Inferno, American Honey, Storks The Film Review

Hello, and welcome to The Film Review on BBC News.

This is a special addition from the red carpet at the BFI at the London

form first of all. -- London Film Festival.

So, Mark, what do we have this week?

We have Inferno, American Honey, and Storks, and animated feature about,

guess what, Storks. And we may be talking to some of the

stars and the director of Nocturnal Animals, which is having its

premiere tonight. Let's begin with Inferno. Tom Hanks and Dan Brown,

what could possibly go wrong? Quite possibly everything. If you seen the

da Vinci code, I thought that was just plain terrible, everything was

dark and everybody was explaining the pot to each other in the dock is

all the plot to each other. Angels and Demons was ridiculous. And now

Inferno. Tom Hanks is one of the world's most boring investigative

characters wakes up in a hospital, where is he? Is he in Florence?

Conveniently he wakes up to find that Felicity Jones, the doctor

looking after him, knows an awful lot about Dante, because that is

going to help them both foil a plot to bring about the apocalypse. Here

is a clip. They're used to transport

dangerous substances. Security in case

it's lost or stolen. Tubes like this can only be opened

by a specified individual. I'm getting the number for

the consulate. Look, there is a simple way to find

out if this thing belongs to me - either my thumb will open it or

it won't. If it's viral agent, will it be

released if I open it? No, no, there would be an inner

sleeve, maybe even two. OK, before I put myself in anyone's

hands, I want to know You can't help but thinking that Ron

Howard, who is a fine director, could do better? The thing is, I

think it is faithful to Dan Brown. I haven't read any of Dan Brown's

novels, but everybody explains out loud all the time that everything

that is happening for no good reason at all. It is a thumbprint

identification, it identifies you from your thumb. The problem is, if

you get a film that has actors of the character of Tom Pang, even they

cannot make the script sound like anything other than somebody reading

out an instruction manual, you know you are in trouble. The plot is

per', but most importantly, it is boring. It is a turbo chore, giving

that what they are actually up against is the apocalypse,, it

should be more up citing. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is here, as indeed is

Tom Ford. Maybe they could join us. You have obviously got the dress

message! Tonight is a little different. Tom, we want to talk

about Nocturnal Animals, premiering here tonight. You describe it as a

cautionary tale about relationships. Can you tell us? For me it is about

finding the people in your life that you love, that love you, that mean

something to you, and hanging onto them our lead character, played by

Amy Adams, doesn't do that. She lets go of something. As I said, it is a

cautionary tale about what can happen when you throw things away.

You know, our culture today is so much about throwing things away, we

throw things away, we throw people away, this is about not doing that.

It is also about the search for happiness which may not actually

make you happy? Well, yes, sometimes in contemporary culture we can be a

bit misguided and think that may material things can make us happy.

This is really a lesson again in the opposite of that. The film has a

story within a story. In the fictional story, you play the

terrifying presence, it is a brilliant role, so much that I

didn't recognise you for the first five minutes of the performance. Can

you tell us about the character and how you got into the role? Yet,

thanks to Tom, he gave me the opportunity to play this character

with a sociopaths, almost, you know, with complexities. What is beautiful

though is that Tom wanted him to be very charismatic and magnetic on

screen, quite overwhelming and overbearing. But unpredictable, and

therefore dangerous. And I think that was the fun in being able to

play this role. It is very tense and very disturbing. What was it like to

film it? It was exactly that, very intense. I mean, I can't remember if

we shot over three days and three nights? It was demanding and

training and psychologically it was intense, yeah. I think the point of

bringing date to a nervous breakdown was almost my job, to provoke and

manipulate him -- bringing Jake to another's breakdown. My wife was

very happy, she said, thank you for giving me my husband back when we

were done with that! Can you tell me something about the school, which

really struck me? I worked with a composer, we share the same love for

a kind of old-fashioned, overblown, we have that same love, the same

type of score, which heightens the emotion in the film. Something I'm

learning about myself as a full maker. I like enhanced reality, is

things that are a bit larger-than-life. There are two

stories, one in a very sterile world and another in the book which is

more sort of rough and violent. You have two very contrasting

environments which look very different on screen. They do look

very different on screen. However, the stories start to feed each other

and wind themselves up into really we are telling one story through

actually three stories, and in a book and flashbacks from the past.

Tom, there is one of the story, I want to do whilst you here, the big

American story on Donald Trump. -- I wanted to ask you. We have to get

political! Trump cannot be elected. I find it frightening and disturbing

that we are in this situation. I am a Democrat, I'm voting for Hillary

Clinton, and I does pray that that man does not get any further. Use a

prize that tens millions of Americans may vote for him? -- are

you surprised. We don't know that. It is a wake-up call for all of us.

There are a lot of people in the world, in Britain as well, who feel

quite disenfranchised, and we need to address that. Let's hope that the

solution is not bomb dropped. We need to not ignore that. Tom, Aaron,

thank you very much -- the solution is not Donald Trump. We have got

atmosphere here at least. Let's move on. American Honey. This is the

feature by Andrea Arnold. He was in Wuthering Heights. This was a really

terrific these of work, a story of an 18-year-old Texan girl who has a

very dysfunctional home life, she is Lord onto the road by a character

played by Shiloh bruv, who gets her joined up with a group of travelling

magazine sellers. They travel to Kansas City and onwards, selling

magazines. It is basically an on the road movie, sort of modern day easy

rider to some extent. The things I love about the film are, firstly,

superb performances, whether it is from Sasha Lane, a new, who Andrea

Arnold discovered, or for Shia LaBeauf, it is an old Academy ratio.

Rather than looking narrow, it looks tall. It is intimate and detail but

also looks upwards to the stars. Extraordinary use of music, the

musicale told a story beautifully. Although it is a long film, it is a

full that deserves to be long and earns the right as they on-screen. I

thought it was a fine piece of work. If you liked Fish tank you will

really like this. The midwest scenes for an English director. She handles

it superbly. You get a sense of living in this environment,

everything about the film reels tactile and honest and genuine. I

really liked it. As you can probably hear from the crowd around us, we

are now joined by Amy Adams and Armie Hammer, also from Nocturnal

Animals, very good to see you. My scandal as husband back here from

the film. A very challenging role for you? Yet, it had its challenges,

but Tom really made it easy. It was a wonderful sort of experiment for

me to get to convey all these emotions with no words but just

reading. And I really enjoyed it. And when I did get to work with such

wonderful actors as Armie, it was wonderful to have that interaction.

You are also working with a design as well as a film director. How is

that? The look of the film is obviously important? Hugely

important, you see he eye for detail, whether it is being

instrumental in how each one of the characters look, to adjusting the

clothes where his eye for detail is, you see why he has been so

successful. He has an impeccable eye for detail, it is amazing. Tell us

something about your character? He was described as being bashing and

handsome, but we know he is very duplicitous. Come on, what else do

you need?, for all intents and purposes, he is just a very

expletive husband. We will apologise for that! Both characters are very

flawed. When we meet them. It is easy to judge them. What I realised

in sort of examining the characters is you get into the sort of history

and how fear and dissatisfaction drives choices that aren't

necessarily the best choices for us. The question of happiness, which I

raised with Tom a little while ago, the pursuit of happiness but feeling

an entitlement to be happy. That may not make a person or a character

happy? It depends on how you pursue happiness. Entitlement to happiness

is something that we all hope for as human beings, thinking that

happiness is a 24-hour per day experience is naive, but it is how

we pursue happiness. If we choose to use the superficial to define

happiness or success, that is really going to feel empty at the end of

the day. One of the difficult things, you are a character who

plays almost reading a manuscript. To convey reading on screen, the

moment you drop the script is a shock. That is not the easiest thing

to convey on-screen. It is not the most easy thing to look interesting,

which she does flawlessly. One of the things that helped me, I would

make Tom sit down and read, in such an elegant way. When I read, I

create a lot of double and triple chins, you know. But Tom, I would

watch him read and do things, there is such an elegance to him that

actually really helped. He became my news, as opposed to the actor

becoming the muse to the director, I became -- he became my news. Do you

wonder how he fits it all in? Yes, because I'm not that motive is dead!

So... I couldn't run several empires like he is doing -- I am not that

motivated. I feel like I could run an empire under stress. Why? What

Empire? So much about the film is the way it looks but also the way

the score sounds. Could you tell us about when you saw the finished

movie and whether it look to you as you expected? Saying how it looks,

it is important to also say that it is not style over substance.

Definitely Howard looks is important. With the lighting and

sound Tom is able to take us, would the way it looks he is able to take

us in and out of the past and present, fiction and reality within

the stories. It would be difficult to expect anything from this movie

because it is so markedly different from his first film, really a

testament to what he is able to do as I director. I went into this

completely cold, knowing nothing about the story. I was impressed,

scared in moments, rarely involved. It is fascinating way it manages to

hold those three stories and intertwined them. The way it looks a

big part in that, so does the score. Tom's vision, that is what he

described to me when he was pitching the film to me, how he intended to

pull us in and out through motion, that is how we really struck, how

emotion pulls us in and out of the stories. Amy, congratulations on the

film and good luck with the premiere tonight. It's been a delight, thank

you. I think some fans want to talk to you. We just like to apologise

again for what was clearly an unscripted moment from Armie Hammer

there. What else have we got, Mark? Storks is an animated feature about

thaw. In the past, thaw used to deliver babies the families' homes.

Now they are into delivering parcels via the post, sort of like an

upmarket parcel delivery service. Now we have the story of a young

stalk about to take over the business, which very soon is going

to be changed forever. Here is a clip.

You know why I built my office entirely out of glass,

18 years ago, I saved All Stalks by getting out of...and

Now, this Monday at Stork Con, the board will announce they're

Which means you, are going to be named...

Here's the thing, it is intimately funny, there are lots of jokes and

sequences which individually work well in and of themselves. The

narrative is, to be honest, confused. Even doing that small

synopsis, it is about storks who used to bring babies, they don't

bring babies but they have a huge babymaking machine that they have

turned off. All of that stuff slightly bothered me because it is

not a narrative weekend here in full. However, it is colourful and

bright, it has slapstick humour that will entertain parents and younger

audiences. Whilst it is on-screen, people will find it diverging. I

doubt that what they will then do is go home and remember it is one of

their favourite films, because it doesn't have like a classic

character, it is a very, very strange and, let's be honest,

confusing full. We're not entirely the target audience. These are the

same people that came up with Legoland. I thought

Legoland was very doubtful, but kids loved it. The Lego movie is a high

watermark, this is nowhere near that. The Lego movie managed to take

a bunch of different franchise elements and turned into something

which was genuinely funny and broke out from the animated sequences to

the light sequences at the end. That is Colin Firth on the red carpet.

Here for the premiere of Nocturnal Animals, as indeed we are. As they

are posing, you have seen the film, you have had a pre-premiere... I was

very impressed by it. We were saying in the interviews, I went in not

knowing anything about the story, I thought it hung together

brilliantly, it was a fine piece of storytelling, the music was direct

terrific, it was reminiscent of Hitchcock and 40s noire at some

points. In one of its narratives it was very violent and distressing,

and another one was Amore Matic and yelling. It is a really interesting

piece of work. -- more romantic. I liked A Single Man very much, a

stylish goal. This sounds like a different piece? It is a step up,

yes, a more epic endeavour, I was impressed by how well he brought

together the different elements, not only marshalling a large cast but

the into twining strands of the narrative very well. Not to give so

much away, there are parallels with something like The French Lieutenant

Governor -- the French lead tenant's woman. That is an interesting

comparison. The way in which they did that full was very clever. Doing

the filming within the filming, that did work very well. Let's talk about

your Best of week. Under The Shadow. This bill was set in Iran, shot in

Jordan, actually a British film which is a chiller, it draws on the

Baba duck, films that I love. A woman and her daughter in an

apartment block in Teheran being terrorised by forces both natural

and supernatural. You will love it, because it is intelligent and

understated when it needs to be scary it is doing new release Gary,

it is a really adventurous story, very well told. -- it needs to be

scary. I was knocked out by it. The writer and director did a brilliant

job, the design is superb, everybody should see it. Your DVD is the clan,

the Argentinian full. Based on a true story, a crime drama in 80s

Argentina involved in kidnapping and killing. On the one hand it is a

strange twist the domestic story. On the other hand, this kind of

horrifying reality of these crimes. It has a very strong political

undercurrent. It is a film in which the tone of it is very

uncomfortable. You never settle into the film, it is uncomfortable all

the way through, and that is how it should be. Something which is a very

awkward watch, never allows the audience to relax. We have one

minute left. This Film Festival, it does go from strength to strength. I

was talking to the director pointing out that cinemas are not necessarily

going from strength to strength. They used to be won over there, it

is no more, it is a big coal. But dull puttable is self has a real

drawing power. The opening film was a United Kingdom, it is a fantastic

film. What was great was to seek it playing in the big auditorium to an

audience that clearly loved it. I think she has done a terrific job

taking a true story and combining politics and personal stories and

doing it really, really well. There is a real sense of excitement about

this festival. You know, just look at the crowds. You look at how well

attended it is. Absolutely, I think it is really thriving, and there

have been some exceptional pieces of work this year. You can get more

online. A quick reminder before we go that

you'll find more film news and reviews from across the BBC

online -t hat's at And you'll find our previous

programmes on the BBC iPlayer. Good evening. A little chilly there

in Leicester Square but dry at least as it has been for many parts of the

southern half of the