Film Carew

It's an oft-repeated cliché: actors love working for Woody Allen. But for all the allure of Allen's name, it's rare that an actor actually accomplishes anything memorable when working with Woody. There's those distant memories of Diane Keaton in the '70s, and the more-pleasing recent one of Penélope Cruz taking Vicky Christina Barcelona to unexpectedly fierce places, but Allen's filmography is littered with an unending array of one-note comic caricatures performed with tossed-off ease. His actor-friendly reputation has little to do with the weight of his work; more to do with the fact that he works fast, casts vast ensembles, and rarely labours over a scene. Often you get the feeling —like, on screen— that the Hollywood celebrities that've populated his pedestrian past two decades are doing so as some combination of résumé-padding or working-holiday-taking.

This makes Cate Blanchett's turn, as the titular anti-heroine in the otherwise staggeringly-mediocre Blue Jasmine, all the more impressive. There's no real reason to watch Allen's 45th feature other than to see Blanchett at work; giving complexity, ferocity, contradiction, and resolve to yet another flighty-female in the Woody pantheon. Too much will be made of the role's swinging extremes between high-vanity: from the endless fashion-parade of luxury-brand ensembles and million-dollar jewellery pieces, to the scenes where Blanchett is finally stripped of her make-up and daubed with unflattering sweat stains. Yet most of her work, here, is more subtle. Put into the wrong hands, Allen's unchanging dialogue seems overwrought and something approximating embarrassing; actors interchangeable as the collective voice remains (tediously) singular. But Blanchett makes it all feel like an authentic extension of character, from the moment she begins the picture mid-oversharing babble.

Blanchett isn't the only one doin'-work, endeavouring to lift so-so material above its middle-brow station. Here, Allen leans on lots of minor comic ideas about a culture-clash between upper and lower classes; with Blanchett playing a one-time millionaire-trophy-wife turned down-on-her-luck financial-crisis loser, forced to shack up with her low-rent sister. Just the thought of Woody crackin' wise about the collision between upper and lower classes brings back horrifying memories of the execrable Small Time Crooks, but here he has Sally Hawkins and Bobby Cannavale —old hands at bringing humanity to gum-snappin' caricatures— giving his Guido guttersnipes unexpected depth. Still, even as it hints at ensembledom (with everyone from Alec Baldwin to Louis C.K. to Andrew Dice Clay showing up), Blue Jasmine is really a study in a single character; with both the present and the past seen through her questionable perspective; flashbacks often trigged by a muttering episode of dementia.

Blanchett's fall-from-grace —tottering around in her million-dollar wardrobe whilst working a menial minimum-wage job, sleeping on her sister's couch, and lapsing into psychologically-harmed fugues— stands as grand financial-crisis symbol. But that's not quite what Blue Jasmine is getting at (and, gladly, it is getting at something; no sure thing with Allen, whose pictures are often built on a trivial sitcom premise that may or may not have any thematic meaning at all). It isn't a film about modern America, but America as it's always been; the new realm of speculative finance just another iteration on the country's long manifestation as an eternal frontier, fertile for perennial reinvention. It's not subtly done —characters literally say things like “I'm a new person” and “I've become a different person”— but the fact that it's done at all is a minor victory for those forced to suffer through yet another film from the world's most overrated filmmaker.

I'm So Excited is billed as Pedro Almodóvar returning to his early risqué days, to the riotous camp of something like 1982's Labyrinth Of Passions. But, as if we needed another reminder that you can never go back —in time, home, to the scene of the crime, etc— the 19th film for Spain's most-acclaimed filmmaker is one of his most minor works; a broad, bawdy, badly-judged attempt at a 'romp' in which so much of the saucy dialogue and salacious transgression feels painful and dated. Mere queerness may've been transgressive three decades ago, but here the outrageous flight attendants feel like remnants of a passé past: less reminiscent of the post-punk, no-budget, anarchic liberties of Almodóvar's first handful of films, more reminiscent of Steve Vizard and Michael Veitch on Fast Forward. In attempting to recapture his freewheeling past, Almodóvar completely abandons the meticulous, multi-layered storytelling of recent films; the complexity and dexterity of the screenplays for Broken Embraces and The Skin I Live In standing in stark opposition to the cheap gags and unearned sentiments that mark this regrettable lark.

A Hijacking's literal title clues you in on its basic plot: a Danish cargo ship in the Indian ocean is boarded by Somali pirates, who take the small crew hostage and start making ransom demands. Tobias Lindholm, who recently co-wrote Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, creates both escalating tension and stark contrast, as the film goes back and forth between a cook (Joan Philip Asbæk) held captive in the sweaty galley and the CEO (Soren Malling) presiding over corporate HQ back home; where dealing with blackmail is akin to negotiating another business deal, and haggling over dollars-and-cents is about both 'rescue' and PR exercise. Lindholm's writing has the unwavering conviction of the Danish Dogme school, and his depictions of deadlock —pirates, crew, and corporate stooges all at odds— carrying a claustrophobic weight that presses heavy upon viewers.