Trailerwatch: The Fantastic Mr. Fox

It looks sort of...endearingly cheap? The first few shots of this film kind of creeped me out but I'm pretty sold on it after seeing this trailer. It looks like something you might have seen on CBBC in the late 80s. There's a few good jokes in there as well, and it's nice to hear Meryl sound all motherly ain't it?

Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events

In the tradition of all great children's films, Brad Silberling's adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events offers a dark, scary vision of adolescense.  No sooner do we meet Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken) and Sunny Baudelaire, then they are orphaned and packed off to their distant cousin, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey in a rubbery, OTT performance).  It soon becomes apparent that Olaf wants nothing more than to get rid of the children and claim the family fortune.  Pursued by Count Olaf in a variety of guises, the Baudelaires stay with their herpetologist Uncle Montgomery (Billy Connolly) and then with their paranoid Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep).

Adapted from the first two Lemony Snicket novels, Silberling's film feels very episodic, and those who find Jim Carrey irritating will find nothing here to win them over.  However, the imaginative set design and some excellent performances from Browning and Aiken really make this stand out.  Both of these elements, plus a brilliantly macabre sense of whimsy, combine to give the film a real emotional weight that is lacking from the majority of children's movies.

Doubt

John Patrick Shanley's serious adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a complex meditation on Catholic guilt that veers between being tense and compelling in certain scenes to po-faced and obvious in others. Set in a Catholic school in 1964, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) suspects the friendly Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of sexually abusing Donald, a black altar boy. Acting on the shyly-voiced suspicions of the idealistic Sister James (Amy Adams), Aloysius attempts to hound Flynn out of the parish, insisting that she doesn't need proof, all she needs is her "certainty".

There's plenty to admire here but not an awful lot to love. What Doubt excels at is character motivation. We're not sure on why Aloysius pursues Flynn with such vigour or whether Flynn is guilty of what she accuses him of. There's one particularly memorable scene with Viola Davis as Donald's mother. To say any more would rob the scene of its dramatic impact but suffice to say that it's uncomfortable and provocative in the way that good cinema should be. Shanley's direction is unfussy but he's unable to overcome the stagey-ness of his central conceit, and is too reliant on metaphor to get his point across (the storm constantly raging outside, a lamb placed in a Nativity scene with an air of significance). He is, however, ably served by four actors all on the top of their game. Davis and Streep are especially electric, whilst Hoffman and Adams provide nuanced, intelligent riffs on similar roles in their back catelogue. It's a clever film but it's also one that is, for the most part, distant and emotionally uninvolving.