Film reviews round-up: Doctor Strange, After Love, Burn Burn Burn and Werner Herzog's Lo and Behold

Benedict Cumberbatch's Marvel debut and a new documentary about the world wide web

Benedict Cumberbatch in a scene from 'Doctor Strange'

Doctor Strange (12A)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Scott Derrickson, 114 mins, starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Rachel McAdams, Mads Mikkelsen, Benedict Wong, Chiwetel Ejiofor

Doctor Strange is a Marvel movie with a strong metaphysical undertow. It’s a film in which characters levitate, experience astral projection, learn how to tamper with “temporal probabilities” and skip between different universes. They make the kind of gnomic utterances about life and fate not heard since David Carradine was spouting Zen philosophy in TV series Kung Fu. Between times, there are plenty of explosions, crashes and fight sequences. The tone switches from the cerebral to the juvenile with the merest flick of a sling ring. Visually, the film is a treat and it benefits from an enjoyably sarcastic performance from Benedict Cumberbatch as the doctor who turns into a mystic warrior.

First encountered in the operating room, Stephen Strange (Cumberbatch) is a know-it-all brain surgeon who answers general knowledge questions about obscure Seventies jazz records while performing life-saving operations. Hs hands are as sensitive as those of a concert pianist. He is supremely arrogant and self-centred, with an unshakeable inner conviction that he is the smartest guy in the room. “I’m talking at a neurological society dinner, come with me,” is how he asks a girl for a date. He drives a sports car and can’t bear the idea that anyone would have the temerity to overtake him. That’s what prompts the spectacular car accident that leaves him a physical wreck. The accident is shot by director Scott Derrickson and his crew in operatic slow motion. We see glass shatter and the car turn a series of graceful somersaults. (Whatever else, the film uses 3D in a constantly inventive way.)

After 11 hours of surgery, Doctor Strange is a self-pitying mess. He has stainless steel pins all over his body and his hands are wrecked. What isn’t diminished in the slightest is his amour propre. “There are other things in your life that can give your life meaning,” his colleague and lover Christine (Rachel McAdams) tells him now his medical career looks shot. “Like you?” he asks in caustic disbelief.

There’s a long tradition of superheroes heading east in search of spiritual enlightenment. In Batman Begins, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne studied with the League of Shadows in Bhutan. Here, Strange travels to Kamar-Taj, Katmandu, and enrolls with the softly spoken guru, “Ancient One” (a shaven-headed Tilda Swinton.) She enjoins him to forget everything he knows, to shake off his western arrogance (something he never quite achieves) and to use his spirit to heal his body. Strange shaves, leaving himself with Fu Manchu-like whiskers but he is very attached to at least one of his worldly possessions, his Jaeger-LeCoultre luxury watch (shown in close-up in a shameless exhibition of product placement).

This is surely the only Marvel movie in which so much emphasis is placed on reading. Strange’s original brilliance as a surgeon was based on his photographic memory. In Katmandu, he hoovers his way through the contents of the sacred library, stealing texts from behind the back of the library custodian (Benedict Wong) and he begins to develop his magical, necromancer’s powers.

Doctor Strange has a formidable cast. Cumberbatch takes to the Marvel universe with a sardonic relish reminiscent of that of Roberrt Downey Jr in the Iron Man films. Swinton is intriguing and mysterious as the mystic leader drawing some of her powers from the dark side. Chiwetel Ejiofor is in imposing form as her protegé and lieutenant Karl Mordo, who helps teach Strange how to use his powers for fighting. The actors are skilled enough to make us intensely curious about their back stories and for us to accept some of their more preposterous lines of dialogue.

In Casino Royale, as one of James Bond’s most sadistic antagonists, Mads Mikkelsen cried blood. As Kaecilius, he is playing a villain in similar mould here, a sleek and cruel figure in kung fu robes and with Marilyn Manson-like eye-liner. There are enjoyable barbed exchanges between Strange and Kaecilius but, once the fighting begins in earnest, any subtlety in the performances is lost. One of the inevitable frustrations here as in almost all superhero movies is that character and plot will eventually become secondary to the action. Most of the cast members are only given the opportunity to give half a performance before it is time to rescue the world. Cumberbatch alone is allowed to explore his character more deeply.

The special effects department achieves astound feats of prestidigitation, making buildings rise, fall and merge with one another, like live action versions of cubist paintings. One moment a character might be in Katmandu. The next, he or she will leap through a time loop to London or New York. We see Strange use his sling ring to reverse time. There are strange surrealistic interludes, for example, the phantasmagoric scene in which a hand sprouts another hand and suddenly there is a thicket of fingers, and we’re taken everywhere from Mount Everest to the furthest reaches of the cosmos.

Roy Rogers had his trusty horse, Trigger. Strange here has his very own amazing “Cloak Of Levitation”, a red cape with a personality of its own that will sometimes detach itself from his shoulders to get him out of trouble. The scenes in surgeries are shot in hypercharged fashion, with watches ticking and doctors sweating as they use cutting-edge medicine (instead of the Ancient One’s mysticism) to bring characters back from the dead.

True to its title, Doctor Strange turns out to be wondrously bizarre: an action movie with flights of fantasy that rekindle memories of the most outré psychedelic cinema of the Sixties and Seventies. With its B-movie plot, the film is also often anticlimactic and frustrating. It’s a mind-bending affair that in its weaker moments late on seems every bit as ludicrous as Michael Bay’s Transformers monstrosities.

Lo And Behold, Reveries Of The Connected World (12A)

Dir: Werner Herzog, 98 mins, featuring: Elon Musk, Lawrence Krauss, Lucianne Walkowicz, Sebastian Thrun

By Werner Herzog’s standards, this is a relatively restrained and open-ended documentary. Instead of prisoners on death row or suicidal penguins marching to their doom, his subject here is the internet. He is ready to listen to everybody’s point of view. Plenty of his interviewees regard the web in utopian fashion. They hold forth about the wonders of robotics, self-driving cars and how the worldwide web can be used to reach out to communities and thereby solve complex medical conundrums that have baffled medical researchers for years. One predicts that humans will soon be able to tweet their thoughts as if by telepathy (and without having to use devices.)

Other interviewees are far less sanguine about the impact of the net on human behaviour. A grief-stricken mother, whose family was bombarded with abusive messages and images after her daughter died after driving a car off a cliff, describes the internet as the “spirit of evil.”

Herzog also meets characters acutely sensitive to radiation who live as hermits, trying as hard as they can to keep away from technology that makes them physically ill. “If the internet shuts down, people will forget how they used to live,” one respondee suggests. There are grim stories about South Korean video game addicts who wear nappies because they don’t want to waste time on bathroom breaks. “Could it be that the internet dreams of itself,” Herzog wonders in an attempt to move onto higher philosophical ground.

The German director has often talked about the pursuit of “ecstatic truth” in his documentaries and of his disdain for the banality of cinema verité. One mild disappointment about Lo And Behold is that this isn’t Herzog in his usual crackpot, visionary form. We hear relatively little of his distinctive, messianic tones on the soundtrack and he doesn’t reveal his own feelings about the internet. This is an intriguing and provocative film which explores its subject from many different angles. What it lacks is a point of view. You could imagine this documentary being made in exactly the same way by another filmmaker - and that’s why it doesn’t seem like a proper Herzog movie.

After Love (12A)

★★★★☆

Dir: Joachim Lafosse, 101 mins, starring: Bérénice Bejo, Cédric Kahn, Marthe Keller, Jade Soentjens

Belgian director Lafosse’s After Love is like a European art-house counterpart to Kramer vs Kramer. It’s a story of a couple breaking up – and of the mess and pain their slow separation causes not only to each other but to the lives of their young daughters. Marie (Bérénice Bejo) and Boris (Cédric Kahn) no longer want to live together but can’t afford to live apart. They share the same apartment but go to extreme lengths to try to avoid one another. Each has assigned days which they’re allowed to spend with the children. “On my days, come back after they’re in bed,” Marie hisses at her estranged partner. They even have separate shelves on the fridge. She is furious when he takes cheese from her shelf. She certainly doesn’t want to do his laundry anymore. Boris, an architect, is well-nigh broke. If they decide to sell the apartment, paid for with her family’s money, he wants to be compensated in full for the renovation work he has done.

This could easily have been a very claustrophobic and oppressive affair. It is set almost entirely within the couple’s apartment. Key moments in the drama include seemingly banal disputes about who will buy one of the daughters a new pair of football boots or whether Boris should be allowed a slice of cake at a celebratory dinner. All the domestic strife does become a little wearing but After Love is surprisingly absorbing. Lafosse doesn’t take either couple’s side. He lets us see just why they’re so disgusted with one another but also makes it apparent that, when they’ve spent so many years together, what Gwyneth Paltrow calls “conscious uncoupling” isn’t at all easy. Much though they hate to admit, there is still lingering affection and even sexual attraction.

Bejo and Kahn (who is better known as a director than an actor) give very nuanced performances as the couple who can hardly bear to be in the same room but have so much history between them that they can’t work out quite how to escape from one another.

Burn Burn Burn (15)

Dir: Chanya Button, 105 mins, starring: Laura Carmichael, Chloe Pirrie, Joe Dempsie, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Jack Farthing,

Two young middle-class women scatter the ashes of their recently deceased friend Dan on a road trip to four corners of the UK in Chanya Button’s comedy drama. It’s a very uneven ride. The screenplay seems partly inspired by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and by Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (whose most famous passage provides the title of the film) but the tone here is very Middle England. The women are driving in a borrowed Volvo. Their ports of call include rural Shropshire, Wales, York and Scotland. Dan speaks to the women from beyond the grave in a series of irreverent pre-recorded video messages which they watch after each stop. Seph (Laura Carmichael, best known as Lady Edith from Downton Abbey) and Alex (Chloe Pirrie) are in their late twenties, both with “relationship” issues and at a transitional point in their lives.

On their journey, they drink too much, behave badly in Welsh nightclubs and have encounters with all sorts of oddballs. They also learn to “make the most” out of “every little tiny second they breathe”. Often very maudlin, the film has a nice line in eccentric, screwball humour and at least some of the energy its title promises. It also benefits from the very lively performances by Carmichael and Pirrie as the two friends trying to make sense of their own muddled lives even as they grieve their friend.