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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Heart of an Oak review – 18 spectacular months in the life of an exquisite tree

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This peaceful nature film contemplates the creatures and critters that live in and around a 200-year-old oak, including some Top Gun-esque aerial cinematography

Entirely devoid of dialogue (unless a bit of Dean Martin on the soundtrack counts), this pleasant nature film observes the seasons passing for 18 months on, around and even underneath a 210-year-old oak tree in Sologne in central France. Technically, some would argue this is not exactly a documentary because some of the sequences are staged or composed of shots taken at totally different times, but scientific accuracy and cinematic authenticity aren’t really the point; this isn’t didactic film-making in the David Attenborough or even March of the Penguins tradition, crafted to drop a bit of natural history knowledge on the viewer. That said, if you sit through the end credits, you’ll at least learn some of the featured creatures’ Latin and French names, with the English handles in the subtitles.

In fact, although the exquisite tree gives the film its title, the eponymous plant-kingdom character doesn’t hold directors Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux’s focus any more than a stage set. The oak is mostly a background character here, apart from a few animated bits where we see the root systems intermingling with nearby networks, a very modish point that gestures to recent research on how trees “talk” to each other. Instead, Charbonnier and Seydoux sketch in the animal community around the tree – especially the cute mammals that live inside its crevices, like a chipper red squirrel and a family of wood mice. Birds also get a bit of love, with plenty of shots of Eurasian jays and robins frolicking about. In one spectacular sequence, clearly the product of a zillion cameras having been set up to catch bits of footage, we see a jay reeling through the forest, trying to lose a pursuant goshawk, in a scene that rivals Top Gun: Maverick for aerial cinematography of the decade.

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