Heaven can wait: "Eternity"

If you find yourself onside with Eternity from an early stage, it's because this is a project all but engineered to trigger something positive in the cinephile lizard brain: an American movie making the kind of imaginative leap that American movies once made on a regular basis. (A sign of how far those movies have deviated from the path of righteousness over recent decades: this particular flight of fancy has had to be backed by the boutique studio A24, as if romantic endeavours were a marginal or niche concern.) Co-writer/director David Freyne (who did 2020's Dating Amber) has taken notes from Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life and the mighty A Matter of Life and Death in envisioning a vast limbo where the recently deceased, preserved in their happiest human form, are sent while they work out which eternity is the right one for them. These various afterlives are advertised like theme parks are to you and I: Capitalist World, Marxist World, Jewish World, Man-Free World, Smoker's World ("because cancer can't kill you twice"), possibly even World of Leather (for fans of either sofas or the 2025 motion picture Pillion) and the man-heavy World of Sport, presided over by benevolent deity Dickie Davies. You might want to choose quickly, given this supposed purgatory's resemblance to an airport terminal: hell on earth, in short, a place you long to escape at the earliest possible juncture. It is, however, a promising backdrop for a romcom, because these spectral commuters are obliged to make... well, not life-or-death choices, because that's a moot point up here, but choices nevertheless. They get more urgent still once Larry (Miles Teller) and his late, long-time wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) realise they're occupying the exact same astral plane as Joan's first love and husband Luke (Callum Turner). Decisions, decisions.

It's a movie with one big and very welcome surprise: how adept Teller is at playing the Cusacky underdog. Larry died as a cranky old man, which explains his wardrobe and weary demeanour, but Teller, liberated from a run of try-hard dramatic roles, makes him a charming contender for anyone's affections. It's both cosmically cruel and supremely funny that he should be notably shorter than his love rival, though I think we should say Larry's immediate verdict on Luke - "he looks like Montgomery Clift" - is some way wide of the mark. (Is this Larry also stuck with his older self's cataracts?) Turner actually looks, as so many of our male stars now do, like someone who got famous on an E4 show - and at least five years too young for the fully grown woman he's wooing. Spiritually, Luke is the younger man, his death in the Korean War cuing one of this script's best and cheekiest jokes, but Turner can't give the character any inner life - he's just tall - which makes the central choice easier and more predictable than perhaps we'd hoped. (Oddly, the Chris Evans of Materialists might have worked in this role.) It's a problem Freyne cannot solve. Whenever Teller is front and centre, we spy the abundant possibilities of a film like this; whenever Olsen's with Turner, you spot only the limitations of this particular film, a movie like they used to make, just not quite operating at its predecessors' level. The writing's not as sharp, the production design neither as imaginative nor as well-funded, the resolution laboriously arrived at rather than decisively and stirringly claimed. We get all the literature and trailers for those other worlds, but barely a glimpse of the real thing; when the characters enter a building called the Archives, they watch themselves acting out scenes from their pasts in front of painted backcloths. (It has the look of provincial dinner theatre, where the Fox or Warner Bros. version of Eternity would have resulted in something closer to cinema. Dare I suggest this isn't the kind of movie A24 should be making, whether because they don't quite have the money or because Celine Song used up all the money?) It'll do, as a functional date movie, a singleton's Friday-night wallow or down the line as a timekiller on a longhaul flight - and your attendance and attention may yet encourage the suits to make more of these with stronger material besides. But it's also further proof of the way American movies now routinely ask us to settle for the so-so, for minor, fleeting, short-term pleasures, where once creatives armed with a similar idea would have pushed for something truly worthy of Eternity as a title.

Eternity opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

Into the weeds: "Anemone"

The headline story with Anemone is that Daniel Day-Lewis has been coaxed back into the limelight, albeit by someone close to home: his own son Ronan, the film's writer-director. (Cinephiles with long memories will recall that DDL warmed up for There Will Be Blood by appearing in 2005's The Ballad of Jack and Rose, written and directed by his wife - and RDL's mother - Rebecca Miller.) An intriguing subplot is that Anemone pairs DDL, widely regarded as the greatest actor of his generation, with Sean Bean, a sometimes mocked, much-imitated small-screen regular who in recent years has come to assume a craggy gravitas via such heavyweight projects as Jimmy McGovern's Time. It's a sign of the place Bean now occupies in the thespian landscape that he should have been cast as DDL's onscreen equal, the Abel to his Cain, in a film that imagines a distinctly unusual reunion between brothers: deep in the woods, after many long years apart. In Anemone's opening scenes, we may struggle to see the forest for the trees: RDL is very deliberate in setting up the mystery of why these two men are reuniting, why here and why now. But the specifics are compelling enough. Bean's Jem leaves a family behind him to go on this hike, his Biblical tattoos indicating this is a man who's known both struggle and God in his time. We intuit that DDL's Ray has become a hermit of sorts long before he cues up Black Sabbath's "Solitude" - the world is a lonely place/you're on your own - to reaffirm his lifestyle choices. Ray is fiercely protective of this self-imposed isolation, picking up an axe when he hears footsteps approaching. Almost as eloquent, though, is his very next gesture: upon realising the intruder is his own kin, Ray mutely sets the axe down and puts the kettle on.

It's hard not to be drawn in. Here are two men from very different places, played by actors from utterly distinct worlds, who've reached a point in their lives and careers where they're comfortable to sit with and in silence; over these two hours, their task will be to make the internal external and return the past to the present-day. Anemone proceeds to monitor a growing tension between inside and out: the cabin in the woods, at one point presented as the kind of bisected cutaway one might see in a picturebook a father might well have gifted his son; polite society versus its wild-and-woollier fringes. It's very much there in a violently scatological anecdote Ray tells Jem about the vengeance he wrought on the priest who abused him during his care-home childhood. To reach for a summary the God-fearing Jem might appreciate, RDL is needling away at that fine line that separates that done to us from that we do unto others. So it's male violence, then, and male trauma: Ray, one of the recent cinema's few properly convincing hardmen, proves to be as affected - and as damaged - by his upbringing as he is by his time as a British squaddie in the Troubles. Cue one more moment to add to the long rollcall of onscreen DDL genius: after Jem asks what happened over there, Ray at first responds with an unnervingly long glare, either to suggest his brother knows full well what happened, or that he can't or doesn't feel the need to put his experiences into words. The film isn't exclusively about male suffering, though. From time to time, RDL cuts back to the homefront, less loaded with bristling testosterone, but in many ways every bit as fraught. Here, we meet Jem's wife Nessa (Samantha Morton, unravelling as only Sam Morton can), who has a complicated relationship of her own with the brothers, and her teenage son Brian (Samuel Bottomley, from Ladhood and How to Have Sex) who has himself started to drift off the rails, as his scraped knuckles and frequent crying jags testify.

For an hour or so, I marvelled at RDL's efforts to connect everything, to repair even the most irreparably broken bond: we may even wonder whether the aggrieved biker who yells at Nessa on a pelican crossing is the subject of the 999 call she's later heard taking in her control-room day job. (The first and final images similarly synch.) Somewhere out there, there's a version of Anemone that is all empty posturing: I say this with some certainty, having sat through several variants over the past few decades. As the version we've got proceeds, we get glimpses of this bizarro-world Anemone: a living-room sitdown between mother and son that - hampered by clunky crosscutting - never catches fire and seems to go on for a small eternity, Ray using words and phrases ("concussive", "full measure of suffering") this actor and director might well reach for, but this character almost certainly wouldn't. The second half exposes the extent to which RDL deploys the monologue as a tactic, either to attract actors or to bring the audience up to speed. The overcast skies, vivid though they are, seem to leach into the drama - suddenly it's all brooding, all of the time - and it hardly helps that the coup de cinéma that intervenes has been half-inched from another film (a modern classic, indeed) on more or less the same theme. The Anemone we have peaks around its midpoint, with a scene that finds Ray and Jem making a rare excursion to civilisation in the form of a quiet pub: no strain, no wobbles, no fuss, just two taciturn men in their natural environment, going back-and-forth over a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps. Here, as elsewhere, RDL finds expressive and surprising ways to flesh out and fill these spaces and silences. It must be a heck of a thing to be able to get your much-laurelled dad to appear in your film about fathers and sons - that's a privilege, yes. But the sincerity with which this filmmaker sets about his own task, the risks he takes, and his eye for the natural world (no Brooklyn Beckham, this) all bode well for the future.

Anemone is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 21-23, 2025):

1 (new) Wicked: For Good (PG)

2 (1) Now You See Me: Now You Don't (12A)

3 (2) The Running Man (15) **

4 (4) Nuremberg (15) ***

5 (3) Predator: Badlands (12A) **

6 (6) The Choral (12A)

7 (7) Christmas Karma (12A)

8 (9) A Paw Patrol Christmas (U)

9 (5) Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution (15)

10 (10) Bugonia (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Wake Up Dead Man

3. Keeper

4. Nuremberg

5. Die My Love

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

2 (4) Nobody 2 (15)

3 (6) The Grinch (U)

4 (3) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

5 (2) F1 The Movie (12) ***

6 (8) One Battle After Another (15) ****

7 (12) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

8 (31) The Roses (15)

9 (5) Superman (12)

10 (10) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Curse of Frankenstein

2. The Ballad of Wallis Island

3. F1: The Movie

4. The Naked Gun

5. Bring Her Back

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Graduate [above] (Friday, Channel 4, 11pm)

2. Gladiator (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Proxima (Saturday, Channel 4, 1.15am)

4. Mission: Impossible III (Friday, ITV1, 11.20pm)

5. The Ipcress File (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.45pm)

In memoriam: Udo Kier (Telegraph 27/11/25)

Udo Kier, who has died aged 81, was a singular German character actor who became a fringe hero and a bizarro-world megastar over the course of his sixty-year film career; emerging from the Andy Warhol scene, he enlivened cult indies, Hollywood productions and arthouse hits alike with a signature blend of impish mischief and implied malevolence.

His life, however, almost ended before it began. He was born Udo Kierspe in Cologne on October 14, 1944, in a hospital that was bombed by the Allies hours later; both the newborn and his mother Thekla had to be pulled from the rubble. (Kier never met his father.) After modelling in his teens, Kier moved to London to study English; there, his limpid blue eyes were spotted by the director Mike Sarne, who cast Kier as a gigolo in his short Road to Saint Tropez (1966).

His international breakthrough came with a pair of films made under the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey aegis. As the crazed scientist in the knowingly garish, 3D-enhanced Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), Kier ventured one of cinema’s most forceful line readings (“To know death, Otto, you have to f**k life in the gallbladder!”); he pushed harder still for Blood for Dracula (1974), losing ten pounds in a week to play the prissy Count. On the first day of shooting, Kier was too weak to stand; he elected to play his scenes in a wheelchair.

Hopes of a serious acting career were partially dashed when the production shot under the poetic title Love is a River in Russia arrived in Cannes heavily recut and retitled Spermula (1976), but Kier was soon adopted by directors with vision and some idea of how best to deploy the bug-eyed madness he embodied: he played an ominous psychologist in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and became a go-to for Rainer Werner Fassbinder between The Third Generation (1979) and Lola (1981).

The actor had befriended Fassbinder as a teenager; the pair even briefly cohabited, although Kier soon retreated from the director’s speedfreak lifestyle and punishing work ethic: “I moved out because he was burning himself up in such a destructive way. I didn’t want to be part of it. He threw my suitcases down the stairs because he wanted to say that he’d thrown me out. He died two months later.”

He worked steadily in Germany through the 1980s, attempting a pop career with the 1985 single “Der Adler” and playing Hitler in the queasily comic The Fuhrer’s Last Hour (1989). By then, however, he’d encountered the ambitious young Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, who asked Kier to retell his origin story in Epidemic (1987), then cast the actor in his made-for-TV Medea (1988) and Europa (1991).

Relocating to California in 1991, Kier revived an American career that was as curious as anything else in his filmography. He leered in photos for Madonna’s scandalous 1992 book Sex and raved in the singer’s “Deeper and Deeper” promo; he played an eccentric billionaire opposite Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1993); he was unwigged by Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire (1996) and played a NASA psychologist in the Bruce Willis blockbuster Armageddon (1998).

Von Trier remained a fan, casting the actor in his career-making provocations: the visual highlight was the outsized baby Kier played in the surreal soap The Kingdom (Riget, 1994-2022), though he was also memorable as the wedding planner undone by the Apocalypse in Melancholia (2011). (The two became firm friends: Kier was also the godfather of Von Trier’s daughter Agnes.)

In the new millennium, he cropped up in films by Argento (Mother of Tears, 2007), Werner Herzog (Invincible, 2001 and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, 2009) and Guy Maddin (Keyhole, 2011); after voicing the scheming parrot Professor Pericles in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (2010-13), he extracted a love rival’s eyeballs with a spoon in the grim WW2 drama The Painted Bird (2019).

In his final years, Kier earned an Independent Spirit nomination for his turn as a devoted hairdresser in Swan Song (2021); he played Hitler again in the short-lived streaming series Hunters (2023); for the Brazilian critic-turned-director Kleber Mendonça Filho, he appeared in the latter-day Western Bacurau (2019) and the upcoming The Secret Agent (2025). In recent months, he’d been voicing a character for Hideo Kojima’s much-anticipated videogame O.D. (2026 tbc). 

“I’m an aesthetic person who loves beauty,” Kier told The Guardian in 2002. “When I’m in London, I go to Leicester Square and visit the French church [Notre Dame de France] to see Jean Cocteau’s beautiful altar. I buy two candles, one for my dead friends and one for my living friends, and I go out in a good mood. Then I go and play the Antichrist.”

He is survived by his long-time partner, the artist Delbert McBride.

Udo Kier, born October 14, 1944, died November 23, 2025.

Angels with dirty faces: "Wake Up Dead Man"

The third of Rian Johnson's Knives Out murder-mysteries is at the very least a step up from 2022's Glass Onion. Where that immediate predecessor proved as moneyed, slick and antiseptically surfacey as its chosen tech-bro milieu (and, indeed, the series' new Netflix platform), Wake Up Dead Man digs a little deeper and shows a willingness to get its hands dirty every so often. The theme this time is the stories we tell, and those we allow to proliferate; the first half benches Daniel Craig's wafty sleuth Benoit Blanc to trade in theological debate and religious schism. Mildly disgraced Catholic cleric Josh O'Connor is sent to a leafy new diocese to serve as second-in-command - and, it's hoped, liberal counterbalance - to fire-and-brimstone-preaching Monsignor Josh Brolin, busy bonding his dwindling congregation (devout organist Glenn Close, sottish doctor Jeremy Renner, cranky author Andrew Scott, disabled cellist Callie Spaeny, aloof lawyer Kerry Washington, right-wing vlogger Daryl McCormack) by inflaming their blood. This localised radicalisation project is halted one Good Friday when Brolin is discovered in a sealed side chapel with a blade in his back. Re-enter Blanc - his rationalism strong as ever, his travel bag loaded with locked-room whodunnits - so as to reaffirm the junior priest's faith and break up an apparently murderous personality cult. Any resemblances to real-world American politics in 2025 are for legal reasons coincidental, but you wouldn't be alone in spotting them.

The four words that lodged in my head early on - Jonathan Creek Christmas special - thereafter refused to budge. After three instalments, it's become clear the Knives Outs have become ultra-expensive TV movies, constructed in the manner of the longer Columbo specials or a half-season of Johnson's own, just-cancelled cable project Poker Face. Certain of this season's Netflix productions - del Toro's Frankenstein, Clint Bentley's Train Dreams - will lose a lot from being watched on an app. Despite the odd little touch that reminds you of Johnson's once-thriving theatrical career - some well-choreographed light changes in the chapel, say - Wake Up Dead Man won't. The money's gone on actors' fees and production design: the chapel's interplay of light and dark, a marble mausoleum that proves central to the mystery, a domestic basement roughly the size of a small warehouse. The idea with this series has always been to make more space for the pleasures of the ensemble: some of those pleasures endure here, but Johnson's never been able to match the fractious dynamism of his original cast. (This troupe does what's asked of them on a scene-by-scene basis, but the one player you really want to hang out with is church handyman Thomas Haden Church, and he's largely sidelined, watching baseball in his shed with a Coke in hand.) Even as telly, Wake Up Dead Man relies upon viewer indulgence: golden-age detective drama could tie up cases twice as tangled inside half of these 144 minutes. Much as Blanc comes over as a passive presence this time, bumbling around in the background while the energised O'Connor takes up the ecclesiastical and investigative slack, Johnson is himself cutting loose, stretching his legs and taking things easy with the Knives Out series. That's fine when the approach generates the entertaining fluff it does here, but there's no particular need to race to the cinema for it; you'll be able to watch it at home over the holidays - for free - with a big tub of chocolates on the sofa next to you.

Wake Up Dead Man is now playing in selected cinemas, and will be available to stream on Netflix from December 12.

Retreats: "Keeper"

After the deafening fuss around last year's Longlegs and the box-office success of this February's Stephen King riff The Monkey, Keeper represents the first of Osgood Perkins' rapid-fire multiplex movies to have landed without much fanfare or popcultural trace. Possibly the trailers made it look overly familiar, like just another cabin-in-the-woods movie. In actuality, sitting with Perkins' latest reveals it to be less obvious in its line of creep and far less generically boilerplate. For starters, its protagonists Liz and Malcolm aren't the usual fresh-faced, carefree teens and college students, rather wary, lived-in thirtysomethings - played by Tatiana Maslany, late of The Monkey, and Rossif Sutherland, lesser-known son of the late Donald - introduced weighing up whether to take their fledgling relationship to a more committed level. The sources of tension they encounter on this weekend retreat are unusual, to say the least. The cabin itself, for one: all modernist wood and glass, its ceilings too high for comfort, its floorboards creaking underfoot, it could scarcely be any less homely or relaxing. The proximity of Malcolm's asshole cousin, holed up in an adjacent hut with a Slavic model, bodes very ill: Birkett Turton, in the role, both resembles and in many ways channels the younger Jeremy Piven. What of the mysterious chocolate cakes that so compel this camera's attention, and the occasional, Lynchian transposition of images, which appear to imply there's precious little boundary between past and present, between outside and in? What, in short, is going on here?, I found myself wondering, first after twenty minutes, again after forty minutes, and then once more around the hour mark, fully aware that Keeper is but a 99-minute movie.

In repeatedly asking that question - as you, too, surely will - one comes to understand why the reception has been so cool. Shelving the grabbier tactics deployed in Longlegs and The Monkey, Perkins here adopts a largely vibes-based approach that demands patience, moving his camera chiefly to obscure what kind of horror film this is until the closing minutes. He's not spoonfeeding or playing to the gallery this time; he's very much doing his own weird thing, which is bound to confound all those who queued up for The Conjuring: Last Rites. What kept me seated and largely intrigued was how this pared-back approach highlights this filmmaker's increasingly deft work with actors. (As the son of one notable performer, he may well be better placed than most to direct performance.) For the longest time, there's nothing much for anyone to go on save a vague sense of unease - but Perkins' leads are interesting personalities, and if Keeper is some Angela Carter-ish, overtly gendered fairytale about big bad men and the women they throw to the wolves, as one comes to suspect, neither Maslany nor Sutherland are playing it as such. She's alert and hypercontemporary, but also prone to distraction and drifting off; he's a little shambling and awkward, but in the way any late bloomer might be. Is the problem with these people or this place? All becomes clear amid Keeper's final movement, which shuffles through freaky and trippy to arrive at gloopy and oddly funny, while at every turn remaining intensely unpredictable. (To the last: what's going on here?) Whether Perkins really is the great white hope of American horror cinema, as some have posited, is anyone's guess. More so than the overcranked Longlegs, though, Keeper sustains itself while proving rather skilful besides: a yarn spun from doubts and undercurrents, backed up by subtly uncanny images.

Keeper is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Dil Se..."

The first Indian movie to crack the UK box-office Top 10, 1998's Dil Se... was an intersection between three emergent masters of their craft: the gifted Tamil writer-director Mani Ratnam, the generational Hindi star Shah Rukh Khan and the increasingly prominent composer-auteur A.R. Rahman. Notice of significance was served by the opening song "Chaiyya Chaiyya" - the one on a train, granted overnight passage to the pantheon of great modern Bollywood numbers - although in retrospect this number serves as a signifier of where everyone's going, exhilarating forward progress and lushly romantic misdirection, bringing the mass audience on board before subsequent reroutings and derailments, with resulting mass casualties. The train is carrying Khan's All India Radio reporter Amarkanth Varma to Assam to interview the locals on the subject of fifty years of Indian independence; these locals prove altogether divided on how much progress has been made exactly. Here, Ratnam reveals a more critical project: weaponising a star - and a newly minted pin-up like Khan at that - to broach the story of the Tamil freedom fighters and the political violence of the 1990s. Khan can certainly put a charming face on this, setting out to court local beauty Manisha Koirala with good intentions and a boyish smile. But there are places and moments on this earth where even the best intentions and the most boyish smile offer little to no protection against the chill winds and ferocious storms of history. In many respects, it's remarkable Dil Se... became the blockbuster that it did.

This is, then, a complex text: simultaneously a love story and a political tract, Indian cinema's Titanic and Wuthering Heights as well as its Reds and Under Fire. In Rahman's title song, the two stars pitch woo while bombs go off around them: where Khan's early, starmaking vehicles saw the actor stretching his arms and legs on picturesque mountaintops, Ratnam dared to wonder what would happen if he was forced to pursue his beloved through a minefield. Given the violent tonal shifts, the film relies more than most on Khan's supreme adaptability, his abundant gifts as a storyteller: the latter are much on display in Amar's radio reports, with their on-the-hoof Foley work, as well as his interactions with those (non-professionals?) cast as the Assamese public. Yet Ratnam deploys Khan tactically, too: Amar is, for much of the duration, visibly just a boy, out of his depth and comfort zone, playing with fire. The opening scene - which finds him huddling on a railway platform, waiting for that train as a storm blows in - is but an early indicator he's going to be tested; he will spend much of the following two hours being beaten up, whether by his sweetheart's nearest and dearest, the local police, soldiers on both sides of this battle, his beloved herself, or simply the harsh realities of late 20th century India. The movies had made Khan famous, a dreamboat, an idealised swain; Ratnam, in one of those cruel but brilliant decisions on which great directorial careers often hang, made him a fool for love.

It is, then, a Mani Ratnam film above all else, the work of someone in fierce control of potentially explosive material that could, with less certain handling, have blown up in everybody's face. Almost thirty years on, we can say with some assurance that no-one - perhaps not even the laurelled Ritwak Ghatak - has shot the Indian landscape more comprehensively and more sensuously. That train song yields to a long hike through the desert, incorporating some lust in the dust; when the film does finally arrive among the mountains, Ratnam and his then-regular cinematographer Santosh Sivan (who went on to direct 1998's The Terrorist and 2001's Khan-starring hit Asoka) frame the peaks not as romantic reverie but an extreme in their own right, a place where people lose their lives. The pair eventually have to confine themselves to a more conventional destination - urban Delhi, where Amarkanth returns heartbroken come the second half - so as to tie this story up. If what follows the intermission proves more reined in than what's gone before - expressive close-ups replacing the expressionistic longshots - the film gains in tautness for it. Here, the political dovetails decisively (not to mention woundingly) with the personal, as Ratnam shows where his characters' misplaced passions finally carry them: Koirala does her most impressive work in a flashback that seeks to explain why she feels compelled to do what thousands of others have been driven to do before her. A teachable example of how to broach heavyweight social issues within a popular format - and curiously foresighted, given the especially fractious decade that followed - Dil Se... builds towards a setpiece on a par with any of the same era's Hollywood thrillers, before its unforgettable finale.

Dil Se... is currently streaming via Netflix, and available to rent via YouTube.