This column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.
FILM OF THE WEEK
Megalopolis (15)
Between scathing reviews and accusations of inappropriate touching of female extras, Francis Ford Coppola’s long gestating vanity project, into which $120 million budget he sank his own money, is shaping up to be, as one critic put it, a megaflopolis. Certainly, its ambitions, in which it liberally quotes from Hamlet and Macbeth, far exceed while the often breathtaking visual images are counterpointed by dialogue and narrative shifts that are baffling and incoherent.
Set in alternative vision of New York rechristened New Rome (there’s even a chariot race at an excessive coliseum-staged wedding), the nuts and bolts come down to a power struggle between rival factions each with their own agenda. It’s lorded over by the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who wants to maintain the status quo and is at odds with Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), an architect who, though never explained how, has the ability to freeze time. He heads up the city’s Design Authority and is intent on sweeping way the old and replace it with his utopian vision of Megalopolis, constructed using a material with magical properties (again never explained) called Megalon. Those whose tenements he, in a flamboyantly orchestrated manner, demolishes are not best pleased with his makeover plans, but it does open up an opportunity for his devious cousin Clodio Pulcher (a delightfully oily Shia LaBeouf) to use the mob anger to fuel his own ambitions to rule the city. His father’s multi-billionaire power broker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), who, later in the film, marries TV reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), who’s also been Cesar’s mistress. His wife’s dead, her body having mysteriously disappeared, which led him to being accused and acquitted of her murder, the case prosecuted by Cicero whose daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) ends up working for Cesar and the pair falling in love, much to the disapproval of her father and his cousin, who carries a torch for her.
These threads all entwine as plots and conspiracies are hatched, though trying to keep hold of them’s never easy as the film, part inspired by an actual coup in Ancient Rome involving figures called Cataline, Cicero and Caesar, ladles up influences and other classical references that include Siddhartha, Marcus Aurelius, and Sappho, the screen frequently splits into three while Laurence Fishburne as Cesar’s factotum provides the voice over commentary and the chapter titles.
As the machinations mount up, just as Cesar seems to be getting the upper hand, Clodio engineers a faked expose of him having sex with, the city’s answer to the Vestal Virgin, supposedly teenage chaste pop star Vesta Sweetwater (Grace VanderWaal) who, in her performance splits into five versions of herself, but, while that’s swiftly shot down, so too, in an unauthorised set-up by Clodio’s henchman (Balthazar Getty), is Cesar. Not that means he’s removed from proceedings, after all he is fathering a child by Julia.
As you may have gathered from all this, it’s a labyrinthine affair that makes machinations and manipulations of The Godfather seem straightforward, and while you’re trying to keep up, you’re constantly been distracted visually by things like Cesar and Julia stepping out on to girders above the city, states like the Scales Of Liberty melting and collapsing on the streets. The cast, augmented by Talia Shire as Cesar’s mother, Kathryn Hunter as Cicero’s wife, Jason Schwartzmann as one of his functionaries and Dustin Hoffman as his fixer, do the best with the mannered and what often sounds random dialogue, but the results are decidedly mixed, Plaza chewing it up, Emmanuelle playing it straight, Voight hamming and Driver frequently overly self-conscious as he emotes, declares, pontificates and screams.
Although the ideas are often never connected and some plot points, like a Soviet satellite crashing into the city, are forgotten, Coppola apparently improvising as he went, there are clear contemporary resonances, down to a Make America Great Again badge (reinforcing Clodio’s Trumpian nature), and how societies rise and fall and utopias become dystopias on a tide of power grabs and overarching ambitions. Ultimately though, while there are moments of eye-popping genius, the film too collapses under its own weight. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
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Dragonkeeper (PG)
A Spanish-Chinese co-production dubbed into English, this mixes together aspects of Mulan and Raya and the Last Dragon, with How To Train Your Dragon hovering in the background. Set in ancient China, a prologue tells how dragons and humans used to live harmoniously but then distrust set in and the dragons were hunted down and locked away. Flash-forward to Ping (Mayalinee Griffith), an abandoned orphan found by a group of traders with strange, blue-lit rocks floating near her who now lives in a hovel with her adoptive grandmother Lao Ma (Sarah Lam), the house, unbeknownst to her, also home to the last two dragons, Lu Yu (Beth Chalmers) and Danzi (Bill Nighy), secretly kept in a dungeon, their blood being used to keep the ailing emperor alive.
Taking her grannie’s place in carrying food to the Honoured Guests, she discovers the pair and their destinies become entwined when one dies, one escapes and she’s accused of being an accomplice. Now, entrusted with protecting the last dragon egg, the Pearl of Longevity, she, a Dragonkeeper in waiting, along with Danzi and her rat sidekick Hua, has to take it to the magical waters of life, where it can hatch, and save all dragons from extinction. But first, she must retrieve it from the sinister dragon catcher Diao (Anthony Howell) with his killer spiders and potions who has an immortality agenda of his own, and also avoid the emperor’s imperial soldiers looking to recapture Danzi.
If not especially dazzling, the brightly coloured animation is decent enough despite some jerky movements and there’s plenty of suitably thrilling sequences, the best being set on a rickety rope bridge, as our unlikely band make their way to their destination, However, the complicated and slow moving plot and its message about accepting responsibility might prove hard for younger audiences to follow while the characters (among them Bill Bailey as a herbalist in league with Diao) are all rather flat and, although Nighy brings his familiar personality to Danzi and, once you get used to her delivery, Griffith is a winning heroine, the rest of the voice cast never really rise to the occasion. Fun enough, but unlikely to see any sequels to the seven books by Australian fantasy author Carole Wilkinson. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Hellboy: The Crooked Man (15)
Created by graphic novel author Mike Mignola, his human-devil offspring with the sawn-off horns who works for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence was first brought to the screen 20 years ago by Guillermo del Toro with Ron Pearlman in the title role. A so so sequel followed along with a 2019 reboot by Neil Marshall starring David Harbour and Mila Jovovich.
Now, Crank director Brian Taylor takes his shot, with the added bonus of Mignola as one of the co-writers. It’s very much a return to and faithful adaptation of the first of his original three-part 2008 comic series, with a much darker tone and with the relatively unknown Jack Kesy delivering a compelling and less flippant more stoic take on the character, though still with those sharp one-liners.
Set in 1959, Hellboy and rookie agent Bobbie (Adeline Rudolph) are stranded in the Appalachians following a botched mission to transport a mutated spider, which escapes and disappears. Desperately searching to find it and a phone, they coming across a forest cabin where one of the family is seemingly bewitched, they and the town haunted by a witch called Effie Kolb in league with the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), a former 18th century war profiteer, Jeremiah Witkins, who was hanged for his crimes before returning as the local Devil. Hooking up with Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), returned home after a long absence after rejecting his own initiation and carrying a witch bone, they find themselves involved in a deadly battle between the forces of good and evil with a plot that involves Tom looking to bury his father, who was transformed into the witch’s horse, in sacred soil, and save the soul of Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), driven to witchcraft by personal tragedy, a blind pastor (Joseph Marcell), and a whole gaggle of witches.
Although there’s a flashback to Hellboy’s birth, his mother burning in hell, the film doesn’t bother with lengthy exposition or backstories, jumping right into the action and pushing the narrative along to its fiery climax, Taylor piling on the jump scares and powerful imagery as it goes, as well as teasing a romantic element in Bobbie’s crush on her partner. Very much targeted at the fans rather than a general mainstream horror audience, while De Toro’s version was undeniably excellent, this is the Hellboy we’ve been waiting for. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
In Camera (15)
The debut media satire feature by Manchester-born writer-director Naqqash Khalid (who wryly drops in a line about mispronouncing his name, “whatever, the Asian dude”), it opens on the set of a TV cop show with the actor (Aston McAuley) playing a detective examining a dead body complaining to his agent that the show, to which he has a multi-series contract, is banal and a waste of his talent. The assumption would be that this is his story. Wrong. The protagonist is the extra playing the corpse, Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan, currently to be seen as Dionysus in Kaos), a struggling actor whose life consists of a joining almost identikit non-white hopefuls in a series of humiliating auditions (he’s a call-time number, never a name) and rejections form everything from a toothpaste commercial (show more white) to a sci fi pilot, any questions about character being scornfully dismissed (“just read the words on the page”).
He shares a house with Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne) who has his own parallel plot as an Irish junior doctor whose endless shifts have him on the edge of a breakdown (he hallucinates a vending machine in the middle of the road, and abuilding leaking blood) and are then joined by a third roommate, Conrad (Amir El-Masry), an immaculately tailored, smooth-talking, self-promoting fashion consultant who tells Aden that the time is right for Britons of colour, “We’re the new currency and we’ve got to use it”. Clearly that’s not the case for Aden in an industry that seemingly only has one room for a British-Asian at a time (here embodied by Antonio Aakeel as the Actor Who Books Everything) . When a model can’t make Conrad’s photo shoot, Aden serves as stand in; he also role plays as a couple’s deceased son as part of their grief therapy. That doesn’t end too well. But, ever the film’s unreliable narrator, he does begin to realise that he could use this talent for mirroring as a means to navigate life, treating it all as a role. Aden likes acting because he says it organised Aden as an actor is told where to stand, what to do, what to feel and what to say. It so much easier than being yourself.
Although, at a concise 95 minutes it feels plot elements have been cut (Bo’s story goes nowhere) and despite some odd surreal touches, Khalid’s exploration of identity within a cultural context does sustain its grip as it winds to a murderous though possibly fantasised climax, and an ending that itself precisely mirrors the opening as another British-Asian extra tells the self-satisfied star it was an honour working with them before he’s briskly marched off set by a production assistant while, in one last sharp satirical swipe at the fake nature of the industry’s diversity, the director tells Aden “You’re like the brown version of … what was his name again …?” This should ensure you won’t forget Khalid or Rizwan’s names in a hurry. (MAC)
My Old Ass (15)
Written and directed by Megan Park, this is a bittersweet comedic riff on the what if your adult self could go back and advise your teenage version. The latter here is Elliott (Canadian actress-singer Maisy Stella and star of Nashville making her feature debut), a slightly brattish, gay 18-year-old who, along with her middle brother Max (Seth Isaac Johnson), a budding golfer, and the precocious younger Spencer (Carter Trozzolo) , lives with her parents (Alain Goulem, Maria Dizzia) on their Ontario cranberry farm. With no interest in carrying on the business, she’s going away to college at the University of Toronto in a few weeks.
Motoring out on her boat to spend the night on an island with her besties, Ruthie (Maddie Zeigler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) getting high on shrooms, Elliott hallucinates meeting her sarcastic older self (Aubrey Plaza ever wonderful in her few scenes) in an amusing set-up that knowingly wrings laughs from how they don’t look similar and how the former thinks 39 is middle-aged. She’s materialised to tell her she’ll grow up to take a PhD, advise her to be less distant from her folks and siblings and, most importantly, avoid anyone called Chad. She refuses to give more details as to why.
Returning to normality, she dismisses it all – until, out swimming, she meets a personable young man called Chad (Percy Hynes White) who’s got a summer job on her dad’s Ontario farm, returning to check out his family’s roots and is a dab hand at things mechanical. It’s a shock, but as much as discovering her phone now has a number under the name My Old Ass (a phrase she used when flirting with her older self) and that she can text and speak to her in the future (there’s no explanation how, just take it on trust).
She tried hard to avoid Chad but inevitably, with confused feelings, she begins to fall for him and also learns from Max, who was going to take it over, that her parents are selling up the farm. It hits hard because while she wants to leave, she also assumed she could always return. All of this is part of the film’s life lessons about savouring the moment because, as Chad tells her, you never know when it’s the last time you’ll experience something and how “The only thing you can’t get back is time”. Having been out of contact while she’s been overwhelmed with confused feelings, older Elliott then suddenly turns up just after younger Elliott and Chad have had, as she puts it, dick sex, leading to finally explaining, in a heartbreaking moment, why she told her to avoid him.
With a wistful tone that complements its end of summer photography, it’s both touching and humorous, the core actresses lighting up the screen with their charisma and comic timing, Stella having the look and vibe of a young Reese Witherspoon (and getting to sing a Justin Bieber cover), while White is charm personified. Park also sneaks in some sly filmic nods, a clip from Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, a nod to teen TV series Euphoria and, coincidentally coming the same week as The Outrun, having Spencer decorate her room, which he’s pre-emptively taken over, with pictures of Saoirse Ronan. Nestling in a similar YA coming of age zone to Booksmart and The Edge of Seventeen, it’s a low key but immensely engaging joy that really deserves more than its one screen showing. (Omniplex Great Park)
Never Let Go (15)
Directed by Alexandre Aja and starring Halle Berry, whose production company pulled it together, this is another cabin in the woods survivalist horror, this one with an unspecified but contemporary setting in which civilisation has apparently been wiped out by some unidentified evil, with Berry’s character, only ever known as Momma, having apparently killed her possessed husband and parents and now protecting her twin sons Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) by insisting that, like her, they remain tethered to thick ropes connected to the house whenever they venture beyond the front porch into the overgrown wilderness, after first offering up a prayer to the house and ritually touching an ornamental door in the floor that opens into a small storage space where she sometimes cruelly sends them to meditate on their misdeeds. The ropes will prevent the evil possessing them. But things are getting tough, bad weather has ravaged their crops and supplies are dwindling, forcing them to eat bugs, squirrels and even tree bark to survive.
One on foraging expedition, angered by his brother’s aside that momma loves him best, Nolan breaks Samuel’s rope, he falling and breaking his ankle. Their mother rushes to help and suddenly there appears the zombie like snake-tongued figure of her mother( Kathryn Kirkpatrick), hovering but unable to touch. However, she’s only visible to Momma, as is her husband (William Catlett) who comes to the cabin asking to see his sons. It’s Nolan who starts to question of what they have been told is true, challenging her authority, while Samuel holds fast, causing a gradual weakening their bond and leading to the former pushing Momma, who he believes to be mentally ill, to face reality, with fatal consequences. It’s at this point that, hearing Nolan’s calls for help when he discovers a road beyond the wood, a hitchhiker appears. Is he real, meaning everything they’ve been told was a lie, or is he, as Samuel insists, a trick by the evil.
It’s a hugely dread-drenched atmospheric, claustrophobic and creepy psychological thriller with themes of grief, sanity, rebellion and redemption, but, while the three core performances are strong, the boys especially so, its attempt to have its cake and eat it by rendering both subjective and objective perspectives on events also makes it rather frustrating, the ending, as the real world arrives and a polaroid Samuel took as he burned down the cabin, again throwing everything into question. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
The Outrun (15)
Directed by Nora Fingscheidt and co-written by Scottish author Amy Liptrot, an unsentimental adaptation of her 2016 memoir about returning to her childhood home in the Orkneys, an archipelago of 70 islands in the northest part of Scotland, to rehabilitate after becoming an alcoholic in London, it’s anchored by an electrifying Saoirse Ronan as Rona. From the moment she first appeared in 2007’s The Atonement, it was clear she was destined to become one of the greats of her generation, going on to accrue five BAFTA and four Oscar nominations, this pretty much guaranteed to add to the tally.
Narratively, it follows a familiar arc of renewal and relapse, rehabilitation and recrimination with broken relationships and blackouts, but never feels like it’s just trotting out the clichés, hewing to the stark fact that there is no such things as a recovered alcoholic but that, as a character, himself many years sober, says “it never gets easy – it just gets less hard”.
A biology masters graduate who grew up on a farm with a schizophrenic and bipolar father (Stephen Dillane) and an evangelical Christian mother (Saskia Reeves), her life and career is derailed by drinking at 30, costing her her job and her boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) before, after a drunken encounter leaving her with a black eye, she check into rehab, eventually returning to Orkney, moving in with her loving but disapproving mother working on her still mentally volatile father’s sheep farm and becoming a RSPB volunteer assigned to record the islands’ corncrake population before, following a relapse, moving to the remote island of Papa Westray to seek sobriety in splendid and spartan isolation.
Mixing the journey to recovery with observations on region’s wildlife, nature and folklore (such as the legends of seals and selkie), Ronan providing the voice over narration, it can be a little difficult to keep track of where you are as the film (and its colour palette) moves back and forth in the timeline, clubbing in London and birthing lambs in the country, and her psychological and physical state, the shifting colour of Rona’s hair (blue tinged, all blue, auburn) often the only anchoring point.
An elemental Ronan is simply sensational, veering between solipsistic silence and mean drunk chaos, opening up at AA meetings but withdrawing in more intimate relationships. Scenes of her lying on her apartment floor surrounded by bottles, retrieving her hidden stash, her furious rows with her long-suffering boyfriend and piercing raw and poignant moments with her parents, all contribute to the film’s emotional power alongside such devastating lines like Rona saying ‘I can’t be happy sober’.
I’m not sure the brief use of animation about Stoor Worm, the sea serpent myth, works or that the Wi-Fi signal in Orkney is as good as it is here, but, with a sound design that incorporates her headphones, electronic music and the sounds of nature, the symphonic climax on the beach as she orchestrates the storm and crashing waves (the fact they can only reach a certain height before collapsing a clear metaphor) is truly rhapsodic. Given her RSPB task, the final shot is fairly predictable, but it also upliftingly ends the film with a literal note that even when all seems lost hope still remains. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
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200% Wolf (PG)
A follow up to 2020 Australian animation, 100% Wolf, adapted from a novel of the same name, this charmless and incoherent sequel that picks up pretty much where the original left off with Freddy Lupin (Ilai Swindells), teenage scion of a family of werewolves, bemoaning that, rather than a wolf, he transforms into a fluffy white and pink poodle, somewhat of an embarrassment, despite his father Flasheart’s reassurance to the contrary, to the pack. Looking to prove himself when a dirigible is in danger of crashing with its passengers aboard, he and is best stray dog buddy Batty (Samara Weaving) take it upon themselves to come to the rescue, but, while they save everyone, footage of him in action puts the pack’s secret night patrols in jeopardy.
Desperate for resect, he decides to pray to the moon spirits for help, attracting the attention of a mischievous blue glowing spirit baby called Moopoo who winds up on earth, transforms Freddy into a wolf but then starts to lose his inner light, meaning he has to be returned to the moon before it fades out, Which entails Freddy seeking out the witch Max (Jennifer Saunders), a former pack member who was banished and trapped in human form for her attempts to control the cosmos, and get her to re-open the portal to the moon. Naturally, she has her own plans. Meanwhile, for never clearly explained reasons, Moopoo has become possessed of some red demon spirit and is causing all manner of havoc.
It’s all chaotic and frenetic as characters zip around with to real apparent purpose, the low budget animation pretty basic and the jokes even more so (there’s a nice canine one about who gets to eat Moopoo’s vomit) while the whole be true to yourself message howls into the void. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Aliens: Romulus (15)
Sited chronologically between Alien and its James Cameron-directed sequel, co-writer and director Fede Álvarez pays dutiful homage to Ridley Scott’s original, not just in the basic plotting but to the extent of reprising Ripley’s iconic line and a facial cameo by the late Ian Holm as Rook, another synthetic, but also offers his own contribution to the franchise mythology with a hybrid creature in the final scenes.
A prologue in which a space probe collects an object from the drifting wreckage of the USCSS Nostromo that’s revealed to contain a curled-up Xenomorph, sets things in motion before the focus shifts to the Jackson’s Star mining colony (for all the advanced technology, they still send canaries down the mine to detect gas) where the orphaned Rain Carradine (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeney, the only ‘name’ in the cast) works alongside Andy (David Jonsson), the malfunctioning socially awkward synthetic her late father programmed to be her surrogate brother and always do what’s best for her.
Learning the company’s moved the goalposts in terms of contract length, she agrees to join her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) who, along with his synthetic-hating cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), sister Kay (Isabela Merced) and their pilot friend Navarro (Aileen Wu), plans to salvage cryonic stasis chambers from a derelict spaceship that’s appeared in orbit before it crashes, using them to escape to the remote planet Yvaga where there is at least sunshine. Although synthetics are banned from Yvaga, Andy’s essential to be able to access the computer systems.
Stealing the mining hauler Corbelan without anyone apparently batting an eyelid, they head off and discover the spacecraft is a research station divided into two sections, Romulus and Remus at which point, switching Andy’s chip for that of the mangled Rook in order to gain access (curing his malfunction but resetting his prime directive), they unwittingly release a horde of frozen facehuggers, from which point the screenplay reverts to default with bursting chests, cocooned corpses, acid blood, confrontations with dome-headed Xenomorphs and so on as the cast is swiftly whittled down before revealing one of the women is pregnant while a reactivated Rook is intent on completing the craft’s mission involving returning an experimental evolution enhancing compound, the Prometheus strain, derived from the Xenomorphs to the colony, meanwhile, the minutes before the spacecraft’s disaster event are ticking down.
After six previous outings, familiarity rather numbs any shocks and surprises, but Álvarez, the video-game styled sequencing and the largely dialled down effects (the no gravity lift shaft sequence with floating acid blood is inspired) succeed in effectively building the tension and creepiness while Spaeney does pretty much all the dramatic heavy lifting in the Ripley role, though Jonsson provides solid support and persuasive chemistry as Andy who gets to tell some punningly bad jokes. Going back to the roots, so to speak, after the Prometheus and Covenant misfires, might feel a little lazy, but the results undeniably pay off. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
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)
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (15)
Thirty-six years on from the original, Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice returns from the afterlife along with director Tim Burton (and composer Danny Elfman) in a sequel that’s as much fun as it is overstuffed with characters, plot turns and special effects. Winona Ryder is back too as Lydia Deetz, the goth teenager an infatuated Beetlejuice wanted to make his bride, now a widowed (husband Richard was killed in the Amazon) “psychic mediator” with a pill problem hosting tacky TV series Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, produced by her self-involved new agey producer and boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) . She has a sulky teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, star of the Burton-directed Wednesday), who thinks mum’s a fraud and ghosts aren’t real. Naturally she learns the opposite in a very dramatic way.
Things are set up early one as Lydia starts imagining she’s seeing Beetlejuice whenever anyone wearing white and black stripes is around while her narcissistic multimedia gallery artist and influencer step-grandmother Delia (Catharine O’Hara) finds herself also bereaved when her birdwatcher husband is (in a claymation sequence) killed by a shark after a plane crash (he’ll turn up later as a headless blood-squirting torso, the original actor now a registered sex-offender)), which brings the whole family back to Winter River for the ostentatious funeral (where choirboys sing Day-O and at which Rory proposes to Lydia) and, in a bike hits treehouse meet cute, Astrid falls for local lad Jeremy (Arthur Conti),who invites her over for Halloween (she comes as Marie Curie dying of radiation poisoning, just to show she’s inherited those goth DNA genes) the night mum’s marrying Rory. Of course, it turns out he has an ulterior motive, which winds up with Lydia having to summon Beetlejuice, who manages a bureaucratic afterlife office with his shrunken head assistants, notably Bob, so she can follow her into the underworld and save her from boarding the Soul Train (cue 70s funk dance sequence) in return for promising to marry him.
Matters are complicated however, by the fact that as, seen in an opening sequence with a Danny DeVito cameo where she staples her body parts back together, the Juice already has a dead soul-sucking ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), who he married in the 14th century and killed when she poisoned him. Now she wants revenge. Meanwhile, he’s being pursued by actor turned dead detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) for bringing a mortal to their real, and Delia’s learnt to her cost that those ceremonial asps hadn’t been defanged after all.
It’s busy to a fault with the different plot elements and characters colliding into each other and spiralling off, often simply for the sake of narrative contrivance, but between the plethora of visual freakies, Ryder’s grounded protective mum, performance, Ortega’s soulfully sullen teen, O’Hara’s scenery chewing and the ever brilliant Keaton’s gleeful reprise of his most iconic (ok maybe also Batman) role, it’s carried on a wave of high energy, visual gags, inventive effects, prosthetics, slime and ghoulish humour. There’s even not one but two scenes giving birth to a Beeetlejuice baby. All that and a brilliant marriage scene with everyone lip-syncing to Richard Harris’s Macarthur Park. First time arounders might argue it’s not equal to the original, but, so good they named it twice, their children and children’s children should be screaming with delight. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Beverley Hills Cop: Axel F (15)
It’s been 30 years since the franchise catastrophically imploded with Beverly Hills Cop III (a sly allusion to which appears early on), but, helmed with workmanlike efficiency by debuting director Mark Molloy. Eddie Murphy returns to his iconic role – along with signature jacket and Harold Faltermeyer’s theme tune– as loose cannon cop Axel Foley, having got married, divorced and acquired an estranged daughter in the interim.
This opens with him back in Detroit to the sound of Glenn Frey’s The Heat Is On (as featured in the original movie) where it seems everyone on the street knows him. Having been kicked off a case involving a robbery and murder, he dupes a hero-worshipping gullible colleague (Kyle S. More) into helping take down the crime ring at an ice hockey game (a stereotypical racial assumptions exchange about a Black man being into the sport falls comedically flat), setting up the first of numerous auto chases (this with Foley commandeering a snow plough) in which numerous cars and property get trashed, once again to the frustration of his boss Jeffrey Friedman (Paul Reiser, one of several returnees from the series. none of whom have aged as well as Murphy) who falls on his retirement word to save Foley’s neck.
This is just a prelude before the main plot kicks in, wherein estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), a criminal defence attorney at a high-powered Beverly Hills firm, has taken on a pro bono case representing Sam Enriquez (Damien Diaz), a low-level drug mule who has been framed for killing an undercover cop. She’s warned to drop the case by way of being suspended in her car by a chain from a multi-storey, Axle getting a call from his old cop buddy private detective buddy Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), who persuaded her to take the case, saying she’s in danger. He immediately sets off for L.A., where Billy, having found evidence showing the dead cop to have been corrupt, has gone missing, setting in motion a repetitive sequence of father-daughter recriminations (he reluctant to acknowledge his poor parenting skills), car chases (variously involving parking enforcement and golf buggies as well as a stolen police helicopter) and shoot-outs with cartel killers and the like, bringing back his old boss Taggert (John Ashton, last seen in BHC II) and introducing new characters Det. Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as Jane’s ex and Kevin Bacon as Captain Cade Grant, a narcotics cop who doesn’t need the tailored suit, Gucci shoes and gold Rolex to have him immediately signposted as the corrupt mastermind, though the script has Axel point it out anyway.
Also reprising Bronson Pichot’s accent mangling Euro queen Serge to embarrassingly painful effect, rivalled only by Luis Guzman’s turn as a karaoke singing Latino drug lord, it ticks the franchise staples as it goes, with Murphy’s snappy improvising and motor mouth patter, the action taking time for the family reconciliation scenes. Having clawed his way back from a string of poor career choices where his comedic skills appeared to have been surgically removed, Murphy has all the old charm, even if the film itself is set to auto-pilot, ensuring this is far more entertaining than it might have been and that a fifth outing is pretty much guaranteed. (Netflix)
Blink Twice (15)
Better known for Catwoman in the recent Batman, co-writer Zoë Kravitz makes her directorial debut with a #MeToo social satire thriller that that addresses sexual violence against women and the psychic toll of trauma, the title being about not looking away from things you blink twice at. It opens with a tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) offering a recorded public apology for some undisclosed “everything that happened”, announcing he’s in therapy and will be stepping down from his CEO role and retreating to his private island to take some time for reflection on his actions.
Working as waitresses at a King fundraiser aspiring nail designer Frida (Naomi Ackie, last seen as Whitney Houston) and her bestie Jess (Alia Shawkat), crash the party and, after a meet cute when Frida trips on her dress, King invites them both to join him on the tropical island. It seems idyllic and, although cellphones are banned, everyone gets their own apartment, a bottle of the island’s own perfume, and matching white linen clothing as they spend their time in a hedonistic whirl of drink, drugs and dinner delicacies prepared by Slater’s chef friend, Cody (Simon Rex). Also among the guests are Vic (Christian Slater) constantly taking photos on his Polaroid and dorky ukulele playing Tom (Haley Joel Osment) while the women include dizzy blond Heather (Tess Mullen), her friend Camilla (Liz Claribel) and Sarah (Adria Arjona), a former Survivor-like reality show contestant who eventually makes the film’s point that women should support rather than compete with each other, while Geena Davis is Slater’s frazzled PA (Stacy).
There’s an early inkling that things are not as they might seem when Frida encounters a maid who repeats red rabbit at her over and over and goes round capturing snakes. Then there’s those unaccountable patchy memories (“forgetting is a gift”, preaches King) bruises and nose bleeds, not to mention the often vacant expressions the women wear. But when Jess, whose yellow cigarette lighter serves as a running motif, disappears and none of the other women seem to know who Frida’s talking about, it’s now readily apparent something decidedly dodgy’s going down.
That the film was originally titled Pussy Island should give a pretty good idea as to the theme of sexual exploitation (a Rohypnol-like drug figures large) and the sister-hood revenge that fuels the violent third act. Despite some messy plotting, thin characterisation (why exactly is Frida fixated on King at the start, even if he is super sexy and super rich?) and overreliance of disorienting visuals and sound , Kravitz keeps the tension and energy moving, even if the echoes of Get Out sound a little too loud while Akie is a strong lead and proves a dynamic pairing with Arjona, with Tatum working different character shades from charm to threat (a scene with him haranguing a red chair is nicely played). There’s also a suitably creepy cameo from Kyle MacLachlan as Slater’s therapist.
The coda twist may be a touch lazy (and narratively contrived after what’s happened), but its power reversal is still satisfying, giving a go girl punchline to a flawed but impressive debut. (Everyman; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Confess, Fletch (15)
Those of a certain age may recall the 1985 Chevy Chase comedy about Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher, a freelance investigative journalist, adapted from the novels by Gregory Mcdonald. The character is now revived by Superbad and Adventureland director and co-writer Greg Mottola with Jon Hamm in the title role.
Returning from Italy where he’s been looking into the abduction of a wealthy art collector with the kidnappers demanding his collection as ransom, but which appears to have been stolen, and striking up an affair with the daughter, Angela de Grassi (Lorenza Izzo), Fletch enters her Boston apartment and finds the dead body of a woman. Calling the cops, he’s cast as the prime suspect by the investigating officers, slow but dogged Morris Monroe and his long-suffering assistant Griz (Roy Wood Jr and Ayden Mayeri making a fine droll double act).
Being fitted up for the killing, Fletch, however, suspects the building’s owner, Owen (John Behlmann), his dotty neighbour Eve (Annie Mumolo) remarking on his dark personality, while, masquerading as his old Boston Sentinel editor boss (John Slattery), interviews Owen’s airhead fashionista ex-wife, Tatiana (Lucy Punch, hilariously explaining the meaning of “bespoke|”) and, poses as a collector seeking a rare Picasso, visits germophobe art dealer Horan (Kyle MacLachlan) who he believes to have the stolen paintings. Meanwhile, Angela’s estranged countess stepmother (Marcia Gay Harden) installs herself in the apartment and has a clear eye on bedding Fletch (she pronounces his name “Flesh”), Angela herself – who clearly has things to hide, turning up shortly after.
Hamm is charm personified, effortlessly navigating his way through a screen-lay rich in irreverent quips and put-downs, along with a running gag about bare feet, but all concerned contribute to the immense sense of fun percolating through the twists and revelations that populate the breezy, light-hearted narrative. If Only Murders in the Building and Knives Out rang your bell, despite the somewhat naff title, this should have equal appeal. (Netflix)
The Critic (15)
There have, over the years, been many egotistical critics who cast themselves as kingmakers or, more often, career killers. Known as The Monster among the theatrical community, veteran drama critic of The Chronicle in 30s London, Jimmy Erskin (Ian McKellan at his most waspish) in one such, delivering his florid barbs with relish although his vituperative bile seems to be reserved exclusively for Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), a leading lady of the stage whose self-confidence is already on shaky ground. And when she confronts him looking for a little kindness, he just doubles down. She does, however, have an admirer in the paper’s new owner, David Brooke (Mark Strong, the film’s only mostly honourable character), who, looking to adopt a more family friendly image an. less indulgent than his late father, clear out some of the old guard dead wood (such as its opera critic drunk), advises him to tone down his reviews of her, warning “Don’t break the law, don’t cause a stink. More beauty, less beast”, something which the self-important Jimmy regards as an unforgivable insult.
Jimmy, however, also has something of a self-destructive streak, not least in bating a group of Oswald Mosley’s Nazi blackshirts. A homosexual at a time when it was a criminal act, aside from maintaining a handsome younger live-in secretary, Tom (Alfred Enoch), he also attends queer after show parties and regularly prowls London’s seedier underbelly at night in search of rough trade. Inevitably, he falls foul of the police (his interrogator sporting British League of Fascists badge) after being caught kissing Tom in public, resulting in his being given notice (with fairly generous terms) and his presence in a painting of their West End club members being scrapped. At which point, seeking revenge, he lures Nina into a Faustian pact, offering to make her a star in return for her playing a part of his own devising, seducing the married Brooke so he can then blackmail him and dictate his own terms of reinstatement.
Written by Patrick Marber and directed by Arnand Tucker, it switches track from dark comedy to a thriller melodrama (with McKellen channelling Shakespeare’s Iago) that takes in suicide, murder and betrayal. As such, it might increase the tension but it also loses something of its bite, somewhat struggling with a subplot that involves Brooke’s Jewish son-in-law, Stephen Wyley (Ben Barnes), the commissioned artist, with whom Nina has been involved in an on/off affair. Fleshing out the cast is wonderfully horrid Romla Garai as Cora Wyley, who later assumes her brother’s position at The Chronicle with her own plans for Jimmy, and Lesley Manville as Nina’s mousy ineffectual mother who, searching to compliment her daughter’s performance, calls it ‘audible’. It is, however, very much a two hander between the wonderfully poisonous McKellen and the vulnerable, compromised, needy Arterton, both well-served by the film’s lighting, score and cinematography. (Cineworld 5 Ways; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Deadpool and Wolverine (15)
The first Marvel movie to get a 15 certificate, directed by Shawn Levy it’s also jump started its faltering track record after a series of misfires and flops. After all, at one point Deadpool does declare himself the Marvel Jesus. It jumps straight in with Deadpool, now officially a part of the MCU, disinterring Wolverine, who died for real at the end of Logan, assuming he has regenerative powers, only to find just an adamantium-laced skeleton, the bones of which he uses to bloodily despatch a small army of Time Variance Authority troops who’ve been sent to capture him. Flashback then to six years earlier when, having used Cable’s time-traveling device to travel from Earth-10005 to Earth-616, his request to join The Avengers is snubbed by Happy Hogan (John Favreau), Now Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) has retired his red spandex masked mercenary and, having broken up with girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) works as a car salesman along his best friend Peter (Rob Delaney). But then, at his birthday party, he’s abducted by the TVA and taken before Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) a rogue operative who tells him that his timeline is deteriorating (and he’s speeding up the process) as a result of the death of its anchor, James “Logan” Howlett, meaning everyone he loves – his X-Force friends among them – will cease to exist. Which is where we came in as, having stolen Paradox’s TemPad, he’s trying to resurrect Logan and save the timeline. And since that Logan’s staying dead, it means he now has to traverse the multiverse and find a Logan variant who can. Which, following a collage of unsuitable or hostile Wolverines (Henry Cavill cameoing among them), bring him to the worst of them all, the self-loathing and generally despised version (Hugh Jackman) who, with his iconic yellow costume, blames himself for the deaths of his fellow X-Men.
He returns him to the TVA only for Paradox to despatch them both to the Void, a pointed Mad Max send up (including a Furiosa gag) where superheroes from other timeliness have been consigned as fodder for sand demon Alioth, ruled over by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the bald-headed telekinetic sister of Charles Xavier who lives inside a fortress carved out of the skeleton of Giant Man. Not only that, but the place is teeming with other Deadpool variants, among them Lady Deadpool (Blake Lively), Dogpool (Peggy), Cowboy Deadpool (Matthew McConaughey), floating skull Headpool (Nathan Fillion, Kidpool (Reynolds and Lively’s daughter Inez), and even one from Wales who, I guess is Welshpool. The super nice version of Wade (Reynolds) points the pair in the direction of the resistance, they joining up with Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes, and a sly nod to the remake without him), Gambit (Channing Tatum) and Logan’s biological mutant daughter Laura (Dafne Keen), all of which builds to the big showdown as the seconds tick down to the destruction of all timelines with only the ultimate sacrifice able to prevent it.
With cameos by, references to or repurposed footage of virtually every Marvel superhero/villain you can name (Juggernaut, Pyro, Toad, Nightcrawler, Sabretooth, with Chris Evans reprising not Captain America but Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four), though sadly no TVA appearances by Loki or Moebius, it’s as exhausting as it is convoluted and bloody with all its self-aware fourth wall meta nods to itself as a film, 20th Century Fox (its logo seen as a destroyed monument a la Planet Of the Apes), Disney, Marvel head honcho Kevin Feigh and Jackman’s musical career. You’ll need multiple viewings (or frame by frame pauses when it’s on digital) to catch even half of them.
At its core though is the volcanic bromance chemistry and funny/sweary banter (not to mention the high octane and brilliantly choreographed fights, largely to iconic 80s pop songs) between an ineffably note-perfect Reynolds and Jackman, but all that would be just action adrenaline where it not for the fact the film, in solid Marvel tradition, digs deep into the emotional arcs behind the snarkiness and flippancy of its characters, with themes of self-worth, insecurity and a need to prove they matter designed to salt the popcorn with tears. Ryan Reynolds is Marvel Jesus and this is one hell of a Holy Trinity. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
The Deliverance (15)
Touted as inspired by the real life case of Latoya Ammons, who moved into a Gary, Indiana rental in 2011 and began noticing disturbing behavior from her children, but essentially playing like a Black version of The Amityville Horror by way of any exorcism movie you care to name, this is a departure for director Lee Daniels after Precious and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, but unfortunately not one he can elevate above the genre clichés and staples.
It starts off well enough as a picture of a dysfunctional family with volatile mixed-race Pittsburgh single-mother Ebony (Oscar nominee Andra Day) struggling with her own demons, both metaphorical and physical, battling with the bottle and her shrewish, chain-smoking born again alcoholic abusive white mother Alberta (Glenn Close, chewing scenery and sporting an array of fright wigs) who’s moved in while undergoing chemotherapy and seemingly hasn’t met a Black man she wouldn’t screw.
Their father, she claims, away in Iraq, having recently moved in to the house, she’s struggling both financially and in trying to raise three kids, teenage Nate (Caleb McLaughlin), pre-teen Shante (Demi Singleton) and their hyper younger brother, Andre or Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins). She’s also subject to regular visits by social worker Cynthia (Mo’Nique) who’s concerned about her ability and fitness to look after them, especially given some unexplained bruises. Seeing Ebony slap Dre for talking back at the dinner table, beating up bullies who attack Nate and telling Alberta “If you wasn’t old and sick I would lay you the fuck out right now!” suggests she has good cause.
All of this makes for involving kitchen sink social drama, but when her children all have inexplicable psychiatric incidences at school but no cause can be found and Dre starts acting talking to an imaginary friend he calls Tre, having unexplained blackouts and catatonic seizures in the cellar, where there’s a hole in the concrete floor, you don’t need that fixed look in his eyes and the flies infesting the house (a dead cat’s earlier found in the cellar), to know what’s coming.
And sure enough it’s not long before Nate and Shante also start acting weird afflicted, and the kids are taken into care and Ebony subjected to psychiatric evaluation after Alberta winds up dead and her wooden crucifix bursts into flames, as the screen’s filled with contorting bodies, speaking in tongues, spewed expletives and kids climbing up walls. Eventually, enter Bernice (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a local pastor who reveals the house’s dark history of demonic possession (mum killed her family and herself) which she failed yo prevent and, kidnapping Dre from hospital, offers to perform an exorcism – or rather deliverance – to drove the devil from Dre. It does not go well.
It’s not that the film doesn’t its fair share of terrors once the standard supernatural aspects takes over, but it’s all so doggedly familiar (there’s even a shot of the house from the same perspective as in The Exorcist) that, other than its leap into faith movie territory with Ebony’s last gasp calling upon Jesus as her saviour, it brings nothing new to the table. All concerned deserve and can do better. (Netflix)
Despicable Me 4 (PG)
Seven years (and the arrival of a baby who despises dad – cue predictable eventual bonding) since the last instalment (although there’s been a pair of Minion spin-offs in the interim), reformed supervillain Gru (Steve Carrell) is back in a film overstuffed with subplots to the extent it feels a like a collection of shorts bolted together. It opens with a Bond-like send-up as a dapperly dressed Gru and his equally attired Minions (all voiced by Pierre Coffin) attend a Class of 85 alumni ceremony for graduates from the Lycée Pas Bon academy for villains. He’s undercover to arrest former classmate and old nemesis Maxime Le Mal (an accent mangling Will Ferrell), who, there with girlfriend Valentina (an underused Sofia Vergara) presented with the top award, reveals his new power of harnessing the power of insects and transforming into a human cockroach. Overpowered and arrested by Anti-Villain League agents, he’s hauled off to a top security supervillain prison. From where he naturally escapes, vowing revenge on Gru and his family (his grudge goes back to when they were students and Gru stole his Karma Chameleon routine for the talent show), planning to kidnap and mutate the baby.
To which end, AVL boss Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) has Gru, wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig), Gru Jr and adopted daughters Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Madison Skyy Polan), relocated to a high-tech safe house in Mayflower, giving them new identities, with Gru as Chet, a solar panels salesman, and Lucy as Blanche, a hair stylist. The girls are less pleased with developments, the youngest, Agnes, complaining (in one of the funniest moments) that she has to lie and say her name is Britney. Naturally, Maxime, in his armoured flying roach, is determined to track them down,
It’s from here the film subdivides into different storylines. Lucy ruins a client’s hair resulting in a Terminator 2 parody in a supermarket. Gru tries to ingratiate himself with snooty neighbour Perry Prescott (Stephen Colbert) and finds himself blackmailed by his longtime Gru admirer and aspiring supervillain daughter Poppy (Joey King) into stealing Lycée Pas Bon’s honey badger mascot, resulting in a run-in with school principal Übelschlecht (Chris Renaud) who contacts Maxime. And then, surely coming to the end of their service life, there’s the increasingly irritating Minions, with all but three (who remain with Gru for their own antics involving a vending machine) taken in by the AVL where Ramsbottom selects five to be transformed into superpowered Mega Minions (basically Minion equivalents of Cyclops, Plastic Man, The Thing, The Hulk and Superman), though the project proves disastrous and they’re retired when they cause chaos (and prompt an amusing Spider-man 2 train stopping spoof) in trying to help. Naturally coming to the rescue in the final act.
With a quickie cameo from Romesh Ranganathan voicing Dr. Nefario and a montage of past characters in the closing credits, it pitches high and low for it audience, with repeated gags involving bottoms (the Minions snigger at the name Ramsbottom) for the kiddies and pop-culture parodies and consumerism satire for the adults. However, while there’s undeniably moments of inspired verbal and visual invention and hilarity (though the closing Gru/Maxime Everybody Wants To Rule The World duet isn’t one of them), it all feels like a disconnected string of jokes in search of a cohesive story. None of that will, of course, prove a barrier to blockbuster box office, a sequel and doubtless a Mega Minions (and possibly Poppy) spin-off. But maybe next time less of a see what sticks approach might be better. (Cineworld NEC, Solihull; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Royal Sutton Coldfield; 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)
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+)
Hit Man (15)
A nerdy, Honda Civic–driving, bird-watcher, bespectacled philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) asks his class ‘How many of you really know yourselves? What if your self is a construct?” And that’s the underlying theme to the latest from director Richard Linklater which, incredible though it sounds, is actually loosely based on the true story of how Johnson was recruited (though not in the circumstances shown here, replacing their regular ‘hit man’ after he’s suspended for beating up innocent teen suspects) to work undercover by the Texas cops to pose as a fake hitman (“the most sought-after professional killer in Houston” ) arranging meetings with potential clients and getting them to incriminate themselves.
The real Johnson was apparently a consummate actor in his adopted personas (he’s referred to here as “Daniel Day” and the“Caucasian Idris”), using various disguised, though that’s all amped up considerable for comic chameleon effect here. He also did help a woman who was being abused by her boyfriend, talking her out of wanting his services, but they did not, as becomes the thrust of the film’s second half, become a romantic couple as he, calling himself (and indeed becoming) Ron, does with Madison (Adria Arjona), or become involved in covering up her ex-husband’s murder.
Currently on a roll, Powell-who co-wrote the screenplay that never telegraphs its twists, is terrific, playing the comedy and the later more thriller and morally more ambiguous elements with timing and Clooney cool, the film itself a meta-commentary on acting, while Arjona, with whom he has real chemistry, and Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s sting colleagues add further punch to proceedings. A palpable hit, man. (Netflix)
Inside Out 2 (PG)
Released in 2015, the original ranks among Pixar’s finest, alongside the Toy Story series and Up. Now, eight years later we revisit Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) emotions as she turns 13, those operating the console inside her emotional Headquarters, still lining up as the primal emotions of irrepressible yellow Joy (Amy Poehler), the green Disgust (Liza Lapira taking over from Mindy Kaling), red Anger (Lewis Black), blue Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the purple Fear (Tony Hale replacing Bill Hader). They’ve created a new section of Riley’s mind called her Sense of Self, the repository of the memories and feelings that form Riley’s core personality, Joy having consigned any negative memories to the back of her mind.
A star player on the school hockey team alongside best friends Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and Grace (Grace Lu), the trio having been invited to take part in a hockey camp so she can apply for a place on the team at her new high school. However, the emotions are shocked when a demolition crew barges in to tear the place apart and reconstruct it for Riley’s new phase. And, even more when, as with Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager, the transition into puberty brings out an overnight change, the hitherto sweet Riley waking up and telling her mother (Diane Lane) to back off, and being snappy with dad (Kyle MacLachlan), every interaction with the console causing her to overreact. And that’s just the start as, to their surprise, puberty ushers in a whole new crew of emotions, headed up by orange wide-mouthed nervous wreck Anxiety (Maya Hawke), catty cyan Envy (Ayo Edibiri), the pink and bulky Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) in his grey hoodie and the snooty Indigo-coloured bored Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), or Ui Ui as Joy calls him, who lounges on the couch.
With Riley having learnt her besties are going to a different school, Anxiety takes over plaguing her with all manner of insecurities and negative scenarios about what lies ahead, seeing her torn between sticking with her friends or trying to act cool and become part of a new clique headed up by Val (Lilimar), the star player on the Firehawks, the team at her new school. Clashes between Joy and the misguidedly overprotective Anxiety over how Riley should act leads to her Sense Of Self being dumped at the back of her mind and Joy and the other emotions on her team being quite literally bottled up and imprisoned by the Mind Cops (Frank Oz among them) in a vault that also holds various imaginary characters from Riley’s head, including a giant dark hooded figure representing her deepest dark secret, video game character Lance Slashblade on whom the younger Riley had a crush and the hand drawn Bloofy and Pouchy from her favourite childhood TV show. The task now is to somehow get to the Back of the Mind and make it back to Headquarters and restore Riley’s Sense of Self before she has a total meltdown.
Decidedly busier than the first film with all the new characters, even so it’s still rooted in the same premise about being in touch with our feelings, the message being that we are defined by all of them, the negative and the positive, and how both can lead us astray in attempting to fit in, and not repressing sides of ourselves for fear of being judged. It’s also awash with more wittily clever wordplay, Joy and the others finding themselves teetering on the Sar Chasm, riding down the Stream Of Consciousness, being assailed by a Brainstorm of ideas (including a very Big one) and Joy trying to calm the frantic Anxiety down with a cup of Anxi Tea. There’s also an occasional before her time appearance by the elderly Nostalgia (June Squibb) and a UK only cameo by television personality Sam Thompson as Security Man Sam. It even slips in a blink and you miss it worry by dad’s Anger (Pete Docter) about his daughter being gay. It doesn’t have quite the novelty of the first film, but the emotions it will uncork in its audience all come bubbling to the sniffle surface. (Vue)
It Ends With Us (15)
Directed by and co-starring Justin Baldoni, and adapted by Christy Hall Colleen Hoover’s 2016 bestseller about the cycle of domestic abuse and denial, this may be a melodramatic soap opera, but it’s one from the top shelf, and, while overlong and reliant on contrived coincidence, has a dark edge and unfolds with some twists you don’t readily see coming.
Blake Lively (slightly older than the book’s character) stars as aspiring flower-shop entrepreneur Lily Bloom who we meet as she returns home to read the eulogy for her estranged father’s funeral but, scarred by the abuse she saw him (Kevin McKidd) mete out to her mother (Amy Morton), can’t find a single thing to say, her list of five point remaining blank. Later, she has a flirty rooftop encounter with neurosurgeon Rile Kincaid (Baldoni), a textbook tall, dark, and dashing self-styled stud (“Love isn’t for me. Lust is nice though”) with a line in smooth chat-up patter, who startles her by angrily kicking a chair though, as he explains, he’s upset because, a neurosurgeon, he’s failed to save a young boy following an accident with a gun (and yes, this does cycle back at the end). There’s sexual tension but nothing happens, they part and she returns to Boston to open her shabby chic florists, Lily Bloom’s where she hires the irrepressible Allysa (Jenny Slate), even though she confesses to hating flowers, who rapidly becomes her best buddy. And, wouldn’t you know it, when Rile wanders into the store it turns out he’s her brother. And so the pair reconnect, she keeping things cool but agreeing to give him a dating chance. As the romance blossoms they, Allysa and her husband Marshall (Hasan Minhaj in a virtually identical role to that in Babes) go to a new upmarket restaurant which, back after eight years in the Marines, turns out to be owned by Atlas (hunky newcomer Brandon Sklenar), a former classmate and Lily’s first love.
Their backstory’s told in flashbacks with him (Alexander Neustaedter) apparently living homeless opposite her parents and the young Lily (a convincingly lookalike Isabela Ferrer) bring him food and the pair eventually falling in love (take note of the heart carved out of oak and the tattoo on her shoulder) before her irate father puts a brutal end to things.
Time moves on, Allysa gets pregnant, Lily and Rile get married and all seems roses. But Atlas’s suspicious of her bruise she says she got by accident and there’s an altercation between him and Rile at the restaurant. Then, after blow up about her relationship with Atlas, Rile apparently falls down the stairs. It’s not though, until later that, in hospital and learning she’s pregnant, the veil of denial’s torn away and she remembers exactly what happened to cause those bruises and wounds.
Both predictable and unpredictable in equal measure as it explores how we find ourselves repeating dysfunctional patterns in our lives (though not why the characters have such bad taste in clothes), it does rather want to have its cake and eat it when it comes to the central abuse and how we’re supposed to feel about Rile. We’re asked to despise him because of his abuse, but at the same time sympathise when we learn of the tragedy that made him who he is and also because he clearly want to try and be a better man, giving him a grace note in the way things end between them. Still at least her wife-beater dad’s 100% vile.
Bolstered by solid supporting turns, the two (three if you factor in young Lily) central performances are strong, complex and layered Lively on terrific form as a woman coming to realise she has to make the right choices, difficult though they may be. And if the screenplay can’t resist ending on the promise of a happy new future, it’s probably earned it. (Cineworld NEC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes (12A)
Rebooted as a trilogy in 2011, Maze Runner director Wes Ball now launches another motion capture three-parter, firmly distancing himself from its predecessor with an opening that has Caesar being sent off on a simian funeral pyre. However, just as Andy Serkis’s character goes up in smoke, so too does much of the previous saga’s philosophical musings as it leaps forward several generations for a rites of passage that begins with young chimp Noa (Owen Teague) and his two best buddies Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) out on a daredevil trees swinging, mountains climbing mission to each obtain an eagle’s egg which, when they hatch, they will train to catch fish (they’re known as the Eagle Clan), Noa having the biggest challenge since his dad’s the clan’s eagle master or bird man or whatever.
Unfortunately, a scavenging human – or speechless echo – infiltrates the camp and his egg ends up getting smashed, meaning he has to mount his horse and go find another for the next day’s ceremony. This inadvertently brings him into contact with a bunch of masked apes from another clan who wield taser lances and, following Noa’s horse, lay waste to the village, kill his father and take the clan, Noa’s mum (Sarah Wiseman) among them, prisoners. Now, determined to free then, he heads off into the forbidden valley (full of rusted ships and ruined skyscrapers overgrown with foliage) where he first meets Raka (Peter Macon), a wise old Orangutan who holds firm to Caesar’s precepts and then the wild child girl (Freya Allan) who broke his egg, who, much to their surprise, turns out to be able to speak and is called Mae. It seems she’s the last survivor of a group of similarly endowed humans who were massacred by the same apes who sacked Noa’s village and who serve brutal bonobo great ape Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), who has warped Caesar’s teachings, has a pet human accomplice (William H. Macey) who’s taught him Roman History and has enslaved his fellow apes to break through into an old human military silo behind which he believes are the tools he needs to conquer the other ape clans. And which he also believes Mae has the answer to getting inside and that Noa too may prove useful.
There’s some downtime as Noa gets to learn more about what life with apes and humans used to be like and vainly tries to his dad’s eagle to bond with him, but this is just the build up to the big flood and flame confrontation finale between him and Proximus, with Mae’s own mission to recover something from the silo as the launch pad for the next instalment.
Needless to say, the motion capture renders incredibly convincing apes (even if it’s sometimes hard to work out who is who) while the visual effects and action sequences keep the adrenaline pumping. Teague is an excellent replacement for Serkis, bringing a gripping cocktail of fear, courage, nobility, cleverness and compassion to Noa, Macon delivers wisdom and wit (his reaction on seeking zebras is a treat), Durand is suitably megalomaniac while Allan proves as feisty an action warrior woman as she did in The Witcher. And she also teaches Noa to say ‘shit’,
It’s undeniably overlong, takes a while to get into gear (and I’m not persuaded the post-ape-apocalypse timeline actually stands up) and the analogies of the earlier films are dialled down in favour of a basic hero’s journey, but as a set-up for the inevitable apes vs humans sequel, it certainly knows its monkey business. (Disney +)
Kneecap (18)
Those not familiar with the genre, probably won’t know that Kneecap (named for the infamous punishment doled out during the Troubles) are a hugely successful Irish language hip hop group out of West Belfast, featuring best friends Liam Ó Hannaidh (aka Mo Chara) and Naoise Ó Cairealláin (aka Móglaí Bap) and older music teacher JJ Ó Dochartaigh as the initially anonymous balaclava-clad DJ Próvaí. Directed by Rich Peppiatt and co-written with his three stars, all playing themselves, it unabashedly wears its Trainspotting influences on its sleeve and powers along with that same sweary pulsating energy as it unfolds an exaggerated account of their rise to fame. Think of it as Bhoys In The Hood.
The two boys learnt Gaelic (“Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom”) from Naoise’s father, Arlo (Michael Fassbender, largely offscreen until the last act), a former IRA member who faked his death and now teaches yoga, and the film is firmly anchored in the campaign to legislate it as officially recognised language in Northern Ireland. Indeed, Liam first encounters JJ when, refusing to answer the police in English, he brought in to interpret. Ferreting away Liam’s notebook, he’s impressed by the lyrics and persuades the pair to work with him setting them to music, persuading them this would be a powerful way to bring the Irish language to a modern audience, his girlfriend Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty) being heavily involved in the campaign.
As such, the film charts their rise from an initial pub gig, a video filmed by the girl behind the bar going viral, to eventual sell-out stadiums, even though their promised radio debut on RTE is initially banned for its outspoken lyrics before Naoise’s hitherto reclusive mother Dolores (Simone Kirby) organises a protest, with a subplot involving Liam’s growing romance with a Protestant girl named Georgia (Jessica Reynolds) who has relative providing a plot twist you don’t see coming.
Of course, as warned by aggressively unpleasant detective Ellis (Josie Walker), their music is also attracting the wrong sort of attention, most specifically from Radical Republicans Against Drugs, a real (but played here as ironically dumb) dissident organisation from Derry that targeted those suspected of being drug dealers (which, of course, the boys are).
A rowdy, raucous, vulgar anti-establishment awards magnet with a relentless barrage of ketamine-fuelled (cue a claymation hallucination sequence) club banger beats and tunes like the anti-Brit anthem H.O.O.D to Parful’s paean to getting high and a middle finger to sectarianism, plus a dodgily hilarious Bobby Sands gag, it won’t be to everyone’s taste but there’s no denying its edgy, electrifying vitality. (Mockingbird; Vue)
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)
Lee (15)
After Civil War’s fictional account of photojournalists in a war zone now, adapted from her son’s Antony Penrose’s biography (he only learnt of her wartime life and photos after her death), comes cinematographer-turned-director Ellen Kuras’s account of Elizabeth “Lee” Miller (Kate Winslet), an 1920s American model turned fashion photographer who became Vogue UK’s war correspondent in WWII, covering the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Her most notorious photo, however, was one of herself inside Hitler’s private bathtub.
It’s a fairly conventional biopic, adopting the time-worn approach of flashbacks through a late in life interview (thought that comes with a twist in the final moments), Lee’s story opening in rapid succession with her coming under fire in Saint-Malo, the start of the interview (with Josh O’Connor) and meeting future husband, surrealist artist and pacifist Roland (Alexander Skarsgård in a largely nothing role), in Paris at a gathering of intellectuals, among them Solange D’Ayen (Marion Cottilard), the French editor of Vogue, Picasso (Enrique Arce) and surrealist poet Paul Éluard (Vincent Colombe) and his wife Nusch (Noémie Merlant) where it appears to have been de rigeur for the women to go topless.
As Miller begrudgingly unfolds her wartime exploits, the conventionally structured narrative has her approach Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) for a job, clashing with introduce the sniping Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett), take photos of the London Blitz, use her American nationality to wangle an assignment with the invasion of Europe, form a working partnership with Life photographer David Scherman (Andy Samberg), take snaps of the wounded, and run up against British military chauvinism before Colonel Spencer (James Murray) allows her to join the troops at Saint-Malo (which turned out not be as pacified as thought and she took the first – but censored –photo of the use of napalm) before covering the liberation of Paris (where she witnesses the treatment of female collaborators and stops an American soldier from raping a French woman- who should be grateful – an act which resonates with a later confessional as it tacks on a brief indictment of toxic masculinity) and finally visits the notorious cattle trains and death camps, the famous photos which the censor refused to allow UK Vogue to publish as being “too disturbing”, before setting-up and posing for Scherman’s bathtub shot at Hitler’s gaff in Munich. Everything being then wrapped up with the concluding 1970s ‘interview’.
Although much is omitted (there’s almost nothing about her non-war photography, one of which inspired Magritte’s Le Baiser, both she and Penrose had been previously married and the pair didn’t actually wed until 1947, and she also slept in Hitler’s bed) and often feels overly schematic, it’s generally faithful to the facts and perfectly captures Miller’s eye for a striking photograph, be it lace undies on a clothes line or corpses on a train. Although the performances are adequate, the male roles are largely rote, all the emotional intensity coming from the actresses, with Winslet delivering one of her finest turns as the complex Miller in all her rage, fear, frustration and compassion. In one of her letters Miller wrote that her adventures “were good cinema”. Despite its flaws, Lee proves the point. (Cineworld NEC, Solihull; MAC; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
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)
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)
Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire (12)
The first half of writer-director Zack Snyder’s sci fi saga, 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. It’s now available as a more violent, more extreme three hour plus director’s cut. (Netflix)
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (12)
The second part of Zack Snyder’s Star Wars meets The Magnificent Seven rip-off has received possibly the worst review of his career. Which seems a touch harsh given that, will knowingly derivative and generic, it’s actually a more than decent, action-packed sci fi adventure.
It picks up from the end of the first part with Kora (Sofia Boutella), a fugitive renegade with a hidden past – and identity – as a former royal bodyguard connecting her to the tyrannical Imperium commander Balisarius and the assassination of Princess Issa following the murder of the King and Queen, and her love interest as Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) celebrating having, with the help of their fellow fighters, former general Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and cyborg sword master Nemesis (Doona Bae), and the locals on farming planet Veldt, defeated and killed Motherworld evil admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein).
Except his body’s recovered and regenerated, the wound on his chest prompting Kora’s new nickname as The Scargiver, leading to yet another all-out assault to crush the rebellion on Veldt, as the plucky band have to fight off the murderous Motherworld legions while Kora and Gunnar sneak aboard Noble’s ship to destroy it from the inside. All of which, save for some Kora backstory exposition and a couple of last act surprise revelations, is served up as a constant barrage of action set-pieces, in which, as per the source inspiration, not everyone survives. As such, it’s exhilaratingly explosive high octane stuff, this time providing more involvement for Anthony Hopkins voicing Jimmy the droid , with an ending that dutifully sets the stage for third – and, who knows, maybe ever fourth, instalment, which will inevitably be met with critical scorn and fanboy euphoria in equal measure. (Netflix)
Rebel Ridge (15)
Despite a title that sounds like some war movie and which only comes into play as meeting point late in the film, this proves a smart and compelling thriller very much in the Western tradition of the lone hero taking on corrupt smalltown authorities. Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, our hero here is Terry (rising British star Aaron Pierre) who, wearing headphones, is oblivious to the police car behind him until he’s knocked off his bicycle. He’s subsequently interrogated by the two white officers, Marston (David Denman) and Lann (Emory Cohen) and, when the search his bag, find a stash of money. He explains it’s from selling his share in a Chinese restaurant to his former Korean War Chinese medic partner (Dana Lee) and he’s taking it to bail out his cousin on a possession charge (before he’s processed to prison where, a witness in a gangland killing, his life will be at risk). They, however, insist it’s drug money and, as such, they have a legal right to seize and keep it. He can file a complaint, but that’s a long process, and unlikely to succeed.
From this point, Terry finds himself taking on an unjust and convoluted system and coming up against the corrupt and racist local police chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) who needs the money to keep his department operational (a legal settlement threatened to bankrupt the town) while finding an ally in Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a law clerk with her own backstory and a victim of the same broken legal system, who has uncovered a string of similar incidents involving those arrested on misdemeanours all being held for the 90 days before charges are dropped, the judge (James Cromwell) apparently all part of the shady dealings. She also, apparently, has an accomplice on the force who’s watching her back.
Brokering a deal but never keeping to it, Burnne and his henchmen reckon Terry will just walk away, but they don’t know that, a former marine, he has (rather like Liam Neeson’s characters) a special set of skills, as officer Sims (Zsané Jhé) finds on researching Wikipedia. Touching on social and racial injustices, it’s a slow burn to the eventual showdown (Terry does his best to work within the law and it’s the only time shots are ever fired, although there’s only one death throughout the film) and reveals, with a resolution that hinges on how dashcams are activated when a police siren’s turned on.
There’s some contrivances (drugging Summer in the back of a cop car so she’d fail a urine test and lose custody of her daughter if she continues to interfere) and an unconvincing change of heart in the final moments, but otherwise this is a thrilling and fresh excursion into genre territory (Netflix)
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. (Netflix)
Sing Sing (15)
Directed by Greg Kwedar, this is loosely based on The Sing Sing Follies, Esquire article about the highly successful real life Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme (only 3% of those engaged ever return to prison) that originated at the titular maximum-security penitentiary in 1996 when prisoners sought help in writing and producing a play to perform for their fellow inmates. The every excellent Colman Domingo is the wrongly convicted John “Divine G” Whitfield (a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, internet radio talk show host, actor, film director and producer, and youth counsellor) who mentors his cellmates in performing Shakespeare. The film opens with him as a performer, concluding a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream and primarily centres around his involvement (initially prickly and antagonistic but gradually transforming) with George “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing a fictionalised younger version of himself, the real Whitfield also cameoing), a badass convicted of armed robbery, as the troupe (played mostly by actual RTA alumni), led by group leader and writer Brent Buell (Paul Raci in a role similar to that in The Sound of Metal), assemble and rehearse Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, a musical about a time-traveling ancient Egyptian (one stickler for detail amusingly complains the headband is actually Phoenician) in which Maclin, who had a fondness for the Bard, played Hamlet.
While it captures the dehumanising realities of life behind bars (cell searches, etc.) and how it impacts on the inmates’ psychology and actions (dropping flat to the ground when a siren wails), this is far more about catharsis and the therapeutic power of theatre and the way in which art speaks to its consumers and participants.
Described in one review as The Shawshank Redemption as made by Mike Leigh, the tunnel more metaphorical than actual, it focuses intently on the relationship between the two Divines, never sentimentalising but bringing an inspirational feel to its narrative (the men learning to lower their guard to expose and handle their feelings), wholly unique within the prison genre (perhaps the closest might be The Birdman of Alcatraz). “We’re here to become human again”, says one the men during a rehearsal; the film sings a testament and message to the system as to how that is really possible. (Mon:Everyman)
Speak No Evil (15)
A remake of the unrelentingly grim 2022 Danish film (an in-joke nod concerns a Danish trio obsessed with food), complete with title, plot and even large chunks of dialogue, but with a change from the original’s devastatingly nihilistic ending, Eden Lake writer-director James Watkins’s thriller cautions that kindness to strangers may have an ulterior – and sinister – motive. Their marriage having problems since he lost his job and she quit hers in PR, not to mention a dash of infidelity, holidaying in Italy with their anxiety-prone (she can’t bear to be separated from her stuffed rabbit) 11-year-old daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), might just be the tonic Americans Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis) need. Life certainly brightens up when they’re befriended by retired doctor Paddy (James McAvoy) and his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), who have their own young child, the mute (his tongue apparently shorter than the norm) and distant Ant (Dan Hough), who invite them out for meals, ward off the annoying Danes and are generally friendly, solicitous and outgoing to a fault. When it’s time to go, Paddy invites them to come visit their farm in the West Country and, while Louise is hesitant, she agrees and off they duly go,
Everything seems great. Their hosts are charming and considerate, even if they seem to forget Louise is vegetarian (she nevertheless accepts a slice of their prize goose, as it would be rude not to given it was roasted in their honour). Paddy plies Ben with his homemade cider and, in touch with his alpha male, takes him out in the wilds for some primal scream therapy, their kids hang out together and the foursome go for a dinner of locally sourced food at a friend’s restaurant. But something feels off, and not just that Paddy happily lets Ben pay the bill or that they wind them up faking under the tablecloth fellatio and Paddy saying he’s not actually a doctor when Louise cuts herself.
Louise is put off by the stained bed blankets and resents Ciara calling Agnes out on her table manners, but is apologetic when told the reason. At one point, Louise having found Agnes in the couple’s bed, they pack up and leave before dawn, forced to return for the forgotten toy. Again Ciara offers a reasonable explanation. And, as Louise tells herself, they are British after all. Nevertheless, it’s harder to ignore red flags like the bruises Ant shows Agnes, or how Paddy loses his cool when his son can’t dance in time to Cotton Eye Joe, later saying he’d had too much to drink.
Things take a turn for the terrifying, however, when Ant, whose previously showed Agnes Paddy’s watch collection and passed her an indecipherable message, steals the keys to the locked barn and reveals its and his secrets. Now, it’s a case of trying to get away as soon as they can, Ben forcing himself to man up. But Paddy, who’s professed he prefers the hunt to the kill (someone says he likes playing with his food), and Ciara aren’t about to let that happen.
The core cast are all in solid for, but this is very much McAvoy’s show as he brilliant channels Paddy’s passive-aggressive and controlling nature, his forced smile and predatory eyes speaking volumes, before going full over the top berserker in the last act as Watkins switches from uneasy dark social comedy of manners to full on visceral Straw Dogs intensity. And you’ll never hear The Bangles’ Eternal Flame the same way again.(Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Strange Darling (18)
An opening voice over (by Jason Patric) informs this is the true crime story recreation of the final moments of a rampage by one of America’s most ‘unique’ serial killers. It isn’t and that should clue you in to the mismatch between what you think you’re seeing and the reality as, shot entirely on 35mm and soundtracked to Love Hurts, JT Mollner unfolds his compelling thriller while Giovanni Ribisi makes his feature debut cinematographer.
Told in six non-linear chapters, set in rural Hood River County, Oregon, it opens with a woman in a red dress, the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald, stunning), fleeing through the woods from a moustachioed man in a red lumberjack shirt, the Demon (Kyle Gallner, equally solid), armed with a rifle, after crashing her red car (colour plays a significant role) when he shot at her. The chapter ends with her knocking at the door of a cabin and asking its retired eccentric doomsday hippies Frederick (Ed Begley Jr) and Genevieve (Barbara Hershey) and asks for help.
A later chapter has Fred lying in a pool of blood and the Demon searching the house calling out “Here, kitty kitty kitty” while another, with blue lighting, has the provocative Lady (in a wig) and the creepy Demon smoking and talking in a car before renting a motel room for some cocaine fuelled sadomasochist role play sex games, she first asking him if he’s a serial killer.
To say more would spoil the ingenious twist and reversals that are only revealed in the final bloody chapter before a muted epilogue with one of the most protracted and uncomfortable to watch death scenes in decades closing one of the year’s most unique thrillers. (Vue)
The Substance (18)
A body horror so extreme, even David Cronenberg might feel it was excessive, channelling The Elephant Man, Jekyll & Hyde, Frankenstein and Sunset Boulevard among others with homages to Vertigo and The Shining a dose of Brian Yuzna’s Society in the climax, French writer director Coralie Fargeat affords Demi Moore a career-defining, awards magnet comeback after a decade or more of fairly ho hum roles. She plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a former Oscar winning actress with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame now reduced to hosting Sparkle Your Life, a daytime aerobics television show in outdated leotards. It’s her remaining claim to fame but, taken to lunch (during which we’re given sickening close-ups of him chewing shrimp) by her boorish producer Harvey (a leeringly wonderful Dennis Quaid), surely named for Weinstein, having already heard him slagging her off while in the men’s lavatory, she’s bluntly told, thanks for your service but having now turned 50, she’s surplus to requirements and a new, young presenter will take her place in a revamped version.
Tipped off about some sort of anti-aging drug called The Substance that “makes you a better you”, she duly signs up and us given the location of a secret locker to get her package. Naturally, it’s something of a Faustian deal, whereby she injects a fluid that births (through her ripped open spine a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a younger doppelganger clone (Margaret Qualley). There are, of course, rules. She has to regularly inject a stabiliser and the two versions of herself can’t exist simultaneously, each gets a week while the others fed nutrient, and they must switch back, but always remembering, ominously, “you are one”. While the one’s active, the other lies comatose in a secret compartment in the bathroom of her luxury apartment.
Fairly predictably, naming herself Sue, her new self auditions to be the new Sparkle, Harvey practically wetting himself over his sexy new find, the drooling stakeholders likewise. She’s an overnight sensation, promoted to a new slot as rating go through the roof and is even lined up to host the network’s New Year’s Eve special. However, being only able to work one week in two (she claims she has to care for her sick mother, which is essentially true) starts getting irksome and, her narcissism coming though, she begins stretching out the seven days rule. Matters are further complicated when she takes a lover. There are, of course, consequences for Elizabeth, the first signs of which are a withered finger. It gets worse the longer the gaps are until, as it heads for its deranged, geysers of blood delirium climax, both incarnations literally learn what “you are one” means, as the prosthetics department runs amok.
Variously awash with feminist satirical themes of toxic misogyny, Hollywood’s downer on older women, body image (there’s an electrifying scene as Elizabeth stares at herself and her make up in the mirror, becoming increasingly disgusted with what she sees, the perceived flaws rather than the beauty, and the fetishising nature of the beauty and movie industry (with self-aware irony the camera pointedly dwells on close ups of lithe young female flesh as well as of both Qualley and Moore’s naked bodies).
The cinematography, garish colours, sound design (lots of squelching and cracking) and synth-heavy score all add to the cumulative effect, while the central performances are jawdropping. As the ruthlessly ambitious manipulative ingénue, this is Qualley’s starmaking breakthrough while, garbed in a suit as flashy as his persona, Quaid chomps down into the role, at one point, told his assistant’s name is Isabella, he retorts “Who has time to say that” and call her Cindy instead. But this is Moore’s shining moment, a fearless performance utterly devoid of vanity (as the effects take hold she becomes an increasingly, physically twisted and decrepit hag, though that does raise the question of how she manages to run given the state of her legs) in a film that, with both style and substance, is even more insane that it sounds. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Reel; Vue)
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 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)
Unfrosted (12)
Anyone old enough to remember Tony The Tiger, the mascot for Frosted Flakes, or Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Rice Krispies trio, will find much to enjoy in this unashamedly silly and colourful directorial debut from Jerry Seinfeld, which, framed bas an origin story recounted to a young runaway, charts the cereal rivalry between American firms Kellogg’s and Post in Battle, Michigan, in a race to be first to develop a new breakfast treat for America – the jam-filled toasted (and potentially palate scalding) pastry, the Pop-Tart.
Seinfeld, who co-wrote the screenplay, is Bob Cabana, a fictional marketing executive for Kellogg’s in the early 1960s, working for (fictional) Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan), a descendant of the company’s founder, while Melissa McCarthy is (fictional) Donna ‘Stan’ Stankowski, a former employee whose seconded from working for NASA on the moon landing to help develop its top-secret project. However, across the way, Post, headed up by (real) Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), with whom Kellogg’s infatuated, who are developing their own Country Squares using plans stolen from Kellogg’s (both companies have undercover operatives posing a janitors who hidden cameras in their mops).
Part factual and part nonsense, its peppered with a stream of gags and pop culture references in a storyline that variously entails enlisting an oddball crew of riffs on real historical figures, Sea Monkeys creator Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), fitness entrepreneur Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), bicycle boss Ignaz (here Steve) Schwinn (Jack McBrayer) and (based on Hector Boyardee) celebrity Italian chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan), who creates a sentient ravioli, as taste pilots for the jammy pastry (initially called Trat-Pop) Then there’s a trip to ask a favour of a sexually insatiable JFK (Bill Burr) who gets the (real-life) Wrigleys mascots the Doublemint Twins pregnant, Post recruiting Kruschev (Dean Norris) as a sponsor in response and prompting the Cuban crisis. Plus an Oppenheimer-like pastry toasting testing range that kills off one of the tasters; a Post-sabotaging deal with Puerto Rican criminal sugar magnate El Sucre; news legend Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan who doubles as and Johnny Carson) rambling on about his dodgy habits; a sinister cabal of milkman led by Peter Dinklage and Christian Slater; and a cereal mascots revolt led by real-life preening ham Thurl Ravenscroft (Hugh Grant in a variation of his Paddington character), who voiced Tony the Tiger.
All of this plus cameos by Fred Armisen, Cedric The Entertainer and John Hamm and John Slattery channelling their Mad Men personae adding to the high comedy calorie count in a Coens and Mel Brooks spoofing cocktail. Like its iconic maguffin, it has nothing of nutritional value, but it goes down a treat. (Netflix)
The Union (12)
Another generic Netflix action movie, this pares Mark Wahlberg as Mike McKenna, a blue-collar construction worker who, when an op to extract a CIA defector in Trieste goes fatally pear-shaped, is drugged in New Jersey (cue Bruce Springsteen songs) and wakes up in London to be recruited by former high school girlfriend Roxanne (Halle Berry in black leathers) who, it transpires, now works for a covert intelligence agency of working-class agents known as The Union, run by Tom Brennan (JK Simmons) and headquartered in the BT Tower, and whose closest partner Nick Faraday (Mike Colter) was killed. As an unassuming figure, she wants Mike to help her to track down the obligatory maguffin containing details of every spy and mission in the Western world before its sold to the highest bidder.
Pretty much as predictable as it is formulaic (yes, there’s that supposed dead character reappearing to play the betrayal hand and set up the last act’s multiple Croatian car chases), nevertheless that sparky chemistry between long-time friends Whalberg and Berry, as well as Simmonds’ trademark dry wit delivery and support turns from Jackie Earl Haley and Alice Lee as fellow agents and Stephen Campbell Moore as an annoying CIA operative who wants to shut The Union down, ensures it serves exactly what it promises on the label to provide comfort food that goes down easily even if there’s no nutritional value. (Netflix)