This column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.
FILM OF THE WEEK
Bad Boys: Ride Or Die (15)
The buddy cop franchise instigated by the 1995 original that paired Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as maverick Miami narcotics cops Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence), a sequel followed eight years later to generally poor reviews but was sufficiently successful at the box office to justify a third outing in 2020 with Bad Boys For Life. Its directing team, Adil & Bilall, licking their wounds after the cancelled Batgirl movie, return now for a fourth instalment that, opening with a convenience store hold-up take down and Mike marrying Christine (Melanie Liburd), the physical trainer he met between sequels, takes its cue from the closing moments of its predecessor in which Mike visited his illegitimate son Armando (Jacob Scipio), who had assassinated their boss, Captain Howard, offering a shot at redemption by helping him and Marcus on a case. Although, at that point, no plot had been conceived, it ties in here with a repeat of the scene, but this time with Armando being the only one who can identify who framed Howard (Eric Dane as ex-Army Ranger sociopath McGrath), their former boss (Joe Pantoliano turning up in flashbacks and video recordings) now being posthumously framed for corruption and links with the cartel.
Needless to say, Mike and Marcus aren’t happy that their new boss at AMMO, and Mike’s ex-girlfriend. Rita (Paola Núñez), who killed Armando’s mother in the last film and who is dating prospective mayor Lockwood (Ioan Gruffudd), has no choice to go with the seemingly overwhelming incriminating evidence (naturally uploaded by hacking into various systems), while Howard’s daughter, US Marshall Judy (Rhea Seehoern) and granddaughter Callie (Quinn Hemphill) want nothing more than to see Armando dead. And is determined to take him down as well as Mike and Marcus who are on the run after having been framed for the killing a bunch of cops and freeing Armando.
Although the title is frankly meaningless, this is far better and more enjoyable than it has any right to be. Smith and Lawrence still have great chemistry together while, bringing back characters from the previous films (Tasha Smith taking over the role of Marcus’s wife), turning some of them on their head. Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig get to reprise their roles as AMMO weapon and tech experts Kelly and Dorn, respectively, this time with added love interest. Also back is a deadpan Dennis Greene (who’s only ever been in Bad Boys movies) as Marcus’s marine son-in-law Reggie (getting to clean house of bad guys), DJ Khaled reprises his turn as Manny the Butcher while Tiffany Haddish briefly appears as bad girl stripper Tabitha and there’s another cameo by Michael Bay.
It is, to say the least, a 90s-flavoured switchback ride of twists and turns (though anyone who doesn’t see one not who they seem to be coming should probably go to Specsavers), mixing the gunfire, chases and explosions with running gags about Mike trying to keep Marcus from eating bad shit snacks and he, having had a near death heart attack experience, now wittering on about their past lives together (apparently at one point Mike was literally a stubborn ass), they being eternal soulmates (without dicks) and how he thinks he cannot be killed. There’s also an Oscars in-joke scene where Lawrence gets to slap Smith around the face several times. Climaxing with a guns blazing, hostage freeing, showdown at an abandoned amusement park, complete with crocodile too, it all wraps up with the domesticity of a family barbecue, but they may still have on more ride in them yet. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
ALSO RELEASED
The Dead Don’t Hurt (15)
The second directorial outing by Viggo Mortensen, who also wrote the script and the score, set just prior to and during the American Civil War, it opens with Vicky Krieps’ character on her deathbed and then cuts to a man in black shooting up various folk in the town saloon and plugging the deputy sheriff before riding off. Following a patchwork of timelines, it then proceeds at a leisurely pace to unfold how the two are connected. Krieps is Vivienne Le Coudy, a French Canadian flower seller in San Francisco who’s being pursued by some boastful and entitled dick but then catches the eye of Holger Olsen (Mortensen), a good-hearted, soft-spoken Danish immigrant and carpenter, the pair striking up a relationship and eventually a romance and marriage of sorts, though she’s less than impressed on discovering his sparse isolated and greenery-challenged cabin out west in Nevada.
Fast forwarding, he’s busy burying her while their young son Vincent (Atlas Green), and that’s a whole other subplot that links the characters at the start, watches, when the mayor, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston),turns up to apprise him of the shooting. Olsen, it turns out being the sheriff, and the killer being Weston (Solly McLeod), the psychopathic son of arrogant businessman Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt) who’s in cahoots with the corrupt mayor, who also owns the bank, in taking over the saloon whose owner was one of the victims. Weston meanwhile has fled town and his stuttering stooge has been fitted up as the fall guy in a rigged trial to be set on a horse with a noose round his neck.
A slow burner, other than that opening scene, there’s nary another shot fired in anger until the closing moments but even so it’s not without its drama, emotional and physical, Vivienne building a home with flowers and vegetables but Olsen then enlisting to do the right thing and taking off for the war (it’s his military service that gets him the job of sheriff), while the drunken violent Weston beats up the Mexican saloon piano player because he doesn’t like the music, threatens the barkeep-manager Alan Kendall (W Earl Brown) and comes on to Vivienne who, of independent spirit, is working there. You can see by now where this is heading. Catching back up where we began, Olsen takes Vincent and quits job and cabin to head off for a new life. But, whether he likes it or not, there’s scores to be settled.
Adding to the timelines (to which Olsen’s beard provides the road map) are flashbacks to Vivienne as a child with a Joan of Arc complex, the fate of her father who also goes off to fight in someone else’s war, and her visions of a knight in armour riding through the forest to protect her (the faces behind the visor shifting in the different appearances). All of which, even if the villains of the piece are fairly one-dimensional, adds up to an intelligent, measured and deliberate psychological character study headed up by quietly commanding and multifaceted performances by Mortensen and Krieps that confirms the latter’s prowess behind as well as in front of the camera. (Cineworld 5 Ways, Solihull; Reel; Omniplex Great Park)
A Game Of Two Halves (PG)
A well-meaning but clumsily written and executed directorial debut by Khayam Khan, this follows a familiar sports underdog path variously littered with fish out of water, cultural identity issues and have and have not commentary all to a backdrop of Hyderabad in India. It’s here that British Indian university student Sanjay (a mediocre, personality-free Saaj Raja sporting a constant dazed deer in the headlights expression) ends up rather than Washington after his white girlfriend Mia (Lucy Jackson) changes his application form for a volunteer fellowship scheme his prestigious university is running.
Met at the airport by Kadeem (an equally flat Harish Khanna) who runs the sporting academy where he’s going to coach, Sanjay is underwhelmed to be first find himself staying in run down accommodation where basic would be an improvement (he’s advised to wash more frequently than in England, but, spot the social commentary, the place has no running water) and then finds the so-called academy is a just patch of muddy, barren land for the soccer pitch with ramshackle goalposts and no buildings. He’s tasked with teaching football skills to a bunch of poor kids whose enthusiasm far outmatches their skills (some are girls but they inexplicably soon vanish from the plot). There is, of course, one genuinely talented player, Harnidh (Sachin Chaudhary, one of the few cast members who can act), an urchin living in slum dwelling, saying his dad’s dead and his mum disabled, to whom Sanjay takes a shine.
Meanwhile, Sanjay’s mother (Sudha Bhuchar) discovering what Mia did, tells her she’s no longer welcome and get on the phone to her sister Aama (Swaroopa Gosh injecting some life into proceedings) in India and arranges for him to move in with her and her wealthy developer husband Raab (Pawan Chopra) whose son is a promising player and gets him taken on as the coach for his more upmarket academy’s team. But hey, Sanjay feels a bit guilty abandoning the poor kids, so ends up coaching them in the morning and the others in the afternoon, all of which builds to the obligatory crucial match between the two teams with a big cash prize and his shocked discovery to find why Harnidh hasn’t turned up to play.
It doesn’t help that Shirley Day’s screenplay is all over the place. An early scene which has Sanjay fantasising over an Indian fellow student (and prompting a superfluous Bollywood dance sequence) suggests it might go down the cultural identity route, but this is almost immediately benches for the rest of the film, while later there’s some forced scenes about self-entitled privilege by the better off with everything versus the poor with nothing.
Slow and unevenly paced with Raja unable to show the self-discovery journey his character supposedly undertakes as he realises Hyderabad was exactly where he was meant to be before wrapping up in one of the most tepid romantic reunions to grace a cinema screen, it fails to score in either half. (Vue)
The Watched (15)
Seemingly unable to decide on its title and perspective (in the US it’s The Watchers), an uncertainty that infects the entire film too, this is directorial and, adapted from a novel by A.M. Shine, screenwriting feature debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M Night Shyamalan who serves as producer. The apple clearly hasn’t fallen from the tree in that it’s a creepy mystery that delivers a narrative twist in the last act. Unfortunately, there’s rather more smoke and mirrors than substance.
Set in contemporary Ireland, it opens with an unnamed man trying to escape from something in the woods, going round in circles, always coming back to a Point Of No Return sign, and eventually dragged away to wherever. Cut to Galway where, an American artist working in a pet shop, Mia (Dakota Fanning) is charged with delivering an orange parakeet to a client in Belfast. En route, her car breaks down in the middle of an uncharted forest and, trying to find help, winds up lost and unable to find her way back to the vehicle. As night begins to fall, she spots a white-haired woman who she follows and is urged to enter a strange concrete building before it’s too late, Inside, the woman, Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), introduces her to two others, Ciara (Georgina Campbell), who, we learn is the wife of the man at the start, and young Irishman Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), who hunts for their food, and explains that they are all trapped inside and, at night, they have to line up facing a mirror wall to be observed by the so-called watchers who live in the woods. The coop, as Madeline, who is clearly in charge, calls it, has power, a chair, a table, a lamp, and a video player (a sort of Love Island DVD is provided for their entertainment) but apparently, there’s no way to escape the woods before night comes and, while they can venture out in the daylight, they shouldn’t stray far and most certainly shouldn’t poke around in the cavernous burrows to be found here and there.
Without giving away too much of the plot, Mina, whose backstory involves causing her mother’s death as a child, climbs down one such hole to discover various objects, leading to an assault on the coop and apparently Ciara’s husband pleading to be let in. There’s a further discovery of a lair cum laboratory beneath the coop where a computer and a cache of video recordings conveniently explains it was designed by a Professor Kilmartin (John Lynch) as part of his research into Ireland’s ancient faerie folk or changelings, who could transform to take on the bodies of others, while a later discovery introduces Halflings which, as the name suggests, are half faerie-half human.
However while, assisted by some compelling camera work, the early going sets up a Blair Witch creepiness, intrigue and tension without any explanations, that gradually dissipates to a point where even the appearance of the spindly watchers fails to inject any sense of dread or horror. The lack of anything more than surface character depth (Ciara’s reactions to her husband’s death is bad AmDram) doesn’t pull you into the fates of those being watched while the eventual escape is all rather perfunctory (follow the bird) and the motives of the watchers and the ‘big’ are all rather underwhelming, while the guilt-trauma elements introduced at the start are never much developed. Competent at best, she might go on to better thing, but other than curiosity over the family link, there seems little reason to waste your time, likely to make it one of the year’s great unwatched. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
AVAILABLE NOW
American Fiction (15)
A scathing and wickedly funny satire on white stereotyping of Blacks in popular culture where trauma, poverty and felons dominate the narratives and how Black writers pander to those and a white liberal audience in order to get success, writer-director Cord Jefferson’s feature debut and Oscar winner for his adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, is an early contender for the year’s best of list.
Jeffrey Wright gives a career peak performance as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (one wonders perhaps why, on a different jazz riff, he wasn’t nicknamed Mose?), a curmudgeonly, smugly self-righteous and inwardly self-hating college professor and respected intellectual author from a middle class family who’s struggling to find a publisher for his latest book (a dry reworking of Aeschylus’s The Persians) internally bristling at having to deal with passive aggressive attitudes at work (one of his students storms out when he tries to teach Flannery O’Connor’s The Artificial Nigger, for which he’s given a forced leave of absence) and on the street. He’s constantly ridiculed for his taste in white wine and white women. Distancing himself from lazy perceptions of being Black, declaring that he doesn’t believe in defining art or people by race, he takes umbrage on finding his novels placed in a bookstore’s African American section, raging that the only things Black about them is the ink.
So he’s incandescent when fellow middle class Black author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) is feted by the literary establishment and the media for her best-selling novel about inner city Black women called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which, while a life she’s never known, panders to all the clichés of character and Black narrative that appeal to her white readership or, as she puts it, “giving the market what it wants”.
Letting off steam, for a joke and to prove a point to himself, he churns out his own parodic novel in the same vein, part inspired from having watched 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Titling it My Pafology as a send-up of Golden’s supposed street language and about drugs, ne’er-do-well fathers and gang shootings, he has his agent (John Ortiz) send it out under the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh. To his shock – and indeed confirmed horror – he’s offered a deal worth more than he’d earn in a lifetime. Needing money to pay for nursing home care for his ailing mother Agnes (a lovely understated turn by Leslie Uggams) who’s showing signs of Alzheimer’s, he agrees, pushing the joke further by having his agent say that Leigh is a wanted fugitive. The publishers and, inevitably, Hollywood, are in raptures. His having had to leave a meeting with movie producer Wiley (Adam Brody) to avoid being recognised, only further bolsters the mystique behind his fantasy self.
Eventually, feeling it’s all getting out of control, during a conference call to the publishers, he tells them he wants to retitle the book. He wants to call it Fuck. It barely takes a heartbeat before they’re enthusiastically agreeing, calling it a bold and radical statement. A movie deal is also moving forward. However, matters get complicated when Monk is asked to be part of a New England Book Association’s Literary Award panel, alongside Golden, to decide the book of the year, and it’s decided that Fuck should be included for consideration. Despite he and Golden making persuasive arguments to reject it, their white fellow judges are unanimous in placing it top of the list. All of which builds to an awards ceremony that, in the proposed screenplay, comes with three different endings. It’s a no brainer as to which one Wiley opts for.
Peppered with barbed humour, spiked irony (Wiley’s new film is Plantation Annihilation, a Blaxploitation starring, as in an joke, Ryan Reynolds where a white couple marry on a plantation and are murdered by the ghosts of former slaves) and sheer laugh out loud lines, Jefferson also grounds the narrative in the Boston-set family and domestic melodrama. This involves Monk’s relationships with his confrontational, substance-abusing gay doctor brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), divorced after being found cheating with a man, his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), also a doctor, who makes an early exit, his mother’s long-time live-in carer Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor who gets her own story finding love with Raymond Anthony Thomas’s cop), and his public defender across the street neighbour turned girlfriend Coraline (Erika Alexander, excellent), while the ghost of his suicide father haunts his repressed feelings. While, in terms of its target audience, it may have its cake and eat it, it’s a real classic. (Amazon Prime)
Argylle (12A)
Ignore the savage reviews, the latest screwball spy caper from Matthew Vaughn is a barrel of fun that never takes itself seriously and comes with more twists than something that is very twisty indeed. Bryce Dallas Howard is introverted Elly Conway, the best-selling author of a series of spy novels featuring the adventures of her suave titular hero, Agent Argylle. Her latest has him uncovering a secret league of rogue agents, her reading of the fifth instalment intercut with imagined scenes (a la Sandra Bullock’s author in The Lost City) featuring Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill sporting a ludicrous square hairdo) who, in the opening scenes staged to Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything, finds his cover blown when trying to arrest enemy agent LaGrange (Dua Lipa) and has to be rescued by his techie Keira (Ariana Debose), only for her to be killed. Ordered in a blink and you’ll miss it cameo by Richard E Grant to capture LaGrange, who’s escaped on a motorbike, there follows a wonderfully ridiculous car chase before she’s plucked, literally, from her bike by Argyll’s sidekick Wyatt (John Cena), she revealing a secret file that will bring down the Division before committing suicide. The story’s to be continued in book six but Elly has hit a creative block, her mother (Catherine O’Hara) disparagingly dismissing the cliffhanger as a cop out).
Boarding a train to visit her and get some input, taking along her sole companion, Alfie, a Scottish Fold furball (Claudia Schiffer’s cat Chip apparently), in a backpack, she becomes the target of a fellow passengers legion of a would be assassins and is saved by the straggle-haired Aidan (Sam Rockwell proving his leading man credentials) who, it turns out is a real spy (quick fire editing having Elly variously see him as himself and Argylle) and, the pair eventually parachuting from the train, explains that she’s being pursued by an organisation known as the Division (headed up by Bryan Cranston) because her book somehow predicts the future and they want her to write the next chapter so they can get their hands on a coded file called The Masterkey. The pair (Elly too scared to have ever flown before) travel to meet her folks in London to find the file and where hordes of heavily armed goons turn up to take them out.
Now if all this feels a lot to take in, then what comes next is a complete rug puller as twist follows twist as it heads down assorted rabbit holes with no one who you – or indeed they – think they are, Cranston turning up as another character entirely and the screenplay introducing a backstory between the confused Elly and the scruffy Aidan and a visit to France to meet former CIA deputy director Alfred Solomon (Samuel J Jackson) who reveals Argylle isn’t as fictional as she thinks.
To say more – or let the cat out of the bag so to speak – would spoil the inventive surprises as true identities are revealed and fictional characters turn out to be real, and Sofia Boutella puts in an appearance as the mysterious The Keeper, the film closing up with another book reading where Cavill turns up in the audience (with an ever more preposterous haircut) and a mid-credits sequence that links it directly to Vaughn’s Kings Man universe and sets up manner of possible sequels. Less violent that Vaughn’s usual fare (there’s a wry scene where Aidan tries to explain how Elly should squish a bad guys head and she can’t bring herself to do it) but still loaded with frantic wall to wall action. It’s utter nonsense of course, but frankly any film that can include both a slo-mo shoot-out amid coloured smoke choreographed as a dance routine to The Beatles Now And Then and a balletic figure-skating knife fight on an oil slick just has to be seen. (Apple TV+)
Asteroid City (12A)
Shot in widescreen washed out pastel colours, drenched in retro nostalgia, deadpan dialogue, and heavily stylised with a self-aware sense of artifice, set in a red-rock Southwest American desert town in 1955, this is quintessential Wes Anderson. With its single phone booth, one pump gas station and 50s diner and motel, Asteroid City (pop 87) is also the site of a giant meteorite crater tourist attraction, intermittent atom bomb tests and the annual Junior Stargazers convention where teenage science geeks gather for their awards.
When his car breaks down, war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman on peak form) is stranded in town with his four kids, Stargazer Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and his three eccentric young sisters, Andromeda, Pandora and Cassiopeia (Ella, Gracie, Willan Faris), who he’s yet to tell their mother died three weeks earlier and he has her ashes in a Tupperware tub, prompting the arrival of his wealthy father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect them.
Also gathered are world weary TV star Midge Campbell (Scarlet Johannsen, terrific), J.J. Kellogg (Live Schreiber), Sandy Borden (Hope Davis) and Roger Cho (Stephen Park) whose respective kids, botany wiz Dinah (Grace Edwards), rebellious Clifford (Aristou Meehan), sceptical Shelly (Sophia Lillis) and anti-authority Ricky (Ethan Josh Lee), are all award winners. There’s also Montana (Rupert Friend), stranded there with his fellow cowboys when the bus left and who’s attracted to June (Maya Hawke), a science teacher with her church group pupils, local scientist Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) who sponsors the awards, and General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) who’s due to present them.
However, the ceremony is interrupted by the arrival of an alien who steals a meteorite fragment and flies off, prompting a quarantine of everyone there and a rebellion by the Stargazers to make contact, Augie’s photo being leaked to the media. Meanwhile, various romances bubble up.
Except, as seen from the start and in subsequent black and white sequences, what we’re actually watching is a television behind-the-scenes and recreation of the first staging of a play called Asteroid City by esteemed New York playwright Conrad Earp (Ed Norton), who’s in a relationship with one of the cast, presented by The Host (Bryan Cranston) as directed by the womanising Schubert Green (Adrian Brody) with all the characters being the actors who, under their real names, auditioned for and appeared in the stage production (save for Margot Robbie whose role – her lines movingly re-enacted with Augie/Jones – as the mother was cut).
Constructed as a series of tableaux, meditations on bottled up grief interweave with themes of storytelling and being aliens in our own skins and, of course, the meaning of life (or understanding the play) And while emotion is deliberately kept at arms-length, there’s still a certain poignancy as the stories unfold. There’s also a swathe of good gags, both visual (a recurring cops vs crooks car chase) and verbal, among them a vending machine that sells plots of land out in the desert. Adding to the star-studded cast there’s Steve Carrell as the motel manager (inexplicably toting a pistol), Matt Dillon as the mechanic and Jeff Goldblum who has one line in the black and white sequences as the actor playing the alien. All that and a great memory party game. At the end of the day, the dazzling style may triumph over the obtuse substance, but even so it’s an intoxicating experience. Glad to meteor indeed. (Peacock/Sky Cinema)
Atlas (15)
Another Netflix number from Jennifer Lopez, set in the not too distant future, this taps in to the AI angst zeitgeist with her as Atlas Shepherd, a misanthropic military data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, who finds herself on a mission to capture AI terrorist Harlan (Simu Liu), the renegade techno-sapien created by her mother and a sort of surrogate brother, who, 28 years earlier, created the means for AI to break free of human control (shades of Terminator and Creator here) and turn on its makers, killing 3 million before fleeing into space.
Now Atlas is recruited by military commander Boothe (a bored-looking Mark Strong) to help locate Harlan’s hiding place, which she does by cleverly interrogating (Abraham Popoola), a captured TS, and insists on joining the mission (she wants to kill not capture), led by Colonel Banks (a virtually cameoing Sterling K Brown) because, as she explains, no one knows Harlan better than she does. She does, however, refuse to neurally ‘sync’ with the AI battle suits or ARCS used by the soldiers.
Naturally, everything goes pear-shaped with Harlan having anticipated everything, leaving all the crew dead, save the escaped colonel, and Atlas alone in her ARC, which calls itself Smith (voiced by Casca (Gregory James Cohan), to try and destroy Harlan, who intends to exterminate most of humanity so as to reset it under AI supervision, and a couple of cloned Cascas. To which end, she’s forced to overcome her trauma, guilt and hostility and learn to trust her personal AI, the film revealing how Harlan was able to overcome his programming.
With its confused mixed big tech messages about AI and human interfacing, directed by Brad Peyton with an embarrassingly bad script from Aron Eli Coleite and Leo Sardarian and some underwhelming effects, it’s all something of a derivative mess and, after her last action outing in The Mother, Lopez is here mostly confined to reaction shots of her face inside Smith’s exo-skeleton, with only a few scenes in the finale, allowing her to actually get out and move around. There’s some amusing moments involving the increasingly anthropomorphised Smith adopting Atlas’s sarcasm as it unfolds its emotional healing subtext, but, while far more entertaining than the critical vitriol would suggest, it’s still a clunker. (Netflix)
Back To Black (15)
The latest in what seems like a never-ending stream of musician biopics, director Sam Taylor-Johnson turns the spotlight on the five time Grammy winner, the title taken from her classic second and final album inspired by her tumultuous relation with ex-boyfriend and future husband Blake Fielder-Civil after he dumped her to return to his former girlfriend. It doesn’t go into the same depth as Asif Kapadia’s documentary and, in many ways, is something of a generic rise and fall tale of someone who briefly burns bright only to burn up, but, largely down to a spot on turn by Marisa Abela, who brilliantly captures Winehouse’s look, mannerisms, humour, attitude and, indeed, music, it’s a compelling watch.
A sassy working-class Jewish girl from Camden, into the jazz greats, devoted to her former ’50s nightclub singer nan, Cynthia (Lesley Manville), the inspiration for her eventual trademark beehive hairdo, the daughter of separated parents taxi driver dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan) and troubled mother Janis (Juliet Cowan), she’s talent spotted by future manager Nick (Sam Buchanan) who, impressed her song Stronger Than Me dissing her emasculated boyfriend, hooks her up with Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, whose stable included The Spice Girls (which she spells out in no uncertain terms she has no intention of being anything like), and from there a contract with Island Records. The debut album, Frank, is a huge success but the failure of the title track to make the Top10 sees the label refusing to release it in America and suggesting she stop playing guitar and work on her stage presence, prompting one of the film’s standout scenes as Amy makes her feelings abundantly clear, declaring she need to live the experiences that will fuel her follow-up
Already overly fond of booze and weed, the slippery slope begins when she meets likely lad production assistant Blake (played by Jack O’Connell as a sort of latter day Alfie), in a pub and is immediately attracted by his bad boy charm, he eventually dumping girlfriend Becky and turning up at Amy’s for a euphemistic cup of tea. He introduces her to the music of the Shangri-Las by way of Leader Of The Pack, a 60s girl group which specialised in songs of doomed love and, while she initially tells him it’s the drug of mugs, cocaine and then heroin. It’s to prove an on-off mutually toxic relationship marked by physical and verbal fights, copious bottles of vodka, a stream of tattoos, bulimia, the break-up that sparks Back To Black, a reunion, Miami marriage, his conviction of assault and eventually divorce. Throughout all of which, she’s constantly harried by the paparazzi looking to get shots of her looking her worst.
Mixing in tender moments such as she and Mitch duetting on Fly Me To The Moon and scenes with Cynthia alongside those showing the shocking physical and emotional fall-out from her hedonistic life style and relationship, and while it omits many characters and personal and career events along the way, the core of the film is raw, intense and poignant with Abela’s musical performances (her own vocals not lip-synched) proving electrifying, especially her Grammy Award rendition of Rehab (she had to do it from London on account of failing a drug test) and the live lounge take of Valerie.
The suggestion that Winehouse, here often speaking of her maternal desires, went back on the booze after learning Blake’s new girlfriend was pregnant, is a somewhat controversial suggestion, but there’s little doubt that heartbreak could be listed as one of the causes of death, joining the dead at 27 ranks of Joplin, Hendrix, Cobain and Morrison, the film reclaiming her from the tabloid self-destructive addict image reminding she was a complex, flawed and very real woman. (Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Barbie (12A)
Directed by Greta Gerwig and co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach, this is almost too wonderful for words. Opening with Helen Mirren narrating a send of up 2001 A Space Odyssey’s monolith scene as little girls smash their dolly babies upon seeing the adult Barbie, an inspired supersaturated colour, postmodern meta cocktail of subversive satire, razor-sharp whimsy, feminism and musical numbers, it sets up the idea that there exists Barbieland, populated with an array of different versions of the iconic toy doll and their opposite number, Ken (including Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Scott Evans and Ncuti Gatwa), each Barbie linked to a child’s doll in the Real World. where, as far as they believe, women are in charge and, like the dolls, little girls can be anything they want. Even President.
In Barbieland every day is a good day, especially for Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) who wakes each morning in her pink dream house, greets her fellow Barbies (among them Issa Rae, Dua Lipa, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, Nicola Coughlan and Emma Mackey), hangs out with wannabe boyfriend Beach Ken (Supporting Actor Ryan Gosling), whose only function is to stand around and look good, and generally radiates perfection. Until that is, amid a choreography party, she brings things to a screeching halt when she wonders aloud about dying. The next day, she falls rather than floats to the floor, has bad breath and, catastrophically, finding herself walking flatfooted and not on tip toe. Clearly, something’s amiss. A visit to Weird Barbie Kate McKinnon), mutilated and drawn on by her real world child),ends up with her being told she must go to the Real World, connect with the child who owns her doll, and put things right, especially the cellulite on her thigh. With Ken stowing away in the back of her, naturally, pink car they travel by boat, bicycle, and rocket until they rollerskate into the human world where, she quickly discovers it’s men who hold all the power. She’s horrified, Ken (who has already shown signs of discontentment of being just an accessory, jealous of the attention she gives another Ken and being rebuffed in suggesting sex – if he knew what that was; as Barbie points out she has no vagina and he no penis), rather less so. He rather likes the idea of men lording it over women and, pumped up with ideas about big trucks and stallions, decides to return home and establish his own fascist patriarchy in Barbieland. Meanwhile Barbie heads to the HQ of Mattel, the Barbie toy company, to try to sort things out and is taken aback to find there’s no women executives. And when the CEO (Will Farrell) tries to persuade her to get back in the box, with a little help from an elderly lady (Rhea Perlman in a touching last act insider reference to Barbie’s origins) in a hidden office, she takes off and is rescued by Gloria (America Ferrara), a Mattel employee who, it turns out is the owner of Barbie’s toy counterpart, rather than her spikey and sullen teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt).
However, when they get to Barbieland, everything has changed. The Kens, led by Beach Ken, have taken over and the girls are now all Stepford Barbies, there only to serve their every whim. Can Barbie, with the help of Gloria, Sasha, Weird Barbie and Alan (Michael Cera, launched in 1964 as Ken’s buddy, and put everything back in the pink!
Overflowing with clever jokes along with themes of female empowerment, sexism, gender equality, toxic masculinity and aggression, the impossibility of perfection, conforming to expectations, the complexity of being a woman, who men want to be both whore and mother, being defined by your looks and finding value in who you are, it bursts with energy. It also takes digs at Mattel’s less successful lines, like Pregnant Barbie, the gender demeaning Teen Talk Barbie and Growing Up Skipper with her inflatable boobs. But it wouldn’t be half as good without the irresistible radiant star power of Robbie and Gosling (who again gets to show off his dance moves) who bring their plastic incarnations to vivid and very human life. There cameos from John Cena and Rob Brydon, a reference to Zach Snyder’s Justice League, a clip from The Godfather, and a soundtrack that includes Billie Eilish Oscar winner What Was I made For? Ken’s’ I’m Just Ken showcase and a nice use of The Indigo Girls’ Closer To Fine as sung by Brandi and Catherine Carlile. This is the definitive toy story. (Now)
The Beast (15)
And yet another AI-themed film, this one, inspired by Henry James’s story The Beast In The Jungle, from director Bertrand Bonello with both French and English dialogue and spanning from 1910 to 2044,where artificial intelligence has taken over with humans, incapable of making decisions due to their emotions, reduced to menial jobs. There’s also something called ‘purification, a process in which they can purify their DNA by entering their past lives to purge strong emotions and thereby making them a better it for better jobs.
Gabrielle (a luminously detached Léa Seydoux) wants to move on from reading the temperature of data cores, so enters the programme, to which end the film follows her past lives relationships with Louis (an unreadable George Mackay), the first being in 1904 France where, haunted by a sense of impending doom, she’s an acclaimed Schoenberg-obsessed pianist and the wife of Georges who owns a factory making dolls with blank ‘neutral’ expressions. At a Paris soiree, she meets (for the second time) Louis, an intriguing Englishman, with whom she gets into conversation, the two being drawn to each other, meeting again and eventually embarking on an affair that ends tragically during a fire at the factory and the Paris flooding (with inserted real black and white photos) in 1910.
Waking up back in 2044, she’s put under the care of AI ‘doll’ Kelly (Guslagie Malanda) until she has her second treatment, visiting a 70s and 80s themed dance club (Visage’s Fade To Grey used to good effect), again meeting Louis who is also due to undergo the surgery but is anxious about losing his feelings. The second attempt at purification takes her to 2014, she now a model and actress (the film opens with her auditioning against green screen for a horror film, reacting to some unseen ‘beast’, and returns to the same set up for a traffic accident commercial) housesitting in LA and Louis an increasingly frustrated and embittered incel (someone unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one) who stalks her and, in the third treatment, again in 2014, where he now breaks in armed with a gun, playing out various scenarios as she opens the locked door to approach him, in one of which she’s shot. Back in 2044, she again makes contact back at the now otherwise empty club where she makes an emotionally shattering discovery.
Arguably overlong at two hours plus, even so it’s a complex and beguiling experience that combines sci fi and romantic melodrama as well as scenes with Gabrielle consulting a creepy online medium an online medium (Elina Löwensohn), in exploring how the past and the baggage we carry with us shape the future, involving the song Evergreen as a recurring sensory memory, themes of misogyny, anxiety, fear, control, choice, and emotional trauma, the beast of the title interpretable in a variety of ways, without offering any neat conclusion. (Until Sun: Mockingbird)
The Beautiful Game (12)
A real thing, the Homeless World Cup is an annual international four-a-side football tournament in which, as one of the criteria, the players, as the name suggests, are homeless (or have been in the qualifying year). The film, however, is only loosely based around this rather than, as with Next Goal Wins, retelling an actualtournament, the players or results. Directed by Thea Sharrock and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, it stars Bill Nighy in familiar shrug-shouldered pathos mode, as Mal, the coach for the England team, who recruits Vinny (Micheal Ward) as a striker for that year’s completion in Rome. Once a West Ham contender, he carries a he chip on his shoulder and, though he’s been thrown out by his wife and is living in his car, won’t admit he’s homeless (setting up a sharply emotional scene later when he blows up after learning his young daughter has chosen him as for her class talk on heroes).
Inevitably, he has no team spirit and rubs his motley but enthusiastic crew of fellow players Jason (Sheyi Cole), Syrian refugee Aldar (Robin Nazari), Nathan (Callum Scott-Howells) and Kevin (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) up the wrong way, rejecting their extended hands of friendship and particularly getting the back up of Cal (Kit Young) who, also a striker, resents him potentially edging him out. In Rome, Vinny displays his skills to winning effect, but gives the others the cold-shoulder to the extent he goes off to sleep on a bench rather than in the team quarters.
There’s a flirtatious dalliance between the widowed Mal, Rome bring back memories of his honeymoon, and Italian competition organiser Gabriella (a delightful Valeria Golino), who promises to buy him dinner if the team, regarded pretty much as rank outsiders, win. Indeed with South Africa, the favourites (Susan Wokoma scene stealing as their nun manager), missing their match due to bureaucratic red tape back home, that might actually be a possibility assuming Mac can get them to work together. There again they’ll be up against Italy, another firm favourite.
With the plot involving generous sporting gestures, Vinny winding up as a substitute for one of the other team’s players, a revelation about Mal’s past connection to the young Vinny, a romantic spark between Jason and American goal scorer Rosita (Cristina Rodlo) for whom winning would prevent extradition, Adar’s refusal to play against Italy due to ethnic hostilities with one of their players, and the Japanese team’s amusing sightseeing and moment of glory, it follows a fairly predictable underdog sports movie of redemption and being a winner in yourself regardless of any cup. The influence of things like The Full Monty are evident but never in a way that diminishes the film or the characters, all of whom are very likeable, even if at times selfish, with the interactions off the pitch the heart of the film rather than the action on it. It’s slight but full of charm and easily earns its place on the podium. (Netflix)
BlackBerry (15)
Following on from films about Facebook, Tetris, Nike shoes, GameStop, McDonalds and Beanie Babies, inspired by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book, Losing the Signal, director Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Miller and is one of the film’s stars, brings to the screen a partly fictionalised satirical account of the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, the mid-90s handheld precursor of the iPhone. The brainchild of meek Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and slobby headband-wearing Douglas Fregin (Johnson), a pair of computer geeks who ran Canadian company Research in Motion, it was a pioneering smartphone with a thumb operated QWERTY keyboard with its click sound buttons. However, while they had the tech knowledge, they had no conception of marketing.
Enter Jim Ballsillie (Glenn Howerton), a driven executive and hockey buff who, sensing the pair are on to something, jumps ship from his current job (it turns out later he was fired) and agrees to come on board in return for a 50% cut and being named CEO. Much to Fregins’s horror, the more pliable Lazardi, impressed by his ruthless energy and intimidating charisma and discovering their deal with US Robotics was designed to bankrupt them, agrees to co-CEO and a third share of RIM. Fast forwarding to 2003, with Ballsillie a balding shark in a suit who never seems to rest, he’s soon bombarding potential investors with talk of making millions, while pressuring his partners into rapidly coming up with a workable demo (cobbled together from pocket calculators and Speak & Spell toys of what’s initially called PocketLink) while they try and figure out how to get vast numbers of phones to use the free cellular network without crashing the system. Paying ridiculous fees to hire on poached engineers and sending the sales force out to sell, sell, sell, it’s not long before it becomes a feeding frenzy with the phone so addictive it gets dubbed CrackBerry. However, created in response to Apple’s iPhone, the 2007 touchscreen Storm version, outsourced to China, proved to be virtually inoperable (amusingly Howerson’s seen manually trying to stop them all from buzzing). Then along comes an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into RIM’s dodgy hires using backdated stock options.
It races through the company’s whirlwind rise, making effective use of montages and amusing scenarios, Jim pushing Mike into an act of betrayal and his own obsessed attempts to buy his own hockey team, the Pittsburgh Penguins, with the downfall the result of a mix of hubris, greed, overreaching ambition and sheer stupidity. Its hand-held approach, smart dialogue (inspired by Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet and actually referencing Glengarry Glen Ross), true life absurdity, sterling support from the likes of Michael Ironside as RIM’s scary operations enforcer Charles Purdy who stamps all over its hitherto hippie, slacker nature, Saul Rubinek’s Verizon exec, Cary Elwes as Palm CEO Carl Yankowski threatening hostile takeover, and the electrifying performance from Howerson, fixated with trying to stop the phones buzzing, it glues you to the screen like smartphone version of Succession. A morality tale about the fear of becoming irrelevant, in 2011, there were 85 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide with 45% of the market share. Today it’s 0% and they’re no longer manufactured. (Sky Cinema/Now)
Challengers (15)
Written by Justin Kuritzkes, the husband of Past Lives writer-director Celine Song, and directed by Luca Guadagnino who made the erotically charged Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All, this is an electrifying love-triangle, straight and homoerotic, screwball dramedy set against a tennis circuit backdrop. Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) are longtime friends and court rivals who trained together at the same boarding school Academy, playing both with and against each other.
As the film opens in 2019, Art, who’s won every grand slam but never the U.S. Open, has lost his mojo, losing games to patently inferior players and is considering throwing in his racquet and retiring. To try and keep him on track his wife and coach, Tashi (Zendaya), a former star player, has persuaded him to compete in the ATP Challenger Tour in New Rochelle, N.Y., the winner getting to qualify for the Open, where, faced with a string of no-hopers, he reckons winning will reignite the spark. However, also taking part is wild card bad boy Patrick who, down on his luck, credit maxed out and reduced to sleeping in his car (he has to seduce women so he can get a place to stay, his legendary huge penis clearly an advantage), who, it transpires, was once Tashi’s lover and for whom she may still have feelings. He reckons that he can win her back by defeating his former friend. Or is it perhaps Art he really loves and wants to win back?
Told in a volley of flashbacks and flashforwards, narratively lobbed back and forth, it shows how the three first came together 13 years earlier, they, as teenagers, having just won the men’s doubles in the junior division at the Open and then watching her win her championship singles match. They attend her Adidas-sponsored post-win party, both attracted to her and culminating in a sexually charged hotel bedroom scene ending up in first a three-way kiss and then the boys snogging each other, she declaring she doesn’t want to be a homewrecker. The film then follows how it all fell apart, covering the collapse of the Tashi/Patrick relationship, the injury that led to her retirement and the simmering friction between her and Art over their respective ambitions or lack thereof.
There’s rows, infidelities, tense grudge matches, a car park sex-based negotiation about throwing a match (scored to an angelic boys’ choir singing Welsh hymn Levy-Dew) and much more, all interspersed with some highly kinetic tennis with the balls flying straight to camera. Everyone’s motivations and actions are questionable, but the screenplay never has you siding with one against the other, all three clearly complex and emotionally and psychologically wounded characters. A case of love all, love everything, love nothing.
The constant back and forth across the net and the years can become confusing (hairdos and clothes provide signposts), but, with a techno score by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, it never once loses its grip as it heads to its incredible climax. Both Faist and O’Connor are dynamite while, crackling with sexual lightning and burning up the screen, Zendaya, coy, flirtatious, scheming and calculating, often in the same moment, seems on course to get her first Oscar nomination. Wimbledon was never like this. (Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue; Until Sun: Mockingbird; Mon: Everyman)
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)
La Chimera (15)
Released from prison after being jailed for grave-robbing and mourning the loss of his lover Beniamina (Yile Vianello), dressed in a dirty white-lined suit, raffish archaeologist Arthur (a mesmerisingly diffident Josh O’Connor slipping between Italian and English) returns to a hilltop town in Tuscany to reunite with his fellow tomb raiders who need his dowsing skills to plunder the Etruscan burial chambers scattered around the area so they can sell the stolen artefacts to a mysterious buyer.
Here, lodging in a rundown palazzo owned by the wheelchair bound Signora Flora (Isabella Rossellini), the mother of his dead love, though generally aloof and antisocial, he’s drawn to Flora’s aspiring singer student and dogsbody Italia (Carol Duarte), who teaches him Italian hand gestures, the film unfolding into assorted close encounters with the local cops, often presented in sped-up silent sequences, and a dream sequence involving a red thread he’s trying to follow to its source.
The title referring to an illusion or unrealisable dream, reflected in hazy, sun-dappled 35 mm photography (it’s shot on a mix of film stock), written and directed by Alice Rohrwacher and set somewhere in the 80s, it’s a bewitching, dreamlike and enigmatic melodrama that, sometimes with characters addressing the camera, touches on the often dodgy ways in which museums gathered their cultural relics, Arthur selling his soils to a corporate legitimate business buyer in a towering skyscraper, as well as exploring themes of identity and the connections of past and present, religion and paganism and, indeed, life and death. (Until Sun: Mockingbird)
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+)
Damsel (12)
Something of a step backwards for Millie Bobby Brown whose star has risen rapidly since coming to prominence in Stranger Things and getting rave reviews for her two Enola Holmes outings, this casts her as Elodie in director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s drawn out and clunky medieval fantasy adventure. She’s the daughter of Lord Bayford (Ray Winstone in a terrible wig), ruler of a famine-stricken land, who’s chosen to become the bride of Prince Henry (a blandly good looking Nick Robinson) from the kingdom of Aurea. Being dutiful, she agrees and the family, which includes her step-mum (Angela Bassett with bizarre English accent) and adoring younger sister Floria (Brooke Carter), set off to meet her betrothed and his parents Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright) and King Roderick (a barely sentient Milo Twomey). Initially showing little spark, the two start to bond, however, over a shared love of wanting to travel and so it’s on to the nuptials. However, after her dad emerges from a meeting with Isabelle looking less than over the moon, mum’s gut instinct and the queen’s frosty response to any extended familial relationships has her telling Elodie to call it all off. There is, she feels, something not quite kosher.
And indeed there isn’t as, Henry taking his new bride up the nearby mountain, on which she’s seen fires glowing, to take part in what he describes as an ancient ritual, ends up with him tossing her down a pit. It turns out that hundreds of years earlier a previous king and his men killed three newborn baby dragons, the understandably aggrieved mother (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo) sparing his life on condition that, for every successive generation, three princesses (acquiring royal status in a mingling of blood) are to be sacrificed. And guess who lives in the cave.
And it’s in the cave that the film spends most of the remaining running time, Elodie variously climbing and falling from rocks, running away from the fire-breathing dragon and stumbling on the remains of previous sacrifices and clues as to how to maybe escape. And, when, with help from her repentant father (who has had second thoughts about trading her life for his country’s prosperity), she finally does, a furious Isabelle decides to substitute her with the next best thing, Floria.
There’s a degree of tension in the underground scenes, but that’s undermined by utter predictability of the generic subverted fairy tale plot and the general lifelessness of the performances with a clearly bored Winstone, Bassett and Wright hamming up their one note characters and Brown barely concealing her embarrassment as, in repeated scenes, she cuts her hair, rids herself of corseted bondage for a more practical look and wields daddy’s sword as turns herself into an empowered warrior and strikes up a wholly unlikely How To Tame Your Dragon alliance after clocking on to the truth about what went down. She’s not the damsel in distress, the film is. (Netflix)
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)
The Fall Guy (12A)
Taking the 80s TV series of the same name as its inspiration (the pre-credits scene has two cameo homages and the end credits feature Blake Shelton’s cover of the series’ Unknown Stuntman theme song originally performed by its star Lee Majors ), this puts the focus on the unsung heroes of movies, the stunt double who does all the dangerous stuff for the star. Here, it’s Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), the longtime stand-in for internationally famous action star diva Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson channelling Matthew McConaughey). However, when he’s badly injured when a stunt goes wrong, he blames himself and drops out of the business and also walks away from camera operator love interest Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), taking up a job as a Mexican restaurant valet. However, eighteen months later, he gets a call from Ryder’s producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), who tells him that Jodys is making her directorial debut with a sci-fi action romance called Metalstorm and has specifically asked for Colt to be Tom’s stunt man. Seeing a chance to rekindle the flame, he heads to Sydney only to find Jody, still angry over the break-up, isn’t best pleased to see him and that she never asked for him and puts him through stunt repeat after repeat as payback as she airs her grievances disguised as plot points via a bullhorn.
Instead, it turns out Gail wanted him there because Tom, who’s fallen in with a bad crowd, has gone awol and she wants him to track him down before the studio finds out and cancels the movie. Not wanting to scupper Jody’s debut, he agrees only, after a run in with Ryder’s sword-wielding girlfriend co-star Iggy Starr (Teresa Mary Palmer), to find a dead body on ice in Ryder’s hotel apartment bathroom. This, it turns out was his stunt replacement but, when he takes the police to the scene, the body has gone. Without giving away much more, suffice to say, just as he and Jody were getting it back together, in a plot that involves Colt’s face being deep faked as Tom’s so he can claim he did all his own stunts, he’s now the fall guy in more than one sense. There’s also a bunch of gun toting goons who are murderously intent on getting their hands on footage on Tom’s phone. And that earlier accident may not have been the accident it seemed.
Directed by David Leith, who started out as a stunt double before making films like Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2, with a screenplay by Iron Man 3’s Drew Pearce and the effortlessly cool and charismatic, wisecracking Gosling on a high after Barbie, it’s a wonderfully self-aware screwball action romcom that features, a witty split screen sequence while he and Jody talk about using a split screen, the ever reliable Winston Duke as Colt’s best friend stunt coordinator Dan trading lines from the movies, and Stephanie Hsu as Tom’s personal assistant and wannabe producer Alma. That plus a constant stream of explosions, somersaulting cars, fights aboard a speeding dumpster and a helicopter, a running joke about Colt’s thumbs up after each stunt and even an action dog called Jean-Claude that only responds to commands in French and a hallucinated unicorn. Oh, and, one of the names on the sticky notes plastered all over Tom’s apartment – Jason Momoa
Gosling and Blunt generate terrific chemistry, both in terms of romance and comedic sparring, Waddingham makes the most chewing any available scenery and Taylor-Johnson is a first-rate asshole and, to a soundtrack that includes Taylor Swift’s All Too Well and the riff to Kiss’s I Was Made For Lovin’ You, the film romps along as the twists and reveals pile up while making sure the audience is well aware of how important the stunt team are to such movies with their wires and roll with the punches moves. Indeed, the end credits include montage of the real stunt work and performers involved (no AI here), though Gosling, sporting a Miami Vice jacket, unlike Ryder, can truthfully claim that many of the stunts he did do himself. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
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+)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (15)
A sprawling picaresque origin story prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, set over 15 years and five chapters, while a good twenty minutes too long, George Miller again delivers the post-apocalyptic good in charting how young Furiosa rose from a child to become the Imperator played by Charlize Theron in the earlier film.
It opens with Furiosa (a mesmerising Alyla Browne), a village girl from the hidden Green Place of Many Mothers being captured and carted off, strapped to a customised motorbike, to be presented to Bike Horde leader Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, chewing it up and providing the bulk of the humour) so she can reveal the location of this place of abundance. Mum (Charlee Fraser) rides in to the rescue on a Thunder Bike, but winds up being overwhelmed and killed, Furiosa forced to watch. She’s then kind of adopted/kept prisoner by Dementus as time passes and he embarks on his plan to take down The Citadel, one of the Wasteland fortresses, which is lorded over by gas-masked, white-maned Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), who has a kamikaze army of powder-white, shaven-headed warriors called War Boys and keeps a harem to breed more – and hopefully better mentally equipped – sons like Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and, a new character, Scrotus (Josh Helman). Chased off, Dementus lays siege to the oil-rich Gastown, subduing its leader and subsequently negotiating a deal with Immortan Joe in order not to destroy it. However, the deal involves handing over The Organic Mechanic to serve as the Citadel doctor and Furiosa to become one of the wives. Escaping Rictus’s advances, she disguises herself as a boy and, now, an hour in, vividly played by Anya Taylor-Joy with few words, a scowl and stoic demeanour, becomes sidekick to Praetorian Jack (Thom Burke), who drives the heavily armoured two-section, fuck you War Rig supply tanker she helped to build.
It’s not always easy to keep up with things, especially given the seemingly inexhaustible cannon fodder War Boys seem to be both fighting against and with Dementus, as the action flips between Gastown, The Citadel and the Bullet Farm, which Dementus has taken over, but all you need to know is that along the way Jack and Furiosa forge a connection (it doesn’t end well) and she loses an arm, gains a prosthetic claw and shaves her head as she goes about getting to Chapter Five’s hate-driven revenge on her mother’s executioner. Aside from how the biker crew sport names like Norton and Harley, there’s a world-building wealth of colourfully named characters like Toe Jam, Piss Boy and The Octoboss, including franchise returnees The People Eater (John Howard), the Bullet Farmer (Lee Perry) and even (briefly) the heavy metal guitar playing Doof Warrior with even a glimpse of Max himself, Plus, of course, a variety of rustbucket two, four and multi-wheeled vehicles, including Dementus’s Ben Hur-like chariot with its three chopper horses, which get to be gleefully flipped, rammed and blown up along the way, whether in the sands dunes or on a three days assault (armed parascenders included) down Fury Road in the seemingly endless kinetic action sequences. All ending with the final fate of the peach nut her mum gave her to protect and a credits set-up for Fury Road’s five fighting femmes from the harem. At one point, Dementus asks Furiosa, “Do you have what it takes to make it epic”. Both she and the film most certainly do. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; MAC; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
The Garfield Movie (PG)
A sort of origin movie for Jim Davis’s internationally famous lazy, Mondays-hating, lasagne-loving, snarky cartoon ginger fat cat, the opening scenes reveal how, apparently abandoned in an alley by his street cat dad Vic (Samuel L Jackson), kitten Garfield (Chris Pratt) spots Jon Arbuckle (Nicholas Hoult) in an Italian restaurant and, taking an instant liking for pepperoni pizza and all things pasta, cutely inveigles his way into his life and refrigerator , even allowing him to have a canine companion, yellow beagle Odie (Harvey Guillén), who becomes his own personal factotum.
Fast forward several years and furry pounds, and who should re-enter Garfield’s life, upsetting his lazy life of scoffing carbs and watching Catflix but Vic who needs his estranged offspring’s help in settling a debt to his old street gang Persian cat boss Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) by stealing gallons of milk to make up for the time she spent in the pound on his account.
The plan is to break into the heavy fortified Lactose Farms dairy theme park and steal thousands of bottles, to which end they need to recruit its cast-aside former mascot Otto (Ving Rhames), a grumpy bull with a penchant for dramatic pauses, by promising to reunite him with the cow of his life, Unfortunately, they also have to deal with Animal Control officer Marge (Cecily Strong) and Jinx’s numbskull henchmen, musclebound Shar Pei Roland and weasely whippet Nolan.
It’ll come as no surprise to learn the real reason Vic abandoned Garfield as the film follows a warmly familiar s parent-child reconciliation path, but, alongside the whiskers-wetting sentimentality, there’s a steady stream of fun adventures and action not to mention a voice cameo by Snoop Dogg as Scoop Catt and, given, the trio’s Mission Impossible-style heist, amusing gags about Tom Cruise (“(“In case you’re wondering, I do my own stunts!”, says Garfield) and even a steal from the Top Gun score.
Unlike the cartoon strip which (like Peanuts and The Simpsons) is very much written for grown-ups, this colourfully and zappily animated affair is predominantly pitched at a kiddie audience who should lap it up while waiting for the next appearance by then Minions while offering other gags to entertain the adults too, not to mention a warning about keeping tabs on their children using their smartphones to run up a huge Deliveroo bill. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue; Until Sun: Mockingbird)
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12A)
Having battled each other in Godzilla vs Kong, the radioactive lizard and the giant ape now team up, albeit not until the climax, in this sequel returning director Adam Wingard fills the screen with eye-popping visuals and action sequences, but with convoluted (and at times knowingly silly) plot that finds little room for dialogue that isn’t just exposition or filling, or anything more than one-dimensional characters and a perfunctory quest for family theme. Although not actually connected, it feels like an entire second series of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters blown up for the big screen. Minus any depth. Godzilla Minus One it’s not,
Kong now living in Hollow Earth, it opens with him fighting of a pack of jackal-like predators and a viscerally gruesome moment as he tears one in two and gets drenched in green good. The same scene is mirrored when Godzilla enters the picture, tearing apart marauding Titan Scylla and getting splattered with yellow gunk before heading to the Colosseum to take a nap).
Meanwhile, the Monarch base in Hollow Earth is having issues with the equipment while up on the surface, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the lone survivor of the Iwi people from Skull Island and the now adoptive daughter of Monarch scientist Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), is having visions of and drawing three peaking black triangles. And wouldn’t you know it, these turn out to be an exact match for the print-outs from the base. This leads Andrews to call on whistleblower-turned-conspiracy-blogger Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry) who, along with dentist Trapper (Dan Stevens), called into extract Kong’s damaged tooth and implant a replacement when he comes to the surface world, joins her, Jia and a swiftly eliminated grunt pilot, on a journey into Hollow Earth to find the source of these transmissions, which seem to be some sort of SOS. In addition, Godzilla has been absorbing copious amounts of radiation (turning his scales pink) and is heading for the Arctic where he ends up battling the Titan Tiamat.
And below the surface both Kong and Jia find they’re not the last of their kind after all. Having had a run-in with a ginger kid gorilla named Suko whose trust he eventually wins, Kong discovers a whole tribe of apes ruled by the blotchy red haired evil Skar King who, mirroring Kong’s axe, sports a skeletal bone whip tipped with a crystal blade through which he controls Shimo, an ice-powered Titan, who harbours plans to reach and conquer the surface. And, venturing into an Uncharted Zone, the group encounter, would you believe it, a whole tribe of telepathic Iwi ( headed by Fala Chen as their Queen), from who Jia is descended, having been sending the signals and whose ancient carvings somehow have predicted the girl’s coming to awaken Mothra, yet another Titan and Godzilla’s one-time nemesis, and save them.
And so it all builds to a full on CGI showdown in Rio De Janeiro between Skar King, Shimo, Kong (now fitted with mechanical knuckledusters), Suko, Godzilla and Mothra that ticks the necessary blockbuster boxes, with added doses of violence and viscera (the sight of Kong chewing on serpent entrails is pretty revolting), but is ultimately just big, loud and empty popcorn bombast and if that’s all you want, then this is a gargantuan bucketful. (Vue)
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)
IF (U)
Actor-writer-director John Krasinski makes his family movie debut with this at times messy but ultimately charmingly sweet and touching animated and live-action ode to the magic of childhood imagination and its loss as we grow older,
Her mother having died when she was young and her forever joking father (Krasinski) in hospital with a physically and metaphorically broken heart, precocious in-a-hurry-to-grow-up 12-year-old (“I’m not a child”) New Yorker Bea (the disarmingly winning Cailey Fleming) moves in with her grandmother Margaret (Fiona Shaw). Glimpsing what she believes to be girl who lives upstairs, she ventures up to explore and meets Cal (Ryan Reynolds dialling down the flippancy in favour of sincerity), who insists he lives alone. However, following him one evening, she finds herself introduced to the world of IFs, or imaginary friends (naturally, there’s a clip from Harvey), such as the massive, furry and very purple Blue (Steve Carell) and Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the Betty Boop crossed with a butterfly figure she spied earlier and who lives in Cal’s apartment. Like Cal, only she can see them. It’s a bit like The Sixth Sense for kids – I see imaginary people.
Cal introduces her to the Coney Island retirement home for IFs, who, like the discarded toys in Toy Story (the film also knowingly borrows from Monsters Inc.), have long been forgotten by their former children. It’s Cal, Blue and Blossom’s mission to reunite them with their old kids (in Blue’s case Bobby Moynihan’s dispirited Jeremy) or to find someone else to need them.
Blossom, it turns out was her grandmother’s IF and still keeps a watchful eye on her, while Bea tries to find an IF who can bond with Benjamin (Alan Kim), the young boy she meets on her visits to see her dad. In the process, she rediscovers her own still beating inner child, and it’s not too hard to work out who was her IF.
There’s a star-studded voice cast of cameos as the array of IFs (and no buts), among them Bradley Cooper as an ice-cube in a half-full water glass, Christopher Meloni’s over-enthusiastic raincoated spy, Amy Schumer’s giant red gummy bear, Louis Gossett Jr. as elderly teddy bear Lewis, Matt Damon’s sunflower Sunny, Sam Rockwell as Guardian Dog, Awkwafina as Bubble (a bubble!), Blake Lively (Reynold’s partner) as Octopuss, a cat in an octopus costume, George Clooney’s astronaut, Vince Vaughn as Dragon, Krasinski’s wife Emily Blunt as the English-accented Unicorn and Krasinski himself as Marshmallow Man. There’s even Brad Pitt as the invisible Frank.
They’re all great fun but also contribute to the underlying sadness of once loved imaginary companions who have outlived their usefulness, the warmly sentimental and melancholic film ultimately and often quite poignantly (as with Jeremy and the smell of a freshly baked croissant, for those who get the Proust reference) reconnecting them once more. There’s some wonderful flourishes of imagination, such as the musical sequence in the retirement home to Tina Turner’s Better Be Good To Me, and Cal falling into and climbing out of a work of art, his clothes covered in paint, the film a ray of light and a heartfelt reminder that there’s still magic and hope in an often cynical world. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; 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 the dead 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. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Kung Fu Panda 4 (12A)
One of the last films to be made by the soon to be shuttered DreamWorks Animation, after eight years this brings back Jack Black (whose band Tenacious D sings Britney Spear’s Baby One More Time over the end credits) to voice a fourth adventure by the dumpling-loving giant panda who has now become the celebrated Dragon Master protecting the Valley Of Peace and is setting up his own noodle restaurant. However, he’s taken aback to be told by his mentor, Master Shifu (a croaky Dustin Hoffman), that it is time to move on, become Spiritual Leader and pass the torch, or in this case Spirit Staff, to the one he chooses to be his successor (in a parade of candidates he ends up choosing himself).
Such mission, however, is distracted when he finds himself reluctantly teamed with a streetsmart ninja fox thief named Zhen (Awkwafina, always fun), who he caught stealing from the Hall Of Mirrors, and in criminal-infested Juniper City (where no one’s heard of the Dragon Master), where Zhen’s pangolin cousin (Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan) runs the Den Of Thieves, and up against shape-shifting sorceress Chameleon (a nicely sinister Viola Davis) who is scheming to get his staff and bring back his vanquished enemies from the spirit realm, among them snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane), so she can steal their powers and rule the world. Meanwhile, in what feels like a tacked-on subplot, Po’s two fathers, Mr Ping (James Hong) and Pi (Bryan Cranston), are on a quest to find their missing son. Li (voice of Bryan Cranston), decide to follow their boy. Packed with butt-kicking action sequences, among them an inspired bar fight at the Happy Rabbit Tavern as the building teeters atop a cliff, oddball new characters like the insult-spewing Fish who lives in a pelican’s gullet, and vividly colourful, it’s most definitely energetic but it doesn’t have the emotional pull or the good jokes of the previous films nor, down to a smaller budget, does it include the Furious Five (apparently off on their own missions) other than for a final dialogue-free scene as it heads to the predictable selection of the new Dragon Master in what seems to be setting up a TV series spin-off. As a likely final big screen outing, it’s undemanding fun enough, but the old magic simply isn’t there. (Odeon Birmingham;Vue)
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)
The Letter Writer (12A)
The directorial debut by Layla Kaylif who, after establishing herself as an acclaimed singer-songwriter, now proves an equally impressive filmmaker. Working from her own screenplay, set in 1965 in the twilight of the English colonial protectorate in then Trucial States, the precursor to the UAE, it draws on both The Go-Between and Cyrano de Bergerac to tell the coming of age story of Dubai teenager Khalifa (Eslam Al Kawarit), who, in defiance of his father, who runs a failing pearl seller stall, sets himself up, along with a friend, writing letters (“inquiries, complaints, follow-ups, recommendations, apologies, even divorce”) for the illiterate locals, he often paraphrasing in more blunt terms. One such is garment store owner Mohammad (Muhammad Amir Nawaz) who wants him to write a love letter in English (Khalifa’s tutor advises him to improve his command of the language, being perfunctory at best) to a customer with whom he’s become infatuated, Elizabeth Warren (a rather flat Rosy McEwen), who, the niece of the outgoing governor and working for the Foreign Office, has since returned to London, wanting to know when, she might return. Initially just writing gibberish until he’s rumbled, on seeing her photograph, which Mohammad keeps closely guarded and he then turns into a shrine, he himself becomes besotted, couching the letters with his own clumsy expressions and, having discovered Shakespeare’s sonnets, poetry. As a result, though engaged to be married to an English Colonel (Shane Dodd) who’s been posted to the British compound near where Khalifa works, Elizabeth starts to fall for, as she thinks, Mohammad, her replies further intensifying Khalifa’s crush.
Intercut with the romantic misunderstandings, the film also explores the political climate of the time with the growing resentment of the British (in one scene Khalifa witnesses his mate pissing on the English flag), questions of Arab identity (couched in talk of Nasser, the future Egyptian president speaking English but still being an Arab) and unity, the value of education and generational aspirations.
It suffers from some of the usual first film issues (uneven pace, tone and, especially in the unconvincing scenes set in London, acting, occasional clunky dialogue, excess subplots and underdeveloped characters), but Al Kawarit ably keeps it from sagging with a wry humour (at one point he starts dressing in furs after seeing Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago) and believable emotions that range from fiery anger to tender yearning as his character struggles to find his purpose in the world in which he lives with his complicated family, a local girl (Marwa Al Hashimi), he initially tries to woo, the middle-aged slave Buthayna (Faisa Al Moutha) seeking her freedom and the frustration of virtually British occupation. Never less than engaging, it’s a promising debut and, as you might expect, the soundtrack includes the classic Love Letters, although, in a nice touch, it’s the version by Cilla Black rather than the Kitty Lester original. (Amazon Prime)
Love At First Sight (12A)
A meet cute romance, when, forever late, 20-year old American Hadley Sullivan (Haley Lu Richardson) misses her flight from New York to London for her father’s wedding, she is re-booked on the next. While waiting, she meets fellow traveller Oliver Jones (Ben Hardy), a British 22-year old Yale mathematics student who offers to lend her his charger when noticing her phone is dead. They get to chatting about their lives and idiosyncratic fears (they both hate mayonnaise, he hates surprises). On the plane, a faulty seatbelt ends up with him sitting next to her in business class, where they chat and flirt, she sharing that she’s uncertain about the wedding as she’s not really forgiven her dad (Rob Delaney) for divorcing her mother after he left to teach in Oxford.
On seeing Oliver’s formal suit, she assumes he’s also returning for a wedding, which he neither confirms or denies. They almost kiss, but are interrupted. Arriving at Heathrow, they’re separated into two passport control queues and delays mean that, when she finally gets through, he has already left for his appointment and she’s almost late for hers. And her phone being dead again, the number he texted didn’t come through.
Dad’s wedding goes well and she find she actually likes his new wife, Charlotte. Then, with four hours before the reception, on overhearing that a couple of guests are off to a memorial service for a woman with cancer and two sons, one of whom has flown back from America, she puts two and two together and hops on a bus to Peckham to find Oliver. Although it turns out that, her cancer returned and she refusing treatment, his mum (Sally Phillips) and dad (Dexter Fletcher) are having her memorial while she’s still here, after all what’s the point of people saying nice things if you can’t hear them, everything having a Shakespeare fancy dress theme with younger son Luther (Tom Taylor) in jester garb doing the deejaying, the reunion doesn’t go as well as she’d hoped when she chides him for always quoting statistics rather than being honest about his feelings. So, will they ever get back together? Well, she does accidentally leave her bag behind.
Narrated both on screen and via voice over by Jameela Jamil as various characters (but essentially fate), it’s adapted from Jennifer E Smith’s book The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight and directed by Vanessa Caswill and, while neither she nor screenwriter Katie Lovejoy are in the Richard Curtis league, while utterly predictable (as are pretty much all romcoms), it’s nevertheless warmly charming, largely down to the chemistry between the two leads and a mix of twinkling humour and cheesy but touching messages about not letting things – love, life, death, reconciliations, slip by you in your self-absorption. (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)
The Marvels (12A)
Beset by delays and reshoots, directed and co-written by Nia DaCosta, the first Black woman behind a Marvel movie, this brings together three female superheroes who all have, in different forms, the ability to harness the power of light. That’ll be Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in a follow-up to Miss Marvel, now roaming the galaxy in her own spacecraft, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the now grown astronaut daughter of Carol’s late best friend Maria (Lashana Lynch), who works alongside Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) in his new SABER organisation and gained her powers in WandaVision (and whose lack of a code name serves as a running gag), and New Jersey’s Pakistani-American schoolgirl Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), from the Disney+ TV series (its use of animation incorporated in introducing her here), an over-exuberant Miss Marvel mega-fan whose powers come from a magical bracelet.
The bracelet, or quantum band, however, turns out to have a Kree origin and is one of a pair, the other being recovered at the start of the film by Dar-Benn (a compelling Zawe Ashton clearly having a lot of fun as the baddie) who has an understandable vendetta against Danvers – who the Kree know as The Annhilator for reasons explained later– and needs the two of them to restore life to her home planet of Hela. As such, her motives are sympathetic, her means, which include trying to wipe out the Skrulls, rather less so. Her acquisition of the bangle also causes the three Marvels to body-swap (quantum entanglement, apparently) every time they use their powers, initially creating havoc in Kamala’s home, then affording some skipping rope fun and later proving invaluable in the battle with Dar-Benn.
Despite a plot that involves intergalactic genocide and planet asset stripping, there’s a great deal of playful fun here, notably a sequence set on a world where Miss Marvel is a marriage of convenience princess and where everyone dances as they sing their dialogue (though her prince Park See-joon – is bi-lingual) and one where, in an effort to evacuated the space station, Fury has the crew ‘eaten’ up by a horde of Flerken kitties who spew purple tentacles that swallow things up, all scored to Midnight from Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s musical.
There’s also a great deal of hanging out and banter between the three heroes, all of whom have their own identity issues, the actresses making good use of their individual skill sets and personalities as the film digs into their characters. The problem is, however, what with jump points opening up everywhere in the space, and the action leaping from planet to planet, the narrative is frequently borderline incoherent. Fortunately, unlike the recent slate of Marvel outings, this has a trim running time into which it packs an inordinate amount of plot, redemption and coming of age arcs and action sequences.
Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur and Saagar Shaikh add extra comedic touches as Kamala’s concerned and long-suffering parents and older brother while Abraham Popool sports a nifty set of beard braids as SABER agent Dag and Tessa Thompson puts in a quickie crossover appearance as Valkyrie, the film closing up with the briefly united trio now on their individual plotlines, providing two mid-credits sequences; the first with a cameo from Hawkeye’s Kate Bishop (Hailee Stanfield) as Ms Marvel sets out to create a new team, and the second, with Rambeau now in a parallel universe, a new incarnation for Maria and the return of Kelsey Grammar’s Hank McCoy from the X-Men series. That’s at least three new sequels or spin-offs in the wings. There again, given its bomb at the box office, maybe not. (Disney+)
Napoleon (15)
Turning 85, Ridley Scott still has the stamina of directors half his age, as clearly evidenced in pulling together this two and a half hour epic biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, a balance between his greatest hits (and failures) on the battlefield and his relationship with widowed aristocrat wife Josephine. Opening with the guillotining of Marie Antoinette following the French Revolution, witnessed by then lowly – and somewhat humourless – Corsican gunnery officer Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix in customary outstanding form), his rise to power begins with him, a master strategist, liberating the town of Toulon from the occupying British forces in 1793, his cannons destroying their ships and with the help of his patron and friend Barras (Tahar Rahim) and following the downfall of Robespierre (Sam Troughton) and his Reign of Terror, proceeds to chart his rise through the ranks, his Egyptian campaign (where he may or may not have actually fired on the top of the pyramids), his promotion to general, elevation to become one of the three Consuls ruling France, and eventual crowning as Emperor before his disastrous 1812 campaign in Russia and subsequent exile to Elba, his return to power, the defeat at Waterloo (and a scene aboard HMS Bellerophon wryly congratulating Rupert Everett’s Wellington, who has an even better sneer than himself, on the quality of Royal Navy breakfasts) and exile to St Helena where he died.
Alongside this, it follows the ups and down of his marriage to the sensual and strong-wiled Josephine (an understated but quietly excellent Vanessa Kirby), her cuckolding him (he’s not great at sex and prefers rear entry quickies) while he’s away conquering Italy, her problematic inability to provide an heir, his bedding of a willing fertile volunteer, and the eventual divorce, albeit he never faltering in his love, and ensuring she continued with the life to which she was accustomed, even after marrying the teenage (and shorter) Archduchess of Austria, who dutifully supplies a son (he had, in fact, several children by assorted lovers). All of course wearing that distinctive bicorne hat and tricolour cockade.
The brilliantly staged action set pieces are as stunning and thrilling as they are gorily visceral (a shot of a horse’s chest being ruptured by a cannonball is truly jolting), the decimation of the Austrian and Russian forces, fictionalised on a frozen lake at Austerlitz the centrepiece standout, but ultimately, it never offers any deep insight into what made him tick or the politics in which he was involved (it neglects to even mention his reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies or the massacre at the siege of Jaffa). Scott has announced he’s planning a four-and-a-half hour director’s cut for streaming on Apple, so hopefully that will join the dots. Meanwhile, masterful though this is, its 20 years narrative feels like a 158 minute shorthand guide. (Apple TV+)
No Hard Feelings (15)
In danger of losing her late single mother’s house in the increasingly gentrified beach hamlet of Montauk, Long Island, because of unpaid property taxes and her car repossessed by a tow truck driver (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) ex-boyfriend resentful about her abrupt lack of communication, meaning she can’t work as a Uber driver, 32-year-old Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) answers a Craigslist ad placed by two wealthy helicopter parents Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti) Becker. Concerned that their geeky, socially awkward virgin 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), lacks the necessary experience prior to going to Princeton, they’re offering a brand new Buick in exchange for someone who will, as Maddie puts, “date his brains out”. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky and co-written by John Phillips, it pretty much follows just as you would expect from a film channelling cringeworthy 80s sex comedies like Risky Business (though equally there’s a hint of Paul Thomas Anderson and Cameron Crowe). As in, naturally not revealing her job as a fuck for hire, under the ruse of wanting to adopt a dog from the rescue shelter where he volunteers, Maddie inveigles her way into Percy’s life who, of course, while shy, turns out to be not as much a nerd as he first appears, a relationship gradually blossoming although the crucial consummation keeps running into obstacles. Just as inevitably, the two having grown genuinely close, the truth will eventually come out, setting up the equally predictable dinner with parents scene, the break up and make up.
Pushing the edginess with Lawrence going full frontal (something even the enjoyably vulgar Porky’s resisted) in a skinny dipping scene and subsequent fight with three teens stealing their clothes, it’s both peppered with laugh out loud gags, innuendos and embarrassing moments but also irresistibly sweet with a subtext about her relationship with the pure-hearted Percy opening up the insecure Maddie to moving on in her life (and any hopes that her estranged wealthy father will ever be part of her life) rather than remaining forever stuck in Montauk stasis.
Not everything works; Percy’s overprotective former male nanny Jody (Kyle Mooney) feels a redundant excuse for some unnecessary homophobic jokes. However, Lawrence proves to have solid comic timing (both physical and verbal) as well as dramatic sass, Feldman recalls a young Dustin Hoffman, an aspiring musician his ‘prom night’ restaurant serenading of Maddie with Hall & Oates’ Maneater is a treat, while Scott MacArthur and Natalie Morales, as his pregnant partner and Maddie’s restaurant co-worker, provide solid comic support. It may play the raunchy card, but ultimately this is a sweet, endearing and big-hearted tale of friendship and self-discovery. (Sky Cinema)
Oppenheimer (12A)
Adapted from the 2005 biography American Prometheus, with seven Oscar wins (Film, Director, Actor and Supporting Actor among them) an, writer-director Christopher Nolan delivers his finest work to date, a triumphant biopic of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the man who created the Atom Bomb and, as the film unambiguously avers, consigned the world to eventual destruction at its own hand. As Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”.
Unfolding over a gripping three hours that embraces courtroom procedural, character study and thriller (a feeling accentuated by the score), it moves back in forth in time, framed by and intercutting with Fusion (filmed in black and white) and Fission (in colour). The former is a recreation of the 1959 Cabinet hearings to confirm Lewis Strauss (Supporting Actor nominee Robert Downey Jr.), former head of the US Atomic Energy Commission and a politician closely linked to Oppenheimer (Best Actor nominee Cillian Murphy), as Secretary of Commerce, the latter the loaded behind closed doors McCarthy-era 1954 AEC enquiry driven by attorney Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) to determine if a scapegoated Oppenheimer was a loyal American and should retain his security clearance or not. The theme of American creating and then destroying its heroes when they become an annoyance has been done before, but rarely as well as this.
There’s a few scenes involving the younger Oppenheimer, an ambitious Jewish theorist in the new field of quantum physics, his on-off affair with Jean (Florence Pugh), a Communist Party member, an accusation also levelled at him (he was actually a political agnostic), and his early days teaching and working at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett). The heart of the film, however, focuses on the 1940s when, following events leading up to the 1945 Trinity bomb test, he’s enlisted by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head up the Manhattan Project, which, at a secluded purpose built desert town of Los Alamos in New Mexico, gathered together America’s top scientists and engineers to build the first atomic weapon, initially to beat Nazi Germany to the punch and, when Hitler fell, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more as a demonstration of capability than to bring Japan to submission.
As such, this element of the film is dense in its exploration of moral quandaries about the gulf between idea and application, Oppenheimer’s guilt-haunted but very real concerns about the potential for a nuclear arms race with Russia and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb while the 50s section concerns the emotional and political fallout, the Cabinet hearings revealing his betrayal by the self-serving Strauss, the Salieri to his Mozart, smarting over an earlier humiliation at a congressional hearing,
Alongside a stunning and physically transformative haunting and haunted performance by Murphy with a mastery of a dead-eyed stare, coming to realise the consequences of his arrogance, Downey Jr at the very peak of his powers and a wonderfully prickly Damon, the film is populated by solid supporting turns from the likes Rami Malik, Casey Affleck’s military intelligence officer, Benny Safdie as Hungarian physicist and H-bomb advocate Edward Teller), Gary Oldman as President Truman (scathingly dismissing Oppenheimer as a cry-baby) Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer’s sometime mentor, and Emily Blunt who, as Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife Kitty, an ex-Party member, delivers a last act Best Supporting Actress nomination, while Tom Conti gets to cameo as a convincing Albert Einstein in a pivotal scene shown from three very different perspectives.
Avoiding CGI in favour of optical effects and punctuating the film with images of fiery infernos and exploding stars, it’s visually awe-inspiring and transfixing for every second of the running time. “Try not to set the sky on fire”, jokes Groves before the red button is pressed. Nolan has lit up the whole cinematic universe. (Sky Cinema/Now)
Past Lives (12A)
Unfolding over 24 years, in two 12-year intervals, played out in Seoul, Toronto and New York, writer-director and erstwhile playwright Celine Song’s semi-autobiographical debut is a beguiling bittersweet thwarted love story about unresolved feelings. It opens with a voiceover pondering what three people in a New York bar are talking about and what their relationship may be. They are aspiring playwright Nora (Greta Lee), her fellow writer husband Arthur (John Magaro) and childhood friend and crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and to explore the connections, the film first flashes back 24 years to Korea where Nora, then Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), are academically competitive classmates and budding sweethearts. However, romance is curtailed when her family announces they are emigrating to Canada. The pair part on a somewhat sour note and it’s 12 years before, he still living at home and hanging out with his mates, she now in Toronto, reconnect through Facebook, he tracking her down through her filmmaker father’s page, and then Skype, conduction a flirtatious virtual romance (she recommends him to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ) before realising he’s never coming there and she’s not going back, she shuts it all down.
Twelve more years later, Nora now having married Arthur, who she met at a writing retreat, and rarely speaking Korean, Hae Sung, who has broken up with his girlfriend comes to New York, where she now lives, for a few days, ostensibly as part of his engineering studies, and the two meet up, their meetings causing both to reassess how they feel about each other and what might have been. The title refers to the Buddhist concept of inyun, a belief that some souls are connected through time and past incarnations, somehow fated to be together.
Beautifully framed and photographed (the virtually wordless scene by the fairground carousel and the pair riding a ferry boat around the Statue of Liberty are magical), sublimely directed by Song and exquisitely acted by the three leads, the soulful, reserved Yoo, an understated Marago, who wryly describes himself as “the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny”, and the luminous Lee, it pulses with suppressed emotions, captured in longing looks or the subtle chance in a facial expression, but never falls prey to sentimentality as, subtly also exploring the immigrant experience and indemnity confusions, it builds to a denouement that is both heartbreaking and glowing with joy.
You can feel the echoes of films like David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, but Song has created her own individual and unique vision of their timeless story. An unquestionable film of the year, as Nora and Hae Sung are given to saying when things overwhelm then, ‘whoa’ indeed. (Apple TV+, Netflix)
Polite Society (12)
The feature debut by British writer-director Nida Manzoor, creator of the TV series We Are Lady Parts, mashes up a whole bagful of genres, pouring coming-of-age high school comedy, Bollywood movie, martial arts flick and even references to Jane Austen into the blender and pouring out the results in a glorious smoothie that may not be nutritious but is crammed with fun and flavour.
With an almost entirely Pakistani cast, it’s set in London where, much to the mortification of her traditional career-seeking parents (Shobu Kapoor, Jeff Mirza), teenager Ria Khan (engaging newcomer Priya Kansara) dreams of becoming a female stuntwoman – The Fury – like her idol, real-life British stuntwoman Eunice Huthart, whose signature flying kick she consistently fails to pull off. She’s besties with her older sister, Lena (Umbrella Academy’s Ritu Arya) and constantly needles her to resume her art school studies after having dropped out in a self-confidence crisis, things often getting out of hand as they squabble.
So, she’s horrified when they’re both forced to attend an end of Eid party hosted by one of her mother’s wealthy acquaintances, the imperious and condescending Raheela Shan (Nimra Bucha) and even more so when she learns that Lena is not only dating her geneticist son of Salim (Akshay Khanna) but has also gotten engaged (she apparently has a perfect womb) and will be taking off to Singapore immediately after the wedding.
And so, with the help of her uncool school chums Alba and Clara (Ella Bruccoleri and Seraphina Beh adding solid comedic support), she sets out on a plan to sabotage things, initially looking to try diplomacy but rapidly escalating to trying to dig up dirt (including disguising themselves as men to infiltrate his gym) and, when that fails, invent some (at one point she breaks into the house to scatter used condoms).
It is, as everyone observes, all totally out of proportion. Until, that is, Ria discovers exactly what Salim and Raheela are up to (a touch of Jordan Peele here), at which point it becomes a frantic race by the three friends to stop the wedding before it’s too late.
With a winkingy gleeful and knowingly ludicrous screenplay that, refreshingly peppered with all the sensibilities and sweariness of modern Pakistani youth pulls together Bash Street Kids escapades, torture by waxing, all female martial arts fights (including one with well-trained beauticians), a Bollywood dance sequence and yellow chapter title cards with a clear nod to Tarantino/Rodriguez grindhouse. Vastly funnier than What’s Love Got To With It (and certainly with loads more stunts), further adventures by the Khan sisters would not go amiss. (Sky Cinema)
Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire (12)
The first half of writer-director Zack Snyder’s sci fi saga (with an extended version and Part 2 due in 2024), this is basically a cobbling together of Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai if you’re more arty). Set in the far future where an evil Empire, loyal to a king (Cary Elwes) assassinated along with his wife and healing-powered daughter Issa at the latter’s coronation, command being taken by the senator Balisarius (Fra Fee) who now ruthlessly seeks to conquer the rest of the galaxy, and with the aid of sadistic and not entirely all-human Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who commands the Imperium, the Motherworld’s infantry, put down the rebel insurgency known as Clan Bloodaxe.
It opens on Veldt, a near barren planet where, struggling to raise a harvest, a community of farmers are visited by Noble to appropriate the resources, killing the leader, Father Sindri, as an example, ordering them to have the grain ready when he returns. However, seeing a band of soldiers about to rape a young girl, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a stoical woman rescued some years back from a crashed craft and, as is revealed in chunks of exposition, having a backstory as a high ranking officer in the Imperium forces, fights back, killing them with the help of disillusioned soldier Private Aris (Sky Yang) and, warning that when Noble returns he will destroy everything, teaming up with defiant farmer Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) on a mission to recruit a band of fighters to resist them.
With black marketer and mercenary Kai (Charlie Hunnam in what initially seems to be the Han Solo role), they planet hop as, through individual episodes, one of which involved a child-killing mutant female spider-creature (Jena Malone), they swell the ranks with beast tamer blacksmith Tarak (Staz Nair), cyborg swordswoman, Nemesis (Doona Bai), disgraced Imperium commander General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and, finally, Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher) who brings along half his crew while sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) remains in charge of the other. Come the end of the first half, as Noble and his army come calling and there’s an unexpected act of betrayal, not everyone survives for Part Two.
Unabashedly derivative, generic and unavoidably attracting unfavourable comparisons to the film’s it pillories, even so it does deliver a solid dose of high octane action and slo mo battle scenes, even if the character development seems to have been held back for the longer cut, setting up an assortment of narrative threads to be developed in the sequel along with, one suspects, a bigger role for Anthony Hopkins who provides the voice for the peace-seeking Jimmy, the last of a race of mechanical knights, who, sporting a garland of flowers round his head, is recruited by Kora. Having rather laboriously delivered over two hours of set-up, hopefully The Scargiver will be a pay-off worth waiting for. (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)
Rustin (15)
While Martin Luther King is an iconic historical figure in the fight for civil rights, rather less well-known, but whose input was of equal significance, is Bayard Rustin, a man with a dream of his own. It was Rustin, a queer African-American activist, who, in the face of resistance from opponents within the Civil Rights movement, campaigned, fought for and organised the famous August 28 1963 peaceful protest march on Washington where King delivered his inspirational “I have a dream” speech.
Directed by George C. Wolfe, the film charts the long journey to that pivotal moment, starting back in in 1960, when Rustin (a stupendous Colman Domingo), inspired by Gandhi’s non-violence stance, seeks to persuade his friend Martin (Aml Ameen) to lead a march of 5,000 people. However, the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), led by Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), and Republic Senator. Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright) are opposed to the plan and, whether or not they were the source, rumours of a sexual relationship between “the King and his queen” leads him to tender his resignation, which, to his shock, King accepts, thereby breaching the friendship until Rustin swallowed his pride and called on King to work with him on the 1963 march.
Although the Supreme Court had rules segregation unconstitutional in 1954, in reality little had changed in the American South and Rustin believed that, bringing together people from across America, his proposed march would show solidarity. Again, while trade unionist A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman), with whom he’d worked on an aborted similar protest in the 40s (setting up a flashback as to how a police beating disfigured his face), and fellow activist Medgar Evers (Rashad Demond Edwards) had his back, the NAACP dug their heels in. The film unfolds, then as Rustin, reunited with King, works to change minds and, with an army of volunteers, raise the money for buses to bring supporters to Washington, the initial two-day sit-in eventually reduced to one. Alongside this, the film also explores his homosexuality, primarily through an affair with Elias Taylor (Johnny Ramey), a fictional married Black preacher, and the clear but unconsummated sexual tension with younger white assistant, Tom (Gus Halper). Peppered with a raft of cameos that include Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mahalia Jackson, CCH Pounder as civil rights leader Dr Anna Hedgeman, and Audra McDonald as activist Anna Baker, it’s somewhat let down by its clumsy exposition and one-note pacing, but the story it tells and the charisma of its lead carry it through. (Netflix)
Saltburn (15)
Actress turned novelist turned Killing Eve head writer turned writer-director, Emerald Fennell follows up her Promising Young Woman debut with a very English caustically satirical psychological drama that turns the knife on the English class system, starting out as Evelyn Waugh journeying through Cruel Intentions and ending with a coda straight out Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley.
Set in 2006, Barry Keoghan is Merseyside teen Oliver Quick, who, the product of a working class broken home (disreputable dead, mum alcoholic) who has earned a scholarship to Oxford (Fennell’s own alma mater). A bright but awkward, shy outsider, he’s looked down on by his college contemporaries but is taken under the wing of aristocratic fellow student and party animal Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) after lending him his bike when his own has a puncture. Touched by the sob story of his life and the fact his drug addict dad’s just died, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his resolutely blueblood eccentric (they gather round to watch Superbad) family’s palatial Saltburn estate (telling him that Waugh apparently used the family and house as his model for Brideshead Revisited). Along with the humourless butler (Paul Rhys) and assorted gardeners, the sprawling mansion’s populated by his somewhat dim father Sir James (Richard E Grant clearly having huge fun), emotionally damaged bulimic sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), sponging American mixed-race cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a rival for Felix’s favours, lingering faded glamour houseguest “poor dear Pamela” (a marvellous if almost unrecognisable Carey Mulligan)) and, in a gloriously showstopping performance of razor sharp comic timing and delivery, Rosamund Pike as blissfully privileged, prejudiced and stupid ex-model mother Elsbeth whose explanation as to why she gave up her flirtation with lesbianism is just one of her many hilarious straightfaced lines. She takes a shine to Oliver as, in a more physical way does Ventetia, who, though contemptuous of him, hangs around under his window at night and is rewarded with some steamy oral sex despite being on her period, even though, as a scene lapping up his bathwater makes clear, he’d rather have sex with Felix. As the summer wears on, however, despite the homoerotic electricity things eventually sour between the two friends when, in Felix taking him on a surprise well-meaning visit to his now cleaned-up mother, it turns out Oliver’s not been entirely honest about his upbringing.
Shot in a square ratio, framed with to-camera recollections by Oliver and peppered with laugh out loud deadpan dialogue, there’s also some wonderful quirks such as carving the name of family members and friends who die on a stone and tossing it into the water (let’s just say there’s a fair few extra pebbles by the end) and an audacious use of music that embraces Handel’s Zadok the Priest. the Cheeky Girls’ Have A Cheeky Christmas and a toe-curling karaoke rendition of Flo-Rida’s Low.
Although Pike is the scene-stealer, the performances throughout are consistently sharp with Keoghan utterly magnetic in expressions that shift from doleful to toxic in a blink and bravely quite literally letting it all hang out in the final scene. It might not be quite as ingenious and provocatively original as its predecessor, but even so it’s gold class filmmaking. (Amazon Prime)
Scoop (15)
A recreation of the notorious car crash interview Prince Andrew gave to Newsnight in 2019 attempting to put to bed the scandal about his relationship with the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell and accusations of having had sex with the underage Virginia Giuffre, as directed by Peter Martin from a script by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, adapted from Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews by former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister, this is less about the actual interview and, taking its cue from All The President’s Men and The Post, more a journalistic thriller about the behind the scenes efforts to secure it. When the infamous photo of Andrew and Epstein walking in Central Park, taken in 2010 by Jae Donnelly (Connor Swindells), who also captured a young girl leaving the same private Manhattan home, finally surfaces in a newspaper in connection with a young entrepreneurs event sponsored by the Prince Andrew (a convincing Rufus Sewell under a ton of prosthetics), McAlister reaches out to his Private Secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) proposing a possible interview with the programme’s imperious but highly intelligent anchor, Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), for him to put his side of things. It’s eventually felt this is a perfect chance to change the narrative. History tells a different story.
With the action switching between both sides preparation for the face-to-face, negotiations on what will and won’t be on the table for discussion (Sam and Emily meeting with Thirsk, Andrew and Princess Beatrice at Buckingham Palace), it builds a palpable tension even though the outcome is public record and, with a supporting cast that includes Amanda Redman as McAlister’s mother (who gives a pep talk after Sam is seemingly sidelined), Romola Garai as Newsnight editor Esme Wren and Lia Williams as BBC Current Affairs Director Fran Unsworth, it is compelling viewing and a reminder of what good journalism is all about. A three part TV series, A Very Royal Scandal, is also currently in production with Michael Sheen as Andrew and Ruth Wilson as Maitlis told from the latter’s perspective. (Netflix)
Spaceman (12)
Adam Sandler again proves his serious dramatic chops as Commander Jakub Procházka, a Czech astronaut who is 6 months into a yearlong mission to investigate a mysterious purple cloud of dust, named Chopra, beyond Jupiter, before South Korea gets there. During a televised Q&A a girl asks if he’s lonely, top which he reels of platitudes about space exploration and says no. He is, though, struggling with the isolation, a malfunctioning toilet and the fact he can’t get in touch with his pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan). Indeed, she’s finally had enough of his constant physical and emotional distance and has sent a message saying she’s leaving him. This, however, has been blocked by the head of the Euro Space programme, Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini) and his controller Peter (Kunal Nayyar) fobs him off by saying the link is having technical issues. Needless to say, Jakub doesn’t let on to ground control about his mental state
Shortly after, having dreamt of a spider crawling from his mouth, Jakub actually discovers a spider-like creature (voiced by Paul Dano like an arachnid HAL) with telepathic abilities inside one of the compartments who, eventually (and touchingly) named Hanuš, explains he is the last of his race and was studying human life when Jakub’s emotions caught his attention. As Hanuš explores the memories of this “skinny human” we learn about Jakub’s past, how his father, an informant of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and was killed when Jakub was young, and how he met Lenka but is riddled with guilt for the way he neglected her, not least in abandoning her for another mission when she had a miscarriage.
Directed by Johan Renck and adapted from Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel Spaceman of Bohemia, it clearly has aspiration to be a variant on Tarkovsky’s Solaris, viewers left to ponder if Hanuš is real or a projection of the self-absorbed Jakub’s guilt and anxieties, leading him to seek forgiveness, or indeed exactly what Chopra, which the dying spider says contains the Beginnings of the universe where every moment of time exists simultaneously, represents.
While there’s scenes back in the command centre and with Lenka and her mother (Lena Olin), this is primarily a two hander between Sandler and Dano and, as such, both deliver terrific work in unfolding its existential musings on one’s place in the great scheme of things (with touches of humour such as Hanuš getting a taste for hazelnut spread and Jakub having to spot the sponsor’s AntiQuease commercial message before he broadcasts). There’s areas that could have been further developed in terms of back story and the related feelings, but, while slow to unfold, the cinematography and the core performances bring the melancholia home. (Netflix)
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (PG)
Five years ago, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse introduced cinema audiences to Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a Black Hispanic Brooklyn teenager who gained superpowers when he was bitten by an electromagnetic spider and then found out he was just one of hundreds of spider-powered entities existing on a multitude of different Earths across the multiverse. It also revolutionised animation with its jawdropping mix of retro comic book, Cubism and pop art. The much anticipated sequel takes all that and hypercharges it into a trippy, at times hallucinogenic, kinetic rush that feels like maxed out ADHD that can be exhausting to watch but also delivering exhilaration to every fibre of your being.
It starts, though, on Earth-65 with moody rock drummer Gwen Stacey (Hailee Stanfield), the white-clad Spider-Woman of her world, who’s having problems with her law enforcement father (Shea Whigham) who believes her alter ego was responsible for the death of his daughter’s best friend, Peter Parker (who had transformed into The Lizard). When, following a battle with a DaVinci-sketch looking version of The Vulture, she finally reveals her secret identity, looking to explain and hoping for understanding, he just reads her her rights. Bitterly disappointed, she flees into the Spider-Verse using a device given to her by Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), a pregnant African-American Spider-Woman who helped subdue The Vulture, recruits her as part of the Spider-Society, a team policing the different dimensions.
Meanwhile, back on Earth-1610, now 15, while Spider-Man is famous superhero who was a guest host on Jeopardy and made a commercial endorsing baby powder), Miles is en route to a meeting with his school counsellor and concerned helicopter parents Rio (Luna Lauren Vélez) and newly promoted police captain Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry) for which he’s already late, he’s sidetracked when he runs into someone robbing a local store, a faceless white figures covered in black splodges which are, in fact, portals, through which he or just parts of his body can travel, with whom he gets involved in a running battle. Calling himself The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), this new supervillain was once Jonathan Ohnn (Jason Schwartzman), a scientist who worked for Alchemax, who became what he is today as a result of the collider implosion caused by Miles in the first film. Now he’s looking for revenge by ruining Miles’s life, just as he ruined his. And he’s found his holes can take him into the multiverse.
The central thrust begins as Miles secretly follows Gwen into the Spider-Verse (including a visit to Lego Earth) where he’s reunited with his old mentor, Peter Parker Jake Johnson, who, married to Mary Jane, now has a baby called May, with similar powers, and is confronted by the scarred, humourless Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), the “ninja vampire” of Earth 2099 who runs Spider-Man HQ who explains that having, in an earlier sequence where he and Gwen wound up in Mumbattan and he saved the life of the police captain father of the girlfriend of Spider-Man India (Karan Soni), he disrupted a canonical event. In other words, each Earth’s arachnid adventurer have things in common, being bitten by a spider, the murder of Uncle Ben (or Uncle Aaron – Mahershala Ali – in Miles’s case) …and the tragic death of a police captain. Now he’s thrown everything off-kilter and put the integrity of the entire Spider-Verse at risk. More than that, Miles learns that he’s an anomaly and became Spider-Man by error, that he wasn’t the one the mechanoid was supposed to bite, meaning there is an Earth without a Spider-Man where the storyline unfolded in a much darker manner. Thus Miles is declared Spider Public Enemy No 1 and with Miguel and countless variations in pursuit, he, Gwen, and Hobie Brown aka Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), a Mohawked Londoner with a guitar strapped to his back who’s animated like a living Sex Pistols album cover, have to stop The Spot and save the entire Spider-Verse, not to mention his and Gwen’s fathers by preventing the canon from playing out.
The dazzling animation is eye-popping, often shifting styles and colours within the same scene, close-ups showing the comic-book dot textures of the characters’ skins, driving things along at hyperspeed but also finding time out for quieter, more tender moments such as Miles and Gwen hanging out (upside down) on the dome of the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower that add further resonance to the film’s central theme about the weight of responsibility (an emotional depth that has always distinguished Marvel comics) and the painful journey to self-discovery. There’s a lot of fun too as, along with a joke about the redundancy of saying Chai tea, it wheels out such web-slinging variations as Spider-Horse, Spider-Car, Spider-Cat, and the virtual reality Spider-Byte, interjecting the animation with live action that includes clips from both the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield movies, a brief visit to a convenience store in Eddie Brock’s world and a wordless cameo from Donald Glover as The Prowler (another variation of whom provides a last moments shocker).
Driven by a brilliant score, as the first of the two part sequel, it ends, of course on a cliffhanger setting up Beyond The Spider-Verse. That won’t arrive until next year, by which time your pulse rate might just have slowed down enough to handle it. (Amazon Prime)
Sting (15)
There’s some bloodily gory moments, but, generally, tongues are firmly in cheek for this Australian (but Brooklyn-set) creature feature from writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner in which a flesh-eating alien spider crashes to Earth in an asteroid and, thinking it’s just a common arachnid, is caught by pre-teen Charlotte (Alyla Browne, looking a little like a young version of mother Nicole Kidman) who names it Sting and keeps it as a pet in a jar (Charlotte’s Web, geddit!), feeding it bugs in response to the hunger calls it makes.
It grows at an alarmingly rapid rate and, when Charlotte sleeps, opens the top and goes foraging on its own, its tastes developing from creepy crawlies to a parrot and then luckless exterminators, a grieving drunk Spanish neighbour, and eventually capturing Charlotte’s mum Heather (Penelope Mitchell), comic book writer step-dad Ethan (Ryan Corr) and baby brother and, in a decided Alien-nod, storing them in cocoons inside the building’s ventilation system for later. So, it’s down to Charlotte, armed with a water pistol and bottles of mothballs water, the only thing that can hurt the creature and dissolve the greenish webs, to rescue its victims.
With some decent creature effects, there’s the obligatory tension-building moments with dark corners and shadows and shots of bodies being dragged into vents and a hapless tenant having the spider crawl into her mouth and exit elsewhere, but these are ultimately set-dressing for the film’s fragmenting nuclear family storyline.
Charlotte’s real dad having done a runner (she thinks he’s in Thailand), she has a hot and cold relationship with Ethan, who uses her as inspiration for his Fang Girl comics (she’s not happy on him basing the villain on her father), while he is under pressure to meet deadlines for the illustrations trying to balance that with his make ends meet job as the apartment’s superintendent working for its crotchety, cheap and mean landlady Gunter (Robyn Nevin chewing up the accent), the sister of Heather’s dementia-afflicted mother Helga (Noni Hazelhurst) who spends her time watching TV and knitting and reeks of mothballs (hence saving her from the spider’s shopping list).
It opens with the arrival of wisecracking, pissed-off, Frank (Jermaine Fowler), making (as we earn later) a second visit in response to Helga’s call for an exterminator to deal with the noises in the walls, and then, as he stumbles on the cause, flashing back four days to the events leading up to that (cue the flayed parrot) and then, taking in nerdy biology student tenant Erik (Danny Kim) who points out that spiders don’t have vocal chords, so how can it mimic animal calls, on to the big bug showdown and the inevitable set up for Sting 2. Silly and disposable, but undeniably quite fun. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
The Strangers: Chapter 1 (15)
Not, as the title might suggest, a prequel to the 2008 home invasion horror (which saw an underwhelming sequel a decade later), but the first of three instalments to be released over the course of a year that basically just remakes the original in which three masked strangers, who seemingly have the ability to be invisible in plain sight, terrorise a young couple in a remote rural location, preceded by young woman knocking on a door late asking “Is Tamara home?” Directed with workmanlike reliability by Renny Harlin, it brings nothing new to the party, indeed the masks – Dollface, Pin-up Girl and Raghead (here credited as Scarecrow)- are exactly the same as in the original as is the lack of a motive for their actions – “because you’re here”.
The luckless victims this time are Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) who, celebrating their five year dating anniversary (unlike the breaking-up in the original), are on their way to Portland when, stopping off at a diner in smalltown Venus, Oregon, where they’re met with passive hostility by the creepy locals, a couple of stone-faced adolescents handing out church flyers among them, they find their car now won’t start, he suspecting it’s been tampered with by the garage hands. As a result, they have to spend the night at an Airbnb hunting cabin the woods, kindly dropped off by one of the diner waitresses. They’ve barely settled in when comes that knock on the door, then, having left his inhaler in the car, Ryan takes off on a conveniently handy motorbike, deciding to stop off for burgers on the way back. Meanwhile, along in the cabin, Maya is startled by more bangs on the door and, when the fuse blows, encounters one of the trio in the dark.
Despite that fact that, having seen the trailer, nothing happens unto they start eating the burgers, Harlin still manages to crank up the suspense with the banging, creaking and glimpsed figures. Then the axe splinters the door and it gets down to things in earnest with our intended victims hiding from the intruders, failing to make a getaway, finding a gun, accidently killing an innocent handyman and then getting caught and tied up by the murderous psychos, only one of whom has any dialogue.
Nothing comes as a surprise (nonsensical decisions? Check. Jump scares? Check) and there’s only the faintest whiff of a cityfolk/rural hicks subtext, but the acting’s functional enough and Harlin sufficiently unfolds everything to deliver the goods promised by the packaging, leaving the survival of one of the pair to provide the link into the presumably revenge-driven Chapter 2 where I guess the reboot will be on the other foot. (Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
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 the dead 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)
Tarot (15)
Generic horror to a fault, this ticks the boxes as it goes. A diverse collection of college friends satisfying the ethnic and gender fluid diversity requirements -check. A creepy remote house – check. Ignoring the sign that says ‘keep out’ – check. The cursed artefact that unleashes the evils spirits – check. Shadowy figures – check. Rote jump scares – check. The characters gradually being killed off – check. The eccentric expert to explain the curse backstory (a revenge seeking grieving medieval mum called the astrologer) – check. And so on and so on.
Devoid any sense of self-awareness, genre originality or half-decent dialogue, the derivative plot involves the characters renting the place for a birthday weekend and, looking for booze, coming upon a box with a bunch of scarily illustrated tarot cards. To which end, Haley (Harriet Slater) who’s into all this, is persuaded to give readings to her friends: her just broken-up with-boyfriend Grant, birthday girl Elisa, Paige (Avantika Vandanapu from the Mean Girls reboot), nice guy Lucas, Madeline, all of whom have no personality to speak of, and annoying motormouth Paxton (Spider-Man’s Jacob Batalon the nearest to a name). After they leave the house, they then start dying (in frankly unimaginative fashion save for a darkly amusing moment where one is murdered to the ironic sound of I Saw You) in keeping with their tarot/horoscope readings, leading to the survivors having to go back and try and destroy the cards. The film was originally to be called Horrorscope after the book on which it’s based, but the choice of the eventual title seems quite fitting or at least in terms of the last three letters. (Vue)
The Three Musketeers Pt 1: D’Artagnan (15)
Written in 1844 by Alexandre Dumas, there’s been over 40 big and small screen adaptations but this stirringly and sumptuously directed by Martin Bourboulon is the best in a long while, even if some of the actors do bear a passing resemblance to those in the BBC serial. Largely faithful to the novel (although here Porthos is bisexual and Athos’s marital backstory is somewhat reworked), it starts off in 1627 with the impulsive, puppyish Charles D’Artagnan of Gascony (a wildly charismatic François Civil) setting off with a letter of recommendation to train as a Musketeer and serve Louis XIII. Before he gets there, however, he’s involved in an attack on a woman in a carriage and ends up being shot and buried in a shallow grave. Not actually wounded, however, he claws his way out and gets to Paris where he’s taken in as a cadet by the captain of the musketeers, Tréville (Marc Barbé), but he’s barely dismounted before he finds himself facing three separate (and banned) duels, his opponents all turning out to be the legendary musketeers, Athos (Vincent Cassel bringing due gravitas), the rumbustious Porthos (Pio Marmai) and Aramis (Roman Duris), who can’t seem to balance his womanising and spiritual duties.
However, after dispatching the guards under the command of the duplicitous Cardinal Richelieu (Eric Ruf), he finds favour with the King (a spry Louis Garrel) and, more so, his (here unmarried) landlady, Constance (Lyna Khoudri), trusted confidante to the Queen (Vicky Krieps), Anne of Austria, the thrilling plot breathlessly unfolding to involve a conspiracy by the Protestants, loyal to England, and Richelieu to bring down the monarchy and spark war with England, which Louis’s brother Gaston advises while being railroaded into marrying, Athos being framed for murder and sentenced to death, and D’Artagnan’s frantic dash to England to recover a diamond necklace given to the Queen by Louis, which she’s given to her English lover the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who’s insisting she wear it at the wedding. During which time his path frequently crosses that of Milady (the ever excellent Eva Green), Richelieu’s spy who’s also been charged with recovering the diamonds on his behalf.
The core cast sparking with chemistry, all of this rattles along with brilliantly staged long take swashbuckling derring-do action sequences that are on a period par with John Wick, meticulous costuming, smart repartee, dark skullduggery, unexpected twists, romance, superb widescreen and camera swooping photography with its sepia tones and use of candles, a thrilling adrenaline ride that leaves you wanting more. (Now, Sky Go)
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)
Young Woman and The Sea (PG)
It’s never a good sign when a distributor embargoes all reviews until the day before the film opens; however, it’s hard to fathom’s lack of faith and promotion. never mind the few screens it’s playing at given the fact that, while old-fashioned, it’s one of the best and most inspirational films of the year as well as solid evidence that Daisy Ridley is an actress of real worth and not just some Star Wars appendage.
Born in Manhattan in 1905, the daughter of a Coney Island German butcher, Henry, and mother Gertrude, taken ill with a near fatal case of measles as a girl, Gertrude ‘Trudy’ Ederle was not expected to have a long life. In fact, although almost totally deaf by the 1940s, she lived to the age of 98 and, taking up swimming at an early age, racked up an array of world records, becoming the youngest world record holder in swimming in 1917 for the 880-yard freestyle, holding 29 US national and world records from 1921 until 1925 and winning a gold medal at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. In 1925 she turned professional, setting a record for swimming from Battery Park to Sandy Hook that stood for 81 years, and the following year, on her second attempt, became the first woman to swim the English Channel, breaking the men’s record.
That incredible feat is the third act core of this largely true to the facts biopic by director Joachim Ronning with Ridley delivering a magnetic performance as Trudy, while Olive Abercrombie is equally impressive as her young self. While it plays with the facts in places (here she doesn’t win gold at the Olympics), the first half ably condenses her life up to the channel swim, seeing her battle her traditionally-minded conservative father’s (Kim Bodnia) views on women swimming (in a completely invented scene she batters down his resistance by incessantly playing ukulele singing ‘Don’t We have Fun’) as well as the far wider patriarchal misogyny in regard to women competing in any form of sport, supported by her strong-willed mother (Jeannette Hain), sister and fellow swimmer Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) and WSA coach Charlotte ‘Eppy’ Epstein (Sian Clifford), the younger Trudy transitioning in a dissolve scene to the teenage version along the way.
Declaring her intent to swim the channel, she secures sponsorship (here the result of a fictional bet) from James Sullivan (Glenn Fleshner), the chairman of the US Olympic Committee, but only on the proviso that her coach is Scotsman Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), who had failed to swim the channel on many attempts. It was Wollfe who scuppered her first attempt by having her pulled from the water, though in this telling, a committed chauvinist and bitterly jealous and resentful of her success, he slips sleeping tablets into her tea. Not returning to America as planned, she enlists Bill Burgess (an amusing Stephen Graham), one of the few men to have done the channel swim, as her new coach and, with her dad and sister on the guide boat, and, greased up with goose fat and now wearing her then controversial bikini-styled two piece swim suit (crafted by Meg), heads back into the water, feeding on chicken legs, battling through jelly fish, the current and darkness in the dangerous Dover sandbank the Shallows, her progress being reported on American national radio, to finally step ashore, 21 miles later, on the English beach after 14 hours and 31 mins, beating the previous men’s record by a full two hours. The bonfires lit on the cliffs to guide her are pure invention, but the ticker tape parade she was given back in New York in which some two million lined the road is not and remains the biggest of its kind to this day.
A companion piece in many way to Nyad in how it shows the courage of its protagonist to beat both the odds and the prevailing sexism (and making a point of her becoming an inspiration to other aspirant swimmer young girl), the swimming scenes given a gripping authenticity being filmed in the ocean, the Black Sea and the Channel itself, with emotional beats that never feel manipulative or sentimentalised. It deserves to make a far bigger splash than it’s been allowed. (Cineworld 5 Ways)