Films showing this week either in cinemas or on streaming platforms
FILM OF THE WEEK
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 and deserves to be seen on the biggest screen you can find. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
ALSO RELEASED
Apnas (15)
Co-directed by Ashley Chin and Darren R.L. Gordon from a screenplay by Adrian Scott inspired by real events, this is a slick crime thriller set amid Manchester’s Pakistani Muslim community. Cousins, as kids Awais and Majid Khan tussled about who would play with a toy car before the argument was settled with a bat and ball game by the latter’s father Zafar (Rehan Sheik) in favour of the former. Years later, Awais (Birmingham actor James Greaney) is an accountant with a second-generation British Asian identity issues while Majid (Asim Ashraf), who now goes by MK, drives a flashy car and is a brash violent drug dealer. Awais’s father Aslam (Nitin Ganatra) is a taxi driver family man working to ensure his three kids have a good life and marriages while, the brothers not having spoken for 15 years, Zafar runs a criminal network from Pakistan where he’s a prominent politician, MK handling the UK side of his heroin operation.
Fired from his call centre job, dad’s taxi repossessed and the family struggling to pay the rent, Awais gets sucked into his uncle’s network when he meets MK, who he’s not seen in some years, at a lavish wedding (the guests hiring swanky cards to impress) and is persuaded to work for him as a ‘washer’, laundering the ill-gotten cash using cryptocurrencies. Soon he’s rolling in it, but his new role and lifestyle also see a dramatic personality change in the way he treats people, especially caregiver girlfriend Mollie (Elenor Elmsley). With MK still harbouring resentment about that toy car and the cops (Ash Tandon’s rookie, his Asian boss Mark Smalley and a couple of strongarm white goons) on his trail and a run in with a rival Bradford gang, it doesn’t end well.
Awais has two sisters, Sara (Aisha Osman) who’s studying to be a pharmacist but has ambitions to be a dancer and the younger darker-skinned non-verbal aspiring author Sanaya (Haiesha Mistry) doling out voice over exposition and narration in the form of her diary notes, explaining how their culture influences the choices the characters make (the title is a Hindi word meaning “one’s own” often used to describe family, close friends, or community). With a support cast that includes Reuben J Virdee as Awais’s tattoo artist schoolfriend Chico, it goes through its predictable generic paces well-enough (spot the corrupt cop) with decent performances from its leads even if the climactic redemption feels rather contrived and abrupt. (Cineworld NEC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
Arco (PG)
What if rainbows were actually time travellers from the future flying using multi-coloured suits? That’s the premise behind this French hand-drawn, two-dimensional style animated children’s eco fable with its Hayao Miyazaki influences in which, set in an idyllic 2932 where humans live in floating homes in the sky, ten-year-old Arco (Juliano Valdi) is jealous that his parents (America Ferrera, Roeg Sutherland) and older sister travel through time, but he’s forbidden until he’s twelve. So, one night,. He steals his sisters cape and the gemstone that enables him to fly and attempts to go back in time to see dinosaurs. Instead, he ends up crash landing in 2075 where robots do most of the work and extreme weather events are the norm and homes are protected by bubbles. He’s discovered by Iris (Romy Fay), a girl of the same age, who along with her infant brother Peter are looked after by a robot caretaker called Mikki while their parents (Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman who also voice Mikki) work in the city, the two bonding (arcoiris is Spanish for rainbow), she finding the friendship she needs, but with Arco unable to return home as he can’t fly unless there’s rain and sunshine at the same time.
With a plot that includes three eccentric conspiracy theory brothers (Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea) wearing triangular sunglasses tracking Arco looking to prove the existence of rainbow people, a misunderstanding by Mikki who calls in the robot cops, a wildfire, cave art and the hint that it’s Iris who actually designed the futuristic homes and spurred the invention of time travel, it’s an amiable well-intentioned warning about climate collapse that holds out hope that, while it may not be preventable, it can still be lived with. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
The Good Boy (15)
Taking a cue from Clockwork Orange and attempting be a British Jordan Peele, directed by the Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa from a script by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, this stars Anson Boon as Tommy, a 19 year-old drunken, drug snorting delinquent who terrorises his local community. Until, that is, he’s kidnapped and awaked chained in a basement of some sprawling country estate where Chris (Stephen Graham), physically and psychologically fragile wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) and eager to please son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen) aim to rehabilitate him through motivational tapes, forcing him to watch Tik Tok videos of his assaults, a family viewing of Kes and Pavlovian punishment and rewards. Also part of the household is Rina (Monika Frajczyk), a Macedonian with dubious immigration status who Chris has blackmailed to be their cleaner accomplice. Initially lashing out with verbal threats, Tommy slowly appears to change his attitudes, earning himself limited access to other rooms via a system of gutters and a longer chain.
Co-produced by Jerzy Skolimowski and Jeremy Thomas, it has some thought-provoking ideas and absurdist weirdness but awkwardly contrived it never seems quite sure about its moral compass or what it’s trying to say. On top of which its unexplained attempts to be enigmatic (Chris wears a wig, there was apparently someone called Charlie who may have been Jonathon’s brother or an earlier version of Tommy, Kathryn’s traumatised mental state, Chris’s supposed Home Office connections, Rina’s fate) are just left hanging while the process repeating ending just makes no sense. The performances are strong enough, Anson’s rage and Graham’s creepy calmness particularly, but it never lifts itself beyond the limitations and vagueness of its screenplay. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Midwinter Break (12A)
Based on the 2017 book by Bernard MacLaverty, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Payne, the debut feature from British theatre director Polly Findlay is a slow and somewhat overly measured account of a marriage that has grown numbingly comfortable. Stella (Lesley Manville) and Gerry (Ciaran Hinds) are the Irish couple on question, long married and living in Glasgow after she survived a shooting in Belfast forty years earlier when she was pregnant. Rarely seeing their grown up son, she’s a devout Catholic churchgoer, he’s secular, doesn’t believe in miracles and is fond of a glass or two, something he tries to keep secret. They’re fond of each other but the passion has long faded into pleasantries. In voiceover she describes that it feels they have been “exiled” from each.
For Christmas, Stella surprises him with a four day trip to Amsterdam where they duly do the tourist sightseeing, taking in the galleries and the Anne Frank museum, Gerry managing to find the city’s only Irish pub. Stella is particularly keen on visiting a particular church, a women’s housing facility, and then drops the bombshell that she wants to leave the marriage and join the convent, the reasons relating to a spiritual void crisis that harks back to a vow she made back in Belfast.
The film’s problem is that, other than for a couple of lines and the mundanity of their lives together, the underlying tensions that fuel Stella’s decision are never really developed sufficiently to evoke the emotional power it needs despite the best efforts of its two stars. (Omniplex Great Park; Royal; 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; Everyman; Mockingbird; Royal)
Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come (15)
The 2019 original had one of the best punchline ending in movie history. However, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, couldn’t resist the temptation to just let it lie. Hence picking things up directly after those closing moments, this basically does it all over again with six High Council satanist families stepping up to replace the Le Domas clan, who were either killed or combusted, and subject their sacrificial bride victim Grace (Samara Weaving) to another night of trying to avoid being offed. Some new rules are introduced in that the hunters are not allowed to kill – purposively or accidentally – any of the other rival families (all competing to win a seat at Mr. Le Bail’s high table) at the peril of their entire bloodline turning to bloody mush. Grace, back in that wedding dress, also has a second motivation for playing the game, since they’ve also taken captive her estranged younger sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) with whom she’s just been reunited after several no contact years and who is also being forced to kill or be killed.
The new roster of satanist slayers are headed up by the bickering Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy) Danforth, seen at the start suffocating their father (David Cronenberg) at his request, and also include Néstor Carbonell as Ignacio El Caido, Juan Pablo Romero as son Felipe and Maia Jae as daughter Francesca, Varun Saranga, Nadeem Umar-Khitab and Masa Lizdek as the Rajans, Olivia Cheng as Wan Chen Xing and Antony Hall as son Wan Cheng Fu, and Daniel Beirne as Kip Danforth with Elijah Wood clearly having fun as the cult’s lawyer.
Given the film’s premise, other than there now being two women fighting to survive, there’s fewer surprises and less tension as to the eventual outcome, though that does come with a very clever twist along with a goat. What you do get is more mayhem, visceral deaths and copious blood and body parts, some rather brutal violence and a showstopping wedding ballroom fight featuring Grace and Francesca, her late husband’s former fiancée, swinging out blindly after having pepper spray in their eye, intercut with one between Titus and Faith, both to the strains of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart. It’s not quite as much dark bloody fun as the original, and the ending doesn’t have the same kick, but you should still be ready and willing. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026 @ MAC
Wed: She Taught Me Serendipity (12A)
Directed by Akiko Ohku, divided into five significantly titled chapters and frequently referencing the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, this initially persuades you that it’s a slightly offbeat rom com about Toru Konishi (Riku Hagiwara), a socially awkward lonely second-year college student who, returning to campus after a lengthy absence constantly carries an umbrella (rain or shine) as a security blanket, who finds his perfect match in Hana Sakurada (Yuumi Kawai), who, also seemingly friendless, he calls the “solo soba noodles girl. Both oddballs with similar life experiences. she says their coming together is serendipity. They hang out in cafes, art galleries and bowling alleys, and she tells him to try turning of the television volume to the max. But then fate takes a turn when it transpires that things are not entirely as they seem.
Konishi says he has zero friends, but that’s not true. His best buddy is Yamane (Kodai Kurosaki), a goofball with an eccentric taste in fashion, and he also enjoys spending time with Sacchan (Aoi Ito), a fellow student and singer in an amateur rock band (she insists he listens to Hatsukoi Crazy by Spitz, saying it has one of the best intros of all time), with whom he works after hours cleaning a local bathhouse run by Sasaki-san (Arata Furata) and his pregnant daughter (Honoka Matsumoto), but is oblivious that she has a crush on him. In one of the film’s three riveting soul-baring monologues, when he increasingly acts indifferent to her she confesses her feelings and he has no idea how to respond. She doesn’t turn up for work the next day and the narrative takes on a tragic turn with a reveal that’s somewhat contrived but sheds a different light on the relationship between Konishi and Sakurada, the former growing in emotional maturity as a result.
Ohku makes some effective stylistic choices, including split screens when her characters are actually in the same place and laces the film with quirky humour such as the owner of a café our lovebirds frequent which has poetic names for all the dishes except for rice omelette, to discourage anyone asking for one as he hates making them. It’s a bittersweet joy.
Thu: Blue Boy Trial (18)
Following the 1965 Olympics in Tokyo, the government took a firm stance on public morals, notably cracking down on prostitution. However, they were unable to prosecute transgender prostitutes, know as “Blue Boys,” because they were legally male. So they arrested gynaecologist Dr Akagi Masao for violating the Eugenic Protection Law by carrying out “unauthorized and unwarranted” sterilizations, as well as an unrelated narcotics charge. As such, inspired by these real events and with a cast of transgender non-actors , male trans writer-director Iizuka Kasho’s film follows members of the Japanese trans community and the infamous trial that could forever alter their lives. Defending Akagi (Yamanaka Takashi), citing American legislation regarding such procedures, is Kanu Taku (Nishikido Ryo), whose case rests on persuading three trans women to give testimony about how the surgery essentially saved their lives by aligning their sex with their gender.
One is the flamboyant Ahko (drag artist Izumi Sexy), basically the group’s den mother, one is her arch rival Mei (Nakamura Ataru), both giving striking but contrastive testimonies, and the third, most crucially, is, Sachi (a subdued but compelling performance from Nakagawa Miyu) who, awaiting the final surgery, works as a waitress and lives with her fiancé Atsuhiko. Will she be willing to sacrifice the life she’s made and reveal her true self to the world in order to save both Akaki and others like her?
Although Taku successful argued his case by invoking the right to happiness enshrined in Japanese law, the ruling nevertheless proscribed sex change surgery and shaped the country’s gender, identity, and human rights attitudes for decades, with no further sex-realignment surgery carried out in Japan until 1998.
Addressing transphobia and its repercussion on its victims but also themes of friendship and solidarity, it’s as disappointingly relevant in today’s attitudes and demonising hostility to the LGBT community as it was sixty years ago.
Ballad Of A Small Player (15)
After the widescreen expanse of All Quiet On The Western Front and Conclave, director Edward Berger takes a more intimate low key approach to this character study about dislocation and self-destructive addiction. Giving another standout performance, Colin Farrell plays an Irish con artist gambler who, hiding out in Macau, China’s answer to Vegas, where the locals refer to him as a gweilo or hungry ghost, passes himself off as British aristo Lord Freddy Doyle, complete with precisely clipped accent. Living in a decadent Chinese casino-hotel, with three days to settle his 145,000 hotel bill, he’s on a losing streak and saddled with huge gambling debts he can’t pay off, wiped out at baccarat by a foul-mouthed old dear (Deanie Ip) at the only casino that’ll still extend him credit, but, in his supposedly Savile Row leather yellow gloves, is still looking for the win that will turn things around.
Into his life comes Fala Chen (Dao Ming), who, like a drug dealer feedings junkies, lends money to losers at exorbitant rates, but has decided to get out of the game after her latest mark took a dive from the rooftop, she inheriting his debt. The pair hang out in her houseboat and he wakes to find her gone and numbers written on his palm. Also entering his orbit is frump in designer glasses Cynthia (Tilda Swinton), who, calling herself Betty, is a private detective hired to recover the money he stole from her elderly client, She spots him a stake and suddenly his fortunes change, now he just can’t lose.
Visually striking and vibrantly coloured, adapted by Rowan Joffe from Lawrence Osborne’s novel, it’s a thoughtful meditation on self-loathing, end of rope desperation, compulsion, guilt and redemption, Farrell going all-in on a rollercoaster that variously sees him having a heart attack and wolfing down lobster, sweating out anxiety and almost maniacally exulting in his luck. Though she disappears (for reasons explained later) in the second half, Ming makes for a suitably haunting femme fatale while Swinton digs into her character’s quirks with a sly wink in her eye. With supporting turns from Anthony Wong relating an anecdote about a gambler who dies and goes to what he thinks is Heaven and Alex Jennings as the friend and fellow gambler who know who Doyle really is, both imparting the message that winning kills you quicker than losing, this might not ever play an ace but it holds high enough cards to keep you in the game. (Netflix)
The Bride! (15)
Following her understated turn in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley swings to the other end of the spectrum with a committedly deranged performance that’s well-attuned to the chaos of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore writer-director outing, which, set in 1936 Chicago and New York, is an avant-garde spin on the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein filtered through Bonnie & Clyde, Sid & Nancy Badlands and Joker: Folie à Deux with detective noir and 40s Astaire and Rogers dance movies for good measure.
Gyllenhaal follows Whale’s lead by opening in black and white with Buckley as the voice and face of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley declaring her first book was nothing on what’s she’d imagined for the sequel, but society wouldn’t let her write it. Cut then to colour and a party in 30s Chicago where vociferous firecracker Ida (Buckley, who starred in Gyllenhaal’s first film), mistress to mobster (John Magaro), has got herself caught up with gangland goings on involving Lupino (Zlatko Burić), a mob boss not averse having women who’ve snitched murdered and their tongues taken as trophies. Suffice to say, having been possessed by Shelley’s angry spirit, she soon finds herself hurtling down a flight of steps to her death.
The focus then switches to Frank” (a soulful, vulnerable Christian Bale), Frankenstein’s stitched-up re-invigorated monster, who, scarred face masked to hide the surgery, visits Dr. Euphronious (a sly Annette Bening) a scientific outcast infamous for her own reinvigoration experiments. After 111 years, he’s suffering from loneliness (and never having had sex) and wants her to create him a companion, to which end the pair dig-up Ida’s corpse and, via electricity and a black liquid (that stains her faced and tongue), she’s brought back to life, complete with a black birthmark and, in homage to Elsa Lanchester in Whale’s film, a ‘shock’ of frizzy hair, and persuaded they were engaged before an ‘accident’ to be his burnt orange dressed bride.
So far so relatively straight-forward. But then ambition outstrips narrative coherence as they goes off on a relationship spree, visiting dance movies starring his idol Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), he imagining himself and his bride as the couple on screen, but she plagued by not knowing who she is/was, (it’s eventually decided to call her Penelope, Frank duly tattooing it on his chest), Gradually, rather than an accessory, she begins to develop her own personality (or perhaps it’s Ida’s surfacing), leading her besotted and somewhat time would be Hubbie off on a violent punk binge that grabs the headlines and sees the birth of a riot grrrl movement with women adopting her look and showing toxic men they ain’t gonna take it anymore, or, in the film’s much quoted words of Bartleby the Scrivener, “I prefer not to”. Enter self-doubting Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his smarter “girl friday” Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz), he apparently having a connection to the Bride in her previous life (recognising her during an elaborate nightclub dance sequence) as well as a connection to Lupino.
As a female-empowerment, rebels on the run, find your own voice, police corruption, political power, toxic patriarchy, masculinity through Hollywood’s eyes violently bloody black comedy with numerous literary references and nods to Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, it switches between themes so often and is heightened beyond the max, dream sequence included, it’s hard to keep up. Just so you don’t miss it, at one point the Bride screams “Me too!”
Gathering to an inevitable bullet-riddled climax (though death’s not always the end), it’s a delirious fever dream rush that would have spun messily out of control were it not anchored by Bales’ solid empathetic performance and the no safety net maelstrom that, switching between drawling American and precise English accents depending on which voice is in her head, is Buckley in full flood. As she puts it, “here comes the motherfucking bride”. Take your own confetti. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Code 3 (15)
The title relating to an emergency response requiring lights and sirens, pitched somewhere between straight drama and a tag along reality documentary, director Christopher Leone works from a screenplay by himself and former paramedic Patrick Pianezza as the film follows Randy (Rainn Wilson) as a burnt-out cynical paramedic on his final 24- hour emergency ambulance shift after 18 years before he takes up an uneventful 9-5 job (with lunch breaks) in insurance, his controller Shanice (Yvette Nicole Brown) having persuaded him to see out the shift. Along with his regular partner Mike (Lil Rel Howery), his only friend and the only co-worker who can tolerate him, behind the wheel, they’re also babysitting Jessica (Aimee Carrero), a young trainee along for her first night, enthusiastic and believing she can make a positive impact. Randy long stopped harbouring any such delusions, the night proceeding to offer up a series of incidents that explain why he’s had enough of mopping up life’s tragedies with few thanks and less money.
Breaking through the fourth wall as he talks direct to camera, the night will see the crew attending a multiple fatality car crash, a half-naked mentally ill homeless man screaming about how he’s “Satan and his only messenger”, so he can get a hot meal, being vomited on and attacked by someone they’ve just saved from an overdose, being threatened by a deranged woman with a gun, being patronised and insulted by overworked asshole Dr. Serano (Rob Riggle) and Mike calming down a psychotic Black veteran with PTSD shouting how he’s the President before a couple of trigger happy cops shut him up for good.
A scathing indictment of America’s healthcare system, while powerfully and at times gruesomely dramatic, it’s also frequently wildly funny, albeit mostly gallows style humour (the scene where a woman in a diner asking Randy what’s the worst thing he’s ever seen is an hilarious elaborate wind up, involving a baby and a microwave, unless, of course, he’s not making it up). But more than anything it’s about the humanity of trying to care for those whose lives are in their hands, their best friend on their worst day, whether they want you to or not. If you can’t laugh as an escape valve in the face of it all, then you might as well just kill yourself.
Wilson delivers one of his best performances and his chemistry with Howery rings with authenticity while Carrero both provides the audience foil and a last act twist as Serano gets smacked down. A film that’s impossible to shake off, and perhaps one that will afford a little perspective when you’re complaining how long the ambulance takes to arrive. (Apple TV)
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. (Cineworld NEC; Vue)
Eternity (12A)
Who would you choose to spend eternity with? That’s the premise underlying this throwback to Golden Age of Hollywood screwball romantic comedies (there’s a reference to Montgomery Clift) by openly queer director and co-writer David Freyne. Attending a family gender reveal party with Joan (Betty Buckley)), his wife of 65 years, grumpy Larry (Barry Primus) chokes on a pretzel and dies. The next thing he knows, he’s arrived by train at somewhere called The Hub, a sort of purgatory waystation, where his Afterlife , Anna (an engagingly warm Da’Vine Joy Randolph), explains that, now looking like his younger self (Miles Teller) when he was happiest, here the dead have a week to choose where they want to spend eternity (there is no heaven or hell) from the hundreds of available options, among them Men Free World (currently full), Famine Free Ireland, Queer World, Infantilization Land and Weimer World” (“Now with 100 percent less Nazis!”). But whichever you choose is final and any attempt to leave sends you to The Void.
Shortly after, Larry sees the younger looking Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), who was dying of cancer, and is given the opportunity for them to both spend eternity together. However, there’s a slight hiccup in that the bartender he was having drinks with turns out to be Luke (Callum Turner), Joan’s first husband who, marrying when she became pregnant, died in the Korean War and has been waiting at the Hub for her for 67 years (illogically, since the dead don’t age, dyeing his hair to keep looking young). Now she has to choose between them, Anna and her own AC Ryan (John Early) respectively advocating for Larry and Luke.
An afterlife spin on the classic love triangle, it follows a fairly predictable path with both men trying to outdo the other in professing their love and reminding Joan of their time together, she having to choose between the man who helped her through her grief and with whom she spent most of her life, and the man for whom she was grieving and a life she never had. The screenplay likewise has the audience rooting for one or the other, though both are seen as having selfish and less likeable sides in their attempts to win over their spouse, while sympathising with Joan’s predicament. In light of which, she’s given permission to try out an eternity with each of them (a mountain, a beach), visiting the Archives in which she’s shown tableaux from her two love stories. There’s also the sense of a growing attachment between Anna and Ryan, both of whom have their own reasons for not moving on as the film develops, while the film also introduces Joan’s friend Karen (Olga Merediz), who’s going to Paris Land and reveals that she was happiest in her 70s after her husband died and she got to come out of the lesbian closet. On a similar note one of the husbands also reveals a same sex dalliance.
All three stars deliver engaging and emotionally nuanced performances, although the squabbling between the men can become tiresome, and the script sprinkles humour and poignancy in its bittersweet relationship observations. But, at 114 minutes, its decidedly overlong with the last act offering three successive different resolutions before its literal walk off into the sunset. (Apple TV)
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)
The Friend (15)
When her friend, one-night lover, former professor and best-selling author and much married mentor Walter (Bill Murray) with a penchant for sleeping with his younger students, commits suicide, Iris (Naomi Watts), a middle aged singleton creative writing teacher living alone in a small fixed rent New York apartment and struggling with writer’s block, finds she’s expected to take on Apollo, his 180lb Great Dane. Navigating the thorny network of Walter’s widow (Noma Dumezweni) and two former wives, the rich narcissistic Tuesday (Constance Wu) and Elaine (Carla Gugino), as well as Val (Sarah Pidgeon), the adult daughter with whom he recently reconciled and with whom she’s compiling a book of his correspondence, some 30,000 emails, Iris finds herself on her own journey of grief and self-reawakening, she and Apollo each other’s emotional support. There’s also the problem that the apartment block doesn’t allow pets and unless she rehomes it she’ll be evicted.
Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 best-seller, it’s framed by scenes of Walter’s fateful encounter with the abandoned Apollo in Brooklyn Bridge Park, a story he regularly rehashed over dinner parties, it’s a touching and very New York story about healing and companionship that has echoes of Neil Simon. Watts is predictably wonderful but even she’s eclipsed by Bing who plays Apollo, initially refusing to eat or get in the apartment lift, lays claim to her bed, destroys the apartment when she’s out and spends the time just staring into space. He only perks up when, as Walter did, being read to. The question being how do you explain death to a dog.
As such, it shares a spirit with things like Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, A Dog’s Purpose, Marley And Me and even Greyfriar’s Bobby, pitching the right degree of sentimentality (you just know she goes from dog hater to dog lover) as well as some gentle if slightly black humour. The final act which has her talking to his ghost about the novel she’s writing based on him, doesn’t really come off, but otherwise this is a lovely heartwarmer. (Sky Cinema/NOW)
Goat (PG)
When he was a kid (literally), young Boer goat Will Harris (Caleb McLaughlin), dreamed of becoming a GOAT like his idol, black leopard roarball (a gender inclusive full-contact Mad Max version of basketball) champion Jett Fillmore (Gabrielle Union), captain of Vineland’s team, the Thorns. Ridiculed as being too small (he insists he’s a medium) to play with the humongous animals, he’s encouraged by his waitress mother (Jennifer Hudson) to dream big. Ten years on, however, his mother dead, he’s a delivery boy for the café where she worked, and, although a skilled player, still shut out and mocked by the bigger animals while the Thorns have not won a game all season and Jett, aware she’s getting on a bit now, asking cynical warthog owner Florence Everson (Jenifer Lewis) to do whatever she can to restore the team (all of whom have self-worth issues) to its old glory so they can finally win the elusive Claw championship trophy.
Having sold his prized pair of boots to pay his rent to gerbil landlord Frank (Wayne Knight), whose place is teeming with offspring, Will recklessly stakes it all in a dunking face off against arrogant dreadlocked Andalusian alpha stallion Mane Attraction (Aaron Pierre), captain of rival team the Magma. Inevitably, despite an early strong showing, he loses, gets evicted and ends up crashing with his friends, capybara Daryl (Eduardo Franco) and aardwolf Hannah (Sherry Cola). However, a video of him breaking Mane’s ankles goes viral and, looking to capitalise on the exposure, Flo signs him to the Thorns, much to Jett’s annoyance who sees it for the publicity stunt it is
What follows is a familiar tale of the underdog having to prove himself to his fellow players and sad sack proboscis monkey coach Dennis (Patton Oswalt), his moment coming when, having not being allowed to play all season, he gets to score the wining goal when Jett’s benched for a foul. With Jett having a change in attitude, renewed morale predictably leads to the final showdown between the Thorns and Magma, by way of another bout of selfish ball hogging grandstanding by Jett and news that Flo has sold the team and everyone’s being let go.
With a voice cast that includes basketball star (and producer) Stephen Curry as aspirant rapper giraffe Lenny who gets to sing Don’t Dream It’s Over, Nicola Coughlan as head in the sand ostrich Olivia, Nick Kroll as anarchic, saliva dripping Komodo dragon Modo, and David Harbour as Archie Everhardt, an Indian rhinoceros and concerned father of troublesome twin daughters as the other Thorns alongside Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee as Chuck and Rusty, the musk ox and bat duo commentators, and Jelly Roll as a brutish grizzly bear player, it’s directed by Tyree Dillihay and Adam Rosette with a stylised animation that recalls but isn’t in the same league as Spider-Verse with impressionistic painted backdrops where figures remain static.
There’s some inspired visuals, Vineland is an urban decay overrun with vines while matches are played out on courts made of, for example, molten magma and ice, but repetition and character arc predictability (believe in yourself, work as a team) quickly set in, the hyperactive games played out a deafening pitch, and with none of the characters having more than one dimension, emotional ennui and boredom soon set in. Those who’ve not succeeded in developing elective amnesia might recall the animated basketball disaster that was Space Jam. It’s not as terrible, but it’s no slam dunk either. (Cineworld NEC; Vue)
Goodbye June (12)
A parent dying of cancer’s certainly a different approach to an uplifting Christmas movie, but that’s pretty much all that can really be said about Kate Winslet’s directorial debut. Working from the first screenplay by her son Joe Anders, it centres around the family dynamics when June (Helen Mirren) collapses in the kitchen in the weeks before Christmas and is readmitted to hospital where her doctors say the chemo hasn’t worked and her cancer has spread. She’ll be lucky to make it to Christmas.
Set in Bristol almost entirely within her hospital room (presumably she’s a private patient given the degree of care and the fact it gets decorated with festive trimmings fridge and a couch), June’s surrounded by her curmudgeonly emotionally distant husband Bernie (Timothy Spall) and her children, anxiety-prone son Connor (Johnny Flynn), who still lives at home, and her three daughters, successful businesswoman Julia (Winslet) who’s married to an offscreen partner and struggling to manage career, three children and the financial needs of her siblings, resentful organic obsessive short-fused younger stay at home sister Molly (Andrea Riseborough) who’s wed to the bumbling Jerry (a barely used Stephen Merchant) and, flying in from Germany, the eldest, unwed dippy new age birth counsellor Helen (Toni Collette). She’s pregnant (via a business arrangement) while both Molly and Julia have an assortment of offspring, notably Julia’s cute as a button son Benji (Benjamin Shortland), who tag along for visits and provide the cast for the film’s cringingly heart-tugging sentimental nativity finale.
Electing to say in hospital rather than go home, and administered to by her saintly nurse, the unsubtly named Angeli (Fisayo Akinade who gets to form a loudly telegraphed connection with Flynn), she’s determined to use her last days to reconcile Molly and Julia. who’ve been at each other’s throats for years.
As such, there’s a lot of sibling sniping, everyone’s fed up with everyone, before the big tearful cathartic outpouring of resentments and reconciliations, but, while the acting’s as solid as you’d expect (though Collete does go somewhat large) and Winslet’s direction is able enough, nothing really feels authentic with at karaoke scene involving Bernie singing Ray Charles that feels clunkily contrived and emotionally manipulative. There’s little character development and virtually no backstory to the overly generic and cliched screenplay which never quite balances its comedic and emotional beats, but, if you feel the need for a weepie to go with the season’s sentiments, this is passable enough. (Netflix)
Hamnet (12A)
Working as a Latin tutor to pay off his father’s debts, Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, giving his best and most expressive performance to date) is captivated on seeing a slightly older woman in the forest summoning a hawk to her falconry glove and, following her to her barn, learns her name is Agnes Hathaway, the pair exchanging a kiss before she bids him leave. First seen lying foetal-like at the base of a tree, local superstitious rumour believes her to be the daughter of a forest witch, she having learnt herbal cures from her late mother, one of which she applies to a cut on Shakespeare’s forehead.
Their relationship grows, the pair meeting in the forest where he beguiles her with the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, the account of the Underworld chiming with the forest cave to which she is drawn. In turn, she reads his palm, foretelling great success, but also seeing herself on her deathbed surrounded by two children.
Despite the reservations of their families, Emily Watson plays his disapproving mother Mary she becomes pregnant, they marry and Agnes gives birth to Susanah (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) in the woods. His father John (David Wilmot), aggressively opposed to his literary ambitions Agnes realises he will have to go to London in order to make his name in the theatre community. To which end, he duly does, leaving his wife and daughter in Stratford where she gives birth, this time at home in agony when Mary refuses to let her got to the woods – and the source of her feminine energy, to twins, a boy, Hamnet (an endearingly cute Jacobi Jupe), and a girl, Judith (Olivia Lynes), the latter stillborn, but revived by the sheer power of her mother’s will.
The siblings grow with a close bond, Agnes predicting her son will follow his father into the theatre, Will, having become so successful he can afford to buy the biggest house in Stratford. Life is good and the family happy, the three children amusing their parents with a performance as the three witches from Macbeth.
However, dark times lies ahead. Agnes’s beloved hawk dies and is duly buried in a forest ceremony, she telling the children about the bird’s spirit carrying their wishes, a story Hamnet subsequently relates to Judith when (as foreshadowed by a puppet play her father sees in London) she contracts the plague, he lying beside her declaring he wants to take her place. And so it comes to pass, she recovering and, his mother unable to cure him, the now 11 Hamnet sickening and dying after imagining himself behind a cloth on stage set calling for her. Returning to find his son dead, William almost immediately heads back to London, putting a strain on the marriage, while Agnes, alone with only her mother-in-law and brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), finds herself no longer able to predict fortunes and he, quoting his to be or not to be speech, briefly contemplates suicide.
The essential nuts and bolts are historically true. Anne/Agnes and William did have three children, with the boy, Hamnet, a name interchangeable at the time with Hamlet, dying from the plague. On to this, however, Zhao and co-writer Maggie O’Farrell, who wrote the book on which it is based, have grafted a story of grief, coming to terms with loss and of healing through honouring their memory. It’s as raw and an exposed nerve and richly underpinned with resonant nature imagery and symbolism (the notion of the cave as a portal beyond death resurfaces potently in the final scenes), moving to a climax when, Mary having given her a print notice announcing the debut performance of the Tragedie of Hamlet in London, Agnes, accompanied by her brother, travels to see it, angered at what she thinks is her husband’s exploitation of their son’s death. What she finds, he frustrated at the inability of his actors to deliver the lines, and playing the ghost himself in pancaked white make-up, is something entirely different, a soul cry of pain and love in tribute to Hamnet (in an inspired stunt casting Hamlet is played by Jupe’s older brother Noah) which, to the accompaniment of Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, wordlessly climaxes with Agnes (Buckley a masterclass in cathartic silent facial expression as she finally dissolves into a smile) at the edge of the stage, fantasising her son’s farewell into the next life back through that cave, she and the other spectators reaching out to touch the hands of the dying prince in perhaps the finest, most moving five minutes of cinema you will see this year. The rest is silence, says Hamlet. Well apart from the sobs filling the auditorium. (Omniplex Great Park; Reel)
Hedda (15)
Candyman director Nia DaCosta takes a swerve into classical territory with this updated five act (with title cards) and no suicide take on Ibsen’s dour Hedda Gabbler (also embracing Chekhov’s gun in act one maxim), relocated from Norway to 1950s England and given a racial makeover with an awards buzz performance from a finely-accented Tessa Thompson (who starred in DaCosta’s Crossing The Line) as the scheming but vulnerable Hedda, an illegitimate manipulative free spirit who’s just wed well-born but bland academic George Tesman (Tom Bateman) and persuade him to purchase the sprawling mansion where she’s throwing a lavish (but no flowers) party. The reason being that, in debt up to his eyeballs, she needs Tom to be appointed to a newly vacant professorship, hence inviting the movers and shakers, specifically his superior, Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), to get them on his side. Among the guests is also Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), who facilitated the house purchase and who Hedda is screwing. Unfortunately, so too is the self-invited Eileen Lomborg (Nina Hoss), a gender switch from the play as Hedda’s former lover and classicist who is also after the job on the back of her new book on sexuality, the only manuscript of which she’s brought with her. A now sober alcoholic, Hedda intends to use her Dionysian get together to push her off the wagon and humiliate herself out of the running. But she also still carries a torch, something complicated by the presence of Eileen’s naïve new lover, and co-author Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots), herself an old friend of Hedda.
Opening with Hedda being interviewed by the police about a shooting, it then unfolds in flashback, with not one but two guns, one Hedda’s late father’s (the key to the case of which she wears around her neck) and one wielded by the professor who comes across his young wife Tabitha (Mirren Mack) having it off in the garden with Eillen’s lothario chum David (Jamael Westman).
Subtly examining the constraints on being both Black and a woman (one of the guests remarks their hostess is “duskier than I thought she would be”) forced into socially imposed roles with a below stairs scene involving Kathryn Hunter affording a class commentary, it’s a slow and sensual smoulder that underlines what a good adaptation should be. (Amazon Prime)
Highest 2 Lowest (15)
Spike Lee reunites with Denzel Washington for a reimaging of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 noir High and Low, itself based on Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom, in which a shoe company executive is forced to choose between certain financial ruin and saving his chauffeur’s son when a kidnapper mixes up their two sons. Transplanted from Yokohama to New York, here the man facing the moral dilemma is David King (Washington), the founder of Stacking’ Hits Records and acknowledged by the like of Quincy Jones as having the “best ears in the business” (magazine covers of him adorn his office along with images of Aretha, Stevie Wonder and others. However, the hits aren’t coming any more and, having previously sold his majority interest. he’s looking to buy it back to avert a rival label buyout that he says will see new artists being shed and the music used in commercials. His plan means he has to buy out his partner’s (Wendell Pierce) share, to which end, despite his philanthropist wife Pam’s (Ilene’s Hadera) reservations, he puts up most of his personal assets, including his penthouse home in Brooklyn’s trendy Dumbo neighbourhood and Black art collection (Jean Michel Basquiat’s Now’s the Time and Kehinde Wiley’s Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia among them) as collateral.
However, the day the deal is due to go through, he gets a call saying his son Trey (Aubrey Jospeh), a promising basketball player he dropped off at practice, has been kidnapped with a ransom of $17.5 million in Swiss 1,000-franc notes for his safe return. Contacting the cops, although it could risk the business deal he and Pam agree to pay. But then comes the twist. Trey is found safe and it turns out that, in a mistake confusing their headbands, the kidnapper has instead abducted the son of King’s ex-con Muslim convert driver and best friend confidant Paul (a dramatically nuanced Jeffrey Wright), Trey’s best friend and fellow athlete Kyle (Wright’s real life son Elijah), racist white cop Detective Higgins (Dean Winters) suggesting Paul staged it himself.
The question now is whether King will stay pay the ransom, warned that refusing to do so will harm his and the label’s image. He does, eventually, agree, but the handover of the money, in a backpack containing a tracer, does not go as expected when, an emergency stop as he’s standing between subway train car carriages end route to Yankee Stadium sees it fall to the street, resulting in a lengthy chase involving it being passed between an extended series of moped riders weaving between a Puerto Rican Day Parade (an indulgent excuse to feature Latin Jazz bandleader Eddie Palmieri, Anthony Ramos and Rosie Perez appearing as themselves) before being retrieved only to find the money gone.
Kyle’s duly returned and King’s the hero of the hour, Stacking’ Hits records now back in the charts. But, with those who lent the $17.5 million demanding repayment within two weeks because he broke the terms of the contract by using it as the ransom, he’s determined to track down the kidnapper and recover his money. Kyle’s recalling of hip hop number he heard while being held captive and a demo tape of upcoming artists Trey compiled for his father to listen to, leads him and Paul to ex-convict and aspiring rapper Yung Felon (APAP Rocky) and one of two outstanding rap battle styled face off scenes as he first confronts him at a recording studio and then in prison where Felon, whose crime has made his music a global phenomenon, tries to convince King to sign him. The final showstopping scene explains the film’s title, it being a number written by Sula (rising British soul star Aiyana-Lee in her film debut) a young singer-songwriter discovered by Trey, who auditions for the Kings for their new independent label.
A fairly straightforward thriller with some social commentary on the changing times injected, it’s not up there with Lee’s best, but, despite some unnecessarily prolonged sequences (it opens with a full rendition by Norm Lewis of Oh, What A Beautiful Morning’ from Oklahoma as the camera slowly zooms in on King’s balcony), it sustains the momentum and narrative with Washington delivering a performance as fluid and flexible as an improvised jazz riff. (Apple TV)
A House Of Dynamite (15)
Director Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature since 2017’s disappointing Detroit, written by Noah Oppenheim, told Rashomon-style, returning to the same scenario from different perspectives, this is a white knuckle nuclear nightmare thriller that’s prompted the Pentagon to blusteringly refute its suggestion that America’s nuclear deterrence is little more than a coin toss.
The premise is as simple as it is chilling. A nuclear missile has been launched from an unknown location by an unknown country, possibly North Korea, undetected until mid-flight, and is due to strike Chicago in twenty minutes. The first scenario has Capt. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), the intelligence analyst oversight officer for the White House Situation Room, learning of the missile and initiating communication between her office, the Pentagon, assorted armed forces command and, eventually, the President as the threat level is raised to DEFCON 2. Out at Fort Greely, Alaska, Maj. Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) launches two ground-based interceptors, neither of which succeed in bringing it down. Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defence (Jared Harris), whose daughter is in Chicago, initiates the protocol evacuation od designed federal evacuees, among them Federal Emergency Management Agency official Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram) while, rushing to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) advises the President (Idris Elba, not seen until the third act) not to make any impulsive retaliations until the source of the launch can be attributed, Russia and China both denying responsibility. As the seconds tick away, a call has to be made.
The film then backtracks to Nebraska where STRATCOM commander Gen. Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) is informed of the launch and B-2 bombers are scrambled in readiness, Russia, China and Iran having mobilised their forces in anticipation. NSA advisor Ana Park (Greta Lee) says it’s possible that North Korea could have used a submarine but that there was no awareness of them having such capability. Barrington contacts the Russian foreign minister seeking to have them stand down, but the clock’s ticking and the President is advised to consult with his nuclear aide, Lt Cmdr. Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King) who holds the briefcase with the launch codes.
Finally, in scenario three from which the film takes its title, the focus turns to the President who, having been earlier evacuated from a basketball event, who, now airborne and overwhelmed by events, regards non-retaliation as a nonstarter, Barrington advising the only options are surrender or suicide. Of course, there’s always the chance it might not detonate.
What happens next is never shown, it doesn’t need to be, the film’s frightening cautionary depiction of what might become mutually assured destruction, especially given the nuclear sabre rattling from Putin, more than enough to leave audiences unnerved by the inexorableness of everything, shaken and too stressed to sleep and face what nightmares it might bring. (Netflix)
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. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
How To Make A Killing (15)
Directed by Robert Hamer in 1949, Kind Hearts and Coronets is one of the Ealing classics, a black comedy on which Dennis Price sets about bumping off his relatives (all played by Alec Guiness) to secure the inheritance he’s been denied. Now writer-director John Patton Ford delivers a contemporary update that, while not a remake per se, borrows heavily from the original in its plotting. Here, set in New York, the Price character is Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) whose mother was disowned by Redfellow patriarch Whitelaw (Ed Harris) after getting pregnant and deciding to keep the child. Following her death, after telling him to fight for the life he deserves, the young Becket (Grady Wilson) passes through an array of foster homes, winding up working as a suit salesman. It’s here he reconnects with childhood friend and crush Julia (Maggie Toomey then, Margaret Qualley now) whom, while now married, brazenly flirts with him. Her offhand remark that killing off the other Redfellow heirs (obnoxious to a fault) would see him getting the $10 billion family fortune sets his mind whirring and, after consigning playboy cousin Taylor to a watery grave, he meets his uncle Warren (Bill Camp) at the funeral and is offered Taylor’s job on Wall Street. Next to go in his Patrick Bateman murder spree is talentless photographer cousin Noah (Zach Woods), with Becket then dating and getting engaged to his cousin’s down to earth teacher girlfriend Ruth (Jessica Henwick). At which point, with three more Redfellows (Topher Grace’s flashy pastor among them) added to the tally (good guy Warren fortunately dies of a heart attack, thus avoiding any moral scruples for Becket), re-enter Julia who, trapped in a miserable marriage, tells him she has evidence of the murders and demands money for her silence. A summons to meet Whitelaw at the family mansion leads to Becket finally getting his inheritance only to be then arrested by the FBI and charged with a murder he didn’t commit.
As with the original all of this is recounted in flashbacks, here to a prison chaplain on the night before Becket’s execution, before, following, as in the Ealing version, a last deux ex machina minute femme fatale. However, while Hamer’s film was ingeniously plotted, this is shoddy and scrappy, lurching from absurdity to implausibility with every unfolding scene, devoid of anything resembling comedy, black or otherwise, or charm. Unlike the gleefully roguish Price, a blandly glib Powell appears to have left any personality in his trailer while the screenplay never affords Qualley, who vanishes for long stretches, any opportunity to be more than an underwritten plot device, with only a scenery-chewing Harris bringing a spark to the whole lacklustre affair. Forget making a killing, this is already dead on arrival. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Jay Kelly (15)
A sort of love letter to and starring George Clooney that draws lightly on both Fellini’s 8 ½ and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, director Noah Baumbach and co-writer Emily Mortimer (who also plays hairstylist Candy), is centred around a proposed tribute to beloved Hollywood star Kelly (Clooney). However, having just wrapped his most recent film, and having a midlife crisis, he wants to spend time with his youngest and increasingly estranged daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards) before she leaves for college in Europe. However, while he envisions the two of them going on a trip, she wants to head off with her friends. To add to his emotional baggage, his loyal but long suffering co-dependent manager (Adam Sandler) tells him that Peter Scheider (James Broadbent), the director who gave Jay his break, has died, leaving him feeling guilty that when, his career in decline, Schneider asked him to lend his name to support a new film, he refused.
At the funeral, he runs into his cold college roommate, child psychologist Tim (Billy Crudup) and, while the reunion starts out amicably, resentment about how Jay stole both his girlfriend and the star-making role for which he was auditioning, leads to a brawl. The next day he drops out of his next film and books everyone on a flight to Europe where he now intends to participate in the award ceremony tribute in Tuscany, although this means Ron now has to rearrange things since, when Jay declined, he had the tribute transferred to his other client, Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson).
The real reason Jay’s in Europe though is to ‘coincidentally’ find himself on the same train as Daisy whose movements his assistant Meg has been tracking via one of her friend’s credit cards. Travelling by train like any ordinary person while the fellow passengers recognise him, they pretty much treat him as one of them. Until he foils a handbag snatching and the incident goes viral, turning into a real-life action hero. On the other hand, Tim is suing for assault.
Throw in Jay inviting his estranged, loveless and libidinous father (Stacy Keach) to the lifetime achievement tribute (never expecting him to attend), his older daughter Jessica (Riley Keough), who still carries the scars of his putting career before his family (he walked out of a therapy session involving a letter she’d written about missing him), Ron’s wife Lois (Greta Gerwig) dealing with their own daughter’s abandonment issues and his former partner Liz (Laura Dern) talking about how they’ve subsumed their own lives and relationships to cater to Jay’s needs and problems, and you’ve got a whole tumble of emotional dramas playing out (flashback scenes have Jay stepping in to observe). Finally, it makes its way to Jay’s realisation that he’s confused paid loyalty for love (at one point he calls Ron “a friend who takes 15%”) with his final line at the tribute bringing new import to his frequent on-set “can we go again?”
Opening with Sylvia Plath’s quote “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else, or nobody at all”, it’s all about self-discovery and seeing who it is in the mirror looking back (at one point, Kelly stares into one reciting the names of Cary Grant and Clark Gable – both Clooney comparisons – interspersed with different intonations of his own name).
With a support cast that includes Louis Partridge as the younger Jay and Eve Hewson an old flame, Isla Fisher as Ben’s wife (Isla Fisher), Baumbach leavens the poignancy with gentle humour (a running gag involves cheesecake always being on Jay’s rider because he once said he liked it and every time he says he’s alone a minion is at hand to give him something) and commentary on the whole Hollywood/movie star illusion and reality.
A different film might have taken a harder All About Eve look at things, but with stand-out turns from Sandler and ever twinkle-eyed and grinning Clooney this is one of the better souffles. (Netflix)
Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, adapted from Stephen King’s Twilight Zone/Inception-like short story, this unfolds in three acts, told in reverse. In Act Three, Thanks Chuck, it appears to be the end times as, amid a series of worldwide natural disasters, the shutting down of the internet and a spate of suicides, middle school teacher Marty Anderson (a lovely understated turn by Chiwetel Ejiofor) tries to persuade his students and their parents (among them David Dastmalchian as a grieving single father) that they should still study. During a phone call with his worried ex-wife nurse Felicia (Karen Gillan), he explains Carl Sagan’s theory of the cosmic calendar, that all of existence can be compressed into one year, and we’re heading to midnight Dec 31. His neighbour (Matthew Lillard) tells him of sink holes opening up and talks about how bees have all but disappeared. Marty’s also perplexed by TV ads and posters, including in the windows of houses he passes, featuring a man’s picture and the words “Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” When all telephone service and electricity go down, he goes to Felicia’s house and, in a beautifully poignant moment, they sit together in the night as the stars vanish from the skies. Just before this we finally meet Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), a 39-year-old who’s dying of a brain tumour, his wife Ginny (Q’orianka Kilcher) and teenage son Brian (Antonio Raul Corbo) at his hospital bedside.
Nine months earlier, in Act Two, Buskers Forever, he’s on his way to a banking conference when he encounters a street drummer busker Taylor Franck (Taylor Gordon) and is compelled to start dancing on the spot and, as a crowd gathers, invites Janice (Annalise Basso), who’s sad after being dumped by text, to join him in an improvised routine, briefly interrupted by a headache. The three go their separate ways and, as his health declines, he has the epiphany that God made the world just for that impromptu moment.
The first act, I Contain Multitudes, takes us back to his childhood where variously played by Cody Flanagan (age 7), Benjamin Pajak (age 11) and Jacob Tremblay (age 17), orphaned in a car crash, he goes to live with his paternal grandparents Albie (Mark Hammill) and Sarah (Mia Sara), the latter instilling in him his love of dance while former slowly becomes an alcoholic. At school (where Marty works) he’s captivated by Walt Whitman’s poem A Song of Myself and the line “I contain multitudes”, his teacher explaining that as we grow everything that happens and everyone we meet become part of the universe within our mind. He’s also intrigued as to why Albie forbids him from entering the house’s locked cupola. When Sarah suddenly dies, Chuck joins and becomes the star of his school’s dance extracurricular program “Twirlers and Spinners”, teaching them to moonwalk, where he has a crush on the older and taller Cat McCoy (Trinity Bliss) with whom he shares a euphoric moment at the Fall Fling. His dance ambitions are, however, discouraged by Albie who wants him to follow in his accountant footsteps. When his grandfather eventually dies, Chuck finally unlocks the cupola and sees a ghostly vision from the future.
Narrated throughout by Nick Hofferman, by now (given how recurring people from his childhood don’t seem to age as he does), it should be clear that what we are presented with at the start is not the end of the actual universe, but the end of Chuck’s and, consequently, the multitude his mind contains. As such, for all the cosmic mystery trappings, it’s ultimately a sentimental carpe diem message about embracing those around you while they’re here and living your life to the fullest, although it could be argued that, in not pursuing his terpsichorean dreams, Chuck doesn’t.
With support turns by Carl Lumbly as Marty’s elderly mortician friend Sam Yarborough, Flanagan’s wife Kate Siegel as Chuck’s idealistic teacher and Heather Langenkamp as the Krantzs’ neighbour Vera, while Hiddleston gets star billing and the dance sequence deserves to rank alongside the Gosling/Stone hilltop routine in La La Land, it’s actually the three younger actors, Pask especially, who carry the film. You really need to see it twice, aware of the construction, to fully appreciate and involve in its emotional heart, but it’s definitely a life less ordinary than it might first appear. (Netflix)
Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning (12A)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie and produced by star Tom Cruise, the sequel and conclusion to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, to all intents and purposes it’s also the last of the long-running eight-film franchise. As such, while arguably not as good as Fallout, it ends with a huge popcorn explosion of action, stunts and emotional punches. However, in determining to pay homage to the preceding fil
ms – and Cruise’s daredevil stunts – much of the early going is a bit of a blurry mess of expeditionary flashbacks to pivotal scenes and characters, something that even extends to later in the film with a scene involving Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), the former IMF director now CIA head and a connecting flashback clip from the first film of John Voight as IMF founder Jim Phelps.
For those needing quick catch-up before the action finally kicks in after an hour or so, at the end of the last film Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team, technical expert Benji (Simon Pegg), computer whizz Luther (Ving Rhames), pickpocket turned agent – and teased romantic interest – Grace (Haley Attwell) and new French assassin addition Paris (Pom Klementieff) were outsmarted by Gabriel (Esai Morales) who’s the human liaison to The Entity, an AI programme with the capability of taking control of cyberspace and over all the world’s nuclear arsenals with the aim of eradicating humankind and who, it’s revealed, actually owes its existence to Hunt’s past mistakes. So basically, there’s just four days left to save the world, to which end former CIA director now President Erika Sloane (a regal Angela Bassett) assign (on the sly) Hunt and his team the responsibility of stopping The Entity, all of which will involve using the cruciform key Ethan acquired in the previous films to unlock the Petkova, a source code located in a Russian nuclear sub sunk in the Bering Sea, while the rest of the team try and figure out its location with the help William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), a CIA analyst last seen in the first film who now lives in Alaska with his Inuit wife.
So cue a lengthy underwater sequence and risk of death by decompression, a run in with Russian troops, an internal plot to override Sloane for their own Entity agenda, a dying Luther’s ‘poison pill’ that needs to be paired with the Petkova, a knife fight in white shorts, two tense bomb defusing moments, and, of course, the much touted stunt involving two bi-planes filmed up-lose with the wind gusting through Cruise’s hair (Attell amusingly notes how the longer style suits him).
A supporting cast that includes Shea Whigham’s US Intelligence agent Jasper Briggs, Theo Degas as his former partner now on Hunt’s team, Janet McTeer’s Secretary of State, Hannah Waddingham as the Rear Admiral commanding the aircraft carrier loaned to Hunt, Holt McCallany’s Secretary of Defence and Nick Offerman as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all do solid work and while well self-aware of the preposterous nature of its plot, the tsunami of adrenaline sweeps away any quibbles. As characters are fond of saying “It’s all been leading up to this” and, while it’s hard to ignore the near messianic glorification of Cruise/Hunt for whom “every living soul on Earth is his responsibility”, when he says “I ask you to trust me, one last time”, it’s not a mission you should turn down. (Sky Cinema/NOW)
Mother’s Pride (12A)
Given it comes from the team behind the Fisherman’s Friends films you’ve a pretty good idea of the amiably anodyne nature of this feelgood BritCom. With the current decline of the nation’s pub trade, its heart and intentions are in the right place, it just lacks much of a brain to go with it.
Set in Somerset with a title that evokes the iconic family loaf, it unfolds the rivalry between two pubs, the near bankrupt old fashioned spit and sawdust Drovers Arms, run by emotionally repressed widower Mike Harley (Martin Clunes) who’s facing repossession, and brash gastropub The George owned by snobby bully boy Edward Pritchard (Luke Treadaway). The matter’s exacerbated by the fact both are supplied by the same brewery, which is turning the screws on Harley.
However, when his estranged son Cal (Jonno Davies), a pop star whose career crashed when he couldn’t muster a second hit, who didn’t come to his mother’s funeral and whose old flame Abi (Gabriella Wilde) is now Pritchard’s partner, returns tail between legs, he comes up with a radical rescue plan – set up and microbrewery and go into homebrewing. That and entering the Great British Beer Awards.
With a plot that could have been written on the back of a soggy beer mat, it duly trots along to its predictable resolutions and reconciliations, fleshing things out with a game Mark Addy as the village drunk Paxman who runs the local Morris dancers team (and tries to get them to go disco), of which Mike’s other son Jake (James Buckley) is a member, along with brief cameos from Miles Jupp and Josie Lawrence. There’s some creaky dad jokes about dogging, but most fall as flat as week-old ale, as well as half-hearted mental health issues to its core theme of family and community. A quaffable enough pint but the ABV is definitely 0%. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Mockingbird; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
Night Always Comes (15)
Mostly set over a single night in a Portland, Oregon neighbourhood and adapted from Willy Vlautin’s novel, Vanessa Kirby stars as mid-30s Lynette, whose life is a litany of bad choices, demeaning jobs, escort sex work and rap sheets. She lives with her selfish, irresponsible mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Downs syndrome older brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen), of whom she’s fiercely protective, and they’re being threatened with eviction from her run-down childhood home – and Kenny being taken back into care – unless they can secure a purchase. However, on the day they’re due to sign at the bank, Doreen doesn’t turn up and Lynette finds she’s spent the $25.000 down payment on a new car. She now has until 9am the next morning to come up with the money.
Over the course of the day she attempts to raise the cash, including asking a former client, Scott (Randall Park), she’s still seeing for sex and when he refuses and a visit to friend and fellow escort Gloria (Julia Fox) doesn’t yield the $3000 she’s owed, she enlists her ex-con fellow worker Cody (Stephen James) to steal the safe belonging to Gloria’s senator lover. Inevitably, that too goes pear-shaped, and, still short $6000 and now accompanied by Kenny, ending with her first trying to get Cody to sell the Mercedes she impulsively stole from Scott and then visiting Tommy (Michael Kelly), the ex-boyfriend who got her into sex work when she was 16, hoping to offload the coke from the safe, he putting her in contact with dealer, Blake (Eli Roth). That too ends badly. And to cap it all, Doreen tells her she never wanted o but the house in the first place and is moving out with Kenny.
One of those long night of the soul affairs, Kirby (who also produces) delivers a compelling performance as the abrasive, desperate but good-hearted Lynette but is poorly served by a heavy handed and unsubtle screenplay, clumsy social commentary and poor support cast characterisation where the night may end but it feels the film never will. (Netflix)
Nosferatu (15)
There’s a certain degree of déjà vu among the cast of writer-director horror maestro Robert Eggers’ revision of the F.W. Murnau 1929 silent horror based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the 1923 Tod Browning adaptation. As real estate agent Thomas Hutter (based on Stoker’s Jonathan Harker), Nicholas Hoult recently played Renfield to Nic Cage’s Dracula while, as Albin Eberhart Von Franz, based on Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsin, Willem Dafoe previously starred in Shadow Of A Vampire, about the making of the original Nosferatu, as Max Schreck, the actor who portrayed Count Orlock, Murnau’s renaming of Dracula. Blood it seems is indeed thicker than water in the casting department.
Character names aside and with some excisions, while largely following Stoker’s narrative, it opens with the young Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp) praying to find relief from her loneliness, her cry of ‘come to me’ answered by a shadowy figure (its silhouette on the windblown curtain a nod to Murnau) that manifests as a terrifying monster that attacks her, leaving her in a seizure and setting up the call of psychosexual desire across time and distance that underpins what follows. Cut then to winter in 1883 Wisborg, Germany, with upcoming estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) being charged by his employer, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) with travelling to the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania to sign a contract with the elderly and eccentric Romanian Count Orlock who wishes to purchase Schloss Grünewald, a decrepit Wisborg stately mansion. Hutter’s new bride, Ellen, is fearful, telling him of her terrifying dream prior to their wedding in which she married Death in front of a congregation of corpses, and disturbingly found herself enjoying it. Looking to boost his fortunes, Thomas ignores her pleas to stay at home and, leaving her in the care of his friend Friedrich (a Murnau nod) Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and his wife Anna (Emma Corin), sets off for his fateful date with the devil.
Warned by the local Romani not to venture to Orlock’s home, he witnesses or dreams the peasants impaling what they claim is a vampire’s corpse, before continuing his journey, being met by an unmanned coach and horses that transports him to the foreboding castle to be greeted by the Count (Bill Skarsgård) who (seen only in glimpses) insists on being addressed as befits his title, rasps in deep and low resonating tones (he speaks the extinct Dacian language), has skeletal fingers and long fingernails and generally exudes an icy sense of dread. It’s not long before he discovers the Count’s true nature, an undead blood drinker (Thomas himself becoming a victim) who sleeps in his coffin by day and, more frighteningly, has an obsession with Ellen, purloining the locket containing her hair. Thomas, though weakened, manages to escape but by now Orlock, through the ministrations of Knock, who, a la Renfield, he has made his servant), is in a crate full of plague rats aboard a ship bound for Wisburg (as opposed to Whitby).
Meanwhile, Ellen is suffering from sleepwalking and seizures and Knock incarcerated as a raving madman who feeds on living creatures (pigeon fanciers, look away now), to which end Ellen’s physician Wilhelm (another Murnau nod) Sievers (Ralph Ineson), enlists the help of his mentor, Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Dafoe), a scientist ostracized for his occult beliefs, who deduces both are under the spell of a Nosferatu, something Harding dismisses as nonsense.
Things gather to a head as Orlock, now ensconced in Schloss Grünewald, appears in a dream telling Ellen that he tricked Thomas into signing divorce papers and that she has three nights in which to affirm the covenant she made with him as a child, or he will kill Thomas and wipe out Wisborg with the plague, Anna and her two young daughters serving as bloody proof of his powers. Orlock has to be destroyed, but the only way to do this involves a willing sacrifice.
Shot in dark, drained and muted tones with a pervasive ominous soundscape, it ratchets up the gothic horror as it goes, but beyond the core vampire element Eggars (who researched Eggers French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s work on hysteria) delves into disturbing themes of sexual desire, the (linked) stigma of mental illness and its treatment, corruption and decay, and the fear yet allure of the Other. Visually chilling with its use of shadows and the way Orlock (brilliantly played by a prosthetics-laden Skarsgård) is, until the final scenes, never fully seen as the grotesque, corpse-grey, balding, moustachioed nightmare, it exerts a relentless grip as it builds to the climax. Even if a poker-faced Dafoe at times feels a little melodramatic in the way he delivers the expositionary dialogue and Taylor-Johnson’s a tad hammy as the devastated sceptic sunk into necrophilia, the performances from Hoult as the frantic husband and a mesmerising turn from Rose-Depp who apparently did all her own carnal-driven convulsions, are triumphant. Repulsive and intoxicating. (Sky/NOW)
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)
Directed by Daniel Minahan from his adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel about transgressing boundaries and the American Dream, set in the 1950s (with a matching cinematic style) around the Korean War, this is a sympathetic exploration of queer desires and repression, or otherwise, at a time when cruising bars were regularly raided by police and outed homosexuals publicly mocked for committing suicide.
On Christmas Eve in Kansas, following the return of ne’er-do-well but charismatic Julius (a magnetically complex Jacob Elordi going all Montgomery Clift) whose just been discharged from the Navy without any pay, Muriel (a career best Daisy Edgar-Jones) agrees to marry his older war veteran brother Lee (Will Pouter). Given that she seems to have better chemistry with Julius, who teachers her to play poker, it initially looks like its setting up a love triangle. Until it becomes pretty clear that Julius is gay and a hustler for money with it. Lee wants Muriel to sell her mother’s house and for the three of them to build a new life together in San Diego, but Julius has other plans. Fast forward some years and Lee and Muriel have bought a house on a new development in California and Julius is in Vegas where, playing his card shark skills, he’s talked his way into a job spotting card sharpers in a casino. Meanwhile, Muriel’s gambling has progressed to horse racing, where she’s racking up the wins by listening to punters in the café where she works, amassing a tidy stash of cash that she keeps hidden from Lee in envelopes, claiming the money for the purchase came from selling her mother’s house.
Back in Vegas, Julius strikes up a secret relationship with fellow card sharp spotter gay Mexican co-worker Henry (Diego Calva), the pair sharing a motel room (at one point he tellingly takes Julius to watch a nuclear bomb test in the desert), until a scheme to cash in on their knowledge of cheating backfires. Meanwhile, an encounter with a woman at the racetrack who’s staying with her husband in a gay’s hang out hotel and, more significantly, her openly lesbian Latina farmer neighbour Sandra (Sasha Calle), who’s fighting to save her family home from being demolished for a new interstate, have unlocked her own queerness.
Minahan largely plays the physical sex in a low key manner, but the emotional fires burning in Julius and Muriel are well-stoked, with different consequences for them both and, although the film doesn’t end as violently as it might, its message about embracing a life you’re legally denied isn’t coated with happy ever afters either. As per the title, at some point a horse trots into the narrative, with whatever symbolism and metaphors you want to saddle it with.
The focus on Julius and Muriel means Poulter’s character is inevitably pushed into the background, but he remains the embodiment of America’s conservative picket fence family mentality against which the others are rebelling in their search for self-discovery, as the film pulls you into their worlds. (Sky/NOW)
A Pale View of Hills (12A)
Perhaps best known for Remains Of The Day, a story of misguided loyalty, thwarted dreams and unrequited love, prior to that Kazuo Ishiguro had published two novels rooted in the theme of Japanese identity. A Pale View of Hills was his debut and, adapted and directed here by Kei Ishikawa, follows two connected timelines, defined by different colour schemes, one in 50s Nagasaki and the other 30 years later in the English countryside and a house with a Japanese-styled garden.
Common to both is Etsuko, who, as a child was a survivor of the atom bomb that devastated Nagasaki (with attendant survivor guilt, she denies having been there). Marrying Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita), distant and irritable on account of his long hours at work, left to cater to his father, Ogata-san (Tomokazu Miura), a former soldier who bought in to Japan’s imperialist narrative, who has come for an extended visit, Etsuko (Suzu Hirose) is expecting her first child. The marriage eventually falls apart and she meets and marries a British man (never seen), moving to England with him and her daughter Keiko.
Sometime after Keiko’s suicide, explained as how she never settled, it is here that the film opens with their Anglo-Japanese aspiring writer daughter Niki (Camila Aiko), who, having recently dropped out of university, has come to help her widowed mother (Yo Yoshida), who’s selling up (the stress causing her nightmares), to pack up her belongings. Going through the boxes and papers, she finds an envelope containing old photos from Nagasaki, prompting her to get Etsuko to talk about her previous life for a memoir that might help her understand her sister’s suicide.
Thus we learn about Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido), a social outcast single mother living in a nearby run-down cottage with her emotionally troubled feral daughter Mariko (Mio Suzuki) both with radiation scarring, who dreams of moving to America with her white soldier lover Frank. It’s Sachiko, and her aspirations to glamour, that brings Etsuko to question the role into which she’s been cast as the dutiful wife and housekeeper.
Exploring the legacy of WWII, the role of women in post-war society and national identity, the book is ambiguous as to whether Sachiko is a projection of Etsuko (and Mariko of Keiko) and, while there’s a suggestion in the closing scenes, the film, which is stronger in its Nagasaki narrative, never quite translates this successfully to the screen as its navigates the ghosts of the past and unreliable memories. Nevertheless, grounded in melancholic performances from its three core female leads (and a striking turn by Suzuki), it’s a graceful, elegant and absorbing watch. (Tue:Vue)
These days, it’s fair to say there are Wes Anderson audiences and then everyone else. Droll, deadpan, mannered, witty and idiosyncratic, they are, perhaps, the archly meta absurdist equivalent of Peter Greenaway. The follow-up to Asteroid City, again co-written with regular collaborator Roman Coppola, it reunites him with Benicio del Toro from The French Dispatch, here taking the lead role, alongside recurring Anderson faces such as Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe, Scarlett Johannson, Hope Davis, F.Murray Abraham, Jeffrey Wright, Bryan Cranston, Rupert Friend, Mathieu Almeric and Bill Murray (as God) alongside newcomers to his universe, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Richard Ayoade and Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia Threapleton.
Dedicated to Anderson’s late father-in-law, Lebanese construction mogul Fouad Mikhael Malouf, it’s a satire on capitalism that takes in themes of family, religion, mortality, redemption and more along the way, del Toro stars as Zsa-zsa Korda, a 50s European arms-dealer industrialist of no particular nationality trying to bankroll a byzantine three-part public works project, the “Phoenician Land and Sea Infrastructure Scheme (the plans for which are separated into shoeboxes) as his legacy, while, in America, a secret business and political cartel of his enemies (headed by Friend as Excalibur) are looking to sabotage it and someone is also trying to assassinate him. Case in point being a mid-air explosion on his private jet which, like previous attempts, he walks away from relatively unscathed. It does, though, prompt him to reconcile with his estranged pipe-smoking novice nun daughter Liesl (Threapleton) – he also has nine young sons – who he’s not seen for six years, put his dealings in order and make her his heir, something which she’s reluctant to do, not least because she thinks he may have murdered her mother (rumours are he killed all his wives, among them Charlotte Gainsbourg),
Persuaded to go along, they and Korda’s new personal assistant Bjorn (a hilarious Michael Cera), a Norwegian entomologist geek and the boys’ tutor who may not be all he claims to be and has a crush of Liesl, head out to try and make deals with various associates to cover the funding gap, these lining up as Prince Farouk (Ahmed), American railway tycoon associates Reagan (Cranston) and Leland (Hanks) who negotiate by way of a basketball challenge in an underground railway, shady fez-wearing French nightclub owner Marseilles Bob (Almeric), their meeting interrupted by Sergio (Ayoade) and his a gang of liberal-minded revolutionaries, American shipping magnate Marty (Wright) from whom he gets a blood transfusion after taking a bullet, cousin Hilda (Johannson) who’s building a desert kibbutz and to whom he proposes a marriage of convenience, and, finally, his duplicitous Germanic half-brother Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch, who starred in Andersons Henry Sugar short) who may be behind the assassination attempts and Liesl’s real father.
With Jason Watkins always ready as the notary to stamp the agreements, all of this labyrinthine mix of espionage , conspiracy and business dealings is punctuated with trademark Anderson quirkiness, such as Korda handing out gifts of own-brand grenades and, after each brush with death, his visions of appearing before a celestial tribunal (which includes Dafoe, Abraham and Murray) – filmed in black and white –to account for his dodgy life and dealings.
The cast is firmly committed to Anderson’s aesthetic with everyone delivering their dialogue in pitch perfect form, del Toro while Threapleton is comedic joy as Liesl opens herself up to the temptations of booze, sex and opulent ceremonial daggers. Not, perhaps, up there with The Grand Budapest Hotel in the grand scheme of Andersonworld, but devotees will love it – and, who knows, it could pull in a fair few converts too. (Sky Cinema/NOW)
Relay (15)
A paranoia thriller written by Justin Piasecki and directed by David MacKenzie, the title refers to a real-world service that allows those who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind or have a speech disability communicate with others by phone using a device to place and receive calls, typing out their messages on a machine which are then relayed by an operator who’s sworn to confidentiality. Here, Riz Ahmed is Ash, a New York loner and, as we learn later, recovering alcoholic, who, as ‘Tom’, uses the service to help whistleblowers who’ve changed their mind return the incriminating evidence, they signing an NDA in return for a pay-off and he retaining a safety copy. Demanding they follow his instructions to the letter, he never meets his clients and their only contact is via the relay service. The first we see of how this works is when he brokers a deal between Hoffman (Matthew Maher) and McVie, the CIO of Optimo, a big pharma company for whom he worked, Ash secretly keeping tabs until he’s assured he’s safe.
Facilitated by a lawyer who declines to take her case on, his next client is Sarah (Lily James) who’s discovered that the genetically engineered grain her company sells to farmers in developing countries has seriously toxic side effects, but they’re selling it regardless and are about to be bought out by a corporate in a deal worth billions. With just a few days before the deal goes through, having been ostracised, transferred, finally harassed and stalked, she steals the evidence but then, wary of her safety has a change of mind. Thus bringing her into contact with Ash, whose name she doesn’t know and who she never meets.
This time, however, things don’t go as smoothly, the firm having hired a team of enforcers, headed by Dawson (Sam Worthington) and Rosseti (Willa Fitzgerald) to put on the pressure and identify her contact so as to recover the goods without paying anything. With strong turns from James and Ahmed, he with very few speaking lines, although the logic doesn’t bear close scrutiny, McKenzie has crafted a tense and atmospheric cat and mouse game that plays more to psychological aspects than action (though there’s some intricate manoeuvrings involving the postal services) as Ash and Sarah develop a deeper connection as well as some shared musical tastes. Unfortunately, it comes with a generic third act twist that contrivedly and unconvincingly turns it all on its head (and adds a shootout) and doesn’t play fair with what’s gone before. Even so, this is distinctive and original enough to warrant discovering. (Amazon Prime)
Reminders Of Him (12A)
Following It Ends With Us and Regretting You, directed by Vanessa Caswill this is the third big screen adaptation of Coleen Hoover’s bestsellers about tormented women, this time she herself co-writing the screenplay with Lauren Levine .As such, it follows a familiar trajectory on its sentimental journey through trauma to redemption, forgiveness and salvation,.
Switching genres from her recent scream queen horrors, Maika Monroe is Kenna, returning to Laramie after serving seven years for the under the influence vehicular manslaughter of her boyfriend Scotty (Rudy Pankow). The first thing she does is remove the roadside cross, since he hated memorials, before securing an apartment (only because she agrees to her landlady’s insistence she adopt a kitten, which she names after a kindly former fellow inmate) in the run down Paradise motel, where Monika Myers gets to play comic relief as her Downs syndrome neighbour Lady Diana, Next on the to do list is get a job and, after numerous rejections, she’s finally hired by Amy (Lainey Wilson), to work the checkouts in a grocery store. The real objective in returning home, however, is Diem (Zoe Kosovic), as in carpe diem, the daughter she gave birth to in prison but has never seen since who was taken in by her paternal grandparents Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford) who believe she fled the scene of the accident (warning, don’t drive while listening to Coldplay’s Yellow) and left their son to die. Diem has a surrogate father of sorts in ex-NFL player Ledger Ward (Tyriq Withers) who, living opposite, was Scott’s best friend since childhood. Assisted by his mate Roman (Nicholas Deverney), he now owns a bar that’s been converted from a bookshop, to which Kenna pays a visit, he oblivious as to who she is having never met her before (I guess best friends still keep somethings to themselves). It goes without saying that something sparks between them, he giving her backroom work on the weekend, and, eventually realising who she is, a frankly uninspiring romance inevitably develops, clearly placing him in something of a moral dilemma viz a viz Grace and Patrick.
What ensues is wholly predictable as Kenna’s attempts to see her daughter place him in an awkward situation and get her landed with a restraining order, though everything resolves in tear-jerking fashion when he gives Grace Kenna’s notebook in which she’s written about the events of that fateful night (and, surprise, surprise, she went to prison out of guilt not because she was guilty).
The performances are solid enough without being especially memorable and the plot duly ticks all the genre boxes on its leisurely and frequently rain-soaked way to the foregone conclusion, taking in the assorted ‘reminders of him’ and flashbacks to romantic scenes between Kenna (with ink streaked hair) and Scotty as well as less convincing ones with his and Ledger’s younger selves. Even if you’ve never read the book, you know exactly what you’re getting going in and, as such, it doesn’t disappoint. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; 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)
Scream 7 (18)
Promised to be the franchise’s final entry, this was originally supposed to continue the story of the Carpenter sisters from Scream VI; however, the firing of Melissa Barrera, followed by Jenny Ortega and director Christopher Landon quitting has meant this sees the return of original writer Kevin Williamson who now also takes on directing duties. Back too comes Neve Campbell, pay disputes presumably settled, as Sidney Prescott, obliquely referencing the previous film, now running a coffee shop in Pine Grove, Indiana, living with cop husband Mark (Joe McHale), teenage daughter Taum (Isabel May), named after Rose McGowan’s character from the 1996 original, and two never seen other kids, while, blasé about the usual prank calls, looking to put her past behind her. Back in Woodsboro, that past has turned the Macher house into a haunted house-style attraction for fans of the Stab movies, based on real-life final girl Sidney and reporter Gail Weathers (Courtney Cox), survivors of the Ghostface killings. It’s here where the film opens, with Stab fan Scott taking his girlfriend Maddison to show hera round the memorabilia, including an animatronic Ghostface. Inevitably, an actual Ghostface turns up, bloodily dispatching the pair.
Cut to Pine Grove where Sidney and Tatum are at loggerheads over her boyfriend Ben (Sam Rechner), as well as her wearing her mum’s old jacket, the plot kicking in when Sidney receives the familiar ‘did you miss me’ phone call, apparently from Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) who rumours claim wasn’t actually killed in the first film. Could, some 30 years on, he now be out to finish the job? The new murders get underway with the disembowelling of Tatum’s bestie Hannah (Mckenna Grace), dressed as a fairy and suspended in a harness while rehearsing a school play (amusingly the director complains she had no understudy) alongside the boy operating the harness before, having invaded Sidney’s home, is run down by the convenient arrival of Weathers, looking to reboot her career, and media wannabe twin assistants Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) Meeks-Martin), niece and nephew of Randy Meeks from the first two films, and also murder spree survivors. He’s revealed to not be Macher but murderer Karl Gibbs, some mental hospital escapee; however, a visit there raises the prospect that his John Doe neighbour might indeed have been Stu.
And so it goes, with Sidney agreeing to be interviewed on air by Gail, looking to draw Stu into the open while the rest of Tatum’s social circle and red herring suspects, among them true-crime obsessive Lucas, son of Sidney’s neighbour Jessica (Anna Camp), add to the body count (one inventive death entails impaling on a beer tap and it spewing out of the mouth) before ending up with a brace of Ghostfaces holding Tatum captive so she can watch her mum being killed, finally unmasking for the frankly nonsensical reveal of identities (one key character, one peripheral) and a highly camp theatrical motive monologue.
In the spirit of the series, there’s many a self-aware reference to slasher movie cliches, a namecheck for Jamie Lee Curtis and, via deep fake AI, cameo appearances by Laurie Metcalf as Billy Loomis’s mother Nancy, Scott Foley as Stab 3’s director and even David Arquette as the murdered Dewey, all adding to making you question what you’re seeing. At the end of the day, it’s more a parting gift nostalgia trip for the fans, but it does at least bow out on a reasonable high note. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Vue)
The Secret Agent (15)
Laden with awards and nominations for Best Film and Best Actor, writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho has crafted a political thriller (but there are no secret agents) set amid the political unrest in 1977 Brazil (a time of great mischief according to the opening titles) under its military dictatorship. Constructed in three chapters and with several shifts on the timeline, it opens as Armando Solimões (Daniel Bruhl lookalike Wagner Moura), a former professor and widower on the run after exposing those who wanted to embezzle the public funding of his research, arrives in his yellow VW Beetle at a gas station on his way to Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco, to get a fake passport and collect his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes) who’s been cared for by his maternal grandparents since his mother, Fátima Nascimento (Alice Carvalho), died. The tone’s quickly set when he sees the fly-infested dead body of a thief who tried to rob it lying covered in cardboard. It’s been there a few days. While at the station, the cops arrive and, ignoring the corpse, give him a once over interrogation and a shakedown before allowing him to drive off to the strains of Chicago’s If You Leave Me Now.
Arriving at Recife, he makes contact with elderly former anarcho-communist Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) who runs a refuge for political dissidents, among them single mother Claudia (Hermila Guedes), who becomes his lover, Haroldo (João Vitor Silva) and Angolan Civil War refugees Thereza (Isabél Zuaa) and Antonio (Licínio Januário), and is placed in a job at the city’s identity card office using the name Marcelo where he hopes to find information about his late mother, India. Here he runs into corrupt Civil Police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) who, along with his sons Sergio (Igor de Araújo) and Arlindo (Italo Martins) are investigating the discovery of a severed leg inside a dead tiger shark. He’s not taken with the man’s arrogance or his harassment of barkeep Hans (Udo Kier), a Holocaust survivor who’s assumed to be a Nazi fugitive. Meanwhile, Armandos’ former Eletrobras employer, Ghirotti, with whom he has a political and personal vendetta following a fracas at a dinner with his late wife following an insult about their class status (seen in flashback), has hired the Borba brothers, Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) and Augusto (Ronet Villela), a pair of sadistic hitmen, to kill him. Meeting political resistance movement leader Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) at the cinema where his father-in-law Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is projectionist to record his testimony about Ghirotti’s corrupt activities, she informs him about the contract, the brothers having hired seedy local gunman, Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio) to find him. However, his attempt to kill him is botched, with both a pair of cops, himself and one of the brothers adding to the body count.
Cutting to the present day, history student Flavia (Laura Lufési) and her colleague are researching Elza’s network through old audio recordings and newspaper archives to discover what happened to Marcello/Armando, the former meeting the now adult Fernando (Moura again), a doctor at the blood bank that was once the cinema where he saw Jaws (sharks are a recurring motif) as a boy.
Overlong at 160 minutes, disjointed and erratic in its tone (at one point the severed leg surreally becomes a metaphorical urban myth monster terrorising gay men, dubbed The Hairy Leg by the press), nonetheless it engagingly mines its themes of political corruption, oppression, fear and the unhealing passage of time with Mouro delivering a superbly nuanced performance that encompasses paranoia, anxiety, love, rage, sadness and resignation. You have to submit yourself to Filho’s aesthetic, but the rewards are great. (MAC; Mockingbird)
Sinners (15)
Directed by Original Screenplay Oscar winner Ryan Coogler, set in the 1932 Jim Crow era Mississippi over 24 hours, at its most basic, this is a Black take on Robert Rodriguez’s vampire horror From Dusk To Dawn but with considerably more thematic and allegorical layers about racism, family and cultural appropriation or, as Delroy Lindo’s scene-stealing blues piano playing drunk Delta Slim puts it “white folks like the blues just fine; just not the people who make it”.
Opening with gifted young bluesman, Sammie (R&B singer-songwriter Miles Caton making an impressive acting debut) aka Preacher Boy, staggers into his preacher father’s church, his face scarred and clutching the broken neck of a guitar, dad having warned him that if you dance with the devil one day he’ll follow you home.
Flashback then to introduce his cousins, the goateed Smoke twins, nicknamed in one of several blues legend puns as the blue-capped Smoke (the more volatile of the two) and red-capped, gold-toothed Stack (both played by Coogler regular go-to and Best Actor Oscar winner Michael B. Jordan on compelling double duty),back in Clarkesdale after fighting in WWI and working for the mob in Chicago. Their plan is to get rich by opening a juke joint in the sawmill they’ve bought, with stolen mob money, from local white landowner Hogwood (David Maldonado) who protests rather too forcefully that the Klan no longer exists. To which end they set about recruiting help for the opening night, starting with Sammie and his dobro then adding Slim, sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) as bouncer, Chinese grocery store owners Bo (Yao) and Grace (Li Jun Li) to paint the logo and supply the catfish to go with the 500 bottles of Irish beer they’ve acquired, and Smoke’s occult-dabbling spiritual healer ex-lover Annie (a strikingly soulful Wunmi Musako) to cook. Along the way, at the railway station Stack’s also confronted by his well-heeled, mixed-race former lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, who gets to sing Dangerous, her first new music in two years) who’s still pissed that he never returned for her as he promised and that neither of them attended the funeral of her mother who raised them when they were orphaned. While at the station, Sammie also encounters Pearline (the fiery Jayme Lawson), a young woman stuck in a loveless marriage, with palpable sparks striking between then. She’ll come to the opening night and also take to the stage to sing a smoulderingly erotic blues number. Despite being advised by Cornbred not to come in, Mary also turns up as old flames are passionately – and ultimately fatally – rekindled.
All this is a slow build-up that initially feels like some period anti-hero gangster movie with assorted dysfunctional relationships, motivations and desires. But then it switches gear as an Irish folk singer called Remmick (a manic Jack O’Connell), smoke steaming from his body knocks on the door of Klan couple Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke) begging they hide him from a posse of Choctaws. Bad move, because he’s a vampire and quickly turns them both into followers. The pace and action gathers when the three of them arrive at the club asking to be invited in (true to lore vampires can’t enter of their own accord) and play. Rebutted, they wander off but stay close, to be found singing Will Ye Go, Lassie Go? when Mary rather foolishly ventures out to talk to them. She now turned, one of the twins soon follows suit along with more of the guests and workers, ultimately erupting into a blood bath feeding frenzy as Remmick’s now swollen legion of memory-sharing followers burst in to be met with garlic, silver and wooden stakes.
To reveal who survives until sunrise would be a spoiler, but suffice to say there’s hard decisions to be made about loved ones before a bizarre hallucinatory vision about Annie and Smoke’s dead baby and the mid-credits scene with bluesman Buddy Guy as the older and successful Jamie getting two visitors from the night.
With allusion to the blues being the devil’s music, there’s times when it feels Coogler’s brought more to the thematic table than the film can support, be it the wages of sin, the nature of freedom, disenfranchisement, racism, money, power and more. Nevertheless, he never loses his grip on either character or action, delivering to remarkable musical set pieces, one with Remmick and his cult, now with numerous Black vampires, doing a wild Irish jig to Rocky Road to Dublin and the other inside the club where Sammie’s guitar playing crosses time and space in a number that blurs cultures and eras (a voiceover relates how music can pierce the veil between life and death and summon timeless spirits, among them evil ones, who Annie calls the ‘haints’) to involve an electric guitar player, a hip-hop DJ, a breakdancer, West African ceremonial dancers, women in traditional Oriental dress and a girl in contemporary gear. At two hours plus, it’s a tad overextended, but every second is invested with a molten intensity.(Sky Cinema/NOW;Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe)
Sirât (15)
The title the Arabic term for both a path but also the bridge between heaven and hell, director and co-writer Oliver Laxe opens his existential film with a lengthy extended sequence showing hands setting up speakers in a Moroccan desert and hundreds of dancers moving to the bass beats, setting the dynamic use of imagery by cinematographer Mauro Herce shooting on grainy 16mm and Kangding Ray’s pulsating dance music score (best heard at max decibels). There’s no dialogue for the first 15 minutes, after which we’re introduced to Luis (Sergi López),a middle-aged Spaniard, who has come with his pre-teen son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and their dog Pipa, handing out flyers in his search for his missing daughter, from whom, part of the rave culture, he’s not heard in months. No one recognises her photo and they set up camp to start again the next day. However, amid obscure news reports of what might be the start of WWIII, a truck of armed soldiers arrives ordering their evacuation. While most move out, a group of five weathered, tattooed and physically distinctive ravers break away and head off in their truck and camper van into the desert, looking for another rumoured party somewhere close to Mauritania, followed by Luis in his much smaller van. Played by non-actors, they comprise the Stef (Stefania Gadda), a pragmatic woman of few words, angular mesmerising dancer Jade (Jade Oukid), the playful Tonin (Tonin Javier) who gets to play a song and improvise a puppet using his prosthetic foot, Bigui (Richard Bellamy), who has a stump on is right arm, and Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson).Initially, trying to get him to stop, they gradually warm to him and Esteban, allowing them to follow behind and coming to share their food, water and the petrol they barter from a sort of nomadic donkey gas station, helping out when his ill-equipped vehicle gets stuck at a ford or on a steep mountain road.
As such, gradually becoming a family unit at the end of a collapsing world, with preconceptions and prejudices put aside, as they traverse the barren desert and navigate crumbling cliff edges, the film begins to take on the feel of Mad Max: Fury Road or William Freidkin’s Sorcerer. But then, the tone dramatically shifts, foreshadowed when Pipa accidentally ingests an LSD-laced turd, with a sudden accident that leaves you shocked and devastated and, when they make it to an expanse of desert they find they’re stuck in a minefield, with a series of explosions (that rather unfortunately feel somewhat banally Pythonesque) further whittle down the numbers, leaving the survivors, putting their trust in literally blind faith as they traverse the physical and metaphorical path between life and death that is, as mentioned earlier, ‘narrower than a strand of hair’, to carry their crushing loss with them but also the gratitude of being able to greet another day, Luis himself surrendering to the music and feeling a connection to the vibe.
Leavening the gradually building tension with moments of both light and mordant humour (the first explosion is preceded by someone saying the music will “Make everything blow up”), tender kindnesses and hearts being opened, it carries end of the world as we know it messages alongside the well-worked notion of music and dance as means of expression and healing and, while the narrative is ultimately rather basic, it pulls you in with the power of its characters and the relationships it captures. (MAC; Mon/Wed: Everyman)
Speak No Evil (15)
A remake of the unrelentingly grim 2022 Danish film (an in-joke nod concerns a Danish trio obsessed with food), complete with title, plot and even large chunks of dialogue, but with a change from the original’s devastatingly nihilistic ending, Eden Lake writer-director James Watkins’s thriller cautions that kindness to strangers may have an ulterior – and sinister – motive. Their marriage having problems since he lost his job and she quit hers in PR, not to mention a dash of infidelity, holidaying in Italy with their anxiety-prone (she can’t bear to be separated from her stuffed rabbit) 11-year-old daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), might just be the tonic Americans Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis) need. Life certainly brightens up when they’re befriended by retired doctor Paddy (James McAvoy) and his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), who have their own young child, the mute (his tongue apparently shorter than the norm) and distant Ant (Dan Hough), who invite them out for meals, ward off the annoying Danes and are generally friendly, solicitous and outgoing to a fault. When it’s time to go, Paddy invites them to come visit their farm in the West Country and, while Louise is hesitant, she agrees and off they duly go,
Everything seems great. Their hosts are charming and considerate, even if they seem to forget Louise is vegetarian (she nevertheless accepts a slice of their prize goose, as it would be rude not to given it was roasted in their honour). Paddy plies Ben with his homemade cider and, in touch with his alpha male, takes him out in the wilds for some primal scream therapy, their kids hang out together and the foursome go for a dinner of locally sourced food at a friend’s restaurant. But something feels off, and not just that Paddy happily lets Ben pay the bill or that they wind them up faking under the tablecloth fellatio and Paddy saying he’s not actually a doctor when Louise cuts herself.
Louise is put off by the stained bed blankets and resents Ciara calling Agnes out on her table manners, but is apologetic when told the reason. At one point, Louise having found Agnes in the couple’s bed, they pack up and leave before dawn, forced to return for the forgotten toy. Again Ciara offers a reasonable explanation. And, as Louise tells herself, they are British after all. Nevertheless, it’s harder to ignore red flags like the bruises Ant shows Agnes, or how Paddy loses his cool when his son can’t dance in time to Cotton Eye Joe, later saying he’d had too much to drink.
Things take a turn for the terrifying, however, when Ant, whose previously showed Agnes Paddy’s watch collection and passed her an indecipherable message, steals the keys to the locked barn and reveals its and his secrets. Now, it’s a case of trying to get away as soon as they can, Ben forcing himself to man up. But Paddy, who’s professed he prefers the hunt to the kill (someone says he likes playing with his food), and Ciara aren’t about to let that happen.
The core cast are all in solid for, but this is very much McAvoy’s show as he brilliant channels Paddy’s passive-aggressive and controlling nature, his forced smile and predatory eyes speaking volumes, before going full over the top berserker in the last act as Watkins switches from uneasy dark social comedy of manners to full on visceral Straw Dogs intensity. And you’ll never hear The Bangles’ Eternal Flame the same way again. (Sky Cinema/NOW)
Steve (15)
Adapted with a character focus shift by Max Porter from his 2023 novella Shy, Cillian Murphy reteams with Small Things Like These director Tim Mielants and again shows why he’s regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation. Here, set in 1996, a time of social care resources being cut to the bone, he plays the titular Steve, headmaster of Stanton Wood, a private reform school for troubled youths with mental health issues and violent tendencies who would otherwise be locked up in a detention centre.
The film’s rhythm and busy handheld camerawork (part SD Betacam, part film) mirroring the drum and bass drive to which several of the teens (a mix of actors and non-professionals) listen, Murphy plays Steve, still recovering from a tragic car accident that left him riddled with guilt and substance and drink abuse, as a bundle of nervous energy and anxiety, his emotional pain echoed in that of those in his charge, primarily Shy (a breakout turn by Jay Lycurgo), a shy, smart and introverted teen who, following a phone call from his mother in the wake of another volatile explosion, sinks into a depression as heavy as the backpack in which he keeps his collection of rocks. But, living life like a permanent and physical rap battle, all of the boys are likely to kick off at any point and for any reason, the most volatile being Jamie (Luke Ayres), always ready to poke the bear, Ash (Joshua Barry) and Tyrone (Tut Nyuot), the latter having had his privileges revoked following sexually inappropriate behaviour towards new teacher Shola (Simbi Ajikawo).
All this unfolds over the course of single chaotic day, one in which a TV crew, with an insensitive director and presenter, are filming a segment for a clearly negatively-biased news piece about Steve and his work at the school, several altercations erupt among the boys, and Steve and his staff, among them deputy head Amanda (Tracey Ullman) and tough love therapist-counsellor Jenny (a measured Emily Watson), that the trust have sold the school and it will be closing by Christmas, causing Steve to erupt in rage just like the boys in his care. But they still have to put on an upbeat front for the cameras and a visit by condescending pompous local MP Sir Hugh Montague Powell (Roger Allam), who gets verbally taken down by Ask in one of the film’s funniest moments.
The boys inevitably play to the cameras, massing behind a window and pretending to masturbate, and responding to such banal questions as what would your 1996 self say to your 1990 self with lines like “Always carry a blade”. These, however, are offset by a piercingly poignant interview with Shy (“Sometimes you want to be four years old and start again but not fuck it up this time”) and Steve’s interview on how he feels about the boys the presenter calls society’s waste product.
It’s clear throughout that, while battling with being underpaid and under resourced, all the teachers passionately care for and are fiercely committed to the boys, for whom they are their likely last chance, walking a fine line between tolerance and discipline, friendship and authority. Pitched somewhere between the rawness of Alan Clarke’s Scum and the sentimentality of To Sir, With Love, it seems to be leading to a tragic denouement but, switching between the school and Steve returning to wife and kids at home pulls back from the brink for notes of salvation, redemption and hope. It’s the only time the film doesn’t feel real. (Netflix)
The Thursday Murder Club (12)
Adapted from the Richard Osman series of novels and directed by Chris Columbus, this is very much the sort of cosy Sunday afternoon elderly amateur detective fare as (obliquely referenced here) typified by Rosemary & Thyme, Miss Marple and, currently, Only Murders In The Building, the title referring to a bunch of pensioners in Cooper’s Chase, a retirement home with emotional support llamas on the site of an old convent, who regularly assemble to try and solve cold cases.
It features a stellar lead cast lining up as former MID operative Elizabeth (Helen Mirren whose role as The Queen provides an in joke), former trade unionist figurehead Ron (Pierce Brosnan and wandering accent), erstwhile psychiatrist Ibrahim (Ben Kingley) and, the latest recruit, nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie with a running gag about making cakes), their latest case being the 1973 murder of a young woman who was stabbed and, witnessed by her boyfriend Peter Mercer, pushed from her bedroom window, ostensibly by a masked man, and Mercer’s subsequent disappearance. The case was investigated by Penny Grey, who founded the Club and now lies comatose in the home’s hospice wing attended by her devoted veterinarian husband (Paul Freeman).
While this is the film’s launch pad, it’s put on the backburner until the final stretch, as a series of present day murders occupy the group’s attention, starting with rough round the edges builder Tony Curran (Geoff Bell) one of the investors in the property, who’s at odds with his unethical partner Ian Ventham (David Tennant), who, strapped for cash and facing an expensive divorce, wants to dig up the cemetery and turn the place into luxury flats, kicking out the residents in the process. Eliciting the help of newly arrived policewoman Donna (Naomi Ackie), the foursome proceed to follow assorted clues to arrive at the identity of the killer/s (some poignancy thrown in as to the motivations), their investigations unearthing presumed dead gangster Bobby Tanner (Richard E Grant) and variously involving Ron’s boxing champion turned TV celebrity son Jason (Tom Ellis), DCI Hudson (Daniel Mays, Polish immigrant handyman Bogdan (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), Elizabeth’s dementia-afflicted author husband Stephen (Jonathan Pryce) and Joyce’s financier daughter Joanna (Ingrid Oliver).
It’s self-aware and lightly handled, perhaps too much so, to appeal to the grey pound audience (though Imrie does get to say what the fuck), and, to be fair, the whodunnit(s) leaves you guessing until the end, while the cast, a sly twinkling Mirren doing most of the heavy lifting, give watchable performances without ever really themselves. There’s no bite to trouble the dentures, but it’ll go down nicely with a cuppa and a couple of biscuits. (Netflix)
Train Dreams (12)
Based on an award-winning novella by Denis Johnson and directed by Clint Bentley from a screenplay by Sing Sing director Greg Kwedar with a touch of the Terrence Malick, set in the early years of the last century, narrated by Will Patton and set over several decades, this maps a changing America through the eyes and life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), an introspective itinerant logger and railroad worker. Arriving in Idaho on the Great Northern Railway in 1917 as an orphaned child, he spends his younger years without direction or purpose, labouring alongside migrants of various ethnicities. During his time on the Spokane International Railway, he witnesses a Chinese worker thrown of the bridge, suspected of horse stealing, and, not interfering, the man’s silent ghost will continue to haunt him, Robert believing he’s now cursed.
His life changes, though, when he meets Gladys Olding (Felicity Jones), with whom he falls in love, marries, builds a cabin on the Moyie River and has a daughter, Kate. However, seasonal logging work takes him away from home and his daughter growing for long periods, during which time he crosses paths with a variety of characters, among them Arn Peeples (William H Macy given a scene-stealing monologue) with whom he becomes friends but is killed by a falling branch. There are other deaths too, a worker is killed by a vigilante avenging the murder of his brother and others killed by a falling tree, their graves poetically marked by boots nailed to a tree.
Struggling to find works in the post-World War I economy, he and Gladys take up farming and he builds a lumber mill, but, while he’s away, a wildfire puts an end to his happiness and, while he rebuilds the cabin, his life is now empty and, though he returns to logging, the new technology is rendering his kind redundant. Instead, he becomes a carriage driver, which brings him to contact with Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon) of the United States Forestry Service. Despite what you might expect, no romance develops and he continues to live alone in the vain hope his wife and daughter might return, he even has hallucinatory dreams of Kate.
The years pass, Robert witness to such events as John Glenn’s flight into space and even decides to fly a biplane, the people and events of his life rushing through his mind as he circles and loops through the skies. Eventually it ends in 1968 as he passes peacefully in his sleep.
Similar in theme and structure to Forest Gump, Days Of Heaven and The Tree Of Life, it’s an elegant and elegiac work, documenting the lives of those who worked to change a nation, to open up new horizons and who often tragically suffered as a result. It’s a quietly meditative affair, anchored by a magnificent soulful performance from Edgerton (Jones has less to do, but is effective in her scenes) and the breathtaking cinematography by Adolpho Velos. You should take a ride down its tracks. (Netflix)
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (15)
As penned by authors such as John Dickson Carr, Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, locked room detective mysteries are ones where solving the murder seems impossible. Indeed, Carr’s novel The Hollow Man is a crucial element in Ryan Johnson’s third Knives Out offering.
An outstanding Josh O’Connor plays the Rev. Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer, who once killed someone in the ring, turned New York Catholic priest albeit with a sometimes foul mouth, who’s assigned by Bishop Langstrom (Jeffrey Wright) to the backwater rural parish of Chimney Rock to serve at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude after punching out a deacon. He’s to be assistant pastor to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks John Brolin), the firebrand grandson of Reverend Prentice Wicks, who forced Jefferson’s ‘harlot whore’ mother, Grace (Annie Hamilton), to remain at the church with the promise of receiving his inheritance, only for it to go missing following his death, Grace ransacking the church looking for it, destroying the crucifix, which her son has refused to replace.
Jud takes issue with Wicks’s incendiary preaching, targeting specific members of the flock, which has driven away all but a group of loyal parishioners, Wheelchair-bound cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny) looking for a miracle, failing MAGA-friendly sci-fi novelist Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), scheming lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington) whose adoptive stepson Cy (Daryl McCormack) is a failed politician and aspiring influencer who’s always filming everything around him and posting YouTube videos, alcoholic doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner) whose wife and kids left him, fiercely devout and devoted longtime church housekeeper Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close, given a scene stealing exit), who witnessed the older Wicks’s death when she was a girl, and groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), her adoring admirer.
Refusing to temper his sermons, during his Good Friday service Wicks retires into a storage closet to regather his energy and is almost immediately found dead, stabbed in the back by a knife fashioned from a devil’s head lamp adornment, suspiciously similar to the one Jud stole from a local bar. Although Police chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis) has Jud down as prime suspect, he was after all caught on video threatening to cut him out of the church like a cancer, with nobody in the congregation near Wicks when he died, this is thus a locked room mystery.
Enter, after the lengthy prelude, atheist private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig with longer hair and more stylish suits), who recruits Jud to assist his investigations, which reveals that Wicks, who is buried in the family mausoleum, disavowed his blindly loyal followers congregation and had apparently found where the fortune was hidden and was planning to enter politics with Cy, who, it transpires, was his illegitimate son.
As things unfold and the murder mystery becomes increasingly convoluted, Jud steps back preferring to focus on his ministry (at one point he cuts off Blanc to comfort a comfort-seeking stranger on his phone), there’s an apparent rising from the tomb, another murder and everyone’s revealed to have had a motivation for Wicks’ death. Naturally, it all builds to the obligatory drawing room – or in this case pulpit – explanation as to what actually happened, ingeniously rendering the impossible possible, and who was responsible, Blanc bathed in light streaming through the stained glass windows.
Less flippant than the previous two films, though not without some sharp humour (notably Wicks confessing his masturbatory regimen to Jud), it turns a critical eye on such issues as misogyny, the abuse of power (Wicks is Trump in vestments and at one point someone says “Give me four years, you could be president”), religious hypocrisy, right wing extremism and themes of sin, guilt, greed and God, while also poking fun at the conventions of detective mysteries. O’Connor and Close arguably deliver the stand-out performance but the whole – and again Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a voice cameo – are note perfect as Johnson slyly misdirects to raise suspicions as to their possible guilt. Originally conceived as a trilogy, Johnson and Craig have said they are considering ideas for a fourth. Here’s hoping they sharpen their knives on the whetstone sooner rather than later. (Netflix)
Wasteman (18)
Banged up for 13 years for manslaughter after accidentally killing a teenager by selling him drugs, introverted prison cook Taylor (David Jonsson) learns he’s eligible for early release providing he maintains his good behaviour and is determined to not let anything screw up the chance of being reunited with his now 14-year-old son Adam. Unfortunately, when his cellmate’s head is on the receiving end of his television after crossing the prison’s king rat, Taylor gets a new cellmate in the form of Dee (Tom Blyth) who comes stocked with an endless supply of chocolate bars and even an air-fryer. Initially, he seems friendly enough, letting him use his phone to call Adam and even getting someone on the outside to buy him a pair of trainers. However, Dee’s also started dealing drugs, something that doesn’t sit well with Gaz (Corin Silva) and Paul (Alex Hassell), who control over the prison’s drug trade, Taylor, who regularly gives their haircuts, being one of their clients. When he’s forced to participate when they give a Dee a working over, things inevitably change in the relationship, with Taylor, who’s trying to go cold turkey, now forced to become his mule, picking up the drugs drones drop into the prison, as the conflict between the Dee and the two others escalates, he being caught in the middle, with the sociopathic Dee threatening to have Adam killed if he doesn’t do what he says.
Directed by Cal McMau in a boxy ration with shaky handheld cams from a script by Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran, narratively, it’s all fairly straightforward, mining familiar genre territory but its strength lies in its character studies of the cellmates, both Jonsson and Blyth giving searing performances and while it’s far from the new best prison movie of all time as the posters would have you believe, it’s still compelling viewing. (Vue)
“Wuthering Heights” (15)
The first adaptation to be given such a certificate, following on from the jaw-droppingly explicit Saltburn, writer-director Emerald Fennell digs deep into the passionate sexual desires and erotic sensuality suppressed within but hinted at in Emily Bronte’s story of doomed love, here bursting out of its bodice with wild abandon.
The use of quotation marks underlines this as a high camp re-imagining rather than a retelling, one which dispenses with characters (Cathy’s brother Hindley and his wife) and the second generation narrative to suit Fennell’s agenda, although the foundations remain essentially the same. As such, with some tweaking, years back, the master of Wuthering Heights (a decidedly forbidding gothic edifice cast in black and whites which literally has rocks protruding through the walls), in a “fit of charity” Mr Earnshaw (a wonderfully ripe Martin Clunes), took in a street urchin (Adolescence star Owen Cooper) to become a ‘pet’ alongside his spoiled and wilful young daughter Catherine (Charlotte Mellington), who, here, names him Heathcliffe(after her dead brother), and housekeeper/companion Nelly (Vy Nguyen), the two children becoming close, she seeing herself in him. Fast forward and Earnshaw’s Yorkshire estate is falling apart with gambling debt and, as such, although her heart belongs to the rough and bearded Heathcliffe (Jacob Elordi, minus any hints of an ‘exotic’ lineage with broad Yorkshire accent), her father’s circumstances mean the now grown Catherine (an ever charismatic Margot Robbie) is forced to marry their boringly decent but Thrushcross Grange (decorated in reds and white) neighbour Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), with Heathcliffe, as deliberately engineered by a manipulative Nelly (a quietly imposing Hong Chuo) hearing only part of a conversation saying where she to marry him would degrade her, petulantly taking off into self- exile (in a strikingly framed shot on the moors against a crimson sky) and having an affair (cue assorted secret tryst montages) with her when he subsequently returns as a clean-shaven self-made wealthy gentleman (with new gold tooth) before marrying Linton’s ward (as opposed to sister) Isabella (a unsettlingly simpering Alison Oliver), a besotted BDSM fan willingly complicit in his plan to torment the cruel and proud Cathy as revenge.
Setting the erotic overtone from the start, the film opens with aural misdirection and what sounds like a carnal orgasm but is revealed to be the groaning of a man being hanged with him ejaculating in the process, a scene watched excitedly by the young Cathy who has various hanged dolls in her room. What ensues is a hot operatic fever dream that variously entails Cathy watching bondage stables sex by two of the servants, she masturbating on the moors and Heathcliffe sucking her fingers, phallic symbolism by the bucket, hands sensually running through egg yolks and dough, and Heathcliffe in black and, once wed, Cathy in red and silver (the costumes are Oscar bait fantasies), as well as a translucent wedding night dress, as the camera gorges on brooding, yearning, seething close ups (though, oddly, there’s no nudity at all) as Fennell and hers stars milk the emotional tempests and melodrama.
Other than two inclusions of Olivia Chaney singing the trad folk The Dark-Eyed Sailor, the soundtrack’s driven by big ballads from Charlie xcx (House being a collaboration with John Cale) and suitably foreboding score by Anthony Willis that all add further fuel to the conflagration of destructive desires and passions that, fanned by the wuthering storms, metaphorically sets the moors ablaze. (Cineworld NEC, Solihull; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Zootropolis 2 (PG)
Six years on from the first film, director Byron Howard now pairs with Jared Bush, who also wrote both screenplays (the pair also voice mountain goats), for a busier and perhaps even better sequel that reunites ultra-enthusiastic rabbit cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and former loner con artist fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) who, after saving Zootopia from its crooked sheep mayor Dawn Bellwether (Jenny Slate) are, despite being personality opposites, now partners in the city’s police force.
Taking it upon themselves to apprehend a crooked customs anteater smuggler (John Leguizamo), the mayhem they cause has Chief Bogo (Idris Elba) ordering them attend Partners in Crisis therapy sessions if they want to continue working together. However, during the botched mission, Judy found some shed snake skin, leading her to suspect one might have found smuggled its way into Zootopia, where reptiles haven’t been seen in decades. Clues lead her to deduce that it might be plotting to sneak into the Zootenial Gala, being hosted by the Lynxley family, the descendants of the city’s founder father Ebenezer, to steal his 100 year old diary containing the plans for the climate controlled zones he designed.
Covertly attending the gala, while Judy befriends Pawbert (Andy Samberg), the awkward youngest lynx, Nick spots a hooded figure on the chandelier which turns out to be a blue pit viper. In the resulting chaos in which the snake kidnaps Lynxley patriarch Milton (David Strathairn) and steals the journal, Judy and the viper come face to face, he revealing himself to be Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan) and telling her the book contains proof as to Zootopia’s actual origins. But then Gary’s taken by a mysterious figure.
And so, the film develops into a chase across the city’s different zones between the duplicitous Milton, who’s accused Judy of abetting the viper, his son Cattrick (Macaulay Culkin) and daughter Kitty (Brenda Song), and, helped by Tundratown’s Arctic shrew answer to Vito Corleone and joined by beaver conspiracy theoriest Nibbles Maplestick (Fortune Feimster),Nick, Judy and Gary, who are also being hunted by assorted Zootopia cops, in a search for a long hidden snowbound mountain hiding place containing some vital patent proof. Twists, revelations, lies, double crosses and poignant confessions about true inter-species feelings ensue.
Working from a central message about putting aside differences with a xenophobia thread involving a hidden outcast reptile community in Marsh Market, there’s Chinatown-like film noir elements here (including a nod to The Shining) that are likely to prove decidedly scary for the young audiences, but, then, like the Inside Out films, this really isn’t targeted at them, but rather at older punters who will revel in the almost constant stream of cultural puns (Ewe Tube, Only Herders in the Building) and even a quite literal Tube transportation system and the plethora of celebrity voice cameos that include Shakira as a pop star gazelle, Ed Sheeran as Ed Shearin, June Squib as Judy’s grandmother, Josh Gad as a cop IT expert, Patrick Warburon as narcissistic blonde-maned action hero stallion turned mayor Bryan Winddancer and even brief spots from Danny Trejo, Alan Tudyk, Jean Reno, Dwayne Johnson and Michael J Fox (as a, ahem, fox). Plus the fabulous car chase return of Raymond S. Persi as Flash Slothmore.
Having won the BAFTA, exploding with action and bursting with humour, the animation is top rate as is the attention to both detail and character development, the closing scenes and end credits sequence promising further adventures to come. (Vue)
Screenings courtesy of Cineworld 5 Ways, & Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe
CINEMAS
Cineworld 5 Ways – 181 Broad St 0871 200 2000
Cineworld NEC – NEC 0871 200 2000
Cineworld Solihull – Mill Ln, 071 200 2000
Everyman – The Mailbox 0871 906 9060
MAC – Cannon Hill Park 0121 446 3232
Mockingbird – Custard Factory 0121 224 7456.
Odeon Birmingham, 0871 224 4007
Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe – Ladywood Middleway 0333 006 7777
Odeon West Bromwich – Cronehills Linkway, West Bromwich 0333 006 7777
Omniplex Great Park, Rubery www.omniplexcinemas.co.uk/cinema/birmingham
Reel – Hagley Rd, Quinton, Halesowen 0121 421 5316
Royal – Birmingham Road, Maney, Sutton Coldfield 0121 492 0673
Vue Star City – Watson Road 08712 240 240