Critical Week: Somebody's watching

It's been a quiet week as far as press screenings go, but I've been keeping busy with various events, as well as the usual collection of movies to watch using online screening links. BFI Flare held an event to launch the programme for its 36th festival, and it was great to have an in-person event again - although without the usual festival afterparty. The festival runs 16-27 March as a mix of cinema and virtual screenings and events, and I'm looking forward to it as usual. Flare is easily London's most festive film festival.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Strawberry Mansion
Kimi • Uncharted
The Real Charlie Chaplin
ALL REVIEWS >

As for the movies, I watched Steven Soderbergh's superbly involving Hitchcockian thriller Kimi, which stars Zoe Kravitz (above) as a tech worker caught in a properly suspenseful mystery. Naomi Watts is terrific in The Desperate Hour, essentially a one-woman show about a mother panicking to get back to her children. It's emotive but a bit contrived.  From Australia, Streamline is an intriguing but far too gloomy drama about a swimmer (Levi Miller) who goes off the rails. From Greece, Echoes of the Past is a familiar WWII drama elevated by the great Max von Sydow, in his final film role. The surreal adventure Strawberry Mansion is a wonderfully inventive journey into dreamscapes starring Kenrucker Audley, who also cowrote and codirected. And from France, A Night in the Fields is an involving short feature about two teens working out their friendship and more.

I also revisited the sensitive, improv-style 2020 New York drama Cicada before hosting a Valentine's Day Q&A with writer-director-star Matthew Fifer, producer Jeremy Truong, producer Ramfis Myrthil and editor Kyle Sims. The film's UK release was delayed by the pandemic, and it was great to finally get to meet them, welcome them to London and chat to a very receptive audience.

In this coming week, films to see include Channing Tatum in Dog and the Palestinian thriller Huda's Salon. I'm also heading off on a break for a couple of weeks, so blog entries may be a bit sporadic. But I'm hoping to catch up with the Foo Fighters in Studio 666 and, yes, Robert Pattinson in The Batman along the way.

Critical Week: Founding fathers

It's my birthday week, so I've been a bit off-schedule, spreading celebrations over three days (as you do!). But I still managed to watch a number of films, including two on the big screen. On Netflix, America: The Motion Picture is a wacky animated mash-up of US history and pop culture silliness. It's utterly idiotic, but the barrage of gags means that some of them elicit laughter. On Prime, The Tomorrow War is a bloated action epic thankfully starring the hugely watchable Chris Pratt as a biology teacher (of course with special ops training) sent to the future to save humanity from spike-shooting aliens. It's utterly idiotic, but cheesy enough to keep us entertained. And on HBO Max, No Sudden Move is a gritty mob thriller expertly directed by Steven Soderbergh, with an superb ensemble led by Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro and Jon Hamm. It's snaky and involving, but holds onto its best thematic kick too long.

BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
The Man With the Answers
Another Round • Summer of Soul
Freaky • No Sudden Move
PERHAPS AVOID: Voyagers
ALL REVIEWS >

As for cinema screenings, there were The Last Bus, an involving and never sentimental drama with Timothy Spall as a very old man travelling the length of Great Britain on public busses, and Jumbo, an inventively well-made French romance based on a provocatively offbeat true story. I also watched The God Committee, a dark morality drama starring a serious Kelsey Grammer; the Argentine dramatic horror Rock, Paper and Scissors, which scarily pits siblings against each other; and the glorious Summer of Soul, beautifully documenting a shamefully forgotten Harlem concert series from 1969.

I also returned to a West End theatre to finally catch up with the musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie, a triumphantly engaging story about a teen who wants to be his colourful self. It has properly great songs too, which bodes well for the film adaptation that's due in the autum.

This coming week, I am looking forward to in-cinema screenings of Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh, and The Duke with Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent. Other films to watch include Emile Hirsch in Son and Nicolas Cage in Pig. I'm also taking a couple of days off, getting out of London for the first time in a year.

Contenders: Four dramas

I've been catching up with movies released earlier in the year that are eligible in the upcoming awards season. Whether they're worthy of consideration is another thing...

The Laundromat
dir Steven Soderbergh
scr Scott Z Burns
with Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Jeffrey Wright, Melissa Rauch, Nonso Anozie, Matthias Schoenaerts, Rosalind Chao, David Schwimmer, Robert Patrick, James Cromwell, Sharon Stone
release US/UK 18.Oct.19 • 19/US Netflix 1h35 **

Weaving together a series of true stories, this financial comedy-drama seeks to explore the secret life of money. It's ambitious, silly and deliberately absurd, narrated by two dandy lawyers (Banderas and Oldman) in Panama. But the script follows so many threads and delivers so much information that it never comes to meaningful life. The themes are vitally important, the film makes some very strong points, and the performances are excellent, but the wildly flailing barrage of detail is numbing.

After a personal tragedy, Ellen (Streep) begins looking into the fraudulent insurance company in Nevis that has shortchanged her. She discovers it's linked to a Panama law firm helping the world's wealthiest people hide their money in shell companies. Their globe-spanning clients include murderous drug kingpins, an African billionaire (Anozie) who knows he can buy anything, and a British businessman (Schoenaerts) who arrogantly challenges his contact (Chao) in China. And the story is about to break, implicating everyone from movie stars to governments.

The film is essentially about the astonishingly thin line between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance. But it's very difficult to care, or even to pay attention, amid endless conversations about finance, insurance, lawsuits, and so on, especially when the tone is so glib. The cast tries to spice things up with personality, screenwriter Burns keeps the words sparky, and director Soderbergh keeps things visually whizzy. But it still feels dull and unfocussed. There's too much effort to create witty cause-and-effect metaphors and colourful explanations, when a coherent, involving central story would have done this much more efficiently.

29.Oct.19

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The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
dir Terry Gilliam
with Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce 18/Sp ***. 
Terry Gilliam spent more than 25 years working on this project (a previous attempt to film it was documented in Lost in La Mancha), and getting the film released wasn't easy either. The plot is wacky and meandering, but Gilliam infuses it with a gleefully freewheeling tone, taking flights of fancy at every turn. So even if its defiantly original style can be challenging, it's both raucous good fun and sharply pointed... FULL REVIEW >

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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
dir-scr Chiwetel Ejiofor
with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Maxwell Simba, Aissa Maiga, Lily Banda, Lemogang Tsipa, Philbert Falakeza, Noma Dumezweni, Rophium Banda, Raymond Ofula, Joseph Marcell
release UK/US 1.Mar.19 • 18/UK BBC 1h53 ***.

For his writing-directing debut, Chiwetel Ejiofor ambitiously takes on a true story from rural Malawi. Beautifully shot in the actual locations, the narrative unfolds in a relatively straightforward way, which doesn't allow for a lot of subtext. But it's a thoroughly involving tale, populated by lively characters. And it's also seriously inspirational as it follows a young teen whose curiosity changed his world.

In a small farming village plagued by cycles of drought and flooding, it's getting more and more difficult to manage the grain harvest. Farming a small plot of land, Trywell (Ejiofor) finds his crops either over-soaked or parched. His wife Agnes (Maiga) is an educated woman who wants the best for their teen children Annie (Banda) and William (Simba). Annie hopes to go to university and is secretly seeing a schoolteacher (Tsipa), while William is a voracious student worried because his parents can no longer afford his school fees. So keeping access to the school library becomes a problem as he begins to figure out a way to solve their irrigation problems using wind-power.

The dramatic conflicts in this story feel a little contrived, as they pit the observant, inventive William against his pointlessly stubborn father. Surely Trywell would understand by now that his son might have ideas beyond his age. But he digs his feet in, flails against nature and prays for rain, while ignoring the solution right in front of him. On the other hand, this provides some meaty conversations, and terrific scenes between Ejiofor, Simba and Maiga, who flesh out their characters beautifully. So in the end, it's a skilful retelling of an important story, and aspects of the film are impressive, such as how Ejiofor learned the local language. It also looks gorgeous, and its emotional kick is very strong, as is the way it encourages us to seek outside-the-box solutions to things like political corruption and natural disasters.

23.Oct.19

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Ma
dir Tate Taylor
scr Scotty Landes
with Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis, McKaley Miller,  Corey Fogelmanis, Gianni Paolo, Dante Brown, Luke Evans, Allison Janney, Missi Pyle
release US/UK 31.May.19 • 19/US Universal 1h39 **.

Starting as a rather typical slickly made smalltown comedy-drama, director Tate Taylor begins from the start to undermine the usual forced Hollywood-style levity with elements from horror movies. But while Octavia Spencer keeps it watchable, the script and production are far too smoothed out to actually generate any suspense, including the way the screenplay uses important topics to offer simple explanations for the nastiness that erupts later on.

Erica (Lewis) and her teen daughter Maggie (Silvers) are settling into life in a new town. Trying to fit in at high school, Maggie hangs out with a group of cool kids including popular girl Haley (Miller), nice guy Andy (Fogelmanis) and jocks Chaz and Darrell (Brown and Waivers). After friendly Sue Ann (Spencer) buys booze for them, she stalks them online and befriends them ("Call me Ma!"), turning her basement into party central. But is she only pretending to be a cool adult?

There are interesting layers to the story, such as Ma's insecurities, which date back to her school days, when her classmates included Maggie, Andy's dad Ben (Evans) and his mean-girl girlfriend Mercedes (Pyle). Taylor overstates these themes loudly, making each wrinkle in the story so painfully obvious that the actual surprises seem anticlimactic. And many sequences feel badly compromised (surely Ma did something else to Ben in the first draft, and her own teen humiliation is botched in a pitch-black gloom). Thankfully, Spencer is skilled at believably navigating Ma's whiplash tonal changes from sweet to party girl to psychopath. But even she can't sell the hyper-grisly climax.

31.Oct.19

Requisite Blog Photo: Feeling lucky, punk?

Bonus extra pic, with @maysamoncao and @ruhulabdin

Critical Week: Palatial kitsch

The most talked-about screening in London this week was for Steven Soderbergh's superb Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, featuring revelatory performances from Michael Douglas, Matt Damon and a superior supporting cast. The film is so good (it also took Cannes by storm) that everyone is perplexed as to why HBO didn't put it in cinemas for a week to make it eligible for the Oscars. So look for it to mop up awards from Bafta, the London Film Critics and probably Emmys and TV Golden Globes as well. We also had a last-minute screening of The Hangover Part III, at which critics laughed just once, leaving us even colder than Part II did.

More interesting were two smaller thrillers: Blood, starring Paul Bettany and Stephen Graham, and Black Rock, with Katie Aselton, Kate Bosworth and Lake Bell - both are effectively unsettling (the girls' film is actually scary). And further afield, we caught up with Studio Ghibli's From Up on Poppy Hill, another beautifully mature animated drama; the arty and involving French odyssey Atomic Age; and a pristine rerelease of John Schlesinger's 1972 forgotten gem The King of Marvin Gardens, with marvellous against-type turns from Jack Nicholson, Ellen Burstyn and recent Cannes-winner Bruce Dern.

This coming week I'll be seeing Ethan Hawke in the horror film The Purge, Logan Lerman in the comedy Stuck in Love, the human trafficking drama Eden, Travis Matthews' controversial I Want Your Love, the British drama Dream On, the first in Ulrich Seidl's trilogy Paradise: Love, the German romance Men to Kiss, and the Johnny Cash doc My Father and the Man in Black.