This column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.
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Civil War (15)
There’s no backstory as to why or how, but, unlikely political allies, Texas and California have joined together under a two-star flag as the Western Forces, in an act of secession which, as the film opens, has led to a civil war that is now in its final stages, they, despite protestations by the fascist President (Nick Offerman) bombastically proclaiming the contrary (“Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind”), and the “Florida Alliance” also closing in, emerging as the victors. Given the deliberate resonances of the President with Trump, it might feel less a work of fiction than a prophecy of what might follow if he loses – or indeed wins – the upcoming election.
But, written and directed by Alex Garland, this is not, as the trailers might suggest, an action blockbuster. Indeed, it’s only in the final act, when the apocalyptic fighting reaches the Washington DC war zone, that the bombs and bullets really let rip in electrifying manner. Rather, this is a gripping tribute to the courage of journalists and photographers who risk their lives to report on conflicts, here taking the form of a road trip through a country torn apart, with bodies hanging from bridges, makeshift refugee camps in abandoned stadiums, suicide bombers and murderous militia. Taking the journey are battle-scarred photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst), who, named for an modelled on WWII photojournalist Lee Miller, gained fame in covering the “ANTIFA massacre”, and boozy Reuters reporter writer Joel (Wagner Moura), their being to secure an interview with the President while he’s still breathing, along with veteran wisdom-dispensing old school journo Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). The group’s rounded out with Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an eager, aspirant cub photojournalist who hero worships Lee, she, having saved her during a protest riot in NYC, becoming her reluctant mentor after Joel invites her to tag along.
As such, the screenplay offering bits of exposition as it goes, it follows their friendships and ordeals as they head closer to DC, the film developing their characters as it goes and how journalists such as they struggle to remain objective given the things they are documenting while maintaining a grip on their humanity. At one point, as they stop to get fuel just short of check point, Jessie wanders off and stumbles upon two men strung up for looting, an armed hick asking her to decide what their fate should be. While on the road they are also pinned down by a sniper, go shopping in a town that seems deceptively normal and removed from the conflict and, in the most shattering scene, are involved in a standoff with a group of murderous loyalists (led by a chilling Jesse Plemons in fatigues and red sunglasses), duping bodies in a mass grave who casually shoot two journos simply on account of where they’re from.
Finally, another death added to the tally, they reach Washington, photographing the fierce fighting at the Lincoln Memorial (the film switches between the live action and the black and white photos) before venturing inside the White House where the President’s making his last stand.
Crafted around massive set pieces and more small scale intimate moments, brilliantly lensed by Rob Hardy in mostly verité style, every second sweats with suspense while delivering the embedded message (“Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this. But here we are”, says a disillusioned Lee) never romanticising what it depicts, where even the ‘good guys’ are capable of atrocity, it’s absolutely stunning. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Back To Black (15)
The latest in what seems like a never-ending stream of musician biopics, director Sam Taylor-Johnson turns the spotlight on the five time Grammy winner, the title taken from her classic second and final album inspired by her tumultuous relation with ex-boyfriend and future husband Blake Fielder-Civil after he dumped her to return to his former girlfriend. It doesn’t go into the same depth as Asif Kapadia’s documentary and, in many ways, is something of a generic rise and fall tale of someone who briefly burns bright only to burn up, but, largely down to a spot on turn by Marisa Abela, who brilliantly captures Winehouse’s look, mannerisms, humour, attitude and, indeed, music, it’s a compelling watch.
A sassy working-class Jewish girl from Camden, into the jazz greats, devoted to her former ’50s nightclub singer nan, Cynthia (Lesley Manville), the inspiration for her eventual trademark beehive hairdo, the daughter of separated parents taxi driver dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan) and troubled mother Janis (Juliet Cowan), she’s talent spotted by future manager Nick (Sam Buchanan) who, impressed her song Stronger Than Me dissing her emasculated boyfriend, hooks her up with Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, whose stable included The Spice Girls (which she spells out in no uncertain terms she has no intention of being anything like), and from there a contract with Island Records. The debut album, Frank, is a huge success but the failure of the title track to make the Top10 sees the label refusing to release it in America and suggesting she stop playing guitar and work on her stage presence, prompting one of the film’s standout scenes as Amy makes her feelings abundantly clear, declaring she need to live the experiences that will fuel her follow-up
Already overly fond of booze and weed, the slippery slope begins when she meets likely lad production assistant Blake (played by Jack O’Connell as a sort of latter day Alfie), in a pub and is immediately attracted by his bad boy charm, he eventually dumping girlfriend Becky and turning up at Amy’s for a euphemistic cup of tea. He introduces her to the music of the Shangri-Las by way of Leader Of The Pack, a 60s girl group which specialised in songs of doomed love and, while she initially tells him it’s the drug of mugs, cocaine and then heroin. It’s to prove an on-off mutually toxic relationship marked by physical and verbal fights, copious bottles of vodka, a stream of tattoos, bulimia, the break-up that sparks Back To Black, a reunion, Miami marriage, his conviction of assault and eventually divorce. Throughout all of which, she’s constantly harried by the paparazzi looking to get shots of her looking her worst.
Mixing in tender moments such as she and Mitch duetting on Fly Me To The Moon and scenes with Cynthia alongside those showing the shocking physical and emotional fall-out from her hedonistic life style and relationship, and while it omits many characters and personal and career events along the way, the core of the film is raw, intense and poignant with Abela’s musical performances (her own vocals not lip-synched) proving electrifying, especially her Grammy Award rendition of Rehab (she had to do it from London on account of failing a drug test) and the live lounge take of Valerie.
The suggestion that Winehouse, here often speaking of her maternal desires, went back on the booze after learning Blake’s new girlfriend was pregnant, is a somewhat controversial suggestion, but there’s little doubt that heartbreak could be listed as one of the causes of death, joining the dead at 27 ranks of Joplin, Hendrix, Cobain and Morrison, the film reclaiming her from the tabloid self-destructive addict image reminding she was a complex, flawed and very real woman. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Bleeding Love (15)
A father-daughter redemptive road trip through a poverty-strapped America, while it stars Ewan McGregor and his eldest daughter Clara Mathilde McGregor, and has autobiographical resonances in that, like his landscaper character, McGregor divorced, remarried, has a young son and is reformed drinker, it should not (even if she is one of the co-writers) be read as a depiction of their actual relationship. Known only as Father and Daughter, long estranged, he’s driving her, an art school dropout, from San Diego to Sante Fe and a rehab clinic (she thinks they’re going to visit an artist friend) on account that, the day before, she, a drug addict, almost died of an overdose.
It’s a fractious journey, she resenting his long absences in her life, he guilty about them, Flashbacks to childhood show happier times (albeit her fun father likely under the influence) before he walked out on his marriage. Along the way, there’s several stops for her to pee (on the first she attempts, futilely, to run off into the desert) on account of her weak bladder, one for him to attend an AA meeting, she joining but not participating, to afford a lengthy confessional exposition on his former life, and a motel stopover where, while he’s getting ice, she takes off, asks a stranger where she can get high and goes back to his place and his dealer wife, something she naturally doesn’t mention when she finally drags herself back. Though mostly a two-hander, there’s encounters with various eccentrics and oddballs. There’s a cranky tow truck driver (Kim Zimmer) into astrology who takes them to get their pick up fixed by an elderly amateur mechanic at a birthday party for her young nephew, the host (Jake Weary) coming on to the daughter with drugs and booze. Then, having been given a pumping parting gift, they drive off and, when she’s bitten on her privates while taking a pee, meet up with tart with a heart (Vera Bulder) and aspirations to be a Broadway playwright while looking for a pharmacy in a town that shuts at seven. There’s also a sneaky forbidden dip in a motel pool, a childhood favourite chocolate-and-whipped-cream pancake breakfast she can’t eat.
Directed by Emma Westenberg, the dynamic between the two McGregors is, as you might expect, naturalistic even if the dialogue, given to lines such as “You know I’ve been there” and “I was acting like a child, but I HAD a child”, doesn’t. Archetypal lessons about acceptance and forgiveness come as a given, but the performances lift it above its generic nature, the film title coming from the Leona Lewis number, an old mutual favourite, they sing along to on the car radio in what is essentially a love transfusion. (Vue)
Scoop (15)
A recreation of the notorious car crash interview Prince Andrew gave to Newsnight in 2019 attempting to put to bed the scandal about his relationship with the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell and accusations of having had sex with the underage Virginia Giuffre, as directed by Peter Martin from a script by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, adapted from Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews by former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister, this is less about the actual interview and, taking its cue from All The President’s Men and The Post, more a journalistic thriller about the behind the scenes efforts to secure it. When the infamous photo of Andrew and Epstein walking in Central Park, taken in 2010 by Jae Donnelly (Connor Swindells), who also captured a young girl leaving the same private Manhattan home, finally surfaces in a newspaper in connection with a young entrepreneurs event sponsored by the Prince Andrew (a convincing Rufus Sewell under a ton of prosthetics), McAlister reaches out to his Private Secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) proposing a possible interview with the programme’s imperious but highly intelligent anchor, Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), for him to put his side of things. It’s eventually felt this is a perfect chance to change the narrative. History tells a different story.
With the action switching between both sides preparation for the face-to-face, negotiations on what will and won’t be on the table for discussion (Sam and Emily meeting with Thirsk, Andrew and Princess Beatrice at Buckingham Palace), it builds a palpable tension even though the outcome is public record and, with a supporting cast that includes Amanda Redman as McAlister’s mother (who gives a pep talk after Sam is seemingly sidelined), Romola Garai as Newsnight editor Esme Wren and Lia Williams as BBC Current Affairs Director Fran Unsworth, it is compelling viewing and a reminder of what good journalism is all about. A three part TV series, A Very Royal Scandal, is also currently in production with Michael Sheen as Andrew and Ruth Wilson as Maitlis told from the latter’s perspective. (Netflix)
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American Fiction (15)
A scathing and wickedly funny satire on white stereotyping of Blacks in popular culture where trauma, poverty and felons dominate the narratives and how Black writers pander to those and a white liberal audience in order to get success, writer-director Cord Jefferson’s feature debut and Oscar winner for his adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, is an early contender for the year’s best of list.
Jeffrey Wright gives a career peak performance as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (one wonders perhaps why, on a different jazz riff, he wasn’t nicknamed Mose?), a curmudgeonly, smugly self-righteous and inwardly self-hating college professor and respected intellectual author from a middle class family who’s struggling to find a publisher for his latest book (a dry reworking of Aeschylus’s The Persians) internally bristling at having to deal with passive aggressive attitudes at work (one of his students storms out when he tries to teach Flannery O’Connor’s The Artificial Nigger, for which he’s given a forced leave of absence) and on the street. He’s constantly ridiculed for his taste in white wine and white women. Distancing himself from lazy perceptions of being Black, declaring that he doesn’t believe in defining art or people by race, he takes umbrage on finding his novels placed in a bookstore’s African American section, raging that the only things Black about them is the ink.
So he’s incandescent when fellow middle class Black author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) is feted by the literary establishment and the media for her best-selling novel about inner city Black women called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which, while a life she’s never known, panders to all the clichés of character and Black narrative that appeal to her white readership or, as she puts it, “giving the market what it wants”.
Letting off steam, for a joke and to prove a point to himself, he churns out his own parodic novel in the same vein, part inspired from having watched 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Titling it My Pafology as a send-up of Golden’s supposed street language and about drugs, ne’er-do-well fathers and gang shootings, he has his agent (John Ortiz) send it out under the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh. To his shock – and indeed confirmed horror – he’s offered a deal worth more than he’d earn in a lifetime. Needing money to pay for nursing home care for his ailing mother Agnes (a lovely understated turn by Leslie Uggams) who’s showing signs of Alzheimer’s, he agrees, pushing the joke further by having his agent say that Leigh is a wanted fugitive. The publishers and, inevitably, Hollywood, are in raptures. His having had to leave a meeting with movie producer Wiley (Adam Brody) to avoid being recognised, only further bolsters the mystique behind his fantasy self.
Eventually, feeling it’s all getting out of control, during a conference call to the publishers, he tells them he wants to retitle the book. He wants to call it Fuck. It barely takes a heartbeat before they’re enthusiastically agreeing, calling it a bold and radical statement. A movie deal is also moving forward. However, matters get complicated when Monk is asked to be part of a New England Book Association’s Literary Award panel, alongside Golden, to decide the book of the year, and it’s decided that Fuck should be included for consideration. Despite he and Golden making persuasive arguments to reject it, their white fellow judges are unanimous in placing it top of the list. All of which builds to an awards ceremony that, in the proposed screenplay, comes with three different endings. It’s a no brainer as to which one Wiley opts for.
Peppered with barbed humour, spiked irony (Wiley’s new film is Plantation Annihilation, a Blaxploitation starring, as in an joke, Ryan Reynolds where a white couple marry on a plantation and are murdered by the ghosts of former slaves) and sheer laugh out loud lines, Jefferson also grounds the narrative in the Boston-set family and domestic melodrama. This involves Monk’s relationships with his confrontational, substance-abusing gay doctor brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), divorced after being found cheating with a man, his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), also a doctor, who makes an early exit, his mother’s long-time live-in carer Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor who gets her own story finding love with Raymond Anthony Thomas’s cop), and his public defender across the street neighbour turned girlfriend Coraline (Erika Alexander, excellent), while the ghost of his suicide father haunts his repressed feelings. While, in terms of its target audience, it may have its cake and eat it, it’s a real classic. (Amazon Prime)
Argylle (12A)
Ignore the savage reviews, the latest screwball spy caper from Matthew Vaughn is a barrel of fun that never takes itself seriously and comes with more twists than something that is very twisty indeed. Bryce Dallas Howard is introverted Elly Conway, the best-selling author of a series of spy novels featuring the adventures of her suave titular hero, Agent Argylle. Her latest has him uncovering a secret league of rogue agents, her reading of the fifth instalment intercut with imagined scenes (a la Sandra Bullock’s author in The Lost City) featuring Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill sporting a ludicrous square hairdo) who, in the opening scenes staged to Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything, finds his cover blown when trying to arrest enemy agent LaGrange (Dua Lipa) and has to be rescued by his techie Keira (Ariana Debose), only for her to be killed. Ordered in a blink and you’ll miss it cameo by Richard E Grant to capture LaGrange, who’s escaped on a motorbike, there follows a wonderfully ridiculous car chase before she’s plucked, literally, from her bike by Argyll’s sidekick Wyatt (John Cena), she revealing a secret file that will bring down the Division before committing suicide. The story’s to be continued in book six but Elly has hit a creative block, her mother (Catherine O’Hara) disparagingly dismissing the cliffhanger as a cop out).
Boarding a train to visit her and get some input, taking along her sole companion, Alfie, a Scottish Fold furball (Claudia Schiffer’s cat Chip apparently), in a backpack, she becomes the target of a fellow passengers legion of a would be assassins and is saved by the straggle-haired Aidan (Sam Rockwell proving his leading man credentials) who, it turns out is a real spy (quick fire editing having Elly variously see him as himself and Argylle) and, the pair eventually parachuting from the train, explains that she’s being pursued by an organisation known as the Division (headed up by Bryan Cranston) because her book somehow predicts the future and they want her to write the next chapter so they can get their hands on a coded file called The Masterkey. The pair (Elly too scared to have ever flown before) travel to meet her folks in London to find the file and where hordes of heavily armed goons turn up to take them out.
Now if all this feels a lot to take in, then what comes next is a complete rug puller as twist follows twist as it heads down assorted rabbit holes with no one who you – or indeed they – think they are, Cranston turning up as another character entirely and the screenplay introducing a backstory between the confused Elly and the scruffy Aidan and a visit to France to meet former CIA deputy director Alfred Solomon (Samuel J Jackson) who reveals Argylle isn’t as fictional as she thinks.
To say more – or let the cat out of the bag so to speak – would spoil the inventive surprises as true identities are revealed and fictional characters turn out to be real, and Sofia Boutella puts in an appearance as the mysterious The Keeper, the film closing up with another book reading where Cavill turns up in the audience (with an ever more preposterous haircut) and a mid-credits sequence that links it directly to Vaughn’s Kings Man universe and sets up manner of possible sequels. Less violent that Vaughn’s usual fare (there’s a wry scene where Aidan tries to explain how Elly should squish a bad guys head and she can’t bring herself to do it) but still loaded with frantic wall to wall action. It’s utter nonsense of course, but frankly any film that can include both a slo-mo shoot-out amid coloured smoke choreographed as a dance routine to The Beatles Now And Then and a balletic figure-skating knife fight on an oil slick just has to be seen. (Apple TV+)
Asteroid City (12A)
Shot in widescreen washed out pastel colours, drenched in retro nostalgia, deadpan dialogue, and heavily stylised with a self-aware sense of artifice, set in a red-rock Southwest American desert town in 1955, this is quintessential Wes Anderson. With its single phone booth, one pump gas station and 50s diner and motel, Asteroid City (pop 87) is also the site of a giant meteorite crater tourist attraction, intermittent atom bomb tests and the annual Junior Stargazers convention where teenage science geeks gather for their awards.
When his car breaks down, war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman on peak form) is stranded in town with his four kids, Stargazer Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and his three eccentric young sisters, Andromeda, Pandora and Cassiopeia (Ella, Gracie, Willan Faris), who he’s yet to tell their mother died three weeks earlier and he has her ashes in a Tupperware tub, prompting the arrival of his wealthy father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect them.
Also gathered are world weary TV star Midge Campbell (Scarlet Johannsen, terrific), J.J. Kellogg (Live Schreiber), Sandy Borden (Hope Davis) and Roger Cho (Stephen Park) whose respective kids, botany wiz Dinah (Grace Edwards), rebellious Clifford (Aristou Meehan), sceptical Shelly (Sophia Lillis) and anti-authority Ricky (Ethan Josh Lee), are all award winners. There’s also Montana (Rupert Friend), stranded there with his fellow cowboys when the bus left and who’s attracted to June (Maya Hawke), a science teacher with her church group pupils, local scientist Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) who sponsors the awards, and General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) who’s due to present them.
However, the ceremony is interrupted by the arrival of an alien who steals a meteorite fragment and flies off, prompting a quarantine of everyone there and a rebellion by the Stargazers to make contact, Augie’s photo being leaked to the media. Meanwhile, various romances bubble up.
Except, as seen from the start and in subsequent black and white sequences, what we’re actually watching is a television behind-the-scenes and recreation of the first staging of a play called Asteroid City by esteemed New York playwright Conrad Earp (Ed Norton), who’s in a relationship with one of the cast, presented by The Host (Bryan Cranston) as directed by the womanising Schubert Green (Adrian Brody) with all the characters being the actors who, under their real names, auditioned for and appeared in the stage production (save for Margot Robbie whose role – her lines movingly re-enacted with Augie/Jones – as the mother was cut).
Constructed as a series of tableaux, meditations on bottled up grief interweave with themes of storytelling and being aliens in our own skins and, of course, the meaning of life (or understanding the play) And while emotion is deliberately kept at arms-length, there’s still a certain poignancy as the stories unfold. There’s also a swathe of good gags, both visual (a recurring cops vs crooks car chase) and verbal, among them a vending machine that sells plots of land out in the desert. Adding to the star-studded cast there’s Steve Carrell as the motel manager (inexplicably toting a pistol), Matt Dillon as the mechanic and Jeff Goldblum who has one line in the black and white sequences as the actor playing the alien. All that and a great memory party game. At the end of the day, the dazzling style may triumph over the obtuse substance, but even so it’s an intoxicating experience. Glad to meteor indeed. (Peacock/Sky Cinema)
Barbie (12A)
Directed by Greta Gerwig and co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach, this is almost too wonderful for words. Opening with Helen Mirren narrating a send of up 2001 A Space Odyssey’s monolith scene as little girls smash their dolly babies upon seeing the adult Barbie, an inspired supersaturated colour, postmodern meta cocktail of subversive satire, razor-sharp whimsy, feminism and musical numbers, it sets up the idea that there exists Barbieland, populated with an array of different versions of the iconic toy doll and their opposite number, Ken (including Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Scott Evans and Ncuti Gatwa), each Barbie linked to a child’s doll in the Real World. where, as far as they believe, women are in charge and, like the dolls, little girls can be anything they want. Even President.
In Barbieland every day is a good day, especially for Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) who wakes each morning in her pink dream house, greets her fellow Barbies (among them Issa Rae, Dua Lipa, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, Nicola Coughlan and Emma Mackey), hangs out with wannabe boyfriend Beach Ken (Supporting Actor Ryan Gosling), whose only function is to stand around and look good, and generally radiates perfection. Until that is, amid a choreography party, she brings things to a screeching halt when she wonders aloud about dying. The next day, she falls rather than floats to the floor, has bad breath and, catastrophically, finding herself walking flatfooted and not on tip toe. Clearly, something’s amiss. A visit to Weird Barbie Kate McKinnon), mutilated and drawn on by her real world child),ends up with her being told she must go to the Real World, connect with the child who owns her doll, and put things right, especially the cellulite on her thigh. With Ken stowing away in the back of her, naturally, pink car they travel by boat, bicycle, and rocket until they rollerskate into the human world where, she quickly discovers it’s men who hold all the power. She’s horrified, Ken (who has already shown signs of discontentment of being just an accessory, jealous of the attention she gives another Ken and being rebuffed in suggesting sex – if he knew what that was; as Barbie points out she has no vagina and he no penis), rather less so. He rather likes the idea of men lording it over women and, pumped up with ideas about big trucks and stallions, decides to return home and establish his own fascist patriarchy in Barbieland. Meanwhile Barbie heads to the HQ of Mattel, the Barbie toy company, to try to sort things out and is taken aback to find there’s no women executives. And when the CEO (Will Farrell) tries to persuade her to get back in the box, with a little help from an elderly lady (Rhea Perlman in a touching last act insider reference to Barbie’s origins) in a hidden office, she takes off and is rescued by Gloria (America Ferrara), a Mattel employee who, it turns out is the owner of Barbie’s toy counterpart, rather than her spikey and sullen teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt).
However, when they get to Barbieland, everything has changed. The Kens, led by Beach Ken, have taken over and the girls are now all Stepford Barbies, there only to serve their every whim. Can Barbie, with the help of Gloria, Sasha, Weird Barbie and Alan (Michael Cera, launched in 1964 as Ken’s buddy, and put everything back in the pink!
Overflowing with clever jokes along with themes of female empowerment, sexism, gender equality, toxic masculinity and aggression, the impossibility of perfection, conforming to expectations, the complexity of being a woman, who men want to be both whore and mother, being defined by your looks and finding value in who you are, it bursts with energy. It also takes digs at Mattel’s less successful lines, like Pregnant Barbie, the gender demeaning Teen Talk Barbie and Growing Up Skipper with her inflatable boobs. But it wouldn’t be half as good without the irresistible radiant star power of Robbie and Gosling (who again gets to show off his dance moves) who bring their plastic incarnations to vivid and very human life. There cameos from John Cena and Rob Brydon, a reference to Zach Snyder’s Justice League, a clip from The Godfather, and a soundtrack that includes Billie Eilish Oscar winner What Was I made For? Ken’s’ I’m Just Ken showcase and a nice use of The Indigo Girls’ Closer To Fine as sung by Brandi and Catherine Carlile. This is the definitive toy story. (Now)
The Beautiful Game (12)
A real thing, the Homeless World Cup is an annual international four-a-side football tournament in which, as one of the criteria, the players, as the name suggests, are homeless (or have been in the qualifying year). The film, however, is only loosely based around this rather than, as with Next Goal Wins, retelling an actualtournament, the players or results. Directed by Thea Sharrock and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, it stars Bill Nighy in familiar shrug-shouldered pathos mode, as Mal, the coach for the England team, who recruits Vinny (Micheal Ward) as a striker for that year’s completion in Rome. Once a West Ham contender, he carries a he chip on his shoulder and, though he’s been thrown out by his wife and is living in his car, won’t admit he’s homeless (setting up a sharply emotional scene later when he blows up after learning his young daughter has chosen him as for her class talk on heroes).
Inevitably, he has no team spirit and rubs his motley but enthusiastic crew of fellow players Jason (Sheyi Cole), Syrian refugee Aldar (Robin Nazari), Nathan (Callum Scott-Howells) and Kevin (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) up the wrong way, rejecting their extended hands of friendship and particularly getting the back up of Cal (Kit Young) who, also a striker, resents him potentially edging him out. In Rome, Vinny displays his skills to winning effect, but gives the others the cold-shoulder to the extent he goes off to sleep on a bench rather than in the team quarters.
There’s a flirtatious dalliance between the widowed Mal, Rome bring back memories of his honeymoon, and Italian competition organiser Gabriella (a delightful Valeria Golino), who promises to buy him dinner if the team, regarded pretty much as rank outsiders, win. Indeed with South Africa, the favourites (Susan Wokoma scene stealing as their nun manager), missing their match due to bureaucratic red tape back home, that might actually be a possibility assuming Mac can get them to work together. There again they’ll be up against Italy, another firm favourite.
With the plot involving generous sporting gestures, Vinny winding up as a substitute for one of the other team’s players, a revelation about Mal’s past connection to the young Vinny, a romantic spark between Jason and American goal scorer Rosita (Cristina Rodlo) for whom winning would prevent extradition, Adar’s refusal to play against Italy due to ethnic hostilities with one of their players, and the Japanese team’s amusing sightseeing and moment of glory, it follows a fairly predictable underdog sports movie of redemption and being a winner in yourself regardless of any cup. The influence of things like The Full Monty are evident but never in a way that diminishes the film or the characters, all of whom are very likeable, even if at times selfish, with the interactions off the pitch the heart of the film rather than the action on it. It’s slight but full of charm and easily earns its place on the podium. (Netflix)
Blank (15)
Described in one review as Misery meets Ex-Machina (with a whiff of The Shining and Repulsion), the sci fi feature debut by director Natalie Kennedy stars Rachel Shelley as Claire Rivers, a best-selling thrillers author suffering a bad case of writer’s block with a deadline looming and nothing but blank pages to show for it. She’s persuaded to check into a writing retreat, which, staffed only by AI projections and androids and with a fridge well-stocked with wine (and in which Claire indulges massively), aims to kickstart and assist her writing. Initially all is fine, her every need catered to by her hologram cyberspace host ‘Henry’ (Wayne Brady) and her personal android housemaid, Rita (Heida Reed), vaguely looking like Rachael in Blade Runner. But then there’s a glitch and the software goes on the frazzle, Claire finding herself locked in the room and Rita, who resets every night and greets her next morning like a Stepford Wives Groundhog Day loop, refusing to let her out until she finishes the book.
All this is punctuated with flashbacks to Claire’s childhood where, in a parallel set-up, her younger self (Annie Cusselle) was imprisoned at home having to care for her cruel, abusive blind aspirant writer mother Helen (Rebecca-Clare Evans), forced to transcribe her stories, experiences that have clearly left her traumatised as she tries to tap into those memories as fuel for the book.
Kennedy infuses both flashbacks and present day scenes with a real creepiness that’s well-served by the largely two woman cast, Claire falling apart in hysteria as she tries to find the acceptable right ending (at one point she types The EndThe EndThe End over and over) and Rita becoming an emotionally blank sociopath in carrying out her programming, passively-aggressively repeating “You seem distressed. Maybe you should have a lie down”. There’s some nice visual touches, among them a typewriter POV shot, and, well served by the two leads, the screenplay effectively mines present day AI paranoia as it builds to its climax. (Google Play, iTunes)
Bob Marley: One Love (12A)
In charting the rise to international stardom – not to mention the titular 1978 Kingston concert brokering peace between rival political factions in Jamaica, King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green sticks to a rigid structural framework that’s basically ongoing narrative and cursory flashbacks punctuated by hit songs, either in concert, in the studio or with Marley (a charismatic Kingsley Ben-Adir, who was Malcolm X in One Night in Miami, even if any actual resemblance is limited to the dreadlocks) sitting on a chair. It’s prosaic but it gets the job done, opening in scenes of Marley as a child. leaving his humble home with his Jamaican mother (his father, who died in 1955, was a white plantation overseer and had little to do with him) before cutting to 1976, by which time he’s a major star, already signed to Island Records (James Norton pops up here and there as label boss Chris Blackwell, sharing spliffs and showing concerns but adds no discernible personality to things) and getting ready to play a peace concert in Kingston. Details of his journey to that point are dropped in as the film goes, including his romance with and eventual marriage to Rita (Lashana Lynch), also left to fend for herself.
Then, shot in an assassination attempt before he can play and Rita badly wounded but surviving, after the concert, leaving Rita and the kids behind, he moves to London, setting the film on a course that leads up to recording the Exodus album (here supposedly inspired by one of the band listening to the soundtrack to the film and including a clumsy scene in which the label marketing man complains the cover doesn’t have a photo of Marley), variously taking in being hassled by the police, touring Europe, mixing with the high and mighty, confronting his manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh) over kickbacks from African promotors), a break-up with Rita (Marley’s affairs and illegitimate children by at least six women only briefly mentioned), the iconic 1977 Rainbow gig and (following a soccer accident with his toe) his cancer diagnosis (from which he died in 1981) before culminating in the One Love show back home in Trenchtown.
The patois likely to prove hard for some audiences to follow the dialogue, it’s a somewhat rambling affair that either briefly alludes to or ignores things like his conversion to Rastafarianism (he’s shown at different points reading about Haile Sallassie, symbolised here in a clunky last act scene as surrogate father, and Marcus Garvey) and only skirts over the surface of his radical revolutionary spirit. Likewise, while David Marvin Kerr Jr is spotlighted playing his curly-haired dad Junior Marvin, recruited to add a rock guitar to the sound, the Wailers feel like just so much background and you’d be hard pressed to identify Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer or Aston Barrett (also played by his son Aston Barret Jr), or indeed be aware the original Wailers broke up and only reunited for Exodus. Plus, while Rita registers on account of being his wife (and Lynch has spotlight moment when she calls him out in Paris), the two other I-Threes (Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt) barely warrant a namecheck).
The flashback to the formative band singing Simmer Down, landing their first record deal with Coxone Dodd is particularly lively and engaging while recreations, studio, live or strummed on acoustic guitar, of classics like I Shot The Sherriff (his first UK hit), No Woman No Cry, Jammin’, Exodus (Get Up, Stand Up, Redemption Song and One Love, Ben-Adir’s vocals blended with Marley’s. There’s even a brief scene featuring The Clash doing White Riot
Credited to four writers, it’s a reverential, conventional biopic (several family members, Rita and Ziggy included are producers) that looks to stress Marley as a noble self-sacrificial figure for his people and beliefs (he refused to have his cancer treated(, any rough edges smoothed down, one recurring fields of fire flashback weighed down with heavy-handed symbolism. Serviceable but, unlike the title of his 1973 album, it doesn’t Catch A Fire. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget (PG)
Back in 2000, Aardman Animation released their first feature film, the story of a bunch of chickens escaping from their captivity in a chicken farm, going on to become the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film in history. Now, 23 years later comes the sequel. And if the first film was parody of The Great Escape, the template this time, as is made clear from one of the lines, is Mission Impossible.
Living in a self-governing island community, secreted away from humans, Ginger (now voiced by Thandiwe Newton), who led the escape, and her American rooster hubbie Rocky (now voiced by Zachary Levi),the self-styled Lone Free Ranger, are thrilled when they become proud parents to their first chick, Molly (Bella Ramsey). Molly, like her mother, is rebellious with a sense of adventure, but is firmly told she must never venture across to the mainland and a “world that finds chickens so … delicious”. It’s a warning that becomes even more important when Ginger sees humans clearing the trees on the opposite shore and a Fun-Land Farm truck with an image of a chicken in a bucket.
Needless to say, mum having told her she’s a big brave girl, Molly pays no attention and sneaks away to find out more, meeting up with curly-haired Liverpudlian chicken Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies),who persuades her to join her and infiltrate this apparent chicken blue sky utopia (a sort of Barbieland meets Teletubbies landscape) with all the corn you can eat and where every chicken gets their own bucket and lives a life of supreme happiness.
Except, of course, it proves to be anything but and the slogan “Where chickens find their happy endings” has a definite irony. The collars the chickens wear turning them into blank, hypnotised zombies who just can’t wait to climb the staircase to the glowing sun, to the accompaniment of Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, oblivious that they’re going to be turned into chicken nuggets.
So now, having broken out of a farm in the first film, Ginger now leads a mission to break into one. To which end she’s joined by both Rocky and her returning feathered friends, knitting enthusiast Babs (Jane Horrocks), Busty (Imelda Staunton), Mac (Lynn Ferguson) and the elderly Fowler (now voiced by David Bradley) who can’t stop talking about his wartime exploits. Back too are scavenger rats the cynical Nick and his dimwit accomplice Fetcher, this time round voiced by Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays, lending a hand to save their ‘niece’ Molly.
Once within the heavily fortified compound, which looks like a Bond villain lair (robotic mole sentries, pop-up vacuum tubes and laser-guided iron ducks), it’s a race against time before evil scientist Dr Fry (Nick Mohammed) delivers the promised supply of nuggets to Reginald Smith (Peter Serafinowicz), the owner of the Sir Eat-A-Lot fast food franchise. Which is when Ginger gets the shock of her life to discover Dr Fry’s wife and partner is none other than Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), the owner of the farm they escaped from and who she thought had fallen to her death. And when Tweedy realises Ginger is leading an attempt to free these chickens, it all gets very revenge personal. And when all seems lost, ingeniously popcorn proves to have more uses than just stuffing your face.
Naturally it’s full of puns and old fashion humour (there’s a couple of bottom jokes for the young sniggerers) with clever contemporary gags involving a retinal scanner (and eye-pad) as well as nods to the likes of The Truman Show and Squid Game for the grown up along with a message to mums and dads about their children spreading their wings but keeping them safe at the same time. It may not bring about a mass avoidance of KFC, but it might just prompt a few thoughts about where those breadcrumbed bites come from. (Netflix)
The Creator (15)
While this may tap into current concerns about artificial intelligence, a more basic theme of director Gareth Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz’s sci fi epic is fear of the other. Essentially restaging the Vietnam War in 2070 New Asia, with the Americans looking to eradicate simulants, human-like robots that can be lookalikes of their human templates, here presumably standing in for communists. This is on account of how, a decade or so earlier, AI software detonated a nuke in Los Angles (the actual explanation is delivered as almost an aside towards the end), leading to the USA (and its allies) banning all forms of AI. It remains legal, however, in New Asia, hence why Josh Taylor (John David Washington), a US army special forces operative with a cybernetic arm and leg, is working undercover to find and kill Namada, the mastermind behind the AI. To do so, he’s targeted Namada’s daughter, Maya (Gemma Chan), but things have got complicated in that he’s gone native, married her and she’s pregnant. Things all go pear-shaped when a sudden US attack bows his mission and cover, resulting in Maya apparently being killed when Nomad, the hovering US military installation wipes out the compound.
Extracted, Taylor is given the chance to redeem himself by going back in and finding and destroying the rumour superweapon Namada’s developed, his commanding officer Andrews (Ralph Ineson) and ruthless anti-AI mission leader Howell (Allison Janney playing against type) telling him Maya is actually still alive. A mission is duly set up and, although it all goes to shit, Taylor manages to infiltrate the vault containing the weapon, which turns out to be a child simulant (seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles) with the ability to disrupt electronics. Naturally, this triggers Taylor’s paternal instinct with Alphie, as he names her, becoming his surrogate daughter, looking to protect her against Howell and her team (that one holds a gun to a puppy’s head denotes what bad guys they are) who, warmongering Americans, are determined to kill her along with the rest of the AI population (simulants. flat-headed androids or those with Amar Chadha-Patel’s face who work as the police) and their human kin, he and Howell hoping she can lead him to Maya (aka Mother).
The influence aren’t hard to spot with elements of The Terminator, Akira, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner and Star Wars, the film climaxing as a variant on Luke destroying the Death Star while Alphie’s power is its version of The Force. It’s also not hard to read a Christian parallel with Maya the Virgin Mary, Josh as Joseph and Alphie the AI saviour with a purpose to bring peace to the world (asked at one point what she’d like, as in to eat, she replies for robots to be free).
Given Edwards’ special effects background, it’s no surprise that up there in the Avatar league the film looks incredible, but it also taps into a deep emotional vein too in its exploration of family, morality, xenophobia. The chemistry between Washington and Voyles, who as the adorable innocent Alphie is the soulful heart of the film, summoning her powers by placing her hands together in prayer like some AI take on the Dalai Lama. A scene between her and Taylor talking about heaven is terrific and comes back in the final moments with a piercing poignancy.
There’s moments of humour such as the kamikaze robo-bombs that stomp to their destruction with an “it’s been a honour to serve you” and robots watching holograms of exotic AI dancers, but mostly this keep up the dynamic intensity as the action piles up with a relentless drive as the simulants (headed up here by Ken Watanabe) are driven to a last stand. Derivative it may be, but there’s no denying it delivers everything it promises. (Disney+)
Damsel (12)
Something of a step backwards for Millie Bobby Brown whose star has risen rapidly since coming to prominence in Stranger Things and getting rave reviews for her two Enola Holmes outings, this casts her as Elodie in director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s drawn out and clunky medieval fantasy adventure. She’s the daughter of Lord Bayford (Ray Winstone in a terrible wig), ruler of a famine-stricken land, who’s chosen to become the bride of Prince Henry (a blandly good looking Nick Robinson) from the kingdom of Aurea. Being dutiful, she agrees and the family, which includes her step-mum (Angela Bassett with bizarre English accent) and adoring younger sister Floria (Brooke Carter), set off to meet her betrothed and his parents Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright) and King Roderick (a barely sentient Milo Twomey). Initially showing little spark, the two start to bond, however, over a shared love of wanting to travel and so it’s on to the nuptials. However, after her dad emerges from a meeting with Isabelle looking less than over the moon, mum’s gut instinct and the queen’s frosty response to any extended familial relationships has her telling Elodie to call it all off. There is, she feels, something not quite kosher.
And indeed there isn’t as, Henry taking his new bride up the nearby mountain, on which she’s seen fires glowing, to take part in what he describes as an ancient ritual, ends up with him tossing her down a pit. It turns out that hundreds of years earlier a previous king and his men killed three newborn baby dragons, the understandably aggrieved mother (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo) sparing his life on condition that, for every successive generation, three princesses (acquiring royal status in a mingling of blood) are to be sacrificed. And guess who lives in the cave.
And it’s in the cave that the film spends most of the remaining running time, Elodie variously climbing and falling from rocks, running away from the fire-breathing dragon and stumbling on the remains of previous sacrifices and clues as to how to maybe escape. And, when, with help from her repentant father (who has had second thoughts about trading her life for his country’s prosperity), she finally does, a furious Isabelle decides to substitute her with the next best thing, Floria.
There’s a degree of tension in the underground scenes, but that’s undermined by utter predictability of the generic subverted fairy tale plot and the general lifelessness of the performances with a clearly bored Winstone, Bassett and Wright hamming up their one note characters and Brown barely concealing her embarrassment as, in repeated scenes, she cuts her hair, rids herself of corseted bondage for a more practical look and wields daddy’s sword as turns herself into an empowered warrior and strikes up a wholly unlikely How To Tame Your Dragon alliance after clocking on to the truth about what went down. She’s not the damsel in distress, the film is. (Netflix)
Drive-Away Dolls (15)
Collaborating with wife and editor Tricia Cooke, this is Ethan Cohen’s first narrative feature without brother Joel, a queer road movie with psychedelic 60s throwbacks that, as the final shot reveals, was initially titled Drive-Away Dykes. Set in 1999 Philadelphia, the film opens with Santos (Pedro Pascal) sitting nervously in a bar clutching a silver briefcase, Making a hurried exit, he’s followed and murdered by the bartender. Meanwhile, and with a fairly steamy introduction, oversexed free-spirit Jamie (Margaret Qualley with a motormouth Texas accent) has been dumped by her lesbian cop lover Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) and kicked out of their shared apartment because she can’t keep her tongue in her mouth when opportunity arises.
Learning her equally queer but buttoned-up childhood neighbour friend (later flashback scenes show her contriving to watch her by the pool) Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan playing it, er, straight) is planning a trip to her parents in Tallahassee, Florida, she decides to tag along, Renting from a drive-away car service where someone can transport a car one-way for another client, they hit the road. Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding, the clerk (Bill Camp) has given them the wrong vehicle. It was intended for Arliss (Joey Slotnick), Flint (C.J. Wilson), and Chief (Colman Domingo) and contained a very important package they needed to get to Tallahassee. And so is set in a motion a pursuit as Arliss and Fling try to track them down while the girls make various detours as Jamie tries to get the uptight Marian, who’s not had sex in years and buries her head in James’s The Europeans, to loosen up, including a ‘sleepover’ with an all lesbian soccer team set to Linda Ronstadt’s Blue Bayou. By this time, of course, they’ve discovered the briefcase (cue nod to Pulp Fiction itself borrowing from Kiss Me Deadly) and a basket in the boot, The latter contains Santos’s head packed in dry ice the former a collection of prosthetic penises (Miley Cyrus cameoing as real life visual artist Cynthia Plaster-Caster).
Things eventually head to a Tallahassee hotel where Jamie decides to road test a dildo and both girls are abducted by their numbskull pursuers and wind up at a racetrack back room where Chief explains the dildos are casts taken from prominent public figures and one of them, right-wing and supposedly family man Senator Channel (Matt Damon) is being blackmailed to get his (which Jamie used) back, plot upheavals making Jamie and Marian the blackmailers with Sukie now arriving on the scene with her deceptively docile dog.
Intercut with psychedelic animated sequences, it’s a bawdy and at times violent romp that naturally heads towards Jamie and Marian finding their inevitable connection as a less doomed Sapphic Thelma and Louise. Echoes of various films in the Coens’ oeuvre aren’t too hard to spot, but this does stand out as having more dick jokes and masturbation euphemisms than any of them, and is perhaps even more screwball bonkers than Raising Arizona. It’s a lesser entry into their brothers’ shared canon, but the deadpan performances and the chemistry, comedic timing and sheer charisma of its two leads ensure the joyride journey is never less than fun. (MAC)
Dumb Money (15)
If you think shorting has something to with an electrical fault, then this probably isn’t for you. Directed by I Tonya’s Craig Gillespie, it’s an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Antisocial Network which documented the 2021 GameStop financial soap opera, a David and Goliath battle between Wall Street and amateur investor (from whence the title term insult comes) Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who, as Roaring Kitty, used the Reddit and YouTube social media to spark interest in stocks in GameStop, a chain that specialised in reselling computer games, and which the Wall Streets sharks were betting against, shorting, to make a killing when it collapsed. Written by Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker as high drama, it does its best to make things comprehensible for the layman but even so it might be a good idea to take along a financial adviser to explain as it goes.
Reckoning GameStop was undervalued (during the pandemic it was allowed to stay open as “essential workers”), supported by wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) and much to the bafflement of his underachieving brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), using Robin Hood, a non-commission software app devised by tech billionaires Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), Gill decided to invest his $53,000 life savings, soon attracting hundreds of others to also buy in, among them here GameStop worker Marcus (Anthony Ramos) financially strapped Pittsburgh single mum nurse Jenny (America Ferrera) and lesbian lover students Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold) saddled with ever-increasing loans. Ranged against them were high profile traders Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), who, as the Game Stop investors saw their wealth soar, were faced with catastrophic losses, Plotkin’s Melvin Capital having to bailed out stop it collapsing. Eventually, Tenev and Bhatt were leaned on to put a stop to Gill using their software, shutting down his access to wallstreetbets, leading to the stock falling and threatening him and his followers with ruin and leading to a congressional hearing (the end credits featuring actual footage).
Gillespie keeps things moving, using onscreen titles to keep you up to speed with the financial scores, in a film which takes the events to show how the system is rigged against the small fry, getting you rooting for the nerdy, headband wearing Gill and hissing at his despicable opposite numbers while underlying it with a personality-driven story of self-belief. Headed up by Dano, the cast, which also includes Clancy Brown as Gill’s father and, a mostly PPE masked, Dane DeHaan as Marcus’s rules-citing boss, are on cracking form and the script leavens the mounting tension with a substantial vein of humour (such as Plotkin’s advisors suggesting his wine collection might not be the best backdrop to the online hearing interview) and refraining from any big speech moments about the ugly face of capitalism, and while it may not have the intensity of Boiler Room or The Big Short, investing brings rich entertainment rewards. (Netflix)
Dune: Part Two (12A)
Given there’s no ‘previously on’ styled catch up, you’ll hopefully have taken a refresher course in Part One since director Denis Villeneuve leaps right in with the bodies of the massacred House of Atreides are torched by Harkonnen flamethrowers with the first words spoke, by way of what little exposition there is, by Princess Irulan (a new character, played by Florence Pugh), daughter of the Emperor (Christopher Walken), who conspired with the Bene Gesserit, a sect of psychic witches headed by the devious Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) to commit genocide and hand control of mining the Arrakis spice, basically the currency that underpins power, over to the baldheaded Harkonnens led by the sadistic, bloated Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) with his brutal nephew Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista) charged with overseeing operations.
Of course, the House of Atreides hasn’t been entirely wiped out, with Paul (Timothée Chalamet), the son of the Duke, having survived (as well as three other unfortunates who become fodder for a subsequent Gladiator-style celebration of the Baron’s other nephew and hairless heir, the psychotic Feyd-Rautha (played with lascivious relish and blackened teeth by Austin Butler). Paul has taken refuge among the Arrakis desert dwellers, the Fremen, and taken under the wing of their leader, Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who believes him to be the prophesised (white saviour) messiah or Kwisatz Haderach.
The action kicks in quickly with an ambush on Stilgar, Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), his late father’s concubine. She will subsequently drink of the blue water of life (you really don’t want to know where it comes from, nor indeed how water’s obtained from dead Harkonnen) and, face tattooed, take the place of the tribe’s dying Reverend Mother (with all the knowledge that encompasses), and who is also pregnant with Paul’s sister, Alia, who talks to her from the womb (and, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, appears towards the end speaking to Paul in a vision). Despite suspicion among the Fremen, Paul’s taken in and is trained in the art of riding the giant sandworms (here making a full-blooded appearance after being teased in the first film) with the help of Freman warrior and growing romantic interest Chani (Zendaya,) even if she does think all the prophecy talk is just hokum.
The film is, at root, about whether he is indeed the Lisan al Gaib or if his actions are a self-fulfilling prophecy to gather followers for him to take revenge for his clan’s murders, Chani worried that power will corrupt (drawing him to the dark side, Dune being a prime influence n Star Wars) while he fears the visions of devastating tragedy should he venture South.
It’s a lot to keen track off not to mention a wealth of Christian and other religious allegory, and there’s times when you may find yourself wondering what the hell’s going on and why (and you’ll need to also remind yourself of Josh Brolin’s role as Gurney Halleck, Paul’s former mentor who pups up unexpectedly). But as it unfolds it also slips in more backstory details such as Paul’s true lineage and, in something of a throwaway line, why the saga’s titled Dune, as it heads the final confrontation between Paul, Gurney and the Fremen with Feyd-Rautha and the Emperor and what Paul has to give up in order to bring peace.
Visually its off the scale with minute attention to detail as well as massive explosive set pieces, all driven by a stupendous Hans Zimmer score and Greig Fraser’s brilliant cinematography, while that’s more than matched by the strength of all the major players (Léa Seydoux and Souheila Yacoub are also new additions as, respectively, Lady Margot Fenring, one of the Bene Gesserit, and Shishakli, Chani’s closest ally) as the connections between the characters, Paul and Chani, as the film’s moral centre, in particular, are deepened (Chalamet’s arc from Part One to the end of this is transfixing to watch). At 165 minutes it’s perhaps a touch overextended but, ending with the other Houses refuses to accept Paul’s new status, thereby setting up a Holy War, it’s nevertheless blockbuster epic filmmaking at its finest, but the prospect of another two years before the conclusion is going to be truly frustrating. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Femme (18)
The territory is familiar: a closeted gay man adopts a virulently homophobic persona but ends up in an intense relationship with someone he victimised. Here, as directed by first-timers Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, that’s George MacKay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, the former Preston (MacKay), a heavily tattooed thug who hangs out with a similar crowd, the latter Jules, popular drag artist Aphrodite at a London club who shares a flat with fellow queers plain-speaking Alicia (Asha Reid) and messed-up Toby (John McCrea), who has unrequited feelings for him. Jules spots Jules outside the venue and but he stalks off when he smiles at him. Later, ill-advisedly still wearing his gear, Jules goes to a late-night pharmacy, Preston and his mates turn up and a brutal beating ensues.
Subsequently, he sees him at a gay sauna and makes an approach. Not recognising him out of costume, they have sex and a secret relationship begins, Preston taking him for an expressive Chateaubriand dinner and inviting him back to his flat, Jules bluffing things out by claiming they’re old mates from prison when his gang turn up unexpectedly. Jules, it would appear, is setting up a carefully planned revenge (significantly he wears the same yellow hoodie Preston had on during the attack and which, of course, echoes that of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill). Or is this turning into something else entirely?
It’s a question the film, mostly set at night lit with harsh neon, teases throughout with a twisting edge of the seat noir tension alongside the uninhibited sex scenes, Mackay and Stewart-Jarrett bringing complexity and depth to their characters, both of whose lives are a kind of performance (although the supporting cast are less well illuminated), as it builds to an end that is both devastating and disarmingly poignant. (Netflix)
The First Omen (15)
With a Catholic Church conspiracy plot that’s pretty much identical to Immaculate, even down to the Boys From Brazil touches, this offers up a prequel to the 1976 horror in which, told his child died in birth, the baby of an American diplomat is secretly substituted for another, born at 6 a.m. on the sixth day of the sixth month, the antichrist, who he names Damien. Directed by Akasha Stevenson and set in 1971 Rome amid civil unrest, taking a female perspective with pregnancy anxieties as a motif, this provides the backstory to the child’s birth, engineered by a rogue order of nuns and complicit priests who serve the Devil and, in a variation on the motives in Immaculate, are looking to bring about the antichrist to fuel a resurgence in the popularity of the church, to which people, the young especially, will turn to for help.
Enter American novitiate Margaret (Game Of Thrones star Nell Tiger Free in suitably intense mode ), who, under the auspices of her deceptively kindly guardian, Cardinal Lawrence (a sleepwalking Bill Nighy), arrives at the Vizzardeli Orphanage in Rome where, under the Mother Superior (Sônia Braga) she teaches the children, all girls apparently. One in particular, Carlita Scianna (Nicole Sorace), who is regarded as difficult, often locked in solitary and draws pictures of a girl hovering over a gaggle of nuns and of being restrained, attract her attention and, with a shared bond of disturbed childhood hallucinations, she takes her under her wing.
The film having opened with a harrowing birth scene of a girl, her head covered in black lace, made pregnant but not by human means, her child destined to spawn the antichrist, there’s a whole deal of misdirection as to whom the chosen one is (apparently, but for no explained reason. they must have the 666 mark on their head as opposed to anywhere else on their body, as well as Margarita being taken out for a night on the town prior taking the veil by fellow, more liberated roommate Luz (Maria Caballero). Margaret witnessing some unnatural grotesque childbirths (a claw emerges from the birth canal) within the orphanage and disturbed Sister Anjelica immolating and then hanging herself having declared “it’s all for you” all add to the somewhat slow to catch on Margaret’s sense that all is not quite right. That’s confirmed when she meets Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) the Irish priest impaled in the original film who we first see taking confession from a cameoing Charles Dance before he suffers death by shattered stained glass soon to be, who reveals the murky plot. She dismisses that as paranoia until the finds the truth, involving any number of Sciannas and the real identity of the intended diabolic offspring.
It’s all suitably creepy with the now obligatory dark chambers and flickering candles as it builds to its frenzied birth climax, but, while horror is in ample supply, the inherent predictability rather dissipates the tension while the introduction of the antichrist’s sister sibling seems to rather obviously setting up a nuns on the run action sequel. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Flora and Son (12)
Irish writer-director John Carney knows what he’s good at and sticks to it. So, after Once and Sing Street here’s another Dublin-set tale of misfits connecting through music. This time round it’s Flora (Bono’s daughter Eve Hewson), a sweary, clubbing young working class single mother who makes a few quid nannying and estranged from her musician ex-husband Ian (Jack Reynor), who’s now got a new live in lover of dubious Spanish stock, beds pretty much anyone she meets, She also frequently at odds with her electro-music loving sullen teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) who’s just one petty theft away from juvenile detention. However, seeing a discarded guitar in a skip, she has it fixed and gives it to him as a cheap belated birthday present, He’s not interested (he’s no aspiration to be another “Ed Fookin’ Sheeran”) but Flora decides to try and learn, hooking up for Zoom lessons with LA-based guitar teacher and failed musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
From this point it plays out pretty much as you might expect, with a long distance flirtation between Flora and Jeff (the film nicely has fantasy sequences as he joins her to sing on a Dublin rooftop), he teaching her to play (shooting down her love of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful and introducing her to Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now), she reigniting his creative spark (they co-write a song), and mother and son working together making dance and rap music on his laptop, music, as ever for Carney, being a transformative force.
There’s distant echoes of Wild Rose, but, while both are sweet and uplifting, with the central figure finding self-worth and playing to an appreciative audience, this is a softer, more sentimental film in the way it touchingly captures the mother-son dynamic and Flora’s search for herself. Often evoking parallels with Once in its music as mutual healing theme, it may not be in quite the same league but, fuelled by Hewson’s star-making performance, it’s a truly warm and emotionally engaging film that deserved far wider exposure than its limited streaming only fate. (Apple TV+)
Good Grief (15)
Written and directed by and starring Dan Levy of Schitt’s Creek fame, this is a nicely polished bittersweet gay-based story of grief, loss and recovery. Levy plays Marc, a London-based illustrator (who forsook his aspirations for higher things) for his charismatic husband, Oliver (Luke Evans), whose young adult books have become Hollywood blockbusters, the film opening with a Christmas Eve party at their home. Oliver, however, is off to Paris for a signing, the pair kissing goodbye on the doorstep only for, minutes, later, Oliver to be killed in a car crash. Marc’s life falls apart. And to rub salt in the wound, Oliver’s lawyer (Celia Imrie) tells him the American publishers will want their advance repaid. She suggests, he could raise money by selling their Paris apartment. Except Marc had no idea they had one. And that’s not the only secret Oliver had. A younger dancer for example.
Thus, without revealing anything, Marc and his two best friends, commitment-phobic Sophie (Ruth Negga stealing the honours) and Thomas (Himesh Patel), a former lover, head off to Paris looking for closure (and some nice new clothes) where, finally opening last year’s Christmas card, he unsurprisingly learns Oliver was seeing someone else. And that’s essentially the framework upon which Levy hangs his tale of love, grief, friendship , family and commitment with the three characters working through their self-centred feelings, insecurities, fears and other hang ups, Marc having a fling with a Frenchman (Arnaud Valoito) who bought him a drink at a London performance art party, arrive at peace and acceptance.
Despite the at times overcooked dialogue and self-absorption of the trio, there’s a strong emotional tug (and hint of Richard Curtis) as the characters open up to each other and themselves as Levy heads to his message that “to avoid sadness is also to avoid love” (though perhaps playing Neil Young’s Only Love Will Break Your Heart seems tad unsubtle) while David Bradley has a heartbreaking moment as he delivers a eulogy reflecting on mistakes made in raising a gay son. Heavy-handed perhaps, but the sincerity still shows through. (Netflix)
Gran Turismo: Based On A True Story (12A)
Masterminded by Kazunori Yamauchi, launched in 1997 Gran Turismo is an iconic PlayStation racing simulation game, accurate down to the finest details and which, to date, has seven incarnations and millions of followers. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, this tells the true story of one of them, Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a mixed race teenager from Cardiff, son of Birmingham born former professional footballer Steve (Djimon Hounsou) who played, among others, for Coventry, Wolves and Cardiff City (whose bluebird logo plays an emotional role) and mother Lesley (a thankfully underused Geri Halliwell, displaying all those acting skills you loved in the Spice Girls movie), who, from an early age dreamed of becoming a racing driver. With that being financially out of the question, as his father hammers home, he settled for becoming a top Gran Turismo player.
Staying generally true to the facts, things kick in when Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), a motorsport marketing executive at Nissan (based on Darren Cox who founded the GT Academy) pitches his bosses the idea of giving their fading car market a boost by staging an international competition for Gran Turismo players, the winners of which would be awarded a spot in the GA Academy and the chance to compete in real races. As such, he recruits Black Sabbath devotee Jack Salter (David Harbour), a (fictional) former racing driver who gave it up after a tragedy at Le Mans, as the tough love mentor whose job is to get the 10 finalists (out of 90,000 entrants) up to snuff in the transition from game console to actual steering wheel with the ultimate winner getting a Team Nissan contract as one of their drivers. That will be the soft-spoken Jann (at one point Moore wants to scratch him as he lacks marketable charisma) then, who chills out before each race by listening to Kenny G and Enya.
It will come as no surprise to learn this ticks pretty much all the sports underdog movie boxes, with Salter becoming Jenn’s surrogate father (his pragmatic own dad not supporting his son’s dreams), the confidence crisis (following the spectacularly filmed recreation of the 2015 car flipping crash at Germany’s Nürburgring circuit that killed a spectator), the encouraging love interest (Maeve Courtier-Lilley), hostility from the real racers, the egotistical unscrupulous rival (Josha Stradowski as Nicholas Capa, the film’s equivalent of Rocky’s Drago), the come-back and the split second chequered flag Le Mans climax (where the film does indulge in some wish fulfilment champagne popping tampering with the truth).
At two plus hours, it’s overlong and often feels like a marketing campaign for Nissan and PlayStation, but fuelled by solid performances from Madekwe and Harbour and directed by Blomkamp puts cynicism on the back burner for an inspirational tale of triumph against the odds that, like Top Gun on wheels, makes you feel you’re hurtling around the track low to the ground at 300mph (the real Mardenborough served as Madeweke’s stunt driver) as the healing settles in. (Netflix)
Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 (12A)
While the two mid-credit scenes suggest there is the potential for a further instalment with a new roster or, at least, a prime character spin-off, this definitely brings the curtain down on director James Gunn’s saga of the dysfunctional team of malcontent heroes while also serving as an origin story for Rocket (Bradley Cooper). Still bristling at being called a racoon, he spends most of the film in a coma, hovering on the edge of death after being wounded by the golden-skinned Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), his friends unable to heal him after discovering his body has an in-built kill switch. Flashbacks to how he became who he is today are scattered throughout, revealing him to be part of a genetic experiment by the High Revolutionary (a scenery-chewing Chukwudi Iwuji in generally bellowing default mode) to mutate animals into anthropomorphic beings to populate his vision of a new, ideal, peaceful Earth-like planet; though he’s not above cruelty and the murder of his subjects to achieve that. Rocket, or 89P13 as he’s referred to, proved to have advanced intelligence and an unexplained success in taming his creations’ urge for violence and, having escaped (in a heartbreaking scene in which his new genetically engineered friends do not), the High Evolutionary now wants him recovered so he can access the secrets stored in his brain. To which end, to save him, Peter Quill aka Star Lord (Chris Pratt), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Groot (Vin Diesel), have to somehow infiltrate Orgoscope, the High Evolutionary’s fleshy space lab station, and get the key to disable the kill switch with the help of their Knowhere comic relief associates Kraglin (Sean Gunn) and Cosmo the Space Dog (Maria Bakalova), while preventing Warlock, spurred on by his mother, Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), from abducting the wounded Rocket.
Matters among the crew are complicated by the subplot involving Quill grieving the death of his lover Gamora (a commanding Zoe Saldaña), at the hands of her step-father Thanos and unable to handle the fact that the cold resurrected version has no recollection that they were a couple and is now a member of the Ravagers (led by Sylvester Stallone), of whom he himself was once a part.
The film hops from one storyline and spectacular set piece to another, climaxing with an explosive finale on both the High Evolutionary’s ship (where cages of children are found, affording a new side of Drax to appear) and Counter-Earth, an 1980-designed biosphere based on Star-Lord’s home planet populated by genetically mutated humanimals, with Rocket now back in full on mode, the action intercut with the franchise’s familiar wisecracking and squabbling banter between the team, set to a rock music mixtape (Radiohead’s Creep playing a significant part).
Frequently teasing the possibility that any of the team could die, Gunn juggles themes about family, friendship, animal experimentation and playing God (“There is no God! That’s why I’m taking charge!” declares the High Evolutionary) and not judging by appearances (a trio of monstrous creatures that seem to threaten Mantis, Drax and Nebula turns out to be rather cuddly). It may never quite explain Warlock’s backstory and his somewhat confusing switchback of motivations and actions and, while a nice surprise, the moment when Groot proves to have more than one phrase in his vocabulary does break with character, but it never lets go of its emotional or visceral grip, delivering a hugely satisfying send-off with the end credits featuring images of everyone who’s been involved in the saga, from Kurt Russell and Michael Rooker to Kevin Bacon and even a sly photo of Stan Lee. What the future brings remains to be seen, but for now this is the best MCU movie since Avengers Endgame. (Disney+)
Ghostbusters- Frozen Empire (12A)
Within the first 20 minutes, the film rolls out a couple of old favourites (the Slimer and a bunch of baby Stay Puft figures, now reconfigured as a sort of Marshmallow Minions ) to remind you of how good the original was. The rest of the film does too, but not in a good way.
Again directed by Gil Kenan and co-written with Jason Reitman, it opens with a flashback to 1904 New York where a bunch of firefighters burst into an ice cold room to find everyone inside frozen to death and discover a mysterious green metallic orb in the possession of a chain-mail veiled figure. Cut to the present as, once again, after capturing the Hell’s Kitchen Sewer Dragon terrorising the city, the Ghostbusters, former science teacher Gary (an unfunny Paul Rudd), significant other Callie (an almost pointless Carrie Coon), Spengler’s daughter, and her kids Phoebe (a perky Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard, dull), who’ve moved Ecto-1 back to the NY fire station HQ, are confronted by the ball-busting mayor (William Atherton) after the collateral infrastructure damage who announces his determination to shut down both them and the building and effectively bans science whiz kid Phoebe, as a minor (there’s a running – or rather limping – gag with Trevor pointing out he’s now an adult), from playing any part in busting.
There’s also the problem that their ghost containment cell is full to bursting, but fortunately former ‘buster turned philanthropist and sponsor Winston (straight man Ernie Hudson) and his team, deadpan Aussie boffin Lars (James Acaster) and Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) have built a bigger, better one where they have a device that can separate entities from objects to which they have an emotional connection. Which is where, eventually, the central plot kicks in as loser Nadeem (a welcome scene stealing Kumail Nanjiani) offloads some of his late grannie’s possessions to Ray (Dan Aykroyd, one of the few who seem to actually be enjoying things) who’s in the market for the sort of objects Winston’s lab tests. Ray’s especially interested in one in particular, a green metallic ball covered in ancient script.
Inside, as Patton Oswalt’s nerdy netherworld scholar conveniently explains, lurks the spirit of the pre-Sumerian death god Garraka who’s contriving to use both a human and a ghost to get free, regain his horns and consign the whole world to a frozen death. He can even freeze the proton pack beams. His scheme involves Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), who Phoebe meets in Central Park as her ghostly chess opponent, who died along with her folks in a fire (flames flicker from her spirit form), the film toying with the suggestion of some sort of paranormal same sex attraction, while it turns out that Nadeem also has a vital role to play as the Fire Master, a descendent of early ghostbusters.
Along with Annie Potts returning as Janine, Bill Murray is back cameoing on autopilot as Peter Venkman, but both feel like just another shrugging nod to the franchise. There’s a constant stream of action and livelier than the turgid Afterlife, but there just doesn’t feel any sense of energy on the screen and nothing about the busting makes you feel good. Time to disconnect the line I think. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12A)
Having battled each other in Godzilla vs Kong, the radioactive lizard and the giant ape now team up, albeit not until the climax, in this sequel returning director Adam Wingard fills the screen with eye-popping visuals and action sequences, but with convoluted (and at times knowingly silly) plot that finds little room for dialogue that isn’t just exposition or filling, or anything more than one-dimensional characters and a perfunctory quest for family theme. Although not actually connected, it feels like an entire second series of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters blown up for the big screen. Minus any depth. Godzilla Minus One it’s not,
Kong now living in Hollow Earth, it opens with him fighting of a pack of jackal-like predators and a viscerally gruesome moment as he tears one in two and gets drenched in green good. The same scene is mirrored when Godzilla enters the picture, tearing apart marauding Titan Scylla and getting splattered with yellow gunk before heading to the Colosseum to take a nap).
Meanwhile, the Monarch base in Hollow Earth is having issues with the equipment while up on the surface, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the lone survivor of the Iwi people from Skull Island and the now adoptive daughter of Monarch scientist Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), is having visions of and drawing three peaking black triangles. And wouldn’t you know it, these turn out to be an exact match for the print-outs from the base. This leads Andrews to call on whistleblower-turned-conspiracy-blogger Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) who, along with dentist Trapper (Dan Stevens), called into extract Kong’s damaged tooth and implant a replacement when he comes to the surface world, joins her, Jia and a swiftly eliminated grunt pilot, on a journey into Hollow Earth to find the source of these transmissions, which seem to be some sort of SOS. In addition, Godzilla has been absorbing copious amounts of radiation (turning his scales pink) and is heading for the Arctic where he ends up battling the Titan Tiamat.
And below the surface both Kong and Jia find they’re not the last of their kind after all. Having had a run-in with a ginger kid gorilla named Suko whose trust he eventually wins, Kong discovers a whole tribe of apes ruled by the blotchy red haired evil Skar King who, mirroring Kong’s axe, sports a skeletal bone whip tipped with a crystal blade through which he controls Shimo, an ice-powered Titan, who harbours plans to reach and conquer the surface. And, venturing into an Uncharted Zone, the group encounter, would you believe it, a whole tribe of telepathic Iwi ( headed by Fala Chen as their Queen), from who Jia is descended, having been sending the signals and whose ancient carvings somehow have predicted the girl’s coming to awaken Mothra, yet another Titan and Godzilla’s one-time nemesis, and save them.
And so it all builds to a full on CGI showdown in Rio De Janeiro between Skar King, Shimo, Kong (now fitted with mechanical knuckledusters), Suko, Godzilla and Mothra that ticks the necessary blockbuster boxes, with added doses of violence and viscera (the sight of Kong chewing on serpent entrails is pretty revolting), but is ultimately just big, loud and empty popcorn bombast and if that’s all you want, then this is a gargantuan bucketful. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Immaculate (18)
A novitiate (the film clumsily refers to her as Sister before she’s taken her vows) , Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), arrives from Detroit to take up a new position at My Lady of Sorrows, a remote Italian convent where aged nuns spend their final days, despite the fact she speaks very little of the language. She’s welcomed by the Mother Superior (Dora Romano) and Priest-in-Residence Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte), a former biologist, but gets a frosty reception from the stern by-the-book Sister Isabelle (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi). She’s befriended though by the rebellious (she smokes and wonders if Cecilia’s come because of some indiscretions by a priest back home) Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli), and settles down to follow her calling, believing she was chosen by God after surviving a childhood accident in a frozen lake.
However, given the film opens with a nun trying to escape and being dragged back by three nuns in red masks (a creepy image that’s never explored) and then sealed in a coffin, it’s clear there’s dodgy work afoot. To Cecelia’s understandable distress, she starts having visions and then morning sickness and, while a virgin, is declared to be pregnant just a day after arriving. Naturally, this immaculate reception is greeted with delight by all, Cecelia chosen to be the vessel for the Second Coming. Well, not all. Sister Isabelle tries to drown her, screaming it should have been her, and then throws herself off the convent roof. And then Sister Grace is written out too. Cecilia finds herself increasingly concerned. She’s told part of the building are off limits, the Mother Superior has a red file with her photo in it, and one of the old sisters, who pops up with warnings, is perhaps not as senile as she seems.
Directed by Michael Mohan, it’s an ungainly religious horror that, contriving to have a nail relic from the crucifixion with some of Christ’s DNA, plays like Rosemary’s Baby meets The Boys From Brazil will all kinds of genetic experiments going on in the vaults and as the truth dawn on Cecilia and she tries to make a break, via the catacombs, all hell breaking lose.
Although called on to do little but quiver her lips, Sweeney, whose choice of films has taken a largely downward spiral since Reality, at least seems to be involved in the decidedly undeveloped screenplay, and gives pretty impressive scream and the final gonzo visceral moments. But everyone else has a sort of been there, seen that, where’s the cheque attitude as, visually flat and devoid of much tension, it stumbles from one horror cliché (bird flies into window) to another (creepy dolls, fingernail falls off).
It takes a swipe at the Catholic patriarchy (the Cardinal forces her to kiss his ring – not a euphemism – when she becomes a bride of Christ) and tacks on a woman’s reproductive right to choose message almost as an afterthought but it’s a total misconception. (Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Io Capitano (15)
Adding to an impressive filmography that includes Gomorrah, Reality, Dogman and Pinocchio, Italian director Matteo Garrone now turns his attention people smuggling and refugees, adopting a naturalistic approach as, inspired by true stories, he traces one man’s difficult immigrant journey from West Africa to Europe.
Senegalese sixteen-year-old Seydou (Seydou Sarr making his acting debut) lives with his mother in Dakar but he and his cousin Moussa (Mustapha Fall) have secretly saved up the money they need to make their way to Europe to become pop stars. Ignoring the horror stories, they sneak away without telling their mothers on a journey that, using fake passports, will take them through Mali and Niger and then trekking across the Sahara to Libya, encountering opportunists, bandits and militias who variously torture them and take their cash along the way. In Libya, Moussa is arrested and carted off to prison, and then Seydou ends up in a Mafia-run jail too, being tortured rather than call his mother for money. He does, however, become friends with Martin who, at a slave auction, passes the both off as bricklayers, getting work that eventually secures a passage to Tripoli, where they part ways, Seydou staying behind to try and find Moussa, the need for medical care leading to him being forced to captain (hence the film’s title) a boatload of immigrants across the Mediterranean to Sicily.
Sometimes introducing delirium fantasy sequences into the harsh reality, it’s a powerfully immersive experience with Sarr (who also did the songs along with Fall) bringing a compelling mix of physicality and vulnerability to his character, the heart of the film’s humanity as, after abandoning his mother, he takes on a growing sense of responsibility for those whose lives are in his hands. With vibrant sequences of dancing and drumming balancing with the darker aspects, it’s a definite emotional rollercoaster and, even when they finally make land, there’s no indication as to whether their troubles are over or not. The power of the film is that you really hope they are. (Until Sun: Mockingbird)
John Wick : Chapter 4 (15)
Spin-offs and prequel appearances notwithstanding, the emotional final scene would pretty much seem to confirm this is the final chapter in the series, bowing out in with a flamboyant 169 minute (word is a 225 minute version may surface later) clipped dialogue epic tsunami of fire, fist, knives and sword fights that may be overstuffed but never drags.
Hiding out in the New York lair of the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) from the High Table to whom he still has an obligation and who have placed a $2million bounty on his head, antihero assassin Wick (Keanu Reeves at his Clint Eastwood drawl finest) is planning his revenge. This takes him to Morocco (cue homage to David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia) where he kills the Elder, resulting in the fascist rich kid Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), the current New York High Table top dog, taking revenge by stripping Winston (Ian McShane), who failed to kill Wick, of his role as manager of the Continental, killing his concierge Charon (the late Lance Reddick) and blowing up the building. Then, threatening to murder his daughter, he forces blind retired assassin Caine (martial arts virtuoso Donnie Yen), just one of many biblical references, into accepting the hit on his old friend. Cut to Tokyo where Wick’s taken refuge at the Osaka Continental, run by loyal old friend Shimazu Koji (a quietly charismatic Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter Akira (pop star Rina Sawayama who sings the film’s theme song), but it’s not long before the High Table enforcers, led by the Marquis’s seemingly indestructible right-hand man Chidi (Marko Zaror), and Caine arrive, demanding Wick be given up, leading to the first of a series of knowingly over-the-top extended fight sequences that ends up with one wounded, one dead and Wick again on the run.
Returning to New York, he learns from Winston that there is a way to bring things to an end. Under High Table traditions, he can challenge the Marquis to single combat and be freed of all obligations. The only problem is that he first needs to accepted back into the Berlin crime family the Ruska Roma and to do so he first has to kill Killa (Scott Adkins), the overweight, lavender-suited German Table head with gold gangsta teeth who murdered his adoptive sister Katia’s (Natalia Tena) father. And even having done that (cue another amped up sequence set amid a sea of night club dancers), there’s still the small matter of getting to the Sacré-Cœur in Paris before sunrise to carry out the duel, which, if he fails to do, will result in his and Winston’s execution, as his second, which means, armed with a top end gun and a wearing a ballistic suit, surviving Chidi, the High Table muscle and the dozens of freelance assassins all looking to collect the $20million and rising bounty, and soundtracked on their way by an on air DJ spinning things like Nowhere To Run. One of whom is Mr Nobody (Shamier Anderson), a cool and composed tracker, who with his lethal dog sidekick (which becomes an important plot turning point), has been keeping tabs on Wick, keeping him alive until the Marquis agrees to the fee he’s asking. All of which culminates in the reluctant Caine, who the Marquis has nominated to act in his place, and Wick facing down each other in a pistol duel moderated by the Harbinger (Clancy Brown).
Opening with shots of a fist hitting a bloodied punchbag, stunt choreographer turned director Chad Stahelski stages an increasingly elaborate and inspired sequence of balletic fights, among them a thrilling blazing guns car chase around the Arc de Triomphe, one filmed in an overhead doll’s-house view in a labyrinthine building and, finally, the spectacular climax set on the Rue Foyatier in Montmartre, the 222-step stairway leading to the Basilica and down which Wick is sent tumbling at least twice as the hordes continue to come. After nine years, during which time the narrative has got bigger and more complex, this is one big eye-popping gift-wrapped thank you to the legions of fans who have transformed it into an iconic franchise. Will you love it? Yeah. (Amazon Prime)
The Killer (15)
Reuniting with Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, director David Fincher returns to serial killer territory with this adaptation of French graphic novel Le Tueur, delivering a taut, deliberately clinical revenge thriller involving a cold and methodical hitman. Michael Fassbender delivers a magnetic performance as the icy unnamed assassin, delivering an internal monologue voice over about his way of working (anticipate don’t improvise, show no empathy, stick to the plan, weakness is vulnerability, always ask what’s in it for me) who we first encounter holed up in an abandoned building in Paris, patiently waiting for the right moment to take out his target in the opposite hotel. To pass the time and relieve the boredom he does yoga, repeatedly checks his weapon, eats a McDonald’s and mentally goes through the rules to being an efficient killer. What the rules don’t allow for, however, is the unexpected, such as the target’s visiting hooker getting in the way just as you pull the trigger.
Asking himself “What would John Wilkes Booth do?”, coolly packing up his gear, he leaves, disposing of all the random tools of his trade as he makes his way through the Paris streets, eventually returning to his Dominican Republic hideaway only to find his client isn’t going to let it lie, retribution leading to the hospitalisation of the assassin’s lover after being attacked by a pair of hired thugs. Thus setting up the subsequent globetrotting chapters (six along with the prologue and epilogue) and an array of different fake passports and storage units as, visiting Florida, New York and Chicago he proceeds to work his way up the chain of those involved.
Complemented by a score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and an emotionally emblematic soundtrack of numbers by The Smiths the fastidious killer uses to calm his pulse rate, Fincher and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt meticulously framing every scene, every shot, it follows an implacable body count trail, the violence gradually building as. toting a nail gun, he calls upon the middleman Lawyer (Charles Parnell) and his assistant in New Orleans, the goons behind the attack and, in a scene-stealing cameo across a café table, Tilda Swinton as The Expert, another contract assassin whose subtly sketched emotional complexity stand as a direct contrast to his blankness. Fincher never asks the audience to feel empathy for Fassbender’s ruthless killer, even when phantoms of a conscience seem to briefly trouble him, he then reminding himself of his mantra. Each encounter serves to strip back the carefully constructed faced he’s created, forced into improvisation when anticipation fails, such as the thrillingly choreographed fight with The Brute (Sala Baker) to the backdrop of Fiona Bruce on a TV programme.
Magnetic filmmaking exercised with a steadily building propulsion and tension (and dry flashes of humour such as “I always dress like a German tourist. Nobody wants to interact with one of them”), it transfixes you to the screen, though it’s hard to know which is the more chilling, Fassbender’s emotionless revenge or the fact that, for under £50, you can actually buy a fob copier off Amazon to open an electronically protected door. (Netflix)
Killers Of The Flower Moon (15)
Based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction bestseller about the 1920s Osage murders in Oklahoma, the title is derived from the Old Farmer’s Almanac in which each monthly full moon is given a different name, the Flower Moon referring to May, when the killings began.
Directed and co-written (with Eric Roth) by Marin Scorsese, his first since The Irishman and three minutes shorter at just under three and a half hours marginally shorter by three minutes, it opens with Osage Indian Nation discovering that their reservation sits on a massive oil field, instantly making them oil millionaires (albeit requiring white ‘guardians’), black and white footage showing them with swanky clothes, private planes, and white chauffeurs for their luxury automobiles. Inevitably, with great wealth comes great danger from those who would take it for themselves. And it’s not long before Osage corpses start piling up in suspicious circumstances.
Into this comes the feckless and not overly bright but charming Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), returning from serving as an army cook who, in need of a fresh start and money, but a stomach condition making anything strenuous impossible, is taken under the wing of his cattle baron uncle William ‘King’ Hale (Robert DeNiro) who sets him up as a cabbie. One of his regulars is Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage with three sisters, with whom he falls in love and marries. So far so apparently sweet. But appearances can be misleading. It’s no accident, however, that Mollie, sussing he’s out for money (every day the train brings opportunists looking for an Osage bride), refers to him as Coyote, the trickster of American-Indian mythology, and while Ernest’s intentions may start out honourably and innocently, more of a snake in this First Nation Eden, it’s not long before he falls under the spell of his Machiavellian uncle who, may present himself as a white saviour philanthropist friend to the Osage, but behind the smile is a knife looking to carve its way into their wealth, declaring that their time has past and that of the white man has come.
He’s all for his sad sack’s nephew’s marriage to Mollie, primarily because in so doing Ernest, and by extension himself, will gain control of her ‘headrights’ to the oil deposits on her land. These are shared with her mother and siblings, so for the plan to work, they need to die. Mother (Tantoo Cardinal), and a sister (Jillian Dion) go from apparently natural causes, a wasting disease, two sisters (Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins) violently do not. Their deaths along with those of a husband (Jason Isbell) and private investigator (to which Ernest is party) brought into look into the brutal murder of Anna (Myers), ordered by Hale and facilitated by Ernest, his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) , and assorted cowboy lowlifes. Mollie suffering from diabetes, Ernest, who genuinely loves her, is instructed to add a powder to her insulin shots (‘generously’ organised by Hale) to ‘calm’ her, never questioning why she seems to be getting worse.
As the Osage body count continues to rise and the elders become desperate as no police investigations are ever mounted, Mollie travels to Washington plead for help, leading to the arrival in Fairfax of Tom White (Jesse Plemons in the role initially intended for DiCaprio), part of the newly formed federal Bureau of Investigation under the auspices of J Edgar Hoover, to look into who’s behind the murders.
Now 80, Scorsese remains at the peak of his powers, guiding the film along an unhurried path as the twists, turns and horrors gradually accrue with DiCaprio, all downturned mouth, and DeNiro, both of whom he was worked with extensively, delivers subtle, nuanced powerhouse performances that rank among their greatest. As Mollie, making her feature starring debut, Gladstone, seen in TV series Billions and Reservation Dogs, more than holds her own alongside her co-stars, her expressive face simultaneously holding love, hurt, anger, resolve and disappointment while Tatanka Means, Yancey Red Corn and William Bellau loom large among the Native American cast, Sturgill Simpson, Charlie Musselwhite, Pete Yorn and Jack White join fellow musician Isbell in supporting roles (the late Robbie Robertson created the score) and there’s courtroom cameos from Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow.
A harrowingly potent existentially horrific alternative vision (involving the Tulsa race riots, the KKK and the Masons) as to how the modern West was won with its themes of manipulation, deception, greed, moral compromise, systemic racism and betrayal, the wolves hiding among the sheep, it balances scenes of quiet beauty, such as Ernest and Mollie sitting alongside each other at the dinner table, with sudden brutal violence.
Likely designed to trim it back from a proposed four hour running time, it ends ingeniously with an epilogue which, instead of the usual what happened after end titles, sums the post-trial fates of the characters up in an episode of radio drama True Crime Stories, a fictionalised Hoover-endorsed version of real programmes like This Is Your FBI, with live orchestra and, pointedly, white voice actors giving caricatured impersonations of the Osage, the last being a cameo by Scorsese himself, underscoring the trivialisation of Native American suffering, succinctly summed up earlier when someone notes there’s a “better chance of convicting a guy for kicking a dog than killing an Indian”, echoing the Black lives matter of America’s ongoing racial problems, the camera finally pulling away in an aerial shot of the gathered tribe performing a farewell ritual. This is epic, intelligent, provocative filmmaking. (Apple TV+ )
Kung Fu Panda 4 (12A)
One of the last films to be made by the soon to be shuttered DreamWorks Animation, after eight years this brings back Jack Black (whose band Tenacious D sings Britney Spear’s Baby One More Time over the end credits) to voice a fourth adventure by the dumpling-loving giant panda who has now become the celebrated Dragon Master protecting the Valley Of Peace and is setting up his own noodle restaurant. However, he’s taken aback to be told by his mentor, Master Shifu (a croaky Dustin Hoffman), that it is time to move on, become Spiritual Leader and pass the torch, or in this case Spirit Staff, to the one he chooses to be his successor (in a parade of candidates he ends up choosing himself).
Such mission, however, is distracted when he finds himself reluctantly teamed with a streetsmart ninja fox thief named Zhen (Awkwafina, always fun), who he caught stealing from the Hall Of Mirrors, and in criminal-infested Juniper City (where no one’s heard of the Dragon Master), where Zhen’s pangolin cousin (Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan) runs the Den Of Thieves, and up against shape-shifting sorceress Chameleon (a nicely sinister Viola Davis) who is scheming to get his staff and bring back his vanquished enemies from the spirit realm, among them snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane), so she can steal their powers and rule the world. Meanwhile, in what feels like a tacked-on subplot, Po’s two fathers, Mr Ping (James Hong) and Pi (Bryan Cranston), are on a quest to find their missing son. Li (voice of Bryan Cranston), decide to follow their boy. Packed with butt-kicking action sequences, among them an inspired bar fight at the Happy Rabbit Tavern as the building teeters atop a cliff, oddball new characters like the insult-spewing Fish who lives in a pelican’s gullet, and vividly colourful, it’s most definitely energetic but it doesn’t have the emotional pull or the good jokes of the previous films nor, down to a smaller budget, does it include the Furious Five (apparently off on their own missions) other than for a final dialogue-free scene as it heads to the predictable selection of the new Dragon Master in what seems to be setting up a TV series spin-off. As a likely final big screen outing, it’s undemanding fun enough, but the old magic simply isn’t there. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Late Night With The Devil (18)
Written and directed by Australian siblings Colin and Cameron Cairnes, this resurrects the found footage genre with a new angle in the form of the master tape of a supposed 1970 talk show live broadcast where, as the title suggests, occult terror makes an unscripted appearance. The show is called Night Owls with Jack Delroy which, according to Michael Ironside’s narratior, “five nights a week helps an anxious nation forget its troubles”. Delroy (a wonderfully beige and mediocre David Dastmalchian), however, can’t forget his, most specifically that, while the ratings are reasonable, he simply can’t compete with Johnny Carson and has an increasing reputation as a “perennial also-ran”, despite his membership of a dodgy mysterious men only power brokers club called The Grove that has secret woodland meetings.
There was a spike when he had his stage star wife, dying of cancer, on the show to talk about their relationship, but now he needs another boost. And that might just come with his 1997 Halloween special, during the all-important Sweeps Week, where the guests include Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a psychic who claims to read minds and speak to the dead, and a parapsychologist, Dr June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and her patient (about whom she’s written a book called Conversations With the Devil) Lilly (a disconcerting Ingrid Torelli), a self-assured teen who was the sole survivor to a Satanic church’s mass suicide and is now supposedly host to some demon she calls Mr Wriggles. And then, to stir things up, there’s Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), a former magician turned smug sceptic and professional debunker. To inject a little frisson into proceedings, Jack and his producer persuade June to get Lilly to summon her entity live on air. Clearly, things aren’t going to end well, and Christou, who suffered a vomiting event on stage and supposedly was in contact with Jack’s dead wife, has already been revealed to have died.
Between the broadcast footage (in colour), the film cuts in the ad breaks to black and white backstage footage (although logic suggests the cameras would not be rolling on these private conversations) as Jack butts heads with his crew (as his onstage straight man, Rhys Auteri is getting increasingly concerned about the ‘entertainment’) and guests in his Faustian quest for fame, before it all concludes in a head severing, bloodbath and literal melt down. Almost inevitably schlocky at times, even so, tongue firmly in cheek with performances to match, this is worth tuning in for. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue; Sat/Sun: Mockingbird; Mon: Everyman)
Leave The World Behind (15)
Mingling Hitchcock and Shyamalan, written and directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, this collapse of civilization psychological sci fi thriller, adapted from Rumaan Alam’s novel. has three solid star turns from Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali (with Kevon Bacon making a third act appearance) that keep you engaged even when the narrative feels like it’s struggling.
Jaded with everything (“I fucking hate people”), pretentious self-centred Brooklyn housewife Amanda Sandford (Roberts) packs up husband Clay (Hawke) and the two kids, Friends-obsessed Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and her old brother Archie (Charlie Evans), and heads off to a luxury Airbnb on Long Island, complete with heated pool. However, no sooner have they taken themselves down to the beach than a huge oil tanker ploughs up. Then, back home, that evening they lose all the Wi-Fi, radio and TV signals (pissing off Rose who hasn’t managed to watch the final Friends episode), they comes a knock at the door. It’s tuxedo-clad G.H. Scott (Ali) and his acerbic daughter Ruth (Myha’la) who are the house’s owners (though a bigoted Amanda finds that hard to believe) and are seeking shelter at their own home following a blackout in New Work (something else Amanda has doubt about). She’s reluctant to have strangers – more specifically Black strangers – staying the night, but Clay is more accommodating (especially as G.H. pays him $1000), reckoning it all be sorted out come morning. Come morning and it certainly isn’t though they have picked up alerts that it might all be down to some hackers, who may have even hacked into the space satellites.
Is it an attack by foreign terrorists (out trying to reach town for information, Clay picks up a leaflet dropped from a plane with what seems to be Arabic writing which, as Charlie tells him, is titled Death To America) or is it something even more unsettling? Supernatural, perhaps. Meanwhile, Rose is transfixed by hundreds of deer that appear in the back garden while a flock of flamingos descend on the pool. The roads blocked by hacked driverless cars, plans plummeting from the sky (Ruth fears her mother, who was in Morocco, might have been on one) and occasional brief national emergency broadcasts about violence in Washington do little to calm the nerves. And G.H. is concerned that events are lining up as some top secret government plan he heard about from one of his highly connected clients.
Tapping into conspiracy theory and apocalyptic dread, it builds an air of tension and fear while also examining how people react and respond to one another under such scenarios (enter Bacon as a survivalist Clay turns to when Charlie needs medical help), the swooping and swirling camerawork exacerbating the gathering weirdness. Returning to its running Friends motif, it ends on an open cliff hanger (with no planned sequel) that seems certain to frustrate audiences, especially as it’s all questions and no answers, but in asking how we deal with things as they fall apart around us, those questions are unsettlingly timely. (Netflix)
The Letter Writer (12A)
The directorial debut by Layla Kaylif who, after establishing herself as an acclaimed singer-songwriter, now proves an equally impressive filmmaker. Working from her own screenplay, set in 1965 in the twilight of the English colonial protectorate in then Trucial States, the precursor to the UAE, it draws on both The Go-Between and Cyrano de Bergerac to tell the coming of age story of Dubai teenager Khalifa (Eslam Al Kawarit), who, in defiance of his father, who runs a failing pearl seller stall, sets himself up, along with a friend, writing letters (“inquiries, complaints, follow-ups, recommendations, apologies, even divorce”) for the illiterate locals, he often paraphrasing in more blunt terms. One such is garment store owner Mohammad (Muhammad Amir Nawaz) who wants him to write a love letter in English (Khalifa’s tutor advises him to improve his command of the language, being perfunctory at best) to a customer with whom he’s become infatuated, Elizabeth Warren (a rather flat Rosy McEwen), who, the niece of the outgoing governor and working for the Foreign Office, has since returned to London, wanting to know when, she might return. Initially just writing gibberish until he’s rumbled, on seeing her photograph, which Mohammad keeps closely guarded and he then turns into a shrine, he himself becomes besotted, couching the letters with his own clumsy expressions and, having discovered Shakespeare’s sonnets, poetry. As a result, though engaged to be married to an English Colonel (Shane Dodd) who’s been posted to the British compound near where Khalifa works, Elizabeth starts to fall for, as she thinks, Mohammad, her replies further intensifying Khalifa’s crush.
Intercut with the romantic misunderstandings, the film also explores the political climate of the time with the growing resentment of the British (in one scene Khalifa witnesses his mate pissing on the English flag), questions of Arab identity (couched in talk of Nasser, the future Egyptian president speaking English but still being an Arab) and unity, the value of education and generational aspirations.
It suffers from some of the usual first film issues (uneven pace, tone and, especially in the unconvincing scenes set in London, acting, occasional clunky dialogue, excess subplots and underdeveloped characters), but Al Kawarit ably keeps it from sagging with a wry humour (at one point he starts dressing in furs after seeing Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago) and believable emotions that range from fiery anger to tender yearning as his character struggles to find his purpose in the world in which he lives with his complicated family, a local girl (Marwa Al Hashimi), he initially tries to woo, the middle-aged slave Buthayna (Faisa Al Moutha) seeking her freedom and the frustration of virtually British occupation. Never less than engaging, it’s a promising debut and, as you might expect, the soundtrack includes the classic Love Letters, although, in a nice touch, it’s the version by Cilla Black rather than the Kitty Lester original. (Amazon Prime)
Love At First Sight (12A)
A meet cute romance, when, forever late, 20-year old American Hadley Sullivan (Haley Lu Richardson) misses her flight from New York to London for her father’s wedding, she is re-booked on the next. While waiting, she meets fellow traveller Oliver Jones (Ben Hardy), a British 22-year old Yale mathematics student who offers to lend her his charger when noticing her phone is dead. They get to chatting about their lives and idiosyncratic fears (they both hate mayonnaise, he hates surprises). On the plane, a faulty seatbelt ends up with him sitting next to her in business class, where they chat and flirt, she sharing that she’s uncertain about the wedding as she’s not really forgiven her dad (Rob Delaney) for divorcing her mother after he left to teach in Oxford.
On seeing Oliver’s formal suit, she assumes he’s also returning for a wedding, which he neither confirms or denies. They almost kiss, but are interrupted. Arriving at Heathrow, they’re separated into two passport control queues and delays mean that, when she finally gets through, he has already left for his appointment and she’s almost late for hers. And her phone being dead again, the number he texted didn’t come through.
Dad’s wedding goes well and she find she actually likes his new wife, Charlotte. Then, with four hours before the reception, on overhearing that a couple of guests are off to a memorial service for a woman with cancer and two sons, one of whom has flown back from America, she puts two and two together and hops on a bus to Peckham to find Oliver. Although it turns out that, her cancer returned and she refusing treatment, his mum (Sally Phillips) and dad (Dexter Fletcher) are having her memorial while she’s still here, after all what’s the point of people saying nice things if you can’t hear them, everything having a Shakespeare fancy dress theme with younger son Luther (Tom Taylor) in jester garb doing the deejaying, the reunion doesn’t go as well as she’d hoped when she chides him for always quoting statistics rather than being honest about his feelings. So, will they ever get back together? Well, she does accidentally leave her bag behind.
Narrated both on screen and via voice over by Jameela Jamil as various characters (but essentially fate), it’s adapted from Jennifer E Smith’s book The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight and directed by Vanessa Caswill and, while neither she nor screenwriter Katie Lovejoy are in the Richard Curtis league, while utterly predictable (as are pretty much all romcoms), it’s nevertheless warmly charming, largely down to the chemistry between the two leads and a mix of twinkling humour and cheesy but touching messages about not letting things – love, life, death, reconciliations, slip by you in your self-absorption. (Netflix)
Maestro (15)
Bradley Cooper’s second excursion behind the camera, and, after A Star Is Born, another story with a musician at its centre. In this case, covering some 40 years, it’s a biopic of the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (Cooper), the first American-born conductor to lead a major American symphony orchestra (and namechecked in REM’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), which is used with egotistical amusement here), one that focuses on the many dualities in his personal and professional life. A flamboyant showman wielding the baton, but reserved and introvert in writing his music, swinging between elation and despair, devotedly married to Costa Rican-Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a prelude having him expressing his grief over her death, but also (as she was well aware) a secretly promiscuous homosexual, most notably in an early gay relationship with clarinettist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer).
Following a nonlinear structure that makes extensive use of interview exposition and asides to provide background (West Side Story, arguably Bernstein’s greatest work, has just a fleeting mention), it opens with him getting his big break when, in 1943, he has to substitute for an ill Bruno Walter and conduct the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. This, like the bulk of the film, is shot in black-and-white with saturated technicolour colour scenes in the latter stretch, both conjuring movies from the 40s, the early scenes in a boxy aspect ratio before the more widescreen later ones, the framing also consistently emphasising the distances between Leonard and Felicia.
This is dazzling bravura filmmaking peppered with striking set pieces, At one point a rehearsal scene for the ballet that would become On the Town unfolds into a fantasy sequence of Leonard and Felicia dancing together, while the lengthy sequence of him euphorically conducting the choir and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral in 1973, Felicia watching from the wings, is electrifying. Likewise, Bernstein liberatingly dancing to Tears For Fears in a gay club and the single take scene of an excoriating Thanksgiving argument between the couple as a giant Snoopy balloon floats past the window of their New York apartment. More subdued but no less potent is a moment when Bernstein lies to his oldest daughter, Jamie (Maya Hawke), about the homophobic rumours going round about him.
Arguably, the screenplay doesn’t delve sufficiently into what makes the characters tick, but even so there’s a rich depth with the chemistry between Cooper (who, with the controversial prosthetic nose looks strikingly like Bernstein) and Mulligan, delivering her best work since An Education and arguably the film’s real star (she takes top billing above Cooper), lighting up the screen. Glorious. (Netflix)
The Marvels (12A)
Beset by delays and reshoots, directed and co-written by Nia DaCosta, the first Black woman behind a Marvel movie, this brings together three female superheroes who all have, in different forms, the ability to harness the power of light. That’ll be Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in a follow-up to Miss Marvel, now roaming the galaxy in her own spacecraft, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the now grown astronaut daughter of Carol’s late best friend Maria (Lashana Lynch), who works alongside Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) in his new SABER organisation and gained her powers in WandaVision (and whose lack of a code name serves as a running gag), and New Jersey’s Pakistani-American schoolgirl Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), from the Disney+ TV series (its use of animation incorporated in introducing her here), an over-exuberant Miss Marvel mega-fan whose powers come from a magical bracelet.
The bracelet, or quantum band, however, turns out to have a Kree origin and is one of a pair, the other being recovered at the start of the film by Dar-Benn (a compelling Zawe Ashton clearly having a lot of fun as the baddie) who has an understandable vendetta against Danvers – who the Kree know as The Annhilator for reasons explained later– and needs the two of them to restore life to her home planet of Hela. As such, her motives are sympathetic, her means, which include trying to wipe out the Skrulls, rather less so. Her acquisition of the bangle also causes the three Marvels to body-swap (quantum entanglement, apparently) every time they use their powers, initially creating havoc in Kamala’s home, then affording some skipping rope fun and later proving invaluable in the battle with Dar-Benn.
Despite a plot that involves intergalactic genocide and planet asset stripping, there’s a great deal of playful fun here, notably a sequence set on a world where Miss Marvel is a marriage of convenience princess and where everyone dances as they sing their dialogue (though her prince Park See-joon – is bi-lingual) and one where, in an effort to evacuated the space station, Fury has the crew ‘eaten’ up by a horde of Flerken kitties who spew purple tentacles that swallow things up, all scored to Midnight from Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s musical.
There’s also a great deal of hanging out and banter between the three heroes, all of whom have their own identity issues, the actresses making good use of their individual skill sets and personalities as the film digs into their characters. The problem is, however, what with jump points opening up everywhere in the space, and the action leaping from planet to planet, the narrative is frequently borderline incoherent. Fortunately, unlike the recent slate of Marvel outings, this has a trim running time into which it packs an inordinate amount of plot, redemption and coming of age arcs and action sequences.
Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur and Saagar Shaikh add extra comedic touches as Kamala’s concerned and long-suffering parents and older brother while Abraham Popool sports a nifty set of beard braids as SABER agent Dag and Tessa Thompson puts in a quickie crossover appearance as Valkyrie, the film closing up with the briefly united trio now on their individual plotlines, providing two mid-credits sequences; the first with a cameo from Hawkeye’s Kate Bishop (Hailee Stanfield) as Ms Marvel sets out to create a new team, and the second, with Rambeau now in a parallel universe, a new incarnation for Maria and the return of Kelsey Grammar’s Hank McCoy from the X-Men series. That’s at least three new sequels or spin-offs in the wings. There again, given its bomb at the box office, maybe not. (Disney+)
May December (15)
As directed by Todd Hayes, in 1992, married 36-year-old mother Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) was convicted and imprisoned for having sex with 13-year-old Joe Yoo at the pet shop where they worked, giving birth to their first child while behind bars. Now, 23 years later, they’re married with three kids: college-aged Honor (Piper Curda) and senior high school twins Charlie (Gabriel Chung) and Mary (Elizabeth Yu) who she micromanages with an almost casual cruelty (“I want to commend you for being so brave and showing your arms like that”, she barbedly tells her daughter as she tries on graduation dresses). Gracie sells baked goods, Joe nurtures a collection of monarch butterfly larvae, and her story is about to be turned into a television drama. To which end, actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) arrives at their suburban Savannah home to study them in preparation for the role. She wants to get to the character’s authenticity, Gracie wants to show the world the truth of her and Joe’s relationship. She is, therefore, a tad uncomfortable, at Berry (who’s as screwed up as anyone) interviewing her friend, the townsfolk, relatively accommodating ex-husband (D.W. Moffett) and their embittered adult son Georgie (Cory Michael Smith) about things she doesn’t feel warrant being part of the film, seeing it as unnecessary interference in the family’s lives. Nor is she keen on talking about the packages of dogshit that regularly turn up on their doorstep.
Infusing the melodrama with a campy humour and a soundtrack that knowingly borrows from Michel Legrand’s music for Joseph Losey’s illicit affair classic The Go-Between, it places the marriage under the microscope (it’s not hard to see one particular development coming) as well as exploring the arrested development effect of Joe’s loss of childhood and innocence, and the fears and pain he has buried within, Melton’s understated performance, especially a rooftop chat with his son, especially fine. It’s a slow burn watch and the open ending might leave some feeling slightly shortchanged, but it wields its scalpel with surgical precision. (Sky Cinema)
Migration (PG)
There’s a scene where a family of Mallards stumble upon a battery farm where ducks are reared in luxury before being shipped off to a chef that is ascloseasthis to the same set-up in Dawn Of The Nugget. Coincidence, of course, but the comparison does it no favours.
The Mallards in question are a family headed up by Mack ((Kumail Nanjiani), an overprotective father who refuses to let his more adventurous wife Pam (Elizabeth Banks), or curious kids, teen son Dax (Caspar Jennings), and duckling daughter Gwen (Tresi Gazal), leave the safety of their New England pond, telling them nightmarish bedtime stories so they’ll be too scared to try. However, when another family of ducks stop over en route to migrating to Jamaica, he’s badgered into agreeing to make the trip too, joined by their grumpy Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito). Inevitably, they fly the wrong way and end up in New York where they run into a gang of pigeons, their leader, Chump (Awkwafina), happening to know a parrot, Delroy (Keegan-Michael Key), who knows the way to Jamaica from where he was taken. They just have to rescue him from the cage where he’s kept imprisoned by the aforementioned Chef (Boris Rehlinger) whose speciality is duck à l’orange and who, in his personal helicopter, is soon on their trail.
It’s a fairly thin plot with well-worn messages about family, overcoming narrow-mindedness and facing your fears, with constant references to being eaten and a meeting with a heron (Carol Kane) who might have ulterior motives to taking them in from a storm (she does offer them a frying pan to sleep in) likely to give more sensitive toddlers a restless night . Colourful but forgettable, it passes the time painlessly enough but there’s more fun to be had in the 10 minute Minions short Mooned that precedes this decidedly lame duck. (Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe)
Monkey Man (18)
Looking to buy a gun from an arms dealer, Dev Patel’s character, Kid, is asked “You like John Wick?” and offered a TTI Combat Master, one of Wick’s signature handguns. It’s an amusing line but also a recognition by Patel, here making his directorial debut as well as being co-writer and one of the many producers (Jordan Peele among them), that comparisons would be inevitable so why not be upfront about it. And indeed this is an incredibly violent Hindi John Wick that, also influence by Bryce Lee and The Raid, weaves within it a wealth of references to Hindu mythology.
The title has two meanings. One is the name under which, after being released from prison and wearing a gorilla mask, Kid takes part in rigged boxing matches, in which he always loses, compered by the sleazy Tiger (Sharlto Copley) in the fictional Indian slum of Yatana. The other refers to the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, a deity who is robbed of his powers, but comes back stronger than ever, just one of several cultural motifs and references the film embraces along with its pointed political commentary.
At a basic level, it’s a revenge thriller, Kid looking to wreak vengeance on those responsible for his mother’s (Adithi Kalkunte) death when he was young, she burning alive in a land grab carried out by corrupt chief of police Rana (Sikandar Kher), who is in the service of Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), who masquerades as a spiritual guru to advance his political and power ambitions. Of course, before he can exact justice, Kid, whose hands bear the scars of those fires, has to go through the obligatory batterings (an early bathroom brawl does not go well) and gruelling training sequences, under the guidance of the hijra, an ostracised “third-gender” community of warriors (led by Vipin Sharma), to get him up to physical and emotional scratch. Other ingredients stirred into this ultra-violent and visceral masala include Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar), the ice cold manager of a high-end brothel into which Kid has to immerse himself to get to those responsible, Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala), an escort at Queenie’s club who catches his eye, and street hustler Alphonso (Pitobash) who inadvertently finds himself becoming Kid’s sidekick (and the film’s comic relief).
There’s a surfeit of backstory flashbacks, mostly to Kid’s idyllic childhood before his world came crashing down, as well as feverish dream elements, but mostly this is just crammed with a relentless and visually dizzying torrent of bone crunching and bloody action mayhem sequences, one particular highlight being an elevator knife fight using his mouth to plunge in the blade and another with a breathless turbocharged rickshaw chase. And of course it wouldn’t be complete without an exploding fish.
And yet for all this and despite a paucity of dialogue, Patel still manages to bring real character depth to Kid’s arc of redemption and confrontation with the trauma of his past (albeit less so to the others, who are more one-dimensional) as well as its power to the people commentary on sectarian violence and how the Indian Hindu elite treats its underclass, culminating in the last act unleashing a fury even Keanu Reeves might find excessive. You like John Wick? You’ll love this. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Monster (12A)
Opening with the arson burning of a multi-storey building, a widowed Japanese mother, Saori Mugino (Shoplifters’ Sakura Ando) is concerned over her 11-year-old son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa) whose started acting oddly, being sullen, cutting his hair and coming home with a shoe missing and a cut ear. When one night he doesn’t return and she finds him in an abandoned railway tunnel, she learns he’s being physically and verbally abused by his teacher, Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama), who told him he had a pig’s brain. She duly confronts the school principal (Yūko Tanaka), recently returned after her husband caused the accidental death of her granddaughter, only to be met with blank frostiness and a grudging, insincere apology from Hori. He asserts that Minato has been bullying another student, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), the sensitive and somewhat effeminate son of an abusive divorced alcoholic, but, when she goes to see him, the boy, while also behaving oddly (why is he playing with a gas lighter), seems to be very close to her son. Refusing to accept the school’s casual attitude, she pushes further, Hori getting fired, returning a few days later when it seems Minato falls down the stairs trying to escape him and, later that night, vanishes during a rain storm.
At this point, director Hirokazu Kore-eda and Yuji Sakamoto’s Cannes-winning screenplay pull a Rashomon, returning to tell events from Hori’s perspective as we see, through his eyes, Minato being disruptive and bullying, his resignation being forced by the school to protect it and the principal’s reputation, resulting in him being hounded by the press and dumped by his girlfriend, a hostess in the torched building, before he eventually realises the truth about Minato and Yori’s connection and seeks to apologise. It then flashbacks again to retell it again through Minato’s eyes, offering a reality of what we think we’ve previously witnessed as well as revealing the truth about that accidental death, before, as in the two previous tellings, it ends up at the abandoned railway carriage the boys have made their haven before a magic-realism wish-fulfilment fantasy final shot.
A not entirely subtle questioning of subjective realty as to who is the actual monster (bullies, parents, teachers, the media, the system?) and what makes someone human as fallible figures responding badly to circumstances, it also overdoes its symbolism (fire, rain, potential fallings from roofs) while its musings on Buddhist notions (Minato wonders if his father’s been reborn while celebrating his birthday, complete with cake, beside his photo) add to the narrative mood, compounded by an impressionistic score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto. Ultimately, the shifts of tone from social and family melodrama, bureaucratic hostility, domestic abuse and sentimentality mean it’s never quite steady on its feet, but the core performances and the perception twists keep you involved. (Sat/Sun: Mockingbird; Until Wed: MAC)
Mothers’ Instinct (15)
An American remake of the 2018 Belgian psychological thriller, adapted from Barbara Abel’s novel and marking the directorial debut of cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, on paper the teaming of Anne Hathaway (icily intense) and Jessica Chastain (unusually shrill and flat) as the Jackie Kennedy-like Celine and Alice, close friend neighbours with breadwinner husbands in 60s suburbia whose lives and relationship are torn apart in a terrible tragedy, would seem promising. In reality, however, largely shot with a fuzzy desaturated look, prone to kitsch melodrama, and mannered and over-heightened dialogue and performances, it’s all rather turgid and dull.
Sharing their lives, each with a key to the other’s house, Celine and Alice both have boys, respectively, Max (Baylen D. Bielitz) and the creepily and oddly red-headed precocious Theo (Eamon O’Connell), who are also best friends. But then Max dies in a tragic accident and everything changes. Celine initially pushes Alice, who witnessed but was unable to prevent the accident, away and then takes to spending time with Theo. Celine’s husband Damien (Josh Charles), a doctor, takes to the bottle in his grief and then Alice’s husband Simon (Anders Danielsen Lie) is also dealt a blow when his mother (Caroline Lagerfelt) drops dead during Theo’s birthday party (which she’s scolded Celine for attending).
Clearly attempting but failing to create a Hitchcockian brittle tension as the rift widens between the two women (Alice wants another child, Celine can’t have one) and motives are questioned as it explores motherhood issues, too often it slips into camp, introducing an undeveloped mental breakdown (Alice apparently was once committed by her husband and, wanting to return to journalism, is a mess of frustration in her role as a housewife) before eventually erupting into an overblown climax of betrayals and murders. Psychologically blunt with the thrills overcooked, your instincts should tell you to avoid. (Mockingbird; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Napoleon (15)
Turning 85, Ridley Scott still has the stamina of directors half his age, as clearly evidenced in pulling together this two and a half hour epic biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, a balance between his greatest hits (and failures) on the battlefield and his relationship with widowed aristocrat wife Josephine. Opening with the guillotining of Marie Antoinette following the French Revolution, witnessed by then lowly – and somewhat humourless – Corsican gunnery officer Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix in customary outstanding form), his rise to power begins with him, a master strategist, liberating the town of Toulon from the occupying British forces in 1793, his cannons destroying their ships and with the help of his patron and friend Barras (Tahar Rahim) and following the downfall of Robespierre (Sam Troughton) and his Reign of Terror, proceeds to chart his rise through the ranks, his Egyptian campaign (where he may or may not have actually fired on the top of the pyramids), his promotion to general, elevation to become one of the three Consuls ruling France, and eventual crowning as Emperor before his disastrous 1812 campaign in Russia and subsequent exile to Elba, his return to power, the defeat at Waterloo (and a scene aboard HMS Bellerophon wryly congratulating Rupert Everett’s Wellington, who has an even better sneer than himself, on the quality of Royal Navy breakfasts) and exile to St Helena where he died.
Alongside this, it follows the ups and down of his marriage to the sensual and strong-wiled Josephine (an understated but quietly excellent Vanessa Kirby), her cuckolding him (he’s not great at sex and prefers rear entry quickies) while he’s away conquering Italy, her problematic inability to provide an heir, his bedding of a willing fertile volunteer, and the eventual divorce, albeit he never faltering in his love, and ensuring she continued with the life to which she was accustomed, even after marrying the teenage (and shorter) Archduchess of Austria, who dutifully supplies a son (he had, in fact, several children by assorted lovers). All of course wearing that distinctive bicorne hat and tricolour cockade.
The brilliantly staged action set pieces are as stunning and thrilling as they are gorily visceral (a shot of a horse’s chest being ruptured by a cannonball is truly jolting), the decimation of the Austrian and Russian forces, fictionalised on a frozen lake at Austerlitz the centrepiece standout, but ultimately, it never offers any deep insight into what made him tick or the politics in which he was involved (it neglects to even mention his reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies or the massacre at the siege of Jaffa). Scott has announced he’s planning a four-and-a-half hour director’s cut for streaming on Apple, so hopefully that will join the dots. Meanwhile, masterful though this is, its 20 years narrative feels like a 158 minute shorthand guide. (Apple TV+)
Nimona (PG)
Opening with the heroic Gloreth establishing an order of knights dedicated to protecting the world from the monsters that lurk outside its walls, this animated fantasy adventure fast forwards a 1000 years to a futuristic city and, headed by The Director (Frances Conroy), the Institute where the queen is about to appoint new knights from the graduating cadets, among them Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), a descendent of Gloreth, and Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed). The latter is controversial given that he will be the first commoner accorded such an honour in the queen’s intention to give everyone a chance to be a hero and Ballister is understandably worried that, like bullying fellow cadet Thoddeus (Beck Bennett) everyone will hate him. Instead, he’s met with cheers- until, that is, a laser ray shoots from his high-tech sword and kills the queen, leading to Ambrosius chopping off his arm and Bal fleeing, a wanted murderer. But then, in hiding, he finds himself visited by Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz), a rebellious punky teenager outsider who, assuming him to be a villain, declares herself his self-appointed sidekick (“Because I’m bored, and everyone hates me too”). She is, however, more than a sassy, sparky, streetsmart misfit teen. As he discovers when she rescues him from prison, she’s a shapeshifter capable of transforming into a pink rhino, bear, bird, a whale and even a dancing shark, who revels in causing chaos and smashing things up. She is, in fact, exactly the sort of monster the knights are supposed to destroy. Instead, the two now find themselves joining forces to clear Bal’s name and expose the real murderer. The identity of whom it’s not too hard to work out, but then, as the opening voiceover states, things have a habit of not having the simply resolved happy endings fairytales usually demand.
Adapted from a subversive graphic novel by ND Stevenson and rescued by Netflix after being cancelled by Disney, this is very much a contemporary 2D-3D animation, not just in its dazzling visuals but in its storyline and themes. It’s revealed early on that Bal and Ambrosius are gay lovers while, uncomfortable in her ‘normal’ skin, Nimona is driven by a need to transition. Meanwhile, with the inventive narrative, twisting there’s also familiar messages about intolerance, irrational prejudice and how, in as world where kids “grow up believing that they can be a hero if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different”, if we treat people as monsters, they’re likely to become monsters.
With her catchphrase ‘metal’ and plans that rarely go beyond “Chaos, destruction, something-something-something, we win”, Nimona is a priceless animated anti-hero, her spirit and irreverent humour exuberantly captured by Moretz’s voice work while Ahmed brings the pathos and more serious notes. Driven by a punk-fuelled soundtrack that includes The Banana Splits and guitar riffs by former Sex Pistols Steve Jones, it barrels along with fast-paced action and an utterly infectious sense of anarchy and fun. The ending lays possible ground for a sequel, and one would be very welcome indeed. (Netflix)
No Hard Feelings (15)
In danger of losing her late single mother’s house in the increasingly gentrified beach hamlet of Montauk, Long Island, because of unpaid property taxes and her car repossessed by a tow truck driver (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) ex-boyfriend resentful about her abrupt lack of communication, meaning she can’t work as a Uber driver, 32-year-old Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) answers a Craigslist ad placed by two wealthy helicopter parents Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti) Becker. Concerned that their geeky, socially awkward virgin 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), lacks the necessary experience prior to going to Princeton, they’re offering a brand new Buick in exchange for someone who will, as Maddie puts, “date his brains out”. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky and co-written by John Phillips, it pretty much follows just as you would expect from a film channelling cringeworthy 80s sex comedies like Risky Business (though equally there’s a hint of Paul Thomas Anderson and Cameron Crowe). As in, naturally not revealing her job as a fuck for hire, under the ruse of wanting to adopt a dog from the rescue shelter where he volunteers, Maddie inveigles her way into Percy’s life who, of course, while shy, turns out to be not as much a nerd as he first appears, a relationship gradually blossoming although the crucial consummation keeps running into obstacles. Just as inevitably, the two having grown genuinely close, the truth will eventually come out, setting up the equally predictable dinner with parents scene, the break up and make up.
Pushing the edginess with Lawrence going full frontal (something even the enjoyably vulgar Porky’s resisted) in a skinny dipping scene and subsequent fight with three teens stealing their clothes, it’s both peppered with laugh out loud gags, innuendos and embarrassing moments but also irresistibly sweet with a subtext about her relationship with the pure-hearted Percy opening up the insecure Maddie to moving on in her life (and any hopes that her estranged wealthy father will ever be part of her life) rather than remaining forever stuck in Montauk stasis.
Not everything works; Percy’s overprotective former male nanny Jody (Kyle Mooney) feels a redundant excuse for some unnecessary homophobic jokes. However, Lawrence proves to have solid comic timing (both physical and verbal) as well as dramatic sass, Feldman recalls a young Dustin Hoffman, an aspiring musician his ‘prom night’ restaurant serenading of Maddie with Hall & Oates’ Maneater is a treat, while Scott MacArthur and Natalie Morales, as his pregnant partner and Maddie’s restaurant co-worker, provide solid comic support. It may play the raunchy card, but ultimately this is a sweet, endearing and big-hearted tale of friendship and self-discovery. (Sky Cinema)
Nyad (15)
Sports fans may recall Diana Nyad, a world class endurance swimmer who, aged 25, swam around Manhattan in just under eight hours in 1975, becoming a celebrity and talk-show regular, even if given to a touch of not always factual self-aggrandising about her achievements. At 30, however, she retired having failed in her attempt to the open-ocean record by going from Cuba to Key West in Florida, a 60-hour, 103-mile journey in shark-infested waters one stroke at a time. She went on to host radio shows, write books, give motivational speeches and work as a sports broadcaster. But, her career ending failure nagging at her, turning 60, despite not having swum since, she resolved to try again. It’s no spoiler to say that, at the fifth attempt, she finally triumphed and, directed by Free Solo documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, this biopic follows the struggles to pull that off.
Strapping on the goggles, swimsuit (and bizarre protective masks at different points), doing her own swimming sequences Annette Bening is Nyad (from the Greek for water nymph) while playing opposite is Jodie Foster in her first gay role as fellow lesbian, one time lover and now best friend Bonnie Stoll. While thinking the whole idea is ridiculous and potentially fatal, she becomes her supportive coach, training her back into shape and following as part of the crew on Voyager I, skippered by the implacable Dee Brady) Karly Rotherberg), the now late navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) and shark expert Luke Tipple (Luke Cosgrove), accompanying her attempts, the first four variously scuppered by bad weather, unpredictable Gulf Stream currents, toxic jellyfish and allergic reaction, the film emphasising the mindset required by all involved to pull things off.
The backstory flashbacks (which mix real archive footage with recreation) reveal Nyad’s difficult relationship with a demanding stepfather Aristotle, her sexual abuse as a teenager (Anna Harriette Pittman) at the hands of her coach, Jack Nelson (who is still listed in the Hall of Fame despite numerous allegations from other girls), but the film’s core is firmly on the determination to complete what she set out to do decades earlier (she was 64 when she made the fifth attempt, her scored to Neil Young’s Heart Of Gold) and the repercussion on her and Stoll’s relationship. The central performances, Foster making everything seem effortless and Bening capturing Nyad’s at times prickly personality, are magnificent with real chemistry, with the end credits revealing just how closely they and Ifans resemble their real life counterparts. It doesn’t mention that subsequent controversies or that her swim was ultimately denied ratification due to incomplete documentation, conflicting crew reports and retrospective rules, her entry The Guinness Book of World Records being revoked, but that doesn’t negate what she said in the inspirational speech recreated (and repeated in archive footage) here about it never being too late to dream big. (Netflix)
One Life (PG)
Known as the British Schindler, when, in 1938, with British blessing, the Nazis began to occupy Czechoslovakia, responding to a request for help from Jewish activist Marie (here Marta) Schmolka and English humanitarianist Doreen Warriner, instead of going skiing, a 29-year-old London stockbroker of German-Jewish parentage, Nicholas Winton (anglicised from Wertheim) visited Prague to help his friend Martin Blake, an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, with his Jewish welfare work. Horrified at the conditions he encountered, working from a hotel in Wenceslas Square with volunteers such as British former teacher Trevor Chadwick, and Canadian assistant Beatrice Wellington (absent from this telling) alongside the Committee, when, in November 1938, the House of Commons approved a measure to allow entry into Britain of refugees younger than 17, provided they had a place to stay and a deposit of £50 per person for their eventual return, he began, with the help of his mother back home, to arrange for children to be relocated to foster homes in the UK.
Although the final, ninth kinderstransport was prevented when the Nazis invaded Prague, together, a litany of visas, trains, fundraising, record-keeping and legal red tape, Winton and his colleagues succeeded in rescuing 669 Czech-Jewish children. Modest to a fault, his work, however, went virtually unacknowledged until 1988 when, tasked by wife Grete (Lena Olin) to clear out all the detritus of the past he’s hoarded, looking to find a home for a suitcase containing a scrapbook documenting the work and the children saved – and those not – for historical and educational purposes, it ended up, via Robert Maxwell’s wife Betty, a Holocaust researcher with That’s Life!, a lighthearted satirical consumer affairs BBC TV programme hosted by Esther Rantzen. Unaware of what was planned, Winton appeared on the show and was reunited with one of the women he had rescued and, following public response, was invited back for a second, the studio audience consisting entirely of now grown refugees.
As directed by James Hawes making his feature debut and based on the book by Winton’s daughter Barbara (Ffion Jolly), this is a solid, conventional and unsentimental but emotionally moving account (it’s unfair to describe scenes of distraught children leaving their siblings and parents as manipulative) with the narrative split between 1938 London and wartime Prague with the young Winton played by Johnny Flynn and 1987 Maidenhead with his older self inhabited in a typically heartfelt performance by Anthony Hopkins whose eyes carry the regret of not saving more. They’re bolstered by equally solid period set work – if underdeveloped characterisation – from Antonie Formanová as Marta, Romola Garai as Doreen and Alex Sharp as Trevor with Helena Bonham-Carter haranguing bureaucratic Whitehall consciences as Winton’s mother and Jonathan Pryce as the older Blake (and Ziggy Heath his younger self) while Samantha Spiro makes a reasonably convincing Rantzen lookalike. It has an undeniable BBC TV drama feel to it all, but the story it tells certainly warrants the big screen. (MAC)
Oppenheimer (12A)
Adapted from the 2005 biography American Prometheus, with seven Oscar wins (Film, Director, Actor and Supporting Actor among them) an, writer-director Christopher Nolan delivers his finest work to date, a triumphant biopic of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the man who created the Atom Bomb and, as the film unambiguously avers, consigned the world to eventual destruction at its own hand. As Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”.
Unfolding over a gripping three hours that embraces courtroom procedural, character study and thriller (a feeling accentuated by the score), it moves back in forth in time, framed by and intercutting with Fusion (filmed in black and white) and Fission (in colour). The former is a recreation of the 1959 Cabinet hearings to confirm Lewis Strauss (Supporting Actor nominee Robert Downey Jr.), former head of the US Atomic Energy Commission and a politician closely linked to Oppenheimer (Best Actor nominee Cillian Murphy), as Secretary of Commerce, the latter the loaded behind closed doors McCarthy-era 1954 AEC enquiry driven by attorney Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) to determine if a scapegoated Oppenheimer was a loyal American and should retain his security clearance or not. The theme of American creating and then destroying its heroes when they become an annoyance has been done before, but rarely as well as this.
There’s a few scenes involving the younger Oppenheimer, an ambitious Jewish theorist in the new field of quantum physics, his on-off affair with Jean (Florence Pugh), a Communist Party member, an accusation also levelled at him (he was actually a political agnostic), and his early days teaching and working at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett). The heart of the film, however, focuses on the 1940s when, following events leading up to the 1945 Trinity bomb test, he’s enlisted by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head up the Manhattan Project, which, at a secluded purpose built desert town of Los Alamos in New Mexico, gathered together America’s top scientists and engineers to build the first atomic weapon, initially to beat Nazi Germany to the punch and, when Hitler fell, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more as a demonstration of capability than to bring Japan to submission.
As such, this element of the film is dense in its exploration of moral quandaries about the gulf between idea and application, Oppenheimer’s guilt-haunted but very real concerns about the potential for a nuclear arms race with Russia and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb while the 50s section concerns the emotional and political fallout, the Cabinet hearings revealing his betrayal by the self-serving Strauss, the Salieri to his Mozart, smarting over an earlier humiliation at a congressional hearing,
Alongside a stunning and physically transformative haunting and haunted performance by Murphy with a mastery of a dead-eyed stare, coming to realise the consequences of his arrogance, Downey Jr at the very peak of his powers and a wonderfully prickly Damon, the film is populated by solid supporting turns from the likes Rami Malik, Casey Affleck’s military intelligence officer, Benny Safdie as Hungarian physicist and H-bomb advocate Edward Teller), Gary Oldman as President Truman (scathingly dismissing Oppenheimer as a cry-baby) Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer’s sometime mentor, and Emily Blunt who, as Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife Kitty, an ex-Party member, delivers a last act Best Supporting Actress nomination, while Tom Conti gets to cameo as a convincing Albert Einstein in a pivotal scene shown from three very different perspectives.
Avoiding CGI in favour of optical effects and punctuating the film with images of fiery infernos and exploding stars, it’s visually awe-inspiring and transfixing for every second of the running time. “Try not to set the sky on fire”, jokes Groves before the red button is pressed. Nolan has lit up the whole cinematic universe. (Now)
Past Lives (12A)
Unfolding over 24 years, in two 12-year intervals, played out in Seoul, Toronto and New York, writer-director and erstwhile playwright Celine Song’s semi-autobiographical debut is a beguiling bittersweet thwarted love story about unresolved feelings. It opens with a voiceover pondering what three people in a New York bar are talking about and what their relationship may be. They are aspiring playwright Nora (Greta Lee), her fellow writer husband Arthur (John Magaro) and childhood friend and crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and to explore the connections, the film first flashes back 24 years to Korea where Nora, then Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), are academically competitive classmates and budding sweethearts. However, romance is curtailed when her family announces they are emigrating to Canada. The pair part on a somewhat sour note and it’s 12 years before, he still living at home and hanging out with his mates, she now in Toronto, reconnect through Facebook, he tracking her down through her filmmaker father’s page, and then Skype, conduction a flirtatious virtual romance (she recommends him to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ) before realising he’s never coming there and she’s not going back, she shuts it all down.
Twelve more years later, Nora now having married Arthur, who she met at a writing retreat, and rarely speaking Korean, Hae Sung, who has broken up with his girlfriend comes to New York, where she now lives, for a few days, ostensibly as part of his engineering studies, and the two meet up, their meetings causing both to reassess how they feel about each other and what might have been. The title refers to the Buddhist concept of inyun, a belief that some souls are connected through time and past incarnations, somehow fated to be together.
Beautifully framed and photographed (the virtually wordless scene by the fairground carousel and the pair riding a ferry boat around the Statue of Liberty are magical), sublimely directed by Song and exquisitely acted by the three leads, the soulful, reserved Yoo, an understated Marago, who wryly describes himself as “the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny”, and the luminous Lee, it pulses with suppressed emotions, captured in longing looks or the subtle chance in a facial expression, but never falls prey to sentimentality as, subtly also exploring the immigrant experience and indemnity confusions, it builds to a denouement that is both heartbreaking and glowing with joy.
You can feel the echoes of films like David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, but Song has created her own individual and unique vision of their timeless story. An unquestionable film of the year, as Nora and Hae Sung are given to saying when things overwhelm then, ‘whoa’ indeed. (Apple TV+, Netflix)
Perfect Days (PG)
Directed by Wim Wenders, set in Tokyo, this has a very simple premise, Every day Hirayama (a terrific Kôji Yakusho), wakes up in his sparsely furnished apartment, tends his plants, puts on his blue jumpsuit, gets a coffee from the machine and then gets into his van and, listening to the music (Lou Reed, The Kinks, The Animals, Van Morrison, Nina Simone), on his cassettes, drives off to clean the public toilets in the city’s Shibuya district with the same pristine care and attention to detail that he affords his seedlings, breaking only to have a sandwich in the park and take photographs of the treetops, going to a hole in the wall restaurant on the way home and using the public washrooms to clean himself up. On days off, he does his laundry and gets his pictures developed. Sometimes he goes to a bookshop to pick up a copy of Patricia Highsmith or William Faulkner which he reads by lamplight.
It’s the same routine, but each vignette adds something new to Hiaryama’s exterior and interior life. A half-hearted co-worker (Tokio Emoto) eager to impress the girl (Aoi Yamada), he fancies (who ‘borrows’ one of the cassettes after hearing Patti Smith sing Redondo Beach) and taps him up for a loan and use of the van; a woman who sits near him in the park; a new assistant, and a visit by his teenage niece (Arisa Nakano), who’s run off from his estranged wealthy, overbearing sister (Yumi Aso). And then there’s his literal and figurative black and white dreams of the trees and other motifs. And a regular visit to the bar where the hostess (Sayuri Ishikawa), who gives him free drinks, sings The House Of The Rising Sun in Japanese. At times we get a glimpse of the life he left behind. And perhaps why.
Poetic and lyrical, with only the barest of dialogue, it’s a film about being at peace with life and embracing it with serenity, however mundane or unprepossessing it might be, enjoying its simple pleasures, imbued with the spirits of both Chaplin and Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, it’s quite beautiful. (Sat/Sun: Mockingbird)
Polite Society (12)
The feature debut by British writer-director Nida Manzoor, creator of the TV series We Are Lady Parts, mashes up a whole bagful of genres, pouring coming-of-age high school comedy, Bollywood movie, martial arts flick and even references to Jane Austen into the blender and pouring out the results in a glorious smoothie that may not be nutritious but is crammed with fun and flavour.
With an almost entirely Pakistani cast, it’s set in London where, much to the mortification of her traditional career-seeking parents (Shobu Kapoor, Jeff Mirza), teenager Ria Khan (engaging newcomer Priya Kansara) dreams of becoming a female stuntwoman – The Fury – like her idol, real-life British stuntwoman Eunice Huthart, whose signature flying kick she consistently fails to pull off. She’s besties with her older sister, Lena (Umbrella Academy’s Ritu Arya) and constantly needles her to resume her art school studies after having dropped out in a self-confidence crisis, things often getting out of hand as they squabble.
So, she’s horrified when they’re both forced to attend an end of Eid party hosted by one of her mother’s wealthy acquaintances, the imperious and condescending Raheela Shan (Nimra Bucha) and even more so when she learns that Lena is not only dating her geneticist son of Salim (Akshay Khanna) but has also gotten engaged (she apparently has a perfect womb) and will be taking off to Singapore immediately after the wedding.
And so, with the help of her uncool school chums Alba and Clara (Ella Bruccoleri and Seraphina Beh adding solid comedic support), she sets out on a plan to sabotage things, initially looking to try diplomacy but rapidly escalating to trying to dig up dirt (including disguising themselves as men to infiltrate his gym) and, when that fails, invent some (at one point she breaks into the house to scatter used condoms).
It is, as everyone observes, all totally out of proportion. Until, that is, Ria discovers exactly what Salim and Raheela are up to (a touch of Jordan Peele here), at which point it becomes a frantic race by the three friends to stop the wedding before it’s too late.
With a winkingy gleeful and knowingly ludicrous screenplay that, refreshingly peppered with all the sensibilities and sweariness of modern Pakistani youth pulls together Bash Street Kids escapades, torture by waxing, all female martial arts fights (including one with well-trained beauticians), a Bollywood dance sequence and yellow chapter title cards with a clear nod to Tarantino/Rodriguez grindhouse. Vastly funnier than What’s Love Got To With It (and certainly with loads more stunts), further adventures by the Khan sisters would not go amiss. (Sky Cinema)
Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire (12)
The first half of writer-director Zack Snyder’s sci fi saga (with an extended version and Part 2 due in 2024), this is basically a cobbling together of Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai if you’re more arty). Set in the far future where an evil Empire, loyal to a king (Cary Elwes) assassinated along with his wife and healing-powered daughter Issa at the latter’s coronation, command being taken by the senator Balisarius (Fra Fee) who now ruthlessly seeks to conquer the rest of the galaxy, and with the aid of sadistic and not entirely all-human Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who commands the Imperium, the Motherworld’s infantry, put down the rebel insurgency known as Clan Bloodaxe.
It opens on Veldt, a near barren planet where, struggling to raise a harvest, a community of farmers are visited by Noble to appropriate the resources, killing the leader, Father Sindri, as an example, ordering them to have the grain ready when he returns. However, seeing a band of soldiers about to rape a young girl, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a stoical woman rescued some years back from a crashed craft and, as is revealed in chunks of exposition, having a backstory as a high ranking officer in the Imperium forces, fights back, killing them with the help of disillusioned soldier Private Aris (Sky Yang) and, warning that when Noble returns he will destroy everything, teaming up with defiant farmer Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) on a mission to recruit a band of fighters to resist them.
With black marketer and mercenary Kai (Charlie Hunnam in what initially seems to be the Han Solo role), they planet hop as, through individual episodes, one of which involved a child-killing mutant female spider-creature (Jena Malone), they swell the ranks with beast tamer blacksmith Tarak (Staz Nair), cyborg swordswoman, Nemesis (Doona Bai), disgraced Imperium commander General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and, finally, Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher) who brings along half his crew while sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) remains in charge of the other. Come the end of the first half, as Noble and his army come calling and there’s an unexpected act of betrayal, not everyone survives for Part Two.
Unabashedly derivative, generic and unavoidably attracting unfavourable comparisons to the film’s it pillories, even so it does deliver a solid dose of high octane action and slo mo battle scenes, even if the character development seems to have been held back for the longer cut, setting up an assortment of narrative threads to be developed in the sequel along with, one suspects, a bigger role for Anthony Hopkins who provides the voice for the peace-seeking Jimmy, the last of a race of mechanical knights, who, sporting a garland of flowers round his head, is recruited by Kora. Having rather laboriously delivered over two hours of set-up, hopefully The Scargiver will be a pay-off worth waiting for. (Netflix)
Rustin (15)
While Martin Luther King is an iconic historical figure in the fight for civil rights, rather less well-known, but whose input was of equal significance, is Bayard Rustin, a man with a dream of his own. It was Rustin, a queer African-American activist, who, in the face of resistance from opponents within the Civil Rights movement, campaigned, fought for and organised the famous August 28 1963 peaceful protest march on Washington where King delivered his inspirational “I have a dream” speech.
Directed by George C. Wolfe, the film charts the long journey to that pivotal moment, starting back in in 1960, when Rustin (a stupendous Colman Domingo), inspired by Gandhi’s non-violence stance, seeks to persuade his friend Martin (Aml Ameen) to lead a march of 5,000 people. However, the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), led by Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), and Republic Senator. Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright) are opposed to the plan and, whether or not they were the source, rumours of a sexual relationship between “the King and his queen” leads him to tender his resignation, which, to his shock, King accepts, thereby breaching the friendship until Rustin swallowed his pride and called on King to work with him on the 1963 march.
Although the Supreme Court had rules segregation unconstitutional in 1954, in reality little had changed in the American South and Rustin believed that, bringing together people from across America, his proposed march would show solidarity. Again, while trade unionist A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman), with whom he’d worked on an aborted similar protest in the 40s (setting up a flashback as to how a police beating disfigured his face), and fellow activist Medgar Evers (Rashad Demond Edwards) had his back, the NAACP dug their heels in. The film unfolds, then as Rustin, reunited with King, works to change minds and, with an army of volunteers, raise the money for buses to bring supporters to Washington, the initial two-day sit-in eventually reduced to one. Alongside this, the film also explores his homosexuality, primarily through an affair with Elias Taylor (Johnny Ramey), a fictional married Black preacher, and the clear but unconsummated sexual tension with younger white assistant, Tom (Gus Halper). Peppered with a raft of cameos that include Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mahalia Jackson, CCH Pounder as civil rights leader Dr Anna Hedgeman, and Audra McDonald as activist Anna Baker, it’s somewhat let down by its clumsy exposition and one-note pacing, but the story it tells and the charisma of its lead carry it through. (Netflix)
Saltburn (15)
Actress turned novelist turned Killing Eve head writer turned writer-director, Emerald Fennell follows up her Promising Young Woman debut with a very English caustically satirical psychological drama that turns the knife on the English class system, starting out as Evelyn Waugh journeying through Cruel Intentions and ending with a coda straight out Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley.
Set in 2006, Barry Keoghan is Merseyside teen Oliver Quick, who, the product of a working class broken home (disreputable dead, mum alcoholic) who has earned a scholarship to Oxford (Fennell’s own alma mater). A bright but awkward, shy outsider, he’s looked down on by his college contemporaries but is taken under the wing of aristocratic fellow student and party animal Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) after lending him his bike when his own has a puncture. Touched by the sob story of his life and the fact his drug addict dad’s just died, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his resolutely blueblood eccentric (they gather round to watch Superbad) family’s palatial Saltburn estate (telling him that Waugh apparently used the family and house as his model for Brideshead Revisited). Along with the humourless butler (Paul Rhys) and assorted gardeners, the sprawling mansion’s populated by his somewhat dim father Sir James (Richard E Grant clearly having huge fun), emotionally damaged bulimic sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), sponging American mixed-race cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a rival for Felix’s favours, lingering faded glamour houseguest “poor dear Pamela” (a marvellous if almost unrecognisable Carey Mulligan)) and, in a gloriously showstopping performance of razor sharp comic timing and delivery, Rosamund Pike as blissfully privileged, prejudiced and stupid ex-model mother Elsbeth whose explanation as to why she gave up her flirtation with lesbianism is just one of her many hilarious straightfaced lines. She takes a shine to Oliver as, in a more physical way does Ventetia, who, though contemptuous of him, hangs around under his window at night and is rewarded with some steamy oral sex despite being on her period, even though, as a scene lapping up his bathwater makes clear, he’d rather have sex with Felix. As the summer wears on, however, despite the homoerotic electricity things eventually sour between the two friends when, in Felix taking him on a surprise well-meaning visit to his now cleaned-up mother, it turns out Oliver’s not been entirely honest about his upbringing.
Shot in a square ratio, framed with to-camera recollections by Oliver and peppered with laugh out loud deadpan dialogue, there’s also some wonderful quirks such as carving the name of family members and friends who die on a stone and tossing it into the water (let’s just say there’s a fair few extra pebbles by the end) and an audacious use of music that embraces Handel’s Zadok the Priest. the Cheeky Girls’ Have A Cheeky Christmas and a toe-curling karaoke rendition of Flo-Rida’s Low.
Although Pike is the scene-stealer, the performances throughout are consistently sharp with Keoghan utterly magnetic in expressions that shift from doleful to toxic in a blink and bravely quite literally letting it all hang out in the final scene. It might not be quite as ingenious and provocatively original as its predecessor, but even so it’s gold class filmmaking. (Amazon Prime)
Seize Them! (15)
Patently drawing on the likes of Monty Python, Horrible Histories, Blackadder, and even the Carry On series, this is a Dark Ages mismatched buddies road movie comedy that is mildly amusing rather than actually funny, the jokes laboured and worked to death. The egotistical and not a little cruel and vain ruler of the land, Queen Dagen (Aimee Lou Wood, deserving of much better) is overthrown in a peasants’ uprising led by Humble Joan (Nicola Coughlan, a sort of mini Dawn French), who has discovered the secret of gunpowder (and built cannons to go with it) narrowly escaping with her life thanks to her servant Shulmay (a lively Lolly Adefope), whose name of course she doesn’t know. With Joan and the traitorous Leofwine (Jessica Hynes) in pursuit, joined by Bobik (Nick Frost who seems to have found his level), a dim-witted shit-shoveller with aspirations to a noble life, heading for the coast to strike up an alliance with a couple of Scandinavian kings (Paul Kaye, John MacMillan) who’ve promised to help restore her to the throne. Naturally, secrets will be revealed about Dagen’s misguided resentment of her late mother as the journey becomes one to self-awareness and a resolution to be a better person.
With a cast that also includes Jason Barnett as Thane Tostig and James Acaster as Felix the Ironmonger, and a screenplay that revels in listings some forty shades of shit, there’s times when, even at a trim running time, it feels dragged out and any intended satirical commentary about self-serving political agendas in the name of the people rather lost in the mud. Not a patch on those from which it borrows, but inoffensive enough. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Mockingbird; Omniplex Great Park)
Spaceman (12)
Adam Sandler again proves his serious dramatic chops as Commander Jakub Procházka, a Czech astronaut who is 6 months into a yearlong mission to investigate a mysterious purple cloud of dust, named Chopra, beyond Jupiter, before South Korea gets there. During a televised Q&A a girl asks if he’s lonely, top which he reels of platitudes about space exploration and says no. He is, though, struggling with the isolation, a malfunctioning toilet and the fact he can’t get in touch with his pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan). Indeed, she’s finally had enough of his constant physical and emotional distance and has sent a message saying she’s leaving him. This, however, has been blocked by the head of the Euro Space programme, Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini) and his controller Peter (Kunal Nayyar) fobs him off by saying the link is having technical issues. Needless to say, Jakub doesn’t let on to ground control about his mental state
Shortly after, having dreamt of a spider crawling from his mouth, Jakub actually discovers a spider-like creature (voiced by Paul Dano like an arachnid HAL) with telepathic abilities inside one of the compartments who, eventually (and touchingly) named Hanuš, explains he is the last of his race and was studying human life when Jakub’s emotions caught his attention. As Hanuš explores the memories of this “skinny human” we learn about Jakub’s past, how his father, an informant of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and was killed when Jakub was young, and how he met Lenka but is riddled with guilt for the way he neglected her, not least in abandoning her for another mission when she had a miscarriage.
Directed by Johan Renck and adapted from Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel Spaceman of Bohemia, it clearly has aspiration to be a variant on Tarkovsky’s Solaris, viewers left to ponder if Hanuš is real or a projection of the self-absorbed Jakub’s guilt and anxieties, leading him to seek forgiveness, or indeed exactly what Chopra, which the dying spider says contains the Beginnings of the universe where every moment of time exists simultaneously, represents.
While there’s scenes back in the command centre and with Lenka and her mother (Lena Olin), this is primarily a two hander between Sandler and Dano and, as such, both deliver terrific work in unfolding its existential musings on one’s place in the great scheme of things (with touches of humour such as Hanuš getting a taste for hazelnut spread and Jakub having to spot the sponsor’s AntiQuease commercial message before he broadcasts). There’s areas that could have been further developed in terms of back story and the related feelings, but, while slow to unfold, the cinematography and the core performances bring the melancholia home. (Netflix)
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (PG)
Five years ago, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse introduced cinema audiences to Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a Black Hispanic Brooklyn teenager who gained superpowers when he was bitten by an electromagnetic spider and then found out he was just one of hundreds of spider-powered entities existing on a multitude of different Earths across the multiverse. It also revolutionised animation with its jawdropping mix of retro comic book, Cubism and pop art. The much anticipated sequel takes all that and hypercharges it into a trippy, at times hallucinogenic, kinetic rush that feels like maxed out ADHD that can be exhausting to watch but also delivering exhilaration to every fibre of your being.
It starts, though, on Earth-65 with moody rock drummer Gwen Stacey (Hailee Stanfield), the white-clad Spider-Woman of her world, who’s having problems with her law enforcement father (Shea Whigham) who believes her alter ego was responsible for the death of his daughter’s best friend, Peter Parker (who had transformed into The Lizard). When, following a battle with a DaVinci-sketch looking version of The Vulture, she finally reveals her secret identity, looking to explain and hoping for understanding, he just reads her her rights. Bitterly disappointed, she flees into the Spider-Verse using a device given to her by Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), a pregnant African-American Spider-Woman who helped subdue The Vulture, recruits her as part of the Spider-Society, a team policing the different dimensions.
Meanwhile, back on Earth-1610, now 15, while Spider-Man is famous superhero who was a guest host on Jeopardy and made a commercial endorsing baby powder), Miles is en route to a meeting with his school counsellor and concerned helicopter parents Rio (Luna Lauren Vélez) and newly promoted police captain Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry) for which he’s already late, he’s sidetracked when he runs into someone robbing a local store, a faceless white figures covered in black splodges which are, in fact, portals, through which he or just parts of his body can travel, with whom he gets involved in a running battle. Calling himself The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), this new supervillain was once Jonathan Ohnn (Jason Schwartzman), a scientist who worked for Alchemax, who became what he is today as a result of the collider implosion caused by Miles in the first film. Now he’s looking for revenge by ruining Miles’s life, just as he ruined his. And he’s found his holes can take him into the multiverse.
The central thrust begins as Miles secretly follows Gwen into the Spider-Verse (including a visit to Lego Earth) where he’s reunited with his old mentor, Peter Parker Jake Johnson, who, married to Mary Jane, now has a baby called May, with similar powers, and is confronted by the scarred, humourless Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), the “ninja vampire” of Earth 2099 who runs Spider-Man HQ who explains that having, in an earlier sequence where he and Gwen wound up in Mumbattan and he saved the life of the police captain father of the girlfriend of Spider-Man India (Karan Soni), he disrupted a canonical event. In other words, each Earth’s arachnid adventurer have things in common, being bitten by a spider, the murder of Uncle Ben (or Uncle Aaron – Mahershala Ali – in Miles’s case) …and the tragic death of a police captain. Now he’s thrown everything off-kilter and put the integrity of the entire Spider-Verse at risk. More than that, Miles learns that he’s an anomaly and became Spider-Man by error, that he wasn’t the one the mechanoid was supposed to bite, meaning there is an Earth without a Spider-Man where the storyline unfolded in a much darker manner. Thus Miles is declared Spider Public Enemy No 1 and with Miguel and countless variations in pursuit, he, Gwen, and Hobie Brown aka Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), a Mohawked Londoner with a guitar strapped to his back who’s animated like a living Sex Pistols album cover, have to stop The Spot and save the entire Spider-Verse, not to mention his and Gwen’s fathers by preventing the canon from playing out.
The dazzling animation is eye-popping, often shifting styles and colours within the same scene, close-ups showing the comic-book dot textures of the characters’ skins, driving things along at hyperspeed but also finding time out for quieter, more tender moments such as Miles and Gwen hanging out (upside down) on the dome of the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower that add further resonance to the film’s central theme about the weight of responsibility (an emotional depth that has always distinguished Marvel comics) and the painful journey to self-discovery. There’s a lot of fun too as, along with a joke about the redundancy of saying Chai tea, it wheels out such web-slinging variations as Spider-Horse, Spider-Car, Spider-Cat, and the virtual reality Spider-Byte, interjecting the animation with live action that includes clips from both the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield movies, a brief visit to a convenience store in Eddie Brock’s world and a wordless cameo from Donald Glover as The Prowler (another variation of whom provides a last moments shocker).
Driven by a brilliant score, as the first of the two part sequel, it ends, of course on a cliffhanger setting up Beyond The Spider-Verse. That won’t arrive until next year, by which time your pulse rate might just have slowed down enough to handle it. (Amazon Prime)
Talk To Me (15)
Transitioning from YouTube horror, Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou make their directorial feature debut with an assured entry into the familiar don’t mess with the afterlife genre that brings a fresh approach to well-worn tropes and a whole new meaning to the phrase talk to the hand. Opening with a stabbing and a shocking violent suicide at a party and a genuinely disturbing night scene where a car hits a kangaroo which is left dying in the road ( a sure nod to the deer in Jordan Peele’s Get Out), the narrative hinges on the hand of a dead psychic which, encased in ceramics, those looking for a thrill are encouraged to clasp, making contact with a spirit and saying ‘Talk to me’ and then ‘I invite you in’, whereby they’re taken over and have scary visions, but have to blow out the candle and let go after 90 seconds so that they don’t remain possessed.
One such is black teenager Mia (sterling newcomer Sophie Wilde) who was driving the car that hit the kangaroo and while her surrogate younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) begged her to end its misery, she was unable to bring herself to do so. Following her mother’s death, a gulf has opened up between Mia and her brooding father Max (Marcus Johnson), leading her to spend much of her time at Riley’s house with his big sister and her best friend (Alexandra Jensen), their take no shit mother Sue (veteran Australian star Miranda Otto), working nights This allows them to sneak out to a party hosted by Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio), who initiate a hand session, everyone treating the gross-outs like some sort of supernatural high and a big laugh to be shared on social media.
Naturally, it all goes to shit, staring off with Jade’s ultra-Christian boyfriend Daniel (Otis Dhanji) being taken over by a horny spirit (cue a later foot sucking scene), Mia becoming hooked and going back over and over and Riley volunteering and being possessed by Mia’s dead mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen) who tries to reconcile with her daughter, leading to the time limit being exceeded. All of which results in Mia being ostracised by Jade and Sue following two graphically violent convulsive suicide attempts by Riley whose spirit Mia is shown being tortured in limbo, with killing him the only way to set him free, and her learning the truth behind her mother’s death.
With a subtext about bored youth seeking ever extreme kicks as they sink into addiction (viral and otherwise) along with the trauma of guilt and loss, the pace never slackens as the intensity builds, and while the idea that the dead really are not to be trusted may be well-worn and the narrative is overtaken by the chaos, the brothers still manage to squeeze some decent jolts before the big final twist that leaves things open for a sequel. (Netflix)
Terminal (15)
Vaughn Stein’s hard-boiled noir pastiche, clearly taking its inspiration from Sin City (and Waiting For Godot) and forever referencing Alice in Wonderland, has accrued some particularly damning reviews, but it’s nowhere near as awful as they make it seem. A futuristic sci fi plot twisting revenge thriller, it stars Margot Robbie as Bonnie, a femme fatale female assassin who sets out to win the business of a mysterious crime boss by proving she can turn his current hitmen for hire, Vince (Dexter Fletcher) and Alfred (Max Irons) against each other, to which end she also plays the role of sardonic but sweet diner waitress Annie who lends a friendly ear and some pragmatic advice to Bill (Simon Pegg), an English teacher who’s dying of cancer and looking to end it quicker, and also hooks up with Alfred who, along with Vince, is holed up in a hotel room waiting to be given their target.
Pretty much all of this takes place around a rundown railway station populated only by a limping janitor (Mike Myers in his first film in almost a decade) who shuffles around whistling Danny Boy, and all of which is monitored by an unseen figure on a bank of television screens. There’s also a lot of toing and froing involving briefcases concealed in the station lockers.
As it gathers to the climax, all manner of twists – one especially audacious – are rolled out that tie things together and, while the direction can be stiff and the dialogue cringeworthy, there’s enough of a potential cult air about it to warrant a place on the platform. (Arrow)
The Three Musketeers Pt 1: D’Artagnan (15)
Written in 1844 by Alexandre Dumas, there’s been over 40 big and small screen adaptations but this stirringly and sumptuously directed by Martin Bourboulon is the best in a long while, even if some of the actors do bear a passing resemblance to those in the BBC serial. Largely faithful to the novel (although here Porthos is bisexual and Athos’s marital backstory is somewhat reworked), it starts off in 1627 with the impulsive, puppyish Charles D’Artagnan of Gascony (a wildly charismatic François Civil) setting off with a letter of recommendation to train as a Musketeer and serve Louis XIII. Before he gets there, however, he’s involved in an attack on a woman in a carriage and ends up being shot and buried in a shallow grave. Not actually wounded, however, he claws his way out and gets to Paris where he’s taken in as a cadet by the captain of the musketeers, Tréville (Marc Barbé), but he’s barely dismounted before he finds himself facing three separate (and banned) duels, his opponents all turning out to be the legendary musketeers, Athos (Vincent Cassel bringing due gravitas), the rumbustious Porthos (Pio Marmai) and Aramis (Roman Duris), who can’t seem to balance his womanising and spiritual duties.
However, after dispatching the guards under the command of the duplicitous Cardinal Richelieu (Eric Ruf), he finds favour with the King (a spry Louis Garrel) and, more so, his (here unmarried) landlady, Constance (Lyna Khoudri), trusted confidante to the Queen (Vicky Krieps), Anne of Austria, the thrilling plot breathlessly unfolding to involve a conspiracy by the Protestants, loyal to England, and Richelieu to bring down the monarchy and spark war with England, which Louis’s brother Gaston advises while being railroaded into marrying, Athos being framed for murder and sentenced to death, and D’Artagnan’s frantic dash to England to recover a diamond necklace given to the Queen by Louis, which she’s given to her English lover the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who’s insisting she wear it at the wedding. During which time his path frequently crosses that of Milady (the ever excellent Eva Green), Richelieu’s spy who’s also been charged with recovering the diamonds on his behalf.
The core cast sparking with chemistry, all of this rattles along with brilliantly staged long take swashbuckling derring-do action sequences that are on a period par with John Wick, meticulous costuming, smart repartee, dark skullduggery, unexpected twists, romance, superb widescreen and camera swooping photography with its sepia tones and use of candles, a thrilling adrenaline ride that leaves you wanting more. (Now, Sky Go)
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (12A)
Adapted by Rachel Joyce from her own 2012 novel and directed by Hettie Macdonald, this tells how, learning his old work colleague Queenie (a briefly seen Linda Bassett) friend is in a hospice with cancer, retired pensioner Harold (Jim Broadbent), inspired by an anecdote about giving hope from a young woman in a petrol station, resolves to walk all the 500 miles (thankfully no Proclaimers on the soundtrack, the songs provided by folkie Sam Lee) from his home in Devon to see her in Berwick-On-Tweed and hand deliver the letter he’d originally intended to post, much to the displeasure of his grouchy wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton, holding up her own with a finely tuned performance veined with pain, bitterness and grief).
It’s hard not to draw comparisons with 2021’s The Last Bus in which Tim Spall played a pensioner who, using his free bus pass, travels from John O’Groats to Land’s End England, to return to where he and his wife grew up and scatter her ashes, becoming, as here, a media event and accruing a virtual and physical following in the process.
That, however, felt more credible than Harold’s journey (for which he’s poorly equipped without even a map) during which he sends his money and credit cards home and gets back to nature sleeping rough, eating wild fruit and accepting the charity of strangers, and, naturally, there’s an underlying back story revealed in flashbacks that involves a family heartbreak (cue flashbacks to a drug addict son), a marriage that’s gone off the boil that needs to recover the spark, and an attempt to regain a sense of purpose.
Like Spall, Broadbent disappears into his character, even if this is now rather familiar territory for him, and, the film keeps the tweeness dialled down as it present a warts and all snapshot of contemporary Britain, but ultimately, you may feel worn out long before Harold does. (Sky Cinema)
Wicked Little Letters (15)
Rivalling The Great as the sweariest period dramady ever, but with a real sense of exuberance to letting rip, set in the West Sussex coastal town of Littlehampton, director Thea Sharrock’s dark comedy is actually based on a real life scandal from the 1920s. A middle-aged spinster still living with her puritan mother Victorian (Gemma Jones) and domineering blustering father Edward (Timothy Spall), pious Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) starts receiving foul-mouthed anonymous letters, the missives subsequently extending to numerous other residents.
The finger of suspicion points to Edith’s neighbour and former friend, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), an Irish immigrant single mother with a young daughter (Alisha Weir), black lover (Malachi Kirby) and a fondness for drink and free-spirited ways, she being duly arrested, despite lack of any actual evidence, by the police in the shape of officious prejudiced Chief Constable Spedding (Paul Chahidi) and his toadying subordinate Constable Papperwick (Hugh Skinner). Only WPC Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) is of the belief that Rose is innocent, but her ideas (like checking handwriting) are naturally pooh-poohed and she’s patronisingly dismissed by the patriarchy on account of being a woman (suffragettes should be locked up) and coloured. She, however, recruits a gaggle of local eccentrics (Joanna Scanlan, Eileen Atkins, Lolly Adefope) to help track down the real culprit.
Although the motives are never really examined, the reveal as to the actual letter writer comes about midway and isn’t that hard to guess, the narrative then moving to obtaining proof while the sanctimonious Edith, seeing herself as a martyr (“By my suffering, do I not move closer to heaven?”), basks in her notoriety in the papers and the clock counts down to Rose’s trial (Jason Watkins as the prosecuting counsel) and a certain guilty verdict, with the ensuing loss of custody of her daughter.
The direction and Jonny Sweet’s screenplay loses impetus midway before regrouping for the eventual expose, but it never loses sights of its underlying subtexts of racism, hypocrisy, religious narrow-mindedness, domestic violence and the misogynistic oppression of women. Colman and Buckley, who also co-starred in The Lost Daughter, are of course superlative, digging deep into characters that might be otherwise slightly one-dimensional, the former relishing the liberation of the expletives while Spall, barking them out in full voice, is wonderfully monstrous as Edward and Vasan is an absolute delight as a woman who refuses to be handcuffed by the blinkered social attitudes of those in charge. It could be funnier, it could be sharper and it could be better paced, but even so it’s still hugely entertaining. (Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Wonka (PG)
Right up there at the top of quality street, celebrations are in order for this fabulous prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Family, one that may be sweeter in tone to the average Roald Dahl story but still has room for his grotesque villains. Co-written by Paddington 2’s Simon Farnaby with director Paul King, it’s an origin story that opens with a young magician Willy Wonka (an effortlessly charming Timothée Chalamet in top hat and purple coat) returning home after seven years at sea to pursue his dream of becoming the world’s greatest chocolatier, one instilled in him by his late mother (Sally Hawkins), whose hand-signed chocolate bar he carries with him along with her promise that she’d be with him when he sold his first chocolate.
As such he sets off to Paris, intending to set up shop in the Galeries Gourmet only, thanks to kind heart, carelessness and a fine for daydreaming, he find himself penniless and is duped by the unscrupulous Dickensian yellow-toothed innkeeper Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman), who, with her dimwit henchman, Bleacher (Tom Davis), a couple surely inspired by The Twits, runs a scam whereby guests who don’t read the small print wind up as unpaid labour in her laundry business. Here he finds himself working along fellow victims former accountant, Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter), telephone operator Lottie Bell (Rakhee Thakrar), plumber Piper Benz (Natasha Rothwell), aspirant naff comedian Larry Chucklesworth (Rich Fulcher) and Noodle (a scene stealing Calah Lane), a smart orphan dropped down the laundry chute as an infant and “taken in” for a lifetime of servitude by Mrs. Scrubbit and whose backstory is a pivotal plot point.
However, she and Wonka come up with a plan that allows him to sneak out and try and sell his chocolates which, in turn, causes him to fall further foul of the chocolate cartel, Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton), who retches evert time he hears the word poor, and who, along with the corrupt chocaholic chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key) and in cahoots with an equally corrupt priest (Rowan Atkinson), band together to ensure he’ll never be competition to their high-priced confectionary. He also finds himself with a problem in that at night his chocolates keep getting stolen by a tiny green-haired orange man, who, it transpires, is an Oompa Loompa, who’s on a mission to collect the debt Wonka owes for having unwittingly ‘stolen’ his island’s cocoa pods.
And when, with the help of his fellow laundry inmates, he does manage to open an emporium for his fantastical endorphins-packed mood changing chocolates (among them hoverchocs with encased bugs which make you fly), success turns to failure through the dirty tricks of Scrubbit and the cartel, the trio of villains forcing him to make a deal to leave town and, eventually, when they attempt to expose them, consigning Willy and Noodle to a literal death by chocolate.
A wildly colourful affair, crammed with contraptions (Willy’s suitcase is a chocolatier’s answer to Newt Scamander’s in Fabulous Beasts), comedy capers and all manner of exotic chocolates, not to mention a giraffe that Willy milks to make his candies, the selection box is also packed with a galaxy of fabulously choreographed and sung song and dance routines (Chalamet is a treat at both), reprising Pure Imagination from the 1971 film as well as Grant doing the Oompa Loompa alongside new numbers such as the catchy A World of Your Own by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy who, like King, clearly had Mary Poppins in mind as a template. Raising the bar for Christmas movies, it’s an absolute chocolate fountain delight that should become a seasonal staple. (Omniplex Great Park)
You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah! (12)
One of Netflix’s biggest hits, though produced by Adam Sandler he takes a backseat as, adapted by Alison Peck from Fiona Rosenbloom’s novel, he plays Danny Friedman, father to daughters Ronnie, the serious one, and the more immature Stacy, played respectively by his own daughters Sadie and Sunny, while reuniting with Uncut Gems co-star Idira Menzel as his wife. The younger of the two, Sunny is approaching her bat mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ritual at 13, in which she has to read passages from the Torah and devise a charity project. She, of course, is more concerned about the accompanying party as she and best friend Lydia (Samantha Lorraine), whose mother’s played by Sandler’s wife Jackie, enthusing over themes and what the future will hold, like adjoining homes in Taylor Swift’s Tribeca building. Lydia writes Stacy’s speech and she in turn offers to put together her entrance video biography.
Things, however, soon turn pear-shaped starting with Stacy leaping off a cliff into the water in order to impress her crush, class heartthrob Andy Goldfarb (Dylan Hoffman), resulting in a humiliating tampon moment, and a subsequent falling out with Lydia when she sees her kissing him, prompting the angry declaration of the title and a rather cruel revenge.
Comparisons with Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret are inevitable, not least in Stacy’s own chats with the Man Upstairs, while it also follows genre conventions such as the school’s catty queen bees, the embarrassing parents (Danny’s dad jokes), the shopping sequences and all those girls want to be grown up moments, here largely embodied in a geeky friend being excited to finally shave her legs.
Although it helps considerably if you’re familiar with Jewish culture to get the references and appreciate the jokes involving Jewish mothers, dads, grannies and aunts, it’s nevertheless all very sweet and consistently funny, the entire Sandler clan having solid comedic chops (though Sunny is undoubtedly the star turn) while great support comes from Sarah Sherman as the perky Rabbi Rebecca (who gets to sing God Is Random in response to her class asking why He allows injustice) and Ido Mosseri as the wildly over the top DJ Schmuley. Forget the invite, this is well worth crashing the party. (Netflix)
The Zone Of Interest (12A)
Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is a caring father to his five children while his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) runs the luxurious house and tends to their garden. They picnic by the riverside. She entertains friends and other wives, they have parties where the other children play on the water slide, and when her mother visits she’s much impressed with their successful lifestyle, with fine glasses and devoted servants. It’s a bucolic life.
Except on the other side of the garden wall, on which Hedwig has trailed plants to hide things, lies Auschwitz and Höss is its commander, the chimneys belching out some from the crematoriums and he sitting down with Nazi architects to calmly discuss building a bigger and more efficient set of ovens to “Burn, cool, unload, reload” and boost the ‘yield’. When, in Hitler’s favour, he’s promoted to oversee all the extermination camps and the Final Solution, and has to relocate, she, the Queen of Auschwitz, arranges to stay at the house
Winner of the Best International Feature Oscar, loosely adapted from Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel but here based on the life of the real Höss, for his long anticipated follow-up to Under The Skin, British writer-director Jonathan Glazer is here working in subtitled German, shooting on location (with a perfect recreation of the home) in flat tones and maintaining a detached observational and emotionally cold approach with very few close-ups as he addresses the banality of evil. We hear gunshots, we hear dogs, we hear cries, but we never see over the wall other than those smoke clouds, although there is a sequence when Höss takes the kids down to the river with his birthday kayak before rushing them out when he realises the water’s contaminated with the ashes of the dead. Only in the final moments does it venture inside, but only as a silent coda as the camera traces the harrowing exhibits in the modern day museum.
The horrors are all suggested; the fur coat Hedwig tries on, taken from a Jewish prisoner, the gold teeth the son plays with at night. Nor do we see any Jews other than those enlisted to work in the house of gardens. There are though three sequences shot in polarised black and white when the film shifts from the mundane reality into an almost dreamlike world with a young Partisan girl hiding fruit for camp prisoners. Fuelled by disquieting naturalistic performances, jarring burst of sound and suffused with a quiet, unspeakable anger for which words and graphic images are not enough (it opens with a seemingly interminable completely black screen), and while there are echoes of similarly located The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas it’s quite unlike any previous Holocaust film and it is chilling beyond belief. (Sun: Mockingbird)