Four new films to see this week: The Naked Gun, Bring Her Back, Late Shift and Oslo Stories: Dreams (Sex Love)
★★★★☆
Directed by Akiva Schaffer. Starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder. 15A cert, gen release, 85 min
Neeson is, maybe, trying a little too hard to make sense of the madness in this 'legacy sequel' to the now venerable cop show parody, but the film still zips along impressively. Anderson is terrific as the deadpan romantic foil and Huston a perfect millionaire baddy. At its best when playing on the original series' linguistic misunderstandings. 'You can't fight City Hall,' the set-up lands. 'No ... it's a building.' Some of the funniest jokes are held for an extended end-credit sequence that expands brilliantly on a solid recurring gag from the original series.
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Bring Her Back
★★★☆☆
Directed by Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou. Starring Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sally Hawkins. 16 cert, gen release, 104 min
The Australian directors' follow-up to horror hit Talk to Me casts Hawkins as carer to two orphaned twins with a host of neuroses. A twisted riff on Hansel and Gretel spirals into a grisly meditation on trauma, punctuated by unsettling dark-web videos, gaslighting and a supernatural ritual that is never satisfactorily explained. The film is strewn with gristle but curiously short of starts and frights. The energetic chaos of the filmmakers' breakout hit gives way to something more restrained, though not necessarily more profound. No matter: the Philippous can still freak you out with flair.
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Late Shift
★★★★☆
Directed by Petra Volpe. Starring Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Alireza Bayram, Selma Aldin, Urs Bihler. 12A cert, limited release 91 min
Benesch is superb as a nurse negotiating all kinds of crises as she takes the midnight shift in a Swiss hospital. Night Shift doesn't go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria's eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday. A rebuke to those who fail to act on understaffing.
DC
Oslo Stories: Dreams (Sex Love)
★★★★☆
Directed by Dag Johan Haugerud. Starring Ane Dahl Torp, Selome Emnetu, Ella Øverbye, Anne Marit Jacobsen 12A cert, limited release, 110 min
Confusingly, the first release from Dag Johan Haugerud's epic Norwegian trilogy is Dreams, this year's Golden Bear winner at Berlin and the second film in the sequence. A coming-of-age drama, this delightful bildungsroman follows 17-year-old Johanne (a luminous Øverbye, channelling Renate Reinsve), who falls in love with her arts and crafts teacher (Emnetu), then turns that infatuation into an erotically charged manuscript. Creatives will certainly appreciate the fuzzy intersection of memory, identity and making stuff up that jollies Haugerud's lingering drama along. Should have viewers rushing back for the next two chapters later in the month.
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