Screen: Reviews

While promoting the film at Fantastic Fest, cast member Bill Murray mentioned late on that he might be interested in mucking in on Ghostbusters 3.

Cue all manner of drooling, screaming and fearsome speculating - none of which had anything to do with this adaptation of Jeanne DuPrau’s children’s book.

But, hey, at least we’re not talking about the sort of bad press that The Dark Knight had when star Christian Bale and his mother allegedly fell out in a hotel.

Bill Murray may have sent Bustin’ fans into deafening raptures, but his latest project isn’t all that bad either, thanks partly to some atmospheric visuals and the family-friendly adventure film vibe conjured up by Monster House director Gil Kenan.

City Of Ember tells the story of an underground city built to save mankind, which suddenly begins to fall apart like your last student flat.

So naturally it’s down to two kids to find an escape route from their labyrinthine home before it becomes their tomb.

In a world where execs will throw millions of dollars of CGI money at anything with a script, it’s almost expected that most films will look amazing nowadays.

But these guys have cooked up a brilliant, claustrophopic, industrial landscape which provides a lot of the tension.

Bill Murray is fun as always as the city’s figurehead, and lead actress Saoirse Ronan helps light up any of the darkened plot corners that crop up in the film.

ROMANCE
Nights In Rodanthe (PG)
2/5

So are we too hard on movie tear-jerkers?

We’re quite happy to lap up any number of formulaic moments when someone’s blowing something up, battling drug addiction or stepping into the shoes of a historical icon.

But the moment two people discover “a love that conquers all� on the big screen, there are at least 10 reviewers rushing to their thesauruses to find cool new variations on the word “vomit�.

I only ask this because Richard Gere and Diane Lane are actually pretty good in this movie, and yet it’s a near-certainty that it’s going to get panned worse than a rat in a two-star kitchen.

Diane plays a unhappy wife who’s looking after a remote hotel for a friend when she meets up with heartbreak-riddled surgeon Richard Gere who’s rich with guilt over his neglect of family.

Between them, and sharing a lonesome hotel perched precariously at the edge of the sea with a hurricane on the way, the two fractured hearts escape their daily woes and discover that “it’s never too late for a second chance�.

Penned by the scriptwriter of The Notebook and Message In A Bottle, this presses the same buttons marked longing, loss and regret.

While there’s a warmth to the performances of Gere and Lane, you can’t help thinking back to their collaboration on 2002’s Unfaithful. In that movie about adultery, the pair infused the film with a passion that turned more heads than the script.

Here, it’s just that little more sedate.

Although it’ll pull the heart-strings quite adequately if a by-the-numbers romance is to your taste, it’s just that little bit too routine to be that interesting.

HORROR
Mirrors (15)
2/5

There was a time when America owned the horror movie.

Film-makers unashamedly explored themes such as Cold War fear, commercialism and the family in classics such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Night Of The Living Dead.

Not so long ago, American horror roared. Now it whimpers under the table, picking up leftovers from a generation of talented Asian scare-gurus.

These offerings are starting to blend into one, and there’s very little that stands out in Mirrors, the Kiefer Sutherland vehicle spawned from South Korea’s 2004 chiller Into The Mirror.

Kiefer plays a troubled ex-cop who takes a job in department store, and promptly finds his family being pestered by their own mirror images. It’s something to do with evil spirits, and gives Switchblade Romance director Alexandre Aja the opportunity to get involved in a bit of gore, and let the 24 star cuss at a nun.

But it’s unsatisfying due to the extraordinarily dull plot, which buzzes around a selection of odd locales in an attempt to drum up scares.

Unfortunately, like the rest of the US’s J-horror remakes, it just looks so, so tired.