Tag: t

The Tiger Woman

  By

★★½
“A leopard which changes its spots.”

Am I the only person irrationally annoyed by the title of this 12-episode serial? It takes place in South America, where the only tigers are in captivity. And look at the picture of the heroine. LOOK AT IT. In what universe is that a tiger? I mean, the ears are a nice touch, but it’s very obviously not tiger stripes. Though it has been pointed that in its location, the jaguar is known as el tigre. Which might make sense if there was any other jot of Hispanic culture to be found here. [GWG readers: “Get on with it!”] Oh, alright… if you insist.  

As mentioned, we’re in South America, where two competing oil companies are seeking to establish their territory. The Inter Ocean Oil Company are the current occupants, and have been working in association with the indigenous population, under their white queen (Stirling), known as the Tiger Woman. But if they don’t strike oil soon, their franchise will expire. A predatory, far less friendly (but unnamed) company, is standing by, to make sure that doesn’t happen, allowing them to take over. But Inter Ocean has sent top troubleshooter, Allen Saunders (Rock Lane), to work with the Tiger Queen and block their enemy’s attempts. Those get more desperate as the deadline approaches and Inter Ocean appear to be succeeding. Complicating matters is the Tiger Queen’s original identity as missing heiress, Rita Arnold, something her enemies want to use to their advantage.

The heroine is something of a step forward from Jungle Girl, with Rita/Ms. Tiger at least making an occasional effort to get involved in the fisticuffs (copious, to the point half the oil company’s profits must have gone on replacement furniture). However, it’s rare for this to last more than a few seconds, and it seems she’s as fragile as cut crystal. Run into a wall? Knocked out. Trip on the carpet? Knocked out. Looked at askance by a bad guy? Probably knocked out. I swear, there are times where it feels like she spends half her screen time unconscious.However, as in Jungle Girl, there are odd moments which rise above, though I’m not sure the aeroplane spin would be a move familiar to white goddesses from the sky.

She does have a regal presence (perhaps due to Sterling’s background as a model, before she turned to acting), even if her throne looks a bit like it was built out of banana boxes. Ms. Tiger is also reasonably brave, always willing to put herself in danger when necessary for her tribe – or, probably more relevantly, necessary for cliff-hanger purposes.  I was less impressed with the plotting, especially the shenanigans of the villains, which seem almost random, rather than well-conceived to their particular aims. For instance, they’re supposed to kill Rita, then get someone else to impersonate her and claim the inheritance. If that’s the best plan you can come up with… you need to bring in some kind of outside consultant. Again, it feels as if everything they do is for cliff-hanger purposes, not as a means to an end. It gets kinda repetitive after a while.

Still, this was a big hit, and led to Republic fast-tracking another vehicle for Sterling. Only a few months after this was released, production started on Zorro’s Black Whip, in which she would get to be more of a proper lead.

Dir: Spencer Bennet and Wallace Grissell
Star: Linda Stirling, Allan Lane, Duncan Renaldo, George J. Lewis
Subsequently re-released in 1951 as Perils of the Darkest Jungle, and in a cut-down TV version in 1966 as Jungle Gold.

And Tomorrow the Entire World

  By

★★★
“Chewy, yet slightly crunchy.”

Plenty of films in our genre use violence, either as a tool of the plot, or simply for entertainment purposes. Fewer consider the philosophical and moral underpinnings of violent acts, in the way this does. Luisa (Emde) is the daughter of a rich, aristocratic family who is now a law student. She rebels against her upbringing by joining the P81 commune which is fighting against extreme right-wing groups in Germany. But there is a growing schism in the commune, between those who are opposed to injurious violence, and those who feel the ends justify the means. As Luisa drifts into a relationship with group leader Alfa (Saavefra), she finds herself drawn increasingly to the latter camp – albeit without an appreciation for the potential consequences.

It would be easy for this to descend into political polemic, yet it largely manages to avoid that. Luisa and her pals may be “fighting the good fight,” but they’re clearly not without significant flaws. For instance, Alfa regards the group as his own, personal all-you-can-eat buffet of young women, with Luisa just the next platter. It also does a good job of illustrating the slippery slope, from civil disobedience through property damage to full-on violence against people. At which point, I’d say you lose the moral high ground, and the film acknowledges it can become counter-productive. As someone says after a clash between left- and right-wing factions: “They are angry, really angry, and who’s going to pay? You, Alfa? No, it’ll be someone, somewhere, who had nothing to do with this.”

It’s still a shock when the full force of the German state and (the apparently infamous) Section 129 of their criminal code, is dropped on P81, making Luisa and Alfa fugitives. They hide out with Dietmar, a former activist in the 80’s, who spent time in jail for his acts then, and now lives quietly, working as a nurse. He offers a particularly cynical view regarding the futility of their actions, based on his own experiences: “We were absolutely convinced that we could build a new society. I was going to be a minister.” This is lost on Luisa, who steals a hunting rifle from her family’s home and prepares to launch an assault on an enemy gathering.

The film opens with her tossing away the gun, but at that point it’s not clear whether this was after, or instead of, its use. It’s on that decision that the film’s climax pivots: will she step back from the precipice, or embrace wholeheartedly what it means to take a life, even of someone you regard as lower than an animal? [Pointedly, Luisa is vegetarian…] This was Germany’s entry for the 2021 Best Foreign Film Oscar, though it did not make the final list of nominees. It definitely has that sense of earnestness the Academy likes, and is not so much biased ignores any other side exists – which may be the point, it being easier to hate someone who is kept distant and seen only as “the enemy.” But even an entrenched old hack like myself still found it more thought-provoking than I expected.

Dir: Julia von Heinz
Star:  Mala Emde, Noah Saavedra, Tonio Schneider, Luisa-Céline Gaffron

Too Hot to Handle

  By

★★★
“If you can’t stand the heat…”

Director Schain had already worked with his wife Caffaro on the Ginger trilogy, in which she played (per Wikipedia), “a tough and resourceful bed-hopping private-eye and spy.” Here, the character isn’t too different, though her day job is rather more morally questionable, being a professional killer. “Samantha Fox” (Caffaro) is the identity she has adopted, as she works on a series of hits in the Philippines. On her trail is the local chief of detectives, Domingo De La Torres (Ipalé), who first views Samantha as a suspect, but their relationship quickly becomes more intimate. It feels almost like a precursor to Basic Instinct, in that there’s a cop obsessed with someone he’s supposed to be investigating, and really doesn’t care whether or not she’s a murderer.

The film does aim to make Samantha quite a sympathetic character, in that all the people we see her kill, as ones without whom society is better off. But there are a couple of moments where she seems clearly psychopathic, to Villanelle-esque levels. For example, she takes pleasure in sitting and watching her first victim slowly suffocate to death. This is not by accident. When Domingo takes her on a shooting trip, she states, “It’s much more of a turn on to watch something die slowly. Even then, the greater the distance, the less the fun.” It’s an attitude we see in action, at a cock-fighting event which is apparently her idea of a date night (I’m pleased to report Chris is perfectly happy with dinner and a movie). While watching animals fight to the death, she is simultaneously dreaming about having sex. This seems… not exactly normal.

Yet, Samantha is still depicted as nicer than her victims: it’s not as if her twisted fantasies hurt anyone else. Well, except for her victims, anyway. I did like the way she rarely used physical means to take them down, outside of a duel against an operative De La Torres sends to the boat where she lives. Mind you, that scene is functional rather than impressive, and so it makes sense for the film-makers to script it so that she relies on her smarts. She’s fond of disguises, whether it’s pretending to be an art journalist, or going full brownface as she pretends to be a local maid. Caffaro clearly also has no inhibitions about shedding her clothes, though her figure is on the lighter side for my tastes.

Less effective in general is Ipalé, who became well-knows twenty years later, as Pharaoh Seti in The Mummy and its sequel. It feels as if he learned his lines phonetically, and he makes little overall impression here. I was more excited to see veteran Philippino actor Diaz as De La Torres’s lieutenant, for once getting to play a good guy. Overall, while nothing particularly special, this is reasonably entertaining, and considerably more twisted than I expected in terms of its protagonist and her psyche.

Dir: Don Schain
Star:  Cheri Caffaro, Aharon Ipalé, Vic Diaz, Corinne Calvet

The Trip

  By

★★★½
“One bad trip – but in a good way.”

This is a nasty, mean-spirited piece of work. But I mean that as a compliment, for it’s clearly intended as such. The European Queen of Action Heroines Rapace (I must get round to giving her, her own tag!)  stars as soap actress Lisa, whose marriage to her director there, Lars (Hennie), is on severely shaky ground. So shaky, in fact, that Lars plans to use their upcoming weekend getaway to his father’s cabin to kill Lisa, cut up the body and dispose of it in a nearby lake, while saying she vanished on a solo hike. Except, just as he’s about to enact the plan, it turns out Lisa also intends to kill him in a “hunting accident”, and she gets the jump on her spouse. But before she can enact her plan, an accomplice of his shows up. Then three escaped convicts (literally) drop in to the cottage, with bad intentions of their own.

In some ways, it’s reminiscent of a hyperviolent version of seventies theatrical farce, something with a title like Run For Your Wife. Plot twist is piled upon twist, the characters furiously reacting to every additional complication and new arrival as best they can, in the hope of finding a way out of the mess.  The original Norwegian title translates as “For worse” – as in “For better or…”, and that’s probably a better one than the highly-generic name Netflix tacked on. You will need a strong stomach, to be sure. Wirkola’s previous work has often been in the horror genre, such as Nazi zombie movie Dead Snow and it’s sequal, and that informs a lot of the brutality here. But he also directed What Happened to Monday, also starring Rapace, and this re-union is another good effort. Not all the shots land as they should – there’s what feels like a painfully extended sequence of one of the prisoners going to the toilet on the attic floor, which frankly, I could have done without.

However, the bulk of it works well, if you’re in the mood for brutal black comedy. Having a couple who genuinely want to kill each other, and forcing them to team up against a greater, external threat, is a concept full of potential, and it’s mined with energy and enthusiasm. I particularly loved Lars’s geriatric father, who leaves his nursing home and turns up with a zero-tolerance approach to everyone. But Rapace’s character is the focus, cutting and stabbing her way through proceedings with the best (or worst) of them, while taking no small amount of damage – as the picture (top) suggests. This may not be the sort of film I want to re-visit on a regular basis; not knowing what was coming up certainly felt a significant part of the fun. However, as a bloody good time, with the emphasis on “bloody,” it delivered everything I was hoping, and a little more.

Dir: Tommy Wirkola
Star: Noomi Rapace, Aksel Hennie, Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck
a.k.a. I onde dager 

Till Death

  By

★★½
“Women don’t sweat, they glisten.”

I kinda agonized, for far longer than I should have, over whether this was a 3-star or 2½-star film. It’s probably 2¾. Or perhaps 2 5/8. No, 2 11/16. In the end though, it doesn’t matter. It’s just another in Megan Fox’s attempts to become the next Angelina Jolie, following in the footsteps of the similarly okay but not exactly memorable Rogue. Indeed, I initially thought this was by the same director, but turns out it’s a different director who uses initials in lieu of a first name. Anyway, with this one now available on Netflix, it will likely raise Fox’s action-actress profile. In terms of current rankings, she probably moves ahead of Ruby Rose in the rankings. Though that’s not exactly difficult.

The problems here are mostly pacing, with the movie being too slow to get to the main course. Emma (Fox) is unhappily married to Mark (Macken), an over-controlling lawyer, and is having an affair with one of Mark’s colleagues. After an excess of scenes belabouring these points, e.g. Mark orders her dessert after she has declined it (what a bastard!), on their 10th anniversary, Mark takes her out to a remote lakehouse. She wakes the next morning to find herself handcuffed to him, and Mark then blows his brains out. Turns out, his life was about to fall apart, but he has a plan to wreck Emma’s life from beyond the grave. This involves sending two thugs (Mulvey and Roth) to the house, one of whom has a beef with her, due to Emma having cost him his eye.

Our heroine, therefore, has to elude the home invaders while chained to a 180-lb (literal) dead weight, in a house from which all sharp objects have been carefully removed. This is kinda distracting, as I found myself figuring out alternative methods of separation, such as slamming the corpse’s wrist repeatedly in a car-door. But that’s perhaps for the best, as a distraction from too many shots of Emma dragging Mark’s body around the house, using her wedding-dress as a tarp (I’ll take “Over-obvious symbolism” for $400, please, Alex). Naturally, this unwanted connection lasts only until the plot decides it needs to be discarded, when it becomes a more standard home-invasion thriller.

It does perk up on the arrival of the villains, and there are some reasonably clever twists thereafter. To be honest, Mark’s warped imagination was almost impressive. Though if I was going to such lengths to extract revenge, I’d probably want to be there to see it. Where’s the fun otherwise? Fox does put in the effort, even if as Chris noted, Emma remains remarkably shevelled (as opposed to dishevelled) over the course of proceedings. Her hair and lipstick remain almost pristine despite crawling across grubby floors and snowy landscapes. I’m reminded of the old line quoted at the top; if you can still look hawt when drenched in blood and brains, your make-up artist deserves some kind of award.

Dir: S.K. Dale
Star: Megan Fox, Callan Mulvey, Jack Roth, Eoin Macken

Trial By Fire

  By

★★
“Not so hot.”

When you hear this is a Lifetime TV movie about a female firefighter, that will probably set up all manner of expectations about what you’re going to get. I am here to tell you, this will deliver on every single one of them. While somewhat salvaged by decent production values – there were a few shots involving flames that genuinely looked impressive – you are not going to find a safer, more predictable ninety minutes of entertainment. It’s less a film than a parade of cliches, beginning with the heroine, rookie fire-fighter Kristin Scott (the appropriately-named Burns!) losing her father, the local station chief, in a blaze on his last day before retirement. Her sister Chelsea blames Kristin, as do her colleagues in the station, leading to her punching one of the latter out.

Seeking to obtain validation and self-respect, Kristin seeks to join the elite group known as “smoke jumpers”. They get dropped in to the most hazardous of situations, to try and stem the flames. To even get into the training, she’s going to have to overcome the prejudices of the existing jumpers, who harbour serious doubts about a woman’s ability to stand up to the physical rigours of the position. I’m not going to detail the plot any further, as you should be able to figure it out from there – right down to a finale where Kristin saves Chelsea and her husband when their camping trip suddenly becomes a bit toasty. Will there be flirty banter with fellow smoke jumper Ray (Ravanello)? Or another colleague who seeks to sabotage her chances? Maybe. Oh, who am I trying to kid. Of course there is.

Burns is tall enough to be plausible as a fire-fighter, but height and a “can-do” attitude only goes so far. She just doesn’t have the necessary physical presence. A key part of the smoke jumper testing, about which the film makes frequent mention, is the ability to do a mile in 11 minutes while carrying 100 pounds, and you just never get the sense our heroine would be capable of it. Still, this is part and parcel for the territory, and you can’t blame the film for skewing photogenic e.g. cutely smudged, rather than realistic. I do wish they’d done a great deal more with the script, however, which is just staggeringly bland, girl power wish-fulfillment.

It does appear the flames were probably largely added in post-production, yet these don’t have the obvious digital look you often see in such things. We get some impressively scorched earth scenes, which do actually give a sense of how dangerous this job is. It ends by telling us that 27 of the 400 smoke jumpers in the US are women, and that’s got to be a thankless and incredibly demanding task. I sense any one of their stories would probably be more interesting and less hackneyed than the one we get here. I also suspect any real smoke jumpers who watch this, would likely be rolling their eyes furiously.

Dir: John Terlesky
Star: Brooke Burns, Rick Ravanello, Winston Rekert, Wanda Cannon
a.k.a. Smoke Jumper

Trese

  By

★★★½
“Come get your Phil…”

While undeniably anime influenced, this originates from the Philippines, rather than Japan. It’s based on a graphic novel of the same name, by Tan and Baldisimo, and was made by Netflix’s anime branch. The six x 30-minute episodes were released with English, Filipino and Japanese language tracks. I went for the “original” Filipino, though there’s not a particular case for that. It just seemed to fit the setting better [this isn’t a hard and fast rule. I watched Gunsmith Cats: Bulletproof in Japanese, even though it’s takes place in Chicago].

In this version of Manila, there are a host of creatures from the country’s apparently rich folklore present alongside humans. Most of them I hadn’t heard of beyond the aswang, but they include everything from fire demons to electric entities. I’m sure this partly explains the show’s greater success in its native land; Westerners should probably just accept it all and go with the flow. There is a fragile truce between them and humanity, and on our side, Trese (Soberano) is charged with keeping the peace. Her family has been in this business for generations, and she works alongside twins Crispin and Basilio (dela Cruz), whom she used to “baby-sit”.

The episodes work as stand-alone entities, but there is also an over-riding arc of something malicious bubbling up from the underworld. It seems to be related to corrupt local official, former Mayor Sancho Santamaria (Tandoc). Trese faces off against him in the first show, and he’s sent to prison – but continues his occult manipulations from there, forcing her to confront him further. At which point, the real power behind the throne comes out, for a face-off in the final episode. Not all of them work equally well. There’s a fairly crap one in the middle about a film actress who spawned a pack of goblins or something, that years later came back to take revenge on her and her plastic surgeon. Yeah. I don’t think that was quite thought through to the same extent as the overall concept.

But when it works, it works really well. Some of the episodes deserve expansion to feature length, such as the one where a horde of zombies are unleashed to attack the local police-station. It plays like a cross between Night of the Living Dead and Assault on Precinct 13, and crams more action into its 30 minutes than many full-length movies.The series also does a good job of shading in  grey; across the creatures of folklore, some are friendly to humanity, while others are not, and some shift allegiance over the course of the show.

This is at its best when going its own way, rather than when, as sometimes happens, it becomes a bit Buffy-esque. The whole “heritage” thing is a little overplayed, with her family history dribbled out in little parcels at the start of each part. It’s better when simply focusing on Trese being the bad-ass she is certainly capable of being. Here’s to more of than in any subsequent seasons.

Creators: Budjette Tan, Kajo Baldisimo
Star (voice): Liza Soberano, Simon dela Cruz, Apollo Abraham, Rene Tandoc

A Call to Spy

  By

★★★
“Life during wartime”

There’s no denying the extraordinary bravery shown by female agents in Britain’s Special Operations Executive during World War 2. Largely operating in occupied France, they coordinated sabotage activities, ran communications and generally did everything their male counterparts did. The risks they ran were certainly no less, with about one in three not surviving. We’ve previously had a few articles about them, both fictional depictions such as Wish Me Luck, and more factually oriented accounts, like Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story. This occupies a middle ground. The characters are real: SOE agents Khan (Apte) and Virginia Hall (Thomas) – an American with, I kid you not, an artificial leg – and Vera Atkins, the woman who recruited and ran them. But it takes a dramatic rather than a documentarian approach. 

I think my knowledge going in probably slightly weakened my appreciation for the film. Knowing the stories of Khan and Hall, and their eventual fates, largely robbed this of much tension. However, there is still a good deal to enjoy. This may run 124 minutes, but it never drags, maintaining a solid pace throughout. Indeed, perhaps too solid; you could argue for a lack of escalation, the film having nothing identifiable as a climax. That doesn’t stop it from being consistently entertaining, anchored by a trio of good performances. Katic, sporting an impressive English accent, is perhaps the stand-out as Atkins. She has to deal not just with the chauvinism inherent in the era, but also having her loyalty questioned due to her background as a Romanian Jew. Anti-semitism at the time was not confined to the continent.

The bulk of the drama comes from the other two, and the contrast in personalities could not be more marked. Khan has the near-perpetual look of a deer caught in headlights, while Hall, in her cover as a journalist, possesses a calm assurance. However, they both prove to be equally good at buckling down and getting the job done, dodging danger and almost certain death, in the form of the Nazis, on an almost daily basis – something the film certainly puts over. Stylistically, in some ways it almost feels like a two-hour long montage; there are not many extended scenes to propel the narrative, with instead, sequences cutting together the two women’s lives in occupied France.

It’s still effective, and may have been needed to work around the need for some tampering with timelines. It’s not obvious that less than four months passed between Khan landing and being captured, while Hall spent more than fifteen months in action, before having to flee over the Pyrenees into Spain (not the easiest of treks, given her disability). These and other cinematic conceits are forgivable, and all told, this is respectable enough, and very respectful of its heroines. I tend to think though, that this may be a case where the facts are more impressive than any fiction could ever be,

Dir: Lydia Dean Pilcher
Star: Sarah Megan Thomas, Stana Katic, Radhika Apte, Linus Roache

Torn Asunder, by Michael Todd

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

Katie Maddison is just your average chemistry college student, until she gets kidnapped for use by a Satanic cult, intent on summoning a demonic entity. Fortunately, she is saved from a fate worse than death, and is rescued just in time by a group of warriors known as “The Damned”. However, by that point, said demonic entity – going by the name of Pandora – has embedded herself inside Katie. The good news is, it’s less possession than symbiosis, with Pandora largely happy to chill and pass snarky comment. Though her presence acts as a supernatural power-up, enhancing her host’s strength, speed and healing abilities. The fact Katie is not under control of her dark passenger gets her an invite to join the group on their mission “to protect the uninformed from reality.” As their creed goes, “The sheep can sleep at night, because we don’t.”

The glaring issue here is the complete lack of threat the scenario presents. There are plenty of hints that Pandora is a powerful demon – perhaps even one of the “Seventy-Two”, the top echelon of Hell’s denizens. Yet, in this volume, she proves to be an entirely benign presence – or, as mentioned, very helpful to Katie in her new career. There’s certainly nothing which justifies her telling Pandora, “You are seriously one of the evillest people I have ever met.” She’s a bigger threat to others of her own kind, even helping Katie exorcise a lesser demon from one of her colleagues. Now, I suspect she may be playing a long game – this is an eight-volume series, so virtually everything here is going to be a long game. But combine the demon’s inaction and the relative ease with which the Damned take out virtually every other hell-spawn they meet [the only significant injury suffered is closer to suicide by demon], and you’ve got something in desperate need of additional peril. I would settle for simply extra challenge, since Katie breezes through everything with hardly any apparent effort.

Going by the notes at the end, it’s not quite clear how much Todd actually wrote, of what seems a collaborative effort. He says he was the creator and main script-writer, but “I’m not the person who was responsible for turning the script into the longer story.” Still, his name is on the cover, so he gets the blame. Debra Dunbar showed how demonic possession can be handled in an entertaining way, and Todd [perhaps better known under his Michael Anderle name, for the Kurtherian Gambit series] could learn a lot from Dunbar. Both in establishing your Satanic presence, which here comes over as little beyond a slightly more foul-mouthed version of Paris Hilton, and then in creating a credible threat for your protagonist. Instead, it plays a bit like an entry-level tutorial for a video-game, and certainly falls rather short of the “Supernatural Action Adventure Opera” touted in the book’s sub-title.

Author: Michael Todd
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 8 in the Protected by the Damned series.

Those Who Wish Me Dead

  By

★★½
“Ashes to ashes”

I was expecting so much more. The trailer looked really promising, offering the return of Angelina Jolie to full-on action fare, for the first time since Salt in 2010 [yeah, I know we’ve covered Maleficent and its sequel here; probably too much CGI in those to qualify as “full-on”]. Suffice to say, that really isn’t the case. There is, instead, an awful lot of sitting around a fire tower in the middle of a Montana forest, and too much time spent on supporting characters, when what we really wanted was Lara Croft: Fire Jumper. Indeed, there’s a case that Jolie’s character isn’t even the most action-oriented woman here. We’ll get to that later.

She plays Hannah, a former fire jumper – they get parachuted in to the most perilous of situations to try and stop or divert the path of the inferno. She is suffering PTSD after an ill-defined incident which caused her to blame herself for the deaths of three children, even though everyone says there is nothing she could have done. She has been invalided out to a job on the aforementioned tower, watching for smoke that would indicate a fire under way. Separately, forensic accountant Owen Casserly is on the run, because he Knows Too Much, and is ;ooking to hide out with his relation, local sheriff Ethan Sawyer. On the way, he is ambushed, but gives the evidence to his young son, Connor (Little). He runs off into the forest, and is found by Hannah. However, the assassins (Bernthal + Gillen) are keen to tidy up the loose end represented by the boy.

It takes almost 40 minutes for Connor and Hannah to first meet, and it’s well after that before things really kick off. A fire started by the killer as a diversion has become a raging conflagration, which our heroine and her new-found purpose in life have to handle, as well as those hunting them. They do have help, in the shape of Ethan’s wife, Allison (Medina Senghore), who just so happens to run a survival school, and is remarkably athletic for also being six months pregnant. As mentioned, she arguably does more in the way of direct action than Hannah, getting the better of the killers on at least two occasions.

In addition to my disappointment with the star only really getting her hands dirty at the climax, I was also annoyed by Hannah’s PTSD, which is of the cinematic variety. By this I mean, it exists purely for dramatic purposes, and evaporates entirely at the moments when the plot needs her to act competently. Apparently, all you need to do to cure PTSD is pull yourself together, for the sake of an unaccompanied minor. I will say, some of the fire sequences are very well staged, and if forest flames genuinely move that fast, I have a whole new respect for those whose job it is to try and stop them. These sound technical aspects are not enough to negate a palpable sense of underwhelm.

Dir: Taylor Sheridan
Star: Angelina Jolie, Finn Little, Jon Bernthal, Aidan Gillen