2016 OSCARS MAKEUP SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED

The Academy's make-up branch is moving into slightly new territory this year, though you'd hardly know it by observing their seven-strong shortlist. For those in the know, this branch fucking loves Mel Gibson films, yet his Oscar-hyped Hacksaw Ridge is absent from this list. These seven will become three, the sole existing category with fewer than five nominees, on the 24th of January, when nominations in all categories are announced. And these seven are...

Deadpool

The Dressmaker

Florence Foster Jenkins

Hail, Caesar!

A Man Called Ove

Star Trek Beyond

Suicide Squad

REVIEW - SUICIDE SQUAD (DAVID AYER)

The superhero team-up extravaganza film commits suicide under David Ayer's loose rein. Here is a film so overwhelmed by errors of such gargantuan scale that their aggregate impact is negated by their individual monotony. You barely have the space to process your shock at any one of the film's many moral missteps before the need arises to set it aside, to process your frustration at the calamitous editing hack-job, and again to set that aside to process your bewilderment at Cara Delevingne's atrocious acting. Suicide Squad is, from the most persuasive perspective, the archetypal comic book adaptation of this decade: too much of everything, no longer merely storylines on which the audience is required to be familiar but even the imagined establishment of tonal and emotional foundations. We're supposed to cue responses to the content of Suicide Squad, ever underdeveloped in the film's relentlessly fast back-and-forward motion, not engendered by the efforts of Ayer and his team but produced or regurgitated from within ourselves, drawing upon experience of what we ought to expect from films such as this. Whether we must mine existing reactions, previously subsumed from a limitless wealth of similar films, or spawn them innately is another, more worrying concern. The methods of differentiating Suicide Squad from its kin thus become its only unique pieces of DNA; despite a multitude of promises in the marketing (and also from the film itself), there's little uniqueness at all in its construction. A coarse misogyny sticks out, even from the pervasive atmosphere of typically aggressive, odious macho self-aggrandizement. Otherwise, Suicide Squad is only remarkable for how unremarkable it actually is - visual effects designed by committee, action sequences edited into a blur, video game dialogue dragging everything down yet further. Squad goal: stay away.