The Guest 

Cast: Dan Stevens, Sheila Kelley, Brendan Mayer, Leland Orser
Director: Adam Wingard
99 mins

“The Guest,” is a very odd mix of suspense, humour, violence, and other film genre inspirations. Somewhere in the American southwest, the Peterson family are grieving the death of their son and brother, Caleb, when his Army pal and co-soldier David Collins (Dan Stevens), turns up unannounced to bring his condolences and to  let the unsuspecting group learn that David asked him to inform his loved ones just how much he loved them. Humble, unassuming, and almost nauseatingly polite, David is welcomed first by Caleb’s mother (Sheila Kelley) and then by his father (Leland Orser), who takes quite a bit of convincing but quickly warms up to the stranger, once he agrees to share a beer with him.
 
Thus and inevitably, David is invited to stay indefinitely. Caleb’s troublesome teenage sister, Anna (Maika Monroe), is suspicious but nevertheless drawn in by David’s dreamy blue eyes. Meanwhile her brother Luke (Brendan Meyer), finds in him a surrogate for his lost big brother. David helps Luke with bullies at school, commiserates with Mr. Peterson about his dead-end job and keeps a watchful eye on Anna at a party, sorting out a few ne’erdowells along the way.He’s the perfect houseguest and a comforting temporary addition to the family.
Naturally, he’s not all he appears to be. Dan Stevens, best known as the upper-crust Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey, is surprisingly charismatic, eerily Yank-accent-authentic and menacingly deadly as David, and the film lets him play up the character’s all-things-to-all-people charm. There’s something particularly unsettling about chilling deeds being performed by someone so laid-back and good-looking, all of which adds well to the mix. 

Inevitably however, The Guest slips into formulaic routines with the climax is set in an improbably elaborate Halloween party maze, where Anna and Luke do all the dumb things characters tend to do in these situations – such as wounding the enemy and assuming you’ve killed him. The resolution doesn’t provide enough satisfying answers about David’s past or his motivations; we keep waiting for one more revelation or twist that will bring it home, but sadly it never comes. 


Magic In The Moonlight 

Cast: Colin Firth, Eileen Atkins, Emma Stone, Hamish Linklater, Catherine McCormack
Writer/Director: Woody Allen

100 mins

Resembling the charming and steadfast chap who comes to every function and politely asks a lady to dance, Woody Allen continues to churn out reliably entertaining fluff that it would be just too easy to take for granted. Magic in the Moonlight has a subtext that tackles such cynical indifference - the notion that to dislike this delightful confection would be to resign yourself to ridiculous self-imposed gloominess.

Here, some time after “Scoop”, Allen returns to the topic of magicians and their activities, one of his old showbiz fascinations – with the always-enjoyable Colin Firth starring as Stanley, an illusionist in the late 1920s who dresses up as a Fu Manchu-style performer to mystify audiences with his take on the mysteries of the Orient. Backstage after a performance in Berlin, Stanley is met by fellow magician Howard (Simon McBurney. Howard is concerned about a wealthy family he knows who have been taken in by an American woman who alleges she can speak to the dead. Stanley is an expert at debunking such prevaricators, so without haste, he agrees to visit their estate in the French countryside and expose this young lady as a fraud.

The medium in question is Sophie (Emma Stone), who proves more cagey and more beguiling than Stanley bargained for. The magic man and mystical woman become friends, there are romantic sparks, and when all of his attempts to trip her up fail, Stanley starts to believe that maybe Sophie is the real deal.  Which is where the aforementioned happiness drops by. As a lifelong sceptic, Stanley believes there is no magic in real life. A cheery outlook is merely a delusion. He can't even see the point in bird-watching. Eating and surviving is what we all do. Sophie changes all that, however, because once Stanley accepts that her abilities are real and that there may well be another world beyond that which is readily known, he can surrender to it and himself be free. The more he struggles against it, the more it ensnares him.

It makes sense to celebrate the predictably enjoyable rather than denigrating it. Woody Allen understands what he wants out of a trifle like Magic in the Moonlight, and he understands how to put it together. His casting is excellent - Firth and Stone make for a wonderful onscreen duo, and even the old-style jazz tunes are dependably delightful. Don't take the appearance of Magic in the Moonlight in our cinemas for granted. Woody Allen may be (at the time of writing) 79 years old - he doesn't have to keep doing this, he could easily take his camera and go home. So let’s appreciate the old guy while he's still around. I loved this – and so should you!

The 100-Foot Journey 

Cast: Helen Mirren, Om Puri

Director: Lasse Hallstrom

122 mins

Lasse Hallstrom directs stubbornly sentimental films, faithfully based on some book-club approved best-seller, they're painfully tasteful and strangely lifeless. They're shiny, expensive tear-jerking machines – and "The Hundred-Foot Journey" is the latest. Based on a novel, and brought to the screen by the relentlessly and at times scunnersomely uplifting Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey — this is the story of an Indian extended family that, after some detours, decides to settle (somewhat improbably) in a tiny French village and open a restaurant. Even more improbably, the one space they pick is 100 feet across the road from a Michelin-starred temple to French food, whose stuffy proprietrix is convinced that the opposite of "classic cuisine" is the undoubtedly classless curries being served within nose-wrinkling distance. And so let the snobbery — and the inevitable competition for clients, and respect — begin. Helen Mirren is the French autocrat, and the veteran Indian actor Om Puri is the immigrant patriarch; both act here, of course, with quiet economy. Manish Dayal plays his son and Charlotte Le Bon plays her protegee; they are not, at least technically, Romeo-and-Juliet progeny although an awkward romance develops nonetheless. 

That's predictable, of course, as is everything else — some slight jousting between the two rival establishments, a flash of violent racism (which Mirren's character quickly shows she will not be party to), and an eventual loosening of tensions. Followed by the inevitably naff third act, in which our innocent hero is lured away to and by the big city. There’s a certain amount of food-porn photography here and far from being farm-fresh, his vegetables look like carefully tweaked special-effects; they're as absurdly large and as heavily glistening as a Del Monte ad. Nor does the film gives us an idea of the apparent actual joy of cooking. There are any number of close-ups of chefs sniffing things approvingly. But you see little of the sensuality of making meals, let alone the actual process. The usual absurb minimalist dishes which wouldn’t feed a ladybird are regularly on display. Clearly for the bland/beige brigade "The Hundred-Foot Journey" will definitely hit the spot. There’s no sex or bad language. The young people are pretty, and the old people are funny. And there are no sudden, unpleasant surprises before everything ends happily. It's the screen version of comfort food. Except that even in comfort food there's a difference between something made from scratch, and something that comes out of a box - and "The Hundred-Foot Journey" stinks of stale powdered cheese.