Critical Week: Monumental

Screenings have been a bit slow in London during the Cannes Film Festival, so it's perhaps appropriate that I saw two French films this week. Romain Duris plays the eponymous tower-building character in the biopic Eiffel, which injects Hollywood-style melodramatic romance into a fascinating story. And Juliette Binoche is wonderful as always in Between Two Worlds, an earthy doc-style drama about a journalist who joins a community of very low-paid workers.

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There was also the offbeat Watergate thriller 18½, about two people who discover a copy of that "accidentally erased" tape. It's witty and very clever. And from China, Boonie Bears: Back to Earth is the eighth movie in a 10-year franchise, but only the first to get a UK release. It's a strikingly well-animated romp involving bears and aliens, with some terrific action set pieces and a surprisingly big story too. I also caught up with these two recent streaming releases...

Senior Year
dir Alex Hardcastle; scr Andrew Knauer, Arthur Pielli, Brandon Scott Jones 
with Rebel Wilson, Sam Richardson, Angourie Rice, Mary Holland, Zoe Chao, Justin Hartley, Chris Parnell, Jade Bender
22/US Paramount 1h51 ***
Refreshingly, this comedy never aspires to be anything more than a goofy romp that keeps us smiling and occasionally laughing. Slick and bouncy, the film's chirpy attitude makes up for a string of cheap jokes and a lack of anything substantial under the surface. The story centres on Stephanie (Wilson), who has just woken up after 20 years in a coma following a cheerleading accident. Now at 37, she wants to finish high school, again as head cheerleader and this time as prom queen. There are the obvious gags about about how the world has changed since Stephanie's heyday, including of course mobile phones, social media and Lady Gaga. Her best friend (Holland) is now the principal, the boy (Hartley) she loved is married to her nemesis (Chao), and the friend (Richardson) who had a secret crush on her is for some reason the school librarian. It's annoying that the writers never dig any deeper, because there's scope for a more layered comedy here. Instead they fall back on simplistic plotting, buckets of sentimentality and oddly vague nostalgia. But because the movie is so happily superficial, it just about does the trick as mindless entertainment.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers
dir Akiva Schaffer; scr Dan Gregor, Doug Mand
with Andy Samberg, John Mulaney, Will Arnett, KiKi Layne, JK Simmons, Seth Rogen, Keegan-Michael Key, Eric Bana, Dennis Haysbert, Tress MacNeille
22/US Disney 1h37 ***.
Intriguing reviews made me want to check out this new take on the iconic Disney chipmunks, set in a world where cartoon characters live alongside live-action people. Filled to the brim with cameos, it's a meta-comedy about the movie business. Years after their act broke up, Chip and Dale (voiced by Mulaney and Samberg) have gone their separate ways. Chip is selling insurance, while Dale has had "CGI surgery" and wants to reteam with Chip for a reboot of their 30-year-old hit TV show. Along with wildly inventive effects, witty sight gags and a surprisingly strong mystery plot involving bootleg cartoon characters, the film is a steady stream of hilarious pop culture references. There's even a trip to Uncanny Alley, where everyone has those creepy "Polar Express eyes". A deeply irreverent attitude infuses this film, which makes the barrage of gags unusually sharp and surprising, and the action sometimes feels thrilling too. But it's the character details that make this riotous romp unusually involving. 

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Things remain a bit quieter than usual next week as far as screenings go, but I have one rather big film, Baz Luhrmann's epic biopic Elvis, plus a few to watch at home, including the award-winning Italian drama Il Buco, the burlesque doc Baloney, the comical doc A Sexplanation and the shorts collection The Male Gaze: Fleeting Glances.