
At the film’s heart, Chalamet’s singing and playing performance is even more definitive than the great Cate Blanchett managed when she joined five male actors as Dylan in the experimental I’m Not There (2007).
Non-precious Dylan fans who also love Sixties’ fashions, eyewear and classic American cars and motorbikes will be in raptures thanks to the silky smooth directing by James Mangold (Cop Land / Walk The Line).
Still only 29, Chalamet will hopefully become as endlessly inventive, prolific and enigmatic as Dylan himself, a songwriter, musician and artist whose talents are perhaps most defined by his uniquely unfiltered voice.
The answer will partly depend on how much silver screen electricity Chalamet generates here simply by strumming in the wind.
Wolf Man (15, 103 mins)
A regular collaborator with James Wan (Saw), actor Leigh Whannell turned director to do a top job with 18-rated The Invisible Man in 2020.
Wolf Man is another movie drawing on Hollywood horror heritage, best typified by The Wolf Man (1941) starring Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr.
Here, a father called Blake (Christopher Abbott / Poor Things) takes his young daughter and journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) to the roots of his inherited, difficult childhood home in remote Oregon where trouble lurks in the woods!
Will the family’s future be more dangerous inside the house or outside if ‘Daddy’s got sick’?
The verdict: ☆☆☆
As with The Invisible Man, Whannell channels psychological horror through the eyes of a woman. Typically for a Blumhouse production, there are too many over-the-top sound effects whack-a-moling genuine suspense.
The hairs won’t rise on the back of your neck, but there’s a degree of fun to be had in the dark with the transformative nod towards the far superior brilliance of An American Werewolf in London (1981).
William Tell (15, 133 mins)
The story of post-Roman Empire Austrian aggression and a local huntsman joining Swiss resistance has been rated a 15 for ‘strong bloody violence, nudity and sexual violence’.
The verdict: ☆☆
Shirtless hunks, horses hooves, dodgy barnets, splendid mountains and more… this is an old school adventure with Danish star Claes Bang (The Northman) as Billy the Bolt and Ben Kingsley as King Albrecht complete with a very distracting golden eye-piece.
Written and directed by Nick Hamm (The Hole), William Tell is more about spectacle and apples than cod-Shakespearean language.
An early horrendous death in the Middle Ages’ equivalent of a hot tub sets the scene for the later promise that ‘your heads will be on pikes!’
William Tell is neither Braveheart nor The Northman and is overlong, but there’s a half-decent theme by Steven Price (Gravity / Baby Driver). Showing at Odeon Luxe Broadway Plaza only.
Here (12A, 104 mins)
Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis reunites with Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump / Cast Away / The Polar Express) with a down-the-ages drama which ‘youthenaises’ the double best actor Oscar-winning Aston Villa fan.
But does such technology really add to a film already determined to tediously whizz up and down the generations on one plot of land – or is Zemeckis simply predicting he’s a doomed director dinosaur?
The verdict: ☆
The opening scenes are like watching the ongoing Hollywood fires catastrophe in reverse.
Fire and ice ages lead to an ultimately verdant landscape where future humans settle in a house which begins with workers building a brick chimney first – often the sole remnant of the recent infernos today.
Showing at Odeon Luxe Broadway Plaza, but not Cineworld Broad Street, Here is a cack-handed graphic novel adaptation showing how the ups and downs of life can suck the joy out of everything.
Truly believing in this emotion-free zone is so challenging that some viewers might give up after 20 minutes.
Even the great Tom Hanks can’t save it and the fixed living room perspective is further undermined thanks to a weary score by Alan Silvestri (Forrest Gump).
Including Maria, this is already the third movie this year to play major tricks with time. But only We Live in Time has made the concept truly engaging.
● YOUR REVIEWER: Graham Young has been reviewing films for the media in Birmingham for the last 36 years, serving the Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury, BirminghamLive and BBC WM. He was the 1996 Regional Film Journalist of the Year, and runner-up 1997-99.
