This column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.
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Polite Society (12A)
The feature debut by British writer-director Nida Manzoor, creator of the TV series We Are Lady Parts, mashes up a whole bagful of genres, pouring coming-of-age high school comedy, Bollywood movie, martial arts flick and even references to Jane Austen into the blender and pouring out the results in a glorious smoothie that may not be nutritious but is crammed with fun and flavour.
With an almost entirely Pakistani cast, it’s set in London where, much to the mortification of her traditional career-seeking parents (Shobu Kapoor, Jeff Mirza), teenager Ria Khan (engaging newcomer Priya Kansara) dreams of becoming a female stuntwoman – The Fury – like her idol, real-life British stuntwoman Eunice Huthart, whose signature flying kick she consistently fails to pull off. She’s besties with her older sister, Lena (Umbrella Academy’s Ritu Arya) and constantly needles her to resume her art school studies after having dropped out in a self-confidence crisis, things often getting out of hand as they squabble.
So, she’s horrified when they’re both forced to attend an end of Eid party hosted by one of her mother’s wealthy acquaintances, the imperious and condescending Raheela Shan (Nimra Bucha) and even more so when she learns that Lena is not only dating her geneticist son of Salim (Akshay Khanna) but has also gotten engaged (she apparently has a perfect womb) and will be taking off to Singapore immediately after the wedding.
And so, with the help of her uncool school chums Alba and Clara (Ella Bruccoleri and Seraphina Beh adding solid comedic support), she sets out on a plan to sabotage things, initially looking to try diplomacy but rapidly escalating to trying to dig up dirt (including disguising themselves as men to infiltrate his gym) and, when that fails, invent some (at one point she breaks into the house to scatter used condoms).
It is, as everyone observes, all totally out of proportion. Until, that is, Ria discovers exactly what Salim and Raheela are up to (a touch of Jordan Peele here), at which point it becomes a frantic race by the three friends to stop the wedding before it’s too late.
With a winkingy gleeful and knowingly ludicrous screenplay that, refreshingly peppered with all the sensibilities and sweariness of modern Pakistani youth pulls together Bash Street Kids escapades, torture by waxing, all female martial arts fights (including one with well-trained beauticians), a Bollywood dance sequence and yellow chapter title cards with a clear nod to Tarantino/Rodriguez grindhouse. Vastly funnier than What’s Love Got To With It (and certainly with loads more stunts). further adventures by the Khan sisters would not go amiss. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Electric; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)
Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story Of The Once And Future Heavyweight Champion Of The World (12A)
An unwieldy title perhaps, but you can’t say it doesn’t succinctly sum up the film. While a friend who’s into boxing insist fans of the sport and Foreman especially will rubbish the inaccuracy of the way the bouts are recreated, but, directed by George Tillman Jr, this offers a workmanlike biopic that dutifully marks off all the significant checkpoints.
So, born into a poor family in Houston to good Christian, anti-boxing mom Nancy (Sonja Sohn) who slices hamburger into four for the kids, teenage George (Austin David Jones) beats up the kids who tease him, then as an adult (Khris Davis making a decent literal and metaphorical fist of things) enlists in paramilitary organisation Job Corps in the 60s in search of a future, where, impressed by the power of his punch, he’s taken under the wing of boxing coach Doc Broadus (Forest Whitaker). He goes on to win gold at the 1968 Mexico Olympics (and is dissed back in his neighbourhood for waving the flag rather than a fist for Black Power), meets, marries and has a kids with Paula (Shein Mompremier), a fictional amalgam of this first three wives, knocks out Joe Frazier to become World Heavyweight Champion, cheats on the wife, is defeated by Ali (a miscast Sullivan Jones) in the famous Rumble In The Jungle in Zaire, finds God after having a near death experience when he’s pummelled by Jimmy Young in 1977, gives up boxing, becomes a preacher, meets and marries the devout Mary Joan (Jasmine Matthews), has more kids (in all, seven daughters and five sons, all named George Edward), opens his own youth community centre, learns his alcoholic financial manager (John Magaro) has left him broke, and is reduced to making BBQ sauce commercials before reuniting with Doc and making a comeback, going on to win the title for a second time in 1994 at the age of 45, this time drawing on faith rather than rage.
Part boxing movie, part faith movie (his epiphany comes when he prays for his sister not to lose her baby), it’s a celebratory affair that looks to shine the inspirational torch and largely skates over Foreman’s darker sides (he is, after all, executive producer), favouring the avuncular image of his older years. It doesn’t offer anything fans don’t already know but as a primer for those who are likely more familiar with the grill that bears his name, it’s a decent ringside seat. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Reel; Vue)
Little Richard: I Am Everything (12A)
Although chart success soon petered out once Elvis arrived to claim the title of the king of rock n roll, it’s an indisputable – though largely unacknowledged – fact that, as he himself never tired of pointing out, he was the originator, whose influence, both in music and mannerisms, would inform the likes of Bowie (a big fan), Prince, Rick James and, today, Harry Styles
Born in 1932 in Macon, Georgia, one of 12 children and the son of a church deacon who also ran moonshine and operated a nightclub, ‘Little’ Richard Penniman was music’s answer to the big bang, taking influences from R&B and gospel (Sister Rosetta Tharpe prime among them) and transforming them into an electrifying, primal and sexual force. He’d already had a huge R&B hit with Tutti Frutti (in a cleaned up version, the homosexual anal sex lyrics rewritten) before Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel and it’s often stated that white performers like Elvis (who covered Tutti Frutti), Jerry Lee Lewis (Good Golly Miss Molly) and later The Beatles (Lucille) appropriated black music – and Little Richard in particular, but historian Zandria Robinson prefers to term it obliteration, meaning that black music wasn’t just stolen but the artists were swept under the carpet. It’s hard to believe that the ultra- wholesome white Pat Boone sold more copies of both Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally than Richard did.
Clearly a fan, Lisa Cortés’s documentary sets out to reframe the perspective and in so doing also illuminates how, while reinventing music for a new young audience and being patently queer (both in sexuality and flamboyance), he was also often at war with himself, twice renouncing secular – i.e. the devil’s – music to follow gospel and preach God’s word and conflicted over his sexuality (his father through him out because of his effeminate ways), famously declaring God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, and having an affair with an underage girl, Audrey Robinson aka burlesque dancer Lee Angel.
Drawing on interviews with ethnologists, historians, musicians past (among them members of his old band) and present (Jagger, Tom Jones, Nona Hendryx), director John Walters (whose pencil moustache he wears in tribute) members of the LBGT community and relatives and peppering her film with archive clips of him performing (both musically and in interviews), while it omits certain aspects (his molestation as a child, his male lovers), it offers an illuminating insight into his music, career (he once performed in drag as Princess LaVonne with Sugar Foot Sam from Alabam’) and personality (especially how his pompadour hairdo, use of make-up and costumes and even upright piano playing style were influenced by early 40s openly gay musicians Billy Wright and Esquerita), his magnetic showmanship in front of the camera (he was always very funny, even when making barbed comments on how his contribution to rock and roll had been ignored, as he says in one interview “I’m not conceited. I’m convinced”) seeming an overcompensation for an innate shyness and insecurity.
Cortés use of visual imagery of stars and galaxies exploding, scattering CGI fairy dust whenever the music is heard or mentioned is a touch overdone, but that’s a minor quibble in a long overdue documentary that sets Little Richard at the top of the rock n roll pantheon where he truly belongs.(Mockingbird)
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (12A)
Adapted by Rachel Joyce from her own 2012 novel and directed by Hettie Macdonald, this tells how, learning his old work colleague Queenie (a briefly seen Linda Bassett) friend is in a hospice with cancer, retired pensioner Harold (Jim Broadbent), inspired by an anecdote about giving hope from a young woman in a petrol station, resolves to walk all the 500 miles (thankfully no Proclaimers on the soundtrack, the songs provided by folkie Sam Lee) from his home in Devon to see her in Berwick-On-Tweed and hand deliver the letter he’d originally intended to post, much to the displeasure of his grouchy wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton, holding up her own with a finely tuned performance veined with pain, bitterness and grief).
It’s hard not to draw comparisons with 2021’s The Last Bus in which Tim Spall played a pensioner who, using his free bus pass, travels from John O’Groats to Land’s End England, to return to where he and his wife grew up and scatter her ashes, becoming, as here, a media event and accruing a virtual and physical following in the process.
That, however, felt more credible than Harold’s journey (for which he’s poorly equipped without even a map) during which he sends his money and credit cards home and gets back to nature sleeping rough, eating wild fruit and accepting the charity of strangers, and, naturally, there’s an underlying back story revealed in flashbacks that involves a family heartbreak (cue flashbacks to a drug addict son), a marriage that’s gone off the boil that needs to recover the spark, and an attempt to regain a sense of purpose.
Like Spall, Broadbent disappears into his character, even if this is now rather familiar territory for him, and, the film keeps the tweeness dialled down as it present a warts and all snapshot of contemporary Britain, but ultimately, you may feel worn out long before Harold does. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Electric; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Reel; Vue)
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65 (12A)
On a two-year expeditionary mission to pay for treatment for his ill daughter (Chloe Coleman), seen in the opening sequence and home movie flashbacks, Mills (Adam Driver), an astronaut from an advanced civilisation, crash lands on an unknown planet when his ship’s hit by an asteroid storm and finds himself the only survivor save for Koa (Ariana Greenblatt from My Spy), a young girl who speaks a language he doesn’t understand. He also finds that the planet is home to ferocious dinosaurs. That’s because this is Earth 65 million years ago. And so we’re off into a sort of reverse Planet Of The Apes meets Jurassic Park with Driver having to beat off the admittedly scary beasties, navigate quicksand, lethal geysers, killer flora and keep Koa (ooh, surrogate daughter syndrome) alive and find an errant escape shuttle and get off the planet. Before that impending extinction event.
On paper, while preposterous, it might sound promising, especially given it’s written by the pair behind A Quiet Place. But given a screenplay that never seems to have gone beyond a preliminary draft, a stream of well-worn sci fi clichés and clunky dialogue (though strictly speaking monologue since the girl only copies what Mills says), it all falls repetitively flat. Driver’s too good an actor to not bring weight to his character, but then again he’s also too good an actor for something this forgettable. (Until Tue: Vue)
Air (15)
An underdog sports movie with a difference in that here the underdog isn’t a person but a company. Directed by Ben Affleck from a script by Alex Convery, it tells how Nike, while hugely successful in selling sneakers, was outstripped by its rivals Adidas and Converse in marketing basketball shoes, unable to secure an even half decent player to raise their profile and with the basketball division under threat of closure. Which is when, in1984, having studied footage of him in action, maverick talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (a pleasingly paunchy Matt Damon) persuaded Buddhism-obsessed Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight (Affleck, laid back in a curly wig and tracksuit cool) to follow his own rule of breaking the rules, and put the year’s entire quarter-million-dollar player budget behind just one man, a 21-year-old Chicago Bulls rookie who’d never put foot on an NBA court: Michael Jordan. Not only that but he persuaded Knight to let him, Marketing exec Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), and Creative Director Peter Moore (Matthew Maher), create a shoe specifically for Jordan which they intend to name Air. The point being, as Strasser says, “A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it”.
An Adidas man, Jordan, however, had no interest in signing with Nike, so Vaccarro took the unprecedented – and unprofessional – step of cutting out the middleman, Jordan’s agent David Falk (a hilarious Chris Messina scene stealing with the most hilariously sweary scene in years) and driving out to make his pitch directly to Jordan’s parents, James R. Jordan Sr. (Julius Tennon) and Deloris Jordan (Tennon’s real life wife Viola Davis). His mother, basketball’s equivalent to tennis’s King Richard, is the crux but, while she’s impressed with his balls and how he spells out just how negotiations with the rival bidders will go, she’s also a wily businesswoman who knows exactly what she wants for her son. Not least driving an agreement whereby he got royalties from her show sold bearing his name, a revolutionary contract that changed the face of basketball.
If you know anything about basketball, you’ll be well-aware of his Jordan, hailed as the greatest sportsman ever, not only saved Nike but the entire NBA so it’s daring but sensibly genius of Affleck to choose never to include him in the film other than as a briefly observed out of focus figure with only one word of dialogue. Affleck directs with unbridled confidence, using archive footage to capture the period, while he and every other major player in the film, which also includes Chris Tucker as former player turned Nike exec Howard White, and Marlon Wayans in a one scene appearance as 1984 Olympics coach George Raveling (a character Jordan insisted was included, just as he stipulated Davis play his mother), delivers an awards worth performance, with Damon and Davis especially on fire. It soars all the way to a perfect slamdunk. (Cineworld Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
All Quiet On The Western Front (15)
Written in 1929, telling of the horrendous conditions and mass slaughter experienced by young German soldiers on the frontline in WWI, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel is one of the greatest anti-war novels of all time. Though previously filmed twice, the Academy Award winning 1930 version and a 1979 TV film, this is the first in German from a German director (Edward Berger), and with a wholly German cast.
Outstanding newcomer Felix Kammerer is the central character, Paul, a young student keen to do his bit for the Kaiser, God and the Fatherland who forges consent to enlist along with his friends, Albert, Franz and Ludwig (respectively Aaron Hilmer, Moris Klautz and Adrian Grünewald) all expecting it to be over within months and something of a cushy ride with the French fleeing before then.
There’s a foreshadowing of what’s actually in store in the opening sequence where corpses are stripped of their uniforms which are then returned to Germany to be washed, repaired and recycled to the new recruits, Paul receiving one with the name tag Henrich and being told it was probably too small for him. On arrival in France, they’re given a brutal baptism of fire (Ludwig killed the first night) as it quickly becomes clear they and everyone there are just cannon fodder for the blinkered officers and bureaucrats still deludedly thinking they can win.
There are some moments of light relief, Paul and the roguish Kat (Albrecht Schuch) stealing a goose from a local farmer to feed their mates, Franz having a night of passion with a French woman, the camaraderie of the small group that now includes the veteran, Tjaden Stackfleet (Edin Hasanovic), grown close during their time at Ardennes, but otherwise this is relentlessly grim and harrowing as any notions of heroism or valour are tramped into the blood-soaked mud, bodies are blown to pieces, dog tags of the dead are collected and an ever growing number of black coffins are piled into mass graves.
Unfolding over two and a half hours, the battle scenes are visceral and terrifying, flamethrowers turned on surrendering soldiers, bodies pulped by tank tracks, a room of young recruits gassed to death, the agonising slow death throes of a French soldier Paul stabbed, a black shroud of bleakness enveloping everything until eventually Paul is the group’s only survivor.
Meanwhile, sickened by the senseless losses, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Bruhl who would have surely played Paul in younger days), the German Minister of Finance, is seeking to secure an armistice with the French, headed by General Foch, whose uncompromising demands for German capitulation are not well-received by Erzeberg’s superiors (seen enjoying fine food and wine as opposed to the troop’s turnip bread), and particularly career officer General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow), who orders one final, fatal assault five minutes before the 11am ceasefire.
The film punctuated by gunshot like percussive notes, Berger pulls no punches in depicting the horror, both personal and mass, of the war, the dehumanisation of the fighting, while the addition of the signing of the armistice aboard a train has Erzberger presciently observing how the terms will lead the German people to resent the peace, ultimately giving rise to Nazism and WWII. It’s tough to watch but, in light of current conflicts and the rise of nationalism around the world, it’s a very important reminder of the need for sanity. (Netflix)
Allelujah (12A)
Adapted by Call The Midwife’s Heidi Thomas from the 2018 Alan Bennett play, directed by Richard Eyre and with a stellar cast that includes Judi Dench, Jennifer Saunders, Russel Tovey, Derek Jacobi and David Bradley, it’s hard to see how this grey pound dramedy about cuts to the NHS could fail. But fail it does. Set in Wakefield in a fictional community hospital where various wards are named after celebrities who donated to its upkeep, the Bethlehem, or the Beth, as it’s affectionately known, is facing closure as part of cuts by the never named but clearly Tory government which wants cost-efficient centres of excellence with high profile success rates. What it doesn’t want is things like the Shirley Bassey geriatric ward where the old folk have music therapy sessions (the title prompting the party piece Get Happy ), the impossibly charming Dr Valentine (Bally Gill), actually Valiyaveetil but no one can pronounce it – who oozes kindness and compassion on his rounds, declaring how much he loves old people, while the pragmatic Sister Gilpin (a wavering accent Saunders), who’s about retire and get a medal for her long service, concerns herself with which patients are on the incontinence list. Maybe the film budget was tight but they, resolutely chipper Nurse Pinkney (Jesse Akele) and sullen work experience Andy (Louis Ashbourne Serkis) appear to be the only staff.
The friends of the Beth are running a campaign to keep it open and a local TV crew are here to make a documentary about the fight to save it, interviewing the preening CEO (Vincent Franklin) and the predictably eccentric patients, among them pompous, grammar-pernickety former English teacher Ambrose (Jacobi chewing scenery), retired librarian Mary (Dench) more interested in the marginalia of reader’s annotations than books themselves and to whom the world of iPads is alien, the flirty Lucille (Marlene Sidaway) with her innuendos and Joe (David Bradley)m a cantankerous ex-miner who’s been transferred there to deal with an infection (and is in no hurry to go back to his previous hospital). He also happens to be father of Colin (Tovey), a consultant to the Health Minister who recommended the closure, from whom he’s estranged on account of his son being gay and right wing, though it’s debatable which he resents most. Colin’s in town to visit the old man and make his final assessment for recommendations (and that he has a change of heart is a no brainer) while further problems arise when a newly admitted dementia patient (Julia Mackenzie) who’s had a fall, unexpectedly dies, this prompting the wrath of her daughter and son-in-law who wanted her to hang for inheritance tax reasons and now demand an enquiry. Indeed, the mortality rate on the ward seems to be rather high, three of them popping their clogs in just a few days, which is where the play takes a not entirely surprising swerve into The Good Nurse territory.
Vestiges of Bennett’s dry humour remain to inject a few laughs into the otherwise terminal dialogue, though a running gag abut bedpans is surely taking the piss, but the social commentary is about as subtle as an enema, not least for a bolted on Covid coda and a jarring to camera monologue from Gill that only just falls short of asking the audience to bang some pots. It’s quaintly watchable enough but is probably better suited to a Sunday evening on BBC1 with a mug of Horlicks. (MAC)
The Banshees of Inisherin (15)
It’s 1923 and over on the Irish mainland civil war is in full force (we know this because there’s some occasional smoke and sound of gunfire), but on the beautiful island of Inisherin life is calm and peaceful, the folk going about their (and sometimes other people’s) business and gathering in the pub at 2pm for a glass of the hard stuff and a chat. Which is what Pádraic (Colin Farrell), a mild-mannered farmer with a couple of dairy cows, a horse and his beloved donkey Jenny, who lives with his sister Siobhán (a quietly compelling Kerry Condon), has been doing for years with his fiddle-playing best mate Colm (Brendan Gleeson). However, on the day the film opens, Colm declares he doesn’t like him anymore and wants nothing more to do with him. Pádraic is bemused and confused. He believes himself to be a nice guy, though he may go off on one after a whisky or two. Has he done or said something? Apparently not, it seems that Colm, sunk in despair, has contemplated mortality and wants to get on with writing his music and not spend the rest of his days with someone he regards as dull with nothing to offer but inane chatter and protestations of being nice. When Pádraic continues to push for explanation, initially thinking it was an April Fool jape, Colm declares that, if he talks to him again, he will cut off one of his fingers and send it to him. It’s not a bluff. Five fingers later there’s been parental child abuse, a prediction of doom from the local crone (Sheila Flitton), an animal choking to death on a severed digit, a drowning, a leaving and a conflagration.
Reuniting with his In Bruges stars, the title taken from Colm’s new tune, again mining the theme of obsession writer-director Martin McDonagh addresses in Three Billboards, it’s a black comedy of male pride and loneliness that balances darkness and whimsy (with everybody feckin’ this and feckin’ that) equal measure as it builds to an act of violence. As such, he’s ably supported by a sterling support cast that includes David Pearse as the mean priest, Gary Lydon as bullying copper Kearney who is turned on by the idea of being paid six shilling to oversee an execution on the mainland and regularly batters and molests his mentally challenged son Dominic (a superb Barry Keoghan), who fancies Siobhán and just wants the company of someone who doesn’t abuse him.
It doesn’t quite pull off its parable of events reflecting the “bleakness and grudges and loneliness and spite” of a wider and equally self-mutilating conflict and, at the end of the day and the escalation, all it seems to be asking for is a little peace and quiet with your own thoughts. It’s a quiet, slow burning masterpiece with a banshee wail that will pierce the heart. (Disney+; MAC)
Beautiful Disaster (15)
Adapted from the young teen romance novel by Jamie Maguire, this reunites co-writer and director Roger Kumble with his After We Collided star Dylan Sprouse for what feels like a pick and mix of genres that co-stars Fall’s Virginia Gardner. She plays Abby Abernathy, a child poker prodigy tagged Lucky 13, who, as the film begins, is, tired of bailing him out, cutting out on her fallen star LA gambler father Mike (Brian Austin Green) and heading to join her best friend America (Libe Barer) at college in Sacramento. Here she meets tattooed campus bad boy Travis Maddox (Sprouse), the brother of America’s boyfriend Shepley (Austin North), a cage fighter in his spare time whose relationship are only ever for one night. She immediately declares she’s not interested, so naturally the rest of the film involves them inevitably coming together, largely driven by her losing a bet over one of his fights that means she has to spend a month living in his room in the apartment he shares with Shepley and America. There’s a meet cute with his dad and other assorted brothers, a brief dalliance with another would-be suitor, a drunken birthday party with a great vomit scene, and the obligatory fall out and make up arc. But then, the last third takes off in a completely unexpected direction as an LA double-cross thriller as Abby is forced to resume her poker career to prevent a casino boss breaking her dad’s legs, only to be called out as underage (Vegas requires you to be over 21) and Travis stepping up to take on a fighter called Chernobyl to try and save the day.
Punchier than you might expect from a romantic teen drama with some smart dialogue and Gardner and Sprouse making a lively double act, it’s not a great film but it is an undeniably entertaining one. (Mon:Vue)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (12A)
When Chadwick Boseman tragically died two years, not only did the world lose on the greatest actors of his generation, but it cast a huge shadow over the future of the character and franchise he had launched. Recasting with another actor would have been an insult to his memory but ditching the idea of a sequel was equally unthinkable given both its financial potential and how it had proven that a super-hero movie with an all-black cast could be a box office triumph. Fortunately, an alternative had already been trialled when, after Steve Rogers abdicated the role of Captain America at the end of Avengers: Endgame, the mantle was taken up by The Falcon in the ensuing TV series as he transitioned to take up the shield and the title. And so here, the film, again directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler, introduces another version of the Black Panther, the legendary protector of the Wakandan people, played by one of the already existing cast (given the feline nature of the suit, it’s not too hard to guess who that is). However, the new incarnation doesn’t appear until almost two thirds of the way through its extensive running time that adds an ironic note to the film’s title. Meaning there’s an awful lot of plot-set up to get through first.
It opens with Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) working frantically to find a heart-shaped herb cure for the mysterious illness from which her brother T’Challa is dying. She fails and, according suitable ritualistic pomp and circumstance for a celebratory funeral, he’s consigned to the realm of the ancestors, via his coffin being taken up into the skies on a Wakandan jet, leaving his mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) as the nation’s temporary ruler and Shuri consumed with anger at the world that she was unable to prevent his passing.
Meanwhile, the geopolitical plot driver is set in motion with Western powers wanting to get their hands on and exploit Wakanda’s vibranium resources, attempting to take it by force while Ramonda is addressing the UK, only to be repelled by General Okoye (Danai Gurira) and her warriors; the Queen declaring that the previous mineral will never leave her lands. However, it turns out that Wakanda isn’t the only place it exists on Earth and that, thanks to a machine invented by genius college student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), there’s also evidence of it under the Atlantic Ocean. At which point, the CIA-vessel searching for it is besieged by mysterious warriors and everyone killed. Naturally, the Wakandans are suspected, but, in fact, the real attackers were a blue-skinned underwater race known as the Talokan, led by their ruler Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), a superstrong half-human mutant with tiny wings on his angles. He duly turns up unannounced, blaming Wakanda for quest to obtain vibranium and telling her to find and deliver the scientist responsible for the machine to him, to be killed, or he will attack Wakanda. Oh, and not to tell anyone about him.
All of this takes an inordinate amount of time with only bursts of action to punctuate proceedings, during which, with the help of CIA agent Ross (Martin Freeman), Shuri and Okoye visit her in Washington to try and take her to Wakanda for her protection, Riri and Shuri ending up being captured by Namor and taken to his realm (where we get his origin story and some spectacular shots of his underwater city), where he proposes an alliance to destroy the surface world, an angry Ramonda stripping Okoye of her rank, a rescue by Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), T’Challa’s lover who’s been living in Haiti since The Blip in the Avengers series, and a retaliatory attack on Wakanda that results in yet another royal death. It’s around this point that the real action finally kicks in with a visit to the ancestral plane (cue a reappearance by Michael B. Jordan, as the usurper Killmonger), the emergence of the new Black Panther and the big Wakanda/Takonan showdown complete with some new high tech Wakandan armour.
Fuelled by loss, grief, vengeance, mercy, moral choices, oppression and colonial exploitation of Third World resources among things, it carries a weighty thematic dynamic that at times feels like an overload, but give the film a more mature and sober edge than many of its Marvel companion pieces. On top of which, following The Woman King, it’s the second film this year constructed around virtually all female Black cast. Returning names include Michaela Coel given a bigger role as Aneka of the royal guard and Winston Duke as belligerent Jabari tribesman M’Baku, while among the new additions are Mabel Cadena as Namor’s cousin Namora and Alex Livinalli as the Talokanil warrior Attuma (a renegade warlord and Namor’s enemy in the comics) with famed singer Baaba Maal cameoing as the funeral singer. The performances are strong throughout, but it’s a ferocious Bassett, the electrifying Wright, a fierce Gurira and impressive Mexican newcomer Mejía in his first leading role who generate the high voltage with Thorne’s spunky teenager setting up her role as Ironheart, a rocket-suited teenage Iron-Man, in the upcoming TV series.
And, inevitably, Boseman’s presence haunts the film, both in constant references to T’Challa’s death and, in the final moments, poignant archive footage from the first film, giving the revelatory moment in the obligatory mid-credits scene a hefty emotional punch. (Disney+)
Bodies Bodies Bodies (15)
Directed by Halina Reijin, this pitch black horror comedy for Gen Z is one of the year’s best. Accompanied by her enigmatic working-class new Eastern European girlfriend, Bee (Borat’s Maria Bakalova), recovering addict Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) turns up at a weekend hurricane party at the secluded mansion home of wealthy but toxic (“I look like I fuck. It’s my whole vibe”) childhood friend David (Peter Davidson), much to the surprise of the other spoiled brattish guests who include David’s drama queen actress girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), airhead podcaster (“Hanging out with your smartest, funniest friend”) Alice (Rachel Sennott, her bemused 40-year-old new Tinder boyfriend Greg (Lee Pace), and Sophie’s ever sceptical old flame Jordan (Myha’la Herrold). Another, Max, left earlier following a fight with David.
Tensions are clearly evident, to which end, the others fuelled by drink and drugs, she suggests they play the titular murder in the dark-style game in which each player slaps their friend across the face and takes a shot. After which, one of them is randomly appointed as the killer. However, the slaps rather less than playful, Greg, a group outsider like Bee, decides to retire early and David, who the others have decided is the killer, storms off after another fight with Emma. Only, the power out, to appear at a window clutching at his throat. Now, Sophie’s car battery dead, it’s down to the others to work out who the real killer is as they explore the house by the light of cellphones and flashlights. At some point a gun surfaces.
Riffing on themes of false friendships, paranoia, distrust, jealousy, faux activism and white feminism and making effective use of the claustrophobic lighting and score, it builds the tension as the body count continues to rise as secrets are revealed and the rocky relationships between the group unravel, though to reveal more would spoil the revelations. Peppered with smartly comic dialogue along with the high pitched drama and some bloody violence, the entire cast bring solid, compelling performances to their characters although it’s Davidson, Sennott and Bakalova who, in their different ways, shine the brightest. Even if the final moments are slightly anti-climactic, a wholly unexpected last act twist throws the group dynamics into stark relief while reinforcing the core themes it’s been exposing. This is what happens when you’re cut adrift from your social media and the real world erupts. (Microsoft Store; Rakuten TV; Sky Cinema)
Creed III (15)
As well as reprising the title character, Michael B. Jordan also confidently takes up the directing reins for this third instalment in the Rocky spin-off, one that muddies the clear cut moral waters of the previous outings in both franchises. Now retired from the ring, he’s enjoying the fruits of his success , running a gym and living in a plush L.A. mansion with his successful pop star wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson), herself now in quasi-retirement due to hearing loss, and their deaf daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent), with whom he communicates in sign language. Bianca’s now writing and producing songs for others, while Adonis is mentoring hot-headed new heavyweight champion, Felix Chavez (Jose Benavidez). But then his world’s upended with the arrival of a figure from the past, Damian “Dame” Anderson (Jonathan Majors), fresh from spending 18 years behind bars for reasons shown in the opening sequence of their delinquent childhood and various subsequent flashbacks that add extra detail as to what happened when the young Adonis (Thaddeus James Mixson Jr.) beat up an old nemesis outside a liquor store, Dame (Spence Moore II) intervened with a gun when he was being grappled with and the cops showed up.
A former amateur Golden Gloves champ, Diamond Dame now wants his shot at the big time, the unwitting Adonis, in a mix of guilt and friendship, and stung by a retort reminding him of how he got his own shot as a contender, offering to train him at the gym under Duke (Wood Harris), who sagely suggests it’s not perhaps a good idea given how he’s driven by anger and resentment.
When, following a record release bash where an incident brutally removes Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu) from the upcoming world title bout, Adonis gives Dame his shot, pummelling Chavez to win the title, given the formulaic nature of such films, it’s not hard to predict that the two former friends will end up in the ring together, one in black one in white in Westerns tradition. However, the journey there, one which involves the inevitable training montages, Adonis confronting his past, the discovery of prison letters from Dame he never saw and the exit of a Creed family member from the series, is nonetheless dramatically powerful. As well as ramming the punches home with slow motion rippling flesh as body blows land, Jordan also finds a way to bring something new to the big showdown as the boxing arena transforms into something more existential as the crowds vanish and the ring ropes are replaced by prison bars.
Thompson is somewhat sidelined, but Jordan again brings dynamite charisma to the screen, even so he’s outshone by Majors, delivering a double whammy following his current turn as Kang The Conqueror, in an electrifying embodiment of passive-aggressiveness, arrogance and anger fuelled by a long simmering feeling of being betrayed and abandoned and his future snatched from out of his gloves.
It’s hard to see where Jordan could take Adonis’s story from there, but hey, maybe those scenes with him giving the plucky young Amara pointers on how to deliver a punch might yet resolve into a gender-switch sequel some years down the line. (Sky Store; Until Tue: Vue)
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (12A)
It’s been 23 years since the first adaptation of the first role-playing phenomenon that has established itself as one of the world’s most successful board games was released to coruscating reviews and box office disaster, Since then there’s been a couple of sequels, one for TV and one direct to DVD, neither of which fared much better. Now, however, 11 years since the last outing, directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley and co-written with Michael Gilio, and with no connection to its predecessors, it has been reborn to deservedly thunderous acclaim to stake a claim as one of the year’s most entertaining, enjoyable and spectacular adventure movies.
In this revision, a peak self-mocking Chris Pine is Edgin Darvis, a former member of the Harpers until his wife was killed by a Red Wizard, following which he went rogue and, looking to make a new life for himself and his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman),, joined forces with street-tough barbarian warrior Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), amateur sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith), and con artist Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant in gloriously smarmy scenery chewing villain mode). Infiltrating a former Harper stronghold to steal the Tablet of Awakening that can resurrect his wife, they’re exposed and, while Forge and Simon escape, Edgin and Holga are caught and so it is that two years in, we find them appearing before a prison parole tribunal, pulling off a daring escape and seeking out Forge, only to learn that, now the Lord of Neverwinter and acting as Kira’s guardian, he has turned her against her father (saying he abandoned her for personal gain) and is, in fact, in league with his accomplice, Sofina (Daisy Head), a Red Wizard, and orders their execution. So, following another close call, with plans to break into Forge’s vault to get the Tablet of Reawakening, Edgin and Holga (who’s nursing the pain of a broken heart) track down the sweetly insecure Simon who suggests they also recruit Doric (Sophia Lillis), a sharp-tongued human-hating elfin-eared shapeshifter druid on whom he has a crush, to join the team but, without sufficient magic to disable the defences, a corpse question time with assorted dead warriors results in them calling on the ultra-cool, self-assured, irony-oblivious Xenk Yandar (Regé-Jean Page), a paladin and the sole survivor of the Thay, who were crushed by the Red Wizards, who holds the secret location of the Helmet of Disjunction that will help them overcome the barriers surrounding the vault.
Needless to say, things don’t go too smoothly and after another series of scrapes with assorted dead and living forces, the team end up finding themselves taking part in an old series of gladiatorial Games staged amid mazes in a giant arena that Forge has revived and which he intends to use to steal a fortune from the gamblers and make off with Kira, and for Sofina to turn everyone into zombie slaves. So, no pressure then.
Played out in a series of escalating quests and levels, it rattles along shooting of witty one-liners as it romps from one elaborate action set piece to another, variously involving undead assassins and fire-breaking dragons, a portal-opening hither and thither staff and a bout of lute playing. Featuring eye-popping state of the art digital effects and cinematography, knowing self-aware dialogue, outstanding cast chemistry and a screenplay than can shift from wild slapstick to piercing poignancy at the snap of a finger, not to mention a star turn cameo playing Holga’s dwarf former lover, this will be every D&D fan’s wet dream (with a pleasing nod to characters from the game during the maze sequence) but has more than enough chutzpah to knock the fantasy socks off anyone with even a passing interest in family-fuelled franchises like Game Of Thrones, Lord of the Rings or even Fast and Furious. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Reel; Vue)
Elvis (12A)
As highly melodramatic as it is stylised, Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley pretty much follows the adage of going with the myth (or perhaps fairy tale) when it’s better than the facts. As such, much is brushed over or ignored (his affair with Ann-Margret, , his meeting with Nixon demanding action against the lefties, no mention by name of his legendary backing musicians Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana and while there’s the pills but no Fat Elvis cheeseburger binges), while other parts polish the realities (the young Elvis – Chaydon Jay- may indeed have had his R&B education by hearing Big Boy Crudup singing That’s Alright Mama in a juke joint or gospel by sneaking into a revival meeting, but, despite what the film shows, he and B.B. King weren’t best buddies who hung out together on Beale Street, though they were famously photographed together). Ultimately though, while overlong, this is a solid if flashy portrait of how he became the best-selling solo music artist and a legend whose influence continues to this day set against his relationship with his manipulative svengali manager Col. Tom Parker whose contract stipulated 50% of all earnings, eventually, after Presley’s death, being charged with financial abuse.
Parker, an illegal Dutch immigrant named Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk who claimed to be American and earned the honorary title of Colonel after assisting Jimmie Davis’s campaign to become Governor of Louisiana, was a carnival snake oil showman – or snowman – who got into the music business managing Hank Snow before ‘discovering’ Presley after hearing his Sun recording of That’s Alright Mama and seeing dollar signs to learn that the singer was white not black and seeing how his gyrations exploded sexual frenzy in his teenage girl audience (“She’s having feelings she wasn’t sure she should enjoy”, Parker notes). He’s played here under heavy jowelled prosthetics by Tom Hanks with an accent that sounds nothing like Parker but does, appropriately enough, conjure up the rasp of the serpent from Eden (though the visual suggestions he was Jewish are unfounded) while opposite him Austin Butler delivers a star-making surprise BAFTA winning turn in the title role, capturing his passions, his insecurities, vulnerability and trusting innocence, his voice a close approximation of Presley and looking spookily like him in the iconic poses, although more often he resembles a young John Travolta with the same electrifying charisma.
Although (unreliably) narrated with a running commentary by Hanks as the ailing Parker after Presley’s death, justifying his role and rejecting accusations that he exploited him and essentially caused his death, the screenplay, clearly makes him out to be the villain of the piece, using his flimflam skills, promises of wealth and fame and, ultimately, emotional and financial blackmail, to maintain his control of Elvis even when he was briefly fired in order to secure the money to feed his gambling habit (he negotiated Presley’s five year cash cow deal to be perform at the International in Vegas in return for having his debts cancelled, a point hammered home with the ‘caught in a trap’ line from Suspicious Minds) while his not having a passport being the reason he scuppered any plans for Presley’s international tours. In his commentary, Parker rejects being responsible for the star’s death, going to far as blaming the fans and their obsessive desire to see him keep performing.
As usual for Luhrmann, its delivered in a dizzying rush of over-saturated colour, dissolves, chronological acrobatics and even animation (though the decision to include contemporary hop on the soundtrack is a major misfire). It touches – albeit not in any great depth – on the contentious issue of whites appropriating black music (Presley’s frequently shown in the company of Black performers like King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Little Richard and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, clearly a fan of their music, alongside segregation (childhood poverty meant his family had to live in neighbourhoods meant only for people of colour) and the impact on him of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Ticking the biographical boxes of his army service (apparently engineered by Parker to avoid him being jailed for degeneracy), the inane conveyor belt movies, his devotion to his mother Gladys (Helen Thomson), his inept business manager father Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), his marriage to (and eventual divorce from) Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), and, of course, Gracelands.
A stand out section is the 1968 Elvis comeback special, intended by Parker (to please the sponsors) to be a cosy Christmas special with seasonal sweaters and fireside, but which Presley, in cohorts with director Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery), turned into his rock n roll resurrection in black leathers and ending, following Bobby Kennedy’s shooting, with his stark performance of If I Can Dream. Likewise the recreation of the lavish Vegas performances, though perhaps not as dramatically effective as the scenes of the young Elvis discovering the sexual magnetism in his swivelling hips.
Musically leaving the building ending with Elvis singing Unchained Melody in his final Vegas season before the end captions wrap up his death and Parker’s comeuppance, while superior to Bohemian Rhapsody and ultimately coming in second place to Rocketman, this is Luhrmann’s best since Moulin Rouge. (Amazon Prime; Sky Cinema)
Enola Holmes 2 (12A)
Targeted at young girls who feel in the shadow of their older brothers or not taken seriously simply because they are not boys, this fun and ingeniously plotted sequel returns to 1880s London where Enola Holmes (Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown), sister of the famous detective Sherlock (Henry Cavill), has, inspired by her success in cracking the case in the first film, has set up her own detective agency. Unfortunately, her age and sex deter any potential clients and she’s just about to jack it in when a young girl named Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss) turns up asking her to find her older ‘sister’, Sarah (Hannah Dodd), who’s gone missing after being accused of theft at the local match factory where they both work in poor conditions for pitiful wages and where many other match-girls have been dying of typhus.
Infiltrating the factory, Enola discovers that Sarah did indeed steal something; not money but pages from a ledger, and so, the game afoot, launches a complicated plot and a series of clever clues about corruption and cover-ups that link to a case that has Sherlock baffled involving money that has gone missing from the Treasury being funnelled through several apparently unconnected banks, All of which variously has Enola going undercover at a society ball and being given urgent on the spot dance lessons by romantic interest Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), so she can get to talk to William Lyon (Gabriel Tierney), the son of the factory owner and Sarah’s lover; match-girl Mae (Abbie Hern), who, like Sarah, also works at the music hall and Enola being pursued and arrested for her murder by the decidedly sinister Inspector Grail (David Thewlis), his brutal bobby accomplices and the bumbling Inspector LeStrade (Adeel Akhtar); a rescue by her suffragette mother (Helena Bonham-Carter) and martial arts landlady Edith (Susan Wokoma); a string of cryptic ciphers; and yet another murder all coming together with a swords and fisticuffs climax at the theatre and an inspired twist involving the introduction of Sherlock’s genius nemesis Moriarty.
Delivering messages of sisterhood, of both being self-reliant but also working together for a common goal, the effervescent, perky Brown is a delight, frequently talking directly to the camera as the film breaks the fourth wall, and Cavill has been given a lot more to do this time round as the two end up working together (at this point there is no Watson in his life, but hang on for the mid-credits scene) while the character of Sarah and the final scenes are inspired by the real Sarah Chapman who worked in a match factory, led the first matchworkers strike in 1888 and helped form the Matchworkers Union. Great fun, so roll on No 3. (Netflix)
Evil Dead Rise (18)
Somethings refuse to die, and so it is that Sam Raimi’s franchise, which began in 1981, continues to rise from the grave into which increasingly poor and derivative sequels threw it, not least the 2013 reimagining which dispensed with any of the original black humour in favour of lashings of gore and buckets of blood. The same formula holds true for this latest reboot by Irish director Lee Cronin who apparently drenched set and cast with 6,500 litres of fake blood, presumably paid for with the money saved on the script.
There’s just the bare bones of a plot. After a shaky cam intro and a lakeside prologue in which a possessed woman scalps another and then kills her annoying jerk friend with a drone scalped, things switch to LA a day earlier where, recently abandoned by her husband, tattoo artist Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) lives with her three kids and now visited by her long absent guitar tech sister Beth (Lily Sullivan), When an earthquake opens up a hole in the nearby parking garage, teen son Danny (Morgan Davies) and his sister Bridget (Gabrielle Echols discover a hidden bank vault from where he recovers an ancient book – the Necronomicon – and a bunch of 78s. She, is understandably put off by the illustrations it contains, and tells him to get rid of it. Naturally he doesn’t and instead starts playing the records which, obligingly provide the basic exposition as, recorded by some priest, the last survivor, it explains that incanting from the book unleashes unkillable (cue sequel potential) demons. And so it is that Ellie’s soon possessed, dies, comes back to life and starts trying to turn the rest of her fractured family into monsters too, killing off various neighbours along the way until it’s just down to Beth and her young niece Kassie (Nell Fisher) left trying to find a way to stay alive and destroy Ellie and her brood.
And that’s pretty much it. Sutherland dives tight in, chewing up lines like “mommy’s with the maggots now” with gleeful relish but, while the film offers a few novel kills (one seen through the fish-eye lens of a door) and creative ways of inflicting bodily harm (a cheese grater), and ends with a chainsaw nod to original, it’s never remotely scary while the thin, shallow, empty and soulless story (with a frankly redundant pregnancy subplot) never connects you with the characters. If all you want is vomit, bugs, decapitations, and impalement though the soft palate to go with your popcorn, then this certainly gives you your money’s worth, but otherwise this is a gruelling experience in all the wrong ways. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Electric; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (12A)
Having done blockbuster style business on its brief cinema release, Rian Johnson’s second Agatha Christie/Sherlock Holmes –inspired whodunit now resides at Netflix, returning Daniel Craig as the intriguingly accented Southern dandy super-sleuth Benoit Blanc (and with a surprise star cameo indicating his sexual orientation) as he embarks on another convoluted case.
The Disruptors, a tight knit inner circle who go back to college days when they committed to disrupting the status quo, have all received a complex puzzle invitation for an annual get together with Elon Musk-esque billionaire mutual friend Miles Bron (Edward Norton), the CEO of high tech online network Alpha who styles himself as some utopian hippy, on his private Greek island (dominated by the titular architectural showpiece and adorned with masterpieces that may include the actual Mona Lisa) for a murder mystery weekend, the murder they have to solve being his.
The clique includes Birdie (Kate Hudson), an airhead fashion model turned influencer prone to unwitting racist tweets and forced to take responsibility for a sweatshop that manufactures her line, her assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick), compromised Connecticut governor Claire (Kathryn Hahn) whose campaign is being underwritten by Bron, obnoxious machismo-overdrive right-wing men’s-rights YouTuber Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) and his barely-dressed young girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline) who he’s suing to seduce Bron into giving him a slot on Alpha News, put-upon corporate scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr) constantly subjected to a barrage of faxed demands from Bron, and, surprisingly, Bron’s ostracised by everyone former business partner Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe), who had the original idea for Alpha but got shafted by Bron having refused his plan for Klear, a potentially dangerous hydrogen-based alternative fuel source. More surprisingly, given he has no connection to any of them and Bron didn’t invite him, is the inclusion of Blanc with his natty cravat and one piece swimsuit. For some reason, the island is also home to resident slacker Derol (Noah Segan, in a sly nod to the previous film).
It’s impossible to reveal much without ruining the intricately constructed narrative with its misdirections, twists and turns, flashbacks, reversals and reveals as events play out to the island’s minimalist high tech backdrop with its passive-aggressive anti-smoking alarms, but suffice to say, there’s a definite agenda to the gathering, and one or possibly two actual murders (Blanc solves Bron’s game version almost as soon as he arrives) as Blanc and Brand work together to get to the bottom of Bron’s machinations and unpeel the onion’s multiple layers.
The message that extreme wealth corrupts is fairly obvious but is generally secondary to the enjoyment of watching Blanc unpick the threads to a backdrop of dazzling costume design and cinematography, Craig clearly having a huge amount of fun while performances by Monáe, Norton, Bautista and especially a wildly amusing Hudson are all an utter delight. Not to mention an array of cameos that include Ethan Hawke, Hugh Grant, Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Natasha Lyonne, Yo-Yo Ma, Serena Williams and even Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the voice of Bron’s clock, the Hourly Dong. (Netflix)
Godland (12A)
A visually striking but dour two hours plus period drama about faith and identity shot in a square box radio and set in a remote corner of 19th century Iceland, this follows Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), an emotionally withdrawn Danish priest, as he tries to establish a Christian church in a characteristically remote part of Iceland, documenting his journey, for which he elects to take the most perilous route, with the camera he hauls on his back , the opening credits announcing that the film was supposedly inspired by the discovery of seven glass-plate photographs. To assist him on his somewhat thankless mission, he enlists a Danish-Icelandic translator (Hilmar Gudjónsson), and the gruff Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) as his guide, a simmering feud developing between them.
The plot and cast are fleshed out with Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) and Ida (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir), the daughters of withdrawn widower Carl (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann),the former lined up as Lucas’s prospective wife, as, to a forbidding, hash and chilling landscape backdrop, it meditates on themes of colonialism, dependence, faith, nature and entitlement as, isolated from and unwilling to connect with his new community, it charts Lucas’s psychological meltdown. Not perhaps up there with similar works such as Wrath of God and The Mission, but for those with the patience its terrible beauty will linger. (Sat: Mockingbird; Sat/Sun: MAC)
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande (15)
Directed by Sophie Hyde and written by Katy Brand, this is a two-hander that plays very much like a stage play of three acts and an epilogue and is structured entirely around the conversations between its two characters. These are Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), a good-looking, well-toned young Irish Black man who runs a business service as a sex-worker, and his client, Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson), a recently widowed fiftyish ex-teacher, who has booked a plush hotel room to have sex. Naturally, neither are using their real names. He’s smooth, polite, articulate, non-judgemental and well-versed in how to interact with people, she’s insecure and nervous, confessing that she’s never had – and thinks herself unable to have – an orgasm and only ever had sex with her late husband. He experienced, she far from it, the first session is mostly a cat and mouse game about the two getting to know each other, he trying to calm her anxieties, she finding reasons not to go through with what she’s hired him for.
It’s funny but also piercingly sad as she gradually opens up about her disappointments, the stagnation of her marriage, her husband’s unchanging and brief sex routines, her feelings about her son and daughter and her general view of herself as a failure. It ends with them finally concluding the deal. At the next session, she’s seemingly more confident, having drawn up a fuck-it list of what she wants, staring with oral sex. However, she continues to prevaricate while, over the course of this and the third session, the focus shifts more to Leo, who she presses on his life outside work, his relationship with his mother and sibling, something he’s reluctant to discuss as we come to realise that behind his self-assured persona, his life too his engrained with disappointments, hurt and insecurity (he’s seen checking himself out in the mirror on several occasions, and not for vanity).
It eventually comes to a head where, not understanding how boundaries work, she confronts him with his real name and we learn the heartbreaking reality of his background before he storms out. The epilogue is a final meeting, the relationship between them somehow changed, and introduces a third character, a hotel waitress that Nancy (who reveals her real name in a wry filmic in-joke) used to teach.
Slowly learning more about Leo and Nancy’s inner worlds and emotional scars is part and parcel of what makes this such a terrific work and to give away more would ruin the pleasures and poignancy of the screenplay and the performances with their tremendous chemistry. Suffice to say, embracing shame, frustration, body image, the nature of sex workers, parent-child conflicts, desire, and sexual healing/therapy, it’s a wonderfully compassionate and very human work. McCormack, previously seen in Peaky Blinders delivers a magnetic star-making turn that conveys depth and complexity in the most simple of physical gestures while, in her first nude scene, Thompson, bristling with nervous energy and navigating a lifetime marked by lack of self-worth, guilt, unhappiness and disappointment, gives a luminous, multi-faceted performance that is unquestionably the finest of a stellar career. From foreplay to climax, this will leave you with a glow of satisfaction. (Rakuten TV)
How To Blow Up A Pipeline (15)
Almost a poster child for Extinction Rebellion, Cam director Daniel Goldhaber turns eco-activists into heroes rather than terrorists in his incendiary adaptation of Andreas Mann’s non-fiction book advocating that climate activists should abandon their commitment to absolute non-violence. Taking influences from Michael Mann’s drama Thief and French thriller The Wages of Fear, with gritty cinematography by Tehillah De Castro, he’s transformed it into a white-knuckle heist thriller in which a group of committed activists come together to sabotage an oil pipeline in the West Texas desert, blowing it up at two points but ensuring no polluting oil spillage occurs.
The group is essentially led by Native American Xochitl (co-writer Ariela Barer), whose mother’s just died during an abnormal heatwave, and also comprises fellow disaffected activists disillusioned by the lack of impact peace protests have brought, bomb expert and fellow Native American Michael (Forrest Goodluck), who shares his explosive experiments on social media, picketer Shawn (Marcus Scribner), who, meeting him during the making a well-intentioned but ineffectual documentary, recruits Dwayne (Jake Weary), a thirtyish Texas native radicalised by an oil company looking to drive a pipeline through his family homestead, Xochitl’s childhood bestie Theo (American Honey’s Sasha Lane, who turns out also be a victim of toxic pollution) and her lover Alisha (Jayme Lawson), and, another pair of lovers, the self-styled eco Bonnie and Clyde, Logan (Lukas Gage) and Rowan (Kristine Froseth) who may well have been compromised by the feds.
It’s a slow build as, at times working with flashbacks, the group come together, begin to acquire the materials they will need and then head out to an abandoned property to assemble their bombs, aware that the slightest mistake could cost them their lives (the scenes of Michael creating the wiring are as intense as any UXB scene). The result is one of the year’s most effective and gripping thrillers, including a race against the clock when an unforeseen hiccup almost derails the plan.
A companion piece to the similarly themed Woman At War, fuelled by the terrific ensemble cast, pulsating electronic score and the nerve-shredding propulsive intensity of the narrative with its somewhat unexpected climax, this is one of the year’s best. (Mockingbird)
Infinity Pool (18)
Sharing his father David’s fascination with body horror and identity crises, writer-director Brandon Cronenberg takes its title from swimming pools constructed as optical illusions where the water seems to have no boundary. There’s few boundaries here either in an unhinged film that, breathing deep from the fumes of The White Lotus and Eyes Wide Shut, features semen splashing on stones as one character masturbates another and blades graphically skewering flesh. It’s set in a highly fortified exclusive resort compound in the fictional and ultra-conservative Eastern European island of Li Tolqa to which James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård on incendiary form), an insecure novelist who’s not been able to follow-up his flop debut, has come for inspiration with his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), the daughter of his publisher. Here he meets self-professed fan Gabi (a fearless, electrifying Mia Goth) who invites him and Em to, first, dinner and then, although guests are supposed to leave the compound, a beach picnic with her shifty husband Alban (Jalil Lespert). Much alcohol is consumed and, driving back in the ‘borrowed’ car, James hits and kills a local farmer. They leave the body, abandon the car and return to the resort, assuming no one will know. But then, in echoes of The Forgiven, the police come calling and James is fingered in the death and ordered to be executed by the dead man’s young son. Tied to a stake, with his abdomen exposed, he’s duly butchered. But then the camera pans to the spectators, Alban, Gabi, a horrified Em and…James. It appears that, for a fee, the police, as headed by the dour Thresh (Thomas Kretschmann) can create a clone, with all the same memories. As such, while being forced to watch your own death, this essentially gives those with money the licence to get away with anything. And, it transpires, there quite an enclave of hedonistic doubles.
A dark and often surreal satire on wealth, power and colonial tourism (as such echoing Triangle Of Sadness), it gradually amps up the drama and grotesquery with an over the top drugs-fuelled orgy and, James unable to leave without his passport, he and Em increasingly drawing apart while he and Gabi becomes more entangled as it builds to a tense, unnerving finale as James tries to leave and finds there’s no getting away from the club. Be sure you can stomach the membership before you buy your ticket. (Fri/Sat: MAC)
John Wick : Chapter 4 (15)
Spin-offs and prequel appearances notwithstanding, the emotional final scene would pretty much seem to confirm this is the final chapter in the series, bowing out in with a flamboyant 169 minute (word is a 225 minute version may surface later) clipped dialogue epic tsunami of fire, fist, knives and sword fights that may be overstuffed but never drags.
Hiding out in the New York lair of the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) from the High Table to whom he still has an obligation and who have placed a $2million bounty on his head, antihero assassin Wick (Keanu Reeves at his Clint Eastwood drawl finest) is planning his revenge. This takes him to Morocco (cue homage to David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia) where he kills the Elder, resulting in the fascist rich kid Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), the current New York High Table top dog, taking revenge by stripping Winston (Ian McShane), who failed to kill Wick, of his role as manager of the Continental, killing his concierge Charon (the late Lance Reddick) and blowing up the building. Then, threatening to murder his daughter, he forces blind retired assassin Caine (martial arts virtuoso Donnie Yen), just one of many biblical references, into accepting the hit on his old friend. Cut to Tokyo where Wick’s taken refuge at the Osaka Continental, run by loyal old friend Shimazu Koji (a quietly charismatic Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter Akira (pop star Rina Sawayama who sings the film’s theme song), but it’s not long before the High Table enforcers, led by the Marquis’s seemingly indestructible right-hand man Chidi (Marko Zaror), and Caine arrive, demanding Wick be given up, leading to the first of a series of knowingly over-the-top extended fight sequences that ends up with one wounded, one dead and Wick again on the run.
Returning to New York, he learns from Winston that there is a way to bring things to an end. Under High Table traditions, he can challenge the Marquis to single combat and be freed of all obligations. The only problem is that he first needs to accepted back into the Berlin crime family the Ruska Roma and to do so he first has to kill Killa (Scott Adkins), the overweight, lavender-suited German Table head with gold gangsta teeth who murdered his adoptive sister Katia’s (Natalia Tena) father. And even having done that (cue another amped up sequence set amid a sea of night club dancers), there’s still the small matter of getting to the Sacré-Cœur in Paris before sunrise to carry out the duel, which, if he fails to do, will result in his and Winston’s execution, as his second, which means, armed with a top end gun and a wearing a ballistic suit, surviving Chidi, the High Table muscle and the dozens of freelance assassins all looking to collect the $20million and rising bounty, and soundtracked on their way by an on air DJ spinning things like Nowhere To Run. One of whom is Mr Nobody (Shamier Anderson), a cool and composed tracker, who with his lethal dog sidekick (which becomes an important plot turning point), has been keeping tabs on Wick, keeping him alive until the Marquis agrees to the fee he’s asking. All of which culminates in the reluctant Caine, who the Marquis has nominated to act in his place, and Wick facing down each other in a pistol duel moderated by the Harbinger (Clancy Brown).
Opening with shots of a fist hitting a bloodied punchbag, stunt choreographer turned director Chad Stahelski stages an increasingly elaborate and inspired sequence of balletic fights, among them a thrilling blazing guns car chase around the Arc de Triomphe, one filmed in an overhead doll’s-house view in a labyrinthine building and, finally, the spectacular climax set on the Rue Foyatier in Montmartre, the 222-step stairway leading to the Basilica and down which Wick is sent tumbling at least twice as the hordes continue to come. After nine years, during which time the narrative has got bigger and more complex, this is one big eye-popping gift-wrapped thank you to the legions of fans who have transformed it into an iconic franchise. Will you love it? Yeah. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Luther – The Fallen Sun (15)
It was inevitable that, at the end of the fifth BBC series, with DSI John Luther (Idris Elba) being sent down for doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, that his story wouldn’t end there. And so it is that Netflix have picked things up with this feature-length outing that brings both a bigger budget and a bigger plot that seems to have strayed in from an overblown bombastic screenplay that, while still written by Neil Cross, might well have been pitched and rejected as a potential for Bond or Batman.
Directed by series veteran Jamie Payne, who does at least have a good eye for aerial shots of London, it opens with Luther investigating the disappearance of a young bloke called Callum (lured into a trap with a long missing and long dead woman, apparently kept on ice, found in the car) and promising his mum that he will find him before exposure of his bending of the rules lands him in court and then jail. However, in this reworking, all his troubles have been engineered (shades of Ernst Blofeld in No Time To Die) by the film’s deranged creepy villain, David Robey (Andy Serkis in plastic suntan and a wig from hell), a former city trader who has acquired compromising footage on any number of people (Callum among them) which he uses to DSU Odette Raine (Cynthia Erivo), to a conflagration in which several bodies, Callum’s included, are fund hanging from the ceiling, and then sends a recording of the boys dying screams to Luther in his cell via an FM radio channel, taunting him by saying they’d met before, it’s not long before our redemption-seeking hero is devising a prison break so he can track down his nemesis before Raine and her team, into which his retired former boss DSU Martin Schenk (Dermot Rowley) has been recruited, catch up with him.
Gradually, and following several people leaping to their deaths in Piccadilly Circus, Robey’s preposterous – and surely staggeringly expensive – masterplan is revealed as being to stage a live streaming snuff porn Red Room where punters of varying perversions can virtually join and watch and pick how their chosen victim (he has a cell load of abducted refugees lined up) is killed.
It’s all wildly nonsensical and frequently incredibly violent, riddled with any number of plot all before, by way of a chase through an abandoned underground rail tunnel and Robey’s connection to a woman with a burned, disfigured face in a private hospital that (like the film’s title) never really makes much sense, ends up at his remote snowbound Red Room hideaway in the frozen Norwegian wilds and a showdown that involves Luther, Raine and her abducted daughter.
It moves along at a fair lick with plenty of action scenes to keep you going and along with his trademark coat and car, Elba brings his familiar world-beaten but still unbowed portrayal but at this point, and given the surrounding plot, which randomly throws in everything from Se7en to Saw and Scandi-noir, there’s nothing new to add, although it does end with a set-up for a potential new government agent spin-off that rather amusingly alludes to all that talk of him being a potential new 007. (Netflix)
Missing (15)
Written and directed by Nick Johnson and Will Merrick, who masterminded the virtual photography on Searching, this adopts the same approach by having all the action seen through cameras on CCTV, laptops, mobile phones, smartwatches and live feeds. As with the previous films, it involves a missing character, here that being Grace (Nia Long), the mother of computer wizard June (Storm Reid), whose father (Tim Griffin), as opening edited nosebleed footage indicates, died of cancer when she was young. Grace is now involved with Kevin (Ken Leung), with whom she’s setting off for a vacation in Colombia, leaving instructions for her daughter to pick them up from the return fight. And so, waking after a drunken house party, she duly turns up to find no mum. It seems she didn’t get on the plane and, calling the Cartagena hotel, it turns out all the luggage is still there.
Initially contacting FBI Agent Park (Daniel Henney) at the consulate, frustrated that they may not recover the hotel’s CCTV in time, she also recruits bargain basement local moped-riding Taskrabbit freelancer Javi (Joaquim de Almeida, adding some nice humour along with a dash of surrogate dad and the importance of parent-child communication) to investigate, his search turning up that Kevin bought a padlock from a local hardware store. That turns out to have a romantic explanation, but now, using her hacking skills, June’s digging into accounts, cracking passwords and discovering Kevin’s got a shady past. And then footage emerges of he and Grace being apparently kidnapped, the mystery compounded when Park asks if her mother ever went by another name. Cue conspiracy theories and national TV speculations.
To say more would spoil the twist and turns the film takes as a whole range of things don’t turn out to be what they appear, but between Reid’s sparky lead performance, the barrage of hi-tech and such Easter eggs as a true crime TV series that June watches, this is compelling, well-crafted viewing that totally draws you into its world, though, as a parent, it also sounds alarm bells about just how easy it might be for your children to unlock all those password protected secrets you thought were so secure. (Cineworld NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Mummies (PG)
Directed by Juan Jesús García Galocha and revoiced from the Spanish original, this is very much in the tradition of Disney princess-hero movies with messages about finding your own voice, overcoming fears and becoming the person you were meant to be, it even has a couple of Frozen-like numbers (I’m Today and New Song sung by Karina Pasian) and cute animal pet. And it’s all rather fun and, at times, laugh out loud funny. Formerly a champion ancient Egyptian charioteer, Thut (Joe Thomas) lives in the afterlife in an underground world of living mummies, both human and otherwise, where, having retired due to having lost his confidence following a fatal accident, he now spends the time signing autographs for his fans and looking after Sekhem (Santiago Winder), his boomerang throwing baby brother who has a pet crocodile. It’s Sekhem’s antics which accidentally end up causing him to be the man a magical phoenix is supposed to identify as the one Princess Nefer (Eleanor Tomlinson) is commanded to marry by her Pharaoh (Sean Bean) father. Needless to say, neither are very keen on the idea. However, if Thut doesn’t, then his tongue and eyes will be removed.
A more pressing concern arises, however, when the wedding ring which Thut has been entrusted with his life, is stolen by scheming British archaeologist Lord Carnaby (Hugh Bonneville) who, along with his bumbling, bickering twin sidekicks Dennys and Danny (Dan Starkey), chances upon his trophy room in the underground city, resulting in Thut, Sekhem, Nefer and the croc winding up in London in an attempt to recover it where they accidentally find themselves appearing in a production of Aida where Nefer steals the show and attracts the attention of Asian music producer named Ed (Shakka) who turns her into a pop star, thus fulfilling her dreams of wanting to sing, a notion frowned upon by her mother (Celia Imrie). Now, if they do recover the ring, she will have to choose between returning home or staying in the world of the living, even though, under bright white light, her true nature is revealed. But then there’s also the small problem that, having discovered the truth about the trio, Carnaby has his sights set on a much bigger attraction for his exhibition.
The plot may be overly familiar and clichéd, Thut and Nefer naturally fall in love despite all their protestations (though when did you last see a Disney princess who snored!), but, featuring a stream of amusing culture clash jokes (Sehmen quickly taps into the modern world and technology), some lively chases variously involving a London bus, a chariot and a bulldozer, that will entertain kids and grown-ups alike it’s well-animated, energetically paced and engagingly voiced with a soundtrack that includes Nickleback’s Far Away and, of course, The Bangles’ Walk Like An Egyptian, this is far better than the reviews would have you believe. (Mon: Vue)
The Old Way (12A)
It may come as a surprise to learn that this is the first time Nicolas Cage has made a Western. And while hardly a classic, this by the numbers directorial debut by Brett Dono who is serviceably enjoyable enough with Cage giving one of his more modulated performances. Set in Montana, he plays Colton Briggs, a feared gunslinger who, in the opening sequence, guns down both several officials and the men trying to prevent the hanging of Boyd McAllister, the brother of notorious bandit Walter. Suffice to say, when the smoke clears. Briggs has killed both brothers, leaving only Boyd’s young son James as witness to events.
Years later, having found love with a good woman and had a daughter, the now clean-shaven Briggs has hung up his guns and runs a small store. One morning he takes daughter Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) with him, leaving Ruth (Kerry Knuppe) back at home. As she’s hanging out the washing, four men turn up, Boots (Shiloh Fernandez), Big Mike (Abraham Benrubi), and Eustice (Clint Howard) and the now grown James McCallister (Noah Le Gros) who’s out for revenge. Returning home, Briggs is met by Jarret (Nick Searcy), a US Marshall, who’s on their trail and learns that Ruth has been murdered. Burying her while Brooke sits implacable in the porch, he then takes his guns out of storage, sets fire to the house and the pair set off for revenge, meaning he first has to outsmart and obstruct the Marshall and his posse who want to do things legally.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the genre will have a pretty good idea of how it goes from here, dutifully working its reassuringly predictable, way through the clichés to the final shootout, naturally including the scene where he teaches his daughter how to shoot a gun (she’s crap with a rifle but a dead shot with a six gun), setting up the inevitable later scene where that comes in handy. Carl W. Lucas’s dialogue is heavy-handed and over-written, not least an interminable speech by McCallister detailing his grudge and a long-winded all around the houses last scene exchange between Jarret and Brooke. While, taking his laconic cue from Clint, Cage doesn’t chew the scenery to the extent has in recent outings, Le Gros, Benrubi, Searcy, and, especially, Howard all make up for this by hamming outrageously. Armstrong, however, proves a real delight, even if you can’t avoid thinking she must have watched Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit on a loop as preparation. The film never comes anywhere close to that, but it passes the time well enough. (Rakuten TV)
Operation Fortune:Ruse De Guerre (15)
Its planned cinema released scuppered by the bad timing of having Ukrainian villains, Guy Ritchie’s second venture into espionage territory after the underrated The Man from U.N.C.L.E. finally surfaces on a streaming platform, and, a quintessential Ritchie romp with Mission Impossible echoes, is pretty much worth the subscription in itself. The plot is a familiar recover a secret weapon that’s been stolen for sale on the black market, so that gives a good idea of what to expect in terms of rival operatives, double crosses and location-hopping, all of which the cast and screenplay milk to hugely enjoyable effect with a mix of high octane action and rapid bite banter. Almost inevitably, it involves Jason Statham who, as loose cannon freelance contractor Orson Fortune, is enlisted by the British government in the form of effete operation handler Nathan Jasmine (Cary Elwes) reporting to his ministerial boss Eddie Marsan, to recover “The Handle”, to which end he recruits a team comprising hacker Sara Fidel (Aubrey Plaza) and everyman J.J. Davies (Bugzy Malone) while, in the opposite corner is sneaky rival Mike (Peter Ferdinando) and his gang of heavies.
The middleman negotiating the weapon’s sale is billionaire arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant in Hugh Grant wisecracking pantomime bad guy mode) and to infiltrate his inner circle, Fortune ropes in Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett), an action movie star with whom Simmonds is obsessed, Sara playing his girlfriend and Fortune his manager. With the events and action variously playing out in Cannes, Madrid, and Morocco with a car chase through a Turkish Cliffside, a finale in which Fortune climbs a glass tower and a mid-heist scene where he takes time out to watch the ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ bicycle scene from Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. Knowingly silly with tongues firmly in cheek and everyone clearly having a great time, it’s preposterously energetic and entertaining supercharged fun. (Amazon Prime)
The Pale Blue Eye (15)
Adapted from the Louis Bayard novel by writer-director by Scott Cooper and atmospherically photographed by Masanobu Takayanagi, set in 1830 it revolves around a brace of murders and mutilations at the West Point military academy. In the first, a cadet, Leroy Fry (Steven Maier) has been found hanged and his heart removed from the body while it was in the morgue. To which end, retired ace detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a widower who lives alone after his daughter apparently ran off, is commissioned by Superintendent Thayer (Timothy Spall) and Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) to investigate as a matter of urgency given the academy is under threat of closure. Examining the body he finds a fragment of a note in his band and marks that suggest murder rather than suicide.
In the course of his investigations he recruits another cadet, aspiring poet and future gothic mystery author Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling), an oddball academy misfit (Poe actually did attend West Point) who has also expressed an interest in the case, deciphering the fragment to reveal it was a summons to a secret meeting. The discovery of a butchered sheep and cow with the hearts removed suggest black magic rituals, something given more credence when another cadet, and a potential suspect, Ballinger (Fred Hechinger) is also found hanged, his heart missing (though removed in a less surgical manner) and his genitals mutilated.
Suspicion falls upon the family of Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), the coroner, and more particularly his alpha male son Artemus (Harrey Lawtey). to which end, Poe begins to court the daughter, Lea (Lucy Boynton), who suffers from seizures, though genuinely develops a love for her (the title comes from a fictitious poem he claims was dictated by his dead mother, but also links to Poe’s actual poem, Lenore) as the plot thickens and Gillian Anderson puts in a brief scenery chewing mannered turn as the coroner’s somewhat deranged wife. Suffice to say, suspicions are justified, but not in the way you might expect, with the truth behind the murders being revealed Agatha Christie style with flashbacks and explanations in the final scenes.
Along with Spall and McBurney, there’s somewhat underdeveloped exposition-serving cameos by Robert Duvall as an expert on the occult whom Landor consults and Charlotte Gainsbourgh as Patsy, the barmaid at the tavern who shares his bed. But, all straggly beard and hair, Bale is suitably intense, brooding and introspective as Landor. However, it’s inevitably Poe who proves the film’s real focus, Melling delivering a mesmerisingly off-kilter performance (the role was originally planned for Timothee Chalomet and you can see why), with a plethora of Poe in-jokes that range from a shot of a raven to Landor himself, his name derived from Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin and his final short story, Landor’s Cottage. Poe was, of course, the father of the modern detective story and this most certainly does him fine tribute. (Netflix)
Piggy (15)
Written and directed by Carlota Pereda, the poster for this Spanish revenge-cum-slasher horror pretty much tells you what to expect with an image of an obese blood-spattered teenage girl standing in the middle of the road. She’s Sara (Laura Galán), the daughter of an ineffectual demanding passive-aggressive pork butcher and his wife (Carmen Machi) who is both cruel in her diet-shaming treatment yet also fiercely protective when she learns Sara’s being bullied over her weight. And bullied she is on a daily basis with the fatphobic local kids constantly taunting her and calling her Piggy. One even posts a viral photo of the family labelled The Three Pigs.
One day, she goes to the local pool, self-consciously venturing into the water in her bikini, surprised to find a man emerge from the water. He leaves and, as he goes, three of Sara’s tormentors turn up, callous ringleader Maca (Claudia Salas), the no less mean Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Claudia (Irene Ferreiro), who doesn’t have the courage to stand up to the others. They call her names, hold her down with a water net and then steal her bag, clothes and towel, forcing her to walk home in just her swimsuit. To make matters worse, a car pulls up and a gang of misogynistic boys abuse her too. Fleeing down a dirt road into the woods, she comes across a white driven by the man from the pool and inside she sees Claudia, hand bloodied, screaming help from the back window. The man throws a towel out, Sara grabs it and goes home, saying nothing about what she witnessed. Her silence is compromised, however, when the body of the lifeguard (which she swam past underwater without noticing) is found and the mothers of the missing girls become increasingly frantic. Confronted by the police and her mother, she lies about being at the pool, partly from embarrassment, partly from not wanting to relive what she experienced and, anyhow, why should she help those who’ve made her life hell.
Inevitably, her lie is eventually exposed and the film veers off into even darker territory as another body is found, Sara ventures into the woods looking for her phone, just as the mothers are searching for their daughters and the two local cops for a missing bull, again coming face to face with the killer who, perhaps recognising another misfit, seems to have become her self-appointed protector, eventually dishing it out to her parents. Naturally, she stumbles upon the remaining two missing girls. The question being whether she will save them or leave to a well-deserved fate.
There’s times when the film repetitively stumbles around trying to find its feet, but Galán’s fearless performance keeps you transfixed while, as her mysterious Prince Charming (there’s a grim irony that the only kindness she gets is from a psychopathic killer), Richard Holmes rarely speaks, reinforcing the notion of him as a manifestation of her anger and wish to wreak revenge on her tormentors, until a crisis of conscience arises, while until the final moments there very little blood and violence on screen, but there’s no mistaking the message that allowing violence to persist, be it verbal or physical, simply perpetuates the cycle. (Amazon Prime; Rakuten TV)
The Pope’s Exorcist (15)
Sporting a dry line in gallows humour, Father Gabriele Amorth was the Pope’s official exorcist for 30 years until his death in 2016, during which time he claimed to have performed thousands of exorcisms, albeit some just prayer and ritual, documenting his work in two memoirs. Though not based on any specific case (but patently in debt to The Exorcist), these now serve as the basis for this workmanlike horror featuring Russell Crowe in another accent-mangling role (he sounds like he’s badly impersonating Antonio Banderas) as Amorth who’s despatched by the Pope (Franco Nero) to Spain to deal with a case of possession involving 12-year-old Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) who, following the death of his father in a traumatic car crash, has moved from the US with mum Julia (Alex Essoe) and stroppy teenage sister Amy (Laurel Marsden) to live in and restore the ancient church abbey in Castile that they’ve inherited. Here, with the assistance of local priest Father Esquibel (Daniel Zavatto), he sets about trying to learn the name of the demon (who inexplicably appears to be channelling a Cockney Andy Serkis) so as to banish it only to discover that he himself is the real target.
Directed by Julius Avery armed with a checklist of every exorcist movie cliché imaginable not to mention some Da Vinci Code knock-offs and even a Ghostbusters moment, as the plot stumbles along an underlit narrative that variously involves the two priests being haunted by guilt over their own sins (one’s been screwing local girl, the other’s haunted by the death of one he failed to save), the Pope having a heart-attack, the discovery of a sealed-off underground chamber and sulphur pit (uncovered by Amorth implausibly dragging the top off a well containing assorted skulls with his tiny Vespa scooter), a reveal about the Spanish Inquisition as a tool of Satan, a mummified exorcist and, finally dispensing with any hint of subtlety, an over-the-top showdown that at one point is likely to prompt unintended laughter as it manifests the Virgin Mary.
To his credit, Crowe largely plays it with tongue-in-cheek (“You have a problem with me, you talk to my boss”), delivering the dialogue with far more gravitas than it warrants, but the film itself is never remotely scary while the woeful CGI torpedoes any sense of visual terror. And, clearly having long abandoned any hope of being taken seriously it ends with the Pope declaring Amorth has “struck a mighty blow for our side” and, with apparently another 199 locations of fallen angels to uncover, he and Esquibel teaming up as a Satan bashing buddy duo. Truly diabolical. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Prey (15)
Not put off by the piss-poor response to 2018’s The Predator, 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison take up the challenge of rebooting the franchise, and incredibly pulls off the best in the franchise since the original. Rather than continuing the saga, it takes the bold step of going back to the start, the setting being America’s Northern Great Plains in 1719. Here, Naru (The Ice Road’s Amber Midthunder) is a young Comanche desperate to prove herself the equal of her tribe macho boys, most especially her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers), under whose shadow she lives. An expert with a bow and throwing hatchet, knowledgeable in herbal medicine, she’s ready for her ritual hunt rite of passage. Naturally, her testosterone swamped peers don’t take her seriously, especially when she has to be rescued from a mountain lion, which her brother kills and is subsequently honoured as a war chief.
However, her chance to show her mettle comes when she discovers that there’s very different kind of beast out there, an alien hunter that, using its cloaking technology and hi-tech weaponry is stalking its prey. Having eviscerated the young bucks and what appears to be a small army of French trappers, Naru finds herself as the last defence.
Working on a small scale, Trachtenberg ramps up the tension and intensity, delivering some thrillingly brutal close quarters action as well as graphically visceral butchery in which arrows and flintlock firearms are no match for the alien technology, causing Naru to improvise in inspired ways. Played by the towering Dane DiLiegro, this sleeker, faster Predator with its glowing green blood is also back to basics with sheer physicality and just a skull mask rather than the more familiar face plate, while singlehandedly (albeit with her trusty canine companion) Midthunder electrifyingly commands the screen and the action with her body language, Trachtenberg assiduous in authentically recreating the period and all the necessary trapping, the bulk of the cast being played by Native American actors (the film will have a Comanche dubbed version).
An inspired addition to the current spate of female empowerment thrillers, it’s an exhilarating and reinvigorating fresh take on a franchise that seemed to have nowhere left to go and easily one of the year’s best action movies, making it all the more inexplicable as to why it’s been denied a theatrical release and consigned to subscriber streaming. With an end credits graphic suggesting a sequel, perhaps they’ll reconsider next time around. (Disney+)
Renfield (15)
Renfield, as any self-respecting Bram Stoker devotee knows, was Dracula’s bug-eating deranged servant and familiar when the vampire arrived in England. Here, however, his character’s been superimposed over the novel’s Jonathan Harker as a solicitor looking to make a deal with the count as Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay superimposes them both into Tod Browning’s 1931 black and white classic. This expositionary flashback is explained in a modern day voice over (a device used to increasingly distracting effect) by Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) who’s attending a therapy group for those in abusive codependent relationships, his being with his master, Dracula (Nicholas Cage going full on Nicholas Cage as he sinks his pointy teeth into the role).
You see, Renfield would like to have a normal life instead of going round, eating bugs to give himself powers while he gathers bodies for Drac to drain, he’s just too much of a wuss to stand up to the boss. Currently, holed up in an old derelict building, he’s having to take care of Dracula after he was almost killed and restore him from a charred husk back to his full powers. Which is going to take a lot of bodies, Dracula putting in requests for nuns or cheerleaders.
Meanwhile there’s a drug dealing crime-family subplot, the Lobos family being headed up by Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her tattooed psycho hooligan screw-up son Ted (Ben Schwartz) who have the local cops in their pocket. All that is save for Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina. never feeling like she fits the part) who wants to take them down and avenge her police hero father’s death. All of which naturally causes her and Renfield’s paths to cross as the film romps gleefully from one blood gushing, body splattering, limbs dismembering, guts eviscerating scene to the next, among them one in a sleazy New Orleans night club where a powered up Renfield wades through assorted thugs and an even bloodier one as he and Quincy take on what appears to be the city’s entire police form, SWAT teams and Lobos henchmen, at one point using severed arms as weapons. Dracula, meanwhile, looks to be making an alliance with the Lobos in his plans for world domination,
Cage, as you might imagine, is gloriously, flamboyantly over the top yet without ever feeling hammy, channelling past screen incarnations of the character to charismatic effect; unfortunately, a dialled down Hoult never really convinces, either as the shrinking violet worm who eventually turns when Dracula, his feelings hurt by his familiar’s betrayal (he sets himself up with a nice apartment and more fashionable clothes), starts showing an unhealthy interest in Renfield’s new friends or the homicidal action man. A knowing cocktail of cartoonish comedy and real horror veined with a subtext about standing up to abusive, controlling narcissists, it’s ultimately rather hollow but as Grand Guignol goes, it’s bloody wonderful. (Empire Great Park; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Scream VI (18)
Having survived last year’s carnage, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), the daughter of original killer Billy Loomis and girlfriend of reboot murderer Ritchie, has moved from Woodsboro to New York to start a new life, along with her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega), the latter joining fellow survivors Chad (Mason Gooding) and his smart and sassy horror geek sister Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her girlfriend (Devyn Nekoda) in college. Sam’s having therapy after having killed Ritchie (and is the subject of internet rumours that she was the real Ghostface) while Tara just wants to put things behind her, resulting in a tension in their relationship, the former coming on over-protective. They soon have other things to worry about though when they’re targeted by another new Ghostface who’s tapped into the killer’s ‘fame’ in the wake of the Stab cash-in franchise. Indeed, the whole city seems to have latched on to the killer’s cult, a highly effective sequence coming on a subway train where two of the characters find themselves in a carriage with passengers dressed in horror costumes for Halloween, many in the infamous mask. One of them’s not off to a party.
Along with the obligatory self-aware post-modern meta recitation of the rules for a scary movie franchise given by Mindy (who explains that things now have to get more elaborate), another returning feature is Courtney Cox’s news anchor, Gale Weathers, who wrote a book about the Woodsboro murders and now gets her own inevitable Ghostface confrontation. Also back, from Scream IV, is Hayden Panettiere as FBI agent Kirby Reed, another horror movie nerd. However, as our killer points out, the new rules mean “legacy” characters are no longer sacrosanct.
And, of course, there’s that phone ring and the obligatory opening sequence as someone gets a phone call, here a blonde British professor teaching a course in slasher films who’s on the phone in a Manhattan bar trying to explain to her online date where it is. She goes outside to meet him, wanders into a dark alley (never a good thing to do in New York) and hey, guess what. Except there’s a neat copycat killer on copycat killer twist before we get down to the real Ghostface business, this new incarnation(s) not bothered about lurking in the shadows, or indeed the rules, declaring, “Who gives a fuck about movies?” to one of his victims.
Featuring Dermot Mulroney as the cop on the case and whose daughter (Liana Liberatoin) is also in Tara’s clique of friends (cue a family link back to the earlier film), it may ultimately be just a stylish slasher but it manages to be both true to its predictable arc and still find ways to tweak the formula (a Ghostface shrine with artefacts of all previous cases for the final showdown) to keep it fresh, until you get to scream again. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
See How They Run (12A)
Not the 1944 Philip King farce, but definitely borrowing some of the genre’s traditions (people passing each other in and out of doors), directed with verve by Tom George, making good use of split screen playing up the theatrical artifice, and penned by Mark Chappell this ingeniously gets round Agatha Christie’s stipulation that her play The Mousetrap could not be turned into a film until after its run ended. It opened in 1952 and it’s still in the West End after some 28,000 performances.
Back in 1956, British producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith), who had made The African Queen, bought the film rights, assuming the play would soon close, and it’s around that misjudgement that this superbly crafted and highly amusing whodunit homage is based. Woolf has hired (fictional) sleazy Hollywood filmmaker Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody, who narrates) to direct, but he’s at loggerheads with the gay screenwriter, Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), and wants to rework it with a murder in the opening moments and a wholly different ending, which he’s storyboarded.
As Köpernick observes, in these plays it’s always the most obnoxious character who gets murdered, and so it is that, following a fight with Richard Attenborough (an affectionate portrait by Harris Dickinson), the first actor to play Sgt Trotter, and upsetting several others, he meets his demise during the backstage party marking the 100th performance and his body is dumped on the set.
Assigned to investigate is jaded, boozy Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) who’s partnered with WPC Stalker (Saoirse Ronan, with her natural accent and true comic delight) as his assistant, an enthusiastic rookie who writes everything down in her notebook, with a memo to not jump to conclusions, something the film, with its various misdirections, slyly insists the audience doesn’t do either. There are, naturally a wealth of suspects among a cast of characters that includes Ruth Wilson as theatre impresario Petula Spencer, Pippa Emma-Bennet as Woolf’s mistress-assistant Ann and Sian Clifford as his wife, and Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Mervyn’s petulant Italian ‘nephew’ Gio with Tim Key as the smarmy Commissioner and Shirley Henderson as Christie herself.
It’s gleefully full of in-jokes (Rockwell’s character is named after Tom Stoppard whose The Real Inspector Hound, which he wrote as a parody of things like The Mousetrap, is referenced), while he’s assigned to the case because Scotland Yard is busy investigating the murders at 10 Rillington Place in which, of course, Attenborough starred), and cinema meta gags (a character in a flashback bemoans flashbacks and interscene titles immediately followed by one). All that plus straightfaced but wickedly funny lines, and an ending that wonderfully mirrors everything in Köpernick’s storyboards. There’s a slight tonal stumble when, in a serious moment, referencing how Christie’s play was inspired by a real life case, there’s a scene about having to tread carefully when you’re turning people’s lives into entertainment, but otherwise this is a laugh out loud romp. (Disney+)
Shazam! Fury Of The Gods (12A)
Making the familiar mistake of assuming sequels have to be more and bigger, the follow-up to the hugely enjoyable 2019 blockbuster tends to be one explosive set piece after another at the expense of the character development it seeks to embed, ultimately resulting in exhausting overkill. Now nearly 18, Billy Batson (Asher Angel) still lives with his Philadelphia foster family (Marta Milans, Cooper Andrews) and still has the power bestowed on him by the wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) to transform into an adult superhero (Zachary Levi) by saying the magic word Shazam!, a power he now shares with his foster siblings, the disabled Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), younger brother Eugene (Ian Chen), older gay Pedro (Jovan Armand), academically-driven older sister Mary (Grace Caroline Currey doubling as her super persona) and giggly kid sister Darla (Faithe Herman). But, in a world that includes The Flash, Aquaman and the like, he’s having self-doubts about whether he’s equally worthy, not least due to media coverage of he and his siblings saving lives but failing to prevent a bridge collapsing.
However, a dream date with Wonder Woman is rudely interrupted when the Wizard, long presumed dead, suddenly appears in her body informing him the world is in grave danger. That’ll be down to the opening sequence in which two Greek gods, The Daughters Of Atlas, Kalypso (Lucy Liu) and Hespera (Helen Mirren underused but clearly enjoying her first superhero romp), trash a museum in Athens, killing dozens and stealing an ancient staff, the one Shazam broke in his battle with Sivana (Mark Strong). Now, having forced the Wizard to repair it, they are out for revenge for their father’s death.
Meanwhile, in his everyday identity, Freddy is smitten by new girl in school Anne (Rachel Zegler), who he defends from a couple of class bullies, and overwhelmed that she seems to feel the same way. Unfortunately, it turns out she’s the third Daughter, Anthea, and he’s being lured into a trap to capture his Shazam! self (Adam Brody), her sisters turning up and using the staff to take his powers, kill one of the supporting characters, then conjuring a dome around the city to trap everyone within and imprisoning Freddy with the Wizard.
Thus Shazam Billy and the adult others (Ross Butler, D.J. Cotrona, Currey, Meagan Goode) take off to the Rock of Eternity where, in decided shades of Harry Potter, books can fly and a magic pen the call Steve writes a letter that flies off to Hespera, offering a deal for the return of Freddy, meeting up at a burger join where yet another battle ensues between her and Kalypso, Pedro losing his powers in the process. They do though, capture Hesper and imprison her in their lair, named, naturally, The Lair, except that all turns out to have been her plan so she can escape with the golden apple seed of life. Meanwhile, in a constant array of side switchings, Anthea is helping Freddy and the Wizard escape, setting up yet another set piece involving the superpowered siblings battling Kalypso, a giant dragon and various creatures from Greek mythology who have emerged from the Tree of Life and are laying waste to the city, all involving black killer unicorns and a fight to the death between Billy and Kalypso. Fear not, it inevitably all ends happily.
It never really gets into the doubts brought on by growing up and those transitions from child to the harsh realities of adulthood and, Freddy aside, there’s little exploration of the characters’ inner lives, but you can’t say it doesn’t give you plenty of special effects and fights for your money. There’s a couple of end credit scenes, one involving an attempt to recruit Billy for Amanda Waller’s Justice Society and the other a reappearance of Sivana, ostensibly setting up a third film though, like Gal Gadot’s cameo as Wonder Woman, that future seems very much up in the air in the wake of James Gunn taking over masterminding the DC movies and the fact it bombed at the box office. (Until Mon: Vue)
She Said (15)
Directed by Maria Schrader from a screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, in similar mode to Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s film about the Boston Globe’s investigation into systemic sexual abuse by the Catholic church, this is based on the book in which Pulitzer-winning New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) detailed their struggles and dogged determination in exposing the sexual abuse of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, Twohey having previously reported on then Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s abuse of women, and receiving verbal abuse and death threats in return.
The film opens in flashback, several of which punctuate the film, where, in 1992 Ireland, a young Laura Madden lands herself with a promising an entry-level job with Miramax. A subsequent shot of her running down the street in tears, clearly notes it was not what she’d expected. Cut to 2017, where Kantor, a veteran reporter of workplace harassment, is tipped off that actress Rose McGowan (voiced by Keilly McQuail) was sexually assaulted by Weinstein and, though initially declining to comment, calls back to say how he raped her when she was 23. Likewise both Ashley Judd (playing herself) and Gwyneth Paltrow (in voice only) talk about their own encounters (Judd remarking how work dried up afterwards), but none are prepared to be named in any article. As a way to combat her post-natal depression, Twohey is assigned by editor Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson) to help Kantor, the pair either being met with doors shut in their faces or women who talk about their experiences but, subject to NDAs, won’t go on the record, while legal red tape prevents them from getting specifics. Incredibly, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charged with protecting employees, isn’t allowed to give prospective job applicants information on a company’s history of sexual abuse complaints.
While also juggling home lives with new babies, the more they probe, the more they discover about assaults and settlements (a former of Miramax CFO admits pay-outs but won’t divulge how many),in effect financial gags, the culture of fear and how Weinstein used his connections with the DA office to get criminal complaints dropped. Following up tips, Kantor interviews Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton, stunning in her single scene) who worked at the London office but resigned following an incident in Venice, with her friend, Rowena Chiu (Angela Yeoh) who had a breakdown. She also speaks to the now older Madden (a terrific Jennifer Ehle), the latter, about to undergo a major operation and not subject to an NDA, though initially reluctant, becoming the first to go on record after a Weinstein representative tries to stop her talking, allowing the paper to go ahead and publish, resulting in some 80 other women coming forward and Weinstein (only seen from behind, who tried a last minute intimidation and mea culpa to kill the story) being found guilty of rape and sentenced to prison.
With Andre Braugher as Times head honcho Dean Bacquet, Peter Friedman as Weinstein’s smooth-talking lawyer Lanny Davis cum fixer and several of Weinstein’s victims in small roles, the film captures the working of a newsroom and reporters with the same electricity as All The President’s Men, Spotlight and The Post, building to the final moment as the publish button is hit, and while individually Mulligan (a mix of fury, frustration, empathy and bemusement, her yelling at a guy coming on to her in a bar is seismic) is a stronger, more complex presence than Kazan, together they command the screen in the same way Redford and Hoffman did as Woodward and Bernstein.
Although Weinstein was the target of the story, Twohey and Kantor’s diligent and exhaustive work became the launch pad for the #MeToo movement and subsequent exposure of workplace sexual abuse and harassment in many other fields by men (and women) in power who feel an entitlement to bully those beneath them. (Rakuten TV)
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)
Originating in Japan, one of the first platform video games and, owned by Nintendo, still hugely popular among all ages (at my screening there were two grown men dressed as the character), even if the name makes no sense as there’s only one brother called Mario,30 years on the foul odour of the live action adaptation with Bob Hoskins till remains. Reverting to animation, this revival looks to reboot the film franchise by sticking closely to the game’s mechanics involving jumping between platforms, avoiding obstacles and powering up by opening boxes marked with a ?
Following a prologue in which power-hungry Bowser (Jack Black), the king of the turtle-like Koopas, attacks and destroys a city of penguin-like creatures to get his hands on a power star that will enable him to conquer his entire universe, it cuts to Brooklyn as Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) trying to get their plumbing business off the ground, only to end up creating chaos. Then, when they attempt to fix a broken water mains, they’re sucked down a vortex into another dimension. Separated, Luigi ends up in a fiery realm and is taken prisoner by Bowser and as such sidelined for most of the film, while Mario, who hates mushrooms, ironically finds himself in the Oz-like Mushroom Kingdom (you have to suspect the writers indulged in some magic ones of their own) where, looking to find and rescue his more timid brother, he teams up with the tiny Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and the warrior-spirited Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), who accidentally came there as a child. However, it transpires that the literally and metaphorically horny Bowser is deludedly determined to either marry Peach or destroy her Kingdom, to which end they have to persuade Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen) to loan them his army, which means Mario must first defeat his son, Donkey Kong (Seth Rogan) in gladiatorial platform combat, during which he transforms into a cat. And then defeat Bowser before he can sacrifice his prisoners (glowing star Debbie Downer among them) as a wedding gift to Peach.
Resolutely mirroring the game and loaded with inside references and songs like Holding Out For a Hero and Take On Me, devotees of the game are well-served, though in pretty much every other respect the target audience is 7-year-olds who just want a rush of cute characters, garish colours and non-stop action sequences. Mama mia, here we go again. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)
A Thousand And One (15)
Greeted with glowing reviews but pretty much buried and left for dead by the UK distributor, first time writer-director AV Rockwell delivers a powerful decade-spanning urban drama about motherhood and emotional connections that makes up in solid performances for what it lacks in clarity and underwritten screenplay that tries too hard to cram in too many issues (stop and frisk policy here, rip-off white landlords and school system there).
Opening in 1994 Brooklyn, fresh out of prison, 22-year-old Inez (Teyana Taylor), all attitude and anger issues, gets a job as a hairdresser and starts looking for Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), the six-year-old child she left behind. Finding him hanging out with friends and winning him over with a Power Rangers toy, when he ends up in hospital with a head injury incurred at his foster home, takes him away to set up a new home and a new life in Harlem. Moving into the rundown apartment that gives the film its name, she gets him fake documents and a new name and, whole sometimes fractious, parenting smoothes down her rough edges and their lives together are generally positive. She gets a cleaning job, hooks back up with her ex-jailbird on-and-off lover Lucky (William Catlett), who, looking to go straight, moves in, marries her and becomes a carry father to Terry, the timeline then shifting to 2001 with the now teenage Terry (Aven Courtney) showing promise in school. Things then move to 2005, Lucky exiting the narrative, with the curious, confused, and emotionally damaged Terry (Josiah Cross) looking to further his education, only to be told his social security number is fake, made privy to other secrets Inez has kept from him and faced with being taken back into state care, prompting some hard choices and the bittersweet final moments.
The performances, Taylor and Cross’s in particular, are strong, but the domestic melodrama too often seems to be just a backdrop to Queens-born Rockwell’s portrayal of the neighbourhood where she grew up with the changing face of New York and the gentrification of Harlem with the increasing marginalisation of its poorer communities victims of forces beyond their control, though, bolstered by a jazzy score, she does so with more of a documentarist’s eye without any rose-tinted nostalgia or anti-capitalist invectives. Ultimately, it could have done with some judicious tightening of the screenplay and trimming of the running time, but the final moments between Terry and Inez more than compensate. (Until Mon: Vue)
The Three Musketeers Pt 1: D’Artagnan (15)
Written in 1844 by Alexandre Dumas, there’s been over 40 big and small screen adaptations but this stirringly and sumptuously directed by Martin Bourboulon is the best in a long while, even if some of the actors do bear a passing resemblance to those in the BBC serial. Largely faithful to the novel (although here Porthos is bisexual and Athos’s marital backstory is somewhat reworked), it starts off in 1627 with the impulsive, puppyish Charles D’Artagnan of Gascony (a wildly charismatic François Civil) setting off with a letter of recommendation to train as a Musketeer and serve Louis XIII. Before he gets there, however, he’s involved in an attack on a woman in a carriage and ends up being shot and buried in a shallow grave. Not actually wounded, however, he claws his way out and gets to Paris where he’s taken in as a cadet by the captain of the musketeers, Tréville (Marc Barbé), but he’s barely dismounted before he finds himself facing three separate (and banned) duels, his opponents all turning out to be the legendary musketeers, Athos (Vincent Cassel bringing due gravitas), the rumbustious Porthos (Pio Marmai) and Aramis (Roman Duris), who can’t seem to balance his womanising and spiritual duties.
However, after dispatching the guards under the command of the duplicitous Cardinal Richelieu (Eric Ruf), he finds favour with the King (a spry Louis Garrel) and, more so, his (here unmarried) landlady, Constance (Lyna Khoudri), trusted confidante to the Queen (Vicky Krieps), Anne of Austria, the thrilling plot breathlessly unfolding to involve a conspiracy by the Protestants, loyal to England, and Richelieu to bring down the monarchy and spark war with England, which Louis’s brother Gaston advises while being railroaded into marrying, Athos being framed for murder and sentenced to death, and D’Artagnan’s frantic dash to England to recover a diamond necklace given to the Queen by Louis, which she’s given to her English lover the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who’s insisting she wear it at the wedding. During which time his path frequently crosses that of Milady (the ever excellent Eva Green), Richelieu’s spy who’s also been charged with recovering the diamonds on his behalf.
The core cast sparking with chemistry, all of this rattles along with brilliantly staged long take swashbuckling derring-do action sequences that are on a period par with John Wick, meticulous costuming, smart repartee, dark skullduggery, unexpected twists, romance, superb widescreen and camera swooping photography (try and see it in IMAX) with its sepia tones and use of candles, a thrilling adrenaline ride that leaves you wanting more. The good news then being that Part 2, Milady, arrives in December. (Electric)
Top Gun: Maverick (12A)
Thirty-six years on since the original took your breath away, Tom Cruise returns to the role that made him a global superstar, the authority-bucking US Navy fighter pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. As directed by Joseph Kosinski, who was only 16 when the original appeared, and scripted by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, Maverick hasn’t changed a great deal in the interim. He’s relatively more centred, still single, still in top physical shape and still a captain, partly through choice, partly because he runs the top brass up the wrong way. Indeed, he does so right from the start when, learning the supersonic stealth fighter project he’s heading in the Mojave Desert is being shut down by a Rear Admiral dubbed The Drone Ranger (Ed Harris) as it hasn’t reached its Mach 10 target, he duly climbs into the cockpit and pushes it to the limit and beyond before he can be told in person. However, rather than being disciplined, he’s told to report to his old Fighter Weapons School aka Top Gun stomping ground where he learns an unnamed country is developing an unsanctioned uranium enrichment plant and the school’s best pilots are being recruited to carry out a Dam Busters-style mission to destroy it. Initially assuming he’s one of then, he’s informed instead, by Commanding Officer Beau ‘Cyclone’ Simpson (John Hamm), that he’s there to train them and select the best six. And also that (verging on obsolete) he wasn’t Simpson’s first, or any, choice, but is there at the request of his former rival, long-time friend and now Admiral, Iceman (Val Kilmer).
The hot shots candidates are all introduced in a somewhat unnecessarily extended barroom scene, the ones that matter lining up as nerdy Bob (Lewis Pullman), cockily arrogant Hangman (Glen Powell), spunky female pilot Phoenix (Monica Barbaro), Fanboy (Danny Ramirez) and Rooster (Miles Teller), the now grown son of Goose (Anthony Edwards seen in flashbacks), Maverick’s wingman who dies in action and who, along with many others, Pete himself included, blames as him for his father’s death, thus setting up a somewhat predictable arc between the two.
The same scene also introduces bar owner Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connolly), mentioned but never seen in the original, now given a backstory as Maverick’s former on-off love interest who, now a divorced single mother, re-enters the romantic orbit. Of course, that’s a minor subplot as the film’s main focuses is on Maverick whipping his students into shape so that the chosen ones can fly dangerously low into the mountains under the radar to avoid the anti-aircraft missiles and superior enemy planes, destroy the target and get out again in a race against the clock. So cue all the expected young bucks v old fogey dynamics, pilot rivalries, run ins with Cyclone, and Maverick again bucking orders and pushing himself to breaking point to prove the mission is not impossible, inevitably ending up leading it himself with Rooster as his wingman.
As you’d imagine, right from a recreation of the opening scene (complete with Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone), there plenty of nods to the original along with such iconic Cruise moments as a front on show of him riding his motorbike (in his original Top Gun jacket) grinning like a Cheshire cat. He’s not above taking the piss out of himself either, retorting ‘it’s the only one I’ve got” when someone comments on giving ‘that look’. While better at the grins and the grit expression that registering deep emotion, nevertheless Cruise has a particular affecting and touching scene in a reunion with Kilmer, his character clearly not long for the world (thereby leaving Maverick without anyone in his corner).
Likewise, while playing down the jingoism element, Kosinksi is at his best when the action is in the air, whether in the simulated dog fights (shot in actual U.S. Navy F/A-18s, for which the cast went through a punishing training process) as Maverick pushes his team or the actual dog fights evading enemy jets in the aftermath of the mission, where old grievances and new enmities are all neatly resolved in big bromantic hugs, even if the original’s homoeroticism is decidedly downplayed here.
Cruise again demonstrates that he’s in a cinema superstar league of his own, an ‘event’ in his own right (as the film says, it all comes down to the pilot in the box), a generous actor but inevitably putting others in the shade simply on account of who he is, though Teller at least gets to remind how good he was in Whiplash and Kosinski’s own firefighter drama Only The Brave. Along with a deft use of 70s hits, music’s provided by Harold Faltermeyer with Hold My Hand coming from Lady Gaga, and while that’s no Take My Breath Away, the film will most certainly have you needing oxygen masks. Turn and burn, baby. (Paramount +; Rakuten TV)