REVIEW - LIVE BY NIGHT (BEN AFFLECK)

An apparently limitless trove of inspiration in over a century of cinema - may these time-tested classics continue to educate and enthuse the filmmakers of today. And may those same filmmakers please leave their inspiration as inspiration alone? Live by Night is a vapid, tedious slog through the sorely limited imagination of one of the most dependable filmmakers of today, whose reliability matches that of his most enduring peers, past and present. Ben Affleck might never helm a masterpiece, never produce a classic akin to those to which Live by Night is a dreary homage, but he'll surely never helm a genuine dud either. That dependability allows even this, his first folly as director, to be a pleasurable experience in bits and pieces, fits and starts. To cop a sight of Affleck's fearsomely geometric figure, you'd know that he's a smarter director of action than of emotion, that his grasp of space, geography and aesthetic is considerably more assured than his grasp of the people therein. He's no stylist, though, and his intention of producing a tribute to old-school gangster noir whilst contributing to the genre anew is skewed so heavily in favour of convention over innovation that the end product feels like a hollow template, wholly uninspirational in itself. Forgetting its numerous, draining scenes of forced feeling - as you'll wish you could - Live by Night is a soulless, impersonal film, a valiant but misguided effort and a fine undertaking - check out that production value! - but to largely fruitless ends. Its debt to the mini-mythology of its genre, which it pays in attempting to recreate, is listlessly embodied in sequences whose drab character and tone have a stultifying effect on a film that feels more like a silly superhero origin story at times than a modern gangster movie touchstone.

REVIEW - BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (ZACK SNYDER)

Bombast and bloat: the bread and butter of the superhero movie in 2016. Some, sporadically, sometimes choose to eschew these trends; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice embodies them, emulates them, wrings them dry. The film is dry - there's not a good laugh in it. There is so, so much in this film, and yet so little that we haven't all seen before. So what to say of such a film? That unrelenting bombast turns it into an exceptionally long, dull trailer, and that it is - whether for next year's first Justice League movie or for next year's Wonder Woman. If a trailer generates excitement, then Batman v Superman may be the most exciting film of the year, for what little time Gal Gadot appears on screen. Her character achieves about as much as either of the titular characters do: their mandate is to harumph at each other, and most everybody else, and to look like especially fuckable slabs of meat. Larry Fong's gloomy cinematography only makes this bleak, morally barren (yet entirely too thick to comment upon its burgeoning political streak) movie even grimmer, though it does frame Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill's bulging muscles in such a fashion as to make them appear all the more impossible not to want, even need to cling onto. Batman v Superman's homoeroticism is its MVP, though it's still leagues behind actual pornography, and thus even inferior to that (what isn't?!). Sleek, brutish set design by Patrick Tatopoulos and some fine work by the sound, stunt and composing teams elevate this expensive film's technical specs, though it's otherwise a soulless, thoughtless accomplishment. Bombast and bloat over 2 hours 30 minutes; 2 minutes 30 seconds, and this trailer just might have excited me.