Beauty and the Beast

Cert: PG Runtime: 129 mins Director: Bill Condon Cast: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Kevin Kline, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci

Be Our Guest

Probably the greatest musical of the 1990’s Disney’s Beauty and the Beast has a strong childhood hold on many people. Disney’s recent plans of re-making some of their most beloved classics, don’t get me wrong Jungle Book and Cinderella works pretty well. Once the trailer dropped all I thought was this is a shot for shot re-make! What is the point? Well nostalgia rules Hollywood right now, this film will make a billion dollars easily. So what is Beauty and the Best about? Belle (Emma Watson) is a bookish young woman and keen inventor who goes in search of her father Maurice (Kevin Kline) when he disappears after visiting a mysterious castle. When she gets there, she is shocked to learn that he is the prisoner of the monstrous Beast (Dan Stevens) and volunteers to take his place. Initially terrified of her captive, she soon learns about how he was transformed from a handsome prince into his current state by a magical curse, and a tender love story soon develops.

Beauty and the Beast delivers what it intended to do! It re-lives the magic of the original but it does sink a bit. The music itself when we get the familiar songs work well but the new songs are pretty dull and are only there to flesh out the run-time IMO. Bill Condon is a steady pair of hands for B&B, he helms it well. The set designs are magical and work well within this world, the CGI can be slightly messy. I am not the biggest fan of Dan Stevens Beast look, he doesn’t seem as ferocious as you would expect. Lumiere, Cogsworth & co. work rather well. The realistic aesthetic to them works well, but the Be Our Guest sequence does fall rather flat. It doesn’t look very organic and doesn’t flow well with Emma Watson being the only human in the scene. It took me about 10 minutes to truly get into it because it was such a strange sensation to watch my childhood be portrayed by other people. The introduction of the Beast’s backstory seemed rather pointless too.

As for the cast Emma Watson delivers a Emma Watson performance, she is strong, independent and well we all just love her. She really does embody the Belle we all remember, for me she is my personal favourite Disney female leads. Dan Stevens was an OK Beast, nothing really significant. His mo-cap work was rather good, the fact you actually see his actual expressions really gives Beast more heart. His chemistry with Watson seemed rather flat and didn’t give much spark. The big surprise for me was Luke Evans as Gaston, he embodies the man we all loath and he can sing very well. This guy keeps surprising me every movie. Josh Gad as LeFou gives a great sidekick, the whole openly gay character has gone out of proportion and people need to get with the times. McKellen, Thompson and McGregor were great casting here. They provide great moments in the film and really keep the magic going. Beauty and the Beast is a good time and worth watching but it has it’s flaws. I’m sure the majority will pass it’s issues and just enjoy the movie.

7.4/10

The Fifth Estate

Cert: 15 Runtime: 128 mins Director: Bill Condon Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Peter Capaldi, David Thewlis, Carice van Houten and Stanley Tucci

Man is least himself when he talks with his own person. But if you give him a mask, he will tell you the truth

The story begins as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring, they create a platform that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously leak covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the world’s most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society-and what are the costs of exposing them? You know what they say – you wait for a bus and then two come along at once. After causing a media frenzy in recent years, Julian Assange and his whistleblowing website WikiLeaks have found their way to the big screen this year, twice. Earlier in the year, the documentary ‘WikiLeaks: We Steal Secrets’ was released to highly positive reviews and a lengthy complaint from Assange himself. Now, we have Bill Condon’s dramatic (and according to some, heavily fictionalised) account of the history of the now-infamous website and its founder. Similarly to aforementioned documentary, ‘The Fifth Estate’ has notably been objected by Assange, who wrote to lead actor Benedict Cumberbatch outlining why he shouldn’t take the role or have any part in the film.

Despite this, Cumberbatch didn’t, instead delivering an excellent and nuanced performance that never feels like an impersonation. On the flipside, Cumberbatch is far-and-away the best thing in the film.That’s not to imply that ‘The Fifth Estate’ is a bad film by any means, it’s just that it’s regularly flat and occasionally boring. Many have compared it to David Fincher’s 2010 masterpiece ‘The Social Network’ and the similarities do exist (the foundation of a revolutionary website involving two different people who eventually fall out over said site), but the difference is that this film lacks the spark and most importantly, the compelling dialogue of the latter. When making a film such as this centred on dialogue, it is imperative to make the talk as gripping as possible, but despite trying their best, the conversations here are only sporadically attention-grabbing. Additionally, the sequences set inside the ‘cyberspace’ feel out-of-place and don’t work at all.The film has good intentions and attempts to raise some interesting questions, as it successfully manages not to show favour to any side of the WikiLeaks argument, even going so as far as questioning the film itself, as we see Cumberbatch’s Assange dismissing it in an interview. As well as Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl is very good as Assange’s partner Daniel Domscheit-Berg, while David Thewlis is as usual, a pleasure to watch, here playing the best on screen Guardian journalist since Paddy Considine in ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’. Overall though, the film is not as good as its star – it’s a plodding and unremarkable account of one of the biggest new stories in recent history.

5.3/10