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This week, there are FIVE new films out for you to choose from, led by Upgrade. Here are the titles, with more info below:
- Upgrade
Action Point
Searching
Cold War
Yardie
Upgrade looks like a fantastic piece of comedy/action nonsense, set in the near-future, where technology controls nearly all aspects of life.
Logan Marshall-Green plays the ridiculously named Grey Trace, a self-identified technophobe, who has his world turned upside down, leading to the point where his only hope for revenge is an experimental computer chip implant called Stem.
Writer/Director: Leigh Whannell
Also stars: Rosco Campbell, Richard Cawthorne, Michael M Foster, Betty Gabriel
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
Action Point has a simple premise where Jackass‘ Johnny Knoxville plays a daredevil who designs and operates his own theme park with his friends… although, it’s basically Jackass all over as they get thrown about and injure themselves a lot.
I’d wait for the Blu-ray or DVD on this one…
Director: Tim Kirkby
Also stars: Brigette Lundy-Paine, Susan Yeagley, Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Johnny Pemberton, Dan Bakkedahl, Chris Pontius and the brilliantly-named Joshua Hoover.
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Maybe!
Searching is what David Kim (John Cho – Star Trek Beyond) does after his 16-year-old daughter goes missing, causing this desperate father to break into her laptop to look for clues to find her.
A local investigation is opened and a detective is assigned to the case, however, after 37 hours and without a single lead, David decides to search the one place no one has looked yet, where all secrets are kept today – that laptop. In a hyper-modern thriller, told via the technology devices we use every day to communicate, David must trace his daughter’s digital footprints before she disappears forever.
I’ve seen a lot of people raving about this online, but it looks dull as hell to me.
Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Producer: Timur Bekmambetov (Ben-Hur 2016)
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian
Also stars: Debra Messing, Joseph Lee, Michelle La, Sara Sohn
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
Cold War
A passionate love story between two people of different backgrounds and temperaments, who are fatefully mismatched and yet condemned to each other. Set against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, the film depicts an impossible love story in impossible times.
Watching this trailer, it looks morelike an advert for aftershave or perfume!
Writer/Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Stars: Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
Yardie
Set in ’70s Kingston and ’80s Hackney, Yardie centres on the life of a young Jamaican man named D (Aml Ameen), who has never fully recovered from the murder, committed during his childhood, of his older brother Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary). D grows up under the wing of a Kingston Don and music producer named King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd). Fox dispatches him to London, where he reconnects with his childhood sweetheart, Yvonne (Shantol Jackson), and his daughter who he’s not seen since she was a baby.
He also hooks up with a soundclash crew, called High Noon. But before he can be convinced to abandon his life of crime and follow “the righteous path”, he encounters the man who shot his brother 10 years earlier, and embarks on a bloody, explosive quest for retribution – a quest which brings him into conflict with vicious London gangster Rico (Stephen Graham).
Idris Elba also brought us the so-so Sky One series In The Long Run, and based on this trailer, Yardie it looks pretty tedious.
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.