Beast review – down-and-out MMA fighter film is predictable but still lands punches

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Directed by Tyler Atkins and co-written by Russell Crowe, this Australian feature follows a familiar playbook – but you’ll find yourself surprisingly invested Ah, yes: the promising fighter who could’ve been a contender, could’ve been a champion. But then life intervened: bad decisions were made, promises broken, the wrong paths taken. But what if the past came knocking on his door? What if our long-in-the-tooth hero could have another crack, set things right, get in the ring one more time? To say that Tyler Atkins’ Australian martial arts drama Beast plucks moves from a well-worn playbook is putting it lightly. This is one of those genre films in which nothing surprises in broad terms; it’s the small pivots and deviations that matter. Given the ring of familiarity surrounding everything, I was surprised to find myself as invested in the film as I was, particularly because so many chest-thumping sports movies are already out there, many of which I find about as intellectually engaging ...
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Santa Claus: The Movie review – Dudley Moore sparkles like a bauble in Elf prototype

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Playing an early iteration of the fish-out-of-water elf in the corporate world of New York, Moore has just enough perky charm to redeem an otherwise forgettable seasonal offering

Frankly, I would whisper a tiny humbug to a good deal of this gloopy Christmas movie from 1985, directed by Jeannot Szwarc and now rereleased; and only a sentimental loyalty to the seasonal spirit prevents me from demanding to know if there are no workhouses for the people who made it. The whole thing only comes to something resembling life halfway through, when Dudley Moore’s perky elf takes centre-stage.

There are many other and more deserving yuletide films which should be ahead of this one in the queue for a revival, but my own sweet tooth for Christmassy schmaltz won’t allow me completely to reject this admittedly eventful and bizarre origin myth for Santa Claus, starring David Huddleston as the chortling, bearded present-giver himself. He is a kind of vaguely Euro-Scandinavian guy called Claus, much given to distributing gifts to village children, called to his mythic destiny in a fatal snowstorm like Superman arriving at the Fortress of Solitude. Dudley Moore is his devoted elf Patch who suffers a profound vocational crisis, and Burgess Meredith is the ancient chief elf (mysteriously possessed of full human adult height) who in a very peculiar elf ceremony decrees that Claus is “the chosen one”.

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