This column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.
FILM OF THE WEEK
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, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
NOW PLAYING
Anora (18)
The first American film to win the Palme D’Or at Cannes, written and directed by The Florida Project’s Sean Baker, this catapults Mikey Madison from supporting character roles in the likes of Scream to Oscar-buzz potential as Anora (the Hebrew word for light or grace) aka Ani Mikheeva, a stripper of Uzbek heritage living in Brooklyn’s Russian-speaking neighbourhood Brighton Beach. Materialistic and looking to the world of lap dancing at her upscale Manhattan strip club. So, as the only one of the girls who speaks passable Russian, she’s introduced to Ivan ‘Vanya’ Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn, Russia’s Timothée Chalamet), the spoiled, gangly, immature hard partying son of a wealthy Russian oligarch who lives in his parents’ lush gated mansion where he spends his time getting high, drinking and playing video games. Though vehemently denying she’s a prostitute, she takes up his lucrative offer for several bouts of sex, he then offering her $15,000 to stay with him for a week and pose as his girlfriend. This in turn finds them and his entourage flying to Las Vegas where he proposes (not least so he can get a green card and stay in America) and they end up getting hitched in one of the wedding chapels. So far so whirlwind romance as Ani quits her job to play shag-happy wife. However, when word gets out that Vanya’s ditched his clueless Russian-Armenian minders, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), whose job it is to clean up the messes he makes, and rumours spread on Russian social media, his Orthodox priest godfather Toros (Karren Karagulianis) is ordered by Vanya’s domineering mother Galina Zakharovato (Darya Ekamasova) to find him and get the marriage annulled, she and her husband Nikolai flying over to America to take him back home. However, when his minders turn up, a coked-up Vanya does a runner and, after a lengthy apartment-trashing tussle (there’s a lovely moment as Igor tries to restrain Ani while respecting her personal space), they, Tonos and Ani set out to try and track him down, she reluctantly agreeing to $10000 in return for the annulment but hoping to convince everyone their love is real.
A cocktail of After Hours, Uncut Gems and Pretty Woman, with copious scenes of energetic screwing and liberal doses of black comedy, it’s a tad overlong to get going with perhaps more naked, gyrating lap dancing than are strictly necessary, but once the tragi-comic farce is underway it crackles with real energy and emotion. As the panicking Tonos, his beleaguered brother Garnick and tough but placid enforcer Igor, Karagulianis, Tovmasyan and Borisov (at times suggesting an Armenian Ewan McGregor) make for a wonderful comedic hapless trio and, while neither of the two central characters are especially likeable (both in it for what they can get), Eydelshteyn is immensely watchable as the brattishly entitled and shallow Vanya while Madison sets the screen alight as the smart, unsentimental but vulnerable Ani, giving the touching final shot a real hammer to the heart. (Cineworld NEC, Solihull; Mockingbird; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe)
The Apprentice (15)
Given a new light in the wake of the election, so named for his hosting of the American version of the TV show, directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, while making the point that it contains fictional elements (the alleged rape has been vehemently contested), opening in 1973, this is nevertheless a compelling biopic account of the young hustling Donald Trump (a resolutely convincing Sebastian Stan who makes his reprehensible character more than some cartoon villain) and his rise from badly dressed middleman to overleveraged real estate developer and power broker. His ascendancy began with a chance encounter at an exclusive New York City restaurant with Roy Cohn (a magnetic, screen-stealing Jeremy Strong), the cold, snake-eyed viperish high-powered closet homosexual attorney known for prosecuting atom spies the Rosenbergs and seeking the death penalty. Trump (who’s seen trying to collect rent at his dad’s run down Trump Village in Coney Island) complains that the federal government is investigating his real-estate mogul father, Fred (Martin Donovan), for discrimination against African-American tenants and Cohn offers to help, blackmailing the prosecutor into dropping the case, and, in a Faustian bargain, becoming Trump’s lawyer and Svengali (though ultimately it’s Trump who’s the devil). Aside from smartening up his image (that trademark blue suit) and teaching him how to handle the media, he instils in him the three basic rules of the Cohn playbook– attack, attack attack, admit nothing, deny everything, and always claim victory, even if defeated (a maxim he put into practice after losing to Biden).
Again using blackmail, Cohn (who says truth and morality are just “fictions”), helps Trump with his project to convert the derelict Commodore Hotel, near Grand Central Terminal, into a Hyatt, securing a tax abatement that rides roughshod over the area’s poor. From there, Trump’s ambition grows ever bigger, as do his building, the next, overshadowing his father and going behind his back, being Trump Tower before moving to develop casinos in Los Angeles.
At one point Trump sees Czech model Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova) and her friends being refused entry into his club and, using Cohn’s name, secures them admission, going on to pursue and eventually marry her, only for the marriage to fragment on account (while still maintaining the facade) of his cheating and a bruised ego over her interior designer ambitions. That rampant ego also sees him having liposuction and scalp surgery for his balding, gorging on amphetamines and tanning himself orange. Meanwhile, he has a run in with New York mayor Ed Koch and becomes increasingly distanced from Cohn who advised him his casino ambitions were unwise.
It follows Trump’s ruthless and obsessive pursuit of power and wealth (while himself being steadfastly cheap) at the cost of wife, friends (he turns his back on Cohn when he develops AIDS) and family (like his father, he has little time for his pilot brother Fred Jr as he slides into alcoholism, showing no authentic emotion when he does, and seeks to take control of the family fortune when Fred slips into senility), while making wry allusions to his burgeoning political ambitions (in one scene he demurs when a lackey suggests he should run for office, but is clearly taken by Regan’s MAGA slogan)
Understandably, Trump castigated it (though he might at least have been flattered by Stan’s portrayal of his early charisma and business acumen) and there’s occasions when you have to question where the line between biography and dramatic licence is drawn, though the scene at Mar-a-Lago where he gives the gravely ill Cohn cheap, gaudy cufflinks emblazoned with the Trump logo for his birthday and has the dining room disinfected the next day is chillingly powerful. But beyond its protagonist, the film is also a more general indictment of the corrupting nature of money and power and toxic American masculinity, Trump is just the most public example. (MAC; Mockingbird)
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (15)
Thirty-six years on from the original, Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice returns from the afterlife along with director Tim Burton (and composer Danny Elfman) in a sequel that’s as much fun as it is overstuffed with characters, plot turns and special effects. Winona Ryder is back too as Lydia Deetz, the goth teenager an infatuated Beetlejuice wanted to make his bride, now a widowed (husband Richard was killed in the Amazon) “psychic mediator” with a pill problem hosting tacky TV series Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, produced by her self-involved new agey producer and boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) . She has a sulky teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, star of the Burton-directed Wednesday), who thinks mum’s a fraud and ghosts aren’t real. Naturally she learns the opposite in a very dramatic way.
Things are set up early one as Lydia starts imagining she’s seeing Beetlejuice whenever anyone wearing white and black stripes is around while her narcissistic multimedia gallery artist and influencer step-grandmother Delia (Catharine O’Hara) finds herself also bereaved when her birdwatcher husband is (in a claymation sequence) killed by a shark after a plane crash (he’ll turn up later as a headless blood-squirting torso, the original actor now a registered sex-offender)), which brings the whole family back to Winter River for the ostentatious funeral (where choirboys sing Day-O and at which Rory proposes to Lydia) and, in a bike hits treehouse meet cute, Astrid falls for local lad Jeremy (Arthur Conti),who invites her over for Halloween (she comes as Marie Curie dying of radiation poisoning, just to show she’s inherited those goth DNA genes) the night mum’s marrying Rory. Of course, it turns out he has an ulterior motive, which winds up with Lydia having to summon Beetlejuice, who manages a bureaucratic afterlife office with his shrunken head assistants, notably Bob, so she can follow her into the underworld and save her from boarding the Soul Train (cue 70s funk dance sequence) in return for promising to marry him.
Matters are complicated however, by the fact that as, seen in an opening sequence with a Danny DeVito cameo where she staples her body parts back together, the Juice already has a dead soul-sucking ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), who he married in the 14th century and killed when she poisoned him. Now she wants revenge. Meanwhile, he’s being pursued by actor turned dead detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) for bringing a mortal to their real, and Delia’s learnt to her cost that those ceremonial asps hadn’t been defanged after all.
It’s busy to a fault with the different plot elements and characters colliding into each other and spiralling off, often simply for the sake of narrative contrivance, but between the plethora of visual freakies, Ryder’s grounded protective mum, performance, Ortega’s soulfully sullen teen, O’Hara’s scenery chewing and the ever brilliant Keaton’s gleeful reprise of his most iconic (ok maybe also Batman) role, it’s carried on a wave of high energy, visual gags, inventive effects, prosthetics, slime and ghoulish humour. There’s even not one but two scenes giving birth to a Beeetlejuice baby. All that and a brilliant marriage scene with everyone lip-syncing to Richard Harris’s Macarthur Park. First time arounders might argue it’s not equal to the original, but, so good they named it twice, their children and children’s children should be screaming with delight. (Vue)
Beverley Hills Cop: Axel F (15)
It’s been 30 years since the franchise catastrophically imploded with Beverly Hills Cop III (a sly allusion to which appears early on), but, helmed with workmanlike efficiency by debuting director Mark Molloy. Eddie Murphy returns to his iconic role – along with signature jacket and Harold Faltermeyer’s theme tune– as loose cannon cop Axel Foley, having got married, divorced and acquired an estranged daughter in the interim.
This opens with him back in Detroit to the sound of Glenn Frey’s The Heat Is On (as featured in the original movie) where it seems everyone on the street knows him. Having been kicked off a case involving a robbery and murder, he dupes a hero-worshipping gullible colleague (Kyle S. More) into helping take down the crime ring at an ice hockey game (a stereotypical racial assumptions exchange about a Black man being into the sport falls comedically flat), setting up the first of numerous auto chases (this with Foley commandeering a snow plough) in which numerous cars and property get trashed, once again to the frustration of his boss Jeffrey Friedman (Paul Reiser, one of several returnees from the series. none of whom have aged as well as Murphy) who falls on his retirement word to save Foley’s neck.
This is just a prelude before the main plot kicks in, wherein estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), a criminal defence attorney at a high-powered Beverly Hills firm, has taken on a pro bono case representing Sam Enriquez (Damien Diaz), a low-level drug mule who has been framed for killing an undercover cop. She’s warned to drop the case by way of being suspended in her car by a chain from a multi-storey, Axle getting a call from his old cop buddy private detective buddy Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), who persuaded her to take the case, saying she’s in danger. He immediately sets off for L.A., where Billy, having found evidence showing the dead cop to have been corrupt, has gone missing, setting in motion a repetitive sequence of father-daughter recriminations (he reluctant to acknowledge his poor parenting skills), car chases (variously involving parking enforcement and golf buggies as well as a stolen police helicopter) and shoot-outs with cartel killers and the like, bringing back his old boss Taggert (John Ashton, last seen in BHC II) and introducing new characters Det. Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as Jane’s ex and Kevin Bacon as Captain Cade Grant, a narcotics cop who doesn’t need the tailored suit, Gucci shoes and gold Rolex to have him immediately signposted as the corrupt mastermind, though the script has Axel point it out anyway.
Also reprising Bronson Pichot’s accent mangling Euro queen Serge to embarrassingly painful effect, rivalled only by Luis Guzman’s turn as a karaoke singing Latino drug lord, it ticks the franchise staples as it goes, with Murphy’s snappy improvising and motor mouth patter, the action taking time for the family reconciliation scenes. Having clawed his way back from a string of poor career choices where his comedic skills appeared to have been surgically removed, Murphy has all the old charm, even if the film itself is set to auto-pilot, ensuring this is far more entertaining than it might have been and that a fifth outing is pretty much guaranteed. (Netflix)
Confess, Fletch (15)
Those of a certain age may recall the 1985 Chevy Chase comedy about Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher, a freelance investigative journalist, adapted from the novels by Gregory Mcdonald. The character is now revived by Superbad and Adventureland director and co-writer Greg Mottola with Jon Hamm in the title role.
Returning from Italy where he’s been looking into the abduction of a wealthy art collector with the kidnappers demanding his collection as ransom, but which appears to have been stolen, and striking up an affair with the daughter, Angela de Grassi (Lorenza Izzo), Fletch enters her Boston apartment and finds the dead body of a woman. Calling the cops, he’s cast as the prime suspect by the investigating officers, slow but dogged Morris Monroe and his long-suffering assistant Griz (Roy Wood Jr and Ayden Mayeri making a fine droll double act).
Being fitted up for the killing, Fletch, however, suspects the building’s owner, Owen (John Behlmann), his dotty neighbour Eve (Annie Mumolo) remarking on his dark personality, while, masquerading as his old Boston Sentinel editor boss (John Slattery), interviews Owen’s airhead fashionista ex-wife, Tatiana (Lucy Punch, hilariously explaining the meaning of “bespoke|”) and, poses as a collector seeking a rare Picasso, visits germophobe art dealer Horan (Kyle MacLachlan) who he believes to have the stolen paintings. Meanwhile, Angela’s estranged countess stepmother (Marcia Gay Harden) installs herself in the apartment and has a clear eye on bedding Fletch (she pronounces his name “Flesh”), Angela herself – who clearly has things to hide, turning up shortly after.
Hamm is charm personified, effortlessly navigating his way through a screen-lay rich in irreverent quips and put-downs, along with a running gag about bare feet, but all concerned contribute to the immense sense of fun percolating through the twists and revelations that populate the breezy, light-hearted narrative. If Only Murders in the Building and Knives Out rang your bell, despite the somewhat naff title, this should have equal appeal. (Netflix)
The Deliverance (15)
Touted as inspired by the real life case of Latoya Ammons, who moved into a Gary, Indiana rental in 2011 and began noticing disturbing behavior from her children, but essentially playing like a Black version of The Amityville Horror by way of any exorcism movie you care to name, this is a departure for director Lee Daniels after Precious and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, but unfortunately not one he can elevate above the genre clichés and staples.
It starts off well enough as a picture of a dysfunctional family with volatile mixed-race Pittsburgh single-mother Ebony (Oscar nominee Andra Day) struggling with her own demons, both metaphorical and physical, battling with the bottle and her shrewish, chain-smoking born again alcoholic abusive white mother Alberta (Glenn Close, chewing scenery and sporting an array of fright wigs) who’s moved in while undergoing chemotherapy and seemingly hasn’t met a Black man she wouldn’t screw.
Their father, she claims, away in Iraq, having recently moved in to the house, she’s struggling both financially and in trying to raise three kids, teenage Nate (Caleb McLaughlin), pre-teen Shante (Demi Singleton) and their hyper younger brother, Andre or Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins). She’s also subject to regular visits by social worker Cynthia (Mo’Nique) who’s concerned about her ability and fitness to look after them, especially given some unexplained bruises. Seeing Ebony slap Dre for talking back at the dinner table, beating up bullies who attack Nate and telling Alberta “If you wasn’t old and sick I would lay you the fuck out right now!” suggests she has good cause.
All of this makes for involving kitchen sink social drama, but when her children all have inexplicable psychiatric incidences at school but no cause can be found and Dre starts acting talking to an imaginary friend he calls Tre, having unexplained blackouts and catatonic seizures in the cellar, where there’s a hole in the concrete floor, you don’t need that fixed look in his eyes and the flies infesting the house (a dead cat’s earlier found in the cellar), to know what’s coming.
And sure enough it’s not long before Nate and Shante also start acting weird afflicted, and the kids are taken into care and Ebony subjected to psychiatric evaluation after Alberta winds up dead and her wooden crucifix bursts into flames, as the screen’s filled with contorting bodies, speaking in tongues, spewed expletives and kids climbing up walls. Eventually, enter Bernice (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a local pastor who reveals the house’s dark history of demonic possession (mum killed her family and herself) which she failed yo prevent and, kidnapping Dre from hospital, offers to perform an exorcism – or rather deliverance – to drove the devil from Dre. It does not go well.
It’s not that the film doesn’t its fair share of terrors once the standard supernatural aspects takes over, but it’s all so doggedly familiar (there’s even a shot of the house from the same perspective as in The Exorcist) that, other than its leap into faith movie territory with Ebony’s last gasp calling upon Jesus as her saviour, it brings nothing new to the table. All concerned deserve and can do better. (Netflix)
A Different Man (15)
A blackly comic satirical parable about identity and the faces we present to people, written and directed by Aaron Schimberg it stars Sebastian Stan under heavy prosthetic as Edward, a struggling New York actor who suffers from neurofibromatosis causing tumours to grow on his body (though his craniofacial condition more suggests Proteus syndrome a la The Elephant Man) whose only work to date has been a corporate instructional video on how to treat workers with the similar issues (though it actually reinforces patronising behavior). An apparently affable chap, but understandably shy and nervous, deferential to a fault trying to make himself invisible so as to avoid making anyone feel uncomfortable around him with any attendant cruelty, although everyone actually seems to be generally genial towards him regardless his deformity.
One such is Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) who moves in next to his shabby apartment. While initially taken aback at his appearance, she quickly looks past that and becomes his friend; an aspiring playwright, he gives her his typewriter as a present, nurturing romantic feels she’s never going to reciprocate. Becoming increasingly depressed over his dead end career, when he’s offered the chance of experimental facial reconstruction surgery, with nothing to lose he agrees. Gradually his old face quite literally peels off to reveal a new sexy and hunky version, to which end he reinvents himself as Guy, saying Edward’s committed suicide, becomes a star realtor, gets a plush new apartment and takes very opportunity to cash in on his new good looks. But then, learning Ingrid (whose own actions are morally questionable) is mounting her Off Broadway play based on her friendship with Edward, he can’t resist auditioning for the part, taking along a prosthetic of his old face (which later figures in some kinky sexplay) to clinch the deal. Things – including his now blossoming relationship with Ingrid, who has no idea who he us/was – go well, until, that is Oswald (Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis, in a part written for him), a snappily dressing sharply witty Brit with a relentlessly upbeat attitude, arrives, professing himself a fan of her process and, through his sheer pizzazz, declaring it’s the role he was literally born to play, inevitably getting to replace Edward/Guy as the doppelganger in his own story. And as Edward sees the man he might have been had he taken a different approach to life and his own inadequacies, his true ugly on the inside colours start to show.
Although Schimberg seems to lack confidence in his own screenplay, constantly adding contrivances to the narrative rather than let the characters do the emotional and comedic heavy lifting in the basic you can change the mirror but not the reflection message, both Stan, as the morose, sulky self-loathing Edward and Pearson as the unflappable charmer Oswald are terrific in both their physical and verbal delivery. A timely – but more restrained and considered – companion piece to The Substance that turns the Beauty and the Beast story inside out. (Mon: Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza)
Femme (18)
The territory is familiar: a closeted gay man adopts a virulently homophobic persona but ends up in an intense relationship with someone he victimised. Here, as directed by first-timers Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, that’s George MacKay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, the former Preston (MacKay), a heavily tattooed thug who hangs out with a similar crowd, the latter Jules, popular drag artist Aphrodite at a London club who shares a flat with fellow queers plain-speaking Alicia (Asha Reid) and messed-up Toby (John McCrea), who has unrequited feelings for him. Jules spots Jules outside the venue and but he stalks off when he smiles at him. Later, ill-advisedly still wearing his gear, Jules goes to a late-night pharmacy, Preston and his mates turn up and a brutal beating ensues.
Subsequently, he sees him at a gay sauna and makes an approach. Not recognising him out of costume, they have sex and a secret relationship begins, Preston taking him for an expressive Chateaubriand dinner and inviting him back to his flat, Jules bluffing things out by claiming they’re old mates from prison when his gang turn up unexpectedly. Jules, it would appear, is setting up a carefully planned revenge (significantly he wears the same yellow hoodie Preston had on during the attack and which, of course, echoes that of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill). Or is this turning into something else entirely?
It’s a question the film, mostly set at night lit with harsh neon, teases throughout with a twisting edge of the seat noir tension alongside the uninhibited sex scenes, Mackay and Stewart-Jarrett bringing complexity and depth to their characters, both of whose lives are a kind of performance (although the supporting cast are less well illuminated), as it builds to an end that is both devastating and disarmingly poignant. (Netflix)
Flora and Son (12)
Irish writer-director John Carney knows what he’s good at and sticks to it. So, after Once and Sing Street here’s another Dublin-set tale of misfits connecting through music. This time round it’s Flora (Bono’s daughter Eve Hewson), a sweary, clubbing young working class single mother who makes a few quid nannying and estranged from her musician ex-husband Ian (Jack Reynor), who’s now got a new live in lover of dubious Spanish stock, beds pretty much anyone she meets, She also frequently at odds with her electro-music loving sullen teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) who’s just one petty theft away from juvenile detention. However, seeing a discarded guitar in a skip, she has it fixed and gives it to him as a cheap belated birthday present, He’s not interested (he’s no aspiration to be another “Ed Fookin’ Sheeran”) but Flora decides to try and learn, hooking up for Zoom lessons with LA-based guitar teacher and failed musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
From this point it plays out pretty much as you might expect, with a long distance flirtation between Flora and Jeff (the film nicely has fantasy sequences as he joins her to sing on a Dublin rooftop), he teaching her to play (shooting down her love of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful and introducing her to Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now), she reigniting his creative spark (they co-write a song), and mother and son working together making dance and rap music on his laptop, music, as ever for Carney, being a transformative force.
There’s distant echoes of Wild Rose, but, while both are sweet and uplifting, with the central figure finding self-worth and playing to an appreciative audience, this is a softer, more sentimental film in the way it touchingly captures the mother-son dynamic and Flora’s search for herself. Often evoking parallels with Once in its music as mutual healing theme, it may not be in quite the same league but, fuelled by Hewson’s star-making performance, it’s a truly warm and emotionally engaging film that deserved far wider exposure than its limited streaming only fate. (Apple TV+)
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. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Hit Man (15)
A nerdy, Honda Civic–driving, bird-watcher, bespectacled philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) asks his class ‘How many of you really know yourselves? What if your self is a construct?” And that’s the underlying theme to the latest from director Richard Linklater which, incredible though it sounds, is actually loosely based on the true story of how Johnson was recruited (though not in the circumstances shown here, replacing their regular ‘hit man’ after he’s suspended for beating up innocent teen suspects) to work undercover by the Texas cops to pose as a fake hitman (“the most sought-after professional killer in Houston” ) arranging meetings with potential clients and getting them to incriminate themselves.
The real Johnson was apparently a consummate actor in his adopted personas (he’s referred to here as “Daniel Day” and the“Caucasian Idris”), using various disguised, though that’s all amped up considerable for comic chameleon effect here. He also did help a woman who was being abused by her boyfriend, talking her out of wanting his services, but they did not, as becomes the thrust of the film’s second half, become a romantic couple as he, calling himself (and indeed becoming) Ron, does with Madison (Adria Arjona), or become involved in covering up her ex-husband’s murder.
Currently on a roll, Powell-who co-wrote the screenplay that never telegraphs its twists, is terrific, playing the comedy and the later more thriller and morally more ambiguous elements with timing and Clooney cool, the film itself a meta-commentary on acting, while Arjona, with whom he has real chemistry, and Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s sting colleagues add further punch to proceedings. A palpable hit, man. (Netflix)
Juror 2 (15)
Likely to prove Clint Eastwood’s final film as director, this is a reasonably solid but, for all its moral quandary, underwhelming courtroom drama about guilt, truth, justice and the law. Set in Georgie, Justin Kemp (an unusually flat Nicholas Hoult) is a recovering alcoholic journalist whose schoolteacher wife Ally (Zoey Deutch) is in her third trimester and previous miscarriages. Ideally, he’d be at her side but finds himself selected for jury service alongside a mixed bunch who just want to get it over with so they can back to their lives. The case, prosecuted by Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), who’s running for DA on a get tough on domestic abuse platform, with Chris Messina in the public defender role, has former drug dealer James Sythe (Gabriel Basso) charged with murdering his girlfriend Kendall Carter (Eastwood’s daughter Francesca) after a very public roadside bar row. However, on learning that her body was found dashed on rocks below a nearby bridge, he has the horrifying revelation that it might not have been a deer he hit that dark and stormy night. So, should he do the right thing and confess his suspicions?
Well, not a good idea since his lawyer sponsor (a cameoing Kiefer Sutherland clearly doing Eastwood a favour in a nothing role) advises him that no one would believe he’d been sober on the night in question and, under Georgia law, he’d likely serve time for vehicular homicide. So his choices boil down to either going with a guilty verdict for someone he knows to be innocent, even if he was an abuser) or, as the only hold out, trying to persuade the majority to plump for not guilty.
It’s a sort of watered down 12 Angry Men (except half of the jury are women), as he seeks to cast reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s case and, after one juror (J.K.Simmons), a former detective, is removed after conducting his own investigation (which turns up a list of vehicles that went in for repairs shortly after the accident, Ally’s among them), succeeds in swaying five others (a Chinese med student supports the hit and run theory). This leaves it as a potential hung jury (some of whom are more directed by their own prejudices than the evidence), which could lead to a mistrial and a new jury finding him guilty.
As written by Jonathan Abrams, it’s a contrived and implausible affair that suddenly, with no explanation, has the jury coming to a unanimous decision while, after visiting him in prison, Killebrew (who’s checking out those repair jobs) is having doubts about the legitimacy of her case. Sluggish and rushed in equal measure, and no more than adequately acted, it does raise cynical questions about how the truth might sometimes no serve some people’s best interests in the justice system and ends on an open cliffhanger, but as a likely Eastwood swansong its wings never soar. (Cineworld 5 Ways; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Royal Sutton Coldfield)
Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes (12A)
Rebooted as a trilogy in 2011, Maze Runner director Wes Ball now launches another motion capture three-parter, firmly distancing himself from its predecessor with an opening that has Caesar being sent off on a simian funeral pyre. However, just as Andy Serkis’s character goes up in smoke, so too does much of the previous saga’s philosophical musings as it leaps forward several generations for a rites of passage that begins with young chimp Noa (Owen Teague) and his two best buddies Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) out on a daredevil trees swinging, mountains climbing mission to each obtain an eagle’s egg which, when they hatch, they will train to catch fish (they’re known as the Eagle Clan), Noa having the biggest challenge since his dad’s the clan’s eagle master or bird man or whatever.
Unfortunately, a scavenging human – or speechless echo – infiltrates the camp and his egg ends up getting smashed, meaning he has to mount his horse and go find another for the next day’s ceremony. This inadvertently brings him into contact with a bunch of masked apes from another clan who wield taser lances and, following Noa’s horse, lay waste to the village, kill his father and take the clan, Noa’s mum (Sarah Wiseman) among them, prisoners. Now, determined to free then, he heads off into the forbidden valley (full of rusted ships and ruined skyscrapers overgrown with foliage) where he first meets Raka (Peter Macon), a wise old Orangutan who holds firm to Caesar’s precepts and then the wild child girl (Freya Allan) who broke his egg, who, much to their surprise, turns out to be able to speak and is called Mae. It seems she’s the last survivor of a group of similarly endowed humans who were massacred by the same apes who sacked Noa’s village and who serve brutal bonobo great ape Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), who has warped Caesar’s teachings, has a pet human accomplice (William H. Macey) who’s taught him Roman History and has enslaved his fellow apes to break through into an old human military silo behind which he believes are the tools he needs to conquer the other ape clans. And which he also believes Mae has the answer to getting inside and that Noa too may prove useful.
There’s some downtime as Noa gets to learn more about what life with apes and humans used to be like and vainly tries to his dad’s eagle to bond with him, but this is just the build up to the big flood and flame confrontation finale between him and Proximus, with Mae’s own mission to recover something from the silo as the launch pad for the next instalment.
Needless to say, the motion capture renders incredibly convincing apes (even if it’s sometimes hard to work out who is who) while the visual effects and action sequences keep the adrenaline pumping. Teague is an excellent replacement for Serkis, bringing a gripping cocktail of fear, courage, nobility, cleverness and compassion to Noa, Macon delivers wisdom and wit (his reaction on seeking zebras is a treat), Durand is suitably megalomaniac while Allan proves as feisty an action warrior woman as she did in The Witcher. And she also teaches Noa to say ‘shit’,
It’s undeniably overlong, takes a while to get into gear (and I’m not persuaded the post-ape-apocalypse timeline actually stands up) and the analogies of the earlier films are dialled down in favour of a basic hero’s journey, but as a set-up for the inevitable apes vs humans sequel, it certainly knows its monkey business. (Disney +).
Leave The World Behind (15)
Mingling Hitchcock and Shyamalan, written and directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, this collapse of civilization psychological sci fi thriller, adapted from Rumaan Alam’s novel. has three solid star turns from Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali (with Kevon Bacon making a third act appearance) that keep you engaged even when the narrative feels like it’s struggling.
Jaded with everything (“I fucking hate people”), pretentious self-centred Brooklyn housewife Amanda Sandford (Roberts) packs up husband Clay (Hawke) and the two kids, Friends-obsessed Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and her old brother Archie (Charlie Evans), and heads off to a luxury Airbnb on Long Island, complete with heated pool. However, no sooner have they taken themselves down to the beach than a huge oil tanker ploughs up. Then, back home, that evening they lose all the Wi-Fi, radio and TV signals (pissing off Rose who hasn’t managed to watch the final Friends episode), they comes a knock at the door. It’s tuxedo-clad G.H. Scott (Ali) and his acerbic daughter Ruth (Myha’la) who are the house’s owners (though a bigoted Amanda finds that hard to believe) and are seeking shelter at their own home following a blackout in New Work (something else Amanda has doubt about). She’s reluctant to have strangers – more specifically Black strangers – staying the night, but Clay is more accommodating (especially as G.H. pays him $1000), reckoning it all be sorted out come morning. Come morning and it certainly isn’t though they have picked up alerts that it might all be down to some hackers, who may have even hacked into the space satellites.
Is it an attack by foreign terrorists (out trying to reach town for information, Clay picks up a leaflet dropped from a plane with what seems to be Arabic writing which, as Charlie tells him, is titled Death To America) or is it something even more unsettling? Supernatural, perhaps. Meanwhile, Rose is transfixed by hundreds of deer that appear in the back garden while a flock of flamingos descend on the pool. The roads blocked by hacked driverless cars, plans plummeting from the sky (Ruth fears her mother, who was in Morocco, might have been on one) and occasional brief national emergency broadcasts about violence in Washington do little to calm the nerves. And G.H. is concerned that events are lining up as some top secret government plan he heard about from one of his highly connected clients.
Tapping into conspiracy theory and apocalyptic dread, it builds an air of tension and fear while also examining how people react and respond to one another under such scenarios (enter Bacon as a survivalist Clay turns to when Charlie needs medical help), the swooping and swirling camerawork exacerbating the gathering weirdness. Returning to its running Friends motif, it ends on an open cliff hanger (with no planned sequel) that seems certain to frustrate audiences, especially as it’s all questions and no answers, but in asking how we deal with things as they fall apart around us, those questions are unsettlingly timely. (Netflix)
My Old Ass (15)
Written and directed by Megan Park, this is a bittersweet comedic riff on the what if your adult self could go back and advise your teenage version. The latter here is Elliott (Canadian actress-singer Maisy Stella and star of Nashville making her feature debut), a slightly brattish, gay 18-year-old who, along with her middle brother Max (Seth Isaac Johnson), a budding golfer, and the precocious younger Spencer (Carter Trozzolo) , lives with her parents (Alain Goulem, Maria Dizzia) on their Ontario cranberry farm. With no interest in carrying on the business, she’s going away to college at the University of Toronto in a few weeks.
Motoring out on her boat to spend the night on an island with her besties, Ruthie (Maddie Zeigler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) getting high on shrooms, Elliott hallucinates meeting her sarcastic older self (Aubrey Plaza ever wonderful in her few scenes) in an amusing set-up that knowingly wrings laughs from how they don’t look similar and how the former thinks 39 is middle-aged. She’s materialised to tell her she’ll grow up to take a PhD, advise her to be less distant from her folks and siblings and, most importantly, avoid anyone called Chad. She refuses to give more details as to why.
Returning to normality, she dismisses it all – until, out swimming, she meets a personable young man called Chad (Percy Hynes White) who’s got a summer job on her dad’s Ontario farm, returning to check out his family’s roots and is a dab hand at things mechanical. It’s a shock, but as much as discovering her phone now has a number under the name My Old Ass (a phrase she used when flirting with her older self) and that she can text and speak to her in the future (there’s no explanation how, just take it on trust).
She tried hard to avoid Chad but inevitably, with confused feelings, she begins to fall for him and also learns from Max, who was going to take it over, that her parents are selling up the farm. It hits hard because while she wants to leave, she also assumed she could always return. All of this is part of the film’s life lessons about savouring the moment because, as Chad tells her, you never know when it’s the last time you’ll experience something and how “The only thing you can’t get back is time”. Having been out of contact while she’s been overwhelmed with confused feelings, older Elliott then suddenly turns up just after younger Elliott and Chad have had, as she puts it, dick sex, leading to finally explaining, in a heartbreaking moment, why she told her to avoid him.
With a wistful tone that complements its end of summer photography, it’s both touching and humorous, the core actresses lighting up the screen with their charisma and comic timing, Stella having the look and vibe of a young Reese Witherspoon (and getting to sing a Justin Bieber cover), while White is charm personified. Park also sneaks in some sly filmic nods, a clip from Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, a nod to teen TV series Euphoria and, coincidentally coming the same week as The Outrun, having Spencer decorate her room, which he’s pre-emptively taken over, with pictures of Saoirse Ronan. Nestling in a similar YA coming of age zone to Booksmart and The Edge of Seventeen, it’s a low key but immensely engaging joy. (Amazon Prime)
No Hard Feelings (15)
In danger of losing her late single mother’s house in the increasingly gentrified beach hamlet of Montauk, Long Island, because of unpaid property taxes and her car repossessed by a tow truck driver (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) ex-boyfriend resentful about her abrupt lack of communication, meaning she can’t work as a Uber driver, 32-year-old Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) answers a Craigslist ad placed by two wealthy helicopter parents Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti) Becker. Concerned that their geeky, socially awkward virgin 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), lacks the necessary experience prior to going to Princeton, they’re offering a brand new Buick in exchange for someone who will, as Maddie puts, “date his brains out”. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky and co-written by John Phillips, it pretty much follows just as you would expect from a film channelling cringeworthy 80s sex comedies like Risky Business (though equally there’s a hint of Paul Thomas Anderson and Cameron Crowe). As in, naturally not revealing her job as a fuck for hire, under the ruse of wanting to adopt a dog from the rescue shelter where he volunteers, Maddie inveigles her way into Percy’s life who, of course, while shy, turns out to be not as much a nerd as he first appears, a relationship gradually blossoming although the crucial consummation keeps running into obstacles. Just as inevitably, the two having grown genuinely close, the truth will eventually come out, setting up the equally predictable dinner with parents scene, the break up and make up.
Pushing the edginess with Lawrence going full frontal (something even the enjoyably vulgar Porky’s resisted) in a skinny dipping scene and subsequent fight with three teens stealing their clothes, it’s both peppered with laugh out loud gags, innuendos and embarrassing moments but also irresistibly sweet with a subtext about her relationship with the pure-hearted Percy opening up the insecure Maddie to moving on in her life (and any hopes that her estranged wealthy father will ever be part of her life) rather than remaining forever stuck in Montauk stasis.
Not everything works; Percy’s overprotective former male nanny Jody (Kyle Mooney) feels a redundant excuse for some unnecessary homophobic jokes. However, Lawrence proves to have solid comic timing (both physical and verbal) as well as dramatic sass, Feldman recalls a young Dustin Hoffman, an aspiring musician his ‘prom night’ restaurant serenading of Maddie with Hall & Oates’ Maneater is a treat, while Scott MacArthur and Natalie Morales, as his pregnant partner and Maddie’s restaurant co-worker, provide solid comic support. It may play the raunchy card, but ultimately this is a sweet, endearing and big-hearted tale of friendship and self-discovery. (Sky Cinema)
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 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Past Lives (12A)
Unfolding over 24 years, in two 12-year intervals, played out in Seoul, Toronto and New York, writer-director and erstwhile playwright Celine Song’s semi-autobiographical debut is a beguiling bittersweet thwarted love story about unresolved feelings. It opens with a voiceover pondering what three people in a New York bar are talking about and what their relationship may be. They are aspiring playwright Nora (Greta Lee), her fellow writer husband Arthur (John Magaro) and childhood friend and crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and to explore the connections, the film first flashes back 24 years to Korea where Nora, then Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), are academically competitive classmates and budding sweethearts. However, romance is curtailed when her family announces they are emigrating to Canada. The pair part on a somewhat sour note and it’s 12 years before, he still living at home and hanging out with his mates, she now in Toronto, reconnect through Facebook, he tracking her down through her filmmaker father’s page, and then Skype, conduction a flirtatious virtual romance (she recommends him to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ) before realising he’s never coming there and she’s not going back, she shuts it all down.
Twelve more years later, Nora now having married Arthur, who she met at a writing retreat, and rarely speaking Korean, Hae Sung, who has broken up with his girlfriend comes to New York, where she now lives, for a few days, ostensibly as part of his engineering studies, and the two meet up, their meetings causing both to reassess how they feel about each other and what might have been. The title refers to the Buddhist concept of inyun, a belief that some souls are connected through time and past incarnations, somehow fated to be together.
Beautifully framed and photographed (the virtually wordless scene by the fairground carousel and the pair riding a ferry boat around the Statue of Liberty are magical), sublimely directed by Song and exquisitely acted by the three leads, the soulful, reserved Yoo, an understated Marago, who wryly describes himself as “the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny”, and the luminous Lee, it pulses with suppressed emotions, captured in longing looks or the subtle chance in a facial expression, but never falls prey to sentimentality as, subtly also exploring the immigrant experience and indemnity confusions, it builds to a denouement that is both heartbreaking and glowing with joy.
You can feel the echoes of films like David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, but Song has created her own individual and unique vision of their timeless story. An unquestionable film of the year, as Nora and Hae Sung are given to saying when things overwhelm then, ‘whoa’ indeed. (Apple TV+, Netflix)
Piece by Piece (12A)
Unless you’re into contemporary r&b, hip hop and rap, chances are the name Pharrell Williams will mean little to you, though you’ll most likely recognise Happy, his worldwide viral No 1 hit from Despicable Me 2. He’s also had two further UK No 1s as a featured artist on Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke as well as a No 1 album with Girl, while, as one half of The Neptunes with Chad Hugo, he’s one of the most successful producers in the music business.
Bringing fans and uninitiated alike up to speed, Morgan Neville’s film is a fairly standard music documentary, looking back at the early years and rise to fame and featuring talking head interviews with Williams and many of the artists with whom he’s worked. The difference being that it’s told as Lego animation, Williams explaining the choice of format as, like a Lego set, his view of music – and the world – is about building something from another pre-existing material. Visually, it’s inventive, but narratively it’s pretty much the dame building blocks.
Starting with a Lego figure Williams pitching his Lego concept to a Lego figure Neville, his story begins back in the Virginia Beach Atlantis housing projects where he lived with his parents, Pharaoh and Carolyn, explaining that he had synesthesia, meaning he saw colours in music. Not academically strong, he did, however show a gift for music, hooking up with Hugo to form The Neptunes and impressing famed producer Teddy Riley at a school talent contest and getting signed. From here on in, it’s pretty much an upwards trajectory, helping out Riley with his productions, coming up with beats (a nice touch is portraying them as pulsating Lego bricks), the duo going on to steer their own projects that’s aw them working with the likes of Missy Elliott, Pusha T, Timbaland, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes and Snoop Dog (amusingly shown at one point as a Lego dog), who credited Williams for helping him break away from his gangsta rap image and show his fun side with Drop It Like It’s Hot, his first No 1.
A move into solo artist territory with his 2003 debut album In My Mind and the hit Frontin’, featuring Jay-Z but it would be another 11 years before a follow-up, during which time he diversified/spread himself too thin by expanding into building a brand with things like Ice Cream footwear and the Billionaire Boys Club fashion label. It was during his creative rut, that he was approached to write the music for Despicable Me films, resulting in Happy and a return to making music on a more full time basis.
As well as the celebrity talking Lego heads, there’s also an interview with his wife Helen describing how they met as well as a recreation of his interview with Oprah where he began crying (the animation does wonders with Lego water) while he himself folds forth on matters such as police brutality against African Americans, he writing the hook for Kendrick Lamar’s song Alright, and which became a popular phrase with the Black Lives Matter movement.
It all ends with a Lego in concert sequence with Williams performing the film’s title track, but, with apparently almost no speed bumps or personal dark nights of the soul along the way, it’s an engaging but never exactly inspiring story, making you wonder if the whole Lego concept might be more about a marketing hook than a philosophical one. (Cineworld NEC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire (12)
The first half of writer-director Zack Snyder’s sci fi saga, this is basically a cobbling together of Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai if you’re more arty). Set in the far future where an evil Empire, loyal to a king (Cary Elwes) assassinated along with his wife and healing-powered daughter Issa at the latter’s coronation, command being taken by the senator Balisarius (Fra Fee) who now ruthlessly seeks to conquer the rest of the galaxy, and with the aid of sadistic and not entirely all-human Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who commands the Imperium, the Motherworld’s infantry, put down the rebel insurgency known as Clan Bloodaxe.
It opens on Veldt, a near barren planet where, struggling to raise a harvest, a community of farmers are visited by Noble to appropriate the resources, killing the leader, Father Sindri, as an example, ordering them to have the grain ready when he returns. However, seeing a band of soldiers about to rape a young girl, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a stoical woman rescued some years back from a crashed craft and, as is revealed in chunks of exposition, having a backstory as a high ranking officer in the Imperium forces, fights back, killing them with the help of disillusioned soldier Private Aris (Sky Yang) and, warning that when Noble returns he will destroy everything, teaming up with defiant farmer Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) on a mission to recruit a band of fighters to resist them.
With black marketer and mercenary Kai (Charlie Hunnam in what initially seems to be the Han Solo role), they planet hop as, through individual episodes, one of which involved a child-killing mutant female spider-creature (Jena Malone), they swell the ranks with beast tamer blacksmith Tarak (Staz Nair), cyborg swordswoman, Nemesis (Doona Bai), disgraced Imperium commander General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and, finally, Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher) who brings along half his crew while sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) remains in charge of the other. Come the end of the first half, as Noble and his army come calling and there’s an unexpected act of betrayal, not everyone survives for Part Two.
Unabashedly derivative, generic and unavoidably attracting unfavourable comparisons to the film’s it pillories, even so it does deliver a solid dose of high octane action and slo mo battle scenes, even if the character development seems to have been held back for the longer cut, setting up an assortment of narrative threads to be developed in the sequel along with, one suspects, a bigger role for Anthony Hopkins who provides the voice for the peace-seeking Jimmy, the last of a race of mechanical knights, who, sporting a garland of flowers round his head, is recruited by Kora. It’s now available as a more violent, more extreme three hour plus director’s cut. (Netflix)
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (12)
The second part of Zack Snyder’s Star Wars meets The Magnificent Seven rip-off has received possibly the worst review of his career. Which seems a touch harsh given that, will knowingly derivative and generic, it’s actually a more than decent, action-packed sci fi adventure.
It picks up from the end of the first part with Kora (Sofia Boutella), a fugitive renegade with a hidden past – and identity – as a former royal bodyguard connecting her to the tyrannical Imperium commander Balisarius and the assassination of Princess Issa following the murder of the King and Queen, and her love interest as Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) celebrating having, with the help of their fellow fighters, former general Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and cyborg sword master Nemesis (Doona Bae), and the locals on farming planet Veldt, defeated and killed Motherworld evil admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein).
Except his body’s recovered and regenerated, the wound on his chest prompting Kora’s new nickname as The Scargiver, leading to yet another all-out assault to crush the rebellion on Veldt, as the plucky band have to fight off the murderous Motherworld legions while Kora and Gunnar sneak aboard Noble’s ship to destroy it from the inside. All of which, save for some Kora backstory exposition and a couple of last act surprise revelations, is served up as a constant barrage of action set-pieces, in which, as per the source inspiration, not everyone survives. As such, it’s exhilaratingly explosive high octane stuff, this time providing more involvement for Anthony Hopkins voicing Jimmy the droid , with an ending that dutifully sets the stage for third – and, who knows, maybe ever fourth, instalment, which will inevitably be met with critical scorn and fanboy euphoria in equal measure. (Netflix)
Rebel Ridge (15)
Despite a title that sounds like some war movie and which only comes into play as meeting point late in the film, this proves a smart and compelling thriller very much in the Western tradition of the lone hero taking on corrupt smalltown authorities. Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, our hero here is Terry (rising British star Aaron Pierre) who, wearing headphones, is oblivious to the police car behind him until he’s knocked off his bicycle. He’s subsequently interrogated by the two white officers, Marston (David Denman) and Lann (Emory Cohen) and, when the search his bag, find a stash of money. He explains it’s from selling his share in a Chinese restaurant to his former Korean War Chinese medic partner (Dana Lee) and he’s taking it to bail out his cousin on a possession charge (before he’s processed to prison where, a witness in a gangland killing, his life will be at risk). They, however, insist it’s drug money and, as such, they have a legal right to seize and keep it. He can file a complaint, but that’s a long process, and unlikely to succeed.
From this point, Terry finds himself taking on an unjust and convoluted system and coming up against the corrupt and racist local police chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) who needs the money to keep his department operational (a legal settlement threatened to bankrupt the town) while finding an ally in Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a law clerk with her own backstory and a victim of the same broken legal system, who has uncovered a string of similar incidents involving those arrested on misdemeanours all being held for the 90 days before charges are dropped, the judge (James Cromwell) apparently all part of the shady dealings. She also, apparently, has an accomplice on the force who’s watching her back.
Brokering a deal but never keeping to it, Burnne and his henchmen reckon Terry will just walk away, but they don’t know that, a former marine, he has (rather like Liam Neeson’s characters) a special set of skills, as officer Sims (Zsané Jhé) finds on researching Wikipedia. Touching on social and racial injustices, it’s a slow burn to the eventual showdown (Terry does his best to work within the law and it’s the only time shots are ever fired, although there’s only one death throughout the film) and reveals, with a resolution that hinges on how dashcams are activated when a police siren’s turned on.
There’s some contrivances (drugging Summer in the back of a cop car so she’d fail a urine test and lose custody of her daughter if she continues to interfere) and an unconvincing change of heart in the final moments, but otherwise this is a thrilling and fresh excursion into genre territory (Netflix)
Red One (12A)
The year’s first 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. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
The Room Next Door (15)
Writer-director Pedro Almodovar’s 23rd film, his first in English, adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through and basically a two-hander, it’s also one of his weakest, an over-egged melodrama that pivots around the theme of euthanasia and assisted dying. Once colleagues on a trendy New York magazine who both had, though at different times, the same lover, Damian (John Turturro), former war correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton) and Ingrid (Julianne Moore), now a successful autofiction author, have drifted apart and not seen each other in years. But, learning at a book signing that Martha is dying of cervical cancer, Ingrid reaches out to reconnect. Martha welcomes their renewed friendship, primarily because, the experimental treatment not working, she has acquired a euthanasia pill off the dark web and, estranged from her daughter Michelle (who resents her for never revealing who her father is) and other friends refusing, wants Ingrid to be at her side, or in the room next door, when she takes it, avoiding the otherwise inevitable suffering. “I think I deserve a good death”, she says
Ingrid initially baulks at the idea but eventually agrees and the pair head off to a luxury rental in upstate New York near Woodstock where Martha will do the deed when she feels the time is right. Rather than next door, Ingrid’s actually in the room one floor below, Martha telling her that she will keep her bedroom door open and when she sees it shut it means she’s taken the pill. This, rather inevitably, gives rise to a false alarm designed to heighten the tension and pathos, but which simply feels an overwritten and contrived rehearsal for the much more decorous, calm and placid real thing. Meanwhile, Damien conveniently pops up in town to deliver a lecture, affording the film’s sidebar about climate change.
Essentially a moral and humanist debate on the issue of assisted suicide, Almodovar’s third film in a row about death, it suffers from some stilted and awkward dialogue not to mention a surfeit of references to Faulkner, Hemingway and especially Roger Lewis’ Erotic Vagrancy and James Joyce’s The Dead, of which clips from John Huston’s adaptation crop up. Thankfully, riffing off each other, both Swinton and Moore rise above the somewhat stagey material they have to work with and their interplay and the depth they bring to the friendship gives the film the richness and nuance it lacks elsewhere, especially in some heavy handed mawkish flashbacks. However, although having Swinton resurface playing Michelle feels an unwise choice, the film’s final moments do have a quiet grace that does not rage against the dying of the light, but greets it with composed dignity. (MAC; Mockingbird)
Scoop (15)
A recreation of the notorious car crash interview Prince Andrew gave to Newsnight in 2019 attempting to put to bed the scandal about his relationship with the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell and accusations of having had sex with the underage Virginia Giuffre, as directed by Peter Martin from a script by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, adapted from Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews by former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister, this is less about the actual interview and, taking its cue from All The President’s Men and The Post, more a journalistic thriller about the behind the scenes efforts to secure it. When the infamous photo of Andrew and Epstein walking in Central Park, taken in 2010 by Jae Donnelly (Connor Swindells), who also captured a young girl leaving the same private Manhattan home, finally surfaces in a newspaper in connection with a young entrepreneurs event sponsored by the Prince Andrew (a convincing Rufus Sewell under a ton of prosthetics), McAlister reaches out to his Private Secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) proposing a possible interview with the programme’s imperious but highly intelligent anchor, Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), for him to put his side of things. It’s eventually felt this is a perfect chance to change the narrative. History tells a different story.
With the action switching between both sides preparation for the face-to-face, negotiations on what will and won’t be on the table for discussion (Sam and Emily meeting with Thirsk, Andrew and Princess Beatrice at Buckingham Palace), it builds a palpable tension even though the outcome is public record and, with a supporting cast that includes Amanda Redman as McAlister’s mother (who gives a pep talk after Sam is seemingly sidelined), Romola Garai as Newsnight editor Esme Wren and Lia Williams as BBC Current Affairs Director Fran Unsworth, it is compelling viewing and a reminder of what good journalism is all about. (Netflix)
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. (Omniplex Great Park)
Smile 2 (18)
An opening title reads ‘6 days later’, which only makes sense if you know how the first film ends, Kyle Gallner briefly reprising his role as Joel, the cop who was possessed by the smile entity when Rose killed herself in front of him. And as the sequel is patently pitched at audiences of the first, there’s no need to further elaborate of the Ring-like curse works. This time round, its target is Skye Riley (British actor and singer Naomi Scott who has an in-character EP on Interscope, Riley’s label in the film), a pop diva making a comeback – and unveiling her new hairdo- after kicking the drink and drugs that led to a horrific accident that killed her movie star boyfriend (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack who gets to do dad’s Shining grin) and badly injured her, leaving scars on back and stomach, being interviewed and making a public apology on Drew Barrymore’s chat show prior to her new tour.
She still gets crippling pain, however, to which end she visits her former dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage) for off the book Vicodin only for him, high on cocaine, to stand before her with that rictus grin and bash his head in with a 35-pound workout weight. Naturally, given her past and career resurrection she can’t afford to call the cops, but it’s not long before, preparing for rehearsals, she starts seeing his reflection behind her in the mirror. A guilt-fuelled panic attack hallucination obviously, Skye literally dousing her anxiety with bottles of water. On top of which, she has to contend with her bickering relationship with her doting but controlling manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt looking like Rachel Reeves), her fraying, hair-tearing sanity further exacerbated by a creepy parade of fans lining up for selfies, including a girl in braces with that same grin. Plagued by nightmarish dreams and visions, she tries to reconnect with her former bestie, Gemma (Dylan Gelula), who cut her off at the height of her drug mania. And, worryingly she’s getting anonymous texts asking of she was at Lewis’s apartment the night he died. This, it transpires, is from a man (Peter Jacobson) who says he knows first-hand all about the demonic entity and how to destroy it – Skye just as to die before it can kill her.
Again written and directed by Parker Finn, it follows much the same path as the original in terms of jump scares and bloody deaths but it’s also invested with a deeper emotional and psychological core as it explores the mental stress that comes as part of being a modern day pop star where you become less a person and more of an industry, having to put on a happy face while, with their own fake smiles, everyone’s managing your image and every move. As such, while not cheating on the entity premise, Parker blurs the divide between what is real and what the psychologically repressed Skye sees – bleeding leg wounds, being terrorised by her smiling back up dancers and her possessed mother – with bloody resulting actions. While it’s frankly over-extended and has a final illogical plunge into body horror before the jolting end, Scott gives good meltdown scream queen and you don’t see a major character twist coming, but even so it’s hard to see where, given the limitations of its own rules, it can take further sequels. Mind you, that didn’t stop Final Destination. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
The Substance (18)
A body horror so extreme, even David Cronenberg might feel it was excessive, channelling The Elephant Man, Jekyll & Hyde, Frankenstein and Sunset Boulevard among others with homages to Vertigo and The Shining a dose of Brian Yuzna’s Society in the climax, French writer director Coralie Fargeat affords Demi Moore a career-defining, awards magnet comeback after a decade or more of fairly ho hum roles. She plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a former Oscar winning actress with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame now reduced to hosting Sparkle Your Life, a daytime aerobics television show in outdated leotards. It’s her remaining claim to fame but, taken to lunch (during which we’re given sickening close-ups of him chewing shrimp) by her boorish producer Harvey (a leeringly wonderful Dennis Quaid), surely named for Weinstein, having already heard him slagging her off while in the men’s lavatory, she’s bluntly told, thanks for your service but having now turned 50, she’s surplus to requirements and a new, young presenter will take her place in a revamped version.
Tipped off about some sort of anti-aging drug called The Substance that “makes you a better you”, she duly signs up and us given the location of a secret locker to get her package. Naturally, it’s something of a Faustian deal, whereby she injects a fluid that births (through her ripped open spine a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a younger doppelganger clone (Margaret Qualley). There are, of course, rules. She has to regularly inject a stabiliser and the two versions of herself can’t exist simultaneously, each gets a week while the others fed nutrient, and they must switch back, but always remembering, ominously, “you are one”. While the one’s active, the other lies comatose in a secret compartment in the bathroom of her luxury apartment.
Fairly predictably, naming herself Sue, her new self auditions to be the new Sparkle, Harvey practically wetting himself over his sexy new find, the drooling stakeholders likewise. She’s an overnight sensation, promoted to a new slot as rating go through the roof and is even lined up to host the network’s New Year’s Eve special. However, being only able to work one week in two (she claims she has to care for her sick mother, which is essentially true) starts getting irksome and, her narcissism coming though, she begins stretching out the seven days rule. Matters are further complicated when she takes a lover. There are, of course, consequences for Elizabeth, the first signs of which are a withered finger. It gets worse the longer the gaps are until, as it heads for its deranged, geysers of blood delirium climax, both incarnations literally learn what “you are one” means, as the prosthetics department runs amok.
Variously awash with feminist satirical themes of toxic misogyny, Hollywood’s downer on older women, body image (there’s an electrifying scene as Elizabeth stares at herself and her make up in the mirror, becoming increasingly disgusted with what she sees, the perceived flaws rather than the beauty, and the fetishising nature of the beauty and movie industry (with self-aware irony the camera pointedly dwells on close ups of lithe young female flesh as well as of both Qualley and Moore’s naked bodies).
The cinematography, garish colours, sound design (lots of squelching and cracking) and synth-heavy score all add to the cumulative effect, while the central performances are jawdropping. As the ruthlessly ambitious manipulative ingénue, this is Qualley’s starmaking breakthrough while, garbed in a suit as flashy as his persona, Quaid chomps down into the role, at one point, told his assistant’s name is Isabella, he retorts “Who has time to say that” and call her Cindy instead. But this is Moore’s shining moment, a fearless performance utterly devoid of vanity (as the effects take hold she becomes an increasingly, physically twisted and decrepit hag, though that does raise the question of how she manages to run given the state of her legs) in a film that, with both style and substance, is even more insane that it sounds. (Vue)
Talk To Me (15)
Transitioning from YouTube horror, Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Ph;ilippou make their directorial feature debut with an assured entry into the familiar don’t mess with the afterlife genre that brings a fresh approach to well-worn tropes and a whole new meaning to the phrase talk to the hand. Opening with a stabbing and a shocking violent suicide at a party and a genuinely disturbing night scene where a car hits a kangaroo which is left dying in the road ( a sure nod to the deer in Jordan Peele’s Get Out), the narrative hinges on the hand of a dead psychic which, encased in ceramics, those looking for a thrill are encouraged to clasp, making contact with a spirit and saying ‘Talk to me’ and then ‘I invite you in’, whereby they’re taken over and have scary visions, but have to blow out the candle and let go after 90 seconds so that they don’t remain possessed.
One such is black teenager Mia (sterling newcomer Sophie Wilde) who was driving the car that hit the kangaroo and while her surrogate younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) begged her to end its misery, she was unable to bring herself to do so. Following her mother’s death, a gulf has opened up between Mia and her brooding father Max (Marcus Johnson), leading her to spend much of her time at Riley’s house with his big sister and her best friend (Alexandra Jensen), their take no shit mother Sue (veteran Australian star Miranda Otto), working nights This allows them to sneak out to a party hosted by Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio), who initiate a hand session, everyone treating the gross-outs like some sort of supernatural high and a big laugh to be shared on social media.
Naturally, it all goes to shit, staring off with Jade’s ultra-Christian boyfriend Daniel (Otis Dhanji) being taken over by a horny spirit (cue a later foot sucking scene), Mia becoming hooked and going back over and over and Riley volunteering and being possessed by Mia’s dead mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen) who tries to reconcile with her daughter, leading to the time limit being exceeded. All of which results in Mia being ostracised by Jade and Sue following two graphically violent convulsive suicide attempts by Riley whose spirit Mia is shown being tortured in limbo, with killing him the only way to set him free, and her learning the truth behind her mother’s death.
With a subtext about bored youth seeking ever extreme kicks as they sink into addiction (viral and otherwise) along with the trauma of guilt and loss, the pace never slackens as the intensity builds, and while the idea that really are not to be trusted may be well-worn and the narrative is overtaken by the chaos, the brothers still manage to squeeze some decent jolts before the big final twist that leaves things open for a sequel. (Netflix)
Terrifier 3 (18)
The first of the splatter horror franchise to play on the big screen, much has been made of the excessive gore writer-director Damien Leone has piled on, leading France (where the ratings are usually 12 and 16) to ban it for anyone under 18. But, rather like Macbeth happing supped full of horrors, ultimately the effect is more numbing than sickening.
Continuing the bloody– and dialogue free – exploits of murderous mime Art The Clown (David Howard Thornton back doing a psychopathic Charlie Chaplin) in his black-and-white costume and make-up, miniature hat and rotten-tooth grin, it’s clearly a O Come All Ye Faithful aimed at devotees of the first two direct to video outings. As such, it makes no concessions to newcomers who’ll be floundering to follow the backstory involving Art’s disfigured, demon-possessed former victim turned sidekick Vicky (Samantha Scaffidi), who gave birth to his disembodied head in the Terrifier 2 credits, or, also returning from the previous film, Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera as Leone’s scream queen) who decapitated him with an enchanted sword (though that turns out to be relatively just a flesh wound) and has spent the last five years in a psychiatric hospital. Back out, just in time for Christmas, she returns to live with her aunt (Margaret Anne Florence), uncle (Bryce Johnson) and doting cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose) but is still seeing visions of murdered friends she couldn’t save and what she suspects is the returned Art.
It all kicks off with him dressed as Santa and slaughtering another family (though he does wash up the plate and glass after polishing off the milk and cookies), setting up the central carnage at Christmas storyline (the film’s homage to Halloween), before backtracking to his revival from the dead, securing a new head from a cop he kills (though that’s soon forgotten and he’s back to his familiar looks) as the timeline moves all over the place and various deaths and resurrections.
One of the set pieces takes place at a mall where, sporting the costume and indeed the real beard, he swiped from another Santa (after subjecting him to a blast of liquid nitrogen), he takes over the grotto duty in a way that makes Bad Santa look like a Disney character before it moves on to a somewhat jumbled plot that involves Sienna’s geeky brother and fellow survivor Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), a flashback scene with young Sienna and her comic book artist father (Jason Patric) who creates her own female superhero and seems to have some supernatural connection, and a particularly graphic slaughterfest (there’s a cameo by horror special effects maestro Tom Savini) at a frat house party where Jonathan’s moronic roommate (Mason Mecartea) and his true crime podcaster girlfriend (Alexa Blair) find themselves and their genitalia on the wrong end of Art’s chainsaw. Memorable for perhaps all the wrong reasons, it’s one of the many admittedly gleefully inventive visceral slice and dice, scalping and amputation sequences before it all climaxes in a rabidly excessive showdown that kills off several characters and involves a crown of thorns, death by plastic tube and rats and intestines tinsel. And let’s not forget a scene with Vicky that might be best described as glassturbation. All before setting up the sequel as Art takes the bus (a passenger reading The 9th Circle, the title of the first Terrifier short) with Sienna left having to rescue Gabbie who has disappeared down some pit into whatever inferno. Quite how Leone plans to top the graphic gruesomeness here fairly boggles the imagination. (Vue)
Timestalker (15)
Coventry-born Alice Lowe is the triple hyphenate writer-director-star of this centuries-spanning melancholic romantic comedy about fate always buggering up the course of true love. It begins in Scotland in 1668 with Lowe as Agatha, a yarn-spinning spinster with Jesus fantasies who becomes instantly besotted when she sets eyes on Alex (Aneurin Barnard) a handsome rebel heretic priest who’s about to be subjected to gruesome public execution. She facilitates his escape but ends up dying in the process. She’s then reincarnated over and over again throughout history as she fruitlessly pursues the wrong man of her dreams, always ending up suffering gruesome death. In 1796 France, she’s married to an obnoxious gluttonous aristocrat (Nick Frost). and Alex is the lovable rogue who offers a possible way out, in 1980s New York he’s a huge pop star and she’s the deranged fan, telling her gay best friend Meg (Tanya Reynolds) “I’d rather be a slave than a lesbian” when she makes untoward advances.
And so it goes throughout history, other brief scenes take place in 1847 and the near future, the end result always being the same : find soulmate, die. And in each incarnation Agnes meets variations of the same recurring characters, Frost (George) at one point her stalker at another her knife-throwing act husband’s human target in, including Jacob Anderson as the cryptic wisdom-dispensing put-upon hired hand Scipio and Kate Dickie as eye-rolling elder Marion.
Largely played deadpan but also darkly very funny, it turns a wicked eye on the whole notion of self-deluding (and as we see here self-destructive) romantic love (a sort of anti-Love Actually) and how we need to take control of our lives and not keep repeating the same mistakes. And if it somewhat unravels towards the end, there’s more than enough fun along the way to make the journey worthwhile. (Sun: MAC + Q&A)
Transformers One (PG)
Returning to its small screen animated origins, this is an origins story telling how the metallic Cybertronic race was created by Primus, how the Autobots and Decepticons came about and of the deadly rivalry between Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry), even if it still doesn’t explain why they shape shift into Earth vehicles. At the start, the two future rivals are actually best buddies, as Orion Pax and D-16,a pair of Cybertronian droids in Iacon City who work mining Energon, the planet’s dwindling energy source. Neither, like their co-workers, has the cog that enables them to transform, but the former has ambitions to rise above his station while the latter is more wary of upsetting the status quo. Hoping to attract the attention of Cybertron’s ruler, Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm), the last remaining Prime after the others were killed by the Quintessons, Orion illegally enters them into a race celebrating Sentinel defeating another invasion. And all’s going well until it isn’t, the pair winding up being demoted to garbage sorters, ending up working alongside exuberantly upbeat social reject B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key) – who will eventually become the motormouth Bumblebee, and their sarcastic now disgraced former supervisor, Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson). Discovering containing a distress message from Alpha Trion (Laurence Fishburne), one of the slaughtered Primes, among the garbage, Orion convinces D-16, B-127 and eventually Elita to hitchhike a cargo train and make their way to the surface, which is forbidden, seeking to redeem themselves in a search for the fabled Matrix of Leadership which will apparently restore the flow of Engeron. What they discover, however, is an age-old dark conspiracy involving Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, the reason they don’t have cogs and what actually happened to the other Primes, setting back home to expose the truth. The discovery, however, while bringing about their transforming power courtesy of a revived Prime, also causes an aggressive personality shift in D-16 who is now single-mindedly bent on revenge for the suffering he’s had to endure.
Augmenting the impressive voice cast is Steve Buscemi as Starscream, the leader of the High Guard warbot rebels (who will, eventually become the Decepticons under Megatron’s leadership) and Vanessa Liguori as Sentinel Prime’s murderous spidery-lieutenant Airachnid. All of this is driven at a fairly frenetic pace, but it also endows the droids with more emotional depth than their live-action counterparts, giving them expressive human-like facial features and bringing the emotive engagement sorely lacking in all but the Bumblebee solo spin-off. Whether, as it ends with the birth of Optimus Prime and the beginning of the war with Megatron, the revived animated franchise develops to explore their conflict and the eventual relocation to Earth remains to be seen, but, after the dismal Rise of The Beasts, for once further transformative adventures would not be unwelcome. (Vue)
Unfrosted (12)
Anyone old enough to remember Tony The Tiger, the mascot for Frosted Flakes, or Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Rice Krispies trio, will find much to enjoy in this unashamedly silly and colourful directorial debut from Jerry Seinfeld, which, framed bas an origin story recounted to a young runaway, charts the cereal rivalry between American firms Kellogg’s and Post in Battle, Michigan, in a race to be first to develop a new breakfast treat for America – the jam-filled toasted (and potentially palate scalding) pastry, the Pop-Tart.
Seinfeld, who co-wrote the screenplay, is Bob Cabana, a fictional marketing executive for Kellogg’s in the early 1960s, working for (fictional) Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan), a descendant of the company’s founder, while Melissa McCarthy is (fictional) Donna ‘Stan’ Stankowski, a former employee whose seconded from working for NASA on the moon landing to help develop its top-secret project. However, across the way, Post, headed up by (real) Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), with whom Kellogg’s infatuated, who are developing their own Country Squares using plans stolen from Kellogg’s (both companies have undercover operatives posing a janitors who hidden cameras in their mops).
Part factual and part nonsense, its peppered with a stream of gags and pop culture references in a storyline that variously entails enlisting an oddball crew of riffs on real historical figures, Sea Monkeys creator Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), fitness entrepreneur Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), bicycle boss Ignaz (here Steve) Schwinn (Jack McBrayer) and (based on Hector Boyardee) celebrity Italian chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan), who creates a sentient ravioli, as taste pilots for the jammy pastry (initially called Trat-Pop) Then there’s a trip to ask a favour of a sexually insatiable JFK (Bill Burr) who gets the (real-life) Wrigleys mascots the Doublemint Twins pregnant, Post recruiting Kruschev (Dean Norris) as a sponsor in response and prompting the Cuban crisis. Plus an Oppenheimer-like pastry toasting testing range that kills off one of the tasters; a Post-sabotaging deal with Puerto Rican criminal sugar magnate El Sucre; news legend Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan who doubles as and Johnny Carson) rambling on about his dodgy habits; a sinister cabal of milkman led by Peter Dinklage and Christian Slater; and a cereal mascots revolt led by real-life preening ham Thurl Ravenscroft (Hugh Grant in a variation of his Paddington character), who voiced Tony the Tiger.
All of this plus cameos by Fred Armisen, Cedric The Entertainer and John Hamm and John Slattery channelling their Mad Men personae adding to the high comedy calorie count in a Coens and Mel Brooks spoofing cocktail. Like its iconic maguffin, it has nothing of nutritional value, but it goes down a treat. (Netflix)
The Union (12)
Another generic Netflix action movie, this pares Mark Wahlberg as Mike McKenna, a blue-collar construction worker who, when an op to extract a CIA defector in Trieste goes fatally pear-shaped, is drugged in New Jersey (cue Bruce Springsteen songs) and wakes up in London to be recruited by former high school girlfriend Roxanne (Halle Berry in black leathers) who, it transpires, now works for a covert intelligence agency of working-class agents known as The Union, run by Tom Brennan (JK Simmons) and headquartered in the BT Tower, and whose closest partner Nick Faraday (Mike Colter) was killed. As an unassuming figure, she wants Mike to help her to track down the obligatory maguffin containing details of every spy and mission in the Western world before its sold to the highest bidder.
Pretty much as predictable as it is formulaic (yes, there’s that supposed dead character reappearing to play the betrayal hand and set up the last act’s multiple Croatian car chases), nevertheless that sparky chemistry between long-time friends Whalberg and Berry, as well as Simmonds’ trademark dry wit delivery and support turns from Jackie Earl Haley and Alice Lee as fellow agents and Stephen Campbell Moore as an annoying CIA operative who wants to shut The Union down, ensures it serves exactly what it promises on the label to provide comfort food that goes down easily even if there’s no nutritional value. (Netflix)
Venom: The Last Dance (15)
The final part of the trilogy involving former investigative journalist Eddie Brock (co-scripter Tom, Hardy) and (voiced by Hardy) the wisecracking black helmet-headed alien with a mouthful of teeth, lengthy tongue, raspy voice and a fondness for eating brains and chocolate, making her directorial debut after scripting the previous two instalments (as well as this), Kelly Marcel goes for broke, extending the bizarre bromance bonding in Let There Be Carnage into a full-on superhero buddy movie coherence be damned. There is no pick-up of the Spider-Man teaser last round, as Venom indeed says “I’m so done with this multiverse shit”.
Accused of killing Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), Eddie and Venom are on the run and, after a couple of scenes in Mexico reprising the unnamed bartender (Cristo Fernandez) and disposing of a bunch of Hispanic thugs who run a fighting dogs operation, they hit the road for New York. En route they hook up with Martin (an affable Rhys Ifans), a placid UFO nut hippie who’s taking wife Nova Moon (Alaana Ubach) and kids Leaf and Echo in their vintage VW Campervan to see the fabled Area 51 before its decommissioned, the journey to Vegas involving the family and Venom in a Space Oddity singalong.
However, while Area 51’s shutting down, deep below it is the top secret Area 55 where, as part of Imperium, research is being carried out on captured symbiotes (Mulligan and his emerald green other Toxin among them) by Dr Payne (Juno Temple), who has some somewhat redundant back story involving her brother being killed by lightning, and assistant Sadie Christmas (Clark Backo) who want to study not kill their subjects, all under the command of General Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor under the delusion he’s in a more serious film) who is readying to round up and destroy the aliens.
Meanwhile, Eddie/Venom have other problems to contend with in the form of a Xenophage, an unkillable spidery, multi-limbed alien creatures that has been despatched from Venom’s home world by Knull (Andy Serkis), who created the symbiotes and was subsequently imprisoned by them. The means to his freedom is by acquiring something called the Codex, which is created when a host is killed and can only be tracked when Venom reveals his full form. And then, as is the wont of all the bad guys, he will destroy the universe.
There’s several inspired moments as it builds to an explosive climax which has human hosts and symbiotes battling Xenophages left right and centre, not least Venom taking possession of a horse and racing through the desert and a scene in Vegas that reintroduces the now super wealthy convenience-store owner Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) for a dance sequence with Venom to ABBA’s Dancing Queen. Yes, it’s that kind of anything goes movie.
There is a certain melancholy and emotional frisson in the final self-sacrificing farewell (complemented by a sentimentally cheesey romcom montage of past bonding moments set to Maroon 5’s Memories), but otherwise this just reruns the uneven mix of grumpy mismatched buddy humour and action that’s been the staple of the trilogy, albeit to passably entertaining effect despite the diminishing returns, rendering Eddie’s “Let’s finish this” and Venom’s “With pleasure!)” decidedly heartfelt.
However, while with Venom gone and Eddie resuming his old life it may put a full stop to their story, a new purple pairing and two underwhelming post credits scenes (one with Knull, the other the bartender) suggests there may be more symbiotic spin-offs ahead. But then that’s what Ms Marvel thought too. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
The Wild Robot (PG)
The Oscar for next year’s best animation looks like coming down to the wire between Inside Out 2 and this, the last DreamWorks in house animation, both of which are not only masterpieces of the art but also full to the brim with heart-tugging emotion.
Based on Peter Brown’s 2016 novel, it unfolds on a remote island where a cargo ship from robotics corporate Universal Dynamics has crashed during a typhoon, with only one of its all-purpose people pleaser domestic products, ROZZUM Unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o), surviving. Charged with providing whatever assistance is needed, she attempts to offer her services the local wildlife, who, rather inevitably, see her as a monster. Even learning how to speak their language doesn’t help and, she’s about to activate her retrieval signal when she’s chased by a Thorn (Mark Hamill), a grizzly bear and, in the process, manages to crush a goose nest and its occupant, leaving only a single egg. Preventing it from being eaten by Fink (Pedro Pascal), a wily but friendless red fox, it hatches and the young gosling runt immediately imprints itself on her and manages to break her beacon transponder. Now, stuck on the island, after being informed by Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), a mother opossum, that the chick thinks she’s his mother, she now has a task, to feed him, teach him to swim and ensure he learns to fly in time to join the winter migration. And a ROZZUM always finishes their task.
She now calling herself Roz and naming the gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor), the film follows her and Fink’s efforts to get him into shape, while, discovering others of his kind, he’s treated as a laughing stock for his size, ungainly swimming and living with the monster that killed his true family. As such, the film has familiar messages about belonging, family, thinking with your heart, love and working together, but it’s also a poignant commentary on how, as Pinktail explains, being a mother is a case of making it up as you go along and not just checking boxes (breaking programming), especially if the kid’s adopted.
Eventually, with mentorship from a falcon (Ving Rhames), Brightbill learns to fly in his own individual fashion (we all have to find our way to soar) and is taken under the wing of Longbill (Bill Nighy) for the migration, he and Roz bidding each other goodbye, possibly not to meet again.
After the geese depart, a particularly harsh winter sets in, and Roz and Fink rescue the other animals and bring them to the shelter she’s build, Fink firmly telling them that they have to work and live together if they want to survive (they also promise to not eat each other once things improve, which makes you wonder if the food chain goes vegetarian). They also come together to rescue Roz when Vontra (Stephanie Hsu), a retrieval robot, arrives to capture her and take her memories for Universal Dynamics to study, albeit the ensuing battle setting the forest ablaze.
Roz is wonderful creation, with her extending limbs, remarkable expressive spherical head, detachable self-functioning hand and the ability to mirror any animal’s movements as she ‘goes native’, and barely a second goes by without a stunning visual design, inspired animation, heartfelt emotion or droll and refreshingly unsentimental humour (Pinktail’s litter are all hilariously obsessed with death), Headed up by sterling performances from Pascal and Nyong’o, the voice cast are faultless, their number also including Matt Berry as Paddler, a sarcastic beaver who’s mocked for trying to gnaw down a massive tree. While following in the lineage of The Iron Giant and Wall-E, two earlier animations about robots with similar themes, this is on an entirely different level and one of the most beautiful and moving films you’ll see this year. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; 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)