This column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.
FILM OF THE WEEK
Babygirl (18)
Despite scenes of Nicole Kidman masturbating to porn on her laptop after, as ever failing to orgasm with her husband, despite the certificate Halina Reijn’s darkly comic erotic thriller, her follow-up to Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, is, set over a Christmas that seems to last forever, a generally sexually restrained affair that goes easy on the nudity and heavy breathing, unlikely to prompt much crossing of legs or coats over crotches in the cinema. Kidman, who to be fair gives a fearless performance though not on the same scale as Demi Moore in The Substance, is Romy Mathis, the CEO of Tensile, a “robot business” a logistics firm that runs a successful Amazon-like warehouse delivery scheme. She has a plush apartment in the city and a mansion in the country where she lives with her successful theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), whom she genuinely loves, and two teenage daughters, the girly Nora (Vaughan Reilly), who likes dressing up and dancing, and the older, more grounded Isabel (Esther McGregor), who wears her hair as a lesbian banner.
She has it all, except there’s still something missing. Well, that would be a sex life that matches up to her fantasies, generally about being dominated (a cliched reversal of her corporate power status). The answer soon presents itself in the figure of twenty-something new intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) who she first encounters in the street when he calms a German Shepherd that’s apparently going to attack her. She’s drawn to his cool confident testosterone and only puts up a token resistance when, clearly single-minded in what he wants, he selects her as his mentor. Maybe, she wonders, he can dominate and tame her like he did the dog with whatever metaphorical cookies he has in his pocket. That he’s charismatically young and she’s feeling the years taking a toll (she has Botox and (cryo chamber sessions), is further fuel to the fire.
So, after some charged unprofessionally close encounters in the office and lift and his loaded comments, they’re soon going at it in the gents to the sound of INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart, he tapping into her need to be told what to do. That would include drinking the milk he orders for her at a swanky bar (“Good girl”, he whispers as she passes) as well as getting on all fours and licking a saucerful of it, this time to the Freudian tones of George Michael’s Father Figure. She gets off on being dominated (finally getting those climaxes going) but also the threat of being exposed (“Does it turn you on when I say that?”) that he uses as a leash as the power balance shifts in his favour.
It’s inevitably going to end badly, with an ambitious young assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde), who Samuel’s casually dating, and then her husband discovering what (or indeed who) is going down, though, in a sly take on sisterhood, the former uses her boss’s “bad example” as a feminist bullying bargaining chip for promotion.
Inevitably likely to draw comparisons with the similarly themed 50 Shades of Grey saga, though considerably less erotic, it’s a certainly daring and provocative piece of work even if Samuel’s motives are never really clear (is he seducing her because he can, is he looking to climb the career ladder on her back, does he have real feelings for her?), which makes the coda hotel room scene with him and that dog problematically ambiguous. Nevertheless, it elicits compelling turns from Kidman, a mess of pleasure and guilty conscience over having it, Dickinson’s self-satisfied cocky chaos agent and the wise beyond her years McGregor, although Banderas feels somewhat undeveloped and one dimensional, his eventual emotional breakdown and tussle with Samuel more embarrassing than poignant. It ends, though, with a satisfying go girl punch, Romy having reclaimed her office politics power and self-assurance in telling a lecherous colleague where to shove it. Henceforth, no one, it seems is going to put babygirl in the corner. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
ALSO RELEASED
Club Zero (15)
According to Jessica Hausner, this is a social satire about how parents, preoccupied with their own busy lives, hand over their responsibility for their children to teachers. As both writer and director, she should know but as a theme it’s far less evident than those of eating disorders, cultism and manipulation through the use of food. Set in a boarding school for “difficult’ teenagers somewhere in the UK where the uniform entails yellow T-shirts and khaki shorts, bright blue knee socks and white sneakers, it stars Mia Wasikowska as Miss Novak who, her hair in a tight bob as disciplined as her manner of speech, has been taken on to teach nutrition to her small class of privileged pupils. She’s an advocate of ‘conscious eating’, an actual lifestyle concept that practises mindful consumption by eating more slowly, taking deep breaths before each bite, and practicing meditation to eliminate unnecessary cravings for food. If that doesn’t sound crackpot enough already, Novak’s ultimate aim is to get her students to a state of not eating at all, part of the so-called Club Zero, which, she says will be beneficial for both their health, mind and the planet.
Her students (newcomers Florence Baker, Samuel D Anderson, Luke Barker, Ksenia Devriendt and Gwen Currant) are a mixed bunch, some there to lose weight (one has bulimia, so this fits her perfectly), others for environmental or political reasons, others to just score scholarship credits, but all without a sense of direction or purpose, for whatever reason, like disciples of a cult leader, most either fall under her spell or succumb to peer pressure (“you want to be seen” says one, their regimen making the feel ‘special’), exasperating their parents at the dinner table and, following a complaint by working class mother (Amanda Lawrence) concerned about her son, eventually leading to the school administrator (Sidse Babett Knudsen) having to take action against Novak and the students responding with open rebellion, their not eating an act of radical defiance. A body horror of sorts, as embodied in Wasikowska’s emotionally blank performance, it’s a dry, mannered affair with a hollow disorienting percussive score, albeit not without moments of visceral impact such as a scene involving vomit. A provocative critique of modern day anxieties, ideological fanaticism, fads, parent-child disassociation and the notion of salvation through self-destruction, it’s a chilly experience with an unsettling ambiguous Pied Piper ending, but it eats away at you from the inside. (From Sat: MAC)
The Damned (15)
Despite being buried away in just one local screen, with an unnerving score from Stephen McKeon and Eli Arenson’s striking cinematography, the feature debut by Icelandic director Thordur Palsson is already assured of a place in the years’ best and most chilling horrors, at times evoking thoughts of M.R.James. Set in 19th century Iceland with an atmosphere so thick it threatens to choke you, it centres around a shipwreck just off the coast that serves as home to a small fishing community. It’s winter and times are hard, food scarce and the weather murderous. Seeing the wreck, the villagers are divided, some say it’s their moral duty to rescue the survivors, others take the pragmatic view that, with scant food supplies already, doing so would threaten their own survival. It’s the latter view that wins the day and ships are not put out, However, when they do take to sea the next day hoping to recover the ship’s barrels of salt pork, they’re shocked to discover that some of the sailors have made it to the jagged rocky outcrop known as “The Teeth”, and when they try to get aboard they have to be beaten off and left to drown, though it also costs the life of their helmsman Ragnar (Rory McCann).
When the bodies eventually wash up (a shocking scene suggests one’s still alive but the stomach moments prove to be an eel that got inside the body), they’re buried on the beach, the elderly superstitious Helga (Siobhan Finneran) telling that they must have their hands tied with rope, their feet nailed down, and their wooden coffins rotated three times in order to confuse their spirits and prevent them returning as Draugr, undead creatures of Nordic lore composed of skin, bone and blood, only capable of being destroyed by fire. What follows is a series of mysterious deaths and suicides as well as unnerving visions of a black figure that are inevitably taken to be rooted in hauntings by the drowned men. The truth proves both less and more horrifying. As Daniel (Joe Cole), who becomes the new helmsman says, the living are more dangerous than the dead.
Morality play and psychological horror, it’s a spartan affair, cold and dark, steeped in shadows and mist, drawing on folklore superstition and guilty paranoia alike, given gutsy strength by a strong cast led by Odessa Young as Eva, a young but steely widow who’s in charge of the fishing boat and gets to make the decisions, and Joe Cole as Daniel, their mutual feelings throwing up another ethical dilemma that further stokes the simmering tensions amid a community founded on tough masculine values and survival through strength. Damned good indeed. (Vue)
Emilia Perez (15)
While it never appeared on local screens, the awards it’s accrued, notably four Golden Globes and Best Actress at Cannes for the four core female stars, suggests this is now a real Oscars contender and is France’s official entry for Best Foreign Film. Even so, directed by Jacques Audiard and loosely based on a chapter in Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute, it’s a tonally jarring affair that, initially imagined as an opera, marries songs and sung dialogue to an overcooked, melodramatic narrative that, based in Mexican crime territory, explored themes of identity (a constant in his films) and moral conscience.
Having got her wealthy client off for murdering his wife but with her boss taking the credit , Mexico City lawyer Rita Mora Castrio (Zoe Saldana, who won Best Supporting Actress in a Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes), is approached by Manitas (transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón), a notorious cartel boss, who wants her to help his disappear so that he can transition to the woman he’s always felt himself to be, the gender reassignment surgery performed by Dr Wasserman whom she sources in Tel Aviv (following a musical montage in Bangkok to a song called La Vaginoplastia) who’s persuaded after hearing Manitas’s recollections of gender dysphoria as a child.
Four years later, Manitas declared dead, he now returns, surfacing in London and posing as his long lost cousin, Emilia Perez, enlisting Rita to relocate her ‘widow’, Jessi (Selana Gomez, making more of the role than the script offers) and two children from Switzerland, where they were sent for safety, back to Mexico, moving in to live with her. Jessi only agrees, however, so she can be reunited with Gustavo Brun (Édgar Ramírez), with whom she had an affair.
A chance encounter with the mother of a missing child, stirs Emilia’s conscience over his former life and, with Rita’s help, she sets up a nonprofit, charity for the victims of cartel violence and the ‘disappeared’, their bodies exhumed for identification, proper burial and closure, prompting an amusing moment when a woman, Epifanía (Adriana Paz) declares she’s relieved her abusive husband’s dead, she and Emilia beginning a relationship. Meanwhile, while having freed herself from a corrupt justice system, while herself somewhat morally compromised, Rita’s troubled that many of the charity’s donors are themselves dangerous shady characters. When Jessi announces she intends to marry Gustavo, taking the children with her, Emilia’s reaction sets up the inevitable poignantly confessional and tragic climax.
An exploration of the complexities of human nature, told largely through Rita’s eyes and her bon with Emilia, driven by powerful performances from Saldana and Gascón, it’s a strong melodramatic and emotional narrative (Audiard initially conceived it in operatic terms) with a sharp political edge regarding the grip criminals and corrupt businessmen and politicians exercise over Mexico. However, it’s debatable whether it really needed the song and dance sequences that punctuate it, not to mention the way characters sing their lines, especially when so few of them are especially memorable or stirring (though Saldana’s showpiece at a charity event in Mexico City where she dances in a red velvet power suit while delivering a critique of the country’s corrupt ruling class is easily the strongest). That said, given the tonal rollercoaster, conceiving it as a highly theatrical musical was probably the only way it would work without feeling like some sub-Aldomovar cheesy soap opera. (Netflix)
Maria (15)
Completing his psychologically complex biopic trilogy about iconic 20th century women (Jackie Kennedy, Diana Spencer) driven to the edge by the men in their lives, working from a screenplay by Steven Knight (who also wrote Spencer), Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín offers up an actual diva as, set in September 1977 and, aged just 53, opening with her dead body being removed from her apartment, he relates the last week in the life of legendary American-born Greek opera singer Maria Callas, mesmerisingly incarnated here by Angelina Jolie in her first leading dramatic role in over a decade.
Living a recluse in Paris with her long-suffering but loyal housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), whom she’s constantly asking to rearrange her piano and ashtrays, Callas is trying to get her voice back up to her peak following years of prescription meds abuse and eating disorders, though she declares she has no intention of ever singing in public again. She agrees to film an interview with a young journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee) called Mandrax, – who asks if he should call her Maria or La Callas- though in fact he’s just an hallucination brought on by the drug of the same name.
However, following the narrative conceit, Larraín uses this to prompt her memories of her strained relationship with her older sister Yakinthi (Valeria Golino) and, more significantly, her pursuit by and affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), a man obsessed with his own ugliness, who, in 1957, seeks to seduce her aboard his yacht in the presence of her then husband, though he also has his eyes on Jackie Kennedy, wife of JFK (Caspar Phillipson). It also flashes back to her childhood where, variously played by Lidia Zelikman Kauders (1930), Aggelina Papadopoulou (1940) and Christiana Aloneftis (1947) we see her being pushed to be a better singer by her ruthless, controlling mother Litsa (Lydia Koniordou), with suggestions both Maria and Yakinthi were pimped to German officers for private ‘recitals’ in the slums of Athens. It’s an early indication of abuse that also manifested in the way Onassis sought to control her, forbidding her from singing, eventually culminating in her desire to take control of her own destiny.
Adopting a surreal approach, Larraín interlaces the narrative with operatic arias (a blend of Jolie and Callas) through which Maria unleashes her suppressed emotions, crafting an exploration of what make her – and us – who she is and how she arrives at such crucial points in our lives. One such is her decision to work with suitably fawning pianist (“You’re Maria Callas, you’re not late. Everyone else is early”) Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield) in trying to regain the peak of her vocal powers and which results in her being callously exposed by an opportunistic journalist who secretly records the lesson.
Fantasised scenes such as Callas imaging a full orchestra playing Madame Butterfly in the rain are complemented by Knight peppering his script with some terrific lines, eliciting laughter when Callas demands. “Book me a table at a café where the waiters know who I am. “I’m in the mood for adulation” but also capturing the toxicity she suffered such as when, at a black and white recreation of Monroe singing at JFK’s birthday, Onassis swipes “No one cares about her voice. Just as no one cares about your body”.
With episodes involving her collaborations with Pasolini and Zefferelli, it’s a beautifully photographed study not just of Callas’s life and final days, but of the curse of addictive fame. The supporting cast are flawless, with particular plaudits going to Galino as the estranged sister (their brief meeting in a café is piercing) and Rohrwacher and Favino providing both compassion and comic relief, but, giving her all, this is Jolie’s triumph (Larraín wisely resisting the temptation of a prosthetic nose a la Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein) , a performance of both quiet emotional depth and internalisation in her loneliness and electrifying passion in her climactic recollection of singing Tosca. And her two poodles deserve canine Oscars too. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham; Vue)
A Real Pain (15)
The sort of character-driven low-key indie that characterises Sundance, the second feature from writer director Jesse Eisenberg is a sort of Holocaust road trip dramady about unarticulated grief and discontent as, having already earned co-star Kieran Culkin a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe, seem a likely outside contender for Oscar recognition.
Eisenberg and Culkin respectively play chalk and cheese Jewish cousins David Kaplan, a sharp-tongued repressed married New York digital ads salesman with OCD, and Benji, a charming chaotic unwed idler with a steady stream of nervous patter and no filter between brain and mouth, but a genuine interest in people. One is uptight and detached, the other gregarious but feels things too intensely; each wishes they could be more like the other. Estranged for a while, they’re reunited in travelling to Poland to visit the homeland to fulfil the wishes of their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, and address their own historical trauma guilt.
They join a group of fellow tourists, all with their own connection to trauma or being Jewish. among them hard-edged, self-loathing LA divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Grey) whose grandparents fled the Holocaust, self-described ‘boring’ elderly couple Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane (Liza Sadovy) who have Polish Jewish ancestry, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan, a delight) escaped the Rwandan genocide and converted to Judaism in Canada. Their unlikely guide for the tour round the war and Holocaust memorials is James (Will Sharp), an Oxford educated non-Jewish Brit who Benji rebukes for simply regurgitating local colour facts rather than connecting with them.
Filmed in Poland and including scenes in Warsaw, Lublin and at the site of the Majdanek concentration camp, it’s an edgy and often uncomfortable but very funny comedy (a scene where Benji has an emotional outburst over riding first class on a train to the concentration camp), the cousins separating from the others to go and visit their grandmother’s old hometown and, following the Jewish tradition of placing stones on the gravemarkers of the deceased, attempt to do same by putting one on their grandmother’s former doorstep only to be amusingly rebuked by a neighbour because it could cause the elderly woman who now lives there to have an accident.
Bittersweet and unsentimental but with sudden confessional explosions of disarming poignancy, it’s a pain you really need to share. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
NOW SHOWING
Better Man (15)
Taking his cue from Robbie Williams saying he’d always seen himself like a performing monkey in Take That, The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey’s musical biopic quite literally presents his subject as an ape, Williams proving the voice and eyes and Jonno Davies the motion capture performance. It’s to the film’s credit that, to all intents and purposes, you don’t really notice.
Overlong at more than two hours and a little slow going in places, it follows Williams’ life from his childhood in Stoke-on-Trent through the Take That days (I suspect most have forgotten that, created and managed by Nigel Martin-Smith played just this side of defamatory legal action by Damon Herriman, they started out aimed at the gay market) to the 1995 split and his solo career, but with that including a complicated love-seeking relationship with his Sinatra-loving performer father Peter (Steve Pemberton) whose dreams never matched his achievements and who walked out when Robbie was still a lad, alcoholism, drug addiction and a crippling self-sabotaging battle with anxiety, self-doubt, depression, bisexuality (although that’s only a one line reference) and identity issues all both counter-productive and fuelling his need for attention and ambitions for stardom. While psychologically pretty straightforward and the price of fame theme familiar, it’s far darker than you might expect, not to mention littered with f and c bombs. Interestingly Gracey was originally intended to direct the equally warts and all Rocketman and ended up as producer and, to his credit, he ensures Williams remains a likeable if damaged charmer even when he’s been an obnoxious prick.
Although the finale, which recreates his 2001 One Night With show at the Royal Albert Hall, does have him thanking his mother (Kate Mulvany) as he closes with My Way, the being joined on stage to duet with his father, who he says made him who he is, is entirely fictional, a sort of making peace catharsis and acknowledgement in retrospect, but no less emotional for all that. Otherwise, aside from him not meeting Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) of All Saints on a boat and Knebworth coming after the RAH show, the film seems fairly faithful to events, the hostility between him and Gary Barlow (Jake Simmance), his engagement to Appleton and the souring of the relationship over the abortion prior to their Never Ever No 1 (the pain compounded with a tabloid headline about having Noel Gallagher’s child, both he and Liam figuring in a scene of sweary comic relief), the death of beloved gran Betty (Alison Steadman), her funeral providing the backdrop to Angels, as it builds to his staggering Knebworth headline to 150,000, even if the fantasy massacre of his internal demons, all portrayed as snarling ape versions, amid Let Me Entertain You is a tad bombastic.
There’s actually perhaps fewer musical numbers than you might have assumed, but those there are spectacularly staged, notably (if anachronistically) performing Rock DJ in Regent Street after Take That get their record deal, but between those and the troubled journey to redemption and self-acceptance, it does, as Williams says “give you a right fucking entertaining”. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxeom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Blitz (12A)
When your star is Saoirse Ronan, it’s going to takes real effort to sink the credibility and quality she brings, but, his third feature after the Oscar-winning 123 Years A Slave and gritty crime thriller Widows, which were followed by the acclaimed Small Axe TV series and documentary Occupied City, Steve McQueen does rather fumble the ball with this tonally uneven and at times clunkily written wartime drama.
Set during the London Blitz of WWII, Ronan plays Rita, the mother of nine-year-old bi-racial George (a winning Elliott Heffernan), her Grenadian partner Marcus (CJ Beckford, seen in a hot club dance flashback), in absentia, living with her dad Gerald (Paul Weller in a decent acting debut and getting to sing Ain’t Misbehavin’ round the old joanna) in Stepney and working in a munitions factory where, a decent singer, she gets to perform for a Down Your Way-like morale-boosting BBC outside broadcast before her feisty fellow workers take the opportunity to call for better civilian protection against the air raids instead of locking the Underground stations.
When, on account of the bombing, London’s children are packed off as evacuees, George, feeling guilty at the way he angrily treated her for sending him away, jumps off the train and sets off to walk back to London. It’s a picaresque journey of adventure and self-discovery that will involve him with Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a kindly Nigerian ARP warden (who he meets in a particularly clunky scene in an arcade with dioramas portraying Africans as savages), and, in less friendly circumstances, an embarrassing subplot straight of Oliver Twist involving a gang of Cockney scavengers (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke hamming like panto villains) who enlist him to pilfer the corpses’ pockets in the bombed out ruins.
Meanwhile, back home, Rita’s helping out in shelters set up by socialist community organisers and, learning George has done a runner, going frantic and determined to find him. Added into her story is Jack (Harris Dickinson), a shy firefighter with a crush on her, but that never really goes anywhere.
Cobbling together the old-fashioned spirit of The Railway Children, Powell and Pressburger, and the those Children’s Film Foundation films, when not indulging in period drama cliches (and Haley Squires as Rita’s Cockerney sparra colleague) and repeatedly showing close-ups of bombs on their way to cause devastation, McQueen lurches from a sentimental road movie in the manner of Disney’s The Incredible Journey with a plucky child instead of animals to broad brush commentary about the era’s casual racism (George’s often called a monkey. There’s moments when, such as the scenes at a ballroom after a bombing with the hoi polloi in frozen death postures, crowds trying to escape a flooding tube station, and the opening shot of a fireman trying to grapple with an errant hose, he manages to capture wartime authenticity, but mostly it’s all rather politely tableaux through which Ronan wanders. All that and some surrealistic images of flowers. A cosy if at times uncomfortable Sunday afternoon watch in front of the telly, but for McQueen a major disappointment. (Apple TV +)
Carry-On (12)
Though indisputably Die Hard lite (or more accurately, given the time and setting, Die Hard 2), taking time off from having Liam Neeson kill people, set on Christmas Eve director Jaume Collet-Serra turns in some watchable if credibility stretching B-movie action hokum anchored by a central cat and mouse battle of wits between Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman.
The former is Ethan Kopek, sleepwalking through life as a Transportation Security Administration agent at Los Angeles International Airport after being rejected for the police academy after concealing his father’s criminal history. He’s given a wake-up call when his girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson), who’s just been promoted to a senior role at the airport, announces she’s pregnant. To which end, he finally asks his boss (Dean Norris) about possible promotion and more responsibility and is given a trial period in charge of scanning luggage on one of the security lines, substituting for his friend and co-worker Jason (Sinqua Walls), and dealing with a steady stream of obstreperous passengers.
This, as it turns out, is rather unfortunate, since Bateman’s character, only ever known as the Traveller, had put in place a plot to force Jason, whose family he was going to imperil, into letting a passenger’s suitcase pass through unchallenged. So now, instead of Jason, Ethan becomes the mark, with Sofia’s life as the bargaining chip. And, after initially assuming it’s a prank, with his every move monitored by the Traveller’s sniper and surveillance accomplice (Theo Rossi), who’s holding someone captive in his van, with no way of alerting anyone, he reluctantly agrees to play ball, placing Nora’s life above the lives of everyone on the plane. What he doesn’t know is that the case, carried through by one Mateo Flores (Tonatiuh), contains a vial of Novichok, the world’s most lethal nerve gas. Meanwhile horrified to learn on the case’s contents, having framed Jason as drinking on the job in order to get back on the security line, Ethan is now frantically seeking a way of foiling the plot, but the Traveller, who’s feeding him instructions via an ear piece, is always one step ahead, as the death of the cop he passes a message to illustrates.
And as he racks his brain looking for a solution – finally confronting the Traveller, in his black coat and hat, who is clearly in total control, having investigated a fire that took the lives of two Russian mobsters at the start of the film, dogged LAPD detective (Danielle Deadwyler) has intuited something’s not right and called in Homeland Security as she starts putting all the pieces together, trying to figure out who the bomb may be targeting. It’s not a huge surprise to learn everything’s down to corporate profits.
There’s a few twists written in to its otherwise fairly simplistic narrative as not everyone involved turns out to be a bad guy while Collet-Serra throws in some messy but thrilling action sequences, variously involving a showdown among the luggage belts and an in-car struggle set to Last Christmas. It’s not one that stands up to scrutinising the logic, but Egerton again effortlessly carries off the action hero, albeit here a reluctant one, while Bateman sinks his teeth into a rare chance to play the villain, amusingly offering Ethan relationship advice in-between his demands. Ultimately, they’re not McClane and Gruber and there’s no rousing yippee ki-yay moment, but the film ably rises above the baggage it’s carrying. (Netflix)
Conclave (12A)
Adapted by Peter Straughan from the Robert Harris novel and the follow up to director Edward Berger’s Oscar-winning All Quiet On The Western Front, despite a seemingly unpromising plot pivoting round the election of a new Pope, this is a grippingly tense thriller about faith and the nature of and desire for power and unequivocally one of the year’s best films, its success in America a welcome reminder that, amid the familiar CGI-littered blockbusters, alongside Heretic, there’s still an audience for intelligent, thought-provoking filmmaking.
The central figure is the conflicted Cardinal Lawrence (an inscrutable, nuanced turn by Ralph Fiennes), who, when the Pope dies in his room in Domus Sanctae Marthae, is charged with overseeing the conclave, an assembly of fellow cardinals who, sequestered in the Sistine Chapel, charged with electing his successor (a problematic task foreshadowed by the difficulty in removing the Papal ring). It’s not a position Lawrence, whose resignation from his post as Dean of the College of Cardinals amid his crisis of faith in the church the Pope had refused, welcomes and he certainly harbours no ambitions for the position himself. That’s not the case, however, for the narrow-minded Tedesco (John Tuturro lookalike Sergo Castellitto) who wants to return the Papacy to the old, pre-liberal days with everything in Latin, or Tremblay (an almost salivating John Lithgow),who lusts for the power it brings. Lawrence’s fellow liberal friend Bellini (an edgy Stanley Tucci) claims he’s not a viable candidate, but for the sake of the Church, would rather himself than his rivals. Also in contention is the equally conservative and homophobic Nigerian Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati).
Amid the conspiratorial machinations, matters are complicated by Lawrence learning that Tremblay apparently had a meeting with the Pope just before he died and was apparently sacked for conduct unbecoming, though he insists this never happened. There’s also an incident with Adeyemi and a nun from Nigeria who was flown in to the Vatican at the express wish of one of his rivals. With all the cardinals secluded from any outside communication and forming their own cliques, as a web of secrets unfolds, there’s also the surprise arrival of the soft-spoken Mexican cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) who wasn’t on the list and whose posting in Kabul was unknown to all and who, it transpires, had a planned visit to Switzerland paid for by the late Pope. All of this is being quietly observed by the head nun, Sister Agatha (Isabella Rossellini, scene stealing in an almost dialogue-free role).
As Lawrence stars digging into the rumours, while becoming increasingly worried that he’s getting votes himself, working with Bellini to try and stave off the election of either Tremblay or Tedesco, more hidden secrets come to light and there’s more coldly calculated backstabbing, as, bolstered by a tremendous score from Volker Bertelmann, Berger ratchets up the suspense to nail-biting levels while the screenplay throws up provocative debates about the state of the Roman Catholic Church in present times, as well as a sudden .intrusion by political events beyond the Vatican walls.
Amid the raft of outstanding performances, Fiennes gets a terrific Oscar-baiting sermon, declaring that he fears certainty to be the biggest threat to faith and encouraging the cardinals to embrace doubt while, amid the sea of red robes and detailed rituals, there’s some riveting visual moments, most notably an overhead shot of the cardinals gathering in the courtyard with white umbrellas that could easily become an iconic poster. Climaxing with a twist you’ll never see coming, it’s a masterclass in filmmaking and storytelling. (Sat -Tue: Mockingbird; Odeon Bimingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe)
Gladiator II (15)
Arriving 24 years after the original, again directed by Ridley Scott, a now sprightly 86-year-old, and written by David Scarpa, who scripted his Napoleon, it’s no spoiler (the trailer pretty much tells you) to say this might have been titled Son of Gladiator, the film flashing back to an early giveaway clip from the original of a dying Maximus speaking to his former lover Lucilla after slaying the corrupt Emperor Commodus.
It opens in Numidia in Africa, which is attacked and captured by an armada led by Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a general in the service of Rome’s capricious, snivelling and tyrannical twin brother emperors Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and the demented Geta (Joseph Quinn) with his pet monkey, both based on real historical figures and presented as a sort of degenerate Romulus and Remus. Leading its defence is one Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal), a farmer-turned-commander whose soldier wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen) is killed during the battle.
Taken prisoner as a slave alongside fellow soldiers and consumed with seeking vengeance on Acacius, he’s shipped to Rome where, having bested a feral and ferocious wild monkey (an electrifying feat of CGI) in a sort of shop window gladiatorial arena, he’s bought by an impressed Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave turned arms dealer who now runs the gladiator bullpen and becomes his mentor, his ultimate aim being to use him in a plot to take down the emperors and elevate himself to the throne, To which end, while outwardly gregarious and gossipy, he’s revealed to be a ruthless Machiavellian manipulator and backstabber at the heart of the palace intrigue.
It also transpires that, sick of the brothers’ bloody imperial ambitions and the carnage it entails, Acacius, who’s married to Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role in the original, the daughter of the late Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor in the first film whose ‘dream of Rome’ idealism has been trampled underfoot by the twins. She’s part of a conspiracy with assorted senators (Derek Jacobi, back from the original, and Tim McInnerny among them) to overthrow the brothers, as is her husband, who has an army just waiting for the order, and, on the face of it, Macrinus, though, the latter’s true intentions (““That, my friend, is politicsssssss”) are not long in being revealed.
The key to the film’s narrative comes in flashbacks where we see Lucilla sending her young son to safety after the death of his uncle Commodus, he, of course, turning out to be Maximus’s illegitimate son (an early hint for those slower at joining the dots in the twist is his quoting a passage from Virgil carved in Lucilla’s home), eventually taking on his dad’s sword and armour for the big strength and honour finale.
Although he doesn’t have the same physical presence or soulfulness as Russell Crowe, Mescal is terrific in embodying both rage and nobility in his introspection, his expressions both sensitive and fierce but it’s fair to say that even he is in the shadow of a brilliantly complex Shakespearean turn from Washington, while resolutely solid support is given by Pascal and Nielsen. Needless to say, with severed limbs, decapitations and ear-skewerings, it’s also bloodily visceral, every second in the action sequences is a film equivalent of pumping iron, from epic naval battles (both on the sea and in the shark-infested Colosseum, overseen by Matt Lucas’s Master of Ceremonies) to facing down a rhino-riding gladiator and the eventual confrontation between Lucius and, realising he’s not his real enemy, the now exposed and arrested Acacius. But as well as spectacle, it also carries a powerful treatise on political power and, ultimately, an ode to humanity and sacrifice in the service of an ideal, a triumphant and compelling sequel that entertains to the full thrust. (Cineworld 5 Ways; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue; Until Sun: Mockingbird)
Heretic (15)
Hugh Grant puts his charismatic charm to work to compellingly creepy effect in this cleverly constructed thriller that plays rather like a theologian’s version of Saw. Co-directed and written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who scripted the equally high concept A Quiet Place, it’s a three hander between Grant, who plays theological expert Mr Reed, and Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East who, respectively, play missionaries from The Church of Latter Day Saints, i.e. Mormons, the somewhat steely and worldly-wise Sister Barnes and the more girlishly naive Sister Paxton. They’re introduced at the start having a somewhat unexpected conversation about Magnum condoms and porno before they go about trying to engage assorted small town locals in discussion of Jesus Christ to inevitably no effect. Their final stop is to see Mr Reed (the character apparently inspired by Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion), who’s apparently expressed interest in learning more about their religion’s beliefs. Opening the door, tweedily dressed in a colourful cardigan, he’s perfectly affable, inviting them in out of the storm, reassuring them his wife’s at home, as they can’t be alone with a man, and baking a blueberry pie. He seems genuinely interested in what they have to say, but there’s the sense that there’s something off. The girls politely listen to his lecturing about the world’s religions before, noting the candle is blueberry pie scented, deciding to make their excuses and leave. The front door, however, is locked. On a deadbolt timer he says he can’t reset. And, as he’s warned them beforehand, all the metal in those means there’s no phone signal. But he insists they’re free to leave, they’ll just have to go out the back, offering choice of two doors which, after another lengthy bout of theological discussion of how all religions after things like miracles and resurrection in common, most predating Christ, he labels as Belief and Disbelief. They, he says, have to choose according to what they now believe about religion and the existence of God.
There is, of course, much more to it than that, the dense and though providing screenplay addressing not only the existence of a divine being but life after death and, what Reed calls iterations, as in how things become fainter echoes of other things, his examples being the little known fact that the original Monopoly from 1935 was stolen from the earlier taxation-based The Landlord’s Game and how different variations manifested over time, and how The Hollies sued Radiohead for stealing from The Air That I Breathe to write Creep and how they, in turn, sued La Del Rey for plagiarising their song for Get Free. As such, the Book Of Mormon, like The Bible and the Quran, he argues, is a distant echo of Judaism’s Torah. He also raises the question as to why polygamy was once a central tenant of Mormonism – to increase the fold, as the girls argue, or to justify its founder Joseph Smith’s many affairs as Reed suggests. Religion, says Reed, is all sales pitch.
It’s rare to have such an intellectual debate in what is, after all, a horror movie, but then, built almost totally on dialogue, Heretic is a rare psychological cat-and-mouse horror movie indeed as Reed’s machinations are gradually revealed as part of a carefully staged and manipulated experiment designed to lead the girls, or whichever of them is still alive, to confront what he declares to be the one true religion, a cynical standpoint that will have believers foaming at the mouth with indignant rage.
The tension never slips from the moment the girls enter the house, the director’s misdirected expectations when the church elder (Topher Grace) comes looking (they chained their bike to Reed’s gate, surely he’ll rumble something’s wrong) while it teasingly withholds the reason “we don’t talk about Taco Bell” for a breathtaking revelation in the final stretch. It may, finally, slip into somewhat generic and implausible bloody predator and prey territory, but, like the design of the maze-like house, all three performances are brilliantly mapped out and delivered, Grant’s co-stars matching him step-for step, as it leaves you to ponder whether the whole human condition is just smoke and mirrors. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Joy (12A)
Taking its title from the middle name bestowed on Louise Joy Brown by the medical team responsible for her birth in 1978, directed by Ben Taylor with a screenplay from Jack Thorne inspired by his wife Rachael’s struggles with infertility, the film unfolds the decade long pioneering development of IVF. A scientific breakthrough that has subsequently changed the lives of millions of childless couples, the story begins in 1968 when gifted embryologist Jean Purdy (a quietly understated Thomasin McKenzie) becomes laboratory manager for visionary scientist Robert Edwards (James Norton, solid if not dazzling) who’s working in trying to find a way to combat infertility. Together they recruit outstanding obstetrician Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy in familiar curmudgeonly but kindly mode), first seen haranguing a fellow surgeon giving a lecture about medical procedures with which he disagrees, and follows them from setting up base in a makeshift lab at the latter’s hospital in Oldham, where he was Director of the Centre for Human Reproduction, through recruiting women willing to let them harvest their eggs (they dub themselves The Ovum Club) while being told the chances of any success are slight, being rejected for funding by the British Medical Council, a trial and series of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory to the shutting down and the restarting of the programme, finally culminating in the first test tube baby.
Alongside the dogged scientific determination, the film also shows the sacrifices the work cost Edwards, forced to spend months away from his family in Cambridge and castigated by the media (he’s forced into a TV debate against James Watson who won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA to defend his work that does not go well) and the public (he was dubbed Dr Frankenstein), and Purdy who, a Christian, was rejected by her church and mother (Joanna Scanlan) for playing God and found herself facing a moral dilemma on learning Steptoe performed abortions, now legal, because his fellow surgeons refused. As the hospital’s no nonsense Matron, Muriel (Tanya Moodie) tells her, both their work and terminations are about giving women a choice. There’s an added note of poignancy to Purdy’s involvement as she was medically unable (severe endometriosis) to have the children she so desperately wanted. If she couldn’t, she wanted to ensure others could.
It’s a solid workmanlike and very British period drama that’s probably is best suited to the small screen, exposing the snobbery and misogyny of the scientific community (it took 30 years and crusading by Edwards for Purdy’s name to be added to the commemorative plaque at the hospital, she having died in 1985), while also throwing in a somewhat superfluous sidebar about a young doctor (Rish Shah) fruitlessly attempting to woo Jean. More might have been made of the feelings of the prospective hopeful mothers (one says she feels like they’re cattle), but regardless this is heartfelt, affecting and uplifting account of how the passion and dedication of three people brought life to where life could never be. (Netflix)
Kraven The Hunter (15)
Subject to a wave of the same sort of scathing reviews that torpedoes Ms Marvel and Morbius, while undeniably flawed with some awkwardly stilted dialogue and a couple of mind elsewhere performances (that’ll be Ariane DeBose, though to be fair she’s not given much to work with) this deserves far better than. Directed by J.C. Chandor, it’s an origin story of one of the Spider-Man villains, though, other than a couple of references and another of his nemeses, there’s little to link this to the Spider-Verse of which it forms a spin-off. In the comics Kraven’s one of the bad guys, an egotistical hunter who targets Spidey as his prime trophy prey, but here he’s an altogether different figure, a vigilante who, endowed with enhanced sense and strength after being administered one of those comic book staple serums as a teenager and resurrected when he was killed by a lion, targets taking out criminal figures and those who kill animals for sport or profit.
The film opens in the icy Serbian wastes as, having gotten himself imprisoned, he escapes his cell and, scaling the walls like some super parkour master, kills a gangland kingpin with a tiger tooth from his trophy rug. Flashback then several years as a young Calypso (Diaana Babnicova) is given the mystical serum by her voodoo priestess gran along with a tarot card predicting she’ll use it to save someone’s life and cause extreme changes for them. That turns out to be Sergie Kravinoff (Levi Miller) who, along with his illegitimate chameleon personality half-brother Dmitri (Billy Barratt) is taken on an African safari by their father Nikolai (Russell Crowe in heavy accented force of nature scenery chewing form), a power-crazed Russian oligarch drug dealer whose cruel nature in despising the weak has led his wife to suicide, so make men of them by stalking a legendary man-killer lion. It’s this lion that attacks and kills Sergie, though fortunately Calypso’s on hand with the magic goo that interacts with drops of in blood in his wounds, bringing him back to life and giving him animal instincts and eyes that turn yellow when he hunts. He also seems to have useful strong mental bond with assorted four-legged creatures.
Flashforward again and Sergie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who’s gone feral and lives in a high-tech Russian forest retreat on his mother’s old stamping grounds, is estranged from dad and only sees Dimitri (Fred Hechinger), who now owns a club where he plays piano and sings, on his birthday. Sergie now calls himself Kraven, has a hit list of baddies he’s working his way through, his kills earing him the media nickname of The Hunter. To track them down he enlists the now grown Calypso (DeBose) who’s become a London-based top lawyer and is more than happy to help if eliminate those justice can’t touch.
Anyway, after this long setup, the film eventually gets to the main hunt that pits him against an old associate of his dad, beta male Aleksei (Alessandro Nivola) who has had his own magic bullet makeover with a chemical compound that enables him (though not without pain) to turns his skin into in an impenetrable hide (he controls it by some fluid from his ever-present backpack) hence his nickname of The Rhino. There’s also some mercenary assassin who goes by the name The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) and has the ability to apparently teleport while mesmerising his targets, who, seeking revenge for Kraven killing his unnamed mentor, fits into the Rhino’s plot to snare him using a kidnapped Dimitri as the lure. Unless you’ve been living under a rock your entire adult life, you’ll know there twists and betrayals ahead.
It’s best in the early going with its dysfunctional family dynamics and the whole Equalizer-styled narrative before getting into the overly familiar and largely predictable superhero/super-villain tropes with its heavy reliance on digital effects. Even so, Taylor-Johnson makes for a charismatic figure while Hechinger digs into his more ambiguous character (though he too eventually gets one of those compound transformations), and, while some plot points are fuzzy to day the least, cracking along at solid pace, it’s never less than engaging. There’s no end credits scene but with Kraven donning the trademark fury edged top from the comic books at the end, it clearly has intentions of taking the story further. The likely box office catastrophe suggests that’s not going to happen. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Moana 2 (PG)
Initially conceived as a television series but now full blown feature that’s simultaneously empty and overstuffed, set a few years on from the original, ocean-commanding (and there’s far too many high fiving with waves) Polynesian heroine Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) is now an official wayfinder, her task being to restore the natural order of things and reunite the people of the ocean who were separated and scattered by the evil god Nalo in order to keep them divided. Returning to her island with an artefact she discovered, experiencing a vision and visited by the spirt of her ancestor Tautai Vasa, she learns that the island of Motufetu and its inhabitants were submerged by power-crazed storm god Nano and, if it can be raised it will restore all the peoples as one.
And so, much to the upset of her young sister (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda), bidding goodbye to mum (Nicole Scherzinger) and dad (Temuera Morrison) off she sets on another mission in the one-note company of her wilful brattish friend Loto (Rose Matafeo), grumpy farmer Kele (David Fane), and the gormless Moni (Hualalai Chung), who spends his time drawing illustrations of her and his tribe’s stories and has a crush on her. Plus, of course, her relentlessly annoying pet pig Pua and rooster Heihei (clucked by Alan Tudyk), amusingly called bacon and egg by Maui (Dwayne Johnson whose daughters play Moana’s fan club Mo-wannabes), the egotistical demi-god with the animated tattoos who Moni hero worships. However, despite a couple of early brief scenes, he doesn’t put in much of an appearance until the final third.
Along the way to Oceania to break the curse, they again encounter the Kakamora, a tribe of coconut shell pygmies, and she has a run-in with villainous bat lady goddess Matangi (Awhimai Fraser) who has been holding Maui captive but, if she ever had any real narrative purpose, seems to have mislaid it along the way and vanishes from the plot never to be seen again. It’s a slim proposition extended beyond endurance by innumerable ‘hilarious’ scenes of characters falling/being knocked over, washed into the sea, or slimed, along with a giant clam, purple storms, lighting flashes and, whirlpools, all punctuated by songs so unmemorable you’ll have forgotten them ever before they end. Oh yeh, Moana raises the island but is killed in the process, resurrected by her ancestors (and yes, gran’s there too) with her own demi god tattoos on the off-chance of a third revenge of Nano outing teased in the mid-credits scene with the cameo return of giant coconut crab Tamatoa.
Cobbled together by three different directors, none of whom seems to have spoken to one another, it’s visually thrilling but nothing else measures up to the way it looks, making the prospect of the planned live action remake of the original more depressing and redundant than it was in the first place. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)
A far cry from his Oscar triumph Moonlight, director Barry Jenkins comes aboard the Disney train for this prequel to its 2019 photo-realistic remake of the Oscar-winning 1994 coming of age animation. With Simba (Donald Glover) and Nala (Beyonce Knowles-Carter) off to give birth their second cub, Kiara (Beyonce’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter) is left at Pride Rock in the care of Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen), they soon being joined by the mandrill Rafiki (John Kani) who tells her the story of her grandfather and how he became the Lion King. Punctuated by several irritating interruptions from Timon and Pumbaa (who also sing a reprise of Hakuna Tamata and crack a jarring gag about Disney’s legal department), we learn how the young Mafasa (Braelyn Rankins) was separated from his parents (Anika Noni Rose, Keith David) in a flood and rescued by Taka (Theo Somolu), the son of Obasi (Lennie James), the king of another pride. Embraced as a brother by Taka but rejected by Obasi as a stray, Mufasa’s taken under the wing of Taka’s mother Eshe (Thandiwe Newton) and forced to live with the lionesses. Growing up alongside Taka (now voiced by Levin Harrison Jr), the now older Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) is embraced into the pride when he saves Taka from an attack by a murderous pride of white lions led by Kiros (Mads Mikklesen), known as The Outsiders, whose son Mufasa kills when Taka backs away in fear. The pair sent a way for their safety, Taka’s pride are all killed by Kiros and his subjects.
Eventually hooking up with the young Rafiki (Kagiso Ledika), who’s been exiled by his fellow monkeys and baboons for being different, and Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), a huntress who’s lost her pride (and who will eventually become Mufasa’s mate, thereby sparking Taka’s jealousy as he has his heart set on her) and her hornbill companion Zazu (Preston Nyman), they head off in search of the fabled land of Milele, pursued by Kiros and his lionesses, seeking vengeance.
The animation is outstanding , especially in rendering water, wet fur and the lions’ eyes (their smiles rather less so), but the film it serves rather less, the early going slow and repetitive and lacking the original’s emotional dynamic before it eventually gets to its message about working together. Along the way it unveils the origins of Rafiki’s stick, the formation of Pride Rock and how Taka came to be known as the grudge-bearing Scar, but little really engages just as any trace of Jenkins’s personality and his ability to capture human emotion is lost amid the CGI, confined by the dictates of predictability. There are flourishes of real excitement and energy, as in the final confrontation between Mufasa and Kiros and the voice work is generally solid, but it’s generally rather average and, despite being penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda, there’s not a memorable song among them, the best of a weak bunch being We Go Together, based around the aphorism: “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far go together”. It will, of course, prove a blockbuster, but creatively it gives a whole new meaning to how pride comes before a fall. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
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 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. (Amazon Prime)
Nightbitch (15)
The pitch and the metaphor are simple. Underappreciated by her family and frustrated by a misogynistic society, a stressed out suburban mother turns into a dog. Or, as its central character puts it: “Motherhood isn’t all sunshine and baby powder. Motherhood is fucking brutal”. Fortunately, Amy Adams gives a performance that elevates it beyond the unsubtly didactic female empowering self-help fairytale narrative of Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s absurdist novel.
An artist who gave up her career and life in the city to be a stay at 50s-like home wife and mother, the pointedly unnamed Mother (Adams) loves her son but resents how her role as robbed her of any other identity and sense of self, reduced to trying but failing to bond with her relentlessly upbeat circle of fellow new or pregnant mums (Zoë Chao, Mary Holland, Archana Rajan) in the embarrassing ‘book baby’ group, given to anger flare-ups at the drudgery of her ostensibly single parent life (“cooking the same food for her son and visiting the same park,) and her loving but frequently absent husband’s (Scott McNairy) thoughtless flip comments and take her for granted attitude. When she remarks she’s thinking of never resuming her art, he just agrees, his lack of encouragement exacerbating the growing rage. Meanwhile, her former art world friends just mock her when they meet up.
She starts to notice something’s odd when a trio of dogs start following her around, turning up to leave gifts of carrion on her doorstep at night. Her senses start to get sharper and she has these strange daydreams of slapping her husband or savaging him like a wolf, and dreams of transforming into a dog, liberating her animal self, running around on all fours and howling and hunting with her canine companions. Or are they dreams? I mean, what’s with eating mac ‘n’ cheese out of a dog bowl and the fur on her lower back! Or the tail and the six nipples. And who killed the family cat?
And really that’s about all there is to it. There’s no Substance-style body horror but you do get some internal monologues, a period where she abandons family to paint again and a couple of night-time transformation scenes into her sleek were-self (“I was once a girl, a bride, a mother. And now I will be this”) as it trots out lines like how the woman she used to be “died in childbirth” in its delineation of the pitfalls of pregnancy and parenthood for women. Slipping between reality and magical realism, Jessica Harper cameos as a woman in a bookstore who points her to ‘A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography’ while there’s also an underdeveloped hint that the other mums might also be part of her pack. Adams drolly mines the sometimes sharp comedy but can do little with the more spell it out dialogue that never digs as deep into the film’s philosophical; treatise as it might and, ultimately, suggests a simple ‘I’m sorry’ fixes everything. Worth it for Adams, but otherwise a bit mutt and deaf. (Fri/Sat: MAC)
Nosferatu (15)
There’s a certain degree of déjà vu among the cast of writer-director horror maestro Robert Eggers’ revision of the F.W. Murnau 1929 silent horror based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the 1923 Tod Browning adaptation. As real estate agent Thomas Hutter (based on Stoker’s Jonathan Harker), Nicholas Hoult recently played Renfield to Nic Cage’s Dracula while, as Albin Eberhart Von Franz, based on Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsin, Willem Dafoe previously starred in Shadow Of A Vampire, about the making of the original Nosferatu, as Max Schreck, the actor who portrayed Count Orlock, Murnau’s renaming of Dracula. Blood it seems is indeed thicker than water in the casting department.
Character names aside and with some excisions, while largely following Stoker’s narrative, it opens with the young Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp) praying to find relief from her loneliness, her cry of ‘come to me’ answered by a shadowy figure (its silhouette on the windblown curtain a nod to Murnau) that manifests as a terrifying monster that attacks her, leaving her in a seizure and setting up the call of psychosexual desire across time and distance that underpins what follows. Cut then to winter in 1883 Wisborg, Germany, with upcoming estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) being charged by his employer, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) with travelling to the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania to sign a contract with the elderly and eccentric Romanian Count Orlock who wishes to purchase Schloss Grünewald, a decrepit Wisborg stately mansion. Hutter’s new bride, Ellen, is fearful, telling him of her terrifying dream prior to their wedding in which she married Death in front of a congregation of corpses, and disturbingly found herself enjoying it. Looking to boost his fortunes, Thomas ignores her pleas to stay at home and, leaving her in the care of his friend Friedrich (a Murnau nod) Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and his wife Anna (Emma Corin), sets off for his fateful date with the devil.
Warned by the local Romani not to venture to Orlock’s home, he witnesses or dreams the peasants impaling what they claim is a vampire’s corpse, before continuing his journey, being met by an unmanned coach and horses that transports him to the foreboding castle to be greeted by the Count (Bill Skarsgård) who (seen only in glimpses) insists on being addressed as befits his title, rasps in deep and low resonating tones (he speaks the extinct Dacian language), has skeletal fingers and long fingernails and generally exudes an icy sense of dread. It’s not long before he discovers the Count’s true nature, an undead blood drinker (Thomas himself becoming a victim) who sleeps in his coffin by day and, more frighteningly, has an obsession with Ellen, purloining the locket containing her hair. Thomas, though weakened, manages to escape but by now Orlock, through the ministrations of Knock, who, a la Renfield, he has made his servant), is in a crate full of plague rats aboard a ship bound for Wisburg (as opposed to Whitby).
Meanwhile, Ellen is suffering from sleepwalking and seizures and Knock incarcerated as a raving madman who feeds on living creatures (pigeon fanciers, look away now), to which end Ellen’s physician Wilhelm (another Murnau nod) Sievers (Ralph Ineson), enlists the help of his mentor, Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Dafoe), a scientist ostracized for his occult beliefs, who deduces both are under the spell of a Nosferatu, something Harding dismisses as nonsense.
Things gather to a head as Orlock, now ensconced in Schloss Grünewald, appears in a dream telling Ellen that he tricked Thomas into signing divorce papers and that she has three nights in which to affirm the covenant she made with him as a child, or he will kill Thomas and wipe out Wisborg with the plague, Anna and her two young daughters serving as bloody proof of his powers. Orlock has to be destroyed, but the only way to do this involves a willing sacrifice.
Shot in dark, drained and muted tones with a pervasive ominous soundscape, it ratchets up the gothic horror as it goes, but beyond the core vampire element Eggars (who researched Eggers French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s work on hysteria) delves into disturbing themes of sexual desire, the (linked) stigma of mental illness and its treatment, corruption and decay, and the fear yet allure of the Other. Visually chilling with its use of shadows and the way Orlock (brilliantly played by a prosthetics-laden Skarsgård) is, until the final scenes, never fully seen as the grotesque, corpse-grey, balding, moustachioed nightmare, it exerts a relentless grip as it builds to the climax. Even if a poker-faced Dafoe at times feels a little melodramatic in the way he delivers the expositionary dialogue and Taylor-Johnson’s a tad hammy as the devastated sceptic sunk into necrophilia, the performances from Hoult as the frantic husband and a mesmerising turn from Rose-Depp who apparently did all her own carnal-driven convulsions, are triumphant. Repulsive and intoxicating, this sets the year’s horror benchmark. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
The Order (15)
A 1978 ‘children’s’ novel about a right wing nationalist insurrection by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, The Turner Diaries has provided a blueprint and impetus for several white supremacist incidents, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 2021 storming of the Capitol along then. It also provided the name for The Order, an Aryan Nation breakaway neo-Nazi organisation led by Bob Matthews that was responsible for numerous porn shop and synagogue bombings, bank and armoured car robberies designed to fund a race war, and the June 18th, 1984 murder of Alan Berg, a confrontational talk-radio host who took on anti-Semites and other fate mongerers, who was shot down outside his home in Denver.
It was his murder that finally swung the FBI into action, director Justin Kurzel tense true-crime thriller, based on The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, following the dogged work of composite fictional federal agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) who, a broken marriage in the rear view mirror, has transferred to smalltown Idaho looking to take things easier after working in New York on cases involving the KKK and Cosa Nostra, and with an obligatory burden of guilt over an informant’s death.
Digging into robberies that suggest a white supremacist link, he partners up with local family man deputy Jamie (Tye Sheridan) and fellow jaded agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett), piecing together what he sees as plot leading up to a domestic terrorism militia uprising, the trail leading him to Matthews (an icily cool Nicholas Hoult), the charismatic mastermind behind The Order with both a loyal wife (Alison Oliver) and a pregnant lover (Odessa Young) and a small gang of followers. It’s not, however, until a gun is left behind following a multi-million armoured car heist, that there’s any tangible link to Matthews, the film gradually building the frustrations, tension, and shoot-outs as it heads to its stand-off in Whidbey Island, Washington where Matthews perished in a fire at the safe house where he was hiding.
Sporting bristling moustache and few extra pounds, Law is terrific as the coiled, troubled anti-hero wrestling with both the case and his personal demons while Hoult brings an unshowy quiet intensity Matthews, both a loving dad and an angel-faced ruthless monster a man with a persuasive tongue (The Order’s motto “Victory forever, defeat never”) but rarely taking a hands-on part in the action, generally leaving the dangerous work to his followers. There’s strong work too from Sheridan, although his fate is pretty much signalled from the outset.
Gripping as both a fact-based docudrama and detective thriller, with the likes of Mann, Lumet and Friedkin as touchstones, sounding a concerning timely note about the American right-wing racism and its Trump poster-boy. At one point, a white supremacist figurehead says “In 10 years, we’ll have members in the Senate”. Talk of retrospective prophecy. (Vue; Until Sun: Mockingbird)
Paddington In Peru (PG)
Dougal Wilson taking over the directorial reins, opening with a flashback to Paddington as a cub plunging into the river trying to grab an orange and being rescued by his adoptive Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton), there have, the film announces at the start, been some changes in the Brown household, not least that Mrs Brown is now being played, far less engagingly, by Emily Mortimer rather than Sally Hawkins. Narratively, however, they entail daughter Judy (Madeleine Harris) preparing to fly the nest for university, son Jonathan (Samuel Joslin) having become a room-bound chill-out inventor of Heath Robinson-like contraptions, and spiderphobic Mr Brown (Hugh Bonneville) finding himself with a new American boss at his insurance company advising him to embrace the risk rather than being risk averse. And Paddington (endearingly voiced as ever by Ben Wishaw) has got UK citizenship and (cue photo booth slapstick) a passport.
That’s particularly useful when he gets a postcard from Mother Superior (Olivia Colman) , the nun who runs Peru’s Home for Retired Bears, saying his Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton) is pining for him, this prompting the whole family and housekeeper Mrs Bird (Julie Walters) hopping a plane to see her. Except, when they arrive they learn she’s gone missing in the Amazon, with only an ankle bracelet and her glasses to be found. So, naturally, they hire a riverboat, crewed by Hunter Cabot (a hammy Antonio Banderas) and his daughter Gina (Carla Tous) and set off upriver.
All of this is a quest set-up involving Cabot’s search, goaded by the ghosts of his equally avaricious ancestors, for the fabled lost Incan city of El Dorado and its reputed gold. And he’s not the only one with a hidden agenda regarding the treasure, Paddington apparently unknowingly holding the key to its location.
Echoing the embrace risk maxim, it’s a more adventure-oriented action offering than the gently winsome British comedy of its two predecessors, it loses a great deal of its charm in the process, at times teetering on the bland before gathering some sort of impetus in the final stretch. There’s several movie allusions, among them a rolling rock straight of Indiana Jones, a nod to Fitzcarraldo in the gramophone on Cabot’s boat and, in a wholly redundant musical number, Colman channelling Julie Andrews as a guitar playing nun, but, rather like the Peru setting (though it gives good rainforest), the characters and cast are generally underused by its disappointingly generic, predictable and repetitive screenplay.
The animation is once again top notch in its ursine realism, even if the CGI effects falter elsewhere and it comes with a cosily sentimental message about home and the difference between your tribe and your family. Past cast members Jim Boadbent, Ben Miller and Sanjeev Bhaskar have brief moments and former writer Simon Farnaby also gets a cameo, while a mid-credits scene grants, ahem, a reprise to a character from Paddington 2 alongside an array of new bears with London railway station names that you kind of hope never make their way into a spin-off. It will of course delight its intended audience, but, while marmalade sandwiches are still the order of the day, the taste is diluted and thin cut rather than tangily chewy. (Cineworld NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Portraits Of Dangerous Women (15)
A quirky British dramedy from Swiss film-maker Pascal Bergamin, while driving her car down the country lanes, and quarrelling with her art gallery owner dad Jon (Mark Lewis Jones), stressed out primary school teacher Steph (Jeany Spark) hits a dog which, it transpires, has already been hit, though not necessarily killed, by Tina (Tara Fitzgerald), the school caretaker with a shady past. As they get out to survey the incident, troubled teen Ashley (Yasmin Monet Prince from Supacell), who’s standing at the roadside, distraughtly announces that the dog was hers.
The question as to who was to blame and what to do with the deceased canine is just the start of a series of events and unlikely connections that bring all four together with Ashley approaching Jon with a view to exhibiting a series of found photographs she’s been collecting depicting ‘dangerous women’, and essentially appointing herself his assistant and taking on aspiring painter Claude (Joseph Marcell) as a client. Meanwhile Steph adopts (briefly) an elderly cat of an elderly cat that’s a mirror of her boring partner Paul (Gary Shelford), and (equally briefly) flirts with the pet shop owner Steve (David Mumeni) while Tina, dressed up in a gold number, decides to throw a secret party in the school hall to celebrate, her divorce, something which ends up involving Jon’s police officer sister Cathryn (Abigail Cruttenden) and Steph being taken to hospital. Meanwhile, Ashley admits the dog wasn’t hers and the three women try and track down the real owner. All of which serves to explore how all three are lonely, lost and needing connections, the way they dress (Steph all floral, Tina in dungarees) acting as signposts to their self-image. Oh, did I mention the roadside grappa bar?
There’s some droll British humour as well as flashes of poignancy that keeps you engaged even if the dialogue can feel mannered and storyline and its focus on the everyday mundane tends to wander all over the place, dropping plots and characters as it goes but the cast, which includes Annette Badland and Sheila Reid as dotty old dears, are, if not exactly dangerous, extremely entertaining company. (Amazon Prime; Apple TV+)
Red One (12A)
A Christmas movie directed by Jake Kasdan, it’s an effects heavy action odd couple comedy that, decades ago, might have been pitched as a Schwarzenegger vehicle. Here though it’s Dwayne Johnson as Callum, the commander of E.L.F., the Enforcement Logistical Fortification security team (among them Agent Garcia, a polar bear who seems to have strayed in from The Golden Compass, and a Rockhopper penguin clearly out of its habitat), who are charged with keeping Santa, codename Red One, safe. However, disillusioned with the increasing number of callous adults lacking the Yuletide spirit, he’s handed in his notice and is about to take his last Christmas Eve run aboard the supercharged sleigh drawn by the oversized, glowing antlered (and curiously all female) reindeer. However, everything’s thrown out of whack when Nick (J.K. Simmons), thinner, less hairy and more pumped (he presses weights) than the stereotypical Santa, is kidnapped when unknown forces breach the invisible force field concealing the high-tech North Pole HQ (surely ripped off from Arthur Christmas). It is, in transpires, all part of a plan by the wicked shapeshifting Christmas witch Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), who, in a variation on the usual villain cliché, wants to make the world a better place by punishing (by way of snowglobe prisons) all those on Santa’s naughty list. One of those, a Level 4, is Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans in constant smirk mode), who we first meet as a young kid telling his cousins Santa’s not real and has now grown up to become a cynical, alcoholic super hacker for hire, in debt to loan sharks and a deadbeat divorced dad with a young son, Dylan (Wesley Kimmel), he barely ever sees.
‘Recruited’ by Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), who heads up some international agency that monitors mythological figures (cue cameos from the Headless Horseman and Pumpkinhead), to help track the kidnappers, it turns out he’s the one unwittingly responsible for providing the co-ordinates in the first place. So now it’s down to him and Callum to work together to rescue Nick and save Christmas, all of which involves a trip to Hawaii battling giant snowmen who just put themselves back together, a slapping match in Germany with Nick’s dark cold-hearted brother Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), Gryla’s ex, and, of course, some father-son bonding and a reigniting of that lapsed belief in the basic decency of humanity.
The finale goes to town on showing the elaborate workings of Nick’s globe-spanning present delivery operation and throughout the caper there’s a whole lot of shrinking and growing, mostly by Callum and, courtesy of his wrist device any number of toys (Hot Wheels, Monopoly and Mattel Robots product placement warning), toy shops naturally being mystic portals, though sadly a gag teasing an end credit Wonder Woman action figure never materialises. With a thankless cameo by Bonnie Hunt as the cookie-baking Mrs Santa, it’s big on energy and effects but low on charm and you can almost join the focus group dots that mark out the target audience. But even so, there’s still enough seasonal spirit heart and fun to make it a holly jolly watch. (Amazon Prime; Odeon Birmingham)
The Six Triple Eight (12)
While there are flaws, you can help but think that some of the acidic criticism it’s received is more about attitudes to its director Tyler Perry than the actual film which, telling the story of the real-life second world war battalion composed entirely of Black women and the only such group to serve in Europe, is a solid, well-acted and inspirational tribute that hits all the right emotional and indignation notes.
The pivotal figure is Lena Derriecott (Ebony Obsidian), a young small town Black woman whose best friend is the white Jewish Abram David (Gregg Sulkin), a relationship that naturally does not sit well with the white folk, especially her bitchy bigoted blond classmate Mary Kathryn (Sarah Helbringer). Before he ships out, having signed up as a pilot, he gives Lena a ring asks her to wait for him. Tragically, he’s destined never to return, shot down and burned beyond recognition, a bloodied letter to her recovered by the soldier that pulled his body from the wreckage.
Grief struck, Lena too resolves to enlist, joining the Women’s Army Corps where, inevitably, she and her fellow Blacks find the same bigotry, racism and segregation they faced in civilian life. At boot camp at Fort des Moines, they’re put through basic training under the command of Charity Adams (Kerry Washington) , her tough, no-nonsense approach fuelled by a determination not to give her white male colleagues any reason to claim her soldiers weren’t up to the task, reporters always looking to embarrass the military for accepting Black women into its ranks.
Constantly pushing to be deployed to Europe, Adams (eventually promoted to Major, the highest ranking Black woman to serve in the US Army), and, a result of a campaign by activist Mary McCloud Bethune (Oprah Winfrey) who bends the ear of Eleanor (Susan Sarandon) and Franklin Roosevelt (Sam Waterson), her troops are finally assigned a mission as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion and deployed to Birmingham, and, without formal orders and adequate resources, lodged in freezing wooden buildings at King Edward’s School in Edgbaston, their job being to sort some 17 million letters to and from home that have piled up in enough bags to fill several aircraft hangers, having the knock on effect of damaging morale at both the front and back home. Given just six months, it’s a task the bigoted Southern General Halt (Dean Norris) believes they are incapable of pulling off and is determined to seem the fail. He, however, fully underestimates the 855-strong battalion and especially, Adams who, when threatened with being relieved of command and replaced by some white Lieutenant, responded “over my dead body, sir”.
With Lena’s lost letter naturally among those being sorted (setting up a moving cathartic moment), Adams comes to realise their job is far from demeaning, but of vital importance to the war effort, as the women devise ingenious ways of identifying otherwise undeliverable mail from fabrics, logos and even perfume scent.
While the real-life Derriecott and Adams are the central characters, this is very much an ensemble piece with Sarah Jeffery, Kylie Jefferson, Sarah Helbringer and Shanice Shantay among Lena’s circle, the latter scene-stealing and providing sharp comic relief as the straight-speaking Johnnie Mae (who may or may not be based on Pvt Johnnie Mae Walton) while Jay Reeves give charm as the soldier who takes a shine too (and eventually married) Lena.
Other than the opening battlefield scenes and a sudden UXB incident that claims to women’s lives, the action and tensions are wholly embodied in the combat against prejudices, Adams and the others fighting with a verbal armoury to prove themselves and seek equality and respect. Ending with photos of the real women and credit notes on what happened to some of them along with an oration by Michelle Obama celebrating the 6888, it’s not in quite the same league as the similarly themed Hidden Figures, but, like the women it portrays, it deserves far more respect than it’s been afforded. (Netflix)
Small Things Like These (15)
His first film since Oppenheimer, though the scale is smaller Cillian Murphy (who served as producer) and the intensity of the story are no less intense. Set near Christmas in 1985 New Ross, Ireland, Bill Furlong (Murphy) is a successful coal merchant, married with five daughters. One day, delivering coal to the local convent where young girls are supposedly trained for their future, he sees something that gives him pause, a women being dragged inside while her mother ignores her pleas. Going inside, he finds young women, supposedly the school’s pupils, being made to scrub the floor and one who asks for his help so she can escape and drown herself. It’s pretty clear –and one unspoken common knowledge – that the convent is, in fact, one of the infamous Magdalene Laundries, Catholic institutions little more than workhouses where unmarried sex workers and pregnant women, so called ‘fallen women’ – were sent for supposed rehabilitation, their babies taken away. Bill can sympathise, he himself being the illegitimate son of an unmarried teenage mother, though, while ostracised by her family, she was fortunate as a wealthy woman took her in as her maid.
Troubled but reluctant to get involved, his conscience is pricked on his next visit to discover Sarah (Zara Devlin) shivering in the coal shed, ostensibly locked in by accident, who asks him to help find her baby. They’re interrupted, however, by Sister Mary (Emily Mortimer) who, feigning kindness, says the girl is mentally unwell and bribes him with a hefty bonus for his wife who – along with the local publican – tells him to not get involved. After all, the church treats the townsfolk well in exchange for turning a blind eye. But, finding Sarah again in the shed, he can no longer stand idly by, reputation be damned.
Directed by Tim Mielants and based on the novel by Claire Keegan, it’s a slight story but still carries a heavy weight about, to borrow the old phrase, how evil thrives when good men stand by and do nothing. Bill’s discovery of his father is, essentially, a redundant element when the film’s thrust is the cruelty and moral turpitude of the outwardly respectable Catholic Church in a repressive Ireland as well as the underlying toxic masculinity. There’s no melodrama and dialogue is sparse, Murphy conveying his emotions through his eyes and expression while Mortimer is chilling as the corrupt and cruel Mother Superior with a fierce and intimidating stare, and the film, which is dedicated to the more than 56,000 young women who suffered in the laundries up until 1996 and the children taken from them, is drenched in a devastating melancholy. It may lack the incendiary power of Peter Mullen’s The Magdalene Sisters, but its quiet anger is no less compelling. (Amazon Prime; Apple TV+; Sky; MAC)
Sonic The Hedgehog 3 (PG)
With Sonic (Ben Schwartz), fox Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and echidna (or spiny anteater) Knuckles (Idris Elba) now come together as Team Sonic, life in Green Hills, Montana, seems to have quietened down as they spend time with their adoptive father sheriff Tom Wachowski (James Marsden) and his wife Maddie (Tika Sumpter). It’s fated not to last, however, when, in secret G.U.N.) prison facility off the coast of Japan, the systems are hacked, awakening and freeing Shadow the Hedgehog (a suitably quietly intense Keanu Reeves) after 50 years in suspended animation when a project went pear-shaped and, in a vengeance rage for the death of his young friend Maria (Alyla Browne), proceeds to create chaos in Tokyo and Director Rockwell (Kristen Ritter) arrives to recruit the team to stop him. However, Shadows overpowers them, leading them to have no option but to join forces with their arch nemesis Dr Ivo Robotnik (Jim Carrey, returning from retirement), whose drones supposedly killed G.U.N. Commander Walters, a mission that takes them to an abandoned G.U.N base where the team’s captured and Robotnik comes face to face with Project Shadow’s leader, his equally bushily moustachioed estranged grandfather Gerald Robotnik (Carrey) who has plans to activate his Eclipse Cannon an orbital laser and destroy Earth in revenge for the death of Maria, his granddaughter.
Taken at a breakneck pace, the fairly formulaic plot variously involves Tom getting wounded while trying to steal a vital keycard and Sonic going solo and using the Master Emerald to transform into the golden Super Sonic while Shadow absorbs the Chaos Emeralds’ energy to become Super Shadow as they lock horns, or perhaps spines, in a final showdown while the two Robotniks have their own confrontation.
With the simplistic message that love is more important than revenge, the plot really takes second place to the action and humour, to which end Carrey does derangedly terrific double duty (if his scenes aren’t improvised he surely scripted the dialogue), the end result delivering everything it promises in the package, complete with two end credit already in the works sequel set-ups that introduce Amy Rose and the Metal Sonics and confirm at least one of those consumed in the final fireball is coming back for more. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
We Live In Time (12A)
The narrative’s simple. Set in London, following a meet cute where she accidentally knocks him down with her car, Almut Brühl (Florence Pugh), a former figure skater turned competitive rising star chef about to open her new restaurant, and Tobias Durand (Andrew Garfield), a low-level Weetabix rep who’s just got divorced and is living in his dad’s spare room, strike up a romance. They fall in love, she’s diagnosed with ovarian cancer and has a partial hysterectomy, she then gets pregnant, they have a daughter Ella (Grace Delany) and then the cancer returns at stage 3. It’s fairly familiar territory about love, life and death, but, working from a script by playwright Nick Payne, director John Crowley gives it a refreshing spin with a non-linear structure, jumping back and forth through time, the emotional switchback following suit, while the chemistry and understated star wattage of Pugh and Garfield provide the anchor and grounding in a compelling and natural honesty as it switchbacks from those early jubilant courtship scenes (like Past Lives, a children’s carousel is backdrop to a romantic moment) to the gravity of hard decisions.
With a sterling supporting cast that includes Lee Braithwaite as Almut’s exuberant cooking assistant, Douglas Hodge as Tobias’s father, warmly stirring together uplifting humour (a gag about Terry’s Chocolate Orange is a delight) and wrenching poignancy with small (the candle-lit proposal) and big moments (chaotic childbirth in a petrol station bathroom) alike and building to Almut taking part in the Bocuse d’Oran international cookery competition (which she enters without Tobias’s knowledge and has a nailbiting climax) to validate herself, it’s ultimately about making the most of the time you have and living life (ice skating here serving as the metaphor) rather than subjecting yourself and those you love to pain and distress on the off chance. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll also learn the best way to crack an egg. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Wicked (PG)
Debuting in 2003, created by Stephen Schwarz and loosely based on the 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire a backstory that put a revisionist spin on the witches from The Wizard Of Oz, the musical went on to become one of the most successful of the past two decades, Broadway’s second-highest grossing behind The Lion King. Now, directed by John M. Chu comes the film adaptation (curiously the trailer gives no indication it’s a musical, perhaps wisely given the Joker fiasco), this being Part One (ending at stage version’s intermission) with Part Two due next November.
It opens with Galinda, the Good Witch of the North announcing that the Wicked Witch of the West is dead, melted by a bucket of water, with subsequent celebration by all in Munchkinland (now red heads rather than of small stature). However, when one girl has the temerity to ask if they weren’t once friends, flashback takes over, starting with the unfaithful wife of the Governor of Munchkinland (Andy Nyman) giving birth to a green-skinned baby (why she is never explained), he ordering the bear nanny to take the thing’ away. As she does so the child manifests some sort of magical powers.
Years later and the now grown Elpheba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) accompanies her paraplegic younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode), whose condition her father blames on Elpheba, to become a student at Shif University (a sort of Oz version of Hogwarts) where she first crosses paths with Galinda (Ariana Grande), an insufferably spoiled brat with a fondness for pastel pinks whose come to study sorcery. However, when in her anger Elpheba again manifests her powers when her sister’s mocked, it’s she that Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the Dean of Sorcery, takes on as her sole student, ordering the reluctant Galinda to have her as roommate.
From the start there’s friction between the two, exacerbated with the arrival of the self-satisfied bad boy Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) on whom Galinda sets her sights though, having literally bumped into her on the way, he’s more taken with Elpheba. The thrust of the narrative gets underway when there’s a decree issued forbidding animals, such as goat history professor Doctor Dillamond (Peter Dinklage) from being teachers, all part of a purge to stop animals, figuratively and literally, from having a voice in Oz. Elpheba and Fiyero (who gets to sing Dancing Through Life in the university library set-piece) having rescued a caged lion cub, the two girls, who’ve become unlikely friends, though Galinda’s no less self-preoccupied (and did give Elpheba that pointed black hat as a cruel joke), now come together to fight against the injustice, she declaring she’s now to be called Glinda in honour of how Dillamond pronounced her name. And when Elpheba gets a personal invite to the Emerald City to meet the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), she joins her as it’s finally revealed who’s behind the purge of animals and Elpheba finds herself grasping her destiny and, as Kermit once said being green. Not to mention explaining the origin of those winged monkeys and the yellow brick road.
Lavishly filmed and orchestrated with CGI and AI environments all over the show, the film’s resolutely faithful to the musical with its not entirely subtle messages about tolerance of difference and the Orwellian fascist repression and ostracisation of outsiders, exercising control through offering a common enemy. And, of course, animal lib.
With its many musical numbers, it’s full of energy though, it’s fair to say it never fully comes alive until the train to Emerald City arrives along with the eventual appearance of the musical’s showstopper, Defying Gravity. Eviro is quite magnificent as the kind-hearted girl whose had to bear cruelty and rejection from everyone, around, her father included on account of her skin colour, alluding to how villains are often the people we make them become, while Grande does a good job of making Galinda more approachable than her popular (her signature song) high school Mean Girl character bitch might otherwise have been. There’s solid support too from Yeoh and the ever reliably creepy Goldblum, neither of whom are quite what they appear to be, while the cast also includes Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James as Galinda’s arse-kissers, and Ethan Slater as Boq Woodman, a Munchkin in love with Galinda but persuaded to strike up a romance with Nessarose (whom, of course, becomes the Wicked Witch of the East). There’s brief cameos too by Schwartz himself and Winnie Holzman who wrote the book for the musical as well as original Broadway stars Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth as co-presenters of the Wiz-O-Mania show telling of the Wizard’s arrival to Oz in his hot air balloon, and, for those who know their Oz, nods to the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, Tin Man and even Dorothy, who’ll all figure in Part Two when we get to go back over the rainbow. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Woman Of The Hour (15)
Ana Kendrick not only stars but makes a very impressive directorial debut in this true crime recounting of 70s serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) who, when eventually caught, was convicted of five murders though the estimated number of victims was far higher (he killed two, a woman and young girl, while out on bail). As seen in the opening in 1977 Wyoming, posing as a photographer looking for models, he would lure women to a remote spot before killing them during a sexual assault. The film depicts two further victims, that of young runaway Amy in 1979 San Gabriel (she escaped, leading to his arrest) and, in a change of routine, flight attendant Charlie in 1971 New York City whom he kills after helping her move into her apartment.
The story centres, however, in 1978 Los Angeles where, after a string of failed auditions, struggling aspiring actress Sheryl (Cheryl) Bradshaw (Kendrick) is persuaded by her agent to appear as a contestant on the TV show The Dating Game. She thinks it’s beneath her but with the potential to be spotted as well as meet potential suitors, she agrees, turning up to her episode in which she has to ask questions of the three bachelors hidden behind a partition. Bachelor #3 is revealed to be Rodney.
Much to the annoyance of the host (Tony Hale), Sheryl ditches the banal prepared questions and starts asking her own, confusing dim-witted Bachelor #1 with one about philosophy and exposing Bachelor #2’s sexism. Alcala, though, is smooth and charm her, they winning a romantic trip for two to Carmel. However, a member of the audience recognises him as the man she saw with her friend, who was later found murdered but, just as the police didn’t respond to reports by survivors, isn’t taken seriously by the show’s security. Meanwhile, out in the parking lot, after the show, Sheryl’s having reservations about her intended date, especially when, having brushed him off after they’ve been for drinks and his mood shifts, he starts following her.
As director, Kendrick adeptly builds the tension and navigates the film’s themes of sexism and misogyny and how women so often have to bear the burden of proof when reporting assault, though is less assured in the generic narrative mechanics, the abrupt ending feeling somehow tossed away, leaving the end credits to wrap things up. However, as Sheryl she delivers another strong and multi-faceted performance while Zovatto is suitably chilling and the creepily smooth but compassionless long-haired Alcala. An impressive debut, it’ll be interesting to see how she builds on this. (Netflix)