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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Wicked Little Letters review – a depressing, obvious, clunky waste of a stellar cast

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Any wider comment on the strange, sad nature of the scandal this film is based on is sidestepped in favour of broad laughs and superficiality

Unconvincing, unfunny and bafflingly heavy-handed, this shrill non-comedy fails to say anything entertaining or historically insightful about the true story of the Littlehampton poison-pen scandal of 1923. It’s a terrible waste of a stellar cast, headed by Olivia Colman, although the simple aggregation of everyone’s acting talent does raise the film a bit.

Colman plays Edith Swan, a prim-and-proper spinster in the curtain-twitching world of 1920s Littlehampton, always congratulating herself on her Christian rectitude; she lives with grumpy elderly dad (Timothy Spall) and glowering mum (Gemma Jones). Edith has a problem neighbour with whom she’s fallen out after initial friendship: this is Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a woman from Ireland who cheerfully likes drinking and swearing. So when Edith starts getting bizarre, obscene unsigned letters through the letterbox – and then more and more people start getting them, too – Rose is in the frame, the outsider that all these xenophobes dislike anyway. But policewoman Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) thinks there’s more to it.

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