This column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.
FILM OF THE WEEK
Aliens: Romulus (15)
Sited chronologically between Alien and its James Cameron-directed sequel, co-writer and director Fede Álvarez pays dutiful homage to Ridley Scott’s original, not just in the basic plotting but to the extent of reprising Ripley’s iconic line and a facial cameo by the late Ian Holm as Rook, another synthetic, but also offers his own contribution to the franchise mythology with a hybrid creature in the final scenes.
A prologue in which a space probe collects an object from the drifting wreckage of the USCSS Nostromo that’s revealed to contain a curled-up Xenomorph, sets things in motion before the focus shifts to the Jackson’s Star mining colony (for all the advanced technology, they still send canaries down the mine to detect gas) where the orphaned Rain Carradine (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeney, the only ‘name’ in the cast) works alongside Andy (David Jonsson), the malfunctioning socially awkward synthetic her late father programmed to be her surrogate brother and always do what’s best for her.
Learning the company’s moved the goalposts in terms of contract length, she agrees to join her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) who, along with his synthetic-hating cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), sister Kay (Isabela Merced) and their pilot friend Navarro (Aileen Wu), plans to salvage cryonic stasis chambers from a derelict spaceship that’s appeared in orbit before it crashes, using them to escape to the remote planet Yvaga where there is at least sunshine. Although synthetics are banned from Yvaga, Andy’s essential to be able to access the computer systems.
Stealing the mining hauler Corbelan without anyone apparently batting an eyelid, they head off and discover the spacecraft is a research station divided into two sections, Romulus and Remus at which point, switching Andy’s chip for that of the mangled Rook in order to gain access (curing his malfunction but resetting his prime directive), they unwittingly release a horde of frozen facehuggers, from which point the screenplay reverts to default with bursting chests, cocooned corpses, acid blood, confrontations with dome-headed Xenomorphs and so on as the cast is swiftly whittled down before revealing one of the women is pregnant while a reactivated Rook is intent on completing the craft’s mission involving returning an experimental evolution enhancing compound, the Prometheus strain, derived from the Xenomorphs to the colony, meanwhile, the minutes before the spacecraft’s disaster event are ticking down.
After six previous outings, familiarity rather numbs any shocks and surprises, but Álvarez, the video-game styled sequencing and the largely dialled down effects (the no gravity lift shaft sequence with floating acid blood is inspired) succeed in effectively building the tension and creepiness while Spaeney does pretty much all the dramatic heavy lifting in the Ripley role, though Jonsson provides solid support and persuasive chemistry as Andy who gets to tell some punningly bad jokes. Going back to the roots, so to speak after the Prometheus and Covenant misfires, might feel a little lazy, but the results undeniably pay off. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
ALSO RELEASED
Ozi: Voice Of The Forest (PG)
An eco-message movie about the effect of deforestation directed at younger audiences, with Leonardo DiCaprio on board as one of several producers and Hugh Bonneville as narrator, this is a suitably colourful and impressively animated (even if the dialogue is rather more simplistic) with the voices of some leading Hollywood stars, among them the late Donald Sutherland in his final role as an albino alligator.
Seemingly orphaned when her forest home is burned down and she’s separated from her parents (Laura Dern, Djimon Hounsou), young orangutan Ozi (Amandla Stenberg) is rescued by wildlife sanctuary conservationists Kirani and Robert and taught to communicate through sign language. This takes a step up when a device from Greenzar (the self-promoting ‘caring’ palm oil manufacturing organisation that orphaned her in the first place) enables signing to be translated into words and, becoming a social media sensation, Ozi finds herself an online influencer, a sort of chimp Greta Thunberg, spreading the message about saving the rainforest.
She then learns her parents might still be alive and, with the help of a snarky wiseass wild monkey called Chance (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Honkus (Urzila Carson), a feistily enthusiastic if clumsy rhino, sets off to penetrate Greenzar’s biosphere, a supposed idyllic refuge for the wildlife whose homes they’ve destroyed, only to fall foul of the company’s collaborator killer croc (Sutherland) and his crew.
Mixing jokey humour and cartoon slapstick with some rather more intense threats of violence, it also has a rather ambivalent approach to technology and how it’s used, with Greenzar’s public image sanctuary (a parallel here with the utopia in Dawn Of The Nugget) operating on much the same logic about planting a new tree for every hundred cut down . That said, the more isn’t necessarily better eco message is important and there’s plenty of fun to be had along the way. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Sky Peals (12A)
A mixed race night shift burger chef in the Sky Peals Green motorway service station in Yorkshire, Adam (Faraz Ayub) tells his find your new self-therapy group that his estranged late father (who was found dead in his car outside the service station and had earlier left a message about meeting up), was possibly an alien. He also feels he might be one too, after all he keeps blacking out, experiencing distorted lights and sounds, and wakes up somewhere else. He also causes car alarms to go off in his presence. “Do you ever feel that you’re in the wrong place?” he asks single co-worker mum Tara (Natalie Gavin), rather clearly laying out the identity/belonging theme of writer-director Moin Hussain’s atmospheric debut which plays like an existential sci fi meditation on racial and cultural identity (notably Adam feels equally out of place at the Mosque funeral).
Rewinding through the security footage of his father’s last movements, he spots a glitch that suggests he might be watching a ghost, and indeed Adam too is something of a living ghost. An introverted recluse who wants to stay in the kitchen and is clearly uncomfortable in the greeter role assigned by the chipper new manager (Steve Oram), he’s uncomfortable around people. Meanwhile that lack of belonging his reinforced by the fact his mother (Claire Rushbrook) has sold the family home to move in with her new partner, and he has to find somewhere else to live. And, of course, the service station is a kind of metaphorical limbo with the connecting bridge spanning two ‘worlds’, a sign announcing “enjoy the rest of your journey.
Creepy and unsettling with a strong thread of anxiety that’s embodied in the somnambulant nature of the customers and Ayub’s finely executed portrayal of a man confused within and about his own life, it’s not exactly subtle in its symbolism and imagery and isn’t really exploring any new ideas about a living in a mixed modern day society, but it does weave a compelling spell. (Mockingbird)
Babes (15)
The directorial debut of Pamela Adlon, who voiced Bobby in King Of The Hill and appeared in Californication, this is essentially a wish granting for fans of the now defunct comedy series Broad City about two free-wheeling twentysomething BFFs in New York that was created by and starred Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson. When the show ended, Glazer returned to stand-up but now returns to the big screen as co-writer and co-star of a pregnancy comedy about, well, two free-wheeling twentysomething BFFs in New York.
The first act involves lifelong friends (they text each other about taking a dump) free-spirited yoga teacher Eden (Glazer) and heavily pregnant dentist Dawn (Michelle Buteau) embarking on their annual Thanksgiving ritual of catching a movie together, only for the latter’s waters to break and being rushed to hospital where, along with Dawn’s husband (Hasan Minhaj), Eden watches her give shit-splattered birth.
Returning home with a bagful of expensive uneaten sushi, she meets Claude (Stephan James), who’s just filmed a scene as a waiter in a Scorsese movie, and, bonding over loss of parents, relationship issues and Mortal Kombat, they end up having sex. Fast forward a month and he’s apparently ghosted her and Dawn’s having postpartum problems expressing milk for her baby. Then, having the pair get high on New Year’s Eve, Eden discovers that, first, she’s pregnant (even though she was on her period and, second, Claude died in a car accident the day after they met. She decides to keep the baby.
From here the plot traipses through Dawn and Marty having to deal with their firstborn’s insecurity-driven regression in potty-training and, having volunteered to baby sit for their date night, the friends falling out after Eden lets him watch The Omen, with a disastrous fall out for his carer, and Eden having to find someone else to attend her pregnancy checks (cue an overly self-aware cameo by Oliver Platt as her estranged father).
Naturally, the nature of the beast, means they’re reconciled come the end credits, each having learned something about friendship, independence, parenthood and themselves. As such, it’s a generally sweet romantic comedy founded on real chemistry and with an amusing running gag about John Carroll Lynch’s follicly-challenged obstetrician (though Sandra Bernhard’s cameo as a dentist feels like a returned favour), but all rather marred by the two leads feeling they have to deliver virtually every line with a high pitched hysterical shriek and a screenplay that involves constant vulgarity and gross outs with virtually every bodily fluid known to the man and, more pertinently, woman. It does though have the best credit line of the year involving talking bosoms – Dawn’s Breasts – Whoopi Goldberg. (Until Wed: Mockingbird)
Bad Boys: Ride Or Die (15)
The buddy cop franchise instigated by the 1995 original that paired Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as maverick Miami narcotics cops Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence), a sequel followed eight years later to generally poor reviews but was sufficiently successful at the box office to justify a third outing in 2020 with Bad Boys For Life. Its directing team, Adil & Bilall, licking their wounds after the cancelled Batgirl movie, return now for a fourth instalment that, opening with a convenience store hold-up take down and Mike marrying Christine (Melanie Liburd), the physical trainer he met between sequels, takes its cue from the closing moments of its predecessor in which Mike visited his illegitimate son Armando (Jacob Scipio), who had assassinated their boss, Captain Howard, offering a shot at redemption by helping him and Marcus on a case. Although, at that point, no plot had been conceived, it ties in here with a repeat of the scene, but this time with Armando being the only one who can identify who framed Howard (Eric Dane as ex-Army Ranger sociopath McGrath), their former boss (Joe Pantoliano turning up in flashbacks and video recordings) now being posthumously framed for corruption and links with the cartel.
Needless to say, Mike and Marcus aren’t happy that their new boss at AMMO, and Mike’s ex-girlfriend. Rita (Paola Núñez), who killed Armando’s mother in the last film and who is dating prospective mayor Lockwood (Ioan Gruffudd), has no choice to go with the seemingly overwhelming incriminating evidence (naturally uploaded by hacking into various systems), while Howard’s daughter, US Marshall Judy (Rhea Seehoern) and granddaughter Callie (Quinn Hemphill) want nothing more than to see Armando dead. And is determined to take him down as well as Mike and Marcus who are on the run after having been framed for the killing a bunch of cops and freeing Armando.
Although the title is frankly meaningless, this is far better and more enjoyable than it has any right to be. Smith and Lawrence still have great chemistry together while, bringing back characters from the previous films (Tasha Smith taking over the role of Marcus’s wife), turning some of them on their head. Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig get to reprise their roles as AMMO weapon and tech experts Kelly and Dorn, respectively, this time with added love interest. Also back is a deadpan Dennis Greene (who’s only ever been in Bad Boys movies) as Marcus’s marine son-in-law Reggie (getting to clean house of bad guys), DJ Khaled reprises his turn as Manny the Butcher while Tiffany Haddish briefly appears as bad girl stripper Tabitha and there’s another cameo by Michael Bay.
It is, to say the least, a 90s-flavoured switchback ride of twists and turns (though anyone who doesn’t see one not who they seem to be coming should probably go to Specsavers), mixing the gunfire, chases and explosions with running gags about Mike trying to keep Marcus from eating bad shit snacks and he, having had a near death heart attack experience, now wittering on about their past lives together (apparently at one point Mike was literally a stubborn ass), they being eternal soulmates (without dicks) and how he thinks he cannot be killed. There’s also an Oscars in-joke scene where Lawrence gets to slap Smith around the face several times. Climaxing with a guns blazing, hostage freeing, showdown at an abandoned amusement park, complete with crocodile too, it all wraps up with the domesticity of a family barbecue, but they may still have one more ride in them yet. (Vue)
Barbie (12A)
Directed by Greta Gerwig and co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach, this is almost too wonderful for words. Opening with Helen Mirren narrating a send of up 2001 A Space Odyssey’s monolith scene as little girls smash their dolly babies upon seeing the adult Barbie, an inspired supersaturated colour, postmodern meta cocktail of subversive satire, razor-sharp whimsy, feminism and musical numbers, it sets up the idea that there exists Barbieland, populated with an array of different versions of the iconic toy doll and their opposite number, Ken (including Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Scott Evans and Ncuti Gatwa), each Barbie linked to a child’s doll in the Real World. where, as far as they believe, women are in charge and, like the dolls, little girls can be anything they want. Even President.
In Barbieland every day is a good day, especially for Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) who wakes each morning in her pink dream house, greets her fellow Barbies (among them Issa Rae, Dua Lipa, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, Nicola Coughlan and Emma Mackey), hangs out with wannabe boyfriend Beach Ken (Supporting Actor Ryan Gosling), whose only function is to stand around and look good, and generally radiates perfection. Until that is, amid a choreography party, she brings things to a screeching halt when she wonders aloud about dying. The next day, she falls rather than floats to the floor, has bad breath and, catastrophically, finding herself walking flatfooted and not on tip toe. Clearly, something’s amiss. A visit to Weird Barbie Kate McKinnon), mutilated and drawn on by her real world child),ends up with her being told she must go to the Real World, connect with the child who owns her doll, and put things right, especially the cellulite on her thigh. With Ken stowing away in the back of her, naturally, pink car they travel by boat, bicycle, and rocket until they rollerskate into the human world where, she quickly discovers it’s men who hold all the power. She’s horrified, Ken (who has already shown signs of discontentment of being just an accessory, jealous of the attention she gives another Ken and being rebuffed in suggesting sex – if he knew what that was; as Barbie points out she has no vagina and he no penis), rather less so. He rather likes the idea of men lording it over women and, pumped up with ideas about big trucks and stallions, decides to return home and establish his own fascist patriarchy in Barbieland. Meanwhile Barbie heads to the HQ of Mattel, the Barbie toy company, to try to sort things out and is taken aback to find there’s no women executives. And when the CEO (Will Farrell) tries to persuade her to get back in the box, with a little help from an elderly lady (Rhea Perlman in a touching last act insider reference to Barbie’s origins) in a hidden office, she takes off and is rescued by Gloria (America Ferrara), a Mattel employee who, it turns out is the owner of Barbie’s toy counterpart, rather than her spikey and sullen teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt).
However, when they get to Barbieland, everything has changed. The Kens, led by Beach Ken, have taken over and the girls are now all Stepford Barbies, there only to serve their every whim. Can Barbie, with the help of Gloria, Sasha, Weird Barbie and Alan (Michael Cera, launched in 1964 as Ken’s buddy, and put everything back in the pink!
Overflowing with clever jokes along with themes of female empowerment, sexism, gender equality, toxic masculinity and aggression, the impossibility of perfection, conforming to expectations, the complexity of being a woman, who men want to be both whore and mother, being defined by your looks and finding value in who you are, it bursts with energy. It also takes digs at Mattel’s less successful lines, like Pregnant Barbie, the gender demeaning Teen Talk Barbie and Growing Up Skipper with her inflatable boobs. But it wouldn’t be half as good without the irresistible radiant star power of Robbie and Gosling (who again gets to show off his dance moves) who bring their plastic incarnations to vivid and very human life. There cameos from John Cena and Rob Brydon, a reference to Zach Snyder’s Justice League, a clip from The Godfather, and a soundtrack that includes Billie Eilish Oscar winner What Was I made For? Ken’s’ I’m Just Ken showcase and a nice use of The Indigo Girls’ Closer To Fine as sung by Brandi and Catherine Carlile. This is the definitive toy story. (Now)
The Beautiful Game (12)
A real thing, the Homeless World Cup is an annual international four-a-side football tournament in which, as one of the criteria, the players, as the name suggests, are homeless (or have been in the qualifying year). The film, however, is only loosely based around this rather than, as with Next Goal Wins, retelling an actualtournament, the players or results. Directed by Thea Sharrock and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, it stars Bill Nighy in familiar shrug-shouldered pathos mode, as Mal, the coach for the England team, who recruits Vinny (Micheal Ward) as a striker for that year’s completion in Rome. Once a West Ham contender, he carries a he chip on his shoulder and, though he’s been thrown out by his wife and is living in his car, won’t admit he’s homeless (setting up a sharply emotional scene later when he blows up after learning his young daughter has chosen him as for her class talk on heroes).
Inevitably, he has no team spirit and rubs his motley but enthusiastic crew of fellow players Jason (Sheyi Cole), Syrian refugee Aldar (Robin Nazari), Nathan (Callum Scott-Howells) and Kevin (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) up the wrong way, rejecting their extended hands of friendship and particularly getting the back up of Cal (Kit Young) who, also a striker, resents him potentially edging him out. In Rome, Vinny displays his skills to winning effect, but gives the others the cold-shoulder to the extent he goes off to sleep on a bench rather than in the team quarters.
There’s a flirtatious dalliance between the widowed Mal, Rome bring back memories of his honeymoon, and Italian competition organiser Gabriella (a delightful Valeria Golino), who promises to buy him dinner if the team, regarded pretty much as rank outsiders, win. Indeed with South Africa, the favourites (Susan Wokoma scene stealing as their nun manager), missing their match due to bureaucratic red tape back home, that might actually be a possibility assuming Mac can get them to work together. There again they’ll be up against Italy, another firm favourite.
With the plot involving generous sporting gestures, Vinny winding up as a substitute for one of the other team’s players, a revelation about Mal’s past connection to the young Vinny, a romantic spark between Jason and American goal scorer Rosita (Cristina Rodlo) for whom winning would prevent extradition, Adar’s refusal to play against Italy due to ethnic hostilities with one of their players, and the Japanese team’s amusing sightseeing and moment of glory, it follows a fairly predictable underdog sports movie of redemption and being a winner in yourself regardless of any cup. The influence of things like The Full Monty are evident but never in a way that diminishes the film or the characters, all of whom are very likeable, even if at times selfish, with the interactions off the pitch the heart of the film rather than the action on it. It’s slight but full of charm and easily earns its place on the podium. (Netflix)
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)
Borderlands (12A)
Being downgraded from its M (i.e.18) videogame certificate, seems likely to be a red flag for fans, but they’re not the only ones who’ll leave thinking they’ve wasted time and money. One can only imagine Cate Blanchett lost a bet (or, given last year’s dismal The New Boy, her faculties), otherwise how else to you explain away her decision to slum it in Eli Roth’s hyperactive, noisy, messy, clunkily written, juvenile and borderline incoherent adaptation that looks like a bad Suicide Squad or Guardians Of The Galaxy knock-off!
She plays Lilith, a redhead bounty hunter who was born on the planet Pandora, long rumoured to hold a hidden vault containing the secrets of the lost Eridian civilisation, who’s hired to rescue Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the bratty kidnapped daughter of the all-powerful corporate exec Atlas (Edgar Ramirez, a vapid villain at best). Except, rather than having been abducted, Tina, who sports plush bunny ears, a pink Band Aid on her nose and has an endless supply of exploding stuffed rabbits, has actually been rescued by former elite mercenary seeking redemption Roland (Kevin Hart), the pair teamed up with reformed masked berserker Psycho Krieg (Florian Munteanu). Adopted by one-wheeled wiseass robot Claptrap (Jack Black), a horrendous cross between C3PO and the Minions, she finds herself allied with the trio and, on their return to Pandora (a Mad Max styled mash-up where Gina Gershon cameos as the Red Light barkeep), searching for the keys to the vault, is also reunited with Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the scientist who looked after her after her mum was killed during an uprising.
Apparently, to unlock the vault, they need three keys, one of which is a prophesised daughter of Eridia, who might be Tina herself whose backstory explains why she thinks she’s the special one. Meanwhile, Atlas, his goons and an army of berserkers all want them dead.
Wildly miscast (though they do their best in the circumstances, albeit with enthusiasm dialled down) and doling out huge chunks of exposition as it goes, it follows the familiar videogame route of moving from one quest level to the next by way of different post-apocalyptic locations and despatching hordes of bad guys, not to mention driving into the mouth of a giant creature and using missiles to create an exit. It’s not without moments of invention or wit (Claptrap excreting bullets is unexpectedly funny), but these are rather like an occasional cactus in vast arid desert of dodgy CGI. It is, though, mercifully short. At the end of Tar, Blanchett’s character was seen conducting music for a bad video game. Oh, the irony. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget (PG)
Back in 2000, Aardman Animation released their first feature film, the story of a bunch of chickens escaping from their captivity in a chicken farm, going on to become the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film in history. Now, 23 years later comes the sequel. And if the first film was parody of The Great Escape, the template this time, as is made clear from one of the lines, is Mission Impossible.
Living in a self-governing island community, secreted away from humans, Ginger (now voiced by Thandiwe Newton), who led the escape, and her American rooster hubbie Rocky (now voiced by Zachary Levi),the self-styled Lone Free Ranger, are thrilled when they become proud parents to their first chick, Molly (Bella Ramsey). Molly, like her mother, is rebellious with a sense of adventure, but is firmly told she must never venture across to the mainland and a “world that finds chickens so … delicious”. It’s a warning that becomes even more important when Ginger sees humans clearing the trees on the opposite shore and a Fun-Land Farm truck with an image of a chicken in a bucket.
Needless to say, mum having told her she’s a big brave girl, Molly pays no attention and sneaks away to find out more, meeting up with curly-haired Liverpudlian chicken Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies),who persuades her to join her and infiltrate this apparent chicken blue sky utopia (a sort of Barbieland meets Teletubbies landscape) with all the corn you can eat and where every chicken gets their own bucket and lives a life of supreme happiness.
Except, of course, it proves to be anything but and the slogan “Where chickens find their happy endings” has a definite irony. The collars the chickens wear turning them into blank, hypnotised zombies who just can’t wait to climb the staircase to the glowing sun, to the accompaniment of Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, oblivious that they’re going to be turned into chicken nuggets.
So now, having broken out of a farm in the first film, Ginger now leads a mission to break into one. To which end she’s joined by both Rocky and her returning feathered friends, knitting enthusiast Babs (Jane Horrocks), Busty (Imelda Staunton), Mac (Lynn Ferguson) and the elderly Fowler (now voiced by David Bradley) who can’t stop talking about his wartime exploits. Back too are scavenger rats the cynical Nick and his dimwit accomplice Fetcher, this time round voiced by Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays, lending a hand to save their ‘niece’ Molly.
Once within the heavily fortified compound, which looks like a Bond villain lair (robotic mole sentries, pop-up vacuum tubes and laser-guided iron ducks), it’s a race against time before evil scientist Dr Fry (Nick Mohammed) delivers the promised supply of nuggets to Reginald Smith (Peter Serafinowicz), the owner of the Sir Eat-A-Lot fast food franchise. Which is when Ginger gets the shock of her life to discover Dr Fry’s wife and partner is none other than Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), the owner of the farm they escaped from and who she thought had fallen to her death. And when Tweedy realises Ginger is leading an attempt to free these chickens, it all gets very revenge personal. And when all seems lost, ingeniously popcorn proves to have more uses than just stuffing your face.
Naturally it’s full of puns and old fashion humour (there’s a couple of bottom jokes for the young sniggerers) with clever contemporary gags involving a retinal scanner (and eye-pad) as well as nods to the likes of The Truman Show and Squid Game for the grown up along with a message to mums and dads about their children spreading their wings but keeping them safe at the same time. It may not bring about a mass avoidance of KFC, but it might just prompt a few thoughts about where those breadcrumbed bites come from. (Netflix)
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 Creator (15)
While this may tap into current concerns about artificial intelligence, a more basic theme of director Gareth Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz’s sci fi epic is fear of the other. Essentially restaging the Vietnam War in 2070 New Asia, with the Americans looking to eradicate simulants, human-like robots that can be lookalikes of their human templates, here presumably standing in for communists. This is on account of how, a decade or so earlier, AI software detonated a nuke in Los Angles (the actual explanation is delivered as almost an aside towards the end), leading to the USA (and its allies) banning all forms of AI. It remains legal, however, in New Asia, hence why Josh Taylor (John David Washington), a US army special forces operative with a cybernetic arm and leg, is working undercover to find and kill Namada, the mastermind behind the AI. To do so, he’s targeted Namada’s daughter, Maya (Gemma Chan), but things have got complicated in that he’s gone native, married her and she’s pregnant. Things all go pear-shaped when a sudden US attack bows his mission and cover, resulting in Maya apparently being killed when Nomad, the hovering US military installation wipes out the compound.
Extracted, Taylor is given the chance to redeem himself by going back in and finding and destroying the rumour superweapon Namada’s developed, his commanding officer Andrews (Ralph Ineson) and ruthless anti-AI mission leader Howell (Allison Janney playing against type) telling him Maya is actually still alive. A mission is duly set up and, although it all goes to shit, Taylor manages to infiltrate the vault containing the weapon, which turns out to be a child simulant (seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles) with the ability to disrupt electronics. Naturally, this triggers Taylor’s paternal instinct with Alphie, as he names her, becoming his surrogate daughter, looking to protect her against Howell and her team (that one holds a gun to a puppy’s head denotes what bad guys they are) who, warmongering Americans, are determined to kill her along with the rest of the AI population (simulants. flat-headed androids or those with Amar Chadha-Patel’s face who work as the police) and their human kin, he and Howell hoping she can lead him to Maya (aka Mother).
The influence aren’t hard to spot with elements of The Terminator, Akira, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner and Star Wars, the film climaxing as a variant on Luke destroying the Death Star while Alphie’s power is its version of The Force. It’s also not hard to read a Christian parallel with Maya the Virgin Mary, Josh as Joseph and Alphie the AI saviour with a purpose to bring peace to the world (asked at one point what she’d like, as in to eat, she replies for robots to be free).
Given Edwards’ special effects background, it’s no surprise that up there in the Avatar league the film looks incredible, but it also taps into a deep emotional vein too in its exploration of family, morality, xenophobia. The chemistry between Washington and Voyles, who as the adorable innocent Alphie is the soulful heart of the film, summoning her powers by placing her hands together in prayer like some AI take on the Dalai Lama. A scene between her and Taylor talking about heaven is terrific and comes back in the final moments with a piercing poignancy.
There’s moments of humour such as the kamikaze robo-bombs that stomp to their destruction with an “it’s been a honour to serve you” and robots watching holograms of exotic AI dancers, but mostly this keep up the dynamic intensity as the action piles up with a relentless drive as the simulants (headed up here by Ken Watanabe) are driven to a last stand. Derivative it may be, but there’s no denying it delivers everything it promises. (Disney+)
Deadpool and Wolverine (15)
The first Marvel movie to get a 15 certificate, directed by Shawn Levy it may also be the one to jump start its faltering track record after a series of misfires and flops. After all, at one point Deadpool does declare himself the Marvel Jesus. It jumps straight in with Deadpool , now officially a part of the MCU, disinterring Wolverine, who died for real at the end of Logan, assuming he has regenerative powers, only to find just an adamantium-laced skeleton, the bones of which he uses to bloodily despatch a small army of Time Variance Authority troops who’ve been sent to capture him. Flashback then to six years earlier when, having used Cable’s time-traveling device to travel from Earth-10005 to Earth-616, his request to join The Avengers is snubbed by Happy Hogan (John Favreau), Now Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) has retired his red spandex masked mercenary and, having broken up with girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) works as a car salesman along his best friend Peter (Rob Delaney). But then, at his birthday party, he’s abducted by the TVA and taken before Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) a rogue operative who tells him that his timeline is deteriorating (and he’s speeding up the process) as a result of the death of its anchor, James “Logan” Howlett, meaning everyone he loves – his X-Force friends among them – will cease to exist. Which is where we came in as, having stolen Paradox’s TemPad, he’s trying to resurrect Logan and save the timeline. And since that Logan’s staying dead, it means he now has to traverse the multiverse and find a Logan variant who can. Which, following a collage of unsuitable or hostile Wolverines (Henry Cavill cameoing among them), bring him to the worst of them all, the self-loathing and generally despised version (Hugh Jackman) who, with his iconic yellow costume, blames himself for the deaths of his fellow X-Men.
He returns him to the TVA only for Paradox to despatch them both to the Void, a pointed Mad Max send up (including a Furiosa gag) where superheroes from other timeliness have been consigned as fodder for sand demon Alioth, ruled over by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the bald-headed telekinetic sister of Charles Xavier who lives inside a fortress carved out of the skeleton of Giant Man. Not only that, but the place is teeming with other Deadpool variants, among them Lady Deadpool (Blake Lively), Dogpool (Peggy), Cowboy Deadpool (Matthew McConaughey), floating skull Headpool (Nathan Fillion, Kidpool (Reynolds and Lively’s daughter Inez), and even one from Wales who, I guess is Welshpool. The super nice version of Wade (Reynolds) points the pair in the direction of the resistance, they joining up with Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes, and a sly nod to the remake without him), Gambit (Channing Tatum) and Logan’s biological mutant daughter Laura (Dafne Keen), all of which builds to the big showdown as the seconds tick down to the destruction of all timelines with only the ultimate sacrifice able to prevent it.
With cameos by, references to or repurposed footage of virtually every Marvel superhero/villain you can name (Juggernaut, Pyro, Toad, Nightcrawler, Sabretooth, with Chris Evans reprising not Captain America but Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four), though sadly no TVA appearances by Loki or Moebius, it’s as exhausting as it is convoluted and bloody with all its self-aware fourth wall meta nods to itself as a film, 20th Century Fox (its logo seen as a destroyed monument a la Planet Of the Apes), Disney, Marvel head honcho Kevin Feigh and Jackman’s musical career. You’ll need multiple viewings (or frame by frame pauses when it’s on digital) to catch even half of them.
At its core though is the volcanic bromance chemistry and funny/sweary banter (not to mention the high octane and brilliantly choreographed fights, largely to iconic 80s pop songs) between an ineffably note-perfect Reynolds and Jackman, but all that would be just action adrenaline where it not for the fact the film, in solid Marvel tradition, digs deep into the emotional arcs behind the snarkiness and flippancy of its characters, with themes of self-worth, insecurity and a need to prove they matter designed to salt the popcorn with tears. Ryan Reynolds is Marvel Jesus and this is one hell of a Holy Trinity. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Despicable Me 4 (PG)
Seven years (and the arrival of a baby who despises dad – cue predictable eventual bonding) since the last instalment (although there’s been a pair of Minion spin-offs in the interim), reformed supervillain Gru (Steve Carrell) is back in a film overstuffed with subplots to the extent it feels a like a collection of shorts bolted together. It opens with a Bond-like send-up as a dapperly dressed Gru and his equally attired Minions (all voiced by Pierre Coffin) attend a Class of 85 alumni ceremony for graduates from the Lycée Pas Bon academy for villains. He’s undercover to arrest former classmate and old nemesis Maxime Le Mal (an accent mangling Will Ferrell), who, there with girlfriend Valentina (an underused Sofia Vergara) presented with the top award, reveals his new power of harnessing the power of insects and transforming into a human cockroach. Overpowered and arrested by Anti-Villain League agents, he’s hauled off to a top security supervillain prison. From where he naturally escapes, vowing revenge on Gru and his family (his grudge goes back to when they were students and Gru stole his Karma Chameleon routine for the talent show), planning to kidnap and mutate the baby.
To which end, AVL boss Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) has Gru, wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig), Gru Jr and adopted daughters Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Madison Skyy Polan), relocated to a high-tech safe house in Mayflower, giving them new identities, with Gru as Chet, a solar panels salesman, and Lucy as Blanche, a hair stylist. The girls are less pleased with developments, the youngest, Agnes, complaining (in one of the funniest moments) that she has to lie and say her name is Britney. Naturally, Maxime, in his armoured flying roach, is determined to track them down,
It’s from here the film subdivides into different storylines. Lucy ruins a client’s hair resulting in a Terminator 2 parody in a supermarket. Gru tries to ingratiate himself with snooty neighbour Perry Prescott (Stephen Colbert) and finds himself blackmailed by his longtime Gru admirer and aspiring supervillain daughter Poppy (Joey King) into stealing Lycée Pas Bon’s honey badger mascot, resulting in a run-in with school principal Übelschlecht (Chris Renaud) who contacts Maxime. And then, surely coming to the end of their service life, there’s the increasingly irritating Minions, with all but three (who remain with Gru for their own antics involving a vending machine) taken in by the AVL where Ramsbottom selects five to be transformed into superpowered Mega Minions (basically Minion equivalents of Cyclops, Plastic Man, The Thing, The Hulk and Superman), though the project proves disastrous and they’re retired when they cause chaos (and prompt an amusing Spider-man 2 train stopping spoof) in trying to help. Naturally coming to the rescue in the final act.
With a quickie cameo from Romesh Ranganathan voicing Dr. Nefario and a montage of past characters in the closing credits, it pitches high and low for it audience, with repeated gags involving bottoms (the Minions snigger at the name Ramsbottom) for the kiddies and pop-culture parodies and consumerism satire for the adults. However, while there’s undeniably moments of inspired verbal and visual invention and hilarity (though the closing Gru/Maxime Everybody Wants To Rule The World duet isn’t one of them), it all feels like a disconnected string of jokes in search of a cohesive story. None of that will, of course, prove a barrier to blockbuster box office, a sequel and doubtless a Mega Minions (and possibly Poppy) spin-off. But maybe next time less of a see what sticks approach might be better. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue; From, Wed: MAC)
Dumb Money (15)
If you think shorting has something to with an electrical fault, then this probably isn’t for you. Directed by I Tonya’s Craig Gillespie, it’s an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Antisocial Network which documented the 2021 GameStop financial soap opera, a David and Goliath battle between Wall Street and amateur investor (from whence the title term insult comes) Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who, as Roaring Kitty, used the Reddit and YouTube social media to spark interest in stocks in GameStop, a chain that specialised in reselling computer games, and which the Wall Streets sharks were betting against, shorting, to make a killing when it collapsed. Written by Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker as high drama, it does its best to make things comprehensible for the layman but even so it might be a good idea to take along a financial adviser to explain as it goes.
Reckoning GameStop was undervalued (during the pandemic it was allowed to stay open as “essential workers”), supported by wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) and much to the bafflement of his underachieving brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), using Robin Hood, a non-commission software app devised by tech billionaires Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), Gill decided to invest his $53,000 life savings, soon attracting hundreds of others to also buy in, among them here GameStop worker Marcus (Anthony Ramos) financially strapped Pittsburgh single mum nurse Jenny (America Ferrera) and lesbian lover students Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold) saddled with ever-increasing loans. Ranged against them were high profile traders Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), who, as the Game Stop investors saw their wealth soar, were faced with catastrophic losses, Plotkin’s Melvin Capital having to bailed out stop it collapsing. Eventually, Tenev and Bhatt were leaned on to put a stop to Gill using their software, shutting down his access to wallstreetbets, leading to the stock falling and threatening him and his followers with ruin and leading to a congressional hearing (the end credits featuring actual footage).
Gillespie keeps things moving, using onscreen titles to keep you up to speed with the financial scores, in a film which takes the events to show how the system is rigged against the small fry, getting you rooting for the nerdy, headband wearing Gill and hissing at his despicable opposite numbers while underlying it with a personality-driven story of self-belief. Headed up by Dano, the cast, which also includes Clancy Brown as Gill’s father and, a mostly PPE masked, Dane DeHaan as Marcus’s rules-citing boss, are on cracking form and the script leavens the mounting tension with a substantial vein of humour (such as Plotkin’s advisors suggesting his wine collection might not be the best backdrop to the online hearing interview) and refraining from any big speech moments about the ugly face of capitalism, and while it may not have the intensity of Boiler Room or The Big Short, investing brings rich entertainment rewards. (Netflix)
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+)
Gracie and Pedro: Mission Impossible (PG)
The road movie plot about animals having to make it back home after getting separated from their families is so well-trod it’s practically threadbare, the only spin to this lacklustre animation being that it’s nailed to a mismatched buddies movie in which our Tom & Jerry styled mutually antagonistic heroes have to learn to work together to overcome the obstacles and, naturally, wind up being friends.
So you have pampered posh pedigree pooch Gracie (Claire Alan) and Pedro (Cory Doran), a streetsmart rescue cat with abandonment issues, who, when their pet carrier gets misplaced by the airline, are left behind when the family moves from LA to Salt Lake City. Exiting the airport they catch a bus they think is going there only to find themselves heading for Vegas with a magician’s rabbit (Susan Sarandon). Here they wind up trashing a hotel’s penthouse suite and on the run from dim-witted detective Doyle (James Kee) and his far smarter ferret sidekick Sherlock (Mike Nadajewski), almost get eaten by a two-headed snake (Alicia Silverstone) in the desert, hitch a ride on a freight train only to be kicked off by the turkey conductor (Bill Nighy) and end up in an abandoned fun fair, where, trying to evade, Doyle and Sherlock, find themselves having to place their fate in the paws of the two shady rats (John Stocker, Ron Pardo) who earlier traded information for their identity tag collars (and yes, that does mean they find themselves having to escape from the pound).
The brief star voices cameos augmented by Danny Trejo as a fish narrator, Brooke Shields as a horse and Al Franken as the family’s confused grandfather, it goes through the slapstick paces adequately enough but, increasingly repetitive and with the insult trading between its two charmless protagonists and the running gag about the cheapo airline (can do kid Sophie forces them into action with a viral video of their incompetence) becoming ever more wearisome, it turns into something of a slog as it creaks it way to the reunion happy ending and its inevitable positive message. The only impossible mission here would seem to stop the toddlers getting bored long before it ends. (Omniplex Great Park)
Gran Turismo: Based On A True Story (12A)
Masterminded by Kazunori Yamauchi, launched in 1997 Gran Turismo is an iconic PlayStation racing simulation game, accurate down to the finest details and which, to date, has seven incarnations and millions of followers. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, this tells the true story of one of them, Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a mixed race teenager from Cardiff, son of Birmingham born former professional footballer Steve (Djimon Hounsou) who played, among others, for Coventry, Wolves and Cardiff City (whose bluebird logo plays an emotional role) and mother Lesley (a thankfully underused Geri Halliwell, displaying all those acting skills you loved in the Spice Girls movie), who, from an early age dreamed of becoming a racing driver. With that being financially out of the question, as his father hammers home, he settled for becoming a top Gran Turismo player.
Staying generally true to the facts, things kick in when Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), a motorsport marketing executive at Nissan (based on Darren Cox who founded the GT Academy) pitches his bosses the idea of giving their fading car market a boost by staging an international competition for Gran Turismo players, the winners of which would be awarded a spot in the GA Academy and the chance to compete in real races. As such, he recruits Black Sabbath devotee Jack Salter (David Harbour), a (fictional) former racing driver who gave it up after a tragedy at Le Mans, as the tough love mentor whose job is to get the 10 finalists (out of 90,000 entrants) up to snuff in the transition from game console to actual steering wheel with the ultimate winner getting a Team Nissan contract as one of their drivers. That will be the soft-spoken Jann (at one point Moore wants to scratch him as he lacks marketable charisma) then, who chills out before each race by listening to Kenny G and Enya.
It will come as no surprise to learn this ticks pretty much all the sports underdog movie boxes, with Salter becoming Jenn’s surrogate father (his pragmatic own dad not supporting his son’s dreams), the confidence crisis (following the spectacularly filmed recreation of the 2015 car flipping crash at Germany’s Nürburgring circuit that killed a spectator), the encouraging love interest (Maeve Courtier-Lilley), hostility from the real racers, the egotistical unscrupulous rival (Josha Stradowski as Nicholas Capa, the film’s equivalent of Rocky’s Drago), the come-back and the split second chequered flag Le Mans climax (where the film does indulge in some wish fulfilment champagne popping tampering with the truth).
At two plus hours, it’s overlong and often feels like a marketing campaign for Nissan and PlayStation, but fuelled by solid performances from Madekwe and Harbour and directed by Blomkamp puts cynicism on the back burner for an inspirational tale of triumph against the odds that, like Top Gun on wheels, makes you feel you’re hurtling around the track low to the ground at 300mph (the real Mardenborough served as Madeweke’s stunt driver) as the healing settles in. (Netflix)
Harold And The Purple Crayon (PG)
Published in 1955 (and followed by several sequels) and still popular among small children, Harold And The Purple Crayon is a basic children’s picture book by Crockett Johnson about a four-year-old boy who has a big purple crayon that allows him to draw pictures in the air of anything he imagines; the objects then become real. It’s now been turned into a live action (with a nicely handled animation set-up) fish out of water comedy by Carlos Saldanha, the director of the Ice Age movies. Now, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid showed that it was possible to translate basic line drawing cartoons into a personable film with actual actors. This is not Diary Of A Wimpy Kid.
Taking a similar idea to Barbie, the book character of Harold starts to question why his drew him in the first place and when the Old Man narrator (Alfred Molina) falls silent he decides to draw himself a portal into the real world to find him. He’s followed by, first, his animal friend Moose and then Porcupine, all three becoming human figures with Harold played by Zachary Levi, Moose by Lil Rel Howery, and, separated from them, Porcupine as a purple-mohawked punk played by an underused Tanya Reynolds (from Sex Education and currently The Decameron).
Shortly after arriving, Harold and Moose cross paths with widowed frustrated pianist mum Terri (Zooey Deschanel echoing her turn in Elf) and her young son Mel (Benjamin Bottani), who’s bullied at school and has an imaginary dragon friend named Carl. Persuading his mum to let them spent the night in their spare room, he learns of the magic crayon (and draws himself a ferocious spider-fly) and promises to help find the Old Man. In the ensuing antics Harold and Moose manage to cause chaos and get Terri fired from her discount store job (which she hates), visit the Johnson museum to find his ‘father’ (his God turns out to be dead), and, along with Porcupine, get locked in jail, variously using the crayon (half of which he gives to Mel) to paint Terri’s house and draw purple pies, ice cream, skateboards, roller skates, a single propeller plane, a giant lock and a wrecking ball (as well as a puma that inexplicably isn’t purple).
Naturally, there’s a villain of the piece, here in the form of librarian and wanna be fantasy author Gary (Jemaine Clement a decidedly low rent version of Jim Carrey’s Doctor Eggman in Sonic) who creepily has his eyes set on Terri, which climaxes in a showdown between him (having ingested the crayon) and Harold (prompting the film’s best joke in a cowboy shoot-out parody where they both ‘draw’) as he attempts to destroy them and mould the world to his own imagination.
Levi basically just rehashes his man-child character from Shazam, but with even more over-acting, while, other than Deschanel, the rest of the cast are just filling check on the call sheet. Given the perfect opportunity to let rip with the special effects, the crayon’s creations are decidedly underwhelming while the film’s themes about friendship, self-confidence, absent fathers, identity and the power of imagination are all spelled out in half-hearted fashion. It’s amusing enough for undemanding eight-year-olds, but it’s never one to make you want to wax lyrical. (Cineworld NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Vue; Until Wed: Mockingbird)
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)
Hundreds Of Beavers (12A)
Directed and co-written by Mike Cheslik, this is up there with the same out of your head surreal slapstick of Sasquatch Sunset, but with less bodily fluids, gore and sexual explicitness (though there’s still plenty of visual innuendo). Largely wordless and shot in black and white with a mix of live action and animation, it takes its influences from the silent shorts of Buster Keaton, Tex Avery animation, Looney Tunes, and Mel Brooks and George Miller, opening with a musical number in which drunken 19th century applejack salesman Jean Kayak (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) has his farm destroyed when a beaver eats one of the support beams of a giant keg, which rolls into his fireplace and explodes. Waking up in the heavy winter snow, he now has to try and survive, repeatedly failing in his attempts to catch food (trying to bag a series of actors in rabbit costumes using giant snowballs or carrot sculptures) and getting beaten by a pair of beavers he ill-advisedly attacks. Visiting a local merchant (Doug Mancheski), he notes how fur trappers turn a tidy profit and sets off to amass his own beaver skins, taken on by a trapper (Wes Tank, killed soon after by wolves) as his protégé, to trade up for better gear and hopefully win the love of the merchant’s daughter(Olivia Graves).
The animation skills and imagination on display are impressive with a pair of beavers styled after Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigating Jean’s traps, he ultimately luring them all into the wolves’ cave to be slaughtered so he can get their pelts, only to himself be caught and put on trial for beaver killing, found guilt, set to be skinned and made into a coat.
It’s eccentric prankster cartoonish nonsense with intertitles, sound effects, cranked-up speeds and sprightly music as well as puppets and actors in furry suits – or mascots as the credits have it, Tews giving a suitably deadpan performance amid the absurdity and, it should be said, some subtle eco messages. As such it would have made a delightful twenty minute short, but expanded to just under two hours, even as a future cult midnight movie, it wears out its welcome long before the end. (Sat/Sun: MAC)
I Saw The TV Glow (15)
Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature is a highly idiosyncratic and increasingly creepy coming-of-age horror about the way television impacts our live as we escape into fictional constructs. Opening in the 90s, seeing a TV commercial for a teen monster-of-the-week horror fantasy show called The Pink Opaque (a clear Buffy pastiche) about two psychically-linked girls (Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan) battling Mr Melancholy (the Man in The Moon) and his underlings, bi-racial 12-year-old Owen (Ian Foreman) is fascinated, However, it frustratingly airs past his bedtime. But then he encounters Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a cynical misfit queer ninth-grader with an abusive step-father who lends him an episode guide, the two forming a tentative friendship, he lying about sleepovers with another friend in order to watch episodes at her house. The years pass, he still under a bedtime curfew, Maddy records episodes for the now older Owen (Justice Smith), estranged from his father (Fred Durst) and his mother (Danielle Deadwyler) dying of cancer, to watch, but otherwise there’s no contact or communication between them. The show is eventually cancelled and, when the pair meet again in their twenties (he working at Fun City, she, now with a different name, having taken off years earlier), they start to question the nature of their reality and the nature of the show, especially the other side of the screen (the pair as the characters)and the disturbing season finale.
A nonbinary and trans filmmaker, through Owen (though both he and Maddy reflect the impact of lives unlived), narrated by Smith and featuring original songs from Caroline Polachek and Phoebe Bridgers (who cameos as herself), Schoenbrun frames the film as an understated meditation on queer identity and, while the ending (and indeed much of the plot) is likely to leave some frustrated and perplexed, it never makes you want to switch channels. (Until Tue: Mockingbird)
IF (U)
Actor-writer-director John Krasinski makes his family movie debut with this at times messy but ultimately charmingly sweet and touching animated and live-action ode to the magic of childhood imagination and its loss as we grow older,
Her mother having died when she was young and her forever joking father (Krasinski) in hospital with a physically and metaphorically broken heart, precocious in-a-hurry-to-grow-up 12-year-old (“I’m not a child”) New Yorker Bea (the disarmingly winning Cailey Fleming) moves in with her grandmother Margaret (Fiona Shaw). Glimpsing what she believes to be girl who lives upstairs, she ventures up to explore and meets Cal (Ryan Reynolds dialling down the flippancy in favour of sincerity), who insists he lives alone. However, following him one evening, she finds herself introduced to the world of IFs, or imaginary friends (naturally, there’s a clip from Harvey), such as the massive, furry and very purple Blue (Steve Carell) and Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the Betty Boop crossed with a butterfly figure she spied earlier and who lives in Cal’s apartment. Like Cal, only she can see them. It’s a bit like The Sixth Sense for kids – I see imaginary people.
Cal introduces her to the Coney Island retirement home for IFs, who, like the discarded toys in Toy Story (the film also knowingly borrows from Monsters Inc.), have long been forgotten by their former children. It’s Cal, Blue and Blossom’s mission to reunite them with their old kids (in Blue’s case Bobby Moynihan’s dispirited Jeremy) or to find someone else to need them.
Blossom, it turns out was her grandmother’s IF and still keeps a watchful eye on her, while Bea tries to find an IF who can bond with Benjamin (Alan Kim), the young boy she meets on her visits to see her dad. In the process, she rediscovers her own still beating inner child, and it’s not too hard to work out who was her IF.
There’s a star-studded voice cast of cameos as the array of IFs (and no buts), among them Bradley Cooper as an ice-cube in a half-full water glass, Christopher Meloni’s over-enthusiastic raincoated spy, Amy Schumer’s giant red gummy bear, Louis Gossett Jr. as elderly teddy bear Lewis, Matt Damon’s sunflower Sunny, Sam Rockwell as Guardian Dog, Awkwafina as Bubble (a bubble!), Blake Lively (Reynold’s partner) as Octopuss, a cat in an octopus costume, George Clooney’s astronaut, Vince Vaughn as Dragon, Krasinski’s wife Emily Blunt as the English-accented Unicorn and Krasinski himself as Marshmallow Man. There’s even Brad Pitt as the invisible Frank.
They’re all great fun but also contribute to the underlying sadness of once loved imaginary companions who have outlived their usefulness, the warmly sentimental and melancholic film ultimately and often quite poignantly (as with Jeremy and the smell of a freshly baked croissant, for those who get the Proust reference) reconnecting them once more. There’s some wonderful flourishes of imagination, such as the musical sequence in the retirement home to Tina Turner’s Better Be Good To Me, and Cal falling into and climbing out of a work of art, his clothes covered in paint, the film a ray of light and a heartfelt reminder that there’s still magic and hope in an often cynical world. (Vue)
Inside Out 2 (PG)
Released in 2015, the original ranks among Pixar’s finest, alongside the Toy Story series and Up. Now, eight years later we revisit Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) emotions as she turns 13, those operating the console inside her emotional Headquarters, still lining up as the primal emotions of irrepressible yellow Joy (Amy Poehler), the green Disgust (Liza Lapira taking over from Mindy Kaling), red Anger (Lewis Black), blue Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the purple Fear (Tony Hale replacing Bill Hader). They’ve created a new section of Riley’s mind called her Sense of Self, the repository of the memories and feelings that form Riley’s core personality, Joy having consigned any negative memories to the back of her mind.
A star player on the school hockey team alongside best friends Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and Grace (Grace Lu), the trio having been invited to take part in a hockey camp so she can apply for a place on the team at her new high school. However, the emotions are shocked when a demolition crew barges in to tear the place apart and reconstruct it for Riley’s new phase. And, even more when, as with Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager, the transition into puberty brings out an overnight change, the hitherto sweet Riley waking up and telling her mother (Diane Lane) to back off, and being snappy with dad (Kyle MacLachlan), every interaction with the console causing her to overreact. And that’s just the start as, to their surprise, puberty ushers in a whole new crew of emotions, headed up by orange wide-mouthed nervous wreck Anxiety (Maya Hawke), catty cyan Envy (Ayo Edibiri), the pink and bulky Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) in his grey hoodie and the snooty Indigo-coloured bored Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), or Ui Ui as Joy calls him, who lounges on the couch.
With Riley having learnt her besties are going to a different school, Anxiety takes over plaguing her with all manner of insecurities and negative scenarios about what lies ahead, seeing her torn between sticking with her friends or trying to act cool and become part of a new clique headed up by Val (Lilimar), the star player on the Firehawks, the team at her new school. Clashes between Joy and the misguidedly overprotective Anxiety over how Riley should act leads to her Sense Of Self being dumped at the back of her mind and Joy and the other emotions on her team being quite literally bottled up and imprisoned by the Mind Cops (Frank Oz among them) in a vault that also holds various imaginary characters from Riley’s head, including a giant dark hooded figure representing her deepest dark secret, video game character Lance Slashblade on whom the younger Riley had a crush and the hand drawn Bloofy and Pouchy from her favourite childhood TV show. The task now is to somehow get to the Back of the Mind and make it back to Headquarters and restore Riley’s Sense of Self before she has a total meltdown.
Decidedly busier than the first film with all the new characters, even so it’s still rooted in the same premise about being in touch with our feelings, the message being that we are defined by all of them, the negative and the positive, and how both can lead us astray in attempting to fit in, and not repressing sides of ourselves for fear of being judged. It’s also awash with more wittily clever wordplay, Joy and the others finding themselves teetering on the Sar Chasm, riding down the Stream Of Consciousness, being assailed by a Brainstorm of ideas (including a very Big one) and Joy trying to calm the frantic Anxiety down with a cup of Anxi Tea. There’s also an occasional before her time appearance by the elderly Nostalgia (June Squibb) and a UK only cameo by television personality Sam Thompson as Security Man Sam. It even slips in a blink and you miss it worry by dad’s Anger (Pete Docter) about his daughter being gay. It doesn’t have quite the novelty of the first film, but the emotions it will uncork in its audience all come bubbling to the sniffle surface. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; MAC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue; Until Tue: Mockingbird)
It Ends With Us (15)
Directed by and co-starring Justin Baldoni, and adapted by Christy Hall Colleen Hoover’s 2016 bestseller about the cycle of domestic abuse and denial, this may be a melodramatic soap opera, but it’s one from the top shelf, and, while overlong and reliant on contrived coincidence, has a dark edge and unfolds with some twists you don’t readily see coming.
Blake Lively (slightly older than the book’s character) stars as aspiring flower-shop entrepreneur Lily Bloom who we meet as she returns home to read the eulogy for her estranged father’s funeral but, scarred by the abuse she saw him (Kevin McKidd) mete out to her mother (Amy Morton), can’t find a single thing to say, her list of five point remaining blank. Later, she has a flirty rooftop encounter with neurosurgeon Rile Kincaid (Baldoni), a textbook tall, dark, and dashing self-styled stud (“Love isn’t for me. Lust is nice though”) with a line in smooth chat-up patter, who startles her by angrily kicking a chair though, as he explains, he’s upset because, a neurosurgeon, he’s failed to save a young boy following an accident with a gun (and yes, this does cycle back at the end). There’s sexual tension but nothing happens, they part and she returns to Boston to open her shabby chic florists, Lily Bloom’s where she hires the irrepressible Allysa (Jenny Slate), even though she confesses to hating flowers, who rapidly becomes her best buddy. And, wouldn’t you know it, when Rile wanders into the store it turns out he’s her brother. And so the pair reconnect, she keeping things cool but agreeing to give him a dating chance. As the romance blossoms they, Allysa and her husband Marshall (Hasan Minhaj in a virtually identical role to that in Babes) go to a new upmarket restaurant which, back after eight years in the Marines, turns out to be owned by Atlas (hunky newcomer Brandon Sklenar), a former classmate and Lily’s first love.
Their backstory’s told in flashbacks with him (Alexander Neustaedter) apparently living homeless opposite her parents and the young Lily (a convincingly lookalike Isabela Ferrer) bring him food and the pair eventually falling in love (take note of the heart carved out of oak and the tattoo on her shoulder) before her irate father puts a brutal end to things.
Time moves on, Allysa gets pregnant, Lily and Rile get married and all seems roses. But Atlas’s suspicious of her bruise she says she got by accident and there’s an altercation between him and Rile at the restaurant. Then, after blow up about her relationship with Atlas, Rile apparently falls down the stairs. It’s not though, until later that, in hospital and learning she’s pregnant, the veil of denial’s torn away and she remembers exactly what happened to cause those bruises and wounds.
Both predictable and unpredictable in equal measure as it explores how we find ourselves repeating dysfunctional patterns in our lives (though not why the characters have such bad taste in clothes), it does rather want to have its cake and eat it when it comes to the central abuse and how we’re supposed to feel about Rile. We’re asked to despise him because of his abuse, but at the same time sympathise when we learn of the tragedy that made him who he is and also because he clearly want to try and be a better man, giving him a grace note in the way things end between them. Still at least her wife-beater dad’s 100% vile.
Bolstered by solid supporting turns, the two (three if you factor in young Lily) central performances are strong, complex and layered Lively on terrific form as a woman coming to realise she has to make the right choices, difficult though they may be. And if the screenplay can’t resist ending on the promise of a happy new future, it’s probably earned it. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Kensuke’s Kingdom (PG)
Designed for older children who embrace the slow, sophisticated pace of Studio Ghibli rather than the hyperactive ADD style of things like Despicable Me, directed by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry, this traditional 2D hand-drawn animation adapted by but with deviations from Michael Morpurgo’s novel by Frank Cottrell Boyce, has plenty of charm and thoughtful musings to offer. Having both been made redundant, Mum (Sally Hawkins) and Dad (Cillian Murphy) have embarked on a year-long sailing voyage round the world with daughter Becky (Raffey Cassidy) and younger son Michael (Aaron MacGregor), the latter rather less excited about leaving everything behind and being still treated like a little kid. He has, however, stowed away the family dog, border collie Stella. and, during a storm, they are both swept overboard.
Michael wakes to find himself and Stella on the beach of a fog-shrouded island in the Indian Ocean, backdropped by unclimbable cliffs and with no apparent food or fresh water to sustain them, a help message dug into the sand washed away by the tide. However, when he wakes in the morning there’s two bowls of water, fruit and raw fish on a platter atop the hollow log in which they’ve been sleeping. These, it’s eventually revealed, have been placed there by the island’s sole inhabitant, Kensuke (Ken Watanabe), an elderly former Japanese sailor who found refuge there when his ship was sunk during the war, a faded photograph the only relic of his old life.
Though neither speaks the other’s language, while initially testy, a friendship slowly develops (Kensuke treating Michael when he’s stung by jellyfish), a connection forged by Kensuke’s drawings made using handmade brushes and ink crushed from flower petals and Michael’s logbook sketches of his family. Following him into the jungle, Michael discovers he’s befriending a group of orangutans while a flashback reveals his wife and young son were killed by the Nagasaki atom bomb. Now, the wildlife have become his new family, scooping baby turtles out of the way of seagulls and, later, he and Michael coming up against poachers who have come to trap exotic birds and who leave a young orangutan motherless and Kensuke wounded.
The eco messages about family and cross-cultural collaboration in protecting the natural world are gently unfolded as is Michael’s coming of age arc from naïve and irresponsible to empathetic and protective, and while the animation is at times quite primitive and the colours washed out, it still has an attractive aesthetic. It will never reap the same success as Inside Out, but its heart is just as big. (Vue)
Killers Of The Flower Moon (15)
Based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction bestseller about the 1920s Osage murders in Oklahoma, the title is derived from the Old Farmer’s Almanac in which each monthly full moon is given a different name, the Flower Moon referring to May, when the killings began.
Directed and co-written (with Eric Roth) by Marin Scorsese, his first since The Irishman and three minutes shorter at just under three and a half hours marginally shorter by three minutes, it opens with Osage Indian Nation discovering that their reservation sits on a massive oil field, instantly making them oil millionaires (albeit requiring white ‘guardians’), black and white footage showing them with swanky clothes, private planes, and white chauffeurs for their luxury automobiles. Inevitably, with great wealth comes great danger from those who would take it for themselves. And it’s not long before Osage corpses start piling up in suspicious circumstances.
Into this comes the feckless and not overly bright but charming Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), returning from serving as an army cook who, in need of a fresh start and money, but a stomach condition making anything strenuous impossible, is taken under the wing of his cattle baron uncle William ‘King’ Hale (Robert DeNiro) who sets him up as a cabbie. One of his regulars is Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage with three sisters, with whom he falls in love and marries. So far so apparently sweet. But appearances can be misleading. It’s no accident, however, that Mollie, sussing he’s out for money (every day the train brings opportunists looking for an Osage bride), refers to him as Coyote, the trickster of American-Indian mythology, and while Ernest’s intentions may start out honourably and innocently, more of a snake in this First Nation Eden, it’s not long before he falls under the spell of his Machiavellian uncle who, may present himself as a white saviour philanthropist friend to the Osage, but behind the smile is a knife looking to carve its way into their wealth, declaring that their time has past and that of the white man has come.
He’s all for his sad sack’s nephew’s marriage to Mollie, primarily because in so doing Ernest, and by extension himself, will gain control of her ‘headrights’ to the oil deposits on her land. These are shared with her mother and siblings, so for the plan to work, they need to die. Mother (Tantoo Cardinal), and a sister (Jillian Dion) go from apparently natural causes, a wasting disease, two sisters (Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins) violently do not. Their deaths along with those of a husband (Jason Isbell) and private investigator (to which Ernest is party) brought into look into the brutal murder of Anna (Myers), ordered by Hale and facilitated by Ernest, his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) , and assorted cowboy lowlifes. Mollie suffering from diabetes, Ernest, who genuinely loves her, is instructed to add a powder to her insulin shots (‘generously’ organised by Hale) to ‘calm’ her, never questioning why she seems to be getting worse.
As the Osage body count continues to rise and the elders become desperate as no police investigations are ever mounted, Mollie travels to Washington plead for help, leading to the arrival in Fairfax of Tom White (Jesse Plemons in the role initially intended for DiCaprio), part of the newly formed federal Bureau of Investigation under the auspices of J Edgar Hoover, to look into who’s behind the murders.
Now 80, Scorsese remains at the peak of his powers, guiding the film along an unhurried path as the twists, turns and horrors gradually accrue with DiCaprio, all downturned mouth, and DeNiro, both of whom he was worked with extensively, delivers subtle, nuanced powerhouse performances that rank among their greatest. As Mollie, making her feature starring debut, Gladstone, seen in TV series Billions and Reservation Dogs, more than holds her own alongside her co-stars, her expressive face simultaneously holding love, hurt, anger, resolve and disappointment while Tatanka Means, Yancey Red Corn and William Bellau loom large among the Native American cast, Sturgill Simpson, Charlie Musselwhite, Pete Yorn and Jack White join fellow musician Isbell in supporting roles (the late Robbie Robertson created the score) and there’s courtroom cameos from Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow.
A harrowingly potent existentially horrific alternative vision (involving the Tulsa race riots, the KKK and the Masons) as to how the modern West was won with its themes of manipulation, deception, greed, moral compromise, systemic racism and betrayal, the wolves hiding among the sheep, it balances scenes of quiet beauty, such as Ernest and Mollie sitting alongside each other at the dinner table, with sudden brutal violence.
Likely designed to trim it back from a proposed four hour running time, it ends ingeniously with an epilogue which, instead of the usual what happened after end titles, sums the post-trial fates of the characters up in an episode of radio drama True Crime Stories, a fictionalised Hoover-endorsed version of real programmes like This Is Your FBI, with live orchestra and, pointedly, white voice actors giving caricatured impersonations of the Osage, the last being a cameo by Scorsese himself, underscoring the trivialisation of Native American suffering, succinctly summed up earlier when someone notes there’s a “better chance of convicting a guy for kicking a dog than killing an Indian”, echoing the Black lives matter of America’s ongoing racial problems, the camera finally pulling away in an aerial shot of the gathered tribe performing a farewell ritual. This is epic, intelligent, provocative filmmaking. (Apple TV+ )
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)
Longlegs (15)
As the son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins writer-director Osgood Perkins has a solid grounding in the serial killer genre, this, set in the Clinton era, coming with a satanic horror overlay, with a clear debt The Silence Of The Lambs as rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (a jittery Maika Monroe) hunting down the man responsible for the deaths of numerous families over the years, he not actually killing them, but, leaving behind a coded message signed Longlegs, prompting the fathers to murder their wives and young daughters.
It’s a complex narrative that begins with the young Lee (Lauren Acala) encountering a pale gender flux-looking Longlegs (an unsettling Nicolas Cage barely recognisable under prosthetics in another gonzo psycho turn, his creepy glam perv look inspired by the lyrics T.Rex’s Get It On quoted at the start), speaking in a fluttery falsetto the snowy day before her ninth birthday. Twenty-five years later, estranged from her heavily religious and heavily medicated mother (Alicia Witt) having shown psychic powers in identifying a suburban house she believes is connected to the murders, she’s made a key member of the Longlegs case team by her boss Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to make of the investigative team on the now ten murders. As such, she makes the link that they all took place on the daughter’s birthday on the 14th of the month, tracing everything back to a farm family in 1966, whose sole survivor, the daughter (Kiernan Shipka) the only survivor and now in a psychiatric institution. Early on in the unravelling, Longlegs is revealed to be a dollmaker (suffice to say they’re the catalyst for the bloodshed) in the service of Mr Downstairs, but there’s more (not entirely hard to see coming) twists involving his accomplice.
Involving various disturbing hallucinatory flashbacks to Lee’s past, several viscerally bloody killings, dividing it into three chapters (one of which has his own daughter Bea hardware-store worker giving Cage a metaphorical finger), Perkins builds a slowly creeping tension, sometimes compounding the claustrophobia with a boxy ratio, the sound design and the odd angles of Andrés Arochi Tinajero’s cinematography as it builds to another bloody carnage and a decidedly open ending, even if it’s hard to see where a sequel might go. (Cineworld 5 Ways, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue; Until Wed: Mockingbird)
Maestro (15)
Bradley Cooper’s second excursion behind the camera, and, after A Star Is Born, another story with a musician at its centre. In this case, covering some 40 years, it’s a biopic of the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (Cooper), the first American-born conductor to lead a major American symphony orchestra (and namechecked in REM’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), which is used with egotistical amusement here), one that focuses on the many dualities in his personal and professional life. A flamboyant showman wielding the baton, but reserved and introvert in writing his music, swinging between elation and despair, devotedly married to Costa Rican-Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a prelude having him expressing his grief over her death, but also (as she was well aware) a secretly promiscuous homosexual, most notably in an early gay relationship with clarinettist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer).
Following a nonlinear structure that makes extensive use of interview exposition and asides to provide background (West Side Story, arguably Bernstein’s greatest work, has just a fleeting mention), it opens with him getting his big break when, in 1943, he has to substitute for an ill Bruno Walter and conduct the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. This, like the bulk of the film, is shot in black-and-white with saturated technicolour colour scenes in the latter stretch, both conjuring movies from the 40s, the early scenes in a boxy aspect ratio before the more widescreen later ones, the framing also consistently emphasising the distances between Leonard and Felicia.
This is dazzling bravura filmmaking peppered with striking set pieces, At one point a rehearsal scene for the ballet that would become On the Town unfolds into a fantasy sequence of Leonard and Felicia dancing together, while the lengthy sequence of him euphorically conducting the choir and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral in 1973, Felicia watching from the wings, is electrifying. Likewise, Bernstein liberatingly dancing to Tears For Fears in a gay club and the single take scene of an excoriating Thanksgiving argument between the couple as a giant Snoopy balloon floats past the window of their New York apartment. More subdued but no less potent is a moment when Bernstein lies to his oldest daughter, Jamie (Maya Hawke), about the homophobic rumours going round about him.
Arguably, the screenplay doesn’t delve sufficiently into what makes the characters tick, but even so there’s a rich depth with the chemistry between Cooper (who, with the controversial prosthetic nose looks strikingly like Bernstein) and Mulligan, delivering her best work since An Education and arguably the film’s real star (she takes top billing above Cooper), lighting up the screen. Glorious. (Netflix)
The Marvels (12A)
Beset by delays and reshoots, directed and co-written by Nia DaCosta, the first Black woman behind a Marvel movie, this brings together three female superheroes who all have, in different forms, the ability to harness the power of light. That’ll be Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in a follow-up to Miss Marvel, now roaming the galaxy in her own spacecraft, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the now grown astronaut daughter of Carol’s late best friend Maria (Lashana Lynch), who works alongside Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) in his new SABER organisation and gained her powers in WandaVision (and whose lack of a code name serves as a running gag), and New Jersey’s Pakistani-American schoolgirl Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), from the Disney+ TV series (its use of animation incorporated in introducing her here), an over-exuberant Miss Marvel mega-fan whose powers come from a magical bracelet.
The bracelet, or quantum band, however, turns out to have a Kree origin and is one of a pair, the other being recovered at the start of the film by Dar-Benn (a compelling Zawe Ashton clearly having a lot of fun as the baddie) who has an understandable vendetta against Danvers – who the Kree know as The Annhilator for reasons explained later– and needs the two of them to restore life to her home planet of Hela. As such, her motives are sympathetic, her means, which include trying to wipe out the Skrulls, rather less so. Her acquisition of the bangle also causes the three Marvels to body-swap (quantum entanglement, apparently) every time they use their powers, initially creating havoc in Kamala’s home, then affording some skipping rope fun and later proving invaluable in the battle with Dar-Benn.
Despite a plot that involves intergalactic genocide and planet asset stripping, there’s a great deal of playful fun here, notably a sequence set on a world where Miss Marvel is a marriage of convenience princess and where everyone dances as they sing their dialogue (though her prince Park See-joon – is bi-lingual) and one where, in an effort to evacuated the space station, Fury has the crew ‘eaten’ up by a horde of Flerken kitties who spew purple tentacles that swallow things up, all scored to Midnight from Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s musical.
There’s also a great deal of hanging out and banter between the three heroes, all of whom have their own identity issues, the actresses making good use of their individual skill sets and personalities as the film digs into their characters. The problem is, however, what with jump points opening up everywhere in the space, and the action leaping from planet to planet, the narrative is frequently borderline incoherent. Fortunately, unlike the recent slate of Marvel outings, this has a trim running time into which it packs an inordinate amount of plot, redemption and coming of age arcs and action sequences.
Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur and Saagar Shaikh add extra comedic touches as Kamala’s concerned and long-suffering parents and older brother while Abraham Popool sports a nifty set of beard braids as SABER agent Dag and Tessa Thompson puts in a quickie crossover appearance as Valkyrie, the film closing up with the briefly united trio now on their individual plotlines, providing two mid-credits sequences; the first with a cameo from Hawkeye’s Kate Bishop (Hailee Stanfield) as Ms Marvel sets out to create a new team, and the second, with Rambeau now in a parallel universe, a new incarnation for Maria and the return of Kelsey Grammar’s Hank McCoy from the X-Men series. That’s at least three new sequels or spin-offs in the wings. There again, given its bomb at the box office, maybe not. (Disney+)
Napoleon (15)
Turning 85, Ridley Scott still has the stamina of directors half his age, as clearly evidenced in pulling together this two and a half hour epic biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, a balance between his greatest hits (and failures) on the battlefield and his relationship with widowed aristocrat wife Josephine. Opening with the guillotining of Marie Antoinette following the French Revolution, witnessed by then lowly – and somewhat humourless – Corsican gunnery officer Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix in customary outstanding form), his rise to power begins with him, a master strategist, liberating the town of Toulon from the occupying British forces in 1793, his cannons destroying their ships and with the help of his patron and friend Barras (Tahar Rahim) and following the downfall of Robespierre (Sam Troughton) and his Reign of Terror, proceeds to chart his rise through the ranks, his Egyptian campaign (where he may or may not have actually fired on the top of the pyramids), his promotion to general, elevation to become one of the three Consuls ruling France, and eventual crowning as Emperor before his disastrous 1812 campaign in Russia and subsequent exile to Elba, his return to power, the defeat at Waterloo (and a scene aboard HMS Bellerophon wryly congratulating Rupert Everett’s Wellington, who has an even better sneer than himself, on the quality of Royal Navy breakfasts) and exile to St Helena where he died.
Alongside this, it follows the ups and down of his marriage to the sensual and strong-wiled Josephine (an understated but quietly excellent Vanessa Kirby), her cuckolding him (he’s not great at sex and prefers rear entry quickies) while he’s away conquering Italy, her problematic inability to provide an heir, his bedding of a willing fertile volunteer, and the eventual divorce, albeit he never faltering in his love, and ensuring she continued with the life to which she was accustomed, even after marrying the teenage (and shorter) Archduchess of Austria, who dutifully supplies a son (he had, in fact, several children by assorted lovers). All of course wearing that distinctive bicorne hat and tricolour cockade.
The brilliantly staged action set pieces are as stunning and thrilling as they are gorily visceral (a shot of a horse’s chest being ruptured by a cannonball is truly jolting), the decimation of the Austrian and Russian forces, fictionalised on a frozen lake at Austerlitz the centrepiece standout, but ultimately, it never offers any deep insight into what made him tick or the politics in which he was involved (it neglects to even mention his reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies or the massacre at the siege of Jaffa). Scott has announced he’s planning a four-and-a-half hour director’s cut for streaming on Apple, so hopefully that will join the dots. Meanwhile, masterful though this is, its 20 years narrative feels like a 158 minute shorthand guide. (Apple TV+)
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)
Oppenheimer (12A)
Adapted from the 2005 biography American Prometheus, with seven Oscar wins (Film, Director, Actor and Supporting Actor among them) an, writer-director Christopher Nolan delivers his finest work to date, a triumphant biopic of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the man who created the Atom Bomb and, as the film unambiguously avers, consigned the world to eventual destruction at its own hand. As Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”.
Unfolding over a gripping three hours that embraces courtroom procedural, character study and thriller (a feeling accentuated by the score), it moves back in forth in time, framed by and intercutting with Fusion (filmed in black and white) and Fission (in colour). The former is a recreation of the 1959 Cabinet hearings to confirm Lewis Strauss (Supporting Actor nominee Robert Downey Jr.), former head of the US Atomic Energy Commission and a politician closely linked to Oppenheimer (Best Actor nominee Cillian Murphy), as Secretary of Commerce, the latter the loaded behind closed doors McCarthy-era 1954 AEC enquiry driven by attorney Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) to determine if a scapegoated Oppenheimer was a loyal American and should retain his security clearance or not. The theme of American creating and then destroying its heroes when they become an annoyance has been done before, but rarely as well as this.
There’s a few scenes involving the younger Oppenheimer, an ambitious Jewish theorist in the new field of quantum physics, his on-off affair with Jean (Florence Pugh), a Communist Party member, an accusation also levelled at him (he was actually a political agnostic), and his early days teaching and working at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett). The heart of the film, however, focuses on the 1940s when, following events leading up to the 1945 Trinity bomb test, he’s enlisted by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head up the Manhattan Project, which, at a secluded purpose built desert town of Los Alamos in New Mexico, gathered together America’s top scientists and engineers to build the first atomic weapon, initially to beat Nazi Germany to the punch and, when Hitler fell, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more as a demonstration of capability than to bring Japan to submission.
As such, this element of the film is dense in its exploration of moral quandaries about the gulf between idea and application, Oppenheimer’s guilt-haunted but very real concerns about the potential for a nuclear arms race with Russia and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb while the 50s section concerns the emotional and political fallout, the Cabinet hearings revealing his betrayal by the self-serving Strauss, the Salieri to his Mozart, smarting over an earlier humiliation at a congressional hearing,
Alongside a stunning and physically transformative haunting and haunted performance by Murphy with a mastery of a dead-eyed stare, coming to realise the consequences of his arrogance, Downey Jr at the very peak of his powers and a wonderfully prickly Damon, the film is populated by solid supporting turns from the likes Rami Malik, Casey Affleck’s military intelligence officer, Benny Safdie as Hungarian physicist and H-bomb advocate Edward Teller), Gary Oldman as President Truman (scathingly dismissing Oppenheimer as a cry-baby) Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer’s sometime mentor, and Emily Blunt who, as Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife Kitty, an ex-Party member, delivers a last act Best Supporting Actress nomination, while Tom Conti gets to cameo as a convincing Albert Einstein in a pivotal scene shown from three very different perspectives.
Avoiding CGI in favour of optical effects and punctuating the film with images of fiery infernos and exploding stars, it’s visually awe-inspiring and transfixing for every second of the running time. “Try not to set the sky on fire”, jokes Groves before the red button is pressed. Nolan has lit up the whole cinematic universe. (Sky Cinema/Now)
Past Lives (12A)
Unfolding over 24 years, in two 12-year intervals, played out in Seoul, Toronto and New York, writer-director and erstwhile playwright Celine Song’s semi-autobiographical debut is a beguiling bittersweet thwarted love story about unresolved feelings. It opens with a voiceover pondering what three people in a New York bar are talking about and what their relationship may be. They are aspiring playwright Nora (Greta Lee), her fellow writer husband Arthur (John Magaro) and childhood friend and crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and to explore the connections, the film first flashes back 24 years to Korea where Nora, then Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), are academically competitive classmates and budding sweethearts. However, romance is curtailed when her family announces they are emigrating to Canada. The pair part on a somewhat sour note and it’s 12 years before, he still living at home and hanging out with his mates, she now in Toronto, reconnect through Facebook, he tracking her down through her filmmaker father’s page, and then Skype, conduction a flirtatious virtual romance (she recommends him to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ) before realising he’s never coming there and she’s not going back, she shuts it all down.
Twelve more years later, Nora now having married Arthur, who she met at a writing retreat, and rarely speaking Korean, Hae Sung, who has broken up with his girlfriend comes to New York, where she now lives, for a few days, ostensibly as part of his engineering studies, and the two meet up, their meetings causing both to reassess how they feel about each other and what might have been. The title refers to the Buddhist concept of inyun, a belief that some souls are connected through time and past incarnations, somehow fated to be together.
Beautifully framed and photographed (the virtually wordless scene by the fairground carousel and the pair riding a ferry boat around the Statue of Liberty are magical), sublimely directed by Song and exquisitely acted by the three leads, the soulful, reserved Yoo, an understated Marago, who wryly describes himself as “the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny”, and the luminous Lee, it pulses with suppressed emotions, captured in longing looks or the subtle chance in a facial expression, but never falls prey to sentimentality as, subtly also exploring the immigrant experience and indemnity confusions, it builds to a denouement that is both heartbreaking and glowing with joy.
You can feel the echoes of films like David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, but Song has created her own individual and unique vision of their timeless story. An unquestionable film of the year, as Nora and Hae Sung are given to saying when things overwhelm then, ‘whoa’ indeed. (Apple TV+, Netflix)
Polite Society (12)
The feature debut by British writer-director Nida Manzoor, creator of the TV series We Are Lady Parts, mashes up a whole bagful of genres, pouring coming-of-age high school comedy, Bollywood movie, martial arts flick and even references to Jane Austen into the blender and pouring out the results in a glorious smoothie that may not be nutritious but is crammed with fun and flavour.
With an almost entirely Pakistani cast, it’s set in London where, much to the mortification of her traditional career-seeking parents (Shobu Kapoor, Jeff Mirza), teenager Ria Khan (engaging newcomer Priya Kansara) dreams of becoming a female stuntwoman – The Fury – like her idol, real-life British stuntwoman Eunice Huthart, whose signature flying kick she consistently fails to pull off. She’s besties with her older sister, Lena (Umbrella Academy’s Ritu Arya) and constantly needles her to resume her art school studies after having dropped out in a self-confidence crisis, things often getting out of hand as they squabble.
So, she’s horrified when they’re both forced to attend an end of Eid party hosted by one of her mother’s wealthy acquaintances, the imperious and condescending Raheela Shan (Nimra Bucha) and even more so when she learns that Lena is not only dating her geneticist son of Salim (Akshay Khanna) but has also gotten engaged (she apparently has a perfect womb) and will be taking off to Singapore immediately after the wedding.
And so, with the help of her uncool school chums Alba and Clara (Ella Bruccoleri and Seraphina Beh adding solid comedic support), she sets out on a plan to sabotage things, initially looking to try diplomacy but rapidly escalating to trying to dig up dirt (including disguising themselves as men to infiltrate his gym) and, when that fails, invent some (at one point she breaks into the house to scatter used condoms).
It is, as everyone observes, all totally out of proportion. Until, that is, Ria discovers exactly what Salim and Raheela are up to (a touch of Jordan Peele here), at which point it becomes a frantic race by the three friends to stop the wedding before it’s too late.
With a winkingy gleeful and knowingly ludicrous screenplay that, refreshingly peppered with all the sensibilities and sweariness of modern Pakistani youth pulls together Bash Street Kids escapades, torture by waxing, all female martial arts fights (including one with well-trained beauticians), a Bollywood dance sequence and yellow chapter title cards with a clear nod to Tarantino/Rodriguez grindhouse. Vastly funnier than What’s Love Got To With It (and certainly with loads more stunts), further adventures by the Khan sisters would not go amiss. (Sky Cinema)
Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire (12)
The first half of writer-director Zack Snyder’s sci fi saga (with an extended version and Part 2 due in 2024), this is basically a cobbling together of Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai if you’re more arty). Set in the far future where an evil Empire, loyal to a king (Cary Elwes) assassinated along with his wife and healing-powered daughter Issa at the latter’s coronation, command being taken by the senator Balisarius (Fra Fee) who now ruthlessly seeks to conquer the rest of the galaxy, and with the aid of sadistic and not entirely all-human Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who commands the Imperium, the Motherworld’s infantry, put down the rebel insurgency known as Clan Bloodaxe.
It opens on Veldt, a near barren planet where, struggling to raise a harvest, a community of farmers are visited by Noble to appropriate the resources, killing the leader, Father Sindri, as an example, ordering them to have the grain ready when he returns. However, seeing a band of soldiers about to rape a young girl, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a stoical woman rescued some years back from a crashed craft and, as is revealed in chunks of exposition, having a backstory as a high ranking officer in the Imperium forces, fights back, killing them with the help of disillusioned soldier Private Aris (Sky Yang) and, warning that when Noble returns he will destroy everything, teaming up with defiant farmer Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) on a mission to recruit a band of fighters to resist them.
With black marketer and mercenary Kai (Charlie Hunnam in what initially seems to be the Han Solo role), they planet hop as, through individual episodes, one of which involved a child-killing mutant female spider-creature (Jena Malone), they swell the ranks with beast tamer blacksmith Tarak (Staz Nair), cyborg swordswoman, Nemesis (Doona Bai), disgraced Imperium commander General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and, finally, Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher) who brings along half his crew while sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) remains in charge of the other. Come the end of the first half, as Noble and his army come calling and there’s an unexpected act of betrayal, not everyone survives for Part Two.
Unabashedly derivative, generic and unavoidably attracting unfavourable comparisons to the film’s it pillories, even so it does deliver a solid dose of high octane action and slo mo battle scenes, even if the character development seems to have been held back for the longer cut, setting up an assortment of narrative threads to be developed in the sequel along with, one suspects, a bigger role for Anthony Hopkins who provides the voice for the peace-seeking Jimmy, the last of a race of mechanical knights, who, sporting a garland of flowers round his head, is recruited by Kora. 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)
Saltburn (15)
Actress turned novelist turned Killing Eve head writer turned writer-director, Emerald Fennell follows up her Promising Young Woman debut with a very English caustically satirical psychological drama that turns the knife on the English class system, starting out as Evelyn Waugh journeying through Cruel Intentions and ending with a coda straight out Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley.
Set in 2006, Barry Keoghan is Merseyside teen Oliver Quick, who, the product of a working class broken home (disreputable dead, mum alcoholic) who has earned a scholarship to Oxford (Fennell’s own alma mater). A bright but awkward, shy outsider, he’s looked down on by his college contemporaries but is taken under the wing of aristocratic fellow student and party animal Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) after lending him his bike when his own has a puncture. Touched by the sob story of his life and the fact his drug addict dad’s just died, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his resolutely blueblood eccentric (they gather round to watch Superbad) family’s palatial Saltburn estate (telling him that Waugh apparently used the family and house as his model for Brideshead Revisited). Along with the humourless butler (Paul Rhys) and assorted gardeners, the sprawling mansion’s populated by his somewhat dim father Sir James (Richard E Grant clearly having huge fun), emotionally damaged bulimic sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), sponging American mixed-race cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a rival for Felix’s favours, lingering faded glamour houseguest “poor dear Pamela” (a marvellous if almost unrecognisable Carey Mulligan)) and, in a gloriously showstopping performance of razor sharp comic timing and delivery, Rosamund Pike as blissfully privileged, prejudiced and stupid ex-model mother Elsbeth whose explanation as to why she gave up her flirtation with lesbianism is just one of her many hilarious straightfaced lines. She takes a shine to Oliver as, in a more physical way does Ventetia, who, though contemptuous of him, hangs around under his window at night and is rewarded with some steamy oral sex despite being on her period, even though, as a scene lapping up his bathwater makes clear, he’d rather have sex with Felix. As the summer wears on, however, despite the homoerotic electricity things eventually sour between the two friends when, in Felix taking him on a surprise well-meaning visit to his now cleaned-up mother, it turns out Oliver’s not been entirely honest about his upbringing.
Shot in a square ratio, framed with to-camera recollections by Oliver and peppered with laugh out loud deadpan dialogue, there’s also some wonderful quirks such as carving the name of family members and friends who die on a stone and tossing it into the water (let’s just say there’s a fair few extra pebbles by the end) and an audacious use of music that embraces Handel’s Zadok the Priest. the Cheeky Girls’ Have A Cheeky Christmas and a toe-curling karaoke rendition of Flo-Rida’s Low.
Although Pike is the scene-stealer, the performances throughout are consistently sharp with Keoghan utterly magnetic in expressions that shift from doleful to toxic in a blink and bravely quite literally letting it all hang out in the final scene. It might not be quite as ingenious and provocatively original as its predecessor, but even so it’s gold class filmmaking. (Amazon Prime)
Scoop (15)
A recreation of the notorious car crash interview Prince Andrew gave to Newsnight in 2019 attempting to put to bed the scandal about his relationship with the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell and accusations of having had sex with the underage Virginia Giuffre, as directed by Peter Martin from a script by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, adapted from Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews by former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister, this is less about the actual interview and, taking its cue from All The President’s Men and The Post, more a journalistic thriller about the behind the scenes efforts to secure it. When the infamous photo of Andrew and Epstein walking in Central Park, taken in 2010 by Jae Donnelly (Connor Swindells), who also captured a young girl leaving the same private Manhattan home, finally surfaces in a newspaper in connection with a young entrepreneurs event sponsored by the Prince Andrew (a convincing Rufus Sewell under a ton of prosthetics), McAlister reaches out to his Private Secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) proposing a possible interview with the programme’s imperious but highly intelligent anchor, Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), for him to put his side of things. It’s eventually felt this is a perfect chance to change the narrative. History tells a different story.
With the action switching between both sides preparation for the face-to-face, negotiations on what will and won’t be on the table for discussion (Sam and Emily meeting with Thirsk, Andrew and Princess Beatrice at Buckingham Palace), it builds a palpable tension even though the outcome is public record and, with a supporting cast that includes Amanda Redman as McAlister’s mother (who gives a pep talk after Sam is seemingly sidelined), Romola Garai as Newsnight editor Esme Wren and Lia Williams as BBC Current Affairs Director Fran Unsworth, it is compelling viewing and a reminder of what good journalism is all about. A three part TV series, A Very Royal Scandal, is also currently in production with Michael Sheen as Andrew and Ruth Wilson as Maitlis told from the latter’s perspective. (Netflix)
Talk To Me (15)
Transitioning from YouTube horror, Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou make their directorial feature debut with an assured entry into the familiar don’t mess with the afterlife genre that brings a fresh approach to well-worn tropes and a whole new meaning to the phrase talk to the hand. Opening with a stabbing and a shocking violent suicide at a party and a genuinely disturbing night scene where a car hits a kangaroo which is left dying in the road ( a sure nod to the deer in Jordan Peele’s Get Out), the narrative hinges on the hand of a dead psychic which, encased in ceramics, those looking for a thrill are encouraged to clasp, making contact with a spirit and saying ‘Talk to me’ and then ‘I invite you in’, whereby they’re taken over and have scary visions, but have to blow out the candle and let go after 90 seconds so that they don’t remain possessed.
One such is black teenager Mia (sterling newcomer Sophie Wilde) who was driving the car that hit the kangaroo and while her surrogate younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) begged her to end its misery, she was unable to bring herself to do so. Following her mother’s death, a gulf has opened up between Mia and her brooding father Max (Marcus Johnson), leading her to spend much of her time at Riley’s house with his big sister and her best friend (Alexandra Jensen), their take no shit mother Sue (veteran Australian star Miranda Otto), working nights This allows them to sneak out to a party hosted by Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio), who initiate a hand session, everyone treating the gross-outs like some sort of supernatural high and a big laugh to be shared on social media.
Naturally, it all goes to shit, staring off with Jade’s ultra-Christian boyfriend Daniel (Otis Dhanji) being taken over by a horny spirit (cue a later foot sucking scene), Mia becoming hooked and going back over and over and Riley volunteering and being possessed by Mia’s dead mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen) who tries to reconcile with her daughter, leading to the time limit being exceeded. All of which results in Mia being ostracised by Jade and Sue following two graphically violent convulsive suicide attempts by Riley whose spirit Mia is shown being tortured in limbo, with killing him the only way to set him free, and her learning the truth behind her mother’s death.
With a subtext about bored youth seeking ever extreme kicks as they sink into addiction (viral and otherwise) along with the trauma of guilt and loss, the pace never slackens as the intensity builds, and while the idea that really are not to be trusted may be well-worn and the narrative is overtaken by the chaos, the brothers still manage to squeeze some decent jolts before the big final twist that leaves things open for a sequel. (Netflix)
Thelma (12A)
Recently widowed and living alone in an L.A. condo, when she falls victim to a phone scam and mails $10,000 to a PO address believing her doting grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger), who helps her negotiate her computer and e-mails, needs to bailed out of jail, with the police of no help, nonagenarian Thelma Post (June Squibb making her starring debut at 94) decides she’s going to get it back. Inspired by Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible (the score is a Lalo Schifrin pastiche), despite having had breast cancer, a double mastectomy, sepsis, oedema, a valve replacement, a hip replacement and a brain tumour, having recovered the address to where she posted the cash, the plucky old bird calls in at local care home and hijacks the two seater mobility scooter belonging to her late husband’s best friend Ben (Richard Roundtree sounding a grace note in his final role). He insisting on coming along for the ride but needing to back in time to play Daddy Warbucks in Annie, they set off to Van Nuys. Meanwhile, believing her mental health has declined she’s wandered off, her excessively uptight daughter Gail (Parker Posey), fussing son-in-law Alan (Clark Gregg) and Danny, who, his relationship on pause and no direction in life, is, like Thelma, infantilised by his parents, try to track her down.
Written and directed by first-timer Josh Margolin with both the plot impetus and Thelma based on his stubbornly determined grandmother of the same name, it follows a gentle buddy comedy pace with a mingling of wit and poignancy (a senility running gag is Thelma mistaking passers-by for people she thinks she knows, though it has a clever pay-off) as having ‘borrowed’ a gun from a forgetful old friend (Bunny Levine), they finally track down the perpetrators, store-owner Malcom McDowell who tries to justify his actions by the declining economy, and his young assistant.
Wisely not opting to over-egg the vigilante plot, Margolin keeps things grounded with the action never extending beyond trying to get up after a fall and rolling over a bed (as opposed to jumping between buildings), while gently tracing a message about how society seeks to marginalise the elderly, deeming them incapable of looking after themselves, yet never underplaying the effects of growing old.
It stumbles slightly with the awkward sitcom nature of scenes between Thelma’s family and two nursing home workers (Nicole Byer, Quinn Beswick) and the ending is a bit of an anti-climax, but, with a magnificent Squibb at its heart it’s real grey-pound joy. (MAC; Mon: Everyman)
Trap (15)
Although Split and Glass marked a promising comeback, following Old and Knock At The Cabin, M Night Shyamalan continues his slide back down the slope with this preposterous cod-Hitchcock thriller (pitched as “What if ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”) wherein family man fireman Cooper, who’s secretly a dismembering serial killer tagged The Butcher (Josh Hartnett) with 12 victims to date, is puzzled by the huge police and SWAT presence at the sell-out show by Lady Raven (Shyamalan’s R&B star daughter Saleka Night Shyamalan) to which he’s taken his superfan young daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) and learns from Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), a loose-mouthed concessions vendor, that’s it’s been set up as an FBI trap who’ve had a tip off that their single-father prey (all they know is he is white and has an animal tattoo) will be there. Apparently they intend to question all the 3000 men in attendance as they leave, which suggests the overtime budget must be huge.
All of this is revealed early on when Cooper slips into the toilets to check his phone and we’re shown a man chained to a metal pole in some basement lair. But that doesn’t mean Shyamalan’s dialled down on his staple twists, they’re just stored up for the last act (in case you were wondering how the FBI knew he’d be at the show) where, having managed to get out of the stadium by forcing Lady Raven to help them under the pretence of a treat for Riley, having duped her uncle, a cameoing Shyamalan, into having her join her hero on stage for the final number by saying she has leukaemia.
It’s all exasperatingly illogical with its serpentine plot contrivances as our pop diva seeks to outfox him by having her limo drive to Cooper’s home with his wife (Alison Pill) and young son, but Shyamalan does make a decent fist of building the suspense, intercutting Cooper’s cop distractions with a couple of prickly run-ins with the mother of one of Riley’s friends, with whom she’s fallen out, and listening in on a lifted police radio to the FBI profiler (Hayley Mills, surely cast just for a Parent Trap in joke) doling out exposition as she describes him as a split personality with mommy issues.
None of that would work, however, if it wasn’t for Hartnett’s ability to shift from scary creep to charming dad in just a switch of a smile, but even he can’t do anything to salvage the final credibility-defying and clumsily staged scenes that break out into a sweat in setting up a sequel. Trap has the wrong first letter. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Twisters (12A)
Five years after two of her friends and her boyfriend died in an experimental college project attempt to take down a twister in Tornado Alley in Oklahoma by sending a dozen barrels’ worth of polymers up into its core, guilt-ridden Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has given up storm chasing and retired to a job as a New York-based weather analyst. But then along comes fellow survivor Javi (Anthony Ramos) who has a simmering in the background crush on her and now heads a corporation of storm chasers called Storm Par and wants her help – and in particular her uncanny ability to spot where tornado fill form – in surrounding one with three of his all new high-tech radar (they and their van amusingly named for the characters in The Wizard Of Oz) so they can gather data. She refuses until, with Oklahoma in the grip of a major town destroying twister outbreak, he appeals to her save the world idealism and she agrees to join his crew of boffins (with future Superman David Corenswet as the resident jerk).
Which is when she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a showboating Stetson-wearing good ol’ boy self-styled daredevil Tornado Wrangler (motto – “you don’t face your fears, you ride ‘em”) with an irritating cocky grin (but also a degree in meteorology) who drives a customised red truck (it shoots off fireworks and anchors itself to the ground), and his crew of mavericks (drone piloting Sasha Lane and Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian’s mechanic among them), on whom Brit journalist Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton) is making a photo-documentary profile. Naturally, there’s initial rivalry friction in their twister-chasing just as there is a developing sexual tension before, in the wake of more small-town devastation, her panic in the eye of the storm, the reality behind Javi’s shady property developer investor and a somewhat repetitive series of near death twister run-ins, the two of them join forces after she finally returns to her loving mum (Maura Tierney), uncovers her old research and together they realise what her polymers process is missing. Cue a final once more into eye of the storm.
Connected only in name to the 1996 original which starred Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton (his son James make a tribute cameo), and drawing on the technological developments in both filmmaking and combatting weather events since then, it’s a major step-up for director Lee Isaac Chung whose last film was Minari, a small scale drama about South Korean immigrant farmers in 80’s rural Arkansas, who pulls it off with a dynamic confidence despite the repetition, an avoidance of mentioning climate change and some plot strands being sucked up along with the cars and infrastructure. Powell again proves his movie-star charisma with a perfectly styled coif added to his signature smile and squint while, channelling Kate’s passions, self-recriminations and turmoils, Edgar-Jones is the film’s emotional centre of gravity. There’s nothing that quite matches the original’s shot of a cow being sucked up into the sky, but, the gale force event movie of the summer, it’ll blow your socks off. “We gotta get everyone in the movie theatre!” someone yells. It will. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; 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)