Gran Turismo (2023)

Aka Gran Turismo: A True Story. There’s no future in racing. Following a pitch by marketing executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), Nismo, the motorsport division of Japanese car manufacturer Nissan establishes the GT (Gran Turismo) Academy to recruit skilled players of the racing simulator Gran Turismo and turn them into real racing drivers. Danny recruits former driver-turned-mechanic Jack Salter (David Harbour) to train the players. Jack is initially hesitant but accepts after tiring of the arrogance of his team’s driver, Nicholas Capa (Josha Stradowski ). Meanwhile in Cardiff, Wales, teenager Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) a university dropout, clothes shop employee and gamer is an avid player of the racing simulator and wants to become a racing driver despite the disapproval of his former footballer father Steve (Djimon Hounsou). His mother Lesley (Geri Haliwell Horner) suggests he return to college to study engineering and get into the racing business that way. Jann discovers he is eligible for a qualification race to join the GT Academy after setting a time record for a particular track. The night before his race, Jann is invited by his brother Coby (Daniel Puig) to a party and they take their father’s care. Jann flirts with a young woman named Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley) whom he fancies. The gathering breaks up when police arrive and Jann initiates a pursuit after driving away when their friends are pulled over. The brothers escape but are caught returning by their father. Jann offers to take the blame for Coby if he admits that he is the better driver. Jann is brought to his father’s place of employment the following day in an attempt to be taught a life lesson but leaves early to partake in the qualifying race, which he wins, earning a place in GT Academy. At the academy camp, Jack puts the competitors through their paces in various tests, through which ten competitors are narrowed down to five. During one of the tests, Jann crashes with Jack in the car and claims that the brakes were glazed. This is later proven correct by analysts, to Jack’s surprise. The remaining five compete in a final race to determine who will represent Nissan. Jann narrowly wins the race against American competitor Matty Davis (Darren Barnet) but Danny insists Matty should be chosen as the representative due to his better commercial viability but Jann is selected at Jack’s insistence. Jann is told that if he finishes at least fourth in any one of a series of qualifying races, he will earn a professional licence and contract with Nissan. He finishes last in his first professional race at the Red Bull Ring in Austria after Nicholas taps him into a spin. Despite gradually improving over the next few races, he does not finish the penultimate race in Spain. He travels to Dubai for his last qualifying race during which Nicholas takes a corner too fast and crashes. Despite the debris from this crash cracking his windshield, Jann achieves a fourth-place finish and earns his FIA licence. He then travels to Tokyo with Danny and Jack to sign his contract and uses his signing bonus to fly Audrey to Tokyo as they start a relationship. Jann’s first race after signing is at the Nurburgring. He starts the race well and maintains a high position until the front of his car lifts into the air at the Flugplatz corner, hitting a barrier and launching into a crowded spectator area. Jann is airlifted to the Nürburgring Medical Center and is informed while in hospital that a spectator was killed in the crash, to his horror. When Jann is reluctant to return to racing and blames himself for the spectator’s death, Jack returns him to the Nürburgring. He reveals that he was involved in a fatal accident at the 24 Hours of Le Mans which led to a fellow driver dying and subsequently Jack’s retirement from driving. An inquiry clears Jann of any wrongdoing but professional sentiment turns against sim drivers. In response, Danny decides that a sim driver team needs to compete at Le Mans and finish on the podium to prove their viability. Danny enlists Matty and fellow GT Academy participant Antonio Cruz (Pepe Barroso) to make up the three-driver team alongside Jann … It’s like he suddenly remembered he was a racing driver. For petrolheads and gamers alike, this alternative sports biopic based on a true story written by Jason Hall and Zach Baylin has a lot to offer – a dream job for a kid whose life is dedicated to a simulation of it in the video game created by Kazanori Yamauchi, played here by Takehiro Hira. After a half hour setup, in which our hero is supposedly the offspring of the world’s least likely couple, he comes into the purview of a nasty looking man who’s hiding his own hurt under a cloak of viciousness. You’ve got instincts that can’t be taught. As the narrative demands, the key relationship here is of course with mentor Salter, the tough but decent father figure that Jann lacks at home and who of course is concealing the tragedy that led to his own retirement (perhaps the internet didn’t work a decade ago so Jann has to wait until the 70th minute for Salter to tell him). A wonderful running joke is Jann’s need to listen to MOR music to keep his nerves in check – while he has Enya and Kenny G in his ears, Salter is playing Black Sabbath on an old school Walkman: that leads to a change in song choice at the crucial moment on the race track. The other strand is the idea that learning how to drive on a simulator video game is not a bad thing (what else …) even if there are no real bumps on this road that can’t be straightened out. Anyone looking for a deep and meaningful discussion of the existential or actual gap between reality and simulation may look elsewhere – or find that this constitutes proof that there is no difference whatsoever. Of course this is all predicated on the fairy tale model, nowadays that means transposing things from self-imposed lockdown life to doing things for real and so it is – oh joy! – that Jann finally races at Le Mans, the ultimate proof of racing prowess. A colourful, splashy tale with so much great coverage by cinematographer Jacques Jouffret blended with game visuals that even a conservative storyline and the questionable use of a real-life tragedy can’t help but entertain once this gets wheels under it. The real Mardenborough performs as his avatar’s stunt double, fact fans. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Somewhere out in the world there’s a kid who’s faster than all these arseholes

The Life of David Gale (2003)

Rape. Murder. Death Row. Very intelligent guy. David Gale Kevin Spacey) is a former philosophy professor on death row in Texas. With only a few days until his execution, his lawyer negotiates a half-million dollar fee to tell his story to Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), a journalist from a major news network. She has a reputation of keeping secrets and protecting her sources and has herself served a jail term for just such an infringement in defence of someone producing kiddie porn. With four days before his presumed execution Bitsey arrives at his prison and his lawyer Braxton Belyeu (Leon Rippy) diverts her intern Zack Slemmons (Gabriel Mann) and Gale tells her his story in a series of flashbacks: In 1994, Gale is a successful public intellectual and the head of the philosophy department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an active member of DeathWatch, an advocacy group campaigning against capital punishment. At a graduation party, he encounters Berlin (Rhona Mitra) a graduate student who has been expelled from the school that afternoon and who earlier asked him to up her grades in exchange for sex. When Gale gets drunk, she seduces him and they have rough sex. She then falsely accuses Gale of rape. The next day, he loses a televised debate with the Governor of Texas when he is unable to name any innocent people executed during the governor’s term. Gale is arrested, but the charge is dropped when Berlin disappears. However, his marriage, career and reputation are all destroyed, his home is sold and he struggles with alcoholism after his wife Sharon (Elizabeth Gast) takes their little son Jamie (Noah Truesdale) with her to Spain and disallows contact. Constance Harraway (Laura Linney) a fellow DeathWatch activist is a close friend of Gale who consoles him after his life falls apart. However, Harraway is discovered raped and murdered, suffocated by a plastic bag taped over her head. An autopsy reveals Gale’s semen in her body and that she had been forced to swallow the key to the handcuffs, a torture technique known as the secure top method which Gale previously wrote about in a journal article. The physical evidence at the crime scene points to Gale, who is convicted of rape and murder and is sentenced to death. Now Bloom investigates the case in between her visits with Gale. Gale maintains his innocence, claiming he and Harraway had consensual sex the night before her murder. Bitsey comes to believe that the apparent evidence against Gale does not add up. She is tailed several times in her car by Dusty Wright (Matt Craven) an alleged one-time lover and colleague of Harraway, whom she suspects was the real killer and who has been trailing Bitsey and Zack. Wright slips evidence to Bloom that suggests Gale has been framed, implying that the actual murderer videotaped the crime. Bitsey pursues this lead until she finds a videotape revealing that Harraway, who was suffering from terminal leukaemia had committed an elaborate suicide made to look like murder. Wright is seen on the videotape, acting as her accomplice, implying that they framed Gale as part of a plan to discredit the death penalty by conspiring to execute an innocent person and in its aftermath ultimately releasing evidence of the actual circumstances. Once Bitsey and Zack find this evidence, only hours remain until Gale’s scheduled execution and they enlist Nico the Goth Girl (Melissa McCarthy) who now resides at Constance’s old home to restage her death … Name one innocent man that Texas has executed during my tenure. Urgency is inscribed from the first frame when Bitsey is running down a country road. After a series of flashbacks and contemporary interview scenes we rejoin that particular scene at 114 minutes in and the finale unspools. The screenplay by Charles Randolph resulted in a uniquely polarising critical reception for what transpired to be the late and lamented Alan Parker’s final production. Hate’s no fun if you keep it to her she just wanted to help other people avoid it. It’s a cunningly contrived drama, giving Gale a fully established private life and then turning his choices in a very different direction on the basis of one bad decision at a party with a sexpot which throws his life into disarray. You’re not here to save me, you’re here to save my son’s memory of his father. In this race against time narrative, the plot construction necessarily revolves Bitsey chasing her tail a little – we are to some degree in Silence of the Lambs territory when she talks to David in prison so that the ultimate manipulation of this conscientious journalist makes more sense in retrospect. Part of the dramatic problem is Winslet’s performance – it doesn’t ring entirely true: yes, she’s been carefully selected for the job of ‘saving’ David Gale on the basis of her fearsome reputation for journalistic ethics but somehow she doesn’t seem entirely serious in her profession as it’s presented here. Winslet overacts somewhat particularly in the more emotive setups. Where this should perhaps have engaged more with the idea of the role of journalists in promoting a point of view and the machinery of the news industry in shifting or controlling social perspective on crime and the death penalty becomes a more personalised tale about the lengths activists go to in order to make meaningful change – and in the State of Texas, which has a very high annual body count when it comes to Death Row. The final twist is probably a move too far in a film which thrives on every kind of sensation, good and bad. It is however very interesting on several levels, including performance. Ironically, in view of the criticism, this was allegedly inspired by a true story. Co-produced by Parker and Nicolas Cage. Let’s not throw a pity party and sit around reading Kafka

Love in the Afternoon (1957)

Aka Ariane. I always tell you what I’m doing, but you never tell me what you’re doing. Paris. Young cello student Ariane Chavasse (Audrey Hepburn) eavesdrops on a conversation between her father, Claude Chavasse (Maurice Chevalier) a widowed private detective who specializes in tracking unfaithful spouses, and his client, Monsieur X (John McGiver). After Claude gives his client proof of his wife’s daily trysts with American business magnate Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) in Room 14 at the Ritz Hotel, Monsieur X announces he will shoot Flannagan later that evening. Claude is nonchalant, regretting only the business he will lose, since Flannagan is a well-known international playboy with a long history of casual affairs. When Ariane cannot get the Ritz to put her through to Flannagan on the phone, and the police decline to intervene until after a crime has been committed, she decides to warn him herself, and leaves for the hotel. When Monsieur X breaks into Flannagan’s hotel suite, he finds Flannagan with Ariane – not his wife (Lise Bourdin), carefully making her escape on an outside ledge. Flannagan is intrigued by the mysterious girl, who refuses to give him any information about herself, even her name. He starts guessing her name from the initial A on her handbag, and when she declines to tell him he resorts to calling her thin girl. She has no romantic history but pretends to be a femme fatale to interest him, and soon falls in love with the considerably older man. She agrees to meet him the next afternoon, not mentioning that she has orchestral practice in the evenings. She arrives with mixed feelings but spends the evening while waiting for him to leave for the airport. Ariane’s father, who has tried unsuccessfully to protect her from knowing about the tawdry domestic surveillance details in his files, notices her change of mood but has no idea that it proceeds from one of his cases. A year later, Flannagan returns to Paris and the Ritz. Ariane, who has kept track of Flannagan’s womanising exploits through the news media, meets him again when she sees him at an opera while surveying the crowd from a balcony. She puts herself in his path in the lobby, and they start seeing each other again … He who loves and runs away, lives to love another day. The first of twelve collaborations between Billy Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, this sprightly adaptation of Claude Anet’s 1920 novel Ariane, jeune fille russe is in fact the fourth screen version of the story, the second of which (1932) had a screenplay co-written by Wilder and the third which supposedly inspired this was made in Germany in 1931 by Paul Czinner. The attraction for Wilder is clearly in the potential for making a film along the lines of his hero Ernst Lubitsch with his fabled ‘touch’ and aside from the judicious use of eavesdropping (a suggestive trope Lubitsch loved), key to this is the casting. For Wilder, Hepburn was kissed by the angels and it was their second film following Sabrina. She shines here as the music student with ideas beyond those of the older men around her, curiosity stoked by those amorous files in her father’s office. According to her biographer Alexander Walker, there were alterations to the screenplay, so “Wilder had a heroine who behaved with the serene composure of a self-confident schoolgirl. It would work, he was sure. Truant and pert, Audrey bubbles along, sticking her oval chin out as if to invite love, the putting up her guard just in time.” Cooper remains an epic iteration of masculinity but wasn’t Wilder’s first choice – that would have been Cary Grant, who never agreed to appear in any of his productions. He comes to Paris every year and I always know because my business improves noticeably. Cooper, however was affable company for a location shoot in a city Wilder loved that had given him respite and a career after fleeing Nazi Germany. It was their second collaboration too because in 1938 Cooper had appeared for Lubitsch as another womaniser in France in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife on which Wilder had done some writing and that had also marked his first collaboration with previous writing partner and producer Charles Brackett. Now he tailored Cooper’s role more specifically to how he appeared twenty years later. There was a problem, though. “The day I cast Cooper, he got old,” Wilder told Charlotte Chandler. For Chevalier this gave him his first non-singing screen role in a decade. It restored his popularity following his conduct during the war – like many in the French film industry, he agreed to work in tandem with the occupying Germans. He wasn’t especially popular on set however, and Wilder left him out of the cocktails he hosted each evening (just as he had done with Humphrey Bogart on Sabrina).  In Paris, people make love – well, perhaps not better, but certainly more often. They do it any time, any place. On the left bank, on the right bank, and in between! They do it by day, and they do it by night. The butcher, the baker, and the friendly undertaker. They do it in motion, they do it sitting absolutely still. Poodles do it. Tourists do it. Generals do it. Once in a while even existentialists do it. There is young love, and old love. Married love, and illicit love.  It was a tricky shoot not merely because of unseasonable weather and mosquitoes but also because of the street demonstrations and violence in Paris following the Russian invasion of Hungary and the Suez crisis, forcing Wilder to speed up filming and organise evacuation plans if the worst occurred. The amoral tale is softened somewhat by the use of music and songs, almost as melodrama (in the original meaning) including Charles Trenet’s L’ame Des Poètes, Henri Betti’s C’est si bon and Fascination, a motif which is hummed throughout the film by Ariane in a score supervised by Franz Waxman and played by those obliging gypsies who also serve as a Greek chorus, discreetly disappearing when the action hots up. Cooper’s advancing age (56) and haggard appearance (he would have a full face lift two years later) made this stylish and witty exploration of sex a hard sell in the US market where the straightforward philandering didn’t go down well at a time when Lolita had just been published. However the content is mitigated by that lightness of touch that disguises discomfort while Hepburn performs beautifully as the naive daughter opposite Chevalier as her concerned father and of course Cooper who is taken in by her assumed identity in a story of double standards and hypocrisy. And a coda was added to the American production to make things right. You could fly in the twins from Stockholm. Hepburn remarked that the enterprise might have made more sense had the men’s roles been swapped. She discarded the possibility of playing Gigi on the big screen in part because Chevalier was in the cast – that twinkle in his eye didn’t seem paternal at all. She was drinking too much during production and presumed guilt led to a bout of the anorexia that plagued her. She’s a very peculiar girl. Not my type at all. As is the custom with Hepburn’s roles, there’s a fairy tale transformation here but it’s really that of Flannagan’s Don Juan – albeit there’s a fun reference to Cinderella when Ariane mislays her shoe in his hotel room. You know who I am, Mr. Flannagan, I’m the girl in the afternoon. Hepburn was outfitted by Hubert de Givenchy (and an uncredited Jay A. Morley) but her hairdo was altered from her previous urchin look in Funny Face with a centre parting introduced to a soft pageboy bob by Grazia di Rossi. She retained the look off the set, which caused quite the fashion brouhaha, and the Yorkie, Mr. Famous, which absent real life husband Mel Ferrer had bought to keep her company and wound up having a co-starring role here. The tiny creature gets smacked so much! For all its issues and complications, this is an irresistible, seductive, tart, wistfully romantic and sophisticated delight with an absurdly moving ending (plus that coda to emphasise a morally correct conclusion). And isn’t the Saul Bass poster ingenious? We did have a good time, didn’t we?

The Holdovers (2023)

The world doesn’t make sense anymore. I mean, it’s on fire. The rich don’t give a shit. Poor kids are cannon fodder. Integrity is a punch line. Trust is just a name on a bank. December 1970 in New England. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a classics teacher at Barton Academy, a boarding school he once attended on scholarship. His students and fellow teachers despise him for his strict grading and stubborn personality. Dr. Hardy Woodrup (Andrew Garman) Barton’s headmaster and Hunham’s former student, scolds Hunham for costing the academy money by flunking the son of an important donor (a senator), causing Princeton University to withdraw his offer of a place. As punishment, Hunham is forced to supervise five students left on campus during the holiday break, including troublemaker Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) whose mother cancelled a family trip to St Kitts to honeymoon with her new husband. Also staying behind is cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) whose son Curtis attended Barton and joined the military to pay for college but has been killed in the Vietnam. To the students’ chagrin, Hunham forces them to study and exercise on their break. After six days, the wealthy father of one of the students arrives by helicopter and agrees to take all five students on the family’s ski trip with their parents’ permission. Angus, who is unable to reach his parents for permission, is left alone at Barton with Hunham and Mary. When Hunham catches Angus trying to book a hotel room, the two argue about Hunham’s disciplinarian policies. Angus impulsively runs through the school halls and defiantly leaps into a pile of gym equipment, dislocating his shoulder. Hunham takes Angus to the hospital; to protect Hunham from blame, Angus lies to the doctors about the circumstances of his injury. At a restaurant, Hunham and Angus encounter Lydia Crane (Carrie Preston), Woodrup’s assistant. Hunham flirts with Lydia, who invites the pair to her Christmas party. Angus, Hunham, Mary and Barton’s janitor Danny (Naheem Garcia) attend Lydia’s party. Angus successfully flirts with Lydia’s niece Elise (Darby Lily Lee-Stack). Hunham is disappointed to discover that Lydia has a boyfriend and Mary gets drunk and has an emotional breakdown over Curtis’s death. Hunham insists on leaving early. Hunham and Angus argue; when Hunham references Angus’s father, Angus says his father is dead. Mary scolds Hunham for his unsympathetic attitude. Feeling remorseful for his actions, Hunham arranges his own small Christmas celebration … There’s nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man’s every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present. Director Alexander Payne’s campus dramedy is set in the early 1970s so the mind turns to those wintry Love Story moments and the political satires of the era and even casts itself as a gnarly riposte to Dead Poets Society: this boasts none of those tropes or inclinations. Instead it’s about the accidental forming of an alternative family with Giamatti in the best performance he’s created since the last time he worked with Payne in the estimable and beloved Sideways. Their collaborations create nuanced portraits of masculinity in a continuum observed in Payne’s other work but somehow come off best when they’re together. At least pretend to be a human being. Please. It’s Christmas! Here he’s essentially Scrooge on the path to redemption as the seasonal setting and quasi paternal function require. I have known you since you were a boy, so I think I have the requisite experience and insight to aver that you are and always have been penis cancer in human form. Newcomers Randolph and Sessa are impressive indeed in their debut film roles. The backdrop of course is Vietnam and it’s foregrounded with the loss of Randolph’s son reminding us that it’s offscreen drama which informs a lot of on the nose exchanges in an often cliched character study that paradoxically ignores the contemporary politics in the main, lending its focus instead to the politics of the school. Twisted fucker orphaned that glove on purpose. Left you with one so the loss would sting that much more. If there’s a flaw in construction it’s in the absurd overlength at 133 minutes – something that definitely could not be thrown at the films it wants to retrospectively join in the pantheon. Those chilly scenes of Winter 1970 are authentically captured by cinematographer Eigil Bryld who perhaps surprisingly was shooting digitally. Written by David Hemingson, very loosely adapting Marcel Pagnol’s Merlusse to create a quasi-autobiographical tale, this is bracingly performed. Not for ourselves alone are we born

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

Gorillas in the Mist (1988)

Some of them believe a woman living alone up there has to be mad. 1966. Occupational therapist Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) is inspired by Kenyan-British paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey (Iain Cuthbertson)  to devote her life to the study of primates. She writes ceaselessly to Leakey for a job cataloguing and studying the rare mountain gorillas of Central Africa. Following him to a lecture in Louisville, Kentucky in 1966, she convinces him of her conviction telling him she can count. He is persuaded after months of campaigning. They go to the Congo, where Leakey and his foundation equip her to make contact with the gorillas, introducing her to a local animal tracker, Sembagare (John Omirah Miluwi). Otherwise she is alone. Settling deep in the jungle, Fossey and Sembagare locate a troop of gorillas, only after she realises Sembagare has never tracked gorillas before. Never, ever run from a gorilla. They are soon displaced by the events of the Congo Crisis and find themselves forcibly evicted from their research site by Congolese soldiers, who accuse Fossey of being a foreign spy and agitator, believing her to be British. Fossey is resigned to returning to the United States but Sembagare and her temporary host Rosamond Carr (Julie Harris) motivate her to stay in Africa. Fossey establishes new research efforts in the jungles of neighbouring Rwanda where rampant poaching and corruption become apparent when she discovers several traps near her new base camp at Karisoke. Nevertheless, Fossey and her colleagues make headway with the gorillas, taking account of their communication and social groups. Her work impresses Leakey and gains international attention. National Geographic, which funds her efforts, dispatches photographer Bob Campbell (Bryan Brown) to highlight her research. Fossey, initially unreceptive to this unannounced observer, grows increasingly attached to Campbell after several photo sessions with the gorillas. The two become lovers, despite Campbell’s marriage. Campbell proposes to divorce his wife and marry Fossey but insists that she would have to spend time away from Karisoke and her gorillas with him in Borneo, ultimately leading her to end their relationship. Fossey forms an emotional bond with a male named Digit and tries to prevent the export of other gorillas by trader Claude Van Vecten (Constantin Alexandrov). I’m not running for Miss Congeniality. Appalled by the poaching of the gorillas for their skins, hands and heads, Fossey complains to the government of Rwanda and is dismissed but one minister, Mukara (Waigwa Wachira) promises to hire an anti-poaching squad. Fossey’s frustrations reach a climax when Digit is beheaded by poachers. She leads numerous anti-poaching patrols, burns down the poachers’ villages and stages a mock execution of one of the offenders, serving to alienate some of her visiting research assistants Brendan (Iain Glen), Larry (David Lansbury) and Kim (Maggie O’Neill) and gaining her various enemies. Sembagare expresses concern at Fossey’s opposition to the emerging industry of gorilla tourism, but she nonchalantly dismisses his worries … They are not going to turn this mountain into a goddamn zoo. This biopic of famed naturalist Dian Fossey features phenomenal performances, not merely from Weaver as the ornery woman who applied her occupational therapy skill set in an entirely alien environment and suffered for her efforts, but her animal friends. Adapted from her own memoir and an Esquire article by Harold T.P. Hayes, this isn’t entirely a sympathetic portrait but it is a desperately upsetting film due to the violent butchery inflicted on the gorillas particularly because the scenes between Dian and the animals (a combination of the real thing, actors in costume and animatronics) are awesome. Perhaps there is a writing flaw in the screenplay by Anna Hamilton Phelan (with Tab Murphy) and that is the lack of penetrating insight into Fossey with this sometimes feeling a little like a sketch and not a fully fledged portrait. There are no Out of Africa moments here – no time to sit back and enjoy the scenery or look at Fossey in an intimate way in a bigger context despite her willingness to reveal herself in every way to Campbell. She is literally a creature in the wild. Fossey is a can-do woman, pragmatic, active and direct and rarely exhibiting weakness to others. Persistent, driven and passionate, a character of rare devotion and capable of great love, Weaver is tremendous as this hard-living woman, a woman alone, even her choice of cigarettes is both expensive and hard on her lungs – you could see Katharine Hepburn in the role but Weaver probably has more colours in her characterisation than Hepburn would have mustered in her heyday. You’re the story. You’re what people are interested in. She has to be told that exposing her in magazines is good for the gorillas – to stop those doctors buying pieces of gorilla’s bodies for display. So she agrees to her own form of guarded display, the kind in which she engages with the gorillas in order to communicate. Her choices, good and bad, can be judged by the reaction of Sembagare – Miluwi’s face is a marvel in repose. This takes place in a febrile exotic setting with the locals as likely to take a machete to one as draw breath and there is no forgetting that while Africa may be the cradle of mankind it cannot be mistaken for civilisation and it’s always ripe for exploitation. The geopolitics are always lurking in the undergrowth and they have no respect for life. The cinematography by John Seale is simply seamless with great editing by Stuart Baird but the strangely discordant score by Maurice Jarre is oddly discomfiting, a harbinger of Fossey’s fate, because, like all women in this world, she must be taught a harsh lesson. Immensely moving. Directed by Michael Apted. This isn’t your private kingdom

Scarlet Thread (1951)

An East End spiv. A 1950s wide boy with cinema accent. Petty thief Freddie(Laurence Harvey) likes to talk jive in an American accent in London’s Soho where he hangs out trying to impress the ladies. He joins forces with suave gangster Marcon (Sydney Tafler) to commit a jewel heist in the University town of Cambridge with (Harry Fowler) driving their getaway car. But loses his never, fires his gun and the victim, an elderly man gets dragged away in the car. When the men are chased through the streets of Cambridge by students they take refuge in the garden of the Master’s house and are greeted by his daughter Josephine (Kathleen Byron) who takes them for graduates and invites them in. Marcon introduces himself as an old student – Aubrey Bellingham – and passes himself off to a visiting vicar but Josephine’s romantic interest Shaw (Arthur Hill) is suspicious and then her aunt (Renee Kelly ) arrives – the woman the men ran into as they escaped their pursuers. And womanising Freddie then takes a fancy to Josephine, then it transpires the man he shot was her father – and the radio news reports the man has died … This university is packed with young men who talk in inverted commas. Lewis Gilbert’s early noirish film provides a great opportunity to see a callow pulpy youthful Laurence Harvey, learning which side of his face was more photogenic and doing the old cheap romance thing with (bizarrely enough) charismatic Byron, she of Black Narcissus with the crazy lipsticked mouth – and the clue to his real British identity recalls that film. How bizarre it is to see these gangsters come a cropper in the rarefied setting of Cambridge University, chased by students in flapping gowns. There’s some genuinely interesting cinematography by Geoffrey Faithfull – over the shoulder tracking behind Tafler (Gilbert’s brother-in-law) and Harvey after the heist goes wrong; point of view shots in the getaway car piloted by Harry Fowler alongside a policeman on a motorbike making good use of the rear view mirror as he sweats at the wheel. The contrast between these surprising crims and the fish out of water setting is jarring but also pleasing, the early Soho scenes with Dora Bryan and the presentation of Harvey as spiv quite fascinating. Not great but it is has its moments, not least when Harvey’s mask (and fake American accent) slips and Tafler’s act as the ancient graduate is very convincing. Adapted by A.R. Rawlinson and Moie Charles from their play. You dance too well. It makes me think of all the women you’ve danced with

Misbehaviour (2020)

So this is the eye of the revolution – up close it sure is revolting. As the 1970 Miss World competition looms, divorced mother of a little daughter Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) encounters sexism as she is interviewed for a place as a mature History student at University College London. She encounters Women’s Liberation activist Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) painting slogans on a poster and warns her about bobbies patrolling the street. She joins her group which lives as a commune and advises them to engage with the media – they’re so shabby and disorganised and they don’t even have TV but another group in Peckham disagrees with their tactics. Meanwhile Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans) and his wife Julia (Keeley Hawes) are busy trying to secure Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) as host of Miss World against his wife Dolores’ (Lesley Manville) wishes because when he last did it in 1961 he took the winner home. Pressured by London-based South African apartheid activist Peter Hain (Luke Thompson), Eric Morley decides to parachute in an extra contestant, black Pearl Jansen (Loreece Harrison) who along with Miss Grenada Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is one of the few coloured contestants in the beauty contest. Then a wilder element of Libbers blows up a BBC van on the eve of the competition and the Grosvenor Road commune has to go through with a proper protest under cover of normal clothing during the live show … You think you can have the same freedoms as a man but you can’t. The screenplay by Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe from Frayn’s story is rooted in reality: this is a group biography but done as a comedy drama in the style of a heist story. It’s a conscientious and entertaining if mild intervention into the evolution of women’s rights. A touch more of zany might have helped this become a genre entry which it’s straining to do but respect for the (still living) heroines obviously hampers wilder moments. And perhaps the truth. It’s a political tale of unbelievable misogyny and inequality. The display of the beauty queens’ behinds for rating is truly shocking: how on earth did this outrageous cattle mart go on as long as it did?! However the lovely irony, that the protest (which occurs in the midst of infamous philanderer Hope’s outrageously sexist monologue) engenders a feminist movement is well played and the meeting between arrested Sally and newly-crowned winner Hosten nicely encapsulates the complex theme and issues which today’s feminists would call intersectional. Fun fact: Sally’s daughter Abigail (Maya Kelly) was the daughter from her marriage to legendary actor John Thaw. Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe. Turns out my seat at the table is actually a high chair

Black Christmas (2019)

Aren’t you tired of fighting against your true nature? With holidays around the corner, Riley Stone (Imogen Poots) and her friends Jesse (Brittany O’Grady) and Marty (Lily Donoghue) prepare for a Christmas party at their sorority house at Hawthorne College. But when a masked stalker targets girls and goes on a killing spree following a series of threatening direct messages to the girls’ phones purportedly from the school’s slave-owning founder, they decide to fight back – but he’s in the house. Then they realise there’s more than one masked man to deal with and a girl is missing …Something doesn’t feel right. The woke millennial remake of Bob Clarke’s brilliant 1974 Canadian slasher, this plugs into campus stories from the past decade involving unwholesome fratboy rituals and a rape culture targeting female students. It ups the ante by also unpicking the masculinist backlash against women and the idea of safe spaces – all that and with a supernatural undercurrent too. Written by director Sofia Takal and April Wolfe, adapting the original screenplay by A. Roy Moore, the Final Girl narrative is therefore stunningly contemporary in its politics but that means the thrills take a bit of a back seat. There really is no room in the story for the geeky romantic Landon (Caleb Eberhardt) who might or might not help the girls but Cary Elwes is good as the lecturer whose misogyny rules the roost. Riley is a good character but she never rises to the occasion, as it were, and needs help – so you might say that this heroine’s journey is very much a group endeavour as she is forced to come to terms with a past sexual assault. Truly a tribute to the notion of sorority. You used to be a fighter. It’s time to be a fighter again. If not for yourself for your sisters

Come Back, Little Sheba (1952)

You and Marie are nothing but a couple of sluts. Twenty years after their shotgun marriage, their child dead and their little dog lost for months, dowdy Lola Delaney (Shirley Booth) rents out a room in the house she shares with her recovering alcoholic husband, chiropractor Doc (Burt Lancaster). The pretty college student Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore) does life drawings in the living room of track star jock Turk Fisher (Richard Jaeckel) and Lola enjoys watching them fall in love. Their carry on aggravates Doc who infers that they are engaged in sexual shenanigans despite being told that Marie is engaged to someone else. He compares Lola to Marie and his obsession ultimately drives him back to the bottle despite his two year membership of Alcoholics Anonymous which had got him back on track … I can’t spend my time kissing all the girls. Booth was recreating her acclaimed stage role (and it won her an Academy Award in her screen debut at 54) and Lancaster gives a great, mature performance in a William Inge play that reads like a suburban take on A Streetcar Named Desire: just how big is this house and how long is this woman going to stay in the spare room? Adapted by Ketti Frings, Lola is slatternly and useless but enormously endearing, Doc is remote and difficult but somehow admirable. His paranoia is not far from the surface and peppy Marie gets under his skin. His concealed passion destroys his resolve but Lola treats Marie like a daughter, unaware of his conflict until she opens the cupboard to make cocktails. He has never forgiven her for the forced marriage that stopped him training as a proper doctor and then Lola lost the baby. When his pent-up violent anger finally erupts it’s shocking. It’s a persuasive picture of long-festering marital resentments, fixation on the brevity of youthful beauty and loss and a signature film of kitchen sink realism. Directed by Delbert Mann. Alcoholics are mostly disappointed men