Chloe Woods watches Pixar’s colourful new feature.

Full confession: it took genuine effort not to break into embarrassing sobs in the middle of the (fairly busy) cinema. That might be the sleep deprivation talking, or it might be because Pixar hasn’t produced a tear-jerker like this since the first few minutes of Up. And that is, obviously, a recommendation.

In lively small-town Mexico, the Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) approaches. For twelve-year-old Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez), cursed with being a budding musician in a family of music-hating shoemakers, it provides the opportunity to live up to his idol Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt) by competing in the talent competition – until he sets off a real curse and finds himself in the Land of the Dead. Now, to exactly nobody’s surprise, he has until daybreak to get home or be trapped there forever, with only fast-talking chancer Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal) to help him get to Ernesto, the one person Miguel believes can get him home on his own terms. (Yes, it’s an oddly specific request.) From there – the usual plot shenanigans and adventures are predictable, but nonetheless heartfelt twists ensue (basically, if you thought twice about the title when you learned who Coco was, you’re 95% of the way there) – and we reach the equally predictable, but well-earned, happy ending. Or as close as you can get to one when half the cast is dead.

Death here is not an ending – only the beginning of a new kind of life, full of joy and love for many, in the teetering, colourful Land of the Dead. If I knew more about Mexican culture perhaps I’d have spotted more, because the film brims over with its vibrant celebration – including conversations with Frida Kahlo (Natalia Cordova-Buckley), quite literally multicoloured alebrije acting as spirit guides, and an opening narration illustrated by the cut-out silhouettes of paper pennants while Miguel indignantly explains that his great-great-grandmother Imelda (Alanna Ubach), after being abandoned by her no-good musician husband, could have gone into the business of fireworks or wrestlers’ underwear but, no, it had to be shoes. Miguel is delightful through the film both in voice and animation (and has a cute animal sidekick, therefore is clearly a princess), while the rest of the voice cast holds up perfectly well even if Imelda’s pet cat does act as something of a scene-stealer. Though all the characters are memorable except – perhaps intentionally – the villain, unnameable for reasons of spoilers but quite of the seen-it-before moustache-twirling mould; they are capable of hiding in plain sight and earning the trust of otherwise good, sensible people. This is – in case the whole “journey to the afterlife on the day of remembrance for dead loved ones” didn’t tip you off – one of Pixar’s more thematically complex films (which I’d love to talk about more, except: spoilers): if you opt to beg or borrow a small child to justify seeing it, pick one of school age¹. It’s really not necessary, though. Nobody’s going to judge you for making a detour away from The Darkest Hour to see the superior film.

And the music. Ah, the music: not because it is spectacular, or because the singing is phenomenal as anyone can have technique. This is not a musical: it is a film about music, which is very different. Though never stated outright, the intent is clear – that music has most value not in performance or the quest for fame, but in the connections it helps create and preserve between human beings. If some of the leads are a little shaky on their vocal chords, it matters far less than the heart in the music and the fact they’re singing at all. And through the music, the memory of love².

Coco is out now in UK cinemas. Watch the trailer:

¹That’s not to say it isn’t a film for kids. It is very much a film for kids, death and betrayal included. There’s a quote I can’t quite remember, or name who said it – though it may have been CS Lewis, or somebody adjacent to him – to the effect of aspiring to tell stories that are worthy of children. Coco is one such.

²This, specifically, is why you’re going to cry.

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Spielberg’s latest, star-studded film.

Usually, the actors are the ones we accuse of phoning it in. After an impressive thirty-nine features, among them lauded some of the greatest films in history, it’s a disappointment to see from Steven Spielberg something so – dare I say it – boring. It’s not that The Post is bad in any objective sense, only that it gets so caught up in its own high-mindedness it forgets to notice whether the audience has fallen asleep.

The first hour in particular drags through the slow details of inter-paper politics and occasional hints of the turmoil to come. The Post picks up a little once the Pentagon Papers enter the picture: but even then it’s a drawn-out and anticlimactic sequence of events. There’s also no great need to pay attention – the film will hammer in both plot points and thematic ones to exhaustion. You won’t leave totally enlightened about the Vietnam War or the impact of the study’s release on the Nixon administration, but you will absolutely be prepared to give an off-the-cuff presentation on the responsibilities of the free press. As long as you don’t mind being without sources, that is: because while The Post does pay lip service to the public consequences of releasing the papers (which reveal that, by 1971, successive administrations had known the Vietnam war was a lost cause for six years), it does a damn poor job of showing any actual concern. The main issue is the fate of the paper, as a financial concern and a personal one. That could have made a perfectly compelling film in its own right; but the import of this local, family-run paper’s destiny for the free press and the democratic process – which, again, we are told about, rather than shown – is less than obvious. Yes, the Washington Post published: but it could have been any now-forgotten rag.

This is the problem. My mother was born in 1971; a straw poll of millennial friends about the Pentagon Papers brings unanimous references to “that film I saw a trailer for recently” and nothing else. The Post, as a film, is missing half its pieces because it presumes understanding of why the Washington Post was later considered a critical bastion in the tradition of muck-raking journalism and a ballsy free press. There’s an obvious comparison to be drawn – this is not the first time the Washington Post has been fictionalised for the big screen – but All the President’s Men, though released (in 1976) only four years after the events of Watergate, does a much better job of sketching out the implications for the uninitiated. Maybe that’s because back then, when events were still fresh in everyone’s mind, it was clear which parts of the message needed to be stated simply. The Post by contrast comes across as an adult talking to a small child – and skipping over the bits required to actually convince. Which would explain the six Golden Globe nominations, I suppose. It will no doubt have very different connotations for an audience which recalls the events in question, and they’ll probably be the main ones watching it. But the people with most to learn from a film like this, which – however crudely – waxes lyrical on the importance of a free press to hold the government accountable, are the people with little interest in a staid Oscar-bait feature starring Tom Hanks as Tom Hanks (I mean, Ben Bradley) and Meryl Streep as Meryl Streep (whoops – Katharine “Kay” Graham).

Timely – it’s timely, after a fashion. The script was purchased in 2016; Spielberg opted to direct the film last February, a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration. I’m going to assume you’ve heard the words “fake news” before: if at any point in the last year you’ve blissfully tuned out the details of the current American administration, all you need to know is it involves a constant assault on the free press, the denial of press passes and other access, and a daily stream of nonsense. Do the newspapers speak truth to power now? When they try, it rarely seems anyone is listening. The Post yearns for the days of the Nixon administration, when revelations of shadiness and lies in the White House could provoke a sea-change in attitudes rather than an exhausted shrug, and journalists cared first and foremost about informing the public. The old-fashioned technologies of typewriters and dial-phones are lovingly caressed by the camera: the point here is not to learn from the past, but simply to romanticise it. Let us go back – to what? To Nixon? To the successive governments who lied about Vietnam? To the courses set in motion that brought us to where we are now? It was not a simpler time of more straightforward questions; that’s only how it seems in hindsight. Ben Bradley and Katharine Graham themselves had dubious links to the heart of government, were pressured not to publish, and battled to find resources for serious journalism. There have always been buffoons and charlatans. People were not nobler then – or they are not less so now – the news is only the first draft of history, and that’s the most telling line in the film: because it doesn’t only mean history still full of notes and clutter. History is penned by the victors, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers marked an important date in the temporary victory by a certain conception of journalism for cultural territory. Newspapers and television anchors, unlike politicians, became people we could place faith in. That was part of the problem. Do the events of The Post have relevance to our present situation? Yes, indeed. Is the solution an attempt to recapitulate the past? No – only in the most basic impulse – that you must tell the truth.

Does the film? I’ve no idea, honestly. Part of its dullness may stem from a loyalty to historic fact, which is rarely cinematic, but if so that would be wasted effort: historic films tend to be swallowed wholesale or disbelieved regardless of their individual merits. Among the current crop, the best to be said for The Post is that at least it’s not another World War II biopsy: but it was supposed to be a film, not a repetitive two-hour lecture on how awesome the free press used to be. We’ve all seen Trump’s tweets. We know.

The Post is out now in UK cinemas. Check out the trailer:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Aaron Sorkin’s Oscar-hopeful directorial debut.

Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) is driven, ambitious, and smarter than every man in the room. Bringing Bloom’s own 2014 memoir to the big screen in a feature both written and – for the first time – directed by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, Molly’s Game is a fast-paced, fast-talking film spanning Molly’s rise and fall as host of two of this century’s most infamous poker tables. Smart as she might be, the cards are ultimately stacked against her, and what began as a game will end up somewhere far more serious.

It’s about poker, but also it’s not about poker, so don’t expect to learn much about the game itself. In-depth explanations of particular hands, provided once or twice, will fly past unless you already understand them. What matters here is the culture of poker-playing among two distinct sets of the American elite, and the associated legal implications: poker itself may be above-board (and Molly makes a determined effort to keep her games clean, or at least ensure plausible deniability) but the other entertainments of the very rich are often not. The film leans into the odd seediness of gambling; even when hosted in classy rooms and breaking not a single by-law, there’s a petty crassness in the competition over money, the politics of invites, and the hapless glee with which a good number of players throw themselves onto the whims of the table’s masters. Molly draws a distinction between poker players and gamblers – almost all those at her games are the latter, including (though she does have enough other concerns to make “good decisions” for a while) Molly herself.

Opening – appropriately enough – with a narrative bluff, the film launches at breakneck speed and (though it drops a notch after the first few minutes) carries that energy for the remainder of its run-time. In the present day, Molly meets with lawyer Charlie (Idris Elba) shortly before her trial and, lacking the funds to pay for counsel, throws herself on his mercy. These conversations (confusingly set after the release of the book the film is based on, and referring to it) intercut and provide a framing device for the retelling of earlier events. By Chastain’s breathless narration we learn that Molly Bloom, after an accident put her out of the professional skiing she’d expected to be her life, worked as an office clerk and cocktail waitress before (and leading to) the eight years of running a high-stakes poker game in LA. When she was ousted from that, she pulled off an incredible ploy to launch a bigger game in New York: it was this game, hosted in a thousands-a-night hotel room, that brought Molly spiralling into drug addiction and entanglements with the Russian mob. Then she wrote a book about it. It’s a point of note that she refused to name anyone in the book not already revealed: considering her involvement in illegal high-stakes poker games and a somewhat self-absorbed tack towards life, Molly comes across as a basically decent human being.

A good part of the credit for that goes to Chastain, of course: this isn’t a performance to go down in history as one of her best, but it’s solid. The chatterbox Molly of the present day contrasts vividly against her younger self, alternately demure, terse, and thoughtful: she is careful with her words, and also clearly has no time for idiots. She spends much of her time talking down to men who think they’re talking down to her: Charlie, though not quite an idiot, gets open condescension instead, which he takes on the chin. This unfortunately gets rendered down into a whole psychotherapy thing surrounding Molly’s dislike and distrust of other humans – specifically men – culminating in a left-field appearance by her psychiatrist father (Kevin Costner). The paternalistic lecture he offers to his grown daughter about her own psyche might have been less galling if we’d seen more of Molly’s interactions with other women: her mother is often mentioned but rarely on-screen, and her female co-conspirators in New York are sidelined for the sake of presenting Molly as isolated in an aggressively male world.

About half the film is, functionally, “Idris Elba and Jessica Chastain stand and talk in a room”, which succeeds most of the time on the strength of script and cast (not that we’d mark these two down as having any particular chemistry together) despite some unfortunate directing choices. Never mind contrasting the two Mollys: the starkest contrast of this film is the one between the script produced by experienced, self-aware writer Aaron Sorkin and the film-making led by amateur director Aaron Sorkin. Fortunately he tends to stick to the tried-and-tested, but it’s easy to tell when he’s aiming for something more interesting, because those are the bits that don’t work.

They are relatively few. Peppered by moments of humour which allow the leads to show off their comic timing, and laced with light commentary on the nature of wealth and corruption in America (so taken for granted, and exploited by the film’s lead, it becomes easy to overlook its broader implications), Molly’s Game is far from groundbreaking: but it does, for the most part, work. And though this review is three weeks late and the film has been in cinemas since the start of the month, there are worse things to go and see.

Molly’s Game is out now in UK cinemas. Watch the trailer below.

Editor Chloe Woods tears into Michael Gracey’s historical musical.

Spoilers ahoy! This piece is more commentary than review.

Given the chance to ask one question, I would ask the creators of The Greatest Showman: why is this the set of lies you chose to tell?

We know films aren’t real. We know full well they are an act of showmanship, of illusion, of storytelling – something very close to a lie. But the point isn’t strictly truth; though historical films do often claim truthfulness and educational value, The Greatest Showman is not one of these, and perfectly upfront about it – the audience should twig from the beginning this will be a decidedly loose adaptation of the life of P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman). Frankly, if the trailer didn’t warn you, you have only yourself to blame. I’m not concerned that The Greatest Showman might have fudged biographic details, or exaggerate the tameness of elephants, or work to a timeline as thin as gossamer. No, the point is not truth: the point is honesty. We humans, poor creatures, might have some small talent for distinguishing raw fact from brute fiction, but we are so easily blinded by the dishonest.

Let’s start with. Fluid timelines may be excusable, but it does in fact make a great deal of difference whether The Greatest Showman is set before or after the American Civil War. After all: what Civil War? You wouldn’t know, from this film, that either the war or slavery ever occurred. You also wouldn’t know that P. T. Barnum’s career as a showman began in 1835 with Joice Heth, an eighty-year-old enslaved woman he presented as the nanny of George Washington; opinion varies on whether he bought or leased her but he sure as hell didn’t offer her a contract as a free agent. (The state of New York had passed an abolition law in 1799 and all slaves had been freed by 1827: but if Barnum could not legally have been anyone’s “master” in New York, that doesn’t mean anyone told the blind, paralysed Heth.) Knowing this history, which The Greatest Showman conveniently elides – in the film, he secures a loan from the bank with his former workplace’s sunken trading ships, establishing his con-artist traits but framing them as cheeky and benign – puts a very different angle on its approach to race relations.

Which is, after all, an approach that would suggest a generally – ah – progressive attitude, an openness of mind, on Barnum’s part. He hires siblings Anne (Zendaya) and W. D. Wheeler (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) without comment; W. D. serves as a background character for the rest of the film, while Anne gets a romantic subplot with Philip Carlyle (Zac Efron). Carlyle is fictional in himself, conveniently freeing him from any of the prejudices which might have belonged to his real-life inspiration. Barnum’s reluctant business partner, won over during a song in which Jackman looks briefly as though he might be about to launch into a striptease, Carlyle acts as the voice of modern values in moments they can’t be completely shoehorned into Barnum’s character: and he falls in love with Anne, which – with the crudest of historical accuracy – would have been verboten in 1850s(ish?) New York. The film is so determined to hit you over the head with this, it’s hard to decipher what they actually like about each other. Look how racist people were then! Think of their forbidden love! For the viewer, the trials faced by the couple might well be accompanied by a sense of satisfaction, in knowing that we are better now… When the reality is that if we have, over time, adopted different values (mostly because the Black community, and others, fought tooth and nail to be recognised), it does not mean we are any less beholden to the blind assumptions of our culture: not more open-minded, only – a little – less racist.

The condescension peaks with Efron and Zendaya’s duet Rewrite the Stars, which is suitably cloying and more memorable for its accompanying acrobatics than any musical virtue. Credit to them for actually singing their parts, though: Rebecca Ferguson as “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind couldn’t manage that much.

Ah. Jenny Lind. A bit of research suggests she’s been unfairly represented (The Greatest Showman spins donations to charity as social-climber virtue-signalling) – twisted to further the arc of Barnum’s social-climbing ambitions. It is an arc, though real people don’t conform to dramatic structure, and an inconsistent one at that: does he want to be recognised specifically by the elites who shut him out in childhood, or can he simply not stand the thought of people he isn’t making laugh? The film spins a simple moral about the lure of the bright lights, fame and fortune, which Jackman’s Barnum – being at least a decent man, if not a good one – recognises and is conflicted about. It’s a pretty story; the issue is, all our evidence suggests the real Barnum, more notorious hoaxer and charlatan than defender of the downtrodden, wouldn’t have cared to hear it.

But sing for the outsider: the real musical standout is Keala Settle. This Is Me differs from most of the film’s attempted showstoppers (including the opening and closing numbers) by lingering after it ends: an uplifting, foot-stamping ballad of the kind Barnum’s showcases almost certainly would not have sung. I need to be clear: when we throw out the assumption of cultural familiarity with the past, we often make the mistake of also throwing out historical people’s sense of themselves as individuals or creators rather than passive victims of their social norms. Yes, there were people in the Victorian era who fought for the right to be recognised as human in a world determined to deny them: you can see that in the abolition movement, in various religious groups, in early feminist writers. But those at the very edges of society, showcased as freaks, for crowds to gawk at if not curse, rejected by their own parents and communities – do you think, even if they believed in themselves as deserving of a place in the world, they’d have dared to sing it? And do you think P. T. Barnum, who put them on display, would have been the benefactor who sang it alongside them?

Here we meet the lie at the heart of the lies: that rich men care for anything but riches. That’s a capitalist folly and in large part and Hollywood one: the point where Barnum’s carnival of lights loops back round to the film it’s enshrined in. Hell, maybe Barnum believed in his own fine tales about making people laugh. The film was seven years in development, probably because nobody thought it would sell until they heard about Hamilton (of the same mould: you do realise the man owned slaves, don’t you?); but maybe the film’s creators have convinced themselves they care for artistic pride and the smiles on their audience’s faces as much as they do for money. Go in knowing this and you’ll still be hard-pressed not to walk out whistling. That’s the game: keep ‘em coming back for more. Only a movie. Under it, the dangers of the lies; the master of freaks and inveterate fraud transformed into go-getting, spunky trickster hero. I would ask the creators of The Greatest Showman: is this what you really believe in? Cheap, dishonest, reckless – if nothing else, what better homage could there be to the man? Welcome to the circus…

The Greatest Showman is out now in UK cinemas. Check out the trailer:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews the Bad Moms holiday sequel.

I believe I’ve spotted a theme when it comes to sequels for comedy films: add more funny people, but have the humour take a backseat to heartfelt, meaningful moments. That, or double down on the slapstick. (Judging by the trailer, this would be the preferred method of Daddy’s Home 2, which has gone for exactly the same method of expanding on its original premise as the film under review: have the protagonists’ parents visit for Christmas. It would be interesting to perform a compare-and-contrast of the films but – and perhaps saving this reviewer’s sanity – I can’t stand Mark Wahlberg.) We’re fortunate, at least, A Bad Moms Christmas goes with the first method.

So. Amy (Mila Kunis), Kiki (Kristen Bell) and Carla (Kathryn Hahn) are our three original bad moms. The plot of the first movie, if you haven’t seen it, is almost totally irrelevant, though (and this, too, is a theme) the film will not bother to explain any of the established interpersonal dynamics and certainly won’t build upon them, so good luck understanding why any of these people matter to each other. (Unless, I suppose, you consider Amy’s new boyfriend getting a Christmas invite to be a character arc.) The focus is almost entirely on their variably-screwed-up relationships with their mothers, respectively: Ruth (Christine Baranski), Sandy (Cheryl Hines) and Isis, yes, “like the terrorist organisation” (Susan Sarandon looking as if she’s highly enjoying herself). They run the usual gamut of bad-mother stereotypes: Ruth is the overly-demanding, culturally snobbish perfectionist, Isis the negligent stoner who swings into town every three years for gambling money, and – wildcard number 3 – Sandy the overly-clingy one with no sense of boundaries whatsoever.

The plot quick-steps through the predictable beats by means of the expected shenanigans: getting drunk in a mall, a rather entertaining dodgeball game, the moms alternately cowing before and standing up to their mothers. For Amy, our lead, things culminate at the massive Christmas party (sushi, camels and Kenny G included) threatened throughout the film, while the others have their own breaking points. Then everybody kisses and makes up and celebrates Christmas together. I mean, that’s not even a spoiler, is it? Outside this, we have a tacked-on romance plot for Carla (her possible loneliness is mentioned only twenty or so minutes into the movie, and the subplot itself is deliberately ridiculous – it basically consists of a string of big-dick jokes and ties into little else in the film – and, uh, the guy is handsome, I suppose? I can’t really tell), and the development of a friendship between the grandmothers themselves (oddly sweet, in its way, though it does call to attention that Sandy is rather more deranged than the other two).

It’s entertaining enough, for the most part. All the cast members can handle the comedy required of them, which, though we might call it a bare minimum for a funny movie, is not always the case. It’s not bad. There’s just nothing particularly memorable about this film: it’s the same kind of thing we’ve been seeing all our lives, over and over again. That in itself is arguably the most interesting thing about it. What do we tell each other when we’re not paying attention? That children are the most important thing in a woman’s life (I somehow doubt the sentiment will be echoed for the fathers in Daddy’s Home); that if raising us drove our mothers crazy, we are not to criticise them (as Wanda Sykes tells us in a bizarre – enjoyable, sure, but bizarre – cameo as Sandy and Kiki’s therapist); that we are to forgive people who’ve made no effort to apologise or make amends for bringing Kenny G into our homes. Also that small children swearing will always be hilarious. I don’t know. It’s just a funny movie, right?

Bad Moms Christmas is out now in UK cinemas. Watch the trailer below.

Our second co-hosted Central DOCS Club event at Picturehouse Central featured a screening of Jane Goodall doc Jane followed by a discussion. Get involved in the next DOC Club screenings with Mountain on Dec 18th and Walk With Me on Jan 8th.

Editor Chloe Woods continues the discussion with her review of the film.

Apparently I can’t assume everybody knows who Jane Goodall is. Born in 1934, the world’s most famous and most-revered expert on chimpanzees first set foot in Africa in her early twenties, and in 1960 established the (ongoing) field study of chimps in Gombe, Tanzania. Not long afterwards she shook both the scientific community and the wider world with her groundbreaking observations into chimpanzee behaviour – particularly the revelation that they used and made tools – and since the mid-1980s she has travelled the world to campaign for conservation and environmental responsibility. That’s Jane Goodall¹.

Brett Morgen’s documentary, Jane, expands on the bare bones of this biography via recent interviews with Goodall, narration from her 2001 autobiography and – most astonishingly – footage from the National Geographic archives, shot in the 1960s by Hugo van Lawick, and believed lost until 2014. Van Lawick, as the documentary notes, is considered one of the world’s greatest nature filmmakers, and it shows. He was also for a while Jane Goodall’s husband: that shows, too, despite the constraints of the assignment brief (Goodall was not, for example, best pleased to be informed the National Geographic wanted footage of her washing her hair when there were chimps to look at) and the objectivity a wildlife photographer must attempt to maintain between subject and camera. But in the early years at Gombe, where the largely untrained Goodall was free to work as she best pleased and did so according to her own values rather than the established ones of the scientific community – then rather colder and more dismissive towards viewing animals as individuals with personalities rather than automatic cogs in the grind-wheel of natural selection – Gombe was not a place of enforced objectivity, and likely better for it.

But it takes a while for Jane to get to that, and it has no inclination to hurry through its story. There are many shots, particularly in the opening minutes, of Goodall by herself in the African forest; then Goodall, and later others, interacting with the chimpanzees to whom she gave names. We learn a little about her childhood, about the part of her life spent (still with van Lawick) on the Serengeti, and about her subsequent campaigning work, and much of this is accompanied by Goodall’s own thoughts on the matter. She is hardly unaware of the startling position she occupied as a young woman doing work in Africa by herself, first feared-for and required to take her mother along as chaperone, then dismissed by her looks and her age when her research challenged prior belief. She muses also on the dangers of chimpanzees, not then known, but growing apparent through the years of research; the dangers to chimpanzees by close human contact, both accidentally and as deliberate harm; and, perhaps most intimately, on how she came by her own character and the single-minded confidence that would lead a person to watch the chimps for months upon end while making no apparent progress. She makes no apologies for having no interest in marriage until she met someone who shared her passion and, when it came to a choice between husband and that passion, no apologies for putting the passion and her ambition first. For though we learn about Jane’s relationships with her first husband², her son and her parents, it’s clear the defining relationship of her life has been that with chimpanzees, both in aggregate and singularly.

So, from the caterpillar crawling on the branch to the infant chimp playing on the tent, Goodall’s calm, classic English accent leads the viewer through the grainy images; and though relatively few of the clips might correlate to the moments referenced, since chimps will rarely perform for camera and the most important events can hardly be predicted – that’s of no consequence. If we don’t see it as it happened first we are, after all, used to the illusions of cinema, and being in the right place and the right time – Africa, the young Jane Goodall with her hair back in the loose ponytail she still wears today – they are truer than many, weaving a tale it is difficult not to be drawn into. (Though it does get a little didactic towards the end, which is no crime in itself but clumsily shoehorned here.)

The strange thing about this is it almost disguises the fact that Brett Morgen, as a filmmaker, has not done anything outstanding. The critical world has been full of praise for this documentary – well, yes. Van Lawick’s footage is universally gorgeous and Goodall’s strength of character and intelligence shine through: beyond this, the construction of the documentary is on the unoriginal side. It’s very much as if Morgen, handed these impressive starting blocks from which to construct the documentary, fitted them together competently enough (and I’ll admit, combing through the archive footage must have been a hell of a job), then floundered when asked to impress upon it his own interpretation. The points of focus feel as though they’ve been riffed from Goodall’s autobiography and, if so, she must take credit for the narrative structure of Jane, which races through emotional milestones without lingering long enough to let their impact sink in, repeats itself to the point of patronisation, and uses trite, overblown musical prompts to spell out the moment’s mood. And as a result it is merely very good when, given the materials and subject matter at hand, it could well have been brilliant.

Goodall is very media-savvy and this film as much as anything will show her as she wants the world to see, but you can be both astute and genuine. There can be little doubt her love of chimps, and of the natural world more broadly, has driven her for fifty years; little doubt too, though it receives passing mention in this up-close-and-personal work, of the impact she’s had upon both the scientific and environmentalist communities. Jane treats us to details in the life of a remarkable woman from a perspective once thought lost forever. Even if Morgen might have been less condescending in his musical motifs, it’s well worth the watch. Because that’s Jane Goodall – the first and grandest of the Trimates³, and perhaps the most important primatologist in history.

¹Some details which didn’t make it make it into the film but which this writer considers interesting: in 1962, after first developing her own ideas on chimp behaviour and marking herself out as an independent thinker, Goodall became a student of Newnham College, Cambridge as one of the few people to study for a PhD without first receiving a bachelor’s degree; she is vegetarian; and in 1987 or so Gary Larson referenced her in a comic which the staff at the Jane Goodall Institute described as an “atrocity” but Goodall herself was apparently quite entertained by.

²You wouldn’t know it from Jane, but Goodall has been married twice. Her second husband, Derek Bryceson, died of cancer in 1980 after about five years of marriage.

³There were three women who set out, via the encouragement of palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, to study then-unknown great ape species in the 1960s and ‘70s. The second, the bombastic Dian Fossey, was immortalised in the 1988 Gorillas in the Mist three years following her murder at still-unconfirmed hands; the third, Birute Galdikas, is less well-known but like Goodall campaigns for environmental conservation and primate protection, in addition to continuing her research on orangutans in Indonesia. The unfortunate alternative name for the group is “Leakey’s Angels”. So now you know.

Editor Chloe Woods examines Angela Robinson’s biographical drama.

Sometimes history defies the limits of creative imagination: and this is the case with the creator of Diana Prince, Wonder Woman, first introduced to the world in (1941) by William Marston. What author would invent a disgraced psychologist living in a clandestine polyamorous relationship in 1930s American suburbia to write and publish the world’s first truly successful female superhero – as a vehicle of propaganda for the cheerful submission of boys and men to women’s superiority? But such is the history recounted in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.

Or at least, that’s either the story director and writer Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S., The L Word) believes she’s telling, or the one she knows she’s not telling. It’s hard to be certain. Though few people have ever accused the makers of historical films of being overly beholden to actual, lived reality, it’s considered decent of them to stick with the generally-accepted version of events, even when it concerns a history not many people know about. Here, the generally-accepted version is that the story is about William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), the progenitor of Diana and of DISC theory, a psychological theory later developed into a behavioural assessment tool, and his relationship with two women. It’s true that Professor Marston and the Wonder Women follows said Professor Marston for much of the film; true that he is central to the framing device so might be attributed with guiding the narrative; true that on paper the film revolves around the triadic, polyamorous relationship of Elizabeth-William-Olive most accounts report, Professor Marston and his wonder women; true that the story being told is the story advertised, the history-as-understood.

Except that, looked at from another angle, the film is not about Professor Marston or his life or the creation of Diana at all. Those things are included, and they’re more than subplots, but they’re less than plot. At this film’s beating heart drives nothing more nor less than a love story between two people, not three, and neither of them is William Marston. It was – to put it bluntly – a surprise, and one I’m still struggling to piece together. Perhaps Robinson didn’t think a heterosexual relationship needed to be sold as hard. Perhaps she thought it didn’t deserve to. Perhaps she simply wanted to focus on two women falling in love (I should mention, perhaps, that Robinson is herself a lesbian). Perhaps she thought it was true. Whatever the reason, ultimately, the upshot is that the most important story in Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman is the story of Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall) and Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) and their complex, resisted, baffling love across the years.

Film studies 101: how do we show love on screen? Traditionally, compared to love in the real world, it contains rather more in the way of lingering glances and longing looks, and rather less driving over at 3am because the cat is stuck under the cooker again. We could argue about the merits of romance’s presentation in film until the chickens come home to roost, but for now, let’s play by the rules. By staging, Olive and Elizabeth are often isolated – together – while William is peripheral; he is rarely alone with either past the opening minutes of the film. Whether he is present or absent, both camera and score are more interested in the points of contact the women share, both physically and in their eyes across empty rooms and speakeasy tables. It is Olive’s advance towards Elizabeth that sets the triad into motion, and Elizabeth’s wariness of her feelings towards another woman – shame as much as logical awareness of societal censure – that provide its greatest stumbling block. They orbit around each other while William, much of the time, simply watches: the film is a study in who is watching who and it seems not coincidental that during their most pivotal moments he is cast into the role of voyeur. This is true not only of the almost gratuitously lavish relationship-forging kiss but, frankly, of the sex scene that follows. Though husband to one and lover to the other, William Marston for the large part is constructed as much as as live-in companion, and might even be read as facilitator of Olive and Elizabeth’s relationship. Certainly, his final important act (knowing he has – spoilers – not many years left to live) is to encourage their reconciliation; in real life, as the closing credits note, Elizabeth and Olive remained together long after William’s death.

The story in which William Marston is the central lynchpin of a poly relationship with two bisexual women who inspired the warrior Diana (also – though very latterly – bisexual) may be the story we are being told, but it is not the story we are being shown. Hell: the word “bisexual” is never used, and though the old historical-accuracy bell may be rung for that (may: the term is older, but it does appear to have only been popularised by Kinsey later than the film is set), that doesn’t account for the inclusion of “lesbian” or a namecheck of Sappho. And if I appear to have spent a disproportionate quantity of the review on this, it’s because I’m still not sure what to think. Angela Robinson either has no idea what she’s doing, or she’s a genius. And this film is not, otherwise, the work of someone with no idea what they’re doing: it’s solidly-structured, the dialogue is well-written, the characters are vivid and complex; and if the sound and camerawork aren’t going to set off any new stylistic trends, they’re a fair cut above competent. It’s hard to believe Robinson wasn’t fully aware, making this film, she’d effectively underwritten an official history of polyamorous bisexuality with a lesbian love story. I suppose the important question is whether or not she’s right. Debates continue to this day about the true sequence of events in the Marston household, including over how much of the loving, balanced relationship depicted between the three existed in reality.

Well. Whatever story is being told, the actors sell it. Hall stands out as the proud Elizabeth, equally gifted and cursed as a woman in the early 20^th century with driven intelligence; Elizabeth is the most cautious of the three towards their relationship, and Hall balances the fine line between pragmatic and ashamed perfectly. Heathcote is also strong, presenting Olive as the ingenue who perhaps could have been afforded greater opportunity to show off her own intellectual strength. Evans too acts well, though he’s a little less portly than Marston in reality, and I must admit the ages of their children are baffling. (They look school-aged when the chronology suggests they should be toddlers.) I’d also recommend taking the psychology with a teaspoon of salt. Though they have debates, the film doesn’t seek to undermine known wrong beliefs the characters share – for example, about the effectiveness of polygraphs. The psychological bent of the film, and the focus on Marston’s DISC theory, might render some scenes uncomfortable to viewers who don’t agree with the paradigm.

It’s certainly an addition to this year’s impressive slate of LGBT films, if a somewhat awkward one considering – shall we say – all of the above: the question remains where to place it. I’m still uncertain. Then again, I’ve been told not everyone watches films to interrogate their presentation of gender dynamics or sexuality, so to conclude (TL;DR) I should simply say Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is a highly enjoyable watch if you’re in the mood for reasonably light historical drama (with occasional naked people). And while not everyone might agree with me that it’s a fine film, there can be no doubt it’s a fascinating one.

Professor Marston & the Wonder Women premiered at London Film Festival on the 10th of October.

Editor Chloe Woods takes a look at Matthew Vaughn’s blockbuster sequel.

Two facts are indisputable. Matthew Vaughn likes to blow people up. And he can make a bloody good movie. Kingsman: The Golden Circle is everything its predecessor was and then some – more chaotic, more creatively ridiculous, more irreverent, and ultimately more fun. Where The Secret Service dragged early on, The Golden Circle feels no need to explain its parameters and plunges audiences straight into a wild ride.

Indeed, the metaphor of the rollercoaster is apt, because Kingsman – like so many of its ilk – is a masterclass in producing the impression of danger and thrills while knowing we are securely strapped in. Of course the world will be saved. Of course things will return to pretty much as they were before, give or take an allegiance or two and the deaths of people who apparently don’t matter in the first place. Or should, but tone is hard to balance and the poignancy of loss doesn’t settle easily against a background of such low stakes – and I do mean low because, whatever other boundaries it pushes, the Kingsman films will not allow them to be genuinely high. Yet into this The Golden Circle tries to inject a realism and sombreness around individual death that – I’m not saying it couldn’t work. There are no rules here. But it doesn’t work. I’m not sure how far these films can go on attitude alone: as much fun as the Kingsman movies are, and as much as I’ve enjoyed both far, I’m not raving to see a third one.

All the same. It’s a good movie. For the value of good that means quality.

Plot – you wanted plot? Taron Egerton’s Eggsy emerges from the Kingsman Tailor’s shop and comes face-to-face with an enemy he thought dead, but who has in fact been cyborg’d. There are some explosions. Poppy (Julianne Moore), queen of all she surveys in a faux-fifties diner complex hidden in the middle of the jungle, steps into play as the villain of the piece: delightfully unhinged, armed with “the mincer” (it’s exactly what it sounds like) and a pair of vicious robotic dogs (good doggies), and ready to unleash a megomaniacal doomsday plan upon the planet. There are more explosions. We are introduced to the Statesmen – the American counterparts of the Kingsmen, with whisky (note spelling) in the place of tailored suits and one damned good Indiana Jones impression. Actually, I think Indy had a bit less finesse with a whip. More explosions, some shenanigans with a cable car, a rendition of Take Me Home, Country Roads that might leave you unable to hear that song the same way again followed by a joke about heroin overdoses followed by a sob story about dead loved ones fit to give you whiplash – and the good guys win.

There’s probably some sophisticated point to be made here about the James Bond movies, those paragons of the spy-action genre, and the Kingsman series’ efforts to parody/pay homage to/play off Bond’s established tropes. Unfortunately, your reviewer (as reminded at the screening when her rowmate attempted to draw her into conversation about Daniel Craig’s performance) has seen, approximately, two and a half Bond films, of which the only enduring memories are Honey Ryder in a bikini, Judi Dench’s wonderful (spoilers) death scene and the pristine blandness that was Spectre. Certainly the similarities are evident. The Golden Circle has shucked off the shackles a little in favour of growing into its own thing, which might be welcomed if we all approved of the own thing.

There are three things to contend with here. First is, if (spoilers) the anal sex joke in The Secret Service bothered you, there are a couple of scenes in this film you’re not going to like – and they don’t wait for the end credits. But that’s a whole nother discussion about our society’s attitudes towards sex (versus representations of violence, in terms of women and gender roles, in terms of films-as-provocation, etcetera, etcetera). Second, this film probably thinks it’s being progressive in terms of representation, but Halle Berry’s Ginger stands out as one of two important female characters and the only important non-white character to make it to the end of the film – and when I say “important”, I don’t mean she actually gets to do anything. Multiple people don’t get to do anything interesting for more than a couple of scenes: we’re playing with an overloaded cast here.

And third, the film tries to talk politics. Oh, gods, it tries to talk politics – which mostly feels like being hit over the head with a baseball bat, or the reverse of one of those anti-drug PSAs from the 80s. Though I will say (and I’m sure this was in place before the November elections), the US president still manages to be less cartoonishly evil than the one America actually has.

But if you can turn your brain off from all that, you’ll find Elton John (as himself) in a couple of his best classic outfits stealing scenes from everyone but Julianne Moore, an otherwise solid cast (Mark Strong stands out as Merlin), a few of the most out-there and technically impressive action scenes you’re likely to come across this year, a fair number of laughs, and a vaguely satisfying saved-the-world ending. Truth is, there’s something about these films that a lot of people truly love, and as someone who’s liked them but not loved them I can’t precisely figure out what it is: but if you did love the first one, I’d hazard you’re likely enough to love The Golden Circle too. And if not, cover your eyes for the uncomfortable bits and hum John Denver to yourself.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is out now in UK cinemas. Trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Taylor Sheridan’s murder mystery thriller.

This is a film about pain.

Wind River opens to a girl running in a frozen field, under a white moon. We watch her run and we know she will not survive. From there, the film opens to the bleak and beautiful landscape of Wyoming, snow-bound while the rest of the world undergoes spring. We meet Corey Lambert (Jeremy Renner) in white sniping gear; a ranger with the Fish and Wildlife Services, employed by the US government, white man with a Native son, he belongs and does not belong and he knows this as intimately as he knows the land he works in. His job is to keep livestock safe by the slaughter of its predators. In his life, death is familiar and unremarkable; in the film, we find the threat of it always present, in some of the most peaceful moments. How to live? When all you have is the land, and the land does not care?

Here humans are weak, and die easily. Here humans are strong, and fight to survive. Corey is marked by his protectiveness not only towards the flocks but towards almost everyone he encounters. We might call this attitude masculinity, honest and fractured; an expression of what we’re trying to describe but usually fail to when we use the word as virtue. There is no judgement or demand here: it simply describes the character of certain people recognised as carrying out certain roles in the community, who mostly happen to be men. For Corey, filling the role he’s learned is his – as a man – means simply that he is capable (of surviving, of making his way in the wilderness), and he will guard those who are not. He will guard them with kind words and he will teach his son to be gentle.

He has failed before in his duty to protect. He has learned there must be some surrender to the whims of fate: perhaps that is why he has kept his mind, and others have not. Because this is, as I say, a film about pain, and there is no mercy here for those who inflict it. They are shown to be pathetic and grovelling and weak. They are those who have broken under suffering to become pitiful and monstrous; less than human; survival is not, after all, only a physical act. There are no excuses for those who take and take, and leave shattered communities and lives behind. That is why the film does not and cannot shy away from the worst violence humans inflict upon each other.

So Corey Lambert walks alone in the wilderness. He guards the sheep from the wolf. Tracking a mountain lion, he finds a dead girl instead, setting off a hunt to find her murderers. Then into the snow-bound landscape stumbles FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen). A green, city-born southerner, she makes mistake after mistake, but learns quickly. She attaches herself to Corey like a lost lamb, judging correctly that he can help her bring justice – or whatever passes for justice here – better than the overstretched police department.

I won’t tell you the rest. The most important parts of the film are not necessarily those to be included in a synopsis, and to describe those powerful, quiet moments would be to cheapen them. Wind River exists swathed in snow and the shifting musical soundscape of America, though it is often quiet, and leaves the viewer to read the signs. Not an actor in the film is but perfectly cast. Renner reminds us of his skill in more serious endeavours. Olsen is a blend of frailty, composure and stubbornness; she crashes headfirst through the languid mood with city vibrance, but that’s fitting, since she does not belong.

There might be reservations about a film starring two white leads set on an, um, reservation and revolving around the violence inflicted against the Native American community. But there are always two questions. Does this story deserve to be told? And: has this story been told well? As a film speaking to Native suffering through the eyes of a white man and a white woman, yes, Wind River is a story told well. For the characters’ part, Corey, at least, understands plenty of this: he is not surprised to have the colour of his skin thrown in his face over the careless use of the word “we”. But if it is not his land, the people here are nonetheless his family. Jane, who sees first and foremost a dead girl and a murder she refuses to leave unsolved, seems to have only a passing awareness of the cultural difficulties and trundles into them with a well-intentioned lack of sensitivity. The point – in this film about pain – is compassion. It is that people might help not out of group loyalty or obligation but simply because they see others in need and are in a position to do something about it; that this is the right thing to do; which argument can only be made and sympathised with from the perspective of those with the power, not those who are denied it. So: yes, they’re white people, and this is first and foremost a film for white people, but that is not in isolation a bad thing. While I might wish for three films by Native writers and crew for every one Wind River, I would not wish away Wind River.

If nothing else, it is beautiful.

This is a film about pain. It is about loss, about longing, about grief. It is about boys up to their eyeballs on drugs because they think there’s nothing better available for them; a girl who dreams of meadows; a veteran who promises endless summer to another girl, who will die alone in the cold. It is the hunter alone, dispassionate compassion, and survival. But Wind River does not dwell on those who bring this pain, on their actions, or on their identities; the villains of the piece are briefly-seen, gruesome, and the film sees no need to revel in the portrayal of their actions. This is not a film about violence, though violence permeates it. No, this is a film about pain. About how we bear it. About how we reach out, sometimes, and share it, in the hopeless attempt to lessen its weight. And it is about how, at the ends of the earth, where winter storms overwhelm spring, we find our ways to carry on living.

Wind River is out now in UK cinemas. Trailer below.

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Lucia Aniello’s female-driven comedy.

If you look to your left, you will see a crop of spoilers almost ready for harvest. Please keep your hands and arms inside the review. The author is not responsible for opinions you may pick up on the tour – be sure to shake your brain down before exiting if you don’t wish to take them home.

Yeah, all right. Nobody expected high cinema. Scarlett Johansson’s foray into the world of girls-gone-wild raunchy film was always going to be more an exercise in keeping an audience laughing for ninety minutes than a contemplation on the nature of the human condition or whatever Martin Scorsese is up to this week. So we can excuse almost any criticism you want to throw at Rough Night (which, I should mention, is really Lucia Aniello’s, not Johansson’s) as long as it meets that one requirement, call it a success, and send it off to join the pile of future teen sleepover fare. But here we run like an out-of-control speedboat onto the unforgiving sand of Rough Night’s fatal, inexcusable flaw:

It’s not really very funny.

I know humour is subjective, but I think I have some grounds for making this claim because 1. Nobody in the cinema was laughing, 2. There was hardly anybody present to begin with, suggesting neither word-of-mouth nor advertising had worked in its favour (and, OK, it was Edinburgh during the final weekend of the Fringe) and 3. Subjective or not, there are some basic ground rules in terms of making jokes work and Rough Night broke them. 90% of comedy is in the execution: plenty of the gags would have looked fine on paper, only to fall flat on-screen for reasons nobody would have been able to explain and to the director’s well-known mantra of, “Let us fix it in post.” It’s really simple stuff: tone, timing, setup, payoff. Notwithstanding that comedy is one of the hardest things on the planet, comedy is one of the easiest things on the planet. People want to laugh. If I’m doing my job right, there’s a 50-50 chance this review will make you laugh more than Rough Night¹, though admittedly I don’t have to wrangle multiple people who think they’re funny and one A-lister who might just wish she can leave this one off the resume right about now, or hold your attention for ninety minutes. Unless you read very slowly. I don’t judge.

Jess (Johansson) and Alice (Jillian Bell) were best friends and roommates in college, to which end we are treated to a five-minute beer pong segment for no other purpose than to demonstrate they were Best Friends In College. Now Jess is running for office (state senate, not that it matters) and Alice is doing something with children: as far as I can tell, teaching snot-nosed children their ABCs, which we’re meant to read as failure though we’ve no indication it wasn’t a perfectly good career choice or exactly what she wanted to do. Blair (Zoe Kravitz) is also doing something with children, namely fighting custody battles over them with all the money she makes as a real estate agent, while her ex Frankie (Ilana Glazer) is hosting the kind of unwashed protests that went out of fashion in 1973, which she then runs off from to attend Jess’s bachelorette party. It’s never clear if Frankie knows she’s a hypocrite, or if the film knows modern anti-capitalist protest involves less in the way of “people with mobile phones are hypocrites” and more “legal aid funded via Indiegogo”. Taking a stab at youth activism seems like an odd choice for a film that wreaths itself in the language and tropes of social justice (or tries to, at any rate), but Blair doesn’t come off unscathed either, so the cynicism would seem to be about life and people in general and is never well-articulated; and in the middle of laughing at them for stereotypes too many times simplified to resemble anything in reality, we are actually meant to like them as individuals. I think.

Anyway – bachelorette party – there’s an unnecessary meeting in an airport, and I’m starting to think I’ve seen this movie before. Multiple times. Same eyes, different people, though at least one recent version was significantly better. They reach Florida (and then, and then), where the four are joined by Kate McKinnon’s Pippa and we take a nosedive into The Kate McKinnon Show. I’m reasonably confident the script at points said nothing but “let Kate McKinnon be funny here”. That’s a valid tactic, if you can trust an actor to come up with the goods. Unfortunately McKinnon cannot be trusted, and also isn’t really an actor. Anyone who says Scarlett Johansson can’t act should sit through this film: she emotes more with her little finger than the rest of the cast put together, and the strongest scenes (alongside Demi Moore and Ty Burrell as loved-up swingers) are those in which she gets a chance to take the lead. Unfortunately McKinnon, by far the weakest link, receives the lion’s share of the camera’s loving gaze.

Anyway – I’m getting to the point – they kill a stripper. Who (spoilers) turns out not to be a stripper, because heaven forfend your characters must suffer consequences. (… That, in fairness, we can attribute to genre.) They spend the rest of the film attempting to clean up the mess and in the process, naturally, make things worse. In an even less entertaining sequence, Jess’s fiance, Peter (Paul W. Downs), drives all the way to Florida in an adult diaper after a garbled phone call leads him to believe she wants to call off the wedding – or rather (credit to my viewing companion for this observation), what started as a joke about the more sedate bachelor party got ripped to shreds by the necessity of getting Peter to Florida for the climax of the film. Oh, and (spoilers), Blair and Frankie get back together, with no build-up beyond angry bickering and no attempt to resolve their totally incompatible lives, core value sets or evident communication issues. But hey – lesbians/bisexual women deserve to have ridiculous tacked-on romances in bad movies as much as straight couples.

And basically: it’s a bad movie. It was supposed to be a funny movie and it’s not a funny movie, which is all it was ever going to have going for it, and the most interesting thing about all this is I feel there are fewer movies like it with each passing year: mid-range summer comedies destined to not-quite-vanish in popular memory. Its obvious twin in the summer slate, Girls Trip, is smart, on point and a cut above. Rough Night – not a total flop, but far from a stellar success – was never aiming to be anything grand, or groundbreaking, or particularly clever. It only wanted to make people laugh. It only needed to make people laugh.

It just wasn’t funny enough.

Rough Night is out now in UK cinemas. Trailer below.

¹Having now written the whole thing, I don’t think that’s true, but it’s almost midnight and three days late so you can take what you get.

 

Editor Chloe Woods reviews David Leitch’s highly-anticipated Cold War thriller.

A few weeks ago, the BBC announced Jodie Whittaker as the new Doctor, and discussion turned naturally to the casting of another British cultural icon who has worn many faces: James Bond. Charlize Theron, the star of spy thriller Atomic Blonde, is one of the names on everybody’s lips in discussion of a potentially gender-swapped Bond. This is foolishness, not because Theron would make anything less than an excellent Bond, but because she’d be wasted in the sleek, sanitised confines of Bond’s more-money-than-sense adventures.¹ Atomic Blonde has a heft and a glamour all its own, and it would be a far better use of everyone’s time to focus on that film for its own sake than treat it as an audition tape for another franchise.

Focus is key. Atomic Blonde throws audiences in at the deep end of Cold War espionage, spinning a network of alliances and counter-alliances its characters are deeply familiar with but we will only begin to unravel towards the end of the film. To confuse matters further, it takes a non-linear approach to time, framing the main sequence of events within the post-mission debrief of Lorraine Broughton (Theron) by her MI6 and CIA handlers. The film doesn’t take some of the liberties it might with this setup – while Lorraine may not be totally honest in her report, the camera is always honest with the audience; but honesty too can be used to deceive, and I doubt many viewers will see the film’s ultimate revelations coming far in advance. (Or possibly I haven’t watched enough spy films to be good at second-guessing them. Who knows?)

So here we are: Berlin, 1989, in the days immediately before the fall of the Berlin Wall. James Gascoigne (Sam Hargrave) is murdered by a KGB agent for a list of spies’ names multiple people are eager to get their hands on. Lorraine is sent in to retrieve the list alongside David Percival (James McAvoy), a British agent who has effectively gone feral in the smuggler’s paradise, punk underground of East Berlin. Both have secrets of their own, and neither trusts the other, even as they work together to get both the physical list and the man whose head holds its contents back across the wall before the situation implodes. In the process Lorraine meets and forms a connection with the young agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella), drinks more vodka than the human body should be capable of processing, takes multiple ice baths (some more voluntary than others), destroys several cars, shows off a series of outfits to remind us ‘80s fashion wasn’t all dire, and engages in one of the most brutal and drawn-out action sequences I’ve seen in a long while.²

So here we are: Berlin, 1989, in the days immediately before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though it’s true of London too, everything is in black and white and the grey between, except when it matters. The world of spies is short on colour, truthful about the cost its residents must pay to survive there as about nothing else (Percival, who no longer cares about distinguishing truth from lies; Delphine, who sought adventure; Lorraine, guilty, detached, composed, undefeated but curiously broken, red welts of bruises hidden under a pure white coat; do you think this film says nothing?) and perhaps in the end the escapism of its fine bars and fast cars belongs more to the characters than the audience. The fight scenes, when they show up – and there are plenty, mostly small-scale but memorable – are effective and well-choreographed, without the frenetic modern determination to change shots every two seconds. Set to the music of flesh slamming on flesh, they trap the audience claustrophobically inside racing vehicles, or in unending sequences rendered bitterly amusing by the sheer persistence of the combatants.

So here we are: Berlin, 1989, in the days immediately before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The soundtrack is quintessentially ‘80s, synth-pop and Bowie, drawing audiences right into the time period. Bond is Bond in a tux in any decade but Lorraine Broughton belongs here: in loose off-the-shoulder T-shirts, thumping nightclubs, crowds of protest marchers armed with placards, at the centre of global events set to be broadcast openly across the planet but where she and her ilk will be nowhere to be seen, because honesty too can be used to deceive. She has – nearly – the required comfort moving in the grey spaces between morality and loyalty, between trust and betrayal, at the tail end of a false war fought with little dignity on anybody’s part, in a place and time lived more at the edges than most, in a city divided between two halves hard to distinguish. In many ways it’s reminiscent of the Wild West; that’s innate to the period, both frontier spaces on the verge of being tamed, but the parallels feel deliberate at times.

Am I the only one who finds it funny to think of the very end of the Cold War as the setting for a period piece? When does the recent past become history? When the people who lived through it young are old enough to tell its stories, I suppose: there’s been a resurgence of the 1980s in popular culture recently, as those who experienced the decade in their formative years become executive producers and bigshot directors. Of course any period piece belongs in two times: the time it’s set and the time it’s made. Sometimes the latter is more honest – forest, trees, the perspective of hindsight – and in interesting ways: no major action film of the ‘80s or ‘90s would have made its lead bisexual and her main emotional bond part of a relationship (explicitly containing sex – I mean, really explicitly – and in fairness, there may be merited accusations of the male gaze there) with another woman, while remarking on neither character’s sexuality in the slightest. (Let’s hope that will soon become as unremarkable as women in films with professional careers or black men in charge of major international organisations.)³

And Theron absolutely sells it. She sells everything. She’s the haunted, hollow-eyed, too-long-in-the-job expert spy trying to complete a risky mission under particularly turbulent circumstances; at the same time, she’s the survivor, recounting the same events, in a bare room to portly men who hope they’re still pulling her strings. Toby Jones’s Agent Gray makes an excellent foil to Lorraine in the debriefing scenes – a little too ingenuous, a little too straightforward, not to be playing the game – just as Percival does in Berlin: careless, heedless, seeking a last refuge in laughter and barbarity while Lorraine takes her ice baths, and plans for the future. Do you think this film says nothing? It’s dangerous to tell the truth.

And so. If you found Inception too confusing or you don’t like blood, Atomic Blonde might not be for you. Otherwise, if you like action films or spy movies in any capacity, I suggest checking it out. It’s great fun, in a chillingly heartless kind of way; or it’s chilling, in an oddly fun and broken beat, in the spiralling and dying world of Cold War Berlin, 1989.

Atomic Blonde is out now in UK cinemas. Watch the trailer below: 

¹I admit, I’m thinking in particular of Spectre here, which out of all the Craig films was by far the most underwhelming and, if anything, memorable for its sheer forgettableness. I remember little of what happened in it – only that the plot felt like an excuse to move from set-piece to set-piece; that’s not actually a selling point in an action film, even if many people, some of them studio executives, make the mistake of thinking so.

²Admittedly, I’ve never watched John Wick, another series they’re comparing Atomic Blonde to. It seems there’s a fashion for gender-bending names to describe Atomic Blonde: Jane Wick; James Blonde. Idiots. A spy thriller starring a woman is no more a rip-off of established genre conventions and tropes than every other film in existence; and badass women, contrary to popular belief, were not invented in 1977, 2003, or 2017.

³Look, I managed to pull the feminist rant out of the main body of the text this time! But, come on, Charlize Theron as the bisexual star of an action spy thriller? I can’t not address that. OK. It feels necessary to consider the question of representation; of the accusation women in action films are often subjected to in feminist discourse, of “behaving like men” – in this case, particularly, in relationships. There’s an old unaddressed question in feminism of how far the drive for equality means eliminating differences either in behaviour or expectation between genders, and a separate but related question of the way “male” roles are often pedestaled (and “female” roles dismissed as inferior⁴) though those “male” qualities may be questionable at best. In other words, women must aspire to be allowed to act like men, but men often act badly, and women must not act badly… It’s complicated. But if freedom and equality mean the freedom to act as we choose without being judged according to our gender, sometimes that will mean women who are violent, or crude, or cold, and the equality isn’t in what they do but what they can. Sometimes it will mean women who engage in the same callous objectification as men have long been guilty of, towards men, towards other women, and in the real world that is not acceptable but in fiction sometimes it is acceptable to show a thing without hand-holding your audience through the difference between depiction and endorsement and, as a final point, that is not what happens in the film. I felt it necessary to address, since people have been claiming it does, but the actual relationship between Lorraine and Delphine is – worth not spoiling at this point. Let’s just say, while she falls into a fairly common archetype for a love interest, she’s a long way from a Bond Girl.

⁴This year’s releases include Gifted – about an uncle raising his niece by himself – which strikes me as an opposite and equal thing. As far as we only see films like Atomic Blonde and never films like Gifted, as far as women can only take on roles traditionally viewed as “men’s” to earn respect and men do not take on “women’s”, it’s a problem. (And films like Gifted are still rare, films like Atomic Blonde growing more common, slowly: so it is a problem.) But the problem lies in the pattern, not the individual – problems usually lie in patterns.

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Malcolm D. Lee’s acclaimed comedy.

It’s the sleeper hit of the summer, and with good reason. Girls Trip is a highly entertaining, sparkling delight of a film. The old standby of girls-gone-wild combines with an exploration of women-gone-serious: gender and racial politics, the difficulties of adulthood and the importance of female friendship alongside absinthe-induced hallucinations and an abundance of sex jokes. There’s no contradiction here – only a reminder that the depths of human suffering can often be found sandwiched amidst comedy; that being funny is not in contradiction with darkness, nor even a relief from it, but sometimes one and the same thing. (Comedians know this.)

Ryan Pierce (Regina Hall) and her three best friends, known in aggregate as the Flossy Posse, remained close for many years after college before finally – as we’re first led to believe – drifting apart. Ryan, now a successful lifestyle writer and double-team icon of marital bliss alongside husband Stewart, receives an invitation to act as keynote speaker for the New Orleans-based Essence Fest, and takes it as an opportunity to reconnect with the rest of the Posse by inviting them along. From their first reunion it’s clear there’s tension between the four, and particularly between Ryan and celebrity blogger Sasha (Queen Latifah). But equally clear is the kind of worn-in love shared between people who’ve known each other for half a lifetime; who have a stable full of in-jokes and have always, or almost always, been there during the worst moments.

From there, I’d rather not give too much of the plot away. It’s far more entertaining to watch.

The core of the film revolves around Ryan, who preaches about having it all and (predictably) cannot have it all, and finds herself struggling to hold together a less-than-perfect marriage against public scrutiny and her own doubts. Her work conflicts with Sasha’s, tied up in the image both feel they must present to each other and the wider world – riven with old grudges and betrayals, and rendered fraught by the fact that neither has a safety net to rely on if things truly go south.

Balancing this out are the less life-critical but nonetheless heavy challenges faced by Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Dina (Tiffany Hadish). More exaggerated characters than Ryan or Sasha, they are sketched out with a deftness that builds them into more than caricatures: Lisa is the overly-cautious one who needs to let go, but not only that; Dina is the carefree one who needs to grow up, but not only that. Though they’re responsible for most of the actual antics of the film (guess which member of the Posse thinks absinthe is a good idea), the same personality traits lead them to their own conflicts – with each other, and negotiating their place within the group – with revelations of surprising self-awareness and resentment.

Pulling together a stellar script and cast are set-pieces fit to transport the audience to the streets and bars of New Orleans in full swing, featuring dance-offs, cooking exhibitions, and aerial zip-lines (and moments that will have you thinking, “You’re not going to, please tell me you’re not going to – oh, you did”). The tone remains consistently well-balanced through the film, even while juggling sharp changes – from despair to humour to a rousing speech or two – in the space of minutes. It also contains a pointed examination of black women’s relationships with both black men and white women (and a near-total absence of white men) through Stewart and the Pierces’ agent Liz (Kate Walsh) in a web of more intimate interpersonal power dynamics – though there are people far better-suited than me to pass judgement on how honestly and accurately Girls Trip reflects the experiences of black women, of black women’s friendship and ambition and solidarity and celebration of their own strength. That is, after all, the point of Essence Fest; we hear the words ‘black magic’ a time or two; if it’s a little heavy-handed it’s probably earned the right, and there are few, if any, other films saying similar things. As noted: there are good reasons Girls Trip has been selling out screens despite benefiting from fairly little advertising.

Anyway, Girls Trip is still going strong and I highly recommend – if it sounds like it’s in any way at all your thing (or even if it doesn’t) – that you check it out.

Girls Trip is out now in UK cinemas. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Michael Showalter’s acclaimed rom-com.

WARNING: Spoilers ahoy.

I’m sorry. I didn’t love this film.

I feel the need to apologise because The Big Sick has been basking in an avalanche of praise since its earliest showings, and it feels churlish and arrogant – as a student blogger lurking in my small corner of the internet – to claim it has been overhyped. Actually, no, it’s not arrogant, and I’m not sorry. As a film-making endeavour, The Big Sick is a perfectly respectable piece of work, and as a film, it’s enjoyable enough. But the glowing praise lavished upon it for nothing so very groundbreaking speaks more to its reviewers’ expectations than anything else, and at its core there sits – whether deliberate or not – something much sadder and more pitiful than a lauded absence of mere cynicism would suggest.

Now I’m being arrogant.

But let us begin at the beginning. The Big Sick is based on the courtship between Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, who co-wrote the film. Nanjiani plays, er, Kumail Nanjiani – as himself, as a character of the same name, as something in-between: a version of himself, an interpretation, and one no doubt both purposefully and unintentionally skewed from the reality. Emily – last name changed to Gardner here – is portrayed by Zoe Kazan. Early in the film, they meet at one of his stand-up events, sleep together, agree not to pursue a relationship, do so anyway, then break up when Emily discovers the box of Pakistani headshots Kumail keeps for the day he maybe-possibly kowtows to the version of marriage his parents deem acceptable. As Emily points out, that’s something he should have mentioned to a girl who doesn’t fit the required mould; but Kumail is an inveterate secret-keeper, habitual apologiser, and constant liar – particularly to himself over the likely consequences of trying to maintain immediate peace while allowing serious issues to go unaddressed. Anyway, after the break-up, Emily falls ill and is placed in a medically-induced coma and Kumail plays nice with her family for the remainder of the film. (Spoiler: she lives. Double spoiler: the film ends with the clear implication they will get back together.)

It’s a rom-com, right? The rom-com of the year; though romantic comedies more often play up both the fantasy and the comedy in exchange for realism. The Big Sick has gone for something a little different. No matter how much of it really happened, the film is imbued with a consistent sense of reality, almost to the point of exaggeration: realism as caricature. There are points where this slips: aspects of the family dinners are clearly constructed according to story-logic rather than real-world-logic; so is the sheer awfulness of Kumail’s one-man show. For much of its run-time, though, The Big Sick feels more like mockumentary than film. It’s shot through with conversations so embarrassingly awkward, most of us would despair to suffer one in a month. How Emily and Kumail get from monosyllables to sex is a mystery, since their chemistry is most acute when they’re flinging insults at each other. Those great romantic milestones of “testing your romantic partner by whether they like your favourite movie” and “not being able to use the bathroom while your partner’s in the next room” make an appearance, and… Here’s the thing. I have no doubt these are indeed common parts of relationships. Not universal, but common enough. But that doesn’t mean they’re any less part of a script, a set of lines we use to reduce human connection to rote (sex on the third date and two-day rules), because we want the real world to play along by story-logic too. And according to story-logic, the guy gets the girl. So despite lying to her, despite doing nothing to earn back her trust – never mind her love, but her trust – despite the shallowness of grand romantic gestures, Kumail gets the girl. In real life, he got the girl. But I don’t know how much of this is true.

One day I will be able to write a review without it descending into a feminist rant. This is not that day. Yes: this is about male entitlement. And either it’s an honest reflection of what happened or it’s not and they decided to write it this way because it would be romantic – and who can blame them? 98% on Rotten Tomatoes would agree. Either way, I hope they’re happier than I thought that particular couple would be when leaving the cinema. For me, the difficulty lies in believing that the real people who live in these worlds of vanilla-Western story logic would be able to step outside and reconstruct them, given the difficulty they sometimes have in understanding other humans well enough to hold a functional conversation. In the most generous interpretation, then, it’s a film, and we can judge it as something closer to fiction than anything else.

The truly strong relationships in The Big Sick are those between Kumail and Emily’s parents: Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano), who manage to veer from those accepted archetypes and bring genuine pathos to their own deeply strained relationship. It doesn’t hurt that both actors, and particularly Hunter, overpower Nanjiani in terms of screen presence, while Kazan has little opportunity to interact with them on-screen. Kumail’s relationship with his family is also a fascinating one. Though he makes constant references to “my culture”, his loyalty to Pakistani culture is told rather than shown – in contrast to his Americanisation, rarely mentioned but leaping off the screen – and his hang-ups appear more due to fear of disappointing his family, or being outcast by them, than actually caring about the cultural practices they’re using as a marker. In other words, the conflict of the film stems from Kumail’s eagerness to keep his family happy while having no innate drive to fill the role allocated to him – and his ethical cowardice in refusing to deal with the consequences of this tension. When push comes to shove, he does make a decision, and I suppose the point of a pseudo-heroic arc is to conquer your flaws. The problem is that it doesn’t justify the romantic resolution: Emily has no way of knowing about this. And Emily herself has few apparent flaws, other than having a human rather than a limitless degree of patience over his prevarication.

It’s funny. I usually like things more than expected, and I wanted to like this film. The Big Sick has a lot going for it; it’s certainly both smarter than and distinctly different from what we might call the typical romantic comedy. That does not make it transcendental. Oh, and it’s not even all that funny.

The Big Sick is out now in UK cinemas. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Jon Watts’ MCU re-introduction of the beloved superhero.

Well, wow.

Reboot fatigue? Nah. It may only be three years since the last Spider-Man movie, but it’s important to remember that’s it’s fifteen years since the last really good one. Spider-Man: Homecoming is up there with the best of its predecessors and the best of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and stands as an example of what the MCU can do when playing to its strengths. This is a fast, fun film which audiences are almost certain to enjoy.

From airport battles in Germany and other far-flung adventures, Homecoming reels the MCU into a more grounded perspective on the city of New York. The sense of the city itself, thoroughly established in the first act, might drift a little as the film progresses; but it does ultimately remain rooted in place, with appropriately local and personal stakes. Much of Homecoming revolves around Peter Parker (Tom Holland)’s high school and his relationships there: both looking and feeling like an actual school populated by actual teenagers, the famously quip-heavy style is far more effective here than in more serious settings. (I could be snide and say it works best among teenagers because the Marvel films have always had something of a teenage mentality. Since the Hollywood action industry makes no apologies of the fact that its main target audience is the average fifteen-year-old boy and the rest of us come as a bonus, I don’t think I’m being very snide.) Kids at quiz team practice, after all, might actually talk like this.

And Peter Parker is very much a kid. He falls asleep at school, gets tongue-tied around the girl he has a crush on and builds Star Wars Lego with his best friend. He’s overconfident, overexcited and still learning his way around his own abilities. Under all this, there’s a good heart: Peter’s no killer, which marks him out from the more bloodthirsty bulk of the MCU and draws a particular line between Peter and Tony Stark (a slightly-more-than-cameo by Robert Downey Jr). Peter, for all his smarts, doesn’t recognise that yet, and neither does Tony – who’s trying to be a mentor to a boy with a perspective on the world he will never grasp. The precise nature of this – which I shouldn’t give away – does something to assuage the unfortunate implications of pitching for-the-little-man Vulture (Michael Keaton) as the enemy, in the wider context of both America’s current slide into outright plutocracy and the more typically Randian leanings of the Marvel universe. Even taken alone, it’s hard to say whether or not Homecoming succeeds in avoiding that trap: it mostly depends on whether you take the Vulture as a tragic villain or simply a villain, and that’s such a narrow line here that there’s unlikely to be a consensus. Either way, he’s one of the more compelling and memorable MCU antagonists – though that’s not exactly a high bar.

Others of the usual weaknesses are here. The soundtrack is perhaps the strangest thing about the film. It’s upbeat, lively, perfectly pitched – but the recognisable songs date from circa 1976 (The Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop) and no doubt there are whole essays to be written on what that says about a film which, on the surface, is making such an effort to feel fresh and modern. The cinematography is – look, I’ve admitted many times it’s not my forte, but even I could tell it was more a journeyman’s than a master’s work. A few shots are distractingly odd, though most are simply uninspired, and suffer from the usual frenetic inability of the camera to settle for more than ten seconds at a time. The action, similarly, works well enough but is hardly going to win any prizes. Homecoming’s strengths lie in its characters and relationships, in its dialogue, in a sense of fun resting on many familiar but not-quite worn-out jokes. Peter Parker’s character arc as Spider-Man is central here, of course, and comes to a head at three particularly powerful points late in the movie – one of which comics readers are likely to recognise. (I recognised it, and my comics knowledge mostly stops at Tintin.)

Iconic moments from the source material may serve as Easter eggs; but there’s an interesting point to be made about the importance of prior knowledge and the development of shared cultural canon in relation to superheroes, who’ve been established as the modern world’s Hercules and Dionysus (and, um, Thor) over the last few decades. Spider-Man: Homecoming assumes at least passing knowledge of the events of The Avengers and would be, if not hard to follow, a significantly less meaningful film without it: but what’s wrong with that? Anybody who hasn’t caught up on at least part of the MCU by now is unlikely to start here. This kind of obligatory intertextuality, building on taken-for-granted reference points, surprises us only because it is no longer common in a world of almost boundless media choices – historically speaking, most societies had a much smaller set of stories to work with and could afford complex allusions or recurrent retellings (think Arthurian legend). The MCU has been criticised for using each of its films to set up the next one, to the detriment of the current film, only for the following movie to suffer the same fate: it is a genuine problem. But we do see here how the same idea can be turned on its head – Homecoming exploits the events of previous movies to develop its setting and themes without being beholden to anything but itself (notwithstanding the more traditional act of setting up characters and dangling plot threads for sequels – but that would be telling).

As integrated as it is within the MCU universe, however, Homecoming is its own film. Apart from Robert Downey Jr and Jon Favreau (reprising his role as Happy Hogan), it stars an almost all-new cast. Tom Holland, who made his debut in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, is delightful and utterly believable as Peter. Jacob Batalon gets some of the best lines as Peter’s not-totally-bumbling, fanboy best friend Ned, while Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May manages to pull off the cool aunt vibe without undermining her position as Peter’s concerned and struggling guardian. Laura Harrier plays Liz, with a crush on Spider-Man and a sweet spot for Peter Parker, quite delightfully. (That all the people in the know about Spider-Man are male while women and girls are left in the dark is a little niggling. In terms of the narrative, it’s something that just happens, the way events play out, because it’s not as if Peter ever told anyone on purpose: but more broadly speaking, nothing just happens in any movie.) And Michael Keaton makes a delightfully human villain, affable even in his threatening moments, driven by both resentment and ambition well-earned enough to make Loki look like a petulant child.

It would have been nice if they’d figured out how to make a Spider-Man movie before the several previous tries, but hey, you can’t have everything. This one is the success story: a very strong Spider-Man film, a very strong MCU film, and a bloody good all-round movie. There’s a sequel already in the works, of course, so let’s just hope they can keep it up.

Final thing: I highly recommend sticking around for the final end-credits scene.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is released in the UK on July 5. See the final international trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Sofia Coppola’s latest. 

1864. Three years into the American Civil War, the remnants of a young ladies’ school in Virginia – five pupils, one teacher and the headmistress – find an injured northern soldier and decide to care for him until he’s well enough to survive as a prisoner-of-war. What follows in this gorgeous, stripped-down remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 film by the same name is a taut exploration of femininity and flirtation, of competition and alliance between women, the well-earned distrust of men and the ways outsiders can unbalance isolated (particularly female) lives. In other words, The Beguiled is very much a Sofia Coppola film: and among those, one to remember.

The Beguiled sets out to explore a very particular place. It’s clear from the beginning that we are entering a different world, and what kind of world it is. The opening scenes, draped in mist, show an archway of trees which serves to suggest isolation from everything beyond: the rumbling echoes of gunshots do not interfere with the child picking mushrooms. The action of the film takes place entirely within the house and grounds; dialogue hints that the characters are aware of and in contact with the outside world, but apart from brief visits by two sets of Confederate soldiers we see no signs of this. Within this already constrained space, the film is sharply divided into the interior and exterior spaces of the school. The former are crisp and clean – consisting of sewing and French lessons, a music room, and smart clothes: the starch white blouses worn by Nicole Kidman’s “Miss” Martha, the headmistress, stand out. Meanwhile the exterior is in decay – the garden strewn with fallen branches – and much as these upper-class young women attempt to maintain their pristine environment, the truth is they are obliged to tend the garden, fetch water and care for livestock themselves in the absence of the slaves they formerly relied on. Nonetheless, they venture no further.

The northern soldier, John McBurney (Colin Farrell), interrupts that peace dramatically. Bloody first aid – and later gruesome surgery – are carried out in the music room, guns are fired, expensive set pieces destroyed. But much of that comes later: after the initial flurry of excitement, the film settles into an easy pace driven far more by subtle character dynamics than action. Coppola has described this as her first attempt to write a heavily plot-driven film, building on tension and suspense, and in this regard she may need a little more practice. While the film achieves high tension very successfully in individual scenes, across its arc as a whole this aspect sometimes takes a back seat to the exploration of other ideas, and ultimately The Beguiled comes across as a tad calmer and more composed than the typical melodrama. The bulk of the film feels peaceful – lighthearted, even– as the building blocks for later eruptions are being prepared. But in the final act the situation implodes, alliances shift rapidly, and all previous events converge on the film’s chilling conclusion.

Those other ideas are mainly concerned with sexual and gender politics: and in this, the film excels. The setting of the half-abandoned school allows for the exploration of women and girls at various stages of life, and their different reactions to the one man at the centre of all the fuss. John McBurney is the charmer, the cad, familiar to most of us: but even the grown women here are relatively naïve, and he thinks he has them all in the palm of his hand. There’s the puppy love of kind little Amy (Oona Laurence) and Marie (Addison Riecke), totally unaware of their own eagerness to please him, shifting back into children’s innocent dancing games. Jane (Angourie Rice), a little older, is the most outspoken against his presence but easily flattered. Elle Fanning’s Alicia sits on the verge of womanhood, bored with school, aware of her ability to attract men, if as-yet-unaware of how obvious her actions are to others. Then again, the schoolteacher Miss Edwina – Kirsten Dunst – does not succeed at any greater discretion, and certainly has little more sense: it’s only the headmistress Martha, blunt and sure of herself, who resists McBurney’s charms, and even she dresses up for him at dinner. Here, the unspoken rules of social conduct are brought to the forefront, tangling themselves in a multitude of ways between the eight characters. But these are the subtleties of the women’s game: when McBurney takes things too far, with dramatic consequences, we see how the rules can be ignored, and how men’s anger and aggression can tear apart the lives of women unprepared to defend themselves. There are seven of them and one of him, but on a dime their kindly soldier can become a hulking, ferocious figure, bringing home the brutality of the war they have secluded themselves from.

All of this is beautifully spelled out through slightly more than an hour and a half of unhurried screenplay. The use of Phoenix’s score is minimal and effective, though less notable than the background noise of Virginia: the inescapable hum of cicadas, birdsong and gunfire help to ground the film, as do the air of decay in the gardens and the soft dusk light of the evening lookout. Coppola has stated that, “It’s not about the Civil War,” and while this assertion might take some defending, it’s clear what she means. The war itself is held at a remove. If we didn’t know from history, we would have no idea of their politics or ideologies: the only thing to matter is that they’re enemies. This seems to have been a deliberate decision on Coppola’s part. We’re informed not five minutes into the film that “the slaves have gone”; the 1971 film and original book both included a black slave who makes no appearance here. Coppola has been criticised for her erasure, and that’s a fair point, though it’s important to consider the alternative: talented as she is at what she does, I can’t imagine her doing anything but making a hash of that narrative. The result, of course, is that the women’s identity as slave-owners is removed from prominence. But that’s hardly out of line with Coppola’s thought process here: this is a film intimately concerned with the ways people are shaped by their environment and try to navigate within its confines. We see that in the importance they place on hospitality and decorum, on the feminine art of embroidery – the teachers raising the girls for a world that soon, as McBurney comments to Martha, will no longer exist. Whether it is about the Civil War or not, the more-than-aesthetic features of the vanishing antebellum South, the social habitus and cultural assumptions (not to mention the southern Gothic trademarks and other aspects which combine to give it a strong sense of place and time), mean it could not easily be anywhere else.

And finally, holding the film together is an almost flawless cast. Kidman and Dunst are on top form: Kidman in particular has the tricky job of delivering lines which amuse the viewer without undermining the internal seriousness of the film. Elle Fanning is perhaps a little too self-possessed for the intended silliness of her character. The younger girls are simply delightful, while Colin Farrell is utterly believable as the handsome Irish soldier. The beguiled, whichever of the characters you believe that to be, are a haunting set of individuals caught up in a strange, familiar, hard-to-believe, unsettlingly true story; and The Beguiled, if you’re planning a cinema trip, comes highly recommended.

The Beguiled is released in the UK on July 14. See the teaser trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews the first season of the highly-anticipated Neil Gaiman adaptation.

What are gods, but reflections of ourselves?

Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s 2017 adaptation of American Gods is at once shallower and richer than the novel it was based on. It’s hard to subdivide a book so intricately woven; much as it tries to end on a summatory note, the show’s eight episodes feel like they deserve to be slotted seamlessly into a larger whole, without the arc and climax typical of television series. (It doesn’t help that the eighth episode is in many ways the weakest.) Still: that’s not necessarily a burden. The sense of a story half-told will bring viewers back and, the expansionism of studios aside, this is one that deserves to breathe in the telling.

We follow Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), except when we don’t, as he leaves prison, learns of his wife’s death, and is hired by the uncanny “Mr Wednesday” (Ian McShane). Around him, strange events start to proliferate – from faceless soldiers to people back from the dead – and Shadow starts to wonder what, precisely, he’s signed up for. All of this is real, though it will take him a while to believe it. The viewers are given far more information, from detours into the perspective of Shadow’s dead wife Laura (Emily Browning) to the languid Coming to America tales, narrating the procession of gods across oceans and giving us an insight into their workings. This makes Shadow’s obtuseness as the season progresses a little wearing: though he’s meant to be clueless, that’s less effective when we don’t share that cluelessness through his eyes.

The reality of gods is evident from the opening, and Mr Wednesday’s identity (“Wednesday – my day!”) should be blindingly obvious to anyone with more than the scantest knowledge of mythology. The strength of that revelation, when it comes, is undermined by the greater pedigree of those surrounding him; which, in the interests of avoiding spoilers, I’ll simply call an interesting deviation from the book – which picked its own stance on the matter for very good reasons – and leave it at that. But if Mr Wednesday is underwhelming, there are other, more intriguing questions lurking. What is a god? If they are made and unmade, can they be anything other than the beings we create? Can they slip beyond our control? Gods feed on belief and on worship; on sacrifice – no greater worship than to offer up your own blood and breath. But some do seem to be kinder than others; so perhaps the avarice of those others is less down to their innate need for worship than the qualities we imbue in them, upon their creation, and which so easily rebound upon ourselves. What is worship, what is its worth, and what do the new gods of America – Media (Gillian Anderson), Technical Boy (Bruce Langley) and Mr. World (Crispin Glover) – offer to their followers? And finally: what are gods to do in, as Media puts it, “an atheists’ world”?

American Gods is the kind of show to inspire such questions. Solemn even in moments of comedy, it’s drenched in tonal and structural choices to evoke the eloquent grandiosity of an art film or work of literature. (We are, after all, living through the golden age of television. But there’s a certain irony to all this: Neil Gaiman is usually found in the science fiction and fantasy section. American Gods is fantasy, unquestionably, but writers can afford to be less grandiose even when their subject matter is grand. Television lives and dies by quicker judgements.) For the most part, it feels like a waking dream, or like the legends themselves brought to life. American Gods is unafraid of long scenes designed to evoke mood rather than progress the plot, and to shift various character dynamics in subtle moments: from Shadow’s perspective in particular, not a lot happens, but plenty changes. It’s a shock, further into the season, to realise how little time has passed over Shadow and Mr Wednesday’s pan-American road trip. The use of colour is vivid, visceral, from the deep blues of midnight to the rich reds of blood and flame. It’s not always that dark: spanning America, we take in bright spring meadows, abandoned police stations and – often – dusty, bright highways. A chilling, unsettling soundtrack (by Brian Reitzell) serves to bind these various places into a singular show. Both seen and implied, the imagery is often graphic and sometimes bizarre. As we might expect.

The original novel was published over fifteen years ago, so we might also expect that American Gods has been updated for the present decade. And this is the case, but only to a certain extent. The technology has been adapted, of course; and there’s greater emphasis on diversity than many probably noticed in the book – but this is emphasis, contingent on expanding our perspective away from Shadow’s, rather than an active change. The gay Jinn (Mousa Kraish) and the Old Gods of many cultures were already present: they merely had less focus. American Gods has always been a story about the diversity of America and critically unchanged, in accordance with this, is the sense of America itself: a place in a constant state of change and flux, alluring for both gods and humans alike in the hope of making new names for themselves, and still in conflict over the core of its own identity. So people, so gods: as far as American Gods has a discernable plot so far, it’s that of a battle brewing between the old gods of Mr Wednesday’s recruitment and the new personifications of the modern world.

Many people will not like this show. It’s deeply irreverent towards both gods and humans. It does not offer easy answers to questions of its plot or world, which we are dropped into with little early explanation. (The answers offered to its thematic questions are easier than they might be; this is what I mean by “shallow”.) It’s unashamed about the role of sex in both religion and human relations – suffice to say an orgy is among the least shocking of its uses, if you’re likely to be shocked. But those who do like it may well find it enthralling and, even if their meaning’s not clear, may well find its potent images haunting them long after the credits have rolled.

The first season of American Gods is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Marc Webb’s latest.

I must admit, I was a little wary of this film going in. While I’d heard good things about Gifted, the portrayal of highly intelligent children in movies is variable at best. They are so often caricatured, presented visually and tonally at a distance from any sense of childhood. The upcoming The Book of Henry, featuring an eleven-year-old who talks down to his own mother, is a model of the type; and it’s safe to say I was not comforted when a trailer for that film played before this.

Gifted, as it turns out, does not fall prey to these tropes. From the moment we meet her it’s clear that Mary Adler (McKenna Grace) is, first and foremost, a little girl. She chases sandpipers across the beach and enjoys taking boats out with her uncle (and her cat). She runs when she’s told not to. While she can be obnoxious, bratty and defiant, these traits show up as the natural behaviours of a bored seven-year-old testing the limits of environments designed to constrain her. Mary is a smart kid, not a miniature adult: and by this I mean, nothing she does is in conformation to very adult ideas of what “clever people” do or consider themselves too good for. She hasn’t yet learned to worry about that; and with her uncle Frank (Chris Evans)’s influence, it’s very likely she’ll never care.

Mary is a child, pushed around by forces she has little say in. It’s Frank’s arc and choices that drive the film, starting with his decision to send her to an ordinary public school. After watching his genius sister Diane burn out under the pressure of hot-housing and intense research, Frank (no intellectual slouch himself) became determined to ensure Mary never suffered the same fate. But he may have swung too far in the opposite direction, leaving Mary – who can solve university-level mathematics – stifled in a classroom of peers learning to add to ten. It’s clear Frank is aware, early in the film, that the path he’s taken is but a guess and one many people would disagree with, and this provides the wedge by which his mother Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan) can lever away at his willpower and claim Mary for her own purposes.

Evelyn, the main antagonist of Gifted, is the most tragic figure in the vicinity. She sees Mary, not as the person she is, but as a vessel for her own ambitions – and a second chance at achieving greatness after being thwarted with Diane. At its heart, this film is not about giftedness or Mary’s talents, but about tangibly flawed human beings and the frailties of a single, exceptional, but very recognisable family. Frank and Evelyn’s dynamic pushes and pulls between civility, a shared sense of humour, deep-running resentment and sharply divergent life philosophies. Frank preaches compassion while Evelyn seeks greatness, and has allowed herself to become monstrous in the quest for it. It’s not clear if, by the end of the film, she catches a glimpse of her own reflection in the revelation of how Diane truly saw her: but her final breakdown is heart-wrenching nonetheless.

I don’t apologise for giving away that Gifted has a happy ending. As often happens in high-stakes films starring children and animals, it feels like it comes with a safety net; but there’s a reassurance in that. Knowing it’s likely to end happily makes the intervening upset easier to bear. Though it does bend disbelief at a couple of points for the sake of catharsis (I’m thinking here of the cat), for the most part Gifted plays its emotional hand well. It is a well-constructed, well-crafted film, hiding subtle dribbles of information behind more blatant exposition, and with a quirky approach to both sound and visuals. Often enough it decides we don’t need to hear the dialogue, and dials up the music to drown it out, letting the characters fade into their own lives. At other times it’s sight that vanishes: most memorably when, silhouetted against a glorious orange sky, Mary uses Frank as a climbing frame and he talks to her about faith. Later the camera shakes when Frank is at his most uncertain – allowing well-meaning people to sway him from his own judgement; the wisest people are those who know they know little – a nice touch; by the end, it is still and confident. The closing act echoes many lines from the opening, to substantial effect. And the film manages to integrate modern technology, something many in Hollywood are still figuring out, more handily than most (and to, sometimes, amusing effect).

It’s hardly without flaws, of course. Octavia Spencer, who – as usual – steals every scene he has lines in, is grievously under-utilised as Roberta. We know her character loves Mary but, outside that, she has little depth. The plot thread of Frank’s relationship with “Miss Stevenson”(Jenny Slate) starts strong but fizzles out by the end of the film. Evelyn segues into a caricature of herself at points. Though perhaps that’s necessary: only a cariacature of a human being could act as she does. By which I don’t mean such people aren’t real.

This is not a film, I’d like to make clear, about the dangers of genius. Frank might initially think that’s the story he’s living in: while he fosters Mary’s intelligence and thirst for learning at home, he’s wary of letting anyone else push her to her limits, in the well-earned fear she’ll end up like her mother. Evelyn provides a looming threat of that outcome and Frank is not wrong to push against her incanted platitudes of “What’s best for the child.” But Frank himself, who asked his niece’s school to “dumb her down into a decent human being.” By the end we see him come to the understanding that Mary’s gifts – if you have that kind of faith – are to be cherished and nurtured. Mary is not a gift, except perhaps as a person, to love and be loved; and it’s up to Frank to let her be whoever she’ll become on her own terms, as far as possible. While chasing sandpipers.

Gifted is out now in UK cinemas. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Roger Michell’s adaptation of the gothic thriller.  

The first film adaptation of My Cousin Rachel since 1952 is fortunate to be spared the judgement of its original author. Given her distinctive style and take on human nature, it’s hard to think but that Daphne du Maurier would have been disappointed with this by-the-numbers retelling. It’s not bad, exactly. Just insipid. All right, boring.

It has much in common with the better-known Rebecca: the Cornish coast, a house which almost serves as a character in its own right, and a possible murder mystery. The plot follows Philip Ashley (Sam Claflin) after his life is thrown into turmoil by the death of his cousin and father-figure, Ambrose, following which Ambrose’s possibly-murdering wife shows up at the house and proceeds to make herself part of Philip’s life. This takes a while: the film’s opening is languid and includes the retelling of Philip’s childhood, much letter-reading and bouts of curiously sympathetic weather. The most notable thing to be said here is that I’ve rarely seen a film go to such lengths to make its lead so utterly dislikeable – a brute of a man who cannot and will not learn – which could be used to disturbing effect if it stood alone, but instead jars badly with the later hints that he’s legitimately ill. Does that excuse his behaviour? Render it moot? Should we be glad he’s got his comeuppance – at other people’s expense?

When Rachel (Rachel Weisz) finally shows up half an hour in, it feels as if the plot should kick into gear; instead, the film spins its wheels for much of the remaining runtime and dissipating the tension previously built up as Philip promptly forgets his suspicions and becomes infatuated with her. Here the weakness of the film’s perspective becomes apparent. The aim is clearly for ambiguity: is Rachel a monster, or is she innocent of the crimes attributed to her and – though somewhat more spendthrift and manipulative than most – simply an intelligent woman who has made hard decisions to survive in a man’s world? But we perceive Rachel through Philip’s eyes, and Philip’s eyes, from shortly after his meeting until near the end, are besotted, leaving the film to drag without any sense of the greater conflict at hand despite our rational awareness of it, and our ability to see – as Philip cannot – the possible guile in Rachel’s actions. The disjunct between the question of Rachel’s homicidal tendencies and Philip’s lovesick antics should be compelling, but in practice falls flat, perhaps simply because it lasts twice as long as it needs to.

The anticlimactic ending can be excused, at least – that’s familiar from du Maurier, though the film’s conclusion has been changed from the original. Your humble reviewer not having read the novel, I can’t say how faithful the adaptation is as a whole, but it gives a sense of falling into that familiar category of adapted works which rest their weight on the strength of their source material – or are scared to stray too far from it – and so import wholesale features which may work in one medium but not in another, while failing to do much else of interest. Rachel Weisz is the most memorable aspect of the cast, among a host of uninspired performances; Sam Claflin certainly does little to endear us to his leading man. There’s little to be said of the cinematography, use of sound and so on beyond competence. It does make a hearty attempt at visual storytelling in a couple of places, marking it above those adaptations which feel more like books shot on film than actual movies; and perhaps we don’t expect groundbreaking creativity from our workaday historical films. Though if we did they would be far more compelling.

It’s not a totally tragic waste of two hours, much as the film itself may be a tragedy depending on how you read it: and while that’s a respectable little brain-teaser to mull over, even as a mystery My Cousin Rachel doesn’t entirely succeed. But if you prefer your films to actually be, you know, engaging, you may want to give this one a miss.

My Cousin Rachel is in UK cinemas now. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Guy Ritchie’s take on the Arthurian legend.

Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword is… Well. It’s something. It’s definitely something. Bombastic and cacophonic, at times it feels like nothing so much more nor less than an acid trip inside a particularly frenzied mind: space and time are malleable here, many things are about to catch fire, and spectacle is king – notwithstanding an overabundance of actual kings.

Scratch that surface and you’ve got a pretty good film, functionally speaking. You’ll recognise the basic plot, though not from any Arthurian legend: the rightful king-in-hiding (Charlie Hunnam as – in case you can’t guess – Arthur Pendragon) must reclaim the throne from his crown-stealing uncle (Jude Law as Vortigern). All very Hamlet, though Arthur has less in common with the Danish prince than with the stereotyped fast-talking big man of the streets. A gang lord building his coffers and networks, it’s not clear if Arthur already planned to retake the crown before he gets tossed in at the deep end: identified by Vortigern, in possession of a magic sword and coerced into throwing his lot in with the rebels who’ve waited for his return. There are rodents of unusual size, predictable deaths, and enough anachronisms to make a medieval scholar sob into their copy of Y Gododdin. So what? It’s a King Arthur movie. Historical accuracy is not exactly the aim.

And it’s a King Arthur movie with a particular approach that people are likely to hail as “modern”. Even ignoring the continued presence of swords, castles, archers and – I don’t know – magic, this is to entirely miss the point. “Modern” suggests a break with the past, them-and-us, the living and the dead, and an infallibility of our own ways of seeing the world compared to the dull, naïve inhabitants of history. Ritchie’s King Arthur is not modern. It is merely contemporary. And, in being contemporary, it is part of a long tradition of modifying the legends to fit the current zeitgeist: Geoffrey and Malory did the same when they made Arthur’s companions knights and gave them the virtues of chivalry and courtly love fitted to their own day, rather than the hazy post-Roman period in which those myths originated. But King Arthur is, to its credit, successfully contemporary. The dialogue is fast-paced, sarcastic and wise-cracking, as we expect of many a modern blockbuster. It’s ethnically diverse, at least by the standards of pseudo-historical pseudo-medieval England: Djimon Hounsou leads the rebels as the staunch Sir Bedivere, while Tom Wu and Kingsley Ben-Adir also feature. (For what it’s worth, China’s a bit of a stretch – the Chinese had better places to visit than Dark Ages England – but this is reasonably accurate, much as people like to believe the British Isles were uniformly vanilla-hued until 1950.) Londinium, with a half-razed Colosseum in the background, and despite being constructed of wood and tarp, is nonetheless recognisable as our London and takes centre stage in the film, over and above half-forgotten Camelot; and it’s inhabited by ordinary folk with the cynical attitude towards kings and prophecies we nowadays apply to politicians. All of this helps to make King Arthur a fun, engaging watch.

But it is also truly “contemporary” in the sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Look, I didn’t go into this film planning to make a feminist critique – fresh off the heels of Miss Sloane, I was really hoping that, for once in my life, I could leave that angle out – but it has to be said: King Arthur has a woman problem. It’s not that there are no female characters; that could have been overlooked. There are many female characters and they act as a veritable roll call for the mistreatment of women in film. Three die at Vortigern’s hands alone after seconds of screen time. A fourth (played by Annabelle Wallis) – almost the only one who seems to act of her own accord – is described by him as “not a pawn” but “a far more useful piece”. We’re meant to hate Vortigern, but his casual comparison of a woman to a chess piece doesn’t feel like part of the reason why. Women indeed have no agency in this world. The most powerful person around is the “girl” – not woman – identified only as “the mage” (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey) despite being the main female character, and she is acting on the orders of the unseen Merlin and still needs to be rescued twice; she can defend herself only when it doesn’t interfere with the plot. Other, inhuman female figures offer Vortigern his power, for a price. The majority of women in this film are either magic, mysterious, to be bargained with and not to be trusted; or they are more helpless than a small boy (the young Arthur or his friend’s son Blue both manage to be more competent than grown adult women); or, in the mage’s case, both. And it’s not that I necessarily think Ritchie (also credited for the screenplay alongside Lionel Wigram and Joby Harold) bears any ill will towards women, though they do have a disproportionately high body count. He’s just one of the many, many men who doesn’t recognise us as full human beings.

Instead of well-developed women, what do we have? The usual Excalibur-sword in the stone confusion, a Vortigern who is now somehow King Uther’s brother, and King Arthur raised in a brothel. Oh, I expected no more accuracy to the established canon of Arthurian legend, a sprawling beast in its own right with more retcons and crossovers than Marvel and DC comics put together, than I did to actual history. But one of the points at which King Arthur diverges from both is particularly telling. In all versions of the legend, Arthur is king of the Britons. Here he’s not. And that’s really, really important.

Time for a brief history-and-mythology lesson. The earliest reference to an “Arthur” is in the Welsh-language poem Y Gododdin, an epic retelling of a battle in the vicinity of modern Edinburgh. The standard medieval version was codified by Geoffrey of Monmouth, born in Wales though not necessarily Welsh, in the early 1100s. Arthur is strongly associated with Wales and Cornwall, strongholds of resistance against the Anglo-Saxons in the early medieval period. In Geoffrey’s version and others, Vortigern was a warlord and the only man spared during a massacre carried out by some of those Anglo-Saxons in the Night of the Long Knives. Arthur fought against the Anglo-Saxons. Or as you’d know them, the English.

In King Arthur, he refers to himself as English and his kingdom as England. The outsiders are Vikings. The king’s men wear Saxon warriors’ masks. The film is set largely in London – sorry, Londinium – which in reality was almost abandoned during the period. Suddenly, we have a verion of Arthurian legend centred on the creation of England; in which Arthur is suddenly a king of the very people he’s been fighting for fifteen hundred years. What the hell is going on here? It takes a very basic misunderstanding of the source material to do this by accident, though I don’t think it matters whether it was accident, sheer unconcern or intentional. But it does matter. It’s not that Arthur doesn’t belong to the English: he has for a thousand years. Geoffrey wrote from Oxford. Tales of the once and future king were told and retold across this land. Why so glorify your own enemy? I’m not sure. It’s not to make the ultimate victory greater; Athur is clearly the hero, the good king, in all his legends; the king who will return for the sake of all Britons. (It may be telling that I’ve never come across a version in which he actually does, as genuinely modernising as that would be.) I think in part it was a way for the English, as colonisers, to claim their place on the islands – of saying that Arthur was their king and they could be Britons too, as they settled in and the difference did somewhat blur. Of course, the legend of a united land under one king must have appealed to the English earls as they battled their way across the Welsh marches. But there remained this echo: Arthur was a king of the Britons, and he fought the first people who would become the English, and their adoption of him could not erase that. How long does it take colonists to forget they have not always been there? About fifteen hundred years.

What does this mean, why does this matter? Because we are not all English still. I am not English: I’m from Edinburgh, setting of Y Gododdin. Arthur is mine as much as yours, but not as king of England. Rewriting him in this way grounds an attempt at English nationalism and nation-building that hasn’t been seen, arguably, since the Middle Ages. Unlike those they share the islands with, the English have relatively little identity of their own, distinct from “British” – why would you need one, when you’ve got an empire? But those days are passing and with Scotland in particular on a likely trajectory towards independence, and perhaps there’s a sense that it might be a good idea to develop one. I don’t mean to imply that King Arthur is particularly important in this regard. For the most part, it’s a big, fun action movie replete with jokes, well-choreographed small-scale fight sequences (we could have done without the blurriness, which tips over into confusion at times), a score by Daniel Pemberton which can best be described as “eclectic” and decent workmanship acting from its leads. It does try to make a few deeper points in relation to Arthur’s individual arc, and these are applied so thickly they seem to have been poured on with a JCB. It’s hardly a deep treatise on the state of English national identity. But that’s the point: you can tell a lot about people by the things they don’t think are groundbreaking. And in this regard it may just act as a bellwether.

Anyway. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword a bloody enjoyable film, though likely to be more missable than many of the summer’s other blockbusters. I’m not determined to urge you to see it, but if you do go, and if you tend to like commercial films, you’ll probably have a good time. Sometimes I wish I could agree with the people who believe that’s all we should ask for.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is in UK cinemas now. See the final trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews John Madden’s political thriller, now finally released in the UK.

“Were you ever normal?” Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain)’s employer asks her after an act of particular duplicity. “Or were the twisted thought processes wired in the womb?”

Miss Sloane is a belter of a film. Over two hours long and stuffed to the gills with fast-paced plot twists and sharp dialogue, it is not a movie to watch unless you can offer it your full concentration: this it both demands and deserves. At the centre of it we find Elizabeth –  the titular “Miss” Sloane – who is one of the most feared lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

The plot is complex but can be distilled as follows. When the pro-gun lobby attempts to hire Madeleine Elizabeth “Liz” Sloane to fight a gun-control bill, she packs up and goes to fight for the opposition’s apparently unwinnable position. Her opponents ultimately try to destroy her reputation with accusations of ethical violations, landing Elizabeth in a high-level hearing, which is where we meet her at the beginning of the film. For most of its runtime, Miss Sloane interplays the hearing and the sequence of earlier events. It eventually becomes apparent that there is more at stake than the fictional Heaton-Harris bill, left to be forgotten as other political games take centre stage.

Scorning her protégée’s penchant for academia and downing prescription pills in the bathroom, our initial impression of Elizabeth is of the classic ice queen, if one hampered by a claimed sense of ethics. This is, to a limited but important extent, a façade: Elizabeth is an expert at playing on what people expect to see. Because Elizabeth Sloane is the smartest person in every room she walks into, she will let people (usually men) know she thinks this, and she will let them believe it’s arrogance – until they understand too late that it’s true. For her, the Heaton-Harris case is both bigger and smaller than the question of the second amendment. She wants to win, marking victory in ways most of the people around her cannot grasp. As best I can tell – for this is a complex film – what she wants to win, in the end, is her own faith in her own integrity and decision-making power over her own life.

Described as “twisted” and “cold”, Elizabeth Sloane’s integrity is not of a sort most would recognise. She is not instinctively good with people; it does bother her when she hurts them but, to her, there is no point at which the means cease to justify the ends. I’ve reviewed two films recently starring sociopathic women – Elle and Lady Macbeth – and it was a relief to see Elizabeth Sloane was the polar opposite: not bereft of empathy, but capable of extending it beyond the immediate confines of her own life in ways that mean she struggles to see the trees for the forest. She can connect with people when she chooses – that’s part of her success as a lobbyist – but ultimately she is a woman on a mission. The question of gun control is illustrative of this. Early in the film we see her grow tired of being asked whether she has a personal experience with gun violence, as if – she retorts – that is the only reason she would have an opinion. Elizabeth lives in a world of bigger pictures, of “foresight”, and this is both a blessing and a curse.

The world punishes people who think like that, and it doubly punishes women. Can you imagine a Mr Sloane here? Elizabeth is not defined by her gender – she is singular and remarkable regardless of gender – but it is hard to see a man in the same position; because other people do define her by gender, and men are not challenged in that way. Men are not forged in the gauntlet of being constantly seen as weak, less capable, monolithic in thought and deed. For a woman to reach Elizabeth’s position she must be twice as good, and she will still be reduced to ‘a woman’ by men who believe she can be bought and sold. This is highlighted by the boorish gun advocate she encounters in the opening minutes of the film, and by her boss’s chastisement after she laughs him out of the room. Elizabeth comments, “I’m not interested in gender” to the leader of a feminist group, who retorts, “All you need is a dick”; but while she may be one of those who’d rather do away with the whole nonsense, she nonetheless clearly understands it, and turns it to her advantage as best she can. In high heels and red lipstick, she is unashamed of her femininity or her sexuality – which, in the absence of human connections, she satisfies via the hiring of male prostitutes. The film itself is also acutely aware of gender (see: boorish gun advocate), and it’s notable that, in a film written and directed by two men (Jonathan Perera and John Madden), and starring the gorgeous Chastain, the only real eye candy is provided by Jake Lacy’s “Forde”.

Though Elizabeth is central, Miss Sloane is populated by a cast of lightly fleshed-out but enjoyable characters. Of these her most critical relationship is with Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), the idealist gun-control campaigner whose history Elizabeth lays bare for public consumption for the sake of winning support, with backfiring and potentially deadly consequences. Her former assistant Jane (Alison Pill), though more of a background character, provides an exploration of the tensions and relationships between women in a testosterone-heavy world. Mark Strong’s Rodolfo Schmidt, Elizabeth’s employer through the bulk of the film, comes closest to grasping her machinations and acts as a grounded, clear-moral-compass-having foil to Elizabeth’s larger games.

There’s relatively little to be said from a film-making perspective. Miss Sloane adheres to the language of its genre in music, wardrobe and setting: driven by its plot and analytic rather than symbolic themes, it plays very much by the rules, if fluently so. The film is shot beautifully, of course. From the chrome and glass of America’s elite to a bustling, grimy Chinese restaurant, it glides eloquently from scene to scene, with the exception of one frantic, blurred moment when the power plays threaten to tip over into unpredictable lethal violence. We open with a close-up of Elizabeth and we close with a more distant shot; but we understand her far better than we did from her words at the beginning, though they are all perfectly true, and we leave her deciding where to go next.

Miss Sloane is out now in UK cinemas. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews William Oldroyd’s feature debut.

WARNING: Put your spoilers in the air like you just don’t care! (No, seriously, don’t read the midsection if you haven’t seen the film.)

We remember the story of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Scottish play, yes? The wife who urged her husband to murder that he might be king, went mad with guilt, and died amidst cries of, “out, damn’d spot”? The name of the film is a trick: this is not that story, but an ultimately darker and more cynical take on human nature.

It is a very good film. Florence Pugh stars as Katherine in William Oldroyd (directing) and Alice Birch’s (screenplay) adaptation of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. In this version, set in Victorian England, Katherine is the uncertain young bride of a middle-aged husband who either cannot or will not have sex with her, but is quite happy to pleasure himself to the sight of her naked body. When he disappears for months on end, she is left to contend with her father-in-law – a particularly vile caricature of a 19^th-century household patriarch. The tensions of gender and age between the two, and additionally of class and race versus the household staff, are vividly articulated. This tension reaches an early climax when the young, black maidservant Anna (Naomi Ackie) is forced to kneel like a dog by the white, male, wealthy Boris (Christopher Fairbank) for a problem Katherine, and not Anna, has caused.

It’s easy to sympathise with Katherine early in the film. Florence Pugh has perfected a butter-wouldn’t-melt expression, and Katherine’s life is no enviable one: bored stiff, exhausted by the daily rigmarole of restrictive hair and clothing, she has been bought and sold for a parcel of her family’s land and is now expected to act as a brood mare for a husband who won’t, as she points out, actually fuck her. That she strays into a dalliance with the new stablehand, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), is no surprise; and neither, ultimately, is her response when their discovery causes Sebastian to be viciously beaten and locked in the shed. But Katherine’s calmness over the act is chilling. The shift in the balance of power is almost tangible: Katherine first invites, then orders Anna to sit with her while her father-in-law loudly expires in a locked room, and Anna obeys. Anna has always known Katherine is not a person to cross, and now knowledge of the murder – which only she could reveal – drives her into mute madness.

Katherine thinks herself victorious, and moves Sebastian into the house as her prize. But she is thwarted by unfolding events: first the return of her husband, Alexander (Paul Hilton); then the reveal of his bastard child and ward by a secret mistress. (The child Teddy and his grandmother – played by Anton Palmer and Golda Rosheuvel respectively – are both black and buzz with a sense of recently-acquired wealth and status, giving the lie to anyone who claims it is “unrealistic” to portray diversity in historic England.) At each turn, Katherine’s response is to murder any person who gets in her way. It is Sebastian, though cast in the role of ‘Macbeth’, who grows increasingly uncomfortable with the actions she forces him to participate in, and ultimately repents and attempts to reveal her crimes. Though Katherine’s denials are unconvincing, there is no question a mad stablehand will be believed over a pretty young widow, and she manages to turn the blame on Sebastian and Anna too, finally wiping the slate clean of anyone who might betray her. Now lady of the house, carrying Sebastian’s child and apparently free of all guilt, as the camera settles in for the final shot we see discontent in her expression. Katherine feels she has lost, because Sebastian – over whom she desired complete dominion – has escaped her control.

The film is a fascinating, taut portrayal of a singular cold individual and her impact upon her environment. As events unfold, more of Katherine’s true nature is revealed; there is never a point at which we are surprised by her actions, even as we wonder whether the film or the woman will follow each point through to its obvious – if gruesome – conclusion. I only have one question: why are all these women monsters? Perhaps it’s because I went to see Elle (our review) recently and that film is still fresh in my mind, but it’s a common and jarringly specific trope: the female-led drama in which the central character is arguably justified in taking action against her (male) abusers and is simultaneously, coincidentally or not, an outright psychopath with no apparent human feeling. It’s not clear if we’re meant to believe Katherine has gained her coldness from her cruel environment: while we see her mimicking her husband’s mind tricks at one point, we also never see her be kind (she could quite easily have rescued Anna from humiliation) – except maybe to Teddy, who she is nonetheless quite willing to suffocate and only refers to as “that boy” rather than by his name. So probably not.

How much of Katherine’s story would change if she was not a monster? If she was capable of caring for any person but herself, or for any goal other than her own power plays? We might find the affair forgivable, and even the disposal of Boris – driven by anger over his treatment of Katherine’s lover – does not render her totally beyond redemption. It is at her husband’s murder she crosses the line, and at the child’s she seals it. But Katherine’s nature is unchanged through the film, visibly so: all her acts were those of the monster, guiltless, utterly selfish. There is pity in her situation but the film presents murder as her only recourse and any woman who turned to it would be questionable; but instead of asking whether she might be justified the film compounds its presentation of Katherine as monstrous by having her continue to kill when it is no longer clearly necessary. What should she have done: suffered in silence? There are more options than this. For some women in history, violence has indeed been the only escape, but more rarely than we see in such films. And those driven to kill do not walk away with smiles on their faces; Shakespeare understood this, four hundred years ago, in the madness of the first Lady Macbeth. But now, by this trope, by its reinforcement across multiple films, we hear the subtle suggestion that any woman who dares to take action against the situation she finds herself in must be something half-inhuman: to be feared rather than identified with. And this is potentially a very dangerous message to send.

As I said, as a film, it’s very good. A minimalist soundtrack and heightened focus on present, physical sounds help to draw the viewer in. The cast is universally solid and Lady Macbeth avoids the drama-school feel of many period dramas: the characters swear, make sarcastic remarks, struggle to hold in laughter and behave in all the other little human ways we tend to remove from our image of the Victorians. The film is quietly funny at the right moments, a near-impossible feat to pull off in a work as chilling as this one. Many movies try to relieve their tension with comedy and relatively few succeed; Lady Macbeth falls into that elite minority. Put together, all this produces a film which belies its potential surrealism to feel straightforward and lived-in – the poster shot of Katherine in her blue dress is striking rather than typical of the movie. It’s worth seeing. But it’s worth being aware of what it’s saying, too.

Lady Macbeth is in UK cinemas now. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews F. Gary Gray’s eighth chapter in the Fast & Furious saga.

WARNING: The night is dark and full of spoilers. I’m a little pissed off. Oh, just read the review. Unless you’re trying to avoid spoilers. In which case don’t.

I have a confession to make. I’ve never seen any of the Fast & Furious films before. I knew about three things beforehand: this is the eighth film in the series, there are lots of fast cars, Vin Diesel plays a guy called Dom. Apart from that, I was going in blind. I realise this is not a good place from which to review a Fast & Furious movie in the context of the Fast & Furious franchise, and that I’m probably about to seem highly ill-educated to anyone who’s seen the preceding films. But it may just be an advantage when it comes to judging The Fate of the Furious as a film in its own right.

You see, there’s a reason I haven’t seen any of these movies. Or any Transformers movie, any Underworld movie, or even Independence Day until last year. Film is a victim of severe class and intellectual snobbery. Film buffs are characterised as either Quentin Tarantino fanboys, or so refined they consider Oscars fare lowbrow, but I’ve always found this to be a more severe problem among casual filmgoers. Of course, taste is a matter of personal prerogative; but many’s the person who will look down their nose at action films in general, or who might adore those films with enough cultural cachet – Star Wars, Jurassic Park, the Marvel universe – but would not deign to watch the trashy, commercial action blockbusters which continue to rake in mind-blowing sales figures despite being largely ignored by the chattering classes. Some might simply assume they’re bad films. But more often they’re dismissed with the same quiet sniff and pat on the head as the ‘chick flick’ or the ‘children’s movie’: they might be perfectly good – if that’s all you’re after. Now sit down and leave the proper ‘art’ to the grown-ups.

Unlike the hated Transformers, there seems to be a consensus that the Fast & Furious films are good. You don’t get to eight movies by being bad, particularly if you can’t depend on the sale of Transformers toys – or Captain America outfits – to fund the habit. The FF movies show up at fairly regular intervals, get a nod of approval as well-made, solid films, and soon fade from reviewers’ memory. I get the impression that’s been changing recently; I noticed a fair bit of buzz around this most recent entry, accompanied by acknowledgement of the series’ increase in quality as it’s gone along – with occasional suggestions that this doesn’t mean the films have got better at doing what they do, but that they have developed, deepened, transcended their bad-action-blockbuster roots. Since I haven’t seen the early films, I’m not in a position to comment on that, but the whole discussion intrigued me enough to pick up a ticket. Also, the last few movies I’d reviewed had been heavy on rape, death and all-round depressing-ness; I’d failed to shotgun Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in time, and I wanted to see something fun.

First of all (finally): The Fate of the Furious is bloody good fun. It opens to gorgeous, colourful shots of bustling Havana, set to a thrumming beat and the roar of engines (and a few too many shots of skinny girls in tight shorts, which won’t be repeated but serve to underline one of the film’s main issues, which I’ll get to). Within minutes it’s clear what we’re dealing with: adrenaline junkies, death-trap cars, and impossible driving set in a world of cocky overconfidence. Then Charlize Theron (as Cipher) shows up to set off the plot. The film loses some of its energy after that – it would be near-impossible to retain – but carries its sense of attitude and fun throughout. Theron is wooden and Diesel is bland, but Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson are a delight on-screen – particularly when they get to play off against each other – and Helen Mirren appears to be greatly enjoying herself in a brief but marvellous appearance. The plot, fortunately, is little more than an excuse for personal drama and progressively more ridiculous action scenes. There’s a haka, a baby in a shootout, and an ice race against a nuclear-armed submarine. So far, so big dumb fun. Right?

But The Fate of the Furious is trying to say something important. It’s not subtle. In fact, it beats you over the head with the theme: family is important. Cipher, our primary antagonist, is set up as the straw evolutionary psychologist to tear down Dom’s belief in the importance of love and loyalty. It’s no coincidence that Cipher has no family herself, that her identity as a single individual rather than a group is presented as an important reveal – and even then, she’s not totally self-serving. Though her motives are a little unclear, they trend along the lines of god-complex-driven desire to make the world’s governments behave for everybody’s benefit, rather than sheer greed or power-hunger. It’s almost as if the writers can’t conceive of a character driven by genuine selfishness. (Also, they’re clearly cribbing from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, minus the semi-complex questions about personal responsibility and culpability because Cipher is so firmly presented as flat-out evil. There’s a definite Winter Soldier homage about halfway through.) Family. Is. Important.

It’s not exactly abstract, is it? There’s a nice visual metaphor near the end for the strength and power of family; impressive as it is on-screen, it’s also about as literal as you could make that point. The whole film is fairly literal. It’s playing in a big space but it’s not playing with big ideas; rather it’s grounded in familiar, human concerns. Looking out for your siblings. Deciding whether to make nice with someone you don’t like. Learning to be part of a team. Dealing with a partner’s betrayal, as Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) does – that’s one I’ve rarely seen in film, as I can recall, and more rarely still outside of those art films which drive themselves on being character-driven. But do you know where I have seen it?

On soaps. Infidelity plotlines – along with surprise pregnancies and car crashes – are the bread-and-butter of shows like Coronation Street. The classic British soap is a melodramatic exaggeration of everyday life, while The Fate of the Furious involves a wrecking ball ploughing through a line of cars; obviously, they’re not the same thing. But there are strong similarities in tone, in the way characters are presented – plain-spoken and recognisably human, rather than the finely-carved strangers of many high-class films – and in the way they face their problems. And the viewers, in both cases, are not concerned with existentialism, metaphysics or political theory so much as with watching a version of their lives play out on the screen, projecting themselves onto it, and maybe taking something away from it. To let go of old grudges. To play by others’ rules. The importance of family. Whether these are all good lessons to swallow unreflectingly – well, that’s another question, isn’t it? They are at least well-intentioned, and there’s no reason everybody should care about the personal revelation of faith. Some people just want to live their lives.

But there is one lesson in the film with the potential to be toxic. Unwittingly, maybe, but that’s no excuse. Dom apparently betrays his family and goes to work for Cipher because she has captured his ex-girlfriend, Elena (Elsa Pataky) – and Dom’s previously-unknown infant son. The outcome of this is predictable immediately: the woman will die and the baby will live. And, indeed, the woman dies (without agency or any say over her fate or much of a mention afterwards) and the baby lives. This is not the only time The Fate of the Furious sidelines or minimises women. Letty – funnily enough, the only woman in the film who shows herself capable in combat or even of driving a car – may be adept enough in action scenes, but as Dom’s wife and presumed equal she deserved better than to end smiling over his dead ex’s baby with no sign of conflict. Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) has no more character development than rolling her eyes at the idiots who try to flirt with her – and a final put-down which serves to point out that the audience, too, doesn’t know her last name.

You know what? I’m not even surprised. I’m just exhausted and pissed off that I can say: there are multiple female characters, and they don’t get to do as much as the men, and they don’t get to be as badass as the men, and one of them gets fridged, but they’re there and sometimes they make plot-relevant decisions and this is still better than every James Bond movie ever made. And otherwise, the film is a blast, it’s beautiful, it’s lively, there are lots of cool explosions… Action films don’t need to be complex. They don’t need to be subtle. But it’s one thing to say the movie is allowed to be dumb. That’s not the same as letting the writers off the hook. Because looking out for your family is all well and good, but the natural secondary role of women and their inherent disposability is another thing people will take away from this film. And that’s really a lesson we should stop teaching.

The Fate of the Furious (released as Fast & Furious 8) is out now in UK cinemas. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Ben Wheatley’s latest.

Welcome to the 1970s. You may want to invest in body armour. Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, following in the traditions of films such as Goodfellas or Reservoir Dogs, is a cavalcade of violence and blood-spattered gore, executed by rough men (and one woman) whose lives are defined by it. Though Martin Scorsese is one of Free Fire’s executive producers, the parallels to – or, if you want to be harsh, imitation of – Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 classic are more obvious: after a brief outside encounter, the cast enters an enclosed space and proceeds to shoot at each other. That’s it. That’s the plot. Or at least as much of the plot as you need to know.

What you should know: though it won’t win any awards for World’s Most Graphic Violence, this is probably one to give a miss if you have difficulties with blood, brain matter, improvised first aid, near-immolation, assault with a deadly vehicle, or sudden headshots. (Really, what were you expecting?) Otherwise, Free Fire comes recommended. It is a well-crafted, deft, fun and surprisingly funny movie which for the most part trots along at a nice pace towards an unsurprising but well-earned conclusion. And though very little will appear shocking in hindsight, the film does pull off enough misdirection to allow for nice sleight-of-hand surprises in the moment. Free Fire does occasionally get lost in its own melee: this is more noticeable early on, before the initially large cast has been thinned out or become familiar – and they are not all easy to tell apart. Despite best attempts at differentiation, Free Fire does ultimately star Brie Larson, Babou Ceesay and almost a dozen white guys; excuse me if I had a little trouble remembering who was who.

Most memorable of the men are Sharlto Copley’s Vernon, bedecked in full disco gear, and Armie Hammer’s Ord. As hired security, Ord is both the most competent and among the most affable of the men – if affability is compatible with probable sociopathy: though only interested in leaving with his limbs intact and the money he was promised, he makes little attempt to cool the situation and is callous to the death around him. Ord’s employer, Vernon, is one of the hot-tempered livewires determined to escalate the violence, for no better reason than his paranoid, panicky sense of macho pride. Meanwhile, Cillian Murphy’s Chris – leader and main character from the Irish mobsters squaring off against Vernon’s crew in the initial deal-gone-wrong – is one of the few characters to show protective rather than murderous instincts. Though the Irish crew are a more close-knit team and Chris has personal motivation to keep them alive, he reserves the bulk of this attitude for Brie Larson’s Justine, as the only woman in the room.

Now: part of me wants to complain that we keep making films starring almost a dozen white guys, one black man, and one woman. As a general rule, we should probably ease off. But Free Fire in its own right, in a hyper-masculine gangland setting (it needn’t be the 1970s), is saying some pointed and reasonably smart things about gender. Justine is well aware of the assumptions these violent men have about women and more than willing to play upon them, while proving herself, in the end, determined not to be defined by the role the men try to cast her in, and neither to surrender to their confusion between the power of a gun and sheer brutality. Thanks to Free Fire’s contractual obligation to blow stuff up at intervals and the sheer size of the cast, all of its characters are archetypes rather than individuals, but Justine is among the best-developed: if not the most interesting in her own right – and she certainly has less personality than Ord or Vernon – she’s certainly in the most interesting position.

(Anyone who has seen the film might notice that I’m fudging here, a little; but anyone who’s seen the film should understand that it would be a massive giveaway to even hint at which other character(s) something similar might apply to.)

The film is strong on its depiction of violence, which is – as noted – never overly graphic, but more importantly never glamourised. From the beginning we are given the sense of an aggressive world, though initially background rough-housing receives less focus than foreground conversations. Once inside the factory, the situation reverses: words fade against the imagery of movement and weapons, even when the guns have no human target. From the beginning we are keenly aware of the threat of bloodshed; even when the conversation is at its friendliest and before the relevant fuse has been lit, it’s difficult to see the two groups as anything but a keg of gunpowder unlikely to remain on peaceful terms. Once it’s unleashed, barrages of action alternate with lulls to keep the overall tension in a fair sweet spot, neither fizzling out nor building to a fever pitch. As mentioned, there are laughs, too, though it doesn’t always feel right to engage with the film’s moments of comedy (even when led by the characters): while not fully visible, the audience is well aware of the characters’ pain and injury and the brutality of the events unfolding – and by extension the brutality of the world these characters live in, which has made them hardened to it.

As far as lighting and cinematography go, I have little to say, except that I noticed nothing amiss in this regard; even if visuals were within my wheelhouse, this is not a film built upon its visuals. (Notwithstanding that all films are built upon their visuals; I mean that Free Fire is a long way from, say, Fury Road in this regard.) Sound-wise, the film prefers to lean on its present sounds and some juxtapositional use of John Denver, appropriate for a movie dedicated to the sense if not the actual inclusion of realism. The leads shrug off bullets a little too easily; otherwise it doesn’t overly stretch reality, in either plot or action, despite tending towards absurdism at times. It’s a tricky balancing act.

You’ll have difficulty if, after all this, you actually want to go and see it: Free Fire is showing at relatively few cinemas now and has done relatively poorly at the box office so far. There’s a quietness to it, despite the explosions; I didn’t read it as either a thriller or a black comedy, the genres it’s been judged for failing at, so much as a cynic’s study in social dynamics. As that, it works. Make of that what you will.

Free Fire is out now in UK cinemas. See the UK trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Paul Verhoeven’s latest.

A film with an 18 rating can be as graphic as it likes. Elle doesn’t take advantage of that; not right away. It keeps its violence beneath the surface, lurking, waiting to burst through at the most unsettling moments. At all times we are acutely aware of its hidden presence and the fragility of the things that mask it: the rules and patterns of everyday life which hold only so far as everybody involved agrees they will. And if this threat of violence haunts the life of Elle’s central character more vividly than it does most of our own, it is reflected in her own chilling psyche. This is not a film to see if you want to continue believing that people are, or perhaps should be, essentially good.

Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), the wealthy founder of an acclaimed video game company, is raped in her home by an unknown attacker. Elle opens with this initial attack and follows Michele through the weeks and months afterwards; the film might be best described as a character study exploring a woman’s response to assault in the context of her everyday life. It’s not about rape, or not only about rape, and yet it is. Sex, and the power plays inherent to sex, permeate the film. Michele is hardly an innocent in this regard: it’s clear she has long been willing to wield her sexuality as one among a range of weapons she uses to achieve control over her world. Following the opening rape, it’s this loss of control which she finds traumatising, rather than a sense of violation or shame. (“Shame,” as she puts it, “is not a strong enough emotion to stop you doing anything at all.”) A series of subtle and less-than-subtle actions serve Michele in her attempt to regain her usual equilibrium and self-determination; she’s not interested in revenge, but when it becomes clear she remains under threat, she is willing to resort not only to drastic measures but to those most people would consider, at best, bizarre.

It would be impossible to talk about what these actions actually entail without spoiling the film. Michele approaches the world with a casual dismissal of most social norms or expectations, except when it suits her to follow them, and as a result her decisions at every turn are at once obvious and unforeseeable to any viewer who might struggle to abandon their own understanding of the world’s rules. Michele does not play by the rules. And she does play, both as a game designer, and with people: “one of your traps”, as her ex-husband puts it – and she expects the same of others. Usually such a character, in a film, would be viewed from a distance and allowed to maintain the charade of superiority, of being something more polished and capable than the fumbling humans. Here we meet Michele sweeping up shattered glass in her no-longer-safe kitchen, and understand that for all she is a cold and somewhat terrifying individual, she is one of the fumbling humans too. And that’s all you’d see if you met her in real life.

Isabelle Huppert is wondrous. Of course: Isabelle Huppert is always wondrous – but she’s on top form here, with a particularly meaty and complex role to get her jaws into. The supporting cast is far less memorable – with the exception of Judith Magre in a delightful turn as Michele’s mother Irene – but also, given the focus of the film, less critical. Notably also, Michele’s friend Anna (Anne Consigny) does not receive enough focus for her presence at the end of the film to carry the weight it otherwise might. Perhaps this is deliberate – her own story, only hinted at, is not Michele’s. On a technical level the film must succeed because I did not notice it failing, but Elle’s real strength lies in its writing, both for characterisation and for structure. It feels every bit of its 130-minute runtime yet never drags. The story is spooled out perfectly over the two-hour runtime, ramping up the tension in Michele’s private drama while the lives of the people around her disintegrate and reform with all the absurdity of upper- and middle-class mores falling apart at the seams: here Elle teeters on the edge of caricature but never quite dives in. It also pays lip service to the typical diversionary tactics of the genre (on paper Elle is a psychological thriller; it’s fair to say we’re focusing on the “psychological” here) with regards to the rapist’s identity – and in the process manages to deliver a couple of nasty shocks.

In other words, Elle is very well-made and very good. That’s not the same as saying you should watch it. It has the potential to be baffling, and to induce a great deal of cognitive dissonance in anyone unwilling to abandon their usual ethics long enough to comprehend Michele’s motives and choices. And the movie is, of course, not without its flaws. But I would say it is worth checking out, for the sake of the subtle and interwoven ideas Elle explores about social and individual constructions of power, through sex, through physical violence, through perception – and the arguable irrelevance of anything we might call morality to our decisions. It would take another ten thousand words to pick apart these strands, but they are fairly well-encapsulated in the film’s final image of Michele and Anna walking through a graveyard. As the screen fades, we understand: this is a film about women’s persistence in the face of a world determined to destroy them. And it offers a terrifying vision of who might be best suited to survive.

Elle is out now in UK cinemas, and on Blu-ray/DVD/Digital in select countries. Watch the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Peter Berg’s follow-up to last year’s Deepwater Horizon.

There are certain people who respond to tragedy by saying: Oh, that’s terrible. Look. Isn’t that terrible? It sounds inoffensive enough – tragedy is terrible – until you realise it’s always somehow hard to drag them away from the thought. To them, terrible is the most important feature of the event. Not how it happened, or who was responsible, or whether it could have been stopped, or whether it can be stopped from happening again; not how it fits into all the myriad complexities of our society, politics, culture, history, and unconsidered value judgements. The most important thing is that it is terrible. And so the sabres rattle.

We are drawn to tragedy. Nobody’s clear on why, but I suspect the reason lies in the danger it suggests: as you slow to pass the crashed cars on the motorway, your brain adds another point to the threat level of cars, and maybe you ease off the accelerator on a different day. This explains why we seek both confirmation – look – and comfort in the face of uncertainty. But we don’t only look for reassurance in community: we look for security. This is why the questions are leading, and why they force concordance. Look. Isn’t that terrible? The other questions don’t matter, despite their obvious usefulness, because our brains prefer the simplicity of abstract boxes over the messy complexity of the real world: we only need to know what category it falls into, and we can fool ourselves we know everything important. The agreement of disaster must come first. Look. Isn’t that terrible. What can you say but, yes, it is? So we are assured the people around us are aware of the threat, and ready to protect us against it.

This would be one thing if we lived only as ourselves and the people around us. It is quite another in a world with newspapers, broadcast news and the internet. Most of us will personally know people who die or are seriously injured in road accidents and most of us will never meet a victim of terrorism; but when it is terrorist attacks that dominate the news cycle, it is terrorist attacks our brain believes to be the larger threat. The choice of news companies to focus exclusively on events such as the Boston Marathon bombings or the Bataclan attacks when they occur – their editors trapped by the same inability to look away as the rest of us – plays a role in this, and has earned the epithet of “disaster porn” or “tragedy porn” as a result. Other tragedies are treated in a similar manner (particularly mass shootings of other motive, plane accidents, and particularly lethal storms), but terrorism is the main star, and terrorist attacks used to whip up a frenzy of righteous anger. Who would try to hunt down a storm, or assault the Atlantic Ocean? But people and nations – people and nations already defined as enemies – can be reinforced, in the aftermath of such events, as fair targets.

This is what I mean when I say Patriots Day is the worst and most insidious kind of disaster porn.

Patriots Day is the third team-up for writer-director Peter Berg and actor Mark Wahlberg, after 2013’s Lone Survivor and 2016’s Deepwater Horizon. The film depicts the days immediately before and after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Wahlberg stars as the fictional police sergeant Tommy Saunders, whose role is apparently to combine the efforts and achievements of multiple police departments during the manhunt while providing timely breakdowns/heartfelt speeches/man-of-the-people jabs at the FBI’s colder, more pragmatic attitude. The plot focuses mainly on the search for the bombers, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze); until this gets rolling, the film feels more like a random series of and-then events than a focused narrative. As a police thriller, it’s a perfectly serviceable movie. The long shootout sequence in which (spoilers for anyone who slept through 2013) Tamerlan Tsarnaev dies (and from which, coincidentally, Wahlberg’s character is absent until near the end) would be perfectly engaging if not for the nagging question: how the hell did this film turn into a police thriller? What about the victims?

Because, you see, this film wants us to care about the victims. The first section is dedicated to beating us over the head with the message that we should care about Jessica Kensky, Patrick Downes, Sean Collier and Dun Meng. The first two are a husband-and-wife couple injured in the bombing, the third was killed by the Tsarnaevs a few days after and the fourth was carjacked by them during their attempted getaway. Since Collier and Meng only intersect with the narrative later, their uninteresting early scenes are initially baffling. For all four, the aim of the early slice-of-life sequence seems to be to engender empathy in the audience, as reinforced by background music which may be aiming for hauntingly melancholic but instead lands on maudlin. Perhaps I’m an optimist, but this strikes me as a massive misunderstanding of human nature, and one which massively under-credits our ability to care for people in pain – as we did, as we do, every time disaster strikes and we see the dazed or broken strangers on our screens. We don’t need to be given all the reasons someone is worth caring about before we will feel sorrow for them. There’s a difference, of course, between this and caring about someone personally, such that a film character comes to feel like a friend and their loss hits us as such – and if that was the goal of Patriots Day, then it falls far short. With the exception of Dun Meng, the victims we’re shown at the beginning hardly feel like characters at all: they are props to the plot, there to be hurt or killed and provoke the good guys into action so that the film can grow into the chase movie it always wanted to be. Heck, the bombers have more personality, and certainly more agency.

Agency. Now there’s a thing. Who has the agency in this film? Who drives the plot? The Tsarnaevs. Two Muslim boys with a vendetta against American infidels. (Or something; the film does not feel the need to clarify on the nature of Islamic terrorism, and later suggests they are both 9/11 truthers and highly suspicious of the mainstream media. The first is, to the best of my knowledge, still a shorthand for cuckoo-crazy in most quarters; the second is chillingly ironic given recent political developments, and the older dog-whistle of “don’t trust the media” on the American far right which underlies them. But I digress. The absence of a balancing, non-extremist Muslim presence in the film despite the majority of non-extremist Muslims in real life leaves the bombers to be representative of their religion: it’s not the Tsarnaevs who are cuckoo-crazy, but Muslims in general. Too obvious?) Two Muslim boys with a vendetta against American infidels caused death and mayhem on Patriots’ Day itself: doesn’t that just sting? America, you see, is the most powerful country in the world. It does not come under attack. Never mind that Islamic extremism can be linked to long decades of American interventionalism, particularly in the Middle East, and that America because it is powerful always had agency while the people trapped in the pot it set alight then left to boil over are the ones trying to claim some back. (This is not to in any way excuse their actions – there is no excuse for targeting civilians, ever – only to say that the root causes of extremism do not lie in an arbitrary Abrahamic religion.) But this is terrible, remember? This is America under attack, and when attacked, it defends itself. Hence: police thriller.

It’s a power fantasy. America is under attack, but the boys in blue will save it – Mark Wahlberg will save it, with a limp and a string of cheap, jarring jokes. (Targets of comedy: the lower class, nerds, high-vis uniforms, men who speak openly about their feelings.) Being permitted to dramatise events however it likes – and willing to include as much heroism for Wahlberg’s character as the truth can be bent to accommodate (including a bizarre scene in which Tommy reveals an eidetic memory for street cameras, not to mention his discovery of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s final hiding place) – it provides not only the panorama of disaster porn, but the catharsis of revenging upon that disaster. The main thing to be taken from this, on one level, is that American police are at their best when they can be pointed at a target: hardly a flattering picture. It also masks a deep hypocrisy. Late in the film, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife – Katherine Russell (Melissa Benoist) – protests during her black-ops-style interrogation that, “I have rights.” “You ain’t got shit, darling,” Khandi Alexander’s “Veronica” snaps in return, a line so familiar from action movies and political thrillers we forget we should be horrified to hear it applied to true events. (The question isn’t whether it actually happened – Patriots Day can only be described as substantially fictionalised – but that Berg thinks it both plausible and relatively unconcerning, at worst evidencing the gravity of the situation.) You ain’t got shit – is that so? Thomas Jefferson would probably disagree (“… All men are created equal, with certain unalienable Rights.”) Here’s the dirty little truth: the second they’re threatened people will happily shuck off their democracy, their principles, and all other fine words for the law of tooth and claw, and they will still call themselves the good guys. We see this again in the speech Wahlberg’s character gives about love, minutes before the film surrounds a teenage boy with assault rifles and calls it a victory. That’s the tone of the end of the film: the triumph of love over hate. But if that was the triumph this would never have happened. Hate does not – as the speech suggests – appear in a vacuum, from outside, from the Others, while we are pure and free of it; and the question of love is not about those we’ve already offered it to. But these are the things the film believes.

Everybody else, by the way, loves this film – both critics and moviegoers, judging by a glance at the Rotten Tomatoes score. I’m not sure what they’ve found to praise. The camerawork? Uninspired, flat, shaky, or just wobbly – dull, still shots or random movements. Maybe they were going for realism, but the real footage is still fresh enough for that. The soundtrack is eerie, at one point physically painful, and often telegraphs the film’s intentions minutes in advance. The inconsistency in a single scene is astounding: Kevin Bacon’s character berates Wahlberg’s over crime scene contamination, then proceeds to contaminate the crime scene. “It’s terrorism,” he announces, the word “Islamic” immediately appended as if nobody else could build an improvised bomb. Mark Wahlberg does heart-rending quite well, I suppose; the rest of the cast is strong, the plot rumbles along nicely once it picks up speed, there are no technical criticisms to make – but that’s nothing to do with it, is it? Even critics judge films according to whether they instinctively agree with their ethos as much as objective technical traits. I’ll admit: I went into this film expecting to dislike it. I expected a cheap attempt to use the bombing victims for tear-jerking sympathy. I didn’t expect them to be an afterthought in a revenge thriller which tried to claim anything about this situation could feel victorious.

What, surely, about the way the city pulled together in the aftermath of the attacks? Patriots Day is in fact the merger of two movies; the other was to be called Boston Strong after the city’s rallying cry. But these words receive no mention until the discussion following the end of the film proper. We see the medical services, and the police force – and the ordinary people of Boston cowering in their houses or, very briefly, laying flowers for the dead and injured. There is no sense of a city pulling together. And if there were – I cannot recall seeing people do otherwise, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in a major city. I’d hate to have a mindset that found it surprising, or live in a world where I should. People care about their fellow citizens and their communities. Sometimes that’s the problem. But to call it remarkable, as so often happens, is to once again massively undersell basic human empathy.

Only for our own, of course. Not for the others, the hate-filled ones who can be safely condemned as evil, and we good: the brown-skinned people praying to a prophet rather than a messiah. (The Tsarnaevs hailed from the Caucasus.) When tragedy overwhelms rational thought we seek revenge and call it uplifting. That’s true of anywhere; but it’s America, right now, that provokes resentment across the world and cries wolf when the people it bulldozes over lash out in the only way they feel they have left – and the people who suffer then are innocent. But tell yourself evil can be defeated with guns and platitudes and we can glory in it, because those are things we don’t want to admit we believe, and this is the abhorrent message of a morally bankrupt film, making a mockery of death and pain.

There is one good thing to be said about it: positive reviews or not, the film has been a box office flop. The acclaim it’s received may be partly a phenomenon of selectivity – yours truly notwithstanding, most of those likely to see it will be the people already inclined to swallow both the diabetic coating and the rot underneath. It’s not a film to wander into by accident: the memory of Boston is still too fresh. Recommendation? As you’ve probably gathered somewhere in the last two thousand words, this is not a film I can in good conscience suggest any person give money to; but when it rolls around on Film 4 it might not be a bad idea to check it out, as an object lesson in faux sensitivity and unintentional propaganda. What happened in Boston was terrible, but that’s not the only thing to be said about it. The people of Boston – and all of us trying to survive in an increasingly hate-filled world – deserve better than this.

Patriots Day is out now in UK cinemas. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews James Mangold’s conclusion to Hugh Jackman’s tenure as Wolverine.

If this is to be the final Wolverine film (as we can all pray to the gods of the silver screen), it is a fitting one. James Mangold’s film is the third solo outing for Hugh Jackman’s version of the character, and it is a film focused very much on endings.

We open twelve years into the future, in a world where new mutants have long since ceased to be born. Logan, who straddles the border between the USA and a barely-distinguishable Mexico, is working as a driver to support an ailing Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). He is aided only by sun-fearing Caliban (Stephen Merchant); others of the old generation are never mentioned, and if any survive, it’s clear these three wouldn’t know where. Charles suffers from potentially lethal psychic seizures, Logan’s healing powers are slowly abandoning him, and the world around them too feels like it is dying. Though not as post-apocalyptic as the trailers might have suggested, it is nonetheless a harried and weary world, superhero cyborg tech contrasted with a general aura strongly reminiscent of the Wild West; but rather than a lawless place being slowly claimed for civilisation, it is one being abandoned. Logan, unlike Charles, is quite willing to let it go, and refuses to help the mutant child Laura (Dafne Keen) even after the offer of payment or the revelation she shares his powers. Only when he learns what she’s been through does his resistance begin to crumble. The remainder of the plot focuses on their efforts to reach safety, in the form of a dubious “Eden”.

The film spends its early scenes in near-darkness. The very first is a deliciously brutal fight in which Logan tears apart a gang of attempted car-strippers, and warns us there are few limits to violence in a film which well earns its 15 rating – but it does not set the tone of the film. Once Laura enters the picture, the visual palette broadens considerably, taking in the bold, warm shades of the desert, the bright lights of convenience stores and casinos, and poignant forest greens. The film walks a careful balance between light-hearted road trip and tense action thriller: between frequent fight sequences there are moments of calm, and even of levity and joy.

Hugh Jackman carries the burden of the film as solidly as Jackman ever does; he may have a limited range – gruff or roaring in anger – but it’s well-exploited within the context of the film. Patrick Stewart is the usual delight, sharp-tongued and kind by turns, though his most emotional scene falls flat as the film has struggled to lay the groundwork for it beforehand. (There’s a fairly complex network of foreshadowing and allusion through the movie, and about 70% of it lands.) Boyd Holbrook’s cyborg hunter Donald Pierce, the main antagonist of the film – by which I mean the one with the most screen time – exudes an air of friendly menace; the true villain of the piece is far less compelling, but his appearance is thankfully brief. The real star of the piece is young Dafne Keen as the mute Laura, sullen with Logan, ferocious in battle – she is not spared the film’s violence – but most impressive for her ability to capture the blend of world-weariness and wonder, insouciance and naive joy, only a hurt child could contain.

The film’s structure, as so often, does not entirely do credit to its actors’ talents. Logan starts strong but peters out towards the end. That’s not to say it drags exactly – there’s very little that could obviously have been removed, and some worthy of expansion – only that it falters: the final third feels at once compressed and dragged-out, possibly thanks to an impressive and highly dramatic earlier scene that leaves the immediate aftermath to feel anticlimatic. The decline is not disastrous, and the final fight scene is still more interesting than many in recent superhero movies – though, being a superhero film, it would be hard-pressed to convince us the stakes are as high as they might seem, and indeed the end is somewhat predictable. It is nonetheless effective, particularly for Keen’s pitch-perfect performance in the final scene.

Logan’s themes, meanwhile, unfold beautifully. The film is trying to say something surprisingly simple, and surprising, given both the bloodshed and cruelty it contains: that people are basically good. Not innocent – Laura is not innocent, for all her ignorance. But good. We see this in Gabriella (Elizabeth Rodriguez), Laura’s surrogate mother; in kind strangers on the road; in Logan and Charles themselves, flawed and guilty as they are. Sometimes good people do terrible things, and the burdens they carry for those acts are paralleled by their respective physical and mental breakdowns. Charles yet believes Logan might have a future, because part of his guilt lies in taking the hope of future or family from the other man – and Logan finds its idea of goodness in family, whether born or made. (It is explicit about the theme of family, almost undermining the point.) But both of them are old men fated to finally confront their own shadows – Logan quite literally – and it is Laura to whom the future belongs. In many ways her course is set to echo his; she must already confront the burden of killing, even of killing bad men, and she too has adamantium in her bones. But Logan takes this sense of cyclicity and makes it hopeful. Logan is a hero; Laura will be too.

Logan is a hero, though Logan is another of those films determined not to be a “superhero” movie. There’s been some discussion, as always, around the film’s decision not to place him in a comics-style costume. I’d say it would be almost more poignant if he’d donned it once – but it’s hard to imagine this Logan, of the film itself, in the black and yellow. He has no desire to advertise what he is or set out on deliberate heroics. For all that, it falls squarely in the genre – it is still a movie about a man with super-healing powers and claws in his hands – and its contrast to other recent offerings is fascinating. The major players at the moment in “superhero films” are the DC and Marvel cinematic universes: on one hand painfully grim, on the other filled with shallow comedy and few serious consequences. The X-Men movies have always existed slightly outside this dichotomy, but often slide into nothing more than narratively jumbled action films. (See: X-Men: Apocalypse.) Logan demonstrates a third way, both harsh and warm. The deaths do not feel gratuitous, and the jokes are earned. As I said at the beginning: this is a worthy film to round off Logan’s independent arc. They should never have made three Wolverine films, but I’m glad they made this one.

Logan is out now in the UK. See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods takes a spoiler-filled dive into Denis Villeneuve’s stunning sci-fi drama – which took home a BAFTA award last night and is now nominated for 8 Oscars.

If you have not yet seen Arrival, please be aware that 1) this piece is chock-a-block full of spoilers, 2) this piece won’t make much sense and 3) this piece strongly advises you to beg, borrow or otherwise obtain a copy of the film as soon as humanly possible.

The screen goes dark. The credits roll. As the lights come up people stretch, hunt for bags, and remember their half-finished popcorn by tripping over it. Two rows in front of me I hear this pronouncement:

‘The aliens had visited before.’ A middle-aged man, offering words of wisdom to a beffudled companion. ‘That’s why she’d already been having the visions.’

Normality, we might say, is restored.

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You could make it up. You just wouldn’t want to. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival received its wide release in the USA two days after the election of Donald Trump: a demagogue who on first, second and all subsequent glances is the precise antithesis of everything Arrival says and appears to be trying to stand for.

This is what we call “timely”.

Arrival’s particular release date almost certainly fed into the rave around the film, since critics rarely fall into Trump-voting demographics, and at least passing mention of that timeliness made it into every review of the film I’ve seen. The comparison was generally kind to Arrival. The USA might be on a path to isolation, brutal populism, and social if not literal self-destruction (and Britain apparently determined to shackle itself to America’s star-spangled fate); but at least there is this film – this brave, clear-sighted, wonderful film – to show people a better way, just when it’s most needed. If films like this can be made, seen, nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars – surely the situation’s not all that dark?

This is what we call “optimism”.

How the hell are people supposed to learn from something they barely begin to understand?

The aliens had not visited before.

“Before” is a fluid concept for Louise Banks (Amy Adams). Time itself is perfectly linear, and – being part of time – so is Louise’s own life. It’s her perception of her life, and the passing of time, that decouples itself from simple forward motion over the course of the film. We see best how this works when Louise uses it to crucial effect in the telephone sequence: she looks ahead to gain information from a later point in time. From the presentation of the scene, she doesn’t simply observe her future self but is, in the moment, both at once. A life does not need to be experienced in order.

I used to think this was the beginning of your story. Before the heptapods, before the impossible ships, before the decipherment of an alien language, Louise Banks lived through highlights of her daughter’s birth, childhood, and death. If the future, why not the past? Why not show her younger self what is to come? (If she deliberately showed herself anything at all. Maybe some events simply echo through your life, spilling over into a time you didn’t know such things were possible. It’s not the aliens she sees, after all. It’s the important things.) Equal parts explanation and promise, the visions that haunt Louise through the film don’t mean anything extraordinary occurred before the heptapods’ arrival. They mean “before” no longer matters. They mean “beginning” no longer matters, and so never did. I used to think this was the beginning of your story – where? At birth? Louise knows better than that. In the dreams? The dreams both lead to and are the result of future events. This is the unbreakable loop of causality time travel so often traps us in. If the future is known, how can it be chosen?

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The first obvious message of this film is: talk to each other.

There is a theory in linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which posits that the words we use structure the way we see the world. Orwell was a fan of the concept. At its extremes it fails: our thinking shapes our words as much as our words shape our thinking, and in a sense we invent all the words we use. We may be able to judge what words like table and spoon mean to the people around us – but what about words like hope, or justice, or – tool?

Though it becomes harder when we speak different languages, the real difficulty arises when we must accommodate different ways of seeing the world. This is the case in Arrival, not only with the heptapods, but most strongly illustrated by them.

All conversations are an act of translation. Talk.

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I would be extrapolating, if Villeneuve didn’t spell all this out quite clearly in the structure of the heptapods’ writing. And if the main character was not a linguist who could literally, liberally, spell it out.

The heptapods have never seen time as linear. They, like Louise, are capable of using that knowledge: all of their actions are based on an understanding of what they will meet on Earth, and what will happen afterwards.

Did you realise, watching the film, that Abbott must have embarked on this mission knowing it was going to die?

The second obvious message of this film is: trust each other.

Arrival has no villains. It does not even, really, have antagonists. The people who cause the film’s climactic conflicts are good people presented with the utmost of sympathy. They do not act out of greed or selfishness, and are to be found on all political “sides” – and because of their choices the world teeters on the brink of cataclysmic crisis.

The handful of military and national leaders who shut down the previously international effort to understand the heptapods do so motivated by genuine fear of others’ intentions. They have no evidence to support this fear. It is rooted in their own biases. People who want nothing more than not to be attacked will believe others wish to attack them.

Trust, the film says, that those others only wish to attack you because they believe you wish to attack them. That there would be no such wish if each saw the other’s desire driven only by mortal fear. That we do not, at the beginning, wish more harm than good on our fellow beings. And so trust.

(This is one point on which I truly wish I could believe Villeneuve was right.)

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Time is not linear. It may not even exist.

Children ask, “Why can we see the past and not the future?” We can’t. If we could, the study of history would be simpler. We see the impressions left on us by a place we have passed through, and time itself consists of a series of moments. But this is the kind of philosophy real philosophers sneer at. Are we the same beings, from one now to the next? Or are we destroyed utterly in one second, to be recreated in the next?

“Beginning” and “ending” have no meaning. That’s why it’s not the promise of a full, long life that makes it worth living. We see that Louise’s daughter Hannah brings laughter to the world, and knows it. Does the pitiful end of her life discredit that? Do ours?

Because the less obvious message of this film is: live.

Some people have commented on what this film says about great revelations. The film says, they’ve argued, that most people when faced with world-shattering discoveries will quietly file them and return to worrying about everyday life. This is not untrue. Some have also interpreted Arrival to mean it would make no difference to us if we knew our own futures, because we would still be obliged to live them, and this, too, is not untrue.

All fiction is rooted in reality. Arrival can say these things because they are already real aspects of our own lives. We don’t know our futures, you say? Nonsense. We know that we will die. (All comments on immortality should be redirected, unless you’d like a lecture on the heat death of the Universe.) We know that, unless we are very exceptional, people we love will either die or be left to grieve for us. We know that, unless we are very exceptional, we will have people to love. There you are: your future, in its most critical points. But when we were small children we did not know this, and learned with horror of the inevitability of death – and, in most cases, returned to worrying about everyday life.

So this is nothing new.

But you must remember it. This is the point. Louise will not forget, now. Nobody in that world will forget the day the heptapods came or the gift they brought, even as book deals are signed and lectures dozed through. We live in our everyday lives, but we live poorly unless we carry our understanding with us. We can’t drop it when the credits roll and return to normality. Normality contains everything.

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If this is time, then what of choice? This is the old difficulty of time travel: if we know our own futures, to what extent can we be said to choose them?

But we are still thinking linearly. We know the future because it is what we did choose. Even in the world of Arrival, alternatives can only be guessed at.

This is hard – there are no words for this.

Louise’s actions will not be the same as if she had no knowledge of the future. That factor cannot be removed. But they will be her actions, and create that future; and choices made in her future will affect her present. Don’t think of time unfolding: think of ripples in water spreading out to meet each other.

This is where the film departs from all sense of reality. We cannot see the world like that. But science fiction does not have to be possible.

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We call it timely, and we do have reason.

In the months since this film was released, we have watched the country it was made in retreat further from the rest of the world. Commenters have made the obvious points, about communication, and trust, and the aching similarities of all living beings in their beautiful fragility and so their shared right to an unpersecuted existence. And etcetera. These are points, but I do not believe they are the point.

Don’t be afraid to live for fear of pain. Accept that you will suffer: you know enough of the future to understand that.

Trump’s supporters deny it. Not all those who voted for him, but the ones who bought into his message and continue to. Make America Great Again. Those who fear a future both known and unknown build walls to keep the world out, and hide from reality, and lash out at anyone or anything that poses the slightest risk. A country as much as a person can do that. This is what America is doing now.

Louise Banks had a daughter knowing she would lose her. Abbott came to Earth knowing it would die. Maybe that makes it easier – knowing the shape of things as well as the colour. Maybe it is easier to face difficult things if you have no alternative but to acknowledge them. Unlike them, we can forget our futures. We must strive not to. This is frightening; but ultimately, Villeneuve suggests, it is the way to achieve less pain. What would have happened if no heptapod had been willing to make the sacrifice Abbott did? The humans would never have noticed, but the heptapods’ society would have been forfeit.

Arrival is not only timely because it sends a message of tolerance. It is timely – at all times – because it challenges us to be braver in our very approach to the world.

I’m imposing myself on the film. I apologise. Maybe all I’ve read into it isn’t there; or maybe it’s there because it’s part of life, not because anyone intended, and you could see the same in any film. But I don’t think so.

Denis Villeneuve is working in the best tradition of sci-fi: visions of other worlds held up as a mirror to our own. Deceptive in its simplicity, this is not only a beautiful film, or a well-acted one, or a timely one, though it is all of those things. Arrival is important. And – being a non-blockbuster, a popular but still relatively niche work of science fiction – it will not be seen by nearly the number of people who should see it; nor, most likely, will many of them understand what it is trying to say. Important but, in the manner of many of the most important statements, liable to be forgotten.

We’ll never be able to quantify what effect it might have had.

But time will tell.

Arrival is still screening in select UK cinemas, and will be released on UK Digital HD services on March 6, followed by Blu-ray and DVD on March 20 (for the less patient, it’s out now on the U.S. iTunes store). See the trailer below:

Editor Chloe Woods reviews Jeff Nichols’ touching Cannes favourite – now finally released in the UK following Ruth Negga’s Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

Does it help? Retelling this story?

Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) were at the centre of the 1967 Loving vs Virginia trial, which declared all the US’s anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. As a white man and a “coloured” (black) woman, they had not previously been allowed to live as a married couple in the state of Virginia – their birthplace and home. The film Loving follows Richard and Mildred in the years between their marriage and their victory in the Supreme Court, and charts the pressures which drove them to take on a battle they had little interest in fighting.

We wouldn’t think it matters now. Nobody in the western world has seriously contested mixed-race marriages in the fifty years since that ruling. Unlike, say, the heroines of Hidden Figures, the Lovings were famous at the time and there are already well-known accounts of their lives. But hey. People have made less warranted biopics.

The actors, first of all, are exemplary. This most obviously applies to Negga and Edgerton: the first as the conflicted and determined Mildred, the second portraying Richard as a man who cares for nothing more than his wife’s happiness and well-being. With the film intimately focused on the Lovings, few other characters receive a significant degree of screen time or development; but the supporting cast is strong and helps to flesh out the world they inhabit.

As presented here, the Lovings are simple people who would like to be left in peace: to live as husband and wife, not be forced to move miles from home, and raise their children in a suitable environment. They are not concerned with the wider effects of their actions and do not see why anybody should be bothered about theirs. Like the Lovings themselves, the film takes the rightness of their case for granted: it’s not a polemic. (Or if it’s meant to be it fails as one, because it never makes an argument to convince anyone not already convinced. The Lovings’ relationship brings no harm and plenty of good: that may be enough for us, but the worst racists do not think like that. They will not be won over. This is fine; I don’t think that was ever the point.) It’s also, more surprisingly, not a love story. The bond between Mildred and Richard, and the strength of their marriage, is taken for granted by the film. We’re shown early that they do love each other deeply, but – between their failure to communicate and divergent approaches to their predicament – the relationship feels fraught at times. This is a problem. It doesn’t need to be a love story, but we should know whether the bond at the core of the film can be relied upon. (If the relationship was not meant to be trusted, it would be one thing, but it comes across more as a filmmaking fumble than deliberate uncertainty.)

If not a love story, then what is it? It’s a love story. Sorry. It is; the love story’s just not between Richard and Mildred. Early in the film, they opt to leave the state rather than separate, and this shows decisively their love for each other is stronger than that for their homes and families. The question, then, is whether that second love is strong enough for the Lovings to claim their right to both. Opening with the announcement of Mildred’s pregnancy, much of the film focuses on their children, and it’s their children who always drive them back to Virginia. This makes it unfortunate that one of the key points relating to the state of their marriage – the question of miscegenation and mixed-race children – is left unmentioned until near the end of the film. It would have been more effective to present that stake early on, even if the Lovings themselves were unaware of the issue.

The film in general has a “show, don’t tell” problem. Usually, this would mean “telling” is used in place of “showing”; here, it’s an admirable attempt to show stymied by confusion over which is which. Scenes so explicit they come across as patronising are no less clumsy exposition than the most awkward dialogue and, equally, some issues could afford a little more discussion. (“Show, don’t tell” doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to use your words.) Other sequences work beautifully – the black workers in the fields, the jail scenes in which Richard is not allowed to bail out Mildred for their shared crime, and the shopping montage all come to mind – and it’s admittedly a difficult balancing act for a film spanning ten years. But this is not the only area in which the film suffers inconsistency. The introduction of two garish, city-slicking lawyers (Nick Kroll, Jon Bass) in the second half is accompanied by attempts at humour which might be more successful if they didn’t jar with the film’s already-established tone. The camerawork varies between gorgeous and utterly pedestrian in an almost documentary-style manner, and along with the film’s absence of a soundtrack at many points it sometimes feels as though it can’t decide whether it wants to be a film or a narrative reconstruction. The soundtrack itself could have exploited its eclectic mix of bluegrass, blues and other styles more effectively to evoke 1950s and ‘60s Americana.

The film has deeper issues than this. It’s not a clever movie and I don’t get the impression it’s trying to be, but that doesn’t excuse structural issues of which the swings in tone are only part. The thematic undercurrent of the film is building – Richard Loving is a builder, and plans to build his own house for his family – and this might have been apt if the Lovings had, in fact, built anything. Instead they are largely passive in the conclusion of their own story, as bigger forces build momentum around their case and they take only the smallest of decisions to ride with it. And the decision they do make, to ask for help in the first place, feels unearned as a dramatic turn: the pressure driving the Lovings to fight back rather than continue to be pushed builds up over the years, but doesn’t feel like it’s built enough before it breaks. Though the logic is sound, the playout falls flat in the film itself.

Now, having criticised it for a thousand words, here’s the verdict: I loved this film. I don’t mean in the way you’d love a great movie; I mean in the way you’d fall in love with a puppy tripping over its own paws as it learns to walk. Loving is as sweet and earnest as its main characters. It may be visually and aurally inconsistent, suffer from unnecessary jokes, and have some deeper structural problems. It may not be a Great Film. And it won’t change any minds: if you’re determined to close your heart to the puppy, no puppy-dog eyes and hopeful tail-wagging will convince you otherwise. But for those of us who agree with the film’s key assumption – that there should have been no need for the Lovings to spend ten years in pain and uncertainty, in the wilderness, fighting for the right to stand exactly where they’d been in the first place – for those of us who agree with that, we are reminded that victories can be won, have been won; that the most bigoted of societies existed in our familiar, recent past, and that there were good and brave people in them nonetheless. I know we have some enemies, but we have some friends too. Does it help, retelling this story? Not if you’re trying to win an argument. But if you’re looking for courage, yes.

Loving is out now in UK cinemas. See the trailer below:

Our Editor Chloe Woods reviews Pablo Larraín’s experimental and intimate biopic.

Everybody but the Producer’s Guild loves this movie.

Jackie, Pablo Larraín’s first film in English, follows Jacqueline “Jackie” Kennedy in the days following JFK’s assassination. Released in the US over a month ago, the film world has raved about Natalie Portman’s portrayal of its eponymous lead. Jackie itself has received only slightly less acclaim. Yet, despite arguably outclassing films such as Arrival, Hell or High Water, and even – I’m going there – La La Land¹ (our review), it has so far been snubbed for Best Picture nods by the major award nominations and this is not expected to change when the Oscars publish their list next week. Why?

We open to discordant, slurring bass notes and the image of an estate far removed from Washington, where hollow-cheeked Jackie Kennedy (Portman) greets the journalist who has come to interview her about her husband’s death. From here we are taken back: first to the early days of Jackie’s life as First Lady, then to the shooting itself and the immediate aftermath. The film’s chronology is fluid and it soon becomes clear that the interview itself is not a framing device but a core part of the film, which flits back and forth through time, and of the former First Lady’s strategy.

Portman, as we’ve all heard, carries the weight of the film and does so beautifully. As a woman who maintains layers of masks even when alone, never lets us know if her true self has been revealed, and claims to no longer recall the difference between performance and reality, the role of Jackie Kennedy is a challenging one beyond the usual difficulties of biopics; but from Portman’s performance you might think it easy to be by turns poised, anguished, melancholy, demanding and even joyful. Of the supporting cast, Peter Sarsgaard is effective but forgettable as Bobby F. Kennedy, while John Hurt steals scenes in a wonderful turn as the opinionated Father McSorley. Stéphane Fontaine’s camerawork is rarely dramatic but always quietly functional, and a handful of striking scenes stand out at critical moments. More memorable is Mica Levi’s score, exaggerated and off-kilter to great purpose as a warning that the film is not all it might appear to be – and certainly not the film viewers are likely to expect.

Jackie is not a celebration of Jackie Kennedy’s fortitude, nor a dissection of her grief, nor even an exploration of the disconnect between grand narratives and human truths. Though presented on a very human scale, sensitive to the frailties of the small creatures at its centre – even when they are presidents, and presidents’ wives – the film’s ultimate concern is the collapse of narrative and truth into one another, through a woman who (with fortitude, and with grief, and despite her allotted role as trophy wife) masterfully exploits the understanding that they are the same thing. The journalist is permitted to grasp something of this: he notes that he expects Jackie to scream, “My husband was a great man.” Bobby Kennedy lists his brother’s failures and asks what is wrong with her, well aware Jackie is too astute to be ignorant of how little JFK achieved. The viewer too might be left wondering why Jackie is so determined to have her husband remembered as a latter-day Abraham Lincoln. While the film records her actions in pursuit of a grand spectacle to solidify her husband’s greatness, Jackie’s motives are rendered less and less fathomable. Only near the end does it becomes clear –

But that, perhaps, would be telling.

We know from the beginning that Jackie Kennedy is no stranger to spectacle. Through the filming of a White House tour, years before the main events of the movie, we watch Jackie learn to hide her powerful intellect and present herself as the president’s devoted, politically naïve wife. In her least controlled moments, when the mask slips, her instinct is to understand and take charge of the situation; after the first shock of her husband’s death she soon rallies, determined to take the steps necessary to ensure his legacy. Wavering over the line between reality and fiction, Jackie is a woman who wields truth like a weapon and understands better than anyone around her the malleability of history.

This may be part of the reason various award guilds, known for staunch traditionalism and a certain fondness for easy morals, have not flocked to Jackie as both critics and audiences have. Though it does not undersell the grief of JFK’s death for the people around him, it shows this grief in opposition to both Jackie’s driven actions, and the film’s own interest in taking a sickle probe to the version of America’s history she helped to create. It’s intriguing to note here that Larraín is not American. Anybody might challenge the accepted story of JFK’s greatness and martyrdom; probably only an outsider would use it as a case study in the question of myth-making. The film takes it for granted that Kennedy’s legacy is constructed. (Maybe that’s news, maybe it’s not. It’s worth noting that JFK’s assassination does survive, fifty years on, as a story of tragic death and great potential cut short. In this sense Jackie achieved what she was aiming for. But Kennedy’s memory is not nearly as ubiquitous, or unquestioned, as she might have desired.) Its main concern is with whether this construction is necessary or justified, and whether Jackie honestly believes it is or acts for her own reasons. Does the USA need its own Camelot? Does Kennedy deserve to be its King Arthur? America already has its founding myths: does it need more? And what will Jackie sacrifice, or has she already sacrificed, in the attempt to create one? These are difficult, uncomfortable questions, necessitating a more cynical approach to history than most who live within it like to believe in; and they are questions on which the film very nearly reserves judgement.

Now, don’t think I believe Jackie is perfect. It fails to address what JFK, in fact, stood for – civil rights and the space programme receive barely a passing mention. In a sense this is excusable, but the comparison to Camelot (also glorified with a very vague sense of “good”) is unbalanced by the equal and opposite comparison to Abraham Lincoln. The tonal control shudders at times in the transition between the interview and the rest of the film. The interview might also be accused of falling into the “tell, don’t show” trap, but it’s fairer to say that by spelling out its basic thesis, Jackie leaves space for more subtle and nuanced points to unfold naturally. In many ways more character study than dramatic narrative, this is a wilful movie with important and complex points to make about the role of a First Lady, women’s power, the creation of the past, and the loss of identity in service of that creation. (The irony of making these points through a fictionalised historic figure is not lost. Who speaks for the dead?) All of this may render Jackie a little, shall we say, less than loveable for the average Producer’s Guild² member; but awards are fleeting and history may yet offer vindication. Even if it doesn’t, Pablo Larraín’s will be a name to watch out for³.

No marks out of ten; we die like men. Verdict: go see it⁴.

Jackie is out now in UK cinemas. See the theatrical trailer below:

¹Hell or High Water is the poor man’s No Country for Old Men, while La La Land doesn’t know whether to repudiate its own snobbishness or not. I adored Arrival and might give it the edge if I watched it back-to-back with Jackie, but it’s still unjustified that of the two only Arrival has received Best Picture nominations from the BAFTAs or the Producers’ Guild. I’m fully aware the whole thing is commonly derided as a nepotistic sham. It’s still annoying.

²Yeah, yeah, I’m picking on the Producers’ Guild. I’d rather pick on the Oscars, but they haven’t released their nominations yet and who knows? Maybe they’ll surprise us.

³It should already be a name to watch out for, but all his previous work is in Spanish and I personally am a useless internationalist.

⁴My companion cried. Just so you know.