The Fall Guy (2024)

You fall down, you get right back up. How far would you go for the one that you love? Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) works as the double for famous action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor Johnson) who always says he does his own stunts. However, he is severely injured during a stunt gone wrong and he abandons his career and his girlfriend camerawoman Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). 18 months later, Colt, now a valet for a small Mexican restaurant, is contacted by Tom’s film producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham). She informs him that Jody is directing her first film, sci-fi epic Metalstorm, and wants him to work on the production in Sydney Australia. After arriving on set, Colt learns that Jody never requested him and is still angry about their breakup. Gail reveals that Tom has disappeared after getting involved with drugs: she wants Colt to find him before his absence causes the film’s cancellation. Not wanting Jody’s directorial debut ruined, Colt visits Tom’s hotel room and a nightclub, where he gets into fights. In the hotel room, he finds a dead body in a bathtub full of ice. When Colt returns with the police, he finds the body has disappeared. Meanwhile, as production of Metalstorm continues, Colt and Jody begin to rekindle their relationship until Gail abruptly informs him that he has to go back to the US. Instead, he continues looking for Tom by tracking down his PA Alma Milan (Stephanie Hsu) and they are both attacked by people looking for a phone belonging to Tom in Alma’s possession. Colt defeats them after an extended chase through Sydney involving a rubbish truck. He and his friend Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), the stunt coordinator on Metalstorm, unlock the phone at Tom’s apartment. They discover a video of an intoxicated Tom accidentally killing his previous stuntman Henry. The henchmen attack Colt and Dan, destroying the phone with shotgun pellets. Dan escapes, but Colt is captured and brought face-to-face with Tom, who has been hiding out on a yacht on Gail’s instructions. He reveals that Gail is framing Colt for the murder using deepfake technology to replace Tom’s face with Colt’s on the incriminating video. Tom also reveals that Colt and Henry’s ‘accidents’ were orchestrated by himself. Henry’s body is discovered and the doctored video is released on news media, while Gail tries to convince Jody that he is guilty. Colt escapes and is presumed dead after a boat chase, though he swims to safety … I’m the director. You’re a stunt guy. We need to keep it super profesh. If last year was the Summer of Barbenheimer, that compound of mutually assured box office billionairedom, the films’ respective supporting stars are the whole show of this decade’s Romancing the Stone, at least its descendant by way of Howard Hawks and screwball. Much has been written concerncing memed-about Gosling’s super-ironic commentary on modern masculinity, a career pivot which makes him – in the words of a Guardian writer’s recent article – the most important Hollywood star, so we’ll go with it. Dry supercilious wit being a thing Blunt does well, they’re a great pairing in a story that both sends up Hollywood and mines its great romantic inclinations. Adapted very loosely by Drew Pearce from the beloved Eighties TV show created by Glen A. Larson which starred Lee Majors, Heather Thomas and Jo Ann Pflug/Markie Post not to mention a Rounded-Line Wideside truck (and an outdoor bathtub). Stuntman turned director David Leitch cut his teeth on great action movies and is responsible for helming John Wick among others and this is not just the most recent ode to the craft (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Gosling’s own turn in Drive, Burt Reynolds was Hooper, then there’s The Stunt Man, to name the most outstanding in this sub-genre) which is due to be honoured at the Academy Awards one of these years, it’s a clever metatextual behind-the-scenes examination of the business, the deceptive nature of stars’ PR, and the pitiless nature of the production machine when you’re not flavour of the month (or fit to work). It’s all of that but mostly it’s a crash-bang-wallop action movie with ever more spectacular sequences. This is a precision-tooled mainstream hit with something for everyone, a genuinely warm and funny knowing adventure-satire with finely tuned star performances. Unlike the show, when Majors got to croon The Unknown Stuntman (covered here by Blake Shelton in a great soundtrack featuring AC/DC and Kiss), Gosling hasn’t got a theme song – this year’s showbiz highlight has got to be his Oscars rendition of I’m Just Ken, but he doesn’t need another tune, that’s already part of his star text so everyone just incorporates it and tucks it away into what they know about supposedly the most important Hollywood star, the self-deprecating caring sharing modern action man. And, since this is about stuntmen, big up to Logan Holladay for all those rolls. Huzzah! It ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward

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?

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Aka Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Women aren’t dangerous if you know how to handle them. Television actress Pepa Marcos (Carmen Maura) is depressed because her boyfriend fellow actor Iván (Fernando Guillen) has left her. They dub foreign films, notably Johnny Guitar starring Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden and she has missed their morning recording because she took a sleeping pill. Iván’s sweet-talking voice is the same one he uses in his work. About to leave on a trip, he has asked Pepa to pack his things in a suitcase he will pick up later. Pepa returns home to her apartment to find her answering machine filled with frantic messages from her friend Candela (Maria Barranco) a model. She rips out the phone and throws it out the window onto the balcony of her penthouse where dozens of her animal friends live including a pair of ducks. Candela arrives but before she can explain her situation Carlos (Antonio Banderas) Iván’s son with his wife Lucía (Julieta Serrano) arrives with his snobbish fiancée Marisa (Rossy de Palma). They are apartment-hunting and have been sent by an agency to tour the apartment. Carlos and Pepa figure out each other’s relationship to Iván – they had already met at the phone booth outside Carlos’ home the previous evening. Pepa wants to know where Iván is, but Carlos does not know. Candela tries to kill herself by jumping off the balcony. A bored Marisa decides to drink gazpacho from the fridge, unaware that it has been spiked with sleeping pills. Candela explains that she had an affair with an Arab who later visited her with some friends. Unbeknownst to her, they are a Shi’ite terrorist cell. When the terrorists leave, Candela flees to Pepa’s place; she fears that the police are after her. Pepa goes to see a lawyer whom Carlos has recommended. The lawyer, Paulina Morales (Kiti Manver) behaves strangely and has tickets to travel to Stockholm. Candela tells Carlos that the terrorists plan to hijack a flight to Stockholm that evening and divert it to Beirut to demand the release of an incarcerated friend. Carlos fixes the phone, calls the police, hangs up before (he believes) they can trace the call and kisses Candela. Pepa returns; Lucía calls and says that she is coming over to confront her about Iván. Carlos says that Lucía has recently been released from a mental hospital. Pepa, tired of Iván, throws his suitcase out (barely missing him); he leaves Pepa a message. Pepa returns to her apartment and hears Carlos playing the Lola Beltran song Soy Infeliz. She throws the record out the window, and it hits Paulina. Pepa hears Iván’s message, rips out the phone and throws the answering machine out of the window. Lucía arrives with the telephone repairman and the police, who traced Carlos’ call. Candela panics, but Carlos serves the spiked gazpacho. The policemen and repairman are knocked out, and Carlos and Candela fall asleep on the sofa; Lucía aims a policeman’s gun at Pepa, who figures out that Iván is going to Stockholm with Paulina and their flight is the one the terrorists are planning to hijack … Weird things happen all of a sudden. Enfant terrible Pedro Almodovar’s international breakthrough, this was a smash hit from its initial release in Spain and became the biggest grossing foreign film in the US since Fellini’s 8 1/2 – which is just one of the many ironies proliferating in this story because it’s the first homage in a meta referential narrative centering on film, recording, dubbing and projection. Ludicrous coincidences, general hysteria, a suitcase that keeps changing hands, repeatedly pulling the phone and answering machine out of the wall, using prescription meds to control every situation, a mambo taxi stocked to the gills with every magazine, music genre and toiletry known to humanity that shows up every time Pepa needs a lift, all life is here in the most confident expression yet of Almodovar’s art. For once Maura is suited and booted in great tailoring in a setting that’s colour coded to the max with red the ultimate flashpoint for this sincerely crazy tribute to melodrama, with Joan Crawford providing the film within a film. I thought this sort of thing only happened in films! A vivid, nutty melodramatic farce, this is simply unforgettable. Released 25th March 1988, that means it’s time to wish Women a very happy birthday! What an insane story!

Leap Year (2010)

A day for desperate women. Successful Boston real estate stager Anna Brady (Amy Adams) is frustrated that her long term boyfriend cardiologist Jeremy Sloane (Adam Scott) still has not proposed to her after four years. She decides to travel from to Dublin to propose to him on February 29,  Leap Day, while he is attending a conference. Anna plans to invoke an Irish tradition, when a woman may propose to a man on leap day. During the flight, a storm diverts the plane to Cardiff  in Wales. Anna hires a boat to take her west across the Irish Sea to Cork. The severity of the storm results in her being put ashore at a small seaside village of Dingle. Anna requests surly Irish innkeeper Declan O’Callaghan (Matthew Goode) to give her a lift to Dublin. At first he refuses, but as his tavern is threatened with foreclosure, he agrees to drive her for 500 euros. Along the way, he mocks her belief in a leap year tradition of women proposing to men. A herd of cows blocks the road. Anna steps in cow dung while attempting to move the animals and tries to clean her shoes while leaning on Declan’s car, which causes it to roll downhill into a stream. Continuing on foot, Anna flags down a van with three travellers who offer her a lift. Ignoring Declan’s warning, Anna hands them her luggage. They drive off without her. Anna and Declan make their way on foot to a roadside pub, where they find the thieves going through Anna’s luggage. Declan fights them and retrieves Anna’s bag. While waiting for a train in Tipperary, they ask each other what they would grab if their homes were on fire and they had only 60 seconds to flee. They lose track of time and miss the train. They are forced to stay at a B&B  where they pretend to be married so that their conservative hosts will allow them to stay. During dinner, when the other couples kiss to show their love for each other, Anna and Declan are forced to kiss as well  … Why don’t you try and stop trying to control everything in the known universe? The screenplay by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont unearths a previously unknown Oirish custom called ‘Bachelor’s Day’ throwing together two mismatched romantic protagonists into a tiny car (of a marque last seen in Ireland maybe forty years ago) and hurtling them around the country in a screwball road movie that hits more posts than goals in terms of plausibility or indeed verisimilitude. A cast of redoubtable local performers including Pat Laffan, Alan Devlin, Ian McElhinney and Dominique McElligott do their best with mindless if inoffensive comedy (if you’re not Irish) and the scenery as shot by Newton Thomas Sigel is curiously muddy throughout. Made variously in Counties Wicklow, Dublin, Mayo Galway and Kildare, filming took place in and around the Aran Islands (Caragh’s Inn in Kilmurvey on Inishmore) and Dun Aonghasa Cliffs, Connemara, Temple Bar, Georgian Dublin, the Rock of Dunamase in County Laois, Enniskerry and Glendalough National Park in Wicklow, Carton House Hotel in County Kildare and Olaf Street in Waterford City. A romcom that never rises above the sum of its parts but certainly provides a lens into the tourist view of the island. It’s so bad it’s enjoyable and has become a major cult. This eventually bounces along with a fun soundtrack of popular songs in a score by Randy Edelman. Directed by Anand Tucker. You just surprised me. You keep doing that

The Zone of Interest (2023)

I wasn’t really paying attention. I was too busy thinking how I would gas everyone in the room. Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland, 1943. Camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Fuller) live in an idyllic home next to the camp with their five children: Klaus (Johann Karthaus), Hans-Jurgen (Luis Noah Witte), Inge-Brigitt (Nele Ahrensmeier), Heidetraut (Lilli Falk) and Baby Annegret (played variously by Anastazja Drobniak, Cecylia Pekala and Kalman Wilson). Höss takes the children out to swim and fish while Hedwig spends her time tending the garden. He receives colleagues who explain to him how the new crematorium can be run continuously. Servants take care of the household chores and the prisoners’ belongings are given to the family: Hedwig tries a lipstick left in the pocket of a full-length fur coat. Beyond the garden wall gunshots, shouting, trains and furnaces are audible. Höss approves the design of a new crematorium, which soon becomes operational. Höss notices human remains in the river when he’s fishing and gets his children out of the water. He sends a note to camp personnel, chastising them for their carelessness. He perhaps has sexual relations with prisoners in his office. Meanwhile, a Polish servant girl at the Höss villa sneaks out every night, hiding food at the prisoners’ work sites for them to find and eat. Höss receives word that he is being promoted to deputy inspector of all concentration camps and has to relocate to Oranienburg near Berlin. His objections are futile and he withholds the news from Hedwig for several days. Hedwig, now deeply attached to their home, begs him to convince his superiors to let her and the children remain. The request is approved and Höss moves. Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge) comes to stay and wonders if the Jewish woman she used to clean for is in the death camp. Eventually she is horrified by the sight and smell of the crematorium flames at night and leaves, leaving behind a note that an irate Hedwig burns after reading. Months after arriving in Berlin, in recognition of his work, Höss is charged with heading an operation named after him that will transport 700,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz to be killed, permitting him to return to Auschwitz where he will be reunited with his family … I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice. Loosely adapted by British writer/director Jonathan Glazer from the 2014 realist novel by the late Martin Amis, it’s incumbent upon everyone reporting on this to reference Hannah Arendt’s hoary old phrase, the banality of evil, if only to restate the obvious and the accurate for the hard of listening. And the senses are pricked as much as the conscience in this film which is replete with an array of auditory assaults. The original novel didn’t use the names of the real-life people but Glazer decided to use the historical figures on which Amis based his narrative and conducted in-depth research in conjunction with the Auschwitz Museum as well as using Timothy Snyder’s 2015 book Black Earth as a source. The leads had already acted together in Amour Fou and Huller’s own dog Slava was used for filming. The family’s villa is a derelict building adjoining the camp based on the original (which has been a private home since 1945) and 10 cameras were set up so that the effect as the director says is Big Brother in the Nazi house. Only natural lighting is used, embellishing the concept of cool observation. No atrocity is seen, just heard, with an astonishingly immersive soundtrack of effects created by Johnnie Burn based on testimony and maps of the site, while Mica Levi’s score is restricted in use to further the documentary feel of a story about a German family absorbed in its own pathetic validation against the background of the mass killing and burning of Jews next door which is organised as calmly and efficiently as the preparing of meals. A devastating film that is truly better seen (and heard) than described, this is an overwhelming achievement, filled with a ghastly dread both insinuated and expressed. Immaculate if truly grim filmmaking. Sadly, Amis died on the day this UK-Poland coproduction received its world premiere at Cannes 2023. The life we enjoy is very much worth the sacrifice

American Fiction (2023)

Geniuses are loners because they can’t connect with the rest of us. Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a highly intelligent but frustrated black writer and professor teaching at a Los Angeles college. His novels receive academic praise but sell poorly and publishers reject his latest manuscript for not being black enough. His university puts him on temporary leave due to his aggressive brashness with sensitive white students who are triggered over racial issues and suggests he attend a literary seminar and spend time with family back in his hometown of Boston. At the seminar, his panel is poorly attended but there is a packed room for an interview with Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) whose bestselling novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto panders to black stereotypes. In Boston, Monk spends valuable time with his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) who’s exhibiting shows signs of Alzheimer’s and his doctor sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross). While having drinks with Monk, Lisa suffers a heart attack and later dies in the hospital. Monk’s estranged brother, plastic surgeon Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) turns up for Lisa’s funeral. Cliff is divorced after his wife caught him cheating with a man; he now engages in frequent drug use and casual sex. Monk meets and starts dating Coraline (Erika Alexander) a lawyer living across the street. Frustrated by Sintara’s success and the costs of care for his mother, Monk writes My Pafology, a satire mocking the literary clichés expected from black writers: melodramatic plots, deadbeat dads, criminality, gang violence and drugs. After submitting it to publishers out of contempt, he is shocked to be offered a huge $750,000 advance and his agent Arthur (John Ortiz) convinces him to adopt the persona of former convict ‘Stagg R. Leigh’. As Stagg, Monk is offered a movie deal from producer Wiley (Adam Brody). In response to publishing executives’ insulting comments, Monk tries to sabotage the deal by demanding the title be changed to Fuck. Unexpectedly, the executives agree … Not being able to relate to people isn’t a badge of honour. Adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 satirical novel Erasure by debut writer/director Cord Jefferson, this takes on millennial obsessions with race, politics and identity and smashes them to smithereens with intersectional gusto. What is this? I told you to dress street! Teasing out the business of student triggers and campus policies, the intricate hypocrisy of publishing and societal ‘norms’ and mashing sibling rivalry into the generative mix, this takes every opportunity to score points and it’s an equal opportunities offender as preppy intellectual Monk assumes a blacker identity for the benefit of other people and his career. White people think they want the truth, but they don’t. They want to feel absolved. Throwing caution to the wind with intelligent verve, nobody gets away with their nonsense yet it’s the central performance by Wright that roots this in a dramatically logical narrative. Jefferson’s screenplay astutely curates an assemblage of everything that is wrong with today’s ironically judgmental judgmentalism for hilarious results. Only a viewer unaware of their own artificially implanted bias and idiotic expectations could fail to appreciate the smart story this is telling about the stupidity that has overwhelmed society and institutions in an era of cancelling and reputational destruction. An ironic skewer in the belly of the contemporary beast that is a laugh out loud riot. Potential is what people see when what’s in front of them isn’t good enough

Argylle (2024)

You need to stay on target. Introverted spy novelist Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) has almost finished writing her fifth book about Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill), the title character of the Argylle spy series. On a train journey with her cat Alfie (Chip) to go and visit her mother Ruth (Catherine O’Hara) home in Chicago, Elly is saved from an ambush by an actual spy, Aidan Wylde (Sam Rockwell) who explains to her that a devious organisation, known as the Division, headed by Ritter (Bryan Cranston) has targeted her because her novels seemingly predict their future. Aidan travels with Elly to England, hoping that her next chapter will reveal how to stop the Division. In London, the duo searches for a Masterkey that would help expose the Division that Elly had also referenced in her novels. Suspecting Aidan wants to kill her too, Elly calls her mother for help and she immediately travels to rescue her daughter. There’s a knock at the door and it’s Elly’s father (Bryan Cranston). Then Aidan arrives and reveals that her parents are both operatives of the Division, forcing him and Elly to fend them off before fleeing. Who’s the only person who hasn’t tried to kill you in the past seventy-two hours? Escaping to France, Aidan and former CIA deputy director Alfie Solomon reveal that Argylle is not entirely fictional: Elly is in fact agent Rachel Kylle (‘Argylle’ having been derived from ‘R. Kylle’), who was captured and brainwashed by the Division five years ago and made to believe that Dr. Margaret Vogeler (Ruth) and Director Ritter (Barry) were her real parents. Elly put her suppressed memories into her novels in modified form … We’re on our own now. Cats. Writers. Spies. A recipe for success! Starwise it’s essentially Bryce versus Bryan – with a lot of Sam and Henry to spice things up. Even John Cena and pop star Dua Lipa show up in the great opening sequence and later Samuel L. Jackson and Ariana DeBose enter the fray. There’s an argument to be made for a director with such clear gifts as Matthew Vaughn that he should be making serious films – that is, narratives with more significant content and in reality it would appear he is painting himself into a corner of ridiculousness if not necessarily one of large scale likeable silliness. But we might mention that here he’s making a film about the inside of a woman’s mind (and even her eyelids) – kudos for that. Spies lie. It’s part of the game. As the perennially youthful Rockwell morphs into the amusingly Action Man-like Cavill we understand how a writer thinks, the rules of the espionage genre and enjoy Vaughn’s permanently witty point of view as Ellie figures out how to do adventure and spying in the real world (again). You’re just a character I made up. As usual in a Vaughn production, everything looks beautiful courtesy of DoP George Richmond and production designers Russell De Rozario and Daniel Taylor, the action is well managed and there are even some meta references (Argylle is definitely suited and booted by Kingsman). There’s an impressive score by Lorne Balfe with an astute use of the Beatles’ final song to lend poignancy. The midpoint reveal is great fun. Thereafter the conventions necessarily come into play. The greater the spy – the bigger the lie. There’s an easy bond (James?!) between our principals: You’re one hell of a spy, Ellie. Not a bad writer, either. And it’s a jolly sight indeed to have Howard spend most of the film carting her cat Alfie around in a posh backpack – and you know what they say about cats in dramatic structure (Save the Cat?!) – if there’s one in the first act, it has to go off in the third! It makes us think Vaughn is precisely the director to reinvigorate that moribund franchise albeit this is the first in a series of its own to perhaps be fused with Kingsman at a later date. Bonkers, nutty and fun, to be honest, this had us at Cat. Just tell us what happens in the next chapter

The Secret of Seagull Island (1980)

Has anyone ever told you you have the most beautiful eyes? Barbara Carey (Prunella Ransome) flies to Italy to visit her blind sister Mary Ann (Sherry Buchanan) but arrives in Rome to discover she has apparently disappeared, last seen three weeks earlier, putting a concert at the music academy where she trains in jeopardy. Barbara approaches the British Consul for help in this uncharacteristic and worrying situation and Martin Foster(Nicky Henson) assists her. People don’t just disappear. He’s reluctant at first but then thinks a rather louche Italian Enzo Lombardi (Gabriele Tinti) might know of Mary Ann’s whereabouts but Lombardi denies all knowledge and Barbara doesn’t believe him, getting into a scrap on his boat which might turn into something much worse when Martin turns up and rescues her. Local police believe they might have found Mary Ann’s body with eyes gouged out and then when it’s not her, link Mary Ann with another blind woman who is in hospital after a marine accident, found adrift in a dinghy – that’s not her either. It’s suggested that a reclusive rich man called David Malcolm (Jeremy Brett) the owner of a private island between Corsica and Sardinia might hold the answer to the mysterious murder of a series of blind women. When Barbara visits the blind woman in hospital a weird high pitched recording of birds is played in her room and the woman throws herself out of the window while Barbara is hit on the head. She now is apparently blind and introduces herself to Malcolm who has a thing for blind women. Then she visits his island where his disfigured son makes her acquaintance despite the fact that along with Malcolm’s first wife he’s supposedly dead. Malcolm’s wife Carol (Pamela Salem) isn’t too happy at the new arrival on her patch … I don’t know what it is about you but ever since we met I’ve been behaving like James Bond. Once upon a time, the Summer of 1981 to be precise, ITV showed a compelling British-Italian drama miniseries at teatime on Saturday called Seagull Island. And we wanted to see it again. It has cropped up all these years later thanks to the Talking Pictures channel, but in an entirely different form, a feature film, meaning that a couple of hours of drama (actually somewhere in the region of 200 minutes) have been lost to editing antiquity. Barbara is constantly in jeopardy and physically attacked and her situation pivots on Malcolm’s storytelling and behaviour with Brett turning into an expansive and thrillingly evil bad guy and Henson rolling up now and again to save the day. The plot is a lot less clear in this version than in the original series but the generic ancestry is happily in the suspenseful giallo tradition where American actress Buchanan originally made her name with What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974). It’s satisfyingly glamorous, delighting in the setting and the trophies of wealth – speedboats, lovely production design and costuming. There are some very good underwater scenes but there’s also a deal of gore and violence. We know it’s more than forty years since this was made but it’s still rather sad that the four leads (Ransome, Brett, Henson, Tinti) are long departed this earthly realm. Directed by Nestore Ungaro who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeremy Burnham and Augusto Caminito. The score is by Tony Hatch. The island isn’t large enough to make one feel lonely

Hypnotic (2023)

That park. That day. Texas. Austin Police Department detective Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) regales his therapist with the story of the abduction of his seven-year-old daughter, Minnie (Ionie Olivia Nieves) which occurred three years ago and led to the dissolution of his marriage. Afterwards, he is picked up by his partner, Nicks (J.D. Pardo) who informs him they have received an anonymous tip that a safe deposit box will be robbed. While staking out the bank, they witness a mysterious man (William Fichtner) give instructions to civilians and fellow policemen who immediately follow his commands. Rourke suspects they are all in an elaborate heist and races to the targeted safe deposit box. Inside, he only finds a picture of Minnie with the message Find Lev Dellrayne written on it. The mysterious man escapes but Rourke is now convinced the heist has something to do with his daughter’s disappearance. A trace run by Nicks on the tip-off call leads Rourke to the address of fortune-teller Diana Cruz (Alice Braga). Cruz tells Rourke that the mysterious man from the bank is named ‘Lev Dellrayne’ and that he and Cruz are both the escaped ‘Hypnotics’: powerful hypnotists trained by a secretive government Division to control people’s minds. She also tells Rourke that he is mysteriously immune to her own mind control abilities. You cannot brute force a mind like yours. Dellrayne hypnotises Nicks into attacking Rourke and Cruz, forcing Cruz to kill him in self-defence. Now the two primary suspects in Nicks’ murder, Rourke and Cruz flee to Mexico. There, they learn from a former Division contact of Cruz’s Jeremiah (Jackie Earle Haley) that Dellrayne is searching for ‘Domino’ a weapon developed by the Division which was stolen and hidden by Dellrayne when he escaped. He erased his own mind. Dellrayne then wiped his own memory and left behind triggers that will prompt him to gradually recall Domino’s location and simultaneously increase his regained hypnotic power. Dellrayne uses his ability to control civilians to pursue Rourke and Cruz from the contact’s apartment and into the surrounding city. However, Rourke taps into his own (previously unknown and unacknowledged) hypnotic power to stop Dellrayne’s control of the civilians, allowing him and Cruz to escape. Rourke and Cruz next seek out River (Dayo Okeniyi), a reclusive Division hacker. He hacks into the Division database and learns that Rourke’s former wife, Vivian (Kelly Frye) was a member of the Division. Cruz and River figure Rourke must be another Hypnotic whose memory was wiped. Later that night, Rourke investigates River’s database on his own, learning that Minnie is actually the Domino: she is the daughter of two powerful hypnotics: Rourke and Vivian. And – Cruz is actually Vivian; Rourke’s memory of his wife’s face had been altered so that he believed ‘Cruz’ to be a stranger. Rourke then realises that all the events and locations seen up to this point have been hypnotic constructs created in a facility populated by Division agents that have simply acted out the roles of all the people he’s met up to this point. Vivian and Dellrayne’ explain that Minnie was born and raised within the Division but Rourke escaped with her to stop her from becoming their weapon. Rourke hid Minnie and then wiped his memory, so the Division has been repeatedly putting him through a constructed scenario to make him remember … Are you familiar with the concept of hypnotic constructs? Something of a flop on its US release, this Roberto Rodriguez film sits in the cinematic Venn universe where Philip K. Dick meets Christopher Nolan, albeit it is more logical and with a 50% running time of the latter’s usual output. Co-written by the director with Max Borenstein, there is a deal of not just mind- but actionbending, recalling the world of Inception, with an interesting twist in using Affleck (the world’s worst line reader, fact fans!) when he’s told by a guy raising his eyepatch to take a better look at him, There’s more to you than meets the eye. That applies not just within the story but within the Affleck star text and his granite persona is given a depth and range he’s not usually required to play. By the time the 13th construct is being enacted we’re up to speed along with him but he still has another card left in the deck. Like all disguised westerns this concludes with a shootout but it’s the who, why and how that make it pleasurable. It’s sharp and pleasingly complicated and at 94 minutes a painless exercise in freeform genre cinema. You brought this on yourself