Your night in: Every movie on Melbourne TV tonight rated
Comedies, war films, car racing and a biopic of a social media mogul — Leigh Paatsch reviews every movie on TV tonight so you can make the most of your night in.
Leigh Paatsch
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THE INTERN (M)
***1/2
8.30PM CH. 7
Hey, world! Old folks have employment prospects too! Especially if they land a post-retirement gig as silver-haired sensei to the CEO of a booming internet start-up. That is it for insightful takeaways from The Intern, a sugar-sweet, wafer-thin comedy hoping to inspire many hugs across the generation gap. It is only the comfortable chemistry of leads Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro that averts a feel-good folly here. Hathaway plays the hip young boss of a popular fashion website who takes on a 70-year-old senior citizen (De Niro) as her unpaid junior assistant. This is one of those middle-of-the-road affairs that is neither good nor bad. Can get quite funny once in a while. Can also take you to the brink of completely nodding off twice in a while.
2 FAST 2 FURIOUS (M)
**
8.30PM 7MATE
No Vin Diesel, no movie. As hard as the late Paul Walker tries, this backfiring sequel to the original 2001 street-racing hit The Fast and the Furious desperately lacks the good oil that only the super-slick Mr Diesel could have supplied. Worth seeing only for the pulse-raising sight of those nitrous oxide-powered jalopies tearing up the tarmac on a regular basis. Better things – no, make that much better things – were to come for the franchise. But first, we all had to make it through Tokyo Drift.
THE BOURNE SUPREMACY (M)
***
8.30pm Ch.9
After the 2002 smash hit The Bourne Identity, this passable sequel marks a return to active duty for everyone’s favourite amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), who still can’t determine what he’s forgetting to remember. (Or is that remembering to forget?) Bourne leads his former workmates at the CIA on a wild-goose chase across Europe while he works through that gnarly identity crisis. Quite a forceful spy drama until author Robert Ludlum’s usual formula kicks-in.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010)
****1/2
9.30PM GO!
This masterful, contentious and gripping biopic of Facebook web tycoon Mark Zuckerberg (expertly portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg) downloads us deep inside the control-alt-delete mind of its subject. You can hit the escape key all you want. You won’t be able to get away. Acclaimed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (TV’s The West Wing) cleverly splits the Zuckerberg story into duelling, before-and-after morality tales. Inter-cut with a meteoric rise to internet billionaire-dom is a series of lawsuits suggesting Zuckerberg swiped his big idea from smaller minds. A provocative commentary on the ever-widening gap between the online world and the real world. Directed by David Fincher (Fight Club). Co-stars Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake.
ALONE IN BERLIN (M)
**1/2
7.30pm WORLD MOVIES
This middling WWII drama is the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, an everyday German couple who forged a brave resistance to the Nazis after the death of their son on the battlefields of France. The Hampels (played with modest assurance by a well-cast Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson) took it upon themselves to take a stand against the barbarism of Hitler’s Third Reich, and they did so in a most unusual way. Operating in strict secrecy, the pair distributed anti-Nazi propaganda all over their home city of Berlin in the form of incendiary postcards. Novelist Hans Falluda originally published his account of the Hampels’ heroic crusade in 1947, but it wasn’t until recently a best-selling English translation of the book brought their exploits to wider attention. Unfortunately, the relatively sedate nature of the couple’s clandestine operations is not all that cinematic, and stoic, straight-bat scripting and direction can make the film seem more dreary than it really should be. Co-stars Daniel Bruhl.
A BIGGER SPLASH (MA15+)
***1/2
9.30PM WORLD MOVIES
Celebrating lavish indulgence and offering complete escape is a tricky combo for a movie to pull off. This sublime new melodrama knows exactly when to live it up, or leave while the going is good. Tilda Swinton stars as Marianne, a veteran rock star spending three months in silence to save her ailing voice. A move to a sun-drenched island with boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) is rudely interrupted by two uninvited guests. Harry (Ralph Fiennes) used to be Marianne’s producer of choice. And a long-time live-in lover. Now he is craftily looking for a way back into Marianne’s affections, with a recently-discovered daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson), in tow. The uncomfortable energy flowing between this quartet is anything but uncomfortable to witness. Performances from all four leads are right on song – particularly Swinton and Fiennes, who revel in the surreal spark shared by their characters.
STRANGERLAND (MA15+)
**
9.35PM NITV
Nicole Kidman (in good form here) and Joseph Fiennes (bit of a passenger) star as a troubled couple whose teenage children have disappeared shortly after the family have relocated to the outback. The film tries too hard to maintain a mystique that only makes an oblique screenplay all the more impenetrable. If you really must, be both very forgiving and very patient. Co-stars Hugo Weaving.
THREE MOVIE PICKS FOR STREAMING OR RENTAL
LATE NIGHT (M)
***
AMAZON; or rent via FOXTEL STORE, GOOGLE, ITUNES, YOUTUBE MOVIES
A consistently endearing light comedy that plays effectively enough when viewed as the cross between the Meryl Streep hit The Devil Wears Prada and TV’s 30 Rock it unmistakably is. What keeps this engaging (though not always engaged) affair in an audience’s good graces are lively scriptwriting and a flawlessly dominating lead performance from the great Emma Thompson. She plays Katherine Newbury, an acerbic British talk-show host whose lengthy run on American TV will soon end unless she reverses a precipitous ratings slide. To do so means reconnecting with both an adoring public kept at arm’s length, and a team of writers she refers to by number (should she even deign to be in the same room). The accidental hiring of a vastly inexperienced joke generator named Molly (Mindy Kaling, who also penned the winning script here) proves to be the X-factor that just might save the imperious Katherine from small-screen oblivion. While Thompson is indeed wonderful here, so too is Kaling and a choice support cast.
GREEN ZONE (M)
***1/2
FOXTEL
This Iraq war movie is brought to you by the ill-fated hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Matt Damon stars as a whistleblowing soldier who knows there is something fishy about the Coalition of the Willing’s reasons for storming Baghdad in 2003. While the world waits for evidence of WMDs, Damon wages a one-man war to prove there is no evidence at all. The meaty subject matter and Damon’s sure-footed presence elevate this adrenalised action thriller above the expected average. The only sticking point is the herky-jerky, handheld camerawork blatantly overused by director Paul Greengrass. Seriously, there are minutes at a time where viewers will feel as if they are trapped inside a rolling car.
LOVING VINCENT (PG)
****
SBS ON DEMAND
This ethereal hybrid of biopic, drama and investigative mystery pieces together the life of revered artist Vincent van Gogh, and is quite unlike anything seen on screen before. This is, in fact, the first-ever entirely handpainted movie. The end result is both captivatingly beautiful and slightly disarming. It’s like having fallen asleep in a gallery, you awake to find the oils from van Gogh’s paintings have slid off their canvasses and filled the air around you. Stars Saoirse Ronan, Aidan Turner.
Originally published as Your night in: Every movie on Melbourne TV tonight rated
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