REVIEW - THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (ANTOINE FUQUA)

For all that Antoine Fuqua may be a forceful director, ever seeking a dynamic set-piece and a capable director of action, he's a dismal storyteller. Tasked with remaking a classic remake of another classic, and handed a promising script by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk, he yet again proves himself incompetent at dealing with the most basic elements of filmmaking, and The Magnificent Seven thus falls far short of the magnificence it touts. Whether smearing the screen with sun-dappled lens flare courtesy Mauro Fiore's insipid cinematography, or flattening out all the thematic texture with John Refoua's workmanlike edit and his own inability to stage dialogue, Fuqua ensures that, no matter what noble or exciting aspirations to which this film may strive, it'll eternally fail to strike one as anything nobler than just average. The warning signs arrive early - whatever hopes you may harbour that The Magnificent Seven might recreate the timbre of Hollywood's many iconic mid-century Westerns are succinctly dashed by sorry choices such as an unremarkable aesthetic scheme and an astonishing over-reliance on ADR (entire sequences feature not a single word visibly uttered on the screen, yet line after line exits the speakers). Better to sit back and anticipate the inevitably arresting action, which papers over some issues of confusion and continuity with its general fast pace and some committed performances. No-one commands the screen quite like Denzel Washington, and there are vivid turns from Vincent d'Onofrio, Lee Byung Hun and Peter Sarsgaard (the narrow winner of the most closely-contested game of 'Who Would Paddy Fuck First From The Cast?' in years). Strictly surface pleasures then, but pleasures nonetheless.

REVIEW - EXPERIMENTER (MICHAEL ALMEREYDA)

Experimenter is a playful experiment of Michael Almereyda's own. Exhausting his subjects' full intellectual capacity, and forming at once a period point to the psychological debate it enters into and a defiant snub to much of that debate, Almereyda seems to find no alternative but to soak his potentially dry, analytical biopic in humour. There's a certain smugness to it all, no doubt, but it somehow feels earnt - Experimenter is an intelligent piece of work, and its self-satisfaction is mitigated by an equal sense of subversion that leavens the tone. If he neglects to mirror Stanley Milgram's techniques of deception and illusion, Almereyda seeks a similar purpose: hoodwinking his viewer one way after another, screwing with the standards we expect from biopics, or psychological inquiries, or formalistic chamber pieces. It's under such an analysis that almost anything in Experimenter becomes excusable - damaging details such as a slackening in the direction in the film's latter half, or a tendency to comment upon the philosophical discourse which it both depicts and contributes to in such a manner as to discourage further commentary, are actually wholly forgivable in the context of the film's wider scheme. Some of Almereyda's ploys are a little too overt (the literal elephant in the room being overtly overt), but even their negative impact is negligible in a film so full of thought and thoughtfulness. Peter Sarsgaard is as subtly effective as ever (though his fake facial hair is less subtle), and Winona Ryder turns in mature character work, the likes of which she's rarely remembered for, yet has always been best at.