Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

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

The Lesson (2023)

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?

And the Band Played On (1993) (TVM)

Is there a name yet for this disease? 1976: by the Ebola River in Zaire. American epidemiologist Don Francis (Matthew Modine) of the World Health Organisation arrives in a village where he finds many of the residents and the doctor working with them have died from a mysterious illness later identified as the Ebola haemorrhagic fever. It’s his first exposure to this kind of epidemic and the images of the dead he helps to cremate haunt him when he later becomes involved with HIV/AIDS research at the CDE (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta. 1981: Francis becomes aware of a growing number of deaths among gay men in Los Angeles, New York city and San Francisco from a rare lung condition – pneumocystis pneumonia. It only afflicts people with weakened immune systems. He moves to Atlanta, Georgia where CDC Administrator Dr. James Curran (Saul Rubinek) asks him to begin an in-depth investigation into this new immune disorder. Due to the Reagan Administration’s clampdown on public spending, Francis is forced to work with little money, limited space and outdated equipment including microscopes. He clashes with members of the medical community, many of whom resent his involvement because of their personal agendas. Francis comes into contact with the gay community after he and his colleagues find strong evidence that the disease is spread through sex. Some gay men support him, such as San Francisco activist and congressional aide Bill Kraus (Ian McKellen) but others such as Bobbi Campbell (Donal Logue) express anger at what they see as unwanted interference in their lives, especially in his attempts to close the local bath houses, read as homophobia. Kraus works with the doctors treating gay patients to try to save the gay community from the virus, to the point that it costs his own relationship with boyfriend Kico Govantes (BD Wong) who moves on with an architect. Francis and other CDC staff are shocked that representatives of the blood industry are unwilling to do anything to try to curb the epidemic because of potential financial losses. While Francis pursues his theory that AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus (based on his own interest in feline leukaemia and Hepatitis B) his efforts are stymied because of competition between French scientists from Paris’ Pasteur Institute led by virologist Luc Montagnier (Patrick Bauchau) and American scientists, particularly Robert Gallo (Alan Alda) of the National Institutes of Health who is enraged when he finds out that Francis collaborated in typically collegiate fashion with the French scientists. The researchers squabble over who should receive credit for discovering the virus and for development of a blood test. Meanwhile the death toll climbs among many different types of people including children who receive infected blood. One day in 1984, while exercising at a local gym, Kraus notices a spot on his ankle and worries that it might be Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-defining illness … The party’s over. One of the two most essential publications of the 1990s (the other being Crisis in the Hot Zone) was Randy Shilts’ 1987 non-fiction book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Excellently adapted by the venerable screenwriter Arnold Schulman (who died February 2023 aged 97) and premiered at the Montreal Film Festival before being screened on TV first by HBO and later by NBC, it knits several strands of storytelling together. It of course has the flavour of public service broadcasting as well as that benighted niche, Movie Illness of the Week. But with this cast and talent never mind the source material it still possesses a unique urgency. This could be the first deadly epidemic in history in which nobody officially died. The intricate scaffolding of the screenplay is constructed to bring together the various aspects of the teams working in silos who unwittingly find commonalities but take their time to work out their findings collectively through accident and coincidence until finally they discover the starting point. Almost everyone I know has or wants to. An internationally starry cast including Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Nathalie Baye, Glenne Headly, Anjelica Huston and Tcheky Karyo – with Richard Gere’s cameo as a version of (unnamed) acclaimed choreographer Michael Bennett – finds itself linked to the impossibly handsome Gaetan Dugas aka Patient Zero (Jeffrey Nordlin) that French-Canadian air steward the carrier who is symptom-free until he gets Kaposi’s. It’s like all the plagues in the history of the world got squeezed into one. When it’s not just gay men but African women in Paris and Haitian people in the US and babies in NYC dying from what Prince called the big disease with a little name, the strands of the narrative are united just as the personal issues are pushed to the forefront with a race to find a vaccine. The sparing use of archive, timed to punctuate developments and place them in an historical context, assists the affect of the performances. I want to stop you from turning this holocaust into an international pissing contest. On the political front there are a number of interests – the Reagan administration, the CDC, the doctors whose big pharma investments are at risk, the blood banks, the gay activists resistant to the bath house closures and then there’s the rivalry between Gallo and the Pasteur Institute which the American narcissist insists is a competition between countries. When doctors start acting like businessmen, who do people turn to for doctors? The irony that the man preaching safe sex finds himself infected is wonderfully exposed in McKellen’s subtle performance. Ultimately progress comes down to the same sample leading the competitors to discover the first new human retrovirus. This is where the diseases are. In an impressive ensemble, which doesn’t extol one individual over any other, Modine as Francis is the motor and the conscience, the protagonist whose original findings in Africa trigger his understanding of the spread of the disease creating empathy for a difficult front line that involves the everyday problems besetting the medical profession. The credits rollcall of the dead – from Arthur Ashe to Ryan White – and the movement’s activists, over Elton John’s The Last Song, is sobering indeed. Elegantly directed by Roger Spottiswoode who delivers a coherent, moving and emotive docudrama with a powerful political punch about stigma, prejudice, ignorance and self-interest that still has the capacity to make jaws drop in chronicling an epidemic with lessons for everyone. Will we ever learn? And will anyone ever commit to the fact that the origin of the protein that evolved alternately into HIV/AIDS or Ebola in humans came from Africans eating monkeys? This was known in 1993, when this film was produced, six years after Randy Shilts’ book was published but presumably nobody dared bring it up. We still fear a little reality about the transmission of disease in a world where borders no longer exist in the rush for globalised profit and concomitant unstoppable uncontrolled migration. This didn’t have to happen. We could have stopped it

BlackBerry (2023)

We call it PocketLink. 1996: Waterloo, Ontario. The co-founder and CEO Mike Lazirides (Jay Baruchel) of Research in Motion and his best friend and co-founder Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) are preparing to pitch their ‘PocketLink” cellular device to businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). Lazaridis is bothered by the incessant buzzing of Balsillie’s Chinese intercom and fixes it before Balsillie arrives to the meeting. Their pitch is unsuccessful but when Balsillie is fired from his job due to his aggressive ambition, he agrees to work with them provided he is made CEO of RIM and given one half of the company. They hesitate but after they confirm Basillie’s suspicion that their deal with US Robotics was a malicious attempt to bankrupt them, they bring Balsillie in as co-CEO with one third of RIM for a cash infusion that requires Balsillie to mortgage his house. Balsillie arranges a pitch for the PocketLink with Bell Atlantic and forces Fregin and Lazaridis to build a crude prototype overnight which he and Lazaridis take to New York. Lazaridis forgets the prototype in their taxi, leaving Balsillie to attempt the pitch alone. Lazaridis recovers the prototype at the eleventh hour and finishes the pitch, rebranding the PocketLink as the ‘BlackBerry’ which becomes massively successful. 2003: Palm CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes) plans a hostile takever of RIM which forces Balsillie to try to raise RIM’s stockprice by selling more phones than Bell Atlantic’s (now Verizon Communications) network can support. This crashes the network, as Lazaridis had warned, so Balsillie poaches engineers from around the world to fix the problem, as well as hiring a man named Charles Purdy (Michael Ironside) as RIM’s COO to keep the engineers in line but this upsets Fregin who values the casual fun work environment he and Lazaridis had created. The new engineers fix the network issue under Purdy’s strict management enabling RIM to avoid Yankowski’s buyout. 2007: RIM’s upcoming pitch of the BlackBerry Bold to Verizon is thrown into chaos when Steve Jobs announces the iPhone … You’re not selling togetherness any more. You’re selling self-reliance. The story of the original smartphone is equal parts horrifying and hilarious. The original Canadian tech bros vs their own boss (with differences cleverly signalled by their in-car musical choices) whose acquisitiveness culminates in a funny aeroplane chase across the US trying to buy out the National Hockey League is on the money when it comes to the cultural differences between creatives and financiers. Maybe we could call it the prophet: profit margin. The core initially is the long-term friendship between Mike and Doug which is gradually usurped by Mike’s dealings with the reptilian Jim who is performed with vainglorious precision by Howerton. His presence prises the friends apart as Mike cannot handle the pressure and Doug cannot comprehend his fraility. This has the virtues of a whistleblower-style docudrama, recounting that insanely good idea to combine a cellphone with a pager and email. The dark moment when Steve Jobs announces the iPhone triggers a chain reaction of events of a desperation that is blackly comic and (almost) tragic. Mike’s presentation to Verizon is a model of a public nervous breakdown. How a small operation of laidback tech geniuses is transformed into an impersonal profit-driven major player (albeit briefly) with grownups in the once friendly groovy music-filled workplace being supervised as though they’re retarded teens in a silent call centre is sobering but explains much about our paranoid surveillance society and the men who control it. This razor-sharp comedy drama is directed by co-star Matt Johnson from a screenplay co-written with producer Matthew Miller. I created this entire product class!

The Flash (2023)

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

Sumotherhood (2023)

I’m in this thing and after today everyone is going to know about us. Riko (Adam Deacon) and Kane (Jazzie Zonzolo) are two friends living in a flat in East London who dream of being taken seriously as roadmen. They are in debt of £15,000 to a local Indian crime family, the Patels. Kane failed to get the money after selling drugs to a Somali gang, but was instead beaten up. They devise a plan to get the money to pay them back. First, they attempt to sell a mobile phone to two other men, but they decline as it meant to be a gun after Kane mistook the word strap. The second attempt has them trying to rob megastar Lethal Bizzle but end up getting knocked out, stripped and embarrassed in front of everyone while a Link Up TV cameraman records their predicament. The video goes viral and makes the two a laughing stock. For a third attempt, they hold up the local bank but after an argument accidentally reveal their identities. Leo DeMarco (Danny Sapani) ignores their commands and dares Riko to shoot him. After arguing with Leo, he passes out suffering a heart attack. This gains Riko attention after apparently shooting Leo and earning him the nickname, Rambo Riko. It also sparks interest in gang leader Shotti (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) who sends him, Kane and Dwayne (Arnold Jorge) to retrieve a bag of drugs and money from a nightclub. Riko gets distracted by a girl named Tamara (Leomie Anderson) whom he fancies. A fight breaks out between Riko, Kane and members of another gang. The two win the fight and escape. Riko explains his bipoloar to Dwayne and the two form a bond when he reveals that he himself suffers from autism. They then realise that they forgot the bag from the club but before they can go back for it, they are chased by a rogue and Ian (Vas Blackwood) a xenophobic black police officer and his partner Bill (Barry McNicholl). After crashing the car Riko and Kane are caught but Dwayne escapes. At the police station, Riko calls Tamara who happens to be the stepsister of Leo who has woken up from his heart attack. Leo thanks Riko and tells him that he has decided to quit his gang life and has become a Christian. Unfortunately, Leo’s mental brother Tyreese (Richie Campbell) vows revenge against Riko and rages after he finds out the relationship between him and Tamara. Tyreese goes on the hunt for Riko, even running a policeman over after mistaking the latter for him. Riko and Kane are released and go back to Shotti where they reveal that they forgot the bag, infuriating him. After Shotti is informed that they beat up a member from a rival gang, they reconcile. Shotti lets them tag along for a deal at a warehouse with Polish gangsters … If I was your man I’d be here, innit. And on and on it goes. The culture wars begin here, really, with this ostensibly satirical swing at London gang culture winding up in a shoot-em-up that is as toxically stupid and trope-filled as its target and to anyone outside that milieu (guilty as charged) feels like a genre from another planet, mainly due to the lingo. Comedy it may well be but there’s a shot here of a body that is straight out of a violent gangster flick that’s not remotely amusing. Click Clack! Writer, director and star Deacon is known from Noel Clarke’s ‘hood movies, his own directorial debut urban comedy Anuvahood (2011) and is playing to a knowing sympathetic audience as he sends up the kinds of films he used to star in. It probably helps that Deacon could call on several celebrities such as Jennifer Saunders and Tamzin Outhwaite – and – wait for it – Jeremy Corbyn, former Labour leader – to make cameo appearances and there are some good moments of humour but they become fewer as the narrative progresses with a descent into a tale of rivalries that belongs in Gangs of London. At 25 minutes in there’s a subplot starring Ed Sheeran as Crack Ed which is so appalling we can’t even bring ourselves to articulate what he does. He might well regret his insatiable need to please. The double act leading the fray however clearly have chemistry and make for engaging goons. They came out in droves at least at a local level for this but as for us, we’re a bit mystified, mate. Quite impenetrable and ultimately wearying, this needs simultaneous translating for those of us without a clue about grime culture and all sorts of other things from housing estates in E15, innit. Can everyone stop getting shot?

10 Lives (2023)

Find a lap. Purr when stroked. Pampered streetwise cat Beckett (Mo Gilligan) takes for granted the lucky hand he has been dealt when he is rescued and loved by Rose (Simone Ashley), a kind-hearted and passionate student researching bees at university. Beckett settles into a comfortable life in the country. literally becoming a fat cat, while Rose and her klutzy boyfriend Larry (Dylan Llewelly) continue her project. Rose has to deal with the mentor Professor Craven (Bill Nighy) who unbeknownst to her is a rival plotting to sabotage her work because of a childhood incident with a bee. When Beckett loses his ninth life and he is inadvertently locked out of the house he shares with Rose, fate steps in to set him on a transformative journey … You don’t know how one small insect can change the world. Deviating from your premise with a subplot that also involves non-human species is an unusual way to navigate narrative. First this is about a cat. Then it’s about bees. The plot lines in the screenplay by Ash Brannon, Ken Cinnamon, Karen Wengrod and Leland Cox intersect in the character of Rose and when Beckett gets lost, they diverge and he goes through the kind of kitty cat disasters that clock up to his requisite number of lives. He presents himself to Rose when he comes back in different forms with the different-coloured eyes that mark him out. Look at you, all charm with your big stupid face! Despite the excursion into thriller territory there’s a buoyancy to the drolly villainous performance of Nighy as the fake mentor/real rival who will be pretty familiar to anyone carrying out research in the world of academia. The message here is about complacency,, valuing friendship and what you’ve got, the pointlessness of holding grudges and seeking revenge (even if Nighy makes it sound very pleasurable). Beckett gets to have a real hero’s journey and Gilligan acquits himself well as a presumably Sarf Lahndon feline. The animation is pleasing, the characterisation is fun and it all comes together in the end in a kind of animal shelter afterlife with a real-life conclusion bound to tug at the heartstrings. Pop star Zayn Malik makes his movie debut voicing Cameron and Kirk. Directed by Christopher Jenkins. When you live and love with all your heart one life is all you need

Everything Went Fine (2021)

Aka Tout s’est bien passé. This is our story. Novelist Emmanuèle Bernheim aka Manue (Sophie Marceau) receives a call from her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) informing her that their retired businessman and art collector father André (André Dussollier) has suffered a stroke. She rushes to the hospital in Paris where she sees the ill effects of this cardiac event: his face is horribly stricken, falling to one side, his speech is affected. She looks at the catscan of his brain on her computer at home. Manue is a devoted visitor despite the cruelties inflicted upon her in her childhood when he called her ugly, constantly berating her for her huge appetite (she is patently beautiful and thin). She used to fantasise about killing him. She is stunned when he asks her to help him die. It’s still illegal so Manue debates the situation with Pascale and then pays a discreet visit to a lawyer for advice and contacts a Swiss clinic run by a woman doctor (Hanna Schygulla). Their mother, his ex-wife (Charlotte Rampling) is a sculptress in the throes of arthritis, Parkinson’s and depression who doesn’t care a fig for him. She is already devastated by her own loss. She reminds her daughters that her parents didn’t attend their wedding because they warned her she was marrying a homosexual. His lover Gérard (Grégory Gadebois) creates a row in the hospital and the women have to stop him visiting. He says he’s getting the great watch he was promised by their father. As Andre gets better Manue is convinced he has forgotten about the whole idea but he tells several people including a cousin and regularly reminds her to make the arrangements. Then someone rats the women out to the police ... I want you to help me end it. Adapted from the titular autobiographical novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim by writer/director François Ozon, who regularly collaborated with the late novelist (she died in 2017), this difficult and highly emotive subject is treated in such a matter of fact realistic way and yet with a sure lightness of touch it becomes a remarkable viewing experience, decorated with stunning acting that nonetheless doesn’t feel like competitive performance. The unsentimental approach to a fraught scenario, dripfeeding backstory into the well managed narrative, subverts any potential for melodrama. Don’t tell your sister, but this story would be great for one of her novels! By turns desperate, petulant, pleading, sorrowful, distressed, enthusiastic, Dussollier is majestic as the playful monster, the gay dad whose bonkers lover has to be banned from visiting – until Manue sees them in a tender moment and eventually Gérard gets the Patek Philippe watch and it is clear the end is nigh. Manue is the daughter whom he treated disgracefully but whom he secretly adores as her sister clearly realises. Everything’s coming together. He wonders randomly when informed of the cost of the Swiss solution how poor people do it. They wait to die, shrugs Manue. This wealthy industrialist reminds her to get his Legion of Honour ribbon. We are in the world of the superannuated bourgeoisie for whom money is no issue but ill-health is the great leveller and financial comfort cannot stop the indignities of the loss of bowel control and the need for 24/7 care. As the moment nears and subterfuge is required the only person keeping a truly clear head is the man who sees only one option rather than succumb to the dreadful infirmities that will encroach upon him as further incidents will surely occur given his prognosis. He recognises his great life, his entitlement, his privilege and now his destruction. Amid all the superbly constructed tension there is great humour, telling detail, laughter, tears. A rich and timely drama, fair in every possible way. Mesmerising. You know, he’s a bad father. But I love him

Weird Science (1985)

Why can’t we simulate a girl? Nerdy social outcast Shermer High School students Gary Wallace (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt Donnelly (Ilan Mitchell Smith) are humiliated by senior jocks Ian (Robert Downey Jr.) and Max (Robert Rusler) for swooning over their cheerleader girlfriends Deb (Suzanne Snyder) and Hilly (Judie Aronson). Humiliated and disappointed at their direction in life and wanting more than being shamed in the school gymnasium, Gary convinces the uptight Wyatt that they need a boost of popularity in order to get their crushes away from Ian and Max. Alone for the weekend with Wyatt’s parents gone for a couple of days, Gary is inspired by watching the 1931 classic Frankenstein on TV to create a virtual woman using Wyatt’s computer, infusing her with everything they can conceive to make the perfect dream woman. After hooking electrodes to a doll and hacking into a Government computer system for more power, a power surge creates Lisa (Kelly LeBrock) an astonishingly beautiful and intelligent woman with the power to transmogrify. She quickly procures a pink 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible to take the boys to a Blues bar in Chicago where she uses her powers to get fake IDs for Gary and Wyatt. They return home drunk where Chet (Bill Paxton) Wyatt’s mean older brother, extorts $175 for his silence. Lisa agrees to keep herself hidden away from him but realises that Gary and Wyatt are very uptight and need to seriously unwind. After another humiliating experience at the mall where Ian and Max pour a cherry Icee on Gary and Wyatt in front of a crowd, Lisa tells the bullies about a party at Wyatt’s house, before driving off in a Porsche 928 she conjured for Gary. Despite Wyatt’s protests, Lisa insists that the party happens in order to loosen the boys up. She meet Gary’s parents, Al (Britt Leach) and Lucy (Barbara Lang) are shocked and dismayed at the things she says and her frank manner. Gary explains her away as an exchange student. After she pulls a gun on Al and Lucy (which is later revealed to be a water pistol) she alters their memories so Lucy forgets about the conflict but Al forgets that they had a son altogether. At the Donnelly house, the party has spun out of control while Gary and Wyatt take refuge in the bathroom, where they resolve to have a good time, despite having embarrassed themselves in front of Deb and Hilly. Then the house is invaded … We can deal with shame. Death is a much deeper issue. Bizarre even in the annals of Eighties comedy, this outlier in the John Hughes universe is remarkably charmless, tasteless and crude. What begins as a teen high school comedy descends quickly into a sex fantasy that is an equal opportunities offender despite the sweetness of the woman of many a man’s dreams driving the story. Adapted from a Fifties magazine story Made of the Future by Al Feldstein, Hughes’ screenplay makes these boys grow up way too fast and Hall’s take on black language proves embarrassing forty years on (and even back then). This battle of the sexes is really just a trawl through sexist tropes which makes watching these kids grow up overnight a lot harder to tolerate. Hughes was so good at the proclivities and sensitivities of teens – clearly the boys have lousy parents and Smith even has Paxton as a vicious older brother so friendship and mutual victimhood unites them. How can two people have the same dream? However none of the ideas clicks. Even the minor presence of Robert Downey (as he’s billed) in the ensemble doesn’t assist the plot or tone. The film’s final half hour effectively renders the entire premise redundant and the Risky Business conclusion is the closest this gets to decency. So inexplicable they even use a colorised clip of Frankenstein and the jukebox soundtrack is hardly up to Hughes’ usual standards. Horror fans will get a kick out of Michael Berryman as a mutant biker though and the clothes are great! Lisa is everything I wanted in a girl before I knew what I wanted

Dune: Part Two (2024)

I’m here to learn your ways. Following the destruction of the House of Atreides by the House of Harkonnen, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) daughter of Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) the head of House Corrino secretly journals that Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) may be alive. On Arrakis, Stilgar’s Fremen troops including Paul and his pregnant mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) overcome a Harkonnen patrol. When they arrive at Sietch Tabr some Fremen suspect they are spies, while Stilgar and others see signs of the prophecy that a mother and son from the so-called ‘Outer World will bring prosperity to Arrakis. Stilgar tells Jessica that Sietch Tabr’s Reverend Mother Ramallo (Giusi Merli) is dying and that she must replace her by drinking the Water of Life, a fatal poison for males and the untrained. Jessica’s body transmutes the poison, surviving and inheriting the memories of every female ancestor in her lineage. The liquid also accelerates the cognitive development of her unborn daughter Alia (Anya Taylor-Joy) allowing Jessica to communicate with her telepathically. Jessica and Alia agree to focus on convincing the skeptical northern Fremen of the prophecy. Jessica urges Paul also to drink the Water of Life and become the Kwisatz Haderach [‘the shortening of the way’ in the Kabbalah]. The young and rebellious Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) and her friend Shishakli (Souhelia Yacoub) believe that the prophecy was fabricated to manipulate and subjugate the Fremen but she begins to respect Paul after he declares that he only intends to fight alongside the Fremen not to rule them. Paul and Chani fall in love as Paul embraces the Fremen ways: learning their language, participating in rites such as riding a sandworm, becoming a Fedaykin fighter and helping raid Harkonnen spice operations. Paul adopts the Fremen names Usul and Muad’Dib as he his likened to a kangaroo mouse. Due to the devastating spice raids, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Starsgard) head of House of Harkonnen and former stewart of Arrakis and enemy to the House of Atreides replaces his nephew Glossu Rabban Harkonnen aka Rabban (Dave Bautista) as Arrakis’s ruler with his psychotic younger nephew and heir apparent Rabban’s younger brother Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler). Lady Margot Fenring (Lea Seydoux), a Bene Gesserit is sent to evaluate Feyd-Rautha as a prospective Kwisatz Haderach and to seduce him to secure his genetic lineage: she is duly impregnated. Jessica travels south to unite with Fremen fundamentalists who believe in the prophecy of the Mahdi. Paul stays north, fearful that his visions of a holy war will come to pass if he travels south as a messiah. He reunites with Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) the former military leader of House Atreides and Paul’s mentor who leads him to the hidden atomic stockpile of House Atreides. Paul was not able to foresee Feyd-Rautha’s attack on the northern Fremen, including Sietch Tabr, forcing Paul and the survivors to head south. Shishakli remains behind and is killed by Feyd-Rautha. Arriving south, Paul drinks the Water of Life and falls into a coma. Chani is angered by this but is forced by Jessica to revive him by mixing her tears with the liquid. Paul attains a clearer vision of the past, present, and future, seeing an adult Alia on a water-filled Arrakis and that Jessica is the Baron’s daughter, making Paul both an Atreides and a Harkonnen. Chani attempts to warn the southern Fremen that the prophecy will be used to enslave them, but Gurney quiets her down. Paul galvanizes the fundamentalists by showing that he can read their innermost thoughts. He declares himself the Lisan al Gaib and sends a challenge to Emperor Shaddam. Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother and the Emperor’s Truthsayer Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) tells Irulan that she advised the Emperor to annihilate House Atreides because they had grown too defiant. Shaddam arrives on Arrakis with Irulan, Mohiam, and his Sarduakar troops. As he meets the Harkonnens, the Fremen launch a massive military strike using atomics and sandworms … He’s a sociopath, highly intelligent, in love with pain but sexually vulnerable. And so the behemoth that is the second half of director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci fi Dune carves its path into global consciousness with a positively Shakespearean scenario unfolding. Viewed through the prism of one of Herbert’s great influences, Lawrence of Arabia, the fey, androgynous and rather reluctant protagonist who rallies the rebels against the powerful desert overlords makes more sense of Chalamet’s casting, a callow youth not quite ready for his hero’s journey who says to Zendaya’s Chani, I want to be your equal. In the 1960s the interest in ecology and the world’s resources together with a question about the future of Islam can clearly be mapped onto today’s geopolitical catastrophes with Paul’s Messianic position as Mahdi key to the resumption of the Fremen fundamentalism and the miracles of Christianity given a wholesale workout. Essentially the Abrahamic religions intersect in battle and beliefs, the role of the desert prophet a common trope. The visual debt to Lawrence is clear in certain visual quotes but it’s mitigated by the murky palette of greige created by cinematographer Greig Fraser and the tendency to blur Chalamet’s slight figure against the rippling sands: not a visual choice Lean would ever have made when clarity and precision were key to the earlier film’s expressive beauty. Sometimes this looks like it’s shot through Paul’s dusty goggles and his lusciously long lashes. The extraordinary Colosseum/Nazi-styled gladiatorial fight in an infrared rendition of Harkonnen is a glorious and daring exception, a clear statement about a world drained of colour. And, not to put too fine a point on the general tendency of the film, when we step away from the major world building sequences, there are too many close ups – a problem afflicting many films at the present time. This can’t be a budgetary choice so must be an aesthetic one. The storytelling in the streamlined screenplay by Villeneuve & Jon Spaihts (with early work by Eric Roth) is much more efficient here than in the first part: that film’s setting up of the spice-mining story and the different planets’ ecological concerns permits a slicker narrative to unfold here, the 2 hour 46 minutes running time notwithstanding with a religious and familial fight resulting in war. Every beat is hit at the right time. Happily there are a couple of clunky moments which might make you giggle at presumably unintentional reminders of Life of Brian (sometimes this prophet doth protesteth too much) while the ladies say twice (repetition being a screenwriting trick) that the religious prophecy is designed to distract, a common Marxian precept (something about the spice of the people, natch). The major jaw-dropping story twist at 120 minutes is of the Star Wars variety and very pleasurable it is too, turning the last 45 minutes into an astonishing conflict of character, wits and strength. Every hero requires a vicious enemy and Butler makes for a mesmerisingly sadistic villain. Caveats aside, this is mostly masterful filmmaking with engaging characters, terrific timing and excellent structure, which creates a narrative matrix of totally absorbing events and developments with an open-ended conclusion in which we can see Paul evolving into an anti-hero while the women take charge. This psychedelic sci fi encompassing faith, friendship, fascism, imperialism, breeding programmes and destiny, is hitting theatres when the concerns of the recent past are replaying out in real time. Part three (Dune Messiah, which is set 12 years following the aftermath of the war) is in the works but according to Villeneuve, he is not rushing it. More’s the pity! I am not the messiah