'War Horse' review:

I fundamentally don't care whether a wide-eyed village simpleton (Jeremy Irvine) finds his 'orse. Especially not amongst the horror of the First World War. And yet here is 'War Horse': a film that time and time again asks the audience to put the fate of the titular steed, Joey, above that of the on-screen humans. Upon hearing of a man's death in battle via letter, Irvine's farm boy hero is only moved to say "he was riding Joey when he died" - fearing for the horse and instantly disregarding the man. At the height of the idiocy, a doctor is asked to leave a makeshift hospital full of dying soldiers to tend to Joey. Who bloody cares about this horse?!

Apparently everyone, for in this story Joey touches the lives of several different people, on different sides of the conflict, heralding chaos, death and misery wherever he goes. As based on the acclaimed Michael Morpurgo novel-turned-stage play, it's supposed to be the story of man's inhumanity to man seen through the eyes of an innocent animal. Yet Steven Spielberg's overwrought and overlong melodrama (as penned by the apocalypse signifying double-act of Richard Curtis and Lee Hall) makes it feel as though he's somehow the cause of all these problems rather than an observer - with more than one owner facing death or ruin before 146 laboured minutes are done.

Unless you automatically gawp and coo at the merest sight of an animal, you won't give the slightest toss what happens here. The human characters, with little screen-time to speak of, are painted as the thinnest caricatures: Benedict Cumberbatch as the shouty, plummy officer, Tom Hiddleston as a softly-spoken, well-meaning aristo, Emily Mortimer as the put upon farmer's wife, Peter Mullan as the drunken old farmer and so on. Though they all make a decent show of it - particularly the increasingly ubiquitous Cumberbatch.

Tonally it's all over the map too, shifting between the most wholesome Hovis advert never made and gritty, 'Saving Private Ryan' style battle sequences in which people crawl through mud crying and riddled with bullets. To give you some idea of what a mess it is, here are four isolated scenes listed in chronological order: some comedy business with a wacky goose; an artful shot of two children being executed; a short sequence in which a cute French girl tries to teach Joey how to jump; the battle of the Somme.

The increasingly self-parodic John Williams relentlessly underpins all this with his most cloying score to date, leading to an extraordinary disconnect between what's being depicted (usually a handsome horse running) and what we are obviously supposed to feel. The worst thing though is that Spielberg is just not built to tell a story about moral equivalence, the futility of war and the commonality of all men. He needs to create baddies and sell us goodies we can cheer for. The result is that the worst war time atrocities are shown committed by the German army whilst Joey is in their care - with a commander who smokes a cigar and might as well laugh maniacally at the end of every sentence.

A decent early action scene manages to convey both the historic potency of the cavalry charge and its obsolescence in 20th Century warfare within an expertly staged five minutes. But the film's best sequence sees a German and British soldier meet in no man's land in a mutual effort to free Joey from some barbed wire: they joke together and end the encounter wishing each other well. This is what the heart of the material is supposed to be about but it's not what Spielberg has been gearing us up for. Under his direction this is reduced to the story of a "magnificent kind of horse" and makes for the purest kind of hogwash.

'War Horse' is out now in the UK, rated '12A' by the BBFC.

'Tyrannosaur' review:

Olivia Colman is lovely isn't she? I don't know her personally, but what I mean is she seems lovely on the telly. Turning up in TV sitcoms, as Sophie in 'Peep Show' or the vicar's wife in 'Rev', I am never in any doubt that her characters are basically good and beyond harmless, probably in part thanks to her big, friendly eyes. She certainly isn't someone you want to see beaten, raped and literally pissed on by Eddie Marsan in a grim, socially real, British movie about social isolation and domestic violence. But here we are.

I'm fairly sure, unless you're some sort of psychopath, there aren't any people you wish to see in that situation, but for me that goes doubly for lovely, smiling Olivia Colman. Which is one of the many reasons Paddy Considine's debut film as a writer and director, 'Tyrannosaur', can be pretty hard to take. Terrifically acted and deeply moving, but a tough watch indeed.



In it Colman is Hannah, a devout Christian woman who leaves her middle class house every day to work in a drab charity shop on the rough side of town - probably just to get away from her vicious husband James, played by an especially scary Marsan. James is possessive and spiteful and some of the things he does to Hannah defy belief, existing outside the realms of even your cruelest imagination. The violence in 'Tyrannosaur' may be less explicit and frequent than scenes in the similarly grim 'Kill List' (also from Warp Films), or even the recent thriller 'Drive', but it's far more hard-hitting because it's based in a deeply upsetting reality. And it somehow keeps getting worse, with the level of abuse suffered by Hannah still being revealed right up to the very end.

It is working at the charity shop that Hannah meets Joseph played by Peter Mullan, who is the sort of unpredictable, violent and all too recognisable old drunk that spends his days drinking in the corner of his local boozer, babbling incomprehensibly to himself. He is the opposite of harmless and when we first see Joseph he is kicking his dog to death in the street. After a chance encounter he befriends Hannah and we get to glimpse the underlying tragedy of this disturbing individual you'd be wise to cross the street to avoid. Both characters - and even the sickening James to an extent - are depicted with considerable compassion and deeply affecting empathy, with neither straying into caricature.



Mullan is for all intents and purposes the star of the film, which mostly takes his point of view - and he is excellent in it, with the sometime director (of 'The Magdalene Sisters' and recently 'Neds') able to portray this dog-kicking racist as rounded and human without undergoing some unlikely third act u-turn. With that in mind it seems unfair to single out Colman in this review, but there is nothing to be done about that because, for me at least, she is the heart of the movie and the key ingredient. It is really something that she can play this doe-eyed Christian victim without making her infuriating or wet in the least, and the more we care about Hannah the more wretched much of what you see will likely make you feel.

On this first showing, it would seem Considine is a very comfortable director of actors and an intelligent writer of characters. If he has displayed any similarity with his friend and frequent collaborator Shane Meadows, then it is in the fact that he has used his debut feature to take the side of elements of society most would not willingly gravitate toward, and he has done so with confidence and a keen eye for social detail.

'Tyrannosaur' is rated '18' by the BBFC and is on general release in the UK.