She’s a woman in folklore, ergo a temptress or a virgin – bound to be blamed for something. In 1975 elderly writer Alice Lamb (Penelope Wilton) is putting the finishing touches to her new book in her seaside cottage where she’s lived since World War II. Back then reclusive writer Alice (Gemma Arterton) has her sequestered life on England’s south coast upended when Frank (Lucas Bond), a child evacuee from the London Blitz, is left in her care. Despite initially resolving to be rid of him, her life upended, Alice finds herself and her emotions reawakened by him and she is reminded of her secret relationship with Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) whom she met at a concert in London in 1926. Frank takes an interest in her research into the connections between Fata Morgana, the pagan heaven called Summerland and the phenomenon of floating islands. Unbeknownst to Alice there is a connection between her great love Vera and this boy Frank and when his maverick schoolfriend Edie (Dixie Egerickx) discovers that Frank’s father has been killed in wartime action and Alice is unable to break the news to him, the angry girl takes things into her own hands … Life is not kind. Anguish is inevitable. On the surface of this outline we are reminded of Bedknobs and Broomsticks and single woman Alice is routinely name-called by the vicious local children with witch one of the nicer epithets as they busy themselves putting into action what the local women talk about on the sly. Tom Courtenay has a lovely supporting role as the kind headmaster at Frank’s school and Sian Phillips is splendid as the judgmental grandmother to the fractious Edie. It’s beautifully made with outstanding cinematography by Laurie Rose and nicely detailed production design by Christina Moore. Volker Bertelmann’s sympathetic score sounds like the sea. With its sprinkling of Mozart it emphasises the storyline about magic and the connections that can be made between myth and life, a theme well developed in temperamental Alice’s own wonderment at the possibilities of the human condition, the capacity to see mirages and turrets and flags in the sky. A rather elegantly beautiful romantic drama with many subversive elements that carry a narrative weight that stays with the viewer. Despite terrible loss, life can sometimes boast its small miracles of lust, love and life. Written and directed by Jessica Swale and executive produced by Arterton. Stories have to come from somewhere
There’s too many of them. You can’t kill the world. 1930s West Virginia. Outlaw Ben Harper (Peter Graves) gets his son John (Billy Chapin) and daughter Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) to swear they won’t reveal where he’s stashed $10,000 he robbed from two men he murdered when the police apprehend him so they can have it when they grow up. He shares his prison cell with serial killer turned preacher Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) who determines to find the man’s widow Willa (Shelley Winters) when he’s hanged. He charms everyone in the small town. She is convinced he has come to redeem her and he woos and marries her, murders her, dumping her body in the river and chases the children across a Southern Gothic landscape when John accidentally reveals that he and his sister know where the money is … You know, when you’re little, you have more endurance than God is ever to grant you again. Children are man at his strongest. They abide. Beautiful and strange, as haunting and iconic a fairytale as those other standalone monochrome masterpieces, Frankenstein and The Miracle Worker. With a screenplay attributed it to legendary critic James Agee and the only film ever directed by Charles Laughton who substantially rewrote the overlong script, adapted from the 1953 Davis Grubb novel which drew on the real-life crimes of Harry Powers who hanged in 1932 for the murder of two widows and three children. It’s a stunning Expressionistic allegory about good and evil with the quality of a Mother Goose rhyme, as Laughton noted. The usually laidback Mitchum is truly terrifying as the monster who seems to materialise out of sheer force of will to murder children while Winters, who had already performed beautifully in the earlier melodrama A Place in the Sun, has another careful role here as the gullible mother. She was studying acting with Laughton whose theatre producer Paul Gregory had found the property. Laughton hired Stanley Cortez to shoot the film along the lines of a D.W. Griffith silent masterpiece with unique sets created by Hilyard Brown and they make images for the ages: far beyond the apparent noir story promised. Lillian Gish’s appearance as Rachel Cooper, a woman who takes in stray children, reinforces the narrative power underscored by Walter Schumann’s music. It was rejected at the time but it has outlasted many of its more lauded contemporaries to be appreciated as a work of true artistry. Sadly it meant Laughton never directed again despite having a version of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead ready to go. What a tragedy for cinema. And what an incredible film, a simply great saga of astonishing power about childhood, fear, family, crime, evil and death. Laughton wanted the audience to sit up straight in their seats again. Mission accomplished. It’s a hard world for little things MM#3333
Aka You Belong to Me. My husband and I have a very different way of dealing with things – we don’t talk about it. When a case study patient Daphne (Emily Alyn Lind)of psychotherapist Philip (Casey Affleck) commits suicide following the murder of her friend, her brother James (Sam Claflin) shows up on the doorstep of the home he shares with his second wife Grace (Michelle Monaghan) and his high-schooler daughter Lucy (India Eisley) who’s just been expelled for doing a line of coke. He stays for dinner, talking about his first novel and the trouble he has writing his second. He befriends both daughter and stepmother and seduces them both, capitalising on information he has obtained about the death of the couple’s young son when Grace was in a car crash. Complaints start flooding in about Philip’s professionalism and his reputation is on the line and his colleague Dr Vanessa Fanning (Veronica Ferres) supports him when he realises James may be behind his entire life falling apart and could well be someone else altogether when he finally gets a copy of the independently published novel with someone else’s photo on the jacket … For many years I had decided a coping mechanism and it was to blame you. The classic single by The Police obviously inspired this ironic stalker tale about a therapist who has problems too. Good to know. The chilly environs of Washington State and the isolated modern home of this dysfunctional family who don’t talk to each other properly provide an apposite setting for a thriller that carries the ghost of Fatal Attraction right through to its concluding sequence. Affleck has some good moments as the shrink who can’t get anything much off his chest and Claflin goes full psycho when the situation demands. Monaghan has a better than usual role as the supportive wife who isn’t that supportive, actually, and Eisley is your typical coke-sniffing stupid teen – only in the movies would a father say his daughter doing cocaine at that age was normal acting out. There are some interesting observations about what people actually tell each other in therapy – and who does the telling. As everyone knows, psychiatry is still in its earliest stage of evolution so this will end very badly indeed. Always remember to keep your hockey skates handy when there’s a stranger in the house. Sigh! Written by David Murray and directed by Vaughn Stein. Look what you made me do, Doc!
I’m too old to run. Where the hell would I go any way? Ageing hitman and mob enforccer Jimmy Conlon (Liam Neeson) is best friends with his mob boss Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). He’s haunted by his past and the murders he committed and police detective John Harding (Vincent D’Onofrio) is on his case to come clean. The situation changes when Shawn tries to kill Michael (Joel Kinnaman) Jimmy’s estranged son a limo driver who just happens to be in the wrong place when a gang of Albanian heroin dealers are met with gunfire by Shawn’s son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) when they come to collect and now Danny wants Michael dead. Trouble is, Jimmy gets in between them and kills Danny to save Michael but then the forces of Shawn and the police conspire to frame Michael. Jimmy pleads with Michael to give him one night to make amends and sort out loose ends and the chase is on with ruthless killer Price (Common) out to finish them off … I’m coming after you with everything I’ve got. The unstoppable combo of Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra continues apace with another breathless outing, this time with a father-son relationship times two, the good son and the very bad son and their papas aren’t exactly nice guys at least in the conventional sense of the term. Taking on almost mythical dimensions with its night-time NYC setting and a race against time to get home by dawn (shades of The Warriors), an Irish-American gangster rivalry and a quest for vengeance, this is smooth storytelling using the full panoply of gangster tropes so familiar to us that just the sight of Harris behind a desk at an Irish bar on a corner or the sentence they’re Albanian drug dealers tells us everything we need to know in a story complicated by crooked cops. Neeson expands his caring father shtick from the Taken trilogy, this time having an estranged son. nicely etched by Kinnaman who still deserves a great leading role (The Informer notwithstanding). Although it’s written by Brad Ingelsby there is no sign of a basketball. A terrific action thriller with Neeson seeking redemption for sins on a Biblical scale. I’ve done terrible things in my life. Things for which I can never be forgiven. I betrayed friends, turned my back on the ones closest to me. I’ve always known that my sins would eventually catch up to me. No sin goes unpunished in this life. Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes when you are dying. That’s bullshit. It’s your regrets that haunt you in your final moments. Everything you’ve failed to be. Everyone you let down. Everything you’d go back and change, if only you had more time
The Admiralty take a pretty dim view of a former member running contraband in the Mediterranean. A former British Naval Officer Geoffrey Peace (Richard Johnson) now makes his living by smuggling goods around the Mediterranean. After being forced to dump his cargo having nearly being caught by the authorities in Malta, he is eager to recoup his losses and is approached by former colleague Harry Riker (Jeremy Kemp) keen to retrieve a stash of diamonds lost by the late prospector husband of Julie Chambois (Honor Blackman) on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia in South West Africa. Accompanied by his regular colleague David (Roy Dotrice) who has issues with the seemingly psychotic and mute Johann (Peter Vaughan), their mutual memories of something that happened in that location in 1943 involving Geoffrey haunt the trip …. You should have gone back years ago if that’s where your ghost lives. Adapted from the 1959 Godfrey Jenkins novel by Marvin H. Albert, a name we know as the author of the western novel Leonardo Di Caprio is reading on his lunch break during Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It was originally acquired by legendary screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, intended as a vehicle for that great combo of Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. Somehow it got into British hands and a decade later this was made. The combination of treasure-seeking quest, crime, WW2 derring-do and adventure story meshes well in a neatly constructed narrative in which the wartime mission to destroy a revolutionary German U-boat in its moorings rises its head to pay off the later pretty traditional story of cross and double-cross, with these mismatched crims out to outdo each other and maybe to do each other in. John Wilcox’s cinematography revels in the gorgeous contrasting settings of ports, sea and desert, navigating the sandbars and shallow rocky African waters with that impressive old boat wreck ahead, rising out of the sand to taunt the diamond hunters. Blackman has a blast as the beautiful femme fatale with some decent zingers to deliver while Johnson looks alternately guilt-stricken and troubled throughout, as well he might, a handsome foil to pizza-faced Kemp who plays fast and loose with the truth and his motivation. Vaughan has a striking role as the German rendered mute by the horrors inflicted by Johnson decades earlier and whose WW2 flashbacks trigger the doubly ironic killer ending. For fans of Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean – and aren’t we all? Directed by Don Chaffey. Perhaps it was here that Earth first emerged from chaos
Aka ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!At first it was fun, but I am too young to be tied down. A Spanish cleaning lady with a chaotic life and a pill addiction, Gloria (Carmen Maura) lives in a Madrid apartment with her cranky husband, Antonio (Angel de Andres-Lopez) ; their two trouble-prone sons, gay Miguel (Miguel Angel Herranz) and drug dealer Toni (Juan Martinez); and Gloria’s ruthless lunatic mother-in-law Abuela (Chus Lampreave) who is addicted to both bottled water and fairy cakes. With little emotional support, apart from call girl neighbour Cristal (Veronica Forque) who likes Gloria to keep her company during bonking sessions, Gloria finds herself at wit’s end and finds out that Antonio has a secret passion on the decadent German singer Ingrid Muller (Katia Moritz) for whom he had worked as driver in Germany. Writer Lucas Villalba (Gonzal Suarez) who’s doing the memoirs of a random dictator tries to convince Antonio to forge letters from Hitler and travels to Germany to meet the singer to invite her to participate in the scheme. She’s in the middle of a suicide attempt and he persuades there’s money in the scheme. Gloria is pushed over the edge when an argument with her husband leads her to hitting him over the head with a hambone causing his accidental death. As Gloria deals with the morbid matter, other eccentric characters including an evil ginger child, a lizard called Dinero and a gay paedophile dentist who Gloria allows adopt Miguel, enter the picture, only adding to the craziness and police inspector Polo (Luis Hostalot) starts to investigate Antonio’s death … Tonight’s client would like a whip. If I don’t take him one, he might leave. One of the unexpected eruptions of the Eighties was rebirth of the Spanish cinema, almost entirely courtesy of writer/director Pedro Almodóvar’s crazy comedies and Gloria is one of his great creations, a female hero like no other. Women today just won’t stay home! The collaboration of actress and director was such a balm to a country on the verge following Franco’s reign and their crazy vehicles somehow contained the truth of female experience as well as knowing high comedy: love, servitude, lies, housework, melodrama, marriage, motherhood, money, murder (out of Roald Dahl), sex, drugs, prostitution and perversion, the whole gamut. What I wanted was some commonplace scene of elegant, sophisticated sadism, like in French films. This mad farce with its charismatic protagonist and nutty plot is one of the most purely enjoyable and fun satires ever made, a work of seemingly joyous abandon. Maura is never less than magnificent: she is the performer who Almodóvar once said is the actress who has best absorbed and communicated my idea of the female. Maura has said of him, What I liked about his characters was that they were full of vitality, positive, practical, surreal – at least the ones he gave me. They’re characters where the woman is in charge. Such sheerly witty feminism – has it ever been bettered? Tell me who are the romantics and who are the realists?
Aka Out of Rosnheim. Jesus, I hate things that don’t make sense. German tourist Jasmin Munchgstettner (Marianne Sugar Baby Sägebrecht) argues with her husband (Hans Stadlbauer) after car trouble strands them along a dusty highway in the American Southwest’s Mojave Desert. Fuming, she storms off and travels by foot to the nearest outpost of civilisation – the Bagdad Café. Upon arriving, she butts heads with owner Brenda (CCH Pounder), but they soon forge an unlikely friendship. What begins as a few days’ respite becomes a prolonged stay as Jasmine finds her niche within this eccentric truck-stop community… She shows up outta nowhere without a car, without a map. She ain’t got nothing but a suitcase filled with men’s clothing. How come? How come she act so funny like she was gonna stay here forever? And with no clothes?! No! I don’t like it! It don’t make no sense at all! No, no, no, no, no! It don’t make no sense! A heartwarming fish out of water tale that might be the second and final entry in that Eighties cycle of Germans-in-America films that started with Paris, Texas. The sensitive impact of this generous woman on the kind of motley crew you invariably find in rural communities in the movies is amusing and transcends the inevitable whimsy to make this halted road movie oddly moving. The characterisations of the lead and the ensemble (including Jack Palance, Christine Kaufmann, George Aguilar, G. Smokey Campbell et al) are filled with loving detail. Strikingly shot by Bernd Heinl with music by Bob Telson. Quite enchanting, as magical as the illusions Jasmin performs for the customers. Written by Eleonore Adlon and Christopher Doherty and director Percy Adlon. Now why would you want to leave?
You Logans mustn’t be as simpleminded as people say. Once-promising football player West Virginian Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) is laid off from his construction job in the tunnels underneath the Charlotte Motor Speedway. He is close to his daughter, Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie) who lives with her mom Bobbie Jo Chapman (Katie Holmes), her stepfather Moody (David Denman), and her two younger half brothers. Sadie performs in beauty pageants, and Jimmy’s hair stylist sister, Mellie (Riley Keough), does her hair. Bobbie Jo and Moody plan on moving to Lynchburg as Moody plans to open up a new dealership. Jimmy goes to the Duck Tape Grill & Bar, where his brother, Clyde (Adam Driver), tends bar. Clyde, an Iraq war veteran and amputee missing the lower part of his left arm, believes the Logan family is cursed. A NASCAR-team owner, obnoxious British drinks creator Max Chilblain (Seth MacFarlane) enters the bar with two friends and makes fun of Clyde’s disability. Jimmy defends his brother and starts a fight; Clyde grabs a bottle from the bar and heads outside to set Max’s car on fire. Max and his friends run outside to see the car burning and start filming the scene. Jimmy grabs their phones and throws them into the fire, then turns to Clyde and says ‘cauliflower.; The next day Jimmy tells Clyde his plan to rob the Speedway by exploiting his knowledge of the underground pneumatic tube system used to move the Speedway’s vast amount of money. Clyde and Jimmy recruit a team for the robbery: their sister Mellie, incarcerated safe-cracker Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) who’s told his wife has run off with his money and another man, and, at Joe’s request, Joe’s dimwit brothers Sam (Brian Gleeson) and Fish (Jack Quaid). Clyde gets himself intentionally sent to prison on a minor charge. The plan is to break Joe and Clyde out of prison for the robbery and return them to prison later in the day; Joe recruits an inmate to orchestrate a riot on the day of the robbery as a distraction. With the (unknowing) help of a woman working in the vault, Mellie, Sam, and Fish infest the Speedway’s tube system with painted cockroaches to determine which tubes go to the vault. When he’s out gathering supplies, Jimmy meets former schoolmate Sylvia Harrison (Katherine Waterston), who gives him a free tetanus shot inside her mobile clinic, which is in need of donations. Jimmy learns that construction at the speedway is being completed ahead of schedule, forcing them to mount the heist a week earlier, during the much busier Coca-Cola 600 race on Memorial weekend…. The dirty big secret is that I am the asset in this scenario. With a screenplay by Rebecca Blunt, this good times rolling Southern fried heist comedy from director Steven Soderbergh is amiable fun even if the drawling accents at times preclude comprehension. The family relationships are initially baffling but eventually clear up. Craig revisits his psycho In Cold Blood persona (with a preview of Knives Out) in a nice counter to Tatum’s decent skin while Sebastian Stan as racer Dayton White gets to be the handsome hero accidentally letting the gang escape. It’s great fun watching Dwight Yoakam as the prison governor Warden Burns simply refusing to acknowledge there’s a riot going on. Reverse-engineering the heist procedure itself is nothing less than genius. The one moment of horror is seeing little Mackenzie tarted up like a hooker for her pageant. The fourth act introducing Hilary Swank as the pesky persistent FBI agent Sarah Harrison is nicely managed. For fans of NASCAR that’s Jeff Gordon, Darrell Waltrip, Mike Joy and Adam Alexander commentating. It’s like your makin’ us hurt America
Ihave never met an Israeli face to face. December 1992. Mona Juul (Ruth Wilson) a diplomat in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls her husband Terje Rød-Larsen (Andrew Scot) director of the think tank the Fafo Foundation who is in Jerusalem to talk to Yossi Beilin (Itzik Cohen) Deputy Foreign Minister of the State of Israel. Beilin explains to Terje that the peace talks are in a dead end, because everybody demands everything at once, and Terje offers a new approach: an Israeli meeting a Palestinian on neutral ground. Mona has a meeting with Ahmed Qurei (Salim Daw), the minister of finance of the PLO, in London, Britain, where Mona and Terje introduce him to Yair Hirschfeld (Dov Glickman), an Israeli professor for economics. The secret meeting, since Israeli officials were not allowed to talk to Palestinians, starts cold but warms up when they find common ground in their mutual expertise and they agree to meet again. The followup meeting with more serious players is held in a manor near Oslo,Norway, with Qurei aka Abu Ala to his friends and Hassan Asfour (Waleed Zuaiter) as representatives of the Palestinian government and Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak (Rotem Keinan) as Israelis representatives. The meeting starts out formal and cold, but warms up over time and through socialising, the sharing of good food and smaller hiccups resulting in a first series of drafts for a Declaration of Principles (DOP). As neither Hirschfeld nor Pundak are Israeli officials, talks are about to come to an end there. After some back and forth and Terje making unfounded claims that he would get an Israeli official to join the talks, Mona decides to break the secret to Johan Jørgen Holst (Karel Dobry), the Norwegian minister of foreign affairs, who facilitates a meeting with Uri Savir (Jeff Wilbusch) from the Israeli foreign ministry to review the DOP. This meeting starts very aggressively: showboating Savir and Qurei accuse each other of terrorism and murder, but again warms up over time with Savir expressing willingness to give up the Gaza Strip and Jericho a city 20 miles outside of Jerusalem to the Palestinians as an autonomous region. Uri Savir then presents the result to Joel Singer Igal Naor), the hardass legal adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who meets with the group to finalise the document with official backing. Instead it almost leads to a breakup of the talks over Singer’s attempts to rewrite the document. At the request of Hirschfeld, Mona finally breaks her ‘facilitate only’ doctrine and gets involved. She can defuse the situation by sharing her own story about the conflict, hinted at by grim flashbacks throughout. After that the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord is meant to be finalised through a telephone conference between Shimon Peres (Sasson Gabai) and Yasser Arafat. After some trouble getting Arafat, who is residing in exile in Tunis, on the line, they manage to talk to Qurei, who speaks on behalf of Arafat and the rest of the government because he claims to be more proficient in English. After a long conference, they agree to accept each other’s legitimacy and postpone the controversial question on Jerusalem, thereby finalising the negotiation … It’s only in the sharing of the personal that we can see the other for who they truly are. Adapted from his 2017 Tony award-winning stage play by the writer J.T. Rogers, this is a remarkably even-handed account of how the high stakes talks behind the Oslo Accord were brokered, conducted and concluded. Dramatically this could have been very static but some good management of location, a running joke about the fabulous food and the tensions generated between Scott and Wilson who hover behind closed doors and whose direct intervention is not required until the discussions between implacable enemies reach fever pitch in this chilly place (both parties agree California might have been nicer), create a matrix of back-and-forth of fundamental disagreements and misunderstandings which intrigues and impresses in this very well staged and humane re-enactment. The couple who have engineered the meeting are constantly wondering what’s happening which is a neat construct as talks are always on the verge of collapsing and it takes some ingenuity and tricks to rescue them. It’s engagingly performed and Geraldine Alexander has an eyecatching role as Toril Grandal the manor’s housekeeper whose mouthwatering waffles make the bad atmosphere evaporate. In many ways this is a remarkable insight into how diplomacy works and how productive back channels might be created – there are no parades, no fanfare, no chauffeurs. And it’s freezing. The Americans are kept in the dark – everyone agrees on that. Perhaps the conceit that Mona’s personal experience needs the agreement to move on with her life is a little problematic. The ‘acts’ are broken up by Scott and Wilson’s interactions and attempts to bring both sides back together as well as historical archive clips which put the developments in a recognisable time and place in this remarkably lucid history. The final newsreel coda is of course the deux ex machina: the appalling assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist. And since then both Arafat and Peres have also died. Truly tragic. Directed by Bartlett Sher in his cinematic debut. Executive produced by Marc Platt and Steven Spielberg. Shot by Janusz Kaminski. Garbage and taxes is what a Government does.
Where’s an Avenger when you need one? In 1995, super-soldier Alexei Shostakov aka Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Black Widow Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) are Russian undercover agents are posing as a regular family in Ohio USA with surrogate daughters Natasha Romanoff (Ever Anderson) and Yelena Belova (Violet McGraw) when they get the call to finish their mission to steal S.H.I.E.L.D intel. They escape to Cuba where they rendezvous with their boss General Dreykov (Ray Winstone) who has Romanoff and Belova taken to the Red Room for training. Years later Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) has bombed Dreykov’s Budapest office apparently killing him and his daughter Antonia. In 2016 she is a fugitive for violating the Sokovia Accords and is hiding out in Norway from US Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt) when she is tracked down by Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) who’s looking for antidote vials sent by Yelena (Florence Pugh) herself a Black Widow who has killed a rogue former Black Widow and come into contact with a synthetic gas that neutralises the Red Room’s chemical mind-control agent. The two young women reunite in Budapest. Romanoff learns Dreykov is alive and the Red Room is still active. Shortly after, Black Widows attack them. Romanoff and Belova evade them and Taskmaster before meeting Mason (O-T Fagbenie), who supplies them with a helicopter. Romanoff and Belova break Shostakov out of prison to learn Dreykov’s location. He tells them to speak with Vostokoff, who lives on a farm outside Saint Petersburg in Russia, where she developed the chemical mind control process used on the Widows and is currently working on controlling pigs. Belova reveals that while they were not a real family, she believed they were so. Vostokoff admits she sent their location to Dreykov. His agents arrive and take them to the Red Room, an aerial facility. Dreykov has reactivated the Black Widow programme and world domination is his at the push of a button … You named a pig after me? And so the Marvel franchise becomes an anti-patriarchal spy thriller with a battle of the sexes pitched at the base level of pheromones with the comic barbs coming from Pugh and Harbour. When you whip your hair when you’re fighting and you do like a fighting pose. It’s a fighting pose. You’re a total poser. She’s not impressed by her poseur ‘sister,’ he’s jealous of Captain America. The irony in this pair of ‘sisters’ is that Pugh is the one perceived to be weaker and is going to have her brain removed by Dreykov’s doctor; but it’s Johansson’s exposure to Western values and her emotionality that is the real driver and leads to the inevitable conclusion. It’s a prequel to both Infinity War and Endgame but it’s not an origins story per se albeit it fills in gaps for Civil War. It’s well set up in the very first scene as the bogus natives (like TV’s The Americans) have to leave at an hour’s notice; and the later resentful friction between the ‘sisters’ amuses but it takes its sweet time to get to the point: geezerish mastermind Dreykov who gets Johansson’s blood boiling. He’s like Moonraker up there plotting against mankind using these unwanted and stolen girl-children recycled into murderous robots minus free will and ovaries. It’s that confrontation with Johansson (which is played just right between taunts and brief action) that states the story’s purpose, transforming male egotism into kickass girlpower. The world functions on a higher level when it is controlled. Naturally to find out what happens in the final teased scene you have to stay for the endless credit roll but if you know the films you’ll know that outcome already. Pugh is being groomed for greater things. That’s Paul Thomas Anderson and Milla Jovovich’s daughter as Young Natasha. Story by Jac Sheaeffer and Ned Benson, screenplay by Eric Pearson. Directed by Cate Shortland. I always thought I had no family. Now I have two
mondomovies 