Flare: Put on a show

The 33rd BFI Flare continues this weekend, as a million people marched just across the river Saturday trying to stop the chaos of Brexit. Screenings have been busy, packed with a lively audience looking for movies outside the mainstream that deal with more complex issues of identity and humanity. I particularly enjoy the chance to see short films on a big screen. These are busy days for me: I also have my regular weekly releases to watch, so I'll see both Dumbo and Wonder Park on Sunday, then walk back across the river to BFI Southbank for more offbeat Flare fun. Here are some more highlights...

Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life
dir-scr Tomer Heymann; with Jonathan Agassi, Anna Langer 18/Isr ***.
Unapologetic and more than a little disturbing, this graphic documentary follows a porn star through his day-to-day life, capturing amusingly awkward moments with his family along with the sex shows and harrowing drug trips. With this unvarnished portrait, filmmaker Tomer Heymann takes the audience right into an existence most people would find difficult to imagine: there's no glamour at all. The approach is both intimate and dispassionate, which kind of leaves the viewer's head spinning.

Tell It to the Bees 
dir Annabel Jankel; with Anna Paquin, Holliday Grainger 18/UK 1h46 **.
Told with perhaps too much warmth, this 1950s romance is sharply written, acted and production designed to create a specific period atmosphere. It's austere and fairly bursting with secret feelings as two women fall in love in a small town. The themes are nicely handled with sensitivity and a light directorial touch, but the melodrama begins to feel somewhat sticky in the final act, pushing the characters in arch directions. And a magical realist element never quite gels.

Socrates
dir Alex Moratto; with Christian Malheiros 18/Br ****
Produced by a workshop of young people aged 16 to 20, this Brazilian drama takes a bracingly realistic approach to its story of a teen living, in more ways than one, on the margins of society. Addressing economic issues, religion and sexuality, the film never tries to preach, instead offering an open-handed, humane approach that seeks compassion and hope in a situation that is increasingly desperate. It's a remarkable little film, beautifully shot and edited, and deeply moving... FULL REVIEW >

The Heiresses [Las Herederas]
dir-scr Marcelo Martinessi; with Ana Brun, Margarita Irun 18/Par ***.
A startlingly introspective filmmaking style sets this film apart from the usual self-discovery drama, as it allows the audience to simply take a journey with the central character without ever trying to explain anything. This can sometimes make the film feel rather vague, as key events and relationships are left to the imagination, but it also draws us in to properly feel the weight of what happens... FULL REVIEW >

Light in the Water
dir Lis Bartlett; scr Lis Bartlett, James Cude
with James Ballard, Mike Wallace, Morri Spang, Tom Wilson, Charlie Bartel, Michael Mealiffe, Mauro Bordovsky, Paulo Figueiredo, Amy Dantzler 
18/US ****

With its straightforward, informative approach, this engaging documentary tells an important story that's gripping and powerfully moving. There's a wealth of wonderful archive footage and cleverly integrated snapshots, and the film hinges around firsthand interviews, each person recounting a resonant personal story about how they dealt with harsh prejudice by finding like-minded friends and forming a close-knit family. Forced off his school swim team because he was gay, Charlie joined the West Hollywood Aquatic Club to find a place where he wasn't the "other". Hs story is echoed by a range of men and women who found a place where they could participate in their sport while being themselves. Many of these are older athletes who joined the club as it was founded in 1982, when mainstream teams refused to see gay people as capable of competing. Their stories include bullying, abuse, being fired and sidelined, but as a team of close friends they competed in the first Gay Games in San Francisco, then establishing an international swimming championship with a colourful queer flavour. And the way their team triumphed in the Masters is inspiring, breaking down discrimination and setting world records. And by 1994, the Gay Games were actually bigger than the Olympics. "I didn't know it at the time," one says. "But everything we did was making history." This beautiful film is brisk and full of terrific anecdotes, as these men and women recount their world-class achievements in the swimming pools, happy to refute those who doubted them and to crush ignorance about HIV even as Aids took 38 teammates' lives. Today they remain at the forefront of the fight against discrimination in competitive sport. And yes, the team welcomes its straight swimmers too.

Critical Week: Acting up

Most films I've seen this week have been previews for BFI Flare, the festival that kicks off on Thursday night, so I'll be writing more about them here over the next couple of weeks. Otherwise, I've seen a few movies that will work their way into cinemas over the next weeks and months. These include Madeline's Madeline, a resolutely experimental film that dances around mental illness but features a fascinating introduction to young actress Helena Howard (above with the always superb Molly Parker). Jordan Peele follows up his groundbreaking hit Get Out with Us, an even more audacious riff on the horror genre. It's freaky and often darkly unnerving, and has something powerful going on under the surface. Anna Paquin and Holliday Grainger star in Tell It to the Bees, a warm, slightly gooey forbidden romance set in 1950s Scotland. From Argentina, A Trip to the Moon is a quirky coming-of-age film with a terrific set-up, although it struggles to deliver on its promise. And I also caught up with this one...

Triple Frontier
dir JC Chandor • scr Mark Boal, JC Chandor
with Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona
release US/UK 13.Mar.19 • 19/US Netflix 2h05 *.

This is one of those macho meathead movies in which beefy men go by nicknames like Redfly, Pope, Ironhead and Catfish. The plot sees Pope (Isaac) recruiting four ex-military buddies (Affleck, Hunnam, Hedlund and Pascal) for a mercenary mission to steal hundreds of millions in drug money from a kingpin in the dense jungle where Bolivia, Brazil and Peru meet. With this basic set-up and a very limited vocabulary, it feels like an unused script for Expendables 4, but the adept cast does what it can, breathing charm and camaraderie into the blunt roles. Isaac is always watchable, even in a vacuous part like this, and Affleck is charismatic enough to make his world-weary soldier vaguely intriguing, but Arjona is wasted in the requisite thankless female role. As former special ops soldiers, none of them hesitates before killing anyone who looks even remotely shifty, taking a scorched-earth approach to their work then insisting that no man is left behind, as if that makes them humanitarians. Of course, the mission doesn't go as planned, so this feels like two separate movies: an hour of heist and an hour of messy clean-up as greed literally weighs them down. It's a mix of survival thriller and action violence as these tough guys are pushed to the breaking point. Like their murderous impulses, this undermines the film's pushy moral sermon and leaves the biggest action sequences feeling rather dull (not helped by a trite Disasterpeace score). But the real problem is the clumsy plot, which gets increasingly far-fetched as these true blue heroes abandon their principles and make far too many boneheaded decisions. Frankly it's impossible to see JC Chandor's usually smart touch anywhere.

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BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival runs on the Southbank until the end of the month, and I'll be covering it here with regular updates and reviews. In addition to rather a lot of festival films, I'll also be catching regular releases including Tim Burton's Dumbo, Judi Dench in Red Joan, Charlize Theron in Long Shot, Mel Gibson in Dragged Across Concrete and the animated adventure Wonder Park.

Critical Week: Yes, mother

London-based critics had two traumatic female-centred dramas this week to consider. First up was the trashy melodramatic thriller Unforgettable, featuring a wonderfully nasty mother-daughter relationship between Katherine Heigl and Cheryl Ladd (above), plus Rosario Dawson as the innocent woman caught in the mayhem. Terrible, but a lot of fun. Meanwhile, Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin star in a remake of My Cousin Rachel, based on the Daphne Du Maurier novel about a suspicious 19th century woman who might be manipulating her way into a fortune. (Comments on the film itself are embargoed until closer to the release date in June.)

A little further afield, this week I was able to catch up with Werner Herzog's strangely offbeat drama Salt and Fire, about corporate greed and natural disasters in Bolivia. It has an intriguing central role for Michael Shannon, and at least gets you thinking. And then there's the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, tracing the iconic filmmaker's pre-cinematic inspiration in his own words, with some added slightly overwrought filmmaking from the trio of directors who made this doc.

This coming week we have screenings of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, the acclaimed Russian film The Student and something called Detour. I also have quite a few screener discs to catch up on.