Films showing this week either in cinemas or on streaming platforms
FILM OF THE WEEK
Steve (15)
Getting a one-screen preview prior to landing in Netflix next month, 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. (Mockingbird)
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A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (15)
With a title that sounds like Trump named it, following his cerebral and intense grief-themed After Yang, Korean-American auteur Kogonada now becomes director for hire, reuniting with Colin Farrell for a wish-fulfilment romantic comedy road journey about love, relationships and self-awakening by two commitment-phobes written by The Menu’s Seth Reiss.
Invited to a wedding, New York loner David (Farrell) discovers his car’s been clamped but, fortuitously, there’s a poster for rental company on the wall. Turning up at the remote warehouse to collect his car, he’s met at reception by two oddball characters, The mechanic (Kevin Kline) and The Cashier (Phoebe Waller-Bridge who regularly drops f bombs and intermittently adopts a German accent), who insists he agrees to have a GPS in his 90s vintage Saturn because, you never know when your phone will crap out. At this point you know this isn’t going down any familiar Richard Curtis route
Arriving at the wedding in the pouring rain (which persists through most of the film) he encounters Sarah (Margot Robbie), also there on her own, declining when she asks him to dance and taken aback when she proposes to him, having already warned that, a self-confessed serial charter, it’ll end up with them hurting each other.
The next day, as he leaves, his sentient GPS tells him to pick up Sarah, who, of course, has also rented from the same company and whose car won’t start. Both have been asked if they want to go on a big bold beautiful journey, and so it is that together they set off, guided by the GPS to various stopping points where they find doors that lead them into their respective pasts so they can both come to terms with it. And so it is they variously revisit a Canadian lighthouse where he never experienced the epiphany he was hoping for, a hospital where he’s been born and meets his father (Hamish Linklater) who says his son has a potentially fatal heart condition, the modern art museum Sarah and her mother (Linklater’s wife Lily Rabe) frequented, another hospital where her mother’s died, she not present (she later confesses she was shagging her professor) and his high school open night where he had his heart broken by the leading lady in its production of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (Farrell proving a capable song and dance man) and, eventually, a NY coffee shop where each is telling their respective partners (Sarah Gadon, Billy Magnussen) how they’ll break up with them. All of which is intended to show whey the have both elected to not have attachments and, of course, after each visits their childhood home (he as the dad consoling his younger self (Yuvi Hecht), she being tucked in by her mum), how love is worth taking the risk even if you never know what might happen.
It’s an uncynically sentimental message that takes forever to reach a conclusion you can see coming from the moment they get into their cars, but rather like the magic realism journey it’s all over the place, self-consciously theatrical (some scenes play out in what looks like a rehearsal stage) and whimsically dreamlike (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is an invidious comparison), offering no more than the sort of shallow, surface insights you’d get on a greetings card. It even ends with someone singing Let My Love Open The Door. Farrell and Robbie have genuine emotional chemistry, the film has none. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Royal; Reel; Vue)
Shepherd Code II: Road Back (15)
A one-off screening of the sequel to the straight to streaming 2024 actioner, this again stars French actor/martial artist Alan Delabie, who also co-wrote, co-produced, co-directed, co-composed and even co-cast, as assassin for hire Alex “the Shepherd” Lapierre. Again retired to a quiet life coaching an upcoming MMA fighter with love far from his mind (his last girlfriend was murdered). However, his shot at peace is about to take a turn for the , he’s again drawn back in when his friend and former mentor Lewis (Don Wilson, spending much of the film tied to a chair) is abducted by a scar-faced DuMont (Michael McKell), an old enemy he thought he’d killed, who has now returned to take revenge on all involved and rebuild his Widows crime organisation. And so, |Lapierre reconnects with best buddy fellow hitman Matt (co-writer/director Michael Morris) in a rescue plot that wanders from a Portuguese villa to Paris, Los Angeles and London, collecting assorted friends and associates along the way and engaging in innumerable fights with DuMont’s goons, and, most notably, the sullen, bearded Sanders (Mark Strange) whom, in his long black coat and seemingly unstoppable, has a vengeance mission of his own.
With random internal struggle flashbacks and clunky exposition, it’s low-budget in every sense, from the acting to the mostly mumbled dialogue, even the action copious sequences often feel wooden though at least, joining the narrative midway, Shaina West adds some spark as female London connection mercenary Jessica who uses iron bars as weapons and slips an unexpected Frozen reference into proceedings. However, coming over as a bargain basement Jean Reno, Dalabie’s dynamic range is generally limited to giving menacing stares. It’s fair to say, it’s better than the original, but when the bar’s set that low that doesn’t say much. (Sun: Mockingbird)
NOW SHOWING
Anora (18)
Written and directed by The Florida Project’s Sean Baker, this catapults Mikey Madison from supporting character roles to Oscar winner as Anora (the Hebrew word for light or grace) aka Ani Mikheeva, a stripper of Uzbek heritage living in Brooklyn’s Russian-speaking neighbourhood Brighton Beach. Materialistic and looking to the world of lap dancing at her upscale Manhattan strip club. So, as the only one of the girls who speaks passable Russian, she’s introduced to Ivan ‘Vanya’ Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn, Russia’s Timothée Chalamet), the spoiled, gangly, immature hard partying son of a wealthy Russian oligarch who lives in his parents’ lush gated mansion where he spends his time getting high, drinking and playing video games. Though vehemently denying she’s a prostitute, she takes up his lucrative offer for several bouts of sex, he then offering her $15,000 to stay with him for a week and pose as his girlfriend. This in turn finds them and his entourage flying to Las Vegas where he proposes (not least so he can get a green card and stay in America) and they end up getting hitched in one of the wedding chapels. So far so whirlwind romance as Ani quits her job to play shag-happy wife. However, when word gets out that Vanya’s ditched his clueless Russian-Armenian minders, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), whose job it is to clean up the messes he makes, and rumours spread on Russian social media, his Orthodox priest godfather Toros (Karren Karagulianis) is ordered by Vanya’s domineering mother Galina Zakharovato (Darya Ekamasova) to find him and get the marriage annulled, she and her husband Nikolai flying over to America to take him back home. However, when his minders turn up, a coked-up Vanya does a runner and, after a lengthy apartment-trashing tussle (there’s a lovely moment as Igor tries to restrain Ani while respecting her personal space), they, Tonos and Ani set out to try and track him down, she reluctantly agreeing to $10000 in return for the annulment but hoping to convince everyone their love is real.
A cocktail of After Hours, Uncut Gems and Pretty Woman, with copious scenes of energetic screwing and liberal doses of black comedy, it’s a tad overlong to get going with perhaps more naked, gyrating lap dancing than are strictly necessary, but once the tragi-comic farce is underway it crackles with real energy and emotion. As the panicking Tonos, his beleaguered brother Garnick and tough but placid enforcer Igor, Karagulianis, Tovmasyan and Borisov (at times suggesting an Armenian Ewan McGregor) make for a wonderful comedic hapless trio and, while neither of the two central characters are especially likeable (both in it for what they can get), Eydelshteyn is immensely watchable as the brattishly entitled and shallow Vanya while Madison sets the screen alight as the smart, unsentimental but vulnerable Ani, giving the touching final shot a real hammer to the heart. (Sky Cinema)
Back In Action (12)
The title carrying a double meaning in that this is Cameron Diaz’s first film in 10 years, reaming with her Annie remake co-star Jamie Foxx, himself returning after being hospitalized, directed by Seth Gordon it’s a generic thriller that mines a familiar narrative involving kids who don’t know their parents are spies. Or at least they were. Fifteen years ago, more than platonic partners, she discovering she’s pregnant, CIA agents Emily (Diaz) and Matt (Foxx) narrowly escaped from a plane crash after apparently being betrayed by Baron (Andrew Scott, making the most of a thin role), an MI6 agent.
Resolving to retire, they’ve given up espionage and forged new lives and workaday mundane careers, now living in Atlanta with their two kids, snarky Alice (McKenna Roberts) and her younger rule-following techie brother Leo (Rylan Jackson). However, when a video of Matt losing his cool in a disco after discovering Alice isn’t actually studying with friends goes viral, their old handler Chuck (Kyle Chandler) turns up warning them their cover’s blown. But no sooner has he done so than he’s shot and the pair have to quickly grab the kids and hit the road, being pursued by both Polish KGB agent turned terrorist Balthazar Gor (Robert Besta) and his mercenary henchmen and Baron, who’s still nurturing a running gag crush on Emily, both believing they have the master-key, which they stole during Gor’s kiddies’s birthday party for his daughter, that will give its owner the ability to control any system in the world and which was never recovered from the plane wreckage. All of which means, clearly enjoying being back in the game, they have to, to the confusion of the kids, adopt new names and head to London to seek help from her long-estranged mother, Ginny (Glenn Close), a still formidable former British spy who’s living with her wannabe MI6 agent toyboy Nigel (an amusingly bumbling Jamie Demetriou as a nascent Johnny English).
Unfolding into a road movie with a series of brawls, parenting messages and boat and motorbike chases along the way, while it may be relentlessly rote there are some enjoyable spins, such as the couple improvising weapons out of a petrol pump, a bottle of Diet Coke and a tube of Mentos, an amusing joke at the expense of Jason Bourne and fights staged to Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag at the Tate Modern and Dean Martin’s Ain’t That a Kick in the Head as they literally kick thugs in the head. Trading off one another, Diaz and Foxx have palpable chemistry, Close sinks her teeth into the ham while Roberts and Jackson step up to the not exactly demanding mark as the kids finding mum and dad aren’t the bores they seemed. Undemanding fun, but fun nevertheless. (Netflix)
The Bad Guys 2 (PG)
A sequel to the 2022 Dreamworks animation, for late arrivals this opens with a brief catch-up detailing how, in a car heist and a fast paced Cairo car chase, critter criminals (motto – the heist is never about the loot), fast talking dapper Mr. Wolf (a superb Sam Rockwell), slippery safecracker Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), toxically flatulent Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), unlikely prone to panic master of disguise Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and snarky hacker Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina), were eventually caught and turned over a new leaf. Cut to the present and they’re down on their luck and a crappy car, unable to get jobs on account of their records Wolf goes for an interview at a bank he robbed three times), only a newly ripped Snake, who’s reinvented himself as a yoga-and-kombucha health fanatic, seeming upbeat.
Things proceed to get worse when they’re framed for a series of robberies carried out by the Phantom Bandit, alias snow leopard Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), who heads up a bad girls trio alongside raven Doom (Natasha Lyonne), the unwitting Snake’s girlfriend (kiddies’ eyes should be averted from their a make-out session), and literal-minded wild boar Pigtail Petrova (Maria Bakalova). They’re stealing a metal known (in a Hitchcock in-joke) as MacGuffinite, aiming to use its properties as a gold magnet to steal all the gold on Earth. It’s a plot that entails using a video of Wolf’s love interest, red fox state Governor, Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), that reveals her secret past as the Crimson Paw thief, to blackmail Wolf and his buddies into taking part in one last job, stealing one final MacGuffinite before hijacking the Moon X rocket from Musk-like tech billionaire (Colin Jost) and launching into space.
It’s a fairly twisty and convoluted plot, but it never loses momentum or sags, climaxing in a stunts-filled space sequence that adds a touch of Mission: Impossible and Moonraker to its Ocean’s Eleven meets Reservoir Dogs template. The voice cast and character chemistry is terrific, the core ensemble being augmented by the return of Alex Borstein as Misty Luggins, former Police Chief and now Commissioner, and Richard Ayoade as guinea pig villain Professor Marmalade, who, now in prison and bulked up, prompts a sly Hannibal Lecter homage when he’s visited by Diane. Visually dynamic, crammed with great gags, glowing with charm and sporting a very smart screenplay, it ends setting up a further sequel with our anti-heroes reconfigured as a team of anthropomorphic secret agents. Bring it on. (Omniplex Great Park)
Caught Stealing (15)
Adapted by Charlie Huston from his own 90s set novel and directed by director Darren Aronofsky, the title is a baseball term for when a runner is tagged out before reaching second base, third base or home plate, the runner here looking to get to safety being Hank Thompson (Austin Roberts), a California-bred, New York bartender and Giants fan whose promising baseball career was cut short when, swerving to avoid a cow, he hit a post killing his high school friend and fellow contender and shattering his knee, something that still gives him nightmares, wallowing in guilt and self-pity. A good guy who gives money to the local wino, he works as a bartender for biker boss Paul (Griffin Dunne), lives in a Lower East Side apartment building and is dating feisty paramedic Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). One day. He comes home to find his next door neighbour, Russ (Matt Smith, giving it large), a British punk with an orange mohawk haircut, asking him to look after Bud (Tonic, who was the moggy star of Pet Sematary), his bad-tempered cat who bites everyone but Hank, while he flies back to London to see his sick father. But then a couple of bald Russian mob goons, Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin), aka Microbe, who work for Puerto Rican gangster Colorado (Benito A Martínez Ocasio aka rapper Bad Bunny), turn up looking for Russ and proceed to give Hank such a beating he ends up hospital having had a kidney removed (not good someone fond of booze).
It transpires they’re looking for a key (which, it turns out Russ hid in a plastic turd in Bud’s litter tray) which will unlock the location of a serious stash of drugs money, and they’re not the only ones, there’s also cooly assured Detective Roman (Regina King), who reveals Russ is a dealer, and Hasidic hitmen brothers Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent Donofrio) Drucker, any or all of who, are willing to kill those close to Hank – or give the cat a kicking – to get what they’re after, as the film journeys from Flushing Meadows and Queens (and Shea Stadium) to Coney Island and Brighton Beach in Brooklyn.
Hank more of an everyday troubled joe than some John Wick type, Butler is magnetic without being flashy, the film a slow burner about personal redemption with a mostly dark lighting, the violence brutal and lethal, the humour pretty much the same as Aranofsky gradually ratchets up the tension, pace and odds, with Russ returning to reveal what the key unlocks, then Hank losing it after falling off the wagon. As the assorted mobsters close in, Hank, who’s still handy with a bat, does his best to stop anyone else getting hurt. Guy Ritchie seems to be a touchstone for some of the humour, not least Hank and the brothers visit to their mother Bubbe (Carol Kane) for Shabbos dinner, she taking a shine to him, and a running gag with Hank constantly phoning his baseball fan mother (an uncredited cameo surprise in the final frames) to assure he’s ok, always ending with “Go Giants”. There’ also a couple of intense metal crushing front on car and post interfaces unlike any you’ve seen before. I definite home run. (Cineworld NEC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park)
Companion (15)
After a spate of films sounding warning notes about AI, writer-director Drew Hancock impressively flips the narrative from perpetrator to victim in a cautionary tale about technology and relationships woven with a commentary on toxic masculinity.
Meeting romcom cute in a supermarket, Iris (Heretic’s Sophie Thatcher) is in a relationship with underdog nice guy Josh (The Boys’ Jack Quaid), though there’s something uneasy about how, docile and submissive, she professes she’s wants to ensure all his wants and desires are fulfilled. Her opening voice-over sets you up for that’s to come as she says the two most important moments of her life where when she met him and when she killed him.
They’re off on weekend getaway to a remote luxury home owned by adulterous billionaire Russian Sergey (Rupert Friend with bristling moustache and thick accent), joined by Josh’s standoffish ex Kat (Megan Suri), who’s also Sergey’s girlfriend, and, also in their first flush of romance, mutually besotted gay couple by catty Eli (Harvey Guillén) and the hot but dim, anxious to please Patrick (Lukas Gage), who coincidentally also have their own meet-cute, although Iris feels uncomfortable and unwelcomed in their company. Well, not that unwelcomed by Sergey who, alone by the lake, attempts to rape her. We next see her walking back into the house, covered in his blood. At which point the film upends everything to reveal that Iris is in fact a humanoid, a lifelike fuckbot companion Josh is renting (flashbacks show her being delivered and programmed – her intelligence, level of aggression, voice, etc., all remotely controlled), theoretically programmed to not harm humans.
It turns out that killing Sergey, apparently a drugs dealer, also throws a spanner in the works regarding the real reason the others are there, namely to steal $12million. But, as events spiral out of control into a cat and mouse battle of wits and survival between them and Iris, that’s not the only secret being hidden, but to reveal more would spoil the thrills as they unfold.
Thatcher is terrific in the way she handles Iris coming to terms with who or what she is (learning her tears are just fed from an internal reservoir), gaining Josh’s smartphone app controls and trying to become autonomous and overcome the restrictions of her programming and the feelings with which she’s been implanted. Playing counter to his character in The Boys, Quaid is also compelling in Josh’s mix of spinelessness and ruthlessness, and while Suri’s character is less developed, Guillén and Gage throw some clever curves as things develop.
Sporting an ingenious screenplay and working with themes of manipulation, appearances and reality, control, emotional abuse, the weaponisation and commodification of feelings and , it consistently takes off in unexpected directions, fusing moments of comedy with ones of sudden violence and horror. (Apple TV+)
Conclave (12A)
Peter Straughan’s take on the Robert Harris novel , despite a seemingly unpromising plot pivoting round the election of a new Pope, directed by Edward Berger this is a grippingly tense thriller about faith and the nature of and desire for power and unequivocally one of the year’s best films, its success in America a welcome reminder that, amid the familiar CGI-littered blockbusters, there’s still an audience for intelligent, thought-provoking filmmaking.
The central figure is the conflicted Cardinal Lawrence (an inscrutable, nuanced turn by Ralph Fiennes), who, when the Pope dies in his room in Domus Sanctae Marthae, is charged with overseeing the conclave, an assembly of fellow cardinals who, sequestered in the Sistine Chapel, charged with electing his successor (a problematic task foreshadowed by the difficulty in removing the Papal ring). It’s not a position Lawrence, whose resignation from his post as Dean of the College of Cardinals amid his crisis of faith in the church the Pope had refused, welcomes and he certainly harbours no ambitions for the position himself. That’s not the case, however, for the narrow-minded Tedesco (John Tuturro lookalike Sergo Castellitto) who wants to return the Papacy to the old, pre-liberal days with everything in Latin, or Tremblay (an almost salivating John Lithgow),who lusts for the power it brings. Lawrence’s fellow liberal friend Bellini (an edgy Stanley Tucci) claims he’s not a viable candidate, but for the sake of the Church, would rather himself than his rivals. Also in contention is the equally conservative and homophobic Nigerian Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati).
Amid the conspiratorial machinations, matters are complicated by Lawrence learning that Tremblay apparently had a meeting with the Pope just before he died and was apparently sacked for conduct unbecoming, though he insists this never happened. There’s also an incident with Adeyemi and a nun from Nigeria who was flown in to the Vatican at the express wish of one of his rivals. With all the cardinals secluded from any outside communication and forming their own cliques, as a web of secrets unfolds, there’s also the surprise arrival of the soft-spoken Mexican cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) who wasn’t on the list and whose posting in Kabul was unknown to all and who, it transpires, had a planned visit to Switzerland paid for by the late Pope. All of this is being quietly observed by the head nun, Sister Agatha (Isabella Rossellini, scene stealing in an almost dialogue-free role).
As Lawrence stars digging into the rumours, while becoming increasingly worried that he’s getting votes himself, working with Bellini to try and stave off the election of either Tremblay or Tedesco, more hidden secrets come to light and there’s more coldly calculated backstabbing, as, bolstered by a tremendous score from Volker Bertelmann, Berger ratchets up the suspense to nail-biting levels while the screenplay throws up provocative debates about the state of the Roman Catholic Church in present times, as well as a sudden .intrusion by political events beyond the Vatican walls.
Amid the raft of outstanding performances, Fiennes gets a terrific sermon, declaring that he fears certainty to be the biggest threat to faith and encouraging the cardinals to embrace doubt while, amid the sea of red robes and detailed rituals, there’s some riveting visual moments, most notably an overhead shot of the cardinals gathering in the courtyard with white umbrellas that could easily become an iconic poster. Climaxing with a twist you’ll never see coming, it’s a masterclass in filmmaking and storytelling. (Amazon Prime)
The Conjuring: Last Rites (15)
Twelve years and seven sequels/spin-offs on, the story of real life faith-driven paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorainne (Vera Farmiga) Warren finally wraps up (and with it presumably the workmanlike Wilson’s days as a headline star, unless there’s more Insidious sequels in the pipeline) with the case that brought their active spook hunting days to end. Opening in 1964 , the pair (Orion Smith/Madison Lawlor) are checking out an antique wooden mirror with the carved heads of three babies, but when she touches it the glass cracks and she sees a vision of an entity and her unborn child. Immediately sending her into labour, their daughter, Judy is stillborn, but comes back from death after a minute, her parents subsequently embarking on their controversial and well-publicised (the two stars are inserted into a real Larry King interview with the Warrens) adventures.
Fast forward to 1986, and moving into a two-storey house in Pennsylvania (presumably unaware of the murders committed on the site), the Smurl family (I defy you not to think Smurfs) Jack (Elliot Cowan) and Janet (Rebecca Calder), her in-laws Mary (Kate Fahy) and John (Peter Wight), and their four daughters, teenagers Dawn Beau Gadson) and Heather (Kila Lord Cassidy), and the young twins, Carin (Tilly Walker) and Shannon (Molly Cartwright), celebrate Heather’s confirmation by gifting her that self-same, still cracked mirror, as you do. Almost immediately, things start to turn freaky, the ceiling light crashing down and the girls hearing voices and seeing shadowy figures, the older sisters eventually deciding to throw it out with the trash. Except, while crushed in a dumpster truck, the next day Dawn vomits blood and shards of glass and Jack is himself assaulted by an unseen force and then find themselves subject to a media frenzy. So, who you gonna call?
Well, apparently not the Warrens who, after Ed’s heart attack, have called it a day and now find themselves lecturing on the paranormal to a handful of bored attendees, and getting mocked as B-list Ghostbusters. However, inheriting psychic abilities from mum, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), who’s just got engaged to ex-cop Tony (Ben Hardy with half-hearted backstory) at her disapproving dad’s birthday bash, is starting to have vision of the Annabelle doll and an elderly woman. When old colleague Father Gordon (Steve Goult, one of several returnees and cameos from the franchise, many of them birthday/wedding party guests like Lili Taylor, Mackenzie Foy, Frances O’Connor, Madison Wolfe and Julian Hillard, alongside the real Tony and Judy and producer James Wan) fails to persuade the Warrens to help, he duly takes off to visit the Smurls himself. It doesn’t end well, with Judy having another vision at his funeral that sends her too off to the harassed family, and, hey, wouldn’t you know, that just what the demon wants. So, finally, off trot mum and dad to do their thing one last time. And guess what else has made a return.
Helmed by returning director Michael Chaves, all of this takes a punishingly and interminably slow 75 minutes with creaking doors, unlit rooms, haunted basements, possessed dolls and jump scare ghoulish faces desperately trying to sustain the creepiness before, the Smurls all but consigned to the sidelines, the last act finally opens the floodgates for axe wielding ghosts, sinks flooding blood, apparitions and general paranormal mayhem. It does eventually pay off and Wilson and Farmiga are duly committed to delivering the goods, but having had to sit through woeful dialogue that includes lines like “our family is not like other families”, “fetch the book” and the unintendedly hilarious “there’s something in the attic”, not to mention Howard Jones’ overly optimistic Things Can Only Get Better, you’d be forgiven for not sticking around after the real life footage of the Warrens and their cases, and a resume of their lives, and thus missing the end credit reveal of the mirror and the franchise’s title. Let’s just let the dead rest in peace. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
The Damned (15)
With an unnerving score from Stephen McKeon and Eli Arenson’s striking cinematography, the feature debut by Icelandic director Thordur Palsson is one of the best of the recent best horrors, at times evoking thoughts of M.R.James. Set in 19th century Iceland with an atmosphere so thick it threatens to choke you, it centres around a shipwreck just off the coast that serves as home to a small fishing community. It’s winter and times are hard, food scarce and the weather murderous. Seeing the wreck, the villagers are divided, some say it’s their moral duty to rescue the survivors, others take the pragmatic view that, with scant food supplies already, doing so would threaten their own survival. It’s the latter view that wins the day and ships are not put out, However, when they do take to sea the next day hoping to recover the ship’s barrels of salt pork, they’re shocked to discover that some of the sailors have made it to the jagged rocky outcrop known as “The Teeth”, and when they try to get aboard they have to be beaten off and left to drown, though it also costs the life of their helmsman Ragnar (Rory McCann).
When the bodies eventually wash up (a shocking scene suggests one’s still alive but the stomach moments prove to be an eel that got inside the body), they’re buried on the beach, the elderly superstitious Helga (Siobhan Finneran) telling that they must have their hands tied with rope, their feet nailed down, and their wooden coffins rotated three times in order to confuse their spirits and prevent them returning as Draugr, undead creatures of Nordic lore composed of skin, bone and blood, only capable of being destroyed by fire. What follows is a series of mysterious deaths and suicides as well as unnerving visions of a black figure that are inevitably taken to be rooted in hauntings by the drowned men. The truth proves both less and more horrifying. As Daniel (Joe Cole), who becomes the new helmsman says, the living are more dangerous than the dead.
Morality play and psychological horror, it’s a spartan affair, cold and dark, steeped in shadows and mist, drawing on folklore superstition and guilty paranoia alike, given gutsy strength by a strong cast led by Odessa Young as Eva, a young but steely widow who’s in charge of the fishing boat and gets to make the decisions, and Joe Cole as Daniel, their mutual feelings throwing up another ethical dilemma that further stokes the simmering tensions amid a community founded on tough masculine values and survival through strength. Damned good indeed. (Sky Cinema)
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)
After The Conjuring, another franchise hangs up its boots, returning director Simon Curtis and screenwriter Julian Fellowes (who includes a line about the writer being the start of a film) bidding a fond farewell to the upstairs and downstairs folk at Downton as changing times bring changing circumstances and shifting social statuses. The final flourish is constructed around two core narratives and a sidebar with Lady Mary Talbot (Michelle Dockery) now a social pariah following her divorce from Henry, even though he had a mistress, and Downton struggling to keep its head above water, the Crawleys faced with crippling debts and the gears no longer turning smoothly in the wake of the death of the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith’s portrait dramatically staring down from the wall) and the loss of Cora’s (Elizabeth McGovern) mother in America. The two strands are intertwined when Cora’s brother Harold (Paul Giamatti) arrives to help Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) with the financial difficulties accompanied by suave business associate Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola) who promptly seduces Mary. However, Harold also has some bad news regarding their own family’s money matters and debts that need repaying.
It opens in 1930 with the Robert and Cora, at Grantham House (which, to his horror, Mary suggests they sell) for the London season, attending a West End performance of Noël Coward’s (Arty Froushan) operetta Bitter Sweet starring Guy Dexter (Dominic West),the actor who filmed at Downton in A New Era and now lives with secret lover and former Downton butler Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier) thus setting up a plot device for the third act. The harmonious notes are swiftly thrown into discordance, however, when, the next day, after news of her divorce, a social scandal, breaks, Mary, in an ill-advised crimson dress, is asked to leave a party held by Lady Petersfield (Joely Richardson) because Royalty are due. Then, back at Downton, the ever-useless Harold arrives with news for Cora that a failed investment has lost their mother’s inheritance, which she was relying on to renovate Downton, and he wants to sell her home to pay off Sambrook who’s been bankrolling him. It doesn’t take a genius to realise Sambrook’s a bit of a shark. He also owns a racehorse, thereby enabling a scene at Ascot.
So, basically, what ensues is an attempt by Edith (Laura Carmichael) to engineer a scheme to ger her sister back into favour among the local snobbish socialites while Robert wrestles with the notion of ceding control of Downton to Mary and he and his wife taking up residence in his late mother’s property, Dower House (a block of flats he refers to as a “layer cake of strangers”), and Cora and her brother seek to navigate his financial woes and obligations. Alongside this there’s a comedic subplot involving the annual country fair with Lady Isobel Merton (Penelope Wilon), looking to take the reins from the committee’s ultra conservative old school chairman Sir Hector (Simon Russell-Beale) by enlisting Daisy Parker (Sophie McShera), who’s taking over from Beryl Patmore (Lesley Nicol) as Downton’s cook, and Mr Carson (Jim Carter), who’s retiring for the second time (but hard to be rid of) as Downton butler to be succeeded by Daisy’s husband Andy (Michael Fox), with his housekeeper wife Eslie (Phyliss Logan) advising the nervous premarital and virginal Beryl that sex is quite fun.
Thrown into the proceedings and returning characters too are Tom Branson (Allen Leech), the now remarried widower of the youngest Crawley sister, Sybil, who has news about Sambrook, former footman turned screenwriter Joseph Molesley (Kevin Doyle) who wrote Dexter’s hit film The Gambler and is desperate for an introduction to Coward (in a nice joke and Mary provide the title and inspiration for his play Private Lives), his wife and Cora’s lady maid Phyllis (Raquel Cassidy) Anna Bates (Joanna Froggatt), Mary’s now pregnant maid, and her husband John (Brendan Coyle, valet to Lord Granthan, and Beryl’s local tenant farmer love interest (and father to Daisy’s first husband) Albert Mason (Paul Copley).
It’s a veritable chessboard of characters that Fellowes keeps moving around while his screenplay focuses on themes of change (there’s early talk of London’s redevelopment), of the new generation taking over the torch from the old, cultural differences and social prejudices and attitudes and a solid dollop of female empowerment. If you’ve not followed the TV series and its spin-off films religiously, you may have a problem keep up but, for all the complicated interconnections, it’s actually fairly straightforward with that familiar and cosy BBC period drama glow. It ends with Mary reminiscing alone in Downtown with a flashback montage of scenes from the past, the late Maggie Smith, to whom the film’s dedicated and whose immortal ‘what’s a weekend” line is paid tribute, naturally stealing everything with one of her withering looks. At one point, Harold remarks that maybe the past was more comfortable. Downtown fans will doubtless agree. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; MAC; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
Eddington (15)
Having announced himself as a promising new master of disturbing psychological horror with Hereditary and Midsommar, writer-director burst the bubble with the self-indulgent paranoia tragicomedy Beau Is Afraid and continues on the same losing stream with this even more laborious overlong state of the nation satire that, set against a backdrop of 2020 Covid lockdown, throws in everything from online conspiracy theories, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter and social polarisation to liberal-white privilege and guns in the hope something will stick.
It unfolds in the fictional New Mexico small town of Eddington where the reactionary local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Pheonix) and the progressive mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) are at loggerheads over personal liberty and mandatory masks, Cross arguing that it’s not helpful for anyone with asthma, like himself, and anyway there’s been no cases in the area at all. He also resents Garcia’s support for a planned environmentally dodgy, resource-absorbing data centre that’s got a hostile reception from the indigenous locals. There’s also the fact that Garcia has history with Cross’s wife Louise aka Rabbit (a virtually redundant Emma Stone), aa troubled artist who paints creepy looking dolls and suffers from hysteria and depression and whose mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), now part of the lockdown bubble, is a conspiracy theorist (the Titanic was no accident) and social media addict mom with connections to cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler) who encourages his follows to dig up suppressed memories of child abuse. When Cross decides to run for election as Mayor (free our hearts is his mantra), driving round with conspiracy theories and bad grammar plastered across his jeep, things get even more tense.
Added to the character cocktail are Garcia’s brattish teen son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) who’s dating social justice warrior Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) who’s riddled with guilt for dumping bitcoin obsessed boyfriend Michael (Micheal Ward) because he’s become a cop, even though he’s Black. Plus there’s Eric’s best fried Brian (Cameroan Mann), another social justice warrior, Cross’s aggressive racist deputy Guy (Luke Grimes), Native American cop Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) from the Pueblo Reservation who, naturally, is the target of white cop prejudice, a deranged and violent homeless man whose altercation with Cross goes viral, and assorted disaffected wannabe do-gooder teens.
Framed as a contemporary Western, all this unfolds over an interminable and doggedly dull two acts devoid of any real tension before, following an abrupt plot twist and two murders, the third act finally injects life – not to mention shoot-outs, explosions and an Antifa hit squad – into proceedings. Visually it’s handsome looking and somewhere amid the screenplay (which has a few brief flashes of Trump) there’s themes about connection, communication breakdowns and alpha male anxiety alongside flashes of black humour, but the end result is just a chaotic mess of ideas that never forms a coherent narrative. ( )
F1 The Movie (15)
Having taken to the skies for fast planes in Top Gun: Maverick, director Joseph Kosinski now returns to the ground for fast cars, the actors again actually behind the controls, for this formulaic but adrenaline-spiking brand-endorsed Formula One motor racing comeback redemption melodrama, with Lewis Hamilton as a producer as well as cameoing as himself along with all ten Formula One teams and their drivers in the 2023 season.
Swapping out Tom Cruise for Brad Pitt as the older guy showing the rookies how it’s done, he plays Sonny Hayes, a former F1 hotshot (cue de-ageing into blonde boyish flashbacks) until a near fatal crash took him of the track, spending the next 30 years as a professional (if unsuccessful) gambler, New York cabbie with a string of failed marriages (the press conference slyly plays off Pitt’s one personal track record) and, now, living out of his camper van and a nomadic racing driver for hire. His past catches up with him when his former racing buddy Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), now owner of the APXGP F1 team but unlikely to be for much longer if their current piss poor run continues. He wants Sonny back in the seat with his old school magic, a move that, when he turns up at Silverstone, is met with sniffy disapproval by devious board member Banning (Tobias Menzies) and open disdain by skilled but cocky and insecure rising star Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) who seems him as a threat to his No 1 driver status. A feeling shared by his protective mother (Sarah Miles) who declares Sonny as not a has-been but a never-was, With negative press, a “shitbox” of a car and driver friction, staying on the track let alone in the series will prove a real challenge.
Anyone familiar with sports movies can probably see the rest of the narrative coming as Hayes and Pearce butt heads before the latter learns to work together as a team as things head to the Grand Prix finale in Abu Dhabi, Sonny mixes things up with his, er, maverick, attack tendency to throw the rule book out of the car cockpit, some board member backstabbing and, of course, not forgetting the obligatory romantic interest, here in the form of a sterling Kerry Condon as APXGP technical director Kate McKenna who both gets to build the game changing supercar and play with Sonny’s gearstick.
Bringing his familiar sexily cool nonchalance to a character in it for the rubber burning moment of transcendence rather than the money and glory, Pitt exudes high octane charisma ably supported by a suave but panicking Bardem and the resentful, competitive Pearce, even if the latter’s character is less well-developed. There’s top gear back up too, notably Kim Bodnia as team principal Kaspar Smolinski, Will Merrick as Sonny’s race engineer, Abdul Salis as chief mechanic Dodge and Callie Cooke as tyre gunner Jodie who’s miscalculation in the early stretch afford a running narrative thread.
Fuelled by a stupendous Hans Zimmer score and opening set to Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, at two and a half hours is well overlong but between the breath-taking race action, much from the driver perspective (filmed with mini-IMAX cameras), complete with crashes and those superfast tyre/parts changes, there’s also plenty of off-track personal dramas to keep you engaged. More pointedly, while most racing movies focus on the racing, this is equally balanced with the strategies and engineering mechanics involved in getting past the chequered flag first. As such, this is laps ahead of things like Days Of Thunder, Le Mans and Gran Turismo even if, for all the amusing Hayes/Pearce macho sparring and banter, it never quite rises to the same character dynamics as the Hemsworth/Bruhl classic Rush. Nonetheless, this is a Pitt stop you won’t want to miss. (Odeon Birmingham)
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (12A)
The fourth attempt (fifth if you include Roger Corman’s unreleased version), is, without damning with faint praise, far better than the previous three, even if the basic plot (the team have to battle the Silver Surfer and prevent Galactus (Ralph Inseson) devouring the Earth) parallels, the 2007 entry. Except this time, the twist is that he will spare the planet if Sue and Reed will give up their newborn son, Franklin, who apparently (though Reed can find no evidence) has the latent cosmic power to release Galactus from his hunger.
Directed by WandaVision’s Mark Shakman, like Superman is largely dispenses with an origin story, a TV show (presented by a nebbish Mark Gattis) sketching in that it’s been four years since they got their powers and signature blue and white costumes: socially awkward scientist Reed Richard (Pedro Pascal, elasticity), all cardigans and ties, feisty wife Sue (Vanessa Kirby, invisibility and force field projection, street cool brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) aka the Human Torch who can burst into flames (but is no longer the cocky hothead) and pilot Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who gained super strength but at the cost off being turned into an orange rock figure but, a kiddie loving funster, is no longer full of self-pity. A brief montage details their battles with villains like the Puppet Master, the Red Ghost’s Super Apes and Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser), ruler of Subterranea, who will prove a plot point later on. All of which has made them, based in the Baxter Building, the planet’s beloved protectors, Earth 828 (more parallel dimensions, set in a 60s retro Manhattan) refreshingly having no other superheroes.
The celebration of Sue’s pregnancy (apparently after years of trying) is quickly overshadowed however with the arrival of the Galactus’s herald, the Silver Surfer, here as Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner) rather than Norrin Radd, who gave up her humanity to save her planet. She’s a bit of a turn on for Johnny, but the dampener is her announcing that Galactus is coming to eat their planet, has he has done countless others.
As with Superman, while there are big set pieces with wormholes and trashed buildings, this is very much a character piece about a tight knit family ready to sacrifice themselves (though not or one their child) for one another, and the quartet’s chemistry with its spats, ribbing banter and solid bonds is one of the reasons this really works. There’s also childbirth in space, surely a first.
Not all if it works, I wasn’t persuaded that, while a character from the comics, their pet robot H.E.R.B.I.E. was entirely necessary while calling Natasha Lyonne’s synagogue elementary teacher Rachel and Ben’s romantic interest rather than Alicia Masters a cameo would be greatly overstating things Also, while 7Up and Canada Dry get product placement, it does seems a touch crass that the FF have shoes that leave a 4 imprint in the ground. Mind you the running ‘It’s clobbering time’ gag is a beaut.
As with the previous film it builds to monumental climax that has Shalla-Bal finding her soul and still sees Sue being killed, though her resurrection here as a far more poignant mother-child resonance. A credits sequence with Franklin and a cowled figure holding an iron mask sets things up Avengers: Doomsday, but these first steps are a giant leap for the MCU. (Cineworld NEC; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Freakier Friday (PG)
Twelve years on from the body-switch remake, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reunite for another bout of fish-out-of-water bonding, this time upping the ante with four not two characters trading places as they get to learn life lessons about family and parental relationships as they get to see each other’s lives through different eyes. Directed by Nisha Ganatra, there’s three generations involved. Now a single mum, Anna (Lohan) has quit her rock star dreams as frontwoman of Pink Slip (though she’s still a high-powered Los Angeles music manager) to raise teen daughter Harper (Julia Butters) although her spiky therapist helicopter mother Tess (Curtis) is constantly intruding. Meeting in the principal’s office following a chemistry class incident involving their respective daughters, Anna and widowed English celebrity chef Eric (a blandly anonymous Manny Jacinto) fall in love and set a wedding date, planning to move to the UK. Harper, naturally, resents the idea of uprooting her life while, still grieving her mother’s death and resentful of being in LA, Eric’s mean girl fashionista daughter, Lily (Sophia Hammons) most certainly doesn’t want a stepsister, the pair constantly feuding with each other.
While attending her bachelorette party, both Anna and Tess and Harper and Lily have separate sessions with a dotty multi-hyphenate psychic (Vanessa Bayer) who joins their palms together, warns about their fractured lives and advises the teens to find out where their hearts belong. And on Friday morning, three days before the wedding, they wake up to discover they’ve switched bodies. Harper with Ann and Lily with Tess, the teenagers uniting in a mission to get the wedding called off while the adults try to ensure it keeps to schedule.
It’s an inevitably convoluted plot, one which also involves Anna’s pop star client Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), who has a major tour upcoming, having a meltdown after her ex dumping her and writing a song putting her down, and, Lily as Tess trying to rekindle the spark between Anna and her record store high school boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray), though he seems more interested in her mother.
There’s some vaguely touching moments as the teens learn how much their parents love them and are willing to sacrifice, but mostly the emotional needle barely flickers. More damagingly, it’s almost painfully unfunny as it strains for laughs, although Curtis (as Lily) does score points self-mockingly complaining about her wrinkles and the pitfalls of old age. Her lips makeover is also mildly amusing. The core cast also deftly mimic the character tics and traits on their new personas, but, while all four are engaging, they’re also mostly mugging at a high pitch with the pratfalls and physical comedy overcooked. Both the original and the remake tapped into the complex parent-child minefields to solid box office effect, but, while it may have its moments, this is a definite case where more is very much less. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park)
Get Away (15)
Written by and starring Nick Frost, this is another of his genre spoofing excursions, turning the lens this time on folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar with a plot that follows the familiar trope of outsiders being caught up in deadly rituals. The clueless targeted victims are middle-aged couple dorky dad Richard (Frost) and condescending Susan (Aisling Bea) Smith, who call each other mummy and daddy, and have brought their reluctant, bickering adolescent kids, sarcastic vegan Sam (Sebastian Croft) and surly misanthropic Jessie (a drolly deadpan Maisie Ayres), for a holiday stay on the fictional Swedish island of Svalta to watch the annual Karantän festival, an eight-hour re-enactment of a cannibalistically murderous 19th-century history incident when the locals killed and ate the four British soldiers who’d starved the island.
The family’s warned by the local storekeeper not to take the ferry, advising they won’t be made welcome, but, naturally, as in all such horrors, the blithely proceed, arriving to face a hostile reception led by veteran Karantän organiser Klara (Anitta Suikkari) before checking into the Airbnb they’ve rented off Matts (Eero Milonoff), who turns out to be a creepy pervert who steals Jessie’s underwear and watches her through a two way mirror.
As the islanders make no secret of how they feel about those culturally-deaf interlopers (having a dead rodent thrown at them seems pretty indicative), the Smiths are left in no doubt that more than theatrical blood may well be spilled. And indeed, things do finally erupt in knife-slicing and stabbing carnage with eviscerations and severed limbs and heads. But, as Frost delivers a wicked Psycho-spun twist, not quite in the way you might have assumed.
Directed by Steffen Haars with an enthusiastically scattershot narrative, it is, of course, all utterly but deliberately silly, ridiculous, and wildly overacted as it bathes in geysers of blood and gleefully sends up the genre conventions, complete with a punchline motto I can’t possibly reveal. Great fun. (Sky)
Havoc (18)
Tom Hardy seems to be all over the show at present, and, adding to his magnetic turn in Mobland, he now turns up in the Wales-set thriller as Patrick Walker, a bent cop who works as a fixer for corrupt politician and mayoral candidate Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker) and is a pretty crappy divorced dad (it opens with him doing last minute shopping at a convenience store for his daughter’s Christmas presents). Saddled with an idealistic new rookie partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), he finds himself in the thick of things following the hijacking of a truck full of washing machines (loaded with cocaine, as it happens) that results in one of the pursuing narcotic cops, Cortez, ending up in hospital.
As the plot unfolds, it turns out the heist was carried out by Beaumont’s estranged son Charlie (Justin Cornwell) and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) who take the coke to Triad head Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones) only for three masked men to burst in and massacre everyone else. Now, Patrick has to somehow get Charlie and Mia to safety with Tsui’s mother (Yeo Yann Yann) flying in to exact revenge, her brother Ching (Sunny Pang), Tsui’s henchman, having claimed them as the killers, while also evading fellow corrupt cops Jake (Richard Harrington), Hayes (Gordon Alexander) and Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) who, as this is hardly a spoiler, are in league with Ching to whom they were planning to sell the drugs in the first place.
It’s all convoluted and complicated, but, directed by Gareth Evans who made the two Raid movies and clearly has a hard on for John Woo, it’s also wall to wall, with violent action, crushed skulls, severed limbs and geysers of blood spraying aesthetically on to the white snow, plus a grisly fishing harpoon death, all climaxing at a gunfight at a secluded cabin along with the redemption arc you could see coming a mile off and an ambiguous ending that leaves room for a sequel. For all the excess, Evans doesn’t really bring anything to the table you’ve not seen before, but you have to admit he puts on a pretty decent feast. (Netflix)
Heads Of State (15)
Having worked together on Suicide Squad, Idris Elba and John Cena reunite as co-stars in this ludicrous but hugely entertaining action romp playing respectively, army veteran British Prime Minister Will Clarke and US President Sam Derringer, a former Hollywood action star. Derringer, in the post for six months, is riding high in the approval rating, whereas, six-years into the job, Clarke is experiencing something of a Starmer moment. Neither has much respect for the other, so understandably their first meeting at a press conference to announce a NATO-supported energy initiative is prickly ego-jostling affair. So, to repair the PR damage of their very public argument, they’re persuaded by their respective Chiefs of Staff Quincy (Richard Doyle) and Bradshaw (Sarah Niles) to fly to the NATO summit in Trieste aboard Air Force One and present a united front.
All of this is preceded by the opening set-up wherein a joint MI6 and CIA mission in Spain, led by senior British agent Noelle Bisset (Priyanka Chopra), to capture Russian arms dealer Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine with a subtext of pathos to his brutality), goes pear-shaped leaving the team dead during the annual festival food fight and Gradov acquiring a link to ECHELON, the global surveillance program used by the Anglosphere intelligence alliance Five Eyes. All part of his revenge for his son being murdered when his plans do create nuclear safety were misinterpreted as terrorism.
So, it’ll be no surprise when there’s an attempt to assassinate both Clarke and Derringer in flight, the plane being shot down with both heads of state presumed dead. Except they managed to parachute out and are now stranded in Belarus, aware that someone in their inner circle is a traitor. At which point, re-enter the pun-loving Bisset, who survived the massacre and is on Gradov’s trail. She also happens to have a romantic past with Clarke. Now they have to make it to safety, all the while being pursued by Gradov’s relentless assassins Sasha (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) and Olga (Katrina Durden).
With a pedal to the metal plot that involves a hammily cameoing Hawaiian-shirted Jack Quaid as Marty Comer who runs a CIA safe house in Warsaw, Stephen Root as Gradov’s hacker with a conscience and Carla Gugino as the Vice President (giving a timely Trump-impression speech about dismantling NATO and putting America first), there’s shoot-outs and stunts a plenty, both Elba’s Clarke as the straight man, and Cena’s broader written Derringer well-tooled up and shooting off bullets alongside the quips while Chopra shows she can kick ass with the best. Director Ilya Naishuller never pretends he’s making anything more than a gleefully silly big bucket popcorn mismatched buddy movie (even if the script does slip in a message about partnerships) and as such it’s an absolute winner, leaving you hoping they all get re-elected for a sequel. (Amazon Prime)
Highest 2 Lowest (15)
Showing on a solitary screen but streaming on Apple, Spike Lee reunites with Denzel Washington for a reimaging of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 noir High and Low, itself based on Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom, in which a shoe company executive is forced to choose between certain financial ruin and saving his chauffeur’s son when a kidnapper mixes up their two sons. Transplanted from Yokohama to New York, here the man facing the moral dilemma is David King (Washington), the founder of Stackin’ Hits Records and acknowledged by the like of Quincy Jones as having the “best ears in the business” (magazine covers of him adorn his office along with images of Aretha, Stevie Wonder and others_. However, the hits aren’t coming any more and, having previously sold his majority interest. he’s looking to buy it back to avert a rival label buyout that he says will see new artists being shed and the music used in commercials. His plan means he has to buy out his partner’s (Wendell Pierce) share, to which end, despite his philanthropist wife Pam’s (Ilfenesh Hadera) reservations, he puts up most of his personal assets, including his penthouse home in Brooklyn’s trendy Dumbo neighbourhood and Black art collection (Jean Michel Basquiat’s Now’s the Time and Kehinde Wiley’s Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia among them) as collateral.
However, the day the deal is due to go through, he gets a call saying his son Trey (Aubrey Jospeh), a promising basketball player he dropped off at practice, has been kidnapped with a ransom of $17.5 million in Swiss 1,000-franc notes for his safe return. Contacting the cops, although it could risk the business deal he and Pam agree to pay. But then comes the twist. Trey is found safe and it turns out that, in a mistake confusing their headbands, the kidnapper has instead abducted the son of King’s ex-con Muslim convert driver and best friend confidant Paul (a dramatically nuanced Jeffrey Wright), Trey’s best friend and fellow athlete Kyle (Wright’s real life son Elijah), racist white cop Detective Higgins (Dean Winters) suggesting Paul staged it himself.
The question now is whether King will stay pay the ransom, warned that refusing to do so will harm his and the label’s image. He does, eventually, agree, but the handover of the money, in a backpack containing a tracer, does not go as expected when, an emergency stop as he’s standing between subway train car carriages en route to Yankee Stadium sees it fall to the street, resulting in a lengthy chase involving it being passed between an extended series of moped riders weaving between a Puerto Rican Day Parade (an indulgent excuse to feature Latin Jazz bandleader Eddie Palmieri, Anthony Ramos and Rosie Perez appearing as themselves) before being retrieved only to find the money gone.
Kyle’s duly returned and King’s the hero of the hour, Stackin’ Hits records now back in the charts. But, with those who lent the $17.5 million demanding repayment within two weeks because he broke the terms of the contract by using it as the ransom, he’s determined to track down the kidnapper and recover his money. Kyle’s recalling of hip hop number he heard while being held captive and a demo tape of upcoming artists Trey compiled for his father to listen to, leads him and Paul to ex-convict and aspiring rapper Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky) and one of two outstanding rap battle styled face off scenes as he first confronts him at a recording studio and then in prison where Felon, whose crime has made his music a global phenomenon, tries to convince King to sign him. The final showstopping scene explains the film’s title, it being a number written by Sula (rising British soul star Aiyana-Lee in her film debut) a young singer-songwriter discovered by Trey, who auditions for the Kings for their new independent label.
A fairly straightforward thriller with some social commentary on the changing times injected, it’s not up there with Lee’s best, but, despite some unnecessarily prolonged sequences (it opens with a full rendition by Norm Lewis of Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ from Oklahoma as the camera slowly zooms in on King’s balcony), it sustains the momentum and narrative with Washington delivering a performance as fluid and flexible as an improvised jazz riff. (Apple TV+)
Honey Don’t! (15)
The second in the unconnected lesbian-noir trilogy by director Ethan Coen and his queer wife and writing partner Tricia Cooke, all three starring Margaret Qually but playing different characters. Here, the title taken from a Carl Perkins hit, driving a vintage turquoise Chevrolet SS, she’s Honey O’Donahue, a tough cookie gumshoe (gumshe?) in Bakersfield, California whose prospective client, Mia Novotny, is found dead in a car wreck the day they were supposed to meet, a previous scene showing a mystery woman removing a ring from her finger. The insignia links to the Four-Way Temple led by Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans relishing his douchebag character), who uses his church as a cover for drug trafficking, for whom moped-riding Chère (Lera Abova) is the French liaison, and preaches a doctrine heavy on sexual healing, specifically him having sex with the vulnerable young women in his congregation. His evangelist spoofing sermon about macaroni is hilarious.
Getting Mia’s parents address from evidence room cop MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), Honey learns Mia was a church member. Another case, investigating a gay client’s unfaithful boyfriend, also links to the church when the latter’s run over by Hector (Jacnier), one of Drew’s middlemen, after refusing for the drugs he’s ordered, which, in turns, adds three more to the rising body count. Meanwhile, following a steamy fingering session in the local bar while discussing the difference between crochet and knitting, Honey’s having a passionate affair with Falcone, the pair bonding over their respective abusive fathers while, the disappearance of Honey’s niece, Corrine (Talia Ryder), herself beaten up her boyfriend, after being approached by a seedy looking man at the bus stop leads things into serial killer territory and an out of nowhere tone shifting plot twist.
Throwing in Kristen Connolly as Honey’s older sister Heidi, Gabby Beans as Honey’s assistant and a running gag involving homicide detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day) who keeps trying to set up a date with Honey despite her insisting she like girls, the haphazard narrative lurches through a variety of throwaway scenes, among them Honey’s father turning up looking to reconnect, that never really go anywhere even if they do keep the whipsmart repartee motoring, before it all wraps up with a bloody fight and shooting (and an unexplained swift recovery) and a final scene that would seem to be setting up further developments to unresolved plot points were it not for the fact no sequel’s planned.
The opening sequence is terrific, the names of the crew and cast appearing on billboards and building as, soundtracked by The Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place, the camera roves through the dilapidated town in keeping with its retro chic style. But, Qualley aside, who sashays with a cool charisma like a lesbian Philip Marlowe, and despite some highly charged sex scenes, gay and straight, nothing else (parrot and window interface notwithstanding) rises to the same level. But then, it seems fairly evident that, much like Rodriguez’s grindhouse movies, Coen’s approaching his Chandlesque hard-boiled pulpy noir conventions with a tongue in cheek cockeyed flippancy, and as such, if you’re not looking any deeper, this is actually quite – if ultimately frustrating – fun. (Mon/Wed: Everyman)
It Ends With Us (15)
Directed by and co-starring Justin Baldoni, and adapted by Christy Hall Colleen Hoover’s 2016 bestseller about the cycle of domestic abuse and denial, this may be a melodramatic soap opera (as is the ongoing legal battle between director and star), but it’s one from the top shelf, and, while overlong and reliant on contrived coincidence, has a dark edge and unfolds with some twists you don’t readily see coming.
Blake Lively stars as aspiring flower-shop entrepreneur Lily Bloom who we meet as she returns home to read the eulogy for her estranged father’s funeral but, scarred by the abuse she saw him (Kevin McKidd) mete out to her mother (Amy Morton), can’t find a single thing to say, her list of five point remaining blank. Later, she has a flirty rooftop encounter with neurosurgeon Rile Kincaid (Baldoni), a textbook tall, dark, and dashing self-styled stud (“Love isn’t for me. Lust is nice though”) with a line in smooth chat-up patter, who startles her by angrily kicking a chair though, as he explains, he’s upset because, a neurosurgeon, he’s failed to save a young boy following an accident with a gun (and yes, this does cycle back at ). There’s sexual tension but nothing happens, they part and she returns to Boston to her shabby chic florists, Lily Bloom’s, where she hires the irrepressible Allysa (Jenny Slate), even though she confesses to hating flowers, who rapidly becomes her best buddy. And, wouldn’t you know it, when Rile wanders into the store it turns out he’s her brother. And so the pair reconnect, she keeping things cool but agreeing to give him a dating chance. As the romance blossoms they, Allysa and her husband Marshall (Hasan Minhaj in a virtually identical role to that in Babes) go to a new upmarket restaurant which, back after eight years in the Marines, turns out to be owned by Atlas (hunky newcomer Brandon Sklenar), a former classmate and Lily’s first love.
Their backstory’s told in flashbacks with him (Alexander Neustaedter) apparently living homeless opposite her parents and the young Lily (a convincingly lookalike Isabela Ferrer) bring him food and the pair eventually falling in love (take note of the heart carved out of oak and the tattoo on her shoulder) before her irate father puts a brutal end to things.
Time moves on, Allysa gets pregnant, Lily and Rile get married and all seems roses. But Atlas’s suspicious of her bruise she says she got by accident and there’s an altercation between him and Rile at the restaurant. Then, after blow up about her relationship with Atlas, Rile apparently falls down the stairs. It’s not though, until later that, in hospital and learning she’s pregnant, the veil of denial’s torn away and she remembers exactly what happened to cause those bruises and wounds.
Both predictable and unpredictable in equal measure as it explores how we find ourselves repeating dysfunctional patterns in our lives (though not why the characters have such bad taste in clothes), it does rather want to have its cake and eat it when it comes to the central abuse and how we’re supposed to feel about Rile. We’re asked to despise him because of his abuse, but at the same time sympathise when we learn of the tragedy that made him who he is and also because he clearly want to try and be a better man, giving him a grace note in the way things end between them. Still at least her wife-beater dad’s 100% vile.
Bolstered by solid supporting turns, the two (three if you factor in young Lily) central performances are strong, complex and layered Lively on terrific form as a woman coming to realise she has to make the right choices, difficult though they may be. And if the screenplay can’t resist ending on the promise of a happy new future, it’s probably earned it. (Sky Cinema)
Jurassic World Rebirth (12A)
After a string of underwhelming spin-offs and sequels, the concept Spielberg launched back in 1993 kind of returns to its roots with, set five years after Jurassic World Dominion, a screenplay by the original’s writer, David Koepp, and directed by Gareth Edwards who, as Godzilla shows, knows his way round large scaly monsters.
Opening with a flashback scene wherein a Snickers bar wrapper (and confectionary gets plenty of product placement in a stalking in a convenience store nod to the original’s kitchen scene) leads to a system failure at a secret experimental facility that’s creating hybrid dinosaurs, it moves to the present where interest in dinosaurs has dramatically waned. Except that is for big pharma boss Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) who’s found dinosaur blood has huge financial potential in treating heart disease. To which end, he’s recruited a team of mercenaries led by Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), as well as palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), whose dinosaur museum is being mothballed, to take a blood sample with a DNA-extracting dart, three types of dinosaur, the sub-aqua Mosasaurus (cue a Jaws homage), the land-locked Titanosaurus (a pair seen literally necking) and the flying Quetzalcoatlus (this will require abseiling down a cliff face to get to its eggs). To which end they’re travelling to Île Saint Hubert in the Caribbean, the site of the facility in the prologue, where the species have congregate and which is illegal for humans to enter. En route they rescue a family sailing to Cape Town whose boat has been attacked and capsized, dad Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), young daughter Bella (Audrina Miranda), her older sister Teresa (Luna Blaise) and, not his favourite person but turns out be quite heroic really, her boyfriend Xavier (David Iacano).
Separated by another attack when they reach the island, the film takes off into two interconnected storylines, the team’s quest for the samples (naturally seeing lesser members of the cast list winding up dino-lunch) and the family bonding as they head for the facility to find a radio, the latter involving them being chased downstream in an inflatable by a T-Rex (lifted from Michael Crichton’s original novel) and, in a patent nod to ET, Bella adopting a baby dinosaur (she named Dolores) by feeding it liquorice, a Mac-meal friendly thread that just teeters on the abyss of cute.
While there are some breathtaking shots of ambling herbivores that recall the awe the first film generated, there’s nothing remarkably new in the telling, the plot following familiar beats and character arcs, the team gradually whittled down until corporate greed finally gets its comeuppance in the teeth of the hybrid by Distortus rex. It’s thrilling enough but as the survivors sail off into the sunset, the plot and the film’s mission accomplished, any idea of being reborn again should be firmly discouraged. (Odeon Birmingham; Vue)
The Long Walk (15)
Written during the Vietnam War, but not published until 1979 under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, this was Stephen King’s first novel, a dystopian thriller about a totalitarian regime in which, accompanied by soldiers, each year 100 young men walk a pre-arranged route and must keep a minimum pace of 4 miles per hour, with if they fall below this speed for 30 seconds. If a walker receives three warnings and again falls below the minimum speed for 30 second, he is shot. The walk continues until there is only one survivor, who can have whatever he wants for the rest of his life as his prize.
Working from a screenplay by JT Mollner reshaped for a Trumpian society, Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence halves the number of walkers and reduces the required pace to 3mph but otherwise largely stays true to the book, until, that is, the final sequence involving the eventual winner which is a very radical departure. Set in the aftermath of a civil war, America is in an economic depression and, to counteract an “epidemic of laziness”, each year 50 young volunteers, one from each state, are randomly selected by lottery and, under the supervision of The Major (Mark Hamill, inscrutable behind mirrored sunglasses), who created the idea and offers intermittent ‘pep talks’ (“I’m proud o’ y’boys! Y’all got sack”), walk to an undetermined finishing line until 49 have been given their ticket (i.e. shot), their progress beamed live by the cameras, the survivor being granted unlimited wealth and a single wish.
Prime among the participants are Ray Garretty (Cooper Hoffman), who’s eventually revealed to have a motive beyond financial gain and, sporting a facial scar, the relentlessly positive Peter McVries (David Jonsson), with whom he forms a bond. Among others singled out are underage Curly (Roman Griffin Davis), optimistic religious Arthur (Tut Nyuot) and annoying sharp-tongued wiseass Hank (Ben Wang), with the solitary Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), sociopathic redneck Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer) and Collie (Joshua Odjick Parker) as the most antagonistic, as the walk proceeds (apparently without rest) across (as on screen captions relate) 300 miles and several days and nights while others fall by the wayside and are summarily, brutally (and graphically) executed. To boost their morale, they strike up a Fuck the Long Walk chant. En route, emotionless bystanders watch or cops salute as they pass and, at one point, Ray’s widowed mother (Judy Greer) reappears to urge him on.
The film title not appearing until 20 minutes in following the despatch of the first walker, it holds the attention far more than you might imagine from such a single-focused set-up, Lawrence slowing building the tension and inter-character frictions and friendships, a brotherhood of sorts even among the more dislikable who have their own vulnerabilities, affording the central walkers with personality and depth, Hoffman and Johnson delivering notably commanding performances that invest you in their fate. The final moments come as something of a shock but make sense in the context, and while an at times gruelling watch, the message that the state can never truly crush human dignity and the human spirit ensures you’re with it every step of the way.(Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue)
My Old Ass (15)
Written and directed by Megan Park, this is a bittersweet comedic riff on the what if your adult self could go back and advise your teenage version. The latter here is Elliott (Canadian actress-singer Maisy Stella and star of Nashville making her feature debut), a slightly brattish, gay 18-year-old who, along with her middle brother Max (Seth Isaac Johnson), a budding golfer, and the precocious younger Spencer (Carter Trozzolo) , lives with her parents (Alain Goulem, Maria Dizzia) on their Ontario cranberry farm. With no interest in carrying on the business, she’s going away to college at the University of Toronto in a few weeks.
Motoring out on her boat to spend the night on an island with her besties, Ruthie (Maddie Zeigler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) getting high on shrooms, Elliott hallucinates meeting her sarcastic older self (Aubrey Plaza ever wonderful in her few scenes) in an amusing set-up that knowingly wrings laughs from how they don’t look similar and how the former thinks 39 is middle-aged. She’s materialised to tell her she’ll grow up to take a PhD, advise her to be less distant from her folks and siblings and, most importantly, avoid anyone called Chad. She refuses to give more details as to why.
Returning to normality, she dismisses it all – until, out swimming, she meets a personable young man called Chad (Percy Hynes White) who’s got a summer job on her dad’s Ontario farm, returning to check out his family’s roots and is a dab hand at things mechanical. It’s a shock, but as much as discovering her phone now has a number under the name My Old Ass (a phrase she used when flirting with her older self) and that she can text and speak to her in the future (there’s no explanation how, just take it on trust).
She tries hard to avoid Chad but inevitably, with confused feelings, she begins to fall for him and also learns from Max, who was going to take it over, that her parents are selling up the farm. It hits hard because while she wants to leave, she also assumed she could always return. All of this is part of the film’s life lessons about savouring the moment because, as Chad tells her, you never know when it’s the last time you’ll experience something and how “The only thing you can’t get back is time”. Having been out of contact while she’s been overwhelmed with confused feelings, older Elliott then suddenly turns up just after younger Elliott and Chad have had, as she puts it, dick sex, leading to finally explaining, in a heartbreaking moment, why she told her to avoid him.
With a wistful tone that complements its end of summer photography, it’s both touching and humorous, the core actresses lighting up the screen with their charisma and comic timing, Stella having the look and vibe of a young Reese Witherspoon (and getting to sing a Justin Bieber cover), while White is charm personified. Park also sneaks in some sly filmic nods, a clip from Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, a nod to teen TV series Euphoria and having Spencer decorate her room, which he’s pre-emptively taken over, with pictures of Saoirse Ronan. Nestling in a similar YA coming of age zone to Booksmart and The Edge of Seventeen, it’s a low key but immensely engaging joy. (Amazon Prime)
The Naked Gun (15)
Devised by Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, the team behind Airplane!, Police Squad was a short-lived 1982 police procedural parody TV series which was resurrected in 1988 as a feature film that spawned to sequels, all starring Leslie Nielsen as the clueless Clouseau-like LAPD detective Frank Drebin and peppered with sight gags, wordplay and non sequiturs. It’s now been revised by director Akiva Schaffer with Liam Neeson bringing a self-mocking spin to his action hero persona as widower Frank Drebin Jr., a fan of Sex And The City, Buffy and the Black Eyed Peas and every bit as deludedly self-confident and befuddled as his dad, with his partner Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) also stepping into his late father’s shoes.
Introduced foiling bank robbery in which someone blows a safety deposit box and makes off with something called a P.L.O.T Device, Dreben’s flouting of the niceties of the law sees him removed from the case by the long-suffering Chief Davis (CC Pounder) and assigned to car accident investigation. His first involves the apparent suicide of a high tech company employee and brings him into contact with the dead man’s sister, true-crime novelist Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), who ignites the feeling he could maybe love again and insists her brother as murdered. It’s a trail that leads to wealthy, unscrupulous electric-car tech company head, Richard Cane (Danny Huston), the man to whom the device was handed and who is planning to revert humanity to its primal instincts with only the chosen elite surviving.
It’s a generic destroy the world to save the world plot that really only serves as an excuse for a non-stop succession of juvenile slapstick, scatological jokes, groan-inducing puns (“U.C.L.A? ““I see it every day! I live here”), recurring throwaway sight gags about cups of coffee and sexual innuendo, the latter rather cruder than need be in a scene involving mistaken infra-red images of a turkey baster. Everyone plays the incessant absurdity perfectly straight-faced, and, while not a natural comic, Neeson’s deadpan approach perfectly matches to the material while also sharing a chemistry with romantic interest Anderson (cue cheesy romantic montage involving an animated snowman with a jealous streak) that’s spun over into real life. With targets that include Mission: Impossible, YouTube ads, Bill Cosby, OJ Simpson and a very funny gag about endemic police racism where Drebin narrows down a suspect by the fact he was the only white guy he shot, and cameos that include Priscilla Presley alongside Weird Al Jankovic and Dave Bautista as themselves, it’s never remotely subtle and, although the silliness tends to generate chuckles rather than guffaws perhaps it’s something the world needs right now. (Wed: Mockingbird)
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)
The Old Guard 2 (15)
Released in 2020, written by Greg Rucka based on his comic book series and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the original was about a group of centuries-old immortal (but that being of a somewhat arbitrary nature) mercenaries with regenerative healing abilities dedicated to protecting mankind. It was entertaining B movie action fun. Now, directed by Victoria Mahoney, comes the sequel, which is considerably less so.
Still led by Andromache/Andy (Charlize Theron), who’s now mortal, the team still comprises Joe (Marwen Kenzari), Nicky (Luca Marinelli), mortal CIA agent Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and, having joined them in the first film, Nile (KiKi Layne), former member Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) in exile after betraying them. The plot picks up several threads from the time around, namely Andy’s former best buddy Quynh (Ngô Thanh Vân) being rescued from the iron maiden and an eternity of forever drowning to which she was condemned as a witch (and about which Nile had dreams) by a woman going by the name of Discord (Uma Thurman) who, it transpires was actually the first immortal. With Quynh seeking vengeance for Andy’s apparent abandonment of her, Destiny has plans to use her for her own ends, the core of which, it’s eventually revealed, is using Nile (the last immortal) to render the others mortal. To which end, the team – Booker now back in play and joined by new immortal character Tuah (Henry Golding) who knows the secrets of their origins – are lured to a secret Chinese nuclear facility in Indonesia which she’s going to blow up.
Opening with a James Bond-like action prelude as, tentatively linked to the main narrative, they take out a gun runner, it settles into a tedious series of scenes where everybody sits around intensely talking to one another, occasionally punctuated by some so so combat sequences, primarily featuring Andy facing off against, first, Quynh and later Discord. Unlike the original, this feels drained of energy while going through any number of narrative hoops so that you’re never sure where loyalties actually lie. There’s a nice scene as Andy walks through a passageway in Rome, the background changing from one historical era to another, but invention and imagination is in short supply elsewhere.
Theron again proves herself a charismatic action woman who can maintain a decent hairdo while battling any number of assailants but her co-stars, Ejiofor in particular, are mostly underused, Thurman doing imperious haughty but never really feeling like someone who could snuff out immortality at a whim. With an act of sacrifice seeing Andy regain her immortality, it ends setting up a third chapter in which she and Quynh, have to rescue the others, but whether there’s enough life or interest left in the concept to get there remains to be seen. (Netflix)
Paul & Paulette Take A Bath (12A)
The feature debut of British-French writer-director Jethro Massey, the title a New Wave homage nod to Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, it demonstrates its impeccable taste from the outset with the pointed use of The Motels’ Total Control as an integral part of the soundtrack. With ambitions to be a photographer, Paul (Jérémie Galiana) is a young American in Paris who spots Paulette (Marie Benati), a stylish young French woman, kneeling down in the Place de la Concorde on the site of Marie Antoinette’s execution, imaging what it was like to be on the point of being beheaded. They strike up a conversation, he cutting her hair to bring more verisimilitude to her fantasy, discuss their love lives, her obsessions with Marie Antoinette and Elvis, and then part, he inviting her to his exhibition. When neither she nor anyone else turns up, he sells his cameras and takes up a real estate office job, resuming his affair with his now boss, the older, demanding Valérie (Laurence Vaissière). whom colleagues have nicknamed Goebbels.
They eventually hook up again, Paulette still nursing the hurt after being dumped by her on-off lover Margarita (Margot Joseph), taking a tour to experience first-hand the various crime spots around Paris (among them where the Communards were executed in 1871 and the site of the Bataclan terrorist attacks), accompanied by related photos, as well as a former 19th-century “human zoo” in the Bois de Vincennes that exhibited people subject to colonialism.
At one point, now occasional lovers, he drives her to see her parents in Salzburg, her dad remarking their names make them seem like siblings, which doesn’t end well given her racist mother (Fanny Cottençon) and at another, using his work connections they rent a Munich apartment where Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun reputedly lived, where, re-enacting, they take the titular bath. Later Paul will also rent an apartment once occupied by one of the Bataclan killers.
The film never really makes clear Paulette’s macabre fascinations to “touch the truths” and the frequent allusions to Nazism feel at odds with the otherwise Before Sunset-like romantic tone, but there’s a nice backstory touch as to why Paulette eats whole lemons and, the film ending with a stylish photographic montage, the fluid performances of the two leads have a chemistry that makes it well worth spending time in their company. (Mon: Mockingbird)
The Roses (15)
Directed by co-star Danny DeVito and adapted from Warren Adler’s 1981 novel, The War of the Roses was a 1989 satirical black comedy about marital power play starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as a wealthy couple whose seemingly perfect marriage that begins to fall apart, with material possessions becoming the centre of a bitter divorce battle. It’s now been updated and reimagined by Meet the Fockers director Jay Roach from a screenplay by Tony McNamara that keeps the bare bones but reinvents the characters, settings and pretty much everything else as it variously addresses theme of masculine insecurity, co-dependency neediness, professional identity and jealousy and inappropriate parenting.
The couple this time round are Ivy (Olivia Colman) and Theo Rose (Benedict Cumberbatch) who met cute at a London restaurant where she worked as a chef during a corporate event for his architectural firm and within minutes were shagging in the cold storage room. Ten later, they’re living in America where he’s a hugely successful architect masterminding a maritime museum dream project and she’s a housewife looking after their two kids Hattie (Delaney Quinn) and Roy (Ollie Robinson) making delicious cakes and gourmet meals for the family (though she herself is allergic to raspberries), The film opens, however, with them attending couples therapy, swapping acerbic insults, and proceeds to flash back to what led to this point. It hinges on two things. Theo gifts Ivy a restaurant, which she names We Have Crabs, so she can make her food her own way and then a freak storm demolishes the museum, a video of him panicking going viral, the storm also bringing a food critic to the restaurant (where Ncuti Gatwa and Sunita Mani are part of the team) and Ivy getting a glowing review. He’s fired and her star ascends, she getting magazine articles and jetting off to meet celebrity chefs and opening a franchise, he playing house husband and getting the kids to sign a contract to follow a rigorous physical activity regimen. The pair start bickering and, to feed his frustrated architect talents and mitigate his sense of failure a bone, she funds the building of a luxury home which he designs at often exorbitant cost. Three years on, picking it up after that therapy session, the kids (now played by Hala Finlay and Wells Rappaport) are accepted into the University of Miami track and field team and the simmering marital hostilities come to a head over a celebratory dinner with friends (Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, James Demtrious, Zoe Chao) where they all fire off barbed unspoken resentments for their opposite numbers. All of which, spiritually awakened after his rescuing a whale and feeling unappreciated for his efforts, ends with Theo demanding a divorce. He just wants the house, but her lawyer (Allison Janney, a sharp cameo) is playing hardball. Now they just want to kill each other.
With an ending that both echoes but departs from the original, while there’s plenty of biting British wit, it never feels more than lines in the screenplay and, while both Cumberbatch and Coleman give solid performances in their own right, there’s just no spark between them to make you care whether they stay together or not. As such, things tend to plod rather than zip along, as one contrived confrontation follows another, the emphasis on the caustic and at times slapstick comedy never feeling remotely grounded in any sense of vitriolic reality as la Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe. Not a good year for the Roses, then. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Reel; Royal; Vue; Thu: Mockingbird;)
September 5 (15)
In the early hours of the morning of Sept 5, 1972, gunshots were heard in the Olympic Village where the Summer Games were being held in Munich, the first time in Germany since Hitler. A Palestinian terrorist group calling itself Black September had broken into the Israeli team’s apartments and taken 11 athletes and their coaches hostage, two dying in the process. Directed and co-written by Tim Fehlbaum, the film unfolds what happened over the course of the next 24 hours leading up the FUBAR West German police attempt to rescue the hostages at Fürstenfeldbruck airbase that was, in the confusion, initially announced as a success but eventually revealed to have seen the deaths of all hostages and five terrorists.
All this is shown from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew covering the games who, led inexperienced young TV producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and Sports president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) resisted Network demands that News take over the story, and, aided by engineer Jacques Lesgards (Zinedine Soualem), provided the first ever real-time coverage of a terrorist crisis (some 900 million watched, Arledge noting that was more than the moon landing), moving a hefty camera out onto a mound overlooking the Israeli quarters and even forging an athletes pass to enable one of the crew (Daniel Adeosun) to smuggle cans of film in and out of the Village, among them the infamous black-and-white shot of a masked gunman on the balcony.
With Arledge negotiating more advantageous satellite time slots to block out rival CBS and, at one point, ordering armed police out of the control room, Fehlbaum builds a tense, atmospheric thriller that brilliantly captures media in action as, improvising as they go, the team, among them star reporter Peter Jennings (Bejamin Walker) who with a small camera rig accessed a room overlooking the Israeli apartments and, crucially, fictionalised idealistic German translator Marianne Gebhart (Leonie Benesch), understandably horrified that Jewish blood was again being threatened on German soil, monitoring police channels, report what’s going down. But it also addresses the moral and ethical issues involved as things get increasingly competitive in maintaining their scoop. At one point Bader asks if they can show someone being killed on live television and if so whose narrative is it supporting, theirs or the terrorists, while another comes with the realisation that their images are being watched by the terrorists on the hotel room television, causing a rescue attempt to be called off. When the authorities negotiate with the terrorists to take everyone to the airfield by bus, Mason, again with a scoop in mind, sends Marianne too, armed with sound equipment in the event of any shootout. He also reports the ZDF announcement that the hostages have been freed (albeit with an as we are a hearing caveat) to beat other channels to the punch.
Making very effective use of archive footage, including negotiations with the Black September and that of ABC anchor Jim McKay and Peter Jennings (played by Benjamin Walker in the whose announcements (as well as a clip of Trevor McDonald) are seamlessly woven into the highly focused proceedings, it brilliantly captures the intensity of the moment and how, in reporting, often difficult and professionally callousness split second decisions have to be taken in order to get the story and where responsibility lies in doing so (it forever transformed the nature of live TV reporting) while also refraining from making any political comments (Arledge emphasises that emotions and people are more important), though inevitably prompting the still raw memories of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Though the tragic outcome may be know, the film never loses its white knuckle grip as it travels there. (Sky Cinema/Now)
The Six Triple Eight (12)
While there are flaws, you can help but think that some of the acidic criticism it’s received is more about attitudes to its director Tyler Perry than the actual film which, telling the story of the real-life second world war battalion composed entirely of Black women and the only such group to serve in Europe, is a solid, well-acted and inspirational tribute that hits all the right emotional and indignation notes.
The pivotal figure is Lena Derriecott (Ebony Obsidian), a young small town Black woman whose best friend is the white Jewish Abram David (Gregg Sulkin), a relationship that naturally does not sit well with the white folk, especially her bitchy bigoted blond classmate Mary Kathryn (Sarah Helbringer). Before he ships out, having signed up as a pilot, he gives Lena a ring asks her to wait for him. Tragically, he’s destined never to return, shot down and burned beyond recognition, a bloodied letter to her recovered by the soldier that pulled his body from the wreckage.
Grief struck, Lena too resolves to enlist, joining the Women’s Army Corps where, inevitably, she and her fellow Blacks find the same bigotry, racism and segregation they faced in civilian life. At boot camp at Fort des Moines, they’re put through basic training under the command of Charity Adams (Kerry Washington) , her tough, no-nonsense approach fuelled by a determination not to give her white male colleagues any reason to claim her soldiers weren’t up to the task, reporters always looking to embarrass the military for accepting Black women into its ranks.
Constantly pushing to be deployed to Europe, Adams (eventually promoted to Major, the highest ranking Black woman to serve in the US Army), and, a result of a campaign by activist Mary McCloud Bethune (Oprah Winfrey) who bends the ear of Eleanor (Susan Sarandon) and Franklin Roosevelt (Sam Waterson), her troops are finally assigned a mission as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion and deployed to Birmingham, and, without formal orders and adequate resources, lodged in freezing wooden buildings at King Edward’s School in Edgbaston, their job being to sort some 17 million letters to and from home that have piled up in enough bags to fill several aircraft hangers, having the knock on effect of damaging morale at both the front and back home. Given just six months, it’s a task the bigoted Southern General Halt (Dean Norris) believes they are incapable of pulling off and is determined to seem the fail. He, however, fully underestimates the 855-strong battalion and especially, Adams who, when threatened with being relieved of command and replaced by some white Lieutenant, responded “over my dead body, sir”.
With Lena’s lost letter naturally among those being sorted (setting up a moving cathartic moment), Adams comes to realise their job is far from demeaning, but of vital importance to the war effort, as the women devise ingenious ways of identifying otherwise undeliverable mail from fabrics, logos and even perfume scent.
While the real-life Derriecott and Adams are the central characters, this is very much an ensemble piece with Sarah Jeffery, Kylie Jefferson, Sarah Helbringer and Shanice Shantay among Lena’s circle, the latter scene-stealing and providing sharp comic relief as the straight-speaking Johnnie Mae (who may or may not be based on Pvt Johnnie Mae Walton) while Jay Reeves give charm as the soldier who takes a shine too (and eventually married) Lena.
Other than the opening battlefield scenes and a sudden UXB incident that claims to women’s lives, the action and tensions are wholly embodied in the combat against prejudices, Adams and the others fighting with a verbal armoury to prove themselves and seek equality and respect. Ending with photos of the real women and credit notes on what happened to some of them along with an oration by Michelle Obama celebrating the 6888, it’s not in quite the same league as the similarly themed Hidden Figures, but, like the women it portrays, it deserves far more respect than it’s been afforded. (Netflix)
Small Things Like These (15)
His first film since Oppenheimer, though the scale is smaller Cillian Murphy (who served as producer) and the intensity of the story are no less intense. Set near Christmas in 1985 New Ross, Ireland, Bill Furlong (Murphy) is a successful coal merchant, married with five daughters. One day, delivering coal to the local convent where young girls are supposedly trained for their future, he sees something that gives him pause, a women being dragged inside while her mother ignores her pleas. Going inside, he finds young women, supposedly the school’s pupils, being made to scrub the floor and one who asks for his help so she can escape and drown herself. It’s pretty clear –and one unspoken common knowledge – that the convent is, in fact, one of the infamous Magdalene Laundries, Catholic institutions little more than workhouses where unmarried sex workers and pregnant women, so called ‘fallen women’ – were sent for supposed rehabilitation, their babies taken away. Bill can sympathise, he himself being the illegitimate son of an unmarried teenage mother, though, while ostracised by her family, she was fortunate as a wealthy woman took her in as her maid.
Troubled but reluctant to get involved, his conscience is pricked on his next visit to discover Sarah (Zara Devlin) shivering in the coal shed, ostensibly locked in by accident, who asks him to help find her baby. They’re interrupted, however, by Sister Mary (Emily Mortimer) who, feigning kindness, says the girl is mentally unwell and bribes him with a hefty bonus for his wife who – along with the local publican – tells him to not get involved. After all, the church treats the townsfolk well in exchange for turning a blind eye. But, finding Sarah again in the shed, he can no longer stand idly by, reputation be damned.
Directed by Tim Mielants and based on the novel by Claire Keegan, it’s a slight story but still carries a heavy weight about, to borrow the old phrase, how evil thrives when good men stand by and do nothing. Bill’s discovery of his father is, essentially, a redundant element when the film’s thrust is the cruelty and moral turpitude of the outwardly respectable Catholic Church in a repressive Ireland as well as the underlying toxic masculinity. There’s no melodrama and dialogue is sparse, Murphy conveying his emotions through his eyes and expression while Mortimer is chilling as the corrupt and cruel Mother Superior with a fierce and intimidating stare, and the film, which is dedicated to the more than 56,000 young women who suffered in the laundries up until 1996 and the children taken from them, is drenched in a devastating melancholy. It may lack the incendiary power of Peter Mullen’s The Magdalene Sisters, but its quiet anger is no less compelling. (Amazon Prime; Apple TV+; Sky Cinema)
Smurfs (U)
After the high that was Puss In Boots, director Chris Miller hits rock bottom with this wholly superfluous and boringly pointless attempt to reboot the franchise built around the tiny blue-skinned entities created by Belgian comics artist Peyo. After being previously voiced by Katy Perry and Demi Levato, this time round it’s the turn of another pop diva, Rhianna, to phone in her take on Smurfette, inexplicably the only female Smurf in Smurf Village. The film opens with one of her two wholly, unmemorable original songs as, by way of some sort of exposition, everyone dances while, a la the Seven Dwarfs, announcing their defining Smurf characteristics – among them Clumsy Smurf, Grouchy Smurf (voiced by Miller), Vanity Smurf (Rylan Clark), Worry Smurf and even Sound Effects Smurf. There is, however, one of them who has no ‘thing’ and as such only goes by No Name (James Cordon, one of the film’s few redeeming features), prompting an at least half decent ballad “trying to find a reason to be strong”. He wishes he could do magic, a wish sort of granted, without his knowledge, by Jaunty Grimoire (Amy Sedaris), one of four magical books that provide the film’s maguffin, who’s hiding out in the village.
At this point, it’s fairly clear what the Disney-esque narrative arc is going to be about, kicking off with No Name’s new powers leading to Papa Smurf (John Goodman) being kidnapped by Razamel (JP Karliak), the shorter, cat-hating brother of fellow evil wizard and Smurf nemesis Gargamel (Karliak again). So now, Smurfette and No Name lead an interdimensional rescue mission (which includes Marshmello as slow-witted Turtle) that lumbers through an often hallucinogenic variety of animation styles a la Spider-Verse, various run-ins with Razamel, who wants to gain possession of all four magic books and turn them bad so he can take over the Evil Alliance of Wizards (Octavia Spencer, Nick Kroll, Hannah Waddingham), and adventures in a live action Paris, Munich and the Australian Outback where they interact (poorly) with assorted actors, animals and vehicles. They also discover Papa Smurf not only has a brother named, er, Ken (Nick Offerman) who is part of the Guardians of Good alongside his daughter Moxie (Sandra Oh), but also one with flowing yellow hair named Ron (Kurt Russell) who’s missing presumed dead. Of yeh, there’s also the cake loving colourful troll-like Snooterpoots led by Mama Poot (an unmistakable Natasha Lyonne) who was once in a relationship with Ken.
At one point the film stops dead for a lengthy origins mythology speech about the Smurfs’ purpose, before it resumes its hyperactive rush to the climax where Smurfette turns out to have her own secret backstory. South Park writer Pam Brady displays a welcome sense of self-awareness but also throws in ancient pop culture jokes that will not only go over the heads of the kiddie audience but probably their parents too while lines like Razamel’s henchman Joel (Dan Levy) asking for a good Linked In rating reeks of desperation to be relevant. Ultimately No Name finds his reason to exist. To borrow a recurring euphemism, this pile of Smurf never does. (Odeon Birmingham)
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)
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (15)
Back in 1984, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer created an instant cult class with a spoof documentary about a fictional heavy metal band who were as clueless as they were loud and whose drummers had a habit of dying. Now, 41 years later they reunite for a sequel, reprising their role as filmmaker Marty DiBergi, guitarists Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins and bassist Harry Smalls.
Following an acrimonious split, the members have gone their separate ways, Smalls composed a rock opera called Hell Toupee and now runs a glue museum, St. Hubbins plays in a mariachi band and composes for naff commercials and phone on hold music, while Nigel has set up a shop in Berwick-Upon-Tweed selling or exchanging (according to weight) cheese and guitars. The film opens with Marty telling how, after not speaking to one another for 15 years, the band made a comeback with a one-off concert in New Orleans in a slot vacated by Stormy Daniels. It seems that Hope Faith (Kerry Godliman), the daughter of their late manager Ian Faith has discovered that the band are contractually obliged to play one more show. Thus, Marty follows proceedings, interviewing the individual members and those who worked with them, including groupie Jean Cromie Schmit (June Chadwick) who’s become a nun after mistaking The Police’s Every Breath You Take for the voice of God, former artist liaison manager turned Buddhist Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher) and incompetent promotions man Artie Fufkin (Paul Shaffer), as preparations are put in place for the much-anticipated reunion. To which end, Hope enlists the services of tone-deaf shyster PR man Simon Howler (dryly hilarious Chris Addison) whose clients include a Nicaraguan K-pop boy band, and who suggests one or two of the band dying on stage would cement their legacy.
Living in a house that holds regular ghost tours and serve roast alligator, finding a drummer willing to risk the curse (they’re turned down by Lars Urich, Questlove and Chad Smith) proves a problem until the slot’s eventually filled by young lesbian rocker Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco) whose drum kit is coloured in tribute to the two late Stumpys while Caucasian Jerry (C. J. Vanston) comes aboard as the keyboardist. Rehearsals are fraught with tensions between Derk and Nigel resurfacing, an argument about a chord change sees Paul McCartney offering his thoughts (Big Bottom, which features as a duet by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, is apparently “almost literature”) and siding with Nigel (David subsequently calling him a toxic personality) while, a long-time fan, Elton John drops by and sings Flower People, before agreeing to join them for Stonehenge at the concert. Finally, the old childhood friends reconciled, all’s set for the big night, complete with a full-sized Stonehenge prop this time, but, as ever, things inevitably don’t go to plan.
Adopting the same deadpan poker faced buts elf-aware approach as the original, it’s packed with a flood of stingers, some of which may or may not be improvised, and silliness, notably Nigel revealing how he as a slot inside his Union Jack guitar where he stores cheese and a grater in case he fancies a nibble mid-tune and how he received a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rejection letter saying “Fuck off, Sincerely yours”. Then there’s Derek’s new song about music and mortality called Rockin’ The Urn. It may not go quite up to 11 as the original did, but it’s still a brilliant send-up of rock’s so often self-serious nature. And it has the best visual fart gag of the year. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC; Mockingbird; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Omniplex Great Park; Vue)
Superman (12A)
Despite being overlong at 130 minutes and excessively given to repetition in both narrative and action, James Gunn’s reboot of the iconic superhero delivers the goods and, while, as the latest to sport the S chest logo, David Corenswet ultimately falls short of Christopher Reeve’s (son Will has a cameo as a reporter) seminal portrayal, his very human cocktail of vulnerability and sweetness but also anger outperforms the forgettable Brandon Routh and charismatic but somewhat self-serious Henry Cavill versions.
Dispensing with backstory with opening captions, three years after revealing himself to the world, it whams in what Superman crashing to earth in the Arctic after being handed his first defeat in Metropolis at the hands of someone calling himself the Hammer of Boravia who’s seeking revenge after Superman intervened to prevent his country invading the neighbouring Jarhanpur (Russia/Ukraine parallels no accident). In short order, we’re introduced to Superman’s unruly dog Krypto (overused but fun though quite why he needs to have a red cape is up for debate) and his Fortress of Solitude where Kryptonian robots (three voiced by Alan Tudyk, Michael Rooker and Pom Klementieff)) tend his wounds and play a calming hologram message from his parents Jor-el (Bradley Cooper) and Lara (Angela Sarafyan), though, and a crucial plot driver in the second act, only part of it (do good) was not damaged when he crashed to Earth as a baby and was adopted by Kansas couple Jonathan (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and Martha (Neva Howell) Kent.
However, as raised during his interview with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), who’s aware if his secret identity as her fellow Daily Planet reporter and lover Clark Kent, his life-saving intervention actions were unsanctioned and, as such, a political minefield for American foreign policy. Looking to persuade the administration that Superman’s an alien threat, it’s this and the retrieved other half of the message that egomaniacal envy-driven tech billionaire Lex Luthor (a wonderfully deranged Nicholas Hoult), who’s working the Boravian President (Zlatko Burić), seeks to exploit to turn people against, contain and eliminate Superman so he can’t interfere in his plans, to which end he’s created his own enhanced supervillain muscle, the nanotechnology-powered Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría) and Ultraman (whose identity is a third act twist).
In an increasingly convoluted plot, Gunn also brings in metahumans Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), the arrogant Green Lantern with the bowl cut hairdo, techno-whiz Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and re-incarnated alien Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) as The Justice Gang (or at least that’s what Gardner want to call them) who have less compunctions than Superman about hurting people, alongside element transmuting Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), held captive in Luther’s pocket universe and forced to manifest a kryptonite hand to keep Superman weak, Then there’s Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White (Wendell Pierce) and reporter Jimmy Olsen (Skylar Gisondo) who has a connection with Luther’s latest girlfriend (his last is also caged in his pocket universe), the ditzy mutant-toed Eve (Sara Sampaio) whose selfies also prove vital to the plot.
There’s a lot to take in (not to mention cameo appearances by characters like columnist Cat Grant, Frank Grillo as A.R.G.U.S. director Rick Flag Sr., Maxwell Lord – played by Gunn’s brother Sean – who funds the Justice Gang and even amusingly John Cena’s Peacemaker) and the constant switch between actions set pieces (a Luther-created dimensional rift ripping Metropolis apart for starters) and tonal shifts (snappy humour, an execution) makes it exhausting to keep up, but it’s certainly worth the effort and, with the brief last act appearance by Supergirl (Milly Alcock), Krypto’s actual owner in advance of her own 2026 film, it gets the new DC universe off to a literal and metaphorical flying start. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Amazon Prime; Apple +)
The Surfer (15)
From the style of the opening credits, this is stylistically very much in the mode of a 70s exploitation B movie, complete with a surrealistic ride into the psychedelic hallucinatory breakers in the final stretch. Directed by Lorcan Finnegan from Thomas Martin’s screenplay, it stars Nic Cage as an unnamed businessman, credited only as The Surfer, who, after time in America, has returned to Australia looking to buy his old family home on the hilltop overlooking Luna Bay on the Australia’s south-western coast where he, wife and son, can live. Except she’s waiting for him to sign the divorce papers. And he only has a few days to raise the extra cash to counter another offer.
Set in the run-up to Christmas and in a single location, as the film opens he brings his somewhat reluctant teenage son (Finn Little, credited only as The Kid), who he’s pulled out of school, to the beach to surf the waves he used to ride. Which is where he’s immediately confronted by the obnoxious Bay Boys, a bullying territorial clique of socially privileged figures, one of whom, Pitbull (Alexander Bertrand), tells him in no uncertain terms, “Don’t live here, don’t surf here”, a point they bloodily make to a couple who come along later. The alpha male ringleader Scally (Julian McMahon) advises him to just move on without a fuss, but, his son going back to mum, he has no intention of capitulating and is resolved to surf there (a series of confused flashbacks that involve his father dead on the beach and a suggestion of an incident for which he blames himself, serve to explain why). Things quickly begin to unravel. All the locals tell him he’s not wanted, his Lexus is vandalised by a gang of teenagers, his surfboard’s stolen by the Bay Boys and the local cop is patently on their side. His phone dead, his money and possessions stolen, he can’t pay for a cup of coffee or call his broker, so he makes a deal with the local food hut vendor, handing him his late father’s watch as collateral, only to find he’s been ripped off and conned. He resorts to living out of his car in the parking lot but then that’s stolen and he left with no option but to sleep in the rusting Volkswagen belonging to a crazed old man (Nic Cassim) whose son was a local surfing champ and is looking for the dog he swears the gang has killed along with his missing son. Here he finds a bullet. Reduced to drinking the polluted tap water from the beach toilets, scavenging the bins for food and almost chomping into a rat he’s killed (later to become weapon), he’s once well-groomed, well-dressed appearance is replaced by the look of some beach bum, watching the gang through the binoculars the old man traded for his sunglasses. Already a man on the edge, as the humiliations, the ridicule and the abuse mount up and sanity shrinks, inevitably it’s only a short time before he goes full on Nic Cage gonzo.
A study of mid-life crisis, identity, toxic masculinity and its rituals (“before you can surf you must suffer” is self-appointed guru Scally’s mantra) as well as the illusionary nature of home, it works well until it doesn’t, descending in to a climactic cathartic freak out that twists the bullying into some sort of gaslighting initiation and the reintroduction of the gun from several scenes earlier. Having built the intensity of Cage’s character’s psychological, physical and emotional degradation, it feels like the filmmakers don’t really know how to tie it together, where to take it or resolve in a satisfying fashion, with an ending that basically just stops. That said, shots of snakes, spiders and rats add to the poisonous nature of the whole environment, Miranda Tapsell has a brief role as the photographer whose image of him by his car reasserts his grip on sanity and the Bay Boys cast are suitably odious, but this is unquestionably Cage’s film and it’s his unhinged, raw, volcanic performance that keeps you gripping the film’s board as it plunges into the riptide. (Sky Cinema/Now)
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)
Together (18)
‘Let’s Stick Together’ sang Bryan Ferry but he never meant it as literally as in this compelling writer-director debut by Michael Shanks, a couple’s therapy co-dependency body horror with a rich vein of dark humour about the fear and pull of commitment that opens with a prologue in which two dogs merge together. Real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco star as Millie and longtime boyfriend Tim, she an elementary school teacher, he an aspiring but underachieving thirty-something musician who can’t drive. Landing a job at a school in the countryside, at their New York going away party she proposes to him, but, caught off guard and emotionally distant since the death of his parents, he hesitates before responding, an early cue to the increasingly fragile nature of the relationship.
Having relocated, the pair go hiking and come upon a bell entangled in undergrowth. Caught in a rainstorm, they tumble into an underground cave, where they shelter for the night, he drinks from the pool and recounts how he was traumatised to find his mother in bed with his father’s decaying corpse. The next morning, they wake to find their legs partially stuck together, Tim subsequently becoming increasingly physically drawn to Millie, much to their mutual confusion. Not least when, during impulsive bathroom sex at the school, after he cannot resist the urge to be away from her, they find it almost impossible to uncouple. Realising Jamie (Damon Herriman), a fellow teacher at the school sporting one of those moustaches you should never trust, has sussed them out, she goes to his home to apologise and finds herself talking about her relationship problems with Tim (basically “I’m not sure if we love each other or if we’re just used to each other”), he recounting Plato’s theory of the origin of eros (Zeus dividing eight-limbed beings into two halves, each always seeking to unite with the other, and reminiscing about his apparently late husband. Later, he turns up to welcome them to the neighbourhood, explaining that that the cave they fell into used to be the site of a New Age church. Meanwhile, Tim, who reckons he’s having panic attacks, discovers a photo of a missing local couple at the same site and becomes convinced he and Millie are going to suffer the same fate.
Saying what that might entail would spoil the film’s deliciously creepy and grotesque horrors, but suffice to say their pair find their arms becoming fused together, Millie having to take up an electric saw to separate them.
Drawing on Cronenberg and John Carpenter’s The Thing, riffing on themes and puns about becoming one with your other half (the soundtrack wittily includes The Spice Girls 2 Become 1), literally as well as metaphorically joined at the hip (not to mention lips and eyeballs), it loses something in explaining the supernatural ritual but Franco and Brie deliver knowingly ripe and powerfully physical performances while the final act in the driveway as the couple try to avoid being pulled together and a coda that puts a spin on the term gender fluid make this one of the year’s most inventive and imaginative horrors. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe)
Touch (12A)
A departure from his usual action movies, adapted from the novel by Olaf Olafsson, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur delivers a decades and continents-spanning romantic melodrama of memory, ageing, loss and love that will inevitably but also deservedly prompt comparisons with Past Lives. An elderly Icelandic widower who owns a restaurant in Reykjavik and sings in a local choir, Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) learns he has early onset dementia and is advised by his doctor that it might be a good time to settle any unresolved business. To which end, much to his somewhat overbearing daughter’s consternation, he heads for London just as pandemic lockdown looms (the only guest at his hotel with the 2 metre rule giving the title an extra resonance), to try and find his first love, the less conservative daughter of the stern but fatherly owner of Japanese restaurant Nippon, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), for whom, he worked as a dishwasher after dropping out of the London School of Economics some 50 years earlier (the reference to John and Yoko’s bed-in places it in 1969), his Marxism at odds with his studies.
As such, the film moves back and forth between Kristofer’s present day search, the restaurant now a tattoo parlour, and 60s flashbacks to his youth (Palmi Kormákur, the director’s son) and the growing but clandestine romance with Miko (Yôko Narahashi) as he teaches himself Japanese, the tones of the cinematography changing accordingly. There’s a poignant backstory involving Hiroshima regarding why Miko and her father moved to London after the war that adds further emotional resonance to the narrative, the relationship coming to abrupt end when Kristofer discovers they have closed the restaurant at short notice and just vanished. Back in the present, he learns they moved back to Japan, setting up the third act as he travels to Tokyo to finally reunite with the now older Miko (Yoko Narahashi, also the film’s casting director) and learn of her new life and why she left the old one.
Switching languages and locations, a film about accepting your life and the changes that accompany it, it slowly build its melancholic warmth in its tale of compassion, understanding and forgiveness, interspersed with amusing and touching sidebars such as the older Kristofer’s sake bar encounter with a Japanese “salary man” widower (Masatoshi Nakamura) that ends up with them doing karaoke together, and the younger man being persuaded to sing for his Japanese friends not to mention a truly sensual scene of Kristofer preparing a Japanese breakfast for Miko.
With grace notes support from Meg Kubota as Nippon waitress Hitomi, Tatsuya Tagawa as opera-singing chef Arai-san and Ruth Sheen as young Kristofer’s nosy landlady and a soundtrack that takes in Nick Drake and The Zombies, it’s a beguilingly bittersweet gem that truly puts the touch into touching. (Sky Cinema)
Weapons (18)
Writer/director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian has the same intricately constructed, slow-burn creepiness and knotted twists, playing out in character chapters, returning to the same events to offer different perspectives before tying it all together in the final moments.
The fulcrum of the plot is that at exactly 2.17am, 17 children from a single smalltown Pennsylvania town third-grade school class get up and leave their homes, running with arms out as if playing aeroplanes, and just disappear. All the children that is bar one, young Alex (a mesmerisingly calm and composed Cary Christopher), a regular target of the class bullies, who duly turns up the next day. The class teacher, borderline alcoholic Justine (a suitably nervy fragile Julia Garner), quickly becomes the scapegoat for the angry parents, most notably Archer (Josh Brolin), though she insists she’s as shocked and upset as anyone. That doesn’t stop her becoming the target of understandable parental grief and rage, getting threatening phone calls and someone (clearly Archer) painting the word witch on her car in bright red letters. The school principal, Marcus (Benjamin Wong) forces her to take a leave of absence and warns her not to approach Alex. Naturally, she does only to find the windows of his house all papered over and, peering through a crack, two motionless figures sitting inside.
Justine is the first chapter, followed by Archer, a builder who starts seeing a pattern in the trajectory of the disappearances, then Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a married cop with self-worth issues unable to resist either the drink or Justine. The remaining chapters put the focus on James (Austin Abrams) a junkie that Paul busts and who accidentally stumbles on the answer to the disappearance riddle while attempting to rob Alex’s parents (), Marcus and finally Alex, for the big reveal involving his visiting disturbingly oddball aunt, Gladys (a chilling Amy Madigan), who has a very dark agenda of her own wherein the film lays bare its Grimm colours; suffice to say the accusation levelled at Justine is misdirected.
Tapping into the American zeitgeist unease, teasing things out with the interlinked characters as the tension builds to the violent and richly metaphorical climax but largely avoiding jump scares (even if he does overdo the it’s just a dream horrors), Cregger may eventually lay bare the mechanics but he deliberately never offers any motivation behind what’s happening. Evil just is. In the final stretch he also uncorks some a dark and grim humour, well aware that the climactic scenes while shocking and horrific can only be played for intentional almost silent movie slapstick laughs. Bring Her Back remains the year’s best horror, but this comes a very close second. (Cineworld 5 Ways; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)
The Wild Robot (PG)
The last DreamWorks in house animation, based on Peter Brown’s 2016 novel, it unfolds on a remote island where a cargo ship from robotics corporate Universal Dynamics has crashed during a typhoon, with only one of its all-purpose people pleaser domestic products, ROZZUM Unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o), surviving. Charged with providing whatever assistance is needed, she attempts to offer her services the local wildlife, who, rather inevitably, see her as a monster. Even learning how to speak their language doesn’t help and, she’s about to activate her retrieval signal when she’s chased by a Thorn (Mark Hamill), a grizzly bear and, in the process, manages to crush a goose nest and its occupant, leaving only a single egg. Preventing it from being eaten by Fink (Pedro Pascal), a wily but friendless red fox, it hatches and the young gosling runt immediately imprints itself on her and manages to break her beacon transponder. Now, stuck on the island, after being informed by Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), a mother opossum, that the chick thinks she’s his mother, she now has a task, to feed him, teach him to swim and ensure he learns to fly in time to join the winter migration. And a ROZZUM always finishes their task.
She now calling herself Roz and naming the gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor), the film follows her and Fink’s efforts to get him into shape, while, discovering others of his kind, he’s treated as a laughing stock for his size, ungainly swimming and living with the monster that killed his true family. As such, the film has familiar messages about belonging, family, thinking with your heart, love and working together, but it’s also a poignant commentary on how, as Pinktail explains, being a mother is a case of making it up as you go along and not just checking boxes (breaking programming), especially if the kid’s adopted.
Eventually, with mentorship from a falcon (Ving Rhames), Brightbill learns to fly in his own individual fashion (we all have to find our way to soar) and is taken under the wing of Longbill (Bill Nighy) for the migration, he and Roz bidding each other goodbye, possibly not to meet again.
After the geese depart, a particularly harsh winter sets in, and Roz and Fink rescue the other animals and bring them to the shelter she’s build, Fink firmly telling them that they have to work and live together if they want to survive (they also promise to not eat each other once things improve, which makes you wonder if the food chain goes vegetarian). They also come together to rescue Roz when Vontra (Stephanie Hsu), a retrieval robot, arrives to capture her and take her memories for Universal Dynamics to study, albeit the ensuing battle setting the forest ablaze.
Roz is wonderful creation, with her extending limbs, remarkable expressive spherical head, detachable self-functioning hand and the ability to mirror any animal’s movements as she ‘goes native’, and barely a second goes by without a stunning visual design, inspired animation, heartfelt emotion or droll and refreshingly unsentimental humour (Pinktail’s litter are all hilariously obsessed with death), Headed up by sterling performances from Pascal and Nyong’o, the voice cast are faultless, their number also including Matt Berry as Paddler, a sarcastic beaver who’s mocked for trying to gnaw down a massive tree. While following in the lineage of The Iron Giant and Wall-E, two earlier animations about robots with similar themes, this is on an entirely different level and one of the most beautiful and moving films you’ll see this year. (Sky)
Woman Of The Hour (15)
Ana Kendrick not only stars but makes a very impressive directorial debut in this true crime recounting of 70s serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) who, when eventually caught, was convicted of five murders though the estimated number of victims was far higher (he killed two, a woman and young girl, while out on bail). As seen in the opening in 1977 Wyoming, posing as a photographer looking for models, he would lure women to a remote spot before killing them during a sexual assault. The film depicts two further victims, that of young runaway Amy in 1979 San Gabriel (she escaped, leading to his arrest) and, in a change of routine, flight attendant Charlie in 1971 New York City whom he kills after helping her move into her apartment.
The story centres, however, in 1978 Los Angeles where, after a string of failed auditions, struggling aspiring actress Sheryl (Cheryl) Bradshaw (Kendrick) is persuaded by her agent to appear as a contestant on the TV show The Dating Game. She thinks it’s beneath her but with the potential to be spotted as well as meet potential suitors, she agrees, turning up to her episode in which she has to ask questions of the three bachelors hidden behind a partition. Bachelor #3 is revealed to be Rodney.
Much to the annoyance of the host (Tony Hale), Sheryl ditches the banal prepared questions and starts asking her own, confusing dim-witted Bachelor #1 with one about philosophy and exposing Bachelor #2’s sexism. Alcala, though, is smooth and charm her, they winning a romantic trip for two to Carmel. However, a member of the audience recognises him as the man she saw with her friend, who was later found murdered but, just as the police didn’t respond to reports by survivors, isn’t taken seriously by the show’s security. Meanwhile, out in the parking lot, after the show, Sheryl’s having reservations about her intended date, especially when, having brushed him off after they’ve been for drinks and his mood shifts, he starts following her.
As director, Kendrick adeptly builds the tension and navigates the film’s themes of sexism and misogyny and how women so often have to bear the burden of proof when reporting assault, though is less assured in the generic narrative mechanics, the abrupt ending feeling somehow tossed away, leaving credits to wrap things up. However, as Sheryl she delivers another strong and multi-faceted performance while Zovatto is suitably chilling and the creepily smooth but compassionless long-haired Alcala. An impressive debut, it’ll be interesting to see how she builds on this. (Netflix)
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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
The 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