New Films from Fri 19 Dec by Mike Davies

Films showing this week either in cinemas or on streaming platforms

FILM OF THE WEEK

Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A)

The third in what is now scheduled to be a five part saga, this continues the narrative but feels more of an extended second part of The Way Of Water than a film in its right. Decidedly bloated (at over three hours) with lengthy sequences that (especially in the early going) feel largely unnecessary, it picks up the story following the death of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters, appearing as a spirit), the eldest son of the Sully family, with brother Lo’ak (Britain Dalton, also serving as narrator) grieving and feeling guilt (though this isn’t greatly developed), while his father, human turned Na’vi Jake (Sam Worthington), now part of the Metkayina clan, is burying his by concentrating on matters at hand. His wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), on the other hand, has developed a hatred of humans, which throws up a bit of a problem in relation so teenage Spider (Jack Champion), who they rescued and took in after the death of his father, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang, saddled with the worst of the dialogue), Jake’s former commander and now resurrected obsessive avatar recombinants nemesis. The rest of the family, should you need reminder, are youngster Tuktirey (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and, the crucial figure in this chapter, adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, who gets a cameo in her former human role) who has latent powers and a connection to Pandora goddess spirit Eywa.
The narrative encompasses to main strands. The first involves the Ash People from the aggressive volcano-dwelling Mangkwan led by the ferocious Varang (a striking Oona Chaplin), setting in motion the film’s first spectacular battle when they attack a fleet of flying Na’vi merchant ships (captained by David Thewlis’s Peylak) carrying the Sulley family. This being Varang’s first encounter with guns (the Mangwan are a sort of Pandoran war-painted equivalent of Native American tribes fighting with bows and spears), she immediately gets a hard on for them and the destruction they can bring. This will eventually see her cross paths and join forces with Quaritch (prompting him to ‘go native’). The second concerns Spider who, when the battery powering the mask he needs to survive Pandora’s air, is saved by Kir who uses her filament hair extension to connect to the planet to forge a symbiotic bond whereby he’s able to breathe. This thus makes him invaluable to Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the former head administrator for the RDA mining operation, and Quaritch’s successor General Ardmore (Edie Falco) who see him as the solution to human colonisation. To which end, Quaritch, with Varang’s help, is out to track him down in a mix of both professional and personal motives.
All of this serves to set up a further series of battles, during one of which Neytiri is wounded, including various captures and escapes (including wife, Spider and Jemaine Clement’s marine biologist saving Jake from execution) and a whaling group led by robot-armed Scoresby hunting the sentient Tulkans, before climaxing in the stunning kitchen sink and all final showdown between the different forces, some of the core supporting characters not living for the next sequel. One and perhaps two of the villains may well survive for the as yet untitled Part 4.
Along with the core cast, there’s several returning names, among them Cliff Curtis as Tonowari, chieftain of the pacifist reef people, Kate Winslet as his pregnant wife Ronal, Bailey Bass as their daughter and Lo’ak’s love interest Tsireya, CCH Pounder as Neytiri’s mother and Matt Gerald as Quaritch’s recombinant right hand man Wainfleet.
Alongside themes of family there’s a lot more world building here as well as expanding on elements and creatures from the first to films, but, while it may keep you engaged (the visuals and the colossal imagination at work certainly help) the overly convoluted and repetitive plot again highlights Cameron and writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver’s weakness as story tellers, at times recycling whole chunks from the previous film. Nonetheless, this is real epic big a screen as possible filmmaking, and, while probably not an entry point for franchise newbies, will undoubtedly have Avatar addicts transfixed. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)

ALSO RELEASED

The Ice Tower (15)

Arguably the most direct and accessible work by French auteur Lucile Hadžihalilović, this plays like a female-centred coming of age fairytale of yearning, desire, control and submission, slipping between the realms of reality and imagination.

Set in late 60s France, running away from her foster home, Jeanne (newcomer Clara Pacini), a teenage orphan still grieving the death of her mother from an overdose, whose bead necklace she clings to as keepsake and connection, she takes refuge from the cold and snow in what she thinks is an abandoned warehouse in the Alps. It turns out, however, to be a soundstage where coldly aloof Dietrich-like diva  Cristina van der Berg (Marion Cotillard) is filming a  new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, a story with which Jeanne, in her loneliness, has become obsessed. Spying her in her sparkling white costume, she’s transfixed and sneaks into the wardrobe department to steal one of the crystals from the costume to give to the young girl she reads to at the home.

Discovered by the crew, who think she’s an extra, she passes herself off as Bianca (meaning white), one the teenage ice skaters she’s also obsessed with (a scene scored to Aphrodite’s Child’s It’s Five O’Clock), and quickly catches Cristina’s eye. Both intrigued and smitten by her gamine nature, she gets her director (husband Gaspar Noé), who has a habit of telling young women he might cast them in his Hitchcockian thriller, to make her the understudy to the actress playing the object of her predatory intentions opposite her. Finding an old magazine that reveals Cristina too came from a foster home, her cold imperious demeanour a mask for her vulnerability, Jeanne feels a close connection  and, as the narrative develops, the pair become entangled in an unhealthy relationship founded on desire and domination that blurs together surrogate maternal and erotic issues as the one moulds the other in her own image to inevitably poisonous consequences. The presence of  August Diehl as Max, a confidant of Cristina from an early age who serves as her doctor and seemingly enables her with medications further intensifies that at times hallucinatory textures.

Thematically echoing Black Narcissus andf Mulholland Drive, it exercises an almost trance-like quality to its glacially-paced melodrama as Jeanne and Cristina begin to reflect each other, the cinematography  full of mirrors, shards of light and translucent surfaces (the film’s French title translates as glass or mirror), it pulls you in and burns with the cold fire of frostbite. (Sat/Sun: MAC)

NOW SHOWING

Ballad Of A Small Player (15)

After the widescreen expanse of All Quiet On The Western Front and Conclave, director Edward Berger takes a  more intimate low key approach to this character study about dislocation and self-destructive addiction. Giving another standout performance, Colin Farrell plays an Irish con artist gambler who, hiding out in Macau, China’s answer to Vegas,  where the locals refer to him as a gweilo or hungry ghost, passes himself off as British aristo Lord Freddy Doyle, complete with precisely clipped accent.  Living in a decadent Chinese casino-hotel, with three days to settle his 145,000 hotel bill, he’s on a losing streak and saddled with huge gambling debts he can’t pay off,  wiped out at baccarat by a foul-mouthed old dear (Deanie Ip) at the only casino that’ll still extend him credit, but, in his supposedly Savile Row leather yellow gloves,  is still looking for the win that will turn things around.

Into his life comes Fala Chen (Dao Ming), who, like a drug dealer feedings junkies,  lends money to losers at exorbitant rates, but has decided to get out of the game after her latest mark took a dive from the rooftop, she inheriting his debt. The pair hang out in her houseboat and he wakes to find her gone and numbers written on his palm. Also entering his orbit is frump in designer glasses Cynthia (Tilda Swinton), who, calling herself Betty, is a private detective hired to recover the money he stole from her elderly client, She spots him a stake and suddenly his fortunes change, now he just can’t lose.

Visually striking and vibrantly coloured, adapted by Rowan Joffe from Lawrence Osborne’s novel, it’s a thoughtful meditation on self-loathing, end of rope desperation, compulsion,  guilt and redemption, Farrell going all-in on a rollercoaster that variously sees him having a heart attack and wolfing down lobster, sweating out anxiety and almost maniacally exulting in his luck. Though she disappears (for reasons explained later) in the second half, Ming makes for a suitably haunting femme fatale while Swinton digs into her character’s quirks with a sly wink in her eye. With supporting turns from Anthony Wong relating an anecdote about a gambler who dies and goes to what he thinks is Heaven and Alex Jennings as the friend and fellow gambler who know who Doyle really is, both imparting the message that winning kills you quicker than losing, this might not ever play an ace but it holds high enough cards to keep you in the game. (Netflix)

Black Bag (15)

A blackly comic espionage mole hunt spin on Mr and Mrs Smith, with the husband and wife spies rather than assassins, written by David Koepp and directed (and filmed) by Steven Soderbergh, the title referring to secrecy,   buttoned-up George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender sporting Harry Palmer-styled black spectacles and a dab hand in the kitchen  in a nod to The Ipcress File ) and the sexier Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) work for Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, headed up by a steely Arthur Steiglitz (Pierce Brosnan). Apparently ace at detecting lies, George has been charged with investigating someone from the agency leaking to the Russians details of a virus called Severus which can cause nuclear reactors to meltdown and kill thousands (though never stated the Ukraine war is the backdrop). He’s got one week to identify the traitor and a list of five suspects. One of whom is his wife.

 Also in the narrative melting pot of suspects is erotic fiction fan agency therapist Dr  Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris) who’s dating gaming-obsessed Col James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), and uncouth  alcoholic  Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) who’s resentful of being passed over for promotion and involved with the volatile Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), a relative data expert rookie with daddy issues. The agent who gave him the dies of a suspicious heart attack.

Two dinners are pivotal, the first where he serves chana masala laced with a truth serum to everyone but his wife  turns into Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf series of  confessions and a steak knife through someone’s hand but reveals nothing about the leak. The second, after administering polygraphs, is of an Agatha Christie drawing room nature with a gun on the table awaiting whoever lies.  In-between all this, it seems that both George and Kathryn are being set-up to distrust and spy on each other, especially when he discovers his wife has been keeping things from him in her own black bag.

While a car blows up and there’s a last act gunshot, this follows more of a cerebral  John LeCarre spy thriller path rather than Bourne or Bond territory, meaning there’s a lot of clever sparring dialogue and  psychological misdirections and manipulations, while the audience tries to figure out who’s the one behind the leak. Tongue-in-cheek with several nods to other films in the genre, the whole traitor plot is really a bit of a MacGuffin with the film more accurately an examination of   truth and trust (and the difference between them) in relationships where lying is a stock in trade as several layers of duplicity are exposed. As such the chemistry between the different couples really works (and also in the power play therapy session between Zoe  and Kathryn), Fassbender and Blanchett especially, Soderbergh slickly navigating the screenplay and keeping you involved and guessing up to the last moment. No big bangs maybe, but intelligently explosive all the same. (Sky Cinema/Now)

The Choral (12A)

A fourth teaming of   director  Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett, this is a slight but gently comic and touching tale of the power of music to heal, comfort and inspire. The setting is the fictional Yorkshire village of Ramsden in 1916 where the war has seen many a young volunteer (conscription not yet introduced) go off never to return, 17-year-old postboy Lofty (Oliver Briscombe) delivering the dreaded messages to newly bereaved wives and mothers. It’s also taken its toll on the village choral society which, funded by mill owner Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam), who’s recently lost his own son with his wife in permanent mourning,  has seen its choir master  having decided to enlist, thus requiring a replacement. To which end, committee member Joe Fytton (Mark Addy), the local photographer who  snaps the lads before they ship out, suggests they approach organist turned conductor Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes).

Aside from being an atheist and having no patriotic  sensibilities (his reaction to a rendition of God Save The King is an eye rolling joy) , the real problem, certainly as far as Duxbury’s concerned, is that he’s spent his recent years in Germany  of his own volition. Nevertheless, reputation outweighs prejudice and he duly agrees to take up the position (though the local kids taunt him and the older members sneer), bringing with him his own conscientious-objector pianist, Horner (Robert Emmas), and despite the fact he annoyingly keeps referencing German philosophers and composers, things seem to settle down as he auditions for new singers, among them Bella (Emily Fairn), whose soldier boyfriend Clyde (Jacob Dudman) is MIA, Lofty and his chums Ellis (Taylor Uttley) and Mitch (Shaun Thomas), and, a real find, Mary (Amara Okereke) who  loves singing while she collects for the Salvation Army. Guthrie’s somewhat less impressed by Duxbury, who sees himself as the choir’s star turn.

There’s also an unspoken reservation about Guthrie being a closeted homosexual, a somewhat unnecessary plot addition involving Horner’s crush and an ill-fated romance with a German naval officer that has him forever checking the papers for  news of sea battles.

After making an approach to Edward Elgar to get permission, they eventually settle on performing    his good vs evil parable The Dream of Gerontius which, as it develops,  becomes a theatrical piece about the war and its casualties, enlisting wounded soldiers into the choir, among them Clyde who’s returned alive, minus an arm, much to the consternation of Bella who’s taken up with Ellis, and is chosen by Guthrie to replace Duxbury as the voice of good, he getting to sing the Satan part as compensation.  As fate has it, Elgar (Simon Russell-Beale) is in the area for an investiture ceremony, and, while Guthrie demurs, Mary secretly invites him to come and check out their interpretation. His reaction, not quite what she’d hoped.

With a cast that also includes Alun Armstrong as the village’s funeral director and Lyndsey Marshal as the local prostitute with quite a client list, its ensemble nature sometimes struggles to incorporate all the different stories (the three boys turn 18 and get their call-up papers, Lofty looking to lose his virginity before he goes), but otherwise, anchored around a typically centred performance from Fiennes,  it deftly balances the poignancy and the humour (Bennett’s often sharp wit in solid form) as the community bonds over common goals and tragedies. A touch rose-tinted with the cosiness of a light and warming Sunday evening BBC drama, it’s an undemanding joy, but a joy nonetheless. (Odeon Birmingham; Mon: Mockingbird)  

Christmas Karma (PG)

Even discounting the reliably insufferable Danny Dyer as a hammy geezer Cockerney cabbie called Colin in a festive jumper warbling his version of The 12 Days Of Christmas, this is a real  turkey leftovers. hence the desperate marketing attempt to remind that 23 years ago director Gurinder Chadha made Bend It Like Beckham (discounting the multiple films that followed), which can only backfire if you stand the one against the other. Yet another reworking of A Christmas Carol this at least comes with a unique approach by giving it a vaguely Bollywood musical spin, with Scrooge recast as Eshaan Sood (Kunal Nayyar), a Tory voting Hindu financier and moneylender who, in his childhood, was, along with thousands of other Asians, expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, the subsequent poverty and racism he and his family endured in London accounting for his present day tight-fistedness, an obsession with money that, as in Dickens, cost him his one and only romance.

As per the familiar tale, after an assorted of churlish deeds (among them being rude about a  children’s carol choir) and boorish behaviour to his nephew Eddie (Bilal Hasna) and guitar playing employee Bob Cratchit (Leo Suter) , the ghost of his dead partner Marley (Hugh Bonneville) warns him he will be visited on Christmas Eve by three spirits Christmas past (Eva Longoria fresh from a Day Of The Dead festival), present (Billy Porter’s R&B singer in garish green with his soul sister backing singers) and future (Boy George, the Christmas Karma Chameleon, who just gets to point and sing a bit) who will attempt to get him to change his ways by guiding through their different time zones.

Despite the Indian make-over, while Priyanka Chopra sings Last Christmas (Desi Version) over the credits along with cast and crew and celebrated Bhangra singers Jassi Sidhu and Malkit Singh get to do their turn, given this is a commercial world the bulk of the songs are by Gary Barlow, some of his blandest. And then there’s a breakdancing Santa, a cost of living rap and the everyone getting together for a fairground song and dance finale before a coda back in Uganda. Tiny Tim’s still there (he’s got life-threatening tumours in his legs), but now, while a bit financially strapped, his parents (mum’s played by Pixie Lott) aren’t exactly rubbing a couple of lumps of coal together for heat but have a decently appointed gaff in what looks like Notting Hill, With appearances by Allan Corduner as Mr. Fezzywig, Tracy-Ann Oberman as his wife, Rufus Jones as Rupert Holly and rapper Eve as herself, it looks rather cheap and is  for the most part poorly (or over) acted (Nayyar wanders around looking bewildered) and sung.  To be fair the final new leaf redemption section does have an engaging emotional warmth, but getting there requires exercising a real sense of   charitable seasonal spirit. (MAC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue) 

Code 3 (15)

The title relating to an emergency response requiring lights and sirens, pitched somewhere between straight drama and a tag along reality documentary, director Christopher Leone works from a screenplay by   himself and former paramedic Patrick Pianezza  as the film follows Randy (Rainn Wilson) as a burnt-out cynical paramedic on his final 24- hour emergency ambulance shift after 18 years before he takes up an uneventful 9-5  job (with lunch breaks)  in insurance, his controller Shanice (Yvette Nicole Brown) having persuaded him to see out the shift. Along with his regular partner Mike (Lil Rel Howery), his only friend and the only co-worker who can tolerate him, behind the wheel, they’re also babysitting Jessica (Aimee Carrero), a young trainee along for her first night, enthusiastic and believing she can make a positive impact. Randy long stopped harbouring any such delusions, the night proceeding to offer up a series of incidents that explain why he’s had enough of mopping up life’s tragedies with few thanks and less money.

Breaking through the fourth wall as he talks direct to camera, the night will see the crew attending a multiple fatality car crash, a half-naked mentally ill homeless man  screaming about how he’s “Satan and his only messenger”, so he can get a hot meal, being vomited on and attacked by someone they’ve just saved from an overdose, being threatened by a deranged woman with a gun, being patronised and insulted by overworked asshole Dr. Serano (Rob Riggle) and Mike calming down a psychotic Black veteran with PTSD shouting how he’s the President before a couple of trigger happy cops shut him up for good.

A scathing indictment of America’s healthcare system, while powerfully and at times gruesomely dramatic, it’s also frequently wildly funny, albeit mostly gallows style humour (the scene where a woman in a diner asking Randy whats the worst  thing he’s ever seen is an hilarious elaborate wind up, involving a baby and a microwave, unless, of course, he’s not making it up). But more than anything it’s about the humanity of trying to care for those whose lives are in their hands, their best friend on their worst day,  whether they want you to or not.  If you can’t laugh as an escape valve in the face of it all, then you might as well just kill yourself.

Wilson delivers one of his best performances and his chemistry with Howery rings with authenticity while Carrero both provides the audience foil and a last act twist as Serano gets smacked down. A film that’s impossible to shake off, and perhaps one that will afford a little perspective when you’re complaining how long the ambulance takes to arrive. (Apple TV)

Drop (15)

Phones and laptops have provided a platform for several thrillers in recent years. the latest coming from Happy Death Day director  Christopher Landon, who, using for the most part just two locations, serves up a tension building thriller that takes the old premise of what would you do to protect your family and gives it a 21st century technology twist.

Out of the dating game for several years since the violent death of her abusive husband (the prelude is ambiguous as to whether she shot him), Violet (White Lotus star Meghann Fahy on solid form), mother to five-year-old Toby (Jacob Robinson), is about to venture out on a blind date with photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar doing his It Ends With Us nice guy) she met online.

Leaving Tony in the care of her younger sister Jen   (Violett Beane), she heads for Chicago’s upmarket Palate restaurant with its spectacular skyline view of the city.  He’s late and she has brushes with two other diners, one a would be romeo (Ed Weeks) apparently waiting or his sister, the other a middle-aged man (Reed Diamond) who’s on a blind date does not go well. When Henry arrives, they flirt nervously, Violet distracted by getting texts on her phone by the Apple AirDrop function inviting her to play a game. They can, Henry, explains, only be coming from someone in a 50ft radius, but with everyone on their phones identifying who is impossible. Then the messages turn much darker as she’s told to check her security cameras and sees a masked gunman in her house.  Whoever’s sending them they says if she tells anyone, if she leaves or if Henry leaves then her son will die. The death of someone she tries to get a message too makes it clear, her mysterious dropper – who sees her every move – is deadly serious. And the only way she can save Toby is by removing the memory card from Harry’s camera (we see a brief shot of documents with lots of presumably incriminating figures on them) and then killing him. And acting normal while she does it.

It plays the familiar game of throwing in a bunch of suspects with phones in their hands, the over-enthusiastic rookie waiter (Jeffrey Self), bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), the guy with the sister, while naturally  hiding the real culprit in plain sight, Violet desperately looking for ways not to slip the poison into Harry’s glass before the reveal, a sleight of hand and a burst of gunplay before heading back home to wrap it all up with another nice twist in the deck. A whodunnit hiding a contrived  conspiracy thriller up its sleeve that plays better if you don’t try and pick apart the how that comes with subtext about   abuse (Henry shares a similar story) but is also very self-aware of the underlying silliness of its narrative, all of which Landon pulls off with style to spare. (Sky Cinema/NOW)

Ella McCay (12A)

Having received a major box office black eye with his last film,  How Do You Know, 15 years on writer-director James L. Brooks looks to make a come-back with this Capra-esque screwball political satire. He fails.  Set in 2008 (“a better time when we all still liked each other”), stars Emma Mackey – in a virtual echo of the title – as the 34-year-old lieutenant governor of an unnamed state who, having hitherto been involved in policies for women and children’s health and education (one’s the winsomely named Tooth Tutors  dental plan), gets promoted to the top job when her mentor,  incumbent governor Bill Moore (Albert Brooks),  accepts a cabinet position in the incoming Obama administration, but finds herself  having to deal with assorted personal and professional fallouts.

With her familiar croaky Marge Simpson tones, Julie Kavner both plays her secretary Estelle and serves as the film’s narrator, the film opening with a flashback to Ella’s teenage years, a star high schooler (one report has “You can be a force for good” written on it) who’s faced with the trauma (a term the definition of which she  reads out to her younger brother Casey) with her family moving away on account of her father Eddie (Woody Harrelson) having been fired as a senior hospital administration after a string of sexual misconduct accusations, although her mother Claire (Rebecca Hall) is standing by him. She dies a year later.

Ella stays behind to live with her aunt, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), his sister. She owns a bar called, er Helen’s, on the pointedly named Hope Street and is  a woman who’s never been afraid of speaking her mind, especially in regard to Ella’s boyfriend and future husband Ryan (Jack Lowden), who’ll she call a “ticking timebomb” waiting to blow up her political career. Further down the line, Ella will be blackmailed by a journalist threatening to expose of she and Ryan, now running a pizza restaurant, used an off-limits room in the residence for sex, there’s be marital bust ups, a cruel betrayal, political backstabbing and more.  Running alongside this is a subplot involving tongue-tied Casey (Spike Fearn), who almost never leaves his apartment – not even for her wedding – where he makes a fortune as a computer geek, and his  broken romance with Susan (Ayo Edebiri looking suitably bewildered by everything).

If this makes it all seem like a narrative mess with no sense of rhythms, then indeed it is. One that progresses like it’s wading through treacle with its cast forced to utter reams of exposition and aphorisms that never sound remotely like anything someone would actually say. I mean, ““Maybe we’re all just hamsters on the same wheel, beginning to wonder if the kid who bought us has lost interest”. Come on.

 With Kumail Nanjiani providing some strained comic relief as, Trooper Nash. one of her loyal special detail, character and chemistry is all over the place, but at least for the most part, Mackay manages to acquit herself whether she’s navigating her father’s attempted reconciliation, her politically ill-advised liberal ideas, emotional confrontations, a choice between marriage or morals,  or indeed a scream queen moment with Curtis. She even delivers a cringingly written cannabis-high rant as if she really believes it. It’s refreshing to find a film that flies the flag for optimism in the current political climate, but good intentions and a smile can only get you so far. (Royal)

Eternity (12A)

Who would you choose to spend eternity with? That’s the premise underlying this throwback to Golden Age of Hollywood screwball romantic comedies (there’s a reference to Montgomery Clift) by openly queer director and co-writer David Freyne. Attending a family gender reveal party with Joan (Betty Buckley)), his wife of 65 years, grumpy Larry (Barry Primus) chokes on a pretzel and dies. The next thing he knows, he’s arrived by train at somewhere called The Hub, a sort of purgatory waystation, where his Afterlife ,  Anna (an engagingly warm Da’Vine Joy Randolph), explains that, now looking like his younger self  (Miles Teller) when he was happiest, here the dead have a week to choose where they want to spend eternity (there is no heaven or hell) from the hundreds of available options, among them Men Free World (currently full), Famine Free Ireland, Queer World, Infantilization Land and Weimer World” (“Now with 100 percent less Nazis!”).  But whichever you choose is final and any attempt  to leave sends you to The Void.

Shortly after, Larry   sees the younger looking  Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), who was dying of cancer, and is given the opportunity for them to both spend eternity together. However, there’s a slight hiccup in that the bartender he was having drinks with turns out to be Luke (Callum Turner), Joan’s first husband who, marrying when she became pregnant, died in the Korean War and has been waiting at the Hub for her for 67 years (illogically, since the dead don’t age, dyeing his hair to keep looking young). Now she has to choose between them, Anna and her own AC Ryan (John Early) respectively  advocating for Larry and Luke.

An afterlife spin on the classic love triangle, it follows a fairly predictable path with both men trying to outdo the other in professing their love and reminding Joan of their time together, she having to choose between the man who helped her through her grief and with whom she spent most of her life, and the man for whom she was grieving and a life she never had. The screenplay likewise has the audience rooting for one or the other, though both are seen as having selfish and less likeable sides in their attempts to win over their spouse, while sympathising with Joan’s predicament. In light of which, she’s given permission to try out an eternity with each of them (a mountain, a beach), visiting the Archives in which she’s shown  tableaux from her two love stories. There’s also the sense of a growing attachment between Anna and Ryan, both of whom have their own reasons for not moving on as the film develops, while the film also introduces Joan’s  friend Karen (Olga Merediz), who’s going to Paris Land and reveals that she was happiest in her 70s after her husband died and she got to come out of the lesbian closet. On a similar note one of the husbands also reveals a same sex dalliance.

All three stars deliver engaging and emotionally nuanced performances, although the squabbling between the men can become tiresome, and the script sprinkles humour and poignancy in its bittersweet relationship observations. But, at 114 minutes, its decidedly overlong with the last act offering three successive different resolutions before its literal walk off into the sunset. (Cineworld NEC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Royal)

Fackham Hall (15)

Following on the heels of The Naked Gun! revival,  co-written, among others, by  Jimmy Carr and his brother and directed by Jim O’Hanlon this, its title best heard with a Cockney accent,  turns its spoof eye on Downton Abbey and similar period dramas (throwing in chimney sweep Mary Poppins gag along the way) with a murder mystery sidebar.

Set in 1931, Fackham Hall is a sprawling stately home (one of the rooms is called the masturbatorium), owned by Lord Davenport (Damien Wise) and his wife Prudence (Katherine Waterston). However, all four of their sons (George, John, Paul and little Ringo) having met tragic ends, if death by wanking n can be called tragic, they need to marry their youngest daughter Poppy (Emma Laird), off to her first cousin (the Hall’s motto is incestus ad infinitum), the smarmy chauvinistic  Archibald (Tom Felton) who, since daughters can’t inherit, is now heir to the estate. 

When Poppy does a runner at the wedding, to go and live with a muck seller, the attention turns to the second best choice, her sister Rose (Thomasin McKenzie)  – setting up a Titanic voiceover line by ‘newcomer’ Hayley Mills at the end – who, at 23, is otherwise regarded as a dried up spinster.  Trouble is, she’s fallen for Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe), pronounced no one,  an orphan pick-pocket whom she encounters when she knocks him off his bike while  clandestinely driving her father’s Rolls Royce. It’s an instant attraction, reinforced by a shared love of books  (he mentions Heathcliffe, she reads tales of forbidden love like One Shade Of Gray), he securing a place as houseboy among the below stairs staff, led by housekeeper Mrs McCallister (Anna Maxwell Martin)  and butler Tim McMullan (Cyril), his predecessor Alexa, fired for listening.

Despite the wedding being called off, all the guests, among them Davenport’s old army buddy Darvesh (Ramon Tikaram), J.R.R.Tolkien (Jason Done) who’s taking notes for a book he’s planning, and Great Aunt Bonaparte (Sue Johnston), and characters named Rose Seller andf Lady Gaga, are invited to stay over. Following a shooting outing (Archie proving spectacularly inept) in which he comes to his  aid, Eric is promoted to Davenport’s valet (a task that literally has him serving as his hands). However, things turn dark when Davenport is found dead in his study, at which point enter Inspector Watt (Tom Goodman-Hill), prompting a riff on the classic Abbott and Costello ‘who’s on first’, sporting a (fake) Kenneth Branagh Poirot moustache, setting up the film’s suspects in a  drawing room scene, with Eric clearly in the frame as the killer. And, of course, there’s that forgotten letter that reveals all.

There’s industry in jokes such as the twin Bechdel Sisters, who only talk about men.  in a nod to Alison Bechdel who created a metric for evaluating gender inequality in film, one of the several issues addressed here. But, more importantly, from start to finish, in the grand tradition of Airplane!, it’s rife with visual gags (often wonderfully vulgar) and verbal puns (a map sports such locations as Ricki Lake and Phoebewaller Bridge, while there’s a men’s outfitters named Tailor Swift) and, while some fall flat, most are laugh out loud funny.  Carr also gets some of the most hilarious moments as the local vicar whose run-on line readings display an unfortunate lewd sense of punctuation.  Great Fackham fun. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)

Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 (15)

Based on the successful video game, the original was a  surprise hit back in 2023, but, while dedicated gamers might get some satisfaction, the sequel is a low point on which to  end the year’s horror movies (though Silent Night, Deadly Night might yet lower the bar further). To avoid a stampede at the end, a voice over intro says to hang on for an end credits surprise before the film opens back in 198 at the very first Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza restaurant where Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie), a friendless loner who just wants to see her favourite animatronic, witnesses a young boy being abducted by someone dresses as the Teddy Bear mascot. The grown-ups dismissing her pleas for help, through warned not to by Vanessa,  she ventures into the back, saves the boy but, in front of everyone, dies at the hands of William Afton, the   serial killer (Matthew Lillard) who was revealed and killed in the first film. However her spirit bonds with the Marionette, her kabuki-styled animatronic favourite. Fast forward 20 years, and Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), the killer’s (apparently now ex) cop daughter, who shot her father, is plagued by nightmares about him and has struck up a friendship with Mike (Josh Hutcherson), the former security guard at Freddy’s. He lives with his kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio, who’s clearly not taken acting lessons in the interval), who befriended the first film’s mascots, which were revealed to be inhabited by the spirits of  Afton’s victims (among them Mike’s brother Garrett), and now misses her old pals, especially Chica (voiced by Megan Fox). Mike’s said he’ll fix them but has no intention of doing so. So, having been humiliated by her science teacher Mr Berg (Wayne Knight) over her robotics project, she decides to  revive them herself.

Meanwhile, the team of a TV ghost hunter show she watches arrives at  the original Freddy’s to film a show guided round by a  security guard going by the name of Michael (Freddy Carter), posing as the real Mike, and wind up dead with presenter Lisa (Mckenna Grace) now becoming The Marionette’s new engine.

Again directed by Emma Tammi and written by video game creator Scott Cawthorn, it stumbles along in largely incoherent fashion, seemingly making it up as it goes, as the murderous mascots are freed from the parameters that kept them within Freddy’s  and set off into town to murder the grown up who rebuffed Charlotte all those years ago while Mike and Vanessa (who has more than one secret in her past) race to keep Abby safe from The Marionette.

Never remotely scary and, since the robots work at a leadenly slow pace  their victims, who always act foolishly, naturally have to keep falling over so they can catch up, with any gore (evil Chica squeezes out Berg’s brains but you never see it) kept off-screen, it somehow manages to end up with the prototype mascots inexplicably left in Freddy’s basement, the derelict restaurants all also inexplicably still having full electric power) saving the day.

Given the generally poor quality of the acting (Skeet Urich seems to reading from cue cards as the father of one of the earlier victims), the slapdash direction and lacklustre logic-challenged screenplay with its nonsensical twists, the animatronics, again created by the Jim Henson workshop, are again the only saving grace. And, oh yeh, that surprise, guess who/what’s making a comeback on Five Nights 3! (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)

Frankenstein (15)

A long-held passion project by writer-director Guillermo del Toro, a  mirror to his previous Pinocchio, this by and large hews closely to Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel (pointedly alluding to its Modern Prometheus subtitle) wherein scientist Victor Frankenstein creates and animates a creature from assorted body parts, the two becoming each other’s nemesis (though Del Toro casts it as a complex bromance), notably with the framing device as (Baron Von) Frankenstein relates his story to the captain (Lars Mikkelsen) of a Danish ship trapped in the Arctic ice. Set in Britain rather than Europe, Victor (compellingly intense Oscar Isaac) is a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, which expels him after demonstrating how he can reanimate dead body parts using electricity. His anatomical scientific skills  beaten into him by an abusive surgeon father (Charles Dance), his beloved mother still dies giving birth to his brother William, sparking his quest to overcome death. 

The most dramatic changes come, however, with the character of Elizabeth (the fittingly named Mia Goth, whose confession box moment about the sin of anger is rare comedic touch),  who, in the novel  is Victor’s childhood sweetheart bride, murdered by the Creature (a quietly graceful and tormented Jacob Elordi) when he refuses to create him a companion. Here though, will he lusts after her (that she also plays his late mother adds a Freudian subtext) , she’s actually William’s betrothed and, while she still dies, it’s not at the Creature’s hands, for whom, something of a hottie despite his patchwork body, she has a decided emotional attraction. She also happens to be the daughter of German arms merchant Henrich Harlander  (Christoph Waltz), the film’s version of Victor’s chum Henry Clerval, who funds Victor’s experiments (for an agenda revealed later), with William (Felix Kammera) overseeing the elaborate scenes assembling the machinery in an abandoned tower in which Victor channels lightning through the lymphatic system of the figure he’s stitched together from the body parts of assorted   hanged criminals and soldiers killed in Crimean War. Pointedly he’s strapped to the machinery like a Christ on the Cross (prompting later thoughts of father, why have you forsaken me). Succeeding in bring him to life, he then chains him in the cellar, looking for some signs[of intelligence, frustrated that all the Creature can say is Victor. Until, following her visit, he adds Elizabeth to his vocabulary. 

All this forms the first chapter, with the second, picking up from Victor’s destruction of his lab (during which, in another symbolic variation, he lost a leg), with the Creature recounting his story  to the captain and, involving the blind old man (David Bradley), who thinks he’s the Spirit of the Forest, but with a different approach,  how he learnt language – and the word friend – from listening  to him being read to by his granddaughter from the likes of Paradise Lost and Genesis. Anyway, this is all about humanising someone who pretty much everyone else sees as a monster, though, of course, as somewhat heavily spelled out, the question is who is the real monster, the Creature (who’s horrified to find the notes depicting how he came to be) or, playing God, his Creator. Fathers, sons and forgiveness are the (un)holy trinity at work here.

One of the film’s most powerful elements his how life becomes a curse, the Creature here proving a Victorian Wolverine, both super strong and invulnerable to death (rising up and his flesh healing after being peppered by bullets and stabbed), condemned to an eternity of loneliness. Unlike the novel, the ending brings notes of contrition and redemption, with a final sunset scene that inverts that happy ever after motif. Often visually breathtaking (even if the scenes on the ice look like a stage set and some CGI wolves prove less than persuasive), it offers up a different kind of horror that is philosophically and existentially provocative but ultimately crushingly touching.  (Netflix)

The Friend (15)

When her friend, one-night lover, former professor and best-selling author and much married mentor Walter (Bill Murray) with a penchant for sleeping with his younger students, commits suicide, Iris (Naomi Watts),  a middle aged singleton creative writing teacher living alone in a small fixed rent New York apartment and struggling with writer’s block, finds she’s expected to take on Apollo, his 180lb Great Dane. Navigating the thorny network of Walter’s widow (Noma Dumezweni) and two former wives, the rich narcissistic Tuesday  (Constance Wu) and Elaine (Carla Gugino), as well as Val (Sarah Pidgeon), the adult daughter with whom he recently reconciled and with whom she’s compiling a book of his correspondence, some 30,000 emails, Iris finds herself on her own journey of grief and self-reawakening, she and Apollo each other’s emotional support. There’s also the problem that the apartment block doesn’t allow pets and unless she rehomes it she’ll be evicted.

Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 best-seller, it’s framed by scenes of Walter’s fateful encounter with the  abandoned Apollo in Brooklyn Bridge Park, a story he regularly rehashed over dinner parties, it’s a touching and very New York story about healing and companionship that has echoes of Neil Simon. Watts is predictably wonderful but even she’s eclipsed by Bing who plays Apollo, initially refusing to eat or get in the apartment lift, lays claim to her bed, destroys the apartment when she’s out and spends the time just staring into space. He only perks up when, as Walter did, being read to. The question being how do you explain death to a  dog.

As such, it shares a spirit with things like Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, A Dog’s Purpose, Marley And Me and even Greyfriar’s Bobby, pitching the right degree of sentimentality  (you just know she goes from dog hater to dog lover) as well as some gentle if slightly black humour. The final act which has her talking to his ghost about the novel she’s writing based on him, doesn’t really come off, but otherwise  this is a lovely heartwarmer. (Sky Cinema/NOW)

Havoc (18)

Tom Hardy seems to be all over the show at present, and, adding to his magnetic turn in Mobland, he now turns up in the Wales-set  thriller as Patrick Walker, a bent cop who works as a fixer for corrupt politician and mayoral candidate Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker) and is a pretty crappy divorced dad (it opens with him doing last minute   shopping at a convenience store for his daughter’s Christmas presents). Saddled with an idealistic new rookie partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), he finds himself in the thick of things following the hijacking of a truck full of washing machines (loaded with cocaine, as it happens) that results in one of the pursuing narcotic cops, Cortez, ending up in hospital.

As the plot unfolds, it turns out the heist was carried out by Beaumont’s estranged son Charlie (Justin Cornwell)  and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) who take the coke to Triad head Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones) only for three masked men to burst in and massacre everyone else. Now, Patrick has to somehow get Charlie and Mia to safety with Tsui’s mother  (Yeo Yann Yann)  flying in to exact revenge, her brother Ching (Sunny Pang), Tsui’s henchman, having claimed them as the killers, while also evading fellow corrupt cops  Jake (Richard Harrington), Hayes (Gordon Alexander) and Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) who, as this is hardly a spoiler, are in league with Ching to whom they were planning to sell the drugs in the first place.

It’s all convoluted and complicated, but, directed by Gareth Evans who made the two Raid movies and  clearly has a hard on for John Woo, it’s also wall to wall, with violent action, crushed skulls, severed limbs and geysers of blood spraying aesthetically on to the white snow, plus a grisly fishing harpoon death, all climaxing at a gunfight at a secluded cabin along with the redemption arc you could see coming a mile off and an ambiguous ending that leaves room for a sequel. For all the excess, Evans doesn’t really bring anything to the table you’ve not seen before, but you have to admit he puts on a pretty decent feast. (Netflix)

Heads Of State (15)

Having worked together on  Suicide Squad, Idris Elba and John Cena reunite as co-stars in this ludicrous but hugely entertaining action romp playing respectively, army veteran British Prime Minister Will Clarke and US President Sam Derringer, a former Hollywood action star.  Derringer, in the post for six months, is riding high in the approval rating, whereas, six-years into the job, Clarke is experiencing something of a Starmer moment. Neither has much respect for the other, so  understandably their first meeting at a press conference to announce a NATO-supported energy initiative is prickly ego-jostling affair. So, to repair the PR damage of their very public argument, they’re persuaded by their respective Chiefs of Staff Quincy (Richard Doyle) and Bradshaw (Sarah Niles) to fly to the NATO summit in Trieste aboard Air Force One and present a united front.

All of this is preceded by the opening set-up wherein a joint MI6 and CIA mission in Spain, led by senior British agent Noelle Bisset (Priyanka Chopra), to capture  Russian arms dealer Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine with a subtext of pathos to his brutality), goes pear-shaped leaving the team dead during the annual festival food fight and Gradov acquiring a link to ECHELON, the global surveillance program used by the Anglosphere intelligence alliance Five Eyes. All part of his revenge for his son being murdered when his plans do create nuclear safety were misinterpreted as terrorism.

So, it’ll be no surprise when there’s an attempt to assassinate both Clarke and Derringer in  flight, the plane being shot down with both heads of state presumed dead. Except they managed to parachute out and are now stranded in Belarus, aware that someone in their inner circle is a traitor. At which point, re-enter the pun-loving Bisset, who survived the massacre and is on Gradov’s trail. She also happens to have a romantic past with Clarke. Now they have to make it to safety, all the while being pursued by Gradov’s relentless assassins Sasha (Aleksandr Kuznetsov)  and Olga (Katrina Durden).

With a pedal to the metal plot that involves a hammily cameoing Hawaiian-shirted Jack Quaid as Marty Comer who runs a CIA safe house in Warsaw,  Stephen Root as Gradov’s hacker with a conscience and Carla Gugino as the Vice President (giving a timely Trump-impression speech about dismantling NATO and putting America first), there’s  shoot-outs and stunts a plenty, both Elba’s Clarke as the straight man, and Cena’s broader written Derringer well-tooled up and shooting off bullets alongside the quips while Chopra shows she can kick ass with the best. Director Ilya Naishuller never pretends he’s making anything more than a gleefully silly big bucket popcorn mismatched buddy movie (even if the script does slip in a message about partnerships) and as such it’s an absolute winner, leaving you hoping they all get re-elected for a sequel.  (Amazon Prime)

Hedda (15)

Candyman director Nia DaCosta takes a swerve into classical territory with this updated five act (with title cards) and no suicide take on Ibsen’s dour Hedda Gabbler (also embracing Chekhov’s gun in act one maxim), relocated from Norway to 1950s England and given a racial makeover with an awards buzz performance from a finely-accented Tessa Thompson (who starred in DaCosta’s Crossing The Line) as the scheming but vulnerable Hedda, an illegitimate  manipulative free spirit who’s just wed well-born but bland academic George Tesman (Tom Bateman) and persuade him to purchase the sprawling mansion where she’s throwing a lavish (but no flowers) party. The reason being that, in debt up to his eyeballs, she needs Tom to be appointed to a newly vacant professorship, hence inviting the movers and shakers, specifically his superior, Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), to get them on his side. Among the guests is also Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), who facilitated the hous epirchase and who Hedda is screwing.  Unfortunately, so too is the self-invited Eileen Lövborg (Nina Hoss), a gender switch from the play as Hedda’s former lover and classicist who is also after the job on the back of her new book on sexuality, the only manuscript of which she’s brought with her. A now sober alcoholic, Hedda intends to use her Dionysian get together to push her off the wagon and humiliate herself out of the running. But she also still carries a torch, something complicated by the presence of Eileen’s naïve new lover, and co-author Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots), herself an old friend of Hedda.

Opening with Hedda being interviewed by the police about a shooting, it then unfolds in flashback, with not one but two guns, one Hedda’s late father’s (the key to the case of which she wears around her neck) and one wielded by the professor who comes across his young wife   Tabitha (Mirren Mack) having it off in the garden with Eillen’s lothario chum David (Jamael Westman).

 Subtly examining the constraints on being both Black and a woman (one of the guests remarks their hostess is “duskier than I thought she would be”) forced into socially imposed roles with a below stairs scene involving Kathryn Hunter affording a  class commentary, it’s a slow and sensual smoulder that underlines what a good adaptation should be.  (Amazon Prime)

Highest 2 Lowest (15)

Showing on a solitary screen but streaming on Apple, Spike Lee reunites with Denzel Washington for a reimaging of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 noir High and Low, itself based on  Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom, in which  a shoe company executive is forced to choose between certain financial ruin and saving his chauffeur’s son when a kidnapper mixes up their two sons. Transplanted from Yokohama to New York, here the man facing the moral dilemma is David King (Washington), the founder of Stackin’ Hits Records and acknowledged by the like of Quincy Jones as having the “best ears in the business” (magazine covers of him adorn his office along with images of Aretha, Stevie Wonder and others_. However, the hits aren’t coming any more and,  having previously sold his majority interest. he’s looking to buy it back to avert a rival label buyout that he says will see new artists being shed and the music used in commercials. His plan means he has to buy out his partner’s (Wendell Pierce) share, to which end, despite his philanthropist wife Pam’s (Ilfenesh Hadera) reservations, he puts up most of his personal assets, including his penthouse home  in Brooklyn’s trendy Dumbo neighbourhood and Black art collection (Jean Michel Basquiat’s Now’s the Time and Kehinde Wiley’s Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia among them) as collateral.

However, the day the deal is due to go through, he gets a call saying his son Trey (Aubrey Jospeh), a promising basketball player he dropped off at practice, has been kidnapped with a ransom of $17.5 million in Swiss 1,000-franc notes for his safe return. Contacting the cops, although it could risk the business deal he and Pam agree to pay. But then comes the twist. Trey is found safe and it turns out that, in a mistake confusing their headbands, the kidnapper has instead abducted the son of King’s ex-con Muslim convert driver and best friend confidant Paul (a dramatically nuanced Jeffrey Wright), Trey’s best friend and fellow athlete Kyle (Wright’s real life son Elijah), racist white cop Detective Higgins (Dean Winters) suggesting Paul staged it himself.

 The question now is whether King will stay pay the ransom, warned that refusing to do so will harm his and the label’s image. He does, eventually, agree, but the handover of the money, in a backpack containing a  tracer, does not go as expected when, an emergency stop as he’s standing between subway train car carriages en route to Yankee Stadium sees it fall to the street, resulting in a lengthy chase involving it being passed between an extended series of moped riders weaving between a Puerto Rican Day Parade (an indulgent excuse to feature  Latin Jazz bandleader Eddie Palmieri, Anthony Ramos and Rosie Perez appearing as themselves) before being retrieved only to find the money gone.

Kyle’s duly returned and King’s the hero of the hour, Stackin’ Hits records now back in the charts. But, with those who lent the $17.5 million demanding repayment within two weeks because he broke the terms of the contract by using it as the ransom, he’s determined to track down the kidnapper and recover his money. Kyle’s recalling of  hip hop number he heard while being held captive and a demo tape of upcoming artists Trey compiled for his father to listen to, leads him and Paul to ex-convict and aspiring rapper Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky) and one of two outstanding rap battle styled face off scenes as he first confronts him at a recording studio and then in prison where Felon, whose crime has made his music a global phenomenon, tries to convince King to sign him. The final showstopping scene explains the film’s title, it being a number  written by Sula (rising British soul star Aiyana-Lee in her film debut) a young singer-songwriter discovered by Trey, who auditions for the Kings for their new independent label.

 A fairly straightforward thriller with some social commentary on the changing times injected, it’s not up there with Lee’s best, but, despite some unnecessarily prolonged sequences (it opens with a full rendition by Norm Lewis of Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ from Oklahoma as the camera slowly zooms in on King’s balcony), it sustains the momentum and narrative with Washington delivering a performance as fluid and flexible as an improvised jazz riff.  (Apple TV)

A House Of Dynamite (15)

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature since 2017’s disappointing Detroit,  written by Noah Oppenheim, told Rashomon-style, returning to the same scenario from different perspectives,  this is a white knuckle nuclear nightmare thriller  that’s prompted the Pentagon to blusteringly refute its suggestion that America’s nuclear deterrence is little more than a coin toss.

The premise is as simple as it is chilling. A nuclear missile has been launched from an unknown location by an unknown country, possibly North Korea, undetected until mid-flight, and is due to strike Chicago in twenty minutes.  The first scenario has Capt. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), the intelligence analyst oversight officer for the White House Situation Room, learning of  the missile and initiating communication between her office, the Pentagon, assorted armed forces command and, eventually, the President as the threat level is raised to DEFCON 2. Out at Fort Greely, Alaska, Maj. Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) launches two ground-based interceptors, neither of which succeed in brining it down.  Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defence (Jared Harris), whose daughter is in Chicago, initiates the protocol evacuation od designed federal evacuees, among them Federal Emergency Management Agency official Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram) while, rushing to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center,  Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) advises the President (Idris Elba, not seen until the third act) not to make any impulsive retaliations until the source of the launch can be attributed, Russia and China both denying responsibility. As the seconds tick away, a call has to be made.

The film then backtracks to Nebraska where STRATCOM commander Gen. Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) is informed of the launch  and B-2 bombers are scrambled in readiness, Russia, China and Iran having mobilised their forces in anticipation. NSA advisor Ana Park (Greta Lee) says its possible that North Korea could have used a submarine but that there was no awareness of them having such capability. Baerington contacts the Russian foreign minister seeking to have them stand down, but the clock’s ticking and the President is advised to consult with his nuclear aide, Lt Cdr. Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King) who holds the briefcase with the launch codes. 

Finally, in scenario three from which the film takes its title, the focus turns to the President who, having been earlier evacuated from a basketball event, who, now airborne and overwhelmed by events,  regards non-retaliation as a nonstarter, Baerington advising the only options are surrender or suicide. Of course, there’s always the chance it might not detonate.

What happens next is never shown, it doesn’t need to be, the film’s frightening cautionary depiction of what might become mutually assured destruction, especially given the nuclear sabre rattling from Putin, more than enough to leave audiences unnerved by the inexorableness of everything,  shaken and too stressed to sleep and face what nightmares it might bring. (Netflix)

It Ends With Us (15)

Directed by and co-starring Justin Baldoni, and adapted by Christy Hall Colleen Hoover’s 2016 bestseller about the cycle of domestic abuse and denial, this may be  a melodramatic soap opera (as is the ongoing legal battle between director and star), but it’s one from the top shelf, and, while overlong and reliant on contrived coincidence, has a dark edge and unfolds with some twists you don’t readily see coming.

Blake Lively stars as  aspiring flower-shop entrepreneur Lily Bloom who we meet as she returns home to read the eulogy for her estranged father’s funeral but, scarred by the abuse she saw him (Kevin McKidd) mete out to her mother (Amy Morton), can’t find a single thing   to say, her list of five point remaining blank. Later, she has a flirty rooftop encounter with neurosurgeon Rile Kincaid (Baldoni), a textbook tall, dark, and dashing self-styled stud (“Love isn’t for me. Lust is nice though”) with a line in smooth chat-up patter, who startles her by angrily kicking  a chair though, as he explains, he’s upset because, a neurosurgeon, he’s failed to save a young boy following an accident with a gun (and yes, this does cycle back at ). There’s sexual tension but nothing happens, they part and she returns to Boston to her shabby chic florists, Lily Bloom’s, where she hires the irrepressible Allysa (Jenny Slate), even though she confesses to hating flowers, who rapidly becomes her best buddy. And, wouldn’t you know it, when Rile wanders into the store it turns out he’s her brother. And so the pair reconnect, she keeping things cool but agreeing to give him a dating chance. As the romance blossoms they, Allysa and her husband Marshall (Hasan Minhaj in a virtually identical role to that in Babes) go to a new upmarket restaurant which, back after eight years in the Marines, turns out to be owned by Atlas (hunky newcomer Brandon Sklenar), a former classmate  and Lily’s first love.

Their backstory’s told in flashbacks with him (Alexander Neustaedter) apparently living homeless opposite her parents and the young Lily (a convincingly lookalike  Isabela Ferrer) bring him food and the pair eventually falling in love (take note of the heart carved out of oak and the tattoo on her shoulder) before her irate father puts a brutal end to things.

Time moves on, Allysa gets pregnant, Lily and Rile get married and all seems roses. But Atlas’s suspicious of her bruise she says she got by accident and there’s an altercation between him and Rile at the restaurant. Then, after blow up about her relationship with Atlas, Rile apparently falls down the stairs. It’s not though, until later that, in hospital and learning she’s pregnant, the veil of denial’s torn away and she remembers exactly what happened to cause those bruises and wounds.

Both predictable and unpredictable in equal measure as it explores how we find ourselves repeating dysfunctional patterns in our lives (though not why the characters have such bad taste in clothes), it does rather want to have its cake and eat it when it comes to the central abuse and how we’re supposed to feel about Rile. We’re asked to despise him because of his abuse, but at the same time sympathise when we learn of the tragedy that made him who he is and also because he clearly want to try and be a better man, giving him a grace note in the way things end between them. Still at least her wife-beater dad’s 100% vile.

Bolstered by solid supporting turns, the two (three if you factor in young Lily) central performances are strong, complex and layered Lively on terrific form as a woman coming to realise she has to make the right choices, difficult though they may be. And if the screenplay can’t resist ending on the promise of a happy new future, it’s probably earned it.  (Sky Cinema)

Jay Kelly (15)

A sort of love letter to and starring George Clooney that draws lightly on both Fellini’s 8 ½ and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, director Noah Baumbach and co-writer Emily Mortimer (who also plays hairstylist Candy), is centred around a  proposed tribute to beloved Hollywood star Kelly (Clooney). However, having just wrapped his most recent film, and having a midlife crisis, he wants to spend time with his youngest and increasingly estranged daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards) before she leaves for college in Europe.  However, while he envisions the two of them going on a trip, she wants to head off with her friends. To add to his emotional baggage, his loyal but long suffering co-dependent manager (Adam Sandler) tells him that Peter Scheider (James Broadbent), the director who gave Jay his break, has died, leaving him feeling guilty that when, his career in decline, Schneider asked him to lend his name to support a new film, he refused.

At the funeral, he runs into his cold college roommate, child psychologist Tim (Billy Crudup) and, while the reunion starts out amicably, resentment about how Jay stole both his girlfriend and the star-making role for which he was auditioning, leads to a brawl. The next day he drops out of his next film and books everyone on a  flight to Europe where he now intends to participate in the award ceremony tribute in Tuscany, although this means Ron now has to rearrange things since, when Jay declined, he had the tribute transferred to his other client, Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson).

The real reason Jay’s in Europe though is to ‘coincidentally’ find himself on the same train as Daisy whose movements his assistant Meg has been tracking via one of her friend’s credit cards.  Travelling by train like any ordinary person while the fellow passengers recognise him, they pretty much treat him as one of them. Until he foils a handbag snatching and the incident goes viral, turning into a real-life action hero. On the other hand, Tim is suing for assault.

Throw in Jay inviting his estranged, loveless and libidinous father (Stacy Keach) to the lifetime achievement tribute (never expecting him to attend),  his older daughter Jessica (Riley Keough), who still carries the scars of his putting career before his family (he walked out of a therapy session involving a letter she’d written about missing him), Ron’s wife Lois (Greta Gerwig) dealing with their own daughter’s abandonment issues and his former partner Liz (Laura Dern)  talking about how they’ve subsumed their own lives and relationships to cater to Jay’s needs and problems, and you’ve got a whole tumble of emotional dramas playing out (flashback scenes have Jay stepping in to observe). Finally, it makes its way to Jay’s realisation that he’s confused paid loyalty for love (at one point he calls Ron “a friend who takes 15%”) with his final line at the tribute bringing new import to his frequent on-set “can we go again?”

Opening with Sylvia Plath’s quote “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else, or nobody at all”, it’s all about self-discovery and seeing who it is in the mirror looking back (at one point, Kelly stares into one reciting the names of Cary Grant and Clark Gable – both Clooney comparisons – interspersed with different intonations of his own name).

With a support cast that includes Louis Partridge as the younger Jay and Eve Hewson an old flame, Isla Fisher as Ben’s wife (Isla Fisher), Baumbach leavens the poignancy with gentle humour (a running gag involves cheesecake always being on Jay’s rider because he once said he liked it and every time he says he’s alone a minion is at hand to give him something) and commentary on the whole Hollywood/movie star illusion and reality.

A different film might have taken a harder All About Eve look at things, but with stand-out turns from Sandler and ever twinkle-eyed and grinning Clooney this is one of the better souffles.  (Netflix)

Jingle Bell Heist (12)

A slight but enjoyable Christmas caper, set in London and directed by cinematographer Michael Fimognari, both American Sophie (Olivia Holt) and local lad Nick (Connor Swindells) have reason to harbour a grudge against dodgy department store owner Maxwell Sterling (Peter Serafinowicz). Nick’s an ex-con who got framed in an insurance scam for a robbery at the store after he installed a security system and now works in a mobile phone shop, trying to provide for his daughter (Chyna-Rose Frederick) and an ex-wife who’s threatening to move unless he can.

Her personal motive is held back until the last act, Sophie meanwhile, is a petty thief with a good heart (she swipes a man’s wallet to pay the carol singers he sent away) who works at the store and is caring for her British-born sick mother. When Nick catches her on security camera stealing from the store he blackmails into becoming his heist accomplice, setting  in motion a plan for to both rob Sterling’s safe on Christmas Eve. Problem is, Nick’s never been inside that office and it turns out the safe is a top of the range design that even Sophie may have trouble cracking.

Despite some clumsy storytelling, it breezes along in entertaining fashion with some sparking chemistry between its stars, eventually introducing Lucy Punch as  Sterling’s wife Cynthia, who has her own agenda regarding her philandering Hubbie and who, always with an eye for  some stud on the side,  Nick is charged with infiltrating her home to get the key fob containing the safe’s codes.  Give the recent crop of warmed over turkey trimmings that have been served up on streaming platforms, this deserves to jingle all the way into your seasonal viewing. (Netflix)

The Lost Bus (15)

Another true life story, this stars Matthew McConaughey as Kevin McKay, a divorced down on his luck deadbeat father with an estranged and resentful teenage son (McConaughey’s own son, Levi) an incapacitated elderly mother (his actual mother, Kay), a hostile ex-wife, and a dog with terminal cancer,  who was working as an elementary  school bus driver in Paradise, California, when a spark on an electricity pylon set fire to the parched grassland and led to the 2018 Camp Fire, named for its origin near Camp Creek Road, that raged across the uplands, destroying Paradise and other communities as it went.

An evacuation order went out and McKay. who was on his way to take medication to his sick son, volunteered to pick up kids whose parents couldn’t collect them from their school and drive them to safety at the mustering point. Along with the 22 assorted youngsters, he’s accompanied by schoolteacher   Mary Ludwig (America Ferrara) as co-driver, although in actuality her colleague Abbie Davis was also onboard for what, with communications with depot dispatcher Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson),cut off and unaware of the nature and spread of the inferno,  becomes a tense five-hour 30-mile journey, navigating blocked roads, burning buildings and armed looters with very little water inside a bus rapidly heating up and the kids scared out of their lives.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, its firmly in disaster movie territory, the blaze beyond the control of the fire crews and their beleaguered chief  (Yul Vazquez) although here the heroics are real rather screenplay concoctions, though it still plays the redemption card and throws in some character  shadings for McConaughey (wishes he’d been a better dad) and Ferrara (wishing she’d travelled). The flames may be CGI, but you can almost feel their intensity and danger, the film subtly joining the subtext dots about climate change and human culpability, with shots of cars desperately ramming into each other, a man engulfed in flames and residents fleeing for their lives all fuelling the drama. Go for the burn. (Apple TV)

Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning (12A)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie and produced by star Tom Cruise, the sequel and conclusion to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, to all intents and purposes it’s also the last of the long-running eight-film franchise. As such, while arguably not as good as Fallout, it ends with a huge popcorn explosion of action, stunts and emotional punches. However, in determining to pay homage to the preceding films – and Cruise’s daredevil stunts –  much of the early going is a bit of a blurry mess of expositionary flashbacks to pivotal scenes and characters, something that even extends to later in the film with a scene involving Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), the former IMF director now CIA head and a connecting flashback clip from the first film of John Voight as IMF founder Jim Phelps.

For those needing  quick catch-up before the action finally kicks in after an hour or so, at the end of the last film Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team, technical expert Benji (Simon Pegg), computer whizz Luther (Ving Rhames),  pickpocket turned agent – and teased romantic interest – Grace (Haley Attwell)  and new French assassin addition Paris (Pom Klementieff) were outsmarted by Gabriel (Esai Morales) who’s the human liaison to The Entity, an AI programme with the capability of taking control of cyberspace and over all the world’s nuclear arsenals with the aim of eradicating humankind and who, it’s revealed, actually owes its existence to Hunt’s past mistakes.  So basically, there’s just four days left to save the world, to which end former CIA director now President Erika Sloane (a regal Angela Bassett) assign (on the sly) Hunt and his team the responsibility  of stopping The Entity, all of which will involve using the cruciform key Ethan acquired in the previous films to unlock the Podkova, a source code located in a  Russian nuclear sub sunk in the Bering Sea, while the rest of the team try and figure out its location with the help   William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), a CIA analyst last seen in the first film who now lives in Alaska with his Inuit wife.

So cue a lengthy underwater sequence and risk of death by decompression, a run in with Russian troops, an internal plot to override  Sloane for their own Entity agenda, a dying Luther’s ‘poison pill’  that needs to be paired with the Podkova, a knife fight in white shorts, two tense bomb defusion moments, and, of course, the much touted stunt involving two bi-planes filmed up-lose with the wind gusting through Cruise’s hair (Attell amusingly notes how the longer style suits him).

A supporting cast that includes Shea Whigham’s US Intelligence agent Jasper Briggs, Theo Degas as his former  partner now on Hunt’s team,  Janet McTeer’s Secretary of State, Hannah Waddingham as the Rear Admiral commanding the aircraft carrier loaned to Hunt, Holt McCallany’s Secretary of Defence and Nick Offerman as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all do solid work  and while well self-aware of the preposterous nature  of its plot, the tsunami of  adrenaline sweeps away any quibbles.  As characters are fond of saying “It’s all been leading up to this” and, while it’s hard to ignore the near messianic glorification of Cruise/Hunt for whom “every living soul on Earth is his responsibility”, when he says “I ask you to trust me, one last time”, it’s not a mission you should turn down.  (Sky Cinema/NOW)

Night Always Comes (15)

Mostly set over a single night in a Portland, Oregon neighbourhood and adapted from  Willy Vlautin’s novel, Vanessa Kirby stars as mid-30s Lynette, whose life is a litany of bad choices, demeaning jobs,  escort sex work and rap sheets. She lives with her selfish, irresponsible mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Downs syndrome older brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen), of whom she’s fiercely protective, and they’re being threatened with eviction from her run-down childhood home – and Kenny being taken back into care – unless they can secure a purchase. However, on the day they’re due to sign at the bank, Doreen doesn’t turn up and Lynette finds she’s spent the $25.000 down payment on a  new car. She now has until 9am the next morning to come up with the money.

Over the course of the day she attempts to  raise the cash, including asking a former client, Scott (Randall Park), she’s still seeing for sex and when he refuses and a visit to friend and fellow escort Gloria (Julia Fox) doesn’t yield the $3000 she’s owed, she enlists her ex-con fellow worker Cody (Stephen James) to steal the safe belonging to Gloria’s senator  lover. Inevitably, that too goes pear-shaped, and, still short $6000 and now accompanied by Kenny, ending with her first trying to get Cody to sell the Mercedes she impulsively stole from Scott  and then visiting Tommy (Michael Kelly), the ex-boyfriend who got her into sex work when she was 16, hoping to offload the coke from the safe, he putting her in contact with dealer, Blake (Eli Roth). That too ends badly. And to cap it all, Doreen tells her she never wanted o but the house in the first place and is moving out with Kenny.

One of those long night of the soul affairs, Kirby (who also produces) delivers a compelling performance as the abrasive, desperate but good-hearted Lynette but is poorly served by a heavy handed and unsubtle screenplay, clumsy social commentary and poor support cast characterisation where the night may end but it feels the film never will. (Netflix) 

Nosferatu (15)

There’s a certain degree of déjà vu among the cast of writer-director horror maestro Robert Eggers’ revision of the F.W. Murnau 1929 silent horror based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the 1923 Tod Browning adaptation. As real estate agent Thomas Hutter (based on Stoker’s Jonathan Harker), Nicholas Hoult recently played Renfield to Nic Cage’s Dracula while, as Albin Eberhart Von Franz, based on Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsin, Willem Dafoe previously starred in Shadow Of A Vampire, about the making of the original Nosferatu, as Max Schreck, the actor who portrayed Count Orlock, Murnau’s renaming of Dracula.  Blood it seems is indeed thicker than water in the casting department.

Character names aside and with some excisions, while largely following Stoker’s narrative, it opens with  the young Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp) praying to find relief from her loneliness, her cry of ‘come to me’ answered by a shadowy figure (its silhouette on the windblown curtain a nod to Murnau) that manifests as a terrifying monster that attacks her, leaving her  in a  seizure and setting up the call of psychosexual desire across time and distance that underpins what follows. Cut then to winter in 1883 Wisborg, Germany, with upcoming estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) being charged by his employer, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) with travelling to the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania to sign a contract with the elderly and eccentric Romanian Count Orlock who wishes to purchase Schloss Grünewald, a  decrepit Wisborg stately mansion. Hutter’s new bride, Ellen, is fearful, telling him of her terrifying dream prior to their wedding in which she married Death  in front of a congregation of corpses, and disturbingly found herself enjoying it. Looking to boost his fortunes, Thomas ignores her pleas to stay at home and, leaving her in the care of his friend Friedrich (a Murnau nod) Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and his wife Anna (Emma Corin), sets off for his fateful date with the devil.

Warned by the local Romani not to venture to Orlock’s home, he witnesses or dreams the peasants impaling what they claim is a vampire’s corpse, before continuing his journey, being met by an unmanned coach and horses that transports him to the foreboding castle to be greeted by the Count (Bill Skarsgård) who (seen only in glimpses) insists on being addressed as befits his title, rasps in deep and low resonating tones (he speaks the extinct Dacian language), has skeletal fingers and long fingernails and generally exudes an icy sense of dread. It’s not long before he discovers the Count’s true nature, an undead blood drinker (Thomas himself becoming a victim) who sleeps in his coffin by day and, more frighteningly, has an obsession with Ellen, purloining the locket containing her hair. Thomas, though weakened, manages to escape but by now Orlock, through the ministrations of Knock, who, a la Renfield, he has made his servant), is in a  crate full of plague rats aboard a ship bound for Wisburg (as opposed to Whitby).

Meanwhile, Ellen is suffering from sleepwalking and seizures and Knock incarcerated as a raving madman who feeds on living creatures (pigeon fanciers, look away now), to which end Ellen’s physician Wilhelm (another Murnau nod) Sievers (Ralph Ineson), enlists the help of his mentor, Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Dafoe), a scientist ostracized   for his occult beliefs, who deduces both are under the spell of a Nosferatu, something Harding dismisses as nonsense.

Things gather to a  head as Orlock, now ensconced in Schloss Grünewald, appears in a dream telling Ellen that he tricked Thomas into signing divorce papers and that she has three nights in which to affirm the covenant she made with him as a child, or he will kill Thomas and wipe out Wisborg with the plague, Anna and her two young daughters serving as bloody proof of his powers. Orlock has to be destroyed, but the only way to do this involves  a willing sacrifice.

Shot in dark, drained   and muted tones with a pervasive ominous soundscape, it ratchets up the gothic horror as it goes, but beyond the core vampire element Eggars (who researched Eggers   French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s work on hysteria) delves into disturbing themes of sexual desire, the (linked) stigma of mental illness and its treatment, corruption and decay,  and the fear yet allure of the Other. Visually chilling with its use of shadows and the way Orlock (brilliantly played by a prosthetics-laden Skarsgård) is, until the final scenes, never fully seen as the grotesque, corpse-grey, balding, moustachioed nightmare, it exerts a relentless grip as it builds to the climax. Even if a poker-faced  Dafoe at times feels a little melodramatic in the way he delivers the expositionary dialogue and Taylor-Johnson’s a tad hammy as the devastated sceptic sunk into necrophilia, the  performances from  Hoult as the  frantic husband and  a mesmerising turn from Rose-Depp who apparently did all her own carnal-driven convulsions, are triumphant.  Repulsive and intoxicating. (Sky/NOW)

Novocaine (15)

Suffering from the rare real-life  genetic disorder  Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, assistant bank manager Nate (Jack Quaid, fresh off Companion) can’t feel pain (REM’s Everybody Hurts is ironically played over the opening credits), hence his college nickname. To which end he has to set his watch timer at three-hour intervals to use the bathroom and avoid his bladder bursting and has an   all-liquid diet to prevent him biting  his tongue off. 

Shy and introverted he does, however, fall for flirtatious new bank clerk Sherry (Prey’s Amber Midthunder), who brings him out of his shell and even gets him to eat some cherry pie. So when, the day after they sleep together,  she’s taken hostage in a bank robbery with the perps (Conrad Kemp, Evan Hengst and Ray Nicholson, son of Jack) robbers wearing Santa suits, killing the manager and threatening to shoot Sherry unless Nate opens the safe, following the shoot-out carnage he impulsively steals a cop car and sets off to rescue her.  A cross-city chase leads to a confrontation with one of the robbers who, pulling a gun out of a deep fryer, he accidentally shoots. Now with  the pursuing  detectives (Betty Gabriel,  Matt Walsh) suspecting he was in on the job from the beginning,  he recruits his online gaming buddy Roscoe (Jacob Batalon), who’s not quite the martial arts macho man he claims, in his quest to identify the robbers (entailing a bloody trip to a neo-Nazi tattooist) and track Sherry down, one that involves him being subjected to but not feeling numerous booby traps, burns, beatings and tortures (the nail-removing and bullet retrieval scenes are not for the squeamish). The twist, revealed early one, is that Sherry is not quite what she seems.

Co-directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen with Crank and John Wick as its touchstones, it’s graphically brutal and gratuitously ultra-violent (skin’s torched, bones snapped), but also funny and quite sweet   with Quaid an engaging cocktail of  loveable sucker and panicked bad ass  and, while it’s shot full of plot holes with a repetitive  drawn-out ending before the somewhat hard to accept romantic coda, it’s a painless enough time-passer. (Sky/NOW)

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (12A)

Incoming director Ruben Fleischer  reignites the franchise after almost a decade, reuniting the estranged Four  (and eventually five) Horsemen and adding a new trio of younger magicians to the mix for a film that seeks to do nothing but entertain.  Set ten years on from the previous film the new illusionists are brash Bosco (Dominic Sessa), pickpocket June (Ariana Greenblatt) and quiet and shy Charlie (Justice Smith) who use deepfakes and holograms as wealth redistribution Robin Hoods who, following their latest trick, giving a  crypto conman his comeuppance, are approached by only mildly less arrogant former Horseman Atlas (Jesse Eisengerg) who’s received a tarot card that’s led him to them so, working for The Eye,  he can recruit them for a mission to steal the Heart, the world’s largest diamond. It’s currently owned by Veronika Vanderburg (Rosamund Pike relishing her villain role), the head of a South African diamond company which secretly launders money for arms dealers and criminals.  The plan being to infiltrate the private party where it’s being exhibited and steal is by way of assorted disguises, props and misdirection. When things don’t go as smoothly as hoped, the four are rescued from their pursuers in a surprise appearance  from the three other original Horsemen, mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), card trickster Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), all of whom also received mysterious Tarot cards.

What ensues is a slick of complex caper that, after escaping the police,  involves the seven hiding out at a sprawling estate with various illusory rooms and being reunited  with Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), the former grandmaster of The Eye, with some of them captured during a police raid, and, later, Lula (Lizzy Caplan), Jack’s on-off girlfriend and Henley’s replacement in the second film. Meanwhile, while extending assorted ruthless methods to recover the diamond, Vandenburg’s also getting calls from an unknown number with a man using a voice changer telling her he’ll expose her unless she gives him the diamond.

With locations that range from Brooklyn and  Netherlands to France and the dazzling opulence of Abdu Dhabi (for a race car chase), Fleischer pulling his own sleights of hand in crafting the numerous VFX illusions (and, naturally, explaining Ocean’s Eleven style how at least some of the tricks were done) taken at a pace that never gives you time to ask how, with the score at times deliberately evoking Mission:Impossible, and peppered with plenty of acerbic and snarky lines before a twist reveal that you might have seen coming if the misdirection wasn’t as good as it is. A last minute cameo setting up a fourth film involving all eight Horsemen, this really is big screen magic. (Cineworld 5 Ways; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)

The Old Guard 2 (15)

Released in 2020, written by Greg Rucka based on his comic book series and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the original was about a group of centuries-old immortal (but that being of a somewhat arbitrary nature) mercenaries with regenerative healing abilities dedicated to protecting mankind. It was entertaining B movie action fun. Now, directed by  Victoria Mahoney, comes the sequel, which is considerably less so.

Still led by Andromache/Andy (Charlize Theron), who’s now mortal, the team still comprises  Joe (Marwen Kenzari), Nicky (Luca Marinelli), mortal CIA agent  Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and, having joined them in the first film, Nile (KiKi Layne), former member Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) in exile after betraying them. The plot picks up several threads from the time around, namely Andy’s former best buddy Quynh (Ngô Thanh Vân) being rescued from the iron maiden and an eternity of forever drowning to which she was condemned as a witch (and about which Nile had dreams) by a woman going by the name of Discord (Uma Thurman) who, it transpires was actually the first immortal. With Quynh seeking vengeance for Andy’s apparent abandonment of her, Destiny has plans to use her for her own ends, the core of which, it’s eventually revealed,  is using Nile (the last immortal) to render the others mortal. To which end, the team – Booker now back in play  and joined by new immortal character Tuah (Henry Golding) who knows the secrets of their origins – are lured to a secret Chinese nuclear facility in Indonesia which she’s going to blow up.

Opening with a James Bond-like action prelude as, tentatively linked to the main narrative, they take out a gun runner,  it settles into a tedious series of  scenes where everybody sits around intensely talking to one another, occasionally punctuated by some so so combat sequences, primarily featuring Andy facing off against, first, Quynh and later Discord. Unlike the original, this feels drained of energy while going through any number of narrative hoops so that you’re never sure where loyalties actually lie. There’s a nice scene as Andy walks through a passageway in Rome, the background changing from one historical era to another, but invention and imagination is in short supply elsewhere.

Theron again proves herself a charismatic action woman who can maintain a decent hairdo while battling any number of assailants but her co-stars, Ejiofor in particular,  are mostly  underused, Thurman doing imperious haughty but never really feeling like someone who could snuff out immortality at a whim. With an act of sacrifice seeing Andy regain her immortality, it ends setting up a third chapter in which she and Quynh,  have to rescue the others, but whether there’s enough life or interest left in the concept to get there remains to be seen. (Netflix)

Pillion (18)

The directorial debut by Harry Lighton working from an adaptation of co-writer Adam Mars-Jones’s London-set comedy of manners novel (the title referring to both the back seat on a bike and a queer colloquialism for arse), this comes with fully committed and fearless performances from its stars Harry Melling (Harry Potter’s erstwhile Dudley Dursley) and Alexander Skarsgård. The former is introverted gay traffic warden Colin, who still lives with his parents, dad Pete (Douglas Hodge), in whose barbershop quartet he sings, and mum Peggy (Lesley Sharp), who, dying of cancer, is always trying to set him up with dates. Meanwhile, the latter is Ray, a handsome white leather-clad alpha male biker who, meeting Colin on Christmas Day and taking him down the alley for a blow-job, eventually initiates him into a  BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadism and Masochism) relationship with himself as dominatrix and Colin (wearing a padlock chain round his neck) as his maid, cooking, cleaning, sleeping on the floor  (Ray’s dog shares the bed and couch) and submissive to every command. He also has his head shaved and joins the other submissives in the biker gang (featuring real-life members of the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club as well Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters as another submissive). However, having persuaded Ray to come to dinner with his parents, things don’t go well, Peggy actively disapproving of  Ray (she remarks they know nothing about him, and the screenplay echoes this) and how he treats her son, he accusing her of having a ‘backwards’ worldview.

Following her death, there is a moment of unexpected tenderness from a hitherto cold Ray, who having previously allowed him to have missionary position sex as a birthday gift, now let’s him share the bed and, after Colin steals his bike, agrees to them having an occasional day off from the master-slave relationship.

As visually sexually graphic as the certificate suggests (al fresco shagging and oral sex galore, arse cheeks bent over awaiting supplication), although apparently Lighton cut some of the more hardcore scenes, even so this is an art house psychodrama dressed up as a fairly classic and often wickedly humorous  (“Buy yourself a butt plug. You’re too tight”) coming-of-age love story about devotion and learning who we are and what we want and need from our relationships (there’s a subtle Sleeping Beauty love’s kiss awakening), coming to a close with a touching pub rendition of Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking it’s a hugely impressive debut that more than rewards its stars’ performances (Mockingbird)

Relay (15)

A paranoia thriller written by Justin Piasecki and directed by David MacKenzie, the title refers to a real-world service that “allows those who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind or have a speech disability communicate with others by phone using a device to place and receive calls, typing out their messages on a machine which are then relayed by an operator who’s sworn to confidentiality. Here, Riz Ahmed is Ash, a New York loner and, as we learn later, recovering alcoholic, who, as ‘Tom’, uses the service to help whistleblowers who’ve changed their mind return the incriminating evidence, they signing a NDA in return for a pay-off and he retaining a safety copy. Demanding they follow his instructions to the letter, he never meets his clients and their only contact is via the relay service. The first we see of how this works is when he brokers a deal between Hoffman (Matthew Maher) and McVie, the CIO of Optimo, a big pharma company for whom he worked, Ash secretly keeping tabs until he’s assured he’s safe.

Facilitated by a lawyer who declines to take her case on, his next client is Sarah (Lily James) who’s discovered that the genetically engineered grain her company sells to farmers in developing countries has seriously toxic side effects, but they’re selling it regardless and are about to be bought out by a corporate in a deal worth billions. With just a few days before the deal goes through, having been ostracised, transferred, finally harassed and stalked, she steals the evidence but then, wary of her safety has a change of mind. Thus bringing her into contact with Ash, whose name she doesn’t know and who she never meets.

This time, however, things don’t go as smoothly, the firm having hired a team of enforcers, headed by Dawson (Sam Worthington) and Rosseti (Willa Fitzgerald) to put on the pressure and identify her contact so as to recover the goods without paying anything. With strong turns from James and Ahmed, he with very few speaking lines, although the logic doesn’t bear close scrutiny, McKenzie has crafted a tense and atmospheric cat and mouse game that plays more to psychological aspects than action (though there’s some intricate manoeuvrings involving the postal services) as Ash and Sarah develop a deeper connection as well as some shared musical tastes. Unfortunately, it comes with a generic third act twist that contrivedly and unconvincingly turns it all on its head (and adds a shoot out) and doesn’t play fair with what’s gone before. Even so, this is distinctive and original enough to warrant discovering. (Amazon Prime)

The Running Man (15)

An early Stephen King novel under his Richard Bachman name, incidentally set in 2025, this was first adapted in 1987  an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, to whom an amusing nod is given by having his face on the $100 bills in this new closer  to the book version from director and co-writer Edgar Wright. The premise remains the same, a televised game has contestants (characterised as Hopeless Dude, Negative Man and Final Dude) having to survive being killed by a crew of hunters, except instead of them being criminals looking to earn their freedom, they’re now trying to stay alive and win a billion dollars to turn their lives around. The names of the central characters remain the same, except here Ben Richards (Glen Powell, all easy going Tom Cruise-lite charisma) isn’t a cop framed for a massacring unarmed food rioters, but a blue collar grunt whom, fired umpteen times for insubordination (i.e., calling out unsafe work practices), needs money to buy medicine for his sick daughter and so his wife (Jayme Lawson) can give up working a second job in a sleazy nightclub.

So, he auditions to become a contestant in one of the NRI TV network’s myriad of games, (Spin The Wheel is a particularly nasty joy) having promised that he won’t take part in the game of the title. However, sensing a rating puller in his fuck you attitude (“the angriest man to ever audition”), network president Dan Killian (a scenery chewing Josh Brolin with almost luminously white teeth) assigns him and two others (Katy O’Brian’s queer punk  and Martin Herlihy scrawny slacker) barely seen before being offed, as the contestants. Now Ben, assuming a variety of disguises, has to avoid the five Hunters on his trail –  and indeed the entire bloodthirsty nation – led by passive aggressive cold blooded killer McCone (Lee Pace) in his mask and sunglasses for 30 days, earning a bonus for any Hunter he kills, but having to regularly post in a video recording of himself. To which end, he’s helped by old anarchist buddy Molie Jernigan (William H. Macy, again soon to disappear from the storyline, and a couple of rebels, anti-establishment videos radical  Bradley Throckmorton (Daniel Ezra) aka The Apostle and  Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera) who lives with his demented fascist mother (Sandra Dickinson) in an ingeniously booby-trapped house.

Meanwhile back in the studio, the show’s host Bobby “Bobby T” Thompson (Colman Domingo) is whipping the Colosseum-like studio and viewing audience into a frenzy with doctored fake news versions of Ben’s videos, making him out as some murderous asshole. Making a late appearance is Emilia Jones as Amelia Williams, a civilian he takes hostage and whose pro-game attitudes get to take a turnaround once she realises how everyone’s being played and manipulated.

Moving between moments of quiet to ones of explosive action (including Powell dangling naked from a YMCA building), its anti-authority vision of a dystopian future isn’t exactly subtle in exploring how society is manipulated by media for political agendas even if, come the third act, Wright, as ever, has a tendency to go over the top favouring spectacle over social commentary. Nevertheless, he and Powell do a sterling job in having you rooting for Ben (the soundtrack includes Underdog by Sly & The Family Stone and, inevitably, Keep On Running) to not just survive but bring down the smug Killian (even if the principles abandoning final moments feel contrived), blending grit, pain, poignancy and not a little humour (there’s a cherishable Kardashian-styled reality show satire), as it heads to the finish line. It may not be as smart or cutting as it thinks, but it is undeniable good fun. (Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe)

Silent Night, Deadly Night (18)

The second remake of the 1984 slasher and  the seventh instalment of the tongue in cheek series written and directed by Mike P. Nelson, this is the annual contribution to the killer Santa genre, here with Rohan Campbell taking on the role of  Billy Chapman, an orphan, having watched a  Santa Claus  blast his parents to death, upon touching the killer’s  hand, became the host to an evil presence that means he must now kill twenty-five individuals each December to appease Charlie, the voice in his head. This year, he’s living in the small town of Hackett, working at Ida’s Trinket Tree and has a  crush on the owner’s daughter, Pamela (Ruby Modine). He dreams of a life without murder but as Christmas looms so does Charlie’s voice.

While it delivers the expected (not so visually) bloody killings with axes and hammers, and the occasional sled (because guns are for pussies) it does introduce a new thread in that Billy looks to only kill those who deserve to die (look out Nazi punks) but at the same time Charlie warns him that unless he chooses someone then someone random will add to the body count. There’s also parallel sublots about a Hackett child snatcher and Pamela’s own Explosive Personality Disorder outbursts.  You know what to expect going in and it does exactly what it says on the label. But it’s no Krampus. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)

The Six Triple Eight (12)

While there are flaws, you can help but think that some of the acidic criticism it’s received is more about attitudes to its director Tyler Perry than the actual film which, telling the story of    the real-life second world war battalion composed entirely of Black women and the only such group to serve in Europe, is a solid, well-acted and inspirational tribute that hits all the right emotional and indignation notes.

The pivotal figure is Lena Derriecott (Ebony Obsidian), a young small town Black woman whose best friend is the white Jewish Abram David (Gregg Sulkin), a relationship that naturally does not sit well with the white folk, especially her bitchy    bigoted blond classmate Mary Kathryn (Sarah Helbringer).  Before he ships out, having signed up as a pilot, he gives Lena a ring asks her to wait for him. Tragically, he’s destined never to return, shot down and burned beyond recognition, a bloodied letter to her recovered by the soldier that pulled his body from the wreckage.

Grief struck, Lena too resolves to enlist, joining the Women’s Army Corps where, inevitably, she and her fellow Blacks find the same bigotry, racism and segregation they faced in civilian life. At boot camp at Fort des Moines, they’re put through basic training under the command of  Charity Adams (Kerry Washington) , her tough, no-nonsense approach fuelled by a  determination not to give her white male colleagues any reason to claim her soldiers weren’t up to the task, reporters always looking to embarrass the military for accepting Black women into its ranks.

Constantly pushing to be deployed to Europe, Adams (eventually promoted to Major, the highest ranking Black woman to serve in the US Army), and, a result of a campaign by activist Mary McCloud Bethune (Oprah Winfrey) who bends the ear of Eleanor (Susan Sarandon) and Franklin Roosevelt (Sam Waterson),  her troops are finally assigned a mission as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion and deployed to Birmingham, and, without formal orders and adequate resources,  lodged in freezing wooden buildings at King Edward’s School in Edgbaston, their job being to sort some 17 million letters to and from home that have piled up in enough bags to fill several aircraft hangers, having the knock on effect of damaging morale at both the front and back home. Given just six months, it’s a task the bigoted Southern General  Halt (Dean Norris) believes they are incapable of pulling off and is determined to seem the fail. He, however, fully underestimates the 855-strong battalion  and especially, Adams who, when threatened with being relieved of command and replaced by some white Lieutenant, responded “over my dead body, sir”.

With Lena’s lost letter naturally among those being sorted (setting up a moving cathartic moment), Adams comes to realise their job is far from demeaning, but of vital importance to the war effort,  as the women devise ingenious ways of identifying otherwise undeliverable mail from fabrics, logos and even perfume scent.  

While the real-life Derriecott and Adams are the central characters, this is very much an ensemble piece with Sarah Jeffery, Kylie Jefferson, Sarah Helbringer and Shanice Shantay among Lena’s circle, the latter scene-stealing and providing sharp comic relief as the straight-speaking Johnnie Mae (who may or may not be based on Pvt Johnnie Mae Walton) while Jay Reeves give charm as the soldier who takes a shine too (and eventually married) Lena.

Other than the opening battlefield scenes and a sudden UXB incident that claims to women’s lives, the action and tensions are wholly embodied in the combat against prejudices, Adams and the others fighting with a verbal armoury to prove themselves and seek equality and respect. Ending with photos of the real women and credit notes on what happened to some of them along with an oration by Michelle Obama celebrating the 6888, it’s not in quite the same league as the similarly themed Hidden Figures, but, like the women it portrays, it deserves far more respect than it’s been afforded. (Netflix)

Small Things Like These (15)

His first film since Oppenheimer, though the scale is smaller Cillian Murphy (who served as producer) and the intensity of the story are no less intense.  Set near Christmas in 1985 New Ross, Ireland, Bill Furlong (Murphy) is a successful coal merchant, married with five daughters. One day, delivering coal to the local convent where young girls are supposedly trained for their future, he sees something that gives him pause, a women being dragged inside while her mother ignores her pleas. Going inside, he finds    young women, supposedly the school’s pupils, being made to scrub the floor and one who asks for his help so she can escape and drown herself.  It’s pretty clear –and one  unspoken common knowledge – that the convent is, in fact, one of the infamous Magdalene Laundries,  Catholic institutions little more than workhouses where unmarried sex workers and pregnant women, so called ‘fallen women’ – were sent for supposed rehabilitation,   their babies taken away. Bill can sympathise, he himself being the illegitimate son of an unmarried teenage mother, though, while  ostracised by her family, she was fortunate as a wealthy woman took her in as her maid.  

Troubled but reluctant to get involved, his conscience is pricked on his next visit to discover Sarah (Zara Devlin) shivering in the coal shed, ostensibly locked in by accident, who asks him to help find her baby. They’re interrupted, however, by Sister Mary (Emily Mortimer) who, feigning kindness, says the girl is mentally unwell and bribes him with a hefty bonus for his wife who – along with the local publican – tells him to not get involved. After all, the church treats the townsfolk well in exchange for turning a blind eye. But, finding Sarah again in the shed, he can no longer stand idly by, reputation be damned.

Directed by Tim Mielants and based on the novel by Claire Keegan, it’s a slight story but still carries a heavy weight about, to borrow the old phrase, how evil thrives when good men stand by and do nothing. Bill’s discovery of his father is, essentially, a redundant element when the film’s thrust is the cruelty and moral turpitude of the outwardly respectable Catholic Church in a repressive Ireland as well as the underlying toxic masculinity. There’s no melodrama and dialogue is sparse, Murphy conveying his emotions through his eyes and expression while Mortimer is chilling as the corrupt and cruel Mother Superior with a fierce and intimidating stare, and the film, which  is dedicated  to the more than 56,000 young women who suffered in the laundries up until 1996 and the children taken from them, is drenched in a devastating melancholy. It may lack the incendiary power of Peter Mullen’s  The Magdalene Sisters, but its quiet anger is no less compelling. (Amazon Prime; Apple TV; Sky Cinema)

Speak No Evil (15)

A remake of the unrelentingly grim 2022 Danish film (an in-joke nod concerns a Danish trio obsessed with food), complete with title, plot and even large chunks of dialogue, but with a change from the original’s devastatingly  nihilistic ending, Eden Lake writer-director James Watkins’s thriller cautions that kindness to strangers may have an ulterior – and sinister – motive. Their marriage having problems since he lost his job and she quit hers in PR, not to mention a dash of infidelity,  holidaying in Italy with their  anxiety-prone (she can’t bear to be separated from  her stuffed rabbit) 11-year-old daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), might just be the tonic   Americans Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis) need. Life certainly brightens up when they’re befriended by retired doctor Paddy (James McAvoy) and his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), who have their own young child, the mute (his tongue apparently shorter than the norm) and distant Ant (Dan Hough), who invite them out for meals, ward off the annoying Danes and are generally friendly, solicitous and outgoing to a fault. When it’s time to go, Paddy invites them to come visit their farm in the West Country and, while Louise is hesitant, she agrees and off they duly go,

Everything seems great. Their hosts are charming and considerate, even if they seem to forget Louise is vegetarian (she nevertheless accepts a slice of their prize goose, as it would be rude not to given it was roasted in their honour). Paddy plies Ben with his homemade cider and, in touch with his   alpha male, takes him out in the wilds for some primal scream therapy, their kids hang out together and the foursome go for a dinner of locally sourced food at a friend’s restaurant. But something feels off, and not just that Paddy happily lets Ben pay the bill or that they wind them up faking under the tablecloth fellatio and Paddy saying he’s not actually a doctor when Louise cuts herself.

Louise is put off by   the stained bed blankets and resents Ciara calling Agnes out on her table manners, but is apologetic when told the reason. At one point, Louise having found Agnes in the couple’s bed, they pack up and leave before dawn, forced to return for the forgotten toy.  Again Ciara offers a reasonable explanation.  And, as Louise tells herself, they are British after all. Nevertheless, it’s harder to ignore red flags like the bruises Ant shows Agnes, or how Paddy loses his cool when his son can’t dance in time to Cotton Eye Joe, later saying he’d had too much to drink.

Things take a turn for the terrifying, however, when Ant, whose previously showed Agnes Paddy’s watch collection  and passed her an indecipherable message, steals the keys to the locked barn and reveals its and his secrets.  Now, it’s a case of trying to get away as soon as they can, Ben forcing himself to man up. But Paddy, who’s professed he prefers the hunt to the kill (someone says he likes playing with his food), and Ciara aren’t about to let that happen.

The core cast are all in solid for, but this is very much McAvoy’s show as he brilliant channels Paddy’s passive-aggressive and controlling nature, his forced smile and predatory eyes speaking volumes, before going full over the top berserker in the last act as  Watkins switches from uneasy dark social comedy of manners to full on visceral Straw Dogs intensity. And you’ll never hear The Bangles’ Eternal Flame the same way again. (Sky Cinema/NOW)

Steve (15)

Adapted with a character focus shift by Max Porter from his 2023 novella Shy, Cillian Murphy reteams with Small Things Like These director Tim Mielants and again shows why he’s regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation. Here, set in 1996, a time of social care resources being cut to the bone, he plays the titular Steve, headmaster of Stanton Wood, a private reform school for troubled youths with mental health issues and violent tendencies who would otherwise be locked up in a detention centre.

The film’s rhythm and busy handheld camerawork (part SD Betacam, part film) mirroring the drum and bass drive to which several of the teens (a mix of actors and non-professionals) listen, Murphy plays Steve, still recovering from a  tragic car accident that left him riddled with guilt and substance and drink abuse, as a  bundle of nervous energy and anxiety, his emotional pain echoed in that of those in his charge, primarily Shy  (a breakout turn by Jay Lycurgo), a shy, smart and introverted teen who, following a phone call from his mother in the wake of another volatile explosion, sinks into a depression as heavy as the backpack in which he keeps his collection of rocks. But, living life like a permanent and physical rap battle,  all of the boys are likely to kick off at any point and for any reason, the most volatile being Jamie (Luke Ayres), always ready to poke the bear, Ash (Joshua Barry) and Tyrone (Tut Nyuot), the latter having had his privileges revoked following sexually inappropriate behaviour towards new teacher Shola (Simbi Ajikawo).

All this unfolds over the course of  single chaotic day, one in which a TV  crew, with an insensitive director and presenter, are filming a segment for a clearly negatively-biased news piece about Steve and his work at the school, several altercations erupt among the boys, and Steve and his staff, among them deputy head Amanda (Tracey Ullman) and tough love therapist-counsellor Jenny (a measured Emily Watson), that the trust have sold the school and it will be closing by Christmas, causing Steve to erupt in rage just like the boys in his care. But they still have to put on an upbeat front for the cameras and a visit by condescending pompous local MP Sir Hugh Montague Powell (Roger Allam), who gets verbally taken down by Ask in one of the film’s funniest moments.

The boys inevitably play to the cameras, massing behind a window and pretending to masturbate, and responding to such banal questions as what would your 1996 self say to your 1990 self with lines like “Always carry a blade”. These, however, are offset by a piercingly poignant interview with Shy (“Sometimes you want to be four years old and start again but not fuck it up this time”) and Steve’s interview on how he feels about the boys the presenter calls society’s waste product.

It’s clear throughout that, while battling with being underpaid and under resourced, all the teachers passionately care for and are fiercely committed to the boys, for whom they are their likely last chance, walking a fine line between tolerance and discipline, friendship and authority.  Pitched somewhere between the rawness of Alan Clarke’s Scum and the sentimentality of To Sir, With Love, it seems to be leading to a tragic denouement but, switching between the school and Steve returning to wife and kids at home pulls back from the brink for notes of salvation, redemption and hope. It’s the only time the film doesn’t feel real. (Netflix)

The Thursday Murder Club (12)

Adapted from the Richard Osman series of novels and directed by Chris Columbus, this is very much the sort of cosy Sunday afternoon elderly amateur detective  fare as (obliquely referenced here) typified by Rosemary & Thyme, Miss Marple and, currently, Only Murders In The Building, the title referring to a bunch of pensioners in Cooper’s Chase, a  retirement home with emotional support llamas on the site of an old convent, who regularly assemble to try and solve cold cases.

It features a stellar lead cast lining up as former MID operative Elizabeth (Helen Mirren whose role as The Queen provides an in joke), former trade unionist figurehead Ron (Pierce Brosnan and wandering accent), erstwhile psychiatrist Ibrahim (Ben Kingley) and, the latest recruit, nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie with a running gag about making cakes), their latest case being the 1973 murder of a young woman who was stabbed and, witnessed by her  boyfriend Peter Mercer, pushed from her bedroom window, ostensibly by a masked man, and Mercer’s subsequent disappearance. The case was investigated by Penny Grey, who founded the Club and now lies comatose in the home’s hospice wing attended by her devoted veterinarian husband (Paul  Freeman).

While this is the film’s launch pad, it’s put on the backburner until the final stretch, as a series of present day murders occupy the group’s attention, starting with rough round the edges builder Tony Curran (Geoff Bell) one of the investors in the property, who’s at odds with his unethical partner Ian Ventham (David Tennant), who, strapped for cash and facing an expensive divorce, wants to dig up the cemetery and turn the place into luxury flats, kicking out the residents in the process. Eliciting the help of newly arrived policewoman Donna (Naomi Ackie), the foursome proceed to follow assorted clues to arrive at the identity of the killer/s (some poignancy thrown in as to the motivations), their investigations unearthing presumed dead gangster Bobby Tanner (Richard E Grant) and variously involving Ron’s boxing champion turned TV celebrity son Jason (Tom Ellis), DCI Hudson (Daniel Mays, Polish immigrant handyman Bogdan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), Elizabeth’s dementia-afflicted author husband Stephen (Jonathan Pryce) and Joyce’s financier daughter Joanna (Ingrid Oliver).

It’s self-aware and lightly handled, perhaps too much so, to appeal to the grey pound audience (though Imrie does get to say what the fuck), and, to be fair, the whodunnit(s) leaves you guessing until the end, while the cast, a sly twinkling Mirren doing most of the heavy lifting,   give watchable performances without ever really themselves. There’s no bite to trouble the dentures, but it’ll go down nicely with a cuppa and a couple of biscuits. (Netflix)

Train Dreams (12)

Based on an award-winning novella by Denis Johnson and directed by Clint Bentley from a screenplay by Sing Sing director Greg Kwedar with a touch of the Terrence Malick,  set in the early years of the last century, narrated by Will Patton and set over several decades, this maps a changing America through the eyes and life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), an introspective itinerant logger and railroad worker.  Arriving in Idaho on the Great Northern Railway in 1917 as an orphaned child, he spends his younger years without direction or purpose, labouring alongside migrants of various ethnicities. During his time on the Spokane International Railway, he witnesses a Chinese worker thrown of the bridge, suspected of horse stealing, and, not interfering, the man’s silent ghost will continue to haunt him, Robert believing he’s now cursed.

 His life changes, though, when he meets  Gladys Olding (Felicity Jones), with whom he falls in love, marries, builds a cabin on the Moyie River and has a daughter, Kate. However, seasonal logging work takes him away from home and his daughter growing for long periods, during which time he crosses paths with a variety of characters, among them Arn Peeples (William H Macy given a scene-stealing monologue) with whom he becomes friends but is killed by a falling branch. There are other deaths too, a worker is killed by a vigilante avenging the murder of his brother and others killed by a falling tree, their graves poetically marked by boots nailed to a tree.

Struggling to find works in the post-World War I economy, he and Gladys take up farming and he builds a lumber mill, but, while he’s away, a wildfire puts an end to his happiness and, while he rebuilds the cabin, his life is now empty and, though he returns to logging, the new technology is rendering his kind redundant. Instead, he becomes a carriage driver, which brings him to contact with Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon) of the United States Forestry Service. Despite what you might expect, no romance develops and he continues to live alone in the vain hope his wife and daughter might return, he even has hallucinatory dreams of Kate.

The years pass, Robert witness to such events as John Glenn’s flight into space and even decides to fly a biplane, the people and events of his life rushing through his mind as he circles and loops through the skies. Eventually it ends in 1968 as he passes peacefully in his sleep.

Similar in theme and structure to Forest Gump, Days Of Heaven and The Tree Of Life, it’s an elegant and elegiac work, documenting the lives of those who worked to change a nation, to open up new horizons and who often tragically suffered as a result. It’s a quietly meditative affair, anchored by a magnificent soulful performance from Edgerton (Jones has less to do, but is effective in her scenes) and the breathtaking cinematography by Adolpho Velos. You should take a ride down its tracks. (Netflix)

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (15)

As penned by authors such as John Dickson Carr, Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, locked room detective mysteries are ones where solving the murder seems impossible. Indeed, Carr’s novel The Hollow Man is a crucial element in Ryan Johnson’s third Knives Out offering.

An outstanding Josh O’Connor plays the Rev. Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer, who once killed someone in the ring, turned New York Catholic priest albeit with a  sometimes foul mouth, who’s assigned by Bishop Langstrom (Jeffrey Wright) to the backwater rural parish of   Chimney Rock  to serve at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude after punching out a deacon. He’s to be  assistant pastor to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks John Brolin), the firebrand grandson of Reverend Prentice Wicks, who forced Jefferson’s  ‘harlot whore’ mother, Grace (Annie Hamilton), to remain at the church with the promise of receiving his inheritance, only for it to go missing following his death, Grace ransacking the church looking for it, destroying the crucifix, which her son has refused to replace.  

Jud takes issue with Wicks’s incendiary preaching, targeting specific members of the flock, which has driven away all but a group of  loyal parishioners,  Wheelchair-bound cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny) looking for a miracle, failing MAGA-friendly sci-fi novelist Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), scheming lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington)   whose adoptive stepson Cy (Daryl McCormack) is a failed politician and aspiring influencer who’s always filming everything around him and posting YouTube videos, alcoholic doctor  Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner) whose wife and kids left him, fiercely devout and devoted longtime church housekeeper Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close, given a scene stealing exit), who witnessed the older Wicks’s death when she was a girl,  and groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), her adoring admirer.

Refusing to temper his sermons, during his Good Friday service Wicks retires into a storage closet to regather his energy and is almost immediately found dead, stabbed in the back by a knife fashioned from a devil’s head lamp adornment, suspiciously similar to the one Jud stole from a local bar. Although Police chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis) has Jud down as prime suspect, he was after all caught on video threatening to cut him out of the church like a cancer, with nobody in the congregation near Wicks when he died, this is thus a locked room mystery.

Enter, after the lengthy prelude,  atheist private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig with longer hair and more stylish suits), who recruits Jud to assist his investigations, which reveals that Wicks, who is buried in the family mausoleum, disavowed his blindly loyal followers congregation and  had apparently found where the fortune was hidden and was planning to enter politics with Cy, who, it transpires, was his illegitimate son.

As things unfold and the murder mystery becomes increasingly convoluted, Jud steps back preferring to focus on his ministry (at one point he cuts off Blanc to comfort a comfort-seeking stranger  on his phone), there’s an apparent rising from the tomb, another murder and everyone’s revealed to have had a motivation for Wicks’ death. Naturally, it all builds to the obligatory drawing room – or in this case pulpit – explanation as to what actually happened, ingeniously rendering the impossible possible,  and who was responsible, Blanc bathed in light streaming through the stained glass windows.

Less flippant than the previous two films, though not without some sharp humour (notably Wicks confessing his masturbatory regimen to Jud), it turns a critical eye on such issues as misogyny, the abuse of power (Wicks is Trump in vestments and at one point someone says “Give me four years, you could be president”), religious hypocrisy, right wing extremism and themes of sin, guilt, greed and God, while also poking fun at the conventions of detective mysteries. O’Connor and Close arguably deliver the stand-out performance but the whole  – and again Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a voice cameo – are note perfect as Johnson slyly misdirects to raise suspicions as to their possible guilt. Originally conceived as a trilogy, Johnson and Craig have said they are considering ideas for a fourth. Here’s hoping they sharpen their knives on the whetstone sooner rather than later. (Netflix; Everyman; Mockingbird)

Wicked: For Good (PG)

The concluding half of director John M. Chu’s adaptation of the stage musical is set five years after the original with Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) now hiding out in the woods and proclaimed as the Wicked Witch of the West as a result of her defiance of the charlatan Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), who’s having Oz paved with yellow bricks using enslaved animals, and, with the magic-lacking Glinda (Ariane Grande), who literally and metaphorically has (as her showpiece songs says) her own personal bubble, designated by the scheming Madam Morrible (Michelle Yeoh, who really can’t sing) as the Wizard’s spokesperson.  It’s also been arranged that she will marry Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey),  who’s been promoted as Captain of the Guard and charged with hunting down Elphaba, who, of course, is the  one he actually loves. Meanwhile, Elphaba’s bitter wheelchair bound half-sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode),  having inherited her father’s position as Governor Of Munchkinland, has declared that no animals or Munchkins can leave Oz without her permission, a scheme to stop Boq (Ethan Slater), who also loves Elphaba, from abandoning her. Visiting her, accused of not using her magic to help her, Elphaba enchants Nessa’s  shoes (not ruby but serving the same end), so that she can fly. And, when Boq tries to leave, Nessa’s miscast love spell shrinks his heart, his life only saved when Elphaba turns him to a man of tin.

On  the point of striking a deal to join forces with the Wizard and Glinda in exchange for his freeing the flying monkeys, Elphaba pulls back and, with Fiyero’s help, escapes, thus setting things up for Morrible to use Nessa as  bait to lure her into a trap. At which point, conjuring a change in the weather, enter a  fatal shack and a girl from Kansas to whom Glinda has given those enchanted shoes. With Glinda and Elphaba coming to blows, the latter escaping thanks to a sacrifice by Fiyero and vowing to live up to her reputation, it’s all set up for the big finale.

It continues to spin L. Frank Baum’s original story, upending some elements and restyling others, offering deeper insights into both Elphaba and Glinda (a childhood flashback suggest she’s always been a bit of a fraud), though the introduction of Dorothy, who’s only ever seen from behind or the side, is somewhat of a confused contrivance, not least since we’re told she’s travelling with three companions she’s met in Oz, but while there’s a backstory for both the cowardly lion (Colman Domingo) and the tin man, the Scarecrow’s is utterly muddled and, not lacking a brain and unexplained until the final moments, makes no narrative sense. On top of which the major twist in regard to the Wizard and Elphaba is so brusquely handled as to lose any ironic potency.

The major problems though lie in the pacing and the music. While, turning decidedly darker than the certificate suggests, the last act is dynamic and emotionally powerful, the first two really drag until that death by shack. And, although Grande and Erivo deliver powerful vocal performances to complement the shared poignancy and intensity of their dramatic moments, the songs are undercooked and mostly unmemorable, with only Erivo’s No Good Deed and the climactic cathartic mutual influence friendship For Good making any real impression, and even that’s over-extended, complete with a coda reprise.  That said, along with its core performances, there’s enough colour, emotional dynamic, and themes of sisterhood, friendship, redemption and authoritarian repression to see it through its two hours plus and keep you over the rainbow. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; MAC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)

The Woman In Cabin No 10 (15)

An Agatha Christie knock-off, this stars  Keira Knightley (who’s too often unjustly pilloried by critics) with her signature flared nose smile, as Laura “Lo” Blacklock, an award-winning investigative journalist who, looking for some light relief after a young female source turned up drowned, persuades her editor (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to let her do a  piece about the maiden voyage of the Aurora Borealis, a luxury yacht that sailing to Norway as a charity foundation fundraiser organised by Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce) for his terminally ill shipping heiress Anne Bullmer (Lisa Loven Kongsli), who personally extended her the invitation.

Among the hoity toity celebrity passengers,  Dame Heidi Heatherly (Hannah Waddingham) her husband Thomas (David Morrissey), influencer Grace Phillips (Kaya Scodelario), tech magnate Lars Jensen (Christopher Rygh), playboy Adam Sutherland (Daniel Ings), Anne’s personal doctor Dr. Mehta (Art Malik) and ageing rock star lothario Danny (Paul Kaye), she’s put out find that her photographer ex-boyfriend Ben Morgan (David Ajala) is also working the event.

Things take a dark turn that first night when she overhears a scuffle in the cabin  next door and the splash of a body in the water, she believing it to be the blonde women (Gitte Witt), she accidentally disturbed in the cabin earlier. However, reporting what happened, she’s told the cabin wasn’t occupied. With everyone insisting she’s imagined it all, a trauma aftershock perhaps, Lo sets about trying to identify who among the guests, crew and staff, head of security  Sigrid (Amanda Collin) included,  the murderer is. And in so doing, becomes a target herself.

 Adapted from Ruth Ware’s novel, it’s a wannabe hybrid of Gone Girl and Death On The Nile awash with obligatory red herrings  but,  with some nice set design touches, it’s nevertheless serviceable armchair sleuth fare and Knightley does a decent job as a younger answer to Miss Marple. Unfortunately, all of this is blown out of the water with a contrivance riddled last act and a finale that is so ham fistedly laughably ludicrous and over-acted you might want to give the whole thing a wide berth. (Netflix)

Zootropolis 2 (PG)

Six years on from the first film, director Byron Howard now pairs with Jared Bush, who also  wrote both screenplays (the  pair also voice mountain goats),  for a busier and perhaps even better sequel that reunites ultra-enthusiastic rabbit cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and former loner con artist fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) who, after saving Zootopia from its crooked sheep mayor Dawn Bellwether (Jenny Slate) are, despite being personality opposites,  now partners in the city’s police force.

Taking it upon themselves to apprehend a crooked customs anteater smuggler (John Leguizamo), the mayhem they cause has Chief Bogo (Idris Elba) ordering them attend Partners in Crisis therapy sessions if they want to continue working together. However, during the botched mission, Judy found some shed snake skin, leading her to suspect one might have found smuggled its way into Zootopia, where, reptiles haven’t been seen in decades. Clues lead her to deduce that it might be plotting to  sneak into the  Zootenial Gala, being hosted by the Lynxley family, the descendants of the city’s founder father Ebenezer, to steal his 100 year old diary containing the plans for the climate controlled zones he designed.

Covertly attending the gala, while Judy befriends Pawbert (Andy Samberg), the awkward youngest lynx, Nick spots a hooded figure on the chandelier which turns out to be a blue pit viper. In the resulting chaos in which the snake kidnaps Lynxley patriarch Milton (David Strathairn) and steals the journal, Judy and the viper come face to face, he revealing himself to be Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan) and telling her the book contains proof as to Zootopia’s actual origins. But then Gary’s taken by a mysterious figure.

And so, the film develops into a chase across the city’s different zones between the duplicitous Milton, who’s accused Judy of abetting the viper, his son  Cattrick (Macaulay Culkin) and daughter Kitty (Brenda Song),  and, helped by Tundratown’s Arctic shrew answer Vito Corleone and joined by   beaver conspiracy theoriest Nibbles Maplestick (Fortune Feimster),Nick, Judy and Gary, who are also being hunted by assorted Zootopia cops, in a search for a long hidden snowbound mountain hiding place containing some vital patent proof. Twists, revelations, lies, double crosses and poignant confessions about true inter-species feelings ensue.

Working from a  central message about putting aside differences with a xenophobia thread involving a hidden outcast reptile community in Marsh Market, there’s Chinatown-like film noir elements here (including a nod to The Shining) that are likely to prove decidedly scary for the young audiences, but, then, like the Inside Out films, this really isn’t targeted at them, but rather at older punters who will revel in the almost constant stream of cultural puns (Ewe Tube, Only Herders in the Building) and even a quite literal Tube transportation system and the plethora of celebrity voice cameos that include Shakira as a pop star gazelle, Ed Sheeran as Ed Shearin, June Squib as Judy’s grandmother, Josh Gad as a cop IT expert, Patrick Warburon as narcissistic blonde-maned action hero stallion turned mayor Bryan Winddancer and even brief spots from Danny Trejo, Alan Tudyk, Jean Reno, Dwayne Johnson and Michael J Fox (as a, er, fox). Plus the fabulous car chase return of Raymond S. Persi as Flash Slothmore.

Exploding with action and bursting with humour, the animation is top rate as is the attention to both detail and character development, this makes a strong case as the animation of the year, the closing scenes and end credits sequence promising further adventures to come. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park, West Brom; Reel; Royal; Vue)

Screenings courtesy of Cineworld 5 Ways & Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe

CINEMAS

Cineworld 5 Ways – 181 Broad St 0871 200 2000

Cineworld NEC – NEC 0871 200 2000

Cineworld Solihull – Mill Ln,  071 200 2000

Everyman – The Mailbox 0871 906 9060

MAC – Cannon Hill Park 0121 446 3232

Mockingbird – Custard Factory 0121 224 7456.

Odeon Birmingham, 0871 224 4007

Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe – Ladywood Middleway 0333 006 7777

Odeon West Bromwich – Cronehills Linkway, West Bromwich 0333 006 7777

Omniplex Great Park, Rubery www.omniplexcinemas.co.uk/cinema/birmingham

Reel – Hagley Rd, Quinton, Halesowen 0121 421 5316

Royal – Birmingham Road, Maney, Sutton Coldfield  0121 492 0673

Vue Star City – Watson Road 08712 240 240