Movie reviews

THE darkest and most adult of the Harry Potter movies, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (12A) brings to a close the epic saga of the teenage wizard’s battle against the forces of evil.

In essence, it all comes down to something of a High Noon gunfight (albeit with wands rather than six-shooters) between Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), a fact that may lead those who are underwhelmed by the Potter phenomenon to ask why the pair couldn’t have simply slugged it out toe-to-toe in the first installment.

That said, there are plenty of twists and turns in this movie, the most interesting of which relates to the backstory of Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), the treacherous wizard who betrayed the cause when he murdered Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) — or did he? David Yates’s film is visually impressive, particularly during the scenes in which Voldemort’s massed ranks lay siege to Hogwarts Castle, in the process evoking a Battle of Britain spirit among those trapped inside: it’s not quite a cast of thousands, but virtually every character who has ever appeared in a Harry Potter movie makes a fleeting appearance. That said, it is not a good film.

Strong supporting performances from Fiennes, Gambon and Rickman only highlight the extent to which Radcliffe and his peers, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint (playing Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, respectively), have failed to mature as actors over the last decade or so, while Yates tries to cram far too much emotional development into too short a period of time (at one point, while under siege in the castle, characters break out into what appears to be a spontaneous kiss-a-thon).

Ultimately, however, the film and its finale are undermined by the unique appeal of Harry Potter, which is his ability to perform magic: when a simple spell or a flick of a wand makes anything possible, including the miracle of resurrection, then all tension is leached from the story and it becomes desperately difficult to care who wins or survives, or why.

IN WHAT must be every jailor’s worst nightmare, guard Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) finds himself trapped among the inmates when a riot breaks out in a high security wing of the prison where he is due to start work the following day. Cell 211 (16s) negotiates a rather awkward set-up in the first 10 minutes, when a series of unlikely events conspire to leave Juan unconscious and alone in an unoccupied cell, but once Daniel Monzón’s film hits its stride, with Juan pretending to be a newly incarcerated prisoner, it quickly becomes a superb thriller. Will riot leader Malamadre (Luis Tosar) discover Juan’s true identity? Can the prison authorities manage to extricate Juan before he is torn to pieces by the mob? These and a number of other burning issues contribute to a twisting plot which subverts audience expectations at every turn, while matters are further complicated by a potentially fatal assault on Juan’s pregnant wife Elena (Marta Etura) by a brutal jailor outside the prison gates. Ammann puts in a strong performance in the lead role, but Tosar steals the show with his role as the cunning, charismatic and lethal Malamadre. Monzón, meanwhile, crafts a tale of exquisitely timed punch and counter-punch, building a nail-biting tension towards a cataclysmic finale.

THE documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World (12A) centres on the legendary 1972 chess match between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky, when chess temporarily replaced nuclear warheads as the weapons of choice in the Cold War. While that match is regarded as the highpoint in the career of the enigmatic genius Fischer, Liz Garbus’s film is far more fascinating when it follows Fischer away from the chessboard and into his tortuously complex private life. Rare archive footage and an impressive cast of talking heads create a character so much larger than life that if the film were fiction, it would be dismissed as outlandishly unbelievable. A US chess champion at the tender age of 14, Fischer was so brilliant that he would routinely play against between 40 and 80 opponents at a time, while his match against Spassky in 1972 was so popular that the game was carried live on TV on New York’s Times Square. The price Fischer paid for his genius was his mental health, however, and the second half of the film, when Fischer descended into paranoid schizophrenia and became a hermit, only to emerge a raving anti-Semite despite his Jewish heritage, is as heartbreaking as it is compelling.