Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F review – fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy chases past glories

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Murphy’s maverick cop – and his theme music – are back to fight corruption, but four decades on there’s little energy to enliven their formulaic reunion Eddie Murphy isn’t finished yet – as he proved with his barnstormer of a performance as Blaxploitation pioneer Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite Is My Name . But there’s something a bit tired and formulaic about this further go-around for his iconic Detroit cop Axel Foley from the Beverly Hills Cop action-comedy franchise which 40 years ago made Murphy an explosive Hollywood star – and whose catchy Axel F theme became an 80s anthem, duly revived here. He’s back for the fourth film, yet again leaving his Detroit turf to be a scruffy fish-out-of-water in the hilariously chi-chi world of Beverly Hills, yet again wryly noticing from the wheel of his car, on the way in, a montage of all the crazy California stuff, including a car registration plate reading: PRE-NUP. Axel’s grownup lawyer daughter Jane (Taylour Paige) is in Beverly Hills, menace
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A Year in a Field review – calming, meditative film cycles through the Cornish seasons

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Christopher Morris filmed a field in southwest England for one year for a documentary that wants us to stop and think about the environment

The title says it all: beginning at the winter solstice in 2020, academic and film-maker Christopher Morris filmed a barley field in west Cornwall for one year. A field. That’s it. For 86 minutes this thoughtful, meditative documentary reveals the comings and goings: sunsets, sunrises, the midnight frolics of bunnies, the odd crisp packet blowing in. It’s unlikely to be storming a multiplex near you – though the opening scene does feature the close-up of a corpse. The unfortunate creature in question however is a field mouse that appears – limbs present and correct – to have expired from natural causes. The film’s paciest action scene is a three-minute-plus sequence of slugs slithering across lichen on a standing stone.

This eight-foot stone is more than 4,000 years old. “Carved by an alien civilisation – not from outer space, but outer time,” Morris says. “So long ago that who they were and what this means is lost to us with any certainty.” His voiceover has an elegant turn of phrase, finding poetry in the science of the moon slowly drifting away from Earth, or the complexity of the pale green lichen that makes its home on the ancient monolith.

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