Aka Ndoto Ya Samira. I’d want to leave my dad’s house one day. The fishing village of Nungwi, north Zanzibar. Producer and director Nino Tropiano’s voiceover explains that he has received funding from an Irish organisation to explore female education in Africa. He finds a group of high school girls under the shade of a tree and over a period of time (and the with assistance of a translator) he decides to follow one of the, Samira. He traces Samira’s progress once he secures the agreement of her family and teachers. So what is the origin of Swahili? Over a period of seven years Tropiano catches up with Samira, sometimes after one year, sometimes after 15 months, even three years. He observes the changes in her circumstances, her home, class attendance and interruption, house moves, her development, her maturity. I don’t have any freedom to do what I want. The film’s midpoint, more or less, sees Samira explain everything that is wrong in her life to her teacher. The pivotal issue is the terrible loss of her mother after which her father separated her from her mother’s family in Pemba and moved them to Nungwi where he remarried again twice and has more children whom she has been obliged to care for. Everything in her life including her education has hinged on this event and its impact makes her cry – a terrifically moving moment. Her friend Shamsa claims to be ‘under a magic spell’ but she is controlled by her boyfriend who bans the cameraman from the vicinity. She does what he tells her. She’s not even married! At the exams they’re not speaking; at the graduation there’s a chasm between them. Tension builds at home with her stepmother who insists that she go with her on a trip to the mainland where they stay in a mud hut in the countryside. Then the high school exam results await. She has barely scraped a pass. She’ll be doing this the hard way. Then, a surprising event: a marriage proposal. Despite not being presented as an overt study of girls in Islamic communities or a critique of the religion, this is an immersive account of a society governed by and for men, something the girls question more than once. That extends to the content of the curriculum – we were particularly amused by a kind of parable about theft concerning a duck and a man with feathers in his hair. The sometimes jarring gaps in the storytelling (presumably due to production and funding circumstances) are camouflaged by Samira’s own charm and the occasional intervening voiceover by the filmmaker. It is rare that we feel a subject deserves more time onscreen. However over the years a complete portrait is achieved as this charismatic young woman comes into her own. At least one of my two dreams came true
They should have let me in. Sicily. At a remote winery Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) kills gangster Lorenzo Vitale (Bruno Bilotta) and his henchmen to obtain a key to the winery’s vault and recoup money stolen in a cyber-heist. While leaving the winery, Robert is shot in the back by Vitale’s young grandson (Adriano Sabrie). Robert attempts suicide due to his injury but finds his gun out of bullets and then takes the ferry back to the mainland. While driving on the Amalfi Coast, Robert pulls over and slips into unconsciousness from shock. He is found and rescued by local carabiniere Gio Bonucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea) who brings Robert to a small coastal Italian town called Altamonte where he is treated by a doctor, Enzo Arisio (Remo Girone). As he recovers and regains his mobility Robert becomes acquainted with the locals and becomes fond of the town and its people. He makes an anonymous phone call to CIA officer Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) to tip her off about the winery’s role in the drug trade, disguised as normal business transactions in Sicily. Collins and other CIA operatives arrive at the winery and find millions in cash along with bags of synthetic amphetamines used by ISIS terrorists hidden in a storeroom, confirming Robert’s suspicions. Meanwhile, members of the Camorra harass and kill villagers in an attempt to coerce them out of their housing and take over Altamonte for property development. Robert overhears Marco Quaranta (Andrea Dodero) a high-ranking Camorra member, pressuring local shop owner Angelo (Daniele Perrone) for protection payments. To make an example of him, the Camorra firebombs Angelo’s fish store as the entire town watches. Gio reviews video of the firebombing and calls the Italian central police for an inquiry. Along with his wife Chiara (Sonia Ben Ammar) and daughter Gabriella (Dea Lanzaro), Gio is attacked by the Camorra and beaten for interfering in their operations. Thereafter, Marco demands that Gio set up a boat for him. Overhearing the conversation, Robert asks Marco to move his operations to a different location. When Marco refuses, Robert kills him and his henchmen. The Naples head of police Chief Barella (Adolfo Margiotta) is threatened and tortured by Marco’s brother Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio) the head of the Camorra and is ordered to find the person responsible for Marco’s death … Those people don’t know where to go. Our favourite vigilante returns to equalize everything in sight, starting with the mysterious catalyst whose payoff takes the entire film to establish. Transported to Sicily and the Italian mainland, the violence returns with verve in Robert Wenk’s screenplay, the scribe of the others in the series, in the finale adapted from the TV show that starred Edward Woodward and was created by Michael Sloan and Richard Lindheim. What do you see when you look at me? McCall is ageing now and even he must be tired of all the killing. Lord knows I’m allergic to bad things. Availing of R&R in a pretty village with a pleasant woman restaurateur Aminah (Gaia Scodellaro) which introduces the hint if not the actuality of romance and a civilised doctor to oversee his recuperation he’s glad of it. Do I look like a guy who kills people? That’s an existential question that’s really kinda silly at this point in the trilogy: this film commences with a horrifying sequence of murders – yes, we know it’s McCall doing in some of the Camorra but it’s extremely shocking. Giving the CIA a tip-off is just the start of an elaborate denouement which unearths a terror cell and reveals the extent of the Mafia’s viciousness. The phone relationship with Emma is a preview of coming attractions: You don’t look like you sound/You do! That’s the opening gambit when they finally come face to face 48 minutes in. In these films Denzel is paired with younger women in a non-romantic way – they get the opportunity to do stuff and he returns to pleasantly predictable vengeful type. It’s his question to her that makes her think of the situation from a different angle: Why smuggle drugs into the most secure port in the entire region? That sets her off doing what he knows she will – directing the CIA action where it needs to go and hopefully keeping her out of the line of fire. While the women in this series are given an opportunity for some action it’s curtailed as here, where a well-timed call saves her but effectively puts her out of action – allowing him to rescue her and save the day because he’s the hero and that’s his job. That’s appropriate considering their previous pairing two decades ago in Man On Fire. Washington is an incredibly charismatic movie star and it’s a relief to have the first 45 minutes dedicated to rebuilding his constitution which allows him to cultivate relationships while the gangsters have their way with the locals, setting up an awesome revenge. His medical treatment and slow recovery gives the audience a chance to recover too before the inevitable kicks in. His visceral method leads him to explain his MO to a victim: It’s called pain compliance. It’s like he’s a doctor too! Shot in a palette verging on monochrome with chiaroscuro features by the brilliant Robert Richardson, the scheme complements the black and white morality, with the amorphous evil villainy of the Mafia rather less attractive than the mesmerising Marton Csokas in the first outing. It’s a stylish way for the series to take a bow – a kind of revenge Western with some spaghetti thrown in for good measure and a coda that explains why McCall fetched up there in the first place, a one-man reenacting of The Magnificent Seven against the mafia on their own turf. Directed as ever by Antoine Fuqua. I’m where I’m supposed to be
To start inventing you need something real first. Grenoble, France. In an isolated mountain chalet novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) decides to reschedule her interview with a female literature student Zoe Solidor (Camille Rutherford) because her husband, university lecturer and aspiring author Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) plays music loudly on a loop in their attic, disrupting the interview, making recording impossible. After the student drives away from the chalet, Samuel and Sandra’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes a walk outside with his guide dog Snoop (Messi). When they return home, Daniel finds Samuel dead in the snow from an apparent fall. Sandra insists that the fall must have been accidental. Her old friend and lawyer Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) suggests the possibility of suicide while Sandra recalls her husband’s attempt to overdose on aspirin six months earlier after going off antidepressants. After an investigation, Daniel’s conflicting accounts of what happened shortly before his father’s death, combined with the revelation that Samuel sustained a head wound before his body hit the ground and an audio recording of a fight by Samuel and Sandra the previous day, Sandra is indicted on charges of homicide. A year later, during the trial, Sandra’s defence team claims Samuel fell from the attic window and hit his head on a shed below; the prosecution suggests that Sandra hit him with a blunt object, pushing him from the second-floor balcony. During a courtroom argument with Samuel’s psychiatrist Jammal (Wajdi Mouawad) Sandra admits she resented Samuel due to his partial responsibility for the accident that led to Daniel’s impaired vision: he should have collected him from school but called a babysitter instead so he could stay home and writer. In the recorded fight, Samuel accuses Sandra of plagiarism, infidelity and exerting control over his life before their argument turns physically violent. The prosecution claims that all the violence came from Sandra but she points out that they’d been having conversations and disagreements that he’d recorded for six months as a substitute for writing and his transcriptions when presented by him were not accepted by a publisher in lieu of a novel … I don’t believe in the the notion of reciprocity in a couple. Written by the married couple Justine Triet & Arthur Harari (who appears as a literary critic) during the COVID lockdown, director Triet’s film sustains its mysterious premise right until the conclusion which may prove disappointing – perhaps a European take on the customary bittersweet Hollywood ending. it’s a Choose Your Own iteration of the murder procedural with flashes of Hitchcockian wit throughout. There is a re-enactment and a single flashback but the eccentric courtroom presentation is very different to the Anglo-Saxon convention with witnesses for the prosecution and defence talking over each other, a low threshold for evidence and an equally bizarre concept of the burden of proof (opinion-led, apparently). Sandra’s bisexuality and her affairs are brought up as a reason for her husband’s violent arguments with her, his use of anti-depressants rooted perhaps at her contempt for him when their young son was blinded because he should have been picking up from school, her relentless output still not sufficient to pay the bills while he is at home, renovating, homeschooling Daniel, having no time to write outside of his teaching job. At the heart of the story is a blame game between husband and wife – an accident that caused Daniel’s sight loss and a burning envy of a wife’s success whose latest plot is largely ‘borrowed’ from a passage in a novel Samuel abandoned, a writer wannabe now reduced to transcribing daily home life as a form of autofiction. As the USB recording from Samuel’s keyring is re-enacted he accuses Sandra of stealing his time and ‘imposing’ her worldview upon him despite his having forced the family to relocate to his hometown where she speaks English and the use of language becomes an issue in this French-German union where nuance, suggestion and meaning are potentially lost in translation – English is the no-man’s land resort of communication. Sometimes a couple is a kind of a chaos. The discursiveness masks the fact that it is their blind son and his dog who are the sole witnesses to the accident, spicing up the issue of court appearances and compounding the ambiguous nature of the crime and the lack of compelling evidence. Triet and Harari wrote this with Huller in mind (following an earlier collaboration) and she is a very modern heroine, word-smart, intellectually able, psychologically penetrating and completely at ease with herself to the point of lying easily. She is superb as this take no prisoners character, taking nonsense from nobody and while profoundly concerned with her son’s well-being she also boasts a terrifically charismatic nonchalance. Nevertheless, she is obviously unnerved by the courtroom experience in a language not her own. A sidebar to the exposition is the frank admission by Vincent that he has long thought highly of her. This is of course about writers and what happens when one half of a couple is more accomplished and successful than the other and how envy can eat like a cancer through a relationship. Samuel is destroyed by what he has done to his son, Sandra has dealt with it through adultery while also cheerfully churning out novels and doing translations on the side. She is pragmatic above all. Does Samuel commit suicide and are the recordings made in order to frame Sandra for his alleged murder? Maybe. Did he fall or was he pushed? Is the flashback from the visually impaired son true? Does Daniel lie? Why did he make a mistake in his first account? Rage does not exclude will! Guilt, jealousy, blame, language, meaning, all suffuse this tension-filled narrative which asks questions about how writers make their work and how much it plunders their private lives. How and why the story turns unexpectedly marks out the forensic narrative style. Rightly lauded, the exceptional screenplay was awarded at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards among others and the film won Cannes’ Palme d’Or with the Palm Dog going to Messi! The first 9 minutes of the film are dominated by that appalling music which frankly would drive anyone to murder, if you want to know the truth. We won’t even name it such is its earworm potential for homicidal triggering. Gripping. A novel is not life! An author is not her characters!#700daysstraightofmondomovies! MM#4547
You’ve never seen her, man. She’s in another league. 2019: married tennis power couple former player Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) and currently injured star Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have a young daughter Lily (AJ Lister) who likes to stay in hotels. Under Tashi’s coaching, Art has become a top pro. He is one US Open title away from a Career Grand Slam but he is struggling to regain his form after an injury. Hoping to return him to form, Tashi enters Art as a wild card in a Challenger event in New Rochelle, New York to boost his confidence by beating lower-level opponents. His former best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend is now an unknown player living out of his car, scraping by on the winnings from the lower circuit and also enters the New Rochelle event. 2006: high schoolers and childhood best friends Patrick and Art win the junior doubles title at the US Open. Afterwards, they watch Tashi a highly lauded young tennis prospect make mince meat of the opposition on court. Then they meet her at a party later that night. Usually their attractions are separate but Tashi is the first person to whom Patrick and Art are both attracted. The three make out in a motel room but stop short of having sex. With the two boys playing each other the next day, Tashi says she will give her phone number to whichever of them wins. Patrick wins the match and later signals to Art that he had sex with Tashi by placing the ball in the neck of the racket prior to serving – a tic of Art’s. Tashi and Art go on to play college tennis at Stanford University, while Patrick turns professional and begins a long distance relationship with Tashi. A jealous Art questions Tashi about whether Patrick loves her, and Patrick, recognising Art’s jealously, playfully reassures him of his and Tashi’s connection. Patrick and Tashi fight when she gives him unsolicited tennis advice and he says he views her as a peer, not his coach. In the next match which Art watches without Patrick, Tashi suffers a severe knee injury. Patrick returns to comfort Tashi but she demands he leave, with Art taking her side. Art aids Tashi in her recovery but she is unsuccessful in resuming her tennis career. I want you to join my team because I want to win. A few years later Tashi reconnects with Art and becomes his coach and the two begin a romantic relationship. He reveals that he and Patrick have not talked since Tashi’s injury. In 2011, Tashi and Art are now engaged and Art’s career is on the up. Tashi and Patrick run into each other at the Atlanta Open and have a one night stand, which Art secretly notices. 2019: Starting at opposite ends of the seeding, Art and Patrick advance through the brackets at New Rochelle until they find themselves facing each other in the tournament’s final match. In a sauna the day before the match, Patrick attempts to reconnect with Art but Art rejects Patrick by saying his career is over and he, Art, will be remembered. Patrick secretly asks Tashi to be his coach and lead him to one last winning season, sensing she is unhappy with Art and that Art is tired of playing but she rejects him … Which one is which? Take three highly charismatic young actors, place them in competition with each other sexually and professionally, complicate things with a love triangle and the monotony and sacrifice of life as sportsmen and women and you have the ingredients for a cracking drama. Director Luca Guadagnino returns with a tennis story – a surprising fact particularly given that there haven’t been any good ones but the screenplay from Justin Kuritzkes is multi-faceted. Not just a sports film but a romance, a thriller and a portrait of generalised anxiety erupting from having to sustain a career, creating monetising opportunities from every win, enduring pain, dealing with catastrophic injury, burnout, a friendship contained within the rise and fall narrative that all sportspeople experience over time and driven characters playing at marriage. Using the New Rochelle Challenger event as a framing device intensifies the pressures of the relationship past and present – we see where they are now and how they got there with the catalysing event an almost-threesome that prefigures everything else in their destiny. And as Tashi explains, Tennis is a relationship. What an impressive cast. Faist is the dazzling actor who was by far the best thing about Spielberg’s West Side Story remake – awards should have come his way but the film fell foul of COVID lockdown release schedules just as this one was delayed from Fall 2023 due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Here he’s the walking wounded and he plays tender and vulnerable so well. O’Connor is the talented Brit who has created so many great performances and powers his way through this with a life in freefall and a smirking swagger, never fully out of love with Tashi. Zendaya is finally being allowed to act nearer her age (27 at time of release) and is so famous she’s currently on the covers of both UK and US Vogue, such is her pull for advertisers and the youth audience, a combination of Euphoria and Spider-Man fans with a monster sci-fi epic under her belt following Dune2. Watching the guys watch her on court at the 2006 US Open and later at a party, open-mouthed and lustful like heat-seeking missiles, is highly amusing and sets up the relationship’s eventual complexities with her at the fulcrum, literally calling the shots. Aren’t you everybody’s type? It also sets in motion the director’s familiar focus – young people and their romantic travails – although we know the starting point is the end point, or thereabouts, which is a little like watching Titanic and knowing the outcome but now we get to invest in the characters as they encounter each other 13 years later with everything that has gone on since that first fateful encounter. You typically fall apart in the second round. As the guys get reacquainted with their game and Tashi is turned off Art because his game is off and she lives through him, Patrick sees his chance to upset the applecart, pointing up the performative aspect of all their public lives. Thus the scene is set for Round Two in their lives, rivalries intact. It’s about winning. And I do. A lot. For a sports movie love triangle this fun and sexy we have to go back in time to 1977 and Semi-Tough with Burt and Kris and Jill. That was smart and screwball-y too but set in the world of football. How are you going to look at me if I still can’t beat Patrick Zweig? This is tense and exhilarating and wonderfully played by a cast that is exceptionally well matched and hot for each other. Love all? Not quite. But this is a smash, with a zippy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Who wouldn’t love you?MM#4545
Good writers have the sense to borrow from their elders. Great writers steal! Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack) is an aspiring ambitious young writer and Oxford English grad whiling away his twenties tutoring potential Oxbridge entrants for their exams. He eagerly accepts a position at the family estate of his idol, renowned author JM Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) who hasn’t published since the tragic death of his older son. Liam is tutoring his seventeen-year old son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) under the watchful eye of his French mother, sculptress and art curator Helene (Julie Delpy). JM is cold to Liam whereas Helene checks up on her son each day. Liam manages to help JM with a computer problem when the novelist can’t print something out. Liam wonders about a second server in another location in the house. Helene asks Liam about his writing – and reminds him he included his dissertation subject on his CV – JM Sinclair. His technological nous is such that Sinclair eventually offers him to swap novels. Liam compliments his idol’s work but says the ending feels like a different writer whereas JM destroys Liam’s efforts with cutting comments. Then Liam finds a file that illustrates that he is ensnared in a web of family secrets, resentment, and retribution … We don’t talk of his work, we don’t talk of Felix. Follow those rules and you should be fine. A working class wannabe is invited into a wealthy household and eventually his presence apparently destroys the power base and he is handed the keys of the kingdom. The head of household is played by Richard E. Grant. Sounds like Saltburn? Yes, and any or all iterations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley. In this case Grant is a revered novelist and the tutor for his truculent son has written his dissertation on him and has ambitions to write novels himself. And it appears that Delpy’s Helene is a real femme fatale as the story unravels. So we might call this Slowburn. In fact, it is a very clever wonderfully constructed mystery thriller focused on writerliness and authorship with death as its beating heart. Quite who might be teaching whom, and what the lesson is, changes with each of the three acts and there’s a great payoff (in fact, there’s more than one). Everyone’s intentions are concealed, nature and water are utilised symbolically to plunder the psychological text and the central motif – the rhododendron – is key to the family secret which spills out to engulf Liam, the visitor with ulterior motives. He is played by Irish actor McCormack, whose subtle ingratiating into this warped family picture is not necessary because for quite some time he’s the only person here who has no idea why he’s really been hired. As he adds to the Post-Its for his next novel trusted butler Ellis (Crispin Letts) takes note because the references are entirely parasitic, reminding us that this plot has been used before with Jean-Paul Belmondo in The Spider’s Web and Terence Stamp in Theorem, throroughoing murderous black comedies about the bourgeoisie eating itself. However, integrating the writing experience into this social analysis, the suicide of an older son and a wife’s intricate plan to get revenge while saving her younger son from the same fate, add an entirely new dimension to the premise by debut screenwriter Adam MacKeith. The scheme is brilliantly exposed, with even clever clogs Liam not anticipating the conclusion. You’re not the first. Grant is scarily good as the dinner table bully mercilessly exploiting his older son’s death in private while a chilly Delpy’s character has secrets in abundance. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Anna Patarakina at Haddon House in Derbyshire with a sharp score by Isobel Waller-Bridge to match the shrewd and finely etched performances, this is a marvellous watch, a modern British noir, with an appropriate reminder of an old school screen villainess in the film Grant’s vicious Sinclair watches in his cinema, another element of planting that pays off properly in a knowing thriller. Directed by first-timer Alice Troughton. What makes an ending?
See you yesterday. New Orleans. A ferry carrying US Navy sailors and their families across the Mississippi River for the Mardi Gras celebrations explodes, killing 543 people. ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) Special Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) evidence of a bomb planted by a domestic terrorist and goes to the mortuary where he examines the body of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) seemingly killed in the explosion but found in the river shortly before the time of the blast. Informing Claire’s father and searching her apartment, Doug learns that she called his ATF office the morning of the bombing and figures out that she was abducted and killed by the bomber hours before the explosion. Impressed with Doug’s deductive ability, FBI Special Agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) invites him to join a new governmental unit investigating the bombing. Led by Dr. Alexander Denny (Adam Goldberg) the team uses a surveillance programme called Snow White which they claim uses previous satellite footage to form a triangulated image of events four-and-a-half days in the past. Convinced that Claire is a vital link to the unfolding bomb plot, Doug watches her footage and can track the soon-to-be-bomber when he calls about a truck she has for sale. Figuring out that Snow White is actually a time window, Doug persuades the team to send a note to his past self with the time and place the suspect will be. However it’s his partner Larry Minuti (Matt Craven) finds the note instead, and is shot attempting to arrest the suspect. By using a mobile Snow White unit, Doug is able to follow the suspect’s past movements as he flees to his hideout with the wounded Minuti and then witnesses Minuti’s murder. In the present, the bomber is taken into custody after facial recognition systems identify him as Carroll Oerstadt (Jim Caviezel) an unstable self-proclaimed patriot rejected from enlisting in the military. He confesses to killing Minuti and Claire, taking her truck to transport the bomb and staging her death as one of the ferry victims. The government closes the investigation, but Doug, convinced that Snow White can be used to alter history persuades Denny to send him back to the morning of the bombing so he can save Claire and prevent the explosion … What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world but you knew they would never believe you? The premise of this dazzling sci-fi action thriller is perfectly preposterous but is set up so persuasively it never fails to engage. It helps that this has Washington at his most movie star-ish as you’d expect in his third of five collaborations with director Tony Scott, whose command of the medium is embellished by Paul Cameron’s elegant cinematography. For once in my life I’d like to catch somebody before they do something horrible. The actual time capsule that Doug enters literally enables a race against time. What if it’s more than physics? That’s what Doug suggests to elevate rationale for the potential experience because he’s fallen head over heels for the gorgeous Claire on the mortician’s slab so he calls it spirituality but it’s good old fashioned romance – and he means to have this woman come back from the dead. Seeing her eventually spring back to life is fabulous. One man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot. As the domestic murderer paying homage to Oklahoma, Caviezel has the blankness to match his unshakeable convictions that what he is doing is righteous. Satan reasons like a man but God thinks of eternity, Doug counters with unarguable post hoc knowledge which momentarily throws his captive. Then there’s nothing for it but to enter the world as it was days earlier – and to alter one more bit of history to try change the outcome for hundreds of people: alt-history as we watch. There’s a terrific supporting cast including Kilmer and also Bruce Greenwood and the director’s wife, Donna. Super-stylish, fast-moving and an avowed homage to the great city of N’Oleans, cher. Written by Bill Marsilli & Terri Rossio. I see what’s coming
That’s where we’re at, Future Angie! After her parents, Chinese father Fai (KaiChow Lau) and American mother Veronica (Liz Waters), suddenly get divorced, high school student and teen artist Angie Chen (Emma Galbraith) records her thoughts for a video diary and turns to secret hookups with her private school’s most popular jock Liam (William Magnuson). They keep the relationship secret from their friends and Liam is already dating the whitest person Angie could ever imagine, popular blonde influencer Sheryl White (Emily Garrett). Angie and Liam hook up after school in her bedroom and Angie thinks he feels about her how she does about him but at the same time gains empowerment from a gradual mastery of sex, which briefly engenders fantasies about other boys in school. Then she discovers her father has moved on from his family with a new woman in his life, another Chinese, Min (ShanShan Jin) whose daughter Fang (Thanh Phuong Bui) is Angie’s age. When Angie has to contend with being paired in class with Sheryl for a literature project she discovers appearances can be deceptive because Sheryl’s life is far from perfect. The girls have a lot in common. Angie realises that Liam is playing them both when he refuses to split with Sheryl and Angie confesses to Sheryl about their relationship. Then Min teases Angie about her inability to speak Mandarin and Angie causes a quarrel at her father’s house. Her life seems to be falling apart then her mother realises Angie has been having sex … I really like driving you home and sometimes it’s the best part of my day. A portrait of the artist as a girl, Mei Makino’s funny and affecting debut feature as writer and director debut is complex, smart and true. It’s like real life but you get to control everything. That’s what Angie tells Liam about playing Sims but it’s how she’d like her home existence after her father leaves and her hard-working lawyer mom leaves bagel bites for dinner. I know Liam is sort of an asshole but he’s MY asshole. The best looking guy in the school also appears to have it all but when he and Angie get together he tells her things she thinks are real revelations. When he’s with me in my room he’s not just the hot guy at school. When he seems to regret telling her about his life and bolts early one morning, she figures it’s just reluctance to be open but he still has Sheryl and keeps Angie his secret. But she too is complicit in this hidden relationship. Can we just have a Coke and a smile? he pleads when Angie wants to learn more about him. They are vulnerable to each other but it remains within the four walls of her bedroom. Is that love? Angie ponders. Don’t you want to soak up all life has to offer? he asks, offering her a spliff. This is a hedonist in the making. Maybe Min and Fong give him something that Mom and I never could. The issue of Angie’s biracial identity is horrifically exposed when Sheryl’s mom (Jane Schwartz) compliments her on her Asian-ness – Sheryl’s humiliation is beautifully expressed. The hit is twofold when Min shames Angie over her inability to speak her father’s language. The cultural gap is now a gaping chasm. The maturity that Angie experiences is achieved through empathy – with Sheryl and with her father. She recognises that other people have different outlooks and lives. Of Liam she concludes, It’s funny how he was this mythical presence in my life. When I look at him now he’s just a boy. That’s quite the take home lesson from teenage love: guys will be guys, no matter how they’re dressed up. Wonderfully performed, this is simultaneously obvious and subtle, just like teen life. Angie’s artwork is by Texan illustrator Larissa Akhmetova, as playful and delightful as the film’s protagonist. Okay Future Angie, I can feel your judgment!
You’re the reason this Zod character is going to destroy the earth? Gotham City. After he has helped Bruce Wayne aka Batman (Ben Affleck, uncredited) and Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, uncredited) stop a robbery by a terrorist gang, police forensic investigator and member of the Justice League Barry Allen aka The Flash (Ezra Miller) revisits his childhood home, where he lived with his parents Nora (Maribel Verdu) and Henry (Ron Livingston) before Henry’s wrongful imprisonment for Nora’s murder. On the day of her death, Nora had sent Henry to the grocery store for a can of food that she forgot to buy, leaving her alone in the kitchen where she was killed by an unidentified assailant. Overcome by his emotions, Barry accidentally uses the Speed Force to form a ‘Chronobowl’ and ends up travelling back in time to earlier in the day. Despite Bruce’s warnings of time travel’s unintended consequences, Barry puts the can in Nora’s trolley at the store, so that his father won’t have to leave the house. As he returns to the present, Barry is knocked out of the Chronobowl by an unknown speedster and arrives in an alternative 2013 where Nora is alive. He encounters his parents and his past self, and realizes this is the day he originally obtained his powers. To ensure his past self gains superpowers, the two Barrys go to the Central City Police Department, where Barry re-enacts the event for 2013-Barry to be struck by lightning. Both end up getting struck by the lightning, giving 2013-Barry powers, but causing Barry to lose his own. As Barry struggles to train 2013-Barry on properly using his powers, they find out that General Zod (Michael Shannon) is planning to invade Earth. In an effort to fight Zod, the Barrys attempt to assemble the Justice League but are unsuccessful; in this timeline, Diana cannot be located, Victor Stone aka Cyborg (Ray Fisher) hasn’t gained his abilities yet and Arthur Curry aka Aquaman (Jason Momoa) never existed. They travel to Wayne Manor hoping to find Bruce instead finding an alternate variant who has long retired. Bruce theorises that using time travel to alter history affects events both prior to and after the alteration. They persuade Bruce to return as Batman and help them find Kal-El aka Superman (Nicolas Cage) … We’re Barry. A project decades in development, this action hero time travel comedy has its tongue planted firmly in cheek but manages to straddle the line between daftness and sentiment. It benefits from a conscious exercise in superhero identity politics as well as the travails of adolescence, bereavement and the possibilities and problems of an alternative reality through a sliding doors moment. Miller gets the chance to flex those acting muscles as past/present/future versions of Barry and has a lot of zippy fun that explores the various identities with wit and verve, assisted by a gallery of superheroes to provide an array of powers and some nice casting in the ensemble including Kiersey Clemons as Iris West, Barry’s journalist love interest. Wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts! Typical of the genre it’s long but fortunately humorous and upbeat, dealing in an interesting way with deep psychological trauma as well as the utter misrecognition of adults regarding their teenage incarnations. Even if the effects leave a lot to be desired, many of the film’s highlights are about Keaton’s performance: when he dons the Batsuit 70 minutes in and reasserts his alter ego from his whimsical trampy iteration it gives the heart a lift and pushes the action in a more interesting direction – this narrative is really about men finding the better part of themselves not to mention we’ve had this facet of Keaton before in Multiplicity not to mention the Batman and Birdman personae and he’s having a ball. Meta is where it’s at and there are some extremely good jokes including a final appearance by another Batman which really tickles the funny bone: the multiple Batman concept really gives this a lift. Screenplay by Christina Hodson from a story by John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein and Joby Harold based on DC characters. The Extended Universe is in almost rude good health. Directed by Andy Muschietti who has a cameo as a reporter. Our kids are going to want to see this
There’s war and there’s war. 1990s: Renowned war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) is recalling her youthful relationship with novelist Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen). 1936, Key West, Florida. She meets him by chance in a bar and back at his house run by his wife Pauline Pfeiffer (Molly Parker) the two’s undeniable attraction is noted. My husband always says kill enough animals and you won’t kill yourself. The two writers encounter each other a year later in Spain where both are covering the Civil War, staying in the same hotel on the same floor. Initially, Gellhorn resists romantic advances made by Hemingway but during a bombing raid the two find themselves trapped alone in the same room and are overcome by lust as dust from the conflagration covers their bodies. They become lovers and stay in Spain until 1939. Hemingway collaborates with Joris Ivens (Lars Ulrich) to make the film The Spanish Earth. In 1940 Hemingway divorces Pauline so that he and Gellhorn can be married. He credits her with having inspired him to write the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and dedicates it to her. Over time however Gellhorn becomes more prominent in her own right, leading to some career jealousies between them. Gellhorn leaves Hemingway to go to Finland to cover the Winter War by herself. When she returns to the Lookout Farm in Havana the maid has quit and she tells him the place looks like a Tijuana whorehouse. Hemingway tells her that he has divorced Pauline. The two marry and travel together to China to cover the bombings by Japan. In China, they interview Chiang Kai Shek (Larry Tse) and his wife (Joan Chen) who Gelhorn can’t best when she expresses her horror after visiting an opium den where she has spotted a little girl. Chiang Kai shek is fighting the Chinese Communists and Japanese invaders. Hemingway and Gellhorn secretly visit Zhou Enlai (Anthony Brandon Wong) the revolutionary content to play both ends against the middle until his time comes. Gellhorn covers D-Day in Normandy. She reports on the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps and his so horrified she runs out of them … There’s nothing to writing. Sit at your typewriter and bleed. Bluster and confidence, the devastation of war, lust and fine writing, a universe of division and conflict and conscience, all are called upon as the affair and marriage of two of the twentieth century’s best writers bear witness to unfolding history. Beautifully shot by Rogier Stoffers using different camera effects and archive montages to insert the characters into both colorised and monochrome footage, there is an uneven tone to this biopic as well as shifts in performance particularly by Owen who doesn’t quite capture the self-aggrandising charisma of Hemingway but certainly asserts his sexist boorish aspect. There is a certain comedy to the introduction of the famous characters, who take time to establish themselves in the narrative and sometimes play minor roles, there to augment and embellish the self-mythologising author who is hard to pin down here (Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris does this with caustic aplomb). Surrounded by an entourage of sycophants and hangers on, only John Dos Passos (David Strathairn) appears to question Hemingway’s macho posturing. When Hemingway admits he’s taken her Collier’s contract, Martha repeats what the man he calls the second best American writer has said of Hemingway and he hits her across the face: we know the marriage must be over. But not quite. There’s still a final act of war and humiliation. They have persuasively created a sexual and co-habiting relationship that is sometimes hard to watch when they exchange harsh words – but then wind up laughing at the good of it all. Until they fight again and it becomes ever more vicious. They’ll still be reading me long after you’ve been eaten by worms. Hemingway’s demise following his marriage to Mary Welsh (Parker Posey), who’s written as a celeb-hunting nicompoop, which may not be quite fair, is dramatic and swift in storytelling time (those presumably causative head injuries in the later aeroplane crashes are not covered albeit the car crash here with Welsh probably contributed to it). It’s a rich tapestry and while not successful overall, with an occasional (if forgivable) lurch into domestic melodrama, there are moments of genuine humour, black comedy and horror. For instance when Kai Shek dumps his dentures into a teacup and his verbose spider spouse does the talking and makes an unwilling Gellhorn take a gift. That’s history. The only thing that really interests me is people. Their lives. Their daily lives. And there are instances in war zones when Gellhorn scoops up children as their parents bleed to death and Hemingway, the father of sons by his previous wives, scoffs yet paradoxically admires her humanity. When Gellhorn walks into Dachau but then says Auschwitz was unbelievably worse and just takes off running we sense her disbelief. Kidman is quite splendid for much of the film. This is an amazingly comprehensive and visually immersive portrait of a man and a woman who were at the heart of a decade of world-changing events whose impact we still live with today. However their characters are almost too big to contain (and the gargantuan 2021 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick docu-series Hemingway has far more biographical information), literally covering too much ground with the prism of a domestic battle perhaps too slight for such an enormous focus. Necessarily episodic, the protagonists’ differences are sketched out schematically so this goes just a little way toward explaining why both are legends and Gellhorn fought so hard for her individuation. As she says here, she’s more than just a footnote to Hemingway. Consider this film restitution. At 155 minutes, this was premiered at Cannes but broadcast as a mini-series by HBO. Written by Jerry Stahl & Barbara Turner and directed by Philip Kaufman. We were good in war. And where there was no war we made our own. The battlefield we couldn’t survive was domestic life
In the week it’s been announced a fourth entry in this series Mad About the Boy is due for imminent production, it’s incredible to think that it has been going for close to a quarter of a century. The first adaptation in what became a franchise was released twenty-three years ago today.
Helen Fielding’s hit 1996 novel was a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice and became a cultural milestone. A film adaptation was inevitable.
If the search for the iconic and beloved 32-year old slacker singleton heroine wasn’t quite that for Scarlett O’Hara it seemed of almost national import so the casting of the very un-British Renee Zellweger caused a ripple of consternation but it turned out to be an inspired choice.
She allegedly gained twenty pounds to play Bridget who notes her weight daily in her diary and struggles into her clothes with the help of very big pants.
The meta-casting of Colin Firth, TV’s Darcy from the BBC’s global hit adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, as Bridget’s love object human rights lawyer Mark Darcy, hit the sweet spot. It also meant Firth could send himself up and move on from the typecasting that had followed that other iconic role.
That TV series’ screenwriter Andrew Davies co-wrote the screenplay with Fielding and her onetime boyfriend, romcom king Richard Curtis.
Hugh Grant delighted as the devilish Daniel Cleaver, the rival for Bridget’s affections.
Directed by Sharon ‘Shazza’ Maguire, Fielding’s BFF and immortalised in the film by Sally Phillips, one of the posse helping Bridget through her trials and tribulations, the film was a huge hit and a critical success.
Zellweger was nominated for an Academy Award for her charming performance. Long live Bridget Jones!
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