This column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.
FILM OF THE WEEK
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (15)
Thirty-six years on from the original, Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice returns from the afterlife along with director Tim Burton (and composer Danny Elfman) in a sequel that’s as much fun as it is overstuffed with characters, plot turns and special effects. Winona Ryder is back too as Lydia Deetz, the goth teenager an infatuated Beetlejuice wanted to make his bride, now a widowed (husband Richard was killed in the Amazon) “psychic mediator” with a pill problem hosting tacky TV series Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, produced by her self-involved new agey producer and boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) . She has a sulky teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, star of the Burton-directed Wednesday), who thinks mum’s a fraud and ghosts aren’t real. Naturally she learns the opposite in a very dramatic way.
Things are set up early one as Lydia starts imagining she’s seeing Beetlejuice whenever anyone wearing white and black stripes is around while her narcissistic multimedia gallery artist and influencer step-grandmother Delia (Catharine O’Hara) finds herself also bereaved when her birdwatcher husband is (in a claymation sequence) killed by a shark after a plane crash (he’ll turn up later as a headless blood-squirting torso, the original actor now a registered sex-offender)), which brings the whole family back to Winter River for the ostentatious funeral (where choirboys sing Day-O and at which Rory proposes to Lydia) and, in a bike hits treehouse meet cute, Astrid falls for local lad Jeremy (Arthur Conti),who invites her over for Halloween (she comes as Marie Curie dying of radiation poisoning, just to show she’s inherited those goth DNA genes) the night mum’s marrying Rory. Of course, it turns out he has an ulterior motive, which winds up with Lydia having to summon Beetlejuice, who manages a bureaucratic afterlife office with his shrunken head assistants, notably Bob, so she can follow her into the underworld and save her from boarding the Soul Train (cue 70s funk dance sequence) in return for promising to marry him.
Matters are complicated however, by the fact that as, seen in an opening sequence with a Danny DeVito cameo where she staples her body parts back together, the Juice already has a dead soul-sucking ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), who he married in the 14th century and killed when she poisoned him. Now she wants revenge. Meanwhile, he’s being pursued by actor turned dead detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) for bringing a mortal to their real, and Delia’s learnt to her cost that those ceremonial asps hadn’t been defanged after all.
It’s busy to a fault with the different plot elements and characters colliding into each other and spiralling off, often simply for the sake of narrative contrivance, but between the plethora of visual freakies, Ryder’s grounded protective mum, performance, Ortega’s soulfully sullen teen, O’Hara’s scenery chewing and the ever brilliant Keaton’s gleeful reprise of his most iconic (ok maybe also Batman) role, it’s carried on a wave of high energy, visual gags, inventive effects, prosthetics, slime and ghoulish humour. There’s even not one but two scenes giving birth to a Beeetlejuice baby. All that and a brilliant marriage scene with everyone lip-syncing to Richard Harris’s Macarthur Park. First time arounders might argue it’s not equal to the original, but, so good they named it twice, their children and children’s children should be screaming with delight. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
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The Deliverance (15)
Touted as inspired by the real life case of Latoya Ammons, who moved into a Gary, Indiana rental in 2011 and began noticing disturbing behavior from her children, but essentially playing like a Black version of The Amityville Horror by way of any exorcism movie you care to name, this is a departure for director Lee Daniels after Precious and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, but unfortunately not one he can elevate above the genre clichés and staples.
It starts off well enough as a picture of a dysfunctional family with volatile mixed-race Pittsburgh single-mother Ebony (Oscar nominee Andra Day) struggling with her own demons, both metaphorical and physical, battling with the bottle and her shrewish, chain-smoking born again alcoholic abusive white mother Alberta (Glenn Close, chewing scenery and sporting an array of fright wigs) who’s moved in while undergoing chemotherapy and seemingly hasn’t met a Black man she wouldn’t screw.
Their father, she claims, away in Iraq, having recently moved in to the house, she’s struggling both financially and in trying to raise three kids, teenage Nate (Caleb McLaughlin), pre-teen Shante (Demi Singleton) and their hyper younger brother, Andre or Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins). She’s also subject to regular visits by social worker Cynthia (Mo’Nique) who’s concerned about her ability and fitness to look after them, especially given some unexplained bruises. Seeing Ebony slap Dre for talking back at the dinner table, beating up bullies who attack Nate and telling Alberta “If you wasn’t old and sick I would lay you the fuck out right now!” suggests she has good cause.
All of this makes for involving kitchen sink social drama, but when her children all have inexplicable psychiatric incidences at school but no cause can be found and Dre starts acting talking to an imaginary friend he calls Tre, having unexplained blackouts and catatonic seizures in the cellar, where there’s a hole in the concrete floor, you don’t need that fixed look in his eyes and the flies infesting the house (a dead cat’s earlier found in the cellar), to know what’s coming.
And sure enough it’s not long before Nate and Shante also start acting weird afflicted, and the kids are taken into care and Ebony subjected to psychiatric evaluation after Alberta winds up dead and her wooden crucifix bursts into flames, as the screen’s filled with contorting bodies, speaking in tongues, spewed expletives and kids climbing up walls. Eventually, enter Bernice (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a local pastor who reveals the house’s dark history of demonic possession (mum killed her family and herself) which she failed yo prevent and, kidnapping Dre from hospital, offers to perform an exorcism – or rather deliverance – to drove the devil from Dre. It does not go well.
It’s not that the film doesn’t its fair share of terrors once the standard supernatural aspects takes over, but it’s all so doggedly familiar (there’s even a shot of the house from the same perspective as in The Exorcist) that, other than its leap into faith movie territory with Ebony’s last gasp calling upon Jesus as her saviour, it brings nothing new to the table. All concerned deserve and can do better. . (Netflix)
Red Rooms (18)
One of the most chilling films of the year, writer-director Pascal Plante’s French language thriller is centred around the Montreal trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a weedy, banal-looking man accused of brutally torturing, abusing and murdering three teenage girls, broadcasting their deaths live on the dark web (in the so-called red room) for paying customers who can then download the snuff videos. One of the videos has never surfaced, but, masked in the other two, the question is whether there’s sufficient circumstantial evidence to convict the so-called Demon of Rosemont who sits impassively in his booth looking vaguely bored. Attending the trial each day are teenage serial killer groupie Clementine (Laurie Babin), who insists he’s innocent and being railroaded, and Kelly-Anne (a magnetic Juliette Gariépy), a successful fashion model famed for her blank persona who has become obsessed with the case, though her icy demeanour (a winning trait in her side line playing poker) gives no hint as to her motivations or feelings. The women bond, the former crashing at the latter’s high-rise apartment, as cold and sterile she, where her life’s managed by an equally dispassionate custom-designed A.I. named Guinevere who can trot put bad puns and jokes on command. A technology buff, Kelly-Ann is able to ferret out personal information about the victims’ families and evidence the police have not made publically available. Does her morbid interest make her as much a monster as Chevalier?
Eventually, after humiliation on a TV phone in, Clementine exits the picture, but Kelly-Ann continues her court visits where, as the parents watch, the death are recounted in grotesque detail along with the recordings. Meanwhile, Kelly-Ann is trawling the dark web in pursuit of the missing third video, engaging in a high stakes auction to gain possession. But that’s where the film plays a sleight of hand that would be wrong to reveal, suffice to say, drenched in dread, it builds to a wholly unexpected climax given the sick and monstrous compulsion we have earlier assumed and the frightening reflection of us as an audience drawn into its nightmare. (Mockingbird)
Rob Peace (15)
The second directorial outing by Chiwetel Ejiofor tells the true story of the titular character, Robert DeShaun Peace, a maths and science prodigy Black kid (Jelani Dacres) from East Orange, a Newark suburb in New Jersey, with hard-working mother Jackie (Mary J. Blige) and, separated from his wife, drug dealer father Skeet (Ejiofor) who, in the 80s, was convicted of murdering two young women when Rob was seven. As he grew (a star-making turn by Jay Will also who provides the narrative voice over), Jackie worked three jobs to send him to St. Benedict’s an all-Black private school run by Benedictine monks and his intellect and passion for science earned him a place at a scholarship to Yale, researching a cure for cancer (encouraged by his professor, Mare Winningham) while also fighting to clear his conflicted father’s name (though never mentioning him to his fellow students or even girlfriend Naya), the evidence of his supposed gun apparently planted by the police.
However, needing to raise the money to fund his studies and campaign, he began dealing drugs, initially developing high potency designer weed while at Yale and later running an operation out of his home after moving into real estate to redevelop the neighbourhood to provide homes for the Black community. Falling foul of rival dealers, he was shot dead at 30, all of which is detailed in The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, a biography written by his roommate Jeff Hobbs
With support turns from Camila Cabello as Naya and Michael Kelly as his priest and mentor (espousing the school motto “Whatever hurts my brother hurts me”), it’s both a father-son story (Rob fights to free his father, but harbours doubt as to his innocence, leading to a powerful scene as Skeet lies dying of cancer) and a social commentary on the realities of Black lives in America (at Yale a white student questions what he’s doing in the lab) and the potential so often tragically cut short, and, while the narrative may try to cram too much in, Ejiofor’s writing and direction are generally assured throughout. Arriving with little fanfare on limited screens, its life in the cinemas seem likely to prove short lived, but its bittersweet rise and fall story is worth seeking out. (Cineworld NEC/Solihull; Odeon Birmingham/Broadway Plaza; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
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AfrAId (15)
The latest to tap into the paranoia surrounding artificial intelligence, the fact that this had absolutely no previews for critics would lead you to expect the worst. The good news is that, directed by Chris Weitz, it’s not terrible, but it does all rather fall into overly familiar tropes and incoherence as it goes.
Rather than let the threat emerge gradually, an opening scene gives the game away at the start as an AI, pissed that it’s being turned off, takes revenge on a family, events resurfacing as an incomprehensible kidnapped child plotline in the final moments. But even beyond that, an early reference to HAL, the ‘bad robot’ from 2001: A Space Odyssey is another marker for what’s to come.
John Cho is Curtis, a high tech marketing man in partnership with his former mentor Marcus (Keith Carradine), is married to etymologist Meredith (Katherine Waterson), who has put her PhD on the back burner to play mum to their three kids, high school student Iris (Lukita Maxwell), middle schooler Preston (Wyatt Lindner) who has social anxiety and clingy 7-year-old Cal (Isaac Bae).all three of them spending far too much time on their screens. Cho’s firm is up for a massive contract with a Cumulative, high-tech firm looking to launch their new product, a beyond state of the art AI named AIA that, with the voice of employee Melody (Havana Rose Liu), makes Alexa (that bitch as AIA sneers) look prehistoric, but the company execs, Lightning (David Dasmalchian) and Sam (Ashley Romans), want him to test drive in in his home to get to know more about it.
Initially sceptical, the family’s quickly won over by their new house guest, a sort of AI Mary Poppins who, rapidly sussing out everyone’s physical and psychological needs, proves a gift that keeps giving, chumming up with the kids and getting them to tidy up, diagnosing Cal’s health problem, boosting Preston’s confidence, and convincing Meredith to get back to her degree. She even sorts out Iris’s problem when her manipulative boyfriend Sawyer (Bennett Curran) posts a deep fake porno of her nude selfie online. Though it’s fair to say AIA does get a tad over protective in getting back at him.
But, for reasons never really explained, Curtis, who’s now been made CEO of his firm which Cumulative have bought out, starts getting uneasy about AIA, who has clearly infiltrated all their devices and is monitoring their every move, word and thought. Learning that ‘she’ is being sent away, AIA takes murderous steps to maintain her dominance.
With plot developments that feel like they’re being made up as they go, including mysterious masked figures in a mobile home making strange hand gestures, the question of who works for who at Cumulative and a home invasion that comes out of nowhere, while sustaining the tension it nevertheless comes across as rushed and poorly thought through, losing the scares (though a clip from The Emoji Movie might send some shudders) along with the coherence among ideas lifted from better films, the cast going through the motions and the final rise of the algorithms moments falling with a thud rather than a chill. Alexa, can I get a refund? (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Aliens: Romulus (15)
Sited chronologically between Alien and its James Cameron-directed sequel, co-writer and director Fede Álvarez pays dutiful homage to Ridley Scott’s original, not just in the basic plotting but to the extent of reprising Ripley’s iconic line and a facial cameo by the late Ian Holm as Rook, another synthetic, but also offers his own contribution to the franchise mythology with a hybrid creature in the final scenes.
A prologue in which a space probe collects an object from the drifting wreckage of the USCSS Nostromo that’s revealed to contain a curled-up Xenomorph, sets things in motion before the focus shifts to the Jackson’s Star mining colony (for all the advanced technology, they still send canaries down the mine to detect gas) where the orphaned Rain Carradine (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeney, the only ‘name’ in the cast) works alongside Andy (David Jonsson), the malfunctioning socially awkward synthetic her late father programmed to be her surrogate brother and always do what’s best for her.
Learning the company’s moved the goalposts in terms of contract length, she agrees to join her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) who, along with his synthetic-hating cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), sister Kay (Isabela Merced) and their pilot friend Navarro (Aileen Wu), plans to salvage cryonic stasis chambers from a derelict spaceship that’s appeared in orbit before it crashes, using them to escape to the remote planet Yvaga where there is at least sunshine. Although synthetics are banned from Yvaga, Andy’s essential to be able to access the computer systems.
Stealing the mining hauler Corbelan without anyone apparently batting an eyelid, they head off and discover the spacecraft is a research station divided into two sections, Romulus and Remus at which point, switching Andy’s chip for that of the mangled Rook in order to gain access (curing his malfunction but resetting his prime directive), they unwittingly release a horde of frozen facehuggers, from which point the screenplay reverts to default with bursting chests, cocooned corpses, acid blood, confrontations with dome-headed Xenomorphs and so on as the cast is swiftly whittled down before revealing one of the women is pregnant while a reactivated Rook is intent on completing the craft’s mission involving returning an experimental evolution enhancing compound, the Prometheus strain, derived from the Xenomorphs to the colony, meanwhile, the minutes before the spacecraft’s disaster event are ticking down.
After six previous outings, familiarity rather numbs any shocks and surprises, but Álvarez, the video-game styled sequencing and the largely dialled down effects (the no gravity lift shaft sequence with floating acid blood is inspired) succeed in effectively building the tension and creepiness while Spaeney does pretty much all the dramatic heavy lifting in the Ripley role, though Jonsson provides solid support and persuasive chemistry as Andy who gets to tell some punningly bad jokes. Going back to the roots, so to speak, after the Prometheus and Covenant misfires, might feel a little lazy, but the results undeniably pay off. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Barbie (12A)
Directed by Greta Gerwig and co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach, this is almost too wonderful for words. Opening with Helen Mirren narrating a send of up 2001 A Space Odyssey’s monolith scene as little girls smash their dolly babies upon seeing the adult Barbie, an inspired supersaturated colour, postmodern meta cocktail of subversive satire, razor-sharp whimsy, feminism and musical numbers, it sets up the idea that there exists Barbieland, populated with an array of different versions of the iconic toy doll and their opposite number, Ken (including Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Scott Evans and Ncuti Gatwa), each Barbie linked to a child’s doll in the Real World. where, as far as they believe, women are in charge and, like the dolls, little girls can be anything they want. Even President.
In Barbieland every day is a good day, especially for Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) who wakes each morning in her pink dream house, greets her fellow Barbies (among them Issa Rae, Dua Lipa, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, Nicola Coughlan and Emma Mackey), hangs out with wannabe boyfriend Beach Ken (Supporting Actor Ryan Gosling), whose only function is to stand around and look good, and generally radiates perfection. Until that is, amid a choreography party, she brings things to a screeching halt when she wonders aloud about dying. The next day, she falls rather than floats to the floor, has bad breath and, catastrophically, finding herself walking flatfooted and not on tip toe. Clearly, something’s amiss. A visit to Weird Barbie Kate McKinnon), mutilated and drawn on by her real world child),ends up with her being told she must go to the Real World, connect with the child who owns her doll, and put things right, especially the cellulite on her thigh. With Ken stowing away in the back of her, naturally, pink car they travel by boat, bicycle, and rocket until they rollerskate into the human world where, she quickly discovers it’s men who hold all the power. She’s horrified, Ken (who has already shown signs of discontentment of being just an accessory, jealous of the attention she gives another Ken and being rebuffed in suggesting sex – if he knew what that was; as Barbie points out she has no vagina and he no penis), rather less so. He rather likes the idea of men lording it over women and, pumped up with ideas about big trucks and stallions, decides to return home and establish his own fascist patriarchy in Barbieland. Meanwhile Barbie heads to the HQ of Mattel, the Barbie toy company, to try to sort things out and is taken aback to find there’s no women executives. And when the CEO (Will Farrell) tries to persuade her to get back in the box, with a little help from an elderly lady (Rhea Perlman in a touching last act insider reference to Barbie’s origins) in a hidden office, she takes off and is rescued by Gloria (America Ferrara), a Mattel employee who, it turns out is the owner of Barbie’s toy counterpart, rather than her spikey and sullen teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt).
However, when they get to Barbieland, everything has changed. The Kens, led by Beach Ken, have taken over and the girls are now all Stepford Barbies, there only to serve their every whim. Can Barbie, with the help of Gloria, Sasha, Weird Barbie and Alan (Michael Cera, launched in 1964 as Ken’s buddy, and put everything back in the pink!
Overflowing with clever jokes along with themes of female empowerment, sexism, gender equality, toxic masculinity and aggression, the impossibility of perfection, conforming to expectations, the complexity of being a woman, who men want to be both whore and mother, being defined by your looks and finding value in who you are, it bursts with energy. It also takes digs at Mattel’s less successful lines, like Pregnant Barbie, the gender demeaning Teen Talk Barbie and Growing Up Skipper with her inflatable boobs. But it wouldn’t be half as good without the irresistible radiant star power of Robbie and Gosling (who again gets to show off his dance moves) who bring their plastic incarnations to vivid and very human life. There cameos from John Cena and Rob Brydon, a reference to Zach Snyder’s Justice League, a clip from The Godfather, and a soundtrack that includes Billie Eilish Oscar winner What Was I made For? Ken’s’ I’m Just Ken showcase and a nice use of The Indigo Girls’ Closer To Fine as sung by Brandi and Catherine Carlile. This is the definitive toy story. (Now)
Beverley Hills Cop: Axel F (15)
It’s been 30 years since the franchise catastrophically imploded with Beverly Hills Cop III (a sly allusion to which appears early on), but, helmed with workmanlike efficiency by debuting director Mark Molloy. Eddie Murphy returns to his iconic role – along with signature jacket and Harold Faltermeyer’s theme tune– as loose cannon cop Axel Foley, having got married, divorced and acquired an estranged daughter in the interim.
This opens with him back in Detroit to the sound of Glenn Frey’s The Heat Is On (as featured in the original movie) where it seems everyone on the street knows him. Having been kicked off a case involving a robbery and murder, he dupes a hero-worshipping gullible colleague (Kyle S. More) into helping take down the crime ring at an ice hockey game (a stereotypical racial assumptions exchange about a Black man being into the sport falls comedically flat), setting up the first of numerous auto chases (this with Foley commandeering a snow plough) in which numerous cars and property get trashed, once again to the frustration of his boss Jeffrey Friedman (Paul Reiser, one of several returnees from the series. none of whom have aged as well as Murphy) who falls on his retirement word to save Foley’s neck.
This is just a prelude before the main plot kicks in, wherein estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), a criminal defence attorney at a high-powered Beverly Hills firm, has taken on a pro bono case representing Sam Enriquez (Damien Diaz), a low-level drug mule who has been framed for killing an undercover cop. She’s warned to drop the case by way of being suspended in her car by a chain from a multi-storey, Axle getting a call from his old cop buddy private detective buddy Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), who persuaded her to take the case, saying she’s in danger. He immediately sets off for L.A., where Billy, having found evidence showing the dead cop to have been corrupt, has gone missing, setting in motion a repetitive sequence of father-daughter recriminations (he reluctant to acknowledge his poor parenting skills), car chases (variously involving parking enforcement and golf buggies as well as a stolen police helicopter) and shoot-outs with cartel killers and the like, bringing back his old boss Taggert (John Ashton, last seen in BHC II) and introducing new characters Det. Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as Jane’s ex and Kevin Bacon as Captain Cade Grant, a narcotics cop who doesn’t need the tailored suit, Gucci shoes and gold Rolex to have him immediately signposted as the corrupt mastermind, though the script has Axel point it out anyway.
Also reprising Bronson Pichot’s accent mangling Euro queen Serge to embarrassingly painful effect, rivalled only by Luis Guzman’s turn as a karaoke singing Latino drug lord, it ticks the franchise staples as it goes, with Murphy’s snappy improvising and motor mouth patter, the action taking time for the family reconciliation scenes. Having clawed his way back from a string of poor career choices where his comedic skills appeared to have been surgically removed, Murphy has all the old charm, even if the film itself is set to auto-pilot, ensuring this is far more entertaining than it might have been and that a fifth outing is pretty much guaranteed. (Netflix)
Blink Twice (15)
Better known for Catwoman in the recent Batman, co-writer Zoë Kravitz makes her directorial debut with a #MeToo social satire thriller that that addresses sexual violence against women and the psychic toll of trauma, the title being about not looking away from things you blink twice at. It opens with a tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) offering a recorded public apology for some undisclosed “everything that happened”, announcing he’s in therapy and will be stepping down from his CEO role and retreating to his private island to take some time for reflection on his actions.
Working as waitresses at a King fundraiser aspiring nail designer Frida (Naomi Ackie, last seen as Whitney Houston) and her bestie Jess (Alia Shawkat), crash the party and, after a meet cute when Frida trips on her dress, King invites them both to join him on the tropical island. It seems idyllic and, although cellphones are banned, everyone gets their own apartment, a bottle of the island’s own perfume, and matching white linen clothing as they spend their time in a hedonistic whirl of drink, drugs and dinner delicacies prepared by Slater’s chef friend, Cody (Simon Rex). Also among the guests are Vic (Christian Slater) constantly taking photos on his Polaroid and dorky ukulele playing Tom (Haley Joel Osment) while the women include dizzy blond Heather (Tess Mullen), her friend Camilla (Liz Claribel) and Sarah (Adria Arjona), a former Survivor-like reality show contestant who eventually makes the film’s point that women should support rather than compete with each other, while Geena Davis is Slater’s frazzled PA (Stacy).
There’s an early inkling that things are not as they might seem when Frida encounters a maid who repeats red rabbit at her over and over and goes round capturing snakes. Then there’s those unaccountable patchy memories (“forgetting is a gift”, preaches King) bruises and nose bleeds, not to mention the often vacant expressions the women wear. But when Jess, whose yellow cigarette lighter serves as a running motif, disappears and none of the other women seem to know who Frida’s talking about, it’s now readily apparent something decidedly dodgy’s going down.
That the film was originally titled Pussy Island should give a pretty good idea as to the theme of sexual exploitation (a Rohypnol-like drug figures large) and the sister-hood revenge that fuels the violent third act. Despite some messy plotting, thin characterisation (why exactly is Frida fixated on King at the start, even if he is super sexy and super rich?) and overreliance of disorienting visuals and sound , Kravitz keeps the tension and energy moving, even if the echoes of Get Out sound a little too loud while Akie is a strong lead and proves a dynamic pairing with Arjona, with Tatum working different character shades from charm to threat (a scene with him haranguing a red chair is nicely played). There’s also a suitably creepy cameo from Kyle MacLachlan as Slater’s therapist.
The coda twist may be a touch lazy (and narratively contrived after what’s happened), but its power reversal is still satisfying, giving a go girl punchline to a flawed but impressive debut. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Everyman; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget (PG)
Back in 2000, Aardman Animation released their first feature film, the story of a bunch of chickens escaping from their captivity in a chicken farm, going on to become the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film in history. Now, 23 years later comes the sequel. And if the first film was parody of The Great Escape, the template this time, as is made clear from one of the lines, is Mission Impossible.
Living in a self-governing island community, secreted away from humans, Ginger (now voiced by Thandiwe Newton), who led the escape, and her American rooster hubbie Rocky (now voiced by Zachary Levi),the self-styled Lone Free Ranger, are thrilled when they become proud parents to their first chick, Molly (Bella Ramsey). Molly, like her mother, is rebellious with a sense of adventure, but is firmly told she must never venture across to the mainland and a “world that finds chickens so … delicious”. It’s a warning that becomes even more important when Ginger sees humans clearing the trees on the opposite shore and a Fun-Land Farm truck with an image of a chicken in a bucket.
Needless to say, mum having told her she’s a big brave girl, Molly pays no attention and sneaks away to find out more, meeting up with curly-haired Liverpudlian chicken Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davies),who persuades her to join her and infiltrate this apparent chicken blue sky utopia (a sort of Barbieland meets Teletubbies landscape) with all the corn you can eat and where every chicken gets their own bucket and lives a life of supreme happiness.
Except, of course, it proves to be anything but and the slogan “Where chickens find their happy endings” has a definite irony. The collars the chickens wear turning them into blank, hypnotised zombies who just can’t wait to climb the staircase to the glowing sun, to the accompaniment of Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, oblivious that they’re going to be turned into chicken nuggets.
So now, having broken out of a farm in the first film, Ginger now leads a mission to break into one. To which end she’s joined by both Rocky and her returning feathered friends, knitting enthusiast Babs (Jane Horrocks), Busty (Imelda Staunton), Mac (Lynn Ferguson) and the elderly Fowler (now voiced by David Bradley) who can’t stop talking about his wartime exploits. Back too are scavenger rats the cynical Nick and his dimwit accomplice Fetcher, this time round voiced by Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays, lending a hand to save their ‘niece’ Molly.
Once within the heavily fortified compound, which looks like a Bond villain lair (robotic mole sentries, pop-up vacuum tubes and laser-guided iron ducks), it’s a race against time before evil scientist Dr Fry (Nick Mohammed) delivers the promised supply of nuggets to Reginald Smith (Peter Serafinowicz), the owner of the Sir Eat-A-Lot fast food franchise. Which is when Ginger gets the shock of her life to discover Dr Fry’s wife and partner is none other than Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson), the owner of the farm they escaped from and who she thought had fallen to her death. And when Tweedy realises Ginger is leading an attempt to free these chickens, it all gets very revenge personal. And when all seems lost, ingeniously popcorn proves to have more uses than just stuffing your face.
Naturally it’s full of puns and old fashion humour (there’s a couple of bottom jokes for the young sniggerers) with clever contemporary gags involving a retinal scanner (and eye-pad) as well as nods to the likes of The Truman Show and Squid Game for the grown up along with a message to mums and dads about their children spreading their wings but keeping them safe at the same time. It may not bring about a mass avoidance of KFC, but it might just prompt a few thoughts about where those breadcrumbed bites come from. (Netflix)
Confess, Fletch (15)
Those of a certain age may recall the 1985 Chevy Chase comedy about Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher, a freelance investigative journalist, adapted from the novels by Gregory Mcdonald. The character is now revived by Superbad and Adventureland director and co-writer Greg Mottola with Jon Hamm in the title role.
Returning from Italy where he’s been looking into the abduction of a wealthy art collector with the kidnappers demanding his collection as ransom, but which appears to have been stolen, and striking up an affair with the daughter, Angela de Grassi (Lorenza Izzo), Fletch enters her Boston apartment and finds the dead body of a woman. Calling the cops, he’s cast as the prime suspect by the investigating officers, slow but dogged Morris Monroe and his long-suffering assistant Griz (Roy Wood Jr and Ayden Mayeri making a fine droll double act).
Being fitted up for the killing, Fletch, however, suspects the building’s owner, Owen (John Behlmann), his dotty neighbour Eve (Annie Mumolo) remarking on his dark personality, while, masquerading as his old Boston Sentinel editor boss (John Slattery), interviews Owen’s airhead fashionista ex-wife, Tatiana (Lucy Punch, hilariously explaining the meaning of “bespoke|”) and, poses as a collector seeking a rare Picasso, visits germophobe art dealer Horan (Kyle MacLachlan) who he believes to have the stolen paintings. Meanwhile, Angela’s estranged countess stepmother (Marcia Gay Harden) installs herself in the apartment and has a clear eye on bedding Fletch (she pronounces his name “Flesh”), Angela herself – who clearly has things to hide, turning up shortly after.
Hamm is charm personified, effortlessly navigating his way through a screen-lay rich in irreverent quips and put-downs, along with a running gag about bare feet, but all concerned contribute to the immense sense of fun percolating through the twists and revelations that populate the breezy, light-hearted narrative. If Only Murders in the Building and Knives Out rang your bell, despite the somewhat naff title, this should have equal appeal. (Netflix)
The Count of Monte Cristo (12A)
Having previously written and directed the spellbinding two-parter The Three Musketeers, French duo Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre De La Patellière now present another visually wondrous and narratively sprawling (it’s just under three hours) Dumas adaptation (true in spirit if not always the details of the original), the novel a prototype for such masked vigilantes Zorro, Batman and The Green Hornet.
Everything’s going swimmingly for sailor Edmond Dantès (a charismatic Pierre Niney), having rescued a woman, Anjele (Adèle Simphal), from a burning ship he’s been promoted by his employer Morrel after his former captain, Danglers (Patrick Mille) was fired for not trying to prevent her drowning, he’s reunited with his father and he can now marry his beloved Mercédès (Anaïs Demoustier), cousin of his best friend Lieutenant Fernand de Moncerf (Bastien Bouillon). However, just before they can say I do, in come the troops to haul him before the Prosecutor, Villefort (Laurent Lafitte), on charges of treason, his ex-boss, Danglers having planted a commission from Napoleon he took from Anjele (Villefort’s sister), to incriminate him, the only witness to what happened, Caderousse (Stéphane Varupenne), cowardly staying silent. He’s clearly being set up, but vested financial interests – and a sworn testimony from de Moncerf, whose in love with Mercedes himself, seen him being consigned to an underground cell on the island prison of Chateau D’If, to all intents and purposes dead.
Here, over the course of the next 14 years and the film’s first hour, he meets fellow prisoner Abbé Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), a former Knights Templar who teaches him dozens of language and shares the location of the Templars’ treasure on the island of Monte Cristo. The plan is to escape and share the bounty, but when Faira is killed while digging tunnel, Dantes substitutes for his corpse and gets free. However, he then learns that, in the intervening years, dad’s died, Danglers has cheated his former employer out of his business and fortune and Mercedes has married Frances and had a child, Albert (Vassili Schneider). Thus revenge is duly sworn on his trio of enemies, meticulously and ingeniously executed by Dantes passing himself of as the fabulously wealthy Count Of Monte Cristo, assisted by protégés, thief Andréa (Julien De Saint-Jean), the son of Anjele, and orphaned Haydée who, for their own reasons, have cause to hate Villefort and Moncerf, respectively.
What follows, unfolding among elaborate set and costume design and set to a sweeping score, is a further two hours of elaborate trap baiting, Andréa, posing as Prince Cavalcanti,
assigned to seduce and abandon Villefort’s daughter (in actuality his own sister) and Haydée pretending to be the Count’s goddaughter, Mercedes’s son. Robustly filmed, dashingly acted and its twists and turns ingeniously plotted, the only niggle is how, in the mid-19th century, Dantes manages to have a supply of wigs and rubber prosthetic facial masks that would put the Mission Impossible team to shame.
The ending, with its swordplay set-to between Dantes and Morcerf, feels a little rushed after the leisurely build-up and machinations. but nevertheless this is full-bodied, big screen adventure entertainment, though, given the poor UK box office of its musketeering predecessors, whether there’s an audience ready to embrace it is another matter. (Cineworld 5 Ways)
The Creator (15)
While this may tap into current concerns about artificial intelligence, a more basic theme of director Gareth Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz’s sci fi epic is fear of the other. Essentially restaging the Vietnam War in 2070 New Asia, with the Americans looking to eradicate simulants, human-like robots that can be lookalikes of their human templates, here presumably standing in for communists. This is on account of how, a decade or so earlier, AI software detonated a nuke in Los Angles (the actual explanation is delivered as almost an aside towards the end), leading to the USA (and its allies) banning all forms of AI. It remains legal, however, in New Asia, hence why Josh Taylor (John David Washington), a US army special forces operative with a cybernetic arm and leg, is working undercover to find and kill Namada, the mastermind behind the AI. To do so, he’s targeted Namada’s daughter, Maya (Gemma Chan), but things have got complicated in that he’s gone native, married her and she’s pregnant. Things all go pear-shaped when a sudden US attack bows his mission and cover, resulting in Maya apparently being killed when Nomad, the hovering US military installation wipes out the compound.
Extracted, Taylor is given the chance to redeem himself by going back in and finding and destroying the rumour superweapon Namada’s developed, his commanding officer Andrews (Ralph Ineson) and ruthless anti-AI mission leader Howell (Allison Janney playing against type) telling him Maya is actually still alive. A mission is duly set up and, although it all goes to shit, Taylor manages to infiltrate the vault containing the weapon, which turns out to be a child simulant (seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles) with the ability to disrupt electronics. Naturally, this triggers Taylor’s paternal instinct with Alphie, as he names her, becoming his surrogate daughter, looking to protect her against Howell and her team (that one holds a gun to a puppy’s head denotes what bad guys they are) who, warmongering Americans, are determined to kill her along with the rest of the AI population (simulants. flat-headed androids or those with Amar Chadha-Patel’s face who work as the police) and their human kin, he and Howell hoping she can lead him to Maya (aka Mother).
The influence aren’t hard to spot with elements of The Terminator, Akira, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner and Star Wars, the film climaxing as a variant on Luke destroying the Death Star while Alphie’s power is its version of The Force. It’s also not hard to read a Christian parallel with Maya the Virgin Mary, Josh as Joseph and Alphie the AI saviour with a purpose to bring peace to the world (asked at one point what she’d like, as in to eat, she replies for robots to be free).
Given Edwards’ special effects background, it’s no surprise that up there in the Avatar league the film looks incredible, but it also taps into a deep emotional vein too in its exploration of family, morality, xenophobia. The chemistry between Washington and Voyles, who as the adorable innocent Alphie is the soulful heart of the film, summoning her powers by placing her hands together in prayer like some AI take on the Dalai Lama. A scene between her and Taylor talking about heaven is terrific and comes back in the final moments with a piercing poignancy.
There’s moments of humour such as the kamikaze robo-bombs that stomp to their destruction with an “it’s been a honour to serve you” and robots watching holograms of exotic AI dancers, but mostly this keep up the dynamic intensity as the action piles up with a relentless drive as the simulants (headed up here by Ken Watanabe) are driven to a last stand. Derivative it may be, but there’s no denying it delivers everything it promises. (Disney+)
The Crow (18)
Adapted from the James O’Barr comic, the 1994 original has become something of a cult classic, largely on suspects less for the quality of thе film and more because its star, Brandon Lee, was killed in an on-set accident. Thirty years on, hack director Rupert Preston serves up an updated reimagining father than a remake with a script that repositions the villain as a corporate bigwig in league with the devil and sending innocent souls to hell in return for eternal life. It’s received coruscating reviews, but truth be told it’s not as awful as these might suggest, even if the dialogue borders on the wooden and some scene transitions make no sense.
In this telling, the heavily tattooed Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård), first seen as a boy being traumatised on finding the horse he loves entangled in barbed wire while his alcoholic mother’s in a stupor, is in a state rehab centre where all the inmates wear pink jump suits where he meets erstwhile musician Shelly (a lifelessly flat FKA Twigs), whose got herself arrested to avoid the goons who are after her and her friend Zadie, the latter having posted a video of something they were involved in that would implicate shadowy tycoon Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston in full ham with extra relish). Suffice to say, under a spell by the literally diabolic Roeg (unlike previous outings this has a heavy supernatural coating) Zadie winds up killing herself, with Shelly next on the wanted list of Roeg’s ruthless right hand Marion (Laura Byrne).
Escaping from the centre when Marion (Laura Birn) and her fellow henchmen, along with Shelly’s not exactly overly maternal mother, come looking, angsty poet Eric and Rimbaud fan Shelly hang out in a plush apartment, falling in love and looking to keep off the radar, which makes their going picnicking by the lake and clubbing a tad illogical. Anyway, back at his place they find Roeg’s thugs waiting and they’re both killed. Except Eric wakes up to find himself in some sort of industrial wasteland limbo where a figure called Kronos (Sami Bouajila) informs him yes he’s dead but apparently while some souls are guided to the afterlife bay crow others remain earthbound until they can right the wrong and, as long as his love for her remains pure, he can’t be killed (again). Looking to save Shelly and return her soul to life (clearly having read Orpheus and Eurydice), he duly sets out to kill everyone involved in her death.
At which point the hole-riddled plot basically stops, the rest of the film having him bloodily working his way up the ladder until he gets to Roeg himself, at which point (after a brief moment when he dies because Kronos says that having found out what Shelly did has caused him to doubt) he’s now made a deal to swap his soul’s damnation for Shelly’s return and gone for the full black trench coat, eye-make up and smeared grin like some goth Joker, followed around by that the ever present crow. All of this, climaxes at the opera (Le Diable of course), Roeg’s attending, as, John Wick-style, he slices and dices anyone in his way (the fact he can’t be killed does rather lower the stakes) before the final confrontation and, for Shelly, the vaguely happy ending.
Variously soundtracked by Gary Numan, Joy Division, Foals and, er, Enya, and taking its time to build, it’s fairly predictably a case of style over substance but, while intimate emotional drama is never going to be Skarsgård’s strong point, as with Boy Kills World, he handles the butchery and torso flashing with visceral charisma. Not great by any means, but it does what it says on the tin effectively enough. (Cineworld NEC; Vue)
Deadpool and Wolverine (15)
The first Marvel movie to get a 15 certificate, directed by Shawn Levy it’s also jump started its faltering track record after a series of misfires and flops. After all, at one point Deadpool does declare himself the Marvel Jesus. It jumps straight in with Deadpool , now officially a part of the MCU, disinterring Wolverine, who died for real at the end of Logan, assuming he has regenerative powers, only to find just an adamantium-laced skeleton, the bones of which he uses to bloodily despatch a small army of Time Variance Authority troops who’ve been sent to capture him. Flashback then to six years earlier when, having used Cable’s time-traveling device to travel from Earth-10005 to Earth-616, his request to join The Avengers is snubbed by Happy Hogan (John Favreau), Now Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) has retired his red spandex masked mercenary and, having broken up with girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) works as a car salesman along his best friend Peter (Rob Delaney). But then, at his birthday party, he’s abducted by the TVA and taken before Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) a rogue operative who tells him that his timeline is deteriorating (and he’s speeding up the process) as a result of the death of its anchor, James “Logan” Howlett, meaning everyone he loves – his X-Force friends among them – will cease to exist. Which is where we came in as, having stolen Paradox’s TemPad, he’s trying to resurrect Logan and save the timeline. And since that Logan’s staying dead, it means he now has to traverse the multiverse and find a Logan variant who can. Which, following a collage of unsuitable or hostile Wolverines (Henry Cavill cameoing among them), bring him to the worst of them all, the self-loathing and generally despised version (Hugh Jackman) who, with his iconic yellow costume, blames himself for the deaths of his fellow X-Men.
He returns him to the TVA only for Paradox to despatch them both to the Void, a pointed Mad Max send up (including a Furiosa gag) where superheroes from other timeliness have been consigned as fodder for sand demon Alioth, ruled over by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the bald-headed telekinetic sister of Charles Xavier who lives inside a fortress carved out of the skeleton of Giant Man. Not only that, but the place is teeming with other Deadpool variants, among them Lady Deadpool (Blake Lively), Dogpool (Peggy), Cowboy Deadpool (Matthew McConaughey), floating skull Headpool (Nathan Fillion, Kidpool (Reynolds and Lively’s daughter Inez), and even one from Wales who, I guess is Welshpool. The super nice version of Wade (Reynolds) points the pair in the direction of the resistance, they joining up with Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes, and a sly nod to the remake without him), Gambit (Channing Tatum) and Logan’s biological mutant daughter Laura (Dafne Keen), all of which builds to the big showdown as the seconds tick down to the destruction of all timelines with only the ultimate sacrifice able to prevent it.
With cameos by, references to or repurposed footage of virtually every Marvel superhero/villain you can name (Juggernaut, Pyro, Toad, Nightcrawler, Sabretooth, with Chris Evans reprising not Captain America but Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four), though sadly no TVA appearances by Loki or Moebius, it’s as exhausting as it is convoluted and bloody with all its self-aware fourth wall meta nods to itself as a film, 20th Century Fox (its logo seen as a destroyed monument a la Planet Of the Apes), Disney, Marvel head honcho Kevin Feigh and Jackman’s musical career. You’ll need multiple viewings (or frame by frame pauses when it’s on digital) to catch even half of them.
At its core though is the volcanic bromance chemistry and funny/sweary banter (not to mention the high octane and brilliantly choreographed fights, largely to iconic 80s pop songs) between an ineffably note-perfect Reynolds and Jackman, but all that would be just action adrenaline where it not for the fact the film, in solid Marvel tradition, digs deep into the emotional arcs behind the snarkiness and flippancy of its characters, with themes of self-worth, insecurity and a need to prove they matter designed to salt the popcorn with tears. Ryan Reynolds is Marvel Jesus and this is one hell of a Holy Trinity. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Despicable Me 4 (PG)
Seven years (and the arrival of a baby who despises dad – cue predictable eventual bonding) since the last instalment (although there’s been a pair of Minion spin-offs in the interim), reformed supervillain Gru (Steve Carrell) is back in a film overstuffed with subplots to the extent it feels a like a collection of shorts bolted together. It opens with a Bond-like send-up as a dapperly dressed Gru and his equally attired Minions (all voiced by Pierre Coffin) attend a Class of 85 alumni ceremony for graduates from the Lycée Pas Bon academy for villains. He’s undercover to arrest former classmate and old nemesis Maxime Le Mal (an accent mangling Will Ferrell), who, there with girlfriend Valentina (an underused Sofia Vergara) presented with the top award, reveals his new power of harnessing the power of insects and transforming into a human cockroach. Overpowered and arrested by Anti-Villain League agents, he’s hauled off to a top security supervillain prison. From where he naturally escapes, vowing revenge on Gru and his family (his grudge goes back to when they were students and Gru stole his Karma Chameleon routine for the talent show), planning to kidnap and mutate the baby.
To which end, AVL boss Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) has Gru, wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig), Gru Jr and adopted daughters Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Madison Skyy Polan), relocated to a high-tech safe house in Mayflower, giving them new identities, with Gru as Chet, a solar panels salesman, and Lucy as Blanche, a hair stylist. The girls are less pleased with developments, the youngest, Agnes, complaining (in one of the funniest moments) that she has to lie and say her name is Britney. Naturally, Maxime, in his armoured flying roach, is determined to track them down,
It’s from here the film subdivides into different storylines. Lucy ruins a client’s hair resulting in a Terminator 2 parody in a supermarket. Gru tries to ingratiate himself with snooty neighbour Perry Prescott (Stephen Colbert) and finds himself blackmailed by his longtime Gru admirer and aspiring supervillain daughter Poppy (Joey King) into stealing Lycée Pas Bon’s honey badger mascot, resulting in a run-in with school principal Übelschlecht (Chris Renaud) who contacts Maxime. And then, surely coming to the end of their service life, there’s the increasingly irritating Minions, with all but three (who remain with Gru for their own antics involving a vending machine) taken in by the AVL where Ramsbottom selects five to be transformed into superpowered Mega Minions (basically Minion equivalents of Cyclops, Plastic Man, The Thing, The Hulk and Superman), though the project proves disastrous and they’re retired when they cause chaos (and prompt an amusing Spider-man 2 train stopping spoof) in trying to help. Naturally coming to the rescue in the final act.
With a quickie cameo from Romesh Ranganathan voicing Dr. Nefario and a montage of past characters in the closing credits, it pitches high and low for it audience, with repeated gags involving bottoms (the Minions snigger at the name Ramsbottom) for the kiddies and pop-culture parodies and consumerism satire for the adults. However, while there’s undeniably moments of inspired verbal and visual invention and hilarity (though the closing Gru/Maxime Everybody Wants To Rule The World duet isn’t one of them), it all feels like a disconnected string of jokes in search of a cohesive story. None of that will, of course, prove a barrier to blockbuster box office, a sequel and doubtless a Mega Minions (and possibly Poppy) spin-off. But maybe next time less of a see what sticks approach might be better. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Dumb Money (15)
If you think shorting has something to with an electrical fault, then this probably isn’t for you. Directed by I Tonya’s Craig Gillespie, it’s an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Antisocial Network which documented the 2021 GameStop financial soap opera, a David and Goliath battle between Wall Street and amateur investor (from whence the title term insult comes) Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who, as Roaring Kitty, used the Reddit and YouTube social media to spark interest in stocks in GameStop, a chain that specialised in reselling computer games, and which the Wall Streets sharks were betting against, shorting, to make a killing when it collapsed. Written by Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker as high drama, it does its best to make things comprehensible for the layman but even so it might be a good idea to take along a financial adviser to explain as it goes.
Reckoning GameStop was undervalued (during the pandemic it was allowed to stay open as “essential workers”), supported by wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) and much to the bafflement of his underachieving brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), using Robin Hood, a non-commission software app devised by tech billionaires Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), Gill decided to invest his $53,000 life savings, soon attracting hundreds of others to also buy in, among them here GameStop worker Marcus (Anthony Ramos) financially strapped Pittsburgh single mum nurse Jenny (America Ferrera) and lesbian lover students Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold) saddled with ever-increasing loans. Ranged against them were high profile traders Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), who, as the Game Stop investors saw their wealth soar, were faced with catastrophic losses, Plotkin’s Melvin Capital having to bailed out stop it collapsing. Eventually, Tenev and Bhatt were leaned on to put a stop to Gill using their software, shutting down his access to wallstreetbets, leading to the stock falling and threatening him and his followers with ruin and leading to a congressional hearing (the end credits featuring actual footage).
Gillespie keeps things moving, using onscreen titles to keep you up to speed with the financial scores, in a film which takes the events to show how the system is rigged against the small fry, getting you rooting for the nerdy, headband wearing Gill and hissing at his despicable opposite numbers while underlying it with a personality-driven story of self-belief. Headed up by Dano, the cast, which also includes Clancy Brown as Gill’s father and, a mostly PPE masked, Dane DeHaan as Marcus’s rules-citing boss, are on cracking form and the script leavens the mounting tension with a substantial vein of humour (such as Plotkin’s advisors suggesting his wine collection might not be the best backdrop to the online hearing interview) and refraining from any big speech moments about the ugly face of capitalism, and while it may not have the intensity of Boiler Room or The Big Short, investing brings rich entertainment rewards. (Netflix)
Femme (18)
The territory is familiar: a closeted gay man adopts a virulently homophobic persona but ends up in an intense relationship with someone he victimised. Here, as directed by first-timers Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, that’s George MacKay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, the former Preston (MacKay), a heavily tattooed thug who hangs out with a similar crowd, the latter Jules, popular drag artist Aphrodite at a London club who shares a flat with fellow queers plain-speaking Alicia (Asha Reid) and messed-up Toby (John McCrea), who has unrequited feelings for him. Jules spots Jules outside the venue and but he stalks off when he smiles at him. Later, ill-advisedly still wearing his gear, Jules goes to a late-night pharmacy, Preston and his mates turn up and a brutal beating ensues.
Subsequently, he sees him at a gay sauna and makes an approach. Not recognising him out of costume, they have sex and a secret relationship begins, Preston taking him for an expressive Chateaubriand dinner and inviting him back to his flat, Jules bluffing things out by claiming they’re old mates from prison when his gang turn up unexpectedly. Jules, it would appear, is setting up a carefully planned revenge (significantly he wears the same yellow hoodie Preston had on during the attack and which, of course, echoes that of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill). Or is this turning into something else entirely?
It’s a question the film, mostly set at night lit with harsh neon, teases throughout with a twisting edge of the seat noir tension alongside the uninhibited sex scenes, Mackay and Stewart-Jarrett bringing complexity and depth to their characters, both of whose lives are a kind of performance (although the supporting cast are less well illuminated), as it builds to an end that is both devastating and disarmingly poignant. (Netflix)
Flora and Son (12)
Irish writer-director John Carney knows what he’s good at and sticks to it. So, after Once and Sing Street here’s another Dublin-set tale of misfits connecting through music. This time round it’s Flora (Bono’s daughter Eve Hewson), a sweary, clubbing young working class single mother who makes a few quid nannying and estranged from her musician ex-husband Ian (Jack Reynor), who’s now got a new live in lover of dubious Spanish stock, beds pretty much anyone she meets, She also frequently at odds with her electro-music loving sullen teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) who’s just one petty theft away from juvenile detention. However, seeing a discarded guitar in a skip, she has it fixed and gives it to him as a cheap belated birthday present, He’s not interested (he’s no aspiration to be another “Ed Fookin’ Sheeran”) but Flora decides to try and learn, hooking up for Zoom lessons with LA-based guitar teacher and failed musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
From this point it plays out pretty much as you might expect, with a long distance flirtation between Flora and Jeff (the film nicely has fantasy sequences as he joins her to sing on a Dublin rooftop), he teaching her to play (shooting down her love of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful and introducing her to Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now), she reigniting his creative spark (they co-write a song), and mother and son working together making dance and rap music on his laptop, music, as ever for Carney, being a transformative force.
There’s distant echoes of Wild Rose, but, while both are sweet and uplifting, with the central figure finding self-worth and playing to an appreciative audience, this is a softer, more sentimental film in the way it touchingly captures the mother-son dynamic and Flora’s search for herself. Often evoking parallels with Once in its music as mutual healing theme, it may not be in quite the same league but, fuelled by Hewson’s star-making performance, it’s a truly warm and emotionally engaging film that deserved far wider exposure than its limited streaming only fate. (Apple TV+)
Gran Turismo: Based On A True Story (12A)
Masterminded by Kazunori Yamauchi, launched in 1997 Gran Turismo is an iconic PlayStation racing simulation game, accurate down to the finest details and which, to date, has seven incarnations and millions of followers. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, this tells the true story of one of them, Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a mixed race teenager from Cardiff, son of Birmingham born former professional footballer Steve (Djimon Hounsou) who played, among others, for Coventry, Wolves and Cardiff City (whose bluebird logo plays an emotional role) and mother Lesley (a thankfully underused Geri Halliwell, displaying all those acting skills you loved in the Spice Girls movie), who, from an early age dreamed of becoming a racing driver. With that being financially out of the question, as his father hammers home, he settled for becoming a top Gran Turismo player.
Staying generally true to the facts, things kick in when Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), a motorsport marketing executive at Nissan (based on Darren Cox who founded the GT Academy) pitches his bosses the idea of giving their fading car market a boost by staging an international competition for Gran Turismo players, the winners of which would be awarded a spot in the GA Academy and the chance to compete in real races. As such, he recruits Black Sabbath devotee Jack Salter (David Harbour), a (fictional) former racing driver who gave it up after a tragedy at Le Mans, as the tough love mentor whose job is to get the 10 finalists (out of 90,000 entrants) up to snuff in the transition from game console to actual steering wheel with the ultimate winner getting a Team Nissan contract as one of their drivers. That will be the soft-spoken Jann (at one point Moore wants to scratch him as he lacks marketable charisma) then, who chills out before each race by listening to Kenny G and Enya.
It will come as no surprise to learn this ticks pretty much all the sports underdog movie boxes, with Salter becoming Jenn’s surrogate father (his pragmatic own dad not supporting his son’s dreams), the confidence crisis (following the spectacularly filmed recreation of the 2015 car flipping crash at Germany’s Nürburgring circuit that killed a spectator), the encouraging love interest (Maeve Courtier-Lilley), hostility from the real racers, the egotistical unscrupulous rival (Josha Stradowski as Nicholas Capa, the film’s equivalent of Rocky’s Drago), the come-back and the split second chequered flag Le Mans climax (where the film does indulge in some wish fulfilment champagne popping tampering with the truth).
At two plus hours, it’s overlong and often feels like a marketing campaign for Nissan and PlayStation, but fuelled by solid performances from Madekwe and Harbour and directed by Blomkamp puts cynicism on the back burner for an inspirational tale of triumph against the odds that, like Top Gun on wheels, makes you feel you’re hurtling around the track low to the ground at 300mph (the real Mardenborough served as Madeweke’s stunt driver) as the healing settles in. (Netflix)
Harold And The Purple Crayon (PG)
Published in 1955 (and followed by several sequels) and still popular among small children, Harold And The Purple Crayon is a basic children’s picture book by Crockett Johnson about a four-year-old boy who has a big purple crayon that allows him to draw pictures in the air of anything he imagines; the objects then become real. It’s now been turned into a live action (with a nicely handled animation set-up) fish out of water comedy by Carlos Saldanha, the director of the Ice Age movies. Now, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid showed that it was possible to translate basic line drawing cartoons into a personable film with actual actors. This is not Diary Of A Wimpy Kid.
Taking a similar idea to Barbie, the book character of Harold starts to question why his drew him in the first place and when the Old Man narrator (Alfred Molina) falls silent he decides to draw himself a portal into the real world to find him. He’s followed by, first, his animal friend Moose and then Porcupine, all three becoming human figures with Harold played by Zachary Levi, Moose by Lil Rel Howery, and, separated from them, Porcupine as a purple-mohawked punk played by an underused Tanya Reynolds (from Sex Education and currently The Decameron).
Shortly after arriving, Harold and Moose cross paths with widowed frustrated pianist mum Terri (Zooey Deschanel echoing her turn in Elf) and her young son Mel (Benjamin Bottani), who’s bullied at school and has an imaginary dragon friend named Carl. Persuading his mum to let them spent the night in their spare room, he learns of the magic crayon (and draws himself a ferocious spider-fly) and promises to help find the Old Man. In the ensuing antics Harold and Moose manage to cause chaos and get Terri fired from her discount store job (which she hates), visit the Johnson museum to find his ‘father’ (his God turns out to be dead), and, along with Porcupine, get locked in jail, variously using the crayon (half of which he gives to Mel) to paint Terri’s house and draw purple pies, ice cream, skateboards, roller skates, a single propeller plane, a giant lock and a wrecking ball (as well as a puma that inexplicably isn’t purple).
Naturally, there’s a villain of the piece, here in the form of librarian and wanna be fantasy author Gary (Jemaine Clement a decidedly low rent version of Jim Carrey’s Doctor Eggman in Sonic) who creepily has his eyes set on Terri, which climaxes in a showdown between him (having ingested the crayon) and Harold (prompting the film’s best joke in a cowboy shoot-out parody where they both ‘draw’) as he attempts to destroy them and mould the world to his own imagination.
Levi basically just rehashes his man-child character from Shazam, but with even more over-acting, while, other than Deschanel, the rest of the cast are just filling check on the call sheet. Given the perfect opportunity to let rip with the special effects, the crayon’s creations are decidedly underwhelming while the film’s themes about friendship, self-confidence, absent fathers, identity and the power of imagination are all spelled out in half-hearted fashion. It’s amusing enough for undemanding eight-year-olds, but it’s never one to make you want to wax lyrical. (Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Hit Man (15)
A nerdy, Honda Civic–driving, bird-watcher, bespectacled philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) asks his class ‘How many of you really know yourselves? What if your self is a construct?” And that’s the underlying theme to the latest from director Richard Linklater which, incredible though it sounds, is actually loosely based on the true story of how Johnson was recruited (though not in the circumstances shown here, replacing their regular ‘hit man’ after he’s suspended for beating up innocent teen suspects) to work undercover by the Texas cops to pose as a fake hitman (“the most sought-after professional killer in Houston” ) arranging meetings with potential clients and getting them to incriminate themselves.
The real Johnson was apparently a consummate actor in his adopted personas (he’s referred to here as “Daniel Day” and the“Caucasian Idris”), using various disguised, though that’s all amped up considerable for comic chameleon effect here. He also did help a woman who was being abused by her boyfriend, talking her out of wanting his services, but they did not, as becomes the thrust of the film’s second half, become a romantic couple as he, calling himself (and indeed becoming) Ron, does with Madison (Adria Arjona), or become involved in covering up her ex-husband’s murder.
Currently on a roll, Powell-who co-wrote the screenplay that never telegraphs its twists, is terrific, playing the comedy and the later more thriller and morally more ambiguous elements with timing and Clooney cool, the film itself a meta-commentary on acting, while Arjona, with whom he has real chemistry, and Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s sting colleagues add further punch to proceedings. A palpable hit, man. (Netflix)
Inside Out 2 (PG)
Released in 2015, the original ranks among Pixar’s finest, alongside the Toy Story series and Up. Now, eight years later we revisit Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) emotions as she turns 13, those operating the console inside her emotional Headquarters, still lining up as the primal emotions of irrepressible yellow Joy (Amy Poehler), the green Disgust (Liza Lapira taking over from Mindy Kaling), red Anger (Lewis Black), blue Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the purple Fear (Tony Hale replacing Bill Hader). They’ve created a new section of Riley’s mind called her Sense of Self, the repository of the memories and feelings that form Riley’s core personality, Joy having consigned any negative memories to the back of her mind.
A star player on the school hockey team alongside best friends Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and Grace (Grace Lu), the trio having been invited to take part in a hockey camp so she can apply for a place on the team at her new high school. However, the emotions are shocked when a demolition crew barges in to tear the place apart and reconstruct it for Riley’s new phase. And, even more when, as with Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager, the transition into puberty brings out an overnight change, the hitherto sweet Riley waking up and telling her mother (Diane Lane) to back off, and being snappy with dad (Kyle MacLachlan), every interaction with the console causing her to overreact. And that’s just the start as, to their surprise, puberty ushers in a whole new crew of emotions, headed up by orange wide-mouthed nervous wreck Anxiety (Maya Hawke), catty cyan Envy (Ayo Edibiri), the pink and bulky Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) in his grey hoodie and the snooty Indigo-coloured bored Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), or Ui Ui as Joy calls him, who lounges on the couch.
With Riley having learnt her besties are going to a different school, Anxiety takes over plaguing her with all manner of insecurities and negative scenarios about what lies ahead, seeing her torn between sticking with her friends or trying to act cool and become part of a new clique headed up by Val (Lilimar), the star player on the Firehawks, the team at her new school. Clashes between Joy and the misguidedly overprotective Anxiety over how Riley should act leads to her Sense Of Self being dumped at the back of her mind and Joy and the other emotions on her team being quite literally bottled up and imprisoned by the Mind Cops (Frank Oz among them) in a vault that also holds various imaginary characters from Riley’s head, including a giant dark hooded figure representing her deepest dark secret, video game character Lance Slashblade on whom the younger Riley had a crush and the hand drawn Bloofy and Pouchy from her favourite childhood TV show. The task now is to somehow get to the Back of the Mind and make it back to Headquarters and restore Riley’s Sense of Self before she has a total meltdown.
Decidedly busier than the first film with all the new characters, even so it’s still rooted in the same premise about being in touch with our feelings, the message being that we are defined by all of them, the negative and the positive, and how both can lead us astray in attempting to fit in, and not repressing sides of ourselves for fear of being judged. It’s also awash with more wittily clever wordplay, Joy and the others finding themselves teetering on the Sar Chasm, riding down the Stream Of Consciousness, being assailed by a Brainstorm of ideas (including a very Big one) and Joy trying to calm the frantic Anxiety down with a cup of Anxi Tea. There’s also an occasional before her time appearance by the elderly Nostalgia (June Squibb) and a UK only cameo by television personality Sam Thompson as Security Man Sam. It even slips in a blink and you miss it worry by dad’s Anger (Pete Docter) about his daughter being gay. It doesn’t have quite the novelty of the first film, but the emotions it will uncork in its audience all come bubbling to the sniffle surface. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
It Ends With Us (15)
Directed by and co-starring Justin Baldoni, and adapted by Christy Hall Colleen Hoover’s 2016 bestseller about the cycle of domestic abuse and denial, this may be a melodramatic soap opera, but it’s one from the top shelf, and, while overlong and reliant on contrived coincidence, has a dark edge and unfolds with some twists you don’t readily see coming.
Blake Lively (slightly older than the book’s character) stars as aspiring flower-shop entrepreneur Lily Bloom who we meet as she returns home to read the eulogy for her estranged father’s funeral but, scarred by the abuse she saw him (Kevin McKidd) mete out to her mother (Amy Morton), can’t find a single thing to say, her list of five point remaining blank. Later, she has a flirty rooftop encounter with neurosurgeon Rile Kincaid (Baldoni), a textbook tall, dark, and dashing self-styled stud (“Love isn’t for me. Lust is nice though”) with a line in smooth chat-up patter, who startles her by angrily kicking a chair though, as he explains, he’s upset because, a neurosurgeon, he’s failed to save a young boy following an accident with a gun (and yes, this does cycle back at the end). There’s sexual tension but nothing happens, they part and she returns to Boston to open her shabby chic florists, Lily Bloom’s where she hires the irrepressible Allysa (Jenny Slate), even though she confesses to hating flowers, who rapidly becomes her best buddy. And, wouldn’t you know it, when Rile wanders into the store it turns out he’s her brother. And so the pair reconnect, she keeping things cool but agreeing to give him a dating chance. As the romance blossoms they, Allysa and her husband Marshall (Hasan Minhaj in a virtually identical role to that in Babes) go to a new upmarket restaurant which, back after eight years in the Marines, turns out to be owned by Atlas (hunky newcomer Brandon Sklenar), a former classmate and Lily’s first love.
Their backstory’s told in flashbacks with him (Alexander Neustaedter) apparently living homeless opposite her parents and the young Lily (a convincingly lookalike Isabela Ferrer) bring him food and the pair eventually falling in love (take note of the heart carved out of oak and the tattoo on her shoulder) before her irate father puts a brutal end to things.
Time moves on, Allysa gets pregnant, Lily and Rile get married and all seems roses. But Atlas’s suspicious of her bruise she says she got by accident and there’s an altercation between him and Rile at the restaurant. Then, after blow up about her relationship with Atlas, Rile apparently falls down the stairs. It’s not though, until later that, in hospital and learning she’s pregnant, the veil of denial’s torn away and she remembers exactly what happened to cause those bruises and wounds.
Both predictable and unpredictable in equal measure as it explores how we find ourselves repeating dysfunctional patterns in our lives (though not why the characters have such bad taste in clothes), it does rather want to have its cake and eat it when it comes to the central abuse and how we’re supposed to feel about Rile. We’re asked to despise him because of his abuse, but at the same time sympathise when we learn of the tragedy that made him who he is and also because he clearly want to try and be a better man, giving him a grace note in the way things end between them. Still at least her wife-beater dad’s 100% vile.
Bolstered by solid supporting turns, the two (three if you factor in young Lily) central performances are strong, complex and layered Lively on terrific form as a woman coming to realise she has to make the right choices, difficult though they may be. And if the screenplay can’t resist ending on the promise of a happy new future, it’s probably earned it. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Royal Sutton Coldfield; Vue)
Killers Of The Flower Moon (15)
Based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction bestseller about the 1920s Osage murders in Oklahoma, the title is derived from the Old Farmer’s Almanac in which each monthly full moon is given a different name, the Flower Moon referring to May, when the killings began.
Directed and co-written (with Eric Roth) by Marin Scorsese, his first since The Irishman and three minutes shorter at just under three and a half hours marginally shorter by three minutes, it opens with Osage Indian Nation discovering that their reservation sits on a massive oil field, instantly making them oil millionaires (albeit requiring white ‘guardians’), black and white footage showing them with swanky clothes, private planes, and white chauffeurs for their luxury automobiles. Inevitably, with great wealth comes great danger from those who would take it for themselves. And it’s not long before Osage corpses start piling up in suspicious circumstances.
Into this comes the feckless and not overly bright but charming Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), returning from serving as an army cook who, in need of a fresh start and money, but a stomach condition making anything strenuous impossible, is taken under the wing of his cattle baron uncle William ‘King’ Hale (Robert DeNiro) who sets him up as a cabbie. One of his regulars is Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage with three sisters, with whom he falls in love and marries. So far so apparently sweet. But appearances can be misleading. It’s no accident, however, that Mollie, sussing he’s out for money (every day the train brings opportunists looking for an Osage bride), refers to him as Coyote, the trickster of American-Indian mythology, and while Ernest’s intentions may start out honourably and innocently, more of a snake in this First Nation Eden, it’s not long before he falls under the spell of his Machiavellian uncle who, may present himself as a white saviour philanthropist friend to the Osage, but behind the smile is a knife looking to carve its way into their wealth, declaring that their time has past and that of the white man has come.
He’s all for his sad sack’s nephew’s marriage to Mollie, primarily because in so doing Ernest, and by extension himself, will gain control of her ‘headrights’ to the oil deposits on her land. These are shared with her mother and siblings, so for the plan to work, they need to die. Mother (Tantoo Cardinal), and a sister (Jillian Dion) go from apparently natural causes, a wasting disease, two sisters (Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins) violently do not. Their deaths along with those of a husband (Jason Isbell) and private investigator (to which Ernest is party) brought into look into the brutal murder of Anna (Myers), ordered by Hale and facilitated by Ernest, his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) , and assorted cowboy lowlifes. Mollie suffering from diabetes, Ernest, who genuinely loves her, is instructed to add a powder to her insulin shots (‘generously’ organised by Hale) to ‘calm’ her, never questioning why she seems to be getting worse.
As the Osage body count continues to rise and the elders become desperate as no police investigations are ever mounted, Mollie travels to Washington plead for help, leading to the arrival in Fairfax of Tom White (Jesse Plemons in the role initially intended for DiCaprio), part of the newly formed federal Bureau of Investigation under the auspices of J Edgar Hoover, to look into who’s behind the murders.
Now 80, Scorsese remains at the peak of his powers, guiding the film along an unhurried path as the twists, turns and horrors gradually accrue with DiCaprio, all downturned mouth, and DeNiro, both of whom he was worked with extensively, delivers subtle, nuanced powerhouse performances that rank among their greatest. As Mollie, making her feature starring debut, Gladstone, seen in TV series Billions and Reservation Dogs, more than holds her own alongside her co-stars, her expressive face simultaneously holding love, hurt, anger, resolve and disappointment while Tatanka Means, Yancey Red Corn and William Bellau loom large among the Native American cast, Sturgill Simpson, Charlie Musselwhite, Pete Yorn and Jack White join fellow musician Isbell in supporting roles (the late Robbie Robertson created the score) and there’s courtroom cameos from Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow.
A harrowingly potent existentially horrific alternative vision (involving the Tulsa race riots, the KKK and the Masons) as to how the modern West was won with its themes of manipulation, deception, greed, moral compromise, systemic racism and betrayal, the wolves hiding among the sheep, it balances scenes of quiet beauty, such as Ernest and Mollie sitting alongside each other at the dinner table, with sudden brutal violence.
Likely designed to trim it back from a proposed four hour running time, it ends ingeniously with an epilogue which, instead of the usual what happened after end titles, sums the post-trial fates of the characters up in an episode of radio drama True Crime Stories, a fictionalised Hoover-endorsed version of real programmes like This Is Your FBI, with live orchestra and, pointedly, white voice actors giving caricatured impersonations of the Osage, the last being a cameo by Scorsese himself, underscoring the trivialisation of Native American suffering, succinctly summed up earlier when someone notes there’s a “better chance of convicting a guy for kicking a dog than killing an Indian”, echoing the Black lives matter of America’s ongoing racial problems, the camera finally pulling away in an aerial shot of the gathered tribe performing a farewell ritual. This is epic, intelligent, provocative filmmaking. (Apple TV+ )
Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes (12A)
Rebooted as a trilogy in 2011, Maze Runner director Wes Ball now launches another motion capture three-parter, firmly distancing himself from its predecessor with an opening that has Caesar being sent off on a simian funeral pyre. However, just as Andy Serkis’s character goes up in smoke, so too does much of the previous saga’s philosophical musings as it leaps forward several generations for a rites of passage that begins with young chimp Noa (Owen Teague) and his two best buddies Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) out on a daredevil trees swinging, mountains climbing mission to each obtain an eagle’s egg which, when they hatch, they will train to catch fish (they’re known as the Eagle Clan), Noa having the biggest challenge since his dad’s the clan’s eagle master or bird man or whatever.
Unfortunately, a scavenging human – or speechless echo – infiltrates the camp and his egg ends up getting smashed, meaning he has to mount his horse and go find another for the next day’s ceremony. This inadvertently brings him into contact with a bunch of masked apes from another clan who wield taser lances and, following Noa’s horse, lay waste to the village, kill his father and take the clan, Noa’s mum (Sarah Wiseman) among them, prisoners. Now, determined to free then, he heads off into the forbidden valley (full of rusted ships and ruined skyscrapers overgrown with foliage) where he first meets Raka (Peter Macon), a wise old Orangutan who holds firm to Caesar’s precepts and then the wild child girl (Freya Allan) who broke his egg, who, much to their surprise, turns out to be able to speak and is called Mae. It seems she’s the last survivor of a group of similarly endowed humans who were massacred by the same apes who sacked Noa’s village and who serve brutal bonobo great ape Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), who has warped Caesar’s teachings, has a pet human accomplice (William H. Macey) who’s taught him Roman History and has enslaved his fellow apes to break through into an old human military silo behind which he believes are the tools he needs to conquer the other ape clans. And which he also believes Mae has the answer to getting inside and that Noa too may prove useful.
There’s some downtime as Noa gets to learn more about what life with apes and humans used to be like and vainly tries to his dad’s eagle to bond with him, but this is just the build up to the big flood and flame confrontation finale between him and Proximus, with Mae’s own mission to recover something from the silo as the launch pad for the next instalment.
Needless to say, the motion capture renders incredibly convincing apes (even if it’s sometimes hard to work out who is who) while the visual effects and action sequences keep the adrenaline pumping. Teague is an excellent replacement for Serkis, bringing a gripping cocktail of fear, courage, nobility, cleverness and compassion to Noa, Macon delivers wisdom and wit (his reaction on seeking zebras is a treat), Durand is suitably megalomaniac while Allan proves as feisty an action warrior woman as she did in The Witcher. And she also teaches Noa to say ‘shit’,
It’s undeniably overlong, takes a while to get into gear (and I’m not persuaded the post-ape-apocalypse timeline actually stands up) and the analogies of the earlier films are dialled down in favour of a basic hero’s journey, but as a set-up for the inevitable apes vs humans sequel, it certainly knows its monkey business. (Disney +)
Kneecap (18)
Those not familiar with the genre, probably won’t know that Kneecap (named for the infamous punishment doled out during the Troubles) are a hugely successful Irish language hip hop group out of West Belfast, featuring best friends Liam Ó Hannaidh (aka Mo Chara) and Naoise Ó Cairealláin (aka Móglaí Bap) and older music teacher JJ Ó Dochartaigh as the initially anonymous balaclava-clad DJ Próvaí. Directed by Rich Peppiatt and co-written with his three stars, all playing themselves, it unabashedly wears its Trainspotting influences on its sleeve and powers along with that same sweary pulsating energy as it unfolds an exaggerated account of their rise to fame. Think of it as Bhoys In The Hood.
The two boys learnt Gaelic (“Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom”) from Naoise’s father, Arlo (Michael Fassbender, largely offscreen until the last act), a former IRA member who faked his death and now teaches yoga, and the film is firmly anchored in the campaign to legislate it as officially recognised language in Northern Ireland. Indeed, Liam first encounters JJ when, refusing to answer the police in English, he brought in to interpret. Ferreting away Liam’s notebook, he’s impressed by the lyrics and persuades the pair to work with him setting them to music, persuading them this would be a powerful way to bring the Irish language to a modern audience, his girlfriend Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty) being heavily involved in the campaign.
As such, the film charts their rise from an initial pub gig, a video filmed by the girl behind the bar going viral, to eventual sell-out stadiums, even though their promised radio debut on RTE is initially banned for its outspoken lyrics before Naoise’s hitherto reclusive mother Dolores (Simone Kirby) organises a protest, with a subplot involving Liam’s growing romance with a Protestant girl named Georgia (Jessica Reynolds) who has relative providing a plot twist you don’t see coming.
Of course, as warned by aggressively unpleasant detective Ellis (Josie Walker), their music is also attracting the wrong sort of attention, most specifically from Radical Republicans Against Drugs, a real (but played here as ironically dumb) dissident organisation from Derry that targeted those suspected of being drug dealers (which, of course, the boys are).
A rowdy, raucous, vulgar anti-establishment awards magnet with a relentless barrage of ketamine-fuelled (cue a claymation hallucination sequence) club banger beats and tunes like the anti-Brit anthem H.O.O.D to Parful’s paean to getting high and a middle finger to sectarianism, plus a dodgily hilarious Bobby Sands gag, it won’t be to everyone’s taste but there’s no denying its edgy, electrifying vitality. (MAC; Mockingbird)
Leave The World Behind (15)
Mingling Hitchcock and Shyamalan, written and directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, this collapse of civilization psychological sci fi thriller, adapted from Rumaan Alam’s novel. has three solid star turns from Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali (with Kevon Bacon making a third act appearance) that keep you engaged even when the narrative feels like it’s struggling.
Jaded with everything (“I fucking hate people”), pretentious self-centred Brooklyn housewife Amanda Sandford (Roberts) packs up husband Clay (Hawke) and the two kids, Friends-obsessed Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and her old brother Archie (Charlie Evans), and heads off to a luxury Airbnb on Long Island, complete with heated pool. However, no sooner have they taken themselves down to the beach than a huge oil tanker ploughs up. Then, back home, that evening they lose all the Wi-Fi, radio and TV signals (pissing off Rose who hasn’t managed to watch the final Friends episode), they comes a knock at the door. It’s tuxedo-clad G.H. Scott (Ali) and his acerbic daughter Ruth (Myha’la) who are the house’s owners (though a bigoted Amanda finds that hard to believe) and are seeking shelter at their own home following a blackout in New Work (something else Amanda has doubt about). She’s reluctant to have strangers – more specifically Black strangers – staying the night, but Clay is more accommodating (especially as G.H. pays him $1000), reckoning it all be sorted out come morning. Come morning and it certainly isn’t though they have picked up alerts that it might all be down to some hackers, who may have even hacked into the space satellites.
Is it an attack by foreign terrorists (out trying to reach town for information, Clay picks up a leaflet dropped from a plane with what seems to be Arabic writing which, as Charlie tells him, is titled Death To America) or is it something even more unsettling? Supernatural, perhaps. Meanwhile, Rose is transfixed by hundreds of deer that appear in the back garden while a flock of flamingos descend on the pool. The roads blocked by hacked driverless cars, plans plummeting from the sky (Ruth fears her mother, who was in Morocco, might have been on one) and occasional brief national emergency broadcasts about violence in Washington do little to calm the nerves. And G.H. is concerned that events are lining up as some top secret government plan he heard about from one of his highly connected clients.
Tapping into conspiracy theory and apocalyptic dread, it builds an air of tension and fear while also examining how people react and respond to one another under such scenarios (enter Bacon as a survivalist Clay turns to when Charlie needs medical help), the swooping and swirling camerawork exacerbating the gathering weirdness. Returning to its running Friends motif, it ends on an open cliff hanger (with no planned sequel) that seems certain to frustrate audiences, especially as it’s all questions and no answers, but in asking how we deal with things as they fall apart around us, those questions are unsettlingly timely. (Netflix)
Maestro (15)
Bradley Cooper’s second excursion behind the camera, and, after A Star Is Born, another story with a musician at its centre. In this case, covering some 40 years, it’s a biopic of the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (Cooper), the first American-born conductor to lead a major American symphony orchestra (and namechecked in REM’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), which is used with egotistical amusement here), one that focuses on the many dualities in his personal and professional life. A flamboyant showman wielding the baton, but reserved and introvert in writing his music, swinging between elation and despair, devotedly married to Costa Rican-Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a prelude having him expressing his grief over her death, but also (as she was well aware) a secretly promiscuous homosexual, most notably in an early gay relationship with clarinettist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer).
Following a nonlinear structure that makes extensive use of interview exposition and asides to provide background (West Side Story, arguably Bernstein’s greatest work, has just a fleeting mention), it opens with him getting his big break when, in 1943, he has to substitute for an ill Bruno Walter and conduct the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. This, like the bulk of the film, is shot in black-and-white with saturated technicolour colour scenes in the latter stretch, both conjuring movies from the 40s, the early scenes in a boxy aspect ratio before the more widescreen later ones, the framing also consistently emphasising the distances between Leonard and Felicia.
This is dazzling bravura filmmaking peppered with striking set pieces, At one point a rehearsal scene for the ballet that would become On the Town unfolds into a fantasy sequence of Leonard and Felicia dancing together, while the lengthy sequence of him euphorically conducting the choir and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral in 1973, Felicia watching from the wings, is electrifying. Likewise, Bernstein liberatingly dancing to Tears For Fears in a gay club and the single take scene of an excoriating Thanksgiving argument between the couple as a giant Snoopy balloon floats past the window of their New York apartment. More subdued but no less potent is a moment when Bernstein lies to his oldest daughter, Jamie (Maya Hawke), about the homophobic rumours going round about him.
Arguably, the screenplay doesn’t delve sufficiently into what makes the characters tick, but even so there’s a rich depth with the chemistry between Cooper (who, with the controversial prosthetic nose looks strikingly like Bernstein) and Mulligan, delivering her best work since An Education and arguably the film’s real star (she takes top billing above Cooper), lighting up the screen. Glorious. (Netflix)
No Hard Feelings (15)
In danger of losing her late single mother’s house in the increasingly gentrified beach hamlet of Montauk, Long Island, because of unpaid property taxes and her car repossessed by a tow truck driver (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) ex-boyfriend resentful about her abrupt lack of communication, meaning she can’t work as a Uber driver, 32-year-old Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) answers a Craigslist ad placed by two wealthy helicopter parents Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti) Becker. Concerned that their geeky, socially awkward virgin 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), lacks the necessary experience prior to going to Princeton, they’re offering a brand new Buick in exchange for someone who will, as Maddie puts, “date his brains out”. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky and co-written by John Phillips, it pretty much follows just as you would expect from a film channelling cringeworthy 80s sex comedies like Risky Business (though equally there’s a hint of Paul Thomas Anderson and Cameron Crowe). As in, naturally not revealing her job as a fuck for hire, under the ruse of wanting to adopt a dog from the rescue shelter where he volunteers, Maddie inveigles her way into Percy’s life who, of course, while shy, turns out to be not as much a nerd as he first appears, a relationship gradually blossoming although the crucial consummation keeps running into obstacles. Just as inevitably, the two having grown genuinely close, the truth will eventually come out, setting up the equally predictable dinner with parents scene, the break up and make up.
Pushing the edginess with Lawrence going full frontal (something even the enjoyably vulgar Porky’s resisted) in a skinny dipping scene and subsequent fight with three teens stealing their clothes, it’s both peppered with laugh out loud gags, innuendos and embarrassing moments but also irresistibly sweet with a subtext about her relationship with the pure-hearted Percy opening up the insecure Maddie to moving on in her life (and any hopes that her estranged wealthy father will ever be part of her life) rather than remaining forever stuck in Montauk stasis.
Not everything works; Percy’s overprotective former male nanny Jody (Kyle Mooney) feels a redundant excuse for some unnecessary homophobic jokes. However, Lawrence proves to have solid comic timing (both physical and verbal) as well as dramatic sass, Feldman recalls a young Dustin Hoffman, an aspiring musician his ‘prom night’ restaurant serenading of Maddie with Hall & Oates’ Maneater is a treat, while Scott MacArthur and Natalie Morales, as his pregnant partner and Maddie’s restaurant co-worker, provide solid comic support. It may play the raunchy card, but ultimately this is a sweet, endearing and big-hearted tale of friendship and self-discovery. (Sky Cinema)
Oppenheimer (12A)
Adapted from the 2005 biography American Prometheus, with seven Oscar wins (Film, Director, Actor and Supporting Actor among them) an, writer-director Christopher Nolan delivers his finest work to date, a triumphant biopic of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the man who created the Atom Bomb and, as the film unambiguously avers, consigned the world to eventual destruction at its own hand. As Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”.
Unfolding over a gripping three hours that embraces courtroom procedural, character study and thriller (a feeling accentuated by the score), it moves back in forth in time, framed by and intercutting with Fusion (filmed in black and white) and Fission (in colour). The former is a recreation of the 1959 Cabinet hearings to confirm Lewis Strauss (Supporting Actor nominee Robert Downey Jr.), former head of the US Atomic Energy Commission and a politician closely linked to Oppenheimer (Best Actor nominee Cillian Murphy), as Secretary of Commerce, the latter the loaded behind closed doors McCarthy-era 1954 AEC enquiry driven by attorney Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) to determine if a scapegoated Oppenheimer was a loyal American and should retain his security clearance or not. The theme of American creating and then destroying its heroes when they become an annoyance has been done before, but rarely as well as this.
There’s a few scenes involving the younger Oppenheimer, an ambitious Jewish theorist in the new field of quantum physics, his on-off affair with Jean (Florence Pugh), a Communist Party member, an accusation also levelled at him (he was actually a political agnostic), and his early days teaching and working at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett). The heart of the film, however, focuses on the 1940s when, following events leading up to the 1945 Trinity bomb test, he’s enlisted by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head up the Manhattan Project, which, at a secluded purpose built desert town of Los Alamos in New Mexico, gathered together America’s top scientists and engineers to build the first atomic weapon, initially to beat Nazi Germany to the punch and, when Hitler fell, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more as a demonstration of capability than to bring Japan to submission.
As such, this element of the film is dense in its exploration of moral quandaries about the gulf between idea and application, Oppenheimer’s guilt-haunted but very real concerns about the potential for a nuclear arms race with Russia and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb while the 50s section concerns the emotional and political fallout, the Cabinet hearings revealing his betrayal by the self-serving Strauss, the Salieri to his Mozart, smarting over an earlier humiliation at a congressional hearing,
Alongside a stunning and physically transformative haunting and haunted performance by Murphy with a mastery of a dead-eyed stare, coming to realise the consequences of his arrogance, Downey Jr at the very peak of his powers and a wonderfully prickly Damon, the film is populated by solid supporting turns from the likes Rami Malik, Casey Affleck’s military intelligence officer, Benny Safdie as Hungarian physicist and H-bomb advocate Edward Teller), Gary Oldman as President Truman (scathingly dismissing Oppenheimer as a cry-baby) Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer’s sometime mentor, and Emily Blunt who, as Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife Kitty, an ex-Party member, delivers a last act Best Supporting Actress nomination, while Tom Conti gets to cameo as a convincing Albert Einstein in a pivotal scene shown from three very different perspectives.
Avoiding CGI in favour of optical effects and punctuating the film with images of fiery infernos and exploding stars, it’s visually awe-inspiring and transfixing for every second of the running time. “Try not to set the sky on fire”, jokes Groves before the red button is pressed. Nolan has lit up the whole cinematic universe. (Sky Cinema/Now)
Paradise Is Burning (15)
The feature debut of Swedish writer-director Mika Gustafson owes several debts to other coming of age, neglected adolescents films such as The Virgin Suicides, American Honey and Shoplifters but has its own warmth, charm and poignancy. Co-written with Alexander Öhrstrand, over the course of around a week it unfolds the story of three sisters, streetwise quick-witted sixteen-year old Laura (star in the making Bianca Delbravo), the playful more innocent Mira Dilvin Asaad) and impish seven-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg). Their frequently absent mother not seen since Christmas, Laura is looking after the home, borrowing from neighbour Zara (Marta Oldenburg) when emergencies (like Mira’s first period) arise or the three of them engaging in shoplifting sprees for groceries. Laura also has a penchant for breaking into people’s homes, just to hang out, the girls playing in the pool and filching from the fridges. They’re getting by, but then a crisis arises when social services call to arrange an appointment with their mother about an unauthorised school absence. Fortunately, this will be with a temporary worker who doesn’t know the family, so Laura plans to get someone to pass as their mother. Her itinerant fairground aunt clearly not going to help, Laura sets her sights on Hanna (Ida Engvoll), a troubled woman (estranged from her partner who has custody of their baby) whom she meets while escaping from one of her escapades, inviting her to share her housebreaking, pillaging the owners’ cannabis stashes, dancing to records and reading their diaries. Meanwhile, Mari is befriending Zara’s slobbish boyfriend Sacha (Mitja Siren) in his karaoke contest ambitions and Steffi, who has a thing for stray dogs and a suppressed inner rage, has palled up with a fellow waif.
With the impending visit hovering over proceedings, the film charts the three girls shared celebratory coming-of-age rituals (Mira’s period, Steff losing one of her baby teeth), separate incidents such as Steffi’s run-in with a bullying older girl, and some inevitable sibling fall-outs. The three central and natural performances are superb, creating a real and believable chemistry between the sisters, even if the few adult roles are (like several plot points) somewhat less developed, and Gustafson captures the joy, freedom and anxiety that the girl’s parentless situation brings. It might have been better to end on an open note with the Monday morning ringing of the doorbell, but the joyful and celebratory girls together coda is understandable, both in its affirmation and also in the potential loss that visit might entail. (Until Mon: Mockingbird)
Past Lives (12A)
Unfolding over 24 years, in two 12-year intervals, played out in Seoul, Toronto and New York, writer-director and erstwhile playwright Celine Song’s semi-autobiographical debut is a beguiling bittersweet thwarted love story about unresolved feelings. It opens with a voiceover pondering what three people in a New York bar are talking about and what their relationship may be. They are aspiring playwright Nora (Greta Lee), her fellow writer husband Arthur (John Magaro) and childhood friend and crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and to explore the connections, the film first flashes back 24 years to Korea where Nora, then Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), are academically competitive classmates and budding sweethearts. However, romance is curtailed when her family announces they are emigrating to Canada. The pair part on a somewhat sour note and it’s 12 years before, he still living at home and hanging out with his mates, she now in Toronto, reconnect through Facebook, he tracking her down through her filmmaker father’s page, and then Skype, conduction a flirtatious virtual romance (she recommends him to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ) before realising he’s never coming there and she’s not going back, she shuts it all down.
Twelve more years later, Nora now having married Arthur, who she met at a writing retreat, and rarely speaking Korean, Hae Sung, who has broken up with his girlfriend comes to New York, where she now lives, for a few days, ostensibly as part of his engineering studies, and the two meet up, their meetings causing both to reassess how they feel about each other and what might have been. The title refers to the Buddhist concept of inyun, a belief that some souls are connected through time and past incarnations, somehow fated to be together.
Beautifully framed and photographed (the virtually wordless scene by the fairground carousel and the pair riding a ferry boat around the Statue of Liberty are magical), sublimely directed by Song and exquisitely acted by the three leads, the soulful, reserved Yoo, an understated Marago, who wryly describes himself as “the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny”, and the luminous Lee, it pulses with suppressed emotions, captured in longing looks or the subtle chance in a facial expression, but never falls prey to sentimentality as, subtly also exploring the immigrant experience and indemnity confusions, it builds to a denouement that is both heartbreaking and glowing with joy.
You can feel the echoes of films like David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, but Song has created her own individual and unique vision of their timeless story. An unquestionable film of the year, as Nora and Hae Sung are given to saying when things overwhelm then, ‘whoa’ indeed. (Apple TV+, Netflix)
Polite Society (12)
The feature debut by British writer-director Nida Manzoor, creator of the TV series We Are Lady Parts, mashes up a whole bagful of genres, pouring coming-of-age high school comedy, Bollywood movie, martial arts flick and even references to Jane Austen into the blender and pouring out the results in a glorious smoothie that may not be nutritious but is crammed with fun and flavour.
With an almost entirely Pakistani cast, it’s set in London where, much to the mortification of her traditional career-seeking parents (Shobu Kapoor, Jeff Mirza), teenager Ria Khan (engaging newcomer Priya Kansara) dreams of becoming a female stuntwoman – The Fury – like her idol, real-life British stuntwoman Eunice Huthart, whose signature flying kick she consistently fails to pull off. She’s besties with her older sister, Lena (Umbrella Academy’s Ritu Arya) and constantly needles her to resume her art school studies after having dropped out in a self-confidence crisis, things often getting out of hand as they squabble.
So, she’s horrified when they’re both forced to attend an end of Eid party hosted by one of her mother’s wealthy acquaintances, the imperious and condescending Raheela Shan (Nimra Bucha) and even more so when she learns that Lena is not only dating her geneticist son of Salim (Akshay Khanna) but has also gotten engaged (she apparently has a perfect womb) and will be taking off to Singapore immediately after the wedding.
And so, with the help of her uncool school chums Alba and Clara (Ella Bruccoleri and Seraphina Beh adding solid comedic support), she sets out on a plan to sabotage things, initially looking to try diplomacy but rapidly escalating to trying to dig up dirt (including disguising themselves as men to infiltrate his gym) and, when that fails, invent some (at one point she breaks into the house to scatter used condoms).
It is, as everyone observes, all totally out of proportion. Until, that is, Ria discovers exactly what Salim and Raheela are up to (a touch of Jordan Peele here), at which point it becomes a frantic race by the three friends to stop the wedding before it’s too late.
With a winkingy gleeful and knowingly ludicrous screenplay that, refreshingly peppered with all the sensibilities and sweariness of modern Pakistani youth pulls together Bash Street Kids escapades, torture by waxing, all female martial arts fights (including one with well-trained beauticians), a Bollywood dance sequence and yellow chapter title cards with a clear nod to Tarantino/Rodriguez grindhouse. Vastly funnier than What’s Love Got To With It (and certainly with loads more stunts), further adventures by the Khan sisters would not go amiss. (Sky Cinema)
Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire (12)
The first half of writer-director Zack Snyder’s sci fi saga (with an extended version and Part 2 due in 2024), this is basically a cobbling together of Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai if you’re more arty). Set in the far future where an evil Empire, loyal to a king (Cary Elwes) assassinated along with his wife and healing-powered daughter Issa at the latter’s coronation, command being taken by the senator Balisarius (Fra Fee) who now ruthlessly seeks to conquer the rest of the galaxy, and with the aid of sadistic and not entirely all-human Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who commands the Imperium, the Motherworld’s infantry, put down the rebel insurgency known as Clan Bloodaxe.
It opens on Veldt, a near barren planet where, struggling to raise a harvest, a community of farmers are visited by Noble to appropriate the resources, killing the leader, Father Sindri, as an example, ordering them to have the grain ready when he returns. However, seeing a band of soldiers about to rape a young girl, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a stoical woman rescued some years back from a crashed craft and, as is revealed in chunks of exposition, having a backstory as a high ranking officer in the Imperium forces, fights back, killing them with the help of disillusioned soldier Private Aris (Sky Yang) and, warning that when Noble returns he will destroy everything, teaming up with defiant farmer Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) on a mission to recruit a band of fighters to resist them.
With black marketer and mercenary Kai (Charlie Hunnam in what initially seems to be the Han Solo role), they planet hop as, through individual episodes, one of which involved a child-killing mutant female spider-creature (Jena Malone), they swell the ranks with beast tamer blacksmith Tarak (Staz Nair), cyborg swordswoman, Nemesis (Doona Bai), disgraced Imperium commander General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and, finally, Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher) who brings along half his crew while sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) remains in charge of the other. Come the end of the first half, as Noble and his army come calling and there’s an unexpected act of betrayal, not everyone survives for Part Two.
Unabashedly derivative, generic and unavoidably attracting unfavourable comparisons to the film’s it pillories, even so it does deliver a solid dose of high octane action and slo mo battle scenes, even if the character development seems to have been held back for the longer cut, setting up an assortment of narrative threads to be developed in the sequel along with, one suspects, a bigger role for Anthony Hopkins who provides the voice for the peace-seeking Jimmy, the last of a race of mechanical knights, who, sporting a garland of flowers round his head, is recruited by Kora. It’s now available as a more violent, more extreme three hour plus director’s cut. (Netflix)
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (12)
The second part of Zack Snyder’s Star Wars meets The Magnificent Seven rip-off has received possibly the worst review of his career. Which seems a touch harsh given that, will knowingly derivative and generic, it’s actually a more than decent, action-packed sci fi adventure.
It picks up from the end of the first part with Kora (Sofia Boutella), a fugitive renegade with a hidden past – and identity – as a former royal bodyguard connecting her to the tyrannical Imperium commander Balisarius and the assassination of Princess Issa following the murder of the King and Queen, and her love interest as Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) celebrating having, with the help of their fellow fighters, former general Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and cyborg sword master Nemesis (Doona Bae), and the locals on farming planet Veldt, defeated and killed Motherworld evil admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein).
Except his body’s recovered and regenerated, the wound on his chest prompting Kora’s new nickname as The Scargiver, leading to yet another all-out assault to crush the rebellion on Veldt, as the plucky band have to fight off the murderous Motherworld legions while Kora and Gunnar sneak aboard Noble’s ship to destroy it from the inside. All of which, save for some Kora backstory exposition and a couple of last act surprise revelations, is served up as a constant barrage of action set-pieces, in which, as per the source inspiration, not everyone survives. As such, it’s exhilaratingly explosive high octane stuff, this time providing more involvement for Anthony Hopkins voicing Jimmy the droid , with an ending that dutifully sets the stage for third – and, who knows, maybe ever fourth, instalment, which will inevitably be met with critical scorn and fanboy euphoria in equal measure. (Netflix)
Saltburn (15)
Actress turned novelist turned Killing Eve head writer turned writer-director, Emerald Fennell follows up her Promising Young Woman debut with a very English caustically satirical psychological drama that turns the knife on the English class system, starting out as Evelyn Waugh journeying through Cruel Intentions and ending with a coda straight out Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley.
Set in 2006, Barry Keoghan is Merseyside teen Oliver Quick, who, the product of a working class broken home (disreputable dead, mum alcoholic) who has earned a scholarship to Oxford (Fennell’s own alma mater). A bright but awkward, shy outsider, he’s looked down on by his college contemporaries but is taken under the wing of aristocratic fellow student and party animal Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) after lending him his bike when his own has a puncture. Touched by the sob story of his life and the fact his drug addict dad’s just died, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his resolutely blueblood eccentric (they gather round to watch Superbad) family’s palatial Saltburn estate (telling him that Waugh apparently used the family and house as his model for Brideshead Revisited). Along with the humourless butler (Paul Rhys) and assorted gardeners, the sprawling mansion’s populated by his somewhat dim father Sir James (Richard E Grant clearly having huge fun), emotionally damaged bulimic sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), sponging American mixed-race cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a rival for Felix’s favours, lingering faded glamour houseguest “poor dear Pamela” (a marvellous if almost unrecognisable Carey Mulligan)) and, in a gloriously showstopping performance of razor sharp comic timing and delivery, Rosamund Pike as blissfully privileged, prejudiced and stupid ex-model mother Elsbeth whose explanation as to why she gave up her flirtation with lesbianism is just one of her many hilarious straightfaced lines. She takes a shine to Oliver as, in a more physical way does Ventetia, who, though contemptuous of him, hangs around under his window at night and is rewarded with some steamy oral sex despite being on her period, even though, as a scene lapping up his bathwater makes clear, he’d rather have sex with Felix. As the summer wears on, however, despite the homoerotic electricity things eventually sour between the two friends when, in Felix taking him on a surprise well-meaning visit to his now cleaned-up mother, it turns out Oliver’s not been entirely honest about his upbringing.
Shot in a square ratio, framed with to-camera recollections by Oliver and peppered with laugh out loud deadpan dialogue, there’s also some wonderful quirks such as carving the name of family members and friends who die on a stone and tossing it into the water (let’s just say there’s a fair few extra pebbles by the end) and an audacious use of music that embraces Handel’s Zadok the Priest. the Cheeky Girls’ Have A Cheeky Christmas and a toe-curling karaoke rendition of Flo-Rida’s Low.
Although Pike is the scene-stealer, the performances throughout are consistently sharp with Keoghan utterly magnetic in expressions that shift from doleful to toxic in a blink and bravely quite literally letting it all hang out in the final scene. It might not be quite as ingenious and provocatively original as its predecessor, but even so it’s gold class filmmaking. (Amazon Prime)
Scoop (15)
A recreation of the notorious car crash interview Prince Andrew gave to Newsnight in 2019 attempting to put to bed the scandal about his relationship with the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell and accusations of having had sex with the underage Virginia Giuffre, as directed by Peter Martin from a script by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, adapted from Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews by former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister, this is less about the actual interview and, taking its cue from All The President’s Men and The Post, more a journalistic thriller about the behind the scenes efforts to secure it. When the infamous photo of Andrew and Epstein walking in Central Park, taken in 2010 by Jae Donnelly (Connor Swindells), who also captured a young girl leaving the same private Manhattan home, finally surfaces in a newspaper in connection with a young entrepreneurs event sponsored by the Prince Andrew (a convincing Rufus Sewell under a ton of prosthetics), McAlister reaches out to his Private Secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) proposing a possible interview with the programme’s imperious but highly intelligent anchor, Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), for him to put his side of things. It’s eventually felt this is a perfect chance to change the narrative. History tells a different story.
With the action switching between both sides preparation for the face-to-face, negotiations on what will and won’t be on the table for discussion (Sam and Emily meeting with Thirsk, Andrew and Princess Beatrice at Buckingham Palace), it builds a palpable tension even though the outcome is public record and, with a supporting cast that includes Amanda Redman as McAlister’s mother (who gives a pep talk after Sam is seemingly sidelined), Romola Garai as Newsnight editor Esme Wren and Lia Williams as BBC Current Affairs Director Fran Unsworth, it is compelling viewing and a reminder of what good journalism is all about. (Netflix)
Sing Sing (15)
Directed by Greg Kwedar, this is loosely based on The Sing Sing Follies, Esquire article about the highly successful real life Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme (only 3% of those engaged ever return to prison) that originated at the titular maximum-security penitentiary in 1996 when prisoners sought help in writing and producing a play to perform for their fellow inmates. The every excellent Colman Domingo is the wrongly convicted John “Divine G” Whitfield (a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, internet radio talk show host, actor, film director and producer, and youth counsellor) who mentors his cellmates in performing Shakespeare. The film opens with him as a performer, concluding a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream and primarily centres around his involvement (initially prickly and antagonistic but gradually transforming) with George “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing a fictionalised younger version of himself, the real Whitfield also cameoing), a badass convicted of armed robbery, as the troupe (played mostly by actual RTA alumni), led by group leader and writer Brent Buell (Paul Raci in a role similar to that in The Sound of Metal), assemble and rehearse Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, a musical about a time-traveling ancient Egyptian (one stickler for detail amusingly complains the headband is actually Phoenician) in which Maclin, who had a fondness for the Bard, played Hamlet.
While it captures the dehumanising realities of life behind bars (cell searches, etc.) and how it impacts on the inmates’ psychology and actions (dropping flat to the ground when a siren wails), this is far more about catharsis and the therapeutic power of theatre and the way in which art speaks to its consumers and participants.
Described in one review as The Shawshank Redemption as made by Mike Leigh, the tunnel more metaphorical than actual, it focuses intently on the relationship between the two Divines, never sentimentalising but bringing an inspirational feel to its narrative (the men learning to lower their guard to expose and handle their feelings), wholly unique within the prison genre (perhaps the closest might be The Birdman of Alcatraz). “We’re here to become human again”, says one the men during a rehearsal; the film sings a testament and message to the system as to how that is really possible. (Until Sun: Mockingbird)
Talk To Me (15)
Transitioning from YouTube horror, Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou make their directorial feature debut with an assured entry into the familiar don’t mess with the afterlife genre that brings a fresh approach to well-worn tropes and a whole new meaning to the phrase talk to the hand. Opening with a stabbing and a shocking violent suicide at a party and a genuinely disturbing night scene where a car hits a kangaroo which is left dying in the road ( a sure nod to the deer in Jordan Peele’s Get Out), the narrative hinges on the hand of a dead psychic which, encased in ceramics, those looking for a thrill are encouraged to clasp, making contact with a spirit and saying ‘Talk to me’ and then ‘I invite you in’, whereby they’re taken over and have scary visions, but have to blow out the candle and let go after 90 seconds so that they don’t remain possessed.
One such is black teenager Mia (sterling newcomer Sophie Wilde) who was driving the car that hit the kangaroo and while her surrogate younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) begged her to end its misery, she was unable to bring herself to do so. Following her mother’s death, a gulf has opened up between Mia and her brooding father Max (Marcus Johnson), leading her to spend much of her time at Riley’s house with his big sister and her best friend (Alexandra Jensen), their take no shit mother Sue (veteran Australian star Miranda Otto), working nights This allows them to sneak out to a party hosted by Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio), who initiate a hand session, everyone treating the gross-outs like some sort of supernatural high and a big laugh to be shared on social media.
Naturally, it all goes to shit, staring off with Jade’s ultra-Christian boyfriend Daniel (Otis Dhanji) being taken over by a horny spirit (cue a later foot sucking scene), Mia becoming hooked and going back over and over and Riley volunteering and being possessed by Mia’s dead mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen) who tries to reconcile with her daughter, leading to the time limit being exceeded. All of which results in Mia being ostracised by Jade and Sue following two graphically violent convulsive suicide attempts by Riley whose spirit Mia is shown being tortured in limbo, with killing him the only way to set him free, and her learning the truth behind her mother’s death.
With a subtext about bored youth seeking ever extreme kicks as they sink into addiction (viral and otherwise) along with the trauma of guilt and loss, the pace never slackens as the intensity builds, and while the idea that really are not to be trusted may be well-worn and the narrative is overtaken by the chaos, the brothers still manage to squeeze some decent jolts before the big final twist that leaves things open for a sequel. (Netflix)
Touch (12A)
A departure from his usual action movies, adapted from the novel by Olaf Olafsson, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur delivers a decades and continents-spanning romantic melodrama of memory, ageing, loss and love that will inevitably but also deservedly prompt comparisons with Past Lives. An elderly Icelandic widower who owns a restaurant in Reykjavik and sings in a local choir, Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) learns he has early onset dementia and is advised by his doctor that it might be a good time to settle any unresolved business. To which end, much to his somewhat overbearing daughter’s consternation, he heads for London just as pandemic lockdown looms (the only guest at his hotel with the 2 metre rule giving the title an extra resonance), to try and find his first love, the less conservative daughter of the stern but fatherly owner of Japanese restaurant Nippon, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), for whom, he worked as a dishwasher after dropping out of the London School of Economics some 50 years earlier (the reference to John and Yoko’s bed-in places it in 1969), his Marxism at odds with his studies.
As such, the film moves back and forth between Kristofer’s present day search, the restaurant now a tattoo parlour, and 60s flashbacks to his youth (Palmi Kormákur, the director’s son) and the growing but clandestine romance with Miko (Yôko Narahashi) as he teaches himself Japanese, the tones of the cinematography changing accordingly. There’s a poignant backstory involving Hiroshima regarding why Miko and her father moved to London after the war that adds further emotional resonance to the narrative, the relationship coming to abrupt end when Kristofer discovers they have closed the restaurant at short notice and just vanished. Back in the present, he learns they moved back to Japan, setting up the third act as he travels to Tokyo to finally reunite with the now older Miko (Yoko Narahashi, also the film’s casting director) and learn of her new life and why she left the old one.
Switching languages and locations, a film about accepting your life and the changes that accompany it, it slowly build its melancholic warmth in its tale of compassion, understanding and forgiveness, interspersed with amusing and touching sidebars such as the older Kristofer’s sake bar encounter with a Japanese “salary man” widower (Masatoshi Nakamura) that ends up with them doing karaoke together, and the younger man being persuaded to sing for his Japanese friends not to mention a truly sensual scene of Kristofer preparing a Japanese breakfast for Miko.
With grace notes support from Meg Kubota as Nippon waitress Hitomi, Tatsuya Tagawa as opera-singing chef Arai-san and Ruth Sheen as young Kristofer’s nosy landlady and a soundtrack that takes in Nick Drake and The Zombies, it’s beguilingly bittersweet gem that truly puts the touch into touching. (MAC)
Trap (15)
Although Split and Glass marked a promising comeback, following Old and Knock At The Cabin, M Night Shyamalan continues his slide back down the slope with this preposterous cod-Hitchcock thriller (pitched as “What if ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”) wherein family man fireman Cooper, who’s secretly a dismembering serial killer tagged The Butcher (Josh Hartnett) with 12 victims to date, is puzzled by the huge police and SWAT presence at the sell-out show by Lady Raven (Shyamalan’s R&B star daughter Saleka Night Shyamalan) to which he’s taken his superfan young daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) and learns from Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), a loose-mouthed concessions vendor, that’s it’s been set up as an FBI trap who’ve had a tip off that their single-father prey (all they know is he is white and has an animal tattoo) will be there. Apparently they intend to question all the 3000 men in attendance as they leave, which suggests the overtime budget must be huge.
All of this is revealed early on when Cooper slips into the toilets to check his phone and we’re shown a man chained to a metal pole in some basement lair. But that doesn’t mean Shyamalan’s dialled down on his staple twists, they’re just stored up for the last act (in case you were wondering how the FBI knew he’d be at the show) where, having managed to get out of the stadium by forcing Lady Raven to help them under the pretence of a treat for Riley, having duped her uncle, a cameoing Shyamalan, into having her join her hero on stage for the final number by saying she has leukaemia.
It’s all exasperatingly illogical with its serpentine plot contrivances as our pop diva seeks to outfox him by having her limo drive to Cooper’s home with his wife (Alison Pill) and young son, but Shyamalan does make a decent fist of building the suspense, intercutting Cooper’s cop distractions with a couple of prickly run-ins with the mother of one of Riley’s friends, with whom she’s fallen out, and listening in on a lifted police radio to the FBI profiler (Hayley Mills, surely cast just for a Parent Trap in joke) doling out exposition as she describes him as a split personality with mommy issues.
None of that would work, however, if it wasn’t for Hartnett’s ability to shift from scary creep to charming dad in just a switch of a smile, but even he can’t do anything to salvage the final credibility-defying and clumsily staged scenes that break out into a sweat in setting up a sequel. Trap has the wrong first letter. (Mockingbird; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Twisters (12A)
Five years after two of her friends and her boyfriend died in an experimental college project attempt to take down a twister in Tornado Alley in Oklahoma by sending a dozen barrels’ worth of polymers up into its core, guilt-ridden Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has given up storm chasing and retired to a job as a New York-based weather analyst. But then along comes fellow survivor Javi (Anthony Ramos) who has a simmering in the background crush on her and now heads a corporation of storm chasers called Storm Par and wants her help – and in particular her uncanny ability to spot where tornado fill form – in surrounding one with three of his all new high-tech radar (they and their van amusingly named for the characters in The Wizard Of Oz) so they can gather data. She refuses until, with Oklahoma in the grip of a major town destroying twister outbreak, he appeals to her save the world idealism and she agrees to join his crew of boffins (with future Superman David Corenswet as the resident jerk).
Which is when she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a showboating Stetson-wearing good ol’ boy self-styled daredevil Tornado Wrangler (motto – “you don’t face your fears, you ride ‘em”) with an irritating cocky grin (but also a degree in meteorology) who drives a customised red truck (it shoots off fireworks and anchors itself to the ground), and his crew of mavericks (drone piloting Sasha Lane and Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian’s mechanic among them), on whom Brit journalist Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton) is making a photo-documentary profile. Naturally, there’s initial rivalry friction in their twister-chasing just as there is a developing sexual tension before, in the wake of more small-town devastation, her panic in the eye of the storm, the reality behind Javi’s shady property developer investor and a somewhat repetitive series of near death twister run-ins, the two of them join forces after she finally returns to her loving mum (Maura Tierney), uncovers her old research and together they realise what her polymers process is missing. Cue a final once more into eye of the storm.
Connected only in name to the 1996 original which starred Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton (his son James make a tribute cameo), and drawing on the technological developments in both filmmaking and combatting weather events since then, it’s a major step-up for director Lee Isaac Chung whose last film was Minari, a small scale drama about South Korean immigrant farmers in 80’s rural Arkansas, who pulls it off with a dynamic confidence despite the repetition, an avoidance of mentioning climate change and some plot strands being sucked up along with the cars and infrastructure. Powell again proves his movie-star charisma with a perfectly styled coif added to his signature smile and squint while, channelling Kate’s passions, self-recriminations and turmoils, Edgar-Jones is the film’s emotional centre of gravity. There’s nothing that quite matches the original’s shot of a cow being sucked up into the sky, but, the gale force event movie of the summer, it’ll blow your socks off. “We gotta get everyone in the movie theatre!” someone yells. It will. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe)
Unfrosted (12)
Anyone old enough to remember Tony The Tiger, the mascot for Frosted Flakes, or Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Rice Krispies trio, will find much to enjoy in this unashamedly silly and colourful directorial debut from Jerry Seinfeld, which, framed bas an origin story recounted to a young runaway, charts the cereal rivalry between American firms Kellogg’s and Post in Battle, Michigan, in a race to be first to develop a new breakfast treat for America – the jam-filled toasted (and potentially palate scalding) pastry, the Pop-Tart.
Seinfeld, who co-wrote the screenplay, is Bob Cabana, a fictional marketing executive for Kellogg’s in the early 1960s, working for (fictional) Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan), a descendant of the company’s founder, while Melissa McCarthy is (fictional) Donna ‘Stan’ Stankowski, a former employee whose seconded from working for NASA on the moon landing to help develop its top-secret project. However, across the way, Post, headed up by (real) Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), with whom Kellogg’s infatuated, who are developing their own Country Squares using plans stolen from Kellogg’s (both companies have undercover operatives posing a janitors who hidden cameras in their mops).
Part factual and part nonsense, its peppered with a stream of gags and pop culture references in a storyline that variously entails enlisting an oddball crew of riffs on real historical figures, Sea Monkeys creator Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), fitness entrepreneur Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), bicycle boss Ignaz (here Steve) Schwinn (Jack McBrayer) and (based on Hector Boyardee) celebrity Italian chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan), who creates a sentient ravioli, as taste pilots for the jammy pastry (initially called Trat-Pop) Then there’s a trip to ask a favour of a sexually insatiable JFK (Bill Burr) who gets the (real-life) Wrigleys mascots the Doublemint Twins pregnant, Post recruiting Kruschev (Dean Norris) as a sponsor in response and prompting the Cuban crisis. Plus an Oppenheimer-like pastry toasting testing range that kills off one of the tasters; a Post-sabotaging deal with Puerto Rican criminal sugar magnate El Sucre; news legend Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan who doubles as and Johnny Carson) rambling on about his dodgy habits; a sinister cabal of milkman led by Peter Dinklage and Christian Slater; and a cereal mascots revolt led by real-life preening ham Thurl Ravenscroft (Hugh Grant in a variation of his Paddington character), who voiced Tony the Tiger.
All of this plus cameos by Fred Armisen, Cedric The Entertainer and John Hamm and John Slattery channelling their Mad Men personae adding to the high comedy calorie count in a Coens and Mel Brooks spoofing cocktail. Like its iconic maguffin, it has nothing of nutritional value, but it goes down a treat. (Netflix)
The Union (12)
Another generic Netflix action movie, this pares Mark Wahlberg as Mike McKenna, a blue-collar construction worker who, when an op to extract a CIA defector in Trieste goes fatally pear-shaped, is drugged in New Jersey (cue Bruce Springsteen songs) and wakes up in London to be recruited by former high school girlfriend Roxanne (Halle Berry in black leathers) who, it transpires, now works for a covert intelligence agency of working-class agents known as The Union, run by Tom Brennan (JK Simmons) and headquartered in the BT Tower, and whose closest partner Nick Faraday (Mike Colter) was killed. As an unassuming figure, she wants Mike to help her to track down the obligatory maguffin containing details of every spy and mission in the Western world before its sold to the highest bidder.
Pretty much as predictable as it is formulaic (yes, there’s that supposed dead character reappearing to play the betrayal hand and set up the last act’s multiple Croatian car chases), nevertheless that sparky chemistry between long-time friends Whalberg and Berry, as well as Simmonds’ trademark dry wit delivery and support turns from Jackie Earl Haley and Alice Lee as fellow agents and Stephen Campbell Moore as an annoying CIA operative who wants to shut The Union down, ensures it serves exactly what it promises on the label to provide comfort food that goes down easily even if there’s no nutritional value. (Netflix)
Widow Clicquot (12A)
Those who know their champagnes, will recognise the name Veuve Clicquot as one of the world’s the largest champagne houses, with Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot credited with creating the first known vintage rose champagne in 1810 and pioneering processes still used today. Married (arranged by her parents) to Voltaire-loving vineyard owner François (Tom Sturridge seem mainly in flashbacks) and widowed at 27 ( mental infirmity is hinted at), Barbe (Haley Bennett) with a young daughter (shipped off to an abbey for most of the film), she defies her dour father-in-law Phillipe’s (Ben Miles) attempt to sell the vineyard to Moet, determined to keep control of the ailing wine-making concern she and Francois have worked on so passionately (talking to the vines a trick of the trade), insisting not only can she do the job but she’s the only one who understands how to.
Phillipe temporarily demurs to her, but with a timescale to prove she can pull things off and not ruin the business, to which end she enlists the help of François’s best friend (and possibly more), Louis Bohne (Sam Riley), the best wine merchant in France, her father-in-law’s accountant Edouard (Anson Boon), her maid Anne (Natasha O’Keeffe) and field foreman Georges (Leo Suter), as she battles to create a champagne that will save the estate.
This being the 18th century, she is of course up against the patriarchy, as embodied by the likes of her estate manager Droite (Paul Rhys) and Jean-Remy Moet (Nicholas Farrell) but also restrictive trade embargoes (which she and Louis try to circumvent to smuggle bottles into Russia) and vineyard legislations imposed by Napoleon, eventually ending up in court as the establishment attempt to remove her from running the estate.
As a tale of female resistance against male chauvinism, it’s a fairly low voltage period drama with workmanlike direction but a decent turn from Bennett and Riley and some gorgeous cinematography give it a watchable fizz. (Mon: Everyman)