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| The Guardian - Culture: Film | | | | Spirit Untamed review – a charming load of old pony | | by Wendy Ide Aug 2, 2021 | | This handsome family adventure about a girl and a horse will be a long ride for some Lucky Prescott went to live with her grandparents after the death of her mother in a riding accident. But a squirrel-based disaster sees Lucky and her aunt sent to spend the summer with the father she hardly knows, in a frontier town on the Mexican border. Against her father’s wishes, Lucky forms a bond with Spirit, a wild mustang stallion, and, together with new pals Prudence and Abigail, she sets out to rescue Spirit’s herd from rustlers. Handsome animation adds to the appeal of this sequel to the 2002 animation Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, but this is family entertainment that’s quite niche in its appeal – pony-mad kids will love it, but it may test the patience of parents. Continue reading... | | | | | Jungle Cruise review – theme park ride leaves the handbrake on | | by Wendy Ide Aug 2, 2021 | | Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson fail to ignite in a Disney adventure that’s long on tropes and short on sparks By casting Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson, two actors of rare personal charm, this Disney adventure should have managed to transcend its somewhat unpromising origins (it was, like Pirates of the Caribbean, based on a theme park ride). But for some reason, while both are perfectly likable independently (Blunt in particular is a feisty joy as scientist Lily Houghton), they fail to gel on screen. Their lack of chemistry is not fatal to the film – director Jaume Collet-Serra creates a romp of a picture booby-trapped with adventure movie tropes (arcane curses, snakes, evil Germans) which, while they might seem familiar to Indiana Jones fans, still combine to make for a decent family flick. It’s just that a movie that requires its characters to “mend a broken heart” as part of an ancient riddle should probably have a heart to begin with. Continue reading... | | | | | Shailene Woodley: 'Authenticity is my love language' | | by Alex Moshakis Aug 2, 2021 | | Despite being only 29, Shailene Woodley already has 25 years’ acting experience under her belt. Here, the star of Big Little Lies and Divergent talks about being free-willed, her hippy passions and her late-night calls with Kate Winslet The one and only time Shailene Woodley beams during our time together – a long conversation over Zoom, on a bright weekday morning – is when my young son sneaks into the room in which I’m bent over a laptop, points at the stranger appearing on-screen, and asks, not quietly, “Who’s that?” There is nothing to do but introduce them. Continue reading... | | | | | The Sparks Brothers review – a match made in heaven | | by Mark Kermode Observer film critic Aug 2, 2021 | | Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright is a perfect fit for the absurdist antics of art pop’s most elusive duo in this stranger-than-fiction documentary “They are a band who you can look up on Wikipedia and know nothing!” So says long-term Sparks fan Julia Marcus, just one voice amid a dizzying array of interviewees (from Sex Pistol Steve Jones to Weird Al Jankovic via Flea, Jane Wiedlin, Neil Gaiman and many, many more) wrestling with the stranger-than-fiction tale of one of pop’s most influentially indefinable enigmas. Charting a course from experimental American art-rock projects to breakthrough UK chart hits, outlandish film dreams (some realised, some not) and insanely challenging concert tours (a different album every night!), Edgar Wright’s energetic ode to Ron and Russell Mael marries exhaustively researched archaeology with the sugar-rush thrill of a heady teenage fan letter. Best of all, it manages both to unpack and preserve the carefully cultivated air of mystery that surrounds the duo, leaving the viewer with a renewed admiration for their century-straddling decades of reinvention, while still throwing enough “true or false” curveballs to leave you wondering whether the whole thing isn’t an elaborate work of fiction. Continue reading... | | | | | Arctic thriller's film crew struggled to find true frozen waste | | by Dalya Alberge Aug 2, 2021 | | Colin Farrell and his co-stars in the BBC’s North Water shocked at the loss of wilderness at the north pole from global heating It’s a problem that, a century ago, anyone on a ship in the Arctic Circle just didn’t have to worry about: where is all the ice? Yet this was the unexpected stumbling block faced by the film-makers of a forthcoming BBC thriller set in the Arctic in the 1850s. The North Water is an epic five-part adventure about an ill-fated 19th-century whaling expedition into the Arctic. In the pursuit of realism, its producers realised that they could not rely on special effects. Nor would shooting it in a studio tank or off the coast of Britain achieve the authenticity of filming in the Arctic, however extreme the conditions and challenges. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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