In memoriam: Jordan Klein Sr. (Telegraph 12/11/24)

Jordan Klein Sr., who has died aged 98, was an Oscar-winning cinematographer who eased James Bond’s passage into a wetsuit with his underwater photography on Thunderball (1965), Live and Let Die (1973) and Never Say Never Again (1983).

With the first of these, the newly minted spy franchise expanded its horizons, plunging headfirst into the waves from which Ursula Andress had emerged in Dr. No (1962) and thereby assimilating the subaquatic spectacle of Jacques Cousteau’s immersive nature documentaries. Schemer-in-chief Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi) had a floating lair, a boat called the Disco Volante; the Vulcan bomber he'd hijacked was buried on the ocean floor.

Klein, a diver and engineer who had built protective camera housings for MGM’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and a reliable reputation with work on TV’s Sea Hunt (1958-61) and Flipper (1964-67), was deputised to oversee the underwater sequences. As Director of Underwater Engineering, his duties extended from ensuring performer safety to building fully functional props, including the underwater jetpack worn by Sean Connery’s 007.

“I remember I said to [production supervisor] David Middlemas, ‘What is he going to have that was like the briefcase from From Russia with Love [1963] and the rest of that stuff?’,” Klein recalled in 2009. “He said if I could build it and have it there for Monday morning, they would pay what I was asking […] So I jumped on a plane on Friday afternoon and worked steady all weekend and [got] back Monday at 8.45 and gave [the jetpack] to them… I wish I had kept one of them.”

Connery, Klein revealed, “really didn’t like diving all that much”, but there were other reasons for showing up: “The best part of the day was heading back to the dock after a day working with the girls. They would change out on deck as if they were one of the guys!” More perks followed: making $141m off a $9m budget, Thunderball outstripped its predecessors at the box office, and won a Visual Effects Oscar.

Jordan Klein was born December 1, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, yet at an early age, his family relocated to Miami, where he began diving as a teenager: “We built our own breathing equipment. We used five-gallon steel milk cans for our diving helmet, soldering on a port… [we] cut a donut out of an inner tube and made a little copper ring that would hold a piece of glass in the front and put that on for a facemask.”

A mischievous child, Klein was sent to military school and served in the Navy during WW2. After the War, he opened a surf shop in Florida and invested in a former PT boat, the Arbalete, to take tourists out on dives. Even with the illustrious patronage of Cary Grant and Errol Flynn, however, Klein realised “it would be tough to earn any serious money running a dive boat for the rest of my life.”

Alternative revenue streams were sought, with some success. Klein’s waterproof housing for stills cameras sold 19,000 units in branches of Woolworths; in 1967, Klein teamed with Cousteau to patent the CryoLung, a liquid-oxygen breathing device that sustained divers three times longer than was then the norm.

Once Hollywood came calling, Klein oversaw the wetter work on The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Night Moves (1975), as well as Live and Let Die’s shark sequences: “We understood the psychology of a specific shark after working with him for just a few minutes. The psychology was different for almost every one of them. Fortunately, we could outthink them.”

On Never Say Never Again, an unofficial reworking of Thunderball, he was promoted following early production blunders: “We almost got thrown out of the park in Freeport Bahamas when the pilot hit some stalagmites and stalactites in a cave and broke them. The whole world came to an end as far as the ecologically minded people were concerned. So they told me, ‘You run the thing!’”

Later projects included Jaws 3-D (1983), Splash (1983) and Cocoon (1985); in 2002, Klein received a Technical Achievement Oscar for “his pioneering efforts in the development and application of underwater camera housings for motion pictures”. His final credit was The Celestine Prophecy (2006), a Dan Brown-inspired indie filmed in Florida, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico, passing for the Peruvian rainforest.

By then, cheap, flexible digital filmmaking was replacing the expensive business of shooting on film, though Klein professed a fondness for the latter: “In the old days, I’ve had my camera fill almost all the way up with saltwater and… by two o’clock in the morning, the camera is back running. As long as the optics hadn’t gotten screwed up, I was a happy camper; I knew I could get it to run the next morning.”

He is survived by Lori, his wife of 35 years; by a son, Jordan Klein Jr., himself a specialist in underwater photography; and by three stepchildren.

Jordan Klein Sr., born December 1, 1925, died October 1, 2024. 

Walls come tumbling down: "Blitz"

The new Steve McQueen film on WW2, Blitz, is very different in its methodology from the last Steve McQueen film on WW2, February's naggingly pedantic documentary Occupied City, although there are points of convergence. Once again, we look out on a major European city stalked by the spectre of fascism; once again, the filmmaker's raw material is comprised of everyday homes, streets and lives. Part of McQueen's ongoing project has been to find subtly-to-radically distinct ways of revisiting history and imagery that has become familiar (if not outright tired) over time. Here, he sets out to film London life during wartime in a manner it hasn't been previously, and thereby expand the narrow range and palette of British period drama. It's all there in the prologue, which observes first the convolutions of a firehose being (inadequately) trained on a burning block of East End houses, then cuts to quasi-abstract imagery seemingly viewed from the perspective of either a bomb falling through the sky or a bomber flying over the ocean. Crucially, Blitz is about the perception of difference. Up until this point, most contemporary British WW2 dramas have taken their pallid lead from Ealing or such flagwavers as 1944's This Happy Breed. Both a child and a scholar of empire, McQueen puts a Sikh family in the bomb shelters, installs a Yoruban warden as the conscience of the piece, and seeks eternally to complicate our idea of home. His young hero George (Elliott Heffernan) is a mixed-race evacuee turned escapee, the son of a Guyanan father, liberated by the German aerial assault from the house of love he shares with his white British mother (Saoirse Ronan) and grandfather (Paul Weller; yes, that Paul Weller) and set before a country already riven with internal division. The prejudice he encounters on his return journey strikes the eye and ear as doubly cruel and stinging in the context of a world ablaze. If this is the society our troops are fighting to preserve - one that is casually racist, rather than actively fascist - then what good is any of it? Why shouldn't we let it all burn down?

The primary reference point in McQueen's back catalogue may, in fact, be less Occupied City than 2020's Small Axe: large-scale period drama, made with TV money and an unsparingly critical eye. Blitz unfolds on an even grander scale (the film's panoramic cityscapes have visibly been constructed with streaming TV money rather than terrestrial), yet there's been no let up in authorial rigour and scrutiny. Adam Stockhausen's production design is all the more impressive for having to exist in two states - intact, and in rubble - and this may well stand as the best cast film of 2024, every scene finding faces that present as exact matches for period and part. (Casting director Nina Gold does some of her best work in and around the armaments factory where Ronan the riveter plies her trade: Hayley Squires and Erin Kellyman as fellow workers, Joshua McGuire's foreman exuding bumptious authority beneath a pencil moustache.) With faces like these, McQueen liberates himself from dialogue, and he remains a filmmaker who thinks in indelible images and sequences. So much of Blitz is internalised and felt rather than prescribed: the grandfather's pride as he hears his daughter singing on the radio (music as morale-booster, connecting back to the unforgettable Lovers Rock while also explaining the casting of long-time Red Wedge and Rock Against Racism mainstay Weller); a ghostly, half-glimpsed death on the train tracks; a late visit to a Punch & Judy show during which George is seen to note not the show itself, but the puppeteer's feet. (The comforting illusion of this world, and perhaps something of the magic, has by then been forcibly rubbed off.) Only one previous British filmmaker has come close to thinking about and filming wartime Britain in this particular pictorial fashion, and we'll arrive at him in due course.

What the new film does share with Occupied City - and this is evident long before a member of the Slow Horses ensemble shows up on screen - is the desire to collapse any complacency-inducing distinction between the past and the present, between the Britain of the 1940s and the Britain of today. This London isn't emblematic of some glorious, pre-woke past but an embryonic version of the present: the social schisms (rich/poor, native/migrant), the callous opportunism (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke do a nimble Dickensian double-act as looters preying on our boy, the dying and the dead), the cold indifference of the powers-that-be. Granted, the wars we're lucky enough to be fighting now are more cultural than physical, and fought chiefly online rather than on the ground beneath our feet. But as McQueen notes and insists, they're premised on the same principles and divisions; they demand we take action, and remain aware of them even as we seek shelter by sitting in cinemas under untroubled roofs and skies. These battles go beyond that against fascism, and extend into every corner of everyday life: when, at the last, the Tube station George himself seeks shelter in is flooded with water, it is as the rains that fell upon Spain the other week, washing away all divisions, and revealing our pettier struggles as but a drop in the ocean. With its 12A rating and Working Title logo, there is some superficial truth in the widespread critical assertion that Blitz represents McQueen at his most conventional: it's the one film of this director you can well envisage your mum and dad getting wrapped up in, were they to resist the emblandishments of the Paddington threequel. But it's also demonstrably the work of a politically conscious artist trying to broaden the horizons of the mass audience - to move us, at long last, beyond Downton and its attendant bunting. The highest praise I can bestow on Blitz, and this is finally a film that commands the highest praise, is that it's the kind of sublimely textured, ever-pointed, deeply moving popular entertainment you can imagine the late Terence Davies adoring - and perhaps being jealous he wasn't able to make in his lifetime.

Blitz is now showing in selected cinemas.

For those in peril: "Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection"

While we wait for the Cannes-premiered The Shrouds to manifest in cinemas, a new David Cronenberg artefact bobs into view. Don't make the same mistake I did, in sitting down to watch Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection over lunch; but do watch, because these three creditless minutes of literally free-floating imagery are really quite something, up there with the best of the weirdness distributors MUBI got onto the UK release schedule in the dog days of the pandemic. For those three minutes, we're invited to consider items that would be a source of fascination in their own right: lifelike 18th century wax cadavers of women, presumably once used for medical or scientific purposes. Some of the dolls are intact, but others are revealed to have vast, gaping holes in their torsos, exposing their innards; this revelation is made all the more unnerving by the fact Cronenberg offers no contextualising information beyond that long and winding title. Have these women been hollowed out by some exterior surgical force, or blown open from within, as with John Hurt in the first Alien? Almost as fascinating and unnerving is what Cronenberg does with his leading ladies, framing them against the ocean - setting them on lilos, as if they were holidaymakers at a Club Med resort - panning up and along their curves like a director of 1950s nudie cuties, and overlaying the image with breathy orgasmic groans that seem to give these women renewed inner life. (The pitch might have been Crash meets Splash.) Don't be surprised if some form of seasickness sets in, even over three minutes, but the whole forms another illustration of why Cronenberg, whose work on paper suggests the iciest of outsider artists, has instead become so beloved among the sicko set for his work on film: Four Unloved Women... proves every bit as strange and troubling to encounter in November 2024, with women's bodies in heightened real-world peril, as the oddities this filmmaker was carving out back in Canada in the early 1970s.

Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection is now streaming via MUBI.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 1-3, 2024):

1 (2) The Wild Robot (U) **

2 (1) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

3 (new) Heretic (15)

4 (new) Small Things Like These (12A)

5 (3) Smile 2 (18)

6 (new) Anora (18) ***

7 (new) Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 (15)

8 (4) Transformers One (PG)

9 (new) Singham Again (15) **

10 (new) Juror #2 (12A) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Blitz

2. Point Break

3. Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour

4. Dahomey

5. A Nightmare on Elm Street

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (3) It Ends with Us (15)

3 (2) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12)

4 (4) Despicable Me 4 (U)

5 (5) Twisters (12) ***

6 (9) Practical Magic (12)

7 (8) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

8 (10) Dune: Part Two (12) **

9 (14) Coraline (PG) ****

10 (re) Trap (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Evil Does Not Exist

2. Didi

3. Late Night with the Devil

4. Twisters

5. A Quiet Place: Day One

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Deliverance [above] (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)

2. The Worst Person in the World (Sunday, Channel 4, 12.50am)

3. Four Weddings & A Funeral (Friday, BBC1, 10.40pm)

4. Happening (Thursday, Channel 4, 2.15am)

5. Road to Perdition (Tuesday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

On DVD: "Didi"

One of this year's Sundance sensations, Sean Wang's Didi proves a sweet, fond, more than likely autobiographical coming-of-age story, set over the long hot summer of 2008: The Last Days of MySpace might have been one alternative title. I say more than likely autobiographical, because its 13-year-old Taiwanese-American protagonist Chris (played by Izaac Wang), who goes by the name Wang Wang among his contemporaries and Big Wang in chatrooms, is an aspirant filmmaker, uploading rough-hewn skateboarding videos to YouTube; and our actual director casts his actual grandmother (Zhang Li Hua, featured in Wang's Oscar-nominated 2003 short Nai Nai & Wài Pó) as gran to his onscreen surrogate. Much of this Mountain Dew Fabelmans bears a sense of having been lived through in some way: the family specifics (loving, embattled mother Joan Chen, sassier older sister Shirley Chen), the bristling friendgroup (lots of fucked-your-mom cracks, pranks, Superbad as sacred text), a wider adolescent grossness (Chris peeing in his sister's beauty products, the use of chatrooms to disseminate dodgy links, untimely tumescences, some business with a dead rodent). Much of it contrives to wrap the viewer in the warm hug of nostalgia, and I can see those among us who were 13 in 2008 proclaiming Didi the greatest film of their young lifetimes. It's not short on pop-cultural pleasures for the rest of us, too: if you needed a film to demonstrate the significance of Paramore or to remind you how comparatively clean the Internet was (in design, at least, shorn of scammers and spambots) even as recently as sixteen years ago, you need look no further.

In some way, Wang is following a tried-and-tested career path, lionising his generation much as George Lucas did in 1973's American Graffiti and Richard Linklater did with 1993's Dazed and Confused. (It's just that the hangout spot of choice has shifted online, no longer the diner or football field but messageboards and IM chat windows.) That Didi felt flimsier to me than either of those examples is down to what feels like fairly rote Sundance scripting, setting out experience without shape or much in the way of dramatic roughage. Wang constructs the film as a series of pivotal moments: a sister going off to college; MySpace dying, Facebook speeding up to take its place; Chris falling out with his childhood friends, and in with some older boys. It's vaguely novel that our focal point should be kind of a weirdo: that Didi remains likable has much to do with the way Wang cops to having once been a massive dork and ingrate. Yet any drama here feels like a done deal. We know this kid survived to tell these tales, and the prevailing geniality reassures us nothing unduly terrible is going to befall his younger incarnation, however brattily he may act up. (The more revealing comparison point may not be The Fabelmans, rather James Gray's Armageddon Time.) The stronger material and performances fade into the background: the mother's thwarted dreams of becoming a painter, for example, most touchingly articulated by Chen whenever Didi isn't too busy at the skatepark hunting for LOLs. Somewhere in here, there's a recognition that the son has been given an opportunity his mother never had: the older Wang sees it, and is grateful for it, but can't develop it on screen beyond the occasional poignant gesture. As a result, Didi settles benignly into the cinematic centre ground, a bean bag for viewers to collapse into at the end of the working day. It's not unpleasant at all, but also not as distinctive as Sundance may have framed it as. I also wonder whether this is another example of a movie that's been trumped by TV - and more specifically Fresh Off the Boat, the great Nahnatchka Khan's adaptation of Eddie Huang's memoir of growing up Taiwanese-American in the Florida of the 1990s. Wang gives good hugs, but Khan and Huang added big laughs and unexpected insights.

Didi is available on DVD via Mediumrare from Monday.

Thrillseekers: "Point Break"

The BFI's Art of Action season heads out on tour this weekend with a reissue of Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow's enduring 1991 thriller. The key to fullest understanding and enjoyment here remains a single word: adrenaline. Bigelow seized upon the kind of B-movie script that would have been in regular Hollywood circulation in the VHS era (this one written by Rick King and W. Peter Iliff) and pumped everything up, not least the characters, observed continually egging one another on to higher states of ridiculousness. It's not enough that the antagonists are bank robbers, they have to be surfers as well, spending their afternoons off chasing a very different kind of high; over on the cop side of the ledger, uptight police chief John C. McGinley is forever on hand to fire a rocket up somebody's ass, while hotshot detective Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) initiates an argument with colleague Gary Busey just to elevate this oldtimer's pulse to a level where he might reasonably get in the game. I'm still not sure we buy this young and relatively untested Keanu as an actor, let alone a crack criminal investigator - if they were only a little more circumspect, the surfers might well spot a glaring hole or fifteen in his cover story of having had the werewithal to study law - but he's unimprovable casting as one who is totally psyched and prepared to get completely gnarly. As he tells the surfer girl who provides a way into this underground (Lori Petty): "I'm gonna learn to surf or break my neck." All or nothing; do or die; fight or flight. There aren't many films that have seemed more like a breathless and throaty battle cry, or more deserving of the three-word summation what a rush.

The movie itself is elevated way above its peers by Bigelow's singular ability to channel and give cinematic shape to that adrenaline. Buff dudes on boards, baring their behinds to security cameras; stricken cops, emptying their service revolvers into the air. Rival surfers getting in Keanu's face; the raids and chases; the bits with the lawnmower, the makeshift flamethrower, the tossed pooch, the parachutes. Everything in Point Break looks like one of those virtual-reality clips that became such a contentious currency in Bigelow's subsequent masterpiece Strange Days - it's all pure, untrammeled sensation - although the filmmaker sporadically pauses to weaponise the Petty character as a counterpoint to this extreme machismo. It may be hard for younger audiences to fathom, but such boundless action was a commonplace at the multiplex in the 1990s, the decade of The Fugitive, Speed and In the Line of Fire: Bigelow takes her setpieces as seriously as anybody could, shooting with care and attention to detail and spatial coherence, and packaging the whole with glistening stars and a period-evocative soundtrack. For two hours, we watch as moviemaking is transformed into a Red Bull-ready extreme sport, though upon first release, this now-canonical modern classic would have seemed no more than an unusually enjoyable popcorn flick, one of several that came down the tubes in any given month; you can get a sense of what's ebbed away over the years by comparing the original with the 2015 remake no-one's watched or even thought about since the weekend it opened and closed. Bigelow now seems a little lost, too: an Oscar contender with Zero Dark Thirty as recently as a decade ago, she's been AWOL since 2017's Detroit, and may be suffering as much as anybody from the studios' indifference to backing mid-budget, non-franchise features. Yet as Point Break continues to bear out, she knows what tickles our lizard brains better than almost any other American filmmaker around.

Point Break returns to selected cinemas from today.

Crime and punishment: "Juror #2"

There would be reasons enough to cheer Juror #2, even before seeing the film. For starters, it's the latest work from a filmmaker who, over a long and storied career, has learnt how to fashion a properly compelling motion picture on the subject of law and order: no less than the now 94-year-old Clint Eastwood. Anyone with a deep-rooted love of movies, and of American movies in particular, will want to counteract the film's indifferent handling (limited release in the US, only the most reluctant of awards campaigns) by the corporate philistines who now run the once-mighty Warner Bros. And the film itself presents as a throwback to an earlier, healthier era, recalling that run of mid-budgeted, adult-oriented courtroom thrillers that took hold at the multiplex between 1993's The Firm and 2003's Runaway Jury. (Eastwood himself contributed 1997's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which saw Kevin Spacey on trial.) Jonathan Abrams' script has an automatically compelling hook: a juror (Nicholas Hoult) realises during opening statements that he's the one responsible for the death for which an innocent man is being tried for murder, and then has to redirect his fellow jurors towards the best outcome for everybody. Eastwood bolsters it with a small, carefully raised, tightly knitted army of character actors. JK Simmons is the initially sidelined Juror #4, who comes to bring his own insight to bear on this case; Toni Collette the fierce prosecutor, with Chris Messina acting for the defence; Amy Aquino is the no-nonsense judge; and Kiefer Sutherland plays the bibulous Hoult's sponsor and moral conscience. It matters that we have people we can trust talking, because - unlike those earlier, Grisham-derived or Grisham-adjacent slambang entertainments - Juror #2 is almost all talk, a process of deliberation.

It's interesting, even oddly philosophical talk, nevertheless, geared towards the revelation that everyone on screen has their own doubts and biases. During jury pool, our onscreen judge for the evening states that the fact no-one wants to be here makes everyone a perfect candidate for jury duty. Juror #1 and Jurors #3-12 soon regard this as an open-and-shut case, that the recessive accused (Gabriel Basso, formerly the clean-cut teen star of Super 8 and The Kings of Summer, more recently JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy) is clearly guilty from the outset. Juror #2 has his own, ever-swelling reason to railroad this guy: a heavily pregnant wife (Zoey Deutch) waiting for him back home, along with a new life to make up for the one he's taken, if such a concept is permissible. Everyone has other things they could be getting on with: the Collette character is hoping a conviction will help boost her campaign for high political office. Unlike the absolute liberal certainties of 1957's 12 Angry Men, a picture Eastwood must have admired even if he quibbled with its politics, Juror #2 is forever looking to squirrel out ambiguities. The lawyers may get together after hours to toast the justice system - "it's not perfect, but it's the best we've got", upholding the verdict of those Grisham bestsellers - but Eastwood has lived long enough to hope for something more reliable and less volatile. Every one of these characters has butterflies of some kind in their stomach, which makes a thoroughly 1994-looking production feel newly 2024; these butterflies eventually migrate outwards to the viewer, faced with what has, by the halfway mark, developed into a genuinely unpredictable thriller. There's precisely nothing open-and-shut about this particular case.

There's also nothing overly flashy about Eastwood's crisp, clear and characteristically self-effacing direction; he sets about this tale as he almost always has, deploying the formal building blocks he first saw on set in the 1950s and first picked up for himself in the 1970s. Yet each set-up serves as a confession of the director's own biases: a fondness for groups of good actors, studies of conflicted souls and imperfect characters, professionals doing the best job they can in challenging circumstances, be that within the justice system or the remains of the studio system. As a consequence, the screen starts to flood with an unexpected (because rare) moral seriousness. You could well envisage another, pulpier retelling of this plot - something closer to Runaway Jury, say - with a trickster hero leading the other jurors astray. Lighter touches make themselves apparent from time to time here: the camaraderie between the Collette and Messina characters, the fact they meet up in a bar called Rowdy's Hideaway, surely a nod on production designer Ronald R. Reiss's part to the Eastwood of yore. But the Eastwood of 2024 shoots close-ups that recast his title character, a compromised cog in a malfunctioning machine, as an American Raskolnikov, eaten up from the inside by a secret shared only with us. Does he feel lucky, this punk, to have a second chance at correcting the wrongs of his past? What do we do with everything we've seen and done? How do we live with the guilt we've accrued? If in God we trust, what to do about our fallible fellow man? And what, finally, does true justice looks like? These are extraordinarily big and profound questions to find floating around inside a multiplex, this of all weeks in the great and perilous American experiment.

Juror #2 is now playing in selected cinemas.

Seduced and abandoned: "Anora"

It's not just that they marry in haste and repent at leisure, they even fuck in haste and repent at leisure. One reason early responders have hailed Sean Baker's Anora as a new American classic is surely that it suggests Pretty Woman if it had picked up where The Graduate left off: with two young lovers, bonded as much by cold, hard currency as by sincere affection, wondering what the future holds for them - or, really, if there's any future in their coupling at all. Another reason would be that Baker, as shown by his earlier films, appears to understand a fair bit about the way the world turns for those on its lower rungs. He knows instinctively why a young lapdancer (Mikey Madison), possessed of a certain streetwise intelligence to sit alongside her youthful naivety, might seek to trade in her drab walk-up, stuck with train-track backdrop and pass-agg roomie, for a new life in a Brighton Beach palace with a moptopped oligarch's son (Mark Eydelshteyn), possessed of riches enough to sit playing videogames all day. Yet Baker sees how insecure this world still is, how even installing yourself in a split-level dream house and allowing a boyish swain to throw a fifteen-second hump into you every now and again is no guarantee of the good life. Within this domestic arrangement, the writer-director spies how the lifestyle of the idle rich demands a coterie of hired help to pick up the slack, and hatchet-faced puppetmasters to pick up the tab. But Baker also enters the following into mitigation: that a pair of goofball kids, too young really to know what they're leaping heedlessly into, are as deserving of happiness as anyone in this messed-up, back-to-front, God-forsaken universe.

Two truths quickly become apparent watching Anora. One is that, when he's operating at his very best, Baker makes the business of storytelling - setting out some idea of a world, and then moving the characters and us through it - seem as easy and as fresh as pie. The other is that, again when he's operating at his very best, Baker might be making just about the most likable films in the world right now. The movement, in this instance, is upward mobility. From the shuttered darkness of a stripjoint's backroom, we are transported - via private jet - to the high-flying dazzle of casinos, pool parties and Presidential suites; Baker knows that, like Anora herself, we have to be seduced as well as elevated. This is trickier than you might think, given that everything we see here is being bought and paid for (and with dirty money), all a matter of negotiation, economics and power dynamics. It is doubly tricky, given these kids' frankly terrible taste in music - one early indicator of questionable judgement - although Baker is nothing if not upfront about this, choosing to open the movie with a dance remix of Take That's "Greatest Day". (A lot of bad habits are picked up in stripjoints.) 

As he's done elsewhere, Baker affords his performers uncommon space to inhabit their characters: to make their choices and mistakes, to talk and act in ways we rarely see folks in modern movies talking and acting. Those of us who've grown up watching Madison as one of Pamela Adlon's offspring in TV's blessed Better Things may have to cover our eyes during the stripping and sex scenes - it feels like watching a friend's daughter on the pole - but as a transition into more adult parts, the character of Anora has it all: here is a character who comes to transcend her girlish form, whether by running her mouth in a way that suggests American movies internalising the cultural influence of Cardi B, or by embodying some deeply 2024 anxieties around control and regulation of the female body. (It's all pleasure and profit until the patriarchs show up.) Eydelshteyn has, if anything, an even tougher assignment, to get us to care about a moneyed, coke-snorting stripling with a thick Borat accent - and he succeeds, up until a rather feckless and arbitrary-seeming twist of characterisation in the film's second half. We warm to these kids' spirit, the fact they haven't had the life completely knocked out of them; we sense they'd make a good match for one another if everybody else could just quit their interfering. I did also begin to wonder, though, whether they have quite enough life in them to justify the film's 131-minute running time.

We've seen enough of Baker's work now to suss out potential strengths and weaknesses. In 2017's The Florida Project - still this director's best film, not least for seeming so unlikely an occurrence at that point in the history of the American cinema - this filmmaker demonstrated an ability to toggle between perspectives, including those of a small child and a grizzled hotel manager, and to make those viewpoints convincing and affecting in their turn. Tonally and formally broader than its predecessor, Anora only begins to stutter upon the introduction, in an unusually protracted scene around the midpoint, of Russian-Armenian heavies who present as far less organised than their equivalents might be in reality. That Madison's Anora is already fluent in their mother tongue feels like one more act of kindliness on Baker's part, but also too convenient, too much the screenwriter's conceit: it further neutralises the threat that the mobsters pose, and allows our heroine to outthink and outspeak them to some degree amid the chicanery that follows. Baker would doubtless argue that the running time is in itself an act of generosity - offering his players more space, and us more bang for our buck - but it also allows lassitude to creep into shot. The second half, which drags these characters kicking and screaming around the houses, is in effect a ninety-minute rerun of Tangerine's closing stretch: what was so exhilarating and enthralling there soon becomes exhausting here. There's too much space, and the characters don't develop satisfactorily beyond a certain point; the Russian kid flees for no good reason, everybody else goes round and round shrieking at one another, and the initial pleasure gives way to a pain that begins to feel punitive. I wonder whether this is just reflective of where the movies are at these days: so few comedies are getting made that the ones that do get greenlit feel obliged to bulk themselves out into big, festival-ready, awards-primed events. Baker grants Anora more life, more characters, more movement, more local colour, more T&A - all those things missing from most movies nowadays - and that's certainly worth celebrating. But he also allows the film too much leisure for its own good, finally; we, too, find ourselves with time enough to start repenting.

Anora is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

In memoriam: Paul Morrissey (Telegraph 05/11/24)

Paul Morrissey, who has died aged 86, was an eccentric, sometimes testy writer-director whose input gave Andy Warhol’s initially static experiments in film a new, dynamic, sensational shape; the process began with a trio of censor-baiting provocations – Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) – and culminated in the 3D-enhanced Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), which replaced the earlier films’ skin with offal, gleefully tossed in the audience’s lap.

The pair met in 1965 at a screening of Morrissey’s early shorts at the Astor Peace Playhouse, where Warhol was impressed enough to offer the younger man the position of cinematographer on the artist’s Screen Tests. Within a year, they were collaborating on a classic of the New York underground: Chelsea Girls (1966), a 210-minute portrait of the varyingly dishevelled dreamers who inhabited the city’s notorious Hotel Chelsea flophouse, directed by Warhol, shot by Morrissey.

Whether courted or not, scandal soon followed. Chelsea Girls, which sparked obscenity charges in the US, was banned by the British Board of Film Censors; with its drug use and full-frontal nudity, Trash caused a similar consternation, and only received its X certificate after the Board screened it to a room of middle-aged housewives who deemed it fit for exhibition. The critic Pauline Kael observed that “Morrissey’s films seem to be made by a dirty-minded altar boy.”

Nevertheless, Morrissey brought entrepreneurial smarts to the chaotic environment of Warhol’s Factory. He discovered Flesh’s thrusting young star Joe Dallesandro and added the singer Nico to The Velvet Underground’s line-up; he was pioneering in casting the transgender performer Holly Woodlawn in Trash; and he was crucial to the Warhol-backed, long-running magazine Interview, launched in 1970.

Yet the pair parted ways in 1975, after Warhol returned his attention to painting and other business interests, provoking Morrissey’s ire whenever his former collaborator came up in conversation; he felt his own contributions had been overshadowed. In 2012, he turned on an interviewer who’d lumped him in with an emergent indie movement: “I was not part of a movement, I. Made. My. Own. Films. They. Were. Not. Part. Of. Any. Movement. You’re incapable of understanding that, aren’t you?”

Paul Joseph Morrissey was born in Manhattan on February 23, 1938 to Irish-Catholic lawyer Joseph Morrissey and his wife Eleanor. He attended Fordham Preparatory School in The Bronx and studied literature at Fordham University; after graduation, he completed military service and worked in insurance and social care. In 1960, he opened the Exit Gallery on East 4th Street in New York, where he began programming underground films; the following year, he himself began directing.

In the wake of the Warhol years, Morrissey came to the UK to make The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), a sniggering Conan Doyle spoof co-written with stars Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, although reviews were little short of disastrous: Time Out dubbed it “truly one of the crummiest movies ever made”, and even Morrissey confessed “It’s the only film I’m connected with that I don’t think was very good”.

Thereafter he retreated to the American margins. Madame Wang’s (1981) satirised the L.A. punk rock scene; Forty Deuce (1982), from Alan Bowne’s play about Times Square hustlers, starred a pre-Footloose Kevin Bacon; Mixed Blood (a.k.a. Cocaine, 1984) was a ripe, Reagan-era drug war thriller. He went to Vienna for Beethoven’s Nephew (1985), a period piece that took up arms against the composer, decried by Morrissey as “a very pathetic person who happened to write very good music”.

The aptly scrappy Spike of Bensonhurst (1988), centred on a teenage boxer, found passing favour with Roger Ebert, who labelled it “not the best comedy ever made”, but noted “it has energy and local colour and a charismatic lead performance”. Funding dried up thereafter, although both Veruschka (2005), a documentary profile of the aristocratic model Veruschka von Lehndorff, and his final directorial credit, the migrant drama News from Nowhere (2010), screened at the Venice festival.

A conservative Republican Catholic, Morrissey became known as a firebrand and contrarian, insisting “I think censorship is very good”, and that the Velvet Underground “were stupid and didn’t know what they were doing”. His most splenetic outbursts, though, were reserved for Warhol, whom Morrissey dismissed as “incompetent, anorexic, illiterate, autistic, Asperger’s — he never did a thing in his entire life. He sort of walked through it as a zombie and that paid off in the long run.”

Yet Morrissey’s early work endured as an alternative to an increasingly colourless and corporatised culture. In 1984, indie band Felt repurposed imagery from the Chelsea Girls poster for the sleeve of their second album The Splendour of Fear, while The Smiths used a still of a shirtless Dallesandro from Flesh on their self-titled debut LP. The horror films were revived amid the 1980s 3D revival and after the success of the similarly stereoscopic Avatar (2009), and Morrissey-shot footage added texture to Todd Haynes’ streaming-era doc The Velvet Underground (2021).

While dismissive of modern moviemaking trends, Morrissey occasionally betrayed a fondness for these early countercultural endeavours. Speaking in 1975, after the split but before the bitterness set in, he even afforded his former collaborator rare credit: “What Andy hit upon was that characters were vanishing from films, characterisation was disappearing and was being upstaged by a lot of cinematic claptrap. Andy completely eliminated the claptrap. He just turned on the camera and left the room.”

He is survived by a brother, Kenneth.

Paul Morrissey, born February 23, 1938, died October 28, 2024.

In memoriam: Dick Pope (Telegraph 04/11/24)

Dick Pope, who has died aged 77, was a twice Oscar-nominated cinematographer whose artistry and craft elevated the films of Mike Leigh as the latter expanded his filmmaking palette from the 1990s onwards.

 
Over twelve features, Pope was tasked with illuminating Leigh’s occasionally lugubrious view of human relations, a process that began with contemporary dramas Life is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993) and Secrets & Lies (1996) and continued through the acclaimed period dramas Topsy-Turvy (1999), Vera Drake (2004), Mr. Turner (2015) and Peterloo (2018).
 
Trained in documentary before pivoting to fiction, the bearded, affable, widely liked Pope became a trusted lieutenant, working efficiently within the idiosyncratic methodology – involving months of rehearsals – by which Leigh affords his actors unusual leeway to find the truth of his characters.
 
“[It’s] the same with two people just sitting there talking or with 60,000 people in the square [as in Peterloo],” Pope reflected in 2019. “[Mike]’ll go in there, and he’ll work out how to do the scene without anybody around him — just him and the actors — and then we go from there. I’ve always described it as a bit of a magical mystery tour, because you don’t really know what you’re getting into.”
 
Yet this round-the-houses approach invariably revealed a vision of Britain in which audiences were able to recognise themselves and their neighbours. Pope’s films with Leigh had identifiable microclimates, ranging from the breezier Life is Sweet and sunny Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) to the petrifyingly wintry Naked and the overcast All or Nothing (2002). In Another Year (2010), which tracked key Leigh performers over the course of twelve months, all four seasons were visible and felt.
 
That film was one of several that announced mounting ambition on Leigh’s part. Topsy-Turvy, on Gilbert and Sullivan and the creation of The Mikado, surprised even long-term Leigh admirers with its period detail and jollying musical numbers; Vera Drake dug deeper into history, uncovering the sorry saga of a backstreet abortionist; Peterloo, revisiting the 1819 massacre that bloodied Manchester’s cobbles, featured swelling crowd scenes.
 
Arguably the pair’s finest achievement – and the first Leigh feature to be shot digitally rather than on film – Mr. Turner necessarily recalled the work of its subject, the painter J.M.W. Turner (played by Timothy Spall). Logistically, this entailed such sleights-of-hand as passing off Lowestoft as the flatlands of Holland; there was also much scrambling to complete shots as the sun set behind boats and trains.
 
Pope’s perseverance and diligence was rewarded with an Oscar nod, though with it came a measure of social-media infamy after Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, in the live nominations broadcast, mispronounced the cinematographer’s name as “Dick Poop”. Pope met this regrettable flub with characteristic good humour: “You know what, I have been called a lot worse in my time.”
 
Born in Bromley, Kent in August 1947, Richard Campbell Pope developed an interest in photography as a child, selling photos to local newspapers as a teenager. An uncle suggested Pope combine his interests of photography and film by seeking an apprenticeship in the Pathé laboratories; thereafter, he worked his way through the industry’s ranks.
 
Pope’s first credit was as a clapper loader on the X-rated softcore drama Loving Feeling (1968), which Pope later described as “the dregs of British cinema”. He was promoted to camera operator, initially billed as Richard Pope, on the portmanteau A Promise of Bed (1969) and the David Hockney study A Bigger Splash (1973), and began to travel widely as a cinematographer, shooting episodes of Granada’s Disappearing World and World in Action.
 
Operating a camera on the Clash-scored Rude Boy (1980) steered Pope towards the music business, and he subsequently provided cinematography for a clutch of pop videos, including The Specials’ memorably nocturnal “Ghost Town” promo – a dry run for Naked, stalking the backstreets of Wapping – and the domestic melodrama of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free”, featuring Freddie Mercury in drag.
 
On television, Pope shot Channel 4’s Whoops Apocalypse (1982) and Porterhouse Blue (1987), for which he was BAFTA nominated. By then, however, he was working regularly in film, working unnerving wonders with the cornfields of Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin (1990) in the same year as the suburban Life is Sweet.
 
Naked’s sepulchral photography drew admirers in the US, where Pope’s credits spanned beyond mainstream fare – Disney basketball comedy The Air Up There (1994), actioner The Way of the Gun (2000), lavish magician saga The Illusionist (2006), for which he won his first Oscar nomination – to more independent endeavours, including John Sayles’ immersive, Alabama-set musical drama Honeydripper (2007) and Richard Linklater’s Bernie (2011).
 
But he always returned home, underlining his adaptability via the peppy, Eastbourne-shot teen comedy Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008), Leigh’s Cultural Olympiad short A Running Jump (2012), Krays biopic Legend (2015) and the delicately spun Supernova (2020), shot around the Lake District.
 
Pope’s final collaboration with Leigh, Hard Truths (2024), opens on UK screens in January, having been praised on the festival circuit: the Telegraph’s Tim Robey reported the director’s return to latter-day Britain is “both a solace and, in the best possible way, a slap in the face”, praising the film’s “biting humour”.
 
Asked why he kept returning to Pope, Leigh offered rare praise indeed: “A violinist who owns a Stradivarius is not going to arbitrarily use another fiddle. That is the tool and you can play anything with it.”
 
Pope is survived by his wife Pat.
 
Dick Pope, born August 1947, died October 22, 2024. 

On demand: "If You Were The Last"

Directed by Kristian Mercado from a script by Angela Bourassa, the likable straight-to-streaming romcom If You Were The Last cops to one of its influences early on by having its prospective lovers debate whether or not it was worth the time, money and effort to bring just one man back from Mars in Ridley Scott's The Martian, even if that man was Matt Damon. No such immediate cavalry is coming to the rescue of Anthony Mackie and Zoë Chao, astronauts stranded in a kids'-bedroom idea of space, complete with papier-mâché planets and a shuttle rec room done up like a sitcom den. So the pair spar and bicker, watch old movies together, grow weed (in his case) and - having exhausted all other options, and with their finite resources running out - eventually nudge up against the question of bowing out with one final big bang. As Chao thoughtfully tells her intergalactic roomie: "I mean, you have the only penis for a million miles." Other influences reveal themselves. The high percentage of art design on this spacecraft indicates a fondness for Michel Gondry's homemade fantasias - Chao's character has repurposed a rack of electric drills as vibrators - and with that comes the possibility that anybody who doesn't dig these leads might find the whole cutesy rather than the desired cute. In some ways, Mercado has to crank up the colour, to mitigate against the underlying bleakness of this scenario: a tie-dye rewrite of the Jennifer Lawrence/Chris Pratt dud Passengers - complete with a dead third wheel (played by a familiar comedy face) who serves as the astronauts' confidante whenever the plot demands - IYWTL has to usher us past our awareness things could get a whole lot worse if this pair weren't so obviously hot for one another and weren't bound for some kind of happy ending. On balance, they deserve it. Mackie and Chao, established supporting players seizing an opportunity to position themselves front and centre for ninety minutes, demonstrate good chemistry; more importantly, they bend this plot round in the direction of believable human conversation and experience. If the wider picture is cosmic, what's observed up close - two people undergoing a period of intense, dramatic change - isn't so far away from our own backyards finally. Fluff, but - as with those vibrators - skilfully mounted and pleasure-giving.

If You Were The Last is currently streaming via NOW, and available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

Flights of fancy: "Bird"

Returning to the fictions of Brexit Britain after the overseas awayday of 2016's American Honey and the 2021 documentary Cow, Andrea Arnold opens her latest, Bird, with a sequence that plays almost like a French-and-Saunders-style parody of the Arnold aesthetic: a moptopped youngster, with dirt under her fingernails and a generally dreamy mien, is interrupted while filming a bird in flight through the metal cage of a motorway bridge by the arrival of a twinkly-eyed, heavily tattooed Irish charmer on a scooter touting a toad in a KwikSave bag. After two breaks from the auteurist norm, the new film feels to some degree like business as usual in Arnold-land. Once more, the camera arrives at a fringey Estuary setting (here, Gravesend), a menagerie of furred and feathered friends is emptied out before us (that bird and toad are just for starters) and we're introduced to a wild-leaning heroine - potentially as feral as any of the other creatures on screen - who's trying to figure out her place in this world. For Bailey (Nykiya Adams), the initial goal is to extricate herself from the chaos of the squat she's living in with that twinkly-eyed charmer (Barry Keoghan's Bug) and his young bride, who barely seem that much older themselves, and a brother (who may more precisely be a half-brother or a stepbrother: the chaos is partly that of broken homes) drifting aimlessly into crime. An early scene finds Bailey lopping off her abundant curls, the better to see clearer or redefine herself; and after waking up in a field, our heroine is duly presented with another migratory path, that of a heavily accented drifter in a dress, who introduces himself as Bird and promptly takes up residence atop an adjacent block of flats, watching over our girl. As he's played by Franz Rogowski, the philandering agent of chaos in last year's Passages, you could be forgiven for wondering whether Bird is less guardian angel than dreadful augury. He's inarguably an odd bird, though, and so is the film, for better and worse.

Having reassured us with that opening sequence, Bird quickly drifts further away from everyday British normality than Arnold has ever previously ventured. Yes, this camera takes in shopping precincts, towerblocks and bunkbeds alike, but the logic guiding its movements is dreamier than that of, say, 2006's Red Road or 2009's Fish Tank, synching with a heroine who forever seems on the verge of nodding off or waking up. (It explains Bailey's air of drowsiness, but the squat situation looks implausible in 2024, no matter how overstretched the authorities might be; these broken homes have been fractured altogether artfully.) Bird only begins to function narratively if we accept that Arnold has left social realism behind so as to flirt with magical realism, the trickiest of all genres to pull off in a cinema, dependent as it is on the viewer believing their eyes at all times. I fear it also only works if we then accept Arnold's redefinition of magical realism as "a series of random, mostly unconnected events". Gravesend here represents a fairytale kingdom, which may be a stretch for those who've never been there, and even for those who call it their home. The characters assume the same symbolic value as the caged pets and wild horses of Fish Tank: as his name indicates, Bird is less flesh-and-blood man than he is roaming metaphor, a representative of those migrants who have flocked to the Kent coast, and a model of a softer masculinity than Keoghan's brawling chancer or the toxic new boyfriend of Bailey's estranged mum. The "it really, really, really could happen" of Blur's "The Universal", which Arnold deploys as a recurring nursery rhyme or contemporary lullaby, sounds ever more like a director imploring us to close our eyes and take a leap of faith with her.

Above all else, Bird has visibly been conceived as a hangout movie: arrive at an interesting, underfilmed location with bankable actors, a bunch of kids, an e-scooter and a Spotify playlist and start to thrash something out on the spot before the rolling camera. That search for spontaneity yields convincing bursts of chaos, like the party scene where Keoghan and his fellow squatters do shots and shout along to Sleaford Mods, drowning out a TV bringing news of the effects of climate change on central Europe. (Arnold is not incorrect in intuiting everyone's looking for an escape of some kind right now.) And every now and again, we spy an inspired choice, something precise, evocative and lovely: cutaways to the squat's youngest inhabitant reveal a tousle-haired girl indifferent to the mess around her and determined to press on with her colouring-in regardless. As ever, Arnold proves in thrall to the adaptability of the young - but is she also getting a bit too hung up on it? There is, regrettably, a lot of flapping around where you want Bird to soar: all the graffiti doodled on squat walls and bus windows can't make up, in this instance, for characters that struggle to hold the attention and a wider failure to pursue angles for further dramatic exploration in anything like the satisfying depth of Arnold's earlier work. (Keoghan, notionally Bird's most saleable asset in our accursed, post-Saltburn universe, is the biggest victim of this, either sidelined or forgotten about in the edit.) What's flown the coop is the vice-like plotting of Red Road and Fish Tank, artefacts from a moment when Arnold was presumably still having to present a case to funding bodies in the form of a script rather than - as one assumes happened here - pitching a feature that came to her in a dream and then trying to fill in the gaps around a handful of key images. I don't want to be too down on something so idiosyncratic and personal: this is, after all, the version of this story only this filmmaker could have arrived at, a Wings of Desire raised on party rings and Greggs sausage rolls. But Bird finally lands among Arnold's weakest films, as sorely overstretched at two hours as American Honey was pushing three. It pains me to say it, but one of our best modern directors is going backwards.

Bird opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

Unbreakable: "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"

Having done such a good job of profiling that elaborately dressed but troubled soul Alexander McQueen back in 2018, the blue-chip documentary pairing of Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui have selected what would appear a simpler proposition for their follow-up. Revisiting the life and work of the actor who made us believe he could fly, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is unabashed in its emotionality; it'd be a tough cookie who made it through the first half without shedding at least one tear. By earning the Reeve family's trust, the directors have unlocked a treasure trove of home movies that shed new, touching light on both Reeve the jockish wanderer turned international superstar and the fraught recovery process the actor had to undergo after snapping his neck in a horseriding accident in 1995. That accident is placed upfront here, pivotal as it was; and just when you think matters couldn't possibly get any more painful, up pops Reeve's old roommate and friend Robin Williams (or "Brother Robin", as the family refer to him) to remind us of someone else we've loved and missed. By now, everybody's damp-eyed and not seeing entirely clearly: only that might explain the edit-suite decision to leave in Glenn Close's on-camera assertion that had Reeve lived longer, Williams might still be with us, which seems speculative at best. Yet even the material that isn't heartbreaking moves us in some other way. Jeff Daniels recalls a conversation backstage on Broadway in 1977 during which co-star William Hurt warned Reeve against selling out by signing on for Superman; it's an anecdote made all the more poignant by Hurt's late-career decision to shill for Marvel. (Are we just crying for the state of movies now?) We learn Reeve's father, the standoffish poet Franklin Reeve, was disappointed upon discovering his son had won this role, and not - as he'd originally thought and cheered - a role in Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw; this development lets on all we need to know about this frosty father-son relationship, and why the son felt compelled to push himself as he did. Super/Man may be the first movie to open with the DC logo that goes on to trade in genuinely complex and perilously fragile human beings.

That said, the tears begin to dry up around the halfway mark; Bonhôte and Ettedgui don't always seem to react to the notes coming down from heavyweight corporate producers (DC, HBO Documentaries, CNN) as decisively as they might have. Cutting back-and-forth in time - not unlike Superman setting the Earth in reverse - the pair overuse one potent visual contrast: that between the gym-bulked, kiss-curled Adonis Reeve in the red-and-blue romper suit and the drawn, waxen, understandably hesitant figure in the wheelchair with integral respirator. That juxtaposition may just be unavoidable in retracing the arc of this life: no-one has ever looked better in superhero costume, nor appeared better suited for a particular role. Susan Sarandon and Whoopi Goldberg attest to how this Supes filled them with horny delight, but the most revealing scrap of archive details the look of wonder in a group of kids' eyes as Reeve passes them on the street. Setting out the thesis the actor swapped one form of heroism for another, namely lending greater visibility to disability, the film flirts with hagiography: lots of talking heads announcing how wonderful Reeve was in any configuration. But there were complications, too: the deterioration of the Superman series, from tentpole Warner Bros. blockbuster to corner-cutting Cannon Films pick-up; the failure to land a comparably memorable second role (Bonhôte and Ettedgui might have made more of a case for Reeve's non-franchise endeavours, but the life overshadows the art); divorce from first wife Gae Exton; the aggressive pushing for cures that suggested, even after his accident, Reeve was still thinking like an alpha. Propelled by snappy cutting - for which editor Otto Burnham rightly gets third credit - Super/Man covers a lot of ground, but there are curious structuring and storytelling choices. Bonhôte and Ettedgui delay a segment on the actor's second wife Dana until late on, obliging us to revisit footage very similar to that we've already seen; ugly CG interstitials remind us everybody's still operating within the umbrella of the artless DC-verse; and the access to Reeve's family results in an overextended conclusion. (No-one can bring themselves to say goodbye again.) It's an honourable tribute, but some of that early power and force gets frittered as the world turns.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 25-27, 2024):

1 (new) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

2 (1) The Wild Robot (U) **

3 (2) Smile 2 (18)

4 (4) Transformers One (PG)

5 (3) The Apprentice (15) ***

6 (7) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

7 (5) Terrifier 3 (18)

8 (new) The Room Next Door (12A) ***

9 (8) The Substance (18) **

10 (6) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour

2. Dahomey

3. A Nightmare on Elm Street

4. Juror #2

5. Saw

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (new) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12)

3 (new) It Ends with Us (15)

4 (4) Despicable Me 4 (U)

5 (3) Twisters (12) ***

6 (2) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

7 (10) Longlegs (15) **

8 (12) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

9 (13) Practical Magic (12)

10 (21) Dune: Part Two (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Late Night with the Devil

3. Twisters

4. A Quiet Place: Day One

5. Blur: To the End

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Shawshank Redemption (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)

2. Memoria (Saturday, Channel 4, 1.35am)

3. The African Queen (Saturday, BBC2, 2pm)

4. Airplane! [above] (Friday, Channel 4, 12.05am)

5. Paddington 2 (Sunday, BBC1, 3.05pm)