Film Carew

The grandiose, paid-for-the-rights title of World War Z suggests its global heft: the way this zombie-movie zips around the Northern Hemisphere, datelines teletyped on the screen; the endless aerial shots of cities falling; the nearly-sociological look at how the structures of society bend, break, and rescramble in the face of a fanciful global pandemic. Of, y'know, zombies. But Marc Forster's film, for all its geopolitical dreams and apocalyptic grandeur and CGI'd cities ablaze, functions best when it's at its least sweeping; in the claustrophobic, trapped-in-a-building, survival-horror set-pieces stretched out between the disaster-movie helicopter shots and plane flights.

It all begins with disaster-movie signifiers: a loving family - Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt's hair, Mireille Enos, two sweet girls - tossing out foreshadowing hints that'll come back to haunt them when society falls apart (“have you packed your asthma inhaler?”). One moment, they're stuck in traffic, the next they're dodging CGI/video-game über-zombies, who're less like the roided-up ragers of 28 Days Later, more like escaped lunatics from Toontown. The ultra-jolty, fast-cutting, furious-nothing of the moment-chaos-breaks-out doesn't suggest much; and Marc Forster's wildly-all-over-the-place back-catalogue (from the execrable Monster's Ball to fiasco Stay, from Oscar-bait fluff Finding Neverland and The Kite Runner to the politically-trenchant yet flawed Bond movie Quantum Of Solace) is hardly ripe with promise, either.

"Do you think my hair has upstaged me in this one?"

But then Pitt and family are trapped in a shadowy, sinister, largely-abandoned apartment block at night, and they've got the simplest brief: survive, get to the roof by sunrise. In a brilliantly-mounted sequence, they tiptoe through pitch-black stairwells and corridors, darkness periodically punctuated by flickering fluorescent globes and the bright red shock of fizzing flares. It's a sustained piece of filmmaking tension, smotheringly claustrophobic and stylishly staged; Forster using the 3D plane to project forward via shocks of light; a most non-CGI treatment of the glasses-wearing gimmick that stands amongst its best popcorn-blockbuster uses (floating ash blowing at the audience is, to the contrary, standard 3D usage). The later revelation that the über-zombies are 'aroused' by sound is used to ratchet up the tension in further thriller-sequences: bicycling across rain-slack tarmac, wheels squeaking, or tip-toeing over broken glass; every tiny crinkle of sound resounding with pregnant terror.

These stripped-down moments are when World War Z is at its best. The film is, for the most part, one long series of close-calls and last-second escapes; the human fight-or-flight impulse turned into a tentpole picture that so often plays like a carnival ride. A decent precedent for what it does, when it works, is Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds, a superbly-mounted colour-and-light spectacle unfairly-maligned due solely to its proximity to couch-jumping Tom Cruise. When Forster stays true to the essentially-physical nature of his own disaster-piece - attempting to depict what it feels like to be there, amidst the calamity - then World War Z hits its stride; the endless chase sequences giving it a breathless feeling, barrelling along with pauses taken only to turn up the tension.

Yet, then Forster shows us more shots of cities burning, more swarming masses of cartoon über-zombies, more shit-being-sucked-out-of-an-airplane, more explosions and mushroom clouds and pixels-pushed-around. And, when that happens, and you're no longer held hostage by the endless momentum and the intimate perspective, you're given more time to contemplate not the grand spectacle of World War Z, but its ridiculousness, its preposterousness, and its unevenness.

"See, I can be tender."

The Look Of Love, Michael Winterbottom's carefully-dressed throwback to swingin'-Soho, '70s sleaze, and '80s-coke-haze London, is a portrait of the recent past as distant past; a cheeky, mischievous chronicle of the T&A-bar/softcore-porn empire of one-time richest-man-in-Britain Paul Raymond. Yet, as much as it revels in Boogie Nights-ish kitsch, there's a definite sense that the film is following a man-before his time: Raymond a flesh-peddling, self-obsessed narcissist who craved the spotlight and lived his life as a form of ongoing celebrity performance. In short: a kind of prehistoric ancestor of the reality TV star. From the opening prologue, Winterbottom foreshadows the tragedy awaiting Raymond, and, so, the giddy, Scorsesean rise-and-fall has a hollow quality to it; one captured by Steve Coogan's surprisingly-tender performance, which hones in on the aching insecurity at the heart of this nouveau riche desperado, out to buy happiness, status, and anything else he can throw cash it. His turn is mirrored by Imogen Poots, who slyly, skilfully sinks into the sad resignation of Raymond's beloved daughter, who increasingly sees her endless opportunities as a kind of prison, binding her to failure. Their two performances elevate The Look Of Love - if only slightly - above-and-beyond your run-of-the-mill biopic. Much moreso than the work of Winterbottom, whose blah photographic choices suggest that maybe his hyper-prolific pace isn't always so admirable.