STACK #145 Nov 2016

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CINEMA REVIEWS

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

ALSO SCREENING IN NOVEMBER

RELEASED: Now Showing DIRECTOR: Tate Taylor CAST: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux RATING: MA15+

A faithful but flawed adaptation of the best-seller.

Chick noir – or ‘domestic noir’ as the novelists themselves prefer it to be known as – has taken the book world by storm, but so far the sub-genre has not fared quite as well on the big screen. David Fincher’s take on Gone Girl , arguably the book that paved the way for this new style of psychological thriller, was superb, perfectly capturing the sly wit and menace of Gillian Flynn’s masterful novel. However, the adaptation of S.J. Watson’s Before I Fall Asleep was a proficient but overly melodramatic chiller. The latest domestic noir best-seller to hit the big screen, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train , sits somewhere between the two: while it’s not in the same class as Gone Girl , it’s an absorbing

and ingeniously plotted tale of marital discord and murder. Emily Blunt plays Rachel, the titular girl (well, woman really) on the train who becomes obsessed with a seemingly perfect couple – Scott (Luke Evans) and Megan (Haley Bennett) – who she sees each day from the window of her carriage. When the latter goes missing soon after being spotted with a mystery man, Rachel reports her suspicions to the police, but we soon learn that she is a far from reliable witness. As well as being an alcoholic who lost her job months ago, she has been harassing her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) and his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), who live in the same street as the missing woman. She may have even confronted the missing woman on the night she disappeared, and as Rachel suffers from drunken blackouts, she begins to wonder whether she has done something really terrible. Blunt is terrific as a woman who begins to doubt her own sanity and director Tate Taylor ( The Help ) does a good job in sustaining the tension across the multiple time frames over which the story unfolds. But he's less successful at deploying red herrings, and the finale is something of a letdown. John Ferguson

FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM

The Potterverse continues in this spin-off from J.K. Rowling's beloved series. According to the author, this is the first of five planned features that will link up with the Harry Potter films. Based on a slim Hogwarts textbook, this period fantasy finds wizard Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) in 1920s New York, where the titular creatures have been unleashed. Casting a spell on Nov 17 .

FURTHER VIEWING: Gone Girl

INFERNO

Will Hunting meets Jason Bourne, but it's Ben Affleck who plays the autistic math genius and CPA who "uncooks the books" for criminal organisations and moonlights as an assassin. It all adds up on Nov 3 . (See page 12.) THE ACCOUNTANT

RELEASED: Now Showing DIRECTOR: Ron Howard CAST: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Ben Foster RATING: M

Upping the Dante.

Dan Brown’s pulp thrillers might make for a good read on a long haul flight, but as movies they’re something of an endurance test. The Da Vinci Code was like listening to the audiobook as read by Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen, and Angels & Demons was strangely inert for a film about an attempt to destroy the Vatican with antimatter. Skipping the third book featuring cryptologist Robert Langdon, The Lost Symbol , Ron Howard proceeds directly to Brown’s most recent best- seller, Inferno , and finally delivers the kind of propulsive thriller the material demands. It’s easily

the best film of the three, which is faint praise given the competition. Inferno finds Langdon (Hanks) awakening in a hospital bed with a nasty head wound, a case of temporary amnesia, and experiencing nightmarish visions of hell on Earth. Following an assassination attempt by a Terminator-like lady cop, Langdon flees with British doctor Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) in tow, and must piece together the cryptic clues that link Dante’s famous depiction of Hell with a deadly pathogen designed by a mad billionaire to cull the world’s population by half. It’s the usual race across Europe, from one art gallery, museum and basilica to the next, with the exposition delivered on the run. Things get increasingly more preposterous and some of the plot twists are glaringly obvious, but the cracking pace, some welcome humour, and Hanks’s earnest performance as the thinking man’s Indiana Jones holds it all together... just. If anyone can save the world it’s Langdon, even if he has lost his memory; the guy can still recognise a Florentine spire from his hospital window, even if he can’t remember what coffee is. Scott Hocking

Amy Adams plays a linguist who must decipher an alien language to avert global disaster in this sci-fi drama from Sicario director Denis Villeneuve. Arriving Nov 10 . ARRIVAL

Luke (son of Ridley) Scott makes his feature debut with this creepy, cautionary sci-fi tale about the risks involved in creating a synthetic human – needless to say, there are plenty. Frankenstein meets Ex Machina on Nov 17 . (See page 18.) MORGAN

FURTHER VIEWING: The Da Vinci Code

NOVEMBER 2016

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