Red Sparrow is a 2018 spy-thriller film directed by Francis Lawrence who worked with Jennifer Lawrence (the star here) on a couple of the Hunger Games movies, but this is a very different beast. Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova (in, it has to be said, a not entirely convincing Russian accent), and Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenarts and Charlotte Rampling star as the film's secondary characters. This one is a pretty big departure from what Lawrence has done in the past, although it has to be said that she's making some pretty bold career choices. I'm not the first one to say that, and for a good reason: it's true. After last year's Mother! it appeared as if she was trying purposefully trying to appear in more "mature" films, and believe me, it doesn't get much more mature than Red Sparrow. The film plays out like one of those schlocky exploitation from the seventies, in that there's sexual violence, sex, violence, torture, and all manner o
Goodbye Christopher Robin is a 2017 British drama film written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Simon Vaughan. It stars Domhnall Gleeson as A.A Milne and Margot Robbie as his wife. The story is partly of Milne's life before he writes Winnie the Pooh and his experiences with PTSD. The second half of the film tells the story of his success with the stories, and how that affects his personal life.
For me, this film very much marks the beginning of awards season. Over the next couple of months, there's going to be a slew of films that bring together a group of actors who have a very impressive and varied career under their belts. It's not something I have a problem with inherently, but in my experience a lot of these films are very saccharine and all follow the same narrative with different famous historical figures. My feelings about Goodbye Christopher Robin is that it does suffer from this a little, but it has more depth than other films of this style. We have to like the main character at the end, because that's what the creators of these films think audiences want to see.
Margot Robbie and Domhnall Gleeson are great in the two central roles, and there's some great cinematography to go along with the performances. There are some fantasy-style moments in which the action transitions from illustration to live-action, and these moments are pretty impressive. Things like that do separate Goodbye Christopher Robin from the pack.
However, there are a lot of moments in this film where we see A.A Milne walking with his son through the forest, talking about his toys, naming them, and it's like the writers are on the screen themselves, winking at the audience, saying 'look at that, he just named one of the characters from the book,' and that's one of my main problems with this film. The entire film is practically engineered to be crowd-pleasing in the worst possible way. It does gloss over some of the negative aspects of A.A Milne's personality, but at the end of the film everyone has to be friends, and getting along, because the nature of these awards season films is that the creators want to make the audience feel uplifted, and happy. The problem is, the uplifting mood of the film seems very superficial and forced. I suspect the reason for that is that they don't want to take any risks. Experimental films with unconventional narratives rarely win awards.
This film isn't awful by any means, but it does suffer a bit because the creators have chosen to make a very safe, non-confrontational and slightly dull film which rarely breaks the mold of these fictionalised biopics of famous historical figures. It does have a little more depth than you'd expect from a film like this, but the creators never delved deep enough into the themes. There are very few reasons to go and see it, and your money would be better spent on something else.
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