Films showing this week either in cinemas or on streaming platforms
FILM OF THE WEEK
The Accountant 2 (15)
Nine years on from the original, Ben Affleck reunites with director Gavin O’Connor and writer Bill Dubuque for a slightly longer and far more narratively complex excursion into the world of played Christian Wolff an emotionally aloof autistic mathematical savant who once worked as a forensic accountant and money launderer for mob money with a sideline as a professional Rain Man-like assassin. Still living in his Airstream trailer in Boise and overseeing black-market alternative payments arranged by his nonverbal autistic savant handler Justine (Allison Robertson) who operates out of the Harbor Neuroscience treatment centre in New Hampshire that he funds, changing traffic lights at his request and also serving to offer him advice on what suits he should wear.
He’s brought back into play when Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), a former ally from the treasury department’s financial crimes enforcement, makes contact following the murder of her now retired boss Ray King (J.K. Simmons), killed following a meeting with a mystery hitwoman he wants to track down a missing Mexican family, and specifically the young son Alberto, but not before writing “find the accountant” on his arm. She wants his help tracking down Ray’s killer, to which end he calls in his estranged neurotypical and equally loner but clingy (he’s planning on adopting a dog, prompting an amusing rehearsal of what he’s going to say to get it moved up two weeks) killer for hire brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), who he’s not had contact with since the last film. Both brothers have pretty much of a means to an end approach to things, whereas Medina is a by the book type and horrified at their resorting to violence to gain information not to mention how the autistic teens working with Justine at the Centre can easily hack into someone’s technology to obtain a photo.
In a labyrinthine but interconnected plot, the investigation variously involves a string of high profile hits in a variety of countries, a crime network run from a fish shop, a money laundering pizza company where the missing mother once worked (Chris meticulously details just how the owner’s operating his fraudulent accounts), pimps, human trafficking in Central America, illegal migrants, a prison in Juarez where Alberto (another autistic, which probably scratches RF Kennedy of the audience list) and dozens of other children are being held, and, of course, the enigmatic blonde amnesiac assassin known as Anaïs (Daniella Pineda). With some brotherly odd couple bickering and bonding for good measure.
There’s a solid supply of shoot outs and fights to keep the action quota high but that’s balanced with a series of comedic scenes, starting with Chris at a speed dating event and explaining how he hacked the algorithm and proceeding through Braxton eating ice cream while offhandedly chatting to a woman whose home is full of his latest victims, Medina’s quest to find the right office chair (gratuitous plug for Costco included), and Chris learning to line dance as he actually finds himself attracted to a woman And then there’s a punch line cat too. It’s a bit silly, full of plot holes and implausible, but Affleck and Bernthal are a hoot together as well as a great two man army, and ultimately it definitely balances the popcorn entertainment books. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
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Den of Thieves: Pantera (15)
A sequel to the 2018 original, inspired by the 2003 Antwerp diamond robbery, this reteams writer-director Christian Gudegast and its stars Gerald Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr as testosterone sweating LASD sheriff ‘Big’ Nick O’Brien and cool master thief Donnie Wilson for another heist drama styled on Michael Mann’s Heat and its macho interplay between the two leads.
Just divorced and apparently put on leave, Big Nick, blackmailed by the girlfriend of Federal Reserve robber Merriman who wants her cut of the loot Donnie made off with, apparently in a Panama bank, heads to Nice where, armed with an expired international marshal’s badge and struggling with how to pronounce croissant, and working with the local task force led by Detective Hugo (Yasen Zates Atour) he intends to track him down. Donnie, meanwhile has hooked up with The Panthers, a criminal gang of Balkans who codenamed Pantera by the French cops and fronted by Jovanna aka Cleopatra (Evin Ahmad), intend to rob the ultra-secure and heavily guarded vault at the World Diamond Centre, to which end he’s posed as a high flying diamond dealer to infiltrate the bank where Chava (Nazmiye Oral), the wife of the vault concierge Olivier (Stéphane Coulon), is their insider, but can’t get initially access to the vault itself.
Having flirted with Jovanna at a night club (and getting into a fight with her ex, Marko who’s subsequently ejected from the Panthers along with his buddy Vuk, forming a rival gang), and convincing Donnie’s he’s had enough of the cop life and wants in on the heist, Nick too becomes part of the gang, its members using code names Houdini and Ronin (a John Frankenheimer reference) as they weigh in on a meticulously detailed plan to break into the vault.
Matters are complicated however by the fact that the Calabrian mafia, headed by The Octopus (Adriano Chiaramida) are after Donnie for stealing a red diamond from them in the film’s opening Antwerp sequence, demanding its return and setting up one of several high octane action sequences.
However, while there may be car chases and gunfights, the film’s prime and intense focus is on how, while Jovanna and her right hand man Dragan (Orli Shuka) keep surveillance, Nick, Donnie and Slavko (Salvatore Esposito) break into the vault by coming at from above after scaling the rooftops, the tension piling on as they negotiate the red and green light status to move from one location to the next. Added to which, echoing Heat, there’s those long alpha male bromance dialogue scenes, a lengthy backstory about their respective fathers included, between Nick and Donnie who, for some reason (and underscoring the sexual tensions), he keeps calling Fraulein which plays into the film’s criminal/cop moral ambiguity and con inside a con narrative.
Despite clocking at around 140 minutes, there’s not a second of filler, the yin and yang chemistry between the composed and calculating Jackson and the volatile Butler giving off high voltage sparks mesmerisingly compelling, the ending setting up a potential and highly welcome threequel reuniting all the Panthers for another ingenious heist. (Amazon)
The Ugly Stepsister (18)
The feature debut by Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt, this is an often gruesomely grotesque body horror revisionist period drama take on Cinderella that digs deep into the darker sides of the original Grimms’ fairytale, complete with its shoe-fitting toe amputations.
Set somewhere in 18th-century central Europe, it opens with cynical widow Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) marrying Otto (Ralph Carlsson) , each under the false assumption that the other has great wealth. That’s rudely proved to not be the case when Otto chokes on cake at the wedding breakfast and all assets are seized. Rebekka does, however, have a plan to improve their fortunes. With the province’s Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) announcing he’s holding a ball where he will chose his bride, she intends for that to be her 18-year-old daughter Elvira (Lea Myren). The problem is that she, a gawky timid romantic besotted by the Prince’s book of sexually charged poems and fantasising about him sweeping her away, is a bit of a plain ugly duckling, overweight with braces and a bumpy nose. So, rather than paying for Otto’s funeral, his body left to rot and become infested with maggots in the derelict mansion, she hires the wittily named Dr. Esthétique (Adam Lundgren) to carry out a series of cosmetic modifications, starting with ripping out the braces, then taking a chisel to her nose (meaning she has to wear a metal shield while it heals) and finally sewing on false eyelashes in a scene that will have many looking away. She also bribes a local finishing school to take her as a pupil where to Sophie (Cecilia Forss) teaches her etiquette and deportment and the demanding Madame Vanja (Katarzyna Herman Herman) gives her ballet lessons for the dance three of the girls will perform for the Prince. Meanwhile, growing vain and self-obsessed, in order to lose weight while still gorging on cakes, to the consternation of her kid sister Alma (Flo Fagerli), Elivira swallows a tapeworm egg given to her by Sophie.
Rebekka does, however, have another problem. Her haughty, but beautiful and gifted dancer stepdaughter Agnes (the wonderfully named Thea Sofie Loch Naess) has also been invited and is clearly a far more likely candidate. So, when she’s caught screwing her true love stablehand, Isak (Malte Gårdinger), he’s kicked out and Agnes become the Cinderella figure household servant, She will, however, do whatever it takes to win the Prince.
As Elvira and Agnes’s personalities transform, Blichfeldt ensures the film’s title becomes ambiguous as to exactly who it refers to, playing on the contrast between outer beauty and inner ugliness while also serving, a la Substance, as a critique on society’s obsession with body image. And, while Alma emerges with moral honours, no-one here is quite what they present themselves to be, Elvira’s early encounter with her dream lover revealing the Prince, and his two uncouth buddies, The Feinschmecker (Isac Aspberg) and The Omnivorous (Albin Weidenblad) to be a real vapid prick, though she’s more fixated on his naked arse.
With a blue dress (put together by silk work maggots), the lost slipper, fairy godmother (here the ghost of Agnes’s actual mother), a midnight curfew and mention of a pumpkin coach, there’s several references to the fairytale, but it’s totally shorn of the popular romantic trappings its acquired, more Angela Carter feminist than Disney princess, with its message that beauty is pain, more excruciating for some than others, and pretty much all of the female characters inflicting it on one another in seeking to gain patronage of the patriarchy.
Macabre, horrific and darkly comedic, with a number of scenes that fully warrant the certificate (Elvira squeezing a zit and disgorging the tapeworm are sickeninly revolting, while there’s also a semi-erect penis and dripping semen), a breath-taking dance scene to The Hall Of The Mountain King and terrific performances from its core female cast, the scheming Loch Naess and a wildly unrestrained Myren brilliantly keeping the sympathies shifting as they undergo physical, status and personality transformations, this is mesmerising viewing. (Mockingbird)
Until Dawn (15)
Adapted from the PlayStation video game but with a standalone story within its universe that both nods to and expands its mythology, Swedish director looks to put his resounding Shazam sequel misfire behind him, but only partly succeeds. The whole premise of the film is summed up in the expositionary line “every night something new is trying to kill us as, a year after her sister Melanie’s disappearance and her own depression and attempted suicides, Clover (Ella Rubin) and her stereotypical collection of dysfunctional friends, wimpy ex Max (Michael Cimino), bickering couple Nina (Odessa A’zion) and Abel (Belmont Cameli) and wannabe mystic Megan (Ji-young Yoo), set off to where she was last seen to try and find her. This leads them to an old cabin, ominously described by the creepy gas station attendant Mr Hill (Peter Stormare vaguely reprising his role in the game) as “a place stuck in time”.
Sure enough, they rapidly find themselves trapped in the welcome centre where they meet bloody deaths. Only for the hour glass to reset over and over again so that each night is a variation of the one before, but with a different killer (ghost girl, clown-masked slasher, witch, wendigo) and different deaths (at one point spontaneous combustion offering a change from the usual choppings and skewerings), sometimes, aware of the time loop, even killing each other to reset the sand, with the group bearing the mounting physical and emotional scars; the only way to escape being surviving until dawn. So, basically Groundhog Day meets Saw in the Cabin In The Woods. After the exuberant inventive anarchy of A Minecraft Movie and the genuinely frightening horror of Sinner, it’s disappointing that this reverts back to the same old same old with its group dynamic tensions, jump scares, assorted – if sometimes inspired – gruesome deaths and collection of grotesque killers, the whole repetition concept making it feel like a whole bunch of sequels crammed together with a recurring masked killer offering some form of connection to its supernatural subplot.
While the half-hearted screenplay (about manifestations of your fears) and its clunky dialogue means the characters are typically underwritten and one-dimensional, the mostly unknown cast are at least game for what they’re called on to do and, having previously directed Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation knows his way round studio horror tropes even if he seems less self-aware of the conventions (found footage included) he constantly recycling. The dawn may come up but you may feel like the movie won’t ever never end. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
NOW SHOWING
Aftermath (15)
When Eric (Dylan Sprouse), a former army ranger, is crossing the Tobin Memorial Bridge in Boston with his 16-year old sister Maddie (Megan Stott), they suddenly find themselves in a terrorist situation when group of disaffected mercenaries, led by a decidedly unstable pill-popping Jimmy (Mason Gooding) blow it in half, their aim being to extract a police transport prisoner, Samantha “Doc” Brown (Dichen Lachman), a former member of their group who has apparently betrayed them and is due to testify. Confiscating all cell phones and tying drivers’ hands to the steering wheel, everyone’s being held hostage with the police unable to take any action. So, having freed himself from his ties on account of being able to dislocate his thumb, it’s down to Eric to take down the revolutionists, who are broadcasting live footage with the ultimate goal of getting Doc to read out a confession saying she falsely testified that Retcon squad one three killed innocent civilians without sanction and that the Pentagon was culpable before she’s executed.
Communicating with Maddie by phones they’ve managed to retain and with the help of a couple of the stranded drivers, Eric duly eliminates the opposition until it’s just down to him and Jimmy who, it turns out, has wired everything with a dead man’s trigger to go boom.
A routine and predictable B-movie thriller directed by Patrick Lussier, it has very few surprises but does deliver the goods in terms of the suspense and action, a notable if somewhat unrealistic scene having Eric and Maddie trying to do an Evel Knievel on a motorbike to leap the gap between the shattered roadway, his sister ultimately also ending up in need of being rescued. The dialogue is clunky, the performances uneven, although Sprouse makes a decent fist of his lone hero character, and the narrative confused (it seems the bad guys have the right motives but the wrong tactics) but as an action timewaster there have been far worse. (Netflix)
The Amateur (12A)
Having directed Nicholas Winton biopic One Life, James Hawes stretches his genre wings for a Bourne like espionage thriller that makes up in ingenuity for what it lacks in energy.
When his wife and colleague Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered in a terrorist attack in London, nerdy CIA intelligence analyst, cryptographer and hacker Charles Heller (Rami Malek) is frustrated when Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany) is no hurry to do more than make empty promises about making those responsible pay. So, having identified the group and, with the help of his anonymous online contact Inquiline, accessed files revealing Moore covered up a rogue mission in which civilians and allies were killed (something about which Moore’s new boss, (Julianne Nicholson, is oblivious) , he blackmails them into training him up so he can go all Liam Neeson and track them down himself. However, Charlie’s skill set is more about handling a keyboard than pulling trigger, his CIA teacher Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) informing him that’s just no killer. He is though pretty adept at using technology to lead him to the terrorists with the aim of finally confronting the one who shot Sarah. However, when Moore finds out he’s been bluffing about the files he’s claimed to have, he now finds himself a target, with Henderson despatched to take him off the board.
Based on Robert Littell’s 80s bestseller and previously filmed with John Savage in the lead, there’s not a huge amount of action but, as it hops from one location to another (Madrid, Istanbul, Paris, Romania, Russia), there’s some clever hardwiring of technology (though quite where Charlie manages to source the equipment is never addressed) to variously threaten one of the gang with pollen asphyxiation, decompress and shatter a high rise glass swimming pool and ensnare another in a booby trapped arms deal (Charlie never actually kills hands-on) set up by his now revealed not to be quite who’d he assumed contact (Caitriona Balfe).
There’s some nice touches, such as Charlie watching a YouTube video about how to pick a lock and how he throws the CIA hounds off the scent by manipulating image tracking. He’s also not infallible, nervously screwing things up on a couple of occasions before finally pulling off a master gotcha worthy of Now You See Me in the final act.
Aside from the technology angle, there’s little here that hasn’t been seen in countless previous spy thrillers and the slow pacing often makes it feel longer than the two hour running time. What the film also lacks is any real sense of urgency, though the score does is best to compensate, and while Malek is solid as the inexperienced but hugely competent revenge-seeker he’s rather less effective at playing anguished grief. McCallany does a decent job of being the smug CIA bad guy, but Fishbourne and, more so, Jon Bernthal’s field agent are seriously underused while scenes where Charlie has visions of his dead wife just feel superfluous. Generic and predictable, it’s not bad by any means, just that it feels like some Netflix fodder that’s managed to find its way on to the big screen. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Back In Action (12)
The title carrying a double meaning in that this is Cameron Diaz’s first film in 10 years, reaming with her Annie remake co-star Jamie Foxx, himself returning after being hospitalized, directed by Seth Gordon it’s a generic thriller that mines a familiar narrative involving kids who don’t know their parents are spies. Or at least they were. Fifteen years ago, more than platonic partners, she discovering she’s pregnant, CIA agents Emily (Diaz) and Matt (Foxx) narrowly escaped from a plane crash after apparently being betrayed by Baron (Andrew Scott, making the most of a thin role), an MI6 agent.
Resolving to retire, they’ve given up espionage and forged new lives and workaday mundane careers, now living in Atlanta with their two kids, snarky Alice (McKenna Roberts) and her younger rule-following techie brother Leo (Rylan Jackson). However, when a video of Matt losing his cool in a disco after discovering Alice isn’t actually studying with friends goes viral, their old handler Chuck (Kyle Chandler) turns up warning them their cover’s blown. But no sooner has he done so than he’s shot and the pair have to quickly grab the kids and hit the road, being pursued by both Polish KGB agent turned terrorist Balthazar Gor (Robert Besta) and his mercenary henchmen and Baron, who’s still nurturing a running gag crush on Emily, both believing they have the master-key, which they stole during Gor’s kiddies’s birthday party for his daughter, that will give its owner the ability to control any system in the world and which was never recovered from the plane wreckage. All of which means, clearly enjoying being back in the game, they have to, to the confusion of the kids, adopt new names and head to London to seek help from her long-estranged mother, Ginny (Glenn Close), a still formidable former British spy who’s living with her wannabe MI6 agent toyboy Nigel (an amusingly bumbling Jamie Demetriou as a nascent Johnny English).
Unfolding into a road movie with a series of brawls, parenting messages and boat and motorbike chases along the way, while it may be relentlessly rote there are some enjoyable spins, such as the couple improvising weapons out of a petrol pump, a bottle of Diet Coke and a tube of Mentos, an amusing joke at the expense of Jason Bourne and fights staged to Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag at the Tate Modern and Dean Martin’s Ain’t That a Kick in the Head as they literally kick thugs in the head. Trading off one another, Diaz and Foxx have palpable chemistry, Close sinks her teeth into the ham while Roberts and Jackson step up to the not exactly demanding mark as the kids finding mum and dad aren’t the bores they seemed. Undemanding fun, but fun nevertheless. (Netflix)
Becoming Led Zeppelin (12A)
The first major documentary on the legendary band, as the title says this is about how their birth rather than their entire career and, as such, it follows them only as far as Led Zeppelin II and is focused only on the music and not the lives away from making it, so no salacious tales of hedonistic excess here then. Directed by Bernard MacMahon, well-served by an outstanding research team, the only talking heads are the three surviving members, white-haired guitar legend Jimmy Page, affable down to earth bassist John Paul Jones and. looking ever more leonine, singer Robert Plant with the voice of late drummer John Bonham (who rarely gave them) featured from a previously unheard Australian interview. Whether deliberately staged or not, the scenes of the three listening to it and watching archive footage of themselves, which they’d presumably never seen, is a real strength.
Clocking in at over two hours, the first half is devoted the their individual early years during the ’50s and ’60s, making their way through assorted bands and Page and Jones establishing themselves as in demand session men, the latter bluffing his way into a career as an arranger for, among others, Donovan. Intercut with footage of them as kids and teenagers and anecdotes about their childhood and parents, this is arguably the most interesting part of the film throwing up perhaps little known facts that Page and Jones were session players on the likes of Lulu’s To Sir With Love, early Who numbers and Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger, a live performance of which is a spine-tingling moment. There’s even archive BBC footage from All Your Own of a Page playing in a group with his fellow schoolboys. Footage of such influences as Little Richard, Gene Krupa, James Brown, the Johnny Brunette Trio (playing The Train Kept A-Rollin’, the first number the new band would learn), Sonny Boy Williamson and Lonnie Donegan (who surely warrants his own biopic) further enrich the history.
It was Page who was instrumental in the four coming together when, already having achieved a level of success as guitarist with The Yardbirds when he put together a new line up, initially recruiting Jones, who suggested one time Stourbridge schoolboy Plant, then singer with the oddly named Walsall outfit Obs-Tweedle following the demise of The Band Of Joy, who in turn recommended Redditch-born Bonham as a force of nature drummer, even though Bonham’s wife Pat had told him to have nothing to with him.
The second half focuses on how Led Zeppelin, the name change a suggestion by Keith Moon, forged their chemistry from each member’s individual musical strengths, Page the innovator and experimentalist on guitar playing, Jones an inspired bassist, Plant with an incredible voice that melded blues, folk, R&B and rock (his rock god looks weren’t handicap either) and Bonham’s jazz-inspired force of nature drumming. We see how, unable to get arrested in the UK, they and manager Peter Grant set their sights on America, recording their debut album and then negotiating with Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler for its release, Page keeping everything under their own control and insisting there never be any singles. The album quickly found favour with the underground radio stations and a tour supporting Vanilla Fudge quickly saw them headlining their own dates and festivals. While Page recalls how they focused on playing for themselves in the event audiences didn’t materialise, America quickly recognised their brilliance, but back home, the critics were less enthused, branding them unimaginative, pretentious and dull while the film also includes some marvellous footage of them playing Middle Earth with many in the audience – kids included- looking perplexed and plugging their ears. Of course, come Led Zep II, the film documenting the genesis of pretty much every track, it was a different story, but even so another of the highlights is rarely seen footage of them – still relatively unknown here, playing the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, their first British festival.
There’s an unfortunate tendency for repetition in the second half, Communication Breakdown features in full twice and the frequent use of the same rehearsal clip but with different visual overlays becomes tiresome, but even so, while there’s no critical perspective and much is aimed at a captive audience, this is still a compelling history of the birth of arguably the biggest rock band of all time. (Sat/Sun: MAC)
Blitz (12A)
When your star is Saoirse Ronan, it’s going to takes real effort to sink the credibility and quality she brings, but, his third feature after 123 Years A Slave and gritty crime thriller Widows, which were followed by the acclaimed Small Axe TV series and documentary Occupied City, Steve McQueen does rather fumble the ball with this tonally uneven and at times clunkily written wartime drama.
Set during the London Blitz of WWII, Ronan plays Rita, the mother of nine-year-old bi-racial George (a winning Elliott Heffernan), her Grenadian partner Marcus (CJ Beckford, seen in a hot club dance flashback), in absentia, living with her dad Gerald (Paul Weller in a decent acting debut and getting to sing Ain’t Misbehavin’ round the old joanna) in Stepney and working in a munitions factory where, a decent singer, she gets to perform for a Down Your Way-like morale-boosting BBC outside broadcast before her feisty fellow workers take the opportunity to call for better civilian protection against the air raids instead of locking the Underground stations.
When, on account of the bombing, London’s children are packed off as evacuees, George, feeling guilty at the way he angrily treated her for sending him away, jumps off the train and sets off to walk back to London. It’s a picaresque journey of adventure and self-discovery that will involve him with Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a kindly Nigerian ARP warden (who he meets in a particularly clunky scene in an arcade with dioramas portraying Africans as savages), and, in less friendly circumstances, an embarrassing subplot straight of Oliver Twist involving a gang of Cockney scavengers (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke hamming like panto villains) who enlist him to pilfer the corpses’ pockets in the bombed out ruins.
Meanwhile, back home, Rita’s helping out in shelters set up by socialist community organisers and, learning George has done a runner, going frantic and determined to find him. Added into her story is Jack (Harris Dickinson), a shy firefighter with a crush on her, but that never really goes anywhere.
Cobbling together the old-fashioned spirit of The Railway Children, Powell and Pressburger, and the those Children’s Film Foundation films, when not indulging in period drama cliches (and Haley Squires as Rita’s Cockerney sparra colleague) and repeatedly showing close-ups of bombs on their way to cause devastation, McQueen lurches from a sentimental road movie in the manner of Disney’s The Incredible Journey with a plucky child instead of animals to broad brush commentary about the era’s casual racism (George’s often called a monkey. There’s moments when, such as the scenes at a ballroom after a bombing with the hoi polloi in frozen death postures, crowds trying to escape a flooding tube station, and the opening shot of a fireman trying to grapple with an errant hose, he manages to capture wartime authenticity, but mostly it’s all rather politely tableaux through which Ronan wanders. All that and some surrealistic images of flowers. A cosy if at times uncomfortable Sunday afternoon watch in front of the telly, but for McQueen a major disappointment. (Apple TV+)
Carry-On (12)
Though indisputably Die Hard lite (or more accurately, given the time and setting, Die Hard 2), taking time off from having Liam Neeson kill people, set on Christmas Eve director Jaume Collet-Serra turns in some watchable if credibility stretching B-movie action hokum anchored by a central cat and mouse battle of wits between Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman.
The former is Ethan Kopek, sleepwalking through life as a Transportation Security Administration agent at Los Angeles International Airport after being rejected for the police academy after concealing his father’s criminal history. He’s given a wake-up call when his girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson), who’s just been promoted to a senior role at the airport, announces she’s pregnant. To which end, he finally asks his boss (Dean Norris) about possible promotion and more responsibility and is given a trial period in charge of scanning luggage on one of the security lines, substituting for his friend and co-worker Jason (Sinqua Walls), and dealing with a steady stream of obstreperous passengers.
This, as it turns out, is rather unfortunate, since Bateman’s character, only ever known as the Traveller, had put in place a plot to force Jason, whose family he was going to imperil, into letting a passenger’s suitcase pass through unchallenged. So now, instead of Jason, Ethan becomes the mark, with Sofia’s life as the bargaining chip. And, after initially assuming it’s a prank, with his every move monitored by the Traveller’s sniper and surveillance accomplice (Theo Rossi), who’s holding someone captive in his van, with no way of alerting anyone, he reluctantly agrees to play ball, placing Nora’s life above the lives of everyone on the plane. What he doesn’t know is that the case, carried through by one Mateo Flores (Tonatiuh), contains a vial of Novichok, the world’s most lethal nerve gas. Meanwhile horrified to learn on the case’s contents, having framed Jason as drinking on the job in order to get back on the security line, Ethan is now frantically seeking a way of foiling the plot, but the Traveller, who’s feeding him instructions via an ear piece, is always one step ahead, as the death of the cop he passes a message to illustrates.
And as he racks his brain looking for a solution – finally confronting the Traveller, in his black coat and hat, who is clearly in total control, having investigated a fire that took the lives of two Russian mobsters at the start of the film, dogged LAPD detective (Danielle Deadwyler) has intuited something’s not right and called in Homeland Security as she starts putting all the pieces together, trying to figure out who the bomb may be targeting. It’s not a huge surprise to learn everything’s down to corporate profits.
There’s a few twists written in to its otherwise fairly simplistic narrative as not everyone involved turns out to be a bad guy while Collet-Serra throws in some messy but thrilling action sequences, variously involving a showdown among the luggage belts and an in-car struggle set to Last Christmas. It’s not one that stands up to scrutinising the logic, but Egerton again effortlessly carries off the action hero, albeit here a reluctant one, while Bateman sinks his teeth into a rare chance to play the villain, amusingly offering Ethan relationship advice in-between his demands. Ultimately, they’re not McClane and Gruber and there’s no rousing yippee ki-yay moment, but the film ably rises above the baggage it’s carrying. (Netflix)
Champions (12)
The Farrelly brothers have always had a thing about comedies featuring characters with intellectual disabilities, but never for cheap laughs. Now, making his solo directorial debut, Bobby returns to the source for an underdog sports movie in the Bad News Bears tradition in which a disgraced character is given a chance to redeem themselves by coaching a team of misfits. Here, adapted from 2018 Spanish film Campeones, itself based on a real life team, Woody Harrelson plays Des Moines assistant basketball coach Marcus Markovich (Harrelson), a hot head with NBA ambitions who gets fired from his minor league team for shoving his boss (Ernie Hudson) over ignoring his strategies and is subsequently convicted of drinking and driving after crashing into a cop car. In an amusing court scene with as the judge (Alexandra Catillo) and his attorney (Mike Smith), he avoids a prison by accepting 90 days community service coaching a rubbish local team with intellectual disabilities nicknamed The Friends who operate out of a run down, budget-challenged rec centre run by Julio (Cheech Marin), who also gets to deliver the exposition about the different players and how they have full lives.
All played by ten actors with special needs, among them are Craig (Matthew Von Der Ahe), who keeps going on about having sex with his girlfriend, Showtime (Bradley Edens) who will only shoot the ball backwards, and always misses, Marlon (Casey Metcalfe) who wears a padded helmet and quotes obscure trivia, and the outgoing Johnny (Kevin Iannucci) who has Downs Syndrome, works in an animal care centre, refuses to shower and whose protective sister turns out to be Alex (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Kaitlin Olson), a struggling actor first seen as Marcus’s didn’t end well Tinder one-nighter, which adds further complications but also the developing romantic subplot.
It’ll come as no surprise to find that Marcus goes from initially feeling humiliation and apathy about the task and his team to coming to love them and pushing them to win at the upcoming Special Olympics championship in Winnipeg. Nevertheless, Farrelly ensures the predictable (save for the final winning shot moment) journey with Marcus learning to care for others and not just himself is heartwarming, funny, inspirational and never patronising. Harrison and Olson are engaging characters while the Friends are an irresistible bunch, each getting their moment to shine with particular stands outs being Iannucci, James Day Keith as Benny, a restaurant dishwasher who gets to stand up to the abusive restaurant boss who refuses to give him time off for games (setting up a hilarious sting), Joshua Felder as star turn Darius who, for reasons revealed in a later poignant scene, refuses to play for Marcus, and especially a scene stealing Madison Tevlin as Consentino, another Downs Syndrome player who’s brought in to replace him and takes no shit from either her coach or fellow players. It’s minor league, but it certainly deserves its spot on the court. (Netflix)
Companion (15)
After a spate of films sounding warning notes about AI, writer-director Drew Hancock impressively flips the narrative from perpetrator to victim in a cautionary tale about technology and relationships woven with a commentary on toxic masculinity.
Meeting romcom cute in a supermarket, Iris (Heretic’s Sophie Thatcher) is in a relationship with underdog nice guy Josh (The Boys’ Jack Quaid), though there’s something uneasy about how, docile and submissive, she professes she’s wants to ensure all his wants and desires are fulfilled. Her opening voice-over sets you up for that’s to come as she says the two most important moments of her life where when she met him and when she killed him.
They’re off on weekend getaway to a remote luxury home owned by adulterous billionaire Russian Sergey (Rupert Friend with bristling moustache and thick accent), joined by Josh’s standoffish ex Kat (Megan Suri), who’s also Sergey’s girlfriend, and, also in their first flush of romance, mutually besotted gay couple by catty Eli (Harvey Guillén) and the hot but dim, anxious to please Patrick (Lukas Gage), who coincidentally also have their own meet-cute, although Iris feels uncomfortable and unwelcomed in their company. Well, not that unwelcomed by Sergey who, alone by the lake, attempts to rape her. We next see her walking back into the house, covered in his blood. At which point the film upends everything to reveal that Iris is in fact a humanoid, a lifelike fuckbot companion Josh is renting (flashbacks show her being delivered and programmed – her intelligence, level of aggression, voice, etc., all remotely controlled), theoretically programmed to not harm humans,.
It turns out that killing Sergey, apparently a drugs dealer, also throws a spanner in the works regarding the real reason the others are there, namely to steal $12million. But, as events spiral out of control into a cat and mouse battle of wits and survival between them and Iris, that’s not the only secret being hidden, but to reveal more would spoil the thrills as they unfold.
Thatcher is terrific in the way she handles Iris coming to terms with who or what she is (learning her tears are just fed from an internal reservoir), gaining Josh’s smartphone app controls and trying to become autonomous and overcome the restrictions of her programming and the feelings with which she’s been implanted. Playing counter to his character in The Boys, Quaid is also compelling in Josh’s mix of spinelessness and ruthlessness, and while Suri’s character is less developed, Guillén and Gage throw some clever curves as things develop.
Sporting an ingenious screenplay and working with themes of manipulation, appearances and reality, control, emotional abuse, the weaponisation and commodification of feelings and , it consistently takes off in unexpected directions, fusing moments of comedy with ones of sudden violence and horror, it’s already on the year’s best of list. (Apple TV+)
Death Of A Unicorn (15)
Emotionally estranged from her corporate lawyer father Elliot (Paul Rudd) following her mother’s death, college student Ridley (Jenna Ortega) is reluctantly accompanying him to the isolated Canadian Rockies wildlife reserve estate of the Leopolds, a mega-rich pharmaceuticals family comprising entitled incompetent ex-junkie nepo son Shep (Will Poulter), obsequious materialistic wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and billionaire patriarch Odell (Richard E Grant), who, terminally ill with cancer and not having faith in his son’s acumen,, is looking to bring Elliot on board to act as legal liaison after his death . Ridley is naturally cynical about their professed altruism (“Philanthropy is just reputation laundering for the oligarchy”) and, indeed she’s quickly proven right.
Distracted by arguing and allergies, dad hits an animal in the road which, turns out to be a baby unicorn, bleeding purple blood and its horn glowing which, when Ridley touches it, gives her a hallucinatory trip into some otherworldly realm. But then dad beats it to death with a tyre iron, dumps in the back seat planning to not mention it to his hosts and bury it later that night.
Except it seems it’s not quite dead as everyone sees the car bouncing (indeed a plot point hinges on how unicorns can’t actually die). The baby breaks free and is quickly shot through the head by Odell’s PA, Shaw (Jessica Hynes). Which is when Elliot notices that the blood that splashed on Ridley’s face has cured her acne as well as his allergies and faulty vision. Naturally, the Leopolds are immediately alert to this healing power potential, especially when an infusion of horn dust eliminates Odell’s cancer. Just think how this can benefit the world. Or, more accurately, just think how they can sell it exclusively to their super-rich associates, promoting all three speed dialling and making deals. The only spanner in their profit-frenzy plans is that a pissed-off mum and dad unicorn have come looking for their offspring, dad skewering Odell’s head of science Dr Song (Steve Park) as he and his assistant Dr Bhatia (Sunita Mani) are transporting the body out into van to be taken to a lab for experimentation.
They really should have listened to Ridley who’s been researching unicorn myth and history via illustrations from the (real, save for the imagined new panel) 15th century Unicorn Tapestries and concluded they really aren’t creatures you should mess with. Certainly not the sparkly figures in little girls’ storybooks. Which, of course, means things get progressively worse with an ill-fated hunt into the wood to kills the wounded parent, a rising body count, Shep snorting horn dust, ordering Bhatia to cut of the baby’s horn so he and his mother than exploit it and realising that the only way to calm the beasts is with a pure of heart maiden – guess who. But Ridley has a deeper connection to them than anyone knows.
Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, it initially sets itself up a comedy horror eat the rich satire about self-absorbed greedy capitalists (America’s pharmaceutical corporates in particular) and indeed there’s fun to be had at the sight of the Leopold literally and metaphorically rubbing their hands at the opportunity that’s fallen in to their laps. It goes somewhat off the rails, however, as it swerves into Jurassic Park territory – as well as a visual nod to Aliens, with its unicorns vs humans slaughter fest and never quite figures out what the whole horn-induced magic realism trip is trying to say about grief, loss, healing and the whole cosmos of emotions. Scharfman does, though, have Elliot explain that he’s been a seemingly arse-licking, money-driven asshole to try and ensure Ridley’s secure future, to which end there’s also a predictable self-sacrificing redemption, even if that proves rather anti-climactic.
Well-aware of the whole silliness of its premise (and the dodginess of some of the unicorn CGI), it distracts with the copious gore and some decidedly scenery chewing performances from Grant, Leoni and Poulter with Ortega providing the moral grounding, although arguably the star turn comes from Gotham’s Anthony Carrigan as Griff, the Leopold’s put-upon butler, always at their demanding beck and call, including preparing Odell a unicorn steak. Closing with a not the cliffhanger it thinks fade to black ending as the unicorn family chase the cop car taking Ridley and Elliot to jail, it’s serviceable enough for what it is, it’s just that what is doesn’t really amount to much. (Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe)
Disney’s Snow White (PG)
Dircted by Marc Webb, the latest in Disney’s live action remakes of the studio’s animated classics, most of which have proven less than magical, arrives overshadowed by anti-woke protests about casting West Side Story’s Oscar winner Rachel Zegler, of darker-skinned Columbian heritage, in the title role and the pro-Israeli pronouncements of Gal Gadot who chews the scenery (but somewhat chokes on the singing) as the Evil Queen, but while it has some glaring flaws it can be counted alongside Beauty & The Beast as one of the more successful.
Explaining away Zegler’s Snow White as being named for the weather when she was born rather than the colour of her skin, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, whose past credits include The Girl on the Train, has turned the original’s romantic story into one of female empowerment, dispensing with princes and true love’s kiss in favour of a overcoming self-doubt and a power struggle while retaining the staple magic mirror and poison apple.
Heir to the kingdom following the death of her mother Good Queen (Lorena Andrea) and then dad Good King (Hadley Fraser), who rides off into battle never to return, Snow White finds herself under the heel of her stepmother, Evil Queen, who, when not oppressing the population, turning farmers into soldiers, and treating her stepdaughter like Cinderella, likes nothing more than to stand narcissistically in front of her Magic Mirror (voiced by Patrick Page) to be told that she’s the fairest of them all. Until that is, annoyingly bound to speak the truth, it tells her Snow White will supplant her in terms of fair beauty and – in this revision- fairness. Clearly she has to go.
So, as per the fairytale, she orders her loyal Huntsman (Ansu Kabia) to take Snow White apple picking in the forest and kill her. He of course can’t bring himself to do the deed, setting her free to flee into the forest where she finds herself awash with cute woodland creatures drawn to her purity. And, of course, stumbles on a cottage which, it turns out, is home to (and here’s where the film shoots itself in the foot with cartoonish CGI) ) by seven small (never called dwarfs) and odd magical men stereotypically named Doc (voiced by Jeremy Swift), Grumpy (Martin Klebba), Bashful (Titus Burgess), Sleepy (Andy Grotelueschen), Sneezy (Jason Kravits), Happy (George Salazar) and Dopey (Andrew Barth Feldman), who work in a diamond mine,. Finding her asleep, they take pity and she moves in.
As you’ll know, the Queen learns Snow White’s alive and, disguising herself as an old crone, tricks her into eating that poisoned apple, revealing she had her dad killed and sending her into a Sleeping Death from which she’s awakened, not by some passing prince, but Jonathan (Andrew Burlap), the handsome bandit leader of a band of rebels who she encountered earlier stealing spuds from the castle and let him go, thereby renewing his hope of things going back to the good old days. Now, Snow White rallies him, his men and the not dwarfs into revolt to overthrow the Queen. And so it goes.
Along with the core narrative, the remake also throws in some of the much-loved songs, among them Heigh Ho and Whistle While You Work (though, inevitably, not Someday My Prince Will Come) while The Greatest Showman duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul add new numbers such as Zegler’s Waiting On A Wish, Gadot’s evil anthem All Is Fair and the wryly self-aware showstopper Princess Problems. Far better than expected, though I’d still hold my breath on Bambi. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Drop (15)
Phones and laptops have provided a platform for several thrillers in recent years. the latest coming from Happy Death Day director Christopher Landon, who, using for the most part just two locations, serves up a tension building thriller that takes the old premise of what would you do to protect your family and gives it a 21st century technology twist.
Out of the dating game for several years since the violent death of her abusive husband (the prelude is ambiguous as to whether she shot him), Violet (White Lotus star Meghann Fahy on solid form), mother to five-year-old Toby (Jacob Robinson), is about to venture out on a blind date with photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar doing his It Ends With Us nice guy) she met online.
Leaving Tony in the care of her younger sister Jen (Violett Beane), she heads for Chicago’s upmarket Palate restaurant with its spectacular skyline view of the city. He’s late and she has brushes with two other diners, one a would be romeo (Ed Weeks) apparently waiting or his sister, the other a middle-aged man (Reed Diamond) who’s on a blind date does not go well. When Henry arrives, they flirt nervously, Violet distracted by getting texts on her phone by the Apple AirDrop function inviting her to play a game. They can, Henry, explains, only be coming from someone in a 50ft radius, but with everyone on their phones identifying who is impossible. Then the messages turn much darker as she’s told to check her security cameras and sees a masked gunman in her house. Whoever’s sending them they says if she tells anyone, if she leaves or if Henry leaves then her son will die. The death of someone she tries to get a message too makes it clear, her mysterious dropper – who sees her every move – is deadly serious. And the only way she can save Toby is by removing the memory card from Harry’s camera (we see a brief shot of documents with lots of presumably incriminating figures on them) and then killing him. And acting normal while she does it.
It plays the familiar game of throwing in a bunch of suspects with phones in their hands, the over-enthusiastic rookie waiter (Jeffrey Self), bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), the guy with the sister, while naturally hiding the real culprit in plain sight, Violet desperately looking for ways not to slip the poison into Harry’s glass before the reveal, a sleight of hand and a burst of gunplay before heading back home to wrap it all up with another nice twist in the deck. A whodunnit hiding a contrived conspiracy thriller up its sleeve that plays better if you don’t try and pick apart the how that comes with subtext about abuse (Henry shares a similar story) but is also very self-aware of the underlying silliness of its narrative, all of which Landon pulls off with style to spare. (Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Emilia Perez (15)
Mired in controversy over its leading actress’s racist tweets, directed by Jacques Audiard and loosely based on a chapter in Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute, it’s a tonally jarring affair that, initially imagined as an opera, marries songs and sung dialogue to an overcooked, melodramatic narrative that, based in Mexican crime territory, explored themes of identity (a constant in his films) and moral conscience.
Having got her wealthy client off for murdering his wife but with her boss taking the credit , Mexico City lawyer Rita Mora Castrio (Zoe Saldana), is approached by Manitas (transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón), a notorious cartel boss, who wants her to help his disappear so that he can transition to the woman he’s always felt himself to be, the gender reassignment surgery performed by Dr Wasserman whom she sources in Tel Aviv (following a musical montage in Bangkok to a song called La Vaginoplastia) who’s persuaded after hearing Manitas’s recollections of gender dysphoria as a child.
Four years later, Manitas declared dead, he now returns, surfacing in London and posing as his long lost cousin, Emilia Perez, enlisting Rita to relocate her ‘widow’, Jessi (Selena Gomez, making more of the role than the script offers) and two children from Switzerland, where they were sent for safety, back to Mexico, moving in to live with her. Jessi only agrees, however, so she can be reunited with Gustavo Brun (Édgar Ramírez), with whom she had an affair.
A chance encounter with the mother of a missing child, stirs Emilia’s conscience over his former life and, with Rita’s help, she sets up a nonprofit, charity for the victims of cartel violence and the ‘disappeared’, their bodies exhumed for identification, proper burial and closure, prompting an amusing moment when a woman, Epifanía (Adriana Paz) declares she’s relieved her abusive husband’s dead, she and Emilia beginning a relationship. Meanwhile, while having freed herself from a corrupt justice system, while herself somewhat morally compromised, Rita’s troubled that many of the charity’s donors are themselves dangerous shady characters. When Jessi announces she intends to marry Gustavo, taking the children with her, Emilia’s reaction sets up the inevitable poignantly confessional and tragic climax.
An exploration of the complexities of human nature, told largely through Rita’s eyes and her bon with Emilia, driven by powerful performances from Saldana and Gascón, it’s a strong melodramatic and emotional narrative (Audiard initially conceived it in operatic terms) with a sharp political edge regarding the grip criminals and corrupt businessmen and politicians exercise over Mexico. However, it’s debatable whether it really needed the song and dance sequences that punctuate it, not to mention the way characters sing their lines, especially when so few of them are especially memorable or stirring (though Saldana’s showpiece at a charity event in Mexico City where she dances in a red velvet power suit while delivering a critique of the country’s corrupt ruling class is easily the strongest). That said, given the tonal rollercoaster, conceiving it as a highly theatrical musical was probably the only way it would work without feeling like some sub-Aldomovar cheesy soap opera. (Netflix)
The End (15)
Acclaimed documentary film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer makes his feature debut with a post-apocalyptic musical which, while indulgently overlong at two hours plus, is compelling enough to keep you watching. It opens quoting from TS Eliot’s The Four Quartets but a more apt touchstone might be Samuel Beckett while the premise echoes current TV series Paradise.
Following some sort of ecological catastrophe, life on the scorched surface is unsustainable and, never known as more than Father, Michael Shannon has used his wealth, privilege and expertise as a former oil baron bigshot to create a luxury bunker complete with art gallery, library and an indoor pool, down a deep salt mine populated by Mother (Tilda Swinton), her former chef best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), an embittered doctor (Lennie James) who oversees safety fire drills and doles out medication, and butler cum weapons master (Tim McInnerny), who serves up the lavish meals and cakes. Born after they went underground, there’s also their 25-year-old son (George McKay), to whom Gallagher has been a nanny.
He’s helping his father write a book (though quite who’ll ever read is open to question) exculpating himself for his part in the disaster, arguing he was trying to make a difference and if not him someone else would have stepped up and besides how can you blame just one person. Along with self-justification, the work also involves memories, generally recast to follow his son’s suggestions, while Father also appropriates the experiences of others, such as that of his gay butler, as his own.
Tense and uptight, Mother was apparently a celebrated dancer with the Bolshoi (though subsequent revelations by her friend upend that and, as such, throw into question the father’s account of how they met), the point being that the whole extended nuclear family is living with self-propagated delusion and denials. Mother’s also haunted by guilt in saving her friend, but not her own relatives. The son, meanwhile, is creating a trainset diorama of America on which, having no knowledge of how the world was beyond paintings and photos, he’s imposing his own perceptions of history, one of which being that the Chinese workers who died in building the Central Pacific Railroad were happy to do for the greater good.
Questions as to what might have happened to any who tried to get into the mine (the butler was once shot by intruders, hence the son being trained in firearms) are pretty much clarified when, after 20 years, someone does, a young Black Girl (Moses Ingram) who they find collapsed by their door. The first impulse is to murder her, but, seeing a potential mate for the son (who gets decidedly horny) so he’s not of the line, she’s taken in, but her presence, beginning with calling out how sour the wine is, forces the family to face even more bitter truths. She too, however, has her own demons about how her survival was at cost of her family.
All of this unfolds with the characters singing much of the dialogue (the tunes aren’t bad and suggest perhaps a Sondheim musical even if the singing itself can be deliberately dodgy) as well as involving several dance sequences (an extravagant one by McKay and Ingram is a real highlight).
From the tightly wound Swinton, the intense Shannon, an edgy Bronagh with her own troubled conscience and McInnerny’s repressed butler to the sharply aware Ingram and McKay’s naïve, troubled but curious man-child, the performances are fully committed to the film’s experimental nature as it explores such issues as colonialism, the cost of progress, isolationism and living with our actions. It demands patience, but it’s worth staying to . (MAC)
Flow (U)
While not persuaded it warranted the Best Animation Oscar over Wild Robot, this Latvian offering from Gints Zilbalodis, his follow-up to Away, is a remarkable piece of work, a wholly dialogue-free fable set against a post-apocalyptic Noah-like backdrop in the wake of a great flood that’s gradually engulfing quite possibly the entire planet. There are no humans, no traces of civilisation other than a couple of boats and drowned buildings. Instead the cast of characters are all animals, the first to be introduced being a black cat in a forest staring at its reflection in a puddle. Then comes a rabbit being chased by a pack of domestic dogs themselves, later, running from a herd of stampeding deer. The waves sweep through, the waters constantly rising, but never with any explanation as to why. The cat will eventually be joined by one of the dogs, a Golden Retriever, the pair climbing aboard a passing wooden sailboat, their numbers swollen by the arrival of a lazing capybara, a lemur scavenging shiny objects and a predatory but ultimately helpful secretary bird as the boat is carried along the flood through the landscape, among which are several giant cat statues. At one point the cat falls overboard and is rescued by a humpback whale, while in turn the mismatched crew comes to the rescue of the other dogs.
While the bird proved unlikely adept at steering the rudder, there’s no Disney-style anthropomorphism , the film relying on squeaks, barks and meows for their communication (actual corresponding animal sounds even if the capybara’s dubbed by a camel) with the creatures staying mostly true to type (dogs easily distracted, cat sharp-witted but still prone to chase a moving ball of light). But it’s not exactly difficult to identify the message about putting aside differences, learning to trust, adapting to change and working together for survival (the secretary bird is violent ostracized by the flock for breaking ranks) and, while it’s not exactly subtle and prone to repetition, there’s only so many times the cat can fall into the water and struggle to get on the boat, and the watercolour-styled designs of the characters and the backdrops are simple, the film’s gentle flow, both visually and emotionally, keeps you utterly beguiled. (Until Sun: Mockingbird)
Get Away (15)
Written by and starring Nick Frost, this is another of his genre spoofing excursions, turning the lens this time on folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar with a plot that follows the familiar trope of outsiders being caught up in deadly rituals. The clueless targeted victims are middle-aged couple dorky dad Richard (Frost) and condescending Susan (Aisling Bea) Smith, who call each other mummy and daddy, and have brought their reluctant, bickering adolescent kids, sarcastic vegan Sam (Sebastian Croft) and surly misanthropic Jessie (a drolly deadpan Maisie Ayres), for a holiday stay on the fictional Swedish island of Svalta to watch the annual Karantän festival, an eight-hour re-enactment of a cannibalistically murderous 19th-century history incident when the locals killed and ate the four British soldiers who’d starved the island.
The family’s warned by the local storekeeper not to take the ferry, advising they won’t be made welcome, but, naturally, as in all such horrors, the blithely proceed, arriving to face a hostile reception led by veteran Karantän organiser Klara (Anitta Suikkari) before checking into the Airbnb they’ve rented off Matts (Eero Milonoff), who turns out to be a creepy pervert who steals Jessie’s underwear and watches her through a two way mirror.
As the islanders make no secret of how they feel about those culturally-deaf interlopers (having a dead rodent thrown at them seems pretty indicative), the Smiths are left in no doubt that more than theatrical blood may well be spilled. And indeed, things do finally erupt in knife-slicing and stabbing carnage with eviscerations and severed limbs and heads. But, as Frost delivers a wicked Psycho-spun twist, not quite in the way you might have assumed.
Directed by Steffen Haars with an enthusiastically scattershot narrative, it is, of course, all utterly but deliberately silly, ridiculous, and wildly overacted as it bathes in geysers of blood and gleefully sends up the genre conventions, complete with a punchline motto I can’t possibly reveal. Great fun. (Sky)
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 (as is the ongoing legal battle between director and star), 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 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 ). There’s sexual tension but nothing happens, they part and she returns to Boston to oher 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. (Sky Cinema)
Joy (12A)
Taking its title from the middle name bestowed on Louise Joy Brown by the medical team responsible for her birth in 1978, directed by Ben Taylor with a screenplay from Jack Thorne inspired by his wife Rachael’s struggles with infertility, the film unfolds the decade long pioneering development of IVF. A scientific breakthrough that has subsequently changed the lives of millions of childless couples, the story begins in 1968 when gifted embryologist Jean Purdy (a quietly understated Thomasin McKenzie) becomes laboratory manager for visionary scientist Robert Edwards (James Norton, solid if not dazzling) who’s working in trying to find a way to combat infertility. Together they recruit outstanding obstetrician Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy in familiar curmudgeonly but kindly mode), first seen haranguing a fellow surgeon giving a lecture about medical procedures with which he disagrees, and follows them from setting up base in a makeshift lab at the latter’s hospital in Oldham, where he was Director of the Centre for Human Reproduction, through recruiting women willing to let them harvest their eggs (they dub themselves The Ovum Club) while being told the chances of any success are slight, being rejected for funding by the British Medical Council, a trial and series of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory to the shutting down and the restarting of the programme, finally culminating in the first test tube baby.
Alongside the dogged scientific determination, the film also shows the sacrifices the work cost Edwards, forced to spend months away from his family in Cambridge and castigated by the media (he’s forced into a TV debate against James Watson who won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA to defend his work that does not go well) and the public (he was dubbed Dr Frankenstein), and Purdy who, a Christian, was rejected by her church and mother (Joanna Scanlan) for playing God and found herself facing a moral dilemma on learning Steptoe performed abortions, now legal, because his fellow surgeons refused. As the hospital’s no nonsense Matron, Muriel (Tanya Moodie) tells her, both their work and terminations are about giving women a choice. There’s an added note of poignancy to Purdy’s involvement as she was medically unable (severe endometriosis) to have the children she so desperately wanted. If she couldn’t, she wanted to ensure others could.
It’s a solid workmanlike and very British period drama that’s probably is best suited to the small screen, exposing the snobbery and misogyny of the scientific community (it took 30 years and crusading by Edwards for Purdy’s name to be added to the commemorative plaque at the hospital, she having died in 1985), while also throwing in a somewhat superfluous sidebar about a young doctor (Rish Shah) fruitlessly attempting to woo Jean. More might have been made of the feelings of the prospective hopeful mothers (one says she feels like they’re cattle), but regardless this is heartfelt, affecting and uplifting account of how the passion and dedication of three people brought life to where life could never be. (Netflix)
Memoir Of A Snail (15)
Perhaps best known for his 2009 debut feature Mary and Max featuring the voiced of Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Eric Bana, stop-motion claymation film-maker Adam Elliott is Australia’s answer to Aardman, his minimalistic films a fine cocktail of humour, social observation and poignant emotion with an affinity for the underdog and outsider. This, his second feature, finds him, both narratively and technically, at the peak of his powers, and, while not as elaborate as The Wild Robot, taking its cues from Delicatessen and Amelie, is most certainly its equal.
Opening with incredibly detailed credits as the camera pans across an array of objects and artefacts, set in Melbourne it begins with reclusive hoarder Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) attending dementia-afflicted surrogate mother Pinky (Jaki Weaver) on her deathbed, gasping potatoes before she expires. A collector of snails, both living and artificial, Grace then decides to set them free, relating her story top her favourite, Sylvia (after Plath), as it slithers across Pinky’s vegetable patch. And so, things flashback to the 1970s with Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) living with their paraplegic French alcoholic former Paris juggler and stop-motion animator father Percy (voiced in a nod to Delicatessen and Amelie by Jenout and Caro star Dominque Pinon). She collects snail-themed objects, a hobby inherited from her late mother who died in childbirth, and sports a snail-styled beanie made by her dad, and is defended by Gilbert, who’s a bit of a pyromaniac, from the school bullies who call her rabbit-face on account of her cleft lip.
He dreaming of following in dad’s footsteps as a fire breather and she wanting to be an animator, the siblings have a close bond but, when Percy does in his sleep (his ashes preserved in a jar to be scattered from his favourite rollercoaster ride) , social services force them apart, Grace sent to Canberra to be raised by self-help addicts Ian and Narelle (Paul Capsis) whose swingers lifestyle means she’s often left alone, while Gilbert is packed off to religious fundamentalists who worship the baby Jesus and grow apples in Perth and a life of cruelty and abuse, especially at the hands of family matriarch Ruth (Magda Szubanski) and pastor husband Owen (Bernie Clifford), the pair only remaining in contact by letter.
Grace remains friendless and aimless, the snails her only company and when Ian and Narelle go off to join a nudist group, she’s taken in as a teenager by the eccentric free-spirited and Castro confidante Pinky (so named for losing a finger to an overhead fan while dancing in Barcelona) who sports outsize glasses and “smells of ginger and second-hand shops” (just as Gilbert smelled of burnt matches). Life looks to improve when she meets and falls in love with microwave repairman Ken (Tony Armstrong), but her wedding day is ruined when she receives a letter and box of ashes from Ruth telling her Gilbert, who had struck up a friendship with her rebellious young son Ben, has perished in a fire at their church. Sinking into depression and overeating on microwave sausages, plagued with regret, her life goes from bad to worse, culminating in Pinky’s death. Only a last minute epiphany stops her from suicide as the film finally opens up to embrace light and hope.
The sight of rutting guinea pigs probably tells you this isn’t really for the children, but it’s aglow with a gentle innocence and classical score by Elena Kats-Chernin that warm the pain and anger with a message about not living our lives in shells of our own making, carrying our burdens on our back and, as Pinky says, living life forwards (snails can’t travel backwards). Packed with such visual delights as Grace and Gilbert reading an array of literary classics (from Lord of the Flies to Cahiers du Cinema) and watching The Two Ronnies, it’s a thematically and emotionally rich work and compelling character study that, with voice cameos from Nick Cave and Eric Bana, balances pathos and whimsy to expert effect in recalling the Japanese art of kintsugi as a reminder that “All things can be repaired, and our cracks celebrated”. A definite escargot go go. (Sat-Mon; MAC)
A Minecraft Movie (PG)
The world’s most successful videogame, as I’ve never played I can’t tell you about the Easter eggs and in-joke references, but you don’t really have to be a gamer to get caught up in the fun of this frantic and often very silly adaptation directed by Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess.
For the uninitiated, Minecraft’s a “sandbox game” set in the Overworld part of a universe where everything, foliage, animals, buildings, people, is cube-shaped and you can basically create anything just by thinking about it. For newcomers, there’s a lengthy exposition at the start wherein Steve (Jack Black as the game’s original default skin)) tells how he was obsessed with going down the mine as a kid and when he finally got the chance as an adult found the glowing blue cube that opened the mortal into the Overworld dimension, where he buddied up with a wolf he named Dennis.
Back in the real world, the plot kicks in with the narcissistic pink-jacketed Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), a video-game champion in 1989 whose corner store Game Over World is heading for bankruptcy. His path crosses with Henry (Sebastian Hansen), a teenager artist-cum-inventor who’s just arrived in town with his sister Natalie (Emma Myers) to make a new start after their mum died. When his jet-pack invention is sabotaged and wrecks the local crisps factory mascot where his sister’s working, he gets Garrett to pose as his uncle.
But this is just a preamble until he, Natalie, Garrett and Dawn (Danielle Brooks), a realtor with a literally mobile zoo, get transported through the same portal, via the Orb of Dominance which Steve had Dennis hide in his old house and has now come into Garrett’s possession, lose the Earth Crystal that can get them home, hook up with Steve and find themselves having to save Overworld from Malgosha (Rachel House), a gold-obsessed evil piglin and her porky underlings from The Nether, who wants to destroy all creativity. Cue a series of battles with piglins (once killed they become pork chops), skeleton archer warriors, blockish baby Frankenstein zombies, the Great Hog, a wrestling bout with Chicken Jockey and forging weapons with the Crafting Table as they fight their way to the Woodland Mansion to retrieve another Crystal so they can escape. Just try not to think about ordering a Lava Chicken.
Unlike comparable outings like Sonic, Super Mario and Dungeons and Dragons, there’s no real plot just a case of advancing though various levels, foes and obstacles to reach the goal, but as popcorn goes it’s certainly buttered-up although, given Momoa and Black are given full rein to unleash their craziness (as well as sing some rock songs), the rest of the cast don’t really get much chance to do anything but wave from the sidelines. That said, a cameoing Jennifer Coolidge as the divorced school principal (her ex is Jermaine Stewart’s teacher) has an amusing running gag subplot as she goes on a date with a pacifist monobrowed vegetarian monk who’s wandered into Earth, prompting the film’s funniest line in a nod to its Swedish origins, the waiter being game co-creator Jens Bergensten. The second of two credit scenes sets up a sequel involving Steve’s feminine counterpart Alex.
Game nuts will get more from it that anyone going in cold, but it’s unlikely anyone of them will leaving feeling blocked. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Mr Burton (12A)
Directed by Marc Evans, this biopic of his fellow countrymen, acting legend valley boy Richard Burton and his teacher cum strict mentor Philip Henry Burton, has the sensibility, feel, essence and quality of a vintage BBC drama (even if some CGI industrial backdrops are less than persuasive) anchored in two standout performances by Harry Lawtey, looking like and channelling a cross between Endeavour’s Shaun Evans and a younger David Tennant, and Toby Stephens in the respective roles.
Opening in 1942 in the Welsh mining town of Port Talbot, living in rooms rented from his landlady, Ma Smith (Lesley Manville), the middle aged Burton teaches English, and Shakespeare especially, at the local secondary school as well as writing dramas for BBC regional radio. Like Ma, his acting ambitions thwarted, he has a love of theatre and an eye and ear for talent. Which he senses in one of his pupils, Richard Jenkins, who, estranged from his drunken miner father Dic (Steffan Rhodri), who can never remember which son he is, lives with his doting sister Cis (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and her less than amenable husband Elfed (Aneurin Barnard). Academically promising, he tells Burton, or PH as he comes to call him, he’d like to be an actor and, Pygmalion-style, is subsequently taken under his wing, getting pronunciation and voice modulation lessons (involving him standing on a Welsh hilltop and screaming, venting his frustrations in the process) and, when Elfed forces him to give up school to help with the household finances, Burton not only argues for his reinstatement but uses his connections to get him an RAF Cadet scholarship and a place at Oxford. And, of course, helps him find his literal and figurative (baritone) voice,
An offhand remark about Ma having a spare room, leads to Richard moving in, an arrangement Elfed and Cis are fully supportive of for different reasons, but, as Ma cautions, it might fuel speculation about the pair’s relationship (Burton’s never shown as gay but a scene between him and an accusatory drunken Richard certainly alludes to as much). To which end, Burton proposes to adopt him, Dic demanding £50 to agree, and although the adoption never went through he did become his legal guardian with Richard taking his name.
Following the above row, the pair become estranged and the film moves on to 1951 with Richard now at the RSC (again through Philips connections to a famed theatrical casting agent Daphne Rye, played by Hannah New) preparing to tackle the role of Prince Hal in Henry IV, the play’s theme of his transformation from hedonist to figure of gravitas not lost on the film’s own. However, hewing to the mining tradition of starting drinking from 5, Richard’s having clashes with his director and other actors, his self-doubt and self-loathing manifesting in getting drunk, trying to get off the women and forgetting his lines. In a drunken fog, he phones Ma who duly packs PH off to the rescue, leading to reconciliation, Burton’s acclaimed break-through triumph and his oft quoted declaration that he owed his ‘father’ everything.
Released in the centenary of the actor’s birth, it follows familiar small-town boy makes good and mentor-protege arcs, touching on class prejudices and curtain twitching gossip along the way and, while the fledgling romance (where he professes himself a gentleman) with a schoolgirl (Mali O’Donnell) fizzles away, it does respectable justice to the story it tells. (Sat/Sun: Mockingbird; Mon/Wed: Everyman)
My Old Ass (15)
Written and directed by Megan Park, this is a bittersweet comedic riff on the what if your adult self could go back and advise your teenage version. The latter here is Elliott (Canadian actress-singer Maisy Stella and star of Nashville making her feature debut), a slightly brattish, gay 18-year-old who, along with her middle brother Max (Seth Isaac Johnson), a budding golfer, and the precocious younger Spencer (Carter Trozzolo) , lives with her parents (Alain Goulem, Maria Dizzia) on their Ontario cranberry farm. With no interest in carrying on the business, she’s going away to college at the University of Toronto in a few weeks.
Motoring out on her boat to spend the night on an island with her besties, Ruthie (Maddie Zeigler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) getting high on shrooms, Elliott hallucinates meeting her sarcastic older self (Aubrey Plaza ever wonderful in her few scenes) in an amusing set-up that knowingly wrings laughs from how they don’t look similar and how the former thinks 39 is middle-aged. She’s materialised to tell her she’ll grow up to take a PhD, advise her to be less distant from her folks and siblings and, most importantly, avoid anyone called Chad. She refuses to give more details as to why.
Returning to normality, she dismisses it all – until, out swimming, she meets a personable young man called Chad (Percy Hynes White) who’s got a summer job on her dad’s Ontario farm, returning to check out his family’s roots and is a dab hand at things mechanical. It’s a shock, but as much as discovering her phone now has a number under the name My Old Ass (a phrase she used when flirting with her older self) and that she can text and speak to her in the future (there’s no explanation how, just take it on trust).
She tries hard to avoid Chad but inevitably, with confused feelings, she begins to fall for him and also learns from Max, who was going to take it over, that her parents are selling up the farm. It hits hard because while she wants to leave, she also assumed she could always return. All of this is part of the film’s life lessons about savouring the moment because, as Chad tells her, you never know when it’s the last time you’ll experience something and how “The only thing you can’t get back is time”. Having been out of contact while she’s been overwhelmed with confused feelings, older Elliott then suddenly turns up just after younger Elliott and Chad have had, as she puts it, dick sex, leading to finally explaining, in a heartbreaking moment, why she told her to avoid him.
With a wistful tone that complements its end of summer photography, it’s both touching and humorous, the core actresses lighting up the screen with their charisma and comic timing, Stella having the look and vibe of a young Reese Witherspoon (and getting to sing a Justin Bieber cover), while White is charm personified. Park also sneaks in some sly filmic nods, a clip from Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, a nod to teen TV series Euphoria and having Spencer decorate her room, which he’s pre-emptively taken over, with pictures of Saoirse Ronan. Nestling in a similar YA coming of age zone to Booksmart and The Edge of Seventeen, it’s a low key but immensely engaging joy. (Amazon Prime)
Novocaine (15)
Suffering from the rare real-life genetic disorder Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, assistant bank manager Nate (Jack Quaid, fresh off Companion) can’t feel pain (REM’s Everybody Hurts is ironically played over the opening credits), hence his college nickname. To which end he has to set his watch timer at three-hour intervals to use the bathroom and avoid his bladder bursting and has an all-liquid diet to prevent him biting his tongue off.
Shy and introverted he does, however, fall for flirtatious new bank clerk Sherry (Prey’s Amber Midthunder), who brings him out of his shell and even gets him to eat some cherry pie. So when, the day after they sleep together, she’s taken hostage in a bank robbery with the perps (Conrad Kemp, Evan Hengst and Ray Nicholson, son of Jack) robbers wearing Santa suits, killing the manager and threatening to shoot Sherry unless Nate opens the safe, following the shoot-out carnage he impulsively steals a cop car and sets off to rescue her. A cross-city chase leads to a confrontation with one of the robbers who, pulling a gun out of a deep fryer, he accidentally shoots. Now with the pursuing detectives (Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh) suspecting he was in on the job from the beginning, he recruits his online gaming buddy Roscoe (Jacob Batalon), who’s not quite the martial arts macho man he claims, in his quest to identify the robbers (entailing a bloody trip to a neo-Nazi tattooist) and track Sherry down, one that involves him being subjected to but not feeling numerous booby traps, burns, beatings and tortures (the nail-removing and bullet retrieval scenes are not for the squeamish). The twist, revealed early one, is that Sherry is not quite what she seems.
Co-directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen with Crank and John Wick as its touchstones, it’s graphically brutal and gratuitously ultra-violent (skin’s torched, bones snapped), but also funny and quite sweet with Quaid an engaging cocktail of loveable sucker and panicked bad ass and, while it’s shot full of plot holes with a repetitive drawn-out ending before the somewhat hard to accept romantic coda, it’s a painless enough time-passer. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe)
One Of Them Days (15)
A Black female buddy stoner movie, this stars Keke Palmer and, making her film debut, R&B singer SZA as, respectively, the uptight but responsible Dreux who, after failing to finish her business degree, works the night shift at Norm’s diner but is looking to land a franchise manager deal, and the more free-spirited but self-absorbed and dick-addict corporate-sceptical aspirant artist Alyssa. Childhood friends, they share a run-down apartment in South L.A.’s Baldwin Village, its increasing gentrification represented by the arrival of perky new white resident Bethany (Maude Apatow) and her rescue dog. However, Alyssa’s freeloading boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua David Neal) has taken off with both their valuable sneakers collection and the rent money to fund his crappy T-shirt scheme. And now, while all Dreux wants to do is sleep before her interview, unless they can scrape together $1,500 by of the day, their unsympathetic landlord Uche (Rizi Timane) is evicting them. So they don’t have time to get high and wasted.
And so, directed by Lawrence Lamont, the film follows their misadventures in an attempt to raise the cash, variously involving retrieving a pair of vintage Air Jordans belonging to local gangster King Lolo (Amin Joseph) from a power line, which has him giving them until 10pm to pay $5000 or they’ll die, a visit to a blood bank where a stripper turned incompetent nurse (Janelle James) lets Dreux sell more than the authorised amount, a pay day loan operation that charges exorbitant interest and Dreux having a run in with her Mercedes-driving crush Maniac (Patrick Cage) who she assumes is some sort of criminal, all while Deux is trying to get to the important interview which, given she gets involved in a girl fight outside the office between Alyssa and Keyshawn’s volatile new girl Berenice (Aziza Scott), does not end well. Thankfully, an impromptu art auction does save the day.
With a supporting cast that includes Vanessa Bell Calloway as a woman who’s turned her home into a community refuge, Katt Williams as the ill-named doomsayer Lucky, Dewayne Perkins as a hairdresser, Keyla Monterroso Mejia as the contemptuous Payday loans officer and Lil Rey Howery as the con artists who buys the sneakers, despite its very American-specific nature it’s undeniably energetic and at times quite funny as bad decisions inevitably see the best buddies fall out and then make up. Even so, it’s a bit depressing that female screenwriter Syreeta Singleton feels the need to resort to tired clichés and stereotypes by having her characters say nigga and hos every few beats in an effort to be down with the urban. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe)
The Order (15)
A 1978 ‘children’s’ novel about a right wing nationalist insurrection by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, The Turner Diaries has provided a blueprint and impetus for several white supremacist incidents, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 2021 storming of the Capitol along then. It also provided the name for The Order, an Aryan Nation breakaway neo-Nazi organisation led by Bob Matthews that was responsible for numerous porn shop and synagogue bombings, bank and armoured car robberies designed to fund a race war, and the June 18th, 1984 murder of Alan Berg, a confrontational talk-radio host who took on anti-Semites and other fate mongerers, who was shot down outside his home in Denver.
It was his murder that finally swung the FBI into action, director Justin Kurzel tense true-crime thriller, based on The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, following the dogged work of composite fictional federal agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) who, a broken marriage in the rear view mirror, has transferred to smalltown Idaho looking to take things easier after working in New York on cases involving the KKK and Cosa Nostra, and with an obligatory burden of guilt over an informant’s death.
Digging into robberies that suggest a white supremacist link, he partners up with local family man deputy Jamie (Tye Sheridan) and fellow jaded agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett), piecing together what he sees as plot leading up to a domestic terrorism militia uprising, the trail leading him to Matthews (an icily cool Nicholas Hoult), the charismatic mastermind behind The Order with both a loyal wife (Alison Oliver) and a pregnant lover (Odessa Young) and a small gang of followers. It’s not, however, until a gun is left behind following a multi-million armoured car heist, that there’s any tangible link to Matthews, the film gradually building the frustrations, tension, and shoot-outs as it heads to its stand-off in Whidbey Island, Washington where Matthews perished in a fire at the safe house where he was hiding.
Sporting bristling moustache and few extra pounds, Law is terrific as the coiled, troubled anti-hero wrestling with both the case and his personal demons while Hoult brings an unshowy quiet intensity Matthews, both a loving dad and an angel-faced ruthless monster a man with a persuasive tongue (The Order’s motto “Victory forever, defeat never”) but rarely taking a hands-on part in the action, generally leaving the dangerous work to his followers. There’s strong work too from Sheridan, although his fate is pretty much signalled from the outset.
Gripping as both a fact-based docudrama and detective thriller, with the likes of Mann, Lumet and Friedkin as touchstones, sounding a concerning timely note about the American right-wing racism and its Trump poster-boy. At one point, a white supremacist figurehead says “In 10 years, we’ll have members in the Senate”. Talk of retrospective prophecy. (Apple TV+)
The Penguin Lessons (PG)
Directed by Peter Cattaneo and adapted by Jeff Pope from the memoir by Tom Michell, set in 1976 Argentina under Peronist rule and on the eve of a military coup, cynical and disillusioned with life, the misanthropic Tom (Steve Coogan) arrives in Buenos Aires to the sounds of distant gunfire and “fascistas bastardos” graffiti on the high outside wall to take up a job teaching English (and reluctantly coaching rugby) at a Buenos Aires private school for the sons of wealthy expatriates run by overbearing headmaster Buckle (Jonathan Pryce). His unruly students don’t have the remotest interest in Shakespeare or learning the messages embedded in poems like John Masefield’s Sea Fever, and whatever enthusiasm Tom may have once possessed is draining way, labouring on only to try and get improve his students’ grades so their parents continue to pay the fees.
When everyone’s sent home for a week following a bombing, Tom heads to Uruguay looking to get laid, grudgingly agreeing to let sarcasm-blind Finnish science teacher Tapio (Björn Gustafsson) tag along, where, in an attempt to impress a one-night stand he rescues a Magellan penguin from an oil slick on the beach and finds himself now responsible for the bird. Smuggling it back to Argentina in a canvas tote bag, now named Juan Salvador, the bird becomes his feathered – and only – friend. However, introducing Juan Salvador into his lessons (obviously without Buckle knowing) , despite his smelling foul and crapping everywhere, does spark a surprising enthusiasm among the pupils (David Herrero’s bullied Diego being the stand-out) whom Tom gradually wins over (and starts teaching anti-war poetry) in a sort of penguin answer to The Dead Poets Society.
Meanwhile, the political situation dramatically chances as the despotic junta take charge and anyone who challenges them are “disappeared” by the secret police. One such is Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), the teenage political activist daughter of his housekeeper Maria (Vivian El Jaber) and, while advised by Buckle to keep out of the politics, his personal tragic backstory and having seen her abducted and doing nothing prompts him to try and find out where she’s been taken by appealing to the parental nature of secret police chief, with decidedly unsuccessful and painful results.
While there’s a decided tonal contrast between the middle-aged man’s redemptive arc of atonement and the brutality of the repressive regime, the film nevertheless manages to carry it off, largely down to the combination of some laugh out loud comedy courtesy of Coogan’s familiar deadpan irony and ability to switch to engaging pathos and the irresistible scene stealing performances by the real not CGI Baba and Richard as Juan Salvador with whom everyone, Buckle included, ends up having confessional conversations. Those familiar with the true story will know that our avian hero doesn’t quite make it to credits (which include actual archive footage of those involved), but that really just adds to the feelgood and emotional punch it delivers. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Portraits Of Dangerous Women (15)
A quirky British dramedy from Swiss film-maker Pascal Bergamin, while driving her car down the country lanes, and quarrelling with her art gallery owner dad Jon (Mark Lewis Jones), stressed out primary school teacher Steph (Jeany Spark) hits a dog which, it transpires, has already been hit, though not necessarily killed, by Tina (Tara Fitzgerald), the school caretaker with a shady past. As they get out to survey the incident, troubled teen Ashley (Yasmin Monet Prince from Supacell), who’s standing at the roadside, distraughtly announces that the dog was hers.
The question as to who was to blame and what to do with the deceased canine is just the start of a series of events and unlikely connections that bring all four together with Ashley approaching Jon with a view to exhibiting a series of found photographs she’s been collecting depicting ‘dangerous women’, and essentially appointing herself his assistant and taking on aspiring painter Claude (Joseph Marcell) as a client. Meanwhile Steph adopts (briefly) an elderly cat of an elderly cat that’s a mirror of her boring partner Paul (Gary Shelford), and (equally briefly) flirts with the pet shop owner Steve (David Mumeni) while Tina, dressed up in a gold number, decides to throw a secret party in the school hall to celebrate, her divorce, something which ends up involving Jon’s police officer sister Cathryn (Abigail Cruttenden) and Steph being taken to hospital. Meanwhile, Ashley admits the dog wasn’t hers and the three women try and track down the real owner. All of which serves to explore how all three are lonely, lost and needing connections, the way they dress (Steph all floral, Tina in dungarees) acting as signposts to their self-image. Oh, did I mention the roadside grappa bar?
There’s some droll British humour as well as flashes of poignancy that keeps you engaged even if the dialogue can feel mannered and storyline and its focus on the everyday mundane tends to wander all over the place, dropping plots and characters as it goes but the cast, which includes Annette Badland and Sheila Reid as dotty old dears, are, if not exactly dangerous, extremely entertaining company. (Amazon Prime; Apple TV+)
Sinners (15)
Directed by Ryan Coogler, set in the 1932 Jim Crow era Mississippi over 24 hours, at its most basic, this is a Black take on Robert Rodriguez’s vampire horror From Dusk To Dawn but with considerably more thematic and allegorical layers about racism, family and cultural appropriation or, as Delroy Lindo’s scene-stealing blues piano playing drunk Delta Slim puts it “white folks like the blues just fine; just not the people who make it”.
Opening with gifted young bluesman, Sammie (R&B singer-songwriter Miles Caton making an impressive acting debut) aka Preacher Boy, staggers into his preacher father’s church, his face scarred and clutching the broken neck of a guitar, dad having warned him that if you dance with the devil one day he’ll follow you home.
Flashback then to introduce his cousins, the goateed Smoke twins, nicknamed in one of several blues legend puns as the blue-capped Smoke (the more volatile of the two) and red-capped, gold-toothed Stack (both played by Coogler regular go-to Michael B. Jordan on compelling double duty),back in Clarkesdale after fighting in WWI and working for the mob in Chicago. Their plan is to get rich by opening a juke joint in the sawmill they’ve bought, with stolen mob money, from local white landowner Hogwood (David Maldonado) who protests rather too forcefully that the Klan no longer exists. To which end they set about recruiting help for the opening night, starting with Sammie and his dobro then adding Slim, sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) as bouncer, Chinese grocery store owners Bo (Yao) and Grace (Li Jun Li) to paint the logo and supply the catfish to go with the 500 bottles of Irish beer they’ve acquired, and Smoke’s occult-dabbling spiritual healer ex-lover Annie (a strikingly soulful Wunmi Musako) to cook. Along the way, at the railway station Stack’s also confronted by his well-heeled, mixed-race former lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, who gets to sing Dangerous, her first new music in two years) who’s still pissed that he never returned for her as he promised and that neither of them attended the funeral of her mother who raised them when they were orphaned. While at the station, Sammie also encounters Pearline (the fiery Jayme Lawson), a young woman stuck in a loveless marriage, with palpable sparks striking between then. She’ll come to the opening night and also take to the stage to sing a smoulderingly erotic blues number. Despite being advised by Cornbred not to come in, Mary also turns up as old flames are passionately – and ultimately fatally – rekindled.
All this is a slow build-up that initially feels like some period anti-hero gangster movie with assorted dysfunctional relationships, motivations and desires. But then it switches gear as an Irish folk singer called Remmick (a manic Jack O’Connell), smoke steaming from his body knocks on the door of Klan couple Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke) begging they hide him from a posse of Choctaws. Bad move, because he’s a vampire and quickly turns them both into followers. The pace and action gathers when the three of them arrive at the club asking to be invited in (true to lore vampires can’t enter of their own accord) and play. Rebutted, they wander off but stay close, to be found singing Will Ye Go, Lassie Go? when Mary rather foolishly ventures out to talk to them. She now turned, one of the twins soon follows suit along with more of the guests and workers, ultimately erupting into a blood bath feeding frenzy as Remmick’s now swollen legion of memory-sharing followers burst in to be met with garlic, silver and wooden stakes.
To reveal who survives until sunrise would be a spoiler, but suffice to say there’s hard decisions to be made about loved ones before a bizarre hallucinatory vision about Annie and Smoke’s dead baby and the mid-credits scene with bluesman Buddy Guy as the older and successful Jamie getting two visitors from the night.
With allusion to the blues being the devil’s music, there’s times when it feels Coogler’s brought more to the thematic table than the film can support, be it the wages of sin, the nature of freedom, disenfranchisement, racism, money, power and more. Nevertheless, he never loses his grip on either character or action, delivering to remarkable musical set pieces, one with Remmick and his cult, now with numerous Black vampires, doing a wild Irish jig to Rocky Road to Dublin and the other inside the club where Sammie’s guitar playing crosses time and space in a number that blurs cultures and eras (a voiceover relates how music can pierce the veil between life and death and summon timeless spirits, among them evil ones, who Annie calls the ‘haints’) to involve an electric guitar player, a hip-hop DJ, a breakdancer, West African ceremonial dancers, women in traditional Oriental dress and a girl in contemporary gear. At two hours plus, it’s a tad overextended, but every second is invested with a molten intensity. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
The Six Triple Eight (12)
While there are flaws, you can help but think that some of the acidic criticism it’s received is more about attitudes to its director Tyler Perry than the actual film which, telling the story of the real-life second world war battalion composed entirely of Black women and the only such group to serve in Europe, is a solid, well-acted and inspirational tribute that hits all the right emotional and indignation notes.
The pivotal figure is Lena Derriecott (Ebony Obsidian), a young small town Black woman whose best friend is the white Jewish Abram David (Gregg Sulkin), a relationship that naturally does not sit well with the white folk, especially her bitchy bigoted blond classmate Mary Kathryn (Sarah Helbringer). Before he ships out, having signed up as a pilot, he gives Lena a ring asks her to wait for him. Tragically, he’s destined never to return, shot down and burned beyond recognition, a bloodied letter to her recovered by the soldier that pulled his body from the wreckage.
Grief struck, Lena too resolves to enlist, joining the Women’s Army Corps where, inevitably, she and her fellow Blacks find the same bigotry, racism and segregation they faced in civilian life. At boot camp at Fort des Moines, they’re put through basic training under the command of Charity Adams (Kerry Washington) , her tough, no-nonsense approach fuelled by a determination not to give her white male colleagues any reason to claim her soldiers weren’t up to the task, reporters always looking to embarrass the military for accepting Black women into its ranks.
Constantly pushing to be deployed to Europe, Adams (eventually promoted to Major, the highest ranking Black woman to serve in the US Army), and, a result of a campaign by activist Mary McCloud Bethune (Oprah Winfrey) who bends the ear of Eleanor (Susan Sarandon) and Franklin Roosevelt (Sam Waterson), her troops are finally assigned a mission as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion and deployed to Birmingham, and, without formal orders and adequate resources, lodged in freezing wooden buildings at King Edward’s School in Edgbaston, their job being to sort some 17 million letters to and from home that have piled up in enough bags to fill several aircraft hangers, having the knock on effect of damaging morale at both the front and back home. Given just six months, it’s a task the bigoted Southern General Halt (Dean Norris) believes they are incapable of pulling off and is determined to seem the fail. He, however, fully underestimates the 855-strong battalion and especially, Adams who, when threatened with being relieved of command and replaced by some white Lieutenant, responded “over my dead body, sir”.
With Lena’s lost letter naturally among those being sorted (setting up a moving cathartic moment), Adams comes to realise their job is far from demeaning, but of vital importance to the war effort, as the women devise ingenious ways of identifying otherwise undeliverable mail from fabrics, logos and even perfume scent.
While the real-life Derriecott and Adams are the central characters, this is very much an ensemble piece with Sarah Jeffery, Kylie Jefferson, Sarah Helbringer and Shanice Shantay among Lena’s circle, the latter scene-stealing and providing sharp comic relief as the straight-speaking Johnnie Mae (who may or may not be based on Pvt Johnnie Mae Walton) while Jay Reeves give charm as the soldier who takes a shine too (and eventually married) Lena.
Other than the opening battlefield scenes and a sudden UXB incident that claims to women’s lives, the action and tensions are wholly embodied in the combat against prejudices, Adams and the others fighting with a verbal armoury to prove themselves and seek equality and respect. Ending with photos of the real women and credit notes on what happened to some of them along with an oration by Michelle Obama celebrating the 6888, it’s not in quite the same league as the similarly themed Hidden Figures, but, like the women it portrays, it deserves far more respect than it’s been afforded. (Netflix)
Small Things Like These (15)
His first film since Oppenheimer, though the scale is smaller Cillian Murphy (who served as producer) and the intensity of the story are no less intense. Set near Christmas in 1985 New Ross, Ireland, Bill Furlong (Murphy) is a successful coal merchant, married with five daughters. One day, delivering coal to the local convent where young girls are supposedly trained for their future, he sees something that gives him pause, a women being dragged inside while her mother ignores her pleas. Going inside, he finds young women, supposedly the school’s pupils, being made to scrub the floor and one who asks for his help so she can escape and drown herself. It’s pretty clear –and one unspoken common knowledge – that the convent is, in fact, one of the infamous Magdalene Laundries, Catholic institutions little more than workhouses where unmarried sex workers and pregnant women, so called ‘fallen women’ – were sent for supposed rehabilitation, their babies taken away. Bill can sympathise, he himself being the illegitimate son of an unmarried teenage mother, though, while ostracised by her family, she was fortunate as a wealthy woman took her in as her maid.
Troubled but reluctant to get involved, his conscience is pricked on his next visit to discover Sarah (Zara Devlin) shivering in the coal shed, ostensibly locked in by accident, who asks him to help find her baby. They’re interrupted, however, by Sister Mary (Emily Mortimer) who, feigning kindness, says the girl is mentally unwell and bribes him with a hefty bonus for his wife who – along with the local publican – tells him to not get involved. After all, the church treats the townsfolk well in exchange for turning a blind eye. But, finding Sarah again in the shed, he can no longer stand idly by, reputation be damned.
Directed by Tim Mielants and based on the novel by Claire Keegan, it’s a slight story but still carries a heavy weight about, to borrow the old phrase, how evil thrives when good men stand by and do nothing. Bill’s discovery of his father is, essentially, a redundant element when the film’s thrust is the cruelty and moral turpitude of the outwardly respectable Catholic Church in a repressive Ireland as well as the underlying toxic masculinity. There’s no melodrama and dialogue is sparse, Murphy conveying his emotions through his eyes and expression while Mortimer is chilling as the corrupt and cruel Mother Superior with a fierce and intimidating stare, and the film, which is dedicated to the more than 56,000 young women who suffered in the laundries up until 1996 and the children taken from them, is drenched in a devastating melancholy. It may lack the incendiary power of Peter Mullen’s The Magdalene Sisters, but its quiet anger is no less compelling. (Amazon Prime; Apple TV+; Sky)
Touch (12A)
A departure from his usual action movies, adapted from the novel by Olaf Olafsson, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur delivers a decades and continents-spanning romantic melodrama of memory, ageing, loss and love that will inevitably but also deservedly prompt comparisons with Past Lives. An elderly Icelandic widower who owns a restaurant in Reykjavik and sings in a local choir, Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) learns he has early onset dementia and is advised by his doctor that it might be a good time to settle any unresolved business. To which end, much to his somewhat overbearing daughter’s consternation, he heads for London just as pandemic lockdown looms (the only guest at his hotel with the 2 metre rule giving the title an extra resonance), to try and find his first love, the less conservative daughter of the stern but fatherly owner of Japanese restaurant Nippon, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), for whom, he worked as a dishwasher after dropping out of the London School of Economics some 50 years earlier (the reference to John and Yoko’s bed-in places it in 1969), his Marxism at odds with his studies.
As such, the film moves back and forth between Kristofer’s present day search, the restaurant now a tattoo parlour, and 60s flashbacks to his youth (Palmi Kormákur, the director’s son) and the growing but clandestine romance with Miko (Yôko Narahashi) as he teaches himself Japanese, the tones of the cinematography changing accordingly. There’s a poignant backstory involving Hiroshima regarding why Miko and her father moved to London after the war that adds further emotional resonance to the narrative, the relationship coming to abrupt end when Kristofer discovers they have closed the restaurant at short notice and just vanished. Back in the present, he learns they moved back to Japan, setting up the third act as he travels to Tokyo to finally reunite with the now older Miko (Yoko Narahashi, also the film’s casting director) and learn of her new life and why she left the old one.
Switching languages and locations, a film about accepting your life and the changes that accompany it, it slowly build its melancholic warmth in its tale of compassion, understanding and forgiveness, interspersed with amusing and touching sidebars such as the older Kristofer’s sake bar encounter with a Japanese “salary man” widower (Masatoshi Nakamura) that ends up with them doing karaoke together, and the younger man being persuaded to sing for his Japanese friends not to mention a truly sensual scene of Kristofer preparing a Japanese breakfast for Miko.
With grace notes support from Meg Kubota as Nippon waitress Hitomi, Tatsuya Tagawa as opera-singing chef Arai-san and Ruth Sheen as young Kristofer’s nosy landlady and a soundtrack that takes in Nick Drake and The Zombies, it’s a beguilingly bittersweet gem that truly puts the touch into touching. (Sky Cinema)
Warfare (15)
Co-written and directed by Alex Garland and Iraq veteran Ray Mendoza, based on memories of what took place, this tells how, in 2006, a Navy SEAL team, Mendoza (played here by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) among them, found themselves pinned inside a house in Ramadi, Iraq, during the American occupation, taking heavy casualties before they finally escaped. An echo of Blackhawk Down, while certain characters come to the fore it’s basically an ensemble piece that, with only basic characterisation, tells it how it was rather than embellishing with the usual war movie cliches and emotional interiorisation. It’s loud (but without any score), visceral, graphically bloody (a body is blown apart, guts spilling out, a leg lying in the street) and fully immersed in the chaos of the firefight, the frantic efforts to survive and the piercing screams of the wounded. There’s courage under fire but the film never attempts to glorify anything.
Following a prelude of the team crowded round a monitor watching a tacky aerobics work out video with women thrusting their pelvises to a cheesy dance number, it shifts to night as the soldiers commandeer a house, isolating its two families in one room for their safety and setting up a sniper position as they monitor the comings and goings outside, the enemy mostly seen through either a rifle scope or in pixilated black and white drone footage. As a unit, no one soldier is singled out for particular attention, backstory or monologue, Alpha One leader Erik (Will Poulter), radio operator Mendoza, sniper Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis, one of the casualties and survivors to whom the film’s dedicated) on a makeshift platform peering through a hole in the wall assisted by Frank (Taylor John Smith) taking notes on movements, gunner Tommy (Kit Connor) with brain trauma fogging his senses, ANGLICO Capt McDonald (Michael Gandolfini), Petty Officer Sam (Joseph Quinn) and Jake (Charles Melton), in charge of Alpha Two that comes to assist all getting equal time with the camera as events unfold.
The tension is palpable as, learning air support will be temporarily available and seeing the local gunmen massing, you wait for some 30 minutes before the inevitable arrives, here manifesting in a grenade tossed through a window. Getting a fighter plane to demonstrate a ‘show of force’ and stir up dust clouds, Erik calls in an armoured Bradley for a CasEvac of Elliott under cover of a smoke canister, but an IED explodes, eviscerating one of the translators and leaving Sam and Elliott with grotesque wounds to their legs. When Alpha Two, the ‘frogmen’, finally make it inside, they’re still pinned down by gunmen on the rooftops and, their superiors refusing to send other vehicles only for them to be destroyed, Jake get his radio op to impersonate a CO to call for two more Bradleys. It’s just a matter as to whether they can survive in the time it will take them to arrive.
The performances are compelling, urgent but restrained (other than the screams for morphine), the sound design fully immersing you at the heart of the action, the silence at times even more deafening than the gunfire, explosions and screams, the meat grinder mayhem never lets up, exercising white knuckle grip on the audience as you’re assaulted by the terror and fear that floods from the screen.
credits juxtapose photos the real combatants (some their faces blurred) with their on-screen counterparts, a tribute to their bravery but most certainly not something to have wannabees banging on recruitment centre doors. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue; Until Sun: Mockingbird)
The Woman In The Yard (15)
Depressed and an emotional wreck following the death of her husband David (Russell Hornsby) in a car crash, herself in a leg brace, Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) can barely bring herself to get out of bed let alone stock up on groceries to feed her two kids, combative teenager Tay (Peyton Jackson) and his sparky young sister Annie (Estella Kahihi), or contact the power company to get the gas back on. Then looking out of the window of their unfinished dream house, she sees a woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) dressed in black, lace covering her head, sitting in their Georgia farmyard in an iron-cast chair. She hobbles out to confront her and, sound clearly travelling the distance well, hears her say that today’s the day and reveals hands with blood on them. Going back in, she tells the kids she’s probably confused and wandered from some mental home. But the woman remains. Not just that but she moves closer to the house. On top of which the dog disappears and we see the chickens in the hen roost are bloodied and dead.
For a long time not a lot happens but director successfully build a creepiness Jaume Collet Serra as Ramona, a former artist gets edgy, losing her temper with her children and having flashbacks to the accident. A further flashback to herself and Daniel indicates that the perfect life in the country she thought she was getting isn’t so perfect after all, she losing her sense of self in having to devote all her time to help build the fixer-upper dream and look after the kids. At some point, seemingly propelled by the woman’s shadow, objects start flying around, terrifying Annie. The woman also prompts Tay to push his mother for the truth about how the accident happened
The question, of course, is who or what is this woman. Is she death, is she a metaphor for Ramona’s trauma, is she fate come to provide deliverance. And today’s the day for what? At one point you might find yourself asking who among the characters is dead. There’s some teasing cues, the film Ramona and Daniel are seeing visiting is The Mirror Has Two Faces and, in practising her writing, Annie always reverses the ‘r’. But even come the cathartic climax, involving the woman, Ramona and a rifle with a single bullet pointing to perhaps suicide as escape from guilt, it’s still muddled and obtuse, a vague riff on The Shining perhaps, that never quite seems sure of where it wants to go. Nonetheless, the suffocating dream it conjures in just that simple image as well as the metaphorical unravelling scenes of Ramona imagining unpicking her stitches or yanking up the dog’s buried chain, should keep Black Mirror fans happy. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe)
Woman Of The Hour (15)
Ana Kendrick not only stars but makes a very impressive directorial debut in this true crime recounting of 70s serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) who, when eventually caught, was convicted of five murders though the estimated number of victims was far higher (he killed two, a woman and young girl, while out on bail). As seen in the opening in 1977 Wyoming, posing as a photographer looking for models, he would lure women to a remote spot before killing them during a sexual assault. The film depicts two further victims, that of young runaway Amy in 1979 San Gabriel (she escaped, leading to his arrest) and, in a change of routine, flight attendant Charlie in 1971 New York City whom he kills after helping her move into her apartment.
The story centres, however, in 1978 Los Angeles where, after a string of failed auditions, struggling aspiring actress Sheryl (Cheryl) Bradshaw (Kendrick) is persuaded by her agent to appear as a contestant on the TV show The Dating Game. She thinks it’s beneath her but with the potential to be spotted as well as meet potential suitors, she agrees, turning up to her episode in which she has to ask questions of the three bachelors hidden behind a partition. Bachelor #3 is revealed to be Rodney.
Much to the annoyance of the host (Tony Hale), Sheryl ditches the banal prepared questions and starts asking her own, confusing dim-witted Bachelor #1 with one about philosophy and exposing Bachelor #2’s sexism. Alcala, though, is smooth and charm her, they winning a romantic trip for two to Carmel. However, a member of the audience recognises him as the man she saw with her friend, who was later found murdered but, just as the police didn’t respond to reports by survivors, isn’t taken seriously by the show’s security. Meanwhile, out in the parking lot, after the show, Sheryl’s having reservations about her intended date, especially when, having brushed him off after they’ve been for drinks and his mood shifts, he starts following her.
As director, Kendrick adeptly builds the tension and navigates the film’s themes of sexism and misogyny and how women so often have to bear the burden of proof when reporting assault, though is less assured in the generic narrative mechanics, the abrupt ending feeling somehow tossed away, leaving credits to wrap things up. However, as Sheryl she delivers another strong and multi-faceted performance while Zovatto is suitably chilling and the creepily smooth but compassionless long-haired Alcala. An impressive debut, it’ll be interesting to see how she builds on this. (Netflix)
A Working Man (15)
Adapted from a novel titled Levon’s Trade after its protagonists name, this reunites Jason Statham with The Beekeeper director David Ayres but a wholly generic but watchable enough thriller along the lines of Taken, except here, Levon Cade, a former black ops Royal Marine turned Chicago construction site foreman who, after a bried moment of reluctance. is forced to reawaken his old self and rescue Jenny Garcia (Arianna Rivas), the feisty daughter of his boss Joe (Michael Peña) who took him in when none else gave him a chance, who, it transpires has been kidnapped for sex trafficking in a convoluted plot variously involving Russian mobsters (Jason Flemyng is prominently billed but quickly gets drowned) , privileged predators, the facilitating kidnappers and a veteran turned drug dealing biker gang leader (Chidi Ajufo). To which you can also throw in Cade’s blind former army buddy (David Harbour) whose life he saved.
To flesh out the psychological impetus, Cade’s wife committed suicide and his resentful father-law restricts access to his cutely precocious daughter ( ), which is why he’s sleeping in his car and living in grubby digs to save money for a custody battle. Co-written by Ayres and Sylvester Stallone, it’s full of holes (why would he stake out the target house parked a few feet away barely concealed by bushes?) and well over half of the film (repetitively drawn out over two hours) simply Statham bloodily working his way through an army of goons, colourful characters including Didi (Maximilian Osinski), Flemyng’s flamboyant middleman son and seriously fashion-challenged underlings Viper and Artemis. Ultimately, it’s Statham 101 with no surprises and preciously interest in character, but undiscriminating fans will get exactly what they pay for. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Screenings courtesy of Cineworld 5 Ways & Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe
CINEMAS
Cineworld 5 Ways – 181 Broad St 0871 200 2000
Cineworld NEC – NEC 0871 200 2000
Cineworld Solihull – Mill Ln, 071 200 2000
The Everyman – The Mailbox 0871 906 9060
MAC – Cannon Hill Park 0121 446 3232
Mockingbird – Custard Factory 0121 224 7456.
Odeon Birmingham, 0871 224 4007
Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe – Ladywood Middleway 0333 006 7777
Odeon West Bromwich – Cronehills Linkway, West Bromwich 0333 006 7777
Omniplex Great Park, Rubery www.omniplexcinemas.co.uk/cinema/birmingham
Reel – Hagley Rd, Quinton, Halesowen 0121 421 5316
– Birmingham Road, Maney, Sutton Coldfield 0121 492 0673
Vue Star City – Watson Road 08712 240 240