Films showing this week either in cinemas or on streaming platforms
FILM OF THE WEEK
Wildwood (12A)
Touted as being by the hands that made Coraline, Laika have crafted a stop-motion animation (with some CGI assists) masterpiece that seems a foregone conclusion to walk away with the Oscar. Directed by Travis Knight and adapted from the book by Colin Melo (singer with Portland’s The Decemberists who contribute the closing song) and illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis, it opens with a naked young boy throwing himself to his death from the balcony of his home, after ripping open his chest to reveal he’s actually an automaton. His mother, the Dowager Governess, Alexandra (Carey Mulligan bringing emotional depth to her villain) being arrested and exiled by the Governor (Marc Evan Jackson), her second husband. The backstory comes later.
The core narrative begins in Portland (complete with several local landmarks) with teenager Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee, excellent) defying her hippie parents’ (Maya Erskine, Jake Johnson) instructions and taking baby brother Mac into town, where he’s abducted by a murder of crows. Her nerdy friend Curtis (a scene stealing Jacob Tremblay) caught up in the chase she pursues them over the railway bridge and into the mist-enshrouded Impassable Wilderness, a place her father’s always warned her about. There they encounter a troop of talking coyote soldiers led by Maksim (Tom Waits) who serve Alexandra and who seek to take them prisoner. Splitting up, he’s captured and taken to the Governess, who is at war with Brendan (Mahershala Ali), the Bandit King, and his people (among them Amandla Stenberg), and is befriended by Septima (Awkwafina), a rat. Prue, meanwhile, is picked up by the wilderness postman) and taken to the Governor, who refuses to help and has her locked up as an outsider. Escaping (in an amusing scene as she distracts her literal guard dog by making him play fetch), she meets Owl Rex (Richard E. Grant), an avian prince, who fills in the story of Alexandra’s actual son’s death and her turning to the Dark Arts. General, a giant Golden Eagle (Angela Bassett) arrives to carry Prue to Iphigenia (Tantoo Cardinal), an ancient North Woods mystic, but pursued by crows, things end tragically with Prue captured. Meanwhile, back in Alexandra’s castle, where he and assorted Bandits are locked in suspended cages, Curtis has discovered that she has Mac and, consumed and blinded by grief, intends to use him as deadly instrument in her search for her son’s bones, something that will unleash destruction by ivy.
Which is enough exposition, as the story unfolds with the backstory to Prue’s own birth, a dark arts deal, and, with defecting coyote Dmitri (Charlie Day) lending a paw, the rallying of the Bandits and the North Woods villagers (complete with a rabbit constable) against the coyotes, a full-scale battle and, as hinted at earlier, the awakening of Prue’s latent magical blood connection to nature
There’s some throwaway amusing touches, such as a unicycling Darth Vader and a street vendor’s sign advising you treasure hand-crafted art while it’s still around, but from the opening suicide to images of rotting corpses and savage slaughter, frequently intensely dark and gothic, this is a fairy tale that makes those of the Brothers Grimm seem tame and is clearly pitched at the upper end of the young audience. Drawing on influences that range from obvious Narnia comparisons to Lord Of The Rings, Labyrinth and Bridge to Terabithia while the gathering of crows is pure Hitchcock, it’s both visually spellbinding and narratively and emotionally complex, with rites-of-passage, coming-of-age, friendship, family trauma, community and environmental themes threaded throughout. Magical in every possible sense. Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
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Clayface (18)
A minor league Batman villain, Clayface made his debut in 1940 as a B-movie actor turned criminal using the identity of a villain he’d played in a horror movie, but in the late 50s he became Matthew Hagen, a treasure hunter who gained shapeshifting powers after being exposed to a pool of radioactive protoplasm. Now, under the auspices of director James Watkins with a script co-penned by horror maestro Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, those origins merge into Matt Hagen (Welsh rising star Tom Rhys Harries in his leading debut,), whose risen from the Narrows ghetto in Coast City to become, as Rob Brydon’s talk show host has it, Gotham’s rags-to-riches triumph with his first Oscar nomination.
However, out celebrating, ignoring a warning from his fellow actor best mate Corey (Joshua James), he makes the mistake of sleeping with Mia (Joana Riberio), the starlet girlfriend of vicious mob boss Markos Szabo (scenery chewing David Dencik) and has his face carved up as a result. Disfigured, having lost his looks he quickly also loses his agent (Nancy Carroll), turncoat manager (Eddie Marsanwho gets to prove literally spineless) and career, his reputation dragged through the dirt as he’s portrayed as the bad guy and is reduced to living in a cockroach infested apartment.
After a series of unsuccessful operations (the nose slicing is especially squirm-inducing) and wearing a plastic mask that makes him seem some Halloween freak, he chances upon news of experimental scientist Dr Caitlyn Corr (an assured Naomi Ackie) who, stiffed by her former partners, has developed an AI-led experimental nano cell treatment that could regenerate his features. Persuading her to let him be a voluntary human trial subject, things seem great and he soon has his good looks again, turning up at s red carpet bash to wow the assembled media. Only to suddenly find his face melting. Turning again to Corr, he overdoses himself with her concoction, the terrifying result being that he becomes able to transform himself to look like others, setting him off on a revenge quest against those who done him wrong. The transformations are triggered by rage, with Corr, with whom he’s developing a romantic connection despite her being engaged to a GCPD detective (Max Minghella), the only one who can calm him down.
The first DC 18 certificate, driven by startling AI effects (presaged by the opening facial massage scene), set in a deliberately artificial-looking Gotham City, echoing Sam Raimi’s Darkman, it’s full on body horror (a notable moment being in a plane toilet as he cuts through his fused eyelids) but, thanks to a standout performance from Rhys Harries, one where visual spectacle doesn’t come at the expense of grounded character and intense emotional complexity. While questions of identity are clearly woven in, while Clayface’s vengeance (which often involves taking on the form of his victims) is bloody and brutal, it’s not until the final act, following a night club massacre, that the character shifts from tragic anti-hero to villain. Given there’s no end credit scenes, where that goes is something only time and the box office will tell. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
Ghosts: The Possession Of Button House (PG)
A feature spin-off from the family-friendly BBC sitcom by the Horrible Histories team about a rag tag bunch of friendly ghosts from different historical eras – from caveman Robin (Laurence Rickard) to Regency poet Thomas, youth group leader Patrick (Jim Howick) who was accidentally shot with an arrow, overly excitable Georgian noblewoman Kitty (Lolly Adefope) and sleazy sex scandal Tory MP Julian (Simon Farnaby) – haunting the house (or at least the place) in the country where they died, this picks things up after its owners, Alison (Charlotte Ritchie), the only one who could see them) and Mike (Kiell Smith-Bynoe moved out with their baby while it was converted into a hotel and golf course.
As such, it won’t mean anything if you never saw the show, but its legion of fans will be keen to find out what happens when their afterlife tenancy is put at risk when the refurb comes to a halt and it and their fate involves a band of eco protestors who set up camp on the land, a corrupt MP and a bunch of teens who break in and who, they learn, they can possess, as well as them tracking down Alison and Mike for help.
With Kitty interacting with teenager Jack (Scott Ellis Watson), stuffy Edwardian Fanny (Martha Howe-Douglas) discovering feminism, caveman Robin falling for a dreadlocked crusty (Sian Clifford) and Julian attempting to navigate the modern world via his possessed teen, the visual and very British verbal gags (tabloids and scotch eggs) are inoffensively mild, silly and just a touch rude with all the characters, including the closeted WWII Captain (Ben Willbond) and a Tudor nobleman’s decapitated head (Rickard), all getting their moment. There’s times when expanding to feature length means it slightly drags, but it should scare up decent box office numbers. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
Klara And The Sun (12A)
Directed by Taika Waititi, who made Hunt For The Wilderpeople, Jojo Rabbit, two Thor movies and the underrated Next Goal Wins, adapted from a Kazuo Ishiguro satirical novel about technology, theology and love and starring Jenny Ortega, Amy Adams and Natasha Lyonne, on paper this sounds perfect. In reality, however, it’s a disappointing misfire.
Set in a future where the internet has been outlawed, Ortega is Klara, an outdated humanoid Artificial Friend powered by the sun (unlike newer models which use Bluetooth), her deity, who, stuck in the window of a store run by a grumpy Lyonne, seems destined to end her days as spare parts. That is until teenage Josie (Mia Tharia), her younger sister having recently died and her father having walked out, persuades her work-obsessed emotionally absent mother, Chrissie (Adams), to buy her to keep her company. Shipped off to their quaint cornfields-surrounded home, she’s scrutinised by housekeeper Melanie (Rachel House) and robo-birds builder neighbour Rick (Aran Murphy, son of Cillian) while Chrissie, who keeps the box she was shipped in, makes her well-aware of the warranty that means she can be returned as unsuitable if need be.
Adjusting to her new world (one where the concept of wheat is pretty scary) and becoming besties with Josie, it follows similar narrative pathways to the likes of E.T. and Big Hero 6, taking a tragic turn on learning that Josie, whose chromosomes have been surgically modified to make her supersmart, is seriously ill, to which end she turns to her solar God, which she believes lives behind the hill where it dips at sunset, to try and save her as the film heads into its questions about faith and what it means to be human.
In terms of both physical and emotional performance, Ortega is wonderful as the wide-eyed, naïve and ever optimistic Klara who gradually comes to learn about the human world but Waititi can’t seem to stop himself undermining the deep themes about love and human relationships with constant resorts to incongruous comedy and banal platitudes, unable to get a grip on or reconcile it with the second half when things get serious, a misjudgement that, while not unentertaining, leaves the film feeling messy and hollow. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
The Lost Children Of Tuam (12A)
Running a smallholding with her paint salesman husband (Andrew Bnnett), in September 2010, as a night-school project, Catherine Corless (Monica Dolan), an amateur historian in rural Ireland who’d suffered from clinical depression, decided to research and write an essay on the former Tuam Mother And Baby Home, which, run between 1925 and 1961 by the Bon Secours nuns in her town, took in unwed mothers and their babies.
A radio report about a Galway man who had grown up in England with no memory of his biological single mother (as had been Corless’s own) and talking to men in their sixties who, as boys, had jumped into what turned out to be a septic taking containing bones (which, assumed to those from the Irish Famine were then reburied) led her to go through what archive material she could find,. In doing so she discovered a staggering number of death certificates for children over that time, a rate of nearly one a fortnight from whooping cough, measles, malnutrition and other childhood illnesses, but no record of any internments. , embark on the laborious task of trying to match death certificates with burial records, creating a 3D model of the home and scanning Land Registry maps to build a picture of what had happened and where. Her persistence to not be brushed aside as she campaigned to find the truth in the face of denials and platitudes by former nuns and intransigence by the church authorities, ultimately unearthed the devastating fact that nearly 800 babies and children has been buried in a sewage pit and unmarked mass graves in the grounds of the home.
Dolan is outstanding as Corless who overcame her unease about being in the spotlight to rally the outraged locals and push for an exhumation, refusing to meet with the visiting Pope when he refused to discuss the home, while the actors playing survivors who had been neglected and abused by the nuns as children(among them Ian McElhinney who was raised in the home, his mother refused permission to see him) are universally moving. Her intercut dreams of nuns and marching boots don’t comfortably sit with the otherwise straightforward narrative, but, directed by Frank Berry from a script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz based on a feature in the New York Times, it unfolds in resolutely unsentimental and unmelodramatic fashion as the incremental horror of what took place builds, climaxing with 2017 footage of Enda Kenny’s address to the Dail, deriding those who still believe single mothers are an abomination in the eyes of God and deserve to lose their children while the men bear no condemnation. If this doesn’t break your heart, you’re probably a member of the Roman Catholic clergy (Tue: Mockingbird)
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18)
Nia DaCosta taking over directing duties from Danny Boyle, the fourth part of Alex Garland’s dystopian post apocalypse zombie franchise picks up directly from the end of 28 Years Later, with Spike (Alfie Williams) confronted by the non-infected Satanic cult known as The Jimmys, inspired by Jimmy Savile with their blonde wigs and blue tracksuits, with its psychopathic leader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), who, with a Teletubbies fixation, claims to speak directly to Old Nick, his father, forcing him to fight and defeat one of his credulous ‘fingers’ as an initiation into the cult. In their twisted beliefs, they inflict his interpretation of ‘charity’ on their home invasion victims (characters returning from the earlier film for a clear Clockwork Orange nod) in horrifically brutal skin flaying ways, though not before one of them manages to dispatch the particularly sadistic Jimmima (Emma Laird).
It takes a while (and indeed the first half of the film is slow-going) to get round to reintroducing Dr Ian Kelson (an exuberantly unfettered Ralph Fiennes) who has created an ossuary memento mori monument to fallen humanity, the bone temple of the title. In the previous film, he encountered a smarter and stronger infected, an alpha he dubbed Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) and here, through a combination of drugs and kindness, he manages to reach past his zombie state and tap into the humanity still buried within, potentially suggesting the virus can be treated and contained.
Eventually paths will cross, with Lord Jimmy persuaded that Kelson, whose skin is orange on account of the iodine he’s taken to fight off the virus, is actually Old Nick, the cult gathering at the site of the temple where the two opposing forces meet and strike a deal of sorts, one which will involve Kelson pretending to be Satan incarnate as, in a mind-boggling scene, he dazzled and terrifies the followers dancing and singing along to Iron Maiden’s Number Of The Beast (with somewhat eclectic musical tastes, his collection also includes Duran Duran’s Girls On Film) before finally recognising Spike behind the wig and mask.
With Erin Kellyman as Jimmy Ink, a cult disciple who is more questioning and less submissive and proves a friend to Spike it builds to a suitably powerful and violent climax involving an upended crucifixion and a Christ-like sacrifice for humanity, Garland’s frequently deranged and bonkers screenplay entails Crystal and the atheist Kelson in a discussion about religion and the way it is manipulated by its followers while also exploring themes of morality and spirituality.
Aside from Samson yanking a head from its body and scenes involving brains-eating and several naked Rage infected figures, there’s surprisingly little zombie action here, the focus being very much on human conflict and savagery. To which end, DaCosta conjures a dark and visceral aesthetic that is more concerned with intellectual ideas than horror tropes. Not that there’s isn’t plenty of graphic violence but there’s some sly humour too (including Fiennes referencing Spinal Tap) as she navigates the complex web of menace and emotion within which her film’s suspended.
Gathering momentum and power as it heads into the final stretch, it ends with Jimmy Ink and Spike being chased by infected and observed by two characters (and it’s not hard to guess who one is) which, bringing things back to the first film, sets up the fifth and as yet undated and unnamed final chapter and presumably revealing what happened to the healthy baby to which Samson’s mate (whose body Kelson disposes of in an early sequence) gave birth in the previous instalment. (Sky/NOW).
Animals (15)
Both directed by and starring Ben Affleck alongside Kerry Washington, this may be nowhere near his best work behind or in front of the camera, but it’s still a serviceable thriller. Affleck is Mark Kimball, a former teacher and Gulf War veteran turned well-intentioned independent candidate in the Los Angeles mayoral race, who needs to win the Latino vote to secure victory. To which end, convinced by campaign manager Sam (Steven Yeun) and without telling wife Abbey (Washington) he commits his remaining life savings to fund an aggressive outreach.
Spanners are thrown into the works however when, on Halloween, he gets a call from an unknown number saying they’ve kidnapped his preteen son, Denny (Christopher Woodley) and, making him aware they’re watching the house, demanding $7 million by midnight or they’ll kill him. Admitting to Abbey he doesn’t have the money, facilitated by Sam, he’s forced to turn to a mysterious fixer known as Dayle (a suitably cold-faced white-suited Gillian Anderson) who’ll get him the cash in turn for a $1.4 million fee regardless of the outcome. With no other choice, he agrees to her terms. Which is when Denny arrives back home and they realise that, wearing identical costumes, the kidnapper has mistakenly abducted Hector (Jacon Estrada), the son of undocumented handyman Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez), who’s the lover of their nanny Cecilia (Adriana Paz).
Is he still prepared to pay the ransom for a boy he barely knows? Given a recording of his refusal that would sink his campaign, there seems little choice. However, Dayle having hinted she can have the kidnapper killed when he tries to collect the cash, what they now have to do is instigate delaying tactics until the morning, with Sam urging Mark to go ahead with a planned event addressing potential Latino voters.
It’s a fairly straightforward narrative that raises predictable moral choices, but the screenplay unnecessarily compounds this in revealing Abbey, frustrated at being sidelined by Mark’s political ambitions, has been having an affair (a one scene Ray Fisher), though this largely seems to be just an excuse for Affleck and Washington to shout at each other over who’s to blame. Likewise, Ramon sneaking out in a failed attempt to subdue the lookout just feels like padding, but does at least offer some credibility to the melodramatic third act in which a secret phone recording implicates Mark in the intended murder.
After the tense set-up, it’s all resolved within minutes, the reveal of the kidnapper’s identity and motive offering nothing before a coda that reframes what happened as a political spin.
Essentially, the second remake of Kurosawa’s High And Low after Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, its superficial political and racial commentary and ethical debate lack the nuances of both but as a timewaster thriller it’s worth a look. (Netflix)
Apex (15)
She may have had several stunt doubles, but Charlize Theron still gives a powerful physical performance in this survival prey vs predatory drama set in the Australian outback. Playing adrenaline junkie Saha, in the taut opening sequence she and husband Tommy (Eric Bana) are climbing Norway’s forbidding Troll Wall peak when a storm comes in and, she forced to cut the rope tying them together, an avalanche sends him to his death.
Cut to some months later as, holding Tommy’s lucky compass, she turns up at the fictitious Wandarra National Park on a pilgrimage of healing, and is warned by the ranger at the gas station that there’s been a string of disappearances, including families with young kids, in the region to where she’s headed. She’s then harassed by a pair of lascivious game hunters (Matt Whelan, Rob Carlton), ominously named Diesel and Ripper, before a third stranger, Ben (Taron Egerton with credible Aussie accent), intervenes, she asking him how to reach the Grand Isle Narrows. Given to possible routes she, naturally, chooses the hard but scenic way, starting out at Blackwater bay.
Arriving at night, she has another intimidating encounter with the hunters who are skinning kangaroo carcasses (a misdirection given they then vanish from the plot) and, in the morning sets out down the rapids by kayak, setting up camp only to awake in the morning to find her bag missing and, continuing down the river, eventually reaching the Narrows where she’s surprised to find Ben already there, explaining he lives in the area, where he makes the homemade jerky he supplies to local stores, and offering to share supplies – which, naturally, turn out to be the ones that were stolen. He then produces a crossbow and says she has until the song on the stereo ends to get a head start before he comes after her.
The feature debut by writer Jeremy Robbins and directed by Iceland Baltasar Kormákur, it’s firmly rooted in the same wilderness terror territory as things like Wolf Creek while also echoing Kormákur’s earlier thriller Beats, but with a two rather than four-legged predator. Once the chase begins, the film follows a fairly predictable course, embellished by a captured Sasha, chained to Ben, being taken to his man cave, discovering he’s a cannibalistic serial killer with ghoulish orthodontics and mummy issues that make Norman Bates seem well-adjusted and learning the grisly ingredients of his distinctive tasting jerky, building to a climax that moves from yet more fighting in the rapids to, she having broken his leg, a mirror of the tandem climb opening.
A virtual two-hander, while boasting some spectacular cinematography and wild water sequences, it’s basically standard B-movie fare with just a token subtext about grief, guilt and letting go, but Theron and Egerton deliver fully committed performances, even if he can be a tad over-manic, while Kormákur slowly builds the sense of dread before all hell breaks loose in the visceral climax. (Netflix)
Bugonia (15)
The fourth teaming of director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone, the title referring to an ancient Greek belief that bees spontaneously generate from the carcasses of dead oxen, adapted by The Menu screenwriter Will Tracy, this is a remake of 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! but with a gender switch for two of the characters. As such, anyone who’s seen the original will be aware of the last act twist – which here ventures into the realms of 60s TV sci fi cheesiness but, with its final scenes scored to Where Have All The Flowers Gone, still packs a chillingly numbing punch, a conspiracy thriller rooted in the premise that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, exercises a gripping cocktail of tense drama and black comedy.
Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the high profile power-dressing, subtly manipulative, coldly calculating CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith who’s abducted by bee-keeping conspiracy theorist eco-terrorist Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), who works at the company’s warehouse, and his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, himself autistic), who believes her to an Andromedan, part of an alien species that’s infiltrated the human race and is killing off the bees in keeping with Colony Collapse Disorder. Holding her captive in their basement, smearing her with antihistamine cream and shaving off her hair so she can’t communicate with the mothership, Teddy’s plan is to use her as a bargaining tool to force the aliens to leave Earth, giving her four days to admit the truth before the lunar eclipse allows her ship to enter the atmosphere undetected.
However, while clearly deranged and delusional, Teddy’s actions are also driven by a different motive in that his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), was a guinea pig for one of Auxolith’s drugs, leaving her comatose in a nearby hospital with Michelle covering things up. Initially vehemently refuting his alien claims but then deciding to play along, Michelle tries to turn things to her advantage, noting that the almost childlike Don, who, like Teddy’s has been injected with a “chemical castration” formula, seems uncomfortable with his cousin’s plans. During the torture (aptly set to Green Day’s Basket Case), Teddy, in full-on psychosis, becomes persuaded that she’s a member of the Andromedan royal family, and, out of respect, lays on assort of state dinner upstairs, only for taunting to see it end in a fight and a fork stabbing. Meanwhile, the police have launched a hunt and, adding another creepy layer, local sheriff Casey (Stavros Halkias) keeps coming round looking to make amends for having molested Teddy when he was his babysitter.
Things turn bloody with a suicide and a subsequent murder, before Michelle persuades Teddy his mother can be cured with anti-freeze, something that inevitably does not end well, she, playing to his fantasies and explaining that, after accidentally wiping out the dinosaurs, the experiment was designed by the Andromedans to help humans, which they created, evolve beyond their self-destructive nature.
Again rooted in themes of power struggle dynamics, class, entitlement and media manipulation, while more narratively straightforward than Lanthimos’s past two outings, it still runs the freak flag up the deadpan humour mast, gleefully allowing the cast to dive into its eccentricity and weirdness. Stone once more gives 110 percent to the character and narrative while Plemons, all lank hair and barely suppressed rage, is terrific, both engaging empathy and revulsion as you’re led to ask which truth is actually out there. (Sky/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. (Sky/NOW)
Cold Storage (15)
A B-movie escaped virus (here fungus) gross out comedy horror directed by Jonny Campbell from David Koepp’s adaptation of his own novel, it works on the premise that, in 1979, not all of the decommissioned Skylab burnt up on re-entry part of it landing in Western Australia, where a farmer built a makeshift museum around it. The film opens in 2005 with a frantic call about a mutated green, tendril-like fungus that’s escaped from the container, infecting everyone and making their bodies explode. Biochemist Dr. Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon) and bioterror operatives Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Leslie Manville) arrive to contain it, but Martins is infected and a military strike is called in to incinerate the entire area, the sample being taken to an underground cold storage vault at the Atchison Storage Facility in Kansas.
Fast forward and the vault has been sealed and the top floor’s now a self-storage unit where ex-con Travis (Joe Keary), aka Tea Cake, and veterinary student colleague Naomi (Georgia Campbell) are working the night shift, while their boss Griffin (Gavin Spokes) has cut a deal with a biker gang to steal a stash of high end TVs. Meanwhile, elderly client Ma Rooney (Vanessa Regrave) is holed up in her unit, intending to commit suicide (she will later resurface to join the fray). Hearing a beeping alarm, Travis and Naomi investigate and it turns out to be malfunction in the vault’s security systems. It goes without saying, that the fungus is poised to escape, necessitating the return of Quinn, who, when his old nemesis (Richard Brake) refuses to do anything, is covertly contacted by a military officer who calls herself Abigail, and reconnects with Trini to collect a dirty bomb device she has stored at her home so they can basically save the world.
It’s all gleefully silly with the fungus variously infecting a clutch of rats, a cat that skewers itself, a deer that explodes with copious gore, Naomi’s ex-boyfriend and, eventually the gang members while Travis and Naomi work with Quinn to destroy it. References to things like The Body Snatchers abound, there’s more twists than a knotted rope, the performances come with knowing winks, the splatter is plentiful and the dialogue is as cliched as you’d imagine, but for midnight movie trash it’s all rather fun. (Sky/NOW)
Crime 101 (15)
Adapted by writer-director Bart Laton from the Don Winslow novella, the 101 refers to the LA highway and the crime concerns a string of high end jewellery robberies along the route, the thief being Mike (Chris Hemsworth on terrific form) who leaves no traces and never harms anyone. On his trail but with no clues to follow is Lou Lubesnick (an understated Mark Ruffalo), a hangdog detective recently dumped by his long-term girlfriend (a cameoing Jennifer Jason Leigh) whose theory that it’s all the work of one man is dismissed by his fellow cops and superior who just want cases wrapped up. Mike literally works for Money (a grizzled Nick Nolte), who sets up the heists and takes his cut but, after a close call involving a jammed gun, Mike’s decided to call time, a decision compounded by having struck up a romance with Maya (Monica Barbaro), a music publicist who rear-ended his car and who is frustrated that she knows nothing about his background. Passing on a job he was doing for Money in Santa Barbara, considering it too risky, it’s carried out instead by motorbike-riding thug Ormon (Barry Keoghan who starred in Layton’s heist docu-drama American Animals), who, unlike Mike, has no compunctions about violence.
The net, however, is closing in with Lubesnick using DNA from a blood sample found in Mike’s abandoned car to uncover his real name and identity. Meanwhile there’s a plot intertwine involving Sharon Colvin (Halle Berry, feisty), an insurance broken for elite clients who’s pissed at being constantly passed over for partner and whom Mike tries to get onboard for a robbery involving a ton of cash, illegally important diamonds and his upcoming wedding at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the confidential details of which she has access to.
Inevitably summoning Michael Mann references, though this is more a study of characters adrift in a sea of corruption (Mike has issues about his line of work, Sharon about being a woman in a toxic man’s world and overshadowed by a younger rival, Lou with the department’s cover up of a shooting) than action movie, Layton still has a firm grip on the slowly building tension (even if there’s a couple of loose ends involving Money and Mike’s hacker) while the hotel room showdown by way of two characters engaged in deceiving each other while riffing on Steve McQueen and the chaotic car chases through LA (with its subtext scenes of homelessness and urban decay) get the pulse working overtime. After the Damon/Affleck Netflix thriller The Rip, this is shaping up to be a great year for 90s throwback crime thrillers. (Amazon Prime)
Dead Man’s Wire (15)
In 1977, behind with his mortgage payments for an Indianapolis property that planned to develop into an affordable shopping centre, refused time to make payments, and suspecting his broker, Richard O. Hall, and his father where conspiring to defraud him, with the bank foreclosing and they buying the land for below its market value (though there was no evidence to substantiate this), Tony Kiritsis, a paranoid geek with a dodgy tache, turned up at Hall’s Meridian office with a shotgun fitted out with a dead man’s wire to the trigger. This was affixed to Hall’s neck so that if he tried to escape or the police shot at Kiritsis, the gun would blow Hall’s head off, Kiritsis demanding a settlement and a public apology from Hall Senior as events played out over three days.
Very much in the same veinas Dog Day Afternoon (indeed Al Pacino plays Hall’s loathsome father who mocks his son for having Stockholm syndrome), Network and The Sugarland Express, following a documentary and a podcast, his story is now given a feature film treatment by Gus Van Sant and writer Austin Kolodney with Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis, Dacre Montgomery as Hall Junior and Colman Domingo as Fred Temple (based on WIBC-AM news director Fred Heckman), the local soul DJ (cue tracks by Roberta Flack, Barry White, Donna Summer and even Deodato’s Also Sprach Zarathustra) who Tony, and not the brightest spark he thinks he is, says is the only person he trusts and who serves as the film’s community representative and narrator.
The setting moving from Hall’s office to Tony’s shabby apartment, around which cops (many of whom were Tony’s acquaintances) and reporters (among them Myha’La as fictionalised twenty-something, Black local TV reporter Linda Page looking for a scoop), cluster, he enjoying his sudden fame but without any real idea of where his stunt is going. Indeed, things rather tail off following Hall’s release as the film tidies up what happened next, though there’s a sense of satisfaction at Meridian’s fate.
With a supporting cast that includes Neil Mulac as FBI hardhead Patrick Mullaney and Cary Elwes as the Indianapolis detective assigned to kill Tony, the film comes with a clear economic, political and cultural framework and labour and capital commentary that can’t but conjure thoughts of the 2008 subprime crisis while Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised pointedly plays over the end credits. (Sky/NOW)
Deadline (15)
Set but banned in Hong Kong for apparently national security concerns, director Kiwi Chow Kwun-wai delivers a provocative campus thriller that targets controlling authoritarian pressure cooker education systems where grades are all and students are driven to be hyper-competitive to achieve at all costs.
It’s set in the prestigious private En Shan High School where, run with military-like precision and unforms, an AI evaluation programme strictly monitors the students and teachers, including recording how much attention students pay in class. However, seven days before the all-important final exams, the school is flooded with posters warning that unless things change an unnamed student will commit suicide, the blowback threatening the faculty, overseen by out-of-his-depth Principal Kung (Anthony Wong) and exposing dark secrets and the use of mind-enhancing drugs to boost performance.
Chief among the core characters are Heng (Bai Run-yin) who is constantly bullied on account of his ADHD, head boy Jay Mo (Michael Chang) who initiates a No Student Suicide Contract campaign, Mimi Shao as the self-harming Ruoyan who’s on antidepressants and driven to be number one, and teachers Miss Tien (Allison Lin), who’s worried she’s falling short of delivering the help her students need, and Mr Gao (RD Huang), who fearful of being fired if his students don’t improve, gives Heng a textbook with highlighted questions. He’s confronted by Chun (a terrific Jimmy Lia), a rebel who prefers to tend the school garden than study, who accuses him on giving his pupils take the performance-enhancing Alza. And then there’s Peiching (Tai Ya Zhi) who, turned away by Tien, kills herself. Though she’s not the one who wrote the note.
Making use of a whodunnit structure, it delivers a scathing indictment of the education system and the society of which it is emblematic which prioritises measurable results and success over people and mental health, with the inevitable fall out and costs, though, conditioned perhaps, it also show the students themselves as being complicit in the system.
With its oppressive setting, constant tension (urine tests fuel the unrest), atmospheric use of light and colour, it’s a compelling work that raises awkward questions and should be compulsory viewing for all those who design, implement and are subject to the education system to which we are all bound. (Odeon Birmingham)
Digger (15)
A satirical eco black comedy about the excesses of extreme power, corporate greed and climate change as a result of the inability of humans to control the forces of nature, directed and co-written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, this stars a prosthetically transformed Tom Cruise as wealthy, powerful but balding and paunchy Southern oil tycoon Digger Rockwell who declares oil is the Earth’s mother’s milk and is more concerned about his dying white cat Maggie (a mechanical rather than real feline for pay off-gag at the end) than the environment When his company’s drilling in Greenland accidentally dislodges a glacier, sending it towards Europe with an inevitable tsunami and an escalating chain reaction of catastrophic events, he declares he’s the only one who can save humanity from the apocalyptic environmental disaster he’s himself created. However, some 30 minutes in, there’s a Brechtian reveal (winked at in the opening credits) that pulls the rug from under everything you’ve seen which (spoiler alert) reveals this is a rehearsal for a contemporary revival of a play called Fossil Fools. It’s a bold coup de theatre but it doesn’t undermine or invalidate the film’s eco message or the commentary on the illusory nature of art or its socio-political role.
With at least one scene that evokes the surreal nature of Dr Strangelove (along with Digger’s Slim Pickens-like Stetson), it’s a visually showy but, as captured in a knockout speech to a UN-like assembly, provocative comment about our unwillingness to give up our fossil fuel dependency. Despite praise for Cruise’s pointedly over the top shovel-brandishing (his grandad’s 1917 crude-discovering implement) performance, divisive reviews of the film as a whole have thrown a shadow over Cruise’s talked-up Best Actor win, though a nomination is guaranteed. Providing further fuel to the absurdist nature of it all are John Goodman as blowhard President of the United States with “asshole cancer” who, if nuking the icy mass fails, wants to be sure the US shoulders no responsibility, an underused Sandra Hüller as Digger’s green-energy entrepreneur half-sister and Jesse Plemons as the play’s producer. Riz Ahmed plays the only really grounded character as Ganesh, Digger’s scientific advisor who, his warnings dismissed by his employer as profit-threatening doom-mongering, is falling apart under the weight of all the bad news he’s charged with delivering. You can understand why some might feel misled and cheated, but, toweringly ambitious, cleverly constructed and visually striking, it’s something you should really dig into. (MAC)
Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight (15)
Adapted by first time director Embeth Davidz from part of Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of her childhood growing up in Rhodesia period to and during its transition to Zimbabwe, the title referring to an expression about things falling apart, with its limited release and lack of promotion, seems unlikely to draw more than a handful of punters. Which is a shame because, closer in tone and spirit to Chocolat than Out Of Africa, its easily one of the year’s best.
It’s 1980, on the eve of the election that brought Robert Mugabwe to power and saw the Black majority win back control of their own destiny, and also at the tail end of the terrorism that saw many white farmers and so-called Black collaborators, being murdered (the film doesn’t shrink from footage of atrocities). Herself born in South Africa, Davidtz plays Nicola Fuller, a horse-loving part-time policewoman married to soldier husband Tim (Rob van Vuuren) who tends the family farm (and sleeps with a machine gun) when he’s away on patrols. She has two daughters, awkward and insecure adolescent Vanessa (Anina Reed), who will at one point be sexually abused by her ‘uncle’, and the fiercely outgoing 8-year old tomboy Alexandra (Lexi Venter) or Bobo as she’s affectionately known. There were once two other children, guilt over the death of one of them weighing heavily on Bobo. To help on the farm, there’s two Black servants, the gruff Jacob (Fulami Shilubana) and Sarah (Zikhona Bali), who’s very much the nanny to the somewhat over-indulged Bobo, something she’s warned puts her in danger (compounding the images of armed patrols, hostile looks from local Blacks and scenes, shots through binoculars flashing in the distant hills are an early clue that things will turn nasty).
As the election night unfolds and the consequences are brought home, the alcoholic Nicola increasingly unravels. However, as with the book, the film is told and shot from Bobo’s perspective, soaking up everything she sees and hears and totally without a filter in what she says (such as how Africans don’t have last names), and who also provides the insightful and often amusing voice over and dialogue commentary (she speaks of her parents having sex as moving the furniture with their clothes off), talking of being afraid to go to the toilet at night lest a terrorist, riding her motorbike through the bush, smoking cigarettes and shooting bottles with her popgun. As such, Venter, who had never acted before, is a sensational find, her blonde hair matted, her face almost constantly smudged with dirt, her eyes darting, at once both vulnerable and a feral wild animal. In a just world, she’d be up there in the Best Actress nominees. With a soundtrack that includes South African artists Roger Whittaker and Clut and, inexplicably Chris de Burgh’s Patricia The Stripper, the film powerfully builds to a close and the end of the exile from Eden myth Sarah was telling Bobo. Do yourself a favour and go to the dogs. (Sky/NOW)
Enola Holmes 3 (12)
Helmed this time round by Adolescence director Philip Barantini, reunited with series scripter Jack Thorne, shorter than the two previous films, Millie Bobby Brown returns as Sherlock’s younger sister, picking up from Enola Holmes 2 as, now in her twenties, she agrees to marry her House of Lords lover Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), despite her brother (Henry Cavill) cautioning what a change of name might mean to her independence and identity. The wedding’s set to take place in Malta, where his father, serving as an officer during the British occupation, married his mother, with Sherlock invited to walk her down the aisle, though he’s also there working on a case. However, while Tewksbury’s waiting at the church, Enola, who’s been having doubts regarding how a Lady’s position in society will sit with her detective passions, is rushing to the ceremony in a carriage when she’s stopped by Dr Watson (Himesh Patel, getting more to do this time round) who tells her Sherlock’s gone missing, likely kidnapped (Cavill spends much of the film tied up in a cave).
Throwing marital plans on the back burner, she sets out to try and find him, initially following the British Army sergeant she saw him checking out earlier, who is shot before she can question him, his last words being ‘wrath’, a clue to add to the word Khost, a city in Afghanistan, Sherlock had scrawled on the mirror during his abduction. Matters are further complicated when her future mother-in-law (Hattie Morahan) is also kidnapped and a woman Enola’s following, believing she’s Adeline Rathe, as opposed to wrath, is also shot and killed.
It comes as little surprise, especially given the film’s prologue, that criminal mastermind Moriarty (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) is behind all this and, without revealing too much, the narrative unravels a colonialism-critiquing tale of dodgy dealings in the name of the British Empire, prejudice, a missing treasure of looted gold, and some hidden secrets regarding the Tewskesbury family.
Again having Enola break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience (though to a lesser extent), it also features Jason Watkins as Brigadier Sampson, Tewkesbury’s godfather and fellow officer friend of his late father, Joe Azzopardi as Mikiel Mizzi, part of the Malta liberation movement Partito Anti-Riformista, a last minute cameo return by Susan Wokoma as Enola’s mentor Edith, and, delightfully, the hugely entertaining return of Helena Bonham Carter as her on-the-run activist mother Eudoria.
The plot with all its misdirections, twist and turns and time outs for a couple of heart to hearts can get a bit knotted at times, echoing Eudoria’s observations that “A puzzle is always as mischievous as the setter” and “the answers we receive are rarely the answers we seek”, but it rarely stumbles in delivering action, wit, fun and another captivating turn from Brown, ending with a coda and a sunken galleon that suggests another game will soon be afoot. (Netflix)
Forgotten Island (PG)
Co-written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, the Dreamworks team behind Puss In Boots: The Final Wish, set in the 1990s Philippines, this is a hyper-active, dazzlingly colourful story of friendship with a rich Filipino folklore backdrop.
It opens with the young Jo (H.E.R.), an orphaned aspiring comic book artist tomboy, telling her class the story of the island of Nakali (meaning “forgotten” in Tagalog) and the dreaded Manananggal , a vampiric winged demon that can split her body in half . Mocked by one of her classmates for making it all up, she’s sent to the principal’s office after attacking him, where she meets the cooler headed aspiring scientist Raissa (Liza Soberano), who defended her, and invites her to meet her grandmother, Fatima (Dolly deLeon), who tells them about her travels to Nakali. Becoming best friends, they have matching bracelets with charms representing important moments in their lives. Years later, Fatima having passed, Raissa tells Jo, who’s working at a fast food restaurant (the last one she hasn’t been fired from), that, following her parents’ wishes, she moving to America to go to CalTech. At her farewell party, the girls sneak away to the beach where Jo discovers a magical sand dollar that serves as a portal to Nakali. Both entering, they wake up stranded there the next day with (shades of The Hangover) no memory of what happened, the dollar missing and Raissa discovering half her head’s been shaved and tattooed and she’s grown a pair of wings! These, it transpires, belong to Manang (Lea Salonga), a Manananggal, who really wants them back. Befriended by Raww (Dave Franco), a sort of weredog prone to going full canine whenever there’s a stick around, they’re taken to meet the agoraphobic cave-dwelling Batiba (Jenny Slate) who offers to send them home, but demands their bracelets and accompanying memories in exchange.
Refusing, they set out to find the Jewel of the Sea sand dollar portal, which, they’re told by Bungi, (Manny Jacinto), a blue giant three-eyed mummy’s boy baby demon, was stolen by Truffle Wuffle (Ronny Chieng), the king of the Duwendes (whatever you do, never call them cute), leading them in turn to Merhman (Kevin McCann) who, when rehydrated, presents as a self-involved, merman prince with pink starfish nipples and claims the dollar is in his kingdom. As the story unfolds, pursued by the Duwendes, we learn how Raissa came by Manang’s wings after saving a Kapre village and that not everyone has been telling them the truth.
With animation within the animation, echoing Spider-Verse, it’s a chaotic, freewheeling and exhausting affair that’s never as random as it might seem, drawing you into the characters and their journeys with surprises and developments that often come with a hefty emotional punch about sisterhood, the enduring nature of real friendship and the role of memories in nourishing our lives. Scary and funny in equal measure, with more edginess and light profanity than is usual for such family fare. Just don’t ask about ‘fire-rrhea’. An early contender for next year’s animation Oscar, it’s a blast. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
Frankenstein (15)
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)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (15)
Seated in a Los Angeles diner, the customers are bemused when, at 10.10pm, a bizarrely garbed bearded and bedraggled unnamed man (Sam Rockwell in full tilt manic) wearing a plastic coat festooned with wires strides in announcing he’s from the future and needs volunteers to save the world. He just doesn’t know the right combination. Apparently. In Groundhog Day manner, this is his 117th attempt to get it right. Believing he’s telling the truth Susan (Juno Temple) and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) volunteer, while he coerces Scott (Asim Chaudry), Bob (Daniel Barnett), Marie (Georgia Goodman), Mark (Michael Peña) and his girlfriend Janet (Zazie Beetz) to join them. Then the cops turn up and, given the various options available, it ends with Bob quickly departing the plot while the others escape through a basement tunnel Susan somehow knows exists.
Working in full on gonzo mode, director Gore Verbinski and writer Matthew Robinson, then put the core narrative on the back burner while three backstories take the stage, Susan, whose son was a high school shooting victim and is resurrected as a clone (paid for by the government), but with a different personality, and is given an alternate AI that can revive the dead virtually; Mark, a substitute teacher at Janet’s school, who is pursued by zombified students after touching one of their phones; and Ingrid who, works as a kiddies’ party princess and has nosebleeds caused by an allergic reaction to wi-fi and cellphones, and whose partner Tim dumped her to go and live in a virtual reality.
Their stories intersect to bring them together for the mission which entails finding a nine-year-old boy who is about to create an AI that will take over the world and introducing a security protocol to ensure the AI “likes people”. To add to the already barking narrative, we learn the man comes from a sunless post-apocalyptic future where the obsession with virtual reality led to real world resources running out and was raised by his mother in a bunker, blaming himself for her being killed by a drone. Then there’s a pair of men wearing animal masks who are trying to kill them, the man says, from previous attempts, they will always be attacked but never in the same way, and a home invasion by zombie teenagers, and another depletion in the ranks before finally making it to the target house where the boy (who turns out to be a clone) is tapping away on his keyboard as they attempt to plug in the rebooting protocol while being attacked by AI tendrils. And if that all doesn’t blow your mind, let me mention the giant mutant cat.
A madcap sci fi satire warning about the dangers of AI removing our humanity, smartphone obsession, misguided technology and the way social issues are (mis)handled, there’s shades of 12 Monkeys and Brazil in the mix, but mostly this is head-spinningly original even when it wigs out into ever more unpredictable haphazard eccentricity. You’ll have fun, and probably won’t die. (Amazon Prime)
Hamlet (15)
Directed by Aneil Karia and written by Michael Lesslie this is based on and pruned down (no Yorick) from Shakespeare’s tragedy rather than a straight translation to the screen. As such, several liberties are taken with the text, structure and characters, the more things in heaven and earth speech, for example, being directed at Ophelia rather than Horatio. Indeed, Horatio is entirely absent from this interpretation, which is set in the South Asian community in contemporary London with Riz Ahmed in the title role.
It opens with him returned home for the funeral of his father (Avijit Dutt), the CEO of Elsinore, a property development empire, and the ritual washing of his corpse, and shocked to learn his mother, Getrude (Sheeba Chaddha), is set to marry her brother-in-law, Claudius (Art Malik), Hamlet’s patently unsavoury uncle, who has taken over the business. Also there for the Hindu funeral and wedding are Polonius (Tim Spall), Claudius’s fixer, and his son Laertes (Joe Alwyn), Hamlet’s best friend, and daughter Ophelia (Morfydd Clark), his sometime girlfriend.
A visitation by his father’s ghost (which it’s suggested is a ketamine hallucination) saying he was murdered sets the plot in motion, as, feigning madness (though there’s a strong suggestion he lost his mirth a while back|), Hamlet sets out on revenge and a plan to confirm Claudius’s guilt by having a troupe of travelling players enact a play at the wedding involving a king’s poisoning. Events largely follow the original with Hamlet stabbing Polonius, a grief ridden Ophelia drowning herself and Laertes seeking revenge, all building up to the body count climax which involves poisoned wine but no duel. Along the way, however, Lesslie transposes scenes and dialogue and totally reimagines the character of Fortinbras, who here, by way of social commentary, is the collective name for a tent city of those dispossessed by Elsinore, the leader of which saves Hamlet from being killed in a construction site reworking of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scenario. Shot by Stuart Bentley on digital video using jittery handheld camera, it takes in banging night clubs, ceremonial dhol drums, traditional dances and an array of Indian rituals and details, the screenplay and Lesslie’s authentic sounding new dialogue (though the references to kings and lords feel anachronistic here), largely keeping the iambic pentameter, giving it an urgency and mining the emotional intensity. And intensity is the keyword to Ahmed’s performance, often shot in stark close-up, as he unravels in his obsessiveness (the monologues are like feverish infernos, but at times the words are lost in the sound mix)), an inspired touch being having him deliver the to be or not to be speech while racing through the city’s nighttime streets in his car. Never less than claustrophobically atmospheric, it’s incredibly violent and makes a point of stressing Shakespeare’s word play in the cunt-ry matters line, and probably not ideal for school trips by A-level students, Somewhat shaky mid-way, it builds to a brutally desolate finale in which, while the line itself is never spoken, the rest is silence. (Sky/NOW)
Heart Of The Beast (12A)
In the opening sequence, following a week later scene to which it will return, retired Special Forces officer James Belmont (Brad Pitt) is piloting his a small plane through the Alaska mountains (but shot in New Zealand) alongside Odin, the equally battle-scarred (titanium teeth, prosthetic leg, PTSD nightmares) German Shepherd who he raised from a puppy and has been his combat dog through many missions. Now he’s just looking for some peace and quiet in nature. Pitching camp on a shore with the stars and a cooler of Belgian ale for company, catching salmon and brewing coffee, it’s idyllic. The solitude is briefly broken that night by the arrival of a former gold prospector (a heavily bearded superfluous J.K. Simmons) who shares a beer and rows off before dawn.
With a storm coming in, James and Odin take off only for him to suffer a heart-attack, sending the plane crashing into the waters, the latter dragging his master to safety. From this point, 58 miles from the nearest road, looking to find their way back to civilisation and pitching tent as they go, it becomes a wilderness survival movie as writer Cameron Alexander and director David Ayer (with whom Pitt worked on Fury) throw in pretty much every predator going (only snakes and gators missing) in a series of incidents that invariably wind up with Odin licking James’ face or he patting the dog’s head. And a couple more mini heart-attacks too.
There’s a tense moment as they have to navigate fallen trees over a ravine with the river rushing far below, but generally this doesn’t really offer much in the way of drama or suspense (there some fuzzy flashbacks to battle scenes) and, while it works hard to capture the mutual bond between man and dog without oozing Marley & Me sentimentality, it never really sparks the emotions it seeks to evoke. It’s not helped either by how Odin (played by Uber and his sons), while an impressive performer, lacks the expressiveness and range that earned Uggi in The Artist a Palm Dog at Cannes.
Ending where it began with Anna Lambe stopping her truck on the road as she’s faced with Odin, it’s strives for poignancy but only really leaves to pondering how quickly loyalty and allegiances can be transferred. Pitt is mostly solid but other than physicality the film doesn’t ask a great deal of him and while watchable enough, it lacks the heart of its title. Disappointing. (Cineworld NEC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Her Private Hell (18)
Writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn could never be accused of subtlety, but his latest also takes coherence off the table. Set in some mist-shrouded futuristic city, actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher) invited her new influencer co-star Hunter (Kristine Froseth) to share the suite when her travel arrangements are disrupted by the mist. Elle, who has a strained relationship with her stepmother and former bestie Dominique (Havana Rose Lui)), is making a film with her lecherous father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scoot), a Barbarella-ish sci fi adaptation of a sapphic graphic novel called Candyfloss, which involves she and other women in the cast being fitted with costumes by sinister dressmakers Ms S (Aoi Yomada) and Ms T (Shioli Kitsuna), and which she hopes will bring her and her father closer. However, having told the women about the legend of the Leatherman, a demonic murderer with diamond-encrusted gloves (S and T being his shape-shifting accomplices), who appears with the mist and can only be killed by cutting off his hands, he then departs, leaving her a golden hatchet as birthday gift, with Elle and Hunter witnessing the Leatherman rip out a neighbour’s chest and throw her through a window. At which point, the film introduces Private K (an expressionless Charles Melton), an American G.I. once stationed in Japan, who’s hunting the Leatherman convinced he was behind the disappearance of his daughter, and, as K’s drawn into a crystalline realm resembling the Candyfloss set, it just gets even more incomprehensibly barking mad. Oh, and there’s yakuza too.
To call the performances mannered would be an understatement, the almost all-female cast delivering the dialogue with a sort of transfixed bemusement as to what’s going on, leaving this as pretty much all dazzling Day-Glo style and bloody violence impenetrable substance, making David Lynch’s most bizarre excesses seem straightforward. Devoid of tension or humour (other than perhaps intentional camp), it’s a laborious, pretentious ordeal that only the most fervent Refn fan could possibly sit through, even they might find it a push. ( From Sun: MAC)
The History Of Sound (15)
When America becomes involved in WWI, David is drafted (“Write. Send chocolate. Don’t die” says Lionel) and, when the conservatory closes, Lionel, who has poor eyesight, returns to Kentucky to tend to the family farm after his father’s (Raphael Sbarge) death. The pair reunited in 1919, when David returns from Europe and invited Lionel to join him on a commission to travel across Maine, camping in tents, collecting rural folk songs and recording them on wax cylinders (including a visit to an island where ex-slaves and Irish immigrants are facing eviction) before again parting ways, Lionel’s letters going unanswered. Things shift to 1923 with Lionel now living in Rome with a young cellist lover (Alessandro Bedetti),but, unhappy at singing in the local choir, taking up a job as a conductor at the University of Oxford where he briefly becomes involved with student socialite Clarissa Roux (Emma Canning) before his mother’s (Molly Price) illness forces a return to America and a trip to Maine and some unexpected revelations as to what happened to David (including a remarried wife, Belle, strikingly played by Hadley Robinson) as he seeks to discover what happened to those wax cylinder recordings, the film concluding in 1980 with Lionel, now an ethnomusicologist (and played by Chris Cooper), receiving a package that contains a piercingly poignant message from the past.
Given the time when the film is set, surprisingly there’s almost nothing about the risks their forbidden love would have posed, any romantic setbacks coming from themselves, both very much closeted, rather than society. Taken at a measured pace and anchored in the strong central performances, though it falters when O’Connor is offscreen and the narrative focus shifts, and with sparse renditions of songs such as The Unquiet Grave, All Is Well, Silver Dagger, The Snow It Melts The Soonest and Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies, many arranged and/or performed by Sam Amidon (though it ends to Joy Division’s Atmosphere), it’s a worthy addition to the queer cinema canon. (Sky/NOW)
Hoppers (U)
Following the underwhelming Elio, Pixar is relatively back on form with a family friendly film that puts a new spin on the whole anthropomorphised talking animals genre. It opens though with the rebellious young Asian-American Mabel Tanaka (Lila Liu) embarking on a one-girl animal liberation mission at her school before her mother drops other off with her park ranger grandma (Karen Huie) who, seated together on a rock overlooking the glade, teaches her about finding calm and serenity in the beauty of nature because “It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big”.
Years later, however, grandma having passed, that beauty is soon threatened by a plan by Beaverton’s up for re-election Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm, developing different personality levels as the narrative progresses) to blow up the beaver dam and drain the glade in order to build a concrete highway overpass, displacing its many creatures in the process. And so Mabel (Piper Curda), now a 19-year-old college student, embarks on a eco-activist mission, although her attempt to get the community to sign her petition falls on deaf ears. Her activism means she’s neglecting her studies, annoying biology professor, Dr. Fairfax (Kathy Najimy) who, she discovers has invented a technology called ‘hopping’ which enables humans to transfer their consciousness into a robotic creature, enabling them to talk to the animals. Hijacking a robot beaver, Mabel ends up in the glade where the animals believe her to be a real beaver, grumpy bear Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor) and dopey beaver Loaf (Eduardo Franco), who she saves from becoming the former’s lunch, take her to meet King George (Bobby Moynihan), the almost hippie-like head beaver of the communal Superlodge with its ‘pond rules’ and discovers that Jerry has installed noise-emitting artificial trees which have driven the animals away. Destroying them, she and George bond over their backgrounds and ideals, and the animals gradually begin to repopulate the glade, all of which only further fuels Jerry’s efforts, leading George to summon a meeting of the Animal Council involving the laid back Amphibian (Steve Purcell, frog), self-important Fish (Ego Nwodin), slow-witted Reptile (Nichole Sakura as the three snake sisters), bad tempered Bird (Isiah Whitlock Jr, goose) and Insect (Meryl Streep relishing her role as a malevolent butterfly) rulers. Unfortunately, her accidentally killing the Queen who’s declared Jerry must be squished, makes Mabel and George targets by her vengeful and power-crazed son Titus (Dave Franco) and the other council members alongside Jerry, one attempt involving him being divebombed in a hair-raising mountain car chase by an apex predator shark named Diane (Vanessa Bayer). With Mabel now seeking to protect her former nemesis, this all leads the Council forcing Fairfax and her team (Aparna Nancherla, Sam Richardson) to build a robot Jerry for Titus to inhabit in his own single-minded agenda for the glade and the local humans.
Directed by Daniel Chong and written by Jesse Andrews, it carries a clear message about the need to respect the natural world and its inhabitants, work for community safety and protect the vulnerable, it manages to be both simultaneously sweet and red in tooth and claw (the certificate is a tad generous perhaps), in what’s to all intents and purposes a beaver version of Avatar, though a great deal more fun. (Disney+)
Insidious: Out Of The Further (15)
Feeling increasingly that the franchise simply exists to keep Lin Shaye in work, written and directed by Jacob Chase, this is the sixth instalment and, on the plus side, doesn’t star one-dimensional carboard cut-out Patrick Wilson but does follow the familiar narrative of people being tormented by demonic spirits from the dream space dimension called The Further. This time round, set a few weeks after The Red Door, the protagonist is single mother dental hygienist Gemma (Amelia Eve), thereby setting up some scary body horror stuff for anyone with an aversion to dentist chairs and drills. One of her patients, an old man (Lester (Joseph Lopez. presents with a lot more than rotting teeth, attacks her and tears out strands of her hair while she’s scraping slime from his mouth, and turns out to be Lester, the chief of three demons, the other two being old hags, wandering the neighbourhood and entering the house she shares with her nine-year-old daughter, Maya (Island Austin). It’s worth mentioning that, as seen in the prologue, the same house was where her younger self witnessed her emotionally absent mother’s (Laura Gordon). brutal suicide and supernatural happenings. Twenty years on, given she’s experiencing terrifying dreams, understandably, her cop boyfriend (Brandon Perea) reckons she should sell up and move on. The problem being that, in a departure from the other films, Gemma has the power to enter The Further, something cult leader Cyrus (Sam Spruell) seeks to use to bring back the demons that attach themselves to her.
In its favour, it’s marginally better and more inventive than its recent predecessors, the horrors including turning Maya’s crawlspace into a Backrooms-like claustrophobic maze, but the resurfacing of Elise (Shaye), now a ghost communicating via tattoo artist and medium Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) who helps people like Gemma escape The Further, here mainly headed by chief demon quickly puts in back on the same tired going through the motions path with an array of dodgy special effects. There’s some moments of humour, such as Gemma using fruit segments to illustrate The Further to Nick, and the early stages are actually quite scary, but by the time it reaches the sense-challenging end you can’t help feeling the filmmakers have got as bored with it as the audience will undoubtedly be. (Vue)
Kiss Of The Spider Woman (15)
Set in 1975 in an Argentinean prison, Manuel Puig’s 70s novel was adapted as a stage play in 1983 and then turned into a 1985 film, set in Brazil, starring Raul Julia and William Hurt, subsequently becoming an award-winning stage musical in 1992 with the narrative now set in 1983 in the run up to the collapse of Argentina’s military junta and now returns to the screen directed by Bill Condon and produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. In all instances the core plot remains the same, Luis Molina (queer actor Tonatiuh), here a gay window dresser convicted of public indecency for same-sex acts and who identifies as a woman, shares a cell with Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna), a Marxist political dissident, and, in order to get his parole, has been charged by the warden with obtaining information, cunningly leveraging his sick mother as a ploy to get groceries.
Though Valentin initially baulks at Molina’s flamboyance and political indifference, the pair form a bond as the latter regales him with nightly retellings of her favourite film, the titular Hollywood musical starring her idol Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez). The novel features six different films, but that’s been pared down here to the film within film that Molina recounts, a love story between fashion mag publisher Aurora (Lopez, all blonde and red lipstick) and famous photographer Armando (Luna), with the characters recast by Molina into his dream versions with Tonatiuh playing Aurora’s gay assistant and best friend Kendall Nesbitt. The trio travel to Aurora and Armando’s home village, where they encounter the gangster Johnny Desiderio (Tony Dovaloni), who ends up looking to kill Armando, while Aurora has to deny her love in order to save him from the cursed kiss of the Spider Woman (Lopez), who protects the village in exchange for the sacrifice of a native woman’s lover. Then there’s Molina’s fantasies within fantasy that have her sharing scenes with her movie idol, all of which are regularly punctuated by the stark, coldly lit prison cell realities as she and Valentin slowly fall in love, the former gifting him her red scarf as a token and protecting him when he’s poisoned and tortured by the authorities. Eventually paroled, Molina meets her fate when carrying out a mission for Valentin, culminating in another of the film’s many colourful and lavish musical set pieces (nodding to a string of famous Hollywood musicals, including Cat Women, a keynote in Puig’s novel) with songs by Cabaret and Chicago duo John Kander and Fred Ebb.
After some iffy action movies, returning to her song and dance metier Lopez is on terrific form, though both Luna and Tonatiuh snap at her heels for the acting honours and, while the film somewhat downplays its trans identity (Sky/NOW)
Leviticus (15)
Opening with a prologue in which gay life guard Marnie (Tyallah Bullock) is attacked by an unseen assailant while engaged in sex in a public pool shower, set in Australia, the feature debut by writer-director Adrian Chiarella is a queer social horror that takes its title from the Old Testament book that religious conservatives cite as evidence of the divine prohibition of homosexuality.
Living in a drab rural Victoria town with a strict evangelical community, teenagers Naim Reid (Joe Bird) and the more outgoing, risk-taking Ryan Whelan (Stacy Clausen) are secret lovers, the former having moved there on an account of his mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) seeking some sense of order. However, when Naim sees Ryan kissing Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), the son of the town’s pastor, Rob (Ewan Leslie), he angrily outs them both. As a result his parents call in a deliverance healer (Nicholas Hope) to exorcise their homosexual desire, a ritual that causes Ryan and Hunter to convulse, vomit and scream, leading a withdrawn Ryan to subsequently give Naim the cold shoulder.
Things take a dark turn when he sees Ryan apparently talking to empty air and taking photo booth pictures (printed out with a speed that defies reality) of him kissing an invisible figure, pulling open to the curtain to see him being strangled by an unseen force. The horror unfolds in a narrative that has the demonic force taking the likeness of those they love, meaning neither can trust who they think they’re with or indeed anyone around the. It gets bloodier when Hunter is bloodily killed and decapitated, Naim disclosing his relationship with Ryan to a detective (Zahra Newman) who, in turn, tells his mother who, looking to save him from persecution also calls in the exorcist. Meanwhile, blaming Ryan and Naim for her brother’s death and her father’s abandonment of the family, Hunter’s sister Izzie (Davida McKenzie), plots her own revenge, revealing that it was Naim who outed him.
An inspired and genuinely scary horror about the implacability of evil (“It comes for you when you’re alone. Nothing will make it stop” says a girl who also underwent the ritual), partly influenced by It Follows, it’s a literal case of fatal attraction as it explores what it means to be demonised, here by homophobia, which is the real demon, unleashed in the exorcism, not the homosexuality, but also a offers be true to who you are message and a solidarity in a somewhat simplistic love conquers all resolution. The last act somewhat runs out of steam after everything that’s gone before, but, like Obsession, this gives the horror genre a real shot in the arm. (Sat-Mon: MAC)
Masters Of The Universe (12A)
Starting life as a Mattel toy figure in 1982, followed almost immediately by a comic book series, and, in 1983 an animated TV series, the franchise was effectively killed off with the irredeemably awful 1987 live action feature film starring Dolph Lundgren. Now almost 40 years later, it’s being revived and rebooted by Bumblebee director Travis Knight. And it’s an absolute joy.
Things open in Eternia and Castle Grayskull where young Prince Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), the son of King Randor (James Purefoy) and (formerly of Earth) Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley), is getting combat training to “be a man” under Duncan – aka Randor’s general Man-At-Arms (Idris Elba) – when the planet is invaded by the skull-faced, blue-skinned evil Skeletor (Jared Leo), aided by his personal sorceress Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie), Duncan’s defeated by the cyborg Trap-Jaw (Sam C. Wilson) and the King and Queen captured. However, Adam, thanks to The Sorceress (Morena Baccarin), the guardian of Castle Grayskull, is sent to Earth along with the Sword of Power, which he unfortunately loses on his arrival.
Fast forward 15 years, and the sweet, mild-mannered Adam Glenn (Nicholas Galitzine) is working in HR with a He/Him nameplate, getting grief from his boss (Sasheer Zamata) for his constant obsession about trying to find the sword. But, thanks to a comic shop nerd, he eventually does, only to be attacked by a beast from Eternia and is rescued by his childhood friend and Duncan’s daughter Teela (Camila Mendes) who whisks him back to Eternia, which is suffering under Skeletor’s rule, reuniting him with characters he remembers from his youth such as Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang), Mekaneck (James Wilkinson) and Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) as well as Duncan who’s now become a pathetic drunk.
Skeletor’s forces again tracking them down, things really take off when this motley crew, along with Roboto (voiced by Kristen Wiig), a domestic robot fed up of cleaning floor, come together to take on Skeletor and Adam finally calls on and unleashes the power of the sword, transforming him into a ripped super strong hero clad only in a leather girdle and lionskin as he embraces his true self and destiny.
Their fortunes variously rise and fall as the film progresses, but while over two hours, it never feels remotely overlong, packed with plenty of action sequences, a couple of redemptive arcs, a father-daughter reconnection, the eventual appearance of talking tiger Cringer – subsequently Battle Cat, and that long-awaited He-Man proclamation. In similar manner to Guardians Of The Galaxy, it knowingly leans into its silliness without ever being smugly wink wink about it, and is peppered with nudge nude homoerotic innuendo about fisting and giving head with at one point Skeletor(Leto gloriously camping it up with English accent and villain cackling) telling Adam he wants to get his hands on “‘big, long sword dangling between your glorious thighs’. There’s also some teased sexual frisson between Adam and Teela, Lundgren puts in an amusing knowing cameo accusing Galitzine of stealing his spot and Brian May provides the Sword of Power guitar music. None of this would work though without the quality of the performances, the cast never sending themselves up but always with a sparkle in their eyes at being in on the joke. Mendes makes an impressive warrior woman with daddy issues, Elba is a sturdily reliable as ever, Leto seals every scene he’s in and, at times reminiscent of the young Brendan Fraser, and a disarmingly self-aware adorable Galitzin looks perfect in the role and there’s three credits scenes setting up the sequel, the final one briefly introducing He-Man’s sister, She-Ra. Given the dated franchise, expectations were low but this really is one of the most fun films of the year. (Amazon Prime)
Matchbox: The Movie (12)
The latest to base a film on a familiar toy brand (a Hot Wheels and Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots are forthcoming), this is another generic nut and bolds race against the clock good guys vs bad guys adventure movie with the connection to the tiny cars simply how the central characters were collectors as kids (though Bill Camp’s garage owner Smalley does get to explain why the models were so named), with the story’s hero bottling out of giving the girl he loved the super rare vehicle she coveted.
Fast forward twenty years and he, Sean (John Cena), is now an indominatable secret agent recovering a nuke out in the Sahara and delivering it to a CIA contact. Job done, his boss Helen (Danai Gurira) advises him to lie low for a while. Instead, hearing of Smalley’s death, he returns home to Ohio to pay his respects and reconnects with the old gang, plane-phobic contractor Crosby (Sam Richardson), his eye in the sky wife Charmaine (Teyonah Parris), gay science teacher Ted (Arnesto Castro) and speed demon ambulance driver Aimee (Jessica Biel), the aforementioned unconsummated crush.
However, it turns out the bomb never reached its intended destination, , the CIA assuming he stole it, inevitably gathering them all up like some Mission Impossible wannabees in a pursuit from Morocco to Bucharest and Budapest with CIA chief Mosier (Corey Stoll, arms dealer Mustafa (Randeep Hooda), Helen and her henchman (Daniel Bernhardt) variously chasing, capturing and shooting at them along the way as they variously dress up in posh togs to visit a casino and call in help from facilitator Robbie (Golshifteh Farahani) and Russian spy Grigor (Kristofer Hivju) along the way.
It’s efficiently acted, with each member of the team getting their moment to shine (Castro enjoyably finding his inner kick ass) in the various fights and vehicle chases, while Cena can do this stuff in his sleep stuntman turned director Sam Hargrave going through the action tick boxes to undemanding but watchable effect, even if two hours is rather pushing the patience. (Apple TV)
Nurenberg (15)
The trial of high ranking Germans complicit in the horrors of the Holocaust was formerly dramatised in 1961’s Judgement At Nuremberg, but, directed by Stanley Kramer, the central focus was on respected jurist and legal scholar Ernst Janning, Here, in his gripping sophomore outing, a psychological thriller of sorts, his first film in 10 years, director and screenwriter James Vanderbilt has drawn on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist and the relationship between American army shrink Douglas Kelly (Rami Malek), who was brough into evaluate the mental state of the prisoners, and Hitler’s Reichsmarschall, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe on towering peak form), the highest-ranking surviving Nazi, who didn’t even figure in Kramer’s film, here first introduced imperiously surrendering to American troops and ordering them to carry his luggage.
The film follows the mechanism that brought the courtroom and trial into being, many of the higher ups just wanting to line the prisoners up against and wall and shoot them rather than affording them a propaganda platform, with Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) insisting the Allies should be better than their enemies and that they have their day in court, creating the concept of crimes against humanity in the process. There’s some interesting moral murkiness too, Kelley seeing an opportunity to make his name writing a book about his patients while, playing devil’s advocate, Göring argues that bombing Hiroshima and carpet bombing of German cities were as much war crimes as anything he and his fellow defendants, among them naval commander Karl Dönitz, propagandist Julius Streicher, labour leader Robert Ley and Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess (who tried to fake amnesia about the whole thing, are accused of.
While there are some dramatic inventions, the film is mostly true to the facts and includes numbingly horrific real footage of the concentration camp victims as part of the court proceedings, Vanderbilt also elaborating on the poignantly tragic real life backstory of Kelley’s translator Howie Triest (Leo Woodall), including how Kelley and Göring became essentially the film’s Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, the former carrying letters to and from his wife and daughter in hiding. And, while it may seem like a narrative flourish, British prosector David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E. Grant) really did turn the tables on Göring when, while having admitted he set up the concentration camps as forced labour but blaming Himmler for the exterminations, arguing that the Final Solution was a mistranslation of total solution, seemed to have crushed Jackson’s case, he goaded him into condemning himself through loyalty to Hitler.
There’s some solid support work from John Slattery as Burton C. Andrus, the Commander of the Nuremberg prison, and Colin Hanks as the shrink brought in to give a second opinion when it’s felly Kelley’s compromised, and Shannon is excellent as Nelson, constantly being outmanoeuvred by his prime accused and undermined by his superiors. However, the film’s beating heart is the psychological cat and mouse therapy sessions between its narcissistic bromance couple, Kelley with his internal struggles and the fiercely self-confident, quietly spoken and assured Göring (dramatically Crowe has the upper hand), insisting he’s never going to be hanged (in fact, he committed suicide on the night he was due to be executed, though whether he managed to do so by borrowing a palming magic trick Kelley showed him is uncertain).
Following the verdicts and the harrowing execution scenes, the film moves forward to a shamed and drunk Kelley trying to promote his book and, the film moving from historical observation to contemporary commentary, arguing that the crimes that were prosecuted remain a present danger as history never learns from itself, the talk of deportations and persecution ringing a very clear bell about the nature and actions of current American administration and, as Weist says earlier, the complicity of a nation that lets it happen. Never feeling its two and a half hours, it compels from start to finish. (Sky/NOW)
Best Film and Director Oscar winner, following 2014’s Inherent Vice, this is the second Paul Thoms Anderrson film to be influenced by a Thomas Pynchon novel, namely 1990’s political allegory Vineland about a former 60s radical who, twenty years later, now spends his days drinking and smoking. Working from this basic premise, Anderson has expanded things considerably for a mix of comedy, action and drama that runs for over two and a half hours.
Set in a fascist America where police and the military have become fused, it opens with insurgency guerilla group French 75 (actually a cocktail made from gin, champagne, lemon juice and sugar) which includes Junglepussy (rapper Shayna McHayle), Mae West (Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim), badass Deandra (Regina Hall) and cerebral Howard (Paul Grimstad) aka Billy Goat, and led by the uncompromising Perfidia Beverly Hills (R&B star Teyana Taylor) and her explosives expert lover Bob Ferguson (Leonardo Di Caprio), nicknamed Ghetto Pat, liberating a bunch of Mexican immigrants from a San Diego holding centre where she captures and sexually humiliates Captain Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a military creep who’s turned on by Black women. Despite his racist views, he subsequently has sex with her, though he’s in the submissive position, and several bombing and bank robbery montages later, a very pregnant Perfidia (the image of her spraying round from her Uzi is unforgettable) is captured by Lockjaw, strongarmed into selling out her fellow activists, goes underground in a witness protection programme he arranges but escapes to Mexico.
Fast forward 16 years to the strains of Steely Dan’s Dirty Work, and Bob, who got out of the game when their daughter was born, now slobs around in a plaid bathrobe and a beanie, drinking, taking drugs and playing a tough love daddy (no phones, no parties) to the teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) who believes her mother died a hero to the cause. At which point, Lockjaw re-enters their lives. Desperate to become a member of the Christian right white supremacists cabal, Christmas Adventurers Club (Tony Golwyn among the leaders), he’s told them he’s never had carnal relations with a woman of colour. Which means eliminating the incriminating evidence that Willa represents. To which end, sending the militia to Baktan Cross, rounding up migrants as a pretext for finding Bob and Willa, the film basically becomes a catch and rescue chase movie by the two dysfunctional fathers, one from the left, one from the right, with the abducted Willa at the centre, her karate Sensei (Benicio Del Toro), who happens to run an immigrant underground railway, joining forces with Bob.
The narrative’s packed with car chases (the final act involving a three car roller coaster across the desert highway), betrayals, shoot-outs, ICE-like raids (the film was made before Trump returned to power but carries a political immediacy) and locations that include a convent of radical nuns. Scored to nerve lacerating effect by Jonny Greenwood, there’s plenty of dramatic and emotional tensions but equally Anderson laces things with absurdist comedy, notably in a telephone exchange between Bob, who’s trying to find the group’s rendezvous, and a by the book operative who insists he gives him a password Bob’s weed-fogged brain’s long since forgotten.
As a befuddled flawed but very humanised father DiCaprio, gives his best turn since The Revenant while Penn, with weathered features, menacing steely scowl and a semi-limping gait deservedly won Best Supporting Actor, their core performances given solid and striking support by Infiniti in her film debut and, though she’s only in the first act, Taylor (Jena Malone) also gets to cameo as the voice of the greeting code.
Narratively sprawling, overflowing with provocative ideas and disturbing images of contemporary America and undeniably overlong, even so it never once feels didactic or out of Anderson’s control. (Sky/NOW)
Other Mommy (15)
Adapted from Josh Malerman‘s bestseller Incidents Around the House, directed by Rob Savage this is a supernatural horror as presented from the perspective of seven-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), who, her parents’ marriage fracturing, find a new companion in a humanoid entity that emerges from her bedroom closet and bears a close resemblance to her work-focused mother Ursula (Jessica Chastain, mind-bogglingly awful), and who she calls Other Mommy. Initially seeming friendly, a darker, sinister agenda slowly manifests with the figure, who’s able to transport Bela to different realms, asking to possess her and be let into her heart. Witnessing the malevolent doppelganger after assuming it was just an imaginary friend, her parents, Chastain and Jay Duplass (Daddo), enlist the generic paranormal investigator, Lois Anthony (Dichen Lachman), who attempts to confront the entity, but fails to stop the horror escalating, a death involving family friend and Ursula’s possible lover, “Uncle Frank” (Arian Moayed), providing a particularly gruesome and violent set piece.
Clearly, it draws on childhood terror, anxiety and Bela’s emotional vulnerability over potential family collapse and associated themes of motherhood, marital unhappiness and the awakening to the fact that your parents might not be the perfect people you thought, but none of this is greatly thought or worked through. Instead, after an effective start with a genuinely chilling shared bath scene, it increasingly just relies on the child in danger trope and Chastain like a female Pennywise with her rictus smile gleefully delivering a series of bodily contortions as it moves ever further away from its psychological premise and, compounded by a relentless core, into just unsubtly throwing in one ever more outlandish jump scare and dodgy CI effect after another. Visually striking and unsettling in its use of perspective and confined spaces but becoming ever more narratively ridiculous and unintentionally funny, ignoring any attempt to explain motivation, it also totally reworks the book’s dark ending with a ludicrous overwrought finale that resolutely torpedoes what begins as ambitious and ends as abysmal. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (15)
The final chapter in Tommy Shelby’s story follows an arc of redemption and salvation for both Tommy (Cillian Murphy as magnetic as ever) and his estranged illegitimate son Duke (a complex Barry Keoghan). His father, sequestered in self-exile in his country estate where brother Arthur’s buried, tended only by Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee), haunted by possibly opium fuelled visions of ghosts from the past, notably daughter Ruby, and writing a book, Duke has become the new leader of the Peaky Blinders, implementing a far more brutal regime.
Set against a WWII backdrop that in the opening scenes entails the bombing of the BSA munitions factory in Small Heath and Duke, facilitated by a corrupt Chief Constable, subsequently stealing the arms, the plot entails a Nazi plan to flood Britain with forged banknotes to bring about economic collapse and victory for Germany. As such, Cockney fascist sympathiser Beckett (Tim Roth chewing scenery), treasurer of the British Union of Fascists, is in charge, recruiting loose cannon Duke (“The world don’t give a fuck about me and I don’t give a fuck about the world”) as his treasonous weapon of choice to facilitate the mission.
Having refused to his MP sister Ada’s (Sophie Rundle) plea for him to come back and sort his son out, after being visited by Kaulo Palmer (Rebecca Ferguson), the Romany psychic twin sister of Zelda, Duke’s dead mother, Tommy’s persuaded to return to Birmingham, dressed in signature hat and coat and at one point riding a horse, and confront his living ghosts in an attempt to find the peace denied him. What unfolds, punctuated by another Shelby family death, sees Tommy and Duke working together through their issues to foil Beckett’s plot, Steven Knight’s screenplay careful to keep you guessing as to whether betrayal is on the cards in its Greek-tragedy styled father-son narrative.
Despite some expositionary dialogue and flashbacks to bring both devotes and newcomers up to speed in regard to Tommy’s history, director Tom Harper keeps the pace and tension on a fairly direct course, revisiting franchise Birmingham landmarks like the Garrison pub, the canal docks and warehouses while, the latter stretch, moving to Liverpool, with Stephen Graham, last seen in 2022, returning as Tommy’s scouse counterpart Hayden Stagg, building to big explosive shoot out and the final closure.
Soundtracked by music from Fontaines DC, Girl In The Year Above and, naturally Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, along the way there’s several highpoints, not least Tommy’s return to the Garrison giving a mouthy soldier a grenade lesson on who he is, a father and son fight in a muddy pig stye (earlier the site of a grisly body disposal) and some emotional heft involving sex between Tommy and Kaulo – or maybe Zelda – and his confession (to himself rather than anyone else) as to his role in Arthur’s death. It doesn’t have the depth and character development you get from an extended series, but, tight and efficient in its execution, it’s a worthy bringing down of the curtain, while leaving it open for a next generation follow-up. (Netflix)
Project Hail Mary (12A)
Having previously adapted The Martian, Drew Goddard now turns his hand to another Andy Weir lost in space novel, directed with consummate flair by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with Ryan Gosling again proving the dictionary definition of charismatic. As molecular biologist Ryland Grace, it opens with him awakening, shaggy haired and bearded, after some light years in hypersleep to find himself aboard a spacecraft in a distant star system with his two fellow astronauts having died. Initially confused and amnesiac, he gradually pieces things together remembering, via flashbacks, that he’s a middle school teacher who’s been co-opted by ultra-composed government agent Eva Stratt (a cooly classy Sandra Hüller) to study Astrophage, a microorganism emanating from an infrared line from the Sun to Venus called the Petrova line that’s causing the Sun and surrounding starts to dim, which will result in a globally catastrophic cooling of Earth within 30 years. However, there is one star, Tau Ceti, that’s not been infected and, using Astrophage as fuel source (albeit rather volatile as an explosion subsequently shows) the plan is to travel there and find out why it’s immune in the hope of saving Earth and the rest of the universe. Adopting the football term for one last outside chance, dubbed Project Hail Mary (full of Grace, geddit) with only enough fuel for a one way journey it’s a suicide mission, the crew’s scientific findings being sent back to Earth.
Despite his reluctance (‘I put the “not” in “astronaut”’), with no family or attachments Grace is forcibly made to take the place of the original science officer who’s killed in the explosion, and now finds himself alone, Until, that is, he discovers another spacecraft manned by another sole survivor on a similar mission, this turning out to be a spidery rock-like alien Grace decides to call Rocky. Working out that his species sees through echolocation, Grace finds a way to communicate, Rocky eventually given a computerised voice, as they work together to save their respective planets.
A near perfect cocktail of irresistible charm, top shelf humour (a hilarious Meryl Streep gag included), soulful emotional depth, sharp sensitivity and massive blockbuster action with eye-popping visuals, its themes of odd couple bromance, courage, sacrifice draw on a whole package of influences that take in ET, Close Encounters, Silent Running and Short Circuit. Other than the flashbacks and the scenes involving Rocky (puppeteered and voiced by James Ortiz), this is very much a one man show, one which Gosling commands with a masterful class that seems certain to earn a 2027 Oscar nomination. There are arguably one too many endings before the final amusing scene, but it never feels the two and a half hour running time. (Amazon Prime)
Rabbit Trap (15)
Writer-director Bryn Chainey makes his feature debut with a Welsh horror that, set in 1976, is big on atmosphere but fuzzy on coherent narrative. Relocated from London to a remote Welsh cottage, sound recordist Darcy (Dev Patel) and his alternative musician wife Daphne (Rosy McEwen) are capturing sounds from nature to transform them into avant garde electronic music for her next album. Out in the woods, he’s surprised by an encounter with a nameless androgynous child (a creepy Jade Croot echoing a young Barry Keoghan) from a mysterious background who traps rabbits and offers to teach them more about the area and its folklore legends of the Tylwyth Teg, fairies who steal children from human families, leaving changelings in their place, and the fine line between those worlds, he gradually and then intensely inserting himself ever more into their relationship, treating Daphne as a surrogate mother, questioning why they aren’t already parents.
As supernatural dread builds, with a faerie ring introduced into proceedings, the film becomes frustratingly more narratively abstract and incoherent, compounding the underdeveloped nature of Darcy (who suffers nightmares about his father) and the deeply melancholic Daphne, despite strong turns by Patel and McEwen, and ultimately dissolving into an unresolved finale weighed down by symbolism and cryptic suggestion. (Sky/NOW)
Regretting You (12A)
The second feature adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel following last year’s It Ends With Us, directed by John Boone who made The Fault In Our Stars this (not in the same league as either but vastly better than The Notebook) is firmly in similar soapy romantic melodrama/mother-daughter tearjerker territory. The trigger event comes early when a car crash takes the lives of Chris Grant (Scott Eastwood) and Jenny Davidson (Willa Fitzgerald), respectively the hunky husband and party girl younger sister of sensible-headed Morgan Grant (Kate Middleton lookalike Allison Williams), who likes to design houses, leaving behind her bereaved aspiring actress nearly 17 daughter Clara (McKenna Grace) and widowed new father Jonah (Dave Franco). As flashbacks show, he’s her longtime best friend who’s carried an unspoken crush since they were at high school 17 years earlier (de-aged but still looking then like their older selves), geekily mooning into her eyes (and she his) but never revealing his feelings when she got together with his best friend Chris. And also got pregnant.
Even if you don’t know the book, anyone familiar with the genre will see what’s coming and it’s not long before Morgan and Jonah realise their respective partners were having an affair, casting into doubt the parentage of his baby son Elijah who’s mostly cared for by his never seen mother. Both decide to say nothing about all this to Clara, who’s not only wracked by grief but also riddled with guilt for reasons explained later. She’s comforted by aspiring filmmaker Miller (Mason Thames), the chivalrous cool boy in school who’s in an off girlfriend relationship and we first meet as (in a whimsical running joke) he enlists her help to relocate a city limits sign so that a pizza company will deliver to his cancer-afflicted grandfather (Clancy Brown). At some point Clara will learn the truth about her dad and aunt and will also catch her mother and Jonah in a clinch (their first kiss), throwing more emotional hand-wringing into the mix.
Largely down to the strong performances and chemistry, the film’s actually better than this makes it sound, even if the tone is somewhat inconsistent and any tears or lumps in the throat are genuinely earned. Even so, you’re left wondering just how much trauma therapy’s going to be needed to sort everyone’s complicated family relationships out and, more to the point, if you’ve seen the trailer, why the line that gives the film its title isn’t actually in the film itself, thereby losing its arguably most reach for a tissue moment. (Sky/NOW)
Resident Evil (15)
For fifteen years and six films the franchise adaptation of the video game was a career support system for director Paul W.S. Anderson and his actress wife Milla Jovovich, coming to a close with The Final Chapter while, involving neither of them, 2021’s Welcome To Racoon City and the subsequent Netflix series proved the nails in the franchise coffin.
Now, however, Weapons director Zack Cregger has rebooted it with events not based on the actual games but paralleling and updating Resident Evil 2 and starring a terrific Austin Abrams, who played a homeless drug addict in Cregger’s previous film, as Bryan, a bumbling everyman medical courier, who has to take on a viral outbreak of infected monsters in Raccoon City during a delivery.
Although he’s come to the end of his shift, he agrees – for double pay and despite a snowstorm and an ill-equipped vehicle – to make one more night-time run, ferrying a package from one hospital to another. En route, a woman (Andrea Miltnerová), clearly off her head, walks out into the road in front of his car and, she catatonic, he bundles her in so he can take her to the hospital too. However, he’s pulled over by a police officer (Johnno Wilson) who takes her and orders him to follow, but then the shit quickly hits the fan, when the cop’s car crashes, he’s killed and the woman attacks Bryan, forcing him to shoot her with the sheriff’s gun. His own car undrivable, he heads for a nearby house where, in short order, he’s attacked by and kills a dog, a man and his wife (the same woman as before), their corpses sprouting tentacles, as does a girl he finds hiding in an RV., who bites him before he can shoot her.
Coming to the rescue are Umbrella employees Paul (Paul Walter Hauser) and Maxine (Kali Reis), who explain that there’s been a virus outbreak that’s mutating its victims into monsters and the package he’s carrying contains the final part of the cure. Inevitably, when they do get to Racoon City, all hell breaks loose and phone messages with his never seen girlfriend Michelle (Sara Paxton) over an unplanned pregnancy are the least of his problems.
Balancing mounting tension with a streak of humour (a running gag about bullet-resisting padlocks for one and Bryan complaining about his wet socks) and awash both blood and gore, the monsters, the amalgam, an acid vomiting infected and a maternity ward of mutating sacs (resonating with his ambivalence to parenthood), are especially inspired, there’s some effective jump scares, misdirects, creaking floorboards, and, in a nod to the games, a first person shooter perspective with Bryan muttering how he’s not a real gun guy, shouting out “I’m only good at guns in games”. Meanwhile, that bite’s looking increasingly worrying. A perfect Friday night scream fest for game afficionados and general horror fans alike, it builds to a final moment for a Resident Evil movie where a sequel isn’t an inevitability, it’s a must. (Cineworld 5 Ways; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
The Rip (15)
Directed and written by Narc’s Joe Carnahan, channelling Michael Mann and Antoine Fuqua, and taking its title for an operation where police seize stolen items, this reunites Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on screen for the first time since 2023’s Air, here as, respectively, Lieutenant Dane Dumars and Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne, jaded cops from the Tactical Narcotics Team of the Miami Police Department. It opens with one of their colleagues, Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco), being gunned down while on a case, with Internal Affairs and the FBI, here led by Byrne’s brother Dale (Scott Adkins), suspecting an inside job. Following a tip, ), ostensibly suggesting it’s a drug search Dumars and his team, Byrne Mike Ro (Steven Yuen), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor) and Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno) visit a house in a cartel controlled neighbourhood, occupied by the late homeowner’s granddaughter, Desi Molina (Sasha Calle), who turns out to be a police informant, and, with the aid of a money sniffer dog (yes, that’s real) discover $20 million in drug cartel cash hidden in the attic. What follows is a taut tale in which, Dumars refusing to follow protocol and confiscating everyone’s phone, it teases the possibilities of corruption and betrayal, DEA Agent Matty Nix (Kyle Chandler) telling Byrne that Dumars may have been involved with Velez’s death, leading to a siege, shoot outs, and an ingenious series of misdirection twists. Steeped in film noir moral murkiness and fuelled by vociferous performances by the heavily bearded Damon and Affleck, their chemistry again igniting the screen, it cranks up the tension as you try and work out who’s dirty and who isn’t (Dumars has tattoos across his knuckles, acronyms for “Are we the good guys?” and “We are and always will be”) as, with a frantic car chase, it builds to a fierce finale. Ripping stuff. (Netflix)
Sense And Sensibility (U)
It’s just over 30 years since Ang Lee made his film of the Jane Austen novel starring screenwriter Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet as the Dashwood sisters. Here, directed by Georgia Oakley, the follow-up to her award winning debut Blue Jean, writer Diana Reid gives it a fresh spin with Daisy Edgar-Jones as the sensible Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles as the sense-challenged emotionally impulsive Marianne.
The plot is little altered, when Henry Dashwood dies he makes his son John (Tom Brooke) promise to use the inheritance to provide for his three half-sisters, Hamnet’s Bodhi Rae Breathnach as the younger Margaret, and step-mother (Caitríona Balfe), but his avaricious shrewish wife, Fanny (Stacy Martin), persuades her spinless husband to not offer any financial support, leaving them in dire straits, forcing them to move from the Sussex estate to Barton Park, a cheaper Devon cottage owned by her second cousin, John Middleton (Turlough Convery) with the girls’ only prospects being an advantageous marriage, a task to which, like finding them new lodgings, Middleton’s busybody mother-in-law Mrs Jenning (a marvellous Fiona Shaw with a pug permanently attached to her arm) views with relish. The girls, however, want to marry for love not money,
The objects of affection remain Fanny’s compassionate brother Edward Ferrars (a winkingly charming George MacKay turning into Hugh Grant), to whom Elinor takes an immediate fancy, and Willoughby (Frank Dillane), who owns a small estate and for whom Marianne falls after he comes to her aid when she sprains an ankle. Both men, however, have secrets, engagements that will compromise the sisters’ happiness. Elsewhere, Herbert Nordrum scores points as Colonel Brandon who reins in his ambitions regarding Marianne when he realises she’s not going to reciprocate (she sees him as “sincerely dull”) but still takes a concern in her welfare while Ceara Coveney as Mrs Jennings’ cousin Lucy Steele confides news that demolishes Elinor’s dreams.
While not given a contemporary look as such the sisters most certainly do not wear their hair in the tidy refined styles one might expect and for a period romantic drama, this is cast in definite shades of melancholy (there’s only one kiss in the entire film), textured with images of nature (it opens with a caterpillar crawling over Marianne’s finger) and earthy colours and to a great extent devoid of humour, though Eliot Sumner as Mr Palmer, burying himself in a newspaper to avoid his wife’s witless chatter does raise a chuckle.
Along with new backstory connecting Brandon and Willoughby, Oakley also includes the novel’s briefly mentioned duel scene, though I’m not persuaded it adds a great deal other than allowing Marianne to see Brandon does have passions after all. There’s also perhaps one folk dance scene too many.
Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles bring a believable sisterly chemistry to their relationship, be in comforting or berating each other, both making the most of their close-ups, while Breathnach is no less engaging even if she’s offscreen for much of the film, though again Oakley has the sense and sensibility to resist turning Austen’s sharp social commentary into some modern day feminist message. Lee’s film remains the definitive adaptation but this is a worthy rival. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom (U)
Having tackled the sci fi genre with Farmageddon, Aardman now pitches up everyone’s favourite stop-motion woolly wonder in what, while a month early, is sure to become a Halloween staple.
In the run-up to the big event, everyone on Mossy Bottom Farm are getting into the spirit. Fondly remembering his old cowboy get-up, the Farmer (John Sparkes) has got two tickets to Mossingham’s Halloween Hoedown but is too afraid to ask romantic interest the Vet (Nina Sosanya) to be his date on account of his receding hairline. Meanwhile Shaun (Just Fletcher) and the flock have been secretly cultivating a pumpkin patch for the celebrations, proudly displaying a drawing by Timmy. However, when an incident involving the Famer and his goat turns them all to mush, Shaun, having discovered a book called Home Made Science in the abandoned windmill decides to play mad scientist and, with a Heath Robinson contraption that Wallace would have been proud of, whip up a potion that, poured on a surviving seed, will make them grow again at a rapid rate. This he decants into Farmer’s discarded hair tonic bottle, which, in turn, trusty dog Bitzer (Sparkes) returns to his owner, who decides to apply it to his scalp.
It works rather better than anticipated, producing not only a crop of large pumpkins but an impressive ginger mane on the Farmer. Unfortunately, it carries on working, both the pumpkins and Farmer’s hair continuing to expand at an alarming fate until the latter finds himself transformed into a hairy horror, inevitably being mistaken for some monster when the villagers see him and decide to put an end to him.
The Vet, meanwhile, having tranked him, reckons he’s a Bigfoot and hatches a plan to send him ‘home’ to Bigfoot Island (just a few miles away from Bighand Island). And so, it’s down to Shaun and the other sheep to find a way to reverse the process and save all concerned.
The dialogue as ever consisting of wordless grunts and mumbles, it’s a love letter to silent movie comedy and classic horror films, Frankenstein being the most obvious reference (the mob cornering the Beast in the windmill, one of the sporting a Jason mask from Friday 13th) ), but the opening moments playfully feature a nod to Thriller as the flock emerge from the barn, while homages to Nosferatu, The Wolfman and, in an inspired sound gag, the Psycho shower scene music are also included to put a smile on adults’ faces. Likewise are such hilarious throwaways about The Archers, The Wombles, social influencers, a hairdressers called Barber Black Sheep, unintelligible parking signs and parcel delivery couriers, and even a riff on the waxing scene from The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And if you want to read in messages about tolerance and diversity (there’s even a lesbian wedding couple) and the dangers of GM techniques, then it will happily respond. Spooky – though not scary- Halloween fun for the kids and the grown-ups alike. Bleat a path to its door. (Cineworld Solihull; MAC)
The Sheep Detectives (PG)
Adapted from Three Bags Full by German crime author Leonie Swann by Craig Mazin (a distinct family friendly contrast to his work on Chernobyl, The Last Of Us and Scar Mobie and Hangover sequels) with Kyle Balda making his live-action directorial debut after helming Despicable Me 3 and two Minions movies, this is a sort of ovine Babe mixed with a woolly The Thursday Murder Club homage to Agatha Christie’s mysteries.
Set in the fictional English village of Denbrook, it stars Hugh Jackman as George Hardy, a shepherd who lives in an American-styled trailer, raises his motley flock for wool not meat, treats ailments with his patented blue medicine and reads detective stories to them every night. Of course, he doesn’t think for a moment they understand what he’s saying. But he’s wrong. As we quickly learn, they not only understand English but can speak it too, albeit only among themselves.
A loner with a past, the sheep are George’s family and he has given all of them names, primarily accident-prone elderly sage Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) who remembers everything, the imperious Sir Richfield (Patrick Stewart), snow-white prima donna Cloud (Regina King), twin rams Reggie and Ronnie (Brett Goldstein) forever butting heads, and nut-brown Shetland ewe flock leader Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) who always manages to solve the murders before George gets to the reveal. There’s also lone wolf, so to speak, Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) who, like an unnamed lamb, has been ostracised as he was born in the winter.
So, when, one morning, George is found murdered (Jackman does get further appearances as flashback and ghost) and faced with the shocking reality that the dead don’t just transform into clouds as she and the others have always believed, Lily takes on the role of Miss Baarple as she, Mopple and Sebastian set out to find the killer.
There are, of course, a number of usual suspects, local butcher Ham Gilyard (Conleth Hill), rival farmer Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole), Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), and nosy innkeeper Beth Pennock (Hong Chau) along with Rebecca Hampstead (Molly Gordon), an American who turns up with George’s no-nonsense lawyer Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson) and is revealed to be the daughter he once put up for adoption (as well as his South Africa-based son) and who, given George’s recently revised will, clearly has a strong motive.
Caught up in all this are journalist Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine) who initially tuned up to cover the village cultural festival (just three stalls actually) and now finds himself with a potential name-making scoop, and somewhat bumbling local copper Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), who the intrepid trio have to somehow nudge in the direction of the clues as he tries to prove he’s capable of doing the job. The human cast have a certain cartoonish nature but, rendered in perfectly detailed digital animation down the last wisp of wool, the core sheep come with more in-depth personality.
Naturally, there’s any number of red herrings as suspicion shifts from one villager to the next before, in true never the one you think tradition, the real killer’s unmasked. As such, there’s plenty of gentle humour involving the sheep’s antics (and a punning play on being ‘sheep’), but where the film really scores is in how it addresses the underlying themes of death, fellowship, family, communal memory and the necessity of grief as part of the healing process. A particularly poignant touch is in how the sheep can collectively blank out unpleasant memories or experiences (hence the notion of sheep clouds) while Lily’s embracing of Sebastian and the unnamed lamb as part of the flock has its own emotional weight. A shear delight. (Amazon Prime)
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12A)
The year’s biggest movie with $1.15 billion and counting, after the triple Spider-Man shenanigans of No Way Home, incoming director Destin Daniel Cretton steers clear of any multiverse connections (though there’s still several MU cameo crossovers) with Peter Parker (Tom Holland at his most compelling) now nursing a broken heart and living a lonely solitary life after the death of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and Dr Strange’s spell erasing everyone’s knowledge of his secret identity, in particular, to keep them safe, best friend Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) and, more pointedly, love of his life MJ (Zendaya, quietly entrancing). He now lives in a shabby attic room with his screens and technology (Naomi Watts voices his AI assistant) and goes about his crime-fighting in a quasi-partnership with NY detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), his answer to Batman’s Commissioner Gordon, liaising with her by phone as he monitors crime reports.
In short order, the opening sequence has him taking down The Scorpion (Michael Mando), ninja outfit The Hand and Tombstone (Marvin Jones III), though some will return later, but the plot kicks in when he battles to stop a tank that’s rampaging through the city, which sees his path cross again with The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), and ends up breaking into the Department of Damage Control, an organisation that polices those with super powers and seeks to reverse engineer them, only to find its driver is an elderly old dear who, it turns out, has been possessed by someone with telepathic powers who can mentally jump from person to person. They cannot, however, get inside Peter’s head.
Consulting (in amusing scene in which he bristles at his suit being called a leotard and, sporting mask and trunks, joins her in her office swimming pool) Yelena Belova (a slyly funny Florence Pugh), the Black Widow of the New Avengers, who tells him there have been repeated attacks on the DODC, headed up by Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), by someone looking for something called V-Max which they believe to be locked inside a vault.
On top of his mental anguish heartbreak at losing MJ (he’s written a letter explaining everything which he never gives her and bumps into her at a party where she’s with her new boyfriend) Peter’s having an arachnid mutation equivalent of teenage hormone changes, getting angry for no reason, suffering headaches, heightened senses and, distressingly, shooting organic webs (a bit like spontaneous ejaculation) out of his wrists, something to which he understandably reacts with revulsion.
Looking to understand and control what’s happening to him, he seeks the advice of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), now teaching quantum mechanics at Empire State University, who has devised an inhibitor to stop him becoming The Hulk (of course, the monster eventually emerges, more brutal than ever) Peter looking to build one of his own. All of which is basically a prolonged set up to the reveal of the telepathic nemesis (Sadie Sink of Stranger Things fame) though disclosing her name would spoil the intake of breath when you learn it (suffice to say Marvel buffs may have already sussed, and, while the character’s somewhat at odds with the established MU, she will be part of Avengers: Secret Wars) and the reason why she’s attacking the DODC.
With a firmer grip on the action that he had in Shang-Chi, Cretton delivers all the web-spinning dynamics you could wish for, Peter often undergoing some punishing beatings and even hospitalised with a gunshot wound at one point (setting up an amusing moment with Bernthal) but also balancing the physical thrills with adult emotional poignancy (a scene where MJ apparently remembers Peter is cruelly devastating) and humour (much again courtesy of Batalon),
The dialogue in the early going is a tad stilted, but relaxes as things progress with the third act bringing an empathetic rapprochement between hero and ostensible villain and Peter ultimately coming to understand that, while loneliness hurts, life is not meant to be lived alone. How that web is woven only time and the sequel will tell. (Vue)
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (15)
Back in 1984, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer created an instant cult class with a spoof documentary about a fictional heavy metal band who were as clueless as they were loud and whose drummers had a habit of dying. Now, 41 years later they reunite for a sequel, reprising their role as filmmaker Marty DiBergi, guitarists Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins and bassist Harry Smalls.
Following an acrimonious split, the members have gone their separate ways, Smalls composed a rock opera called Hell Toupee and now runs a glue museum, St. Hubbins plays in a mariachi band and composes for naff commercials and phone on hold music, while Nigel has set up a shop in Berwick-Upon-Tweed selling or exchanging (according to weight) cheese and guitars. The film opens with Marty telling how, after not speaking to one another for 15 years, the band made a comeback with a one-off concert in New Orleans in a slot vacated by Stormy Daniels. It seems that Hope Faith (Kerry Godliman), the daughter of their late manager Ian Faith has discovered that the band are contractually obliged to play one more show. Thus, Marty follows proceedings, interviewing the individual members and those who worked with them, including groupie Jean Cromie Schmit (June Chadwick) who’s become a nun after mistaking The Police’s Every Breath You Take for the voice of God, former artist liaison manager turned Buddhist Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher) and incompetent promotions man Artie Fufkin (Paul Shaffer), as preparations are put in place for the much-anticipated reunion. To which end, Hope enlists the services of tone-deaf shyster PR man Simon Howler (dryly hilarious Chris Addison) whose clients include a Nicaraguan K-pop boy band, and who suggests one or two of the band dying on stage would cement their legacy.
Living in a house that holds regular ghost tours and serve roast alligator, finding a drummer willing to risk the curse (they’re turned down by Lars Urich, Questlove and Chad Smith) proves a problem until the slot’s eventually filled by young lesbian rocker Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco) whose drum kit is coloured in tribute to the two late Stumpys while Caucasian Jerry (C. J. Vanston) comes aboard as the keyboardist. Rehearsals are fraught with tensions between Derk and Nigel resurfacing, an argument about a chord change sees Paul McCartney offering his thoughts (Big Bottom, which features as a duet by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, is apparently “almost literature”) and siding with Nigel (David subsequently calling him a toxic personality) while, a long-time fan, Elton John drops by and sings Flower People, before agreeing to join them for Stonehenge at the concert. Finally, the old childhood friends reconciled, all’s set for the big night, complete with a full-sized Stonehenge prop this time, but, as ever, things inevitably don’t go to plan.
Adopting the same deadpan poker faced buts elf-aware approach as the original, it’s packed with a flood of stingers, some of which may or may not be improvised, and silliness, notably Nigel revealing how he as a slot inside his Union Jack guitar where he stores cheese and a grater in case he fancies a nibble mid-tune and how he received a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rejection letter saying “Fuck off, Sincerely yours”. Then there’s Derek’s new song about music and mortality called Rockin’ The Urn. It may not go quite up to 11 as the original did, but it’s still a brilliant send-up of rock’s so often self-serious nature. And it has the best visual fart gag of the year. (Sky/NOW)
Streetfighter (15)
The latest video game reboot, following on from the recent Mortal Kombat sequel and reinvented Resident Evil, director Kitao Sakurai looks to erase memories of past atrocities, the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle and the even worse Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. It’s fair to say he comes up short.
Opening, in animation form, in 1987 with Ryu (Andrew Koji) listening to What’s Up six years before it was actually released, via a quick backstory resume, the story proper starts in 1993, when, their bond shattered by Akuma (Joe Anoa’i) who kills their mentor Gouken, Ryu, now selling noodles, and cocky adoptive brother bad boy Ken Masters (Noah Centineo), who’s reduced to fronting commercials and novelty fights with polar bears, are reunited for a hotel room brawl before, seeking personal redemptions, finding themselves pulled back into the combat world when, looking to leech their fighting powers and working with his blue-uniformed bodyguard Juli (Rayna Vallandingham), the villainous Lord Bison (David Dastmalchian in high camp mode like some panto Alfred Molina) stages a new World Warrior tournament involving fighters from across the globe, among them Chun-Li (Callina Liang) who, driven by personal reasons, is working undercover for Interpol to expose his real agenda.
Given the game’s central premise is having fighters beat the crap out of one another, the film actually has rather less action that you’d imagine, spending far too long on a convoluted narrative about vendettas, broken bonds, bad guy ambitions and supernatural powers. With a support cast that includes wrestler Cody Rhodes as a blonde-wigged Guile, a green-skinned Jason Momoa, rapper 50 Cent, Kalaripayattu-trained Bollywood star Vidyut Jammwal and Orville Peck as the masked, vain Vega, there’s plenty of colourful personalities and some dynamic animated sequences that suggest it might have been a better route to take. But that’s not enough disguise the fact this as often incoherent, nonsensical mess with an unfocused narrative, clunky dialogue (“male friendships are very complex”), sexual innuendo, embarrassing kinkiness and childish humour that all concerned take far too seriously before, following the return of Akuma, the unleashing of Evil Ryu and some energy blast battles, a sequel bait ending. Round two seems unlikely. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
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)
Twinless (15)
Opening with an offscreen car fatality and the subsequent funeral for his extroverted gay brother Rocky, in whose shadow he always lived, the guests awkward in paying their respects to his lookalike and his mother (Lauren Graham), the more introverted and less intelligent (not the brightest tool in the shed he says of himself) Roman (Dylan O’Brien) joins a Portland support group for those who have lost an identical twin. Here he meets and befriends Dennis (director James Sweeney), a shy young gay man, with whom he grows platonically close through their co-dependency. He introduces Dennis to a colleague, looking to perhaps hook him up. Likewise, Dennis introduces him to his fellow worker Marcie (Aisling Franciosi), a romance developing of which Dennis becomes curiously jealous.
Then Sweeney upends everything you think you know, revealing a connection between Dennis, who didn’t have a twin, and Rocky (O’Brien) that totally recasts his relationship with Roman, while Marcie becomes aware of several inconsistencies in what Dennis has told him about himself. Entailing graphic gay sex and biting black humour, Sweeney executes this all brilliantly, pulling you further into the two men’s stories, their grief and emotional wounds and needs with both himself and O’Brien, in his contrasting twin roles (with and without moustache), delivering mesmerising and emotionally involving performances in a storyline that navigates bereavement, trauma, sibling disparities and bonds, and anger management. Wholly original, it’s a genuine delight. (Sky/NOW)
Unabomber (15)
The story of how Ted Kaczynski terrorised America for some 18 years with his homemade package bombs targeting figures from the fields of technology, science, academia and aviation, killing three and injuring 23, has already been a four-part documentary in Netflix along with others on such serial killers as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Now, coming in the wake of the factually bodged telling of the Lizzy Borden story, comes this true crime biopic directed by Janus Metz Pedersen from a screenplay by Sam Chalsen and Nelson.
It’s told across two timelines, one set in 1958 with Kaczynski (Jacon Tremblay), a clever but socially aloof 16-year-old student at Harvard who is enthralled by psychology professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe), who wrote a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler, and his partner Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis) who, having pioneered the. Thematic Apperception Test in which subjects are asked to respond to an assortment of ambiguous images, now need volunteers for a new CIA-backed experiment. The sessions involve Kaczynski being fitted with sensors and strapped to a chair as he engages in brutal debates with an older student known only as Mr C (Gus Halper). His experience will lead to his eventual bombings.
The other strand takes place in the mid-90s San Francisco with Shailene Woodley as Joanne Miller an FBI forensic linguist who argues the Unabomber’s psychological profile us both outdated and wrong and, while ridiculed by her misogynistic colleague Leo (Alexander Ludwig), believes the key to identifying and tracking him down lies in the language used in his so-called Manifesto, a 35,000-word paper entitled Industrial Society and Its Future.
The first narrative has a degree of tension, from the extreme close-up of a man opening a package that’s arrived at his home to the confrontational sessions with Mr C while also introducing its Moby Dick (Morgan’s favourite nook) motif but, with the adult Kaczynski never seen until his eventual arrest at the secluded shack where’s he’d been hiding as a recluse, the somewhat disconnected second never rises to its Silence Of The Lambs aspirations. The fact that he was eventually identified through his writing by his brother also rather undercuts the forensic and investigate work with a frankly anti-climactic banality.
Tremblay and, to a lesser extent, Crowe (a mix of A Beautiful Mind and Nuremberg) give solid performances (their eventual face-to-face confrontation about the experiments especially electrifying), though Woodley’s saddled with a somewhat wooden cipher of a character, but, while it asks whether Morgan’s experiments created the monster (which Kaczynski denied) or simply released it and his loathing of humanity, it never really answers the question. Underwhelming. (Netflix)
The Uprising (15)
Written and directed by Paul Greengrass, this takes the peasants’ revolt of 1381 in which Wat Tyler led a rebellion against the crippling taxes imposed on the common folk (taxing the nobility and the Church deemed politically unwise) by the council ruling England in the name of the 14-year-old Richard II. However, the central character is (guessingly inspired by William Langland’s allegorical fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman) known simply as Ploughman (a commanding Andrew Garfield), a farmer who lost wife and children to the Black Death. It’s he who strikes the first blow, killing a soldier when the collector demands he pay seven years’ taxes on his family as he has no documentation of their death and his men forcibly examine the women’s genitals to see if they are of child-bearing age. His action fuels the growing unrest as he joins force with Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), whose father served in the late kings army, and radical egalitarian priest John Ball (Jamie Bell chewing the scenery) as, having stormed Canterbury Cathedral, they determine to march on London to petition Richard (Woody Norman), the mob his nightmares made manifest, whose forces are away in Scotland and France, who meets them at Blackheath and agrees to their demands for self-determination and justice against his advisors, the mob then sacking the city and massacring the council and merchants as things turn bloodily out of control.
As such, while there’s some broad strokes, it’s solid filmmaking with a strong political message about how government oppression and injustice will prove an unstable civil unrest pressure cooker (as seen centuries later by the French Revolution, while it’s not difficult to draw parallels between the mob and Reform). There’s plenty of bloody and violent handheld camera battle action to go with the peasants’ calls for justice and the self-interest intrigues of the council, who include Tom Hollander as court treasurer Robert Hales, Stephen Dillane as archbishop Simon Sudbury and Jonny Lee Miller as the Mayor of London, William Walworth, the supporting cast also bolstered by Katherine Waterston as the icy Queen Mother and Thomasin McKenzie as one of Ploughman’s fellow rebels.
There’s a bizarre anachronistic misstep in the one year later epilogue when, after Tyler’s killed and the revolt crushed, the Ploughman resurfaces, emerging from the forest, sporting a bow and clad in green hood and mask, with the film becoming a Robin Hood origin story despite the historical incongruity between the myth and the events on which the film’s based, but it’s still a rousing work. (Cineworld Solihull; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park)
Verity (15)
The latest Coleen Hoover adaptation, directed by Michael Showalter as a poor man’s Brian DePalma, a romantic psychological thriller, it stars Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades lite mode as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer whose mother has recently passed. At a publisher’s meeting that could change her fortunes, she’s discovers the man who helped her clean up when she witnessed a traffic accident that killed a cyclist and left her splattered with blood (bizarrely comforting her with the too much information “I’ve seen worse… I pulled my eight-year-old girl’s body out of a lake”) is realtor Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), the husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) who, following a car crash, has been rendered catatonic and unable to complete her book series. He wants her to work as a ghost writer, working from the notes that already exist. However, moving into their remote lake house (where inevitably she gets involved with Jeremy), she discovers a confessional memoir on a memory stick (Hathaway narrating in flashback how she met her husband and her postpartum depression), a different story to how Jeremy spins it, confronting her with questions about Verity’s psychological wellbeing and past, which involves the deaths of her two daughters, who it transpires she jealously resented, her surviving young son, and the nature of the crash. And whether Verity is truly comatose. Or just an incredibly good actress. Thankfully, Hathaway is.
Unadulterated, underplotted sub-Rebecca high camp quasi-erotic (at one point during sex teeth marks are left on the headboard) melodramatic trash that pushes credibility to the limit, the cast wander through with glazed minds and expressions, Johnson remarking “I have resting bored face” with unintended irony while Showalter throws in dramatic thunderclaps, though whether that’s to underline the drama or wake the audience is open to question. It’s arguably the best of the Hoover adaptations to date, but that’s a very low bar. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Royal; Vue)
Weapons (18)
Writer/director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian has the same intricately constructed, slow-burn creepiness and knotted twists, playing out in character chapters, returning to the same events to offer different perspectives before tying it all together in the final moments.
The fulcrum of the plot is that at exactly 2.17am, 17 children from a single smalltown Pennsylvania town third-grade school class get up and leave their homes, running with arms out as if playing aeroplanes, and just disappear. All the children that is bar one, young Alex (a mesmerisingly calm and composed Cary Christopher), a regular target of the class bullies, who duly turns up the next day. The class teacher, borderline alcoholic Justine (a suitably nervy fragile Julia Garner), quickly becomes the scapegoat for the angry parents, most notably Archer (Josh Brolin), though she insists she’s as shocked and upset as anyone. That doesn’t stop her becoming the target of understandable parental grief and rage, getting threatening phone calls and someone (clearly Archer) painting the word witch on her car in bright red letters. The school principal, Marcus (Benjamin Wong) forces her to take a leave of absence and warns her not to approach Alex. Naturally, she does only to find the windows of his house all papered over and, peering through a crack, two motionless figures sitting inside.
Justine is the first chapter, followed by Archer, a builder who starts seeing a pattern in the trajectory of the disappearances, then Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a married cop with self-worth issues unable to resist either the drink or Justine. The remaining chapters put the focus on James (Austin Abrams) a junkie that Paul busts and who accidentally stumbles on the answer to the disappearance riddle while attempting to rob Alex’s parents, Marcus and finally Alex, for the big reveal involving his visiting disturbingly oddball aunt, Gladys (a chilling Amy Madigan), who has a very dark agenda of her own wherein the film lays bare its Grimm colours; suffice to say the accusation levelled at Justine is misdirected.
Tapping into the American zeitgeist unease, teasing things out with the interlinked characters as the tension builds to the violent and richly metaphorical climax but largely avoiding jump scares (even if he does overdo the it’s just a dream horrors), Cregger may eventually lay bare the mechanics but he deliberately never offers any motivation behind what’s happening. Evil just is. In the final stretch he also uncorks some a dark and grim humour, well aware that the climactic scenes while shocking and horrific can only be played for intentional almost silent movie slapstick laughs.(Sky/NOW)
Whalefall (15)
Taking the phrase the belly of the beat literally, this goes full Jonah with a survival thriller about a deep sea diver who gets accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale when he gets ranged up the giant squid it’s having for dinner and then has an hour of oxygen to try and escape.
The title referring to what happens when a dead whale sinks to the ocean floor to become part of a marine ecosystem, adapted from co-writer Daniel Kraus’s 2023 bestseller and directed by Brian Duffield who, one would hope had is tongue at least half in his cheek, it stars Resident Evil’s Austin Abrams providing the emotional anchor as Jay Gardiner who, back from college and looking to bring closure for his mother (Elisabeth Shue) and older sisters (Jane Levy, Emily Rudd) goes scuba diving off the Monterey coast to find and recover the remains of his tough love father Mitt (an alpha male intense Josh Brolin) who disappeared during a trip with his buddy (John Ortiz), presumed, as indicated by letters left behind, to have committed suicide after developing a cancer that mean he could no longer go diving.
Swallowed up, the rest of the alternates between him trying to find a way out (jellyfish handily serving as the lighting director) with whatever manmade and marine detritus tools he can lay his hands to before he’s sucked in the inner stomach to be dissolved by the acid. As such there’s a lot of scenes with him battling against assorted flesh protrusions intercut with flashbacks to his troubled downhill relationship with his macho dad, his Jedi-like ‘voice’ encouraging him from deep in the intestines to use everything (including handy escape a whale tips) he’s been taught to free himself.
Scientifically just about plausible (though sperm whale’s gullet’s not large enough to actually swallow a person), it conjures an inevitable claustrophobia and some vivid moments of body horror, though it also falls prey to unintentional humour (try not giggling when he calls for help when the whale opens its maw). In coming to terms with his dead dad, it is, of course a spiritual metaphor for how grief can swallow you up and the healing process it needs.
Punctuated by some occasional aquatic action sequences (whale vs orcas), it is unquestionably unlike anything else you’ll see this year, and if you ever wondered what happens when a whale pukes, then this is must. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Royal; Vue)
The Whisper Man (15)
The title referring to a serial child kidnapper and killer who left his victims with bags over their heads and their fingernails trimmed, adapted from a book by crime novelist Steve Mosby aka Alex Cross and sporting 90s thriller clothes, it’s directed by James Aschcroft, the follow up to The Rule of Jenny Pen. Here, Robert De Niro wanders on autopilot through a streaming pay day as Pete Willis, a retired Jersey detective who caught Frank Carter (Michael Keaton in a couple of chilling scenes), the original killer of the title, but never found the remains of his last victim. However, when a young boy, Neil, vanishes and a tape recording points to a copycat, he becomes involved in the investigation when Jake (Acston Luca Porto), the sensitive grandson he’s never seen, the son of his recently widowed estranged crime novelist son Tom (Adam Scott), also disappears in similar circumstances, Tom having heard his son reciting the whisper man rhyme. Working with Willis is lead detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan) who’s keen to follow in his footsteps, but Carter will only talk to Willis.
It plays out in generic procedural mode with a two parallel daddy issues and mythologised fathers plotline: could the new killer be Carter’s son, Frank Jr (Owen Teague) trying to impress his abusive father, or an accomplice who was never identified. As such, with Hamish Linklater as Norman Collins , a collector of murder mementos who’s revealed to have a link to Carter, it works solidly if unexceptionally enough. However, the introduction of Jake’s imaginary friend, a girl in a blue jumper, with Tom saying he too had such a friend, called Mr Night, who would visit and kiss him on the forehead before he went to sleep, adds a supernatural element that sits poignantly but awkwardly with the rest of the narrative.
With a damp spot answer to Chekov’s gun and the aforementioned daddy issues resolved in the last act, involving a shock twist as to why Carter’s keen to be reunited with his son, it’s a contrived but watchable enough time filler. (Netflix)
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