Rooney Mara

Filmmaker David Lowery reunites the stars from his offbeat Western Ain't Them Bodies Saints for an even more offbeat drama about the afterlife. A ghost story in which the lead character is a guy under a sheet feels like it should be funny, and yet this is a resolutely arthouse movie, inventive but pretentious and high-minded. Yes, the silly imagery makes us giggle, but Lowery strikes such a somber tone that we can't help but take it seriously.

Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara reunite to play a couple whose happy life comes to an end when he is killed in a car crash. Now he wanders around their small house, watching his wife grieve, only able to communicate to another ghost who's haunting the house next door. After his wife packs up and moves on, this sheet-clad spirit sticks around, trying to communicate with a single mother (Sonia Acevedo), then a partying mob of ravers, including one guy (Will Oldham) who launches into a diatribe about the meaning of existence. But since he's dead, this ghost has only begun to experience his own journey through time and space.

Yes, as it goes along, the film spirals out into the kind of epic exploration of eternity that Terrence Malick keeps making (see The Tree of Life or To The Wonder). The central conceit of having Affleck performing under a white bedsheet is very clever, because it undercuts all preconceptions about ghost movies, offering a refreshingly earthbound approach that avoids swirly digital effects. But the fact is that, no matter how dark the film's tone is, it looks rather ridiculous. And Lowery only just barely gets away with walking this fine line between corny self-indulgence and meaningful drama.

Continue reading: A Ghost Story Review

After several high-profile grown-up movies (from Atonement to Anna Karenina), director Joe Wright aims this Peter Pan origin story squarely at children. So while it's far too manic and broad for adults, this adventure will be the most exciting movie any 8-year-old has seen in years. It's colourful and fantastical, and it thankfully doesn't indulge in reworking the beloved J.M. Barrie stories. Instead, it imagines an action-packed prequel universe.

As German bombs fall on London during the Blitz, young Peter (Levi Miller) is up to all kinds of mischief in the grim orphanage overseen by Mother Barnabas (Kathy Burke), who sells bad boys to airborne pirates. Sure enough, one night Peter is taken, sailing into the sky to Neverland, where he is sent to work in the mines for the swaggering, heartless Captain Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). In the mines Peter is befriended by the adventurer Hook (Garrett Hedlund), and when Peter discovers that he can fly they make their escape. Blackbeard chases them out into the woods, where they take refuge with Princess Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) and her tribe, which is convinced that Peter is the child of a prophecy that will lead the fairy kingdom to freedom. But just when Peter learns who his parents really were, Blackbeard catches up with them.

This is an old-school kids' movie, packed with larger-than-life characters and outrageously imaginative action sequences that make the most of the 3D cinematography. Yes, there's so much digital trickery going on that the movie is essentially a cartoon, but it's so vividly explosive that it's a lot of fun to watch. And many of the big set-pieces are genuinely thrilling. There's also quite a lot of fun to be had in the way the story twists the familiar characters around. Obviously, Hook couldn't have always been a bad guy; here he's one of the heroes, and he still has both hands, which hints that further prequel adventures may be on the cards.

Continue reading: Pan Review