Few opening credits feel quite so redundantly unnecessary as the appearance of ‘a Guy Ritchie film’ does at the end of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword‘s preluding five minutes. Already, by this early stage in what can only be described as a bonkers romp into the thickets of Arthurian legend, Ritchie has slam dunked a checklist of his signature motifs. Whilst giant elephants and villainous Magi stampeding on a pseudo-medieval castle, led by bad-egg wizard (Volde)Mordred, may not be typical of the Snatch and Sherlock Holmes director’s oeuvre, a flippant attitude to real time motion and laddish vibe are both very much present and correct.
In a year in which The Emoji Movie is an apparently acceptable entity, and in which The Lego Batman Movie can deliver an exuberant – and surprisingly layered – hit, the former controversy of a blockbuster having been spawned from a theme park ride seems but a drop in the industrial ocean. Yet, when Captain Jack Sparrow, played by then cult-curiosity Johnny Depp, sailed into Port Royal, Jamaica, aboard his sinking ship – to the strum of Hans Zimmer’s self-plagiarised Gladiator score – he brought with him the origins of a three billion dollar franchise. The Curse of the Black Pearl was not only far from the flop predicted by forecasters, but was met with a degree of critical acclaim.
When the grieving fiancé (Paula Beer) of a German First World War casualty visits her beloved’s grave in 1919, the sight of a veteran French survivor (Pierre Niney) laying flowers upon it is the last thing she might expect but the first which she meets. Inspired by Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 film Broken Lullaby, itself based on Maurice Rostand’s ‘L’homme due j’ai tué’ play of two years earlier, such is the set up to François Ozon’s César award-winning Frantz, a heartbreaking tale of love, loss and lies, intertwined with intrigue.
The Film Blog 